Cathy Lamb's Blog, page 44

Come And Visit With Me

Come and visit with me! I will be at Powell’s Books in Cedar Hills, in Beaverton, Oregon, on Monday, October 3 at 7:00 chatting about my new book, “The Language of Sisters.” Would love to see you there, of course. I PROMISE I will not drone on. It’ll be shortish and I’ll try to think of something entertaining to say.

I will also be at Jan’s Paperbacks on Saturday, October 8th at 1:00 chatting about – ta da! – the same book. Aloha Villa Shopping Center, 18095 SW Tualatin Valley Hwy, Beaverton, OR 97006. If you would like to order a signed and personalized copy of my book from Jan’s, here are the details.http://janspaperbacks.com/node/409

Hope to see you all, I really do. Cheers.

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Win 32 Books With Liz and Lisa

Liz Clark Fenton and Lisa Steinke Dannenfeldt THANK YOU for including my novel, The Language of Sisters, which almost drove me straight out of my own bleepin’ mind when I was writing it, on your Best Books list. It’s an honor to be here. Me and my odd imagination thank you for it.

READERS, copy and paste the link to enter a contest to WIN all 32 books on the list.

http://www.lizandlisa.com/blog/2016/9...

 

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A Dating Daughter And A Vampire

There are some things you just cannot be prepared for as a parent. The other day Rebel Dancing Daughter said to me, “Mom, how would you feel if I started dating a vampire?”

Sigh. Well, gee whiz. I don’t know. Protect your neck? Stay away from Transylvania? They’re rather pale, are you sure?

Where was the answer to this question in all the parenting books I read?

 

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Giveaway – The Language of Sisters and Henry’s Sisters

Fun giveaway through my publishing house, Kensington Publishing, in New York City if you’d like to enter.

Copy and paste this link, log into facebook     http://kensingtonbooks.tumblr.com/cat...

The Language of Sisters, Henry’s Sisters, and three vases.

Cheers and good luck!

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Henry’s Sisters, On Sale, Cheap and Sweet

Greetings, all!

Henry’s Sisters is now out in mass market paperback. So cheap, on sale, $4.58. The kindle edition is also on sale, only $4.99. Yet again, cheap.

Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Henrys-Sisters...

Here’s an excerpt, written from the point of view of Isabelle Bommarito, who truly has some issues:

I grabbed my lighter with the red handle from the kitchen, lighter fluid, a water bottle, my lacy bra and thong, and opened the French doors to my balcony. The wind and rain hit like a mini hurricane, my braids whipping around my cheeks.

One part of my balcony is covered, so it was still dry. I put the bra and thong in the usual corner on top of a few straggly, burned pieces of material from another forgettable night on a wooden plan and flicked the lighter on. The bra and thong smoked and blackened and wiggled and fizzled and flamed.

When they were cremated, I doused them with water from the water bottle. No sense burning down the apartment building. That would be bad.

I settled into a metal chair in the uncovered section of my balcony, the rain sluicing off my naked body, and gazed at the sky scrapers, wondering how many of those busy, brain – fried, robotic people were staring at me.

Working in a skyscraper was another way of dying early, my younger sister, Janie, would say. “It’s like the elevators are taking you up to hell.”

Right out of college she got a job as a copywriter for a big company on the twenty ninth floor of a skyscraper in Los Angeles and lasted two months before her weasely, squirmy boss found the first chapter of her first thriller on her desk.

The murderer is a copywriter for a big company on the twenty ninth floor of a skyscraper in Los Angeles. In the opening paragraphs she graphically describes murdering her supercilious, condescending, snobby boss who makes her feel about the size of a slug and how his body ends up in a trash compactor, his legs spread like a pickled chicken, one shoe off, one red high heel squished on the other foot.

That was the murderer’s calling card.

No one reports his extended absence, including his wife, because people hate him as they would hate a gang of worms in their coffee.

Janie was fired that day, even though she protested her innocence. That afternoon she sat down and wrote the rest of the story, nonstop, for three months. When she emerged from her apartment, she’d lost twenty pounds, was pale white, and muttering.

At four months she had her first book contract. When the book was published, she sent it to her ex boss and wrote, “Thanks, dickhead! With love, Janie Bommarito,” on the inside cover.

It became a best seller.

She became a recluse because she is obsessive and compulsive and needs to indulge all her odd habits privately.

The recluse had received a flowery lemon – smelling pink letter, too. So had Cecilia, whose brain connects with mine.

The rain splattered down on me, the wind twirly whirled, and I raised the Kahlua bottle to my lips again. “I love Kahlua,” I said out loud as I watched the water river down my body, creating a little pool in the area of my crotch where my legs crossed. I flicked the rain away with my hand, watched it pool again, flicked it.

This entertained me for a while. Off in the distance I saw a streak of lightning, bright and dangerous.

It reminded me of the time when my sisters and I ran through a lightning storm to find Henry in a tree.

I laughed, even though that night had not been funny. It had been hideous. It had started with a pole dance and ended with squishy white walls.

I laughed again, head thrown back, until I cried, my hot tears running down my face off my chin, onto my boobs, and down my stomach. They landed in the pool between my legs and I flicked the rain and tear mixture away again. The tears kept coming and I could feel the darkness, darkness so familiar to me, edging its way back in like a liquid nightmare.

I did not want to deal with the pink letter that smelled of her flowery, lemony perfume.

 

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Gardening, Stress, And A Delphinium

I woke up yesterday and decided that I should plant 400 bulbs to make myself feel better. I needed to feel better.

I planted daffodils. Red and yellow tulips. Two frothy blue flowers.

And crocuses. I love crocuses because when they pop up I know that winter is ending.

It was me and the dirt and the sun and my 400 bulbs.

I planted most of them in the backyard as I’ve added a ton of dirt to a newly cut border.

This summer gardening fever hit hard, the Garden Nerd in me cackled her way out, and I bought a red camellia, two magnolia trees (one died. Waaaa!), blue delphinium, soft pink hydrangeas, a cherry tree, and a bunch of flowering plants that I bought on the side of the road in the country for three bucks.

I didn’t know what they were, I bought them anyhow. Mystery plants.

Gardening takes my stress away. There is something about being covered in dirt, digging a hole with a shovel, and planting something that you know will grow that is soothing and comforting.

Gardening makes my life better, and so often I cannot make anything better.

Sometimes my problems can be fixed, resolved, eliminated, healed.

And sometimes it’s just a matter of living with them the best I can.

Sometimes I cannot write. I don’t have writer’s block exactly, but the words on the page are such crap I wonder why I don’t quit. Or I can’t get a character to move. Or I’m burned out and frazzled.

Sometimes life gets too stressful. Stressful enough that getting enough air down my lungs becomes a challenge. Negative enough to make me want to move to Montana and call it a day.

But a garden…now I can make that better. I can fix it.

In an hour, weeds can be picked and an area that wasn’t pretty is now pretty.

In half a day pots can be filled with geraniums, Alyssum, petunias, impatiens.

In a full day a new border can be dug, dirt dumped, arching trees and purple butterfly bushes added.

I can see improvement. I can take something dull and brown and fill it with delicate fuchsias, spiky ferns, and a gentle red rose.

I have so much more work to do in my garden, in my tiny patch of Earth. In fact, on the left side of my house I simply dumped part of a dump truck full of bark dust down to smother those incessant, pesky weeds.

But one day I want to build a patio and trellis so I can watch the sunset because I truly think that sunsets are a daily, shining gift and I too often miss out on that gift.

One day I want to cut out a curving design in the center of my grass so I can plant a pink tulip tree and add purple sage, blazing stars, hostas, and black eyed Susans.

One day I want to transform a stark corner with a wire fence around it into a book reading area.

But, for now, I’m delighted.

I have planted 400 bulbs.

I cannot wait for spring so I can see them again

 

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Such A Pretty Face Is Only $2.99 Today

Friends,

I almost forgot!

Such A Pretty Face is on sale today for only $2.99, on Kindle.

How would you feel if you lost 170 pounds? Stevie Barrett did. Her whole life changed.

This is the second chapter of the book…

 

I am going to plant a garden this summer.

With the exception of two pink cherry trees, one white cherry tree, and one pink tulip tree, all huge, I have a barren, dry backyard and I’m tired of looking at it. I almost see it as a metaphor for my whole life, and I think if I can fix this, I can fix my life. Simplistic, silly, I know, but I can’t get past it.

So I’m going to garden even if my hands shake as if there are live circuits inside of them and a floppy yellow hat dances through my mind.

I’m going to build upraised beds, a whole bunch of them, and fill them with tomatoes, squash, zucchini, radishes, lettuce, carrots, peas, and beans. But not corn.

I’m not emotionally able to do corn yet, too many memories, but I am going to plant marigolds around the borders, and pink and purple petunias, rose bushes and clematis and grape vines.

I’m going to stick two small crosses at the back fence but not for who you think. I’m going to build a grape arbor with a deck beneath it, and then I’m going to add a table so I can paint there, as I used to. I’m also going to build three trellises for climbing roses over a rock pathway, one arch for me, Grandma, and Grandpa, which will lead to another garden,  with cracked china plates in a mosaic pattern in the middle of a concrete circle, for Sunshine.

This may sound way too ambitious.

It is. But I see this as my last chance to get control of my mind before it blows.

I can wield any type of saw out there, and I have to do this, even if it takes me years. That I can even think in terms of a future, when I used to see only a very short, messy future, is a miracle.

Why? Because two and a half years ago, when I was thirty two years old, I had a heart attack

I used to be the size of a small, depressed cow.

The heart attack led to my stomach strangling operation and I lost one hundred and seventy pounds. Now I am less than half myself, in more ways than one.

My name is Stevie Barrett.

This is a story of why I was the way I was and how I am now me.

I am going to plant a garden.

 

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Huffington Post, Secrets, And The Language of Sisters

Thanks to Huffington Post and writer Brandi Megan Granett for this interview. I can’t seem to copy and paste the original to here…technology can be tricky for me. So baffling. So confusing. Here’s the original link to it:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/t...

 

The Language of Sisters:  A Conversation with Cathy Lamb

By Brandi Megan Granett

In Cathy Lamb’s beautiful new novel, The Language of Sisters, she weaves together a tale of family, following sisters, Toni, Valerie, and Ellie Kozlovsky, as they grapple with their family’s past in the Soviet Union and their own futures. 

The Kozlovsky sisters find the power of love to carry them through, and readers will be swept along on the journey, too!

The Language of Sisters features such a diverse cast.  How did you pick these women to create?  Who did you have the most fun with?

I am one of three sisters.  And, I’ll have to say, so peace can be maintained, and no swords will be wielded, that none of the sisters in my book are based on me or my sisters.  Truly. BUT, I do understand sisters, sister friendships, and sister dynamics. It can be a complicated and semi – crazy relationship.

I wanted each sister in the story to represent something, or many somethings, in women’s life journeys. For example, Valerie is a prosecuting attorney with two kids.  She’s juggling full time work, a demanding career, kids, and a husband.  That’s hard, it’s really tough.

Ellie Kozlovsky owns a business designing pillows.  She’s engaged, but is wrestling with whether or not she wants to be married…at all.  What will marriage give her? What will she have to give up? Does she want to give that up? Marriage asks for compromise and sacrifice. Does she want to do either? Is something wrong with her for not wanting to get married or is it perfectly fine that she is most happy on her own?  Does she want to have kids? Really? Is she allowing society’s messages to push her into marriage?

Toni, through whose eyes the story is told, is struggling with losing someone she loves, which happens to all of us, very unfortunately.  She lives on a yellow tugboat on the Willamette River in Portland, and she’s a reporter for a newspaper. She’s trying to breathe again after her life fell apart. Most of us have been there with Toni– the life falling apart and the trying to breathe again part.

Together the three sisters are part of a huge family, immigrants from Russia, with a ton of quirky and odd members who do quirky and odd things.  They’re funny. They cry. They fight. They laugh. So, it’s sister dynamics, and family dynamics, and all the complexities and laughter therein.

I had a lot of fun writing about the girls’ fiery mother, Svetlana, the Russian restaurant she owns, and how she puts the family’s problems up on the Specials board every night and admonishes her kids through her recipes for all to see.

Are secrets always dangerous?

No. Secrets aren’t always dangerous at all.

I absolutely think that some secrets should be forever kept.

Some secrets are dangerous to keep, obviously, if someone else could get hurt, there’s something illegal blah blah blah. We all know when secrets shouldn’t be kept.

But I also think that almost everyone has secrets.  Why share? What would be the point of sharing? Will it cause someone else pain? Will it wreck a life or relationship? Will it bring in more honesty, more wisdom? Does it need to be shared for comfort, for reassurance? Will it cause someone else great happiness if it’s told?

Ya gotta think of all those things…

In  The Language of Sisters  there’s a whopper of a secret. Where did Dmitry, the adopted brother, come from? No one has wanted to talk about it, no one has been allowed to talk about it. But the secret has followed the Kozlovsky family from the Soviet Union, twenty five years ago, and it’s about to explode. In a good and bad way.

What did you need to learn about tug boats to write about Toni’s unique living arrangements?

Oh, I learned more about tugboats than I thought I would ever need to know. But, most importantly, I went to a tugboat that was being used as a home. It, too, had been remodeled. In fact, Toni’s  yellow tugboat on the Willamette River is much like the one I saw in Portland.  The crew quarters are now a closet. There’s an office that used to be the office for the tugboat captain, the bedroom was expanded, the wheelhouse has been remodeled, etc.

You write beautifully on social media about your own daughters.  What did raising them teach you about creating sisters on the page?

Raising daughters is a lovely privilege.  And it’s tricky. You want to raise independent, strong, courageous, interesting, smart daughters who absolutely will not buy into this dangerous and ridiculous media – based image of what beautiful is.

When I created the three sisters in my book, I wanted them to be as I described above. But I wanted them to be real. I never write characters that are perfect. No one is, my characters aren’t. Really, if I wrote a character who was perfect and had a perfect life, everyone would hate her, right?

The sisters really screw up sometimes. They also love to have fun. They go skinny dipping. They go to a bar and Toni does cart wheels across the stage. They go to family parties and, one time, end up in a bathtub together. There’s a fight on a floor with one cousin over a hair brush, and they sew pillows together.

They survived their dangerous childhood in the Soviet Union.  The sisters stick up for each other. They’re great friends. They love each other dearly. That’s what I want for my daughters, and my son, that forever love and friendship.

A very short summary of The Language of Sisters…Three sisters. One brother. A secret that is chasing them down.

A little longer summary:

1) Toni Koslovsky lives on a yellow tugboat in the Willamette River in Oregon. She needed space to breathe.

2) Toni has two sisters. They can sometimes hear each other in their heads, a message coming through. It’s odd, it’s inexplicable. It’s a gift handed down from the Sabonis family line through their widow’s peaks. Their mother had it, too.

3) The family immigrated from Russia when Toni was a little girl. They left a lot of secrets there…and the secrets have been running after them ever since.

4) The family has many crazy members and the dynamics can be mind blowing. You might relate to some of them.

5) Toni has something hidden in a little shed next to her tugboat. She doesn’t want to look at it. She doesn’t want to think about it. But she does.

6) Love. Laughter. Funny stuff. A blue heron, a woman named Daisy, a DEA agent who lives down the dock, a restaurant, a scary man. Pillow making, skinny dipping, too much wine. More laughter.

 

 

 

 

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Great Thoughts, Great Readers. My Chat With Anderea Peskind Katz

The Language of Sisters by Cathy Lamb


August 29, 2016 | by Andrea Katz | Great Thoughts | 



 The Language of Sisters by Cathy Lamb (one of my very favorite authors and people) comes out on August 30th.  Like all of Lamb’s books, it is a joy to read.  I daresay this might just be the best of Cathy’s books (which I can’t believe I am saying as I thought What I Remember Most was her best until I read this one!)   I am thrilled to share with you a guest post from Cathy Lamb …..  (I wish I knew Bette Jean!)

My Mother, Her Three Dresses, and A  Love of Books

by Cathy Lamb 

 

When I was a child I didn’t know that my mother had only three dresses.

All I knew was that she was the best. Kind, loving, smiling.

She could make delicious birthday cakes shaped like treasure chests and frothy chocolate milk. She didn’t mind when I came in dirty from head to toe from playing outside or if I had a butterfly or a roly poly in my hand to show her.

Bette Jean loved my dad, my sisters, my brother, and me, and she loved books, that I knew for sure.

When I got the Scholastic book order form at school all I had to do was circle all the books I wanted with a purple crayon and she wrote a check.  The books would come and I would get a whole stack of them.  It was like Christmas morning, every time.

I remember the Beezus and Ramona books. Narnia. The Little Princess. Pippi Longstocking. The Secret Garden. Who could forget, Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret?

One time my sixth grade teacher took one of my Judy Blume books away and called my mother.  She told my mother I shouldn’t read it. My mother said I could read whatever I wanted and sent me right back up to school to get the book. She was my book champion.

Though I grew up in a fairly strict Catholic household, she did not believe in censoring what her kids read.

My parents were very conservative with money. They had four kids and my mother stayed home with us. Their own parents had lived through the Depression and had given them dire warnings.  They believed that it wasn’t if a financial disaster would strike, it was when, and one should be prepared so one didn’t starve or lose the house.

That’s why my mother only had three dresses when I was very young. The budget was too tight and they were saving for the imminent, looming disaster.

But books? Yes to books.

My mother literally sacrificed dresses so her kids could have more books.

When I was a teenager, my mother became an English teacher at my middle school. I was scared to death the first day she started teaching there. I was sure that she would run screaming from the room, as the kids would surely turn into wild Tazmanian devils and create tornados of disruption. I could hardly breathe.

Nothing of the sort happened.

Everyone loved her. Kids started talking to me who had never talked to me before – an uncool and gawky kid – because they loved my mother.

It was also the end of her limited wardrobe. She bought elegant dresses, tapered slacks, stylish sweaters and high heels that you put in your closet and gaze at in wonder. Gone were the days of only three dresses.  She knew teaching kids was a worthwhile career, and a privilege, and she dressed for it.

First she gave her own kids a love of books, then she passed it on to thousands of kids over her long career as an English teacher.

Through the years we always loved talking about books, and we swapped them back and forth. Mysteries. Historical Fiction. Nonfiction.

Bette Jean was a huge reader and, also, the healthiest person I have ever met. She ate organic foods, she walked all the time, and she was slim. She never smoked a day in her life. She died of lung cancer at sixty, fourteen years ago.

I still miss her. There’s still that raw ache, still that hole in my heart. Sometimes, when I’m reading a book I’ll think, “Mom, you would love this book because…” and I’ll list the reasons, as if she were right there, sitting with me.

In recent years, finally, those thoughts bring me peace instead of tears and grief, and I am glad for that. It is the same with her books. I have so many of her favorites on my shelves, some from her mother, and I treasure each one of them.

Yes, Bette Jean gave me a love of books, from childhood until the day she died.

It has stayed with me for a lifetime.

It’s a gift, it truly is. A loving gift, from mother to daughter.  I’ve passed it down to my daughters, Bette Jean’s granddaughters.

She would be delighted. I know that for sure, too.

 

 

 

 

http://www.greatthoughts.com/2016/08/...

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My New Novel, The Language of Sisters, Is Out Today

Greetings, everyone!

If you need an end of summer novel, my new book is out today.

A short and sweet summary:

1) Toni Koslovsky lives on a yellow tugboat on the Willamette River in Oregon. She needed space to breathe.

2) Toni has two sisters. They can sometimes hear each other in their heads, a message coming through. It’s odd, it’s inexplicable. It’s a gift handed down through the Sabonis family line through their widow’s peaks. Their mother had it, too.

3) The family escaped from Russia when Toni was a little girl. They left a lot of secrets there…and the secrets have been chasing them down ever since.

 

4) The Kozlovsky family has many eccentric and odd members and the dynamics are complicated. You might relate to some of them.

5) Love. Laughter. Funny stuff. A blue heron, a woman named Daisy, a DEA agent who lives down the dock, a family restaurant, a scary man. Pillow making, skinny dipping, too much wine. More laughter.

The first chapter is below.

I so hope you like it.

If you’re in the Portland, Oregon area, I’ll be speaking at Powell’s Books, Cedar Hills, in Beaverton, on Monday, October 3 at 7:00. I would truly love to see you there.

Happy day to you.

Cathy

Amazon https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0190HGQR4/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1#nav-subnav

Powell’s Books http://www.powells.com/book/the-language-of-sisters-9780758295101

Barnes and Nobles http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-language-of-sisters-cathy-lamb/1123105717

 

Chapter One

I was talented at pickpocketing.

I knew how to slip my fingers in, soft and smooth, like moving silk. I was lightning quick, a sleight of hand, a twist of the wrist. I was adept at disappearing, at hiding, at waiting, until it was safe to run, to escape.

I was a whisper, drifting smoke, a breeze.

I was a little girl, in the frigid cold of Moscow, under the looming shadow of the Soviet Union, my coat too small, my shoes too tight, my stomach an empty shell.

I was desperate. We were desperate.

Survival stealing, my sisters and I called it.

Had we not stolen, we might not have survived.

But we did. We survived. My father barely, my mother only through endless grit and determination, but now we are here, in Oregon, a noisy family, who does not talk about what happened back in Russia, twenty-five years ago. It is best to forget, my parents have told us, many times.

“Forget it happened. It another life, no?” my father says. “This here, this our true life. We Americans now. Americans!”

We tried to forget, but in the inky-black silence of night, when Mother Russia intrudes upon our dreams, like a swishing scythe, a crooked claw emerging from the ruins of tragedy, when we remember family members buried under the frozen wasteland of the Soviet Union’s far reaches, we are all haunted, some more than others.

You would never guess by looking at my family what some of us have done and what has been done to us. You would never sense our collective memory, what we share, what we hide.

We are the Kozlovskys.

We like to think we are good people.

And, most of the time, we are. Quite good.

And yet, when cornered, when one of us is threatened, we come up swinging.

But, pfft.

All that. In the past. Best to forget what happened.

As my mother says, in her broken English, wagging her finger, “No use going to Moscow in your head. We are family. We are the Kozlovskys. That all we need to know. The rest, those secrets, let them lie down.”

Yes, do.

Let all the secrets lie.

For as long as they’ll stay down.

They were coming up fast. I could feel it.

 

 

 

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