Author Archives: wendywelch

Pluck It….

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Okay, so I’m just a quiet little person with a happy small life who runs a sweet wee bookstore in the middle of nowhere. I like it that way. New York doesn’t know me, and DC sure doesn’t ask my opinion about anything–or, for that matter, care to hear it offered unsolicited.

I just run a bookstore. That’s enough politics–large and small “p”–for me. So let me say this one thing, and then I’ll go back to being that cheerful pudgy woman who sells books and keeps her mouth shut about the crap flying around in the real world.

“IT’S A SODDING SANDWICH AND THEY’RE BLOODY PUPPETS! NOW WOULD YOU PLEASE GET OVER YOUR TOO-EARNEST-BY-HALF SELVES!”

I understand economic sanctions. I still assign my college students the film “Food, Inc.” and ask on the final exam why bovine hormone milk got pulled off Walmart’s shelves  (Answer: D because shoppers voted with their wallets by not buying it).

But I have cousins who think I’m halfway down the slippery laundry chute to Hell because I still shop at Lowe’s (when my local hardware doesn’t have what I need) and EVERYBODY knows that Lowe’s supports “the homosexual agenda.”

I’m sorry, but I have many gay and lesbian friends, most of whom couldn’t organize their way out of a paper bag.

Yet now those friends are threatening to cut me off if I continue displaying in my shop the cow calendar from Chick-Fil-A. (They put out a very funny one with parodies of literary classics, like “Old Mooler,” and “Jack the Flipper.”)

Get over it, lads and ladies; I think those cows are cute – sometimes cuter than you. The calendar stays. I’m not taking advice on what not to eat from a pig wearing way too much mascara and bling for daytime television, nor accepting religious guilt from a cow.

Put bluntly, Chick-Fil-A and the Muppets are each corporations having a field day with the marketing boom from this gleeful exchange of crossfire. Keep playing these stupid games, you two, and I will learn to live without either of you. It’s not like you have feelings. It’s not like you’re people.

It’s more like you’re laughing all the way to the bank at how easy it is to wind up those little toys called consumers…..

Now please leave me alone to finish this chicken strips basket, so I can go back to working my bookstore. Thank you.

Write (to Figure Out) What you Know

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I like to write. I like reading what other people have written. I like thinking about the ways in which stories (fiction or non) are crafted and put together. It’s fun and interesting to parse out how they were told, and how that plays into what kind of magical or prosaic dances of idea re-arrangement they can pull off inside our heads.

So yeah, I’m a word nerd. And now that the book about our bookstore is coming out this October, people sometimes chat with me about writing. Almost inevitably the words come up: “you wrote about what you knew, your bookstore.”

Well, yes and no. I wrote about the bookstore more to figure out what was going on than to express what I knew. Perhaps Joan Didion put it best: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”

Writing organizes and orders our experiences, extrapolates meaning out of random events, reminds us that life is short but wide, as the Mexican proverb says. They day in front of us doesn’t always look like a part of anything bigger than itself, but it’s hooked to a whole life that builds to more than the sum of its daily parts. In writing, when you lay down what happens in a day next to what happened the day (or week, or month) before and the day (or week, etc.) after, it’s easier to see that what happened is more important than just what happened.

Perhaps writing is like marking the growth of a child against a door frame. Inch after slow, unfeelable inch, you can suddenly look back over three years and say, “Wow! Growth!” But you wouldn’t have seen that movement if it hadn’t been marked down.

That’s what “the bookstore book” (as we call it at our house) did for me. Five years of growing a shop, of learning to live in and among a community, measured against life’s door frame. No, it wasn’t so much “writing what I know” as to find out what I knew.

But I will tell you something about the act of writing our story down: although I’m over the moon that Little Bookstore is getting published, trying to remember and capture all the silly, strange incidents of day-to-day life on paper was almost as much fun as living through them the first time, in and of itself. Looking back at those little penciled lines against the doorway makes me smile.