Carnies

Fall has fallen.  My baby boy, struggling to master the art of stepping upright, stumbles against the ottoman once more.  We’re officially in the cruising phase (easily confused with the bruising phase).  I think of the series of phases he’ll go through next, all the way through adolescence when, Dr. Spock and his contemporaries would have us believe, he’ll phase out of phases entirely until somewhere around middle age.

I don’t agree with them.  For me, fall conjurs memories of the mid 1980s, when my mother and my Aunt Kit fell headlong into an obsession with paint pens, wooden cats, stencil kits, and glue guns.  The Crafting Phase.

I’m not really sure what started it.  Maybe it was the onset of their mid-thirties.  They’d stopped bearing children, so now it was time to nourish other things, like crossed-stitched ducks on “Welcome to Our Home” signs, and wooden spoons with lace bows on the handles that you hang on the kitchen wall.

Once every fall, Kit and Momma would stuff my cousins, sister and me into the station wagon like so many errant leaves, and drag us back to Damascus, to the Annual Constitution Square Festival and Craft Sale.  We squeezed ourselves into the way-back, between stacks of grapevine wreaths and Santas made of toilet paper rolls.  And when the rear door was flung open, we were turned loose — to ”shop” (because what does any child want more than her own crocheted toilet paper holder), guzzle burgoo and funnel cakes, and, my favorite part, enjoy the sideshow of (unintentional) “characters” present at any Kentucky fair.  There were toothless banjo pickers and blind sawblade painters; whittlers so enamoured with their own whittle-itude that they placed $50 price tags on lopsided wooden toy horses.  And, of course, there were thie “hillbilly” booths, where you usually found the most pathetic excuses for “crafts,” and the best sales people.  A toothpick glued to a piece of two-by-four, with a homemade plaquard that read “Hillbilly Toothbrush,” went for $5.95; a cut up stack of phone book pages, glued on the same (”Hillbilly Toilet Paper”) was a dollar cheaper.  One year, Meg, who wasn’t allowed to play with anything resembling a real knife, spent her allowance on a “Hillbilly Switchblade” — a tongue depressor attached to a clothes pin with a rubber band.  (Looking back, I believe Hillbillies and Vacation Bible School Teachers must have shared the same views about appropriate childrens’ toys.)     

It was with a sense of great nostalgia for the Constitution Craft Fair days that I accepted, several weeks ago, an invite to my first rural Book Fair. 

Now, I hate to crush the delusions of readers who think all book-styled events are held in upscale, white-table-clothed venues, with soft music playing in the background, white wine on silver trays, and lots of women in black and men in turtlenecks milling around, tossing out descriptors like “scrumtrillescent.”  Some readings are like that.  Some funerals are, too.

But a book fair is just what the name would imply — the food (well, some of it), the atmosphere, and, oh yes, the characters.   

I arrived at the Fair site, a middle school gymnasium that sprung up, metallic and outrageously modern, out of what looked like a 30-square mile area of cow pasture.  (Sidenote:  Is that trend, nowadays?  The more rural the school, the newer building?  I guess my alma mater in Richmond, KY, isn’t far enough out there to qualify for one of these techie remodels.  The last time I saw MCHS, it still looked like a leftover from the Welcome Back Kotter set.)  As instructed, I was early. The coordinator encouraged us to take time to “set up our table displays.”

I did my best.  (Tell all the truth, I think the last time I put together a table display it was aso in a school gym.  My handiwork consisted of a trifold cardboard poster, covered with Polaroids of me growing crystals in my mother’s frying pan.  I got an Honorable Mention ribbon, and was a little bitter.  The winner did reasearch on whether most dogs were right or left-pawed.  Because that’s useful.  At least my efforts could have benefitted some Kentucky youngster who wanted to, say, start their own meth lab.)   

This time, my display consisted of a white cotton table cloth, books stacked like they’d been flourished by David Copperfield, and a dish of candy corn.  I thought, when I bouht the candy corn, that it was a creative, attention-grabbing touch.  This was before I saw the gold lame draping and homemade fudge some of my fellow authors brought.  Oh, and did I mention the author “uniforms?”  Oh yes.  Handmade cardigans embroidered with appliques that looked like miniature books and letters.  And matching stretch pants.

But these were the least of the attractions.

As I’ve mentioned, I come to these things for the characters, and this time I wasn’t disappointed.  Every author-themed event is a veritable sideshow of human eccentricity.  But rural fairs, where you get a fair number of self-published folks, are special.  These folks haven’t been through a publicist’s “let’s market you” machine.  Some may not know what a publicist is.  A precious few appear unaware that a “public” exists.     

Now, I’m not trying to put down self-published authors.  The world of self-publication is full of jewels, brought to the page with more effort and tenacity than could be wrought by a thousand million-dollar printing presses. Indeed, many literary giants began by publising themselves. 

But from every proud tradition spring a few abberrant seeds, those fair merchants my Grandy would euphemize, with downcast eyes, as “not quite right.”  You sense, just from passing their tables, that the goal of their writing process was not to produce a book, nor to tell a story.  No, it was something along the lines of “Find an occupation that requires me to neither leave my house nor interact with another single, living soul, ever.”       

These folks seem to emerge from their subterranean lairs once or twice a year, when it occurs to them they might actually try to sell some of these cases and cases of books they paid to print.  They aren’t very pleasant.  Often, they are Discovery Channel obese, and look greatly displeased at the notion that anyone would be rude enough to invite them to move into the daylight and make some money.  When you ask them what they’re working on, they don’t look up from their Gameboys or knitting, but make vague references to needing to counteract “the crap that’s out there,” without elaborating on the ”crap” to which they refer.

In other words, in fair-speak,  I don’t think they have the right to call themselves genuine carnies.  Aunt Kit and Sharon Hancock sure were, decked out in their matching denim aprons and Keds without a care in the world.  And I tried my best to be, candy corn be damned, smiling and inviting passers-by to step up and give me a shot.

If I have one piece of advice for authors (self-published, contracted, whatever), it’s this — if you’re going to put your words out there, go all out.  Stand up, be counted, be country, be tacky.  Not everyone’s going to buy you.  But you can enjoy the view from your table while someone still wants to set one up for you.   

All writers are artists, and artists are necessarily carnies.  There’s no hiding it or fighting it; we’re weird.  We’re quirky.  We spend our times in worlds and with people who don’t exist, or thoroughly absorbed in the quirks of those who do. 

But I don’t think we’re alone.  I like to think everyone has a little bit of carny in them.  The thing they’re obsessed with that not everyone else “gets,” the movie that you will advocate until your last breath, the invention where you wish you could put your last dolar, the story they’ll repeat louder and louder until you turn your eyes toward them, at last, and admit that it is interesting, it is good, it is relevant.  

Today, in celebration of fall, I encourage all readers to embrace their inner carny.  Tell us about it in the comment thread, if you like.      

 

  

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