End of an Independent’s Day Closing comments, from its owner, on the close of Meristem by Leonard Gill n case it slipped your notice, July 18th through the 24th nationally marked Independent Bookstores Week, an annual wake-up call to the fact that locally owned and operated bookstores are not only a breed apart – from the chains, the megastores, the online services – but a vanishing breed if book buyers won’t support them. A perfect example to drive home the point: Meristem, the store in the Cooper-Young neighborhood in Midtown that for eight years has proudly gone under the banner “Books & More for Women & Their Friends,” but on August 30th goes under for good. I talked to Meristem’s owner Audrey May last week on the subject of independent bookstores in general, feminist and lesbian/gay bookstores in particular, Alice Walker and Susan Sarandon, and what Meristem, the store with “more,” has stood for over the years. Here’s what’s on her mind. Flyer: Meristem has been publicly on the market since March. I’m curious about the number of offers you got and whether those offers meant to keep the store feminist, lesbian/gay, or something altogether different. May: We had about a dozen people who initially expressed interest. That shook down to a handful, and all were people who would have continued the store in a similar vein: either as a feminist bookstore or as a lesbian and gay store, but one very much in keeping with our original purpose. None of those worked out, but it wasn’t an issue of asking price or location. Part of it was financial. The impact of the chains has made it extremely difficult for any small, independent bookstore to just stay in the market, and the American Booksellers Association is really confronting this in a full-frontal attack with two lawsuits [against Barnes & Noble and Borders and the preferential pricing both receive from publishers]. The ABA has reshaped itself to serve more as an advocacy organization for independent bookstores, and that came about through pressure from independent booksellers who said this is really important, that we’re going to expire if we don’t do something to level the playing field. For some of us, though, it’s a little late. I decided not to go through a broker or do a national search for a buyer because I felt we were enough of a home-grown business and enough of a specialty business that somebody was going to have to really understand who and what we were in order to take this on with a similar mission. We knew the store would change. The store has changed in its eight years. But we got a lot of feedback from customers that, even sold, wanted Meristem to still feel like Meristem. And we had to listen to that. Having put a lot of time and effort into developing a place that had a clear identity, I don’t think it would have made any sense to call it Meristem and have it be something different.Our customers would have been very unhappy. Other feminist bookstores across the country are closing or have been sold in the last few years. But at the same time, new ones are opening up. There are other folks still interested in doing this wild and crazy thing called a feminist bookstore. The Feminist Bookstore Network is still very much alive. But independent bookselling is not a business you go into to make a lot of money. You do it because you love what you’re doing, you love books, you love dealing with people, and you love getting a variety of voices out there before the reading public. Flyer: The range of lesbian and gay titles has never been greater or more visible than it is today. So it can’t be that there isn’t a market for the books and a market for the bookstores that carry them. May: That’s a curious irony. There’s been a critical mass of feminist books, books by women of color, and lesbian and gay books published in the last five to 10 years. A fabulous expansion of publishing in these areas. But the small, independent bookstores that originally hand-sold those books, had signings with those authors, and sometimes even got those authors to the notice of publishers are now struggling and can’t stay in business. At the same time, what people seem to want in a bookstore is what independents have always been best at doing: providing a cozy place where you feel comfortable, where you get good service, where you have a knowledgeable staff and a wide range of books to choose from in a place that doesn’t feel like a strip mall. So the big chains have been copying that model but along very corporate lines. If you look at their financial reports in Publishers Weekly, they’re losing money, but they can afford to lose money in order to put independents out of business. Clearly their goal is to knock out the competition. Flyer: As far as booksignings, what stands out over the years? May: Some of my favorites were with local folks like Gloria Wade-Gayles and Miriam DeCosta-Willis, both “home girls.” Our best-known signing, though, was probably for Alice Walker, which was a true boon for us and fell out of the sky. We’d only been open about six months. Out of the blue I got a call from a sales rep asking would I like to have Alice Walker come and read at the store. Well, I thought the caller was kidding. I thought it was a joke. So I guess I was lucky I didn’t hang up the phone. That was certainly our biggest event. When Susan Sarandon was filming The Client, we’d had a “Susan sighting” up the street from our friends at Lavender Earth. And she just dropped in one day, her kids in the car. The bookstore has allowed us to connect with all kinds of folks, and if anyone wants to know, Susan Sarandon was quite lovely and charming and bought biographies. Flyer: Despite the likes of Alice Walker and Susan Sarandon, has Meristem’s emphasis on lesbian and gay titles been the cause of trouble? May: We’ve had a series of anonymous complaints (they’re always anonymous), and they go first to the mayor’s action center or the police department, basically alleging that we’re running a porn shop because we do sell books about sex and sexuality. They’re usually objecting either to the books about sexuality written for children, which other bookstores and libraries stock – it’s information – or lesbian and gay books. Just the fact that lesbian and gay books are here and we don’t hide them is objectionable to some. Well, I think that’s all the more reason those books need to be available. But we’ve always tried to make a wide variety of materials available to a lot of different people. We have birthday cards for your Aunt Martha even if she’s not a lesbian. It’s harassment and people try to get you any way they can. Most of the people from the police department and zoning office (we’re not zoned as an “adult bookstore”) have been pretty reasonable. But it’s a pain to deal with. Occasionally we’ve also had people come in and “testify.” We just say, thank you for your input, have a nice day. That’s vastly overshadowed, though, by the people we know we’ve really helped, who have told us we’ve made a difference in their lives. Especially lesbian and gay teens, and women in the middle of all kinds of transitions, whether it was coming out, or a divorce, or a legal referral. Whether they were looking for goddess images, or rainbow materials, or just something that says, hey, diversity is a good thing. That’s really been our message all along. Flyer: Meristem has functioned as a community center as much as it has a bookstore. Where did you draw the line? Or did you draw the line? Did one end up supporting the other? May: That’s always been a difficult balance, and perhaps we haven’t succeeded in making that balance work. There’s the retail end that pays the bills, and then there’s the community-service end of it which everybody, including the staff, thinks is important and really wants, but which no one pays for. I’m still hoping there will be some way in the future the Meristem idea can continue to provide services to women. But it won’t be in a retail setting. I personally am not a businessperson. I’ve learned a lot about being a businessperson, about running a business. I’ve made a lot of decisions and choices that I didn’t know I could make. I’ve had to learn about finance, computerization, management. But I realize I’m really more interested in the social-services end of things, and for a bookstore to work as a business, someone with a better business head needs to be doing that part of it. Flyer: But a “better business head” would never have opened Meristem in the first place and in the second place, Memphis, Tennessee. May: It’s because we’ve been more than a bookstore. It really has been “Books and More” in terms of what we’ve sold and what we’ve done. We’ve always been very woman-focused and sometimes that’s been a little challenging for some of our male customers to understand: that it’s important to have a women’s space but that men were always welcome. We’ve functioned as the feminist community center for Memphis and Shelby County and that’s been our goal. And we’ve gotten support from men as well as women. My father, when he was alive, used to sit back in the rocker here and say, “Come on in. Buy something!” So it’s been an interesting ride. Flyer: You’ve also been a real presence in the Cooper-Young district. May: We’ve loved being in this neighborhood. We’ve felt very welcome, very much a part of the business association, and worked hard to be a good neighbor. These kinds of neighborhoods, which are diverse, dynamic, are the future. It’s certainly with a lot of regret that we’re closing the store. Leaving this neighborhood is one of those regrets. But we’ve come to the conclusion that this is part of the ebb and flow of life. We hope that something equally or even more wonderful will come to be in this space and take an active role in the community, the Cooper-Young community, the women’s community, the lesbian and gay community, and the bookselling community. It’s been a fun and interesting adventure. We’ll see what comes next. My hope is that in some way the Meristem dream can continue in some other kind of way, but I guess I never understood the impact we’ve had on the larger community. “Rewarding” is an insufficient word to describe it. Memphis is changing. There is a progressive community here. And we’re honored to have been part of it. Meristem will hold a go-ing-out-of-business sale Friday, August 14th, through Sunday, August 30th. To kick off the sale on books, sidelines, shelving, display cases, fixtures, office equipment, and more, the store, at 930 S. Cooper, is holding a party on the 14th from 5 to 9 p.m., with farewell remarks from owner Audrey May scheduled at 7 p.m. For more information, you can call Meristem at 276-0282, or contact the store by fax (901-276-0553) or by e-mail (Ameristem@aol.com).