INSIDE VOICES

INSIDE VOICES

Robert Gwaltney & Jeffrey Dale Lofton introduce Flannery Buchanan, owner of Bluebird Books

Flannery Buchanan moved to Crozet with her family in 2018 from the Chicago area. She was trained and worked briefly as a school librarian until she began having children and then she stayed home for 15 years raising her four kids. When Flannery was ready to go back to work, she opened Bluebird Bookstop out of a vintage trailer and took it around to vineyards, festivals, coffee shops, anywhere that had people gathering. It was a way for her to test the market without too much overhead. Eventually it became clear that Crozet would support a brick and mortar so Flannery partnered with her friend Chelsea, who had a background in apparel and they opened Bluebird & Company.

Inside Voices (Jeffrey): Tell us about Crozet, VA. Channel the Board of Tourism and entice us there!

Flannery: Crozet is this sweet little town about 20 minutes west of Charlottesville and UVA. We are surrounded by the Blue Ridge Mountains, vineyards, hiking trails, orchards and so much natural beauty. Because of our proximity to UVA, we have a lot of UVA employees and alumni that make their homes here. We also have residents who have come down from larger cities because they want a change of pace or they like being outdoors. The actual town of Crozet is sleepy with a local hardware store and pharmacy and a train that comes through every day around 3PM.

Inside Voices (Robert): How did Bluebird come to be . . . its origins? It’s more than a bookstore, yes?

Flannery: Bluebird is absolutely so much more. When I was living in San Diego in my twenties, I was working an admin job and doing a terrible job at it. I went through a pretty dark time trying to figure out what I was doing with my life and I had this wonderful therapist who saw me through it—Arlene. I will never forget her. On my last day of therapy, as I was saying goodbye before moving to Syracuse for Library School, she gave me this glass bluebird figurine and told me to just keep seeking joy. I’ve carried that little bluebird with me for 20+ years and never forgotten her words.

The business, for me, has been a reflection of that. Finding joy is so often a difficult task, so we aim to provide a space where our clients and customers can be themselves in whatever way that looks like. We like to call ourselves the Cheers of retail, when you come in everybody knows your name.

Inside Voices (Jeffrey): Beyond obtaining business licenses and acquiring retail space, what does putting an indie bookstore on its feet entail?

Flannery: Curating is the hardest part, I would say. We are space constrained, a very small shop. So thinking about what you want to carry, where you want to put your focus down to how many copies, when to restock. We carry mostly new and notable or titles/authors that our staff feel passionately about. We also focus on local authors with whom we have relationships. I personally love to hand-sell debuts or titles that have flown under the radar. The way we approach bookselling is this: if there's a big title that you know you want, you’re going to order it from Amazon or Barnes & Noble. You come to us for recommendations of GOOD books that perhaps you’ve not heard about already.

Inside Voices (Robert): What do you know now that you wish you had known when you opened Bluebird?

Flannery: The absolute hardest part is managing people—I had never managed people before. There is so much I’ve learned along the way about managing people, hiring people, assessing our needs vs. the talents of our staff. We’ve made so many mistakes, things I regret but every time I learn from the mistakes. And I’ve absolutely grown as a person and been better for it. So what I wish most of all is that I could tell my newbie self, you’re going to make mistakes with people and you’re going to feel badly about it but you’re going to be better for it and it’s going to be okay.

Inside Voices (Jeffrey): Given the attack on books and the freedom to read whatever one wants, have you had moments of regret, bursts of pride about opening a woman-owned, independent bookshop?

Flannery: YES. I will never forget a few years ago we were offered the launch for TJ Klune’s In the Lives of Puppets. I had hand sold The House in the Cerulean Sea to SO many people and I remember telling his publicist that I could guarantee 40-60 people. We ended up selling close to 300 tickets and had to take the event offsite. The news was hard that week, especially as a parent to queer kiddos, and before I had a chance to really wallow in it, I reminded myself: you’re doing what you can in your little corner of the world. To have gathered SO many people for an openly queer author with a book that embraced queer characters was a moment that I will never, ever forget.

Inside Voices (Robert): Book stores are crucial partners that authors rely on to promote their work, and you've given many writers a place to do that and meet the public. How do you decide which authors to invite into Bluebird? What advice do you have for authors who want, but are unsure how, to pitch themselves for a slot on your book event calendar?

Flannery: We are such a small shop and relatively new so I don’t have a goal of getting on just any book tours. Not now anyway. I stress too much about getting people to show up! So most of the events we do are with authors that we feel passionately about. That passion we feel spills over to our ability to hand-sell and create fans out of our customers. So it's an easy way to kind of guarantee people will show up! I also love to connect with authors on a personal level because so often that enriches their work for me and makes it so easy to handsell their book. Case in point, I met you, Jeffrey, at the VA Festival of the Book and I was so taken with you that I read your book and adored it. And I’ve sold it to so many people as a result!

My advice to authors who want to land on our schedule would be to reach out and say hi!

Inside Voices (Jeffrey): You embarked on a bold project last year. Tell us about the Crozet Book Festival.

Flannery: The Crozet Book Fest was born of trying to reduce my stress over books events! As I said before I really do stress about the marketing and getting people to events because I NEVER want to waste an author's time. So we thought, wow, there are so many releases in summer and fall for some of our favorite authors, what if we condense them all into a one day festival?

It was one day with events located at various small businesses around Crozet. The idea was you park once and spend the day in Crozet listening to fabulous authors and patronizing our local businesses. We had panels called So You Want to Be A Writer? Building Empathy through Fiction, Planning the Perfect Murder and more! It turned out to be a huge success and now we’re actively planning the 2025 festival!

Inside Voices (Robert): What’s next for you?

Flannery: I am a fly by the seat of my pants kind of person. I operate under the notion that there are dreams for me out there that I don’t even know exist. One day I meet someone or read something and all of the sudden, a dream is born. That said, I do have dreams one day of writing my story and all the good and the bad. I don’t need anybody to ever read it - I just want to know I did it.

As for the business, Crozet Book Fest is Saturday October 25, 2025. It’s going to be a good one!!