Diana Page Jordan | Book Reviews and Inspiration

September 17, 2008
The smell of fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies swells up to greet me as I enter Carol Gardner’s home. You may know her as Zelda — the books and greeting cards with the funny bulldog. This is our first meeting — we’ve been connected by Colleen Sell who edits the A CUP OF COMFORT books. I have a story in two of Colleen’s compilations — MOTHERS & SONS and WRITERS.
Carol and I have read each others’ websites, and now we want to hear the stories. We make ourselves comfortable on the black leather L-shaped couch, surrounded by poster-sized Zelda pictures with inspiring sayings. Zelda as a boxer. Zelda in a wickedly funny red spiky wig and black vest. Zelda in a tux. Remember, Zelda is a bulldog.
We trade stories. I open “I love the way Zelda came to be…”
Carol, her short blond hair tucked behind her ears, tells me that she was in the middle of a divorce, and her attorney said “Get a therapist or get a dog.” She got Zelda.
A few months later, it’s Christmastime and a friend tells her about a pet contest. So Carol plops a Santa hat on Zelda, and applies bath bubbles to the bulldog’s chin, and snaps the winning photo. The caption was something like this: “I got a dog for my man — not a bad trade.” Carol had spent the past decade or so in advertising. She tells me you have to be daring and different and smart.
It’s my turn.
“I’ve always been in radio,” I say.
“No,” Carol says, “begin at the beginning.”
Thoughts swim nervously over where to begin. It is not an easy story to tell and we have just met. People wince. Cry. Turn away.
But then, I feel like I’ve known Carol all my life.
Her eyes fill with tears, and her arms get goosebumps as I tell the complete story. I begin with the romantic beginnings of my maternal grandparents. My grandmother was born in Peru, and was the top RN in the ER at a NY hospital. My grandfather was born in Sydney Australia, and played his Stradivarius for royalty around the world, finally settling in NY. They were introduced by my grandmother’s sister, who played piano at age four at Carnegie Hall. It was a first marriage for both of them — and they were both well over forty. My mother was born when my grandmother was nearly fifty, and her brother came along five years later. It was a romantic home, filled with music and magic and healing.
I skip ahead in the narrative here so as not to bog down the blog — to the place where my mother chooses a tall, dark handsome pedophile, casting aside my father and cutting him out completely. And she and the stepfather, my little brother and I move to the Jersey suburbs — close enough to my grandmother for weekend visits, but far enough away that she doesn’t know that my violent handsome stepfather is raping me. My beautiful mother becomes alcoholic, schizophrenic and suicidal.
I tell Carol of the magical interactions that I’ve had with authors, who have each, in their own way, gifted me with their wisdom, in a caring way, so I could transcend the trauma.
She prompts me, “You’ve written a book about that.”
“Yes, a memoir, BookMark. It’s in the hands of my agent, looking for a publisher.”
Carol says thousands of people could be inspired by the book.
And the wisdom I’ve been graced with — I want to teach that, so others can transcend the trauma.
I survived because of my Books.
Carol survived because of her Bulldog.

From our brokenness comes humor and healing and inspiration.
And the fresh cookie with melting chocolate chips — that helps, too.

August 23, 2008
What irony that an interviewer has to be told to “ask.” My questions usually spring from curiosity about an author’s book, body of work, or even about their process. It is a different kind of question my literary manager wants me to ask of the authors I know.
When I am reticent to act…or ask…I often get a nudge from the universe. Most of us do — it only takes being aware of this deeper source to reap the pleasure.
So, I am digitally editing an interview last night around eight when Christina Katz, author of WRITER MAMA, pops into my mind. I begin having a conversation with her — in my head, subconscious role-playing, if you will — about how to find focus amid all my passions, meanwhile making a living. Now I haven’t seen or talked to Christina since December when I moderated her Writer Mama panel at a Willamette Writer’s event.
Ping! An email sails in.
No kidding.
It is from Christina — sending a cheer to me on Facebook. And to her other 451 friends. But her timing blows me away, so I email her back, telling her I’d just been thinking of her, and may I call.
Ping! Call anytime.
So I do.
She opens with “Your website needs focus.” Holy crap, what’s going on here. It’s only slightly off the topic I was thinking of earlier — like my entire life. Christina is talking about promoting the book I wrote. She asks what it’s about. I reprise “It’s called BookMark: Life-Changing Secrets I Learned from Interviewing Authors. It’s a memoir about how, when I was four, my mother — alcoholic, suicidal, schizophrenic — not only divorced my father, but forbid me to speak of him, changed my name completely, cut his pictures out of all photos. And then she married a tall, dark and handsome pedophile who beat up my dad when he tried to visit a year later, and forbid him to come back. I survived the rapes and the violence and the uncertainty by vanishing into my books. And, I could see angels. When I became a journalist in my search for Truth, and serendipitously began interviewing authors, I learned how to live, and piece back together the life I had lost.” Every author taught me something, and actually, I learned about the Law of Attraction from some of them more than twenty years ago. What I couldn’t do, was break through all the self-limits that were created through the abuse and abandonment. Now, I have broken through, and I am compelled to share how I did it. BookMark isn’t self-help — it’s stories. And you’ll find what you need in its pages.
Christina listens, and we talk about what I really want to do — to help you transcend the trauma. This is actually the impulse behind every book blog. At some point, Christina says, I must create a website just for my book.
I ask about writing for magazines other than for The Costco Connection, and she pours out tips. Later, I pull her book, WRITER MAMA, off my shelf and flip through it. It’s got every detail I need in there. Plus, she has a new book coming out in October GET KNOWN BEFORE THE BOOK DEAL.
She asks my sign. “Leo,” I say.
“That’s the ta-da on your website,” Christina says. “What’s your moon?”
I reply, “Pisces.” She tells me I’m excellent at emotional rapport — that’s the Pisces.” And my ascending sign is Scorpio — the intensity, the desire to dig deep. All makes sense! That’s why I love to interview.
After our hour-and-a-half conversation is over — thank you, Christina — I realize how the advice from my literary manager, Ken Atchity — echoes universal wisdom.
“Ask,” he told me.
I ask.
And, I receive.

August 7, 2008
Oh I am so proud of her!
Chelsea Cain’s newest thriller — SWEETHEART — arrived today.
Chelsea and I met three years ago when I interviewed her about her parody of Nancy Drew, CONFESSIONS OF A TEEN SLEUTH. My studio, the size of a closet, not even a walk-in closet, was dark, and Chelsea never even slipped off her long wool coat for the interview. She spoke in a husky voice, she seemed to scrape her words until they were dry and drawled. Her sense of humor punctuated the conversation with an unexpected heat.
It wasn’t until Chuck Palahniuk invited me into their writing group — through an amazing set of coincidences, which I will reveal another day — that I really got to know Chelsea.
Workshop, as they call it, was born many years earlier, the meeting days have flipped between Tuesday, Monday, and Thursday…and the participants have changed yearly, by virtue of circumstance. During this period of time at Workshop, when Chelsea was writing SWEETHEART, it was mostly just four of us. Chelsea, Chuck, Suzy Vitello, and me. I’d never written a book. Chuck was a veteran. Chelsea was to score a killer deal midday through my first year with Workshop. Suzy wrote prolifically, lyrically. I had a few dozen published author interviews and reviews, and non-fiction stories. No book. We met Monday nights. Mondays became my favorite day of the week. I don’t remember ever missing a Monday.
Chuck challenged me as I wrote my memoir, pushed me to dig deep to excavate the truth at its most raw. Suzy pointed out my literary blunders and my tendency to skate between tenses. And, Chelsea gave me innumerable creative suggestions. One day, she was scribbling on my pages, after the storm of kind, incisive criticism had died down. We asked what she was up to. She had columns of words written down that related to my memoir. She poked her head up from the pages. “BOOKMARK,” Chelsea said, “You should call your memoir BOOKMARK. It’s about books and how they’ve made their mark on you.” Ah Chelsea, absolutely perfect.
This trio of accomplished writers made me a better writer. They held me in their hearts. They pushed and they challenged and they shared their most astute observations in the clearest most clever ways, and we all laughed and sometimes cried together. The first BOOKMARK was a blend of self-help and memoir, and comments came back from publishers that they loved it but they wanted either self-help OR memoir. So, I revamped the first chapter, amping up the self-help while keeping the memoir quality. I read my pages aloud. Chelsea looked up, and in her fabulously frank way, she said “Write the freakin’ memoir.” I totally rewrote the manuscript, with Chuck and Chelsea and Suzy egging me one, insisting I go into the darkest places, with explicit detail. Where I went was brutal and bright, troubling, and at times enlightening. My agent is looking for a publisher for BOOKMARK now. But the best part was experiencing Workshop with Chelsea and Chuck and Suzy — they made the last two years the best ever. Workshop has grown to nine writers, now meets on Thursdays, and is chattier and less intimate — maybe my point of view has shifted because I’m writing fiction now — a romantic ghost story set in an old radio station.
Go buy Chelsea’s new book — and, shhh, check out the acknowledgments in the end.
Thanks, Chelsea!