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The Day I Got to Hang Out with Alice Walker
Writing is not my day
job. Since 1999, I’ve worked for audiobook publisher Recorded Books, first as a
library sales rep, and starting in 2000 as Director of Acquisitions, a position
I continue to hold today. When books are sold, agents or publishers parse out
various rights: hardcover rights, paperback rights, foreign rights, movie
rights, serial rights, and audio rights. That last one is where I come in. I
review probably fifteen to twenty manuscripts a week, decide whether they’re
audio-friendly, then make an offer on the audio rights or decline accordingly.
In essence, I get paid to read books. I’m not saving the world any time soon,
but short of being a full-time writer, it’s as close to the perfect job as I
will ever have. Along the way, I’ve met
some interesting characters.
The first author I
remember meeting face-to-face was Jonathan Franzen. He was in the Recorded
Books studios in New York to do an author interview, and he was so intelligent and
earnest I thought each word that came out of his mouth made me that much
smarter for having heard it. I had a champagne toast with Alice Sebold and her
husband Glen David Gold to celebrate her yet-to-be-published debut novel THE
LOVELY BONES. I got stuck on an escalator at a Los Angeles book convention
behind Tom Sizemore and Heidi Fleiss and watched as Tom proceeded to lick the
side of Heidi’s face. I had breakfast with Richard Dreyfuss, who proceeded to
recount the time he and Billy Zane discovered a Colorado museum dedicated to
bison that also happened to own an authentic Shakespeare folio. I met Gene
Simmons from KISS, and he autographed a lunch box for me. But my high water
mark had to be the day I got to hang out with Alice Walker.
When I was promoted
into the acquisitions department at Recorded Books, I made my own personal
“honey do” list of classic evergreen titles I couldn’t find in audio. One of
these titles was Alice Walker’s seminal classic, THE COLOR PURPLE. I called her
agent, the late Wendy Weil, who I would come to regard as one of my most
cherished mentors in all of publishing. Wendy was straight with me about the
audio rights. She told me plenty of interested parties had come knocking on her
door over the years, that Alice Walker very much wanted to see THE COLOR PURPLE
produced in audio, but that it was under the condition that only Alice get to
narrate the book, and that presently Alice simply didn’t have the time to do
so, and that I was to check back later.
I called Wendy once a month
asking for the rights…for nine years.
Long story short, in
2009 Recorded Books consummated a deal for the audio rights to THE COLOR
PURPLE, with Alice Walker as our narrator. In recognition of that production,
we invited Ms. Walker to be our special guest at a librarian dinner for the
March 2010 PLA Conference in Portland, Oregon.
Now, these events aren’t
unusual for Recorded Books. Previous author events at the big national
shows—PLA, ALA and BEA—had included the award-winning memoirist Alexandra
Fuller, beloved mystery writer Alexander McCall Smith and blockbuster
best-selling author Jodi Picoult. Normally, all the logistics—the car to and from
the airport, the hotel, the meals, etc.—would be handled by one of my
assistants, or perhaps the library sales director, or even a local rep familiar
with the area. But not this time. When Alice Walker got off that plane at
Portland International Airport, I was the one who was going to meet her, and
nobody else.
I had this preconceived
image of Alice Walker as a sort of Nubian queen based largely on just the
photos of her circulating on the Internet. She was usually at a podium, no
doubt saying something profound, her hair in dreads, sometimes wearing reading
glasses, with a knowing smile. As she approached me in the airport, she didn’t
disappoint. Her dreads were gone, replaced by a short salt-and-pepper swirl of
tight curls, but those high golden cheek bones and piercing eyes were still
unmistakable. I introduced myself. She leaned in and shook my hand. Her
greeting was courteous and cautious, what I expected from an intellectual.
I picked Alice up at
the airport a little before noon on Saturday, but our event wasn’t scheduled
until 7 PM that night. In between those times, Alice and I spent roughly four
hours sightseeing in Portland before I dropped her off at her hotel. We had
lunch, a couple sandwiches I don’t even remember eating because I was so
smitten. We talked about a lot of things, things out of respect to Ms. Walker I
prefer to keep between us. I’ll say only that she’s as beautiful, as wise and
as intense as you think she is. I know I struck Alice as a bit of an oddity. There
I was, this clean-cut white boy from Indiana, who called himself a social
progressive, a liberal, and at least as much as he could claim to be, a
feminist. Truthfully, she asked most of the questions, as if I was a figment of
her imagination.
The time finally came for
the event. Our library director was emcee for the night. He took the stage,
saying a few words to a crowd of roughly 200 librarians, then he ceded the
floor to Alice. She told the story she had probably told a thousand times about
how she came to be a writer and an activist. We hung on her every word:
mesmerized, entranced, whatever you want to call it. There are just people who
are that impressive, who transcend the moment. Several times that day, I found
myself trying to slow things down and step outside myself, just so I could take
a mental snapshot. Alice progressed into the story of THE COLOR PURPLE itself:
the book, the movie, and then the Broadway musical. She talked about the time
Quincy Jones and Steven Spielberg showed up at her house “in a limousine longer
than my driveway.” She talked about
Oprah. Alice weaved one anecdote into another. None of us wanted the night to
end, but it looked like it was going to. “After the Broadway show,” Alice said,
“I thought the story of THE COLOR PURPLE was over.”
And that’s when it
happened. That’s when Alice Walker
looked down from the stage at this clean-cut white boy from Indiana and said,
“But then there was Brian.”
She told the story
about me calling her agent every month for nine years. She talked about the
audio production and about how she fought through some laryngitis. She even
talked a little bit about our day in Portland. She ended her story by giving me
a personal standing ovation. After Alice finished and graciously posed with
librarians for a few pictures, a handful insisted that they get their pictures
taken with both Alice and me. It was humbling. It was surreal. It was whatever
superlative you could possibly imagine.
I’d like to say there
was a poignant goodbye, but life can’t be that poetic all the time. Alice was
on an early flight out the next morning and wanted to get to bed early. I still
had some glad-handing to do with librarians, not to
mention at least an hour of power drinking in the hopes of somehow bringing me
down off my euphoric high. Alice said goodnight to me just outside the banquet
hall before going to her room. She leaned in, kissed me on the cheek, and we
hugged. Her goodbye was sweet and tender, what I expected from a friend.
I had come into that
weekend in Portland fairly depressed. A closet writer, I had a manuscript that
had been on submission to publishing houses for three years. I had got a few
nibbles and been to a couple ed board meetings, but the rejections were starting
to pile up, and I was teetering on hopelessness. Alice Walker changed all that.Maybe
I’d get published someday, but maybe I wouldn’t. So what? All Ineeded to do was
be a better person, to appreciate everyone and everything around me—to“walk by
the color purple in a field somewhere and notice it”—and the rest would take
care of itself.
About Brian Sweany: For future details, check out the author’s website at : www.briansweany.com
