A bookstore is a magical place that offers both refuge and wonder to readers. They inspire creativity, and help generate compassion for the many human and nonhuman creatures and characters that occupy the worlds readers love to get lost in. Perhaps, Reese Witherspoon said it best: “I get crazy in a bookstore. It makes my heart beat hard because I want to buy everything”.
Indeed, it’s hard not to want to “buy everything” at Huzzah Books, the independent bookstore and brewery on King Street, a stone’s throw from App State, especially because its owners have taken great care to create a cozy “third space”, complete with pink window frames through which warm sunlight streams in, where lifelong friendships with fellow book nerds can blossom; and the dreamers and admirers of the human imagination can sit (and sip) while they admire and dream.
The English Department’s Biennial Book Party, which is a celebration of faculty publications, took place Tuesday, April 7th. A room full of scholar-writers arrived around 5pm to read and listen to each others’ work. They struck up interesting conversations about everything from medieval literature to creative works of fiction (as one might expect of a room full of English professors) and showed up to either offer support for the speakers, or to read from their recently published works.
A table of small bites sat off to the side and instrumental music set the tone. Rows of chairs and a microphone in front of a worn couch faced the audience. A warm round of applause thanks the store and its employees for letting the faculty temporarily take over the store. People from all walks of life gathered for the chance to hear the authors read from a sweeping and varied program spanning from Michael Docherty’s depiction of the frontiers of California’s Westward Expansion to Melissa Birkhofer’s painting a picture of North Carolina’s Appalachia high country. With Kathryn Kirkpatrick’s lyrical poetry, readers were taken to Ireland and then to Rome, where former poet-laureat of North Carolina, Joseph Bathanti, spoke of familial ties, immigration, and Frank O’Hara from his most recent (or twenty!) collections. By the end of the session, the writers had covered topics and inspired debate from duels to AI in the classroom, but regardless of the subject or the genre, each work reminded the audience that writing is an act that can transcend space and time and that writing can be a powerful medicine, according to Sarah Long’s memoir, Uprooted.
As the last reading concluded and the applause faded, the crowd lingered a while, perhaps a bit reluctant to leave. This is what good bookstores do: they make you want to stay. The pink-framed windows had gone golden with the last of the evening light, as the sun settled to sleep behind the mountain. The old typewriter sat quietly in the corner, maybe waiting for the next dreamer to sit down. Huzzah Books had, for one night, become more than a place to “buy everything”, it had become a place where the people who write all the things readers want to buy came to be seen and heard, where the magic of a bookstore wasn’t only on its shelves, but in the bravery and dedication to craft of the writers whose works filled them.