All Hail the Pulpwood Queen--It's Kathy Patrick

Kathy Patrick started a little Texas bookstore called Beauty and the Book and then a tiara-wearing book club called The Pulpwood Queens that went global. Because of her mission to “get the world reading” Kathy’s notoriety has newspapers, magazines, documentaries, and broadcast media—including Oprah’s Oxygen station-- talking about her the world over. But now her life is an open book as she tells her story within the pages of her own book The Pulpwood Queens Tiara Wearing Book Sharing Guide to Life—yes, we’re giving away an autographed copy Saturday. So here on Words to Go—Here Comes Trouble! Please welcome with me, Kathy Patrick, the Pulpwood Queen herself!

KATHY: Thank you, Patty, for having me.

PATTY: Kathy, you and I recently had a great off-the-cuff discussion that really was the impetus for this week’s theme. Would you like to share a bit about some of the ways you were a stand-out as a kid?

KATHY: When I was a kid, yes, I dressed a little bit different. My favorite outfit in the 5^th grade was a Sears pink uncut corduroy jumper, white Peter Pan blouse worn with purple knee high socks and clear acrylic go-go boots. I wore on the top my sage green plaid coat with built in neck scarf with fringe and a real leopard beret with black python band that I swiped from my mother’s closet.

PATTY: Sure, just the normal attire of a fifth grader.

KATHY: I spent my lunch hour not at recess but up on the stage in the gym dancing with my girlfriends to 45’s on the record player. I did the Freddy, the twist, the jerk, the pony, but my favorite was swing dancing to Beatle songs and The Beach Boys.

PATTY: Those were the days.

KATHY: My favorite subject was art and reading and my teacher had me do all the backdrops for school plays and usually had the lead part in the play too. I was a pre-teen drama queen so move over Lindsay Lohan.

PATTY: Look out! Now, you had your own way of rebelling against kick ball too.

KATHY: Yes, instead of playing kickball, I played with my Troll dolls under this one specific tree that had this great base with a hole that we use to pretend they lived in. My best friend’s name was Debbie and we both liked the color blue, Girl Scouts, and building forts and tree houses. We did not have much time for girly girl stuff but enjoyed riding our bikes and having slumber parties. I was a model student though because I thought teachers were the most incredible women I had ever met. I never wanted to look bad in their eyes, they were just too important.

PATTY: I hear you. I idolized my teachers too. I asked Shellie Thomlinson yesterday—her book also a PWQ selection—what she was thankful for. So I’d like to ask you the same thing.

KATHY: All the relationships I have made since I opened Beauty and the Book, since starting my book club, The Pulpwood Queens and Timber Guys, becoming an author, and of course, all my author friends who still support me in huge ways.

PATTY: You are certainly a big fan of mine.

KATHY: No matter how much fame you accrue, how much money you make, how big a house, or expensive a car, you might dream of, the only thing that matters on God’s green earth is your relationships with family, friends, and others. Those are the true riches on this earth and because of that; I am one wealthy and happy woman. I am very, very thankful.

PATTY: You were once asked, “If you died, what would you want to be remembered the most for?” How did you answer?

KATHY: I would hope to be remembered as being a good mother.”

PATTY: Great answer!

KATHY: In hindsight, I found that answer fascinating as authors, books, reading, and promoting literacy is so important to me. But of this life I have lived so far I have learned that in order to truly change the world, we have to start treating and raising our children as the most precious gifts of all. I tried to do that with my children.

PATTY: This is an important banner over the Hickman household too.

KATHY: I wasn’t even near perfect, but I tried really hard to make them confident, young, ladies. I like to think I helped them develop their own person, gave them wings, and let them fly to find their own dreams. For me that was through reading as I read to them before they were born and still read to them today with one in high school and the oldest in college.

PATTY: I did that, read to them from the womb.

KATHY: I also believe that the more we climb the ladder to success through hard work and determination; we must also reach behind us and help others climb up too. It’s no fun at the mountaintop alone.

PATTY: You are a very purposeful lady, Kathy.

KATHY: That is why reading has led me to a higher purpose. I am currently teaching a life writing class at a nearby homeless shelter and I began this all because of a book, Same Kind of Different as Me by Ron Hall and Denver Moore. Here I thought I was going to be giving to them something precious of me, when what I have found is that their gifts to me have given me a true purpose in life.

PATTY: That was a special moment when at the Girlfriends’ Weekend, these guys came walking in. I talked with one of them and he was so moved by your commitment to them.

KATHY: I practically skip every time I go to meet them each month as this class has brought such joy to my life. Sorrow is there too but the relationships we have formed in this group will carry me through to my dying days.

PATTY: Any parting words of wisdom, Kathy?

KATHY: It’s better to give than receive, I mean, they weren’t kidding. So onward book soldiers, live your life as you would wish for your children.Tiara wearing and Book sharing, Kathy L. Patrick.

PATTY: Thanks so much for chatting here today as our special guest Kathy. As I said Kathy is going to autograph her book The Pulpwood Queen’s Tiara Wearing Book Sharing Guide to Life. I’m sitting here looking at the rhinestone tiara on my bookcase. Kathy Patrick sure knows how to create special memories for book lovers. So let’s do as Kathy says, give of ourselves and to our children.

Tomorrow, we have a special novelist in our midst as Melody Carlson drops in to pay us a visit. Our special week continues—Here Comes Trouble—on Words to Go!

When Story Finds a Way

Since I am a writer and storyteller, I’m going to slow down a bit here at Words to Go to talk about writing and how coming-of-age and feeling different from others plays into our stories. Tuesday through Friday, I’ll chat with other authors about this theme.

The Arkansas River promised me that one day I would float out of town and never look back. Rivers lie. The river runs through my hometown meandering around a golf course where John Daily got his start. Russellville is still dry. The college kids drive to the county line to buy rum and gin for the frat parties. Along the riverbanks is where teenagers drive even now to make out. The best make-out spot was up a hilltop drive called Twinkle Land. It overlooked the river. The sky by night and the dark hot-blooded river by night pumped through our teenage souls filling us with all kinds of yearnings.

Growing up near the river succored me with my first milky drop of ambition. The river wove through my town reminding me that there was a way out. But the way out is a two-way vortex that can tow you back home willing or not.

When my first book contract arrived on my doorstep in Baton Rouge, my father called to tell me my mother was dying of cancer.The news jolted a few neurons loose, pulling back the curtain on my childhood. Hearing that I was losing her was like twisting a magic lens to see my sister Judy and me sitting on our front porch saying what we would become; I could smell the sweat and the striving to rise out of the circumstances that paralyzed my mother and father and kept them wallowing in a life they claimed was killing them.

“Your sister is killing me,” my mother wailed.

“You’re killing me,” my father told my mother.

My father’s brothers and sisters were killing him; my mother’s spending would be our death. My mother redeemed soda pop bottles to buy fabric to sew clothes for my little sister and me, yet it was not enough according to my father; she was killing him. A brother I did not know had killed my mother. I killed my father when I left college and got married. When my husband quit his job at NASA to become a minister, Dad swore it would put him in the grave.

Finally, after all the years of predicting her own death, cancer was finally taking my mother. My father had to be jealous. My mother was finally getting her wish after years of threatening to die. But it broke my heart like the first time she predicted it.

When new writers sit in workshops gazing with that tortured look that I remember as the angst of the unpubbed writer, what they want is a magic bullet to publishing. But in a room of thirty or more emerging writers, the energy of their lust clouds their thinking and often they overlook the most important ingredient in finding their story, that of the striving that is going on inside of them in that instant.

If it were not for striving, I would not be a writer.

My mother and father strived to lie down and not live. But as they took breath, they took risks. Living is risky. Writing about it is even riskier. You tell a lie, and people think it’s true. You tell the truth, and people hate you.

The truth telling continues this week on Words to Go, but we predict you are going to love it. Stay tuned as authors Shellie Thomlinson, Kathy Patrick, Melody Carlson, and Karen Harrington share with me their stories—“Here Comes Trouble—How Our Stories Find a Way.”

Feel the Love Book Give Winners

If you left feedback for our author chats this week, your name was automatically placed in The Big Straw Hat for this week's Feel the Love Book Give.

To start out, we have two unclaimed books from awesome new author David W. Pierce. So we did a redraw of names from this week's postings. The winners are:

Don't Let Me Go--Jennifer Eckert Salvage--Rick Estep

For this week's Feel the Love Books, the winners are:

Redeeming Gabriel by Elizabeth White--Connie Sue Larson
Church of the Dog by Kaya McLaren--Wanda Elaine
Butterfly Trees by Gail Martin--Carly Kendall
The Cure by Harry Kraus--Joyce Mahan

Congratulations, Winners!! Please email me at pattyhickman@bellsouth.net with your mailing address. You will be shipped an autographed book. Please allow ten days
to two weeks to receive your book.

Next week is another great week of author chats, but look out because
"Here Comes Trouble!!" Did you grow up not quite fitting in with the "in" crowd? Did you question everyone and everything? Did you have your own "special" style, sit drawing in the margins instead of taking notes? This is a week of celebrating the artistic temperament and it will be a fun week as we chat with author, comedienne Shellie Thomlinson, The Pulpwood Queen Herself--Kathy Patrick, best selling author Melody Carlson, and spec-fic novelist Karen Harrington. You won't want to miss this fun-filled week of getting to know some of today's most beloved authors here on Words to Go!

Update from Girlfriend's Weekend--Jefferson, Texas or Bust!

Here is a great photage from Girlfriend’s Weekend, just in from Queen Kathy Patrick.Girlfriend’s Weekend Photos


I spent the weekend in Jefferson, Texas at a wild booklover’s festival called Girlfriend’s Weekend, sponsored by the Pulpwood Queen, Kathy Patrick. Kathy is the owner of the world’s only beauty salon and bookstore, Beauty and the Book. You would think that in a town as small as Jefferson, Texas that a book festival would be impossible to pull off. But book lovers came from as far away as Kansas, wearing tiaras and bringing a great spirit of merriment and expectation with them—they are passionate about books and eager to hear novelists tell their stories. I met many new friends, like authors Karen Harrington, Leslie Lehr, Kaya McLaren, River Jordan, (yes, that's her real name) and Margaret Cezair-Thompson. And, of course, I’m lining them all up for an author chat. You’re going to just love talking with them. They are all sparkling new talents in the world of fiction. And Kathy Patrick is the genius bringing book lovers and authors together Suthern Style, and stylin' we all were in our costumes and tiaras!