Whom or What Are Literary Awards For?

When the National Book Awards modified its nomination processes in early 2013, I was concerned about some of the reasoning behind the changes—in particular, the effort to make the awards, in the words of one board member, “a little more mainstream.”

Personally, I think it’d be great if the National Book Awards were as prominently celebrated in our mainstream culture as, say, the Oscars or even the Tonys—but that would require making books more “mainstream” than they are now, which would be a pretty big project, beyond our present scope. Unfortunately, the takeaway from the initial discussion was that the NBA judges were being chastised for “recognizing lesser-known authors for the sake of choosing lesser-known authors,” when they ought to be putting forward books more in alignment with the serious reading public’s sensibilities, as reflected either in the critical appraisal of mainstream reviewers or in actual sales, or in the place on the Venn diagram where those two circles overlap.

(I was about to say “the greater reading public’s sensibilities,” but you can imagine how the literati would react to the books that would emerge from that approach.)

I take the exact opposite point of view. I would never presume to describe myself as a “well-read” person, so, for me, the National Book Awards shortlist has always been about the insights of five people who’ve been given the opportunity to spend a year (roughly) cultivating as close to a comprehensive perspective on contemporary American literature as anyone is likely to possess. What have those five people seen that I and other readers have missed?

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19 November 2013 | better bookends |

Life Stories #53: Wendy Welch

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photo courtesy Wendy Welch

In this episode of Life Stories, the podcast series where I talk to memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I’m joined by Wendy Welch, the co-owner of Tales of the Lonesome Pine, a used bookstore and café in southwestern Virginia. Her memoir about opening that store, The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap, recently came out in paperback, and I asked her about whether she’d been able to forge connections with other bookstore owners during the previous year, when it was a hardcover release. First, she told me about a road trip she and her husband undertook even before the book had come out:

“We went to 42 small towns, looking for bookstores, just looking for bookstores in small towns across America—out to Kansas and back up. It was fairly amazing; we found that about 18 of those small towns were thriving… We started just looking for bookstores, and then we started looking at the small towns themselves… We met a lot of bookstore owners and a lot of small business owners on that trip. Some of them we went back to and visited after the book came out or they were very gracious about promoting it.

“But the big thing was, in the year since then… a lot of people came to the bookstore to visit. Other bookstore owners, but also just people—girlfriend posses, reading clubs, writing clubs—they just wanted to see the bookstore, our bookstore. And they would come and tell us the loveliest stories about their bookstores back in their hometown, then when they went home, they would connect us. So there’s a lot of Facebook friends and there’s actually a support group we started on Facebook for some small bookstores across the midwest.

“We call it the second round of community… We knew that in our community, we were making a community around the bookstore, but that second round of readers and writers and bookstore owners across America and even in some other countries… That’s been absolutely lovely.”

We also talk about, among other things, some of the initial obstacles they faced in trying to start a business in a small community, and about how Wendy’s memoir started out as a record that she set down for herself, in order to make sense of everything that had happened during those early struggles. If you enjoyed the recent Life Stories episode where Ellen Stimson talked about trying to run a general store in rural Vermont, I think you’ll get a big kick out of my conversation with Wendy—and if you haven’t heard that one yet, you might circle back to it after you finish this one!

Listen to Life Stories #53: Wendy Welch (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (And if you are an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)

18 November 2013 | life stories |