When it comes to deciding upon a get-away destination, Winona, Minnesota might not be at the top of your list.

Which is okay. It wasn't at the top of mine, either. Aside from being words that are fun to bounce off the tongue, Winona, Minnesota didn't mean anything to me.

Then I went there to do a reading. Are you allowed to have as much fun at a reading as I had that night in Winona?

To be fair, I've had fun at all of the places I've been including that reading where hardly anyone showed up and no one thought I was even mildly entertaining, and there was an old guy sleeping in the back row. My brother Mitchell and his wife Lucy traveled great distances to be at that reading, and after it was over, I told them they should not drive any more great distances, they should instead come sleep at my hotel. There are two beds in my room, I said. Come stay with me. So they did. And after we settled in, me in my bed, and Mitchell and Lucy in theirs, Mitchell took control of the remote control. He flipped through the channels and stopped when he stumbled upon some porn.

Only it wasn't porn, exactly. Except that it was porn, sort of. It wasn't dwarf porn or donkey porn or even plain old ordinary cable-guy-comes-a-callin' porn. It was more like Instructional Porn. It was strange because there were naked people, and they were doing it, but what they were doing was being narrated by an objective third party. The third party narrator was also naked, but she was mostly there to explain in a flat, clinical voice what it was they were doing. It was boring porn, like the kind the DMV might produce if the DMV produced porn.

"What is this?" I said.

My brother said he thought it might be HBO.

"Where are they?" I said. I couldn't get a handle on the setting.

My brother said he thought it was a basement. He pointed out there weren't any windows.

"They must have a very minimal operating budget," I said.

My brother agreed, pointing out the cheap paneling.

"What are they doing?" I said because there seemed to be some hunkering, and that's when Lucy sat up. "That's enough!" she said. "I can't believe two you are watching that! I think it's weird," she said. "It's weird that you two are watching porn together."

We were in the same room and porn was on and though we hadn't watched it for more than a few minutes, I guess my brother and I were watching porn together. We were not, however, watching porn together. But that's semantics. When your brother's wife tells you to quit watching porn with your brother, you listen. The next thing Mitchell found to watch was a documentary about the history of corn. I know it sounds like a joke--we went from porn to corn--but I assure you this is no joke. I learned that the plant corn has been so domesticated it will longer grow without human intervention.

ANYWAY.

Last week I got to read at The Book Shelf in Winona. This is a fantastic bookstore: not only does it share space with a cafe called The Blue Heron (you want to eat at The Blue Heron, believe me), it's also warm and friendly and Lisa Gray who works there has the best laugh and Chris Livingston who owns the place is a guy who knows books. We swapped titles and Chris sent me home with Allison Bechdal's Fun Home, and I am so in love with it I am going to teach it this fall. And the people who came to the reading did not fall asleep. In fact, they were quite the opposite: these people were very much awake. The conversation was lively and smart and funny.

Because that's what you want in a bookstore. You want it to be a place where people who don't know each other come to know each other. A place of community.

You can't get that on Amazon. But you can in Winona. Seriously, I am going back just to hang out in Chris' store.