First copies of ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM to arrive by express mail before midday on Wednesday. They did not. Left for the airport without seeing, touching, smelling, tasting, chewing on, my co-produced newborn and flew east for 10 hours to the Old World. I do not know when/if my newborn will catch up with me, but I hold a jigger of hope that it somehow will.
ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM is launched. At last!
Oneiro Press, U.K., announces the publication of ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM by ALISON LESLIE GOLD and DARIN ELLIOT. It’s available in the U.S. and worldwide (as a book or kindle) by ordering from Amazon. Written for ages 10-13 but for people of all ages who love dogs, skateboards, rabbits and parrots, and may know someone who drinks too much and behaves like a jerk sometimes.
final harvest. almost.
The last tomatoes! Behold! Cool, damp, moist, bewildered, looking every way at once. Look at the cover proof of ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM – back, front, and spine. Find a glaring error and get a free copy. While it’s being corrected, much nail-nibbling. And the gifts of nature, what to do with them?
falling off the knife-edge
Garden forgotten as heat, humidity, guests, exhaustion, theater, Statue of Liberty, trip upstate, much eating, drinking, eating, walking, collapsing displaced it. Returned yesterday to deluge of rain, so garden and final harvest of tiny tomatoes must wait until the departure of the airport car at 4 a.m. tomorrow morning. BUT … a paste-up of the flap and back copy of ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM is about to arrive After discussion about fonts, my heart quickens since it’s now one notch closer to publication, and soon I will see all with my own eyes. Until then, my head is filled with elephants.
indigestion
There’s rosemary too, also dill and tiny tomatoes, mostly yellow, remaining in the garden. Ginger boiled in water overpowers a case of indigestion from who nows what. August’s come and gone, September brings that beguiling light, Virgo birthdays, visitors from England who’ve never been to America before. ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM trembles on a thin knife-edge as its publication date approaches. Author’s photos (below, Alison Leslie Gold and Peaches the dog, left, Darin Elliott with an anonymous Greek kitten, right,) are meant to be in keeping with the tone of the book which is told by a lost rescue dog named Beckett and includes a parrot, a rabbit, three love-starved dobermans.
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documentation
harvest
At 10:30 the other morning a gardening foot-soldier (Gail) and I solemnly visited the garden patch and clipped the sad eggplant from its tough stem. There wasn’t a scream or a squeal or even a sigh. Later, taking a break from prep for the pending publication of ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM, a sharpened knife sliced, deft fingers salted, sautéed, sprinkled our small harvest with Italian grated cheese, and, in the blink of an eye, all was consumed. There gustatory groans even though the taste was slightly bitter, the skin tough as it had probably been left too long on the vine. Because Anna, ETS’s CEO, was lying on a beach in eastern Long Island instead, photos were taken and will soon follow.
waiting to harvest the eggplant
My niece loves eggplant. We’ve started an Eggplant Tasters Society. She’s a professor, a scholar and a bon vivant, floating around all those galaxies while I, sweat soaked author, am fiddling with minutia in preparation for the coming publication of my co-written (with Darin Elliott) new book for ages 10 – 13 — ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM — to be published by Oneiro Press in the UK. (Fortunately, it will also be available in the US and elsewhere around the world on amazing Amazon so no need to fly to London to acquire it.) Meanwhile, I’d acquired a small plot in a communal garden in Manhattan, so my niece, Anna, and I, CEO and CFO of the ETS, planted an eggplant plant in it and have subsequently studied the growth of a single tear-shaped, slightly sad, eggplant about the size of a child’s bicycle seat, that I am about to harvest. Then we shall decide where and how to eat it.
Meet The Models: Exhibit Explores The People Behind The Paintings
An interview with Alison Gold on NPR.
[facebook_like_button]http://wuwm.com/post/meet-models-exhibit-explores-people-behind-paintings
“I thought of Matisse and his lifetime of models. In her novel The Woman Who Brought Matisse Back from the Dead, Alison Leslie Gold portrays the painter reminiscing about his models: Lisette Lowengard, Helene Galitzine, Greta Prozor. Gold says to do their jobs, those women must master the rigors of a pose. They must hold stock still “for hours and hours and hours,” she says. “Often in a cold studio. This is a testament to the models who stood there and didn’t shiver and try to control their goosebumps.”
Review of Alison on LARB
What Gold modeled for me was the idea that the writer delivers stories that the reader needs. The point is to do that job well.
WHEN I FIRST HEARD OF Alison Leslie Gold in the late eighties, I had no idea what a visionary author she was, or how much she would teach me about the writing life…
