Girlfriend Weekend Outtakes

Authors Deeanne Gist & Hester Bass

I’ve been writing about the 10th annual Pulpwood Queens Girlfriend Weekend Author Extravaganza in Jefferson on January 15-16, hosted by literary maven Kathy Patrick of Beauty and the Book.

Pat Conroy summed up the entire weekend beautifully: “There’s something alive in this room, something that shows that literature means something. This is out of the soil they don’t’ know about on Manhattan Island. We celebrate this every time we open a book or see a tiara

I also want to give a shout out to the Eureka, Kansas, Pulpwood Queens (Heidi, Erica, Pam, and the adorable girls!) for adopting me for the weekend. Heidi (see below) is Kathy Patrick’s BFF from way back. We Kansas girls stick together!

Here are some of my favorite takeaways from the weekend (and as you can tell from the session names, Kat was riffing on a Wizard of Oz theme!):

Friday

I arrived just in time on Friday to catch the end of a panel with Jill S. Alexander, Hester Bass (The Secret World of Walter Anderson), and Heather Hepler (The Cupcake Queen).  Jill’s debut novel, The Sweetheart of Prosper County,

The Best Book Fest in Deep East TX

I have this thing about Jefferson, Texas’ own version of Savannah. As I turned onto Broadway from Highway 59, I did my in-car happy dance. And I was even happier to pull up at the Pride House, my home-away-from-home for the weekend of Jan. 15-18. Jefferson is magical. It’s so steeped in leftover Southern Gothic vibe, with house after house dating back to the 1850s and 1860s, that whenever I turn a corner I think I’ll see a horse-drawn carriage –– wait! I saw horse-drawn carriages driving weekend tourists around the tiny town on Sunday!

After an absence of much too long (say, three years), I made a return trip to my favorite small Texas town for the annual Pulpwood Queens’ Girlfriend Weekend, the brainchild of Kathy Patrick, my literary soul sister. Kathy has run Beauty and the Book, the country’s only combination beauty salon and book store, since 2000. With her past as a book sales rep, she’d always been about books and reading. She got the bright idea of starting the Pulpwood Queens of East Texas book club, whose motto is “Where tiaras are mandatory and  reading good books is the rule.” (One might add that leopard print something or other is the perfect complement to the tiara!)

In 2003, I made my first trip to Jefferson to see for myself how tiaras intersected with books. I had the good fortune to go over Labor Day weekend, when Kathy didn’t have a lot going on, so I got the official guided tour in Kathy’s van with daughters Lainey and Madeleine. They introduced me to Auntie Skinner’s biker bar (home of all things fried and lots of beer), the Hamburger Store (home of amazing pies), the Carnegie Library, and of course Beauty and the Book. At that time B&B was in the basement of Kathy’s home, and she showed me tapes of the PQ’s Good Morning, America

#20: Meet the New Cavalier Girl!

Heeeerrrrrrre’s Consuelo!

La Senorita Principesa!

Loungette!

Supercutie!

She’s settled right in! It’s hard to believe she’s been in her forever home only a little over a month. I love this girl!

#19: So Long, Sweet Girl

This are the kind of first I really do not like: saying goodbye to my second beloved dog in 2009. Miss Patsy Clementine, she of the perpetually sunny disposition, made her transition on Tuesday, December 11. Patsy made it past ten, which was yet another miracle, considering her many health challenges, namely, Cushing’s disease, which caused the big problems over the last year.

As my vet, the wonderful Kathryn Van Winkle, once put it, “It’s just Patsy’s world, and we’re all passing through it.” That was the truth, but what a sweet world to share with a sweet, sweet girl.

I shall miss her championship-level snoring (check out her video here), the way she loved to cuddle with any type of soft surrounding, her “Feed Me” shuffle dance. But most of all, I shall miss my own Miss Congeniality.

It’s oddly comforting to know that her brother, ThunderDog, and cousins Lily, Bear, and Pearl and friend Felix among many others are all there to greet her.

May she and ThunderDog be chomping down Breath Busters in Doggie Heaven! And snore REALLY loud, Miss P Bug, so I can still hear you.

Pages: “The Magicians”

I really wanted to like The Magicians, by Lev Grossman, I really did. But now that I’ve slogged through it, I’m not sure if I did. The first half of the book drew me in completely; instead of going to a traditional college, Quentin is unexpectedly whisked away to Brakebills, an exclusive college for the magically inclined — Hogwarts for grownups, albeit darker. Quentin’s continued fascination with the Fillory books from his childhood lured me along with the promise of Fillory fiction within fiction. But once Quentin and company move into the real world and then out of it again, Grossman lost control of the story. He alternately plods along in maddeningly repetitive detail about who has slept with whom and how much booze is consumed as Quentin and the gang sit around, boring the reader with their navel-gazing ennui. Then the action careens off, only to sputter again in upstate New York and then the Nietherworlds before careening off into a comic-book cliche of a climax. And then the denouement left me thinking, “What the heck was THAT?!?!”

My biggest frustration, however, was Quentin himself and a disturbing trend in American fiction. Just what IS the deal with wimpy, narcissistic male protagonists? Are anti-heroes like Quentin supposed to pass for complicated, three-dimensional characters? Or is that as close as male authors can get to concocting sensitive new age males? I’m so done with that. And all of the high-falutin’ talk in literary circles about how a character simply must develop over the narrative arc? Forget it here, unless you can count what happens to Quentin. Yet at the end he’s still bored, still self-centered, still navel-gazing.  Give me Jamie Fraser any day, people! At least he’s not a wuss!

Countdown to Dan Brown’s Next Bazillion

I know I promised I’d write about Texas books and authors, but this is just too big to ignore. In case your All-Seeing Masonic Eye has been on the fritz, Dan Brown’s long-awaited follow-up to The Da Vinci Code drops just after midnight on September 15.

In The Lost Symbol, symbologist Robert Langdon is back in another frenetic hunt, this time racing through our nation’s capital! Chasing after Freemasons and big tattoed eunuchs! Solving some Mensa-type puzzles! Looking at some symbolic art and architecture! And and who knows what all else, all in the space of 12 hours!!! Whew, that wears me out, just reading about all of that in the preliminary reviews. Maybe Langdon’s angling to replace Jack Bauer? After all “12″ would be perfect for people with A.D.D.

If you simply have to know more, here’s the review from the New York Times review — which, by the way, broke the Random House-imposed embargo on the book by publishing the review on Monday. Take THAT, Matt Lauer — scooped by a newspaper! Ha ha ha!

Or go stand in line at your favorite bookstore on Tuesday. And let me know if anyone shows up dressed like their favorite Dan Brown character — Mary Magdelene or albino monks, anyone? Maybe I’ll run over to BookPeople at midnight to see what’s happening there. Then again, maybe I’d rather just call it a night and get some All-Seeing Shuteye. After all, I’ll be reading all about it later this week.

This piece is also posted at DogCanyon, where I’m weighing in on books and authors and all things literary.