Rick Simonson

Early rains
July 18, 2007

 A strange week it's been, a change of weather not the least of it. Someone brought the rain that usually visits mid-August in a month early. So much for leaving laundry out on the line. There's been some reworking of ground, refocusing of attention, deep breaths, working on getting at the core of things, trying to keep longer views in mind even as it means paying more attention to matters of the moment.. Some of it is time. Some things are going too fast, some passing too slow. Fall buying season is still going on, seemingly eternal, though an end is in sight ... though it is only mid-July ... fall buying season has and would last into August here. Always has. Perhaps to ask, when did it start? The fall titles, they're here now, aren't they? The ones talked of back in March, in April, what was coming, what we'd be tapped for, as in, which has what buzz? Some much is pre-digestion now -- wanting to say how it will all be, then remembering we have to have the actual experience of it, going through what sells, what doesn't.. I know some big much-anticipated title is landing today (or hereabouts): it's the Ken Burns, isn't it? Some coordinated laydown of ALL the World War II books, old and new, reissues and tie-ins, all hitting the beach in a coordinated wave assault, no? Some embargo got broken, the plot of the war revealed, so the affadavits signed go by the wayside, you can sell these as you receive them. That's this week, correct?

One newspaper here (two different reporters) is simultaneously asking me/us for a list of 'summer beach picks' and the fall highlights. There are still two reps to be heard from, at all, in terms of fall appointments (back to that). And hints of what's to come: appointments for the winter/spring lists, files of preview lists for said period coming in e-mail, announcements of event grids for early 2008, coming our way. It's all going on, this projecting on. Meanwhile, here, some claims from the past having their way, some from a more distant time, some from more recent, a strong mix of the sweet and the hard in them.

Of the sweet, there was the evening a few nights ago when the novelist known (this year) as Peter Charles Melman appeared to read from his well-published, well-received debut novel, Landsman. Last seen by some helping lead the literary walking tours of Brooklyn, pre-BEA, he was back in a Seattle that had once been home, back in a bookstore he had worked at but a few years ago, back on a reading stage he had often stood upon ... to introduce an author. He worked here. Now he was here again, now the one being introduced, by our own Greg Berry (who had worked with him). In his time here, and again this night, he was Pete. He has some complicated mix of New York and Louisiana (home places growing up and schooling) in his voice (the New York predominates, so it was funny to hear him read the Louisiana vernacular that's strong in the book) and in his background, as somehow there is family living here. A big turnout was on hand.. Family, friends, the always-surprising part when an author does read early on from a first book that there are yet others she/he doesn't know who actually have heard about the book or are curious enough to be there. There was a contingent of Elliott Bay alums, too, people Pete had worked with - Tamra Nisly, Janet Brown, Shannon Bigler, Vlad Verano, Steve Winter. A few of them, I had to tease, hardly attended any of these at all when they had worked there. Afterwards, they tried to entice Pete to a nearby saloon (Shannon was ready to critique some of the Civil War weaponry that had been described in the book), but Mr. Melman had more upstanding family claims upon his time ('I would love to go get ugly with you, but ...').

Lovely as that was and is, it is hard not to view that alongside thoughts of another who worked here, who will also be a center of attention later this day. Roy Overstreet also worked here, back from the late 1980s on into the mid-90s (there was a pause of a year early on, when he went to Paris to live and write). Roy had left in the mid-90s to go work for Viking Penguin as a southern California rep (we were being plucked left and right for reps back in those days), shortly to lose that when the Putnam Penguin merge/purge of jobs happened, rebounded for a time working for Koen there, and when that ended, moved up to Bellingham to be with a new love re-found from his past.

On June 24, Roy, who was now working for a firm that promotes optical engineering, was vacationing on the Hawaiian island of Kaus'i with his wife Cara Jaye. It was planned to be their last fun trip as a couple, before she would give birth to a first child this October. A rip current pulled Cara into some danger; Roy jumped in to help, as did another man. Cara was helped, and made it back to safety. Despite the efforts of this man, himself in peril, Roy was not. The current took him away.

More will be written at another time of this, as this is a point where Mist Place, writing for out there, has to draw a curtain or veil, be attentive to matters more of the moment and present reality. No writerly remove or detachment from the scene, nor wanting there to be. In the wake of two memorials in Bellingham, there is one here - at Elliott Bay - today (Thursday, July 19 at 5). Seen less as a service than those were, it will still be a chance for family, friends, old colleagues to be together, extending support, sharing stories of all the times that we would say when we try to describe the whole arc of a person's life. Some of those stories, in Roy's case, are pretty funny.

Posted by Rick Simonson on July 18, 2007 | Comments (0)