Here Comes Trouble--and a Whole Lot of Fun! Welcome, Shellie Thomlinson to Words to Go

More comfortably billed as a “talker” than a speaker, author Shellie Thomlinson enjoys entertaining and encouraging a wide range of audiences, as long as she can weave her faith through the stories. Whether sharing her humorous slant on growing up southern in civic and educational settings or offering inspiring devotional features in church services, seminars or weekend retreats, Shellie’s “talks” are full of laughs and motivation. Shellie is the author of “Lessons Learned on Bull Run Road”, “’Twas the Night before the Very First Christmas” and “Southern Comfort with Shellie Rushing Tomlinson” and the recently released title from Penguin Group USA, Suck Your Stomach In and Put Some Color On . Shellie is owner and publisher of a website called All Things Southern and the host of a daily radio show and weekly TV segment by the same name. I’m so pleased to invite Shellie as a guest author on Words to Go. Welcome, Shellie!

SHELLIE: Thank you, Patty, for inviting me.

PATTY: Shellie, As a kid, I didn't follow the herd very well. I got into trouble for starting a book club beneath a tree during kickball. When I persisted, I got sent to the classroom as punishment. That was great--no sweaty kickball in my gut and more time to read. Growing up a little different from the other kids, though, can be painful. Whether we learn passive resistance, mouthy behavior, or dressing above the expected mores for fashion, somehow artistic souls find expression. What is an early remembrance you have as a kid that says, I was different,and this is how it was either good or painful, you fill in the blank?

SHELLIE: When you grow up tone deaf in a family of songbirds sporting an extreme speech impediment and wearing thick coke bottle glasses and big ugly corrective shoes, the You Are Different Memo isn't necessary. Trust me on this.

PATTY: I married into a family of songbirds. I understand your pain.

SHELLIE: Add to that my earliest dreams of becoming a famous country western singer and/or a famous writer despite the obvious hindrances noted above and you have a stellar look into my world.

PATTY: What do you remember about your childhood?

SHELLIE: I settled early on just making the world around me smile, which I still contend is all I was trying to do in the fifth grade when Mrs. Gilly returned to the classroom to find me standing atop my desk and singing, "Oh, yes, they call him the Streak, look at that, look at that...fastest thing on two feet."

PATTY: I remember that song playing on our hometown radio station. What did your teacher do?

SHELLIE: I like to say I didn't have to turn around to know she was there. First, there was the sudden dead pan look of my previously laughing audience. (I'd been hoping for a better review.) Plus, I could feel her breath on my neck. Together with my parents and the principal, they convinced me to give up entertaining, at least for a while.

PATTY: Teachers were so humorless in those days. Some people just don’t have an imagination for fun. In hindsight, when you look now at how your life has unfolded as an author--truly, in your friends eyes, an elevation above the herd--what are you thankful for?

SHELLIE: I could write a novel here from a grateful heart, but as gracious as you are to have me come play at your place Patty, I think you're looking for something considerably shorter. I shall choose three. I'm grateful for the maternal grandmother who saw in me a famous writer and bought me a type-writer when I was eleven, who acted like I had something to say and people needed to hear it. Every child should have such a gift! I am grateful for the opportunity to use words to lighten the loads of those I come into contact with and I'm grateful for The Word that inspires and motivates everything I do.

PATTY: And we are grateful to have you visit us today here on Words to Go. Thank you, Shellie, for dropping in. You can pay a visit to Shellie’s place, All Things Southern, and read her thoughts and ruminations on life.

Tomorrow, I’m pleased to say that we another celebrity in our midst. Kathy Patrick is the founder of the world’s biggest book club and most famous as even Oprah talks about this lady’s book club The Pulpwood Queens. I met Kathy when she picked Painted Dresses as a Pulpwood Queens Selection. And now she has authored her own book too. So drop in and sit a while as we chat with Kathy Patrick—don’t forget your tiara.

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!