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MARSHALL, Texas - Kathy L. Patrick walks into the coffee shop badly in need of espresso. She has been up most of the night, serving homemade jambalaya to published authors from the East and West Coasts and points in between.
She has made not one but two trips to the Shreveport, La., airport an hour away. And why? To fetch more authors, of course, to haul them to her own little corner of East Texas for the sixth annual Pulpwood Queens Literary Festival, which was held over the weekend.
"I'm tired," she says with a sigh, silencing the disco ring tone on her pink cellphone, which demands her attention incessantly. "But the truth is, I don't sleep much. Never have. Who can sleep when you're having this much fun?"
Fun in her case means shaking up the publishing world from the quaint hamlet of Jefferson, Texas, where she's the owner of Beauty and the Book, dubbed "the only hair salon/bookstore in the country."
This year's festival, Girlfriend Weekend 2007, moved 16 miles to Marshall, if only because, well, it's gotten so darn big. Big means more than 500 attendees, including dozens of authors and publishers, two Pulitzer Prize winners and a National Book Award finalist among them.
Big means the club has had numerous appearances on ABC's "Good Morning America."
The Pulpwood Queens' television credits also include the Oxygen network and, yes, Oprah Winfrey's show. Some even consider Patrick a rural, East Texas version of Oprah, given her influence.
Sipping her espresso, the 50-year-old Pulpwood Queen laughs and says: "I never asked to be famous or to be on TV, but what happened is, when you join my book club, you get access to some of the best authors in the country. And now that we've gotten so big, we've finally gotten onto the publishers' radar."
Big means having "hundreds" of chapters all over the country - her Web site claims 24 in seven states, though Patrick says there are many more. She also lists eight in foreign countries.
"It's spreading," she laughs.
And whether they're in Thailand or Terrell, Texas, big means hair, as in bounteous blond wigs, adorned with tiaras, the Pulpwood Queens' headwear of choice. Big means getting best-selling authors to fly to East Texas once a year to wear those same wigs and tiaras and participate in silly skits.
"She's become so well known in the publishing world that, now, they send her everything," says Loraine Despres, author of the best-selling "The Scandalous Summer of Sissy LeBlanc." "As far as hand-selling and word of mouth, Kathy's the best."
After Patrick mentioned "The Dive from Clausen's Pier" by Ann Packer on "Good Morning America," a producer called her to announce that the book had, within hours, ascended to No. 1 on Amazon.com. That week, she says, it rose to No. 4 on The New York Times best-seller list.
It has since sold 675,000 copies, "not bad," Patrick says, "for an unknown author and an unknown book." She says that six books her club recommended in 2006 went on to become best-sellers or have since been sold to Hollywood.
"It's absolutely a real thing," HarperCollins publishing executive Sam Barry says of Patrick's reach. Two of his authors, novelist River Jordan ("The Messenger of Magnolia Street") and Michael Morris ("Slow Way Home"), are here.
"If you think about the kind of grass-roots reach this has, for thousands of readers, it's something that publishers just really, really want," says Barry, the brother of humor columnist Dave Barry. "We focus so much attention on the media hit - the television interview on the `Today' show, the front-page story. ...
"And those of course matter and sell books. But people buy books more than anything by word of mouth. And book clubs are crucial to that process."
Rona Berg, the author of a line of beauty books and former beauty editor of The New York Times Sunday Magazine, says that Patrick - one of three sisters and the mother of two teenage daughters - appeals to women by giving them a sense of strength and power. "She's building a sense of community. She's creating a sisterhood, a grass-roots link between women all over the country."
And, she's importing to the Piney Woods women who might never have seen the place were it not for her.
Despres lives in Los Angeles, where her credits also include television writing. During the 1980s, she wrote the episode of Dallas that answered the question: "Who Shot J.R.?"
She and Berg were among the authors who showed up Friday night at Patrick's home on a Jefferson farm road. Lean dogs and well-fed cats, all rescued from shelters, mingled with the Pulpwood Queens' version of the literati. They ate jambalaya, hot buttered bread and four kinds of pie while, in some cases, wondering what on Earth had possessed them to come.
"I was thinking that driving down here," says Despres. "How does she get all of these people to this little town? I flew from LAX to D/FW, changed planes and flew to Shreveport. I rented a car and drove for an hour. Why do I do it? It's Kathy."
Like much of Patrick's story, the club's beginnings are rooted in pain.
In 1999, 11 years after moving to Jefferson, Patrick was thrilled when a local woman invited her to a book club. Thanking the eight women profusely, she was quickly ushered outside.
"But, Kathy, you can't belong to our book club," the woman said. "You were only invited as a guest."
She was told she might be considered if someone moved away or died. She was crushed. So, she decided to form the Pulpwood Queens and invited every woman she knew. Six showed up at her home in March 2000. She had already decided on the name and on the tiaras. "They looked at me like I was crazy," she says. "I was convinced they'd never come back."
But a month later, at 7 p.m., she looked outside to see a stream of headlights driving up the road. Soon, 35 women wearing tiaras were knocking on her door.
Sisterly bonding is just one of her motives. Heralding deserving but unknown authors is another. But literacy, she says, is now her No. 1 cause.
As a resident of Marion County, she's troubled that it's the fourth-poorest county in Texas.
"If you teach a child to read," she says, "they have the tools to rise above this."
She's also committed in other ways. Patrick and her husband, Jay Patrick, a project manager for a computer company, routinely usher into their home foreign exchange students and foreign visitors. A delegation from Thailand recently left wearing blond wigs in honor of Patrick, who describes her own beginnings as humble.
"I grew up in Kansas and always had big dreams," she says.
But Kansas, in her case, inspires no nostalgia. She describes her girlhood as a "spare the rod, spoil the child" existence. Mother and Daddy didn't get along, she says. If she'd ever clicked her heels, a la Dorothy, it wouldn't have been Kansas to which she returned.
"I was from Oz," she says.
Her only escape - her only salvation - was reading.
She attended seven colleges in three states but never graduated. In 1988, she was living in San Diego, working as a beauty consultant for a department store. She came to Jefferson to visit a sister and never left.
By 1999, she was happily married and working as a book publisher's rep, with East Texas as her territory. And then came the thunderclap.
With the publishing industry suffering a downturn, she was told she no longer had a job.
She was devastated. But for a woman whose childhood, if anything, taught her survival skills, she once again made lemonade out of lemons. She decided it was time to combine the passions of her life, books and beauty, and open her own shop.
And while the zaniness of the weekend has in many ways been a tribute to Patrick, it's hardly the end. Her own book, a memoir of growing up in rural Kansas, will be published in 2008. Tired she may be, but yet another festival is coming up, set for Shreveport in the summer. After that, who knows?
"I never had a plan. I'm a whimsical person," she says. "I have learned to live the day. I don't worry about things any more. Too many good things have happened to me."
And with that, she laughs a lusty laugh, only to be interrupted, yet again, by disco sounds from a pink cellphone.
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WHAT'S ON THE LIST?
Here's a look at some titles the Pulpwood Queens will be reading in coming months, as chosen by founder Kathy L. Patrick.
"The Flamenco Academy" by Sarah Bird
"The Worthy: A Ghost's Story" by Will Clarke
"Miss American Pie: A Diary of Love, Secrets, and Growing up in the 1970s" by Margaret Sartor
"My Lost and Found Life" by Melodie Bowsher
"Rain Village" by Carolyn Turgeon
"Chemistry and other Stories" by Ron Rash
"The World Made Straight" by Ron Rash
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(c) 2007, The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Mclatchy-Tribune News Service.
