Listen to Jim’s comments here: http://jimreedbooks.com/mp3/writersofwordschaotically.mp3
or read on…
There are workshops and conferences and gatherings and meetings where writers and wanna-be writers cluster to find The Secret. Big groups, small groups, tiny groups…all converge to learn something new about the mystery of being a writer.
But a startlingly easy way to energize yourself as a writer is to accidentally happen upon synergy, in the form of an unconscious conflagration of inspired artists who want to write write write.
This just happened at Reed Books/The Museum of Fond Memories.
They walked the hot asphalt streets of Birmingham for blocks and blocks, a mass of disparate personalities and cultures and ages and ethnicities, heading toward Mecca—the bookstore at the center of the universe.
The door opens to the shop, the chime starts chiming, and the unhuddled masses begin filing in, maybe twenty in all. They fill the space. They in no way resemble the majority of young patrons who usually visit us. The difference is palpable.
This amalgam of students, seventh through twelfth grades, is a joyfully seething mixture of authors and poets, diary-keepers and maintainers of notes…and they have one thing in common. Even the most sophisticated among them are excited to be surrounded by books and magazines and newspapers and postcards and letters and documents and sayings and ephemera.
They are ramped up by the sight of the written word, enthused by the spoken word, inspired by the sung word, motivated by the dramatized word.
These students of the Alabama School of Fine Arts are here because they want to be, even though they are led by creative writing teacher Stuart Flynn. Even though the bossman is present, the students want to be here! and the proof is in their joy, the proof is in the fact that they use their own money to purchase books when many their age would be investing in another snack or pair of shoes or one more concert. They are actually buying books!
Their youth and energy rev up the customers and the aged bookdealer, who takes pleasure in finding obscure titles they seek, in bantering with the more extroverted among them, in conversing with the quieter ones, in listening to their exclamations and comments and chatter. Two seventh graders are everywhere at once, asking, probing, absorbing and asking more, and one eleventh-grader comments with a grin, “Oh, they are such children, aren’t they?” She’s observing and making mental notes, as do all writers I’ve ever met. We can’t help documenting the world around us.
What would my bookie life be like if all the customers were this enthused?
Well, I’d be happy and worn-out at the end of the day…but that’s what going home to a quiet life and fondling a good book is for.
We bookies are such children, aren’t we
(c) 2012 A.D. by Jim Reed