PAULA WHYMAN

Welcome to the latest installment of an occasional series about strange, funny, or simply awful book tour experiences. I feel privileged to present a guest post from the talented novelist Caroline Leavitt, whose newest novel, Pictures of You, is now available and poised to be a huge success, with raves from Vanity Fair, and Oprah's O Magazine, where reviewer Jane Ciabattari called it "Suspenseful...gripping. Leavitt is superb at revealing the secrecy inside many marriages."



Here, Caroline tells the unfortunate story of her television appearance from hell...

Sometimes publicity comes at you from an angle. When I wrote a piece about infidelity for a popular anthology, the editor, a friend of mine, and I were invited on a really prominent national television show. I was so thrilled! “It’ll be a fantastic opportunity to talk about your new novel,” my friend advised. Another friend, a media coach reminded me, that no matter what happened on the show, I could turn the questions in the direction I wanted by saying, “As a novelist, I feel…”

I thought I was prepared. I told everyone on the planet that I was going to be on national television, especially my mother. I spent hours changing my clothes and got to the NYC television studio hours in advance. The makeup girl swiped off all my makeup, sighing and reapplied it. The hair person frowned. “We like curly hair, but it has to be TV curly hair,” she said, and proceeded to flat iron my curls so I looked like someone’s prom date in the 1960s. It didn’t matter. I was going to be on national television and I was going to talk about my novels.

The studio is chilly, and it’s me, and three other women, and to my surprise, I’m not introduced as a novelist or even as a writer. I’m just “one of the women in the anthology.” Well, I figure people will know I’m a writer, right? My piece in the anthology is about a time in my life when my first husband cheated on me, and my best friend, his sister, had actually brokered the deal. I’m asked a few questions, but I’m never able to turn anything around to the fact that I am a writer, and then I happen to look at the monitor, and I see under my image, the legend, in big red letters: HER HUSBAND CHEATED ON HER. Nothing about my novel, nothing about my being a writer, nothing about the fact that it’s my first husband who did this and not my darling second. Not even my name! Every question I’m asked is about infidelity. Finally, during the break, my friend, who sees my discomfort, blurts out to the program host, “Did you know Caroline wrote all these novels? That she has a new one coming out? Maybe it would be good to mention it.”

The host smiles and waves her hand. “Oh, of course I know that. I’ll mention it on air after the break.” She pats my knee encouragingly.

“And did you know it was a betrayal by her first husband, not her current one?” my friend says. “The monitor just said husband.”

The host looks sympathetic. “Of course, I know that,” she says. “We’ll fix it immediately.”

The break is over, and I try to sit up straighter. The interviewer turns to me. “So, how did it feel to be cheated on?” This time I’m prepared. “Well, as a novelist—“ I start to say, when another guest interrupts me and goes off on a tangent about the psychology of infidelity. It’s at that moment that I feel everything is lost. I look up at the monitor and under my picture it now says, “BETRAYED BY HUSBAND.”

I come home. My hair is gluey with spray and I feel like I look ridiculous, my eyes are weighted down with mascara and I’m on a busy urban block. I pass a bus stop and two women suddenly turn and look at me. One of them frankly stares. “Hey, I saw you on television!” she crows and I smile weakly. Maybe they’ll remember my frantic quip about my book. “You’re the one whose husband cheated on you, right?” one woman says.

I sit down on the bench beside them. I tell them I’m an author and that I was upset about the show because it was my first husband, not my current one who cheated, and that I really wanted to promote my novels. One of the women nods sympathetically. When I tell them the name of my latest book and what it’s about, one of the women ferrets in her purse and pulls out a pen and writes the name down. “I’m going to buy it!” one of the women says. “Me, too,” says her friend.

I get up and walk home. My hair still looks stupid, but I feel a little better. You never know what kind of doors publicity can open.

Caroline Leavitt’s new novel, Pictures of You, is a Costco Pennie’s Pick and was in its third printing before publication. For an engaging interview in which Leavitt actually does get to talk about her work, see this recent piece by novelist Susan Henderson at The Nervous Breakdown. Leavitt can be reached at www.carolineleavitt.com.

Visual artist Sara Klar has one of the most interesting biographies of anyone I know. As a young woman, she broke with the insular culture in which she was raised and left all that was familiar behind in order to start her life over again, without the support of her family or community. In the process, she was forced to question what she was always taught about how she was supposed to live. She eventually became a visual artist, exhibiting in Brooklyn's Sideshow Gallery and Janet Kurnatowski, and garnering favorable reviews in The NY Artworld and Saatchi and Saatchi, among others.

I met Sara at VCCA last year, and I recently had a chance to visit her Brooklyn studio, where these photos were taken (with my Blackberry--not the best way to show art--better views can be found on Sara's website). Sara's paintings--which as you can see are very large--are the result of a continuous process of assembling and disassembling, building and destroying. She adds layer upon layer of completed paintings to a canvas and then peels, tears, gouges, and cuts away at it in a process of approaching understanding. As in life, unearthing truths is not a neat and orderly process. Sara told me that if she understands a work before it's done, she destroys it and starts again.



I thought about this in terms of my own approach to fiction. This is why I never write an outline (and I don't know many fiction writers who do); I don't want to know what's going to happen. When I begin, I may have an idea what a story is "about." I'll have a starting point for action, a character, and maybe a high point or big event to work toward--which, by the time I reach it, will probably have changed. I don't want any more information than that; I want to discover it as I go. If I find out too much and I'm still far from the end, I'm in danger of disengaging.

In many ways, Sara's approach to painting is the physical manifestation of the writer's revision process. When you have a draft, you have to go back and peel away, cut away, even inelegantly gouge out pieces of it in order to get it to the place where it works. And usually it's at that stage where the real meaning becomes apparent.

In addition to her paintings, Sara has her own interior design consulting firm. Her focus is on one-on-one consultations that, as she explains, "directly address the impact of emotions along with color, shape and function, within the design dialogue."



In her new practice, Design. physical>>>>>emotional>>>>>transitions, she guides people through the process of reimagining their environment while coping with powerful and complex emotional circumstances, such as new babies, second marriages, retirement, divorce, a death in the family, or other dramatic life style shifts. It seems to me that she's succeeded in integrating her approach to painting with what she learned from her difficult past, and applied it to her design work. I wish I had had her help when I was deciding what to do with my late aunt's furniture, which still sits in my living room, though it is both too big and too small for the space. Although it has no sentimental value to me, in what may be a major cop-out, I merely reupholstered it instead of replacing it. Maybe Sara would have convinced me otherwise. It's uncomfortable furniture, and I hardly ever sit on it, preferring instead either my Lazy-Boy recliner or a giant beanbag chair. And I think that's all I'll say about that.

Meanwhile, I hope that at some point Sara will decide to write her story, because it's a good one.

Sculptor David Garratt's work was on exhibit recently at Artspace in Raleigh, NC. If you ever have the opportunity to view Garratt's fascinating sculptures, I hope you'll do so. I missed the Artspace show, unfortunately, but I did catch his exhibit at Sweet Briar College's Babcock Gallery last fall, and wrote about it in this space.

I find it remarkable that Garratt does not use models. Some of his works are self-portraits, but most of the time, he sculpts faces from memory, based on passing glimpses, or from his imagination, in an attempt to capture a moment, or a fleeting emotion.

David is a resident artist at the VCCA.

Ralph Eaton is a Roanoke-based visual artist who says people who see his work sometimes compare him with the bully toy-mutilator from the Toy Story flicks. But his art is anything but mean-spirited. He uses a wide range of ordinary objects, and for some projects, he deconstructs and reconstructs old stuffed animals he finds at thrift shops. Here, he scorched a teddy bear, and I helped. While another artist held the bear at the end of a long pole, and Ralph operated the blowtorch, I took pictures. I therefore admit my complicity in this bear-burning.





"The game I like to play is making the familiar unfamiliar," Eaton explains. "The sculptures are intended to amplify the absurdity of objects that dominate and clutter our culture."

There is of course the added excitement of doing something a little subversive to cute and cuddly toys. My kids thought it was awesome.





Sometimes the stuffed toys are stand-ins for people, Eaton says, "to contrast outer appearances with inner realities. Cured teddy bears are 'cured' of their cuteness to reveal their dysfunctional condition."


Above is a wall sculpture that Eaton will photograph and reconfigure digitally, with similar goals of creating alternate views of reality.

Eaton's work has just been selected for New Waves 2011 at the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia, a juried exhibition, and in March, he'll be a featured artist at Roanoke's Marginal Arts Festival. Check out Ralph's website for a much broader range of his projects (and much better photographs!).

Maybe you've heard this news already, but Homeland Security has just released a document containing a list of words its staff monitors on social media sites, such as Twitter and Facebook. Thanks to a friend for pointing this out...on Facebook... My favorite comment on that thread was the person who said "I didn't friend Homeland Security."

Well, exactly. Because even though these are in some ways open fora, if you have not selected "public" for your privacy settings, you maybe didn't count on the government knowing how many times you've used the word "pork." Yes, that is one of the words. Which leads me to wonder if they're monitoring Congress, or just people like us who have little say over how the pork, er, money is divided up. And, by the way, is Homeland Security monitoring "pork" in their own house? Because this project should be tested for trichinosis.

Of course, Homeland Security is there to protect us. I say that with an utter lack of irony, and even though I bristle at the term "homeland"--which, I believe, is not on their word list. Anyway, they can monitor our public comments all they want. Nothing new there. If you really want to, you can monitor public comments, and so can I. But is Homeland Security a troll, attempting to friend you and then just leaching off your friend list? When it comes to your private exchanges, is 'probable cause' out the window here?

Where, then, to come down on this issue? Words are both innocent and potential weapons. Weapons for good, and weapons for not-so-good.

Some of the words that might interest you that are being tracked: Exercise. Trojan. Cain and Abel. Cloud. Bust. Plot. ("Plot" as in story? Probably not. But don't they have to read the posts before they know which kind of "plot" it is?) And now that Homeland Security has made this announcement, won't the people they're really looking for start using different words? Like "poultry" instead of pork, "Romeo and Juliet" instead of Cain and Abel?

So I have an idea. Call it the "Homeland Security Story Project." I think it might be fun to "write" a story containing the words on the list--sort of like a 4th-grade writing assignment, but with "grown-up" words--and publish it using social media. It could be posted one line at a time as Tweets by a large number of people, or it could be produced using status updates and comment threads on Facebook.

I'm going to kick out a couple lines, just as an example of what I have in mind. The Homeland Security-monitored words are in bold. Feel free to come up with your own story...



Once upon a time, there were two brothers, Cain and Abel. They did not eat pork. One day, while they were working in the meth lab, there was a black out.

"You swine," said Cain. "Did you forget to pay the electric bill again?"

"I think it's the grid," said Abel. "Can you help me out here? I have a date in Juarez, and I can't find my Trojans."

"Not that chick again," said Cain. "Didn't I tell you she's toxic?"

"I know it, man, but I need closure."



Did I say it had to be a GOOD story?? If anyone decides to take up this challenge, I'll post your work on my blog. And by the way, if you don't see me for a few days, please check that special room at the airport, the one lit by a single bare light bulb.