I was sitting across the table from Mary Gay Shipley, owner of That Bookstore in Blytheville. The occasion was a celebration of my fourth novel, WHISTLE: dinner first, and then I would read. This was 1998 and the independent bookstores were beginning to dwindle because the huge chain stores were squeezing them out. Not that I was going to save any of them with sales of my books, but my entire tour of the South was focusing on those stores who had dedicated themselves to hand-selling the works of the little-known, like me, for no other reason than devotion to art and the artists who created them. At the head table that evening, we talked book business; then one of the men said he had heard that Mary Gay had been invited to the White House--President Clinton was lonesome for old and trustworthy friends just to talk to, following the scathing Monica Lewinsky scandal. Mary Gay said she probably would go. Many of her friends were there that night, and mine were nobly represented. Their signed books stood like framed photographs of their faces on the shelves of the homey little store. Even the folding wood-slat chair I was sitting on had been signed by some of those authors-mostly minor, literary authors like me, whose books get lost in the big chain stores. But if major is what you're after, you can find an autographed Grishom or two. As with Janice Daugharty, Mary Gay had faith in John Grishom before he became god of the best-seller list, when he was peddling his books from the trunk of his car. TBIB is still one of the few stores where he makes an appearance to sign and read from his novels. Which helps TBIB keep its doors open and its shelves stocked with those books by us little-knowns. So, you can understand why we are now TBIB disciples. Why we land in Memphis and light out across the Mississippi River for the tiny humble farming town of Blytheville, Arkansas. After bookseller Margie Johns' chicken salad, after her ice cream dessert, Mary Gay stood to introduce me. Holding to the lapels of her yellow Indian-art jacket, she said, "I'm wearing this outfit tonight because it's the one I wore when I took Janice Daugharty's PAWPAW PATCH to Good Morning America on CBS." She was referring to her annual TV appearance in which she makes recommendations for summer reading. What she likes, not what’s popular. That’s why The New Yorker, some years later, dedicated an entire section to the esteemed Mary Gay Shipley: her honesty and good taste as a bookseller has become legendary. She never second-guesses herself. She bows down to nobody. She is a tall, handsome woman; I am so short that I have to look up to talk to her. I look up to her in more ways than that. She keeps people reading; she keeps me writing. She keeps me off the streets, as they say.