Authors share tales of inspiration, hard work, success

BECCA MARTIN-BROWN

bmartin@nwadg.com

Imagine, if you will, it’s a beautiful sunny Sunday in May. The trees are vivid green, and flowers are blooming everywhere on the drive up the hill to the Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs. White tents dot the south lawn, and the parking lot is full of cars from Arkansas and all its neighboring states. But this is a virtual Books in Bloom, so you find the perfect place to pull in, making for an easy stroll to the festivities. Everyone you know in Eureka is there, all smiling and chatting and laughing and meeting authors and buying books.

“None of us wanted to believe” Books in Bloom could be canceled, says Jean Elderwind, one of the event’s co-chairmen. “I have a Plan A (great weather, we are outdoors), Plan B (wet weather, and we are mostly indoors or under the big tent) and Plan C (rain and tornadoes) — and thank goodness, we only had to use Plan C once (in 2011). We didn’t have a pandemic plan, like so many other event planners, which is understandable.

“On March 20, the Eureka Springs May Festival of the Arts committee announced that the entire month of activities were canceled,” Elderwind goes on. “On that day, the Carroll and Madison Public Library Foundation held an electronic meeting about canceling and within two hours, all votes were cast, and we decided to cancel. My first call was to our generous underwriter, Elise Roegnik, and the staff at the Crescent Hotel. Very difficult day.”

This would have been the 15th Books in Bloom, produced from the beginning by the Carroll and Madison Public Library Foundation, a 501(c)3 organization Elderwind helped found in 2002.

“Our 501(c)3 status allows us to apply for grants not otherwise available to us,” she explains. “The Foundation assists the libraries in Berryville, Eureka Springs, Green Forest, Huntsville, Kingston and St. Paul with programs and projects not easily affordable within their operating budgets.

“In addition to fundraising for our libraries, back in 2004 the Foundation also wanted to launch an annual event that promoted the value of books and reading,” Elderwind goes on. “And Books in Bloom was born as our signature event. Our intention all along was to make it an annual event.

“Sixteen years ago, my Books in Bloom co-chair, Lin Wellford, and I explained our idea to Marty and Elise Roegnik, owners of the Crescent Hotel, [saying] we felt that the gardens at the Crescent Hotel would be the perfect setting. Lucky us! The Roegniks were voracious readers and took a chance on our idea.”

Elderwind says “when we can next safely meet again in the same room, the Carroll and Madison Public Library Foundation will certainly talk about next year. I can’t speak for the Foundation board, but I do know that we love offering this great literary event to our community.”

This year, What’s Up! hopes to support the Books in Bloom mission — “to provide an opportunity for the public to meet authors, to hear them speak about their work and various aspects of writing and publishing” — in these pages. In addition to best-selling writer C.J. Box, featured on the previous page, let us introduce you to:

Stephanie Storey

Author of ‘Raphael, Painter in Rome’

Stephanie Storey grew up in Hot Springs and says she started writing when she was 7 “at my parents’ kitchen table overlooking Lake Hamilton.” That first book was titled “Horty the Hog Goes to School” — because, she says, there had to be a Razorback — and from that time on, she told everyone she wanted to be an author. Everyone told her it was a fine hobby, but she’d need a career.

Storey had also illustrated “Horty the Hog,” so going to Vanderbilt University to study art history and studio art made sense. Primarily a painter while she was in college, she spent a semester at the University of Pisa in Italy where she “met a guy named Michelangelo.” She was obsessed and wanted to know everything about his life, but her first novel, “Oil and Marble: A Novel of Leonardo and Michelangelo,” was still some years down the road. During that time, she was a television producer in Los Angeles for big names including Alec Baldwin and Arsenio Hall, along with the Emmy-nominated “The Writers’ Room” on the Sundance Channel.

It took a health scare in 2011 to send Storey back to her writing desk seriously.

“I had one of those moments when you realize life is short, and if life is short, and we don’t get as much time as I was under the impression we did, I’d better do what I wanted to do,” she says. “Oil and Marble” was published in 2016, “Raphael” earlier this year.

“Overall, the reason I write what I write about these world-changing artists is that too often we put these artists up on pedestals, they’re untouchable geniuses, removed from us,” she says. “I am determined to make them human, to take them off of those pedestals, to show they faced the same struggles, the same self-doubt, and overcame enormous obstacles, just like you and I.

“Raphael became an orphan at 11. He died alone when he was 37. He could have been overcome by sadness and loneliness and anxiety, but instead he was consumed by beauty and made it his mission to paint the world the way it should be. And that right now is what’s important about that book, that Raphael never stopped trying to bend the world toward beauty.”

Go Online!

Stephanie Storey

Buy “Raphael, Painter in Rome” wherever books are sold.

Read more about Storey at stephaniestorey.com.

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Kelly J. Ford

‘Cottonmouths’

Kelly Ford grew up around Fort Smith, went to high school in Cedarville, then college at the University of Central Arkansas, where she started in pre-med but “couldn’t pass chemistry.”

“I ended up with a degree in English because I was a reader,” she says, “but I didn’t really have any thoughts about what I would do when I graduated. It was pretty much a blank for me. One of my friends said she was moving to Boston, and she asked me if I wanted to come. It was a free ride out of town, and I had nothing else going on.”

Ford says she’s been “a 9-t0-5’er pretty much my entire life.”

“When I graduated from UCA, they had given us a handout of jobs English majors could have — and I had crossed off everything.” It took awhile to find her niche, but she’s been an IT project manager for a little over 20 years now, and is “so grateful to have a day job that’s reliable and consistent.” She’s also been writing since college, “played around” with screen writing and photography, was interested in animation, “until I finally landed on novel writing.”

“‘Cottonmouths,’ which came out in 2017, is about a college dropout who returns to her hometown and reconnects with a woman she loved as a teenager, only to become entangled in a backwoods drug operation,” Ford says.

Ford explains she was going through a breakup and was visiting some friends in Conway when they started talking about how a lot of the town had been being ravaged by meth. “It was new and kind of shocking, but I also knew people who had had issues with substance abuse and alcohol abuse and been involved with meth, so the elements kind of coalesced into ‘Cottonmouths.’ The written record says it took about 11 to 13 years for this book to come to light, and only about 1% of the first draft ended up in the final copy. It’s never a straight path. There’s always lots of revision.”

Ford is currently working on a novel about a group of friends in Arkansas who were involved in the disappearance of a man when they were in their teens and their efforts not to be implicated as adults.

Go Online!

Kelly Ford

Buy “Cottonmouths” wherever books are sold. The paperback will be released in June.

Read more about Ford at kellyjford.com.

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Matt Coleman

‘A Rocky Divorce’

Matt Coleman, who lives in Texarkana, says he wanted to write from the time he was 16.

“I had a teacher who inspired me to write, who was the first one to tell me I was good at it, and when you’re 16, anybody telling you you’re good at anything fuels you,” he remembers. “It also set me on a path to become an educator. I didn’t anticipate that; I kind of stumbled into it. But I came from a family of educators, so it was sort of predestined.”

Coleman has been in education for 17 years, and it was during a post-graduate class that he started an essay about his first year teaching and thought, “Hey, this could turn in to something.” He threw in a little mystery — something he’d always been drawn to as a reader — and his first book, “Juggling Kittens,” was born. “I took the memoir side of things, and the humorous side, and inserted a mystery into it, and when I was finished, I thought it was something I’d pick up and read,” he says with a laugh.

The seed for “A Rocky Divorce” also came from real life — the experiences his wife went through when her first marriage ended.

“Rocky is recently divorced, very anti-socialite, bubbly and witty and fun and likes to have a drink and have a good time,” Coleman describes. “She’s pretty snarky, but she also has a Sherlockian sense of observation and is able to suss out mysteries. After her divorce, her cousin, the Watson to her Sherlock, talks her into joining the Junior League. She’s poking fun at it all, but her cousin wants her to look into string of home invasion robberies — because if she solves it, they’ll be Junior League superstars.

“It’s been the most nerve-wracking experience of my life,” he says of publishing “A Rocky Divorce.” “It’s out there, and people are reading it who are the basis for characters in the book. I’m always waiting on who I’m going to run into at the grocery store!”

Meanwhile, Coleman is working on a followup to “Juggling Kittens.”

Go Online!

Matt Coleman

Buy “A Rocky Divorce” on Amazon, where the Kindle version is 99 cents during the covid-19 pandemic.

Read more about Coleman at mattcolemanbooks.com.

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Mark Christ

‘The War at Home’

Mark K. Christ is a program director at the Central Arkansas Library System who has worked in historic preservation in Arkansas for nearly three decades. He is the editor or co-editor of many books, including “Rugged and Sublime: The Civil War in Arkansas” and “I Do Wish This Cruel War Was Over: First-Person Accounts of Civil War Arkansas.” “The War at Home” is a foray into World War I, including the works of nine authors collected from a pair of centennial symposia at the Old State House Museum in Little Rock.

Christ did, in fact, have an interest in World War I himself, he says. His grandfather was a Doughboy and was wounded in a gas attack in France. But he also discovered that the war affected Arkansas more profoundly than he might have imagined.

“Casualties of the war were substantial,” he says. “More than 2,000 Arkansans died while in service, and almost 72,000 served.”

Go Online!

Mark Christ

Buy “The War at Home” at uapress.com.

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Crow Johnson Evans

‘Me and Miss Henrietta’

“Me and Miss Henrietta” started life as a short story in a 2012 book titled “Flights of Fancy,” Crow Johnson Evans says. A lifelong singer/songwriter, Evans started writing when she was living between Gravette and Decatur in Northwest Arkansas and caring for her aging parents. “I couldn’t go do gigs when they were living with us,” she explains, “and a story was a bigger canvas than a three-minute song anyway.”

Evans intended to turn the short story into a chapter book for children, but the characters took over, she says, and it became a young adult novel “that is actually for anyone from teens to about a hundred years old.”

“The book is about a friendship between a young girl — she’s 12 when the book begins — and a really cranky old woman who lives out in the woods,” Evans explains. “She’s probably in her 70s. She doesn’t like kids and doesn’t want people around her. But they become really good friends and have a level of respect and communication that’s unusual. They’re really well matched. They get involved in all kinds of crazy things; there’s some mystery in it and, thank heavens, humor.”

Evans laughs when she says “these characters are kind of pushy and now I’m looking at a full novel for adults. You don’t mess around with Miss Henrietta, ‘cause she’s cranky!”

Evans also illustrated the book, a new adventure for her at the age of 75.

“I forget that I’m not in my 20s! I don’t feel this old, but I’m loving what I’m doing.”

Go Online!

Buy “Me and Miss Henrietta” under the “mercantile” tab at crowspun.com.

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Books In Bloom

Meet the rest of the Books in Bloom authors at booksinbloom.org.