I have been putting a lot of time in on the cookbook blog and I really like the way it is looking. It’s kind of a trip to work on because it forces me to think about my early years, growing up, the people who were important to me then, my family, etc. Sorting through those old family photos is fascinating. I wish I had paid more attention when my grandmothers were alive because they loved to tell stories about their mothers and grandmothers and, now that they are gone, I’ll never have the answers to a lot of questions.
A few years ago I got an email from a distant cousin who was doing research on the Valentine family. In my immediate family there had always been a story/legend about my great-grandfather that I personally never much cared for. It was dramatic but unpleasant. However, this distant cousin said she had traced the family line to Scotland. My Great-great Grandfather James Valentine was born in Scotland and he and his wife Elizabeth moved to Canada which is where my Great-grandfather Thomas Valentine was born. I have a picture of him and his wife, my Great-grandmother whose name was Theresa and was of French descent (above right). They also have six sons and a daughter in the photograph. One of them, William, is my father’s 
father.
When I look at their faces I look for familiar features that have passed down through the generations. I am told that I look a lot like my Aunt Bonnie who was my father’s older sister. I remember her with tremendous affection and also because her husband, my Uncle Custy (left), was one of the most handsome men I ever knew.
In a way it is comforting for me to be working on this cookbook at this time in my life. I’ve had a tough summer with too little fun and some financial worries that are lessening now but still causing stress. So working on this cookbook and seeing the faces of the people who came before me is comforting. It reassures me that I am descended from hearty stock and good people and I can handle whatever comes along.
When I was little much of the family activities I remember revolved around my father’s family but after grandma died when I was 13 that began to change. Dad came from a big family and there were tons of cousins and second cousins and third cousins. I never understood all that cousin lineage. My mother only had one sister who lived to adulthood, my Aunt Rosie whom I have talked about here before. She and my uncle Buddy were my godparents. I wonder sometimes if people still have godparents and if that really means anything anymore.
Sorting through these recipes and these pictures is a labor of love. Every time I come across a special recipe I think about the times we had it and all the things that went with it and how I would hate all that to be lost in the future but, of course, much of it is. I am the oldest of eight children and I am the only one left who remembers a lot of family members — Uncle Bill who died when I was 10 and Great-uncle Harry and Great-aunt Clara who never had children but were always wonderful to me. Whenever they came to visit Grandma, who was Uncle Harry’s sister, Uncle Harry would say to me “go get your little red suitcase and you can come home with us!” I always wanted to but I don’t think I ever did.
I had a childhood that was filled with fruit trees and gardens, family stories and home-cooking, relatives and pickles and preserves and bread baking in the oven. Like any family there were troubles too but, when I work on the cookbook blog, I just remember the currant bushes and peeling apples on the back porch and all the aunts and uncles. And then I think I am very blessed.
Thanks for reading.
As I’ve mentioned before I have been following some discussions on the Amazon Discussion Boards. One of the liveliest ones is titled “shameless self-promotion for writers” and there have been a number of writers who have been active in the discussion. It is enlightening in that I have discovered it’s not just me. Many of us have written books. We have published in various ways. Now we are just trying to get our books out there and make them available for people to read. It is difficult.
One of the things that I have discovered is that I am far more reluctant to promote myself than I am to promote others. Over the years I have helped a number of people publish in a number of ways — I’ve edited books, designed them, created covers, made web sites and promotional materials. I’ve written press releases and sent them out to literally hundreds of news sources. Yet, now that it is time to do that for my own books, I am dawdling. I don’t know why.
Well, maybe I do. The very fact that someone started a discussion on Amazon with the words “shameless self-promotion” tells you a lot. First of all “self-promotion” in and of itself carries a certain amount a taboo with it. I remember my parents’ admonitions to not “make too much of yourself”. Nice people are modest and self-effacing and don’t brag. Nice people don’t call attention to themselves. Then when you add the word “shameless” it makes it all the more clear — promoting oneself is a thing to be ashamed of.
The thing is there are thousands of people who don’t feel that way at all! They are wonderful at going out in the world and pursuing whatever it is that they want. They are active in pursuit of jobs, clients, business opportunities, awards and recognition. They go after what they want and, when they get it, we admire them. We say, “wow, what a dynamo he/she is!” It’s a peculiar dichotomy when you think about it.
When I was busy writing my books all I thought about was the story. I was so lost in the worlds that I created that it never occurred to me that these wonderful, delicious characters wouldn’t find an appreciative audience. When my friends started to read the books and give me feedback I was so excited. I loved that they loved what I had written and I thought others would enjoy them just as much. Then when I started the dreaded submission process I got a harsh dose of reality. It wasn’t that potential agents and publishers disliked my stories and characters, not at all. It was that they didn’t even have the time or the interest to read them. “Thank you for your recent submission. Unfortunately at the present time our schedule does not permit us to consider new blah-blah-blah.” Sometimes the manuscripts weren’t even unsealed. What a shock.
For awhile I remained optimistic that someone would read it and fall in love. Actually, someone did. An agent was wild about it. He called me and couldn’t say enough nice things. But then he encountered what I encountered — no one had time to look at it.
So, I pressed on and published anyway. Now the books are out in the world and the feedback I get is wonderful but the issue is still how to get attention, how to get people to want to read my books. It is a humbling process. Rejection is constant but even worse is just being ignored. Everyone is busy. Everyone is maxed out. No one returns phone calls and emails. It is a long, lonesome process of slogging through potential opportunities thinking “maybe this time”.
On the sidebar of this blog I keep a quote from Marianne Williamson, another of my goddesses. It says “who are you NOT to be brilliant, who are you not to shine”. I remind myself of that. And I keep pushing - shamelessly, hopefully, expectantly.
Thanks for reading.
Sometimes my projects and bright ideas get ahead of my capacity for organization. Actually, that’s pretty much the story of my life. I have a lot of ideas, I just don’t have much ability to organize them and keep control of them. Creative people complain about this a lot.
Recently I realized that, despite the fact that I spend much of my working time creating web sites for people, my own online endeavors are all over the place. I’ve been trying to address that lately by organizing my various endeavors and putting them in some kind of navigable order. Clients often tell me that they like the way I keep them organized and the way I structure their web sites. I decided maybe it is time to do that for my own sites.
So this weekend I spent most of my time in front of the computer trying to bring some semblance of order to my work. I created an overall web site at KathleenValentine.com, a domain I’ve owned for years but never really used, and grouped my other sites under it. The internet has been around for a long time now and I always tell people that if they can still get their name as a URL they should do it. I took my own advice and then never did anything with it.
So, I am off on this fairly interesting adventure. My first priority was to get my writing projects all organized under the Books link, then my two blogs — this one and the family cookbook. Next I added my businesses. Valentine-Design is the most important, of course. Without Valentine-Design I’d have to get a real life and a job and other such annoying things. And Parlez-Moi Press which, at present, still qualifies for “hobby” status but I’m working on that. It’s an on-going endeavor.
One of the beautiful things about getting organized is that all of a sudden you see things you didn’t notice before. You start to realize you have possibilities you were unaware of. The cookbook blog is still in its infancy but I’ve noticed that it is already getting some traffic from people doing Google searches for Pennsylvania Dutch recipes. When I put my Great-Aunt Mary’s recipe for keuchuls on the site I did not realize that hers would be one of only two on the entire internet — at least according to Google. Keuchels are a St, Marys tradition. They are, basically, fried dough but Great-Aunt Mary’s were to die for — big, gooey wheels of dough that were puffy and chewy around the edges and thin and crispy in the center. Nothing but sugar, fat, dough and air — German cuisine at its finest.
The other thing I realized was that the Mermaid Shawl that I designed and had a knit-a-long for on this blog still gets a lot of traffic even 2 years after its creation. So I decided that the Mermaid Shawl is going to be my next project. There are a few corrections that need to be made in the directions and I want to add another variation to it besides the Gypsy Shawl that I made in recycled Tibetan Silk. I’m going to set myself the task of updating and organizing the instructions, take some new photos, add the two variations and pull it all together in a full-color PDF file that people can download and print out. And I will email the finished product with my compliments to anyone who purchases The Old Mermaid’s Tale from Amazon and emails me their Order Number. After all, the Mermaid Shawl is the perfect garment to wear while reading that book.
I always feel faintly virtuous when I start getting myself organized. Sometimes it lasts, sometimes it doesn’t but I’ve got a good start now and more new ideas than I have time for. That always makes me happy.
Thanks for reading.
Writing about Julia Cameron yesterday reminded me of one of the other goddesses in my pantheon. When I was still living in Houston I came across Shakti Gawain’s lovely little book Creative Visualization. I remember purchasing it at the Aquarian Age Bookshelf in West University. That was the first “New Age” bookstore I ever knew about. It was in an old house on a shady street and was crammed with amazing books — ideas I had never encountered before. Over the years I acquired many books from that store, attended workshops, and entered an entirely new world of thinking.
So I bought this little book and took it home and read it and was amazed at the beautiful simplicity of it. You cannot become what you cannot imagine. Think, use your imagination, envision yourself and you can make it so. I loved the idea. And I loved the little book.
I knew a little about visualization. I had taken a class in it through Houston’s Leisure Learning program with an absolutely wonderful teacher named Thomas-John Grieves. He was the owner of a studio called the Moonrise Meditation Center in Houston’s Rice Village. For six consecutive Thursday nights a group of us met at the meditation center and Thomas-John would talk about the process of using your imagination to conceive of things that you could bring into your life. He would lead us through a guided visualization that ended in a period of meditation. I was never sure if I really believed I could change things but I loved how relaxed and dreamy I felt after one of his visualizations.
So I began to follow the exercises in Shakti Gawain’s book and, slowly, I began to see myself in a more positive light. It was an enriching process. I had a couple friends who also bought the book and we used to talk about the affirmations we were creating and our experiences doing them.
About a year later I was in Aquarian Age and noticed a flyer posted by the door. Shakti Gawain was coming to Houston and was going to hold one day workshops. I immediately signed up.
When you are enthralled with a particular book or discipline or idea, there is always something slightly scary about meeting its author. You want them to be wonderful but you always harbor the awareness that it is entirely possible to confuse the magic with the magician. I was a little worried about that though I need not have been.
Meeting Ms Gawain was, simply, wonderful. She was beautiful — I knew that, I’d seen her pictures — but she was also funny and warm and friendly and reminded me of a couple girls I’d gone to high school with. I felt like I’d known her for years. That workshops proved to be a pivotal point in my life. I don’t remember exactly what I learned but I knew that people like Shakti Gawain and the people in her workshop were the sorts of people I needed to be around — and wanted to be. And I learned that all I had to do was envision myself as I would have me be and then let the process unfold.
Shakti made time to talk to each of us and when she talked to me she said something I’ve never forgotten. She said, “You have no idea how beautiful you are. You radiate light.” I had never heard of such a thing but I did so want it to be true.
This is what people like Shakti Gawain and Julia Cameron and Thomas-John Grieves have taught me, you can create your life anew each and ever day. You just need to believe. I am not a New Age person particularly. I have too much Catholic in me. But the message of these people is not dissimilar to the message of the early Catholic mystics, if we believe and we open ourselves to the light we will be filled with it. And we will radiate it to others. And that is beautiful.
Thanks for reading.
Yesterday I was talking to a prospective client and in the course of conversation she mentioned Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way. It was a happy reminder for me of a book that was transformative in my life.
I was living in Marblehead when I first heard of The Artist’s Way and I purchased my first copy of the book at The Spirit of ‘76, Bob Hugo’s wonderful bookstore there. I took it home and, within hours I was completely engrossed in it. Cameron’s message was one I needed to hear, You were born to create and you are allowed to create and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. She said that we are all artists. All we need is courage and permission and a method for letting our artist find its own way. She taught about things like doing Morning Pages — writing three pages of longhand every single morning before you even have your cup of coffee. She taught about Artist’s dates — doing something purely self-indulgent and utterly beautiful just because you want to. Because you need to feed your inner artist and you have a right to do that.
I started doing morning pages and I did them faithfully for years. These days I tend to think of this blog as a mature version of those pages. I started taking myself on Artist’s dates and what wonders that afforded me. Trips to museums and galleries. The discovery of wonderful places including The Butterfly Place, Fruitlands, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the gorgeous Lyman Estate Greenhouses with their ancient camellia bushes. Those greenhouses have since transformed into Maggie’s conservatory in Each Angel Burns.
Some time after I began The Artist’s Way I saw that Cameron was doing a book signing at Borders. I went. She was this tiny, funny, clever, witty, utterly beautiful woman who told hilarious stories and charmed everyone who came. A year later she taught a workshop at Interface and I attended. It was three days of magic. My long-neglected inner artist began to wake up and stretch her wings and blossom. On the last day of the workshop each of us got a few minutes alone with Ms Cameron and she told us what she had observed.
She said to me, “You are a very visual person. You observe everything and all your senses are alive. You would be a good writer but an even better designer.” That among other things.
Actually, at the time I was working as a designer in an ad agency but I began to take myself seriously as a designer at that point and it ultimately turned into my own small design business.
She also talked about “clusters” — artists who worked together to support one another’s goals. She said when she was in school she had a cluster with herself and three men who met regularly to support one another. Her cluster consisted of 2 aspiring actors, Robert DeNiro and Harvey Keitel, and aspiring director Martin Scorsese whom she later married. I guess their plan worked.
That winter I joined an artist’s cluster that meet once a week at my friend Judy’s house. I also began to write the short stories that eventually evolved into My Last Romance and other passions. Our group met for several years before we all went our own ways.
I don’t know where exactly my copy of The Artist’s Way is but I’m sure I can find it. It is so heavily underlined in so many different color markers that it is a technicolor mess but I love it. It was good to think of all of that again. Maybe I need to plan a few Artist’s Dates. Who knows where they might take me?
Thanks for reading.
There was a painter, I forget which one, who once said, “When critics get together they talk about art. When artists get together they talk about where to buy the cheapest turpentine.” The same thing is true of writers except these days they all seem to be talking about the same thing — how do I get people to know about my books?
I have been participating in the Amazon Discussion forums a lot lately and in every discussion category there seems to be at least one discussion populated by authors who are trying to shill our books. Self-published authors are totally on their own with very little but their own ingenuity. Those of us who work with small presses haven’t got much more — only the advantage of belonging to some professional groups such as IPNE (Independent Publishers of New England) which gets us into some book fairs. But even though who have published with large presses are depressed about the lack of publicity and promotion they have gotten from their publishers. One member of the group published with Knopf and says she is pretty much on her own when it comes to promotion.
The truth is, compared to promoting, writing your book is the easy part. Promoting it is a non-stop task. And that includes promoting oneself which is very difficult for a lot of us to do. It is a thing I am struggling with myself. When Mark’s book came out I worked like crazy to promote his book and it had good results. Now, on my own with my novel, it is quite another matter. I don’t know how people do it. You have to have tremendous self-confidence, energy, money and time.
There are a lot of innovative things you can try. Writing a blog has helped. Participating in Amazon discussion groups has been helpful, too, but with each passing day the ranks are swelling. The ease of publishing today has created more and more writers.
Readers are also becoming wary of books that come from unknown presses. There are just too many books out there from “My Spare Bedroom Publishing Co.” that are just plain awful. I am asked to review books all the time and I am reluctant to do so because, if they really are dreadful, I don’t want to have to tell the person. Now I know why Kirkus and Publisher’s Weekly reviewers work anonymously. Right now I am reading an independently published book about the Civil War and, I am very pleased to say, it is very good — beautifully written. So I am happy about this and will blog about it when I am done.
But learning to seek attention for our work is a long and arduous process. I still believe that independent publishing is the wave of the future. The average paperback book published by a major press today sells for $8.95 and earns its author 55 cents. Publishing independently gives you a better percentage but you’ll make up for it in the time you spend promoting, promoting, promoting.
I’ve come to the conclusion that I have to overhaul my web site and incorporate all my separate web sites into one. This is going to be a big job. And I have to keep sending out press releases and interviews and... well, I have to keep pushing. I don’t want to but I have to. And what I am trying to make myself realize is that I don’t do it for me — I do it for my characters.
My friend Maureen just finished The Old Mermaid’s Tale (read the first chapter free). She describes herself as a picky reader but she says she loved it. She cried and she fell in love with Baptiste and, talking to her, I was pleased to note that she caught a lot of the subtleties that I’m not always sure are meaningful. I wish I could put Maureen on my web site. She’d convince everyone to try the book. I need to be able to promote my book like she would... we all need to do that.
Thanks for reading.
Over the weekend I spent sometime working on the new blog — the Valentine Cookbook Blog — and, as I was entering the recipes that have been made thousands of times by women in my family, I realized that the three primary ingredients in most of them are things I no longer eat — shortening, white flour, and sugar. It’s kind of amazing really. All the things I loved as a child and have made many, many times as an adult, are now no longer part of my life. Great Aunt Mary’s keuchels, Gram’s mincemeat tarts and apple dumplings, all of Mom’s breads and cakes are composed of shortening (or margarine), white flour, and sugar. Those three ingredients constitute the mainstay of much of good old fashioned Pennsylvania Dutch cooking. And now we find out they are bad for us. How did we all survive?
Actually, I think that about a lot of things. One of the things we most loved when I was a kid was riding in the back of Dad’s truck. All the neighborhood kids would pile into the back of the truck and Dad would drive us around the neighborhood and sometimes as far as the airport where we could watch the little planes come and go. Boy, we thought that was grand entertainment. Nobody ever fell out. But today my Dad would be in jail for that.
We loved to sleep outside in the summer, too. We’d pitch a pup tent down in the field below the house, build a big fire and roast potatoes and hot dogs on a stick and tell stories until our mothers screamed out the window at us to shut up and go to sleep. Nobody ever fell in the fire or poked anyone in the eye with a burning stick or got kidnapped or lost. No parents were ever reported to DSS for negligence.
Later when we were a little older we liked to sleep in the woods across the street. We did that all the time —sometimes there would be three or four tents of kids — the Valentines and the McMackins and the Olsons and the DeLullos. Nobody ever got eaten by a bear or feel in the creek and drowned or anything like that. Our dog once got squirted by a skunk but that was all. We all survived.
I think about these things now and I wonder what in the hell ever happened in the world. Did the world just get so dangerous that we can’t let kids do such things anymore or did all our precautions and safety devices make people become more careless and less protective of one another? I wonder which came first.
It’s the same with the food. Sure, we ate lots of flour and fat and sugar. But we played outside all day and we walked a half mile to school and back every day and over a mile when we got into high school. And we had chores. I wonder today if kids have chores.
I can remember every Saturday my chore was to sweep down the steps to the laundry room, gather up the rugs and take them outside and give them a good shake and then sweep out the laundry room. It took about half an hour if I stayed with it but most mornings it was a couple hours before I got it done. Lolly-gagging was part of the process. But no one ever accused my mother of being abusive for making me do that. They were too busy trying to get their own kids to do their particular chores.
From the time I was old enough to handle utensils I helped with the bread-baking and the jam-making and the pickling and all the other homey chores people did back then. I learned to mend socks, sew buttons on, repair hems, and iron. Sometimes a bunch of girls from the neighborhood would sit on the front porch and gab while we did our mending. Nobody sewed their fingers together or bled all over the socks. When did we stop trusting we could do these things?
So working on the cookbook is good. It reminds me of how it was. I don’t know if it will ever be that way again but I have hopes for the generation of young women who love to sew and knit and bake. I record our recipes for them. May they raise children with memories as fond as mine.
Thanks for reading.
It was 1973 and I was just out of college and had a job and an apartment and my own car (a purple Corvair) and I saw this pair of shoes in the Spiegel catalog. Shoes to die for. They were Chanel red patent leather with a 1 inch platform and a 4" heel and consisted of nothing more than a little heel guard that cupped the back of your foot and a criscrossed bow over the toes. I don’t even remember how much they were but I knew I would DIE if I didn’t own them.
I remember waiting for their delivery in AGONY — oh, those shoes were going to make my life complete. And they were beautiful and I wore them and wore them and wore them though the thought of that today makes my aching back ache that much worse.
Later there were other memorable shoes — a pair of mauve suede sandals on a high platform of dark wood with intricate designs carved in them. They were purchased by a friend on vacation in Greece and, within weeks of the purchase, grew. I had bigger feet so inherited them and, oh, how I loved them.
Then there were the ivory linen wedgies with the long laces that you wrapped around your legs until they were tied just below the knee. And half a dozen pairs of T-straps with squashy heels in different colors that were ever-so French looking. Anais Nin was photographed in a pair just like them. And a pair of violet leather boots just like Stevie Nicks and a pair of black suede boot with a long fringe around the top that laced all the way up the front that were just like Cher’s. Actually, I still have those. Somewhere.
It’s a funny thing. I don’t remember much about my clothes but I have fond memories of shoes. Well, I’m fond of the idea of those shoes but the truth is they nearly killed me. They squashed my toes and massacred my instep and traumatized my calves and screwed up my back but, like too many abusive relationships, that never stopped me from loving them.
And, alas, things have changed dramatically. For years now I’ve lived in Birkenstock sandals in the summer and clogs in the winter but even they don’t provide the ease and comfort they once did. Actually, I can’t believe I am even talking about shoe comfort. There was a time when I looked down my nose at women who lived for their comfortable shoes. No more.
I see a lot of people around in athletic shoes but somehow I’ve just never been able to wear them outside of a gym. I don’t find them comfortable. The tops of me feet are sensitive and I always wind up loosening the laces again and again until they are practically flopping off my feet.
So last night in a fit of despair I logged on to Zappos and started cruising for something reasonably attractive, comfortable with some arch support that would fit my size 11, wedge-shaped feet — narrow in the heel, wide across the toes. I quickly gave up on the “attractive” part. I ordered something. I’m not sure how I will like them but I’m willing to give them a try. Sigh.
What is it about us women and our feet. Men don’t have these problems! They wear what fits and feels good but we want something cute — is there such a thing as cute in a size 11? All my life I have been told I have pretty feet. Age has worked its mischief on that but I still polish my toenails and at least make an effort but finding something I can wear without issues of one sort or another is getting to be a pain. Maybe I’ll just wear the boxes.... Sigh.
Thanks for reading.
Every Tuesday evening for a couple years now a group of us have been meeting for dinner at what we call Chick’s Night Out. It started in a local pizza joint but in recent months has moved to a place famous for its huge and utterly magnificent salads. We never know how many will show up but it is always a treat. Even though all the chicks are 50 and above it is a good opportunity to remind ourselves of our “chick-ness” and to enjoy one another. We never want to go home when we should.
Last night someone asked about how I knew so much about working in a diner (she is reading The Old Mermaid’s Tale) so I told about my job working in a diner in Erie, PA in the sixties and all the varied experiences that entailed. From there we sort of segued into tales of early jobs and it was hilarious. I love stories like that but, of course, I absolutely love stories from people’s lives anyway.
One told about her early years working in a Woolworth’s store and how, in some impetuous and youthful bout of enthusiasm, she decided to free all the parakeets — in the store — during the day — while customers were shopping. Another told a story about a job that required her to take an iguana and a boa constrictor on a Spanish-language television program to talk to kids about them which was fine until the hot lights got the critters over-stimulated. And then someone told about the time she was working in a department store and boldly confronted a would-be shoplifter, much to her co-workers shock. Of course, what she didn’t know was that that same shoplifter had pulled a knife on the last person who confronted him. She apparently was scarier than her predecessor because the guy slammed the item down on the counter and stalked off in a royal huff.
I love these things. I love that we can share them and laugh about them and encourage one another to tell more. Tell about our hippie days, tell about our Catholic schoolgirl days, tell about that first and usually misguided love.
When I taught writing I used to use a meditation technique. I would lead my students through a meditation and a guided visualization and then into a writing exercise designed to get them writing about things they had possibly forgotten. One of the lessons I did involved your first day on an early job. It always produced hilarious results.
Once I had a large group and, following the visualization, I sat back while they wrote. Within a few minutes I noticed one of the women wiping her eyes. She was sniffling and crying and writing away and finally almost sobbing. I walked over and asked if she was alright.
“Oh, yes,” she replied her eyes shining and filled with tears. “I forgot all about this! I loved these people and it was one of the most fun times in my life. I’m so happy I remembered it.”
And when she read her essay it was just wonderful. It made everyone in the room laugh and smile with her.
Memories are such precious things and turning them into stories is a gift to those we love. That’s why thing like these internet blogs are so wonderful — because it gives us a pace to share.
I’m looking forward to next Tuesday night.
Thanks for reading.
It’s true. Imagine my surprise.
What brought this on is a bit of overexposure to discussions on the Amazon Romance Discussion Board. For some reason my novel, The Old Mermaid’s Tale, seems to be considered a romance on Amazon. I’m not real upset about that, there are gazillions of romance readers and if they buy my book that is fine with me but I am continually shocked — yes, shocked! — by the tone of some of their discussions!
I wrote a week or so ago about their discussion about books featuring heroes who had huge appendages. That discussion is still going on and is quite lively. There have also been a number of discussions about how far the sex scenes should go, etc. Well, gentle reader, I broke down and bought two of the romance novels they were talking about and I have to tell you , I’m a prude. I must be.
I won’t tell you the titles of the books — they’re pretty generic anyway — but the first one is a romantic thriller. I picked it because it was set in New Orleans, one of my favorite cities. The heroine is a beautiful (naturally), sexy (naturally) photographer with a disappointing romantic past (naturally). The hero is a devastatingly handsome (naturally), seethingly virile (naturally) hunk whose beautiful and beloved wife up and died on him (naturally). I am almost 200 pages into it and so far these two sexual paragons have not managed to do more than look at each other without blushing but every encounter provides us with pages and pages of throbbing descriptions of their reactions to each other. She can’t take her eyes off his butt, he can’t stop sneaking peaks at her perfect breasts, she blushes when she catches herself looking at his groin, he savors the curve of her butt — on and on and on and... I want to throw the book across the room and scream, “Will you two just do it and get it out of the way???”
Plus, in addition to all this pre-pubescent sexual agony, we are treated to the internal monologue of the killer they are after who savors in excruciating detail all the things he is going to do to his next victim. Meanwhile his victims writhe in their bonds imagining all the perversions he is going to inflict upon them — this to the point of outright silliness.
And this book was on the Best Seller list a few years back.
The second book is considered a historical romance. Oh good lord. If the people throughout history spent as much time trying to figure out how to get laid as the two main characters in this book do it’s a wonder we don’t still live in caves and go around clubbing rabbits for dinner!
This one I also chose because it was set in a place that interests me — Scotland. In fact a village quite close to the one where my great-great grandfather James Valentine was born. I have to give this one credit for some decent descriptions of the country-side and the local folks but, again, the hero and heroine spend page after page after page lusting after and longing for the body of the other. I am only 60 pages into it and have already been treated to 4 descriptions of the hero’s bulge and, predictably, three references to what Scotsmen wear (or don’t) under their kilts.
Well, Baptiste and Clair, I’m sorry for getting you lumped in with these sexually inept nitwits. When I wrote your love scenes I thought they were pretty luscious but I didn’t realize I was supposed to spend half the book describing your endless panting and fantasizing. I wasted all that time trying to make you believable people. I’m embarrassed and I think my career as a romance novelist is over before it began.
Maybe I’m just not old enough to read those books yet.
Thanks for reading.
A new venture has begun! I've started another blog devoted exclusively to food. Below is the first entry in that blog and I hope you will find time to visit it and enjoy. The URL will eventually be www.ValentineCookbook.com but for now it can be found at: www.ValentineCookbook.blogspot.com
In 1981 I was living in Houston, Texas and was dead broke. I was flying home to Pennsylvania for Christmas and wanted to take gifts but I had no money. For years I had collected recipes from my mother, two grandmothers and many aunts, cousins, siblings and friends. So, I pulled them all together and made a cookbook. It was a great hit with my family. My mother began photocopying the book and selling them for $3. She sold hundreds of them! A cooking columnist for the Erie Daily Times named Fran Fry got a copy of it and wrote not one but three columns about the book. He even drove down to St. Marys, PA, where my folks lived and spent a day with my mother sampling her cooking.
In 1992, then living in Marblehead, Massachusetts, I revised the cookbook and added lots more recipes. Again people loved it and I have no idea how many were copied and passed out. Over the past 15 years or so I’ve thought about revising the cookbook yet again but so far I haven’t.
When I began writing and publishing fiction one of the first things people said to me was my writing is very evocative and filled with sounds, smells, tastes, textures. They said my writing was very sensuous. When My Last Romance and other passions was first published a lot of people commented on the lushness of description, including the food. Now that my novel, The Old Mermaid’s Tale is also out, I am hearing more about that. A good part of the action takes place in a diner and there is food — lots of food.
I grew up around people who cooked — really cooked. They planted gardens and canned vegetables. They made bread and home-made pickles and preserves. Food was a big part of life — good food, nourishing, wholesome, delicious food, often fresh from the garden. The chapters in The Old Mermaid’s Tale when Clair works in the kitchen with her mother, where their most intimate talks take place, are straight from my own life. My mother and I had our best conversations while peeling peaches and canning garden fresh corn.
I write a literary blog at www.KathleenValentine.com. And, though I write about art and books and philosophy and knitting and whatever wanders through my mind, I get the most comments and emails when I write about food. I wrote a two part blog on my Gram Werner’s home-made Soltz and another on Sauerkraut and they still get hits everyday. So, I decided to start this blog. I plan to gradually add the recipes from my original Valentine Family & Friends Cookbook. Maybe it will eventually turn into an entire cookbook. Maybe I’ll get to tell a few stories about the memories associated with certain foods.
My family taught me a deep and abiding love for two things — books and good, wholesome food. Both my parents were avid readers and so I became a writer. Both my parents were good, down-home cooks. And so this blog.I hope you’ll try a recipe or two. And I hope you will find, as my Gram Werner would say, “Das Schmecht Gut!”
Thanks for reading!
Saturday evening the North Shore Arts Association will, once again, host their annual Nearly Wet Paint Auction at their beautiful gallery on Pirates Lane. In years past I have always worked at the auction, sometimes upstairs checking paintings out, sometimes downstairs checking art lovers in. But this year I get to be there in a different capacity. Signing a book with a co-author.
Those of us who are in anyway involved in the business of books know how much effort it takes to produce one. The authors are, sometimes, something of minor players in the effort. Yet, the authors get their name on the book and are the ones whose signature the buying public wants. Sometimes I look at gift books or “album” books of various sorts and wonder how the lucky sod whose name is on the cover got such a cake job!
The last few years while working on Mark’s book I often thought he got the easy part, all he had to do was write it! I was the one who got to edit and retype while re-arranging and organizing the frequently confusing bits of manuscript he gave me to work on. I had to interpret the semi-intelligible scribbled out corrections when they came back to me. I had to print out endless revisions and, when the manuscript was complete, format the book, design the cover, arrange for photography and retouch photos, get everything off to press. I wrote and sent out endless press releases, set up the web site, negotiated with the printer, etc. etc. etc. When the book finally came out and Mark was signing copies for fans I couldn’t help but think that there really should be a place for the dedicated slave who worked on the book to sign, too.
So, as the North Shore Arts Association is launching this beautiful art book to celebrate their 85th Anniversary, I want to talk about how much effort was put into it by so many. The book is designed to accompany an exhibition which will open on August 26th in the Pirates Lane gallery. It will feature over 70 fabulous works by artist members of the past alongside the work of current artist members. The whole project is the brainchild of artist Betty Lou Schlemm, A.W.S., D.F. who drew her inspiration from Robert Henri’s beautiful and eternal book The Art Spirit.
If you have never worked on such an exhibition you have no idea how complex it is to organize one. Finding works of art which the owners are willing to lend is the first step. Then there is all the legal stuff to be arranged for, permissions, transportation, insurances, security, etc. For the book everything has to be photographed. I was lucky in that they also asked me to design the book. It was a joy to work on that design and the feedback so far has been good.
The members of the committee, Ruth Brown, Anita Johnson, Tom O’Keefe, Lennie Strohmeir and Bill Trayes spent endless hours in meetings. They met to approve design. They met to proof. They met to proof again. There were hundreds of phone calls and emails and a few squabbles and plenty of miscommunications but, ultimately, that baby go birthed and Saturday night it will make its debut.
NSAA Historian Ted Tysver wrote the biographies of the artists represented in the book. He also penned a brief history of the NSAA. I wrote the essay on “The Past & The Present: Time and Space Cannot Separate Them”. Saturday night Ted and I will be there to sign books but with each signature we write we are honoring and indebted to a lot of other people. It is an honor and a privilege and I am well aware of that.
So come by Saturday night and buy a book (and a painting, too) and be sure to mark your calendars for August 26th when the exhibition is set to open. It is, as BL says, magnificent!
Thanks for reading.
Where is Donna Tartt anyway? After giving the world one of the best books I’ve ever read, The Secret History, in 1989, she has sort of disappeared or maybe I’m not looking in the right places. She wrote a second novel, The Little Friend, which was published in 1998 and since then I have seen little of her.
What made me think about this was two things. I recently re-read The Secret History and loved it just as much this time as I did the first time, and I came across an interview with her on NPR’s Talk of the Nation. It was fascinating. She was being interviewed on Halloween Eve along with Scribe-of-the-Damned Sublime, Anne Rice. The subject was the contemporary Gothic novel.
Now I can fully understand Rice being interviewed for this. She is the grandmistress of the genre but I was puzzled by Tartt being there because I had never thought her book to be gothic but now I am convinced that it is and that is part of why I love it.
Gothic novels have been around for centuries — Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights are outstanding examples. Rebecca in more recent years but what about now? I’ve read a few of Rice’s books — one of the vampire ones, The Witching Hour which I really liked, and some of her less-gothic but still dark offerings. The best of these is, in my opinion, Cry to Heaven, a fascinating novel set in seventeenth century Italy about the castrati — those men with the voices of angels because their testicles had been removed before their voices changed. It’s a stunning book. Rice’s gothic novels are overtly so and none the worse for it. But Tartt?
The gothic novel today, she said in the interview, is populated with real characters in a classic moral struggle between good and evil. One or more of the characters embody the Byronic spirit in that they are dealing with the unknown and the unknowable in a very spiritual sense not dealt with in most popular literature. Today spirituality with its conflicts and dualities is minimized, dismissed as neurosis, or medicated with drugs when, for truly morally obsessed individuals, it is an omnipresent struggle and often an omnipresent frustration. They want to be good but they also want to do something bad. They have made mistakes and now find themselves at a place they are unprepared to deal with. They question their own integrity and how far they are willing to go to achieve their desires will still maintaining self-tolerance. They are right smack dab in the middle of St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul.
Donna Tartt’s hero, some might say anti-hero, Henry Winter is a classic Byronic character. He is Heathcliff. He is Edward Rochester. He is dark and intelligent and intriguing and seductive with a troubled past and now he is faced with an unimaginable situation. He prides himself on being a superior human being but he is faced with a horrible dilemma — he is going to kill his friend. I came across a message board in which readers were discussing the Tartt cast of characters and I was stunned by the number of women who said they had fallen in love with Henry. Stunned and also consoled because I did too.
We live in a time when people avoid discomfort. Psychotropic drugs make it possible to ignore a bad conscience. Endless entertainment makes it possible to avoid introspection. Nighttime chatrooms provide diversion when a sleepless night troubles us. We have stopped believing in a higher being, a higher purpose, a moral imperative. We have substituted what is legal for what is right and what is profitable for what is good. We are abandoning our own souls and we are paying a high price for that. That’s why we need writers like Donna Tartt.
Three of my favorite novels are Tartt’s The Secret History, A.S. Byatt’s Possession and Ron Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy. After listening to the NPR interview I realize all of them are contemporary gothic novels — all of them are filled with spirits and dark moods and romantic ideals in conflict with harsh realities. This is a thing I work at in my own writing. What is good isn’t always right and what is wrong isn’t always evil. And very few situations start out bad — they start quite innocently until the random and uncontrollable vicissitudes of life work their mischief on them.
I hope Tartt is working on a new book. She has a lot to say. Or maybe she has said it all — I don’t know. But I’m open to hearing more from her.
Thanks for reading.
We all go through rough times. It’s just a fact of life. Sometimes the rough times are of our own making other times it has nothing to do with us. Usually it’s a combination of both. As I mentioned the other day, I’ve been having a tough summer. It’s too bad really. I should be happy now but things have gotten to me. Still feeling the sense of aloneness now that my second parent has died, a mild case of post-partum depression now that The Old Mermaid’s Tale is out in the world and I am having trouble finding time to promote it. Another book project that I was excited about at first but has turned out to be something of a mild disaster. Some financial issues because of that. All stuff that will pass but at the moment seems heavy.
Some good things are happening in the world of publishing that encourage me. Lots of publications are starting to feel the pressure of us small independent presses and are doing good things as a result. The esteemed Kirkus Review will now review independently published books that demonstrate the ability to sell by selling 500 copies. This means the author has to work hard to push the book but it also means the returns will be much, much higher than on a conventionally published book.
Also the prestigious New York Times Book Review has started a regular advertising space for independent publishers which, while not cheap, is not outrageous. They also are devoting a page to short reviews of independent books. This is exciting and holds great promise for the future of the small presses. Lots of review services are springing up and the big reviewers are starting to feel the pinch. That’s encouraging. It means that the little guys can make a difference.
But, at the moment, all that seems far away. I am not alone in this. Several of my dearest friends are going through challenging times as well. Health problems, relationships ending, personal challenges they weren’t pleased about. I know all of us will deal as best we can. I know most of us will be fine in the end. Maybe there’s a bad planetary alignment right now. Everything is screwed up and delayed. The checks are in the mail. Call back later. It is a time in which most of us need comfort, a little sweetness in our lives. Some solace.
Over the weekend I spent a lot of time in my sewing room — something I don’t do enough. My sister Lisa has been an inspiration. Whenever we chat on the phone I can hear her sewing machine humming in the background.
Her husband recently changed jobs and is now working for an upscale furniture manufacturer. He has been bringing her gifts of fabric from their upholstery shop. Odds and ends that would otherwise get thrown out but which she has been making into the most fabulous pillows, bags, backpacks for her kids. She is so delighted with her treasures. I get excited just thinking about it.
So I spent two days sewing and have three wonderful, perfect cotton jersey t-shirts made just the way I like them, comfortable necklines, set in 3/4 length sleeves, in the most beautiful colors — violet, teal and sky blue.
There is something comforting about working with your hands. You can let your mind power-down and just let your hands do the work. It brings solace and ease in troubled times.
So, today I have work to do and bills to pay and things to deal with and I’m still feeling a little lost. But I am doing all that wearing a beautiful, perfectly fitted, sky blue cotton shirt that I made with my own hands. THAT feels good.
Thanks for reading.
The article appeared in the newspaper last week. An elderly woman had been pulled from the water off of Pavillion Beach. Everyone tried tro save her but it was not to be. She was wearing a t-shirt, shorts and sneakers. She carried no identification. A plastic bag was found on the beach containing a watch and a set of house keys. If anyone knows the identity, please call the police.
The next day another notice appeared. Woman still unidentified. Police are going all over town trying the keys in known apartment houses. They gave a description that could have been any one of a hundred 80-something women in Gloucester. If anyone knows anything, please call.
Friday’s paper said she was still unidentified but Friday morning I was sitting here working when I heard a commotion downstairs. I walked out onto the landing and the downstairs foyer was filled with men in uniforms — police and fire. They had the door to one apartment open. The keys fit.
She lived downstairs. Her name was Ethel and I talked to her all the time. She was a sweet, quiet woman who had more than her share of tragedy in her life. Sometimes we just stood and visited. Sometimes I took her food. She had a sweet tooth. When I came home from a party with a bag full of leftover goodies I often gave them to her. She loved ice cream and cake. She showed me pictures of her grandchildren. She complained to me about her problems with her kids.
She had a lot of kids, I don’t really know how many but I know three of them died in the last few years. I knew them from saying hello in the hallway as they came and went. Since one of her daughters died some months back Ethel had been very sad. I rarely saw her smile anymore.
It’s a local tragedy but it is more than that. It is someone I knew who walked into the water at a nearby beach on a sunny summer day. I don’t know what happened to make her walk into the water. She just did. And she carried no identification when she did it. No wallet. Nothing. And when they brought her out it was several days until her family called the police. There are complications to that part of the story that I won’t go into but it is a sad, sad tale. I can’t stop thinking about it.
The longer you live, the more people you know who die. That’s an unpleasant reality. A few years back another elderly woman neighbor died. She fell in her bedroom and couldn’t get up. Her son came by to visit every couple days and he found her. But it was too late.
Right away you think of all the things that could have made a difference — if only she had worn a medic alert signal, if only someone had paid more attention, if only, if only... Life is filled with sadnesses. Life ends. The living grieve and pontificate about what SHOULD have happened. The dead... who knows.
She lived downstairs. I’ll never see her again. Her family will mourn. People will talk. Everyone will say why didn’t someone know where she was? Maybe she didn’t want them to. I don’t know.
I’m sorry, Ethel, that you died alone in the water but maybe that’s what you wanted. I know you had a lot of sorrow in your life and I hope now things will be better and you will be reunited with the children that you lost. I will miss you and think of you. I hope you’ll be okay. Good-bye.
Thanks for reading.
What do actors Colin Clive, Orson Welles, Zachary Scott, Michael Leech, George C. Scott, William Hurt, Timothy Dalton, Ciaran Hinds, and Toby Stephens all have in common? For one thing, with the exception of Dalton, none are exactly what you would call a heartthrob even in their prime. But, more importantly, all of them have the distinction of having portrayed the character of Edward Rochester in a filmed production of Charlotte Bronte’s classic Jane Eyre.
First of all, let me say that Jane Eyre was the first novel I read as a girl and I re-read it at least a dozen times before I ever had a real love affair. I was hopelessly besotted by Rochester and, to a certain extent, remain so to this day. He was dark and brooding and wounded and had a pain-filled past. I mean what the heck more is there to ask for from the hero of a novel? When he bluntly asks Jane, “Do you find me handsome?” she quite honestly answers, “No, sir.”
But they fall in love. And even though his past comes to haunt them, they ultimately find one another and live happily ever after — or so the story goes.
What is is about the strange, brilliant, moody, wounded, unhandsome, slightly terrifying man? Why do we love him so much? Or, at least some of us do.
There is a legend in the world of publishing that the two most enduring characters ever created are
Sherlock Holmes and Merlin. I find this interesting because both of them, to a certain extent, fit the “beast” profile. Holmes is cerebral, distant, unattractive but still alluring, physically powerful (which often comes a surprise in stories) and a force to be reckoned with. Merlin is also a solitary, wounded man who is brilliant and, of course, a wizard, but vulnerable and with a wildly mercurial temperament.
Actors must love to play these roles. I don’t think there has ever been a heartthrob actor to play either Holmes or Merlin. Nicol Williamson got to play both and was dazzling as both — I love him in anything, to tell the truth. Too bad he never played Rochester.
But that wounded beast is such a fascination for many women. There is a wonderful story that comes from somewhere in the Orient about a young wife whose husband goes off to war and returns badly beaten up, angry, and savage. She cannot go near him without him lashing out at her. She consults a wizard who tells her he can make a potion to cure her husband but he needs the eyelash of a tiger to make it work. So she journeys off into the mountain and finds a tiger. She spends weeks tenderly courting the tiger, preparing wonderful food for him, singing to him, teaching him to trust her and, finally, the tiger softens and allows her to pluck an eyelash for the potion.
When she returns to the wizard with the precious eyelash, the wizard throws it in the fire and says, “Now, go and court your husband the same way you did the tiger.” It is a wonderful story because it speaks to the most primitive parts of ourselves. Man the savage warrior and woman the tender nurturer. It is the archetype in the extreme.
Maybe that’s why we love those beasts. I remember when the television series “Beauty and the Beast” was on. Every woman I knew was mad about Vincent and every man said “you’re NUTS — he looks like a beast!” Yeah, baby.
I guess in our deepest selves we still harbor seeds of our most ancient selves. Some have had the good sense to be “sensible” and overcome all that but then there are those of us who watch the umpteen-millionth Masterpiece Theater production of Jane Eyre and sigh and think “what a man!”
Thanks for reading.
The New Yorker arrived yesterday so I got an iced coffee and took it out to the beach. Much to my delight there was an article in it about Sara and Gerald Murphy, the couple who were once the “glitteratie” of Paris at the time of the American ex-patriot movement of the 1920s. After reading Hemingway’s utterly luscious A Moveable Feast I went in search of Calvin Tompkin’s Living Well Is the Best Revenge, his delicious little book about the Murphys.
I don’t know why people become attracted to certain periods and places in history. A lot of people these days seem to be fascinated with 18th and 19th century China, something that I have no interest in. But that between-the-wars period in France and North Africa holds endless fascination for me. I’ve read countless books about that time and also of that time. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, O’Hara, Dos Passos were all writing then. And art — oh, the art that was being made then. And jazz... well, I’ve never been able to get enough of it.
There is a photo of the Murphy’s on the beach at Cap d’Antibes. It is a photo I have seen many times and love. Gerald, tall and tan wearing swimming trunks and a striped jersey leaning poking the sand with a cane and beautiful, etherial Sara with her dimpled smile and frothy hair dressed in floating gauze leaning on her husband’s arm, both looking out to sea.
It was popularly believed at the time that the Murphy’s “discovered” the Riviera. It is still acknowledged that they made sunbathing popular. And picnicking on the beach. They were quite the couple. Of course the picture they presented was a veneer, as most pictures are, for lives that were not so idyllic. Gerald was an aspiring artist who, while talented, lacked discipline and motivation. And he struggled all his adult life with his ambivalence about his homosexuality. Sara liked men — especially men like Hemingway and Picasso.
And there was tragedy. They lost both of their sons too young and that changed the beautiful couple forever. They went back to America and Gerald assumed control of Mark Cross, his father-in-law’s company. They became like anyone else.
But I love to think about them back in those golden years on the Riviera and in Montparnasse where there was no other couple more glamorous or whose company was more coveted. I suppose that is one of the privileges of history, that you can look back and pick what you want to think about.
Gerald Murphy is supposed to have said that living well is the best revenge and it is a sentiment that I have always appreciated. The simple truth is that then, as now, there are people who will do everything they can think of to do to try to make your life miserable but the one thing we always have control over is our own responses to such things. Learning to build a life that is our personal definition of “well” it the key.
The Murphys had all the money and the privileges and the glamour that a couple could ask for but that didn’t stop their children from dying or compensate for their own personal demons. This is a thing I find important to remember. And yet they lived beautifully and they knew how to find joy in friendships and accomplishments. An important lesson to learn.
I loved sitting out at the beach reading about them. The evening was hot but the breeze was lovely and the ocean was gorgeous. I finished the article and went over to my friend’s house and said, “Let’s go get dinner together.” And we did. And it was lovely. Living well is the best revenge.
Thanks for reading.
It arrived! A big box filled with fabric. Yum, yum, yum. Where in the heck am I going to find the time to do something with it??? Okay, don’t panic. Slow down and back up.
I’ve always been an avid seamstress and have a small room off my kitchen that is perfect for a sewing room. I have filled it with fabric, notions, a nice cutting table, my sewing machines (conventional and serger) and have spent many happy hours in there sewing away. However, over the past year I haven’t and it is getting on my nerves.
I have a maddening habit of denying myself things that give me great pleasure and I have no idea why I do that. So far 2007 has been a difficult year. I lost my father in February and I’m still not over that. I had a book to design that turned out to be far more complex, frustrating, and problematic than I ever dreamed possible. I had my novel and another book to get ready for press and then promote. And there has been the ongoing battle to keep two businesses running. So it’s not exactly as though I’ve had a ton of time left over to sew but still. I could use those hours of relaxation.
So anyway I was trolling an auction site where they frequently auction of lots of fabric from mills and factories that need to get rid of excess or discontinued stuff. A couple years ago I bought an odd lot of silk fabric that turned out to be a magnificent treasure. The seller only said that all pieces were guaranteed to be more than 50% silk and between 2 and 6 yards each. Boy, did I luck out. I bought 22 lbs. Of silk for under $100 and wound up with absolutely magnificent stuff. I’ve used less than half of it and the rest is just getting more and more tempting as I look at it.
So, anyway, I thought maybe if I had some new yummy fabric it would help jumpstart an interest in going back to the sewing room and, since I found a seller who was getting rid of fine 100% cotton jersey knit by the box, I bid and won a lot of 45 yards of fabric for $75 including shipping. It arrived yesterday.
There are six pieces of fabric in the box. Five 5-yard lengths in teal, lilac, amethyst, a deep blue, and a lovely light apple green. Plus there is one magnificent 20 yard length of snowy white fabric that I love. I love white. So, as I am spreading out my treasures and imagining what I will do with them I am suddenly excited about getting back into the sewing room again.
My first project is going to be some mid-thigh length nightshirts in white. I’m very picky about such things and have three that I made years and years ago but which are now pathetic. They need to be replaced. A year ago I was embarrassed to think anyone would see me in them. Now I’m embarrassed to even take them to the laundry. Time for new ones.
Then there are all the other things I want. My friend Jane has a couple of t-shirts that she bought years ago and hangs on to with tremendous affection because she can’t find anything like them — scoop neck, 3/4 length sleeves, slightly fitted, hip-length, She keeps saying she is going to take one apart and use it for a pattern. I know how she feels. If you find a style you love you want a dozen of them and the manufacturers discontinue styles so fast you are really on your own.
So, hopefully, I will be spending a few evenings in the sewing room. I can’t wait. And I’ll be able to send my nightshirts to the laundry again, too. Phew.
Thanks for reading.
A few years ago I got an email from a distant cousin who was doing research on the Valentine family. In my immediate family there had always been a story/legend about my great-grandfather that I personally never much cared for. It was dramatic but unpleasant. However, this distant cousin said she had traced the family line to Scotland. My Great-great Grandfather James Valentine was born in Scotland and he and his wife Elizabeth moved to Canada which is where my Great-grandfather Thomas Valentine was born. I have a picture of him and his wife, my Great-grandmother whose name was Theresa and was of French descent (above right). They also have six sons and a daughter in the photograph. One of them, William, is my father’s 
