Busy weekend for us. A local book festival, a friend over, and another book event. Through it all, a flurry of old friends and new, and an unexpected Elvis mystery.

Here’s how it all went down…

Friday

The Burnsville Lit Fest (actually known as the Carolina Mountains Literary Festival) was a first for us. The town sits about 40 minutes north of where we live, so it took some maneuvering to deal with the dog, get ourselves fed and clad, and out the door. After dropping off some of my (self-pubbed) books at the sale and signing site and picking up our author packets, we headed over to Carriage House Sundries, recommended to us by some farmer friends at Green Toe Ground. Nice place: wine shop up front, eatery toward the back, all housed in a former 19th century carriage house that once served the locally legendary NuWray Inn.

We did our event at 3 p.m. Billed as He Said, She Said, it was basically us talking about the top five or six questions we get asked by aspiring writers. I’m not sure we got past through the first five. The audience came with lots of great questions, and 45 minutes is not a huge amount of time. I expect if we do it again we’ll focus our remarks more tightly on a specific aspect of publishing, like agents or nonfiction book proposals. Still, something about these people’s questions—and their frustration with piercing the opaque veil of publishing—stuck with me all weekend.

Back to the Carriage House, post talk. Hung out at the bar and talked to some members of the new team that is renovating the old 1833 hotel. The place is famous in the mountains for hosting the likes of Mark Twain, O. Henry, Thomas Wolfe, Jimmy Carter, actor Christopher Reeves, and yes, Elvis! In the past, the NuWray has been the lodging of choice for the Lit Fest, but its ongoing renovation forced organizers to look further afield for accommodations for authors this year.

Of course we asked about the Elvis connection. The guy we talked to said, well, actually, we cannot really prove that he ever stayed here. This, despite the fact that the NuWray, in its prior incarnation, always offered an over-the-top decorated Elvis Room to guests. Naturally, this spurred us to get cracking on the research. We love a good mystery.

Saturday

Cleaned the house top to bottom, persuaded the dog to be on his best behavior, some gardening, laundry, food arranging, and had a great night with a friend who stopped by for drinks and snacks. The unexpected guest of the evening was the torrential storm that blew in and drenched the house, garden, and patio while we huddled under the back porch. Sheets of water pouring out of the gutters made me think, Huh, maybe we should upgrade the gutters the way an old handyman of ours suggested. (Guess they’re making them bigger these days to accommodate more frequent heavy rainfall like this. Gutters, not handymen.)

Sunday

Before the pandemic, Denise hosted a once-a-month author conversation series at Little Jumbo, a local cocktail bar. She went virtual during the pandemic, then took a break from the series while she worked on her own projects, and later, helped me survive my illness. She was really looking forward to getting back to a live event. The guest author this time around was Elizabeth Kostova, author of The Historian, The Swan Thieves, and The Shadow Land. I didn’t know until Denise told me that Kostova is the only author in history to hit No. 1 on the NYT Bestseller list with a debut novel. Did not know that.

They had a great time talking, and Denise will upload the video soon to her YouTube Channel. Since Kostova has a long connection to Eastern Europe—childhood in Slovenia, adulthood in Bulgaria, married into a Bulgarian family—Denise opened by asking what she thought of the characterization of Victor Krum in the fourth Happy Potter book, The Goblet of Fire. The audience tittered, and I’m sure people wondered, Why ask a question so unrelated to your guest author’s realm of expertise?

When you ask a nutty question like that, you never know where it’s going to go. But Denise knows what she’s doing. This time, it paid off perfectly.

Kostova had a hilarious response, saying that she is certain J.K. Rowling knew that her Durmstrang Academy character shared a surname with a legendary Bulgarian khan, Krum the Fearsome, who enjoyed drinking blood out of the skulls of his enemies!

A perfect answer from an art and history scholar, and the author of the most erudite yet chilling vampire novel published in recent times.

The Freaking Upshot

We came away strangely energized by the whole weekend, and determined to chow down on a trio of new books. Met a lot of new authors doing interesting work. Renewed friendships with booksellers lugging and flogging our books to the masses. And connected with some friends we haven’t seen in a long time.

One friend, an aspiring writer with a phenomenal nonfiction story to tell, said he was inspired by the recent deaths of friends to get his ass in gear. For his sake, I hope he does. He needs those words to be out in the world. We all do. If not his, someone else’s. No matter who we are, we hunger for story.

Photo above by me: Morning after the storm.