Tag: authors

Don’t forget your hairbrush

Later I’ll be making a trip to buy all the things I forgot to pack. Though how I forgot anything is beyond me, since half of what I own is lying on the bed behind me.

There’ll be more on the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival later, but right now, some quick photos:


Authors Greg Herren and Mark G. Harris seem to have settled the Great Cafe Du Monde Powder Feud.


Author Stephen McCauley taught a very animated master class on creating characters in fiction.


Stephen McCauley gets writing tips from author David Puterbaugh.


Books! Tables and tables of books for author Timothy J. Lambert to peruse and purchase. (Not that he has any money, Tax Man. Leave him alone, or you’ll be talking to Rex’s attorney.)

More later…

As requested by Marika and Mark

I think I’ve shared before on LJ the tragic fate of my earliest books, which were devoured many years ago by some kind of bug (maybe a termite?) while stored at a family member’s house. All that remained of my Little Golden Books were their little golden spines. In time, I’ve tried to replace many of them (the books, not the spines) by shopping antique stores and vintage book sites. In fact, I found one today while looking for something else and ordered it. There’s one that I fear will always elude me, especially since I don’t know its title or author, only the pictures inside it, but I suppose part of the fun is in the search.

All these pictures can be clicked to enlarge.

According to my mother, I learned to read early, but except for the children’s books I actually owned, I don’t remember a single book from childhood. In fact, I didn’t see a Dr. Seuss book until I was already a teenager. I know I loved reading and was always in the bookmobile in summers, but I think I blocked out portions of my childhood because I was sick, and books became part of those disappeared memories.

I was nine when I began reading my first “real” books–that is, novels. Unlike an ex of mine, who read Moby Dick at around the same age (don’t be too impressed; his intellect peaked early–he dumped me, after all!), I went for more age-appropriate material when I discovered, in the library of my new school in South Carolina, Laura Ingalls Wilder. I also discovered I was only allowed to check out one book a week. One! Which I read the first night I got home, then had to wait a week for the next one.

This would NOT DO. My mother, always struggling with a tight budget, directed me to my brother’s and sister’s collections, where the Hardy boys and Walton boys (not to be confused with the TV family, who were actually Spencers in the book that brought them to life) and Nancy Drew and her pals were cavorting all over the bookshelves. I enjoyed them, but I didn’t want mysteries. I wanted more little houses on prairies, and Spin and Marty at camp learning to ride horses didn’t cut it.

At this point, a kindly family friend, a divorced man with no children of his own, took pity on me. Every few weeks when he went to Greenville on business, he stopped at a discount store (an early version of Wal-Mart) and picked up a Whitman’s Classic for me.

Oh, the joys of discovering the Marches and the Peppers and Heidi and Rebecca and her aunts and (the original) Tom and Becky and… Well, see for yourself. These never leave my possession, so no bugs had a chance to eat them.

I was like any addict, however. I needed more and more. So he finally enrolled me in a book club.

Just as the Whitman Classics fulfilled my need to graduate from the kids’ books I don’t remember, these (sometimes abridged) Readers Digest Best Loved Books for Young Readers, including Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, and The Great Impersonation, took my reading comprehension and enjoyment up another notch. By the time we moved to Alabama, I was ready for my mother’s bookshelves, reading everything from romantic suspense to literary giants.

I’m not sure if I’ve told this story before, but one time when I worked in the bookstore, a mother came up to me. She was frustrated because she kept buying her elementary school-age daughter books, but her daughter didn’t want to read them.

“What else can I do,” she pleaded, “to encourage her to read?”

“Do YOU read?” I asked. “Do you let her see you read?”

That idea had never occurred to her (she wasn’t a reader). I really was blessed to be born into a family of readers, because even if I can’t find the actual beginning of my love affair with books, I do know there’s nothing like walking with a troubled young bride across a misty moor, watching with Daisy as Gatsby throws expensive shirts on his bed, eating cold potatoes with the impoverished Pepper family, weeping over the loss of a beloved little sister, watching Neely O’Hara disintegrate, surviving a war with a green-eyed belle, trout fishing with Lady Brett’s chaps in Spain, and traveling the country with a dog named Charley.

Nothing feeds my soul like a book.

Various whatever kind of stuff

First, this photo makes me SMILE until my face hurts.

I love to see my friends laugh, and that’s a genuine Tim laugh happening here even though I was tormenting him with my camera.

Second, Wednesday, something rare was spotted in the Galleria:

Yeah, flowers, that’s nice, but there are always flowers in the Galleria.

Um, no, although this Nordstrom window IS the inspiration for a scene in Someone Like You, a title that makes me think of Mark G. Harris for some reason, and although it IS the place where I fell in love with a mannequin many years ago, I didn’t find it very exciting on Wednesday.

Speaking of things that remind me of Mark G. Harris, while I was waiting for my glasses the other day, I shot a photo of this spot in the Galleria.

The ice rink where friends Alex and Aaron from The Deal like to go to get in touch with their inner Tonya Hardings children.

Will I ever get to the point?

Button Sunday

I think this button is a paraphrase of Ralph Waldo Emerson: People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.

Emerson died on this date in 1882, a month before his seventieth birthday. He’s buried in a section of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts, called “Authors’ Ridge.” Members of the Alcott, Hawthorne, and Thoreau families are buried nearby. (Washington Irving is buried in a different Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in New York.)

I never get tired of reading about the great writers and thinkers of that period and how they impacted and influenced one another’s lives and work. Concord is a place I’d like to visit and draw inspiration from.

Tax Day and Poetry

Happy Tax Day. Poor April 15–only in the U.S. is the day treated like a loathsome relative whose impending visit inspires dread, whose arrival provokes curses, tears, and frantic rushing about, and whose departure is welcomed with relief that it’s over for another year. There’s no hospitality, even at The Compound, for Tax Day.

For a young woman living in Amherst, Massachusetts, this date in 1862 was among the most significant of her life. It’s the date when a literary critic received a letter from her asking if he would look at four of her poems. This began a lifelong correspondence between the two. Though few of her poems were published while she was alive, some 1800 poems had been written by the time she died. Her friend helped edit many of those poems for publication.

April is National Poetry Month. Each April, the Academy of American Poets produces a poster which it distributes free of charge to schools, libraries, bookstores, and community centers to promote poetry awareness. Emily Dickinson’s only known existing article of clothing graced the 2005 poster:

I’m so lucky that when I first began to think that my future would involve the study of literature, I lived in a home full of good books. When I went away to college, the library was my favorite place to be, and the only gifts I asked for were books.

I still have some of those books. I still take them off the shelf occasionally, and I still discover new ideas and concepts within their pages. I wouldn’t want to endure a life without reading. I’ll always have a love of poetry and affection for the tiny woman living in her own small world whose voice is as large as imagination itself.


Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune–without the words,
And never stops at all

I hope people always celebrate the joys of reading. I also hope your Tax Day is painless.

An interview and more

You can find all kinds of stuff in the new edition of Gay Lifestyle Monthly, including an interview with GLBT publishers, an interview with Steve Berman about his novel Vintage: A Ghost Story, an article about the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival (once again planned for New Orleans in May), and an interview about the collaborative writing process with the Timothy James Beck writing team [curtsy].

Check it out–and former articles, too, which you can find in the sidebar. Thanks, Ellen, for the interview and for your hard work!

A Room of One’s Own


Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart;
and his friends could only read the title.
Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room

Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever finish the biography of Virginia Woolf I began reading many years ago. I always want to, but other things come along, and it gets pushed lower and lower on the list of things to read.

On this day in 1941, Woolf walked into a river and ended her life at age 59. In the note she left for her husband, she wrote:

I have a feeling I shall go mad. I cannot go on longer in these terrible times. I hear voices and cannot concentrate on my work. I have fought against it but cannot fight any longer. I owe all my happiness to you but cannot go on and spoil your life.

I think very few of us understand despair. We know the word. We may think we’ve felt it. We probably sometimes misidentify depression, sadness, grief, and even anger as despair. But despair is a particular hell that can truly be known only when it’s experienced–and once experienced, one realizes that it’s nothing like any other emotion. Somewhere in every other emotion is a kernel of hope. But when despair takes over, it separates us from those we love and who love us most, because love is the most hopeful of emotions, and despair is hopeless.

Today, I was talking to a friend about how amazingly resilient humans can be. I think it’s the failure of resilience, really, that makes some among us surrender to despair, walk into the river, leaving in our wake anguish for those who’ve known us, and in a case like Woolf’s, dismay among future generations over work unfinished, life unlived.

I am watching, from a distance, someone I don’t know–like Woolf, a writer–make a slow, determined ascent from despair. I have no way to tell her I believe that she–unlike Woolf–will be okay, but I feel that writing it here creates a kind of magical connection. Even if she doesn’t read my words, their energy will travel until it reaches the place where it may be needed–if not by her, by someone. Someday, that someone might even be me.

Button Sunday

If a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth,
he need never try to write romances.
Nathaniel Hawthorne,
a quote from The Scarlet Letter

On this day in 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter was published. Things that never occurred to Nathaniel Hawthorne:

1. That his book would spawn a mostly dreadful movie starring Demi Moore.

2. That 100 years later, some guy named Clifton Hillegass would find a way to make millions of students happy. Hillegass published what were meant to be study guides to literary classics, but became a way to avoid actually reading books like The Scarlet Letter (CliffsNotes, not Cliff Notes, as so many people say).

3. That he would never be a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. (Well, it’s true. He wouldn’t. But I just tossed that in here to make Tim laugh.)

4. That 158 years later, his book–a bestseller in its time, heralded as an exploration of philosophical and spiritual themes–would be on the banned books list of his own country and would often be censored for being “pornographic and obscene.”

Nathaniel, you’re still aces to me.