Girlfriends Gather to Celebrate Books

by Rosemary Poole-Carter

In the tiny East Texas town of Jefferson, where population is low and the illiteracy rate is high, Kathy Patrick has found her calling. Dressed in hot pink and leopard print, a tiara sparkling atop her blonde hair, Patrick broadcasts her passion for books and reading. A skilled hairdresser, as well as avid booklover and former publisher’s representative, she now runs a beauty salon/bookshop called Beauty and the Book, styling hair and filling heads with her must-read suggestions. Patrick is also founder of the Pulpwood Queens’ Book Clubs, author of The Pulpwood Queens’ Tiara-Wearing, Book-Sharing Guide to Life, and hostess of the annual Girlfriend Weekend, a literary festival for readers and writers.

This year’s Girlfriend Weekend, January 18 - 19, 2008, was a loosely organized collection of book talks, panel discussions, and parties, concluding with a night of dancing and hilarity at the Ball of Hair–where bookish types let their hair down or teased it to new heights. With infectious enthusiasm, Kathy Patrick and the Pulpwood Queens live their philosophy that reading is fun and exciting and that readers can be outrageously glamorous or plain silly when they choose.

Along with numerous American writers at the festival were Paulina Porizkova, a former supermodel and political refugee from Eastern Europe, and Kim Sunee, an orphan from South Korea, who was adopted and raised in New Orleans, then sojourned in Provence. Both spoke of escaping into books, a coping strategy for dealing with personal trials and traumas shared by nearly everyone in attendance. For many, the love of reading has led naturally to a love of writing.

A pivotal summer in Paris when Porizkova was fifteen inspired her novel, A Model Summer. A quest for identity and the comfort of food inspired Sunee to write her memoir Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love and the Search for Home. Kathy Patrick found books transported her from a difficult early life in rural Kansas and has now made transporting and uplifting others her mission. What is particular about each reader and writer is also universal–through our reading and writing, through our sharing of ideas with one another and of the pleasures we experience in books, we find our place in the world. And once a year we can also find a warm welcome from our girlfriends in the piney woods of East Texas.

Rosemary Poole-Carter, a panelist at the ‘08 Girlfriend Weekend, presented her new novel Women of Magdalene, which is set in a 19th century ladies’ lunatic asylum