A little over a year ago, I moved from Poland, Ohio, to Charlottesville, Virginia, and I barely recognize the sleepy university town where I grew up. At times I even feel a little homesick for Ohio. But one of the great joys of moving back is visiting New Dominion Bookshop, the oldest independent bookshop in the state and a bookshop with an extensive poetry section (located at the front of store—not in the basement or the some dark corner where poetry books are usually found). As a teen, I worked at New Dominion but the shop, like the city, has been transformed. It is now owned by Julia Kudravetz, a poet. Her marketing director, Sarah Crossland, is also a poet. Maybe it’s no surprise then that the shop has become a happening place for poets and writers, particularly during the one week in March when the city hosts the Virginia Festival of the Book, which is this week!
I am so excited about New Dominion Bookshop and the upcoming events at the Festival, I thought I’d interview Julia Kudravetz and Sarah Crossland.
NA: First, Julia, I want to thank you, not only for running the bookshop, but also for opening it up to so many events. What inspired you to buy New Dominion? How does a poet go from teaching and running workshops and readings to becoming the owner of a bookshop?
JK: Thanks so much for interviewing us! I think it has been a long and winding road, so to speak, to being owner of an historic independent bookshop. Everything we do prepares us in some ways for the next task, but in my case, I first got involved in the bookshop through a poetry and fiction reading series that I hosted called the Charlottesville Reading Series. We held it monthly at a nearby artspace, and when a poet or a writer was on booktour, I wanted to be able to sell the book, so I asked Carol Troxell (the former owner) if I could start selling books from New Dominion at the event. From there I began working occasional shifts at the shop and doing their social media. When Carol Troxell passed away suddenly two years ago, I wrote to her husband and asked if he would consider hiring me as the manager, and if that went well I would buy the shop. At the time I was teaching college composition courses during the week, but I finished out the school year and began my job as the manager the day after classes ended. It’s been nonstop since! It’s true that it’s a big switch to go from teaching to managing a business, but in some ways teaching skills translate really well into dealing with the public—you have to be able to talk to people, to understand their needs and what they are looking for, and of course you must be patient and confident even when you’re feeling overwhelmed by it all. I also think that teaching and managing have a lot in common—you have to have a good relationship with a student or employee before you can really ask them to learn new and sometimes difficult skills to keep the shop going.
I am really grateful that I can lead this beautiful bookshop into the next century, that there is a loyal and growing clientele, and that I have such a cool and committed staff, pictured below. I’m also just incredibly lucky to have bought the shop during a time when indies are seeing a resurgence.
NA: Sarah, could you tell me how you came to work in the bookshop? What brought you here? How do you keep the magic of this bookshop alive?
SC: Of course, it's magical when your job perfectly aligns with your writing career. After my MFA in poetry, I managed the classes and programs at WriterHouse, the local creative writing nonprofit in town, and then went on to work for Indie Film Minute, a radio program and website dedicated to promoting independent film. Along the way, I learned about the ways in which storytelling informs how we engage with brands. Also, I watched a lot of Mad Men. When Julia purchased the shop in 2017, one of the things she wanted to focus on was building community outreach through events and marketing. We had met at a creative writing conference in 2011 and reconnected.
The bookshop is a hallowed place. But the best way to "keep the magic alive" is to keep on loving books ourselves. There's so much joy in recommending books, especially when it's someone's first encounter with a great book. My favorite was a time last fall when a quiet teenager came in and said he'd just finished On the Road, and he didn't know what to read next. I handed him Howl, which he had never heard of before. This is what we do at independent bookstores.
NA: New Dominion also hosts a teen reading series? I heard something about PBS doing a spot on the shop?
JK: Yes! Last September the local PBS program “Charlottesville Inside Out” did a profile on our shop highlighting our new teen reading series, Friday Night Writes. It’s an opportunity for young unpublished writers to share their work in an accepting group of other young artists. As the series has evolved, it’s turned into more and more young musicians singing their original songs, and that’s cool—I imagine it will grow and change over time, and I’m not sure what the end result will be, but as long as we have young people discovering the shop and being creative in this space I think the series will go on. The more age groups we can reach, the better for the health of our bookstore going into the future.
NA: What is it like to run a bookshop in this day and age? Do you live, eat, breathe, dream books?
JK: I think it’s one of the most difficult and rewarding things I have ever done. Running a bookshop means you wear so many hats because the shop is a cultural gathering place as well as a place of business. It’s wonderful to see the lists of books coming out and make decisions about how many to buy for the store (and think which customers might want them!). Other days all I think about is how to pay the cleaners and if I’ve paid the sales tax yet for the month. In a larger business, I suppose these tasks—the book buying and the business side—are a little more differentiated—but I like having a little of everything to do. Things certainly never get boring, and sometimes it feels like being in a play—as soon as one character goes out the door, another one comes in with their incredible story. I have lots of material for a memoir already!
NA: Could you list the poets who will be reading here at the festival?
JK: Sure! New Dominion tries to host a lot of the poetry and literary fiction during the festival. Poets reading at the shop or at offsite events we are co-hosting include: Steve Cushman, Molly Minturn, Kirstin Rembold, Joelle Bielle, Kyle Dargan, DaMarris Hill, Alyson Hagy, Maggie Anderson, Kevin Prufer, Melissa Stein, Sherman Bitsui, Diana Nguyen, Francesca Bell, Lindsay Bernal, and Remica Bingham Risher.
What an amazing group to be reading over a period of only four days here!
NA: I'd love to close with a recommendation for a new poetry book—a recent discovery perhaps?
JK: I really enjoyed Lindsay Bernal’s new collection What It Doesn’t Have to Do With. The poems are funny and smart and sad and beautiful. It’s just a great book. And the poet is reading during the festival!
SC: I'm currently reading William Brewer's startlingly gorgeous and heartbreaking poetry collection I Know Your Kind, which is about the opioid crisis in West Virginia. This isn't really poetry (okay, not at all), but I had to slip in a recommendation for the other book I'm currently reading, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Stephen L. Brusatte--it will definitely find its way into a poem soon enough.
Julia Kudravetz is the owner and general manager of New Dominion Bookshop and a writer. A Charlottesville native, she has taught college and high school English is the founder of the Charlottesville Reading Series. She holds an MFA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars.
Sarah Crossland is the recipient of the 2012 Boston Review Poetry Prize, a 2013 AWP Intro Journals Award, and the 2013 Pablo Neruda Prize. Her poems have been published in The Missouri Review, Crazyhorse, Boston Review, TriQuarterly, The Iowa Review, A Public Space, Denver Quarterly, Guernica, and other journals. She is currently working on finishing a collection of poetry about the Romanov daughters, called The Winter Palace. She lives in Charlottesville, VA, where she works as the marketing and communications director at New Dominion Bookshop. You can find more of her poetry at sarahcrossland.com.