Books: Sandra Brown on ‘Rainwater’

Sandra Brown

Sandra Brown, who lives in Arlington, Texas, is a writer who has produced a long string of New York Times bestsellers.

Sandra started her career as a romance novelist, but over the past two decades, her specialty has become the fast-paced, contemporary thriller — crime fiction dealing in murder, corruption, betrayal, and steamy sexual intrigue.

However, her new book, Rainwater (Simon & Schuster, $23.99), is something very different. It’s a story that was inspired by Sandra’s own family history. It is set in 1934, in rural, Depression-era Texas. And while there is indeed corruption and murder in Rainwater, there is also romance, courage and heartbreak. And in her title character, David Rainwater, Sandra has created one of her most memorable heroes.

Here is Sandra Brown, talking about Rainwater.

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When they were young: Sandra's paternal grandparents.

You have said that Rainwater is very close to your heart, and that it was inspired by Depression-era stories told in your family. What real-life experiences happened in your grandparents’ time that made you want to tell this tale?

 

In 1934, as part of the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation’s attempt to remove surplus commodities from the open market, independent dairy farmers were required to pour out the milk they couldn’t sell to dairies. My paternal grandfather refused to waste good milk when families in his community were starving. He’d been giving away his surplus milk to people in need. Federal agents showed up at his farm, and engaged in an armed standoff against my grandfather and some of my gun-toting relatives. However, without a shot ever being fired, the agents withdrew and my grandfather continued to give away his surplus. This made a distinct impression on my daddy, who was six years old at the time. He told this story to me, and it fired my imagination.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sandra's new book was inspired by her father's family, who owned a dairy farm in Central Texas.

You’re always on a tight writing schedule, because you’re under contract to produce a book every year. How did you ever make the time to write Rainwater in addition to your other commitments? How long did it take you from the time you began writing?

 

This story insisted it be written. So when I finished SMOKE SCREEN, but before I began SMASH CUT, I gave myself two months in which to write the first draft of RAINWATER. I didn’t know where the story would go, exactly. I just began writing and let it unfold on its own. When I completed the first draft, I had to put is aside for months while I worked on SMASH CUT. Then, throughout the year, whenever I took a break from SMASH CUT, for instance when my editor was reading the first draft of it, I’d take out RAINWATER and work on it. It took a year to complete, working on it when I could. And when I couldn’t because of other obligations, I missed it!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the farm: Sandra's paternal grandparents, later in life.

There’s a good deal of racial tension portrayed in Rainwater. Did you research how racial segregation affected ordinary people in small-town Texas during that era, 75 years ago?

 

Anyone who grew up anywhere in the United States during the past 75 years has experienced racial segregation on some level. Racial lines were definitely drawn in Central Texas during 1934 when RAINWATER is set. In the story I tried to remain true to the general mindset, from the viewpoint of both blacks and whites, while asserting that not all whites are bigots.

Autism plays a significant part in the plot of Rainwater, but it had not even been identified or named yet, in 1934. What did you learn about the historic treatment of autism? Were autistic children often institutionalized?

What’s really interesting: I didn’t know Solly was autistic until he pulled the pan of hot starch onto himself. I didn’t know he was going to be a special child in any way. When Ella, the doctor, and Mr. Rainwater burst into the kitchen to see what had caused the ruckus, there was Solly, shrieking. His autism came as a total surprise to me. Autism wasn’t given a name until the late forties. One of the characters in RAINWATER refers to Solly as “backward.” She says this to Ella’s face, and not unkindly. I believe that’s simply how Solly would have been regarded by people at that time. He would have been an object of pity. And, yes, most children with this condition were either committed to institutions or locked in the proverbial attic.

Books: ‘Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women’

Here is my latest book review, from the Sunday (Nov. 1, 2009) Dallas Morning News: 

 

 

 

Louisa May Alcott biography details author’s lifelong struggles

By JOYCE SÁENZ HARRIS / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
Joyce Sáenz Harris is a Dallas freelance writer.

 

Two women, both closely identified with the American abolitionist movement, wrote enormously influential best-sellers in the mid-1800s. The first, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery epic Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is acknowledged as a philosophical precursor to the Civil War, but it is barely read today except by scholars of 19th-century literary feminism.

Louisa May Alcott

The second novel, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, has never been out of print since it was first published in 1868. Its tomboyish, restless heroine, Jo March, is considered a female icon worldwide. The domestic drama of the poor but proud March family still entertains modern readers from ages 8 to 80, and Little Women has frequently been adapted for stage and screen over the past century.

Moreover, its author evolved into an object of increasing literary fascination over the past 35 years, as it became clear that Alcott was much more than, as she disparagingly put it, a writer of “moral tales for children.”

In her new biography of Alcott (the basis of a PBS American Masters documentary to air Dec. 28), Harriet Reisen puts 20 years of study into a highly readable story. She casts a revealing new light upon an ambitious woman who was very much like her literary alter ego – except that Louisa Alcott’s life was harder, unhappier and far less healthy than Jo March’s.

Harriet Reisen

As the daughter of Transcendentalist philosopher Bronson Alcott, Louisa moved in literary circles from childhood. But her charming, impractical father seldom provided financially for his family. The Alcotts moved frequently, evading debtors and staying afloat with the generosity of family and friends.

Often, their meals were bread and water. The work of keeping the family fed, clothed and sheltered fell mostly upon Louisa, her three sisters and their mother. Louisa, strong-willed and driven by a yearning for travel and luxury, helped support her family with her “scribbling” even as a teenager.

For 20 years, she wrote dozens of pseudonymous Gothic thrillers for pulp magazines and papers – the same dark, “blood-and-thunder” stories that Jo March wrote for pay. “I’ll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won’t!” Alcott declared.

Alcott in a midlife portrait by George Healy (courtesy of the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)

She won notice under her own name, especially with Hospital Sketches, stories from her months as a Civil War nurse. But Little Women made her a celebrity at home and abroad. Alcott wrote novels for adults, too, but her juvenile works – notably the Little Women sequels Little Men and Jo’s Boys, Jack and Jill, Eight Cousins and its sequel Rose in Bloom – made her fortune and let her support her entire family. But she never found lasting romance or true happiness.

Throughout her life, Alcott was haunted by death and illness. Family deaths were often retold in her saga of the March family, but she could not put the loss of her artist sister May (“Amy”) into her final book, Jo’s Boys. She became the guardian of May’s baby daughter, Lulu, and raised her namesake during the last decade of her life.

Despite the wealth she achieved, she worked almost incessantly except when her poor health interfered. Reisen believes that Alcott suffered from lupus, a debilitating auto-immune disorder.

When she died in March 1888, after a probable stroke, she was 55. Alcott never knew she had outlived her father by only two days.

Joyce Sáenz Harris is a Dallas freelance writer.

jesharris@sbcglobal.net

Louisa May Alcott

The Woman Behind Little Women

Harriet Reisen

(Henry Holt, $26)

Books: Q&A with Laura Wiess on ‘How It Ends’

 

  

 

"How It Ends" by Laura Wiess

 

 

 

 

 

 

How It Ends (MTV Books/Simon & Schuster; $14)  is the latest novel from Laura Wiess, author of Such a Pretty Girl and Leftovers. Although it is marketed as a YA [young adult] novel, How It Ends is a dark-edged, compelling portrait of love’s power over evil, and adult readers are likely to relate to it on a wholly different level than younger readers will.

Mothers and their high school-age daughters may particularly be drawn to share reading the story of teenage Hanna and her relationship with Helen, an elderly neighbor who has become Hanna’s adopted grandmother. By story’s end, long-held secrets are revealed and illusions are shattered as Hanna moves into adulthood.

Here is Laura Wiess, answering questions about How It Ends.

Q&A for Laura Wiess, on How It Ends:

The first half of this book felt like a YA novel for teens, but in the second half, the parts with Louise’s memoir felt like a serious novel for adult readers. Were you ever tempted to change the concept of your book, so that the “novel-within-a-novel,” the audiobook How It Ends, would become your central story, aimed at an older readership?

Hi, Joyce! I’m so glad to be here.

I flirted briefly with the idea back in the beginning, while writing the audiobook and worrying if teen-age Hanna would ever be able to understand how different life had been back then, but then I realized that was exactly the point. Helen was worried that Hanna would not understand, so of course I was worried, too. These were secrets Helen had kept her whole life, and they could never be a casual reveal but if she wanted Hanna to know the truth and not be left with haunting, unanswered questions then exposing her past was a risk she had to take. And since the heart of the story is about the strength of the loving relationship between Hanna and Helen, an unofficial granddaughter and an unofficial grandmother, we needed to know both of them to really understand the Why? behind Helen’s initial decision to lie to Hanna, and then her later decision to confess.

So they had to be woven together, both voices, young and old, because they’re irreversibly intertwined, because they showed up together in my mind and gave each other so much. I needed to explore how grandmothers and granddaughters interact, coming together from different generations, armed with different opinions, experiences and focuses, sometimes clashing, sometimes impatient but also meeting on common ground, and despite their differences, giving each other love, comfort and care.   

Helen’s part of the story starts out seeming like a subplot to Hanna’s teenage self-absorption and romantic angst. But by the end of the book, Helen’s tale takes on great urgency and power. Did its emotional evolution surprise even you, as you were writing it?

In a way, yes, although I pretty much knew right from the start where we were headed and the intense emotions we would be mining to get there. I knew living inside of Helen was going to be rough – it had to be, to be true to her – and it definitely was.

The story’s momentum nearing the end was nerve-wracking, a relentless, no-mercy kind of internal storm there was no getting away from until I’d felt every scene and written every word. That surprised me, how fierce and raw peeling away all the options and facing the inevitable had left me.      

How important was it for you to show the arc of a relationship between characters of completely different generations?

It’s an integral part of the story’s foundation, along with the idea that no one is ever only what you think they are, and that we never really know the private heart of anyone unless it’s deliberately revealed.

There’s an organic rhythm to their relationship, a natural ebb and flow that shifts in accordance with Hanna’s blossoming and Helen’s withering. Hanna is pulling away from her family, making independent (and inexperienced) decisions and searching for her place in an unknown but thrilling new world. Her voice in the beginning of the book is young, excited, and self-absorbed, concerned more with navigating the bewildering maze of love, lust, school, and partying than boring old home life, and so of course it stands in stark contrast to Helen’s more settled, serious one. As Hanna grows and learns, though, her thoughts, actions and her voice matures.

Helen understands the necessity of Hanna’s pulling away (even while she mourns the loss), and is wise enough not to hold Hanna too tightly, or make her feel guilty for leaving her behind. Hanna then chooses to return to Helen because she wants to, not because she’s being forced into it.  She chooses to stay with Helen during a very difficult, heartbreaking time, and making that choice teaches her more about love, life, loss and the depth of her own strength and love for Helen than she ever could have imagined.

Parents often try to protect their children from pain and loss, to shield them from the realities of illness and death. Do you believe it is important for children to grow up understanding that tragedy is an unavoidable part of life?

Children are going to experience pain and loss whether they’re protected or not,  so how tragedy is handled within the family may be just as important, if not more so, than the tragedy itself. To what degree is it explained or exposed? What is the nature of the tragedy, how many questions are answered, and to what level of detailed truthfulness? What is the truth, and how is it handled?

‘The Evils of Socialism’

I have to admit, this little satire cracked me up.

Apparently it is going viral across the Web, assisted by social-networking sites such as Facebook, which is where I first saw it. It originally comes, as best as I can tell,  from another WordPress blog, Cash Peters’ The TV Swami:

“This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by socialist electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the US Department of Energy. I then took a shower in the socialist clean water provided by the municipal water utility. After that, I turned on the socialist radio to one of the FCC- regulated channels to hear what the socialist National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be like using socialist satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. I watched this while eating my breakfast of socialist US Department of Agriculture-inspected food and taking the socialist drugs which have been determined as safe by the Food and Drug Administration.

At the appropriate time as kept accurate by the socialist National Institute of Standards and Technology and the US Naval Observatory, I get into my socialist National Highway Traffic Safety Administration-approved automobile and set out to work on the socialist roads built by the socialist local, state, and federal departments of transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the socialist Environmental Protection Agency, using socialist legal tender issued by the Federal Reserve Bank. On the way out the door, I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the socialist US Postal Service and drop the kids off at the socialist public school. If I get lost, I can use my socialist GPS navigation technology developed by the United States Department of Defense and made available to the public in 1996 by President Bill Clinton, who issued a policy directive declaring socialist GPS to be a dual-use military/civilian system to be managed as a national socialist asset.

After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the socialist workplace regulations imposed by the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the socialist USDA, I drive my socialist NHTSA car back home on the socialist DOT roads, to my house which has not burned down in my absence because of the socialist state and local building codes and socialist fire marshal’s inspection, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to the socialist local police department.

I then get on my computer and use the socialist internet which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration and browse the socialist World Wide Web using my graphical web browser, both made possible by Al Gore’s socialist High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991. I then post on Freerepublic.com and FOX News forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can’t do anything right.”

How Jimmie Dale Gilmore nailed ‘Dallas’ in a song

Dallas at night, if not from a DC-9.

A conversation today on Facebook reminded of a column I wrote back in 2002, about the classic Jimmie Dale Gilmore tune “Dallas.” It’s probably the most famous song ever recorded by The Flatlanders, a Texas trio of lifelong friends from Lubbock: Jimmie Dale, Joe Ely and Butch Hancock.

I’ve always thought the song nailed the character of Dallas in a number of telling ways. So here’s the column again… and if you want to hear the song sung by Jimmie Dale himself, here’s a YouTube link.

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JOYCE SÁENZ HARRIS, Staff Writer  
Published: May 19, 2002
(c) The Dallas Morning News

The topic at lunch (and don’t ask me why) was: What kind of a beautiful woman would Dallas be?

Dallas is like a beautiful woman … with a hangover?

With a Bible?

With Manolo Blahniks in a Neiman Marcus bag?

We never quite decided. The conversation moved on to what the members of the Algonquin Round Table would talk about if they were around today.

After lunch, however, I realized that one Texan has already described the kind of beautiful woman Dallas would be. He did it 30 years ago, in fact. I heard him sing about it just last autumn.

Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s song “Dallas” never made it to the top of any charts in 1972. It was the lead-off tune and lone single from an album by a Lubbock trio called Jimmie Dale Gilmore and the Flatlanders. The project got a dismal, half-hearted release in eight-track format and promptly vanished from all commercial view.

But Jimmie Dale Gilmore and his fellow Flatlanders, Joe Ely and Butch Hancock, did not vanish. They went on to become three of Texas’ favorite singer-songwriters, each with his own cultlike following.

Meanwhile, fans in England rediscovered the trio, and the word spread back home. Eventually the Flatlanders album, a neglected stepchild of corporate Nashville, became the darling of music collectors.

Years later, the album – aptly retitled More a Legend Than a Band — was re-released on CD, in slightly reconfigured form, by Rounder Records. (Sun Records, which had produced the original release, also released the album on CD but called it Jimmie Dale Gilmore and The Flatlanders “Unplugged.”) Jimmie’s song “Dallas” probably got its widest exposure when he sang it as a duet with Natalie Merchant on Jay Leno’s Tonight show.

Today, the Flatlanders’ music is widely recognized for the traditional jewel it always was.

The band began performing together again in 2000 and at last has another CD, Now Again, being released Tuesday.

The trio is scheduled to play the Granada Theater on June 26 and will also be part of the “Down From the Mountain” tour at Smirnoff Music Center on July 20.

I saw the Flatlanders play at the Texas Book Festival last year in Austin. The literary crowd loved them; historian David McCullough, among dozens of others, two-stepped up a storm.

But a clear favorite among the Flatlanders’ tunes was “Dallas,” for the fans hummed and sang along with that one. This is how the opening chorus goes:

Did you ever see Dallas from a DC-9 at night?

Dallas is a jewel,

Yeah, Dallas is a beautiful sight;

Dallas is a jungle,

But Dallas gives a beautiful light.

Did you ever see Dallas from a DC-9 at night?

 

A careless listener might mistake this song as a hymn to our fair city. In a way it is, for if anything, Dallas is even more spectacular by night now than it was 30 years ago.

But the reference to “a jungle” should tip you off that something darker is coming. And sure enough, it does.

 

Now Dallas is a woman who will walk on you when you’re down,

 

 But when you are up, she’s the kind you want to take around.

Now Dallas ain’t a woman to help you get your feet on the ground,

And Dallas is a woman who will walk on you when you’re down.

That’s the kind of a beautiful woman Dallas is, according to Jimmie Dale Gilmore.

Any number of local heroes and has-beens would likely agree with him that Dallas dearly loves winners and is mighty tough on losers.

The “middle eight” verse of the song could be sung by many Dallas newcomers, legal or otherwise:

Oh, I came into Dallas with the bright lights on my mind;

I came into Dallas with a dollar and a dime.

 

Then the song gets really dark:

 

Dallas is a rich man with a death wish in his eyes,

 

A steel concrete soul with a warm-hearted love in disguise;

A rich man who tends to believe his own lies.

I say, Dallas is a rich man with a death wish in his eyes.

 

And all this, mind you, was written years before anybody invented J.R. Ewing or the savings-and-loan scandal.

Ever since I first heard “Dallas,” I’ve thought it really should be our unofficial city anthem.

 

Of course, it never will be. It is much too dark, too subversive, for a city that habitually directs its feet to the sunny side of the street.

 

 

 

If we do have an unofficial anthem, it’s probably Frank Loesser’s 1956 Broadway hit, “Big D,” from The Most Happy Fella.

You’re from Big D,

My, oh yes,

I mean Big D, little a, double L, A-S.

And that spells Dallas,

my darlin’, darlin’ Dallas;

Don’t it give you pleasure to confess

That you’re from Big D,

My, oh yes!

 

 Of course, the talented Mr. Loesser caught the way we Dallasites like to think of ourselves — my, oh yes.

 

But I suspect our fellow Texan, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, may have caught more of the way we really are.

 

24 hours in LOST land

Papa'iloa Beach: Can't you almost see Sawyer?

We got back last Monday from a trip to Maui. On the way back, we had a 24-hour stopover on Oahu… meaning we were in LOST territory.

Unfortunately, I did not run across any LOST shoots that Sunday. Nor did I bump into any stars in the airport or in Waikiki — unless you count spotting the Searcher, aka Penny’s boat, in a Honolulu marina.

But I did persuade my indulgent husband to drive us to a couple of LOST sites in the brief afternoon we had to explore the North Shore, in the area around the cool surfer town of Hale’iwa.

Papa'iloa Beach on Oahu's North Shore, a backdrop familiar to LOST fans.

First we checked out Papa’iloa Beach, where a lot of LOST beach camp scenes have been shot. We were very near the actual shooting site, but not as close as we would have liked. We didn’t have the time (or the energy; it was hot) to trudge a mile south, down the beach and around the point, from the public-access spot where we could legally park.

But the mountains were there as a green backdrop, the beach looked a whole lot like the beach we all know and love… and if you used your imagination, you could almost see a shirtless Sawyer sitting on the rocks, looking out to sea. (Well, at least I could almost see him. My husband was probably imagining Kate or Juliet.)

YMCA Camp Erdman welcomes LOST fans.

Next we went up the Farrington Highway to YMCA Camp Erdman, also known as the Dharma Barracks or “New Otherton.”

Almost nobody was around Camp Erdman that day, and even before we checked in at the Welcome Center, no one seemed to mind that we parked and walked around to shoot photos. As you can see from their sign (above), they seem to welcome LOST fans.

Kate was held captive in Camp Erdman's Assembly Hall.

We spotted the gazebo and the Others’ recreation hall (above), sometimes used as their temporary jail. You’ll recall that’s where Kate was kept prisoner when she tried to rescue Jack, who didn’t really want to be rescued.

The yellow cottages of "New Otherton," aka the Dharma Barracks.

The mustard-colored cottages (above) were unmistakable, although the campgrounds didn’t look nearly as green and pretty as they do in the show (I suspect the LOST crew does a lot of set dressing beforehand). It’s obvious that the cottage interiors we see are sets; the real interiors are much more spartan.

All in all, it was a fun afternoon. If we’d had a few more days in Honolulu, we might have taken a pricey tour of Kualoa Ranch, a private estate where many LOST shoots take place, on the windward side of Oahu. Or I might even have contacted Grass Skirt Productions to see if I could finagle a backstage, on-set visit.

But for the brief time we had on Oahu, it was enough to know that we were as close to the Island as we were ever likely to get. Now when I watch the reruns and see the Barracks, I can think: “Wow…I was there!”

Q&A with Texas romance author Julia London

Summer of Two Wishes by Julia London

Texas is home to many romance novelists, but not many of them take the kind of leap that Austin’s Julia London has just made.

Julia’s best known for her historical romances, but her new novel, Summer of Two Wishes (Pocket Books, $7.99), is a contemporary. And not just any contemporary, but one dealing with a very serious issue: the effects of the current war in Afghanistan on one returning veteran, as well as on the folks back in his Hill Country hometown.

The story centers around Macy, a young war widow in the small Texas town of Cedar Springs, who suffers through two years of grief and loneliness after her cowboy husband, Finn, is reported killed in Afghanistan. But after she finally recovers enough to marry again — this time to a wealthy land broker, Wyatt — Macy is stunned by the news that Finn has been found alive after all. He comes home to Cedar Springs, and Macy finds herself torn between loyalties to her two husbands. Which one will she choose?

There are plenty of hot, steamy love scenes, of course — but Summer of Two Wishes also tackles difficult issues such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), the stresses of military family life, and even the thorny legalities that ensue when a person declared dead is found in fact to be alive.

Julia London

Here is Julia London talking about Summer of Two Wishes:  

Hello, Julia! This is the first book of yours that I’ve read. I was interested in it not only because you’re a Texan, but because you set your story in a part of Texas that we all know and love, the Hill Country.

Another Hill Country lover—that’s great.  Although at this time of year, I wish I was anything but a Texan.  It’s too hot in August for sane people, isn’t it?

You have written a lot of historical romances before now. What made you decide to write a contemporary? And why take on a subject as intense as the emotional fallout from a war that is still ongoing?

It was a need to stretch my creative wings, I think.  I love the historical romance novels I write; it’s like living in a Jane Austen period film.  They are definitely flights of fancy, and they are fun.  But I also had this compelling need to write stories that are grounded more in reality and about people who could be our neighbors. As for the subject matter—what better way to ground the story in reality?  The war is something we’ve all experienced.  In fact, this idea came about because my nephew had served in Iraq with the Marines.  He’s out now and on to a new life, but every year, our local paper prints the faces and names of all the men and women from Central Texas who have been lost to the war.  I couldn’t look at those pictures without thinking of my nephew.  And I thought about all the families who were seeing their loved ones there and who would give anything if they came back. I started thinking, what if one of them did come back?  What would they come home to?  How would life have changed?  The story built from there.

What kind of research was necessary to get the details right about the lives of servicemen and military families?

It was an education for me.  There are several sites and organizations that are dedicated to the families of servicemen and women, but one in particular, the www.americanwidowproject.org gave me insight into what it must be like to be left behind.  I also spoke with people from the military who had been to Iraq.  Interestingly, I never met anyone who had been to Afghanistan.  I read a lot of news items to form that part of the story. 

By an odd coincidence, Tom Batiuk’s syndicated comic strip “Funky Winkerbean” also just featured a very topical storyline about a serviceman believed dead for years who is found alive through an Iraqi prisoner exchange. He suffers from a loss of memory, but he does remember his wife. However, he comes home to find his wife has remarried.

Really!  That is an odd coincidence. 

One big difference: The wife in the comic strip chooses a different husband than the wife chooses in Summer of Two Wishes. 

I honestly didn’t know which husband my wife was going to end up with until near the end.  I went through the process of deciding with her.  I can’t imagine how painful it would be to make that decision in real life.  And it could honestly have gone either way.  She loved two men, and two men loved her.

The other major difference: In the comic strip, there’s no apparent media fanfare over the “dead” soldier’s miraculous return.  However, I think your portrayal of the media frenzy surrounding Finn seemed far more likely to be what happens in such a case. Did you feel it was important to show what sort of public pressure is placed upon returning veterans, from the media and from their family, friends and fellow citizens?

I think in this particular case, it would certainly be a big part of the story.  I can’t imagine that happening today without a lot of fanfare, and probably a lot more than I portrayed.  And it seemed to me that the intense media spotlight would add so much more stress to the situation, which, as an author, I liked.  I also read a lot about the return home, and I tried to put myself in the shoes of returning soldiers.  For some, the adjustment to civilian life seems so drastic, and I guessed that people run out of patience when a soldier doesn’t adjust as quickly as they would like.  I thought it was important to show how that would affect someone who essentially has been living as a captive in the desert the last few years.

Thanks so much, Julia!

Thank you!  I am very happy to have shared some time with you and your readers. 

Books: Quinn Cummings chats about her book, ‘Notes from the Underwire’

Quinn Cummings at 10, backstage in a dressing room, 1977.

If the name “Quinn Cummings” sounds vaguely familiar to you, it’s probably because in the back of your mind, you have a memory of a precocious child who played Marsha Mason’s daughter, Lucy McFadden, in 1977’s The Goodbye Girl. She got an Academy Award nomination for that role, in which her comic timing rivaled that of Richard Dreyfuss. Quinn also was the girl who in 1978 joined the Aaron Spelling drama Family in its third season, playing Annie, the adopted daughter of Sada Thompson and James Broderick.

Quinn Cummings (Photo by Donald DiPietro)

That child grew up a long time ago. Thirty years have passed; she’s almost 42 now, and she has acted only occasionally since her teens. Now Quinn’s a businesswoman with her own company (she invented the HipHugger baby sling), and she’s a mother. She always loved to write, and for the past several years she has been blogging on The QC Report. 

Notes from the Underwire

The success of her blog led to Quinn’s first book, the just-published Notes from the Underwire: Adventures from My Awkward and Lovely Life (Hyperion, $14.99). Technically speaking, it’s a collection of first-person essays, a sort of episodic memoir, although that description makes the book sound way more serious than it really is.

In fact, while there are some serious moments in it, this is one very funny book.

Notes from the Underwire covers everything from Quinn’s acting career to her stint as an AIDS hotline volunteer, from her Significant Other (known here as Consort) and their daughter (known here as Alice) to the perils of homeownership and the bloodthirsty habits of their cat, Lulubelle, a nonpareil predator who is supposed to be catching only mice and rats:

I measure the advent of spring not with the first crocus but the first bird skull. I long to explain to Lu that we only wanted the ugly and verminous eaten, but that would have been like asking Godzilla to stomp only Tokyo’s less popular neighborhoods.

Quinn tells us why she never got to go to her prom, how she spent a couple of years as a talent agent, and how she realized she was not meant to be a sitcom writer. She also opens up candidly about the most terrifying time of her adolescent life, when she feared losing her only surviving parent to cancer.

Here’s Quinn Cummings on Notes from the Underwire.

* * *   

Hi Quinn: Unlike some of your blog-tour reviewers, I’m coming to Notes from the Underwire as a newbie to your blog. So please forgive me if some of these questions would have obvious answers for a longtime reader of The QC Report.

How much of the book came directly from the blog? Did you do much rewriting of original blog posts for book publication?

Very little is from the blog. This annoys me tremendously, as I am lazy and hoped to cut-and-paste my way to being a published author. Mercifully, my editor had other plans. What little was originally in the blog has been edited and, one can only hope, improved to a fare-thee-well.

As a cat lover, I nearly laughed myself sick over “A Nice Big Fat One.” Is Lulubelle still living with you and paying her rent on time?

Lulabelle appreciates your interest but isn’t surprised by it; without ever understanding the idea of the Internet, she’s always assumed she’s world-famous for her beauty, charm and killing skills. Just last month, I was outside watering the plants when she trotted by me in a casual yet purposeful gait. A second later, she leapt into a bush and emerged with something wiggling in her jaws. I shouted “LU!” impotently, and she sneered at me before snapping the neck of the mouse. I think I was to understand that’s what would happen to me if I continued to be a buzzkill.

How grateful are you that so very little of your “child star” past is readily available on YouTube?

I don’t know how much of my earlier life is on YouTube because I’m too fearful to look, so I’m going to say that if very little is on there I am VERY GRATEFUL and yet wish there was a little less.

“Like a Tattoo on Your Butt” was a heartbreaking chapter, especially because I lost a brother (at age 34) to non-Hodgkins lymphoma. He left behind two very young daughters whose whole lives thereafter were changed by his death in 1995. I couldn’t help wanting to know: What happened to your mom? What happened to you?

I’m so sorry about your brother; I’m so sorry for his kids. My mother defied the odds and was able to recover from Lymphoma with only a single round of chemo. She’s here in Los Angeles, still leading an interesting life and adoring her granddaughter. What happened to me? I got over it.

At the end of that chapter, you say you told your vice principal  that you didn’t “plan on getting close to anyone.” But now, of course, you have Consort and Alice. When did you dare to let yourself hope that you could, in fact, be close to someone again?

As I said, I got over it. I didn’t go through Sarajevo; I had a sick parent who then got better. Eventually, I defrosted enough to realize that caring for other people might put you as risk of loss, but not caring for other people sapped most of the color and the flavor out of the world. It’s frightening to imagine losing either one of them, but choosing to participate in the world is infinitely better than sitting in the bleachers.

Quinn, I enjoyed the book tremendously, and you have made a new fan. Thanks so much!

Thank you for such thoughtful questions. Let me know when it’s up and I’ll link to it.

‘This is Walter Cronkite’

Walter Cronkite in 1991 (Washington Post photo)

Today I’m thinking about how, back in the summer of 1992, I had a phone conversation with Walter Cronkite.

The occasion was a High Profile cover for The Dallas Morning News, a story about author James A. Michener, then 85 years old. I had spent an amazing day with the hospitable Mr. Michener — just the two of us, talking, having lunch at a local Chinese restaurant, then talking some more — at his summer home in Brunswick, Maine.

By the time I went home, I had a list of his friends and associates I wanted to chat with. And the one I was most eager to contact was Mr. Cronkite, then 75 and still busy as ever, though retired from the CBS News anchor chair for 11 years.

Over the 10 years I was a High Profile reporter, I often placed such phone calls to secondary sources who were as famous as, or even more famous than, the people I was profiling. Cesar Chavez, Lady Bird Johnson, Dan Rather, Ross Perot, Lloyd Bentsen, Barbara Walters, Franco Zeffirelli, Dame Joan Sutherland — ordinary folks like that. There were only a few times when I was a little nervous about making those calls.

The call to Mr. Cronkite was one of those times.

I mean, this was Walter Cronkite. How many times had I watched him on our family’s TV set as that deep, reassuring voice informed me about the tragedies and triumphs of the 1960s and ’70s? How often had I heard him introduce himself: “This is Walter Cronkite…”? Or sign off with, “And that’s the way it is…”?

Thousands of times, surely, over some three decades. I probably knew that voice as well as I knew my own father’s.

So yes, I was nervous. But I called his office at CBS and left a message for him. And a few days later, my phone rang, and that unmistakable voice informed me: “This is Walter Cronkite.”

So hypnotized was I that I had a little trouble remembering to scribble my notes. But he was kind and patient, and we talked for 10 or 15 minutes, mostly about Mr. Michener and their friendship. Among other things, he told me that his favorite Michener book was Chesapeake.

In the story I wrote (published on Aug. 16, 1992) I ended up using an anecdote about one of their adventures aboard Mr. Cronkite’s beloved sailboat, the Wyntje:

“One time when we went sailing on Chesapeake Bay, we picked Jim up in Oxford, Maryland. We were sailing to Annapolis, and it got nasty out there. Jim was getting pretty wet, and I was worried about him, so I asked if he’d like to go below. But he wouldn’t.

“Eventually the storm passed, and I told Jim that it was lovely of him to insist on staying with me.

“He said, “Walter, I couldn’t afford not to stay on deck. The State of Maryland just made me an honorary Admiral of the Chesapeake. How would it be if they heard I went below in a storm?’ “

I went home that day and told our then-13-year-old daughter (who had met Mr. Michener on our Maine trip): “Guess who I talked to today for my Michener profile?”

“Who?”

“Walter Cronkite!”

“Wow!” Pause. Puzzled look on her face. “Who’s Walter Cronkite?”

I then realized that Mr. Cronkite had retired from the anchor desk when she was only two years old. “He used to be the anchorman on CBS,” I told her. “He’s really iconic, really famous and respected among journalists. Well, among everyone who’s a grownup, really. I can’t believe I got to talk with him!”

All these years later, our daughter is now 30, married and the mother of two small children. I know that Walter Cronkite will never mean to her what he meant to my generation, or to her grandparents’. She’ll never think of any news anchor as “iconic,” really. The communications world has changed so radically that there will never be another news figure with the kind of respect, authority and clout that Mr. Cronkite had.

He was a serious journalist, a real newsman. He did his job well, he loved his work, and he helped to change the world and make it a better place. That’s the best way any journalist can hope to be remembered.

Home is the sailor, home from the sea. Godspeed, Uncle Walter.

Film: ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’

Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince

Thanks to a media preview screening, I’ve already seen Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which officially opens with midnight showings on Wednesday.

It’s safe to say this film is highly anticipated: Across the lobby, fans already were queueing up for another screening five hours later, at 7 p.m., one of those first-come-first-seated promotional showings. And to be honest, they’ve really been waiting longer than that; the new HBP movie’s opening date got pushed back from last fall. So hardcore Potterheads have had about nine months to crank up their squee levels.

Number six in the series is the darkest yet, as the boy wizard’s fan base surely knows. It pays a good deal of attention to certain key aspects of the J.K. Rowling book, while other parts of the original story, as always, must fall by the wayside — even with a running time of two and a half hours, something’s gotta go.

Overall, I felt this sixth film compares favorably with the three more recent entries in the series. (The first and second installments of Harry Potter, directed by Chris Columbus, were huge box-office successes — but were blown away artistically by No. 3, Alfonso Cuaron’s critically acclaimed The Prisoner of Azkaban, which set the standard for all Potter movies thereafter.)

What will Rowling purists quickly spot as hits and misses in Half-Blood Prince?

My major complaint is that I’d have loved to see the book’s opening chapter dramatized. That chapter, “The Other Minister,” discusses a series of disasters in the Muggle world, which are really caused by rampaging Death Eaters, followers of the wizarding world’s evil Lord Voldemort. I was hoping for a couple of scenes with the Muggle Prime Minister (who simply would have to have been played by Michael Sheen, Tony Blair’s cinematic alter ego) and the new Minister of Magic, Rufus Scrimgeour (who will be played in the next Potter film by Bill Nighy).

However, screenwriter Steve Kloves (back after a hiatus from Order of the Phoenix) and director David Yates (returning for his second Potter film in a row) chose to show us, rather than tell about, one of the disasters: a new bridge that inexplicably collapses in a freak storm, thanks to Bellatrix Lestrange (Helena Bonham Carter) and a couple of other Death Eaters, the creepy Carrow siblings.

And instead of giving us scenes from the hilarious chapter with Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore retrieving Harry from the Dursleys’ home, we get Harry in a railway coffee shop, flirting awkwardly with a comely young waitress before Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) whisks him off to persuade Horace Slughorn (Jim Broadbent) to return to Hogwarts as the new Potions professor.

Another big departure: After Harry is deposited at the Weasleys’ home, The Burrow, a fiery Death Eater attack makes it clear that no place is safe. In the book series, a similar attack happens at a Weasley family wedding. But that event happens not in Book 6, but early in Book 7, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. So it seems safe to assume the wedding’s not going to happen in the film series, because the bride and groom don’t show up in this movie at all. Neither does the surly house-elf Kreacher, although he’ll surely appear in the movie version of Book 7.

Lovers of Quidditch will be happy to see one last airborne match in this installment. And as in the book, teenage hormones rampage through much of the film, with “snogging” and humorous romantic situations to leaven the increasingly darker themes of death and loss.

The leading trio of Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) and Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) are joined by Ginny Weasley (Bonnie Wright), Ron’s sister who has grown up to be Harry’s love interest, and who gets much more screen time in this film than in the previous ones.

Luna Lovegood (Evanna Lynch) is happily daft as ever, and the lovelorn Lavender Brown (Jessie Cave) is all over her “Won-Won.” There’s a wonderful set-piece with the Weasley twins, Fred and George (James and Oliver Phelps), in their amazing Diagon Alley joke shop.  Meanwhile, a solitary Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton) lurks miserably about, determined to carry out his secret mission for Voldemort and restore his family’s lost honor.

Other Hogwarts teachers, such as Minerva McGonagall (Maggie Smith), Severus Snape (Alan Rickman) and Rubeus Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane) get a few crucial scenes each, but I felt Snape in particular got short shrift in this film, considering his importance to the series. We never even see him teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts, formerly Harry’s favorite class at Hogwarts. (And has anyone else out there ever wondered what it would have been like if they’d cast Daniel Day-Lewis as Snape? He’s the only actor I can think of who just might have out-Snaped the amazing Rickman.)

Voldemort’s craven sidekick, Peter “Wormtail” Pettigrew (Timothy Spall), is fleetingly spotted in the “Spinner’s End” scene, which also introduces a badly miscast and horribly made-up Helen McCrory as Draco’s mum, Narcissa Malfoy. (Why, oh why didn’t they get Naomi Watts for that role?)

Frank Dillane

In his scenes as 11-year-old Tom Riddle, young Hero Fiennes-Tiffin (nephew of Ralph Fiennes, who plays Voldemort) holds his own with Gambon’s Dumbledore, projecting a youthful malevolence appropriate for the boy who will grow up to be the Dark Lord. It’s also worth noting that Riddle at age 16 is played by another scion of a British acting family: Frank Dillane, son of actor Stephen Dillane (who played Thomas Jefferson in HBO’s John Adams miniseries). The two young actors bear enough resemblance to each other that it becomes easy to believe this is the same boy at different ages.

When Harry and Dumbledore journey to the cave where Voldemort has hidden one of his Horcruxes — a personal relic containing a piece of his irretrievably damaged soul — Yates recreates the scene almost exactly as Rowling imagined it. And it is both dazzling and fearsomely scary. Even when you know exactly what’s coming, the moment when an Inferius grabs Harry is still enough to make you gasp.

It does not do to be too much of a purist with these movies; after all, watching a film is not the same experience as reading a book. But seeing what Yates can do with such a powerful scene makes me wish again that he’d had the chance to direct the first two films as well. There were so many moments in this new film where I was completely, happily absorbed in the story — never mind that I know the entire plot inside out. That’s the mark of an adroit director.

Fortunately, we know Yates is shooting the final two Potter movies. Deathly Hallows is already in production and will be released in two parts, in 2010 and 2011. With twice as many hours to tell the last story, even diehard fans may be satisfied that justice will be done to their beloved wizard’s saga.

I lost my job a week ago…

…and they said it was nothing personal, just the unfortunate result of severe cost-cutting measures and the awful state of the economy, the rise of the Internet and the fall of the American newspaper industry in general, not to mention the grave challenges facing the company if it was to survive. Apparently they couldn’t afford me any more. I didn’t realize I was all that expensive, but there you are.

They thanked me for my more than 25 years of loyalty and service to the newspaper. They wished me well. They promised to send me a big severance check. They said I could leave right away and didn’t have to finish my work or stay to clean my desk. I could clean out my desk the next day, Saturday, when almost no one would be there to witness it.

But since no one was forcing me to leave the building just then, I stayed for several more hours and started cleaning. I completed and sent over a couple of final, extremely minor stories to my editor. Any personal items got cleared off my desk and deleted from the computer; the IT people, I’d been told, would scrub the hard drive.

They hadn’t yet cut off my phone or computer access. So I sent out a mass e-mail to a long list of people, mostly professional contacts and other people who weren’t working in the building. I wanted them to know not to expect to find me there at the paper any more, and to tell them where they should send future press releases. And to say where they could find me from now on, if they wanted to.

The reply e-mails began pouring in almost immediately, and before I left there were scores of letters. All of them used the same word to describe their reactions: “shocked.” Of course, that was what I was, too: shocked, or maybe shellshocked.

I was inside an odd, invisible but protective little bubble that kept me working, e-mailing, talking, and hugging every now-former colleague who came by my desk to commiserate. I even joked around with my friends, making black-humored quips, shaking my head sympathetically in shared dismay, shrugging helplessly in mutual disbelief. Every one of them used the same words: shocked, unbelievable, incredible. They were the ones who were hurting; I couldn’t feel anything, not really. I did, however, take mental note of who in the department seemed truly distressed on my behalf, and who seemed to be avoiding me. It’s funny how you can do that, how easily you can keep score, even while in a state of shock.

I didn’t cry once, not that day. It was very much like when you first hear of a sudden death in the family. You experience both a heightened reality, and a strange disconnect from same. 

Election karma’s gonna get you

After all the nastiness of this election season, it’s a relief to sit down and watch the vote totals rolling in from East to West.

No more campaign ads! No more robo-calls! No more push-polling phone banks! Peace, perfect peace, with  pundits far away, nattering amongst themselves. The defeated will be off licking their wounds tomorrow, wondering how it is that things went so very, very wrong for them. I believe the correct answer there is: “What goes around comes around. You betcha.”  

ABC announced Texas went for John McCain, stating the obvious to anyone who lives here. The pleasant surprise, for me, is that Obama already took Pennsylvania, and ABC says he’ll win Ohio and Iowa, too. I’m wondering what will happen in Missouri, a bellwether state, but when the big burgs of St. Louis and Kansas City report in, I’m expecting Missouri also will show up in the blue column. But I won’t feel really comfortable until Florida’s called — and called with a substantial-enough margin that there will be no attempted theft, no repeat of 2000’s agonizing butterfly ballot/hanging-chad debacle. 

So far my favorite part of the evening, goofy election entertainment-wise, has got to be NBC’s skating-rink electoral map. It’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen, yet I can’t look away every time they show it. I love the people dutifully adding puzzle pieces of red and blue states to the ice out there in Rockefeller Plaza. It’s just a mesmerizingly ditzy idea, no doubt thought up by someone who gets paid six or seven figures to create ridiculous stuff like that. The only thing that could have made it better would’ve been if they’d had swimsuit-clad Miss America contestants carrying out their home states’ jigsaw map pieces. As much as I love Brian Williams, who IMHO is currently the Sexiest Anchor Alive, I cannot believe he didn’t suggest that.  

But the No Showboating Award goes, as usual, to Jim Lehrer and his PBS news team. They don’t make any projection calls of their own; they just report what the AP and other TV networks are saying. They don’t use a lot of fancy CGI graphics. They don’t try to be anything but serious news people. How utterly refreshing.

A new day dawns, with some inspiration from 1932

After the excitement of Election Night, and the satisfaction of seeing this morning’s headlines, more sobering thoughts are beginning to push their way into my mind.

What a daunting prospect the winner now faces.  So many problems to deal with, the mind boggles. But we know the tumbling economy is what drove many undecided voters to Obama’s side. That crisis, in all its many aspects, will have to be his very first priority after he takes office. Even at this moment, he is assembling the team that will advise him on this most crucial of problems.  

I think Barack Obama will have to launch the equivalent of the Manhattan Project on restoring the economy. If he can bring the best minds together to work out solutions that are not only long-term practical but also acceptable on both sides of the aisle in Congress, he will have pulled off a miracle.

No matter what, recovery won’t happen overnight. Yes, Obama may well need two terms to do it, or even just to get the process well underway; that’s how dire things are.

But as I said to my husband last night, Franklin D. Roosevelt needed three terms and a world war to end the Great Depression. And he had no easy time of it, either.

‘When good newspapers mattered’

Today we attended the funeral of former Dallas Times Herald editor Ken Johnson, whose son Clay is a good friend of ours.

Several people gave eulogies, and a couple of old friends talked about when Times-Mirror hired Ken to come and run the Times Herald, back in 1975, I think. They talked a lot about the Dallas newspaper war, about the great stories that were done, the great staffs that were built. And one of his old friends, a non-journalist from Philly, said something about how Ken “ran a great newspaper back when good newspapers mattered.”

My husband and I just looked at each other. I know what we were both thinking: I guess people don’t think they matter any more.

Maybe they don’t.

And yet… everyone ran out to buy copies of yesterday’s newspaper with the historic, front-page news of Barack Obama’s election to the presidency. People wanted to buy copies as keepsakes for themselves, their children and grandchildren — as tangible evidence of a memorable, history-making event. So many copies were sold that the morning’s edition sold out, and the papers had to print up thousands of extra copies. And this happened not just in Dallas, but all over the nation.

What will people do to preserve their memories of great events, I wonder, on that day when there are no more newspapers being printed?

This samizdat presented by Hewlett-Packard

When considering all plausible disasters that might cause a worldwide breakdown in modern communications, I always think of The Stand, the Stephen King opus in which a superflu pandemic wipes out more than 99% of the world’s population.

No internet existed 30 years ago, when King wrote his novel, so television was the glamour medium of the day. It was also the first medium to be disrupted when “Captain Trips” struck.

Broadcasters who tried to tell the truth of the pandemic were summarily executed for treason. Vigilantes used the last TV broadcasts to conduct public executions.

Radio broadcasters’ executions followed shortly thereafter, carried out by military hit squads. Newspapers, in the form of one-page broadside extras, were issued by small-town newsmen — and by the Los Angeles Times, before its presses were dynamited and its remaining workers executed by the Army.

Hmmm. Do we see a pattern there?

My point is that information can be a dangerous thing. It is something that beleaguered governments like to control when it’s in their interest to do so.

If a government arbitrarily decided to disrupt the internet for “security purposes,” who could stop them? What would take the web’s place, if the old, low-tech technology isn’t there when the new, high-tech technology breaks down?

Without print, the last unlicensed, low-tech form of modern mass communication, there would be no samizdats to subvert a massive official corruption. Come the revolution, I guess our Hewlett-Packard Laserjets might have to suffice for a printing press.

 

Panko crumbs: Better than sex!

OK, maybe that’s an exaggeration. But bear with me here.

Since I lost my job last month, I’ve been cooking dinner at home. Dinners out are the first thing to go when you enter this new, straitened lifestyle that does not include HBO or eBay or $100 impulse buys at Target.

To compensate, I’ve discovered the magic of panko.

Two boxes of Progresso panko crumbs sat unopened in my pantry for a month. I planned to try them whenever I had time. And now, as Mr. Bernstein says in Citizen Kane, “I’ve got nothing but time.”

Memories from the archives

This week I spent a day or two finally, reluctantly, digging through boxes holding 20 or so years’ worth of newsprint.

Here was most of my life’s work, and at first glance, it didn’t look like much. It just looked like enough paper to line a thousand birdcages. Enough to train the Obamas’ new puppy plus all the puppies adopted in Dallas for the next year. Pounds and pounds of cheap, moldering, dead-tree newsprint. Yesterday’s news, indeed.

But as I dug through the piles, I found some things that actually made me feel pretty good.

Here’s the two-part series I did in late 1989, “AIDS: The Shadow of Fashion.” It was, as far as I can determine, the first major media take-out on how the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s had decimated the fashion industry, and on the dire effect the disease was having on everyone in the business. The New York Times had to hastily follow us on this one. I know they did, because their men’s fashion writer, Woody Hochswender, told me so. (As it turned out, he used the same ”shadow” metaphor in his lede.) It was a groundbreaking story — even the gay magazine The Advocate didn’t get around to doing it till a year later – but it was, I was told, “too depressing” to run on the cover of the fashion section. So it ran inside, where half of DMN’s readership probably missed it altogether. Perhaps that was the intention.

Here’s a decade’s worth of High Profile cover stories. High Profile was a Sunday section that appeared in DMN from 1981 until 2000; the cover was always a magazine-length profile of a prominent Texan, or someone who had lived at least part of his or her life here. High Profile was a plum job, and undoubtedly the most fun of all the jobs I ever had at the paper. Where else would I have gotten to chat with sources like Cesar Chavez, Walter Cronkite, Ted Turner, Lady Bird Johnson, Tommy Tune, Bobby Short, Otis Chandler, Larry King, Barbara Walters, George Stephanopoulos, James Carville, Dan Rather and Tom Landry?  

 I wrote well over 100 High Profile covers: writers such as James Michener, Anne Rice, Robert Fulghum. Artists such as David Bates and Van Cliburn. Actors such as Kathy Bates, Marcia Gay Harden, Jamie Foxx and Forest Whitaker. (If I High Profiled an actor, and he or she was later nominated for a Best Actor/Actress Oscar, then he or she was obviously fated to win, because I stand at 4-for-4 on that score.) I profiled the president of CNN, Tom Johnson; PBS talk-show host Charlie Rose; pop singer Lisa Loeb; astronaut Mae Jemison. I even profiled a couple of Texas billionaires: Fort Worth’s Ed Bass and Dallas’ Mark Cuban. The story on Cuban ran in late 1999, and in it, I scooped our renowned sports department and broke the news that he was thinking of buying the Dallas Mavericks, which he did about two weeks later.

Who cares what the readers really want?

One of my compadres on Alexandria noted that most of the blogging he sees is simply aggregation or  commentary on material recycled from newspaper or magazine articles and television news shows. This was my response:

There is a good reason why so much of the writing on the web is mere rehashing of print or TV reports. How many people are going to go out and investigate governmental corruption, expose injustices, or uncover violations of civil liberties, if no one is paying them a living wage to do it?

It’s a pretty dang expensive proposition to do the kind of newspapering that uncovers a Watergate scandal, or any other kind of major investigative piece that results in Pulitzer-caliber reporting. Or even the kind of metro or features reporting that may go unsung, and won’t necessarily win big prizes, but that nevertheless changes people’s lives for the better.

In addition, by eliminating so many of the niches in local reporting, newspapers will inevitably lose what once made them invaluable to a wide range of readers, such as:

Those who subscribed primarily for reliable coverage of local food/dining news, or home/garden/design.

Those who wanted expert coverage of religion or science.

Those who enjoyed in-depth, narrative feature writing.

Those who valued wide-ranging criticism of the arts and entertainment fields.

All those readers will rightfully consider themselves underserved when such locally reported elements drop away, one by one, to be replaced mostly with wire-service copy — and not even much of that.

I cannot tell you how many people over the past three weeks have told me: “I just don’t know how much longer we can keep subscribing. They keep taking away everything I like to read.” And this problem is not unique to Dallas. I can guarantee you that from coast to coast, this discontent is rife among the readership at every single metropolitan newspaper in America, as budgets and staff are slashed to cut operating costs.

U.S. newspapers are under siege, desperately struggling to survive in a floundering economy, amid the demands of a new technological world with which we are as yet less than conversant. I cannot pretend to know where the industry’s ultimate solutions, if any, may exist.

All I know is that the answers cannot possibly lie in failing to give the readers what they actually want to read and are willing to pay for.

* * *

By the way, anyone who has not already done so needs to read David Carr’s excellent New York Times piece on why it’s a very bad idea for newspapers to jettison their veteran journalists. His closing words should  cause every newspaper executive in the nation to sleep uneasily:

Newspapers confront tall, menacing seas in the coming year, but it is a sure bet that the ones that dump the ablest hands on deck will be among the first to sink below the waves.

Change as constant and catalyst

Back in 1995, I interviewed a very smart man named Robert K. Hoffman, who informed me:

“Change is not only inevitable, it will wipe you out if you try to slow it down.”

Did I mention that this guy was very smart?

Robert Hoffman died in 2006 of leukemia, at age 59. I often wish he were still here, so we could talk some more about change, and especially about what it means for the media world of today.

Robert’s astute assessment of the inevitability of change has been much on my mind lately, as I have undergone some major changes of my own.  The big one, as readers of this blog know, was being laid off from the newspaper after more than a quarter century as a journalist.

Now, there’s a change that will knock you for a loop. And I should have seen it coming, but I didn’t.

Why should I have seen it coming? Because I know perfectly well that the business I left is not the business I knew in 1995.

That was the year I began using e-mail. I began exploring the web, which back then was a piddly fraction of its current behemoth self. I began realizing, dimly, that this World Wide Web deal was going to be a Really Big Thing.

What I did not realize then was how quickly the web would engulf the world of communications. How, within a mere decade, it would make everything else look not just excruciatingly slow, but so antique as to be positively quaint.

Up till the advent of the net, the newspaper business had moved at what might be called a stately pace. 

It took centuries after 1440 for Herr Gutenberg’s movable-type model to evolve into automated presses run by electrical power. A printing press in 1500 wasn’t all that different from a printing press in 1800. But in the 19th century, innovation began to speed up, as steam-driven, rotary and electrically powered presses successively made it possible to print first thousands, and then millions, of copies in a single day.

It took only a 30-year cycle of late-20th-century modernization for newspapers to evolve from hot type to cold type, then to VDTs (video display terminals, basically big clunky word processors) and eventually to PCs. The arrival of satellite technology and digital production obviated the need for the “backshop,” or composing room. The disappearance of those production jobs was the canary in the coal mine, but few of us on the editorial side spotted it at the time.

In the mid-to-late ’90s, the internet and e-mail began shaking up newsrooms as nothing before ever had. In the past dozen years, the news industry and the entire world of media have changed at a speed I would not have believed had I not been a front-row witness to it.

Lately, I find myself thinking back to this:

When I was in my senior year at the University of Florida, they took our class outside to the parking lot and ushered us into a big tractor-trailer that held a traveling exhibit: a prototype “modern” newsroom with the first VDT I had ever seen. It was about the size of a mini-refrigerator.

We were told something to the effect of: “This, children, is the wave of the future.” I am not sure any of us believed it then, in 1975.

But I sure do believe it now.

The secret of making a perfect turkey

Thanksgiving turkey is an annual chore, and usually it’s an annual bore, as well.

Your basic holiday turkey generally arrives overdone and tasting dull. This is because most people do not know how to properly roast the big bird. They prepare turkey the way their mothers always cooked it: roasted half a day, unto flavorless dryness, as if to ensure the poor turkey is indeed, well and truly dead.

But I’m here to tell you how to do it right. How to have everyone clamoring for more, more, more turkey, the best, most delicious, and absolute moistest turkey you have ever eaten in your deprived culinary life.

Rule numero uno: Take a tip from the chefs and brine the bird.

“Brining” is chef-speak for soaking a piece of meat in salted water.  These turkey tips came mostly from Kevin Garvin, executive chef at Neiman Marcus, with some additional info from the folks at Calphalon.

 You can buy big Ziploc-type bags specifically made for brining, but any extra-thick, securely zipped storage bag will work as long as it’s big enough. Ziploc makes “Big Bags” in XL (10-gallon) and XXL (20-gallon) sizes. I am thinking the XL bag will be big enough for my 14-pound turkey, but a 20- or 24- pound bird might need the 20-gallon bag.

A book to take us worlds away

The Tales of Beedle the Bard

In a week that opened with some very bad news — the death of a dear friend at age 50, from cancer — I’ve been looking for little things to console me. Comforting things like grandchildren… LOST reruns… Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla ice cream. You know, the stuff that makes life worth living.

Books always are a consolation, of course. For one, I have Wally Lamb’s The Hour I First Believed awaiting me. It’s his first novel in a solid decade.

I can’t help wondering if, somewhere inside it, I will find the reason the author chose this particular title. It comes from the second of six verses in that most famous of Christian hymns, “Amazing Grace”:

T’was Grace that taught my heart to fear,
And Grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that Grace appear
The hour I first believed.

A new Wally Lamb is something to anticipate, indeed. But for me, today, there’s something even better:

This morning at 10, the UPS man rang the doorbell and left me a slender Amazon.com box. Today being December 4, of course I knew what the box held, because I’d been waiting for it since July 31. It is J.K. Rowling’s U.S. edition of The Tales of Beedle the Bard. (The UK edition also is on its way, at insane expense, via Royal Mail.)

How happy it makes me to unwrap this little book! Such pleasure is nothing I need explain to any Harry Potter fan, of course.

Like millions of others, I’ve bought and enjoyed everything Jo Rowling has ever put between book covers. Her deft storytelling and subversive sense of humor have made me her abject slave: content to stand in midnight book-release lines, resigned to two- or three-year waits between books. (Hey, at least she never pulled a Wally Lamb on us and made us wait a decade!)

I have lived more hours than I can count in the world of Jo’s imagination, and I consider them hours well spent. Her work is indeed magic, or at least a universal panacea for whatever may ail me.

With Beedle the Bard, I will read slowly, savoring each fable for the first time. In the back of my mind, I will think of the bright smile that I will miss so much, the kind voice that brought such wisdom and strength into our lives.

Two very special women with a gift for words, who even share a name. Goodbye, dear Kathleen.

And hello, Joanne Kathleen.

In attempt to survive, rivals learn to share

For those who haven’t already realized it:  Two longtime North Texas newspaper rivals, The Dallas Morning News and Fort Worth Star-Telegram, are now sharing arts and lifestyle stories.

I’d heard this was happening, and then I began noticing examples of it in print. For example, the DMN’s GuideDaily section featured a story that ran  in the Startlegram, about a show of Italian artists’ Nativity scenes now on view at the Kimbell. 

It ran in the FWST almost two weeks ago, on Nov. 30; it only got into GuideDaily today. The S-T’s writer, Gaile Robinson, was credited as a “Special Contributor,” the usual DMN designation for freelancers. (BTW, Gaile was on staff at the DMN, some 20-odd years ago.)

Visual arts, theater, dance and classical-music reviews will be shared by the two papers. Will TV reviews be next? Movies? Pop music? It’s probably only a matter of time.

Expect to see shared stories also appear in the food and home sections of the DMN, which no longer have any staff writers and depend pretty much on freelancers for local lifestyles content.

Other parts of the newspapers are sure to be affected. Word is that the S-T will take over MLB coverage for the two papers’ sports sections, while the DMN will cover the Mavs and Stars for both papers. You can bet that ever-observant sports fans will notice that, even if the arts and lifestyle coverage changes happen to escape them.

And why would the DMN even bother to maintain a Fort Worth news bureau any more, if the S-T’s writers now are at the Dallas paper’s disposal?

This is happening, of course, to save manpower [read: salaries/benefits] at both newspapers. The end result, inevitably, will be that fewer local writers are needed on both papers, so the staffs of both will shrink further.

And so fewer voices than ever will be heard in the land.

In praise of the permanent sabbatical

It’s been just over two months since I was laid off from the newspaper. In the meantime, we’ve nearly gotten through another round of holidays, and now it’s New Year’s Eve again.

When 2008 began, I had no idea that by the time it ended, I’d be drawing unemployment benefits and wondering what the next act of my life might be. In that first week or month, everyone I knew who had ever been through a similar crisis echoed the same words: In a year or two, you’ll look back and think this was the best thing that ever happened to you. 

In some ways, I’m already feeling they may be right.

I have come to think of this as my permanent sabbatical. Not a vacation, not a punishment: simply a stage of life where I can do only the work I want to do, rather than the work I must do. Nobody is my boss, and only I can decide what assignments I will take. Anything I choose to do as a freelancer, I do on contract.

Several such opportunities now are presenting themselves for the new year, and I will be happy to try them out. I’m fortunate because I needn’t work unless I want to — or so my husband Steve, aka my personal financial wizard, informs me. But I like to write, and people still seem to want me to write, so I think I’ll keep doing it for pay now and then. It is, after all, the only thing I am actually qualified to do.

The funny thing is that, even without paid work to do, I haven’t been a bit bored.  I have had time to do things I like to do, or need to do, or want to do. On some days I might do nothing much at all – and after 31-plus years of working full-time, that’s been a lovely luxury. Better than a day at the spa, truly.

Farewell to ‘The Prisoner’

I was sad to pick up the newspaper this morning and read that actor Patrick McGoohan had died yesterday at age 80. (Yes, believe it or not, I still get some of my news first from the morning paper.)

I was, and still am, a big fan of  The Prisoner, the late ’60s cult-classic TV series for which McGoohan was both creator and star. I remember watching the series as a teenager, and later re-watching it as a young adult, marveling not only at the  twisty plotting and clever dialogue but at the fantastic setting of The Village, where McGoohan’s character, a kidnapped secret agent, was being kept as a prisoner known only as Number Six.

For a long time, I thought that The Village was some amazing cinematic set constructed just for McGoohan’s show, rather as Robert Altman had constructed a town in Malta as the set for his film Popeye. Only later did I discover that The Village is a real place: the fairytale resort of Portmeirion, on the coast of Wales. I resolved long ago to go to Portmeirion on some future vacation. And though I haven’t made it there yet, I still hold out hope that the journey could happen someday.

So many bits of The Prisoner are imprinted on my brain, although I haven’t viewed the series in years. The driving, pulsating theme music; the cool car McGoohan drives in London, a vintage Lotus roadster with the very British licence plate of “KAR 120C”; his awakening to the surreal world of The Village, where everyone dresses nicely and wears a badge bearing their number; the Prisoner’s defiant rant, “I am not a number! I am a free man!”; the deferential dwarf butler; the tall guy who looks like an undertaker; the Village’s omnipresent symbol of the penny-farthing bicycle; the bureaucratic “new Number Two” saying, “By hook or by crook, we will”; the mystery of Number One; “Be seeing you”; and the ominous watchdog Rover, a giant balloon-like bubble that chases and envelopes anyone who tries to escape.  I swear that I have had nightmares about that Rover.

When I went online to read more about McGoohan’s passing, I discovered that the cable channel AMC is making a new version of the series, starring Jim Caviezel and Ian McKellen. This, of course, seems like complete heresy — but I’m cautiously hoping to be pleasantly surprised when I actually see the series.

Meanwhile, I also discovered that AMC is doing us the enormous favor of streaming all 17 episodes of the original Prisoner on its website.  Go check them out.

And, oh yes… be seeing you.

What it’s like to win a Newbery Medal

Not that I know this from personal experience. But Neil Gaiman does, because he got woken up on Monday with that very good news. And in typically generous form, he shared it on his blog.

I’ve always thought it would be very cool to win a Newbery. I don’t know that it would necessarily surpass winning a Pulitzer, or the sainted Nobel for Literature, but the fun thing about a Newbery Medal is that it means both kids and adults will be discovering your book for generations to come. Newbery books stay in print pretty much forever, they always carry the medal imprint on their covers, and grandparents like me will buy them for Christmas presents because they feel anything is better for the kiddies  than another Goosebumps book. 

I actually do buy my granddaughter each year’s Newbery winner for Christmas. She’s only five, and so far her father has only read her one of those books for a bedtime story: Kate DiCamillo’s Tale of Despereaux.  (The Despereaux movie was too scary for her to see, and Daddy adroitly edited the scariest part of the book as he read, but she loved the story, just as I had.)

This past October, Isabella got a little brother, Alex, so I started a new tradition. Every year, Alex gets the Caldecott Medal winner for Christmas. The Caldecott’s given for the best illustrated children’s book. This year it happened to be a book I already knew and loved: The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which was both written and illustrated by Brian Selznick. 

There has been a lot written lately about how Newbery books tend to be chosen by librarians whose literary tastes don’t coincide with children’s, how the medal books just aren’t accessible enough for kids to read with real enthusiasm.  I have to admit I wondered a bit about the Newbery Medal book that Isabella got for Christmas this year: Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices from a Medieval Village, by Laura Amy Schlitz. It’s written in the form of 22 short monologues, is set in England circa 1255, and is not the easiest read even for an adult. There’s some fairly gross stuff in there about a kid helping to deliver farm animals, for example. But it’s got both  writerly imagination and the stink of historical reality about it, making us realize that medieval life wasn’t all just storybook knights and ladies.

I am grateful to the Newbery because it helped launch the career of my favorite childhood author, Elizabeth Enright. She won for Thimble Summer in 1939, but she then went on to write my great favorites: her four novels about the Melendy Family, and her Gone-Away Lake books. She also wrote many wonderful short stories for adults that were later republished in four collections. 

But it’s worth noting that one of the world’s favorite children’s books was not a Newbery Medal book. It was a Newbery Honor book, the runner-up to that yeat’s medalist. Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White is a very nearly perfect book about life, friendship and the enormous power of words. I still can’t read the ending without choking up.

Not too many people these days read the Newbery Medal book for 1953, Secret of the Andes by Ann Nolan Clark. But Charlotte and her web have become immortal, proving that sometimes readers — not judges’ committees — do know best.

The sounds of silence

Good lordy. I just looked at my blog and realized I haven’t written anything new in weeks. And it’s not because nothing has been happening to me, because plenty has. Believe me. I’ve been one busy, busy girl.

For one thing, we bought a new guest bed. I’m sure this sounds like something that would take all of one afternoon to accomplish, but when you are, as I sometimes refer to myself, “technically unemployed,” everything is more time-consuming and more complicated, because you have to find ways to save money doing it.

It was my husband’s idea to buy a new guest bed. He didn’t think the futon sofa-bed we bought merely two years ago had turned out to be nearly comfortable enough for a normal-sized grown person to nap upon.  It was comfortable enough for me, but then I weigh a hundred pounds less than a normal-sized grown person. (That person would be him.)  He thought it would be nice to have a twin bed in there. Something that wouldn’t take up too much room, and as a bonus, wouldn’t encourage us to have undue numbers of overnight guests.

I pointed out that a twin bed would not be long enough for a normal-sized grown person, and what we really needed was an extra-long twin bed — the kind most often used by college students. Those mattresses are five inches longer than a standard twin bed, and thus  they accommodate nappers who are bigger than your average eighth-grader.

Since he is the one who still has a paycheck, I decided he knew whether we could afford this purchase. We could, he said, as long as we didn’t spend too much on it. So I began the search for bedding bargains.

I found a name-brand Twin XL mattress and box spring on a half-price sale at Sears, for $310. I found a steel bed frame at Wal-mart for $40. I found a heavy, solid-wood twin headboard being sold for $40 on Craigslist. I found a Twin XL waterproof mattress protector, a dust ruffle and a vintage Bates of Maine jacquard bedspread on eBay. I bought  a microfleece blanket for $15, and white Twin XL sheets on sale at Bed Bath & Beyond — $10 for a set of two fitted sheets and two pillowcases;  I already had a Twin XL white flat sheet stashed away.  It took me several weeks to get all of this rounded up, and it only cost us about $600, which we easily could have spent for the mattress set alone, were I not the queen of bargain shoppers.  Granted, it cost me hours and hours of my time, but as long as I’m not charging my freelance rates as a personal shopper, time is no big deal.  

My husband, the one who knows whether we can afford things, also decided we could afford a vacation. I suspect this was mostly because he was going stir-crazy after six months of being cooped up in Dallas. Southwest was offering great airfares, so I did all the trip-planning, and we went to San Diego for a seven-night vacay. I found us a wonderful place to stay on Coronado, with a package deal that included a daily gourmet breakfast for two.  We had a lovely time, even if I did manage to lose my favorite Ray-Bans, which vanished and were subsequently found squished, presumably by the wheels of a car. Probably our own car, actually.

Oh, and I’ve begun freelancing, though I’m still waiting for the actual paychecks to begin rolling in. My first “special contributor” byline appeared in the DMN three and a half months after I left its employ. It was an extremely odd sensation to see my name there again.  It’s nearly as strange as realizing that I’m always seeing old stories of mine re-posted on the DMN website, complete with “Staff Writer” and my old DMN e-mail address.

It is even more peculiar to realize that all these months later, my old office phone number has not been disconnected. I’m not kidding — my DMN voicemail still worked when I called it yesterday. Call 214-977-8710 and leave a message; maybe I’ll call back. Or not.  After all, I’m a busy girl with places to go, people to interview and write about, and 500-page books to read and review. Not to mention cooking, laundry, shopping and errands to do.

I never knew it could be this time-consuming to be a technically unemployed housewife. But truthfully? I kind of like it. I think I’m happier and more relaxed than I have been in years. Our house is paid off; our health is good; the grandkids are thriving. Right now, that’s all I can ask for.

Can you imagine living in a no-newspaper town?

If you doubt that American newspapers are an endangered species, take note of this:

Last week, the Hearst Corp. announced that, unless big concessions are made by employees (both union and non), the San Francisco Chronicle would be put up for sale.  The Chronicle, which was founded in January 1865, is the dominant daily newspaper in the Bay Area, and on the West Coast is second only in size to the Los Angeles Times. 

Since newspapers are hardly a hot commodity nowadays, that means the paper would be shut down soon. Once the Chron’s gone, San Francisco will be the largest city in America — maybe in the world — not to have its own daily subscription newspaper.

Hearst also is about to cut loose the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The P-Iis the smaller newspaper in Seattle, and it has long struggled financially despite a JOA (joint operating agreement) with the dominant Seattle Times. But the Times is in trouble too, and it may not last much longer than the P-I.  Other Hearst newspapers such as the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-Newsare hanging on grimly. Like A.H. Belo’s Dallas Morning News, they are the only dailies left in Texas’ largest cities, which all once boasted two newspapers each. But the Houston Post, San Antonio Light and Dallas Times Herald have all been gone for years now.

Last Friday, the Rocky Mountain News published its final edition after nearly 150 years of serving the Denver area. The city’s remaining paper, the Denver Post, is owned by Dean Singleton’s Denver-based MediaNews Group — which also owns the El Paso Times, the Los Angeles Daily News, the Oakland Tribune and some 50 other papers, mostly in California, New England and New Mexico.

The Denver Post, like virtually all American metro papers, has struggled financially in recent years. How much longer will the Post survive? Well, since it’s MediaNews’ hometown paper, maybe it will last longer than some of Singleton’s previous enterprises. Here in North Texas, then-young “Dinky” Singleton (a former DMNer) tried to revive the old Fort Worth Press back in the 1970s. When the fledgling paper went down for the count, his employees never even got their final paychecks. (I know this because my husband was one of them.)

In 1986, Singleton came into town with much fanfare and bought the Dallas Times Herald after LA-based Times-Mirror decided to sell it.  He kept DTH for less than two years before selling it to an associate who let it die on the vine. The company’s assets were sold to the DMN for $55 million in December 1991, and the Herald was immediately closed down.

This pattern is not particularly new. Afternoon papers, former afternoon papers and less-dominant dailies have been a disappearing from this country since the 1960s. Two-newspaper American towns are rarer than whooping cranes. The only American city with more than two daily newspapers now is New York, which has the New York Times, the New York Daily News, the New York Post and Long Island Newsday. 

However, now even the city with only a single dominant daily cannot count on having its newspaper around forever. San Francisco may be the first major city without its own major daily paper; Seattle could be the second. Who will be third? Fourth? Newspapers — even those that still make money, such as the Austin American-Statesman — are on the block all over the country. Without buyers, they face certain diminution and probable extinction. Perhaps some, such as the P-I and  San Francisco Chronicle, will continue to exist in a shrunken, online-only format. Many will not even survive to that extent.

Many bloggers and online commenters assume that “everyone” gets his news online nowadays. Recent surveys, however, say about 20 percent of American households do not have computer access, and roughly the same percentage of heads of households say they have never sent an e-mail. 

People who live on very limited incomes, people who live in remote or rural areas, people who aren’t comfortable with new technology or who consider themselves too old to learn about it — those people aren’t going to consider a laptop as a viable alternative for news access. They might just watch more TV news. But TV won’t be carrying local obituaries, church news, wedding announcements, crossword puzzles or a lot of other things that ordinary people buy a newspaper for.

Most of the real “news” on the Web, in fact, still comes from newspapers and wire services (which have mostly existed to serve newspapers). A city without a daily newspaper is a city that can  expect to see more corruption in its government, because the watchdog of a local free press will have been muzzled if not euthanized. Good investigative reporting is something you won’t see much of, once the daily paper is gone. Television stations, with their shrinking ad revenue, slashed budgets and news staffs, are under the same constraints as other news outlets; they’re having to do less with fewer resources, too. 

Personally, I don’t want to live in a newspaper-less city.  Maybe it’s just because I’m nearly 55, but I cannot imagine getting up in the morning, having coffee with my husband and not having the morning paper there to share.

I know that a lot of people wonder what the big deal is, why print journalists and others are so sentimental about dead-tree news. That’s because they’ve never really had the newspaper habit. The feel of newsprint in one’s hands –  like reading books instead of computer screens — will never quite be replaced by a Kindle. 

All I can say is: I feel sad for you folks who don’t know what I’m talking about. You don’t even know what you’ll have missed. At least, not until the next piece of Obama-like history is made, and you realize you can’t even buy a newspaper to save for your grandchildren.

UPDATE:  The New York Times looks into the future with this story: “As Cities Go From Two Newspapers to One, Talk of Zero.”

And KPLU 88.5, the NPR station in Seattle, ponders what it will be like for Seattleites to live in “A No-Newspaper Town?” 

Why I bought that Geronimo Jackson T-shirt

Anyone who knows me probably knows about my obsession with Lost (currently airing Wednesdays at 8 on ABC).  There are a number of TV shows I like a lot, but only one to which I am an abject slave. This happens to me every once in a while, pop culture-wise. It’s kind of like how I was hopelessly hooked on Harry Potter from Book 1: I was fixated on Lost from the pilot episode on. As a result, I have spent the past four and a half years either (a) watching Lost or (b) waiting like a lost puppy for Lost’s next season to start. Yeah, it’s utterly pathetic. I know.

The Geronimo Jackson ladies’ T

There’s no really good way to explain my infatuation with Lost. Well, of course there’s Josh Holloway, who plays James “Sawyer” Ford, and Henry Ian Cusick, who plays Desmond Hume, and Matthew Fox, who plays Dr. Jack Shephard. They’ve got some mighty good-looking men on that show, and they’re good actors too. Among the women characters, my favorite is Dr. Juliet Burke, played by Dallas’ own Elizabeth Mitchell. And then there’s a whole raft of other characters: Kate Austen, the former fleeing felon and freckled femme fatale; Hugo “Hurley” Reyes, the large and lovable slacker and lottery winner who calls everyone “dude”; Sayid Jarrah, an Iraqi who was tinker, torturer, soldier and spy for the Republican Guard in the first Gulf War; John Locke, whose paralyzed legs and broken back are miraculously healed as soon as he lands on the island; and Sun and Jin Kwon, the Korean couple with gorgeous looks and ugly personal secrets. Then there’s Daniel Faraday, the mentally fragile physicist and time-travel expert; Miles Straume, the sarcastic “ghostbuster” who talks to dead people; and Frank Lapidus, the ace pilot who becomes quite the expert at flying to and from a mysterious island that doesn’t show up on any charts or maps.

The premise of Lost is well-known by now: In September 2004, an Oceanic jetliner breaks apart over the South Pacific en route from Sydney to L.A. A few dozen people from the plane’s midsection and tail section wash up on an island and await a rescue that never comes. Three months later a freighter arrives on an ominous mission, bringing the news that the world believes Oceanic 815 to have been lost at sea with no survivors. Eventually six of the Oceanic castaways return to civilization, a media army and worldwide fame – while telling no one about leaving behind a group of friends who must fend for themselves as the island goes skipping through time.

But the rest of the Lost universe is what makes most of us fans so happily mental. ”The numbers”: 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42. The smoke monster. Dead people who don’t seem to stay dead. The island’s unseen ruler, Jacob. The gigantic remains of a statue with four toes. The hippie-era Dharma Initiative and its indigenous opponents on the island, “the Others.”  Richard Alpert, the Others’ shaman, who never ages.

On Lost, even the good guys aren’t all good, and the seeming bad guys aren’t all bad either. Flawed, complicated, devious and ruthless though they can be, Lost’s villains are some of the series’ most interesting people. Billionaire Charles Widmore, who used to be the Others’ leader, can be appallingly cruel or astoundingly kind, but he’s never predictable. And Benjamin Linus, the rival who ousted Widmore as leader of the Others, is one of TV’s great bad guys. As played by the amazing Michael Emerson, Ben is bug-eyed and shrimpy, but also steely and manipulative. He looks like a complete milquetoast, yet he commands respect, fear, hatred and loathing. Ben can’t be trusted. Ben lies. Ben kills people. Yet the show wouldn’t be nearly as much fun without him.

One of the show’s little in-jokes is Geronimo Jackson, a fictional 1970s-era band whose name keeps popping up throughout the past few seasons. Right now you can find their single “Dharma Lady” on iTunes (they sound a lot like the Grateful Dead), and you can buy Geronimo Jackson T-shirts online at the ABC.com store.

Although I love reading and participating in Lost fansites and blog discussions, I’ve never bought any Lost magazines or action figures, Dharma Initiative-logoed merchandise or other diehard-fan paraphernalia. But for some strange reason, I decided that I wanted a Geronimo Jackson T-shirt, and the other day I got one. Somehow it appeals to me — maybe because I came of age in the ’70s. If Geronimo Jackson had been a real band, I probably would have listened to them back then. Heck, I’d probably still be listening to them: I’ve got early David Bowie in my car’s CD changer right now, and he still sounds good to me after 35 years. 

After this current season, Lost has one more season to go, its sixth, before the series wraps up. I have no idea how the story of the island and its inhabitants will end.

But whatever happens, at least I’ll always have Geronimo Jackson.  

Barons of the press who know their readers

Nicholas Lemann has an interesting piece in The New Yorker, “Paper Tigers,” in which he discusses recent biographies of prominent press barons. He particularly addresses Wall Street Journal owner Rupert Murdoch and his likenesses to earlier media moguls such as Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst (as well as the WSJ’s earlier powerhouse, Barney Kilgore).

(Those who, like me, are devoted fans of Citizen Kane will be unable to read the Hearst passages without thinking of Charles Foster Kane and his fictional New York Inquirer, mercilessly mirroring Hearst and his New York Journal.)

Lemann says that each of these media barons had an individual but uncanny knack for knowing what their readers wanted, and each learned how to build a fortune while providing the supply for that demand.

He concludes:

 These days, we seem to be drifting toward the world that media reformers have dreamed about for half a century, where the press is made up entirely of small players. If we get there, we may find ourselves missing the dinosaurs who once roamed the earth.

A front page that’s a work of art

These days, when newspapers are playing it so very safe, it’s weird, wild and wonderful to see something as wacky as the Louisville Courier-Journal’s front page as rendered by a Turkish conceptual artist.

Call me Climenole, wordsmith for hire

An Alexandrian  colleague recently suggested to me that, in this current media crisis, laid-off journalists  are suffering a sea change: transforming themselves into experienced (and in some cases fairly expensive) wordsmiths for hire. 

For as newspaper and magazine staffs shrink and shrivel, hundreds of ex-journalists are of necessity becoming commercial writers: publicists, corporate spokespeople and freelance “communications” specialists who wield the English language for a living.

 

Full disclosure: Occasionally, I do this very thing myself. In a practical sense, I find it very much like what newspapers call ”rewrite”: taking feeds of information, quotes and statistics from other reporters and reweaving the strands into a story. Or in the case of PR, not into a story but a press release, or a pitch letter. I have editing experience, I’m a clean writer, and I’ve always been pretty good at rewrite, and so I’m finding the transition to freelance PR writing is not too difficult. 

Here’s the thing: There are plenty of educated business people in this country who are very good at what they do, but who either don’t have the time to write, don’t like to write, or aren’t particularly gifted in writing clear, persuasive English. I have always known I could not do their jobs as well as they do. Now it turns out they can’t do my job as well as I do, either. And so they’ll pay me to do it for them.

When you’ve been a writer all your life, and especially when you’ve been paid to write plain English for a living, you tend to take your ability for granted. It’s surprising to discover how many people do not take it for granted. 

To me, language is just a skill I was born with, one I honed professionally for 30 years. To those who don’t like to write, or who can’t do it so quickly and easily, such adeptness verges on a sort of voodoo magic, rather the way we mere mortals regard the Warren Buffetts of the world. I can’t imagine how the Oracle of Omaha does what he does, but I can admire how brilliantly he does it, and I would gladly hire him to manage my portfolio, if only I could afford it.

Needless to say, my services do not cost as much as even one share of Berkshire Hathaway. And I doubt I’ll ever turn my rewrite capabilities into a full-time job as a publicist or spokesperson, as a few of my fellow former journos have done.  Still, it’s nice to know that I can still spin the straw of raw information into the gold of a paycheck. Especially since I am qualified to do absolutely nothing else.

My Alexandria colleague wonders if  “something of the wild and unpredictable [must] inevitably be disappearing from the natural history of human information metabolism in favor of something more… domesticated.” I suspect he is right, at least for those of us who weren’t all that wild and unpredictable to begin with. The gonzo madman Hunter S. Thompson was never my role model. I was always more into the witty, genteel subversiveness of Tom Wolfe.  

But then, the newspaper culture has been becoming more domesticated ever since I got into the business, in the post-Watergate era. Once earnest young Woodward-wannabes with journalism degrees began flooding into newsrooms in the 1970s, the business inevitably lost some of that raffish, Front Page charm that made it so dear to romantic Hollywood screenwriters. The old-school newsmen who kept fifths of bourbon in their desks surely considered us youngsters a bunch of wet smacks — and worse, a lot of us were forgodsakes women.

It’s probably just as well that most of those old guys are gone now, and can’t see what their once-booming business has turned into, and what their starry-eyed successors have become. For them, PR was the Dark Side. For us who have been laid off and who will never have another job in a newsroom, well, PR is what pays the bills, and that’s all we’re really interested in these days.

In his satire Gulliver’s Travels, Dean Swift invented the character of Climenole, who was a “Flapper.” These servants of the Laputa society facilitated communication between their eternally distracted masters by means of a well-placed smack from a blown bladder filled with small pease or pebbles and fastened to a short stick. In a recent piece in the Huffington Post, Erica Jong suggested that perhaps we have become like the Laputans, so distracted by modern technology that we are living more in the virtual world than in the real one.

If that is indeed the case, it may be that the job of Climenole is one with a bright future for ex-journalists. We’ve always been pretty good, after all, at getting people’s attention.

Mr. Wright and the spiral of life

There’s a good story in the New York Times about the exhibition celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Even people who haven’t been there often recognize this landmark on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, just off Central Park. It is one of the last great works of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who died at age 91, six months before the museum opened in 1959.  He spent 16 years working on the Guggenheim, which is one of his most recognizable buildings, probably rivaled only by Fallingwater.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (NYT photo)

The Guggenheim was a huge controversy in the 1950s. It was called an eyesore, an anomaly, a parking garage masquerading as a museum. I suspect it would still be considered radical today if it had just been designed and built in a major American city by one of the world’s great contemporary architects.

But when I walked into it, I immediately knew what Mr. Wright intended a visitor to feel. Suddenly I was inside a chambered nautilus, that “ship of pearl” as the poet Oliver Wendell Holmes described it: enclosed in spiraling circles and flooded by an ethereal light.

I’ve been an FLW fan for a long time, and any time I am in a city with Wright buildings in it, I try to visit them. I haven’t gotten to them all, by any means, not even close — although I am well acquainted with both of the Wright buildings in Dallas (the Gillin House, which is a private residence in North Dallas, and the Kalita Humphreys Theater building on Turtle Creek). There are so many more Wrights I want to experience, because every one is beautiful and memorable in its own way.

Mr. Wright was a singular genius, and he well knew it. He once remarked airily that he could merely shake his sleeve and ideas would fall out – and he probably did not exaggerate much there. He led an outrageous and controversial life, to be sure. But he was a particularly American kind of genius, one who built for millionaires and for ordinary people alike. He came from the Midwestern prairies, and his love of the American landscape — of its hills, trees, deserts, rocks, skies and water – is evident in every one of his designs.  

Every time I walk into any Wright-designed building, I am amazed and uplifted not just by its beauty, but by its organic quality. For something so completely man-made, every Wright building owns an essential connection to the earth — one that began with Mr. Wright’s turn-of-the-century Prairie houses in Oak Park, Ill., and continued right into the dawn of the space age with the Guggenheim.

Off to see the Wizard

I took my five-year-old granddaughter to see a stage production of The Wizard of Oz, Sunday night at the Music Hall in Fair Park. We had good seats (thank you, Craigslist!), and it was fine as far as G-rated family entertainment goes.

Broadway caliber it was not: The Dallas Morning News’ drama critic had complained that the production was a bit cheesy and amateurish, and I have to admit that I’ve seen better acting and singing in any number of community theaters.

But never mind. Isabella and I share a love of the 1939 Oz movie, which we have watched together so often that by now I have memorized every line of dialogue, every song lyric, every bit of business.

Sometimes she will request an Oz song from me, usually a medley of the introductory solos sung by the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion and the Scarecrow (whom Iz charmingly refers to as “the Squarecrow”). She was fascinated by the whole stage show, although it may say something about the human actors that she was most impressed by Toto. “He’s a real dog!” she whispered, ecstatically.

Oz fanatic that I am, perhaps it was fate that I once met Judy Garland’s daughter. (No, not Liza Minnelli – Lorna Luft.) With my talent for completely useless trivia, I know an unhealthy amount about the Oz movie.  Things like: Buddy Ebsen was supposed to play the Tin Man, but he turned out to be deathly allergic to the metallic makeup and had to be replaced by Jack Haley. But you can still hear Ebsen singing in the chorus of “We’re off to see the Wizard…”

I can tell you that the Munchkin Coroner, Meinhardt Raabe, is still alive at 93. I know that Margaret Hamilton, the Wicked Witch of the West, suffered a terrible burn during one of her pyrotechnic vanishing scenes.

I know that Texas native King Vidor (who survived the 1900 Galveston hurricane) shot the sepia-toned opening scenes of Kansas with the still-amazing cyclone effects, while credited Oz director Victor Fleming was busy with Gone With the Wind.

It’s odd to realize that the film’s signature song, ”Over the Rainbow” almost didn’t make the final cut, thanks to MGM studio execs who thought it slowed down an already-long film. Fleming was perfectly willing to let the song go on the cutting-room floor. The songwriters, Harold Arlen and E.Y. “Yip” Harburg, desperately pleaded their case to Louis B. Mayer himself, who relented — and they were vindicated when it won the Oscar for Best Song.

I still think it’s too bad that the film didn’t use the song’s introductory verse:

When all the world is a hopeless jumble
And the raindrops tumble all around
Heaven opens a magic lane
When all the clouds darken up the skyway
There’s a rainbow highway to be found
Leading from your windowpane
To a place behind the sun
Just a step beyond the rain…

Happily, they used that verse in the stage version, and it almost made up for everything the production lacked, even the Music Hall’s bad acoustics. Seventy years on, the magic of Oz is still there for those who await the rainbow.

Jed Mercurio’s ‘American Adulterer’

"American Adulterer" by Jed Mercurio

Here’s a review I wrote for the Books section of the Sunday Dallas Morning News:

By JOYCE SÁENZ HARRIS / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
Joyce Sáenz Harris (jesharris.wordpress.com) is a Dallas freelance writer.

American Adulterer is a strange, morbidly fascinating novel, one sure to generate a fair amount of negative reaction from people who will not read it. Those who do read it, however, will find it peculiarly sympathetic to its subject, President John F. Kennedy, even as it cuts a mythic figure down to very human, deeply fallible proportions.

British author Jed Mercurio, who has a medical background, begins with the conceit of using JFK as “the subject” of a psychiatric study. His actual name does not surface for many pages, but the identity of “the subject” is quite clear from the first sentence:

“The subject is an American citizen holding high elected office, married, and father to a young family, who takes the view that monogamy has seldom been the engine of great men’s lives.”

As the title promises, much of the book revolves around the subject’s libertine attitude toward sex. Yet there are no sex scenes as such in the book. Rather, there is suggestiveness, accompanied by matter-of-fact observations about sexual desire from a male point of view. It’s a man’s world in the early 1960s, and women are regarded subjectively when they are noticed at all.

Mercurio’s “study” posits that his subject’s extramarital sex life was a hobby bordering on addiction. Like other, less famous unfaithful husbands, this one was a compartmentalizer, a rationalizer. The other women in his life were not great romances; they were novelties, challenges for conquest, convenient vessels for physical release.

This could almost qualify as a nonfiction novel, so deftly does Mercurio weave together verified historical fact and sheer imagination. Obviously, we have no idea what really went on in JFK’s head, aside from his own public words, none of which had anything to do with his priapism.

His private life remains mostly a mystery, because those who knew him best, his wife and closest friends, remained loyal to the romantic myth they helped create. Mercurio does his best to strip away the mystery, creating a character who feels authentically like Jack Kennedy. The clinical approach lets the author speak authoritatively about his subject, as an analyst would. But the analyst is soon replaced by the novelist working inside his subject’s head.

It is not a comfortable place to be. Mercurio often dwells on how much physical pain Kennedy endured, how excruciating his days and nights were, and how much deception went into the public image of his youth and vigor. It becomes clear that, if he hadn’t been assassinated, JFK might well have died due to his medical and pharmaceutical issues before he could have served out a second term.

Some sections of American Adulterer have nothing to do with adultery. And those passages are the ones where the president is with his family, the very people who will most likely never read this book.

Although we see little of his parents or siblings (and surprisingly nothing of his brother and confidant, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy), Mercurio sketches exquisitely tender moments with Caroline and John Jr., scenes that portray JFK in exactly the way his family would like best to remember him.

Most affecting of all is the chapter having to do with the agonizing death of the Kennedys’ prematurely born son, Patrick: “His son shows in his few hours of life what every human being should. He seizes every breath. Like his father, he lives a life of pain but never surrenders. … He wonders, when his own end comes, how long he will fight, and if he will give in, and if he will show the courage the boy has shown, his beautiful, beautiful son.”

The dreadfully familiar ending in Dallas comes quickly and unrelentingly thereafter. Perhaps because I haven’t read a lot of assassination literature, I’d never realized why JFK couldn’t escape the fatal, second bullet. “This man wrecked his back saving a wounded comrade, but this is only part of the story,” Mercurio writes dispassionately. “The condition was exacerbated by his philandering in a hotel room in El Paso, and for these two inseparable reasons he wears a brace that holds his head high when otherwise he would be able to duck the next shot.”

Joyce Sáenz Harris (jesharris.wordpress.com) is a Dallas freelance writer.

jesharris(at)sbcglobal.net

Book Q&A: Sarah Bird on ‘How Perfect Is That’

As one of those annoying people who would rather read a good book than do just about anything else, including work for a living, I have finally found a way to make my obsession semi-respectable: I am anointing myself as a book blogger.

To celebrate, here is the first of what I hope will be a series of blog tours with interesting authors. (And muchas gracias to my baby sister, the blogger known as the Little Fluffy Cat, for recently educating me as to what a “blog tour” actually is.) I’ll continue to write about other subjects, too. But this venture promises to be fun for me, and I hope it will be for you, too.

With that in mind, let’s start the fun now.

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Sarah Bird

My inaugural blog-tour Q&A is with award-winning Austin novelist Sarah Bird, the author of one of my all-time favorites, The Yokota Officers Club (Knopf). Her seventh and most recent novel, How Perfect Is That, has just been reissued in paperback (Pocket Books, $15). Sarah is a regular columnist for Texas Monthly, and she is also [full disclosure here] a personal friend.

Backstory: I profiled Sarah for The Dallas Morning News shortly after Yokota was published in 2001. We spent a 110-degree summer day toodling around Austin, hitting some of her personal landmarks such as the LBJ Library, the University of Texas, and Seneca House, the real-life Nueces Street co-op that was the setting for Sarah’s first comic novel, Alamo House.

How Perfect Is That

Seneca House makes a major reappearance in How Perfect Is That, which The News called “a perfect, curl-up-with-a-margarita splash of summer fun…wickedly good.” Its heroine, if you can call her that, is Blythe Young, a trailer-trash Cinderella who married up — way up — into Austin society, snagging Henry “Trey” Biggs-Dix III, “a scion of one of America’s wealthiest dynasties.” But now the marriage is kaput and Blythe has been pre-nupped into poverty. She’s trying to maintain her social standing and make a living as a high-end caterer, and she’s failing miserably. How miserably? She can’t afford to get a Pap smear. And her plight gets worse, and skankier, and funnier, by the page.

Here’s the fabulous Sarah Bird, on How Perfect Is That and other writerly topics:

Now that How Perfect Is That is out in paperback, is it safe for you to reveal to us how its hardcover readers reacted to it? Was there a love-hate thing going on there?

Joyce, hello!  What a doll baby you are, in general, but in particular for allowing me to jump into your digital world like this.

It’s quite interesting for me to talk about a book that was published a year ago.  In that year, I’ve read all the reviews — I am definitely not one of those lofty writers who can hold themselves above the fray and ignore reviews — and had lots and lots of discussions about How Perfect Is That.

The one piece of the reaction to this book that is utterly different from any of my others is how stunningly polarized it is.  More than anything else I have ever written, How Perfect does seem to be a love-it or hate-it read.  This came across very dramatically for me in following the reviews on Amazon.  Until yesterday, I had no — none, zero — four- or three-star reviews.  All fives, twos and ones.   (Oh, Joyce, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten one star before, and reading those one- and two-starrers, I did wish I were an above-the-fray author who never bothered herself about such matters.)

This dramatic lack of middle ground has led me to two conclusions:  One, if a book is foisted upon a reader as a “comic novel,” if the foisterer promises that this will book will make you lose bladder control, and if the reader then does not find the book to be a laugh riot, that reader will be mightily irritated.  Irritated enough to let Amazon know about it.  Apparently, novels that are held out to be comic — unlike thrillers, romance, or even general mid-list literary fiction — don’t miss by inches.  They either synch up with a reader’s sensibilities, what he or she thinks is funny, and are a dead-on hit, or they don’t work at all.

Second conclusion:  It can be a challenge to read about a character who makes moral choices that you, the reader, wouldn’t.  My “heroine,” Blythe Young is a user and an abuser.  A striver and a conniver.  A climber and whatever rhymes with –imer.  Bad two-timer?  Annoying street-mimer?  All right, not the last two, but she is a scoundrel.  The big question hanging over the book is, “Can she be redeemed?”  The bigger question that I was addressing was, “Can she be really funny in the process?”

A few months ago, when I needed to make myself feel confused and depressed, I did a bit of self-Googling.  A series of random links led me to a site that proposed that my first novel, published in 1986, Alamo House:  Women Without Men, Men Without Brains, was the first chick lit book ever.  Who knows?  Though someday it might be remarked that How Perfect Is That was the first in another line:  Bitch Lit.

Did your male readers react differently to Blythe than did females?

I’m going to do a dangerous thing and generalize:  Females are much more likely to demand that a protagonist be someone she can relate to.  Not necessarily like, but someone who would make pretty much the same moral choices that she would.  I’d say that this is even truer if the protagonist and the author are female.

Why did you use your old Austin co-op’s real name, Seneca House, this time around — why not make it “Alamo House” again?

Yay!  Thank you, Joyce, for noticing.  When I wrote Alamo House, I used the name of the co-op where I lived while going to graduate school at UT, Seneca House.  Norton published that book and, fearing libel suits, had me expunge all ties to the real world.  They told me I could call the co-op either Magnolia House or Kudzu House.  Okay, that last is a joke, but New York at that time, early eighties, had a much harder time understanding that Texas was not the South.

I’ve was delighted that Knopf had no problems allowing me to use the real name of my old co-op, which I have a great deal of affection for.

Just exactly how much did you know about Austin high society, prior to writing How Perfect Is That? And how much did you have to exaggerate said society for comic effect?

How Perfect Is That involved a different sort of research than I’d ever done before.  For the high-society sections, I had to go to school on fashion, shoes, handbags, which designers are in, which are out, what each one signifies, the whole semiotics of apparel.  Fortunately, many kindhearted souls in high places helped me with the high-society research by sharing their worlds with me, allowing me to glimpse lives that are a round of charity galas, private jets, and Dom Perignon by the crate.

The low-society stuff was much easier since, like my heroine, I did actually live in a UT co-op boarding house called Seneca House while I was getting my master’s at the University of Texas.  But in that day and age, it housed female graduate students.  It has since morphed into a co-ed, mostly undergraduate, sometimes feminist, mostly vegan, generally activist house which the current residents were kind enough to allow me to visit several times.

So both worlds had their own anthropology, and getting the anthropology right is one of my chief joys in writing.  Mostly, though, I found it hilarious imagining what it would be like to have Barbara Bush as your mother-in-law.  What a weekend with that whole crew might be like.

Pretty much everything was exaggerated.

Do you still get nervous before book signings? Are you finding that using “new media” (such as blog tours) has made promoting your books any easier?

Such a timely question since this is, literally, my very first day of book blogging ever and it is making me oddly nostalgic for the old ways and old days.  Alamo House was published in the mid-eighties at about the same time that readings and signing started becoming popular.  Prior to that, practically the only writers who toured had won Pulitzers.  It just wasn’t that common.  So it took a while for me to get comfortable with this new public aspect of writing.

It started to fall into place for me when I started to think of signings as parties and I was the hostess.  It truly all clicked for me with this book.  Because of my heroine’s fondness for all cocktails — be they grain-, fruit-, or chemical-based — I was inspired to ask Tito’s Vodka to be my sponsor.  They agreed, and my mantra became:  A Buzz With Every Book.

Wow, Joyce, end of “nerves” for everyone.  And, P.S., my apologies to your readers who came to signings in any non-indie bookstore, because, gosh darn it, those big corporations just could not get into my Buzz With Every Book program and let me serve cocktails.

So, at this point I don’t know what effects new media will have.  I am kind of sad, though, about anything that keeps people from getting out of their houses and having a cocktail.

Can you talk about the new novel you’re working on? How about the film adaptation of Flamenco Academy — is it really happening?

Yes, I can!  I am ecstatic that Knopf — my dream publisher, home to my dream editor — has given me a contract for the next one which should be out Fall 2010.  It is about a single mom facing the prospect of an empty nest.  She’s worried about her daughter leaving home, and flat-out terrified that her only child won’t go to college.

Joyce, here’s what I say about all film projects I have ever been involved with:  Don’t buy your popcorn until you’re in the lobby.  I would love for that novel [The Flamenco Academy] to become a film.  It’s been optioned by a wonderful producer, Anne Walker, who produced most of Rick Linklater’s films.  I had a grand time adapting it.  And now the script is in the hands of the gods.

Joyce, come back to Austin.  We’ll eat enchiladas at Curra’s.

Sarah Bird is the author of six previous novels, and writes a regular column for the magazine Texas Monthly. Her features appear frequently in other magazines, including Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping, and she is also a contributor to Salon.com. She lives in Austin, Texas.