Artful Lies and Shelves of Fiction: Craig Walzer at TEDxAthens

Craig is the editor of "Out of Exile: Narratives from the Abducted and Displaced People of Sudan," published in 2008 by McSweeney's Voice of Witness Series. He divides his time between Santorini and New York, working on the bookstore, the press, other writing projects.

I'm Craig and with a group
of beautiful friends that I love,

and at this moment miss very much,
I run a small bookshop

in the town of Oia, on the island
of Santorini in the south of Greece.

And we do philosophy books,
and we do some Greek history

and general non fiction,
we do travel logs and journals.

We print our own books once in a while and
we celebrate tzatziki at every opportunity,

and we feed it to people
on our terrace until they explode.

We have readings
in the evenings in the shop

and we make bonfires
on the terrace at night.

But mostly we specialize in fiction.

When the rare occasion does come,

that someone offers to give me money
in exchange for a book and I perk up,

they're generally putting a story
on the table and saying "I'd like this"

and then more often than not,
they'll ask "What are you doing here?",

"Who are you?" and sometimes
they'll ask "Do you take dollars?"

or "Where are your copies
of 'Fifty shades of grey'?"

(Laughter)

(Greek): Bullshit

(Laughter)
(Applause)

And if I am in the mood
and if I've had a glass of wine

or I'll offer a glass of wine
to the customer and we'll sit down and,

I'll tell them a little bit of stories.

And over the years we've had a thousand
tellings of the story over and over.

And people come
and ask for our nativity story

and we have a thousand alternations of it,
and to keep us awake and alert,

and keep our muscle taught,
sometimes, we'll, just for fun,

throw in little twists on the truth,
to see what we can slip by a customer

that we're probably
never gonna see again.

So I'll tell them that I was born
in Mississippi instead of Tennessee,

or I'll tell them that I got to college
on a basketball scholarship

or I'll tell them that I was one of the
founders of Facebook and watch them shake.

And I mean, this is what we do,

our stock and trade, honestly 75%
and more of our day is spent

selling and telling
stories at the bookshop.

And so, when I was invited here,
I had actually to spin and tell our story.

I had to actually think for a minute,
because I wanted to make sure

that I didn't mess up,
get the facts wrong.

After a while, you start to dissociate yourself

and the story becomes something
that you weren't even there.

You remember it more
as a story that you've told,

than a story that you've actually lived.

So I came back to this instant
and then I thought OK,

I should probably tell something
much more proximate to the truth here.

But then I realized,
probably the quickest way

to quickly tell that would be to base it

on the most important lies
that we encountered,

and that we told ourselves
to make this bookshop happen.

So indulge me for a couple of minutes,

and I'll give you the quick story of how
we did this or are doing this so far.

The way that I'll set it up, so yeah,

we start printing these books
in the back room of the shop,

just on our own as a little money maker
on the side to make ends meet,

because we've always wanted to do it.

And so we were looking at old titles
in the public domain

of favourite authors of ours,
and one of the fellows in our crew,

Chris Bloomfield, that's Bloomfield
with two O's he wanted me to mention,

Chris Bloomfield came across this
old essay that this very handsome man,

Mark Twain, wrote for a speech competition
in Connecticut back in the 1880s I believe.

He did not win the prize,
but it's a beautiful little essay.

And there is this one little part of it
that I'll just launch off of it

and if you want to read along with me,
it says,

"Lying is universal. We all do it."

And we can argue that later, but I think
everyone, we're on the same team here.

"Therefore, the wise thing is for us
to diligently train ourselves

to lie thoughtfully, juduciously;
to lie with a good object,

and not an evil one; to lie
for others' advantage, and not our own;

to lie healingly, charitably, humanely,
not cruelly, hurtfully, maliciously;

to lie gracefully and graciously,
not awkwardly and clumsily…

Then shall we be rid of the rank
pestilent truth that is rotting the land;

then shall we be great
and good and beautiful."

And so we looked at each other
and we said "Yeah, we're doing this, yeah."

(Laughter)

So let me tell you a little
about the best lies of all,

and give you a sense of how
we came to be here from far away.

I first came to Santorini
by chance, by coincidence,

got on the first boat out of Pireaus,

when I was on holiday
with my friend Oliver.

This was back in 2002,
we came to this island, we sat down,

we poured ourselves a glass of wine,
poured some olive oil over some tomatoes,

and basically sat on our terrace
and stared out

with our mouths slightly gape
for several days

and then on about the fourth
or the fifth day we were there,

we ran out of books to read
and there was no bookshop.

So, we did some drinking instead.

And we were stumbling back
from a restaurant one night

and I just looked over at Oliver and said,

"Oliver, we gotta open a bookshop,
so that nobody else has to do this",

and he said "That's a great idea,
we'll call it Atlantis books",

and I said "That's not a very good name,
but we'll worry about that tomorrow."

And we woke up the next morning
and I said "Bookshop!",

and he said, "We're sober now",
and I said, "No, no, no, bookshop."

And so we went back to Athens,

we went to the commercial services
office at the Embassy,

and we met this lady, Eleni,

(Laughter)

and we said, "Can a couple of Americans
open a bookshop in Greece?"

and she looked at me and she said
(Greek): "It will be easy".

(Laughter)

It will be easy.

You know, you go to the tax office
and they give you a paper with the stamp

and then you go
to the cash machine store

and you buy a cash machine
and you put it on your desk.

And (Greek) here you go,
you are a bookstore.

and so we said "Great, great"
and it was such a good answer

and we ran with it so fast that we didn't
even think to ask her a second opinion,

because when you get an answer
that's that good,

you're just going to run with it.

So we went back and we went about
the business of graduating from university

and got together
the best people that we knew,

the most incredible group of friends
and convinced them to come along with us

and one girl that during that time
I happen to fall in love with,

and told her that I was going to build her
a bookshop at an island

in the south of Greece.

And she said, "OK, if you do it, I'll come

and I'll make orange juice
for you in the mornings",

and I said, "Great, great."

So we got this crew together,
we took a van

from Cambridge, England, Christmas 2003

and we packed up the van
and drove it across the continent

and across the Alps and down to Greece
and we got to the tax office.

And they said (Greek):
"It's not going to be easy".

(Laughter)
(Applause)

So that's another long and much more
horrifying TED talk to give you,

all the details on that.
We're on the same team here clearly.

(Laughter)

So we gridded our teeth,
and I sort of slouched

like in that picture
for several months going through

and, you know, in the meantime
we met the locals and the community.

We introduced ourselves to them,

and we said, "We are going to open
a bookstore" and they believed us,

and they start treating us
like booksellers.

And so we found
this hallucination of a building,

beneath the castle at the edge of town,
this old Venetian castle.

And we went to the landlord
and we said, "We want this building",

and he said "I will rent it to you,
but I will charge you way too much,

and then at the end of the year,
I will kick you out

so that I can build presidential suites",

and we said, "OK, fine, we'll take it,
it's too good to pass out."

And we're going do such a great job
the first year

that we're going to melt his heart

and it's a wonderful life all over again
and we'll be fine.

And even if it doesn't work,
if we're going to do it just once off,

and it's going to die anyhow, this is
the perfect place to have the experiment.

So, we got this building,
we adopted a dog and a cat,

we started putting up some shelves,
we started building some tables,

we got an old fisherman's boat
and put it on the terrace.

And our friends started coming, because
they heard that we actually had a place.

And I started writing
their names on the wall

just so we can keep track
of who is passing through.

If you can see there, that's just the very
inception of that back in the years.

And we got things going,
and we were ready to go.

And by Easter time more and more
of them where coming.

We had Easter Eve, we were ready to go
and our shop was very nearly there.

And we were laughing about how
this was really gonna happen

and that some day we were going
to have beautiful kids, like these,

and they were going
to run the shop for us.

And that first summer was glorious
and people came and we had a blast

and we sold good books.

And an old drinking buddy of mine
from Paris, this fellow Jeremy Mercer,

was asked to write an article
for the Guardian

about his ten favorite bookshops,

and on a lark he put us as his favourite.

And it turns out that journalists like
to copy what they read on the internet,

because soon we saw
ourselves popping up

on all these other lists
of the ten best bookshops in the world.

That's the only reason,
because I had this one friend,

who wrote something in the Guardian,
it comes up

and that's why everyone believes it.
Turns out we were just lucky.

(Laughter)
(Applause)

So, notice that there was
no beautiful girl there,

because in the time that it took
to raise that money and motivation

to actually get it going, she had fallen
in love with someone else,

and got off and I didn't know what to end.

We were getting close
to the end of the year,

we could hear the footsteps
of the landlord, coming closer and closer.

And we were going to go home,
and then another beautiful girl walked in

and I just completely forgot about
anybody else who I had ever seen.

And I said we were going to fight,
we're going to come back.

We were going to find,
we were going to built another one.

I'm going to build it for her.

She is the one that
I was going to build it for all along.

(Audience): Bravo!
(Applause)

And then the landlord
came and kicked us out.

(Laughter)

And the next winter, so over the winter
we found another place,

that we haven't even noticed
the year before, this little dingy place.

And we rented that and we started
painting and bashing down walls,

and deliberating where we're going
to put the new shelves.

and bashing down more rocks.

You have to be ambitious to do
this kind of thing once by hand,

but you go a little bit crazy
the second time it turns out

and by Easter year two we had a new shop,
and the books were better,

and they were more of them
and we sit upon our terrace,

and we began to cruise,
and we sold our books.

And we got a new cat
and we put the cat to work and we...

(Laughter)
(Applause)

We got a crew to start coming back,

and Chris was holding court
in the back room, there he is.

And we served up some
more tzatziki, as we do.

And we have more readings
and Chris played his cello.

And we had bonfires in the evening
and we met new friends.

And we danced among the bookshelves
in the evenings until the sun came up.

And we laughed and we argued about
which was the most beautiful bookjacket.

And we pontificated and we watched
as things got a bit hairier on 2008-2009.

Since then it's been a series
of us trying to do

whatever we could creatively
to stay alive,

as I'm sure many of you can relate.

And somehow every year we have
this conversation "Is this the end?"

And we say "Maybe it is" and the we say
"Well, what can we do?" and we wait.

I think it's since 2002 when we first
came up with this idea.

We said "We're just going to run with this
until there is a wall that we bash into",

and we haven't bashed into it yet.

We started printing our own books
in the back room of the shop like I said

and that's gone larger and
that's helped to supplement where,

we are figuring any sort of ways
that we can, to streamline our operation,

to find new and better and more beautiful
and rarer books and it keeps us busy.

And we're still laughing about maybe
our kids will run it some day.

So, I would say, that in these days,
if you find yourselves in the situation

that we're in, it's now
the end of the tourist season

and I'm looking at the books
and I'm going to go back to Santorini

in a couple of days,

and take a look at where
we are at the end of the year,

and I'm gonna hold my breath,

and hope that we can pay the rent
to get through to next spring.

And, I believe, I'm gonna tell myself
that we're going to do it.

We're going to keep lying
gracefully to ourselves,

and we're going to run
with these graceful lies

that women like Eleni
are going to keep telling us,

because if she hadn't lied
to us to our face,

this would never have happened.

So I would say that. Let us lie
gracefully a little bit more

and watch the people that come
and start to believe your story,

because that spiral over the years grows
and continues to grow.

And we had this spiral
that's on the roof of the building,

and we don't know how we're going
to keep everything underneath,

but there is fellow Henry David Thoreau,
another handsome man,

who said "If you build castles in the air,
your work need not be lost;

that is where they should be.
Now build foundations under them."

And that's what we're doing and if you
happen to find yourself

in a magical place, on a magical land,
in some strange and difficult times,

maybe it's time to believe
a few of those lies,

maybe it's time to look at those castles
in the air and keep them there,

and keep building the foundation
under them.

Because you remember that fellow Oliver,
that came on that first trip with me,

he actually left out the first year.

He met a girl the first year
and he took her home.

And they went back and they got married
and on the 4th of January 2012, this year,

eight years to the day, after
we first landed on the island of Santorini...

There is Oliver and there
is Annie Palmawise, they had a baby.

So if we can hold on for 18 more years,
she can run the show for us.

I hope we stick around,
I hope to see you soon.

(Applause)