Somewhere out there, in the city, a soft boom clouded into the morning and a fist of smoke rose from the horizon. Elizabeth leaned against the rail and stared out at the sunrise just breaking the treetops. Little Dan squatted against the wall of the gondola and cried quietly into his folded arms. Then he helped me and my sister Elizabeth and my two brothers into the gondola, latched the door after my mother, and went back to the two vehicles, where he began shifting all his gear from his hatchback into our minivan.

He fired up the flame and helped us hoist the huge sail-fabric of the balloon, showed my mother the levers and explained to her about venting the heat, managing the ballast, using the wind. He waved us off but my mother insisted, held a fist of dollars in front of him and when he wouldn’t take that, she offered him the keys to our minivan. Outside his trailer, the balloon pilot, too, was packing his little Mazda hatchback. When we arrived at the field, the big wicker gondola was idle in the frosted grass and the balloon lay deflated beside it. Everyone else on the block was out in the predawn hours, too, packing their SUVs and hurrying their kids, but we were the first to leave because we hadn’t packed anything. Hearty thanks to Zoë, Samuel, and everyone who came out on a sweltering night to enjoy a spot of literature-out-loud-and an extra cheers, mate to Samuel for giving us a Malvern first, the selfie-with-crowd! (For more Samuel selfies, check out the blog post he wrote about his time in Austin, aka “hot Portland.”) As always, we had our video camera at the ready to capture the action, and we hope you’ll enjoy checking out our footage from a wonderful night of prose.We’d been planning the hot-air balloon ride for months and my mother said we were going if it was the last thing we did.

And Zoe read an excerpt from a short story that appears in the latest issue of Fields Magazine(so if you want to hear the rest of her story… yep, come on down to Malvern Books and pick up a copy of Fields! It’s a very beautiful journal that showcases emerging writers, musicians, painters, poets, and illustrators.) Samuel was visiting us from Portland, Oregon, to read from Hagridden, the hot-off-the-press novel that earned him an Oregon Literary Fellowship. Lucky ol’ Malvern enjoyed a rather splendid hump-day treat this week: we hosted a reading from the immensely talented Samuel Snoek-Brown and Zoë Miller.

Hagridden by Samuel Snoek-Brown