Strange things happen when you publish a book.

Readings become wonderful forums for This Is Your Life-style reunions with people who bring you pictures of yourself as a child, strangling a poor white cat. Strangers thank you, and ask to take pictures with you for their "semi-private website." Reviews appear online written by people who haven't read your book yet.

People ask you funny questions. Maybe they'll approach you at after a reading in California to ask, "Are you going to do a book tour?" Or they'll refill your wine glass at a party and say, "So when will you know whether or not your book is a success?" Or maybe they'll drop an email to inquire, "Have you ever considered that maybe God is real?"

The stubborn belief that your book only exists in the consciousness of people who know you personally finds a challenge in the stranger strolling 4th Street in Berkeley, your distinctive blue book jacket peeking out from under his arm.

Your inbox fills up with thoughtful, warm emails from strangers, and the odd stink bomb of hate mail, calling you a "horrendous pagan," or a "trainwreck," or one from someone calling herself "Peacemama" who dubs you a "southern California bimbo who should be writing about tans and plastic surgery." You have to sit on your hands to keep yourself from replying, "northern California, jerk."

Here's a sort of highlight reel of the little book tour from which I just returned.

-My Politics & Prose reading was an unbelievable delight, in spite of a terrifying moment of doubt precipitated by someone at the bookstore asking, "Is anyone coming for you today?" My sister came down from New York, and the full house crowd included my old boss from a Charlottesville restaurant, friends from graduate school, college, and high school, and lots of smart strangers with difficult questions.

The next day my sister and I walked around the National Mall, marveling at morose Lincoln, the underreported power of the Korean War memorial, and the failure of the World War II memorial to transmit a sense of loss.

-I pulled some diva shit one night at the Omni in Charlottesville a few days later. A party in the hotel room next to mine had been bumping for a few hours, unaffected by my periodic flurries of banging on the wall with both fists. I called the front desk at 3AM in a fury. "I am here for the Virginia Festival of the Book," I announced, "and I have to give a reading tomorrow!" The attendant may have stifled a laugh.

The next morning, the hotel gave me a free breakfast for my troubles. The man at the front desk apologized for my sleepless night. "It's hard to balance professionals who come here," he said, "with people who come to party."

-The next day I had fun guest DJing on my friend Dominic's program on WTJU. I sat up on a little stool and got to talk to Dominic about songs I love. We gave away a copy of my book donated by the UVA Bookstore and someone called to tell me I was participating in a culture of impersonation. Here's the playlist from the show.

-At the UVA Bookstore, I read with poets Mary Ann Samyn and Andrew Mulvania, and novelist Mary Beth Keane, who was a classmate of mine at the UVA MFA program. We sat in the front row of the reading as seats filled up behind us. In front of us, our books were arranged on a long conference table.

"Isn't it crazy how official this is?" Mary Beth whispered.
"Yeah," I said. "Like, somebody stacked those books."

Our reading was a wonderful sort of homecoming, with our professors in the audience and current and past MFAs there to root us on. The program threw us all a lovely reception in the good old MFA lounge, whose loveseat I used to kneel on to smoke cigarettes out the window during parties almost--golly--ten years ago.

-The next day I interviewed on Air America's State of Belief program and then gave a reading at Warren Hall at James Madison University, again with the wonderful Mary Beth Keane. She'd popped over to Warren during my interview. "They have it set up like Obama's going to be speaking," she told me.

It was a nice big event, for sure. Afterward, a student approached me at the signing table and told me he was majoring in Political Science. He glanced at my copy of In the Land of Believers. "So do you think it's worth it to read that?" he asked.

-Saturday, on my flight to California, I wrote something for Berkeleyside on the patchouli-scented stigma of being from Berkeley.

-At 8 Sunday morning, I was a guest on KRON 4's news program. I wish I had video! It looks wonderfully '80s, all grainy and dark, with me sitting on a grey-flecked couch across from my interlocuter, who had this great John Waters mustache. The guest after me was a 14-year-old boy--"the youngest author of a book about chess"--who made me feel a little long in the tooth, but also like I was living out the Platonic ideal of the local news experience.

-A few hours after the KRON thing, I settled in for a Skype chat with Richard Metzger of the LA Times for his interview series on Dangerous Minds. He said he could see me on a big screen in the studio, but for some reason I wouldn't be able to see him on my computer.

"OK," I said, "I'll just look into this little black hole and pretend it's your face."
"That works," he said, "because my face sort of looks like a black hole."

As you can see, he was being modest:


Gina Welch: In the Land of Believers from DANGEROUS MINDS on Vimeo.

Sorry my eyes were rolling all around like Howdy Doody's. My computer screen was very distracting.

-My mother threw me a big fat book party that night. My brothers were there, my college boyfriend flew up from LA, and the man who plucked my query out of the slush pile at my agent's office five years ago was there, too, giving the party a nice feeling of symmetry.

I didn't recognize the family dentist when he approached me to say hello. "Are you from my mother's gym?" I said. I realized who he was in a flash when he looked wounded. "Oh," I said, "I didn't recognize you without your Hawaiian shirt and paper mask!"

My mother gave me a lovely introduction for a reading in her living room, in which she said something to the effect of, You never know what Gina's going to say about something, which was just about the highest compliment I could hope to receive. There was a lively Q&A, where we talked about being regarded as curiosities as Jews and where I had to talk someone down from comparing evangelical Christians to neo-Nazis. During the signing afterwards, a woman I hadn't met before approached me with an intense look in her eye. "I just wanted to tell you I got a terrible review from the LA Times, too," she said.

-Books, Inc. was a great time. They had to pull out extra chairs, and all told the reading, Q&A, and signing lasted two hours. Someone live-tweeted it!

Here's what I looked like reading there:



Yes, there's a showtunes portion of my reading presentation. I bring those sock monkeys along for harmony. You can't see it, but I had great rivers of sweat rolling down my neck. It was hot up there.

A history teacher from my high school came, and two BHS classmates, and the entire family of an old friend, and a beloved ex-girlfriend of my father. And here's a picture with my uncle, who came unexpectedly with his son.


It was a great night.

-My reading at Book Passage the next day had a more modest crowd, but the staff there was so incredibly warm and generous. They gave me ginger tea, and told me about Ozzy Osbourne's recent reading, and made me these notecards, delivered in a wrapped box with a handwritten message!




 Fora.tv filmed the event, and it should be up for consumption pretty soon.

The next day, I flew home.

More reviews have come out since last we saw one another:

The Salt Lake City Tribune

Time Out Chicago

I realize that announcing my bits of news in the blog like this makes it hard to cold gorge yourself on articles and interviews about my book in one sitting. I'm working on creating a Media page so you can sit down and find everything in one place, the better to catch me in a contradiction/see how often I repeat myself.