The Lift Trucks Gallery sent me this short video that they made of last night’s reading. If you don’t blink, at the very end, you will see me up at the mike. But as the others have said, the most fun was (for me) before the event, and (for them) afterward.

I arrived at our designated meeting spot, Tazza Cafe, and as one of the others stated, within minutes, our screeching and cackling and guffawing had driven the other patrons away. Most had arrived before me and Tracy very graciously offered to buy me a cup of tea and then we all got to gabbing, and honestly, it felt like I was with family.

Here’s stuff I learned about the people who went, that I hadn’t already known:

Barbara teaches at an inner-city school and she loves her students and some of them have gone on to compete on a state (national?) level in an academic competition, with her as the coach. They are “Team Sorenson!” She sent me a photo of the team with their trophies but it’s quite blurry. Hoping she’ll send another.

Aislinn’s parents are from Ireland and she’s used to a lot of swearing and foul language and sang a song for us involving brass cleaner and bollocks! It was funny, because she’s soft-spoken and feminine.

Bev’s brother (cousin? Oh, how I wish I was taking notes) is a famous footballer in the UK. Bev’s husband Mark was a very good sport for coming along.

Colleen is thoughtful and kind and recommended my friend Dani Shapiro’s book, highly. She had just finished it.

Tracy was quieter than I expected, but her laugh is booming and infectious.

Alan explained that “putz” and “schmuck” are even nastier words than most of us had thought. Oh yes, we got right down to some vulgarities, even bandying about the c-word at one point (It was me, sorry. It was a joke).

Wonderful Arliss and her husband Bruce live quite near me and Bruce is the published author of a cook book!

Lisa is funny and pretty and thinks she doesn’t photograph well, which she does. Lisa’s Tom, also a great sport.

KC (Ms. Brunch) and her husband Matt met us at the gallery and then went on to dinner with the rest of the gang. I met KC years ago when she was a kid. SHe’s not a kid anymore! Gorgeous.

Here’s a group photo, taken by Tracy:

Here I am at the mike. As you can see, I decided to convert my story into song and sing it for the group.

Well the group has been sending each other photos from past night and perhaps they will put them up on their Facebook pages. Thanks to all who attended, you were wonderful!

I have been insanely busy, this week and so have many people I know. First, my friend Dani Shapiro has a new book coming out on Monday. The book is called Devotion and it’s a beautiful examination of her spiritual journey in what she calls “the afternoon of life.” Click on her link and have a look at her books and blog and introduce yourselves while you’re there.  I’ve already read Devotion and recommend it highly!

I have also been researching animal rescue organizations for my book and would like to call your attention to a wonderful contest that is going on at The Animal Rescue Site.  You can vote for your favorite  rescue organization and the group that receives the most votes will receive lots of $$$$$$$.  But you don’t have to give a penny.  I know everybody is giving whatever they can spare to Haiti relief organizations now, so this is a way you can help by just, literally lifting a finger and clicking on the “vote” link.  If you don’t have a favorite rescue organization, please vote for Hot Water Rescue New England.  This group has saved some of the neediest dogs in New England and could really use the support.  Here’s a gorgeous pup that they have saved and are trying to place:

So get out your vote!  You can vote once a day, every day.

So, now I’m happy. Very happy!

The chat with Dan Chaon is scheduled for Tuesday, January 12, at 8:00 p.m. (EST).

It will be a “live chat” meaning that you will be able to ask Dan Chaon your questions and he will answer them live, but it will all be in text format.  You won’t be able to see anyone.   But once I have the live chat element up and running, I plan to do chats with all of the authors whose books we read.  And I’ll do occasional chats with performers, dog rescuers, maybe even members of casts of television shows.  In fact, in order to make sure there aren’t any glitches for our author chat, I’m planning to ask Denis if he’ll do a chat with you all next week some time.

Well, that’s the news.  Very excited about our future chattiness!

I lifted part of a review of the book from Amazon: “Leff follows Thoreau’s paddle-strokes not only by traveling the same rivers, but by creating a ‘fusion of inward and outward experience,’ incorporating essay-like musing about time and place—and the power of both stories and history to evoke them. Deep Travel is a primer on the art of ‘sight-seeking’ and ‘forensic observation,’ and Leff offers penetrating readings of the river, the vernacular landscape, and Thoreau.”—Ian Marshall, author, Peak Experiences: Walking Meditations on Literature, Nature, and Need and Walden by Haiku

David’s talk was very interesting and now I’m dying to get started on the book.  Outside the Hickory Stick we all posed for photos for the blogs.  David Leff has one too.  It’s here.

Now, I hesitate to show these pictures, but I will, as it will serve as a lesson to all you ladies.  This afternoon, as I headed out after hours squinting at my computer, I looked in the mirror and considered applying makeup.  Just a little mascara.  Then I actually thought: why bother, I’ll just have to take it off later.  And I also had the completely delusional thought: at a certain age, women look quite lovely without any makeup at all.

Somebody actually said that to me recently.  That women look “softer” without makeup at a certain age. Well, how’s this for “soft”?

That’s me with Alan, above. Yes, my face is so soft that my eyes have completely disappeared.

Here I am with David Leff:

Yes, I’m displaying my man hands.  No, I don’t usually wear my wedding ring.  Yes, I’m married.  Any other questions?

David Leff also writes poetry and so I will close with a poem that I lifted from his website:

Halftones

by David K Leff

Bathed in drizzle at dawn, I walk down to the river without
coffee or shower, the haze of slumber not yet fully lifted.
I’m quieted by a world hushed in a glaze of moisture. Light
slowly leaks into a dingy sky, creeps silently without wind
as fugitive wisps of ragged clouds drag mist across hills of
dew-lit grass. All is a muted charcoal smudge,
a sketchbook landscape.  Deep within the fog, on a leaden
millpond framed by a fretwork of gray tree-branch
shadows, geese softly echo each other, hoarsely calling
to ignite a pallid morning growing as vivid as the video
dreams that stirred me from sleep.

“…and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”    James Joyce, Ulysses

My friend Davyne Verstandig, head of the Litchfield County Writers Project, recently asked me if I would like to attend a lecture about James Joyce, given by author Frank Delaney.

James Joyce? Frank Delaney?  Yes I said yes I will Yes.

I met Frank Delaney at a book signing last summer and have been an admirer of his work, so I was thrilled at the opportunity to hear him speak about Joyce.

In his book, James Joyce’s Odyssey, Frank Delaney describes Ulysses as, “an entertaining, funny, absorbing, exciting, enjoyable novel, a book to get lost in, a book to take to a desert island, a book to keep by your bedside, and discover each day something new, a book to be quoted from, recalled, discussed, contemplated, bequeathed, bestowed, but above all to be relished, savoured, a work of intelligence and delight.’

Author Frank Delaney (photo by Jerry Bauer)

I have found Ulysses to be a puzzling, challenging, difficult and maddening novel, a book to not only get lost in, but to lose one’s mind in, a book to take to a desert island and leave there, motoring off with something lighter, like Paradise Lost, a book to keep, not by my bedside, but prominently displayed on a coffee table, to impress others.   I know Frank must be right when he says it is a work of intelligence and delight, I’m just not intelligent enough to feel all the delight.  But I want to be – wicked bad.

The thing is, I have read and reread Joyce’s Dubliners many times because I love the stories so, and have always wanted to appreciate Ulysses, so I decided to attend Frank Delaney’s talk last night, and  I don’t recall when I’ve had a more enjoyable and enlightening evening.  Frank was once a television and radio personality in Ireland and the UK, so he has a wonderful stage presence and his knowledge of Joyce is seemingly fathomless.

Ireland, death, sex, alcoholism, writing, self-loathing, romantic love, begrudgery – all things Irish – all my favorite things –  were touched upon in Frank’s delightful discourse last night.  One of the many tidbits I took away with me is Frank’s theory that one of the reasons Ireland has produced so many great writers, is because the language they write in, English, was forced upon them by their enemies – the English.  Their inventive and provocative use of the English language is a sort of rebellious and retaliatory one-upmanship.

Having spent a little time in Ireland, I have seen what the people can do to the English language, just in conversation, and it’s impressive, to say the least.  Ireland is the only place I  have heard old men (or any men) use the C word as a vowel in regular conversation.  ”I looked up and there she was, herself, the c*%#ing cow, standing like a fecking statue in the rain, in the fecking rain, in the middle of the fecking road.”

Last night’s lecture was the first in a series of talks given by Mr. Delaney. If you live anywhere near Litchfield County, Connecticut, I urge you to try to attend the others.  The schedule is here.  The series will also be available at the LCWP website, along with many other talks, readings and interviews with authors.

That’s Davyne on the left, then me, Marie and Lauren.

Afterwards, there was a book signing and guess who I met? THE MAN OF THE BLOG!
Yes, our very own Alan had driven all the way from his part of Connecticut to this part of Connecticut just to attend the reading, which was just so sweet. He is even more charming in person than he is on the blog. Here he is with me and a copy of my book, An Innocent, A Broad.

Another regular blog commenter was there. She was too shy to introduce herself, but was very sweet to email me later to say that she had been in the audience. I’m not sure if she wants me to tell you all that she was there, due to said shyness. But, during the discussion, Lauren, Marie and I had mentioned Dorothy Parker so this particular blog reader/attendee sent me an email with this poem, which is fitting, because Denis nixed the black dress in the end.

THE RED DRESS
by Dorothy Parker

I always saw, I always said
If I were grown and free,
I’d have a gown of reddest red
As fine as you could see,
To wear out walking, sleek and slow,
Upon a Summer day,
And there’d be one to see me so
And flip the world away.
And he would be a gallant one,
With stars behind his eyes,
And hair like metal in the sun,
And lips too warm for lies.
I always saw us, gay and good,
High honored in the town.
Now I am grown to womanhood. . . .
I have the silly gown.
Thank you all for your advice/opinions. It was so much fun to hear what you all thought. I didn’t tally the votes, but it seemed to be leaning toward the red dress anyway. I’ll post a photo of me wearing it with shoes, makeup, hair and hopefully staring, slack-jawed and drooling, at the gallant one himself, and his beautiful wife.

Anyway, I just reread it and have to say that now, from my middle-aged perspective, it is one of the sexiest books I have ever read. But also, there are so many layers to the book that fascinated me. Lady Chatterley’s invalid husband, Clifford, was a popular novelist, so there was a lot about the writer’s process, which I believe was D.H Lawrence describing his own work to a certain degree. Anyway, here is a passage that I found just riveting, because I have felt that writing fiction is somehow more honest and intimate than writing nonfiction, but have never been able to articulate why. Thankfully D.H. Lawrence was able to do it for me. The passage describes the way Lady Constance Chatterley felt when she overheard their housekeeper sharing local gossip with her husband.

“Connie was fascinated, listening to her. But afterwards always a little ashamed. She ought not to listen with this queer rabid curiosity. After all, one may hear the most private affairs of other people, but only in a spirit of respect for the struggling, battered thing which any human soul is, and in a spirit of fine, discriminative sympathy. For even satire is a form of sympathy. It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead away and recoil from things gone dead. Therefore, the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and refreshing.”

Well, I’ll just leave you with that.

Tomorrow night – Friday, May 1st – I will be reading from my novel Outtakes From a Marriage and participating in a panel discussion with two other authors, Marie Bostwick and Lauren Lipton.

The event is part of a series done by the Litchfield County Writer’s Project, in conjunction with the University of Connecticut. If you live in the Connecticut area, and have nothing else to do, try to come. It’s free! It’ll be fun and not boring, promise! For information call 860-626-6850.

Yesterday, I was a member of a Q&A panel about writing and publishing. It was a part of a career symposium at Emerson College. The best thing about it was meeting two fantastic women and fellow authors. I flatter myself by calling them my fellows, as they are somewhat (okay, a lot) more accomplished as authors than I am. But they were great fun and lovely and I really enjoyed our discussion.

The other authors were Alice Hoffman and Kim McLarin. Alice and her husband Tom and I had lunch before the panel discussion and from the moment we sat down it was as if we had, all three, been lifelong friends. I loved them. Both so funny and down to earth. And then Kim, a writer in residence at Emerson, author, mother and host of a television show, was brilliant and wry and funny and also felt like an instant great friend.

Well, I had a wonderful time and hopefully the students liked it as well. We debated, beforehand, whether we should lie and tell the students that they (and we) will have books published for years to come, or tell them the truth – that the publishing business is barely holding itself together with baling twine – if you possess any other skills, hone those now. We went with a sort of glossed-over truth. Keep writing. Don’t think too much about what’s happening to the industry. People will always buy books. There was much bemoaning of the invention of the Kindle amongst the audience, and I had to come clean about how mine is perhaps my most cherished piece of personal property.

On the subject of Kindle, I have been trying to download books and have found that the Kindle library is quite limited. There is not a single book by Saul Bellow available on Kindle. Basically, you can download most popular fiction and nonfiction published in the last couple of years, and then most of the great classics. The classics are cheap. Madame Bovary cost me 99 cents. Books by Proust, Flaubert, Tolstoy are sold on Kindle much as they would be sold on a card table on Broadway – dirt cheap but without the torn dust jackets and musty odors.

“No thanks, I don’t need to be turned down tonight.”

Anyway, the quote awaiting me on my pillow last night was, “A man never discloses his own character so clearly as when he describes another’s.” Jean Paul Richter

This is so true in life, but a stumbling block, I think, for writers at times.