In Search of the Elusive Book Store

I need my bookstore fix and there are none in these woods.

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

I live on an island approachable by car ferry. The nearest town large enough for both a McDonald’s and a Walmart is an hour and a half away. There is a small book store there but it’s not like a Barnes and Noble, where I can sit at a Starbucks table and read magazines or decide on book purchases or even set up my laptop. It’s a small shop crowded with books, with few places to sit down, no tables for laptops, and with a staff hovering, far too anxious to sell books than they are to talk about them.

When I moved here more than 20 years ago I thought living in the woods would be nothing short of heaven. I hate crowds and traffic and noise. I love blue skies and the smell of balsam, the sounds of living nature, the feel of wind on my bones.

I came here to write and I thought I would publish, but the quiet of the forest lured me into working on long pieces — one novel after another, none of which were ever finished. I wrote nearly every day, and then one year I stopped. On looking back at those manuscripts, I see that some chapters have held up well and may yet have a future, but something was always missing.

And worse, I wasn’t writing short pieces — my stock in trade. The money makers. Nothing of any value came…