Bookseller, literary entrepreneur and anthology editor Sonny Brewer is hitting the road with the Southern Writers Reading series he began in 1998, one year after opening the bookstore Over the Transom in Fairhope, Ala.
He's traveling to help launch Stories from the Blue Moon Café (MacAdam/ Cage), a hardcover anthology of 30 Southern writers that grew out of last November's gathering. First stop, last month, was Jackson, Miss., for Friday and Saturday evening events at the bookstore Lemuria, followed by a shorter Sunday afternoon event at Square Books in nearby Oxford. During the September SEBA trade show in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., Brewer will join a panel discussion on current Southern writing.
Twenty-two of the contributors participated in the highly successful Lemuria event. While there was a slight drop in the number of writers at Square Books, the event nevertheless "went over quite well with our customers," according to special events coordinator Jamie Kornegay.
"This was the most writers we have ever had for one event," Lemuria owner John Evans told PW, "It was very much in the spirit of Sonny that he brought attention to writers not yet well known to our community. Of course, the book also includes writers such as Rick Bragg and Jill Connor Browne who are already popular with Jackson readers—and both are in good form in this collection. But everyone—writers and customers alike—told me they were glad they came." The crowd nearly depleted the store's 600-copy event order from the publisher's initial 15,000 printing.
Lemuria served Blue Moon beer, imported from Seattle, which added to the evening's festiveness. The Blue Moon Café in Brewer's title, however, came from Robert Bell's 1959 novel The Butterfly Tree (University of Alabama Press), set in fictionalized Fairhope.
The venue for the annual, weekend-before-Thanksgiving series, a tie-in with downtown merchants' Christmas kick-off, is a small theater near Over the Transom, a 2,000-sq.-ft. new and used store. Brewer's store also houses his Web site and the Over the Transom imprint, for what he terms "privately published books." It was there the anthology was born in 2001, with publisher David Poindexter and editor Pat Walsh of San Francisco—based MacAdam/Cage present.
"We like to travel around the country visiting our authors," said Walsh, "and we knew William Gay and Frank Turner Hollon would be there, so we decided to attend" last year's series. (Gay's debut novel, The Long Home, was published by MacMurray & Beck, which MacAdam/Cage acquired two years ago, while Hollon's The Pains of April, first published by Brewer at Over the Transom, was reissued in trade paperback this month by MacAdam/Cage.)
But the publisher and editor also wanted to visit the Fairhope literary community for which Brewer designed the series as a forum, although writers from throughout the South are also invited. "We were bowled over!" Walsh exclaimed. "We're lucky if we draw 10 people to the readings we host in San Francisco, but there were over 100 people gathered for Sonny's lineup of readers." Poindexter told Brewer—who has since become a MacAdam/Cage field editor—that if he could compile enough work from the evening's readers plus other Southern writers he was in touch with, MacAdam/Cage would publish it.
Until then, Brewer said, he never thought about developing a book from the series. Nonetheless, providing a spotlight for writers who live in Fairhope is why he began the series. "This place, with a 12,000 population, is home to more published writers than live in a lot of larger cities," he asserted, citing local anthology contributors W.E.B. Griffin, Winston Groom, C. Terry Cline Jr., Judith Richards, Jennifer Paddock, Monroe Thompson and Richard Shackelford. Brewer and all the contributors are donating proceeds from the book to the Fairhope Center for Writing Arts. Unsurprisingly, it was Brewer's initiative that spurred civic authorities to create an archive for local authors' first editions and sponsor creative writing scholarships for the Mobile Bay town's promising high school graduates.
