about this author

Riding with the Pulpwood Queens

We are out of control, zooming down a hillside in a golf cart while two women wearing crowns sit behind me. The young woman driving is in charge of community events at a new $45-million golf course in Northern Louisiana. Although it’s 94 degrees and wet-shirt humid, she wears a tailored suit and three-inch heels that make it difficult to hit the brake pedal.

“Brake,” I murmur. Then a bit more earnestly: “Brake.”

At the edge of a sand trap, my guide flips off her right shoe and slams a bare foot onto the brake pedal. “Well now?” she says in a southern accent that makes every statement sound like a question, “Aren’t we all havin’ fun?”

And I have to admit, yes, I am having fun. I’m on book tour with the Pulpwood Queens, a collection of Southern reading groups organized by Kathy L. Patrick, a roll–up–your–sleeves–and–do–everything woman who runs a combination beauty salon and book shop in East Texas. Kathy picked my second novel, The Canal House, as this month’s book selection and she’s guiding me through a tour of her groups. The Pulpwood Queens wear rhinestone crowns at their meetings, but there are differences of style. Some groups wear large tiaras and leopard print blouses. With a few groups, the tiara is modest and discreet, almost hidden within the hair.

Five years ago, I made a conventional book tour with my first novel, The Lost Tribe. Like many authors, I found myself sitting at a table with a stack of newly printed books waiting for someone to show up. In Iowa City, more than 100 summer students from the local university arrived for the reading and bought exactly three books. In Chicago, I sat alone in the store while embarrassed clerks hovered around the table. The lack of sales didn’t bother me as much as my passive role in these little dramas.

When Algonquin Books accepted my second novel, The Canal House, I began talking to bookstore owners and friends who had organized reading groups. Americans buy Tom Clancy and Danielle Steele novels, but they read this mass–market fiction alone — as private entertainment. The thousands of book groups that have sprung up around the country want to read literary fiction, something that challenges them and encourages a good conversation. I decided to go to these readers directly, rather than sitting in a bookstore and waiting for them to appear.

In order to connect with reading groups, my website has a booking system where I can arrange to talk to readers during their meetings by speakerphone. I learned about the Pulpwood Queens from my publisher and I mailed the uncorrected galleys of my novel to Kathy Patrick. Kathy loved the book and invited me down to Texas. I spent four days there, met about 200 readers and, according to Algonquin, sold more than 300 books.

The acquisitions editor for a well-known paperback publisher told my editor that they rarely consider novels set overseas because “Americans aren’t interested in countries they can’t find on a map.“ The Canal House is a challenge to that limited view of the book–buying public. Set in Europe, Africa, and East Timor, it describes the love affair between an America war correspondent and an idealistic British doctor. As a former war correspondent for the London Telegraph, I have lived or worked in every location described in the book.

It’s that verisimilitude that interests the Pulpwood Queens. Meeting these readers in living rooms, bookstores and at the Louisiana country club, I’m surprised to find how strongly they respond to the book’s themes. Some readers focus on the love story, others ask questions about embedded journalists in Iraq or argue about the moral choices made by the characters. Like many readers, they try to make a direct connection between my past life as a journalist and my fictional creations. Sometimes it’s difficult for me to explain the peculiar alchemy that transforms the base metal of real experiences into a novel.

Writers attempting a similar tour should expect a great deal of driving and fried food. You also should expect to get lost. Although I’m carrying more than two–dozen Map Quest maps, I keep taking the wrong turn and ending up on the President George Bush freeway.

Before I leave Texas, Kathy Patrick gives me a hug, and my own cardboard crown. I pass the crown on to a five–year–old boy who likes stories about knights, but the sentiment of the gift stays with me. Writers — and readers — are inseparable. We just have to connect with each other.