Three days of books, authors, and zany women. Who could ask for more?
I’ve blogged before about Girlfriend Weekend (see http://www.willworkforairfare.blogspot.com/2011_01_01_archive.html ) and this year was no exception. It began with an “author dinner,” which means that the local BBQ restaurant (best BBQ I’ve ever had) catered a dinner for the conference attendees and that dinner was served by the featured authors for the weekend, all dressed in Charlie Chaplin-style costumes. Apparently the authors love this event because they get a chance to meet and chat with other authors and also with readers in a very social environment. Friday and Saturday are crammed all day with 45-minute panels of authors followed by a little break for book signings. It is absolutely wonderful to hear authors talking about what inspired them to write their latest book, the back story for the book (many fiction books are based on real events, which always makes the books more interesting to me), and how they got started writing in the first place. Many of the authors and the books fall into the category of Southern literature, some of which is on the fluffy side (feel-good, motivational, good, clean Christian stories, and so on) and some of which is truly good literature and good reading (nonfiction accounts of famous people and events, fictionalized treatments of true events). Of course, you can buy the books at the conference, but because I don’t want to ship a ton of books home after the weekend, I look up each book I’m interested in to see if it is available for download onto my Kindle. Luckily, everything I was interested in is downloadable!
Girlfriend Weekend is an event put on by the Pulpwood Queens book club which aims at getting more women, men, and children to read and to introducing them to engaging and even life-changing stories. And it is working. There are more than 500 chapters in the USA. Women come to this conference from all over the south and often groups from the same book club wear some kind of fun, identifying clothing. This is an event where women can kick up their heels and be playful and zany, so I saw women wearing tiaras (I wore mine!) and lots of hot pink, leopard print, and sparkly bling. Who says reading has to be solemn and boring? Saturday night is a big party where women dress up in costumes of the theme for that year (this year the theme was The Guilded Age so we saw lots of flappers), book clubs adorn their tables with amazingly elaborate decorations, and women drink and dance and have a great time. Authors also join in, in costume, and seem to have a wonderful time.
Books that really interested me this year are:
A Silence of Mockingbirds A Memoir of a Murder by Karen Spears Zacharias (true story)
You Believers by Jane Bradley (true story)
The Iguana Tree by Michel Stone (true story)
Faith Bass Darling’s Last Garage Sale by Lynda Rutledge (based on true story, light read)
Roses by Leila Meacham (light read)
Into The Free by Julie Cantrell (about American gypsys)
Let the People In: The Life and Times of Ann Richardson by Jan Reid (biography and a good one)
American Ghost: A Novel by Janis Owens (based on a true story)
A Rare Titanic Family: The Caldwell’s Story of Survival by Julie Hedgepeth Williams (true story)
Ghost on Black Mountain by Ann Hite (rare look into Appalachian culture and beliefs)
So here I am eating southern food, being called “hon” and “sweetie” by wait staff in restaurants, trying to remember to specify “unsweet” tea when I order iced tea, and trying to get used to the fact that no vegetable is worth eating unless it is cooked limp with lots of salt, some bacon or ham, and a wee bit of sugar. People in Jefferson are unfailingly friendly and polite and we are getting a small taste of New Orleans because many shops and houses have Mardi Gras decorations up -- Jefferson is so close to Louisiana that it is considered to be “Louisiana West.”
Tomorrow we get to rest up -- and we need it!
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