to the Zona Rosans and Our Friends Everywhere

My Second Letter

1. IN MY FIRST LETTER TO YOU I described my bias against blogging.  I told you that, despite how much I adore the freshness of a writer’s first thoughts, I believe that it’s a better for us to use our creativity to explore ourselves and our ideas in journals, not to mention making poems, stories and books, or even starting businesses (as you know, Zona Rosa is now an LLC, so that we can sell our own books and Zona Rosa-related products).        
       I didn’t know how much fun it would be to break my own rules for creative writing, such as remembering, as Patricia O’Conner wrote in WOE IS I, that an exclamation point is the equivalent of “an eek!”  Or to set aside my bias against excess modifying, as in our acronym, DEA as in “Death to Adverbs.”  Instead, I slathered praise on the Zona Rosans as though it were Crème de la Mer (the most expensive face cream in the world), believing, as humorist Jill Conner Browne says of chocolate, that you can’t have too much of a good thing – or say too much good stuff about great people.
        When I wrote that first message to you, SECRETS OF THE ZONA ROSA:  HOW WRITING (AND SISTERHOOD) CAN CHANGE WOMEN’S LIVES (Henry Holt and Company, 2006) was six months old, and as my friend, the novelist Jackie, or J.L., Miles, says of such times, I’ve “been on roller skates” ever since.  Not long along, Zona Rosan Margie told us about women’s speed-skating teams, with names like “The Femme Fatales” – obviously, women after our own hearts! – and I felt like I’ve been one of them, speed-skating along beside them with barely a break.
        Life has been a whirl of beautiful letters from readers and writers all over the country, as well as Canada, Puerto Rico, Finland, and Australia; news of new Sub Rosa groups across the country; writers conferences all over the place; and as always, and my greatest pleasure, our regular Zona Rosa workshops and retreats – and even getting a little writing of my own done (more about this later).
        And it’s been fun almost every second of the race.  Fortunately, I love the twists and turns, the constant travel and excitement.  After all, I am the woman who, at a therapist’s request, drew my ideal self more than 35 years ago as wearing travel clothes and carrying a suitcase!  And who created another similar image of myself years later when doing a collage – or what Zona Rosan and life coach Deborah calls a “Dream Board,” of myself on a plane with a briefcase – though I didn’t know then that it would be crammed with manuscripts by the Zona Rosans!

2. KEYWORD, PLEASURE -- OUR ZONA ROSA RETREAT IN FRANCE!

As William Safire wrote in his regular column on language in The New York Times Magazine, “Pleasure is a beautiful word.  That s in the middle, pronounced like the z in azure gives a little thrill to the mouth.” And then there’s the word’s meaning:  “‘Happy satisfaction or enjoyment; delight, gratification . . .’”  And this was what we were about to experience in full as we embarked in September on our two-week, pleasure-filled Zona Rosa retreat – a.k.a., “Pajama Party for Grown Up Girls with Smarts” – in a twelfth-century castle two hours from Toulouse (question # 1: how does Suzan, our planner extraordinaire, find these places?!).  For some of us, there was also a subsequent trip to Paris, and in telling you about it, I definitely plan to overuse the word “charming” – how else can I tell you how divine it was?       
        Most of us arrived in Toulouse a day early, where we joyously greeted each new arrival to our party at our small, very French hotel, sampled fabulous food at nearby restaurants – and shopped (question # 2:  how do we always seem to book these hotels, sight unseen, that are right in the middle of everything we love most?!).  At the airport, I had learned, waiting among a group of women covered from head to toe in black burqas – just seeing women whose very clothing signified oppression made me want to reach out to them -- whose luggage had also not yet arrived, that Air France had once again lost my luggage.  And as they had been in the past, they were utterly charming about it, giving me a great little kit, later to double as an evening bag, that contained all one might need for a night (though this time I noticed it didn’t include a condom!), plus a form saying I would be repaid up to $200 if I had receipts for the items I purchased to tide me over.  Since I knew that I also had American Express insurance that would pay up to $500 for any items bought before the luggage was delivered, my sister Zona Rosan and real sister Anne went on a whirlwind shopping spree the next morning during which I bought two pairs of a shoes, a very frou-frou skirt and top that virtually scream français, and French face creams which now sit in my bathroom in Savannah, reminding me, with their pretty pink script, of the trip.  (And better yet, once I was home and sent in my receipts, Air France, along with American Express, reimbursed me for every cent of my purchases, going way over the $200 they had promised!)
        When we arrived at the walled castle near the town of Millau the next evening, we could almost see the drawbridge being pulled up during the Crusades, or extended to welcome friendly travelers.  The town is known for its violets, and appropriately enough, the first thing I saw was my mauve luggage waiting within the entrance, delivered by the ever-faithful Air France. While we were there, Connie, who loves fragrances and other girly things as much as I do, gave me a très petite bottle of violet perfume, tied at its neck with a tiny purple ribbon.
        For the next two weeks Write, Eat, Drink, Talk could have been our mantra. The days were a blur of workshops, readings (and for me, conferences with each writer), not to speak of the laughter, wine, and the Foods of the Goddesses, elegantly served to us by our superb cooks, Pamella and Judith, who, as you may already have read about elsewhere because I can’t sing their praises enough, cook fluently in both French and Italian.
        This year, Liz, an elegant American long married to a dashing Frenchman, and accustomed to her husband’s huge family, gave Pamella and Judith an elegant hand. Even the cooks were writing in every spare moment; given the atmosphere, it was irresistible.  One of my favorite memories is of the three of them sitting at one of the dining tables in the high-ceilinged main room, made cozier by its chandeliers, fireplace, and sofas, shelling peas or peeling potatoes while talking literature with the rest of us. 
        On many days, Pamella, ever the sun-lover, insisted we eat al fresco by the pool (yes, this ancient castle had a swimming pool!) where we also held some of our workshops. A high point was our pre-dinner readings.  We especially loved it when Connie wrote a poem that expressed our feminist sentiments exactly – in it, a fierce she-dragon symbolized our power -- and she and Kathleen read and sang it in chorus.  A feature of every retreat is the arrival song, written and sung by Kathleen; and finally, at our last dinner, the departure song.
        But if you’re thinking a bunch of overgrown Girl Scouts, think again – and more along the lines of the words from our mission statement for Zona Rosa Books, “Words By Women Like You:  Smart, Savvy, Sexy, Searching, And Singular.” Yes, we’re a girl gang, but also a Smart Women’s Society, with a variety of beliefs, life views, and talents.  Ironically, unlike in some womens groups, not one of us is a follower; instead we’re each unique and were usually already outstanding in our own way from the time we met.  Indeed, one of the most exciting parts of Zona Rosa for me is getting to know yet another, smart, talented woman – a heady situation, since I meet them wherever I go!
        At our retreats, some women pair up as walking buddies, others as writing buddies. One of the things we do right away at every retreat is stake out a place to write – Sandra, from Eureka Springs, Arkansas, put a table beside the top of the stone stairs that led to a great hall on the third floor, and created her space there, spreading out the voluminous journals of her seven years sailing her own sailboat (yes, it was pink – and this was long before she knew us!) alone in the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico, despite having never having sailed before when she bought it! While she meditated beside a tree in California, where she was care giving her feisty mother during a time of transition in her life, she asked God what she should do next, and a voice told her:  Buy a sailboat and sail. When I hear stories like these, I’m also struck afresh by how powerful women are, as well as by the law of attraction, and how we can overcome any obstacle to become what we think and dream.
        Now Sandra was writing her memoir, and because she was so visible on her perch, we were all inspired by her work ethic as we passed her on our way to our rooms.  We were even more impressed when she read dramatic excerpts from her adventures during our afternoon readings, one of which concluded with God giving her directions during a storm at sea as to what she should do next.  This time the voice said, Go to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, a town she had never even heard of.
        To talk about every writer there would make this entry as long as another SECRETS – indeed, I’m already collecting stories for the sequel, tentatively titled MORE SECRETS OF THE ZONA ROSA:  WHEN STRONG WOMEN TELL THEIR TRUTHS, and they are delicious indeed.  After every workshop and retreat, I spend hours recording the wonderful things the Zona Rosans say, do and write, with an eye toward writing about them later with their permission. 
        But to hit more of the high points:  Karen, a friend of Suzan’s, and a vivacious blonde ex-literary agent from Canada, now living in Aix-in-Provence, generously spent a day and evening with us to share her know-how on how best to get the attention of agents and editors. Greg, our favorite Brit, now living near Marseilles, where he’s a physicist, came over for a day, as he does to almost all our retreats in the South of France. He gave us updates on the revisions he’s made to his riveting, well-researched World War II novel-in-progress – all the while undoubtedly enjoying being immersed in our estrogen-rich – not to speak pulchritudinous -- company!   Indeed, we always have a few special men around -- a group of smart, beautiful women draws them like a magnet, yes?  Charles, 89-year-old Maggie’s 14-years-younger husband – and a good writer himself – has become such a part of our group that he laughs at the same jokes we do – even the ones about husbands and boyfriends!
        Then came the crème de la crème of excursions, when we all piled into the bus to travel to visit Kathleen McArthur, hereafter known as the Other Kathleen, who lives with her husband Mal for five months of every year in the Dordogne region of France. A Star of our Savannah Zona Rosa group, her recent book, ANNISA, the story of an Afghan girl, was inspired by her years in Afghanistan. 
        After riding several hours through beautiful towns, villages, and countryside – stopping once for coffees at a café filled with good-looking French men – apparently, it was their mid-morning hangout – our driver finally turned onto a narrow road outside a quaint village.  As we drove up to a charming pale stucco house, then piled out, some of us wearing our Zona Rosa T-shirts, a smiling Kathleen, Mal, Marty, Kathleen’s dear friend from Oxford, Mississippi, and a young woman from the village, came down the steps to greet us. 
        Once inside, Mal and Other Kathleen gave us a tour of the house, which was charming indeed – walls covered with art by both Kathleen and Marty, who, it turned out, had become a well-known painter in the US, selling her paintings as soon as she produces them, after leaving her previous (and less happy) life as the wife of a Washington big shot. Kathleen, too, had begun drawing that summer, and from what we saw, she’s as talented as an artist as she is a writer. Then there were the terraces and outdoor spaces – “we need them for when our kids and grandchildren come over” – overlooking the gorgeous French countryside. 
        At last we trekked back to the living and dining rooms with their adjacent sun porch, where small tables had been set with linen and china.  By now the smells from the nearby open kitchen, where the woman from the village was stirring and tending, were driving us crazy.  And no, we couldn’t serve ourselves, Mal and Other Kathleen said when I stood, thinking we would go to the kitchen to serve ourselves, as people often do in America.  And no, we couldn’t help, either.  Over the next two hours, she, Mal and friends served us, course by course, a French meal that I surely would rival any in Paris! (Later, Suzan told me that it’s considered impolite in France not to let people serve you.)  Before we left, all smiling broadly, I gave Other Kathleen a Zona Rosa T-shirt which she donned over her blouse on the spot to wear as they stood waving us off.  (And damn! — these T-shirts – Pamella got the baby-doll fit just right – look good on every one of us, whether tall, short, voluptuous or petite!  Soon we hope to make them available to all of you on our web page).
        Yet all was not over – on our last night back at the chateau, Pamella, Judith and Liz asked that we cut our workshop short and leave the main room to dress for dinner, as is our custom on our last nights.  “I don’t think it’ll take that long,” I protested, wanting to go on with the workshop.  But they insisted, and upstairs, I put on the sparkly très French skirt and top, slipped on slingbacks, and put my hair up, then went downstairs, expecting to see a festive dining room.
        Instead, as I looked out over the stone wall over the courtyard, I saw the long table festooned with a white table cloth, wine glasses and place settings, and candle glow below us, and the Zona Rosa, in their most beauteous outfits, already drifting down the stone stairs.  We were joined by the grounds-keeper and his wife, who turned out to be fascinating:  as a girl, she had fled Poland to escape the Nazis, and kept journals that she wanted someday to turn into a book.  On learning that we were all writers, her face absolutely glowed, and Kathleen, who had been boning up on her French and is a quick study at everything, Connie, who still had good French from her college days, and of course, Suzan and Liz, were all able to speak the local language with her, which made her even happier.  
        It was also our very own Lynn’s fiftieth birthday.  That afternoon, we had each been asked to write the ten things we love most about Lynn, who’s long been a mainstay of our Atlanta Alpha Babes Zona Rosa group. Now Connie and Deborah stood at the end of the long table to read them (one of mine was how great she looks in a mini-skirt). Then Pamella, brought out the official pink Zona Rosa cake, decorated with our cerise lip-print logo on paler pink icing, and lit the candles on it for Lynn.  We all sang “Happy Birthday” as Lynn opened her gift and held up a racy French bra and panty set (“It fit just right!” she told me the next day). All the while, cameras were flashing so fast you’d think we were being set upon by paparazzi – one of the most charming photos turned out to be of Pamella and Judith wearing the tall green chef hats they’d found in the village: “They didn’t have pink!”  And as at all Zona Rosa events, everyone looks very, very happy as though they’ve been told about “the smile without stopping for 20 minutes” meditation Elizabeth Gilbert describes in her book, EAT, PRAY, LOVE.
        The next morning, it was time to reluctantly fly home from Toulouse – except for those of us who had opted to go to Paris for a few more delicious days. Kathleen and Lynn had never been there, and Lynn wanted to further celebrate her fiftieth in the City of Lights.  They stayed in a hotel on the Right Bank, while Sheila, Connie, Anne, and I stayed not far away on the Left Bank at the Cannette St. Germain, a place I’d found on Cheap Paris Hotels on the internet, and which turned out to be charming – there, I’m using that word again; but it’s hard not to in France! -- if not fancy.  And best of all, it was once again right in the middle of everything we wanted to see and do – the kinds of divine restaurants in which what looks like small servings becomes the most satisfying meal you’ve ever had, pastry shops in which the creations were little works of edible art, and the Café Margot, where we sat on the sidewalk on Boulevard St. Germain, facing outward as the natives do, and where we talked to a tall man wearing a red scarf that made him look oh-so-French, but who turned out to be from California.
        There was lots of time for girl talk, and during our last dinner at a French-Moroccan restaurant – yum! – Kathleen and I were astounded to learn that she and I had once shared – though not at the same time – a boyfriend, who we agreed, was charming (drat! that word again!) and sexy, if a scoundrel, but who each kept us each just as satisfied for a time as one of those French meals. But then, Kathleen and I had long since bonded over our taste for a certain kind of man, formed early by our charismatic, yet crazy dads. 
        Needless to say, the English-language bookstores were among our other favorite haunts -- I’m still savoring my trove of tomes, many of them published in England where publishers still apparently revere the literary, I bought at the famous Village Voice Book Store.  Some of us took off for the legendary Shakespeare and Company Books, where, as I mentioned in my previous blog, Katherine, friend and planner for our Highlands, North Carolina, Zona Rosa events, lived for a time, and was once engaged to George, its famous founder. 
        (Katherine, as I also mentioned in Letter No. 1, has created a replica of Shakespeare and Company in Highlands, complete with an apartment upstairs like the one she lived in over the bookstore in Paris; her shop and the patio outside has been the scene of readings and good times during our stays in Highlands.)
        Alas, even the best things must end, and, as usual, we all left as changed women.  But though I didn’t know it, my adventures would be continuing – at least, for a time.  When we arrived at Charles de Gaulle Airport, I got the news at the gate that my flight had already left, in fact was pulling out at that very moment, and no, they couldn’t radio and stop it, as had the Delta reps in Miami as I ran out of breath up to the gate on my trip there.  Anne and I had traveled together from Miami – she had been on the plane, waiting with bated breath as the plane taxied back in to pick me up -- I had forgotten to check whether we were on the same flight for our return.
        As I hugged and waved goodbye to the Zona Rosans, I assumed I’d be on another flight within hours, and wandered through the duty-free shops, buying my favorite Yves St. Laurent “Paris” cologne, and gifts for my husband and kids, and gave myself permission – after all, I’d missed my flight, yes? -- to eat something wicked from the fast food concession; fast food in France is unlike any that one might encounter stateside, and like everything French, a beauty to behold.
        But au contraire:  the cool Frenchman at the rebooking desk finally told that there were no other flights I could get that day. And, he said, the Delta desk upstairs closed at 3 p.m.—on the dot, I learned after I rushed from the gate, through a maze of corridors and up the escalator, tugging my carry-on. Would I have to spend the night in the airport, like Tom Hanks in Terminal?  I wandered though darkened areas, getting lost in cavernous spaces, and trying to go through doors that only opened one way – and not the way I was going! Finally, with the direction of one lone attendant, I found, like a woman crossing a desert, a bottle of Perrier.
        Suddenly, at the foot of an escalator, I found myself in an oasis -- a bustling lower level, where at last, after many requests for directions and retraced steps, I came upon the tourist desk. There another very cool Frenchman gave me a list of possible hotels for the night.  But no, he couldn’t call one for me, but instead, indicated a pay phone across the way, leaving me to use it sans the language, which meant backtracking, at his direction, to a tobacco and news shop to buy a French phone card.
        But when I at last I sat at the little hotel bar among the other stranded travelers, I remembered how much I enjoy being in a strange place alone – and how I always feel exhilarated by meeting new challenges. Indeed, maybe being stuck an extra night in Paris wasn’t that bad after all. That night I wrote a first draft of story in which a woman misses her plane, and even though she’s bought her husband gift, just doesn’t go back – how would she find an apartment, get her money from the States, and most importantly, what back story made her stay?  It wasn’t an unpleasant fantasy.       
        But there’s no getting away from thinking about Zona Rosa, wherever I am:  The next morning on the van back to the airport, I gave cards for SECRETS OF THE ZONA ROSA to the women passengers, who were from Canada and various parts of the US.  “I’m a doctor in Atlanta,” one said, mentioning a writer-boyfriend, a friend-of-a-friend there; and I quickly invited her to visit our Atlanta Alpha Babes group.
        As always, the time just after a journey is one of reflection, and during the coming weeks there was a flurry of stay-in-touch messages between those of us who had been in France. 
        But everyone agreed that Rhonda, who had come from Rhode Island to be with us, made the most memorable comment: “The secret of Zona Rosa is that in Zona Rosa there are no secrets!”  It’s one we’ll be quoting for years to come!
        Soon after, Pamella took the line from Connie’s poem in which a dragon symbolizes the fierceness of women, and asked Sheila, an artist who had joined us from Jackson, Tennessee, to create a design for the back of our memorial T-shirt, which Pamella then had made for us as is her custom.  Every time I put mine on, with its drawing of a brightly colored, très femme dragon taking a big bite out of a cartoon castle, with the words “Truth, Wind, Fire” (parts of France are known for its stiff breezes; in this case, “wind” means what sweeps the debris from our psyches) beneath it, I’m flooded again by delicious memories of our retreat, and the special times we had there.
        And it’s true – no matter how long we’ve known one another before a Zona Rosa retreat, we’ve soon become like sisters.  And as Pamella says of all our retreats, “We see lives change overnight.”

3.  MACHO MEN, GUTSY WOMEN, AND GREAT WRITERS IN A TRULY UNIQUE PART OF THE COUNTRY

In October, I flew to Wyoming to take part in the “equality state’s” – so-called because it was the first state to give women the vote, and no wonder, one thinks when one meets its feisty women --first Equality State Book Festival.  Going there again was like going home:  During the past thirty years, I first read and taught all over the state as part of Poetry in the Schools program then sponsored by state art agencies and the National Endowment for the Arts. On my first visit, I’d quickly learned that Wyoming is the Real West, full of Real Men and Real Women, as well as a gorgeous, if stark, landscape.  My essay, “Magnolia Among the Mesas” is part of my book, CONFESSIONS OF A (FEMALE) CHAUVINIST (Hill Street Press, 2001; or see our web page at www.myzonarosa.com).
        A few years later, I went back to research SLEEPING WITH SOLDIERS:  IN SEARCH OF THE MACHO MAN (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984).  I drove my rental car to oil rigs and other towns, meeting cowboys (yes, they really exist), and interviewing women who worked outdoors at 40 degrees below zero, but who showed up for our meeting as femme as any women I’d met; another who left to drive from a bar in Gillette, where we were talking, to her ranch in South Dakota, at midnight: and ranch women who lived out on the ranch, snowbound with nothing but a short-wave radio, for six months of each year. To subsidize that trip, and also to follow my passion for working with disenfranchised women, I led writing workshops in the women’s prison, where the women put me on by telling how they had once castrated sheep with their teeth (a custom of the past – to quickly stop the bleeding – but not during our lifetime), and more importantly, told their wrenching stories. The prison was small, and in a remote area, as are many things in the West, and the thought that many of them would be there for a lifetime, unable to even buy a Coke without being searched as they went back into the main rooms, was painful.  So the tears and laughter that week were especially meantingful to me.
        Later, I spent happy months at Ucross, a writers’ colony near Sheridan, going to rodeos with the other visiting artists, some New York women who were stunned by the appearance of the rodeo riders, many as good-looking as movie-stars (A tip to single women who like tough guys: out West, men outnumber the women!  When my new women friends in Rock Springs took me to a bar, the men were almost begging us to dance!)  
        In 1995, I served as visiting writer at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, where I rented a tiny, walk-up apartment from my colleague and writer-friend Vicki Lindner.  There, I wrote the beginnings of my first Zona Rosa book, THE WOMAN WHO SPILLED WORDS ALL OVER HERSELF:  WRITING AND LIVING THE ZONA ROSA WAY (Faber and Faber, 1997).  Zona Rosa was just 14 years old then, and was located only in its birthplace, Savannah – now we’re almost 26 years old, and all over the place – and when I had university jobs, everyone hung together as a peer group until I could get home for the spring holidays.
        Last fall, when I arrived in Cheyenne, my host, writer-friend, writer, and artistic director for the Wyoming Arts Council met me to take me the Holiday Inn to freshen up; in contrast to public spaces in the East, the lobby was vast, and the little bar across the way, the friendly-looking people sitting there was tempting.  But Mike soon came back to take me to the Y where his wife Chris works, and where she had planned my second Zona Rosa workshop (I had led one there years before, as well as in Laramie).  When we arrived, we were greeted by a small but warm group of women.  One, who looked familiar immediately walked up to me.  “I’m Nancy,” she said; “You stayed with me when you worked in the women’s prison. . . You told my teenage son how handsome he was, and now he’s been married and divorced three times, and he told me to ask you whether you’re single or not!”
        The next day, Mike and I drove to Casper, the state capital,
where a party was given for me that night to meet local smart women by a Women’s Studies professor at the university, appropriately named Georgia.  The next day I read poetry, and then saw the prize winners for a first-book of poetry award that I had spent the months before judging read from their works. When I had e-mailed Mike with my choices after agonizing for weeks – there are that many good writers in Wyoming, a state with a population smaller than the city of Atlanta -- and even choosing the runners-ups was a challenge. I wanted to know whether any were women, since they featured such poems as “How to Drive a Dozer,” and to my delight, Mike told me that all the poets whose works I’d chosen were femmes. The prize was $3000 to each winner, amazing awards for such a competition; the State of Wyoming truly puts its money where its mouth is!
        The next day, I led a Zona Rosa workshop as part of the conference, and again, I wasn’t disappointed in the strength of the women I met there. Terry, who took me to lunch afterwards, leads wilderness hikes; her ambition, which some deemed foolhardy, is to meet a Grizzly face to face. Wyoming is chock full of strong women writers, and that afternoon, I met Page Lambert, a former ranch wife who leads wilderness and river writing workshops and who would become a literary friend – she’s since moved to Santa Fe, another favorite place.  I also met the illustrious Annie Proulx, who has made her home there since the success of her Wyoming stories – though not everyone in the state liked her take on “Brokeback Mountain.” But then people in Wyoming rarely share the same opinions. I also loved seeing old friends, such as Vicki, her artist-boyfriend, Richard, and the poet David Romvedt. 
        I was amazed when Honor, an old friend and sister writer from New York who e-mailed to say she was at Ucross and she might drive down to hear me. First, I couldn’t imagine Honor, with her elegant New York/European sensibility, even being in Wyoming.  But then the state – and of course, its people – is full of surprises (her trip was curtailed by the weather, as often happens in a place where people live who don’t drive anywhere without first calling the State Patrol).

4. MORE GOOD TIMES, NOT TO SPEAK OF MORE DIVINE FOOD, IN THE MOST FRENCH CITY IN THIS COUNTRY

        November meant going to an entirely different kind of environment – fortunately, I thrive on differences, or as the French say, “Vive La Difference.”  I was on my way to the Words and Music Literary Festival in New Orleans. Founded by Rosemary James and her darling husband Joe, who also head up the illustrious Faulkner Society and Faulkner House Books on Pirate’s Alley in the French Quarter, it’s undoubtedly one of the poshest and most rewarding literary festivals in the US.  The combination of literary lunches at venerable French-Quarter restaurants such as Galatoire’s and Arnaud’s, and glamorous evening events at similar venues, plus an array of outstanding members of the literary world – among the 2006 events was a panel featuring three Pulitzer Prize winners, who gave the scoop on how it happened – make it a heady event to we sister writers.         A spring event, the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival, also adds cachet to the city’s long-standing, star-filled literary history that includes Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and many others.  Once while a house guest at the charming five-story house that houses Faulkner House Books I was thrilled to learn that I was staying in the very room Faulkner had once occupied; that same evening at a cocktail party, I also went into the little apartment over Dumaine Street, kept just has it had been by our hosts, where Tennessee had once lived and wrote.  I felt as though I was living in a writer’s dream.
        Thus New Orleans is another of my “second homes” – my novel, THE HURRICANE SEASON (William Morrow, 1992) is set there, and conveniently required a lot of delicious research, as I had fallen in love with the city the first time I had seen it many years before.
        It’s also home to many good friends, such as Marda, who you met in my first Letter as well as in SECRETS OF THE ZONA ROSA.  This year, she again generously invited me to stay in her lipstick-red guest quarters, or The Red Palace, we call her the darling apartment off the balcony behind her Royal Street condo, which of course, meant lots of time for girl-and-literary talk – I described how well-read Marda is in SECRETS -- and everything else that’s so wonderful about New Orleans. 
        As sometimes happens when one travels a great deal, I arrived with a raging sore throat – the night before, I wondered whether I would be able to go at all.  But as usual, my spirits soared at the thought of getting on a plane – especially one that would take me to New Orleans!  At dinner at the wonderful café next door – Marda, who doesn’t cook, considers it to be almost a part of her home -- I soothed my throat with Mojitos made with fresh mint, and the next morning, at 7:45 and miraculously cured, I was at the Montelone Hotel to speak on SECRETS OF THE ZONA ROSA at 8 a.m. Amazingly, a crowd had already gathered, enjoying the coffee and pastries that Rosemary and Joe always make sure are there for those who come to the morning events (which begin so early, by the way, because there’s just too much to cram into four short days).  Once again, as many times in the past, my excitement about talking about SECRETS and Zona Rosa was a miracle cure, taking with it any illness or lethargy along with it.
        The rest of my visit spun by in the usual – for Words and Music, and New Orleans – whirl of fascinating friends and meals.  A high point was dinner at Galatoire’s (the subject of Marda’s book) with Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Dirda, Pulitzer Prize winner should-be Michael Malone, and writer friends Marda and Lucy Ferriss. 

5. ART DECO MIAMI:  A BEAUTIFUL DREAM

        November meant the fabulous Miami International Book Fair, where I had been invited to speak, as I did a few years before after the publication to the prequel of SECRETS, THE WOMAN WHO SPILLED WORDS ALL OVER HERSELF: WRITING AND LIVING THE ZONA ROSA WAY.  The Book Fair is the brainchild of bookseller Mitchell Caplan, who owns Books & Books in Coral Gables.  And it’s truly one of the greatest book fairs ever, spread out over a large outdoor and indoor site in downtown Miami. 
        This time, my husband Zane drove me down, and we checked into an almost too fancy – and very pricey – Marriott.  I didn’t even want to muss the buttery yellow bedding and towels, and Zane – unfortunately, still a smoker – had to go down eight floors in order to have a cigarette (a tip to myself:  look for the less expensive alternative lodging to the conference hotel when in a big city. The Super Eight nearer the book fair site would have done as well, or better – especially since I had my lovebug with me.  And for those of you who know me from SECRETS OF THE ZONA ROSA, you also know that I consider frugality, when it works as well -- that is, excluding not buying raspberries out of season or anything less than Chanel No. 5 -- is a Smart Woman’s gift to herself, as we can always use a little more money, yes?)
        As I’ve mentioned, one of the great things about writers’ festivals is getting to meet and hear writers we admire, as all of us who are writers are still star-struck, with our own personal Stars populating our own celestial literary universe. Sitting in the hospitality room provided for the authors, enjoying the refreshments set out for us, one is likely to meet authors one has wanted to meet all one’s life.  At my first Miami International Book Fair, I met Alan Garguanus, Clyde Edgerton, and Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief had just come out, and was not yet a movie) – a heady experience, as they were all authors I admired but had never met. (On the other hand, there’s nothing more disillusioning than hearing that one of one’s “Stars” is not the person one thought they would be, as I realized when Suzan told me she was sitting beside a world-renowned literary figure at a literary festival in Ireland, only to find him excruciatingly rude.  Book Festivals are also a great time to catch up with old friends, while still at the hotel, I tried to call Joyce Maynard and John Berendt, whom I had seen on the program and with whom I’d hoped to touch base. But as sometimes happens at events this huge, they had spoken the day before, and were already gone – though John later wrote me a lovely note.
        That night Zane and I boarded a bus with other Book Fair writers, including Julia Glass, National Book Award winner for her first novel, THE THREE JUNES, whom I’d met in New Orleans, for an author party on South Beach.  When we arrived at the Raleigh Hotel, and were directed out of doors to a bar area where people were sitting at little tables and drinking, and then on to a sand-filled beach with bonfires, mattresses (for sitting), outdoor bars and snacks, I felt – as I felt before when visiting the stark and startling Delano Hotel during my previous visit, that I was in a dream.  Everything was so, so art deco, and the scent of the ocean, which I was told was just beyond, the greenery, was everywhere.  Zane fell in love, too.  “If it’s good enough for Johnny Depp, it’s good enough for me,” he said as we walked out through a dining room lined with photos of celebs who had stayed there.
        The next afternoon, I listened to a panel featuring the intellectual and estimable Francine Prose until it was time for my event. I had had assumed that my co-speaker – River Jordan – was a man.  But low and behold, she turned out to be a very funny woman novelist from Tennessee, and we hit off immediately.  We each spoke, than had a great back-and-forth dialogue that had our audience in stitches, among them my dear friend Katherine, of Shakespeare and Company Books, who has a condo where she lives during the winter months in nearby Fort Lauderdale.
        After River and I signed books, and promised to stay in touch, Zane and I took off to meet Katherine at her condo, an hour’s drive north.  When she welcomed us and showed us the guest room, I was struck by acute desire:  the bed was spread with a table-cloth size covering featuring an oversized face of Frida Kahlo, one of my favorite artists, surrounded by jungle imagery. “That’s for you,” Katherine said, as though reading my mind. A lover of garage sales, and every other kind of funky venue, Katherine constantly seeks out unusual objets and books no one else might have (rare editions of Tolstoy’s last journals are among her more treasured possessions, as well as a sources of spiritual guidance). 
        That night, Katherine served us a delicious fish meal – her homemade mayonnaise is to die for – and we sat out on her deck, two blocks from the Atlantic Ocean, feeling again that I was in one of those special moments that I would want to remember forever.  Needless to say, as the owner of a bookstore filled with esoteric titles, Katherine’s brain is also well-filled, making her, in addition to her generosity and her adventurous spirit, an enthralling conversationalist.  The next morning before we left to drive north, Katherine read Zane’s tarot cards while I did e-mail, then opened a closet where she was storing recent literary finds, telling me to take my pick.  An old biography of Georgia O’Keefe drew me, as did several other titles. I wanted to visit with Katherine and stay by the sea a little longer. But Zane’s mother was expecting us for Thanksgiving in North Carolina, and I left ecstatic, the folded Frida Kahlo in my overnight case, and biography of Georgia O’Keefe in hand.

6.  AND THEN TO THE MOUNTAINS, AND MORE FRIENDS

        In North Carolina, Zane’s mom, a widow whose floors one could literally eat off, and who loves to serve her guests, pampered us. She’s also undemanding and I always feel comfortable there, able to read or write as I choose. She’s deaf and part of a large deaf community, and while Zane knows sign language, I don’t (indeed, the sexy way his lips move when he forms words so that she can read them was one of the things that made me fall in love with him). So it’s always a good time for me to so my favorite thing, which is to loll about, read, write and think while mother and son communicate.  And I still had all those wonderful books from France, plus some Zona Rosans and dear friend Connie had loaned me from her own cache.
        The day after Thanksgiving, we drove to Black Mountain to see my old friends, Alice and Lee.  Alice sponsored two Zona Rosa workshops in the beautiful house they had built themselves on the side of a mountain at the edge of a national forest. Alice is such a wit as well as fabulous writer that even her e-mails are delicious; her short stories have also been included in prestigious anthologies, one edited by Paul Auster (I wrote about her in Chapter One in SECRETS.)  Lee recently retired as a professor at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and also just published a study of the work of Henry James (see Stars in the Zona Rosa, the Guys, on our web page).  Now they’ve made their house into apartments in order to have friends they like live near them in what’s a near-communal arrangement.  Already much-traveled -- they have enough amusing stories to keep one laughing for hours, such as the one in which they barely escape their apartment in the midst of the student revolution in Paris in 1968, only to find themselves in another country where Alice, with only one pair of scuffed shoes with her, painted them black for a reception for royalty -- they now spend part of each year in Mexico (thus the “chica” in her e-mail greetings).  We sat out on their deck looking down the mountain into infinite green, where I’ve enjoyed so many meals with them in the past – Lee once gave me five different recipes for pasta, including pasta with collard greens, which turned out to be delicious – and talked about things literary, such as Alice’s recently completed novel, and where we might best have another Zona Rosa workshop, until the sun set.  And though different, the view here, looking out over green hills, was as beautiful as any we’d seen the past week.
       
7. OUR FIRST ANNUAL PINK-TIE AUCTION!

        In mid-December, our first-ever Zona Rosa Pink Tie Auction took place at Pamella’s house near Dunwoody, suburb of Atlanta (“near, but not in,” she’s always quick to say, referring to her recently completed novel, THE DEVIL IN DUNWOODY).  Pamella, ever ready to offer her services, is known for her warmth and her hospitality, not to speak of her downright sexiness. The purpose of the auction was to raise money for our first Pink Tie Party, and toward that end, we had all scoured our closets, apartments or houses in order to find great – read, Zona-Rosa worthy – stuff that we ourselves no longer wanted or used, but which was still wonderful and/or perfect for our diva tastes. 
        That night, to spoof the Zona Rosans’ name for me – the Queen of Zona Rosa -- I stuck a child’s pink plastic crown from Eckerd’s atop my hair and wore with my black dress and heels – it was just the kind of drugstore kitsch I love.      
        When we arrived, we found that Pamella, Connie, and others had arranged our precious items, displaying them in all the rooms, as well providing notepads for our bids.  And of course, Pamella’s cozy kitchen – she’s also the queen of the Foods of the Goddesses, as we call whatever we eat at Zona Rosa events – was filled with goodies prepared by the Zona Rosans, as well as our favorite red wine, and any other libation any of us might want. 
        Deborah took the helm at the head of the dining room table as auctioneer, telling us how the auction would be timed and how to make our bids, and we began flying around the displays, finding wonderful things that the others no longer needed, but which we felt would be just the thing to make our lives complete – though I admit to a bit of angst when Pamella changed her shoes on the spot to put on the high black-satin sequined ankle-strap wedgies I had donated – they were so adorable I almost wanted them back!  (Later, Connie would wear them on loan from Pamella, and I would again see how darling they were – but by then they had almost become official Zona Rosa shoes – available to anyone who wore size 7 1/2!)  Zona Rosan Ellen, a dancer with a dancer’s body, looked like a beauty queen as she struck a pose in a short white fur jacket.  Others, including me, were perusing the wonderful books and pieces of art – my daughter Darcy had contributed a painting, “Zona Rosa Cat” – a pink cat, naturally! – plus several prints of her gorgeous paintings of animals.
        At the end of the evening, Deborah, money whiz and auctioneer extraordinaire, announced that we had made $1265, more than enough for our projected party, given Pamella’s ability to stretch an entertaining dollar without loss of elegance or quality.  
        Little did we know at the time that our party location – Deborah and her boyfriend Tom’s classy in-town condo – would be unavailable on our projected date, as we learned after sending out “Mark Your Calendar” notices to our entire invitation list. Soon after, she and Tom’s landlord told Deborah that the condo association limited guests to the condos to 30 at a time – which, of course, meant that the party couldn’t take place there.    
        So if you’re wondering why you haven’t yet received an invitation to the Pink Tie Party, please know that our search for the perfect in-town space, so more people in the Atlanta area and those willing to fly into Atlanta, can come – is still ongoing, also that we greatly appreciated the offers of wonderful houses outside the city that might have been a much of a drive.  If you have a space to offer, please let us know!

8. AND NEARING, IF NOT QUITE TO, THE FINISH LINE!

        Despite having promised a shorter blog this time, here I’ve done it again! In fact this one may be even longer. And aside from breaking the writing rules I mentioned up front, I’ve also used clichés in order to hasten the process – a no-no in anything we’re writing for posterity.  (As Jon Franklin writes in his book, WRITING FOR STORY, life may be a cliché, but we shouldn’t put them in our writing.)  As I always say to the Zona Rosans when I write something quickly, this gives you a chance to critique me! 
        I also haven’t gotten past mid-December, 2006, and there’s more -- much more -- fabulous Zona Rosa stuff to say, with many great events during winter and spring, 2007.  And because it may be another three months, or even six, before I get around to write you again, let me give you a quick flash forward, which may help you understand by “dizzy” and “heady” are currently my favorite words. 
        In January, we had fabulous Zona Rosa workshops in Austin (our second!); Phoenix, with the help of our wonderful planner there; and San Antonio, at the unique Viva Book Store and art complex, organized by vivacious bookseller Pat (all these cities now have great Sub Rosa groups, so if you live there, go under News & Events on our web page, and get in touch). 
        I also received the news from Nightwood Books, the beautiful bookstore complete with atrium and live birds I described in my first Letter, that SECRETS OF ZONA ROSA had been among their best-sellers for 2006!
        In February, at the South Carolina Writers Festival – where  again I saw so many wonderful old friends – I spoke to a standing-room only audience, and every copy of SECRETS at both on-site bookstores sold out!
        At the end of the month, the huge Associated Writers Conference, in which I take part in every year, met in Atlanta, with over 500 participants.  With the help of Vally Sharpe of United Writers Press, and soon to be the publisher for Zona Rosa Books, we had our own Zona Rosa table at the book fair – we all agreed (and many said) it was the most appealing one there! – and I read my essay on “Trashy Women,” about how I’ve always aspired to be one, on a panel that everyone said was one of the best of the whole conference.  (I also got the news that the University of Milwaukee Press will publish the essays from our panel.) 
        But best of all was that since the conference was held at the Hilton in Atlanta, a large group of us – Zona Rosans from other cities as well as Savannah and Atlanta – had a marvelous dinner, and a chance to share all our news, at Trader Vic’s downstairs!
        In honor of Zona Rosa and St. Patrick’s Day, Kathleen held a party at her fabulous house with wrap-around porches in the historic area at High Shoals, Georgia, near Athens, home of the Athens music scene, of which Kathleen was once a part.  It was a party for the memory books, with Pamella cooking again (of course!) and more food and drink than one can imagine.  We had readings from SECRETS, live music of the Athens variety, and dancing, but the hit of the evening was songs from ZONA ROSA THE MUSICAL as written by Pamella and Kathleen, and sung and played on Kathleen’s piano by the professional musicians who’d made the demo to send out along with the script!  If the response was any indication, ZONA ROSA THE MUSICAL is a sure thing!
        Next, I appeared on “Cover to Cover,” St. John Flynn’s well-known book show on Georgia Public Broadcasting,  Zona Rosan Margie was among the callers during the live broadcast, as was my old friend, the South’s answer to Julia Childs, and famous cookbook author, Nathalie Dupree.
        Telling the stories of Zona Rosans, and how they’ve overcome obstacles in their writing and lives on Public Radio has long been my dream.  So that night I took six commentaries with me in a folder, and left them for producer Susanna Capulouto.  Within weeks, Susanna e-mailed me to say that she wanted to record two of them right away.  After my next Atlanta Zona Rosa workshop, I made a quick trip to High Shoals and Athens to visit with Kathleen and to read and speak at the Athens Barnes & Noble, where I met more great women.  Because of Kathleen, Ellen, and our new friend, Donny Seagraves (you’ll hear more about her later), Athens now has a strong Zona Rosa presence.  In fact, Kathleen is already famous there for TRIAL OF A DEAD LAWYER’S WIFE, the witty, dark memoir she’s finishing in the Atlanta Alpha Babes Group. “Where can I buy it?” one of the women at Barnes & Noble asked me, after I described Kathleen’s book.  So literary agents, listen up!
        The following Monday I went back to the Georgia Public Broadcasting in Atlanta to record.  Recording the commentaries turned out to be a new experience – Susanna coached me, telling me to “talk” the stories (I always do this while speaking to groups!) – rather than read them.  But she said that I was a quick study and that they were fine (no dates at this point on when they’ll air).  It’s good to know how it’s done, and next time, I’ll be ready!
        Next time round, I also promise to tell you about some marvelous recent experiences with the synchronicity of the universe, which helped all these wonderful things come into being.  But just writing this has been dizzying, so I’ll stop now.      Besides, it’s almost that time of year when we take off, bathing suits and champagne bottles in hand, for our annual Zona Rosa retreat at Tybee Island — a.k.a., Savannah — Beach.  Each year, Zona  Rosans, some of them new, come from all parts of the country, and our beautiful beach house is already crammed – though we could possibly make room for a few more participants; last year, we rented a second house for the overflow (see our web page for a full application form under News & Events).
        The last night of the retreat will be one of my favorite events, our standing-room-only Annual Zona Rosa Party at my house, with entertainment by the Zona Rosans (yes, some of it is X-rated!)   Last year our party was written up in the Savannah Morning News by friend-of-Zona Rosa, Rexanna Lester; it’s on the web page if you’d like to take peek.

9. OH, AND I JUST REMEMBERED --

        I also promised to tell you how I got any writing done during this time. To do this, and also continue to  meet new challenges, I reverted to my tried and true method:  morning is my prime writing time, so whatever I’m currently writing is beside me in my briefcase or on my bed at all times. That way, even in a motel, I have no excuses – indeed, I’ve often done some of my best writing in anonymous rooms like these.  Among my recent productions is an essay, “The Ring,” a treatise on marriage, mine in particular, and my belief that women, no matter what their marital status, need to maintain their personal power, their independence – and that these qualities should further develop as we age (older women are such a force, yes?!).  I wrote it on assignment for an anthology DESIRE: WOMEN WRITE ABOUT WANTING – doesn’t that title just make you want to read it!? -- edited by Lisa Solod, to be released by Seal Press this November. The collection also includes pieces by dear friends Joyce Maynard, and Erica Jong -- as well as our own Very Exceptional Zona Rosan, Connie B. Using this method, I also wrote the essay on “Trashy Women,” making corrections on it in my trademark purple ink up until moments before the panel.
        What’s atop my bedspread at this moment?  Besides my notes for this Letter, my treatment for ZONA ROSA THE SIT COM.  In addition, three-hundred-twenty-five pages of a memoir-in-progress about the mental illness in my family and how it affected me as a mother, rebel and writer, rests in my briefcase, along with the question of whether that book or MORE SECRETS OF THE ZONA ROSA should come next.
        And then there are my “writing ideas” notebooks, all chock full of first drafts of poems, essays, and stories, as I never, ever want to lose an idea – they are my version of riches, and the very thought gives me the chills! 
        “Use the F word – Focus” has long been one of our credos.  Recently, I created a new one, “Use the C word – Compartmentalize.”  While we don’t always want to do everything at once, sometimes it’s the only way to meet one’s goals. 
        As most of us know, the real secret of success is effort, Extending Chi (or stretching ourselves beyond what we thought possible, as reads one of our credos) – though usually it’s so much fun that we don’t think of it that way.
        Also that old adage, “First things first” is such an important one for us writers, and by thinking about my writing first thing in the morning, I can still capture and keep in touch with my ideas, and even produce good writing, no matter what else may be going on.

10. AND I CAN’T LET YOU GET AWAY WITHOUT GIVING YOU AN UPDATE ON OUR STARS IN THE ZONA ROSA

which are exploding in number before our very eyes!  So many Zona Rosans are now published authors – over 45 and counting – I have a hard time keeping track!   And nothing – no, nothing! – is more exciting than having a Zona Rosan come to his or her Zona Rosa group, new book in hand, as that month’s Visiting Author.  These events are cause for celebration indeed, and these days, we barely seem able to keep up with them.
        In April, Carol O’Dell first event for her just-published book, MOTHERING MOTHER, was Author-Guest in the Savannah Zona Rosa group, where we had heard it, chapter by chapter over the months while she was caregiving her terminally ill mother.  The book was already receiving acclaim, even before publication, and we were all thrilled.  She next read and signed at the Atlanta Alpha Babes group, where she had also once been a member, and we toasted her with champagne.  In addition, she gave us invaluable advice on promoting our books – Carol is nothing if not a great marketer!
        Around the same time, we got the news that Zona Rosa Emeritus Susan B. Johnson, had found publishers – via contacts she made through Zona Rosa – for not one, but two of her books, SAVANNAH’S CROOKED LITTLE HOUSES and SPIRIT WILLING, a novel that was the first book Susan wrote during her years in Zona Rosa.  At the same time, a filmmaker said he’s like to make a short film of one of her plays, which had recently been performed in Savannah.  Susan is the perfect role model for persevering while continuing to write and perfect one’s craft – as she wrote me in a note when all these good things began to break, “I waited.  And I waited.  And I waited.”  Susan, we are all so proud of you!
        And in July, Karen Dove Barr (yes, that’s her real name!) will be our author-guest with her first book, RUNNING THROUGH MENOPAUSE, a book many women are loving, will be our special Author-Guest  Karen, an attorney, knows how to find balance in her life, and running is one of the tools she loves most.
        Jody Schiesser, described in Chapter Seven of SECRETS as one of our favorite guys ever, and a long-time member of our Savannah Monday Evening Zona Rosa group (that’s the one with men in it!), is currently being written up in all the local media for THE STREET CLEANER, the film he produced along with two friends, and which recently won not just one, but three, awards in film festival!  Jody, a true renaissance man as well as work-at-home father to two boys, recently showed his exquisitely-lit photos of beautiful women at a Savannah venue; in Zona Rosa, he’s writing two novels featuring his unique take on life, as well as poems written in the same voice.
        Last week I was thrilled to receive a copy of Tom German’s first novel, THE CAUCASIAN DOVE, which we heard in the same Monday evening group.  Tom, a charming, retired doctor of orthopedics/sports medicine, and former Fullbright scholar, has taken to writing with a passion, with two other near-finished novels in hand; he comes by it naturally as his father was a cowboy balladeer and writer in South Dakota, where he grew up.  THE CAUCASIAN DOVE has a beautiful blue and red cover designed by his son Matthew German.  Cheers, Tom!
        Speaking of our successes – and we love them all, whether or not they’re in the realm of publication -- Judi Painter, who I first met when I spoke to the book club she had started near my house in Savannah two years ago – it turned out she lives a block from me, and I’d passed her house many times on my walks – and who is now an important part of our Savannah Zona Rosa group – has started a wonderful new business supporting authors, BookNAuthor.  Go to the link for her wonderful web page via our www.myzonarosa.com 
        Deborah Bailey, whose story is told in SECRETS OF THE ZONA ROSA, and who went through a major life transition just several years ago, has at last come upon the profession that is just right for her – as life coach to other women who want to reinvent themselves.  The field she left behind was as CEO and money manager of a business, and now she’s started her own coaching service as well as a Money Boot Camp, with the book to follow. Her first step was to place a colorful ad in Skirt!, our favorite femme publication, edited by woman-after-our-own-hearts Nikki Hardin, whose story is told in Chapter Three of SECRETS.  Watch out, Suze Orman – and to future clients: Deborah knows whereof she speaks!  Deborah’s web link, too, can be found on our web page.
        And then to get back to the Star in the Zona Rosa who might be the most exciting of all to me:  last week, my darling sister Anne, who faithfully hosts our Atlatna Alpha Babes Zona Rosa group, and who has been writing and publishing in literary publications for years – Anne is a well-known and widely published nurse-poet -- received the news that her first collection of poems (though by far not the first one she’s written!), A HISTORY OF NURSING, will be published by Kennesaw State University Press!  Anne, I love you.  And I’m so, so proud of you -- for your vision, your talent  -- yes, it runs in our family! -- and your dedication to doing it right.
        I’m sure that tomorrow, I’ll be hearing of yet another Zona Rosan who’s made her mark!
        Believe it or not, I’m finally coming to the end of what’s turned out to a novella-length Letter. I hope to see you soon at a Zona Rosa workshop or retreat (again, see our web page).
        And in the meantime, a big Zona Rosa kiss.  And bless your writing hand!

—

My First Letter

 1.  THE FIRST MONTHS OF LIFE OF SECRETS OF THE ZONA ROSA:  HOW WRITING (AND SISTERHOOD) CAN CHANGE WOMEN’S LIVES

First, I admit my bias against blogging – while I adore the freshness of a writer’s first thoughts, I also believe that we should keep our best stuff for the works we hope will make the bookstores, or otherwise be preserved for posterity.  On the other hand, I’ve recently noticed – with the proliferation of writers writing blogs – that some of us are, yes, able to write both of the moment, just as we would write a letter to a friend, and keep other material for what we hope will be timeless.  And while you may find this message as long as a chapter in SECRETS, please feel free to read from first one part, then another.
         
The months since the publication of SECRETS OF THE ZONA ROSA:  HOW WRITING (AND SISTERHOOD) CAN CHANGE WOMEN’S LIVES have been so much fun, so full of excitement – with good times made even better by the presence of my Zona Rosa sisters – as often as not wearing our pink trademark Zona Rosa T-shirts Zona Rosan Pamella created especially for the Book Tour.  They’re fitted and sexy, with baby-doll cap sleeves, and while some protested that they were too small before they put them on, everyone I’ve seen wearing them to date looks both adorable and also bathed in a warm flattering pink glow – or is that just the radiance we share at every Zona Rosa event?

Our first en masse appearance in the T-shirts was at my signing for SECRETS at the Ansley Mall Chapter 11 Bookstore in Atlanta, my old stomping grounds near the little house on Monroe Drive where I lived for 13 years, and where the current resident, a florist, has a little shrine to the books I wrote there – a sweet fact he shared after a reading a few years back at the iconic Georgian Terrace Holel on Peachtree Street, across the street from the equally iconic Fox Theater, a vast structure built like an endless mosque, with a dark distant ceiling featuring glittering stars in its theater.  The theater was a setting I thrilled to time after time as a teenager, sitting above the orchestra pit to see Rita Hayworth or Claudette Cobert on the big screen, or to hear Johnny Ray sing, “Cry, Cry, Cry” on bended knee.  Along with the Carnegie Library on Peachtree Street, where I spent many hours in a stuffed green chair in the Children’s Room, or later upstairs in the adult section, imagining I could read every book in the library – or at least, absorb them by osmosis, the theatre was part of the imagery of my childhood, deeply imprinted in my brain.  And later, the little house on Monroe Dive became the site of my first writing workshops when I invited poets to gather in my living room to talk about poetry.  (Some of those poets, most notably Walter Griffin, have now become well-known.)

Thus, at the Chapter 11 Bookstore, a short distance from many scenes from my former life, and looking out of a sea of sister Zona Rosans wearing the same T-shirt I was wearing, I felt like I had come back home. As I spoke, I interspersed my own words and experiences of Zona Rosa with readings from SECRETS – Kathleen’s and Linda’s stories, and the section on how Connie came to write her Ph. D. dissertation on my and diarist Anais Nin’s journals, ending with Connie’s famous Out-of-the-Box credos. 

The first person to speak during the Q & A was a young man who had just wandered, he said, into the store.  “And this was just where I was meant to be.”  He told the story of having “run away to Atlanta” – that his mother didn’t know where he was.  When I told him I was a mother, too – in fact, I had been a mother who had had the same experience as his – I recommended that he write down his feelings, and call his mom and tell her he was okay. Soon, as I talked with others, I saw him scribbling in a notebook in a corner of the store.  “Was he a plant?” someone asked afterward, referring to the fact that our exchange had seemed so natural.  But no, his being there had merely been the synchronicity of the Universe, and I had been happy to save some other woman the pain I had had when my own kids had taken it upon themselves to hit the road. 

During the signing – while I met Zona Rosan Stacy’s visiting parents, and chatted with old friends, the bookseller came up and said “You had more people here than anyone we’ve had in ages – more than E. Lynn Harris!” (“Who’s that?” I asked, then saw an army of Mr. Harris’s books strategically poised near the cash register.)  Afterward, my sister Anne told me that our friend Janet, whom I’ve known since early in my writing life, and who’s now the super-smart head of a business that manages non-profits, said, “It looks like Rosemary has found her true calling.”  It was not the first time I would hear that during the next months, and I would know they were right:  leading Zona Rosa, and talking about SECRETS, and the ZONA ROSANS in it, is as natural to me as breathing. 

Indeed, that I had finished the book at all was incredible, given that three of the people closest to me had had relapses from chronic illnesses not long after I had agreed to the deadline for the book; and that I had written much of it with my world falling down around me, not to speak of the stacks of books and notes I needed to write it, plus manuscripts to be read for the ongoing Zona Rosa workshops that I was still driving or flying to on a regular basis.  Thus, everything about the book’s birth was miraculous, and when I looked back on it, it was like looking back on labor:  I now had this beautiful, unique babe, as well as Zona Rosa, but I could remember none of the pain.

2. GETTING TO KNOW THE FABULOUS WOMEN OF AUSTIN AND SANTA FE, ESPECIALLY SHAKER-AND-MOVER, JUDITH!

But the excitement had begun long before my appearance at the Ansley Mall bookstore.  It began months before the book came out in May, 2006, when I served as keynote speaker for the annual conference of the Story Circle Network in Austin, now headed up by former Atlanta Zona Rosan Patricia – “Trilla” to us – Pando.  My subject was “When Strong Women Tell Their Truths,” and shortly after arriving at the conference hotel and a brief meeting with SCN head, super-intelligent-and-prolific author Susan Wittig Albert, and the rest of the dynamic women who make SCN work, it was time for me to speak.  As I looked out over the sea of shining feminine faces, I felt the rush of connection, an energy that rose as I talked.  (One of the things I would learn during the conference was of the term “gena rose,” or generated by the rose, which was perfect as an alternate term for our peer, or Sub Rosa groups.)

Afterward, two women rushed over to me before anyone else to introduce themselves as Glenys Carl and Elaine Nelson of Santa Fe.  They said they wanted to plan a Zona Rosa workshop there, and before we parted, Glenys thrust into my hands a copy of Hold My Hand, her account of caring for her dying adult son for years and against great obstacles in both Australia and London. The book would turn out be one of the more moving memoirs I’ve read in years (in addition, Glenys is Welsh and has a lovely, lilting accent).  

While in Austin, I also got together with the dynamic Judith Dullnig, who I knew from our Zona Rosa retreats in France and Italy, where the energized Judith takes the time to serve as sous chef to Pamella, our Cook Par Excellence – she’s fluent in cooking both French and Italian! – and thus is partly responsible for our Foods of the Goddesses while abroad.  (But this is merely part of Judith’s claim to fame:  she has also received an award from the Governor of Texas for instigating and leading her highly original  – and very hands-on, as I would see as a guest in her new home later in June – Story Book Project, a program in which women in prison are facilitated in reading stories aloud on audio for the children they’ve left at home.  

At the moment, beside leading the program, Judith was in the process of building not one, but two, houses – in Austin, and a getaway house in Maine, where’s she’s from – and she, her husband, and her adult daughter – back home from Italy, where she had been living and working in an architectural office – were temporarily crammed into a little apartment.  As she ushered me inside, I felt at home; the stuff of busy, creative people was everywhere, just in my little blue house in Savannah, including her daughter’s drawing table and boxes of materials for the prison program.  Now I knew that Judith was truly a woman who puts first things first! 

Indeed, not only was she doing all these things, she had also just co-hosted a beautiful tea in her friend Alegria’s home where I talked about SECRETS and we both talked about our upcoming Zona Rosa workshop in Austin in June, to take place in Judith’s sparkling new house.  She also gave me her recipe for the lemon curd tartlets I couldn’t stop eating – lemon curd from a jar in store-bought shortbread cups!  As they are for other busy women, shortcuts are a part of Judith’s life.

Back at home, I immersed myself in plans – e-mail, not my favorite thing, taking over my life, but for good causes – expanding Zona Rosa and letting people everywhere know about SECRETS OF THE ZONA ROSA.  Needless to say, the details of even big plans can be tedious.  But as Thomas Carlyle said, “Genius is simply attention to detail.”  And when one has all-consuming goals, even the details become exciting.  After brainstorming sessions with my agent Gail and Sarah, my publicist at Holt, I got down to work doing things that to outline here would take pages, along the way creating a notebook and file folders to hold my plans.

As I pondered where I should be the actual pub week of the book, which was destined to be released on May 2, I thought of one of my favorite cities in the world, New Orleans, and my friends there:  I hadn’t been back since before Katrina, and a visit to them was overdue.  I had also just received an invitation from my dear friends, Adrienne and Bill, to their annual Pig Roast; Adrienne is a novelist, Bill is a documentary filmmaker/manager for musicians, and these legendary events are attended by pals from all over the country  But this year, it would be in their new home in New Orleans, where they had made a gutsy move only months after Katrina (Adrienne, a wonderful writer, had been sending me her blogs recounting the aftermath).  Indeed, that was also the week of the Jazz Fest, which I had never attended.  Adrienne generously offered to turn their already huge party -- this year, the writer and director of SIN CITY would be there, as well as numerous musicians from Bill’s world, playing throughout the night -- into a book party for SECRETS!  

Next New Orleans Literary Leader and old friend Rosemary James offered a book signing at her bookshop, Faulkner House Books, on Pirate’s Alley in the French Quarter.  The shop, housed on the lower floor of she and husband Joe’s historic five-story house (which is two rooms wide), is surely one of the more unique bookshops and houses in the country.  Once I had the pleasure of being Rosemary and Joe’s houseguest up winding steps in the fifth floor bedroom where Faulkner had once lived, a heady experience indeed!).  Then when my dear friend Marda (she’s in Chapter Eight of SECRETS) offered the slave quarters, or the Red Palace, as we call her the adorable lipstick-red apartment behind her gorgeous Royal Street condo, I was all set.

 3.  IT’S A BOOK!

Soon – the week before pub date – I was off to Phoenix to visit my darling daughter Lulu (where she’s a psychiatrist) in her new house:  a restful treat during which I enjoyed the wireless in her cool new adobe abode, and we watched old movies from her collection, caught up on mother-daughter stuff, and drank and ate the great fresh produce that grows so profusely in her part of the country.  But – not neglecting literary matters – we also met with April, a young woman who had written me months before, offering to help plan a Zona Rosa workshop in Phoenix for late 2006 or 2007 – April was smart and attractive – and, I could tell, talented:  I was excited at the prospect of our working together!  Next we visited a couple of Border’s Bookstores, where I left off some our postcards with the cover of SECRETS on the front, blurbs on the back, with the lovely customer service people, appraising them of the date and asking them to order the book – in fact, they already had it on order, they said.  And last but not least, we visited Changing Hands Book Store, one of the Southwest’s more outstanding author venues to chat with their events manager about a possible reading/signing at the store during my return to Phoenix next January.

From Phoenix, I flew to New Orleans for a week that was  heady indeed – in first readings from the book, first, at Adrienne and Bill’s house to a huge crowd, and then at Faulkner House Books.  Naturally, I read the part about Marda since she was there – and where I saw Zona Rosans from New Orleans Zona Rosa workshops past and announced our upcoming workshop, to be held at Adrienne’s spacious Garden District house, for later in the year or early 2007.  Rosemary J. also asked me to come back for her annual, lavish, and outstanding Words and Music Festival in November to lead a mini-Zona Rosa workshop there. Since it was Jazz Fest week, the rest of my visit was a blur of parties with, live music and great food at each, plus Marda’s and my traditional lunch of Galatoire’s with our friend, Kenneth, who first took me there years ago, an event made even more heady by his telling me that we were sitting at Tennessee Williams’ favorite table (as we did again on this trip).

Next, I took off for Albuquerque where Paul, of the Savannah Zona Rosa group that includes men, who was visiting his parents in Santa Fe, met me at the plane.  After a beautiful hour-long drive, we met Glenys and Elaine in Santa Fe just outside Garcia Street books, where I would read and sign later in the week, and Subscription Drugs, a darling coffee shop thus named because it probably has more magazines – walls and walls of them, plus art, then any shop I’ve ever seen.  I just wanted to plop down with a double latte and peruse them all.   When Glenys gave me the choice of staying in her small adobe apartment in town, or a space outside town with a car to drive (which Elaine had generously offered), I chose the cozy adobe space which was within walking distance of the book store and coffee shop.  I knew I had made the right decision when I saw its rustic, restful décor, the down comforters Glenys had piled up on the bed, the art and baskets full of art magazines, and the little walled patio out back.   (One of the challenges of my life on the road is learning to enjoy minimal time in fabulous spaces where I’d really love to spend six months or more, as per my dream years before of spending six months  in ten different wonderful places over a period of five years.)

Soon Paul and I were having dinner in a famously rustic Santa Fe hotel with Carolyn and David, old friends from the deep South.  On Friday night I gave a reading at the bookstore, an experience made headier by seeing photos of old friends on the walls, especially Stuart Woods, who had been a resident there for a while.  The next day, I went with Glenys and Elaine to something called Body Choir, based on the writings and work of Gabriel Roth, thinking I would sit out the dancing and watch.  Instead, I found myself on the floor within minutes, moving to the music along with other ecstatic men and women -- having an experience that was such a high that I wrote in my journal that night that I knew I must have it in my life on an indefinite basis!  (Years before Zona Rosa took over my life, I had been an aficionado of discos both straight and gay, dancing as many nights of the week as I could to the Village People and the Sisters Chic, and here I was, dancing again, and realizing how much I had missed it.  It was at Body Choir that I felt the true spirit of Santa Fe, which is beautiful indeed!) 

The week culminated with our dynamic – given the Santa Fe energy -- Zona Rosa workshop.  Among those who attended were many of my new friends in Sante Fe, followed by individual conferences with those who wished on Sunday.  Among the conferees was Leslie, who was working among other things, on a screenplay, and who offered to read my treatment for ZONA ROSA, THE SIT COM.  I also met with Kirsten, a darling New Yorker from Texas who I at first assumed to be a fashion model – she’s tall, blonde, and slender -- though she turned out to work in the production end of fashion, assisting the well-known designer Nicole Miller. (Needless to say, she looked gorgeous in her Zona Rosa T-shirt from the batch I had just received from Pamella via Fed Ex!) Kirsten and I discussed her life, work, and writing plans – and then, as the Goddess would have it – she offered to served as planner for a Zona Rosa workshop in Manhattan!

Before long, I was back in Austin for our Zona Rosa workshop, a two-day event at Judith’s sparkling new house, where we all reeled as we heard and read from one another’s stories. Connie, of our Atlanta Alpha Babes group, had come all the way from Atlanta, and it was wonderful to see her, newly svelte from her recent workouts in preparation for her 26-mile marathon in Alaska.  We were all stunned at Alegria’s talent as a memoirist as she described her mystical early life in Buenos Aires. Joni, a beautiful dentist, said she wanted to go with us to France.  Another woman, who shall remain nameless, described how her husband, a high-level official in the Bush administration, had suddenly left her for another woman when they were in Washington; she had come back to the Southwest to care for her sister, who was dying of breast cancer, when her sister’s daughter, a beautiful young woman with no evident health problems, died in her sleep.  But was she as “ruined” as one would think, given what she had gone through?  Au contraire – as often is the case, she inspired us with her story of courage, strength, and new beginnings at midlife.  Also, as is usual at workshops where I meet with new people, I learned something more about what people want – not just talk about writing and life and discussion of the manuscripts sent me in advance, but an on-the-spot writing-and-sharing experience. (After every reading, talk, or workshop, I always self-critique in my journal the next morning as to how things could have gone even better. And no matter how dynamic things have been, I always learn something new.)  

Despite the hours Judith was putting in on her prison project – she had to run out each morning before our ten a.m. workshops to deliver books, materials -- she also went with me when I spoke and signed at Book Women, a wonderful women’s book store where the audience was rapt, and where I would meet Maxine, who had driven all the way to Austin from Houston to hear me, and who would start our first online Sub Rosa group (see News & Events).  Two nights later, we were at Book People, called the best independent bookstore in the U.S. by Publishers Weekly.  There I met more wonderful Texans, and bought a pink cowboy hat – the store sells everything, and I had almost worn out the one Kathleen had given me from Target.

4. YET ANOTHER SURPRISE: ZONA ROSA, THE MUSICAL IS BORN!

Back in Savannah, I drove to Tybee Island (Savannah Beach), 20 minutes from my house, to meet and talk writing – I thought – with Very Important Zona Rosans Pamella and Kathleen, who had rented a house there for a couple of days.  Instead, they greeted me at their little cottage with the news that over the last 48 hours, they had composed the entire book, based on the music of Oklahoma!, for ZONA ROSA, THE MUSICAL!  Both are professional musicians as well as fabulous writers – Kathleen had brought her portable piano with her from High Shoals, Georgia, where she lives – and, after making me comfortable on the couch with a cup of tea, they proceeded to sing the entire thing to me.   Indeed, in addition to being stunned by the virtuosity of what they had done, they soon had me laughing until I was crying.  (But that wasn’t all:  they were already projecting a second musical, Less Miserable.)

A few weeks later, Kathleen met with an attorney friend to ask whether it was okay to use the score for Oklahoma! as music for their lyrics  – the answer was yes – and  they made plans for a preview performance at the public library in the suburb of Atlanta where Pamella lives.  Our performance was planned for a Friday evening after our regular Thursday eve Atlanta “Alpha Babes” Zona Rosa meeting (though now national and even international, this group serves as our headquarters and think-tank). We were to meet that afternoon for a run-through at Pamella’s house, the site, since Pamella is definitely “the hostess with the mostest,” providing other Zona Rosa festivities throughout the year. 

That Thursday evening, at our regular meeting at my sister Anne W.’s house in Buckhead, Kathleen asked me to close my eyes.  What was coming, I wondered -- the Zona Rosans often give me Zona-Rosa appropriate gifts -- that is, things glittery and pink.  But never before had I been asked not to look.  Given the green light to open them again, I was so surprised I couldn’t speak:  Kathleen had drawn an amazing object from a black garbage bag, and was placing it on my head.  The huge, pink feather headdress --  worthy of the best drag queen in any Mardi Gras parade – stood at least a foot and half above my forehead.  Fortunately, Jill was there to video us and captures the sound track, which was five solid minutes of rollicking laughter!  As I often say, when I speak, the sound one hears most often at a Zona Rosa event is laughter (interspersed with our many more serious moments, and even tears), and on this evening, we laughed even louder and longer than usual! 

We have great times in Zona Rosa all the time – at every retreat, Kathleen and others sing the arrival song Kathleen wrote, as well as the departure song, and anything else that pops into their very musical heads.  In fact our” No Cocks” sweatshirts, as designed by Judith and Susan J., and ZONA ROSA, THE MUSICAL had started around our long dinner table the previous fall during our retreat in Tuscany as the group stood singing and improvising on the words “No cocks here!”

When Anne and I arrived at Pamella’s house the next day, I was again amazed – even rendered speechless again – at the preparations Pamella and Kathleen had made. Not only did we have a choreographer and director/coach in residence, but every possible set eventuality had been covered. They had even created the big Pink Tent that forms the set, and Jill – our resident technical guru – had created a power point presentation that would fill in the rest.  Kathleen, our coach in all things musical, wore a black T-shirt that read “Pretend I’m not here, I’m just the lyricist” so she could stand behind us and coach us while “on stage – help I desperately needed when it came time to “sing” my parts. The Zonettes, or Zona Rosa chorus, made up of Connie, Lynn, Deborah B., Anne, and choreographer Ellen all wore our new Zona Rosa T-shirts with short white tennis skirts, some found by Pamella at local thrift shops.  When the Zonettes bent over, each skirt revealed a pair of white cotton panties on which Pamella had glued a big red kiss – when had she had time to do all this?!  And as if they hadn’t done enough, Pamella and crew had even made pink cotton nuns’ coifs for the moments toward the end of the musical when the members of the chorus become “Sisters of the Zona Rosa,” as in, “Go my sister, and sin way more!” 

In addition, Pamella’s husband Mike had gamely agreed to play Dick, the Bad Guy, despite that it meant dressing in drag and sitting on a portable toilet while supposedly in prison in Oklahoma after waving his “salami” and more at the whole underage cheerleading squad, as played by the Zonettes, who looked like super-shapely teenagers in their outfits.  

(Speaking of being game, my husband Zane agreed to wear a black silk robe imprinted all over with our logo – red lip prints – at our annual Zona Rosa bash at my house in Savannah after our week-long Zona Rosa retreat, or “Pajama Party for Grown-Up Girls with Smarts,” at the beach.  I had ordered the robe when Pamella sent me a web page featuring a photo of a hunky guy wearing said robe as a joke – “I can’t believe you really bought it!” she said when I told her.  But when the robe arrived, it barely fit me – and in the shortest, sexiest way!  The idea of Zane’s broad shoulders stuffed into it was comical.  Still, I praised him for his willingness, if not the actual chance to show his stuff.)

Soon the audience for our musical arrived, many also wearing our official pink T-shirts – including the adorable, blonde Debee, who, looking like a movie star, drove up to the library entrance in a silver convertible with her handsome husband, Dante.  In the auditorium, red-haired Jill, looking good in her own pink shirt, sat behind her projector, guiding the Power Point she had created, complete with Red Brick Road leading to Savannah, the Pink Tent, and Zona Rona. 

And before we knew it, we were performing – however awkwardly – to gales of laughter from our obviously pleased viewers.  Some of us even added extemporaneous lines, as I did when the players sang “Slander and Libel,” and I cited the “small penis” rule, in which a man is unlikely to sue an author if his character is described as having a small member.

After the final applause, Pamella and Kathleen gave out questionnaires asking our audience for their feedback. Back at Pamella’s house, over drinks and plates of Foods of the Goddesses, we rehashed our first presentation and brainstormed new ideas.  By the time we all reluctantly said good night, we agreed that with enhancements, ZONA ROSA, THE MUSICAL, with its log line, “Bigger Than a Hormone, Deeper Than a Body Part,” is sure to leave The Vagina Monologues, not to speak of Menopause, the Musical, in the dust! 

But as usual at any Zona Rosa gathering, more than that had happened:  our new friend and choreographer Ellen – of the enviable legs and shapely figure – told us the moving story of her (for a long time, unlikely) recovery from breast cancer.  As she peeled off her Zona Rosa T-shirt to reveal the mountain lion tattooed over her shoulder, and covering her beautiful, reconstructed breast, we all gasped in awe – not just at the symmetry of her body, but at her story of courage.

5. ZONA ROSANS IN THE WORLD, AND EVEN TALES OF AMOUR!

Networking is part of what Zona Rosa is about, and when Jill decided to go with to Zambia with a Christian group who were going to help children there in honor of a friend’s child who had died (as had Jill’s darling son Christopher), she took one of our new Zona Rosa tote bags – pink, of course, with the logo – plus two copies of SECRETS OF THE ZONA ROSA, inscribed to “Our sisters in Zambia.”  “They were a big hit,” she wrote me later, adding that the toilet paper there was purple, which fit right in with our color scheme.

We bought books and audiotapes from Connie’s collection as part of her contribution to a benefit for Leukemia, inspired by her friend, who is a leukemia patient; one Zona Rosan who prefers to remain nameless, advanced Connie’s cause by paying $300 for an audiotape! Then we applauded month by month as Connie completed the personal training she needed in order to complete the rest of her leukemia challenge by competing in a 26-mile marathon in Anchorage, Alaska.  Indeed, Connie was determined to let nothing stop her, including a serious back injury several years before (through which Zona Rosan Gray had nursed and supported her).  Among her personal benefits as the months went on was a new and increasingly svelte bod which we all applauded as she entered each Zona Rosa meeting, inevitably wearing something black and beaded, and tighter than the month before. After she completed the marathon – with joy and verve, according to the photos -- her long-time boyfriend Raj, who had traveled to Alaska with her, along with her auntie and uncle from Georgia, got down on bended knee before the crowd and asked her the big question:  at her “yes,” he presented her with the tres beautiful ring he had selected with best friend Gray’s help.  It was a win-win day for Connie, Raj, and the Leukemia patients! 

Indeed, it was a time of celebration all round, as Gray married her sweetheart, Don, in a big wedding in Gray’s new home and Don’s old home of Calhoun, Georgia, an event attended by all the Zona Rosans who could get away.  Gray, the rest of us heard – and saw in photos -- was gorgeous in the full-length white gown that was Connie’s wedding gift to her, though Don was in a wheelchair with a torn kneecap – Gray and Dan were determined not to let anything interfere with their nuptials! 

Gray was madly in love – “Listen to this!” she said to me at the beach, handing over her cell phone so I could hear the sexy Deep-Southern way with which Don pronounced “Ba-bee,” as in “Give me a call, Ba-bee!”  But since I didn’t want her to forget who she is – a brilliant woman in her own right, whatever her marital status – I gave her an amber pendant from Paris, wrapped in blue velvet, rather than the requested crockery, along with a note saying “Don’t forget who you are.”)

Pamella’s house has long been a mini Zosa Rosa retreat, or home away from home; Jill and others who live outside Atlanta often crash there in order to come to our meetings. When Raj was promoted to Charlotte, North Carolina, Connie rented an apartment in Pamella and Mike’s house, as while she planned to join Raj on weekends, there was no way she was leaving Atlanta and Zona Rosa for good! Connie was especially thrilled by her first purchase for her writing retreat – a sapphire blue couch on which she already saw herself reclining, computer on her lap. Indeed, sapphire blue is platinum-blonde Connie’s special color and the color of her totem animal – the seal – tattooed above her left breast.

When I was nine, I was the ringleader of another girl-gang, the Three Musketeers, and one of things we did was liberate things from our parents’ houses to spread out on the sidewalk of our neighborhood to create a “store” from which indulgent grownups walking by could make purchases – a kind of grade-school pre-garage sale.  And during the months covered in this blog, the Zona Rosans took me back to my own past in a way I never would have imagined, first, through Pamella’s creations of the No Cock Zona Rosa sweat shirt commemorating our 2005 two-week Zona Rosa retreat in Italy, next, our baby doll Zona Rosa T-shirts, then the amazing array of products the super techo-literate Jill began to produce:  book marks, refrigerator magnets, personal cards, post cards, and our exorcises and credos, in pretty net bags – all with the book cover and our Zona Rosa logo imprinted on them.  Indeed, she even created more little net bags of pink and purple M & Ms, imprinted with the words “Zona Rosa” and “Keep It Simple” – though I hated for people to actually eat them, they would be a big hit at our annual Zona Rosa bash in June.  Soon, before I knew it, I had another little, portable Zona Rosa store on a rolling blue and white cart which I rolled out to carry our new products at Zona Rosa meetings in Savannah, or to transport via a cardboard carton to Zona Rosa meetings asnd workshop elsewhere – complete with a marbleized notebooks in which to record purchases supplied by Pamella, plus a purple net bag for cash given me by Jill, who both know how unbusinesslike I’m likely to be.  The satisfaction I get from the little store every time I wheel it out or put it into my Mustang undoubtedly flashes back to my early inclinations, as does Zona Rosa itself – girt gangs and merchandising were a part of my past, and only needed the resuscitation, the gentle watering, by these fabulous women to come again into full bloom.

6.  AND THAT WAS ONLY THE BEGINNING!

These were only a few of the Zona Rosa events that filled the first few months of the life of SECRETS OF THE ZONA ROSA.  Our annual retreat at the beach outside Savannah in June was so crammed with great women that this year we had to rent two big beach houses instead of one.  Our week of non-stop fun and work was further enriched by newcomers who came from a distance – Shawn, from Wyoming, Charlotte, from San Francisco (where as the foxy librarian she is, as in her web page tag, she reigns over the city’s main library), Roe, from Ohio, and Sheila, from Tennessee, the latter two recommended by therapist and Friend of Zona Rosa, Don Doyle of Memphis. 

Shawn, however, got the prize for being the Zona Rosan who went through the most to be with us:  her tale of driving to Montana to stay overnight in a motel, missing her flight, and finally flying to Atlanta, where she rented a silver convertible – what is it about Zona Rosans and convertibles?  Pamella, Connie, and I all sport them, too – to drive to Savannah, where she had never been, and where she promptly ran out of gas at a major intown hotel.  By the time she got help and got to the beach – where she’d also never been, and where, sans street lights, our beach house was hard to find, to say the least – until a cruiser with the beach’s finest stopped to help her – it was after midnight. But that didn’t stop Shawn from appearing at the breakfast bar the next morning, looking like the fashion model she had once been, as she had her coffee and got acquainted with the rest of us.

The end of the week concluded, naturally, with our annual Zona Rosa bash at my house in downtown Savannah, 20 minutes away.  And while Zane couldn’t wear the lip print robe, we had plenty of great entertainment, all chosen with fun in mind – in fact, it was one of our best Zona Rosa parties ever!  First we read Connie’s over-the-top Credos in chorus, like a church liturgy.  Then Deborah B. read one of her characteristically sexy poems, and Anne W. read “The Woman My Husband Should Have Married” to much hilarity.  Then Claudia Graham and bud Wanda Brooks performed stand up, improving on the number of vibrators (way over the law in Georgia!) in Wanda’s closet, and other outrageous matters.  (Naturally,  I introduced Claudia as the originator of the quip, “The first time I had great sex, I almost went home and told my husband!”)  In conclusion, the Zonettes sang several songs from ZONA ROSA, THE MUSICAL.  And then we all ate and ate – especially the two huge pink cakes complete with red sugar-sprinkle lip prints made by our official Zona Rosa recipe, “My Third Brother’s Third Wife’s Strawberry Cream Cake,” as provided by Claudia.  Indeed, the party was such a success that vibrant Savannah columnist Rexanna Lester wrote about it in a feature for the Sunday Savannah News Press (see box).  The next month, Rexanna joined our Savannah Zona Rosa groups!

7. GLAMOBABE, OR A ROAD TRIP WITH THE QUEEN OF ROAD TRIPS!

Next came my annual trip to the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, with my sister Anne.  While there, I usually actually have time to write – last year, I was setting my iBook afire with the final changes on SECRETS OF THE ZONA ROSA.  But this year, I had different tasks ahead of me:  Charlotte B., Zona Rosan, town wrangler – she’s changed the face of Eureka Springs, which was already funky to say the least, by adding a town market and a weekly outdoor cinema – and publicist par excellence and I embarked on the road trip of a lifetime across Northern Arkansas so that I could fulfill the commitment Charlotte had made for me to appear on the ABC-TV affiliate in Jonesboro, where the talk-show hostess not only talked about SECRETS OF THE ZONA ROSA, but called me the “founder of a movement,” words that especially pleased me since Zona Rosa is so much bigger than my book. Next, we drove on so I could speak at That Bookstore run by the famous Queen of Booksellers, Mary Gay Shipley in Blytheville (pronounced Bly-ville), Arkansas, spend the night in a Holiday Inn, then rush back to Fayetteville on the other side of the state to read at Nightbird Books (an eight-hour trip, during which I almost got us killed -- I’ll never put hot coffee in a cardboard carrier from MacDonald’s on the armrest beween me and the drive again! – and we had to gobble down Krispy Kreme donuts – mine, raspberry, Charlotte’s crème-filled --  to soothe our “nerves.”  It was the first Krispy Kreme I had had in ten years, but both of us felt that we deserved them!) 

Indeed, the whole trip – as any road trip with Charlotte is bound to be – was, well, a trip!  We both wore our Zona Rosa Book Tour T-shirts, and in yet another MacDonald’s, when I nabbed the curl off the top of Charlotte’s vanilla cone, she created a happening on the spot:  “Call Star magazine,” she squealed; “Famous author steals publicist’s ice cream cone!”  The attention we suddenly got from everyone inside was amazing, leading me to realize that everyone in America must read Star, and that leaving cards for SECRETS OF THE ZONA ROSA in every McDonald’s we entered might be a good move – if only I had that many.  Along the way, I also made notes on images that Meryl (former Zona Rosan, photographer and writer, and old friend who takes my official PR photos) might want to use for her next book, from the signs for the little burg of Yellville – where Charlotte yelled out the window as if on command -- to the Flippin Police cars to the pink gas stations.  Indeed, defunct stations, along with thrift shops – now I understand where she got so many pairs of cowboy boots – are Charlotte’s big thing, as are road trips:  indeed, the road trip is the central metaphor for her nearly completed memoir, Road Trip of Love:  My Life as a Texas Jew Girl! 

As we at last swung into the Fayetteville a half-hour behind schedule, Charlotte got on the cell phone to Night Bird Books and pretended to come closer and closer to orgasm as the book shop assistant led us there as though by radar.  “That was fun!” said Stephanie, our traffic controller from the sidewalk in front of the shop where she waved us in and we got out of the car.  And as we walked into one of the prettiest book shops I’ve seen – tiny birds fill a glassed-in atrium in its two-story center—the crowd – seated and waiting for us – burst into applause.  Mendy, the manager, brought us red wine and snacks and then I was ready to speak, meet more fabulous people, and see old friends such as Ginny, who wrote a wonderful piece on SECRETS for the local alternative paper. Later, we left on a high, flying and buoyant for the hour-long trip back to Eureka Springs, stopping along the way at a Subway – by then it was after midnight. 

The next morning I was ready by 10:30 to be interviewed by Jacquie Froelich of NPR – Jacquie is sharp, and has done her homework – when she asks how I feel about using pink as our Zona Rosa color when pink has negative connotations for some women, e.g. those who seek to empower themselves and see the shade as part of the negative trip laid on them by patriarchy; she also cites cultural critic Barbara Ehrenreich’s experience when handed a pink pillow as a palliative, rather than hard facts, just after breast cancer surgery – a sugary response that would offend most any thinking woman. I explain that we’re using the color almost as a form of camp – the word coined long ago by author Susan Sontag to describe the use of elements of popular culture with a new twist in order to turn a traditional perception on its head – as in, how could anyone assume any of the women of Zona Rosa are simperers, even covered head to toe in pink?  I also mentioned the Prologue to SECRETS, in which the radical nature of our position is explained in full.

Soon Charlotte was calling me for the Zona Rosa workshop to benefit the writers’ colony that begins next door with a luncheon at noon, where once more I’m saturated by good vibes, surrounded by great women, and we sell every copy of SECRETS OF THE ZONA ROSA, plus most of our remaining T-shirts and sets of the “exorcises” designed and created by Jill.  Needless to say, the whole week ended on an incredible high, with more to come next week, when Lynn E., a screen and TV writer at the workshop, writes to say Zona Rosa must be a sitcom, or even a reality show – my thoughts exactly! – and also gives me great feedback on who to contact.  Then Indie filmmaker Debra Kirschner, whose first film, THE TOLL BOOTH, had just been released, and who is also a resident at the colony, gives me further great feedback on the sitcom.

Glenna, also a resident at the colony, and an elegant novelist, former editor, and jewelry designer -- her mother-of-pearl pink button pendant is now among my favorite pieces—offers to sponsor me for a Zona Rosa workshop in New York.  I think what a great match she will be for the darling Kirsten Lewis, another Manhattannite I met at the Zona Rosa workshop in Sante Fe in May, who is already researching our New York venue!  Last but not least, before I leave for Highlands, NC, to lead our annual Zona Rosa workshop there, Charlotte and I brainstorm a trip up the west coast to Seattle to lead Zona Rosa workshops, start new Sub Rosa groups, and further promote SECRETS.

In beautiful Highlands, our workshop was sponsored by Shakespeare & Company Books, patterned after the original shop in Paris; Katherine Willoughby, the shop’s unique proprietor, actually lived in the shop in Paris; indeed, she was engaged to its owner, George, a literary figure famous in his own right.  Again, the workshop was wonderful, a high – a week spent with a small group of intense and talented women in the pretty little house Katherine owns and provided.  Mary Ann, from Diamond Head, Mississipi, Sandra (who came all the way from Eureka Springs, where we had met for the first time the week before), Gibson, a witty livewire at 88 and a novelist whose funny fiction I’ve been following for five years and deserves publication, and Gwen, a wonderful new member of our Atlanta Alpha Babes Zona Rosa group, all made the week special, as did having Sherry visit the group:  Katherine had selected Sherry for our scholarship to the workshop the year before, despite her lack of writing experience.  Yet this year, Sherry proved Katherine’s good judgment:  when we heard Sherry read a short story, and then her highly sophisticated poem, we all gasped.  Unlike the others, Sherry is a native of the North Carolina mountains, and her take on life there is both unique and uniquely presented.  Marda, a writer and dear friend  (again, she’s in Chapter Eight of SECRETS) from New Orleans who summers in Highlands also met with us. As usual, Marda, an accomplished writer, and co-author of Galatoire’s: Biography of a Bistro, had much wisdom to share re: our writing projects. 

One night we had an all-girls’ candle-lit dinner planned and served by Katherine; on another, at my signing at Shakespeare & Company Books, we were joined by old friends and writers, Cassandra King and her husband Pat Conroy (who she met around the time she was part of a Zona Rosa workshop in Black Mountain, NC).  It was wonderful to see them, and the workshop participants were delighted to meet authors of such statue.  On our last nights, we hung out at Wolfgang Puck’s little bistro on Main Street, then went to a cocktail party given by two of the many new friends we’ve met through Marda. 

As if as if I wasn’t busy enough along the way, I judged poems for an important poetry contest in Wyoming for a conference take place in October – thought the competition was blind, the three winners and two honorable mentions all turned out, much to my satisfaction, to be women – and tough ones at that:  one of the award-winning poems was “How to Drive a Dozer.”  Then, needless to say, I was accompanied everywhere – on every plane and in every stop – by manuscripts to be read for our Zona Rosa workshops in Atlanta and Savannah.

8.  AND BACK HOME AGAIN

How does one go home again after a summer like that?  Reluctantly.  On the way from Anne’s house in Atlanta, I stopped in Morrow to serve as keynote speaker at the Southern Crescent Writers’ Conference, led by former Zona Rosan Anne B. Jones (see Stars in the Zona Rosa for Anne’s new book), held at the Morrow, Georgia, Barnes & Noble, where once again, I met warm, wonderful people, including the vivacious novelist Jackie Miles (soon to be an author guest at our Atlanta Alpha Babes group), and where, once again, the book sold out.  The next week, back in Savannah, I would face my e-mail – if overwhelming, also often a pleasure, with all the wonderful responses I’m getting to SECRETS from both friends and strangers – (one of the most charming is from Donna G., who says that her blind 84-year-old husband now asks her to read to him aloud from SECRETS each morning, rather than the Bible).  I would also meet what I imagine to be the chaos of my house (not to speak of the needs of my family) – I’ve been living out of a suitcase, it seems, for years – and also speak at the Savannah Barnes & Noble, and be the guest of honor at a lovely book party for SECRETS OF THE ZONA ROSA given by Zona Rosans Extraordinaire, Judi Painter and Lisbeth Thom (Judi lives only blocks from me, but we finally met when I spoke to her neighborhood club the year before; now she is a vibrant and important part of our Savannah Zona Rosa scene.)  But with fall about to begin, and the need to begin our plans for expanding Zona Rosa throughout the country, I realized a stopping point must come until my next account.

As I write this, I’ve relived the fun of being on the road to talk about SECRETS and Zona Rosa.  For the purposes of this piece, I’ve left out the days of frustration at the mechanical problems involved in setting up my new iBook  – the week it took for someone to type my huge data page into the address book on my new iBook (after we learned there was no way to transfer it directly from AOl; amusingly, The New York Times ran an Op Ed piece not long after, referring to the mega company as “a cult”), problems with wireless (it now works like a dream), and dealing with them en route via dozens of phone calls to Jody, the computer whiz and Zona Rosan who created this beautiful web page.  (As I began to recount these difficulties to Pamella, she stopped me in what was the best piece of advice I’ve received in years, saying “are you sure you want to relive all that?”  But that’s the kind of great feedback we routinely give each other in Zona Rosa!)   

I’ve also left out the tears of joy, discovery, and grief that we all share on a regular basis, knowing that anyone who reads SECRETS OF THE ZONA ROSA will have learned about those in full.   For as anyone who is a part of a Zona Rosa workshop or retreat knows, Zona Rosa is really about change – changing our lives, attitudes, and writing.  I’m saving those stories for MORE SECRETS OF THE ZONA ROSA: WHEN STRONG WOMEN TELL THEIR TRUTHS, which will also include updates of stories from SECRETS ONE. But as I often say, the laughter we hear in every Zona Rosa event is an ongoing tribute to the healing powers of our being together, not to speak of the act of creative writing.

I also feel the difference in writing a blog – which is of the moment – and writing for publication, when one knows that one’s words must stand as they appear on the page – hopefully, for a long time, and also translate and communicate one’s content to people who have never before heard, or even thought about, one’s subject matter. And I’ve had the fun of breaking some of my own writing rules – e.g., DEA, or “Death to (Excess) Adverbs (and Adjectives),” with thanks to Mark Twain – freely throwing about modifiers such as “divine,” “fabulous,” and “gorgeous” in order to describe the Zona Rosans, who, indeed, deserve them.

Thus I’m now happy to join the ranks of those who like to share their ideas and experiences more immediately – which, after all, is what we do in Zona Rosa – through our exorcises and our talk – every time we meet!  Time permitting; I plan to share what’s happening and what we are doing and thinking in Zona Rosa every few months or so – though subsequent entries won’t be quite so long!  Right now, the little green light on my iBook, and a million projects are calling out.

And in the blink of a mascaraed eye, we’ll be off to the sixth of our divine two-week Zona Rosa retreats -- as planned by, yes, the fabulous Susan S. -- in the South of France!

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