Book Launch Announced

The launch for The Mystery of the Circus Curse, the fourth book in the “Shandon’s Ivy League” Mystery Series, will be held from 11:30 a.m. – 12:15 Tuesday, May 26, at Hand Middle School. The event is scheduled to be held on the front steps of the school; the rain location will be the school’s media center.

The book, written by children’s mystery writer Karen Petit of Columbia and published by Red Letter Press, continues the adventures of a group of crime-solving pets.

Since 2004, Hand Middle School students have been a test audience for Petit’s mystery series. Teachers and students who participated in the testing of The Mystery of the Circus Curse will be at the launch. More than 200 middle school students have participated in the program since its inception.

The event offers good visuals and the opportunity to promote summer reading.

Children's Author Pens Memoir

Karen Petit, noted author of children’s stories (see her web site at http://www.theivybooks.com/), published her first book for adults this spring (2008). Titled A Paw on My Heart, the book tells the author’s true story of how, in the aftermath of a horrendous divorce, she reluctantly acquired a dog for companionship–and discovered the amazing healing power of pets. Ms. Petit’s publisher is Red Letter Press, Columbia, S.C. The author, pictured here with her now-deceased dog Ivy, invites comments on her work.


Opening of A Paw on My Heart

Ivy rescued me. She didn’t jump into the water and pull me to safety. She didn’t find me lost on a mountain trail. She didn’t push me out of the way of an oncoming car in a pedestrian crosswalk.

Ivy saved me by being herself: a dog.

For more about this author and her books: http://redletter press.googlepages.com

Another winner!

Red Writer congratulates Robert Lamb, whose story "Black Coffee" has been voted the best story of July 2008 to be posted on The Elder Storytelling Place: http://www.timegoesby.net/elderstorytelling/2008/07/black-coffee.html.

The story also appears in print in the summer/fall issue of Ep;phany, A Literary Journal. Lamb is a Columbia, S.C., writer. "Black Coffee" can be seen at http://www.ronnibennett.typepad.com/elderstorytelling/
and http://robtlamb.author.googlepages.com/.

The Winner!

Deep in the Heart -- A Memoir of Love and Longing, by Sheila Morris, a Red Letter Press author, won First Place last night in the Fourth Annual Golden Literary Society Awards competition in Phoenix, AZ. Via redletterpress@gmail.com, Red Writer received the following email from Sheila this a.m. announcing the big news. Sheila attended the event with her Significant Other Teresa Williams.

"WE WON!!!!!! It was an unbelievable night - really - but we WON!!!!!

I thanked my publisher, Red Letter Press, just like all the other winners did, so you joined a special group of publishers tonight!! I wish you had been here to see it. Luckily, I think we can order a video!!

Teresa is as hysterically happy as I am, and we are beside ourselves...honestly, if you could have seen the book on the huge screen just like at the Academy Awards with Red Letter Press written beside the cover along with my name, you would have been so pleased. The presenter read Ed Madden's blurb, and it was great to hear!!

Just wanted to let you know - you should go take a look at the competition if you haven't yet.

Celebrate yourself tonight, you clever devil, you.

Thank you again for your belief in the book - I will always be grateful to you."

(Ed. Note: Dr. Madden, a well-known poet, teaches at the University of South Carolina. Sheila's book was entered in the Lesbian short story/essay category. Deep in the Heart, published in 2007, was her first book. She is now writing another, from which a sampling will be posted here soon.)
To visit Red Letter Press: http://RedLetterPress.googlepages.com

Who You Are Is Where You Were When

James D. McCallister

When I first notice her, I am standing in front of Pollock’s Full Fathom Five, looking for the key. The voices of the patrons echo all around us; in the various galleries, the guards stand by, staid and silent, watching over the masterworks, as well as the aesthetes admiring them. The paintings, that is.

“I approve of this one,” she says in her charming accent—elegant, precise English flavored with a Latino patois, more Spain than Mexico. Her voice is Eros personified, her face and hair dark, exotic. She has circles under her eyes, smudges that are less a flaw than a mark of character: Perfection forestalled by fatigue, perhaps.

She turns to me. “Do you like it?”

At the question from this beautiful woman, my heart leaps into my throat and then drops back down, fluttering around in my belly: I’m a pushover for a pretty face. Always have been. “I think it’s interesting. Different from the broad, anarchic scope of the large canvasses, which can be overwhelming.” I’m just quoting my girlfriend. I’m no art expert.

“Yes,” she agrees. “But different in a good way, I think.”

“So you like Pollack?”

“I don’t like Pollack, not usually. Throwing paint around? I don’t think so. But this one is interesting.” She indeed points to the key embedded in the canvas. “Interesting,” she repeats. I nod in agreement.

Having met this ravishing young lady, I’m even more distracted than I already was by the groups of art lovers hovering and admiring and soaking up the genius, the depth of theme, the aching poignancy, the angularity, the arch satire, the originality, the social commentary, the proficiency of technique, the sophistication of color and line and form. MOMA is jammed on this bright springtime Saturday, and because of the crowds, I’m having trouble enjoying the artworks—but then again, I’m just killing time, really. I didn’t have to pay, because of someone who works here, that same girlfriend who sports me passes. I try to have an interest in these matters, so that the two of us—me and the GF, not this beauty—will have something about which to converse.

As my new friend starts to walk away—she says she wants to see the Jasper Johns that is upstairs—I ask if I may accompany her.

She shrugs, lifts a heavy eyebrow. I take this noncommittal response as leaning toward the affirmative, and so I follow behind.

“Are you a student?” she asks as we stroll along.

“Yes and no.”

“Oh? And what does this mean, this yes and no?” She obviously prefers straight answers. English is her second language, or so I presume.

“It means that, yes, I am a student, but of the world at large.” I inform her of the fact that college is a few years in the past, now. I hope she doesn’t ask what I do for a living, which these days isn’t all that much. “What about you?”

“I am still learning many things, yes.” A small smile, then. “Learning about art. About America.”

“Two broad canvasses. Layered. Dimensional.”

“Like the key in the Pollack?”

As we pass on the catwalk over the grand lobby, I point out the Rodin sculpture down below us, the Monument to Balzac that was so derided at the time of its unveiling, but that now occupies a place of immense honor in one of the world’s most formidable collections of modern art. “More like that—three dimensional. Symbolic. Bigger than life.”

She returns to the prior subject. “I saw your backpack. That is why I wondered if you were a student.”

“I figured it was the glasses and generally bookish air.”

A tiny frown. “What is bookish air?”

“Studious.” Now I furrow my brow, try to look serious, intellectual. “Learned.”

“Ah. What was your course of study? Was it art?”

“Of a different sort—the rarified art that is predicated upon the consumption of exotic tobaccos and beverages of malted hops. Distilled elixirs taking the place of textbooks.” And also of an examined life, I silently remind myself.

She stares at me with vague incomprehension, a tilt of her head.

I hesitate before I continue, not wanting to seem rakish, but I can’t help myself: “Also the pursuit of companionship with the fair sex, as they say.”

“Fair sex?”

“Female companionship. Girls.”
I sense that her vibe has now cooled. She clears her throat. “Well. I see that you have not outgrown this pursuit. Yes?”

“No. I mean, yes: I have a girlfriend—I mean, I’m engaged.” Yes, this is true, but when I saw her—this woman, not Molly—I knew I wanted to be with her. To have her. To know her.

As I suggested, when they’re this pretty the temptation comes naturally, less a habit or a moral failing than a primal urge. I’m a young man, still. I’m the same person I was ten years ago, in a sense, at the first flowering of adolescence, when the girls began to occasionally notice me instead of the other way around. Pre-puberty, I had been a little dork, and the newfound reciprocity by women to my amorous entreaties blew my mind, made me want them all. Untenable, unrealistic—but, again, primeval and quite natural, this feeling. The life force urging itself on. To forge a link to the future, of permanence in the face of the fleeting moments that add up to the sum of a human life.

“Did you meet her in an art museum?”

“No, no, nothing like that. We were classmates, in an undergrad lit course. Funny, though, about the museum thing—as a matter of fact, she’s a docent.”

“Yes? At what museum?”

I shrug, offer a diminutive chuckle. “Here.” The truth is, I came to take Molly out to lunch, but waiting for her break to begin, I got distracted by the paintings. Among other things.

“What is her, oh . . .” She gropes for the correct turn of phrase. “Area of expertise?” She says it expertiss.

“Mixed media. She’s an artist herself.”

“Ah. Waiting to make the sale, yes? Working in the museum . . . to make . . . to burn the candle’s ends, yes, until she finds success?”

“To make ends meet. That’s the expression.”

“Ah.” She checks her watch, glances at the MOMA map. “I hope that she becomes the artist that she wishes to be.”

“It’s her dream. And mine for her, as well.”

“Has she always wanted to do that?”

“Ever since I’ve known her. She says her parents were good about taking her to places like this. Says that she knew from a very young age what she wanted to be, from the moment she walked into a room filled with masterpieces.”

“Masterpieces.” Masterpeezizz.

I explain that Molly’s the opposite of me, that I continue the struggle to find myself, to assume my place not only in the grand course of human endeavor, but on some days to find the me that is inside my head, to define myself. In many ways, I’m the same as I’ve always been, searching for the answer to the riddle that is who and what I truly am. Like everybody, I’ve been shaped by the events of my life, the people around me, the books I’ve read, the films I’ve seen, the art that has inspired me. But to find the sum of the parts—the whole—is the key.

By the time I finish, I feel as though my friend has lost the thread of my rambling—and for reasons having less to do with a language barrier than another level of discourse, that of cogency.

“I should say goodbye, now. I have enjoyed our conversation?”

Why she poses her remark as a question instead of what should be a statement is yet another riddle, but one that will resist a solution—despite my attraction, I understand it is the last time that I will see my new friend, that I will not ask for her name, nor will she ask mine.

“I know that I have. Enjoy the museum.”

“I already have,” she says. She turns on her heel, leaving behind a trace of her scent that is like honeysuckle on a warm breeze.

As I watch her stroll away, my cell buzzes in my pocket, and it is Molly. The art lives and breathes all around me but, as I admitted, I’ve never had much of an appreciation for it, not like my fiancé. Maybe that’s why we’re a good couple. She’s everything that I am not. She completes me.

I wonder, sometimes, what it is that I do for her?

Outside on the street, the trees are in their first flowering of the season of rebirth, and their beauty is matched by that of my girl—except in her expression: Molly looks odd, troubled.

“There’s something we need to talk about,” she says.

“What?”

“Us.”


James D. McCallister, a Columbia writer and merchant, has written prize-winning short-stories and is the author of King's Highway, a coming of age novel published in 2007 by Red Letter Press. He can be reached at gr8tful@bellsouth.net. He also has a web site at http://www.jamesdmccallister.com/.