For Part 1 of our interview, click HERE.

Cathy Luchetti is the author of eight books about the settling of the American West in the 18th and 19th centuries, from religion to cooking and cuisine to courtship rituals and child-rearing. She was invited by Laura Bush to come to the White House to be part of a discussion of Women in the West. She has received numerous honors, including the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award for Literary Excellence for Women of the West (1982) co-authored with Carol Olwell. Her book  Home on the Range: A Culinary History of the American West received the James Beard Best Writing on American Food Award in 1994. Medicine Women: The Story of Early-American Women Doctors (1999) was short-listed for the Willa Cather Award in non-fiction. Other books include Under God’s Spell: Frontier Evangelists, 1772-1915, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (San Diego, CA), 1989; “I Do!”: Courtship, Love, and Marriage on the American Frontier: A Glimpse at America’s Romantic Past through Photographs, Diaries, and Journals, 1715-1915, Villard Books (New York, NY), 1995; The Hot Flash Cookbook: Delicious Recipes for Health and Well-Being through Menopause, Chronicle Books (San Francisco), 1997; Mama Says: Inspiration, Wit and Wisdom from the Mothers in Our Lives, Loyola Press (Chicago), 1999. Her book Children of the West: Family Life on the Frontier, Norton (New York, NY), published in 2001, was named by the Los Angeles Times one of the Best Books of 2001—The West. Men of the West (Norton) appeared in 2004.

Zara Raab: How did you select which first-hand accounts to use in a book like Women of the West? Did you get a sense of the personality of the letter-writer or diarist as you read them?

Cathy Luchetti: They were all different. If it was the Colorado Historical Society or the National Archives or the Bancroft Library––one of the larger institutions––the collections are now on-line with an abstract.  And the photographs are on-line too, and that makes it much easier. But when I started writing my books, very few of them were on-line. For me, it was mostly coming up with the concept, and then coming up with a list of queries and sending it out to the archives. It was sort of like fly-fishing. Hopefully, I’d get an archivist who would think about my letter and then suggest a collection. There might be 15 boxes of materials to sort through, and in that case, it would be easier to fly there and do it myself. The librarians and archivists gave me leads and my job was reading through everything to find the best letters and diaries for my purposes. The most useful and best archivist or a curator was the one who could point me to certain archives and say, for example,  “This is someone who had a fabulous love affair.” That would be the lead, and the rest of it would be my sitting there day and day, and reading and reading.

ZR: Considering the importance of letters and diaries to your account, do you mourn the decline in both in the 21st century?

CL: During all this period when I was raising my children, in the 1970’s and 1980’s, there was no sense of journal keeping or correspondence. But the past ten years or so, people are keeping more records than they ever kept and they are storing all their correspondence. These email letters are with us, there are more of them than we want, or than we can possibly handle. No, we aren’t using a pen or heavy, beautifully made paper, but we are expressing ourselves more than ever.

It’s similar to the frontier, when people whether educated or not, kept journals. Everyone kept them. We have the same thing now. If we go on blogs, half the people are ––well, maybe educated, true, but they don’t care if they’re literate or literary, and many of them aren’t. They’re just recording things that happen to them now. But there is a difference. The people on the frontier felt they were very much in the background of an important time. Today we think we are really, really important even though we don’t have anything to say. It’s narcissistic; it’s the “Me” generation, extended by three more generations. It just is what it is.

ZR: You’re speaking here of the bloggers?

CL: Yes. There’s a difference in quality. Perhaps a hundred years from now, these blogs will be just as valuable as the journals and letters of the 19th Century pioneers.  Perhaps you’ll go to the Bancroft Library to the “Blog” section and there it’ll all be, tear stains, misspellings, popular slang, and verbal graffiti.  You’ll have it all.  . . There’s a difference in quality, however, from the old pioneer diaries. Nowadays, everybody has something to say about nothing.

Peter Hadreas, a professor of philosophy at San Jose State University, and his colleagues are beginning to debate whether blogs are truly more philosophical than philosophy papers published in academic journals. The idea of a philosophy paper is a dialogue a la Socrates, and if you do a paper it’s just your opinion on the matter. But if you write a blog, it opens up a dialogue, which is actually true philosophy. What’s that going to do to the old “Publish or Perish” idea? It’s just one more way in which culture changes. Ideas spark. They go viral. They meet and collide. If they’re bad, they metastasize.

ZR: Did you get to touch and handle the actual letters and diaries you used as sources? Or were they micro-fiched?

CL: Oh, you have to put on your white gloves and you have to get used to looking at almost transparent paper, like onionskin. Often words were written horizontally across the page and also around the edges, because they had to compress as much onto a page as they possibly could. Paper was valuable.  Words would be written crosshatched across other words to save paper. In other cases, the writing would be in a schoolbook and more orderly, Or the document might be typewritten by someone who came across it in the 20th Century and tried to transcribe it. Some letters were water-stained as with tears, and you could image that someone was crying. The paper itself really revealed a lot about them and what their lives were like. If I could read anything at all in a letter handwritten in tiny crabbed handwriting, or large, scrawling handwriting that loped across the page, I counted myself lucky. Sometimes it was a matter of getting three words, but finding the next three indecipherable, and then getting the next three, so you might be able after all to figure out what they were writing about. Some collections were also excerpted in other works, and then I would know exactly who to ask for.  So then gradually I acquired my own “favorite” archives, and I could just go over to my files and select a relevant passage to use. This is one of the reasons I stopped writing: The archival materials became too favorite, almost too old and familiar.

ZR: The letters had marks, tears or blood or dirt? 

CL: Yes, you could sometimes tell the writer or reader had been crying. No blood that I recall. Nobody wore lipstick in those days, so they didn’t blot their lips on the letters. Some letters were burned, as if they’d been read by candlelight. Many of these letters were so fragile, you could just hear them crack if you turned the page.

ZR: What was the paper like?

CL: The paper was fairly good. Everything was built better a hundred years ago. The libraries cover them in plastic and they put wedges in them, so you can only open the pages so far.

ZR: What will happen to all these documents in time?

CL: Someone will have a monstrous scanning task at some point. I don’t know how they are going to handle that.

ZR: The journals were pretty intimate?

CL: There were two or three journals I remember, in which a woman kept track of her period, and so she was worried about getting pregnant. But there wasn’t a lot of tortured soul-searching in most of the diaries, as you can see by reading my books.

ZR: Let’s talk about Under God’s Spell: Frontier Evangelists 1772-1915. What inspired you to do this book?

CL: I had the idea because I was fascinated by frontier religious conversion experiences, and the documented cases of people who had no particular interest in religion or even Christianity, having a religious experience and suddenly feeling they had no choice but to preach and minister to others. I tried to collect those stories. It’s one thing to be someone who’s always wanted to become a minister, it’s another to be roped into it by the divine. These people all had dynamic conversion experiences that completely changed their lives.

ZR: You have a distant ancestor who became a traveling minister in Oregon, and you include an excerpt from his diaries in your book. Did you know when you started your research that you had a relative—a great-great-uncle, A.J. McNemee, I believe, who had kept a diary?

CL: I had no idea.

ZR: You recognized the name in an archive?

CL: No, I came across it in a genealogical reference. My own family has an archive at the St. Helena Wine Library and in that archive the name of this great-great-uncle was mentioned, as a descendent of the Myers. And there it was, this poor bachelor loping around trying to solace grieving widows and orphaned children. He’s one of the backwoods saints. If he were Catholic, he’d be a saint, that is. But since he was a Protestant, he’s an Everyman.

I was also interested in the topic because I had a similar spiritual experience. I had just turned 28, and I had a strong experience that said you now believe in God, as opposed to the day before when I didn’t. I’m a kind of free-range Christian. I was curious; I hoped to find accounts by others who had had similar experiences. It doesn’t happen to people who don’t have their faith; it’s usually people who are wondering about it. I just had this very strong experience. I wanted to see who else had had that experience of being suddenly overwhelmed by cosmic love: It was like being in a meteor shower. Science might call this a neurological event. I call it spiritual.

When people say religion, I usually balk. Religion seems different from faith.  Those involved in organized religion so often lose their faith and have to claw their way back to some kind of place where they can believe again. From doubt to faith, and back again.

ZR: I am intrigued by the comparison you make in your introduction to Under God’s Spell between revival meetings in the 19th century and the 20th century political rally. Is there some of the same “brash assurance” as you call it, in the current American style of political oratory as there was in the revival meetings? Newt Ginghrich as a kind of revivalist?

CL: Yes, absolutely. Actually, religion in the U.S. has played an enormous part in the enfranchisement of women. The only reason women got the vote was that all the men went off to the Civil War, so women got active in the churches. They learned how to organize—how to fundraise, how to take petitions, and so on. They got savvy politically, because they had positions of power in the churches—but, oops, they couldn’t vote! And meanwhile they were all working on suffrage for the blacks. So women began to organize themselves for more powerful roles in society under the aegis of the church they belonged to—so long as the churches were Protestant, but not Lutheran, high church Anglican or Catholic, because these institutions took a dim view of Populism.

People were terrified of these large camp meetings, when the evangelist comes into town to “slay” the townspeople, “slay them in the spirit.” The evangelists came with big energy. The towns actually installed hitching posts for the express purpose of holding people up while they were under the evangelist’s power. These religious leaders were psychically extremely powerful. From a religious point of view, it’s easy to explain, but from a secular point of view, it seemed like mass hysteria.

Yes, women became involved in the churches, and in Chautauqua in New England. And you have the two Great Awakenings, the periods of intense religious revival in the United States. It was logical that if you could get thousands of people gathered together in a meadow for a camp meeting, you could take political advantage of that: It was a perfect place for politicians to campaign and make political points. People became accustomed to the bombast of the preachers. The political rally cum religious camp meeting really didn’t happen anywhere else in the world.  It’s purely, uniquely American, this connection between politics and religion.

ZR: And the personalities of the itinerant preachers, do you think we find them today on the streets of our cities? What you call, and I quote, “Restless and idiosyncratic by nature, the itinerants were as footloose as any mountain men, proclaiming [. . .] their version of [. . . ][Christian] doctrine: ‘free will, free grace, and individual responsibility”?

CL: Berkeley reminds me a lot of a camp meeting. [We laugh.] They are decrying slightly different things, but they are all true believers. What can I say? I’m from Oakland.

ZR: How is American life, or at least life on the West Coast today, shaped by what happened one hundred to two hundred years ago?

CL: What happened 200 years ago would come under the rubric of Can Do. What’s happening now is mostly Can’t Do. And that’s really unfortunate. The Silicone Valley still manifests the pioneer spirit. A lot of the green energy manifests that same spirit–– except it’s government mandated—that’s the difference. The pioneers were individually mandated. I’m a little bit of a libertarian. Nowadays, it’s mostly what you can’t do, because there’s a regulation against it. Anybody trying to get a permit for anything will understand that. It’s the way it has to be. Life is different. The pioneer spirit is pretty much squashed.

Wait. I take it back. The spirit’s not squashed. There are thousand of ideas. The ideas are flowing; it’s just that it’s harder to get institutional and infrastructural support for them. A fabulous new book called Abundance–-I recommend it–– makes this point. As a people, we still question and resist authority. And now there’s an idealization of people who don’t graduate from college. You see all the green farmers, the plantation industry—growing marijuana. Not everything is squelched. Even among the thousands of bloggers, people who can’t achieve anything, but at least they can put down their point of view. And there are so many fabulous ideas that our society comes up with. We have so much great genius that it’s hard to be discouraged. I can’t wait to see what’s next.

ZR: Let’s turn to your book I Do! Courtship, Love and Marriage on the American Frontier. Your account vividly portrays the child and teen brides, and the numberless deaths in childbirth that left so many orphans. Only in the late 20th century did social scientists document the legacy that broken family bonds creates for a generation. Do you think the scarcity of civilized institutions and extended families to care for orphans, not to mention the paucity of other types of civilizing institutions—fraternal societies, clubs, social registers—led to the creation of an underclass of people who were—pardon my saying so—ill-mannered unkempt, undisciplined, incapable of making strong social bonds, in short an underclass of renegades?

CL: I think you are absolutely right. Anywhere else in the world, an underclass would be created by a top down decision. Here in this country, it’s a self-selecting decision, and the ones who make it to the urban centers have the best chance to survive and make it in American terms, to get out of the underclass. But it’s not just a question of staying or leaving the rural areas. There’s a strong cultural component. For example, I just finished a three-day trip with a woman friend from Cambodia who was in Pol Pot concentration camp. She came here, and she was responsible for raising her five siblings, while her parents had a sweatshop. She went to college and got a degree and began making money as a professional. But of her five siblings, not one of them went to college, yet they all look down on her, because although she is successful in American terms, she has no family, no children. It has nothing to do with  being rural; it has to do with being in an ethnic ghetto. The siblings couldn’t boost themselves out.

They think they are better off because they have families and work as manicurists. . . Every population has its way of separating out a certain segment of the population, of ghettoizing its population, of dividing the culture into elite and non-elite. Separating out the strands. It’s just fascinating.

ZR: You describe at one point how the soldiers at one of the forts planned to have the wives and white women killed if it looked like they would be taken hostage by “redskins” and possibly raped. What do you make of the concept of personhood in this attitude toward women’s virtue? As if a woman ceased to exist if she was not longer ‘pure’—at least virtuous white women who were as yet unsullied. Yet this attitude may still exist in some parts of our culture as a kind of tribal attitude that fixes human relationship and identities, and that still exists.

CL: We’re seeing this right now in the Middle East, this over-emphasis on a woman ‘s virtue. Virtue was prized more than the woman; you saw a lot of this in Victorian times. That would make sense. Much of the Middle East is about 150 years behind the West in that respect.

ZR: It is no wonder everyone in the West was a writer, as writing—letters, diaries, expressive poems, and songs—is a way of establishing a self from the inside rather than the outside.

CL: That’s exactly right, and it’s extremely important to the Western experience, where you were removed from all your social bulwarks. A frontiersman in the West didn’t know if someone he met was honest or dishonest. They knew very, very little about the people around them. If someone carried a volume of Shakespeare’s plays in his saddle bag, you figured he was at least educated, but otherwise trust had to be established somehow. People tried to compensate for this lack of social structure by carrying letters of recommendation that said, “I know so and so.” They did this whenever possible. If they couldn’t do this, they would have to prove themselves through valor, hard work, or extreme honesty–– whatever trial and test might work to prove themselves to others. Everybody was on trial. You didn’t know who anybody was, but people were much more open and trusting. They gave you a chance to demonstrate who you were. But later things changed. After the Civil War, there was an influx of Southerners to the Far West. Everybody wanted to be around a Southerner, because of their gentile manners. They said, “Yes, Ma’am,” and “No, Ma’am.” They introduced manners ordinarily expected of a European.

Nowadays, too, people are fashioning themselves to become whomever they wish. Maybe the whole on-line world is a little like the old American frontier. You’re presented with material but you try to read between the lines, and find a way to survive and thrive. You can create yourself and defeat yourself. On the frontier, you had to actually be a physical presence. In the new frontier of cyberspace, you don’t even have to do that to become to become an avatar.

About the Interviewer,  Zara Raab

Zara lives in Berkeley and is one of the first women to graduate in architecture from UC Berkeley. She grew up along California’s North Coast, attending school in Portland when she was fourteen, and later Mills College and the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) for college and graduate school. In her twenties, she traveled, living in Paris, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., where she made a living as a freelance editor and writer, participating for a time in the Capitol Hill Poetry Group, before returning to the West Coast to raise her children.

Early California is a subject of her book Swimming the Eel, just as the drama of family life is the subject of  The Book of Gretel. In leaving behind the rural counties, she became a part of the human potential movement of the 1960′s, and that movement perhaps more than anything, shapes her life and her work. Since she was a teenager, she kept journals, and sometimes returns to those early notebooks for ideas. Her poems appear in many literary reviews and magazines, including The Dark Horse, The Evansville Review, River Styx, Crab Orchard Review, Nimrod, Dos Passos Review, Arts & Letters, and others. She also review books and writes essays on literature for various publications, including the Redwood Coast Review, Poetry Flash, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Colorado Review, San Francisco/Sacramento Book Reviews, and The Boxcar Poetry Review.

The internet and the democratization of the publishing industry have made it easier than ever today to publish a book. With so many people publishing material in so many different formats, the competition to sell one’s writing has never been keener. The wisest and most savvy authors and indie publishers are investigating what a book publicist can do for them.

The book publicist sits at the back end of the publishing chain and is the team member who pushes the finished book into the marketplace. Book publicity begins six to twelve months prior to release date, when the marketing plan and book platform are written, and typically ends about four months after launch.

Book publicists specialize in specific genres, just like literary agents do. These specialties are nonfiction and fiction subgenres like how-to, history, career, business, biography, autobiography, self-help, and historical fiction. Some book publicists are employed directly by publishing houses and some freelance for publishers and authors.

A critical function of the book publicist is to submit galleys and finished books for book reviews. The publicist may also attempt to get the title on a prominent books list or nominate it for a book award. Also within the publicist’s purview is the pitching of features to journalists either written by, about or mentioning the author.

Publicists can both directly and indirectly affect book sales through their book marketing efforts, including promoting a virtual tour, securing author interviews, leveraging the author’s book blog and social networking profiles, and utilizing the author’s media kit. If funds are available, publicists will also schedule an author’s book talk or ground tour. Publicists will sometimes promote free books and conduct book giveaways to generate interest for a title.

Here is a list of services that some publicists offer:

• Devise and execute the book platform
• Acquire endorsements
• Oversee editing of the book’s back cover text
• Edit the author’s biography and the book’s synopsis
• Create a strategy for the author’s book blog
• Initialize the author’s social networking profiles
• Request book reviews
• Assemble a media kit and disseminate its elements
• Pitch interviews and features
• Plan the book’s launch event and book talk
• Schedule, host and promote the book’s virtual tour
• Encourage nomination of the title for book awards
• Position the title for addition to a books list
• Formulate the author’s talking points
• Syndicate the author’s articles
• Recommend venues with high traffic author events
• Leverage the interest of special audiences and book groups

Publicists joke among themselves that no two of them are alike, and in many respects, this is true. Each specializes in a particular type of client or book and each publicist has a track record that illustrates a unique variety of experience. However, one thing is certain–the book with the extra marketing push will always do better, even if a similar title is as good.

About Stephanie Barko

Stephanie Barko, Literary Publicist, was voted Best Book Promotion Service by Preditors & Editors’ Readers Poll in 2011. Her nonfiction successes include anIndieReader Best Book of 2011, a 2011 IPPY and a 2011 International Book Award Winner. Read what clients are saying about her on LinkedIn, and follow her on Facebook.

Basically, there are two kinds of cooks in the kitchen: the free-form cooks, who may look at recipes for ingredient ideas, but create their own dishes by the way they feel, and the systematic cooks ,who follow recipes and ingredients to the dot. The major problem for free-form cooks is that they can rarely duplicate a dish that turns out particularly good. Professionals and better cooks are in the second category; they need to be able to reproduce a recipe exactly every time with only slight modification according to their own taste.

If you are a committed free-form cook, you may never need a thermometer, but if you want your dishes cooked to perfection, you are not likely to be without one. In fact, you’ll likely have two or three. Many professionals consider thermometers as their second most important kitchen tool, right after their knives, and will carry one around at all times.

To ensure that your oven is set at exactly the heat the dial reads, add a simple and inexpensive oven thermometer to your collection. It is easy to reset most ovens, particularly one with a digital dial. The adjustment for most non-digital models is inside the knob that dials the oven temperature. Carefully remove the knob and look for a tiny screw inside that adjusts the thermostat setting.

A candy thermometer is useful when dealing with high-temperature liquids: usually oil or melted sugar.

But the primary, and most critical, thermometer is a small, thin-stemmed digital unit. This helps in many, many different kinds of cooking tasks: having the meat, poultry, and fish cooked to perfection, not overcooked but totally safe; scalding milk without boiling; deep-frying without soaking up oil; cooking with gelatin; proofing yeast goodies; testing baking breads or potatoes for doneness; checking if the freezer and refrigerator are maintaining the correct temperatures, and so on.

Digital instant-read thin-stemmed thermometers are inexpensive, but it’s best not to buy the bottom of the line. Here are some features you should look for:

• A range from freezing to 400⁰F. With this wide range, you can dispense with candy and deep-fry thermometers.
• On/off button to extend battery life.
• Waterproof cover for keeping clean and saving it should you drop it into the dishwater.
• A clamp that attaches to sides of pots, as well as to your apron pocket.

Some cooks like a programmable thermometer with a probe that remains in the baking item while in the oven (I don’t; to me, simplest is best). You can check the progress without opening the oven door. Or if pre-programmed, it warns you when that roasting item is ready.

Totally different types are the costly infrared and laser thermometers, and many cooks consider them as unnecessary toys (myself included). They do read quickly and conveniently, but are no better than their cheaper cousins. They instantly measure the surface of a sauté pan heating up on the stove, if that’s important to you. Professionals stick to simple digitals and attach them to their apron pockets like engineers with their set of pens and pencils.

An inexpensive analog thermometer is also useful; digitals tend to lose their battery power at the most critical time. A simple analog thermometer is a nice backup on such occasions.

Your cooking can only improve when you acquire the habit of using a thermometer in the kitchen all the time, even if you are a total free-form cook.

About Columnist George Erdosh

George Erdosh is a culinary scientist, food writer and certified cooking teacher (and now a cookbook reviewer) with a strong science and research background (Ph.D., McGill University, Montreal). Originally an exploration geologist for some 35 years, he switched career to be a high-end caterer, a business he ran for over 10 years, before switching to food writing and running cooking classes.

He is the author of 10 published food-related books: a six-book series for young readers Cooking throughout American History and The African-American Kitchen; Start and Run a Catering Business (in its 4th edition, translated into five languages), Tried and True Recipes from a Caterer’s Kitchen, and What Recipes Don’t Tell You, as well as numerous articles in magazines and newspapers.

Contact George with questions or problems at howfoodswork@volcano.net.

Writing hot sex is. . .hard.

I wrote a romance novel when I was sixteen. I’d hardly even been kissed— all my education on the subject was from dog-eared, coverless bodice rippers procured at garage sales. To my adolescent mind, these provided all the “education” I needed. I scribbled The Pirate’s Treasure at camp as a series of installments I read aloud each night to my giggling cabinmates. Fabulously tawdry, it featured many of the following words, which should be avoided in any actually hot sex scenes:

Turgid
Hairy
Throbbing
Slippery
Veined
Twitching
Swarthy
Rosebuds (of either the upper or lower kind)
Pulsating
Moist

While I’m not a romance writer per se, writing a good sex scene is indispensable in any writer’s arsenal, and will usually come up at least once in every novel. (Right now I’m “doing” a romantic suspense, and it’s come up more than usual.) As important and commonplace as writing sex is, it’s actually not that easy.

Over the years I’ve come to believe in a state called “reader’s brain”—a semi-hypnotized trance in which the reader seamlessly enters the writer’s world, and voluntarily—as in a good movie—suspends disbelief and embarks upon a journey filled with sounds, smells and experiences they will probably never come across in their own messy, annoying, boring real lives.

This is the joy of reading sex. And since we’re being honest, the joy of writing it too.

And those words listed above, those mood-killing words, are the sand in the vagina of the reader at a critical moment.

The best sex scenes are anchored in details that bring the reader into the bedroom with the characters—but are never tacky or clichéd.

The tender spiral of an ear.

The elegant turn of a shoulder, the shadow of a pulse in the neck.

“Please. Have mercy.” A husky voice, vibrating with need like prayer.

The slow, meticulous act of removing a high heeled shoe. (And leaving the other one on.)

The sucking of a finger, drawing patterns on a naked body. (What are the patterns, wonders the reader—and where will they end?)

Sometimes, it’s rough and desperate, just as we are—a gasping clutch of slamming fulfillment, a rushing together, clothed, against a wall. Sometimes, it’s the clash of warring bodies that turns to hunger, to melting in the hot pour of a shower. Careful details, combined with a glossing-over of the mechanics of the actual act—combine to make scenes that fairly leap off the page.

Overall, whatever “explicit level” is chosen, the scenes in a piece should be kept consistent. If crude words and anatomical details are used, then they should be consistent with the overall tone of the piece, not a delicate flowering suddenly gone rogue with cries of “F—ck me!” (That could be fun, if done believably. If you find a book like this, email me, I want to read it.)

If the usual situation is to bring the reader to the door, then draw the curtain (as I do most of the time in the Lei books) then when the characters actually have sex with us watching, it’s something built up to and handled tactfully. In a more gritty book, it’s fine to use street jargon and such, as long as usage is consistent throughout the scenes, and with the overall tone of the book.

A book with a PG-13 overall rating for violence and tone that suddenly goes Rated X on the reader is discombobulating. In a critique I did of a friend’s sci-fi romantic suspense, we went from intergalactic intrigue to a bedroom scene in zero-gravity with cocks and pussies abounding—which just didn’t fit with the overall language of the book. (Of course, if the book is erotica, forget all the above tips—in that genre, plot is just a device to link the sex scenes. I’m talking about general fiction in this article.)

What I find jarring—other than Forbidden Tacky Words—is when the author suddenly veers away and pulls the curtain on a built-up-to moment and you know they just chickened out on writing the scene. This is a form of playing coy that annoys readers.

Or, a writer flubs it with crudities, overly explaining what goes where, or too many uses of key words, as if saying them over and over imitates the act. One of the challenges of writing hot sex is not overusing the basic words you’ve chosen to describe the parts involved—good writing means avoiding repetition, inside or outside the bedroom. And only one use of the word “penis” per book, please. “Penis” is just not a hot word, sorry guys. If it’s any consolation, “vagina” isn’t very hot either. Must be all those sex ed classes we all had in junior high. But then, over-use of euphemisms doesn’t work either.

Did I mention writing a good sex scene is…hard?

Overall tone consistency, carefully-crafted action that enhances characterization, and creativity in word choice combined with anchoring physical details are what this writer finds make a memorable, believable sex scene.

What are some of your pet peeves with sex scenes, and how do you approach this difficult writing task?

About Toby Neal

Toby Neal was raised on Kauai in Hawaii. She wrote and illustrated her first story at age 5 and has been published in magazines and won several writing contests. After initially majoring in Journalism, she eventually settled on mental health as a career and loves her work, saying, “I’m endlessly fascinated with people’s stories.”

She enjoys many outdoor sports including bodyboarding, scuba diving, beach walking, gardening and hiking. She lives in Hawaii with her family and dogs. Toby credits her counseling background in adding depth to her characters–from the villains to Lei Texeira, the courageous and vulnerable heroine in the Lei Crime Series.

Toby’s website

Links to Blood Orchids:

Book publicists do a number of things to help authors prepare for their interviews, but sometimes—and especially when there are big national media interviews, like NPR and the morning tv shows, at stake—-we hire media coaches.

These coaches are usually people who have worked extensively in broadcast media, often as television, or radio hosts. As such, they understand the time constraints, end goals, and thought processes behind broadcast media better than anyone else.

Publishing houses hire media coaches to work with authors for blocks of time, anywhere from 3 hours to a full 8 hour day, several weeks before the interviews are set to take place. They have read the book in question and have access to the full press kit the publicist has created. With this background knowledge, coaches sit down with the author and discuss the “Why?” of the book, fleshing out the most important talking points and making the case for why readers should pick it up. In a sense, coaches help authors refamiliarize themselves with the text and examine it as if they had never read the book before.

After establishing the talking points, and these are a list of concise, easy-to-remember ideas, coaches help the author get comfortable talking about them. It’s one thing to be used to talking about your book with your editor or publicist or significant other; it’s a completely different ballgame to discuss your book and its merits with a stranger, let alone before a large audience, whether it’s in-studio or at home.

Coaches have all kinds of tips and tricks to help authors make the most of their interviews, from the importance of repetition (it’s NOT a bad thing to repeat your core ideas and phrases…that’s how you make your message hit home!) to techniques for taking difficult, controversial, or nonsensical questions and answering them in such a way that gets your own point across, regardless of the answer a host may be seeking. One of the ways coaches do this is by having an author take part in multiple mock interviews, answering sample question after sample question in varying formats. Often times, coaches will tape the interviews so that they can watch and critique it with the author afterwards.

While the methods may vary, the end result of media coaching is the same: Authors feel more prepared and more comfortable for their interviews. They have the confidence and the practice to handle curveballs because they know exactly how to talk about their book no matter how the questions may be phrased.

About Christina Mamangakis

Christina Mamangakis is a publicity manager at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.  Prior to that, she worked for Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, and W. W. Norton & Company.

After completing my first novel, I didn’t mind when people came up to me after a reading and talked to me as if I had personally experienced the wars between Palestine and Israel in the 1960s. I must admit it was flattering after so many years of being a mere shadow on a landscape upon which my mother, great-grandmother, and great-great grandmother were born. My mother’s family were native Jewish Palestinians, dating far back to the beginning of the nineteenth century when my great-grandmother and great-grandfather settled in ancient Jerusalem, beginning our family. My grandfather founded and ran the very first department store in old Jerusalem, my uncles, aunts, and mother all fought in the Jewish underground from the 1930s through the creation of the State of Israel. Some branches of the family even dated as far back to Palestine as the 1600s. Though I had never personally experienced the causalities and sorrows of the constant war in Jerusalem, I felt a rightful heir to its history, current and past. So I did not bother to correct the many people who assumed that, like my main character, I had absconded behind the borders as a young girl of only fourteen, running off with an American diplomat’s son. I didn’t of course do any of those things and was usually safe inside my grandmother’s home when I visited Israel as a child, the fighting far away.

During my many visits to my mother’s family house in Jerusalem from my home in America, I wasn’t even permitted to go into the streets if there was news of another skirmish. Still, I relished the new self-definition my first novel gave me. Though I lived in America, my mother took me every three years to spend summers in Jerusalem since I was a very young child. When I published, Edges. I was suddenly recognized as a person who had a “voice” in a history where, before I had felt an outsider, only a child in a vastly fascinating, though violent and foreign, land. I had finally laid claim to my heritage by writing a fiction convincing enough for people to think I had lived its history myself.

I had no idea where this new presumptuousness would lead until I wrote and published my second novel, Hysteria. This time, Hysteria, I wrote about a psychotic woman incarcerated inside a mental institution in 1974.  Set in the turbulent 1970s, HYSTERA is a story of a young woman who retreats from the outside world into a world of delusion and the private terrors of a New York City Psychiatric Hospital.  Suffering from a sexual delusion and just plain “crazy,” I had hoped my character would be affecting and moving to readers. I took great pains trying to describe her inner life as authentically and convincingly as I could.  I wanted to make her feel “real” to the reader, the issues of mental illness were so pressing for me, I had witnessed too many people suffer under society’s stigma.

What I didn’t bank on was that readers, as with Edges, would immediately assume I was writing pure autobiography. That the mentally ill character was really me.  I was introduced as a “memoirist” many times (thought the novel is written as a narrative in third person) and everywhere I read, people looked at me with great consternation and concern. Many said things like “I am so sorry you went into a mental hospital when you were young. I do hope this writing was therapeutic for you.” What? I wanted to scream. It’s not me, I’m not her. No I was NEVER crazy like that. But the more I protested, the more people thought I was only being defensive, nodding but not believing me, “Sure, I understand,” they would retort.

I don’t have a clear answer for the contradictory pleasures in creating a fiction narrative that convinces readers that you, the writer, are, indeed, the main character. It is both a fine compliment and a curse that people believe your fiction is so “real” and you can congratulate yourself for achieving such convincing, authentic-sounding prose. Perhaps this confusion on the reader’s part reflects a more profound problem in our story-telling world that now includes reality TV shows, and a myriad of confessional tell-all memoirs, rarely separating truth from fiction.

But it is a given these days as a published writer, that although you’ve published your work as “a novel,” the first question in nearly every interview and book club visit is whether the book is based on a true story. How one answers that has proven to me to be a lot more complicated than I once imagined. Where does truth end and fiction begin when, often, if a book is good, it will tell a deeper truth through inventing a fiction to contain it, or as Picasso once said, “Art is the lie that tells the truth.” In such a blurring of boundaries, there are a lot of spaces the reader will fill in. How an author will suffer or delight in the mix-up seems a new challenge.

About Author Leora Skolkin-Smith

Leora Skolkin-Smith was born in Manhattan in 1952, and spent her childhood between Pound Ridge, New York, and Israel, traveling with her family to her mother’s birthplace in Jerusalem every three years. She earned her BA and MFA and was awarded a teaching fellowship for graduate work, all at Sarah Lawrence.

Her first published novel, Edges was edited and published by the late Grace Paley for Ms. Paley’s own imprint at Glad Day books.

Edges was nominated for the 2006 PEN/ Faulkner Award and The PEN/ Ernest Hemingway Award by Grace Paley; a National Women Studies Association Conference Selection; a Bloomsbury Review Pick, 2006: “Favorite Books of the Last 25 Years”; a Jewish Book Council Selection, 2005; and won the 2008 Earphones Award for an original audio production narrated by Tovah Feldshuh. In addition, it is currently in development as a feature film, produced by Triboro Pictures.

Leora was recently a panelist, on “Israel in Fiction” at the The Miami International Book Fair, 2006, and a panelist, on “War in Writing”, at the Virginia Festival of the Book, 2006. She is currently a contributing editor to readysteadybook.com. and her critical essays have been published in The Washington Post, The National Book Critic’s Circle’s Critical Mass, and other places.

Her latest novel, Hystera, will be published by Fiction Studio Books this November.

I recently attended IBPA’S Publishing University, where I consulted authors in various stages of publishing. Some had several books under their belt, while other’s books were still seedling ideas. No matter the story, there was one recurring theme among the crowd: “I’m overwhelmed!”

In one of the sessions, a speaker turned the discussion to a new Google tool and people began heading for the door. For many authors, the thought of learning and managing yet another social media platform is daunting. Check, please!

The Internet has brought about unlimited ways to build a following (good news, right?), but all the options have many authors bewildered (not so good news). Marketing and publicity to-do lists are growing daily for authors, thanks to the web, but stick around because getting started is often only a temporary hurdle.

Before you start looking for the nearest exit, clarify your strategy. Come up with a written road map, tailored to your specific goals. This clearly defined plan will make your book promotion more manageable. Here’s a sample strategy, broken down into six main areas.

One:

Hone your online brand:

• Step one in book publicity and marketing is branding, and yet so many authors miss it. Do not proceed to the steps below until you have established your online platform.
• A publicist is essential in helping you develop and streamline your message and brand. Work together to come up with the best plan for how you will be positioned online and in the media.
• Both consumers and media will visit your website before making a commitment. So make sure your online persona is ready-to-go prior to launch time. It should reflect you and your book accurately and look professional. You’ll be judged on design quality and content, so invest in professional help.
• Your website should have these key pages: Blog, Press, About the Author, About the Book, Appearances, Contact. It should also be integrated with your social media platforms.
• Build your social media network early. Start blogging at least 3-5 months before your pub date. Same goes for Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter: don’t wait for your book to launch to be active on social media.

Two:

Employ NetGalley:

• Work with your publisher or publicist to get your book on NetGalley 3-5 months before pub date, in order to meet editorial guidelines. Your publicist can help you manage and track downloads and other activity.
• By posting your manuscript on NetGalley, you allow librarians, media, bloggers and other publishing industry pros to have early access to your book, in lieu of galleys and extensive mailouts.
• A great benefit of NetGalley is the built-in community of reviewers and other book industry professionals.

Three:

Organize an online book launch:

• Rally your personal contacts for a special one-day push that can help push your sales and up your web presence. Entice your friends and family to participate by hosting a contest.
• Ask them to post an Amazon review, blog review, and share it on Facebook and Twitter. For each post or purchase, they get another entry for prizes.
• Give away a Kindle, iPad, free consult, or something relates to your book.
• A publicist can manage this process and help you engage your network creatively and effectively.

Four:

Connect with bloggers:

• Online book reviews are a great way to boost your book’s visibility.
• There are dozens of online articles about Virtual Book Tours, so if you’re going the DIY route, start early and allow significant time for research, shipping, and follow through.
• If a blogger reviews your book, return the favor by promoting their review through your social media channels.
• The reasons to hire a publicist for your blog outreach or Virtual Book Tour are many:
• Because publicists work hard to build networks of bloggers for all kinds of book tours, you’re more likely to get better results (in quality and quantity).
• Blog tours are labor-intensive and require close attention to detail and full-time follow up.
• Publicists know how to package a book review pitch with all the right elements to secure quality reviews. They’ll work creatively to get you the best possible exposure.

Five:

Reach out to online media:

Although it hasn’t always been the case, online media is treated with the same respect and guidelines as traditional media. That’s why it makes sense to hire a publicist to handle online media outreach. Keep in mind, an editor is more likely to act on a pitch from a publicist he or she trusts. And unfortunately, your unsolicited emails may go unread.

A good publicist knows the in-roads to your target media. He/she has established relationships and knows which outlets are hungry for content.

But if you haven’t hired a publicist, don’t be afraid to make connections at your favorite blogs and local outlets. Ask if you can contribute a guest post, op-ed or excerpt. Think about what you can do to make an editor’s job easier. Forging a relationship could be mutually beneficial.

Six:

Measure your results:

• Find out the best online publicity recipe for your book by looking closely at sales and visibility indicators: Amazon rankings, website analytics, social media connections, Google Alerts, etc.
• If you hire a publicist, ask about their reporting process. You’ll want to have regular updates and easy access to current activity and results – both positive and negative. A publicist can also help you get the most mileage out of each media hit.

About Stephanie Ridge

Stephanie Ridge is a publicist at PR by the Book (Austin, Texas). In 10 years of literary publicity, she has represented all kinds of authors—from chef to mafia expert, first-timer to bestseller. She loves crafting headlines and isn’t afraid to pinch-hit for clients when duty calls. (Ask her about the time she moonlighted as Mama Bear on a Berenstain Bears book tour.) She was also a publicist at WaterBrook Press, a division of Random House, and at Phenix & Phenix Literary Publicists.

Because of the overwhelming (and quite honestly, surprising!) response to our Children’s Book Week project for our May issue, we’ve decided to launch a brand-new insert into our existing San Francisco Book Review and Sacramento Book Review publications.

About Kids’ Book Review

Starting with our June 2012 issue, Kids’ Book Review (KBR) will be a monthly insert going inside our regular publications and will be written entirely by children (from the little guys to high school age). We will also run our regular Children’s, Tweens, and Young Adult sections that will be written by our adult reviewers.

As I mentioned, the Children’s Book Week program has drawn unprecedented participation since we first ran the program three years ago. We have 157 reviews being written by the kids for our May issue! And the kids are just so adorable with their books (we’re including their photo alongside their review in the publication).

A Sampling of the Kids

If you’re a Children’s, Tweens or Young Adult publisher, just keep doing what you’ve been doing — which is sending us your books. We’ll be sure to provide you with a good mixture of adult vs. young reviewers for them.

We will also be linking the kids’ reviews with our Kids’ Book App, which has more than 5,000 users.

Advertising Opportunity!

Kids’ Book Review

Support children’s literacy by taking out an ad with us for Kids’ Book Review.

We have great advertising opportunities for you children’s book publishers. Please let us know if you’d like to advertise.

Interested In Having Your Kids Participate?

More details about Kids’ Book Review  will be flushed out once we get past our huge May issue, celebrating Kids Book Week. If you’re interested in having your child/ren participate, fill out the brief form below, and we’ll get back with you.

Yes, I want to participate and need more information.

Media Links…Who’s Talking about Kids’ Book Review

http://www.bookweekonline.com/local

Cathy Luchetti is the author of eight books about the settling of the American West in the 18th and 19th centuries, from religion to cooking and cuisine to courtship rituals and child-rearing. She was invited by Laura Bush to come to the White House to be part of a discussion of Women in the West. She has received numerous honors, including the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award for Literary Excellence for Women of the West (1982) co-authored with Carol Olwell. Her book Home on the Range: A Culinary History of the American West received the James Beard Best Writing on American Food Award in 1994. Medicine Women: The Story of Early-American Women Doctors (1999) was short-listed for the Willa Cather Award in non-fiction. Other books include Under God’s Spell: Frontier Evangelists, 1772-1915, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (San Diego, CA), 1989; “I Do!”: Courtship, Love, and Marriage on the American Frontier: A Glimpse at America’s Romantic Past through Photographs, Diaries, and Journals, 1715-1915, Villard Books (New York, NY), 1995; The Hot Flash Cookbook: Delicious Recipes for Health and Well-Being through Menopause, Chronicle Books (San Francisco), 1997; Mama Says: Inspiration, Wit and Wisdom from the Mothers in Our Lives, Loyola Press (Chicago), 1999. Her book Children of the West: Family Life on the Frontier, Norton (New York, NY), published in 2001, was named by the Los Angeles Times one of the Best Books of 2001—The West.

Zara Raab: You got together with a friend, Carol Olwell, to write the first of your histories of the American West. I imagine there are some deep streams in your own personal history, your childhood in Texas, that may account for your motivation for writing so many wonderful books about the American West.

Cathy Luchetti: I am a “Woman of the West.”  I grew up in Texas with lots of bedtime stories about the West. One set of my great-great grandparents came West across the Great Plains in Conistoga wagons. They settled in what became Baker, Oregon.

ZR: Where is Baker, exactly?

CL: Baker is east of Portland, in a desert area––in a place you don’t imagine could be in Oregon. It’s desert with a. little bit of grassland, like eastern Washington State.

ZR: Was Baker a family name of yours? The town of Baker is named in honor of U.S. Senator Edward D. Baker, is that correct? And wasn’t he the only sitting senator to be killed in a military engagement? He died in 1861 while leading a charge of 1,700 Union Army soldiers up a ridge at Ball’s Bluff, Virginia, during the American Civil War. 

CL: Yes, that’s correct. One Baker signed the pioneer register. Frederick Waymire, on my grandfather’s side, was part of the Oregon Continental Congress, had 17 children, and was called the “Far West Davy Crockett.” Another ancestor, also a great-great grandfather, started the second oldest winery in Napa in 1855 and called it To Kalon, which is Greek for “The Highest Good”. His name was Henry Walker Crabb. He was from Germany or Wales, we’re not sure which, and he brought with him all these strains of plants and planted them and built a big beautiful old house. Crabb’s wines were widely known and his Black Burgundy was especially highly regarded in the West,

The house burned, but it has been rebuilt, so it’s still there. Mondavi owns the winery now and kept a To Kalon history room up until a few years ago.  My mother and I would get trotted out every few years to represent the family. The vineyard became rather famous in the 20th Century as the source of the Georges de Latour wines. But yes, I had a pioneer background that made me interested in the lives of these pioneers who came West in the 19th Century.

ZR: Did any of these relatives or ancestors write letter or keep diaries?

CL: Unfortunately, no. Well, wait. There were a number of interviews or articles written about Crabb’s winery back at the turn of the century. Those are on recorded at the St. Helena Historical Society. No letters, which is another reason I was curious.

ZR: What about old photographs?

CL: Unfortunately, only a few photographs. But if you go into the pioneer museum in Baker, Oregon, you can see my great-great- grandmother’s signature.

ZR: You’ve written eight books, mostly about the American West and the people who settled it in the 19th Century. These are large books, full of fascinating details and wonderfully evocative period photographs. Tell us how you went about gathering materials from diaries and other primary sources for your books.

CL: I owe everything to librarians at the archives and historical societies around the country. Every one of my books was prefaced by a massive mailing to a hundred different archives asking them if they had any lesser known correspondence in their files that had to do with the themes of the book. “Yes,” they would write back to me, “We have this collection, that collection.” Sometimes they would be able to photocopy parts of letters for me. Other times I would travel to the place to research the materials, or I would hire someone to do the research. Over time, I would get a sense of what the collections had and as more things became available on line it was easier to look there. But the work was always done with the generous support of the librarians and archivists who with their knowledge and expertise would unearth these little known collections of  letters and diaries.

My usual practice in beginning a book was to accrue information on the subject until it got to be the shape and size of a book. So the first part of writing was a treasure hunt for information. It was a great way to combine travel with research.  For example, North Dakota has a fabulous collection of some of the most beautiful photographs and best diaries I’ve ever seen. They hardly charge anything for the use of their materials. Here in California, Susan Snyder at the Bancroft Library has been extremely helpful.  So I really enjoyed working with the Bancroft. The California History Library in Sacramento has got a wonderful collection, too, as does the Colorado State Historical Society.

ZR: I notice you use some photographs from the collection of Paul Palmquist. Did you work with him?

CL: Oh, yes, I worked with Paul Palmquist for years. He was local, so I always included his photograph. Then he was so unfortunately killed. The photographs in his collection are extraordinary.

I also developed a real relationship with the University of Nevada. I donated almost all my research materials to the Nevada Historical Society. I also did a lot of work at the Mormon Archives both in Salt Lake City and the Oakland LDS Temple Archives.

ZR: What are the fees for the use of photographs?

CL: The Library of Congress or the National Archives or any of smaller places would charge very little. The Amon Carter Museum in Texas will have the very same things the Nevada or Nebraska Historical Society has, but charge five times as much for it. The use fees occur on an enormous sliding scale from $250 to $12.50 for a single photograph. Sometimes I’d find the same photo in a junk or thrift store, or in one of the ghost towns in the Sierra selling memorabilia. Then the cost was very little.

I did a lot of work at the National Archives and the Library of Congress. I spent a lot of time in North Dakota, one of the most desolate places I’d ever been.

ZR: One diary you use in your texts describes crossing what is now Jayhawker Mountain in the desert around southern California. The hardships people underwent just going from one place to another were extraordinary. 

CL: I was just down there backpacking with my son. The idea that anybody could cross that desert is all but unbelievable. In fact, we passed Jayhawker Mountain and we were thinking of climbing, but it was the driest, most desolate place I’ve every seen. That diary tells just how confused people could get without maps and navigation aid. They had the Drinking Gourd and the North Star and one guide and somebody had to make a decision about whether the guide knew where he was going.

ZR: I understand you are involved with the environmental group Desert Survivors. Tell us about that. 

CL: I grew up in the desert in Midland, Texas. Right outside my door there were sand dunes. Rattlesnakes, too. And of course all I could do was get out of there:  I couldn’t wait to leave Texas. But then as you grow up, your roots come back, so I longed for the desert. I found this group called Desert Survivors, an odd group of people who drive hours and hours just to be in the desert, longing for vistas, and dry terrain and all the things that the desert offers. So I’ve participated with them backpacking, hiking and exploring for well over 20 years.

ZR: Are people re-enacting pioneer times when they do this? Like the Civil War re-enactments that are so popular in the South?

CL: There is a desire in this age of complete comfort to pare back and experience things on an extreme level. Going out into the desert gives you a chance to do that. I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily in the sprit of the pioneers. I do not go in costume. I doubt if the women in my book Women of the West were interested in mountaineering or exploration. But there are some parallels

ZR: Let’s turn to Home on the Range: A Culinary History of the American West, which won the James Beard Writing on American Food Award in 1994.

CL: Yes. The James Beard Foundation Award ceremony was held in New York at the Lincon Center.

ZR: So in addition to being a marvelously gifted writer, you’re also known for your cooking. What kind of kitchen did your own mother have when you were a child?

CL: I hate to say this, but I’m sure I’m interested in cooking because my mother was a terrible cook. She was a devotee of the casserole, especially if it had Fritos or potato chips on top of it.  I‘m interested in good cooking because I never got much of it. She showed how she felt about being a housewife through her cooking. She became a much better cook in her sixties. She developed a kind of interest in it.

I like to experiment. I like to take something that you already have and imagine you can make it more interesting. It’s like a puzzle. That’s definitely what the pioneers did. They had dribs and drabs of things. And they had to make something of it. Being in the Peace Corp was instructive, too, in this regard. There were no stores. People would come around selling eggs one day and meat another day. Being in the Peace Corp was the first time I have ever been hungry. It made me think about food in a way I had not thought about food before I developed a curiosity about how to doctor dishes and make them more interesting. I like to do signature pieces, not necessarily fancy but different. As a kid, I was always trying to feed my brother things I’d made from roots and berries and seeds, bird nests and lawn clippings. I served up dishes from whatever happened to be around. And he was smart enough not to eat them.

ZR: When we were kids, we’d mash up acorns and make a paste of that. It was part of a staple for the native Americans.

CL: My kids and I would do that at a family ranch in Middletown. We’d put the acorn meal in the stream over night, and the next day mix it up with Bisquick. I don’t’ think I’ve ever tasted anything so good.

Now it’s called wild crafting and bush crafting. Lots of people are eager to find foods in nature. All kinds of people give classes in how to go about it.

ZR: Have you every given a class in this?

CL: No, but when my book Home on the Range came out, I’d prepare recipes for bram brack, buckwheat or hoe cakes in the fire place for the author interviews.  I’d make Birds on Toast and Washday Rice or drip coffee with roasted carrots whenever I gave a lecture.

ZR: Talk about your lectures. 

CL: Every time a book came out, I’d be invited to give talks about it. And because I’m basically very shy, I made a power point show, where I combined the most interesting parts of each book, anecdotally, into one presentation, and if someone wanted me to talk at a book store, I’d take my presentation. I remember being in the Tattered Cover in Denver, the head of the Storytellers Association came up to me and asked if I would  be a key note speaker, with hundreds of people in the audience, using this power point show. It turned out just fine despite my nervousness.  I would always respond, albeit somewhat reluctantly, if someone asked me to make a presentation. The power point show was a good device and I was happy to use it. I gave a presentation at the Library of Congress and at the National Archives. These were televised.

ZR: Impressive. Are the videos available to the public?

CL: Yes, the videos are archived.

ZR: Home on the Range mentions recipes from the wild west like ragout de prairie dog, mountain sheep antelope, roast grizzly bear, elk steak, codfish balls. Have you tasted these things? Is it possible to? Area these places in the foothills of California where it is possible to go into a restaurant and order, say, a “Hangtown Fry”(an egg and oyster dish)? Or how about beans cooked in the bean-hole method—larded with pork fat and buried in live embers? What about walnut catsup? [65]

CL: In the Mother Lode country, probably you can get Hangtown Fry or some version of it. I gave a lecture at the Virginia City opera house where some of these dishes were offered. There was also a Nevada State Historical Society event for which I’ve had professional chefs prepare elk steak and Birds on Toast.

ZR: Your books inspired you to do these unusual things.

CL: On another occasion some of these dishes were given away as part of a raffle in Nevada. The people who bought the tickets and won the raffle got to come to my house where we served elk steak. It was a big money raiser for the Nevada Historical Society.

ZR: You were enterprising in a very pioneer spirited way.

CL: Yes, I guess I was–including screenplay gigs in Hollywood. One screenplay was called “Hot on the Trail,” produced by William Wyler’s daughter, Kathleen Wyler. The filmmakers wanted to do a documentary on the West and hired me to be the screenwriter. I went to New York and was held captive in the Port Authority Building. It was really interesting. The images would be on screen and I would write the script.   I had to write the script quickly as the images came flowing across this massive screen.

And then there was the enormously popular TV western of the 1990’s, with Jane Seymour as the lead––Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. They used my books and actually flew me to Hollywood several times to consult on how the surgeons would operate on patients. Would the early doctors really sew up a wound by putting a 50-cent piece under the skin? My publisher said, “Well, gee, since this program is willing to fly you to Hollywood, why don’t you write a book?” So that’s how I came to write Medicine Women: The Story of Early-American Women Doctors.

ZR: Medicine Women was the book short listed for a Willa Cather Award in non-fiction in 1999?

CL: Yes, that’s correct.

ZR: What other entanglements with Hollywood did you experience?

CL: A major film company was doing a documentary on courtship and marriage in the West and they, too, flew me to Hollywood to be their consultant. They used photographs and stories from my 1995 book “I Do!”: Courtship, Love, and Marriage on the American Frontier, but of course the photographs are in the public domain, so I didn’t really benefit. They used me as the research tool. I can’t say the photographs were mine, but the collection was mine. I flew down with my son Zack and we played Hollywood-for-a-day.

Every so often Women in the West is optioned by a movie producer. Then it’s dropped, because no one can figure out how to make it into a film. But they keep trying. The book is used by many producers and other writers as resource material. Sometimes this gets acknowledged.

ZR: Could your agent have protected you?

CL: If any of them had optioned the book, yes. But the movie people were just using me as a consultant. These experiences were little adventures into a totally foreign world. The phone would ring, and a little Hollywood voice would say, “Darling, it’s just heavenly. The book is heavenly” in a soft, Southern drawl. And then the option would drop. I should say: “Darling, it’s just funny. Very funny.”

In the end, though, despite all the interest shown in it by movie producers, Women of the West was never made into a film. A play, a theater production, has been created from it, with little vignettes from the book. It was quite effective.

ZR: It should be a TV series, because it’s episodic. . . What are your thoughts of novelists who draw on the West for their stories, writers like Wallace Stegner? Did you ever think of writing a novel?

CL: No, never. Writing a period novel does not interest me at all.  I don’t read historical fiction and I don’t write it. I love literature, though. Stegner’s Angle of Repose is fabulous literature. The general Western is fiction dressed up as history; it a way of introducing readers to the West.

ZR: Regarding Women of the West, did you ever look at Mary Hallock Foote’s letters later published as A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West and later still used by Wallace Stegner as the basis for his novel Angel of Repose?

CL: Wallace was utterly bona fide in taking life events such as Hallock’s story and using them in his fiction. The book gives her credit for the letters. Just as a personal aside, the movie The Descendants got an Academy Award, not because it was such a great movie, but because the Oscar people think they should give an award to things that have to do with history. I think that’s why The Descendants got so much notice in the Oscars. We haven’t really honored Hawaii and its roots this year. So the director of that film was lucky enough to step into a category that the right people felt obliged to award.

ZR: What are you working on now? You have a new book in the works.

CL: I am working on a manuscript I’m calling “Travels with My Headache.” It’s basically traveling with my headache and examining folkloric, food and other remedies and apocrypha having to do with headaches. I’m going in to the direction of my earlier book, The Hot Flash Cookbook.

ZR: What are your travel plans these days? I know you and Peter have traveled extensively in the past.

CL: We’ve traveled in Tibet, Peru, China, Mexico, and Greece. We’ve been in Mexico again recently, and I’m writing little stories about it, investigating the teas and remedies that people there have for headaches. I’ve anthropomorphized my headache. This book is a whimsical approach to a self-help book. There are a lot of books on how to cure a headache, and mine is going to be a more folkloric, travel guide approach to the subject. It’s interesting and it’s fun. I get to riff on lots of weird, interesting stuff. For example, did you know that the philosopher Wittgenstein loved to destabilize complete strangers as well as colleagues with questions like, “Do dogs have headaches?” For him, words were the salvation and damnation of everything.  Do dogs get ice cream headaches? I am asking my veterinary friends.

Every time a new headache question of a magical, apocryphal or whimsical nature comes up, I pursue it . This book is not going to be the Merk manual for headaches—more like an “Eat, Pray, Headache” kind of narrative.  But I will say I‘ve probably read at least a thousand diaries and journals from the old West and no one complained about headaches. Not that they didn’t have them; I’m sure that they sallied forth even with a headache. It’s one of those things that people accommodated. I’m looking at all the people in literature who had headaches, like Virginia Woolf, to see how headaches affected their lives. We’ll see. It’s fun to write.

ZR: Will there be photographs?

CL: Not really just text. I don’t see it as visual.

ZR: What are you reading now, and how do you decide?

CL: I am reading Peter Diamandi’s book Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think. It’s so optimistic. I’m not really a doom and gloom person. I don’t focus on the end of the world and how terrible things are.

I read lots of Mexican and South American books. Rain of Gold, a novel by Victor Villiasenor is one. I like nature  writing, too, like Craig Childs’ The Secret Knowledge of Water: Discovering the Essence of the American Desert, for example. I love H.P. Lovecraft, and I keep a Guttenberg text of James Joyce’s Ulysses my desk.

Click HERE for Part 2 of this interview.

About the Interviewer, Zara Raab

Zara lives in Berkeley and is one of the first women to graduate in architecture from UC Berkeley. She grew up along California’s North Coast, attending school in Portland when she was fourteen, and later Mills College and the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) for college and graduate school. In her twenties, she traveled, living in Paris, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., where she made a living as a freelance editor and writer, participating for a time in the Capitol Hill Poetry Group, before returning to the West Coast to raise her children.

Early California is a subject of her book Swimming the Eel, just as the drama of family life is the subject of  The Book of Gretel. In leaving behind the rural counties, she became a part of the human potential movement of the 1960′s, and that movement perhaps more than anything, shapes her life and her work. Since she was a teenager, she kept journals, and sometimes returns to those early notebooks for ideas. Her poems appear in many literary reviews and magazines, including The Dark Horse, The Evansville Review, River Styx, Crab Orchard Review, Nimrod, Dos Passos Review, Arts & Letters, and others. She also review books and writes essays on literature for various publications, including the Redwood Coast Review, Poetry Flash, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Colorado Review, San Francisco/Sacramento Book Reviews, and The Boxcar Poetry Review.

We all know that the job market is tough. That makes now a better time than ever to hire a few interns. An intern can be a college student who hopes to go into publishing or journalism and needs some hands-on experience to build a good portfolio to show during job interviews. It might be a college or high school student who thinks that maybe publishing or publicity or marketing is what they want to study, and by doing the job, they might discover they love it or perhaps learn they should look at other career paths.

We have used college students for many years as interns. Some have been great and really took on a lot of tasks that were falling by the wayside as “more important” tasks were tackled. Some have needed a lot of hand-holding and almost seemed to take more time than they were contributing, but I still knew I was helping someone and knew I only had to keep them busy for a few more weeks or months.

Some colleges—and even some high schools—give academic credit for the time they spend as interns.

Students aren’t the only ones who might agree to work for experience or at minimum wage with no benefits. There are young mothers who want to get out of the house for a few hours a week when their children are in school or want to keep up their job skills for when they go back to work full time. And don’t forget the baby boomers or even some seniors who are full of life experience and are looking for a way to stay in the thick of things.

How do you find an intern? Contact the job placement at any nearby college and see about posting a notice with them. Put up a notice on one of the social media sites. Ask friends and family if they know of anyone looking for some part-time (or full-time work). Even your church office may know of members who could really use a part-time job. We have found that since we can be flexible and work around their needs, people are happy to work for us (especially since many employers will say to part-time workers, if you can’t be here when we schedule you, forget it).

To pay or not to pay? Some schools don’t allow interns who are getting credit to receive a salary. In those cases, we would give them a bonus at the end of their semester, which was equivalent to what the course cost them. Most we have paid minimum wage. And a few who actually became full-time were paid a little more.

But companies—or individuals—can set their own rules about the work the interns will be doing and what would be a fair wage.

Many small presses and independent publishers/authors just can’t find enough time in the day to get everything done. Consider some of the tasks that could be assigned an intern and determine if this is a way to ease your load. An added benefit: if you get a high school or college student or recent grad, remember they have grown up on the computer and are often much more comfortable and adept at doing research online or helping get out there via social media.

Get the help you need while helping someone else is certainly a win-win situation.

About Kate Siegel Bandos

Kate Siegel Bandos has been doing book publicity for more than 40 years, the past 22 on a freelance basis from KSB Promotions. Over the years she has worked with thousands of books and authors, and can’t imagine how many media contacts she has made during that time. It still amazes her when she realizes she makes a living reading and working with books – the things she loves most (after her family).