Borrowed Names is in Stores, or, Thank you, Thank you!

I have so many people to thank for kind blogging, facebook, and tweeting celebrations of the release of Borrowed Names: Poems about Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madam C. J. Walker, Marie Curie, and their Daughters. The book that I feel as if I’m been talking about forever is out of my house and into the hands of anyone who can get to a library or bookstore or tap their fingers to order online. Friends really can make a day like this great. The house, or at least a room, seems filled with flowers, even if it’s really just the slitty-eyed cat by my elbow.

My friend Sue, who read poetry with me in Mrs. Ericson’s English class in high school (and passed notes folded into origami shapes) met me, all these decades later, to go to the flower show at Mount Holyoke College. We smelled green grass! And saw sights such as this:

Then we stopped at the Odyssey Bookshop http://www.odysseybks.com/ where Sue bought a book. We’re standing with children’s book buyer, Rebecca, who I was glad to hear liked the cover, though it seemed mostly it’s because she’s such a fan of silhouettes that she’s looking for an artist to do one of a rather complicated Greek myth to tattoo on her back. (In case you wondered if now that my daughter is twenty-one have I dropped my mom-ways, as Rebecca described the various characters, I asked, “Isn’t that going to hurt?”)

It was good to have an iced-green-tea toast with my old friend in the real world, but I smiled and caught my breath and teared up at words I read online.

Jama Rattigan, who knows better than anyone how to throw a party, went all out, so to join in please click this link http://jamarattigan.livejournal.com/390056.html. She included not only her bears reading Borrowed Names but photos of the women in my book. She even invited my daughter! Jama served gingerbread with chocolate frosting, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s favorite treat (and her photo convinced me maybe this is not such a bad idea). She set out caviar and champagne in honor of glamorous A’Lelia Walker and crepes with jam, which Eve Curie made while her scientist mother and sister barely noticed what was on the table. In the comments, you’ll find a note from A’Lelia Bundles, the great-great-granddaughter of Madam Walker, and her biographer: her work made mine possible. Jama, of course, offered her more champagne.

Lovely Cynthia Lord cynthialord sent forth her tiny dancing guy and tumbling hamsters.

You know I love Jo Knowles for her joy, warmth, witnessing-way of being in the world, and starting the party early: http://jbknowles.livejournal.com/364854.html

Thank you, Kate Messner, kmessner for saying Borrowed Names is one of your favorite books ever and sending a copy to your mom, who I’ve never met but kind of adore for her paintings on the covers of your first two novels: Spitfire and Champlain and the Silent One.

And I was blown away on Sunday by a review from the Goddess of YA Literature:
http://professornana.livejournal.com/397798.html?view=544998&style=mine#t544998

Loree Griffin Burns http://lgburns.livejournal.com/160423.html author of Tracking Trash, and one of my favorite science writers, has been talking up Borrowed Names, too.

As I was writing this, the dogs barked, a truck made its truck noises, and my author copies arrived. My husband said, “Call up your friends! Let’s have a party!” But I think he was kidding, since he’s now back on the couch with a book in his hands. And I’m enjoying a quiet sense of having finished something that seems to speak to people I care about. And typing out notes about what is coming next, after I feed the cat.