The Best Book Fest in East TX

WLT Executive Director Cyndi Hughes ventured deep into the heart of Texas weekend before last for Beauty and the Book’s annual Girlfriend Weekend Author Extravaganza for the Pulpwood Queens book clubs. She writes about it at DogCanyon, the  WLT’s new media partner. Here’s the piece:

I have this thing about Jefferson, Texas’ own version of Savannah. As I turned onto Broadway from Highway 59, I did my in-car happy dance. And I was even happier to pull up at the Pride House, my home-away-from-home for the weekend of Jan. 15-18. Jefferson is magical. It’s so steeped in leftover Southern Gothic vibe, with house after house dating back to the 1850s and 1860s, that whenever I turn a corner I think I’ll see a horse-drawn carriage –– wait! I saw horse-drawn carriages driving weekend tourists around the tiny town on Sunday!

After an absence of much too long (say, three years), I made a return trip to my favorite small Texas town for the annual Pulpwood Queens’ Girlfriend Weekend, the brainchild of Kathy Patrick, my literary soul sister. Kathy has run Beauty and the Book, the country’s only combination beauty salon and book store, since 2000. With her past as a book sales rep, she’d always been about books and reading. She got the bright idea of starting the Pulpwood Queens of East Texas book club, whose motto is “Where tiaras are mandatory and  reading good books is the rule.” (One might add that leopard print something or other is the perfect complement to the tiara!).

Read the rest of the story here at DogCanyon.

Pictured: Event organizer/Head Pulpwood Queen Kathy Patrick and author Robert Leleux (Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy) teamed up as talk show hosts collectively known as “BobKat” to interview authors throughout the weekend.

Side note about DogCanyon: The site is published by Glenn Smith, who taught “Blogging and the Art of the Personal Essay” for the WLT last fall. WLT members Reba Saxon and Greg Jackson also a contributors at DogCanyon, and we’re looking into getting more WLT members published there. Stay tuned for details!

— Posted by Cyndi