Winter words at the abbey
TONIGHT TONIGHT | So in November of 2024, I did an event at the Fredericton Public Library for Indie Authors. I had a table for myself and all of the authors who wanted to participate from my weird little collective thingy — Agency Press. (It’s not a press! I regret the name, but here we are.)
I was so nervous because it was the first time I’d done anything like that in a REALLY long time. I think my last in-person market as a vintage seller was pre-Covid. This happened years ago, in Durham. And it didn’t go well. Or rather, it was fine, I suppose, but also expensive and sort of a bust. I made my money back, but it was just such a bad vibe and so very stressful all around.
My table looked amazing, but the event was judgement-heavy and snooty and weird, and just reminded me why I like selling online and dealing with customers that way.
Actually, scratch that. It taught me that I don’t want to deal with customers at all. Ever. It taught me I didn’t really want to sell stuff. (And yet at the time, selling stuff was my full-time job. Make it make sense! I cannot. It just was.)
But then I got into this whole indie book thing and I dunno, the idea of doing an event stopped being quite as scary. After all, a bookish event at a library is a far cry from a vending event in an armory in the USA.
Bad news: it was sort of a bust again. The library stuck me in an out-of-the-way corner, literally with and next to the children (literal child authors). Sales were non-existent. Heavens. It was depressing. And stressful, because I still had to put on a smiling face and chat ad be social and it was just BLAH. So … lesson learned for the second time. NO MORE EVENTS.
I was very much determined. I had learned my lesson. But that was then. Now is now. It’s only been a few months since the cursed Indie Book Fair at the library, but it’s been a good give five years since the vintage market, and I have not only been invited to do an event (a last-minute fill-in invite, but an invite all the same), but … I think I am going to do it.
The event in question is a Poetry Reading. Winter Words, it’s called. I was invited by Jordan Trethewey, the most recent Fredericton Poet Laureate, who I met at the very same library event I just said was a bust. He’s been SO nice about my poetry book, and very welcoming in a way most Fredericton people have not been. Granted, I’ve only been in town three years, but still. Socially (and this is very much my own fault as much as it is anyone else’s) it’s been a bit … shall we say dry? Sure. Dry. Let’s go with that.
Anyway, husbutt is out of town, but Jordan has invited me to read at Winter Words and it’s TONIGHT, at the The Abbey Café & Gallery on Queen Street. I’m going to bring The Smeetch with me, as I have nowhere else to put the kid, so you know, BAD MOM alert on top of everything else. How selfish of me. I believe I am filling in for Fawn Parker, who is the current Fredericton Poet Laureate and very fancy indeed. Never met her. Her writing seems good though. (FANCY.)
Wish me luck, though? Events and markets aside, this is a reading, and I haven’t done anything like this in a very long time. So rusty. We’ll see. Hermit-tendencies must be countered. I am going to try. Come out to see me if you’re here and you wanna.
P.S. Okay, so I don’t want to name the market in question (the bad one in 2019) because it remains beloved and I am really not sure it was anybody’s fault. Maybe just a random bad experience for me. Not indicative of anything, you know? Though the vibe was bad for me, I don’t claim to speak for anyone else. But I didn’t have fun and didn’t feel welcome. My table looked great, and yet people acted like a smelled or something. There was an undercurrent of the usual low-key racism wafting about (you know how that goes UNLESS you are not a person of colour, in which case, shush, because you know nothing). There were some wonderful Black artists, and I loved to see that, but I guess there was also something about me — I was TOO something. Too uncategorizable, too mixed, not brown enough, not white enough, fat but not there to be funny, too whathaveyou. Something about my essence and my booth seemed to put people off, though when I asked around about it, everyone told me uniformly that the booth looked great and they didn’t see what it could possibly have been the issue. So … I don’t know. But le sigh. It made me sad.