“Quite the turnout,” she said as they weaved through the crowded store.
“Good,” he said. “The more the merrier.” His voice sounded confident and calm. If he was nervous, he wasn’t showing it.
As they neared the podium, the room took notice. Cameras flipped on, reporters opened their notebooks, and folks in the audience started whispering and gesturing.
Penny turned to give Daniel a final inspection. He’d dressed simply for the occasion in dark dress shoes, dark slacks, and a dark blue sweater over a white collared dress shirt.
“You know what you’re going to say?” she asked.
“I do.”
“Give me a hint. Are you joining Team Christmas?”
A small smile tugged at his lips. “You’re about to find out.”
“Okay, show me your teeth,” she said.
His brow furrowed. “You want me to smile?”
“I want to make sure you don’t have something stuck in them.”
Amused, he gave her a big smile.
“Pearly whites looking good.”
He remained still for a few seconds, his eyes not leaving hers. “Thank you, Penny,” he said quietly. “For everything.”
“You’re very welcome,” she said briskly, pushing back a rush of emotion. “Now get up there. You’ve got this.”
With a nod, he stepped to the podium and tapped the microphone. “Good afternoon,” he said to the room. “I’d like to begin by thanking Penny Quinn and her team at this wonderful independent bookstore, The Tattered Page, for hosting this event today. I’d also like to thank all of you for coming here. I’ll begin with a statement, and after finishing my statement, I’ll be happy to answer your questions.”
He took a deep breath and began. “My name is Daniel Bedford. I’m a writer of fiction —novels, mostly —and the occasional piece of nonfiction. Four weeks and three days ago, I published an essay inThe New York Journalabout Christmas,an essay that generated a whole lot of attention from a whole lot of folks, who then had a whole lot of questions for me that I’ve avoided answering until today.
“The question I’ve been asked most,and avoided most, over the past few weeks, is this: What in the world led me to write and publish my essay?”
He took in the room —the audience filling every available seat, the folks standing behind them, the row of news cameras —and continued.
“Here is my answer in full, every detail included. I wrote the essay because I got the idea to write it, which I realize sounds circular but isn’t. For me, the creative process is about ideas finding me rather than the other way around. When an idea shows up, it’s my responsibility to pay attention. This particular notion came out of a conversation six weeks ago with my buddy Will. We were at a pub, enjoying a beer, talking sports — we’re both basketball nuts — and I had just gone on an extended tear, or maybe you’d call it an extended appreciation, or maybe we should call it what it really was, an extended rant, about the virtues of college hoops and how spending an entire weekend watching games nonstop is basically the peak of the human experience, when Will mentioned that his wife had just startedher yearly tradition of bingeing Christmas movies, which led to us diving into the business of Christmas and the holiday’s commercialization.”
Daniel paused to make sure he had the audience’s attention, which he most definitelyhe did. “Maybe because we were at a pub, and maybe because we were in, shall we say, a relaxed and expansive state of mind, I found myself getting pretty wound up about the Christmas commercialization topic. I started going at it from every angle I could think of, and yes, I even found myself vowing to do something about it. I mean, if that pub had a soapbox, I would have climbed on top of it and announced my intentions to the world.
“So Will, who’s an editor atTheNew York Journaland knows a publishing opportunity when he sees one, said, ‘Dan, if you write an article about this, we’ll publish it.’”
Daniel paused. “So all of this is his fault.”
Surprised chuckles swept through the audience. “Which, to be crystal-clear, isn’t the case at all, but rather just me attempting, no doubt poorly, to make a joke. So allow me to state clearly and for the record: My essay is mine — wholly, fully, solely — and responsibility for it resides with me and me alone. As one of our great presidents, Harry Truman, said, ‘The buck stops here.’”
He cleared his throat and continued. “It took me two weeks to research and write the essay. While I was writing it, I felt great about it. I felt the same when I sent the essay to theJournal, when I reviewed and approved their edits, and when I gave them the okay to publish it. I meant every word of what I wrote. I published the essay with complete sincerity. I’d done my research. I’d gathered my facts. I’d marshaled my arguments. I knew, with utter conviction, that what I was saying wasright.
“And for the first couple of days, as the essay gained traction, I was pleased by the response. It was gratifying to see my message getting out there.
“But then,” he said, “as everyone here knows, the situation escalated. The essay started attracting even more attention —and not the kind I was expecting. TV talking heads were commenting on it. Articles were getting written about it. Folks were posting about it on social media. I’d never gone viral before — yet viral I went.” (In the front row, Penny saw Hettie Mae give Donald a nudge, which he ignored.) “And while, to be clear, some of the attention was on the substance of the argument I was making, most of the attention was on me and several of the sweeping statements I made.
“In the days that followed, as I became the focus of a media frenzy, I responded by doing what a lot of folks do when they’re challenged: I doubled down. I can be pretty stubborn, and believe me, during those days when it seemed like the entire world had a bone to pick with me, I wasn’t ready to listen. So against the advice of pretty much everyone in my life, I refused to offer any further comment. I told my agent, my publisher, my friends, my family, that I’d already said what I wanted to say in the essay and that was that.”
He let out a sigh. “If, in that moment, I’d allowed even an ounce of common sense into this stubborn head of mine, I might have realized that stonewalling the media would only intensify the situation. But did I realize that? No, I did not.
“So I’m here today to do what I should have done sooner: Answer your questions, address your concerns, and be as open, clear, and forthright with you as I can be.”
