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The Washington Post examines the increasing familiar phenomenon of independent bookstores closing. They cite a communication from one book store that says:

"...your shopping dollars help create the community you want to live in. For every $10 you spend at locally-owned businesses, $4.50 stays in our community. The math is simple and compelling:
Vertigo Books $4.50
Barnes & Noble/Borders/Costco $1.30
Amazon $0.00
The money you spend with locally-owned businesses continues to circulate as we pay employees, buy supplies and pay taxes that are used to provide basic services to residents."

Will that kind of math be enough to sway people? For the sake of local booksellers like my very own Annie Blooms, I hope so.

Read more here.

In 2001, my first book, Circles of Confusion, was chosen for the Oregonian’s Book Club. The paper sent a photographer to take a picture of me at my local bookstore, Annie Blooms. The photographer liked the store’s black cat and asked me to pose with it on my lap.

While I’m a cat-person, that cat is not a people-cat, not at all. In the photograph, I’m wearing the strangest expression, a pained smile that’s on its way to just plain pain. It’s because the cat has sunk his claws deep into my thigh.

On Sunday, the Oregonian published an essay I wrote about what it’s really like to quit your day job. They also used that photo from so long ago. Today when I was out for a run, a couple walking a dog stopped me and congratulated me. I kept trying to place them, but couldn’t. Did my kid go to school with theirs? Were they neighbors? It was only after I started running again that I realized they must have recognized me from that photo. Maybe I wear the same pained expression as I stagger up the hill.

You can read the essay here. No photo, though.