State by State

Author:Matt Weiland
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-06-204357-3
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2008-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

Suki says a girl in Bosnia sent him a letter after reading Tom Sawyer. “Dear Editor,” the letter began, “I am a Bosnian girl who has never seen the sea. But I believe that the sea exists because I live in my imagination a lot. As a writer, even if someone has never seen the occasion, you can give them a good opportunity to dream.”

“I mean, try to imagine this city without Mark Twain,” says Suki, as we got back into the car. “This person whose town did not support him and his brother and buy their newspaper so they went broke. This would just be a rest stop on the highway, maybe not even that, if not for Mark Twain. It would be in fragments. But now, look at all these businesses: Huck’s Taxi, Mark Twain Hotel, Mark Twain Restaurant. Twain’s name got passed to their children and grandchildren.” (And that’s only the places named for Twain, Tom, and Huck. There’s also Becky Thatcher stuff. But not too many establishments named for the fleeing slave, Jim.)

“My newspaper exists because I’m selling ads, but do you think it is Bosnian community that supports me the most? No. It’s the Americans. They’re the ones who advertise; the Bosnian community thinks all they need is word of mouth. There are maybe 200 or 300 small business owners in Bosnia’s St. Louis community. They read the paper and pass it on. But the Americans. They advertise. Maybe if the Bosnian community understood what I’m trying to do, they would be more appreciative. I have not raised my price from the beginning because I’m trying to hold them together. Right now,” he says, “only six out of the paper’s fifty-two pages are in English, but some day will be 100 percent English.

“And maybe someday in Bevo Mill it is Sabah Restaurant, Sabah Taxi, Sabah Hotel.”

And then he floored it all the way back to St. Louis.

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