Jane Cholmeley and me after the Lighthouse event.
On Wednesday, June 4, on the eve of A PLACE OF OUR OWN's paperback edition pub day, I did an event at Lighthouse Books, Edinburgh's radical bookstore and a fantastic resource for the city and the community beyond.
Wednesday night's program was called "Queer Women/Queer Spaces" and it consisted of Lighthouse owner Mairi Oliver interviewing Jane Cholmeley and me about said spaces. Jane was one of the owners of Silver Moon, one of London's two feminist bookstores, which was located in the heart of the UK's traditional bookstore street, Charing Cross Road. (No more, alas—it still has a couple of used bookstores, but it's crap-shop central these days.) I had pre-ordered A BOOKSHOP OF ONE'S OWN, Jane's book about the creation, life, and end of Silver Moon, and picked up my copy on pub day, but it took me 18 months to sit down and read it.
It's so great! It's written in a very straightforward style with some good, dry British humor. Jane is very English—a vicar's daughter with an RP accent, who went to boarding school, has that posh name—and who changed thousands of lives with the store she owned and ran with a few other women, most notably Sue Butterworth, her partner in business and for several years, including the crucial setup stage of the store, in life.
The truly impressive part of the book is the openness Jane brought to the project. As Mairi pointed out, it contains some very sexy graphs! She shared the astonishing level of difficulty they faced in trying to set up the store, run the store, and keep the store open. I shouldn't have been surprised, given how many examples of radical transparency A PLACE OF OUR OWN contains—but it's still eye-opening to witness. The challenges of finding fair and equitable ways to work with employees, of just getting along, of having to make tough decisions based on business realities, and by the end of the store's life, the impossibility of working with people and organizations focused on rich Londoners and their ridiculous ideas about real estate.
I can never remember much about events after the fact—I'll recall only a couple of questions and even less of my answers—but I do know that it was really fun. We had a sell-out crowd, and Mairi's questions were fantastic. (The event is online if you're curious. Like lots of institutions, Lighthouse started live-streaming events during the pandemic—and having built up a core of loyal viewers/readers/supporters, some I'm told with immunological or mobility issues, they've continued to broadcast them on YouTube. I know from having done a few panels at the store that some fantastic interventions/questions come from the live-stream viewers.)
My favorite parts of the excellent evening were before and after the panel. Beforehand, Jane, Mairi, and I chatted in the green room—aka Mairi's crowded office—and it was great to get a chance to talk bookstores, even though my experience was much less extensive and involved much less risk than theirs. (For some reason, I was really curious if, in the Internet age, publishers still send reps to bookstores armed with bags stuffed with the latest titles. They do!)
Afterward, we did the signing and chatting part of the evening in the garden. (That was supposed to be the venue for it all, but it was brass monkey weather in Edinburgh that day.) It was so cool! There were some familiar faces—the great cartoonist and Edinburgh resident Kate Charlesworth was there—but it was also fabulous to hang out with all the young queers in attendance. Several were part of a book group called Wuthering Dykes, and their enthusiasm for books and lesbian history was awesome to be part of. They asked me to speak at one of their upcoming meetings, but honestly, I want to join the group!
UPCOMING EVENTS: On Wednesday, June 25, I’ll be on the panel “(Re)imagining Queer Forebearers” at the “Pride in Writing” event at Social Refuge in Manchester. More info about this fall’s visit to the Pacific Northwest coming soon.
RECOMMENDATIONS: I heartily recommend Jane Cholmeley's A BOOKSHOP OF OUR OWN, and this week I read (actually re-read) PARISIAN LIVES, by Deirdre Bair, in which she takes readers behind the scenes of the writing of her biographies of Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir. Both show the making of (very delicious and important) sausage—and both are full of the enraging shit that women had to put up with in the 1970s and '80s. (Not that women don't have to put up with shit today—just different shit!)
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