On my first book tour, when I stopped in Chicago (where I was born), I assumed it would be a scarf-over-the-shoulder, glamorous occasion. My mother, on the other hand, is a Polish immigrant with an eighth-grade education and little experience of the world, and she was suspicious.
"What exactly is a book signing?" she asked.
"It's a sort of party to celebrate a new book," I said lamely, "and the Katzy Book Store lady wants you to send her a list of all our friends and relatives so she can invite them." There was a long pause, as if my mother's brain were a computer searching for a connection.
"Why, that's wonderful," she said cheerfully. "It will be sort of like a wake, won't it?"
A wake, to my mother, is an important occasion. There were other authors signing books that day as well, including an enthusiastic young couple who had just self-published a Tex-Mex cookbook. "It's our vacation," explained the husband, passing chips and dip to my Aunt Ann. "We just load up our trunk with books, and when we get to a new town, we go directly from grocery store to bookstore." Then they both smiled and said in practiced unison, "Have salsa; will travel!"
So this is a book tour, I thought, and I knew right away I would love it as much as a screwball comedy. I've traveled sans salsa a lot since then, and I once autographed at an art museum with a string quartet playing Mozart elegantly in the background. But I must confess, it's not the glamorous occasions I remember most clearly.
I probably shouldn't mention the pixilated conversation I once had at a bookstore with a shy puppeteer who would speak to me only in the high-pitched voice of her raccoon puppet Sparky. Nor the fundraising organization that once asked me to present one of my autographed books to the deposed Queen of Romania. (I have no idea why and I am not making any of this up.) But there was the time I autographed next to a clown who made balloon animals.
Between the day the Borders advertisement came out and the clown arrived, Sunny had apparently had a clown identity crisis and changed her name to Happy. The crowd was restless and they wanted what they'd come for. "We want Sunny. We want Sunny," the kids chanted. Happy's composure, and her clown eyelashes, started to come unglued. Balloons popped, Happy snarled, and several four-year-olds, who at that age were worried about people's body parts falling off, began sobbing uncontrollably. It may be the only time in history that kids preferred an autograph to a balloon dachshund.
It's not the celebrity status nor the chance to boost my royalty checks that keep me signing books. It's the feedback; it's the fun. There's nothing quite like hearing from readers first-hand that the words I conjured on a page are important to them. And there's nothing quite like the amusement I once felt entering a gymnasium packed with children singing "Skip to My Lou." They were accompanied by a tinny piano, and the song's lyrics had been changed to tell the story of my book's vegetable riddle soup. All 600 kids cheerfully waved tongue depressors to which they'd glued Manila paper zucchini and eggplants. It was heartwarming and surreal all at the same time, but you had to love their enthusiasm.
I enjoy book tours in part because an autograph party is my opportunity to escape the solitary confinement of my writing room and—like a Jane Austen heroine—enter Society. It's such a pleasure to engage in good book talk with people who know books, and such a delight to find the droll treasures that Society has to offer.
At Kids Ink Children's Bookstore in Indianapolis, e.g., I got to dip my hand in green paint and become quirkily immortalized on the store's infamous bathroom wall. My new book, Shirley's Wonderful Baby, is dedicated to the store's owner, the wonderful Shirley Mullin; and the book's illustrator, the quick-witted Bruce Degen, decorated his autographed handprint with a cartoon. The Magic School Bus's Ms. Frizzle, swathed in toilet paper, is saying, "Doesn't the bathroom at Kids Ink make you feel wonderful, Arnold?" while Arnold answers, "Actually, it makes me feel flush."
My mother, who is not a reader, doesn't understand why I love book tours. If I could, I'd tell her this: as authors, we write our books with the hope that our stories, like good soup, will help sustain the human spirit, and with the innocent expectation that our books will be read. Most often, our hopes rest on a bookseller's matchmaking ability to marry each book with the right reader. From my point of view, it's icing on the cake when I'm there at the party.
Perhaps this story says it best: one day, in an attempt to encourage a food store chain to continue sponsoring author appearances at inner-city schools, I agreed against my own better judgment to autograph at a grocery store. The mustached store manager was very sweet. "I want you to know," he said showing me to a table, "we have moved the Kluski noodles just for you." The most embarrassing part of that bizarre day was that every 10 minutes a disembodied voice on the loudspeaker announced, "Shoppers—today we have fall apples and chicken breasts on sale, and in between the fish market and produce, we have author Valiska Gregory."
But here's the part I remember fondly: I signed a book for the fish market lady, and she liked the experience so much, I spent the rest of the afternoon trying in vain to explain why I couldn't autograph other authors' books as well. It was the very first book the dear woman had ever purchased in her life, an important occasion, and for me, that was way better than glamour.
