Last Saturday I spent the day with 20,000 other readers and writers at the Union-Tribune Book Festival—an all-day literary extravaganza at Liberty Station. There, in Authors Alley, I shared a table with my dear friend and sister writer, Jill G. Hall. Her half of our eight-foot table graced by her beautiful books and a pair of silver shoes, and my half littered with a couple of my books and a small replica of a typewriter.

Jill and I both knew, as did many others along our Part I of Authors Alley (an entire Part II was located under a separate tent further down the green), that, like the song the strippers sing in Gypsy, “You Gotta Have a Gimmick.” Jill’s silver shoes and my typewriter didn’t feel gimmicky though. The title of Jill’s second novel is The Silver Shoes. My link with typewriters is evident not only as featured images on my website, but through photos posted for “Typewriter Tuesday” on my Facebook page. Friends sent photos of typewriters from all over the world and have given me typewriter jewelry, typewriter key chains, and typewriter notepads. I have typewriter images all over my work space and am planning to get a tiny typewriter tattoo. My business cards feature a typewriter image, too. And here’s my mug shot:

Around town I’m also known as “the queen of prompts,” which comes from the more than twenty-five years I’ve lead writing practice groups, during which we free-write to prompts, and from the fact that my first book, A Writer’s Book of Days, contains a prompt for each day of the year and then some. My other books—Wild Women, Wild Voices and Writing Alone, Writing Together— also contain writing prompts. So what could be more natural than offering a writing prompt to those who stopped by my table.

In preparing for the Book Festival, I printed out a new batch of prompts on address labels and stuck them to the back of my business cards that also has the image of my Underwood, and encouraged people to take my card. “There’s a writing prompt on the back,” I’d tell them.

Smiling a little, sometimes slightyl tenuously, they’d turn the card over and read the prompt. “Perfect,” one woman said, tucking the card in her pocket and grinning like she had a secret. “Oh,” another commented, as if she’d been busted. Sometimes just that sound I’ve heard so often in writing practice groups, huh, like “you get me.” Then, we’d get to talk about writing and telling our stories and that you don’t have to “think,” or wait for the muse to come calling or inspiration to find you to begin writing. In fact all that may get in the way of actually writing anything. “Just grab a detail from the first image that comes when you read that prompt,” I tell them, “and start writing.”

How this works is a wonder and wonderful. How many stories, poems, essays, memories, mini-memoirs, and inspired meanders have come from something as simple as, “It’s Saturday; you’re not at home.” Or “write about your favorite shoes,” or “You hear church bells in the distance” or any other of thousands upon thousands of simple prompts that are like music that invites you to dance; the muse that invites you to write.

While of course I would have loved for every person who stopped by our table to purchase a book (even though I didn’t take that many books with me), that isn’t why I went to the Book Festival and worked a table. I wanted to meet people in person, talk about writing and hear their stories. To me, it was all about connection.

Interestingly, Monday morning, the weekly email I receive from The Writer featured an article about “tabling at literary festivals.” What great synchronicity! Never mind that the email didn’t arrive until after the Book Festival; reading it confirmed that Jill and I had the right idea: we wanted to make in-person connections with our readers, and we used the themes of our books to draw attention to our table.

I can’t say how many people I talked to last Saturday. I arrived home exhausted from so much standing, my cheeks tired from seven hours of smiling, and my throat a little sore from all that talking. But I sure did have fun. And, oh yes, I did sell a few books.

Prompt: Write about a red dress. (go for 14 minutes)