First Fiction Tour '05: Boston

Miranda Beverly-Whittemore sends the first in a series of dispatches from her six-city tour with three other first-time novelists...

So here's the (perhaps disappointingly) good news: everyone is incredibly nice. Like, we're talking very, very nice people. Not a diva among them. I know. I was kinda hoping for some good gossip too.

My husband and I flew in on Sunday afternoon, and took a swift cab to the Charles Hotel in Cambridge. Dinner was had with local family, and then Matthew Carnahan called and we met at the trying-very-hard hotel bar, Noir, for a drink. And though the setting was cheesy, the conversation was not. Matthew Carnahan is very funny, articulate and smart. We talked about family, politics (guess who we didn't vote for), and barely about the book world. It was refreshing.

After a long night's sleep (the longest we'll probably get this week), my husband, Matthew, Marya Hornbacher, and her husband all met for breakfast. Marya is witty and much tinier than I imagined--her prose is so bold that I expected a taller person, and, strangely, she admitted to expecting the same thing from me.

We were picked up by our media escort at 4:20 p.m.--she called my room at 4:05 when I had just stepped out of the shower, letting me know we'd be meeting downstairs in 15 minutes, so there was a bit of a scramble getting ready. But we gathered in the lobby in a timely fashion, and drove to pick up Edward Schwarzchild, who was staying at the Sheraton (poor Ed). Ed is tall, and quietly funny; actually, that's one of the best things I'm learning about all of us, that we each have a healthy sense of humor.

We drove to Jimmy Tingles Off Broadway Theater in Somerville, not knowing quite what to expect. Apparently, Jimmy Tingle (s?) is a native Bostonian, a comedian, who was on 60 Minutes for two years, and has owned his own theater for 2 1/2 years. He was our gracious host and emcee for the evening, a real kind of showman, the likes of which don't really exist much anymore.

Someone from NPR interviewed us individually, and then taped the reading, so that was pretty exciting; it'll air at some point this week, hopefully either on Morning Edition or All Things Considered. That's one of the good things about doing a tour as a group; usually when you're reading by yourself as a first time writer (or second or third, for that matter), it's incredibly hard to get any kind of press. But the First Fiction Tour is a story unto itself, so media has been much more quick to bite.

The reading itself was really fun; it was great to see everyone present their words. Marya and I have both given a lot of readings (though she's given many more than I have, and apparently went on a three-month non-stop soul-killing book tour her first time around), and Matthew and Edward were newer to the game. But they delivered their fifteen minutes of material like real pros. In between readings, Jimmy did some standup. Cindy Dach, who founded the First Fiction Tour, had flown in all the way from Arizona to welcome us to the touring life, and it was real pleasure to meet the person who has put this all together.

So where are we now? We're all sitting on an airplane soaring in the bumpy air between Boston and Detroit. Tonight we'll be reading in Ann Arbor and I promise to keep my eyes peeled for scandal. Mattthew and I are hoping that the ladies will be so overcome by our readings, they'll throw their (clean) underpants on stage. This is, after all, supposed to be a rock tour.