PNBA opened its second morning of the 2024 conference, held in Portland, Ore., with the Authors on the Map breakfast, a session that featured nine authors from the PNBA member region. Olufunke Grace Bankole, Stephanie Booth, Leyla Brittan, Faith Conlon, Zaynab Mohammed, Emma Pattee, Holly Searcy, Megan Williams, and Kelsea Yu talked about their books, the impact of independent bookstores on their lives, and their prospective journeys. Samantha Allen was also scheduled, but was ill and unable to attend. PNBA education committee member Angela Pursel (co-owner of Next Chapter Books, Hermiston, Ore.) gave a spirited welcome to the gathered booksellers for the early-morning presentation, and talked about Allen's book, Roland Rogers Isn't Dead Yet (Zando, December 12) before introducing the first author.
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| Olufunke Grace Bankole | |
Olufunke Grace Bankole, author of The Edge of Water (Tin House, February 4), announced to the room that "my legs are shaking," then went on to thank the booksellers and fellow authors before talking about her first experience with an independent bookstore, at Community Book Center on Bayou Road in New Orleans, and Mama Jennifer, the Black woman bookseller who had worked there since its opening. A few months after they met, Bankole wrote a short story and shared it with Mama Jennifer, who "kindly told me that it was good and that I ought to keep writing." That encouragement, Bankole said, led her "deeper into the works of African writers, starting with foundational voices, like Yvonne Vera, whose novel Butterfly Burning stretches the parameters of language in ways I have not encountered since." She said whenever she moves, "the very first thing I do is I seek out the local indie bookstore where I know I will find the most thoughtfully curated collections of books and the warm welcome of unforgettable booksellers like Mama Jennifer."
Bankole was not the only author who extolled the joy and support found in independent bookstores. Seattle writer Faith Conlon, author of Timelight (Flashpoint, October 29), who also directed the publishing program at Seal Press, talked about the "power of booksellers and librarians getting books into the hands of readers" and called the "connecting [of] readers and writers as a kind of magic." In turn, Kelsea Yu noted that her family did many Seattle Independent Bookstore Days together, and twice won the challenge, which involves visiting every single bookstore in the Seattle area in a one day. She too talked of the bookstore's "vital role in fostering our local reading communities."
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| Stephanie Booth | |
Several of the authors recalled how their love of reading and stories provided the impetus for their books, including Megan Williams, who said that the story of her memoir One Bad Mother (Sibylline Press, September 3) started in the third grade, when "I was told I would never learn to read well." Despite that, she said, "Since then, I have a love of books. I spent a whole lifetime loving books." Stephanie Booth talked of how, ever since she was young, she could check a book out of the library and "be transported into the pages in a way that felt just as real and a lot safer than my everyday life." Trying to recapture that joy of reading was what led her to completely rework and structure her manuscript into her debut novel, Libby Lost and Found (Sourcebooks Landmark, May 21). Likewise, Holly Searcy channeled another sort of transportation from the real world through her days of creating worlds and characters for Dungeons and Dragons games with friends. Initially lured into the game with the promise of storytelling and the ability to have a pet fox, Searcy wrote The Shiver Tree (Blackstone, November 12) as "an homage to our game. I wanted to tell a fun fantasy: friends, heroes saving the day."
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| Emma Pattee signing her book for Chasina Klein (Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle) | |
Another common theme throughout was how authors brought in their own experiences, many of which involved settings and inspirations from the Pacific Northwest. Conlon's middle-grade novel casts the Space Needle as a time travel portal (and also has a character inspired by an older bookseller in Seattle whom Conlon knew). Portland writer Emma Pattee, whose debut novel, Tilt (Marysue Rucci Books/Simon & Schuster, March 25), is about a nine-months-pregnant woman who's shopping at a Portland-area IKEA for a crib when a massive earthquake hits, based her book on the landscape she was very familiar with. She said, "it was really important to me that this book be as factually accurate as possible" and that "every landmark in the book is real--every building, every street; I walked every single mile that's shown in this book." Yu's YA thriller, It's Only a Game (Bloomsbury YA, July 9) also draws from her own experience in Seattle, with nods to the University of Washington, the Seattle Public Library, and the University Bookstores on the Ave (specifically the "Sci-fi and Fantasy section"). She called it her "love letter to the PNW." She expressed how much she "wanted to write specifically a Chinese American young girl. The kind of book that I never got to read when I was young."
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Leyla Brittan had similar desires for her "not quite rom-com" contemporary YA debut, Ros Demir Is Not the One (Holiday House, October 1), which is a Turkish-American Romeo & Juliet remix. Like much of Brittan's earlier writing for her MFA program at University of Wyoming, it deals with themes of "multicultural identity and cultural discomfort" as well as "the tension between ways that people think you should feel about your identity" and the way that the protagonist actually does.
When speaking on her own identity, Zaynab Mohammed said, "I am a writer, a poet, a performer, a creative. I did what I know how to do best: I wrote my story." Mohammed read an excerpt from her book, Are You Listening? (Pownal Street Press, September 10), based on her one-woman play. She said she has "la[id] my heart bare... The pushback for standing up for what I know to be right over the years almost broke me, just like being an Arab woman in Canada almost broke me for decades. Now, I am thrilled and forever thankful to be an Arab woman. I love who I am."
Pursel rounded out the breakfast by thanking the authors for sharing their stories. She said to the audience, "I know it's a dream for all of you as well that we get to share these stories and put them in the hands of readers." The morning concluded with author signings. --Elaine Cho