Last Thursday, April 23rd was the official book launch for Fatted Calf Blues at the Confederation Centre Library in Charlottetown.  I'm pleased to report that it went reasonably well.  About 20 people showed up, a respectable showing.  I was grateful to see some writers whom I have come to know. Considering that I live so far from Charlottetown and feel relatively disconnected from the literary scene there, I very much appreciated the show of support.  

After being introduced, I was surprised to find how nervous I felt.  The strategy was to talk about the book, the disparate nature of the stories and what connects them as a collection, how living on PEI has influenced my writing, where the stories come from and using my own personal experience as a springboard into fiction -- all the while reading excerpts from the stories to prove my point.  It was not as successful as I had hoped it would be.  I wrote a small speech, which I had on the podium in front of me with salient parts highlighted.  As much as I tried to speak "off the cuff" I kept finding myself with head craned over the podium, constantly referring to my notes so as not to lose the thread of theme.  In short, it felt like a disaster, although people were very nice about it.  More successful, I think (and everyone's compliments confirmed this) was the actual reading of the excerpts.  I like reading in public and I believed this showed in my delivery. I chose to read excerpts because I was afraid of boring the audience with a whole story.  

I now realized my mistake lay in not playing to my strengths and misjudging my approach.  Rather than talking about influences, themes, etc. and reading excerpts to show examples,  I should have chosen a story, read it in whole and then talked about influences, themes, etc.  A rookie mistake,and one I hope to rectify in the upcoming launches and appearances I will in Montreal, Ottawa, Hamilton and Toronto.

The Fatted Calf Blues machine is starting to roll and there seems to be a lot of elements I have been juggling to promote the book.  

I did an interview on the CBC Radio One Charlottetown afternoon show Main Street with Matt Rainnie.  This was my second interview with Matt and I think it turned out well.  Matt is very friendly and laid back and knows how to put his interviewees at ease.  All the same, I have a tough time listening to myself (like many people do, I think) and find it's easy to be self-critical when I hear how I stumbled over some answers or felt I could have been more concise.  I could also hear the nervousness in my voice (which tends to pitch a bit higher under stress). Before going into the studio, I sat in the car and listened to Jian Ghomeshi on Q interviewing Leonard Cohen.  I can only hope that someday I can approximate the Cohen’s eloquence and wisdom. 

While I was in Charlottetown I saw copies of Fatted Calf Blues on the shelves of The Bookmark. It made this whole experience all the more real for me like nothing else has so far.  I also saw posters for my upcoming book launch at the Confederation Centre Library on April 23rd (Canada Book Day) at 7:00 pm.  I have to admit I'm feeling nervous about it.  First of all, I'm wondering how many people will show up even though there has been a bit publicity so far with the CBC interview and a nice mention in The Buzz. Thelma and I put together a media release and faxed and emailed it to various newspapers, radio and TV stations.  No responses yet, but hopefully something will happen closer to the time.

I'm also constantly working out in my head what to say at the launch, what points I want to make about the stories, the process of writing them and getting them into a book, how PEI has helped shape my writing, etc.  Also, I keep changing my mind about which story or stories to read.  One long one or maybe a couple of the shorter ones? Thankfully I have decided to limit myself to 20 minutes, so that should help me decide closer to the time.  The one thing I am looking forward to is the food.  Thelma and her mom will be making sandwiches and baking brownies, cheesecake squares and cookies.  

Thelma and I also put together a small promotional video of me reading a postcard story called Elephant Rock, at North Cape (where the story takes place).  It was fairly chilly the day we shot the video. We did two takes of me reading the story with different backgrounds and then Thelma shot some footage of North Cape.  When we watched it all at home, it was obvious that we couldn't use the audio, so I recorded the story on Garageband.

When it came time to mix the video with the audio, the elements didn't all sync up as well as we would have hoped.  In fact, if it weren't for Thelma's editing skills (she is by far the Thelma Schoonmaker  of home made videos) it would look a lot worse than it does.  As it is, I think it has a kind of rough charm all it's own.  We had a few issues with finding the proper format in which to save it (again solved by Thelma's resourcefulness) and will be uploading it (as soon as we can access some hi-speed) onto Facebook (as a virtual launch) and on YouTube.  I doubt that it will go as wildly viral as the performance by Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent, but I do hope it garners some modest attention and helps promote the book.

Putting together the video seems to me symbolic of the whole promotional effort for the book. There are a lot of elements to sync up, all of which Thelma and I have been doing to the best of our ability, but what it all adds up to in the end owes as much to luck as anything else.

When I was first sending out the manuscript for Fatted Calf Blues I received many rejections.  A few publishers commented that, although well written, the stories did not hang together as a collection.  I struggled to understand what they were talking about.  I assumed they meant that a group of stories should have some kind of common link.  It made me self-conscious about the disparities between my stories.  For example, they take place in different locales. Some, like Phone Booth, are distinctly urban, while others, such as Elephant Rock, have a rural setting. There is also the matter of style. The Bridge By Moonlight is told as a relatively straightforward narrative, while Home, James has the much more surreal quality of a recurring dream.  I couldn't help but feel defensive about the collection.  Why was it necessary to have some kind of facile connection to justify this particular grouping of stories?  Wasn't it enough of a common link that they were all written by me?  In fact, I believe the eclectic quality of these stories is what holds them together as a collection.

Perhaps I'm not the only one.  According to the Turnstone Press home page, Fatted Calf Blues is currently near the top of the Turnstone Top Ten. Although I'm not entirely sure how the top ten is calculated, I do know that it is related directly to sales. 

Nevertheless, it seems that eclecticism is somehow equated with commercial and artistic failure. Perhaps it has always been thus, but  those of us who grew up in the sixties  remember listening to commercial top ten radio where one could hear Johnny Cash followed by B. B. King followed by Tony Bennett. Twenty years later radio became much more compartmentalised with narrowly specialised stations popping up everywhere.  I also remember that when the Beatles' White album came out it was seen as an artistic oddity because of the eclectic nature of the songs.  The individuality of the four members' personalities seemed to be the focus rather than their strength as a band.  And yet, when I listen to it now, I marvel at how distinctive they were as a group because of those different personalities.  

The usual pattern for emerging writers is to put out a story collection as a kind of introduction or calling card and then "graduate" to the more lucrative novel.  And yes, I am working on a novel. Even so,  I have recently written a few new stories.  Some have their origins in material that has been excised from the novel-in-progress.  I can't imagine not writing short stories.  Who knows, maybe my next collection will have a more cohesive theme unifying it.  Possibly a novel constructed as a series of connected stories.  That seems to be particularly in fashion these days.  Call me fashionably unfashionable, but I'm more attracted to the unpredictability of a grab bag of stories that could fit anywhere and nowhere.