Girlfriendology.com interviews editor Megan McMorris

Tune in to http://www.blogtalkradio.com/girlfriendology Friday November 20 at 2 pm EST as editor Megan McMorris talks about common friendship faux pas and all the juicy contents of P.S. What I Didn’t Say!

Powell’s guest blog this week

Editor Megan McMorris will be the guest blogger at powells.com this week, look for us there!

kicking off our West and Midwest book tour!

The Pacific Northwest mini book tour is over, and now we’re heading to Denver to kick off our mini book tour in the West and Midwest…two cities in our tour!

DENVER
November 10, 7:30 pm
Tattered Cover Colfax (www.tatteredcover.com)
Join editor Megan McMorris and contributors Bevin Wallace, Jill Rothenberg, and Dimity McDowell as we read our “unsent letters” to our female friends!

CHICAGO
November 11, 7 pm
Book Cellar Inc. (www.bookcellarinc.com)
Join editor Megan McMorris and contributors Anna Cox, Judy Sutton Taylor, Margaret Littman, and Shannon Hyland-Tassava as we read our “unsent letters” to our female friends!

editor Megan McMorris gets female-friendship column!

We’re excited to announce that editor Megan McMorris will be rapping about female friendships as they relate to current events on the wonderful AOL site Lemondrop (www.lemondrop.com). The column will appear twice a month. Stay tuned for more details!

author spotlight: Denise Schipani

In her tear-jerker letter “What I Wish I’d Told You the Last Time I Saw You,” Denise Schipani admits a long-held secret, and offers an apology, to a friend who died.

“I’m still upset about the last time I saw you. I know, I know, it was more than a decade ago by now. And it’s taken me forever to apologize, but just know that all this time, I’ve not been pleased with myself because of it. I let you down. I haven’t even been to your grave yet, and I can no longer keep making the excuse that I’m here in New York and you’re buried way up in Maine, near your parents’ cabin and that lovely lake. I wonder if it’s because going to that part of the world–which is just so beautiful–makes me think of the nagging, not-so-nice reason I didn’t see you more, devote more time to you, at the end. When you were dying. When I last visited you, you were getting still more chemo, but this was not the same as your eight-months-earlier, gung-ho, all-guns-blazing, first try at kicking cancer’s ass. In that eight months, you’d already had several rounds of poisonous chemo, plus radiation, plus surgery, and the cancer’s ass was not kicked. When I saw you that January morning, you had received the news that new tumors were growing–in your lungs, in your pelvis. This was your last-ditch effort. I remember your face that day, exactly, like I’m looking at a photograph. You always had beautiful eyes–big, deep-brown eyes–and they only looked more intense and fierce in your thinner face, and without your lashes and brows. You said, ‘You heard?’ About the new tumors, about the dismal new diagnosis. ‘Sucks, right?’ In my dreams, you’ve forgiven me for not coming again. You show up at my wedding, wearing the short summer dress and pearls you wore to Chari’s wedding, and it doesn’t even seem out of place at my autumn reception. I’m always surprised, in the dream, to see you across the dance floor. I work my way through a sea of dancing guests to find you, to grab your hand. ‘You’re here!’ I exclaim. ‘You came!’ And you say, ‘Of course I’m here,’ and keep dancing…”

DENISE SCHIPANI became a writer in part because of Karen, the friend she wrote to in P.S. A former editor for such magazines as Bridal Guide, American Baby, Child, All Woman, and Zest in the U.K., Denise is now a freelance writer and editor. EDITOR’S NOTE: Many freelance writers were harmed in Denise’s shift from editor to writer, as Denise is a fabulous editor, sniff sniff, but it’s also been fun having her climb over to our side of the fence too. She’s written features, columns, and essays for American Baby, Parents, Parenting, Parent & Child, Redbook, Real Simple, Family Circle, Woman’s Day, Women’s Health, and The Washington Post, among others. She and her husband, Robert, are raising two sons, Daniel and James, in Huntington, New York. Read more of her work at www.deniseschipani.com and www.confessionsofameanmommy.com.

Read more of Denise’s letter, and 35 others, in P.S. What I Didn’t Say: Unsent Letters to Our Female Friends, now available on Amazon and bookstores nationwide!

author spotlight: Jill Rothenberg

She solved the Case of the Missing Balsamic Vinegar. She understands your love-hate relationship with The Boulder Bubble. She’s an uber-athlete just like you. But in “Dispatches to My Salad Bar Savior: An Email Friendship,” Jill Rothenberg explains how the thing that you bond over can ironically be just the thing that gets in the way of a friendship…

“I keep thinking that we must have been separated at birth, only to be reunited at the salad bar at the Boulder Whole Foods forty years later. I’ll never forget you looking over at me the day we met last April as we both lined our to-go boxes with lettuce. ‘Could they maybe put some fresh stuff out? It’s not like these salads are cheap.’ And then the whole line of us, mostly young yoga chicks with flat, bare bellies but me and you in our skirts and boots–working girls in a nonworking town–all in search of the missing balsamic vinegar. What a crisis. Finally, you burst out: ‘Wait a second, girls, I’m just going to go grab some off the shelf.’ You were our salad bar savior. It just gets harder to meet like-minded women as you get older and are single, especially in a place like Boulder where everyone is young, rich, or both. We were that way once here–well, we were young, anyway. Sometimes we thirst for something outside the Boulder bubble (like, um, a bit of diversity, and not just in restaurants). Yet we both love it so much because you can’t beat the trails; the running and cycling are fantastic. And as much as we both have a love-hate relationship with this town–we sit in the Boulder Whole Foods bashing Boulder and everyone in it, as we sit transfixed by the setting sun against the Flatirons–we somehow can’t imagine being anywhere else. I know we’ve been trying to get together for a workout or for dinner, but then one of us flakes out. I’m just wondering what that’s about. I’ve been thinking that, as much freedom as we have as single gals, it sometimes makes us inflexible. We become slaves to our workouts or to our schedules, and I hate to say it, but we can be, well, self-centered and narcissistic. This is all fine and good if you’re talking about the focused training you need to do a long-distance race, but not so good if you’re talking about a friendship…”

JILL ROTHENBERG and her e-mail recipient, Melissa Trainer, are both Colorado transplants who fell in love with Boulder in their Grateful Dead days more than twenty years ago, when they were most definitely not the fashionistas who are making waves through town today. Instead, they wore hemp necklaces and clogs from El Loro on Pearl Street and shapeless gauze skirts from the racks outside of Boulder Army Navy. These days, you’ll find them training for long-distance races all over the state–Jill as a trail runner and dirt biker and Melissa as a former professional downhill mountain bike racer and competitive skier. They still hang out at the Boulder Whole Foods and dress up for their nights out at the St. Julien (where patrons actually wear something other than Crocs) or when they venture into the big city of Denver, where Jill lives–across the street from REI, of course. Jill works as a managing editor at the Geological Society of America and an online instructor for mediabistro.com. Her work has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Urban Moto magazine, and Woman’s Best Friend: Women Writers on the Dogs in Their Lives (Seal Press, 2006).

EDITOR’S NOTE: What Jill fails to mention in her bio is that she not only contributed to Woman’s Best Friend, which was the first anthology I edited, but she came up with the idea. Which means…we all have Ms. Rothenberg to thank for the P.S. book, as without her stellar idea for what I call my “dog book,” there would have been no cat book or no P.S. book either. Clap clap clap clap clap and mwha to Jill!!!

EDITOR’S NOTE, PART TWO: Jill and Melissa actually do not have an e-mail relationship. They have a voicemail relationship. But the C.E.F.H. made us change it. Neener neener to her.

Read the rest of Jill’s letter (or come see her read on November 10 at Denver’s Tattered Cover Colfax location, see Events section for details!), and 35 others, in P.S. What I Didn’t Say: Unsent Letters to Our Female Friends, now available on Amazon and bookstores nationwide!

author spotlight: Bevin Wallace

Winning air-band competitions. Spying on the cute neighbor. Scribbling in your secret club notebooks. Wearing the same outfit. And most of all, feeling like you two are the coolest people on earth. In her laugh-out-loud letter, Bevin Wallace reminisces with her first best friend who doubled as her partner in crime…

“If you were sitting here with me tonight, we’d crack open some Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill and laugh so hard we’d pee our pants. I don’t think I realized until recently how great, special–and hilarious–our friendship was. We’re putting our house on the market, so I’ve been purging old boxes. And I came across our yearbook, Ramblings ‘83, and found the five pages (all marked SAVE FOR LYNNE at the top in red felt tip) you covered with doodles, silly quotes, inside jokes–and the memories came flooding back. We met in second grade, and even though we had lots of separate friends, and I was preppy and you were punk rock (I attempted the New Wave look but always had to incorporate a little pink or teal), we stayed best friends throughout high school. Together, we formed our mean-spirited secret club (total membership: two). Somehow we got it into our heads that we were better (as in cooler, cuter, tougher, smarter) than the other girls on the block. Our many talents included: a blue ribbon-winning three-legged race (we practiced for weeks; it was the only time in my life that I didn’t dread field day); doing The Hustle in very cool disco outfits in the sixth-grade talent show; our well-rehearsed middle school skit, called The Streak (I can still picture Julie running across the stage in that tan leotard); and, of course, our fabulous entry in the air-band competition senior year: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again. We won. Finally, we were the celebrities we always knew we would be! Even if we couldn’t write song lyrics like The Vapours or Big Audio Dynamite (but, man, did we try!)…”

BEVIN WALLACE spent much of her twenties getting over the fact that she never made it big-time as a performer (although her best friend and subject of her letter did once dance on stage with The Tubes). Between stints as a book publicist, bookseller, nonprofit-event coordinator, and PR gal in cities like New York, San Francisco, and Denver, she rediscovered her love of outdoor adventure. Some of her adult escapades include trekking in Nepal and Peru, backcountry skiing in Europe with her two tiny kids (“les petites Alpinistes”), climbing about half of Colorado’s 14ers, cycling in France, and completing the California AIDS ride from San Francisco to L.A. As a former editor at Skiing magazine, she’s traveled and skied all over the world–including Japan, Austria, Utah, Switzerland, Quebec, and Las Vegas. She left Skiing in 2003 to give her knees a rest and to serve as editor-in-chief of Warren Miller’s SnoWorld. Today she works as a copywriter and continues to write for Skiing, Ski, National Geographic Adventure, Delicious Living, Elevation Outdoors, and other publications. She lives in Denver with her husband, David; her seven-year-old son, Sean, and her four-year-old daughter, Lauren–all of them are avid skiers, and they just love to look at photos of mom decked out for The Clash concerts in 1983.

Read the rest of Bevin’s letter, and 35 others, in P.S. What I Didn’t Say: Unsent Letters to Our Female Friends, now available on Amazon and at bookstores nationwide!

author spotlight: Lori Horvitz

In Lori Horvitz’s thoughtful “The Lost Language of Lox,” she examines the idea of how, sometimes, the only way you can help a friend is by letting go.

“We met in a fiction-writing workshop in September of 1997, both of us doctoral students at SUNY Albany. You wrote stories about drunken escapades: one that took place on a Pepto-Bismol-colored bus in Nantucket; another about a marine who lured the narrator into his pickup truck and tried to pull off her shirt, but she ran, leaving one of her sneakers in his possession. Soon I learned there was nothing fictional about your stories. You told me about your boyfriend of five years who studied marine biology in Indiana and wanted to marry you. You said, ‘Maybe I’m in love with him but I just don’t know it. I rarely see him and only call him when I’m drunk.’ At last, I spoke openly about my sexuality instead of hiding it. I told you about my relationship with my last girlfriend, a Mexican scientist who studied in New York for two years before returning to her country. In response, you said you’d never been with a woman but had had crushes on women, and added, ‘Any woman who says she hasn’t thought about it is a big fat liar. Oh my gosh! I’m not hitting on you.’ A week later we took a day trip to Williamstown, Massachusetts. I loved driving in the car with you, listening to the mixes you made for me, both of us singing at the top of our lungs to Joni Mitchell, Cat Stevens, the Indigo Girls. For a good part of our visit, because it was raining, we sat in a cafe/photolab. ‘What a great idea,’ you said. ‘You can drink coffee while waiting for your pictures!’ I loved your optimism, your enthusiasm about everything, every a simple cafe. At the time, I had no idea about your ongoing depression. In fact, your cheerful disguise was so effective that a depressed classmate pulled you aside one day and said, ‘You give me so much hope. You’re the happiest person I’ve ever met.’…”

LORI HORVITZ’s short stories, poetry, and personal essays have appeared in a variety of literary journals and anthologies, including The Southeast Review, The Broome Review, The Salt River Review, Hotel Amerika, The Coe Review, Thirteenth Moon, The Mochila Review, Dos Passos Review, and Quarter After Eight. She has been awarded writing fellowships from Fundacion Valparaiso, Ragdale, Yaddo, Cottages at Hedgebrook, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Blue Mountain Center. She is an associate professor of literature and language at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, where she teaches courses in creative writing, literature, and women’s studies.

Read the rest of Lori’s letter, and 35 others, in P.S. What I Didn’t Say: Unsent Letters to Our Female Friends, now available on Amazon and in bookstores nationwide!

author spotlight: Celena Cipriaso

In “When Words Fail,” Celena Cipriaso gives a heartfelt tribute to her long-lost teenage pen-pal Lee, who introduced her to the idea that “Led Zeppelin speaks to everyone,” that the Sox aren’t that bad, and that if we all had friends who were exactly like us, life would be boring indeed…

“We didn’t speak for those three weeks at writer’s camp at UVA. Instead, we eyed each other from across the room, we heard each other’s name in conversation, and we knew each other by height: You were the tallest; I was the shortest. You were one of the older kids, having just graduated high school, while I was one of the younger kids, just about to start my junior year. You seemed older and quiet, while I was loud and rambunctious. We didn’t speak to each other until the last night, when we were each wandering from floor to floor, passing around our writer’s camp ‘yearbook,’ collecting the signatures of strangers who briefly became close friends and who would be strangers again by the next day, promising that we would K.I.T. We passed each other in the hall. ‘I hate the Sox,’ I admitted to you [you were wearing a Sox hat]. You replied, ‘Well, if all we had were friends that were just like us, life would be boring.’ I think this made me immediately like you. You asked me if I wrote letters and I told you, ‘Not well, but I can always get better.’ And you told me that you were a great letter writer, maybe one of the best, that you would write me great letters if I wrote you back. I didn’t question why we agreed to write letters to people we barely knew back then, but that’s what you did when you were sixteen and at writer’s camp looking for other writer friends. We exchanged addresses and spent hours talking that night. Within the first month, you sent me a letter, a great letter. It was long, your handwriting was cramped, and I learned you loved Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ You asked if I’d ever heard of it, so I went on the Internet and looked up the band. I wasn’t really sure if they would be something I would like–they sounded like a band only boys would like. I wrote you back, telling you that I liked Fiona Apple and Fleetwood Mac, but I didn’t really know this band named Zeppelin. With the next letter you sent, there was a box; you had made me a mixed tape with ‘Stairway to Heaven’ as its first track. You told me that this was a song to hear alone, and that the first time I heard the song, I wouldn’t fully hear it; that I would only feel it, sense its mood. And that once I did that, I would understand that Zeppelin speaks to everyone. I wasn’t sure what that meant, so I did what you told me: shut my door and just let the music play. As the music filled the room, I thought of you, sitting in your room alone, like me, and I wondered if you felt as I did–alone, reaching, those teenage years lasting forever, the loneliness spanning before us, and wondering, just wondering, if there was one person out there who understood this same feeling…”

CELENA CIPRIASO is currently a writer’s assistant at All My Children (yes, the soap with Erica Kane). She began her writing life as a poet and playwright before becoming a screenwriter. She pursued these goals at the dramatic writing program at NYU. She soon realized she sucked at writing fiction, so she decided to start writing nonfiction. Her theatre and spoken-word pieces have been performed in various places throughout New York City and along the East Coast. She has been published in the HarperCollins anthology Yell-Oh Girls! Emerging Voices Explore Culture, Identity, and Growing Up Asian American, a Vassar literary magazine called Asian Quilt, AsianAvenue.com, and RollickGuides.com. She is currently working on her first memoir, and one of its chapters (“The What If Drink”) was published in the online literary magazine World Riot. She’ll always remember the last time she saw Lee, riding away in her car’s back window. And if she could talk to Lee now, she’d say, “The Red Sox aren’t so bad. I’m even kinda a fan now.” Check out Celena’s blog at http://www.skirt.com/user/17899/view

Read the rest of Celena’s letter, and 35 others, in P.S. What I Didn’t Say: Unsent Letters to Our Female Friends, now available on Amazon and at bookstores nationwide!

author spotlight: Tracy Teare

Have you had lingering guilt creep in and get in the way of a friendship reunion? Tracy Teare has, as she explains to her friend Amy in “Something Borrowed, Something Blue…”

“Meeting up with you recently, after not seeing you for ten years, made me feel like I was zooming back in time to high school–minus the stress of exams, boys, and zits. It was a rare treat to share the stories, triumphs, and tragedies that have filled in the years since our last reunion. After all, phone calls and emails are no substitute for chatting late into the night, over coffee, over brunch, in and out of dressing rooms, and through museums. But for me, the laughs and heart-to-hearts stirred up guilty pain too. I mean, who else remembers the name of my first dog and understood how much I loved horses? Or the times our Bruce Springsteen-loving social studies teacher got so fed up with our fits of laughter that he kicked us out of American History? Who else sacrificed her beloved burnt-orange VW Rabbit so I could learn to grind–er, drive–a stick shift? Who else included me in her plans every weekend, even though she almost always had a steady boyfriend and I didn’t? Who else knew how to camouflage not only zits, but a body wave gone poodle? Who else still called me Trixie? All of this makes me feel as low as a street gutter for two big mistakes that I can never undo and will forever regret…strike one was missing your wedding, and strike two was far worse…”

TRACY TEARE is a freelance writer hailing from the Maine coast, near the city of Portland. Writing about friendship was a welcome change up from her usual fare: mainly fitness and parenting, with some health and travel for good measure. Tracy’s work has been published in a number of magazines, such as Real Simple, Health, Prevention, Fit Pregnancy, Wondertime, and Family Fun. She is also a regular contributor to Disney’s family.com, where (much to her girls’ dismay) she records many of her parenting adventures, as well as tips on favorite New England destinations. Tracy has also written extensively about walking and has contributed to two books–Walking through Pregnancy and Pedometer Walking–with walking guru Mark Fenton. Tracy also contributed essays to Seal Press’s Woman’s Best Friend: Women Writers on the Dogs in Their Lives and Cat Women: Female Writers on Their Feline Friends. Though Tracy’s family of three daughters keeps her hopping, she vows not to let so many years roll by before she sees her buddies from high school (especially Amy) again.

Read the rest of Tracy’s letter, and 35 others, in P.S. What I Didn’t Say: Unsent Letters to Our Female Friends, now available on Amazon and at bookstores nationwide!