This R&R feature story on my KDGE book club from August 2002.
Jessie's Book Club
Jessup's book club that has become a key element of her show and a signif icant part of the Dallas literary com munity.
1 first realized how big an impact Jessip's show has had on Dallas when 1 entered a Borders and saw a pile of the book Notable American Women at the information desk. I knew that this was Jessie's Book Chib's selection for the month, but I asked the person be hind the desk why it was there.
ing "I don't know. People just keep ask about it," the bookstore employ ee said, but he would not remain un informed for long, In a little over a year Jessie's Book Club has hosted the mayor of Dallas on KDGE, was fra tared in a cover story in Publisher's Weekly and luu been the talk of New York publishing,
And it all started by accident.
Hey Pretty
"It really all started when we added Poe's 'Hey Pretty," says Jessup. "It was the new version that featured her brother, Mark Danielewski, reading excerpts from his book House of Leaver. When we started playing it, the phones just exploded, so I did some research to find out where the dramatic reading came from.
"I realized that it had been a book that I had seen previously in a book store but was afraid to pick up because of the different fonts and the strange way it was set up. The book doesn't follow a typical read from front to back. You're jumping around. Some times there are only one or two words per page.
"It really looked freaky, and I was afraid of it. Still, when we started play ing the song, I felt like I had to read it so I could explain to people what was happening in the song or at least give them my interpretation."
That desire to give the listeners some background on a song was the first step to what has become Jessie's Book Club. "The Poe song really opened a door," Jessup says. "Because it incorporated music, it made the material more accessible to listeners. However, if I had just talked about a book, I would have been afraid that people who aren't into reading would have tuned out."
Meanwhile, the audience response kept getting bigger and bigger. "It was brilliant, and it was amazing how many people wanted to hear more," Jessup says. "There aren't words to describe how big it was getting. The publicist at Random House said that what was happening in Dallas was the topic of their meetings for weeks."
Jessup continued to talk to her lis teners about House of Leaves, and eventually she realized that something special was happening. The listeners were responding so well that 19 of Amazon.com's top 20 sales areas for the book were within KDGE's broad-cast range
The Next Step
The next step came when Jessup interviewed Poe and Danielewski to gether on the air. It was a logical move for someone who had been discuss ing their work on the air for weeks, but it wasn't necessarily easy to set up the interview,
"I contacted Random House first, because I wasn't getting any help from Atlantic, and I didn't think getting an interview with Poe was an option," Jessup says. "Random House sent me a bunch of books to give sway and arranged an interview with Danish ewski. Well, he's Poe's brother, and one thing led to anoilier, and I was able to interview them together."
Jessup's excitement regarding the project led her to invite Poe and win ewski to perform at the station's am mer festival show in Dallas. What started as a desire to simply give her audience background on a cool song led to the first-ever appearance of an author at Edgefest. Poe and Daniel ewski also did an acoustic show and an in-store appearance that weekend and talked further with Jessup on the
air. This is where our story could end. If things went as things usually do, "Hey Pretty" would be dropped into recurrent or rested, Jessup would go back to talking about alternative mu sic, and on-air discussions about books would once again be relegat-od to NPR. But that's not what hap-pened.
More Rock Stars, More Books
Jessup's next foray into the world of radio book clubs didn't actually involve the radio. It came when she realized that she could use her portion of the KDGE website to host a book club filled with cool books. The inspi ration was, appropriately enough, an other alternative rock star.
"I was sitting here at the station combing websites for show prep, and I ran across a site dedicated to Stephan Jenkins, the lead singer of Third Eye Blind," Jessup says. "But this site was a book club. I remember thinking, "This guy must get razzed since he's got the same name as the lead singer of Third Eye Blind! Well, it turns out that it was the website of the lead sing er of Third Eye Blind, and he has a book club.
"I found out that he was the vale-dictorian of his class at Berkeley, which was just astonishing to me. It wits sort of fun to talk about. I was really inspired by his book club and set up an interview with him."
With motivation from Jenkins, Jes-sup set up her book club on the KDGE website. At the same time, during her show she was using elements of a book she was reading. "I was reading a book about the poet Byron, who everyone has held up as the quintes sential romantic," she says. "This book completely changes that percep tion. I had no idea that the guy had a clubfoot and used that as a license for being the higgest asshole who ever lived on the face of the earth.
"The way he behaved is repulsive, the fact that he drank wine out the skulls of his ancestors after raid ing the tombs on his family estate. It was perfect fodder for the radio, be cause it fed into the somewhat de-mented mindset of your basic Alter native listener." like of
Her provocative on-air comments about Byron and the book as well as ber audienor's response led to interview with the author of the Byron bio. "It was the perfect oppor tunity to correct so many misconcep tions that listeners were taught in high school," says Jessup.
"What was interesting was the number of college-level professors who called and said they didn't know and were never taught that By-ron wrote most of his romantic post ry for his sister, whom he was fuck-ing on the sofa. Those were great calls, because they're teaching English in college, and they didn't know this in-formation."
It All Comes Together
The audience response to her com ments and discussion about Byron was strong enough that Jessup felt that she should try again. She chose a book she thought had warped and strange enough content that her listeners would enjoy hearing about it, even if they didn't read it, Ben Marcus' No-table American Women Jessup also continued to point listeners to her web page, which now included Jessie's Book Club.
"I thought the content of Notable American Women lent itself to the al ternative lifestyle," says Jessup. "Lis teners really freaked out when I talked about excerpts from the book. I inter viewed Marcus and produced a 15-minute bit, but I related every single
thing that Ben talked about to music. "When he is talking about a man buried in the backyard, I played "Man in the Box. I interviewed him on five or six occasions and got about four
JESSIE AND HER BOOKS
Here is KDGE (The Edge)/Dallas afternoon drive host and originator of Jessie's Book Club Jessie Jessup with some of her books.
hours of raw material, which I edited down to 15 mimites."
Jessup's idea of creating musical montages around author interviews brought everything together. The con tent of the books she chose lent them-selves to her audience's lifestyle, and now she had an on-air approach for author interviews that complemented the sound of the radio station. Jessie's Book Club hit its stride.
Support System
Every month Jessup chooses book for discussion. She features it on her page at the KDGE website and discusses it on the air. She works hard to get author interviews, which occur more often than not. The support from the New York-based publishing hous es has been extremely strong, even if the initial support from Dallas-based companies was not.
Jessup says, "One of the salespeo pie went to a large chain here called Half Price Books and told them, "This is what we're doing. What do you think? Their comment was, and 1 tread.' quote, "Your listeners don't reas
"What really kills me is that they then started advertising on our Active Rock sister station, "The Eagle' [KEGL) I was really angry, because these were people who clearly had not done their homework."
It was not long, however, before the grass-roots movement that Jessup had created spread throughout the city. A major explosion in exposure for Jess ie's Book Club was initiated by a sim ple communique to the mayor's office.
on ing Jessup says, "I had seen the mayor TV, promoting her summer read-program, and she was talking about how Mark Cuban had donated $10,000 for shirts and someone else had given her Britney Spears tickets.
"I thought I could help her reach a few kids with that program by send ing over tickets from The Edge, so 1 sent an e-mail to her office. I heard back from her chief-of-staff, and one thing led to another, and we set up an on-air interview.
"I was a bit terrified, because it was the first time I had ever interviewed someone in the political arena, but it was great. It was all about the books, it was awesome. I think it helped the book club. My hope is that hav and
ing her on the show will lend my club credibility. It will be interesting to see what the long-term effects of it are."
The Risk Pays Off
While having the mayor on the air was a big deal and added a significant amount of credence to what Jessup was doing, it wasn't until her efforts were noted in a cover story in Pub-lisher Workly that the local book merchants took notice.
pp "Early on, one of the salespeople. approached Borders, but they just kind of yawned and stretched and said, "Whatever," Jessup recalls. "Well, after the Publishers Weekly column, they got a letter from their corporate headquarters, and now they're all excited about it and want to start a Jessie's Book Club display all of their stores within our listen-ing area." in
The Publisher's Weekly column was a fitting culmination to all the work that Jessup had put into her book club. "David Hyde, who's in Random House's publicity department, put the article in motion," she says. "I got an e-mail from a writer at Publisher's Weekly saying that David had talked his ear off about me so he was writ ing to find out what the hobbub was all about, and it went from there. I was floored when I saw how long the arti cle was."
The article was extremely flattering, and included comments from authors Jessup had interviewed. One of the authors the magazine talked with was Katherine Dunn, who told them that when Jessup pointed out the connec tions between her book Geek Love Shakespeare's The Tempest, it was the first time in 13 years that anyone had picked up on the link. and
Jessup's book club is something that almost seems like it couldn't have been created for radio. It's too risky, too intellectual, too different. But it did happen, and that's a testament to Jessup's dedication and attention to her audience.
the The results have been dramatic for the Dallas reading community. As for radio station, the outcome hasn't been half bad either: After Jessup started talking about books, KDOE No. 1 in afternoon drive for the first time in its history.
