Benjamin Rybeck presents his debut novel, The Sadness, on Wednesday, October 19 at 7 p.m. Arizona State University creative writing instructor Matt Bell joins Rybeck, with his latest work, A Tree or a Person or a Wall. The event takes places at Changing Hands Phoenix.
Benjamin Rybeck is the marketing director at Brazos Bookstore in Houston, TX. He received an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona. His work has appeared in Kirkus Reviews, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Literary Hub, The Nervous Breakdown, and elsewhere. The Sadness is his first novel. He lives in Houston, TX.
Matt Bell is the author of the novel In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, a Michigan Notable Book, and an Indies Choice Adult Debut Book of the Year Honor Recipient, and the winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award. He is also the author of two previous books, How They Were Found and Cataclysm Baby, and his next novel, Scrapper, was published in September 2015. His stories have appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, Best American Fantasy, Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, The American Reader, and many other publications. He teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.
Poets Marsha de la O and ASU associate professor Sally Ball will be reading from their latest poem collections at Changing Hands Phoenix. De la O presents her Isabella Gardner Award-winning collection Antidote for Night. Sally Ball presents her latest collection, Wreck Me. The event takes place on Saturday, October 15 at 7 p.m. For more information, please visit the Changing Hands website or the Facebook event.
MARSHA DE LA O holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Vermont College. Her latest book, Antidote for Night, won the 2015 Isabella Gardner Award and was published by BOA Editions. Her first book, Black Hope, was awarded the New Issues Press Poetry Prize and an Editor’s Choice Small Press Book Award. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Apercus Quarterly, Bosque, and the New Yorker. She lives in Ventura, California, with her husband, poet and editor Phil Taggart. Together, they produce poetry readings and events in Ventura County and are also the editors and publishers of the literary journal Askew.
SALLY BALL is the author of Wreck Me and Annus Mirabilis. She has published essays and reviews in NOR, Pleiades, the Review of Contemporary Fiction, The Volta, and elsewhere. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Ecotone, Harvard Review, and other magazines, as well as online at Narrative and Slate, and in The Best American Poetry. An associate professor of English at Arizona State University, Ball is also an associate director of Four Way Books. She has received fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, CAMAC Centre d’Art, the James Merrill House, and the Ucross Foundation.
Jeredith Merrin will be reading from her new book Owling this Friday, October 14 at 7 p.m. at Changing Hands Tempe. Her latest poetry collection won the 2016 Grayson Books Chapbook competition.
Merrin, brought up in the Pacific Northwest, took her MA in English (specializing in Chaucer), and a PhD from UC Berkeley in Anglo-American Poetry and Poetics. Cup, a special honoree in the 2013 Able Muse Book Award, is her third collection; her previous books are Shift and Bat Ode (University of Chicago Press Phoenix Poets series). She’s authored an influential book of criticism on Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. Her reviews and essays (on Moore, Bishop, Clare, Mew, Amichai, and others), and poems have appeared in Paris Review, Slate, Ploughshares, Southwest Review, Yale Review and elsewhere. A retired Professor of English (The Ohio State University), Merrin lives near Phoenix.
New York Times bestselling novelist, Laurie Notaro, presents her debut historical novel, Crossing the Horizon. She will be presenting her book at Changing Hands Phoenix on Thursday, October 6th at 7:00 p.m. The presentation will include a short reading, a film, a short talk from an experienced aviatrix from the Phoenix chapter of the 99s, and book signing. Changing Hands Bookstore, 300 W Camelback Rd, Phoenix, AZ 85013.
Laurie Notaro was a reporter and columnist for The Arizona Republic. She is the New York Times bestselling author of The Idiot Girls’ Action Adventure Club, Autobiography of a Fat Bride, I Love Everybody and Other Atrocious Lies, We Thought You Would Be Prettier, Idiot Girls’ Christmas, There’s a Slight Chance I Might Be Going to Hell, The Idiot Girls and the Flaming Tantrum of Death, Spooky Little Girl, It Looked Different on the Model, and The Potty Mouth at the Table. She lives in Eugene, Oregon.
Garth Risk Hallberg will be visiting Changing Hands Phoenix with his debut novel, City on Fire. The event is co-presented by the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at ASU. The New York Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Vogue, Newsday, The Atlantic, and others named City on Fire the Best Book of the Year.
The author was born in Louisiana and grew up in North Carolina. His writing has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The New York Times, Best New American Voices 2008, and The Millions; a novella, A Field Guide to the North American Family, was published in 2007. He lives in New York with his wife and children.
Join Amy Silverman to celebrate the launch of her new book, My Heart Can’t Even Believe It: A Story of Science, Love, and Down Syndrome on Sunday, May 1st, from 3pm-5pm at Tempe Changing Hands Bookstore. For tickets to the event and to pre-order the book, visit the Changing Hands website and/or the Facebook event.
Prescott College writing instructor and Arizona Commission on the Arts grant recipient Susan Lang presents her new thriller The Sawtooth Complex, available now from Changing Hands Bookstore. On February 25 at 7 pm, Susan will be doing a reading at Changing Hands First Draft in Phoenix.
The Sawtooth Complex is a fascinating novel that deals vigorously with the dilemmas of human life on the planet. Our willy-nilly destruction of the exquisite natural world is set against the efforts of some people to protect and care for the biology that sustains us. Most characters are torn by contradictions, both personal and political. A few are avid developers; others seek a balance between humanity and nature. Several touching love stories develop and falter among them. The true hero, Maddie Farley, is an inspiring and reluctant monkey-wrencher who lives most closely to the earth. The natural world she inhabits is invoked with poignant accuracy and love. Ultimately, nature itself blows up everyone’s world in a startling forest fire that overpowers the land and the people, laying waste to most everything. The writing about this thrilling climatic event is terrifying, spellbinding, very intense and powerful. And then a miracle occurs. In the wreckage left behind, the author, who is no sentimental idealist or doomsday prophet, finds reason to hope. The story is engrossing, entertaining, and really makes us think. It’s a fine addition to our best environmental and human–humane–literature
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Susan Lang is the author of a trilogy of novels about a woman homesteading in the southwestern wilderness during the years 1929 to 1941. The first novel in the trilogy, Small Rocks Rising, won the 2003 Willa Award, and she was awarded a 2008 Project Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts for her novel-in-progress, The Sawtooth Complex. Lang’s short stories and poems have been published in magazines such as Idaho Review, Red Rock Review, Iris, and The Raven Review. She founded and directed the Southwest Writers Series and Hassayampa Institute for Creative Writing at Yavapai College. Currently, Lang is Faculty Emeritus at Yavapai College, teaches courses at Prescott College, and serves as Event Coordinator at the Peregrine Book Company in Prescott, Arizona. Susan Lang was raised in a wild canyon much like the one referred to as Rattlesnake Canyon in a place homesteaded by her mother. As a young child she lived there first in a tent, then in a rugged cabin once her parents built it. Water was piped in from a spring on the mountain, and the family used a wood stove for cooking and candles and kerosine lamps for light until butane tanks were available to be hauled up the twelve mile rut road from Yucca Valley. A garden and rabbits were essential to the family’s survival. The love her mother had for the wild canyon was passed on to her children, especially her brother, and his wife and daughter who made protecting that wild canyon the focal point of their lives.
The ASU regents poetry professor and PEN USA poetry prize-winner presents his twenty-ninth collection of poetry.
In his twenty-ninth collection of poems, Norman Dubie returns to a rich, color-soaked vision of the world. Strangeness becomes a parable for compassion, each poem leading the reader to an uncommon way of understanding human capacities. In the futuristic sphere of The Quotations of Bone, the mind wanders meditatively into an imaginative and uncontainable history.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
NORMAN DUBIE was born in Barre, Vermont, in April 1945. He teaches at Arizona State University. His poems have appeared in many magazines, including American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and Poetry, He has won the Bess Hokin Award of the Modern Poetry Association and fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Mr. Dubie won the PEN USA prize for best poetry collection in 2001.
Bookselling is often portrayed as a romantic job. Often, movies and television scenes involving a bookstore will cut to a cute but quirky girl in a store with a book propped open in front of her. You can’t smell through the screen, but you somehow know the scent of old books fills the air, giving the shop a trademark scent. Every so often, the chime rings on the door as a customer comes in to browse the shelves, but they leave the girl alone for the most part because they know she’s reading. Once the customer finds what they are looking for, this bookstore girl might have to ring up a sale now and again. Despite the minor interruption, she still gets to finish that dog-eared paperback with the severely cracked spine for the one-hundredth time.
Au contraire, Hollywood. The real scene is just a bit different.
Photo by The State Press
Fast forward to Tuesday, July
31st, in Tempe, Arizona. It’s raining and humid; the start of the monsoon season has arrived. Approximately eighteen hundred people are standing outside Changing Hands Bookstore—another five hundred are inside—to meet former President Jimmy Carter. The store’s usual event ticketing system has been amended by none other than the Secret Service, and their guidelines seem to change almost as fast as bookstore staff can update the large crowd outside.
Sound chaotic? It’s just another day as a Changing Hands bookseller, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
—
Books have always been a big part of my life.
Both my mother and father are educators, and they instilled a love of reading very early on in my life. Throughout my education, I read voraciously, devouring just about any book I could get my hands on, required reading or not.
Although I didn’t realize it when I was younger, hindsight tells me that I was destined for a career working with and around books.
Around January of 2014, I heard that my favorite independent bookstore was opening a second location in Phoenix closer to where I lived. As soon as I got the news, I immediately filled out an application and set out to Tempe. The proverbial train to my then unknown destiny was rolling.
Despite my passion for books, I was doubtful I’d ever get hired at an Arizona institution like Changing Hands. They’d been in business for nearly forty years at the time the new store was announced, and I knew hundreds of people were applying for only a handful of positions.
When I handed in my application, the woman that took it asked me if I had ever worked in a bookstore. I told her I had no bookselling experience, but I had worked in retail for a long time and that I adored books. She thanked me for the application and I left the store.
A few weeks went by, and since I was busy working at two other jobs, my thoughts about working at Changing Hands were pushed to the back-burner, until I received a call to interview. I couldn’t believe it; I had a chance at a job!
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As happy as I was to receive an interview, I was as dejected when I walked out of it. In my head, I had blown the interview. If you were to ask me, I had babbled too much and things I had said felt like a far cry from interview-worthy.
Another few weeks went by with no phone call, convincing me even more that I had left a bad impression with the group that interviewed me.
One day—I was in the car with my family on our way out to see my grandparents—a number popped up on my phone that I didn’t recognize. When I answered the call, it was none other than one of the store owners calling to offer me a full time job as a bookseller. I was so ecstatic. I nearly dropped my phone. I immediately thanked her and told her I would be exceptionally pleased to take the position.
I’ve never looked back since.
—
One of the duties of my job is hosting author events. I initially asked to be trained as an event host because I liked the idea of the challenge it presented and saw it as a way to help combat my social anxiety by facing it head on. Event hosts have to be quick on their feet, patient, adaptable, and have an affinity for managing crowds. They also have to be social beings to a certain extent, interacting with the authors that visit the store and the people that are there to visit those authors.
I’ve been lucky to have helped host some wonderful authors throughout my first year at Changing Hands, including Chris Colfer, Jen Lancaster, David Levithan, and many, many more. My favorite, however, has to be Chuck Palahniuk.
Photo by Heather Hill
Mr. Palahniuk came through Arizona in October 2014 during his tour for his book Beautiful You, and that event was unlike any other I have ever witnessed. To give some perspective, staff had to open a thousand packets containing clear beach balls for people to toss around at Mr. Palahniuk’s cues. Attendees were asked to dress in pajamas (and many did, including myself). Occasionally during the event, Palahniuk would stop, and he, his publicist, and I threw prizes into the audience, which included bags of candy and fake arms tattooed with Palahniuk’s signature that looked like they had been sawed off a human being as a form of torture.
In what other job can you possibly say you’ve thrown fake, dismembered arms with an author’s signature scrawled across them, while dressed in flannel pajama pants?
—
It’s not just the author events that make my job fun. I get to spend roughly eight hours a day, five days a week around books and the people that love them. My coworkers are all just as passionate about books as I am, and the customers that come through our doors are the best in the business. I get to chat with them about what they like and dislike, along with whatever book news is going around. I get to put books in the hands of people young and old, with a range of likes and dislikes.
Book people are my people, and I can hardly believe I get paid to do the job I do.
Although a bookselling position can be crazy at times and stressful at others, I can truly say I’ve never felt more at home. I love what I do. Being able to bring people and books together is an experience that is like no other. Putting a book that may potentially change someone’s life in their hands is like nothing I’ve done before in a career, nor will I again. I’d much rather be the bookseller I am now, rather than that stereotypical bookseller in the movies or on TV.
Eat your heart out, Hollywood. Changing Hands Bookstore is the place to be.
Benjamin Rybeck presents his debut novel, The Sadness, on Wednesday, October 19 at 7 p.m. Arizona State University creative writing instructor Matt Bell joins Rybeck, with his latest work, A Tree or a Person or a Wall. The event takes places at Changing Hands Phoenix.
