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Central Standard

Poetics And Politics: Book Peddler Will Leathem

Paul Andrews
/
paulandrewsphotography.com
Will Leathem surrounds himself with books and ideas at Prospero's Books on West 39th Street in Kansas City.

If you're looking for Will Leathem, he can usually be found behind the counter of Prospero's Books, his irreverent corner shop with creaky wood floors, scattered rugs, and precariously stacked piles of reading material.

That's where he nudges young writers and artists to make work, recommends his favorite books and gets into every kind of conversation imaginable.

The life he has now -- being a fixture in his neighborhood, walking to work, chatting up customers and raising his son in the aisles of his own bookstore -- is one he calls small. But his life hasn't always been "small" in this way. Nor has it always been filled with the rabble-rousing bohemians who frequent his shop.

Before peddling books, Leathem worked as a political consultant for the Republican Party for 26 years.

His introduction to politics started memorably: with a fist-fight.

He was in high school when the Republican National Convention met in Kansas City, back in 1976. His father, a lower-middle class resident of Johnson County who worked for the Social Security Administration, was a dedicated Republican who eagerly attended the event.

Before school, Leathem's dad stuck a Ford/Dole campaign button on his son. Leathem knew very little about politics, and did not object. 

"I believed in Led Zeppelin," he recalls.

But just wearing that button was enough to attract attention. His classmates confronted him in the hallway. They were tearing him apart, not only for what they perceived as his politics, but also for his long hair. As he remembers it now, the whole school gathered in the hall to see what was happening.

"They pushed me a little bit," he says, "and I wasn't very articulate at that point in my life. So I just punched the guy. I didn't know what to do."

What he was doing, he says, was defending a belief.

"It wasn't my belief yet," he explains. "But it was my dad's belief. I loved my father and I respected him and to have it so viscerally challenged produced a visceral response."

The very next week, he went to Sen. Robert Dole's office, started volunteering for the presidential campaign and never looked back.

"It was a pugilistic introduction to politics," he says. "Which is a pugilistic sport."

Credit Paul Andrews / paulandrewsphotography.com
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paulandrewsphotography.com

At the peak of his political career, Leathem organized two senatorial campaigns for Missouri Republican John Ashcroft, who he describes as "a pretty good guy" who is also a "man of contradiction, as we all are."

He adds a cautionary note, that "people are not just cardboard caricatures who are distilled down to 30-second sound bites by both sides trying to define who they are."

Leathem says that literature and politics are outpourings of the same drives, hungers and curiosities.

"You're trying to figure out the best possible information by putting things into your head, reading well, listening well, looking at great art, having really brilliant conversations with very smart other people who may or may not agree with you," he says. "Then you're trying to build legislation or write a great play or a brilliant song that touches somebody or a painting that somebody cannot walk by without looking at it. It's all dealing with the human condition in a proactive way."

His decision to leave politics and open a bookstore happened quickly.

One night, he was sitting in a bar having a beer with a fellow politico, and they were talking about how great it would be to sit and read books and have conversations they really cared about. 

"A month later, we had keys to the building," he says.

Prospero's opened in 1997.

Credit Paul Andrews / paulandrewsphotography.com
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paulandrewsphotography.com
Leathem's son, Riley, keeps his dad company at the store.

Since then, Leathem says, he's become more comfortable with himself. He's also published lots of poetry, both is own and other people's. And he's started a family.

"You meet all of the great gals reading books," he says, adding that he considers it one of the great privileges in his life to have raised his son in the aisles of the bookstore.

In the end, Leathem went from traveling hundreds of thousands of miles a year, as a political consultant, to taking six weeks to go through a tank of gas in his car because he walks almost everywhere he needs to go.

"The things we usually call small, that's where all of the good stuff happens," he says with a conspiratorial grin.

Portrait Sessionsare intimate conversations with some of the most interesting people in Kansas City. Each conversational portrait is paired with photographic portraits byPaul Andrews.

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People don't make cameos in news stories; the human story is the story, with characters affected by news events, not defined by them. As a columnist and podcaster, I want to acknowledge what it feels like to live through this time in Kansas City, one vantage point at a time. Together, these weekly vignettes form a collage of daily life in Kansas City as it changes in some ways, and stubbornly resists change in others. You can follow me on Twitter @GinaKCUR or email me at gina@kcur.org.