The Pulpwood Queen First WEBCAM Video!

Announcing Pulpwood Queen Events and Surprise Guest Author at Next Book Club Meeting!

Dear Readers,

Tonight I will speaking at a dinner at the First United Methodist Church of Tatum, Texas then on to the luncheon event at Austin College tomorrow that is a fundraiser for Home Hospice.

Here is a snippet of a feature in the North Texas e-News today and for the full feature go to:
http://www.ntxe-news.com/artman/publish/article_45748.shtml

Home Hospice Auxiliary Style Show/Luncheon at Austin College to feature Kathy L. Patrick By media release Apr 30, 2008

Grab a tiara and your ticket….

Kathy L. Patrick, owner of the Beauty and the Book bookshop and beauty salon, and founder of the Pulpwood Queens Book Club in Jefferson, TX will be the keynote entertainment for the Home Hospice Auxiliary Style Show/Luncheon, May 1 at Austin College’s Mabee Hall. The Pulpwood Queens Book Club has been featured on Good Morning America, the Oprah Winfrey Show and in Southern Living magazine.

Friday morning at 11:00 a.m. I will be speaking at the Mobberly Baptist Church in Longview, Texas then back home to get ready for our big Pulpwood Queen Book and Lawn Sale Jefferson's Pilgrimage Weekend. Here's the lowdown on that event.

BEAUTYAND THE BOOK

KATHY L. PATRICK

The Pulpwood Queens Book Clubs

Celebrate Pilgrimage in Historic Jefferson, Texas

Featuring authors,

Rosemary Poole Carter, Joyce Brooks

& Rickey Pittman

May 3rd, 2008,

9:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m.

The Pulpwood Queens will also be hosting a Book & Lawn Sale on the grounds

608 North Polk Street

903-665-7520

Now announcing our SURPRISE author guest, (photo above) ,or our May 13th, Pulpwood Queens of East Texas Book Club Meeting, Robert LeLeux of "Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy"!

Robert is flying in all the way from New York to talk about his book that I give 5 diamonds in the Pulpwood Queen Tiara!. Robert is our Bonus Pulpwood Queen Book Club Selection of the month and I do believe that his mother is even coming to this event. You are in for a treat! Everyone is to bring an East Texas dish and remember our Book of the Month author, Paulina Porizkova of "A Model Summer" is also calling in from Los Angeles where she is currently flying in to film the her second season as a judge on the television show, "America's Top Model"! My hope is that all Pulpwood Queen members in the vicinity will come to this event. Please email me at kathy@beautyandthebook.com if your chapter is coming and to let us know what dishes you are bringing. If you don't want to bring a dish, bring $10.00 for the meal and I will make sure we have plenty.

The month of May is going to be our springboard into an exciting summer reading program. We have so far authors, Jacque Couvillion of "The Chicken Dance", and Charles Martin of "Where the River Ends" coming this summer and if that doesn't make you want to read, I just don't know what will!

Tiara wearing and Book sharing,

Kathy L. Patrick

Founder of the Pulpwood Queens Book Clubs

P.S. Starting more Pulpwood Queen chapters than you can shake a stick at including one in Anchorage, Alaska! WOO HOO! The Pulpwood Queens are on a mission to promote reading and the word is getting out! We make reading BIG TIME FUN!

Tomorrow, I will be doing a photo journal of my recent speaking engagements with photos so stay tuned! Some of you just might be featured!

P.P.S. And just sent to me, by my friend Diane Hernandez of the Writer's League of Texas, this link:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=0lNFRLrP014 from YouTube called

Leningrad Cowboys & Red Army Choir - SWEET HOME ALABAMA

The Pulpwood Queens feature Paulina Porizkova!

Dear Readers,

May is almost here so in anticipation of summer, I have selected "A Model Summer" by Paulina Porizkova to read for May.

Paulina will be calling in my book club only from Los Angeles where she is currently going to start filming another season of the television show, America's Top Model. We will meet 6:30 p.m. at Beauty and the Book, 608 North Polk Street, Jefferson, Texas, Tuesday, May 13th. Everybody is bringing an East Texas dish!

Paulina was here for our annual Girlfriend Weekend this past January. I selected her book because first of all she wrote not only a great book, but an important book. She also, I knew, would need the help of The Pulpwood Queens Book Club Selection to get the word out that this is not just another model doing a beauty tips book. This is a book that deserves to be read and read well.

All I can say is "Don't just judge the book by the cover, read the book. Read Paulina's book." I firmly believe that if ever woman and her daughter read this book, we could change the face of modeling and fashion today.

Paulina told me if her mother had not put her on a plane to fly to Paris at fifteen to become a model she would have been a librarian. I am amazed that she wrote this book not in her first language which is Czechoslovakian, but in like her third language English. Think about that will you. The press release and Question and Answer Interview are below.

Tomorrow I will post the author who will be in attendance at our May13, Pulpwood Queens of East Texas Book Club, meeting in Jefferson! Five stars in my Pulpwood Queen Tiara for both these authors, so read below then check in tomorrow to see who our guest author will be for May. Word has it he's bringing his mother too! Intrigued? Tune in tomorrow for the continuing story!

Tiara Wearing and Book Sharing,
Kathy L. Patrick
Founder of the Pulpwood Queens Book Club
www.beautyandthebook.com
www.pulpwoodqueen.com

P.S. Paulina also has an amazing interview in the May issue of Glamour Magazine! All I know is I can't wait to read her next book!

Pamela Peterson 212-456-0171

By Paulina Porizkova

“A gripping read.”

—Vogue

“Porizkova has enriched this story with details only an insider could provide. . . .

a refreshingly clear-eyed point of view.

[A Model Summer is a] vivid, cautionary coming-of-age tale.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“A delicious debut novel about beauty and betrayal

inspired by the life of this former supermodel.”

—Cosmopolitan

A model from the age of fifteen, Paulina Porizkova’s appearances on the covers of Vogue and the Sports Illustrated: Swimsuit Issue made her an international sensation. In her riveting debut novel, A MODEL SUMMER (Hyperion; April 8, 2008; Paperback; $14.95), Porizkova reveals the soaring highs and wrenching insecurities that result from the constant physical scrutiny a young model experiences. The book is a searing, introspective look behind the scenes of a glamorous world many people dream about, but few ever know.

Porizkova’s appealing narrator is Jirina, another skinny fifteen-year old with an unpronounceable name. Growing up in Sweden, Jirina (Yee-ree-na) is too dark and too foreign to be popular with her classmates. Avoiding their jeers, she spends most of her time with her baby sister, trying unsuccessfully to please her unhappy parents. Her life is ordinary verging on grim until her only friend, a fellow immigrant who aspires to be a photographer, enters photos of Jirina in a contest. The owner of a Parisian modeling agency notices something in these photos that no one—especially Jirina herself—has ever noticed in her before: beauty. He brings her to Paris for the summer to see whether she will captivate the fashion world and make it as a professional model.

Jirina’s life changes dramatically in Paris. Shaken at first by casting directors who examine her like an animal (“her jaw is a bit angular, isn’t it?”), she soon settles into tentative friendships with an established Swedish model, a gossipy makeup artist, and a journalist with a mysterious past. When magazines book her for photo shoots in Morocco and Milan, life begins to hold possibilities. She even develops a paralyzing crush on a charismatic photographer who’s just beyond her reach. But once on location, her modeling doesn’t seem to go very well. And despite her sophisticated new friends and their wild parties, Jirina remains a child, alone in a foreign city, yearning for her parents’ approval.

A MODEL SUMMER exposes the dark edges that surround a young model’s sparkling world: movie producers offering stardom—or hard cash—for sexual favors; dangerously jealous rivals; a fluid sense of self; cocaine. Porizkova writes powerfully of the factor that cancels out these risks: the intoxicating experience of being transformed by a camera. Through Jirina, the reader feels what it’s like to be injected with a visceral confidence that blocks out time and emotion. The experience is “like slipping into someone you envy and then finding it’s as good as you thought and you never want to leave.” Having tasted this freedom, Jirina realizes the lengths to which she’ll go to keep it. Her childhood is over, but her next step is uncertain. Written with a thoughtfulness and accuracy that reflect Porizkova’s first-hand knowledge, A MODEL SUMMER is the debut of a talented novelist with devastating insight into the price of beauty.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Paulina Porizkova is a former political refugee, an accidental model, an occasional actress, and a life-long lover of books. Most recently, she has appeared as a judge on CW TV’s “America’s Next Top Model.” Porizkova is married to the musician Ric Ocasek, with whom she has two sons. They live in New York City.

A MODEL SUMMER

By Paulina Porizkova

Published by Hyperion Books

Publication Date: April 8, 2008

Price: $14.95 / Paperback

ISBN:1-4013-0936-7

A Conversation with

Paulina Porizkova

author of

A MODEL SUMMER

Q: Your novel A Model Summer recounts the experience of Jirina, a lonely girl from Sweden who suddenly finds herself modeling in Paris. How much of the story is autobiographical?

A: The story and all the characters are fictional; the rest is all true.

Q: How did this book come about?

A: I’ve always known that I’d write one day, but I got sidetracked first by modeling and then by acting. Besides, unlike modeling and acting, I figured writing could wait until I got old and ugly. The seed of this particular novel took hold a long time ago. I was on the phone with an old school friend, trying to describe my working day. A 15-hour trip to the Seychelles? A photo session with a famous actor who kept hitting on me although he was married and older than my father? Four hours of hair-brushing and makeup application? Posing in a hundred plus degrees in a Moroccan desert swathed in furs and woolen hose while little white scorpions crawl over your boots? How perfectly awful. Even I could tell how “bad” that sounded to someone working behind a counter flipping burgers. My complaints were other people’s dreams. My friend’s inability to understand coupled with my inability to properly explain became a challenge. I knew then what I needed to write about.

Q: Is this the book you envisioned when you started writing it, or did any of the developments surprise you?

A: Everything about this book was a surprise. I thought I had the character, the setting, and that I was about to write a cynical, gritty portrayal of the fashion biz as it had never been done. Instead, as Jirina came into existence on paper, the story became smaller, deeper, and far more intimate. When I sat down to write, it was as though she possessed my body, and used me to tell her story. I was no longer in control of what was playing out on paper. The characters took over and I watched and recorded their actions. Jirina and the rest of my characters had become so real to me that they felt like memories rather than dreams. My only regret was that I couldn’t share them with anyone, since they didn’t actually exist. There were so many times I closed my laptop at the end of the day and wanted to gossip about Jirina, Evalinda, Rob and the rest of them, and had to remind myself that I’d made them up.

Q: You are best known as a supermodel, but you’ve also acted in a number of movies. How do you think your acting experience influenced the way you wrote A Model Summer?

A: I’d often climb into the skin of one of the characters to see how they’d react to a situation, and use that experience to determine how the plot evolved. I’d laugh, cry and live in my characters, just as I would in an acting part. Quite exhausting at times!

Q: What were the best and worst parts of being a model?

A: This is the very question I hope to have answered in the 300 plus pages I have written.

Q: Are you still involved in fashion?

A: Yes, I still have to get dressed every day.

Q: What do you want your readers to take away from reading A Model Summer?

A: What the best and the worst parts of being a model are.

Q: A Model Summer shows a side of modeling that few have seen. How do you feel about the way modeling is depicted in the media today?

A: It’s not so much a question of how it’s depicted as what is depicted, and the depictions are not so much inaccurate as unusual. Quite naturally, the public only hears stories of great successes or tragedies. These account for but a tiny part of the working whole, but it’s all that the public has to go on. So, of course, when one hears the word “model,” one immediately thinks of magazine and E! channel images of unfairly gorgeous young girls in free designer clothes holding on to their famous boyfriends, or anorexic wrecks throwing up their champagne backstage before passing out on the runway. The truth is, for every supermodel you hear about, there are thousands of models you never will. And it’s not for lack of interesting lives.

Q: What makes Jirina’s modeling experience typical/atypical?

A: I tried very hard to make Jirina’s experiences as typical for their time as possible, while creating a plot that would draw the reader in. Although A Model Summer is not autobiographical, it contains quite a few “borrowed” incidents: some from my life, some from my friends, some that were simply overheard. One does not have to go far in the fashion industry to find a good story.

Q: How long did it take you to write this book?

A: My (admittedly awful) first attempt was written perhaps fifteen years ago. I wasted two hundred pages before I realized it wasn’t any good. Part of the problem was that although I was fluent in spoken English, I lagged behind in writing. English was my third language, and not having gone to school past ninth grade, I lacked basic grammar and punctuation skills even in Swedish, never mind English! I decided to put writing aside for awhile in favor of reading a million books, improving my written English, and building life experiences. But even in that first feeble attempt I found the voice of Jirina. Through the years, her voice stayed in my head, popping up occasionally to remind me she was still waiting.

Eventually (and much sooner than anticipated), the day in which I was judged old and ugly arrived. I sat down to write. I had my topic: the everyday work, the thrills, the tedium, and most importantly, the kind of judgment a model is exposed to on a daily basis and the effect this has on a very young girl. My protagonist had been brewing in my head for years, I had read a million books, and my English had definitely improved. I was ready. And then I found out that reading does not necessarily a writer make. I still had lots of technical issues I hadn’t been able to soak up through reading. For example, dialogue: did one use a dash to indicate the spoken voice? The single quotation mark or the double one? Or did one simply write, “she said, he said?” I wrote my first chapter entirely without dialogue…needless to say, I soon enlisted in a writing workshop! It took me two workshops and five years to finish my novel.

Q: What are some of your favorite books/authors? Did any particular inspire you to write A Model Summer?

A: Most of the inspiration for my novel came from my job, but I have read hundreds of wonderful books (if not thousands, and yes, I’m totally bragging) and every good or great one must have put its imprint on me somehow. My favorites these days tend to be long, epic novels about foreign countries, cultures, and politics such as The Soldier of the Great War, Acts of Faith, and A Fine Balance, but I also adore fantasy novels like Cloud Atlas, A Winter’s Tale, and wonderful coming-of-age novels like The Saskiad, and Purple Hibiscus. When it comes to authors, I can list only the dead ones for an obvious reason: their life’s work is done; there will be no further surprises. In no particular order: Austen, Dickens, Balzac, Maupassant, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Fitzgerald.

The Pulpwood Queen Survives PROM!

Dear Readers,

I just got home from prom. No, I did not go. I just happened to have gone to the Bull Durham Dinner Theater and a bunch of my friends from the theater and I, sat outside after the show and watched the flurry of prom activity. You see, the Bull Durham Dinner Theater is right next door to the Jeffersonian Institute where prom was held this year.

Today began with setting my daughter's hair in pin curls. Yes, I did say setting her hair in pin curls as she was going for a retro look. One right after another girls came into my shop for one prom do right after another. I put out a table of great snack foods as I knew these girls probably would not eat a thing until their dates took them to dinner. Everyone seemed to enjoy the party atmosphere and the fun of getting a salon treatment for their special evening.

Here are some of the photos and I think this year was superb! What fun it is to have as their theme, "An Evening of Elegance". At the same time as Jefferson' Prom please note we had a Tractor Parade as you will see photos of the tractors parked on our main street, Austin. I have to laugh, as my daughter, her date and friends all went cyber bowling after prom and then on to IHOP for an early breakfast. I figured they all will come dragging in later this morning as do note I wrote this after midnight.





























About the time they left prom, a stretch Hummer arrived and 16 young ladies and men poured out in sparkly gowns and black tuxes. I captured some of this too so again, enjoy the photos and send me your special prom remembrance. How was your date to the prom? Boy, have I got some doozies!


















Tiara wearing and Book sharing,
Kathy L. Patrick
Founder of the PulpwoodQueens

www.beautyandthebook.com
www.pulpwoodqueen.com