Coffee with Athens-based Author Terry Kay

Athens-based Author Terry Kay found fame as the author of To Dance With The White Dog. I shared coffee and literary talk with this friendly author the other morning at an Athens coffee shop. Look for my article and a review of Kay’s latest novel, The Book of Marie, in a future issue of Athens Magazine. Later, while visiting Kay’s blog, I noticed that he will receive the Stanley Lindbergh award in December. Check that out here:http://www.georgiacenterforthebook.org/lindberg.htm.

Talking With Author Terry Kay

In addition to writing children’s middle grade novels, I write book reviews and magazine articles. Tomorrow morning I’m heading to Athens to interview one of my favorite authors, Terry Kay, for my Bookshelf column in Athens Magazine, a regional lifestyle magazine

Author Terry Kay

published by Morris Communications. Terry is the author of To Dance With the White Dog, After Eli, Shadow Song and several other novels including his latest, The Book of Marie. I feel honored by this opportunity to interview this author who was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in April, 2006. Come back in a day or two to read more about my meeting with Terry Kay.

Happy Halloween to All!

Today is Halloween. In Winterville, Georgia, the small town where I live, fall leaves crackle in the chilly morning breese. All around me, I know children are excited about tonight’s trick or treat expeditions. Tonight my husband Phillip and I will hand out candy at a friend’s house (since my children are grown and kids are afraid to venture up my long driveway). That way, she can go out trick or treating with her six-year-old daughter Emily. Emily’s older brothers, Brian and Michael, will probably “bury” themselves near their front porch with fake tombstone marking their pretend graves. When groups of kids come up to ring the doorbell, the boys will rise out of their graves and scare the living daylights out of the trick or treaters. Who needs candy when you can do something like that on Halloween night?

Every Halloween takes me back to my own childhood Halloweens. My costume of choice? I was always a witch. I guess my dark hair gave me a slight kid witch look. I remember walking down a dark Indiana Avenue trick or treating our neighbors. My favorite was the Palmers’ house. I’d ring the bell and Mrs. Palmer would appear with a plate of candy from husband Red Palmer’s store next to their house. Who could forget the wax lips and mouth harps? The carnivals at Oconee St. School — and later Winterville Elementary? That time in the late 1950s and early 60s when Halloween was more treat than trick?

Welcome to my author’s journey!

How does an online bookseller become the author of a book of her own? That’s what this webblog is all about: my journey of words. In these pages, I’ll show you how I moved from selling the words of other authors in my book business, Junebug Books, to selling my own words in middle grade novel form to Random House Children’s Books. Come along with me. Follow the word trail of this blog as I tell you the how, where, why and even the “how come.”

The Beginning

Actually, I was a writer before I became an online bookseller in 1998. I started writing at age eight, scribbling poems in Mrs. Doster’s fourth-grade class at Oconee St. Elementary School in down town Athens, Georgia. Mrs. Doster liked my poems enough to send one, “How Would You Like to go to the Moon?” to Jack & Jill Magazine. Apparently, that was my first rejection slip since I never heard another word on that subject. (I suspect my teacher filed that early rejection in the round file, to spare me from forth-grade author anguish!) I still remember my “moon” poem from fourth grade. It went like this:

How would you like to go to the moon

up in the blue, blue sky?

How would you like to go to the moon

up in space so high?

I think I would like to go to the moon

up in the blue, blue sky.

I think I would like to go to the moon

up in space so high.

Well, okay. It’s a simple poem about space travel. But remember, in 1959 when I wrote this poem, man (or woman) had not yet been to the moon. So when I looked outside my bedroom window in our little frame house on Indiana Avenue, the moon looked like a wild, unexplored place. And I really wanted to go though I knew my chances as a fourth grade girl in the late 1950s were practically nonexistent. Still, I wrote about it and those words still echo in my mind today, when we actually hear rumblings of possible space shuttles to the moon for all in the not-too-distant future.

I continued to write poems after I “graduated” from elementary school. Later, in high school, I landed on the newspaper staff where I fielded the occasional article assignment. Once in English class, we were assigned to write a character profile. I wrote about a man sleeping in a seat near me on a plane ride to Chicago for the National Scholastic Press Association national convention. When the teacher handed me back my “A” paper, she asked me why I wasn’t writing for the school literary magazine. I didn’t have a good answer for her, other than something about being on the newspaper staff and maybe I didn’t have time for both.

Donny typing in 1969

But I kept writing poetry and a little fiction during my high school days. One of my early short stories ends with Julian Bond as president of the United States. This was in the 1960s, in the days of the Civil Rights Movement. We had sit-ins at our Woolworth’s soda fountain counter on Clayton St. in downtown Athens. Crosses were burned on the very road where I lived. TV news broadcasts were filled with black citizens marching for their equal rights. So to me, my story which ended with a black president was almost as daring, and unlikely to come true, as my poetic trip to the moon. Yet today, we have an African-American presidential candidate.

I’ll continue my journey of words in the next installment of this blog. Come back and check it out soon. Who knows where we’ll go!