Report #4 from the FIRST FICTION TOUR
Hey everybody. I still have my sore throat so thank goodness for these lovely reports from Lisa Selin Davis, the author of BELLY. Guess what! Everything started looking up in Portland! Now put on some Sleater Kinney and see what's up on tour. --Elizabeth
Monday, October 24, report from Lisa Selin Davis:
Portland, Oregon
What a great town. A friend of a friend of a friend picks me up at the airport--a tall and handsome chiropractic student, with a fading South African accent -- and shows me the city. I’m in love. If we could pack it up and move it two hours from New York, I’d relocate immediately. Or, if I could convince all my wonderful New York friends, and my siblings and mom, to uproot themselves and make the grand shift to Portland, I would. What do you say, guys?
For most of the day, I forget about the reading. This is on purpose, for the pain of the no-show night has followed me, transformed this from an adventure--readings! with other first time novelists! all over America!--into an exercise in dread.
The grass here is brilliant kelly-colored, and the roses are in full bloom, and you can get your own bungalow for $200,000, and there are so many nice coffee shops and art movies theaters. Construction is everywhere, but for all the luxury lofts, they have just as many low-income housing projects. Not housing projects the way we think of them, but nice looking places right next to the richy rich places, so as not to segregate all the poor folks and cause all that angst and anger and crime to brew.
If only I wanted to do something else for a living. If only I’d finished urban planning school and gotten a real job.
We show up at the venue--probably the closest thing Portland has to a Midtown Manhattan after work bar. There are a few stragglers. My tourmates and I greet one another--we are cautious, nervous, family members saying hello in the hospital waiting room, anticipating the diagnoses.
It’s okay. We have about 20 people, maybe, including an entourage from the wonderful Powell’s books. At this point, we have lowered our expectations so as not to have them dashed, but after the reading, I have that sort of sad and empty feeling, and not just because I’d just spent the weekend painting the room in my apartment that’d going to be my bedroom after my boyfriend and his daughter move out. When you do a reading, it’s like an offering, and sometimes you can feel people accept. You can feel them connect. And I didn’t. And I’m jetlagged. And profoundly sad. I eat dinner with more friends of friends--so many wonderful people in this town--and I want to feel like my life is still full of adventures, that there are so many adventures yet to come, but I want to crawl into bed with my cat and my soon-to-be-ex boyfriend, furry and gray-haired and champion snugglers.
--LISA SELIN DAVIS