Sunday at the Southern Festival of Books

Thirty-eight years in, the Southern Festival of Books fills the Bicentennial Capitol Mall in Nashville with white tents, and on Sunday one of them was ours: the Middle Tennessee Authors Circle, booth 43, ten in the morning until five.

I had the hardcovers in a stack, the paperbacks fanned beside them, and a pile of bookmarks—Jetson’s Journey on the front, Riverspook on the back—for anyone who stopped. By five o’clock the stack was shorter than it had been at ten, and some copies of the novel went home with new readers. If you were one of them, thank you. If you took a bookmark, the code on the back gets you Riverspook, the free novella, in about ten seconds.

The Authors Circle is a group of Middle Tennessee writers who share a booth at festivals like this one, and the rack in front of our table held all of us at once: crime anthologies and mysteries, a book on Spinoza, and one novel set in Franklin. Thank you to Tom Wood, who organizes it, for the Sunday slot.

Thank you to Humanities Tennessee and Vanderbilt University for the thirty-eighth year of the festival, and to everyone who stopped to talk about the book, the dog, and the town.

If you couldn’t make it to Nashville: Landmark Booksellers on Main Street in Franklin carries Jetson’s Journey, and signed copies are on the book page.

Next in person: “Writing Franklin” at the Williamson County Public Library, Monday, November 30, at 6:00 p.m. Details and registration.