Bookshelf: The Gem of Guelph, ON

I woke up tired. Very tired. And I had an appointment to meet with Bookshelf’s bookstore manager, Dan Evans, this morning. So, I pulled out my favorite attitude adjuster. Rum Raisin lipstick. Then I grabbed press kits, posters, and review copies of Whose Panties Are These? and remembered back to my cymbal playing days when the drummers would shout, “Get up for the game!”

Then that thing happened. The thing that you can’t ever plan or expect. That thing when you meet somebody and you feel like you’ve known them before. I arrived at The Bookshelf and found Dan immediately. He was younger than I had anticipated. Just 30. Red hair coverered in a black Oxford University Press baseball cap. Black rectangular glasses. Ruddy faced. He took a break and sat down with me to talk about Panties. Sand in My Bra sat in a stand at the front cashier on display as The Book of the Day. He said that our PGW Canada rep had already talked him up on the book and that they were getting a reviewer to include it in their newsrag “Off the Shelf”.

When we sat down to talk, the conversation led to books, authors, and the oft connection between travel and broken heart recovery. My energy was up, and I didn’t need the lip stick after all. I could’ve talked to Dan all day.

He highly encouraged me to come back for an event at their store, and was quite persuasive in suggesting that I return for the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival and Toronto’s The Word on the Street next year. Dan was proud of Canadian storytelling and pointed me in the direction of Peter Darby Shine(sp?). He added, “Canadians have great storytellers, and mediocre novelists. The format of storytelling is more suited to our temperment.”

That made me want to know more…

Afterwards, I met with Travelers’ Tales author and contributor Laurie Gough. I’ve met Laurie on a few different occassions in San Francisco and at two previous book expos. Her writing is delicious. Such imagery. Passionate chapters with a talent for description I can only dream about. Emotional evocations that teach you things you didn’t know you needed to learn. Good stuff. You’ve got to read Kite Strings of the Southern Cross.

Laurie is a new mother who has finished her second book (Kiss the Sunset Pig: Travel Tales Coming Home) and is currently looking for a publisher, with hopes of Random House. Right now she has connections shopping it at the Frankfurt Book Fair. In the mean time Laurie is writing some travel guidebooks for the Canadian government and recently had a piece in Canadian Geographic.

I do hope that I can come back and do an event at the Bookshelf with Laurie and the other local Sand and Panties contributors. She’ll be teaching a travel writing class at the University of Guelph some time in January…so it’d be a great fit to do it all then. We’ll see…

It’s lovely here. A small university town surrounded by farms. Yesterday I got my fill of big red barns, horses, and old houses begging to be photographed.

I had such great talks with Laurie and Dan that I’m exhausted again. Sorry I didn’t get to blog as much as I’d hoped. I have SO much to catch up up on and will do my best to get to it tomorrow. Maybe even later tonight….

(This post was brought to you by the free wireless internet access at the Bookshelf cafe. Make sure you check out their cinema and bar upstairs!)