Wooooooo!

Woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

First post of the year! Check it out, fellow bloggers. It’s my big toe testing out the waters of ’09. MY TOE!

Um, sorry. I got kind of carried away there. It’s a very exciting time here at the Gothic, and we’re all a little prone to flights of silliness. For instance, earlier today Arthur and our co-worker Watson and I came up with a premise for a sci-fi novel (and, later, a rock-opera) in which people have brightly colored saliva and are classified according to their colors.

Why all this tomfoolery? Well, we’ve just renovated the Gothic Bookshop, and we’re a little giddy from the results. The front area of the store is now a pleasant, open space, with big shelves of New Arrival Hardcovers facing you when you walk in the door. It’s taken the emphasis off us Gothickers somewhat and restored books to their place as the most important element of the store. (Shoppers may remember that it was formerly our staff, sitting on a raised platform, that customers were forced to gaze upon when they entered the store. I shudder at the memory of that.) There are plenty of other changes, too. We’ve once again allotted some space for a nice sitting area in the back of the store, and we’ve rearranged the store (we couldn’t resist) in a way that hopefully makes more sense.

All of these changes make us feel like we’re working in a new store. It’s funny; pretty much the same books that were here before the Winter Break are here now, but the simple fact of having moved them is making books that I’ve seen a hundred times suddenly look more interesting. It's a New Year's Miracle!

Seriously, though.

It’s got me thinking about how the best writers can do that—take a common, even pedestrian topic and rearrange it in such a way that it draws our attention anew. Selah Saterstrom is a writer who seems able to pull that off anytime she takes pen to paper. I first encountered her writing in her amazing debut, The Pink Institution, and more recently in her equally killer title, The Meat and Spirit Plan. Both take relatively simple subjects (the hilarity and horror of a decaying southern family in one; a southern burnout girl’s year in Scotland in the other) and, by altering the structure of the narrative through which we approach them, make them something entirely new.

I hope we’ve accomplished the same thing here at the store. Come in and tell us what you think.