Something new at the Monroe-Walton Center for the Arts ... our first monthly Book Club event!

On Wednesday, August 22, 2018 at 6:30 PM meet Genie Smith Bernstein author of "Act on the Heart" novel. Her book can be purchased through the gift shop at the art center (discounted price) or online Amazon/Kindle. Lively book discussion. Light refreshments.

Visit Genie's website and her author page on Amazon. You can read an overview of her book there, too. Genie lives in Athens, Georgia, and is a contributor to the Georgia Connector Magazine.

There is no fee to join our Book Club. Look for a new author each month.

Please RSVP to save your space! 

RSVP Email Address: mag@monroeartguild.org

I'm looking forward to seeing friends, old and new, when I speak at the Pilot Club in Eatonton on Tuesday, Feb 2, 2016, 6pm at the Masonic Building on Hwy 16. Two of my favorite topics for a February discussion - Romance and Writing! It's an open meeting, so please join in the fun.

A magazine editor wants to come take pictures of me in “my environment.” EEEEKKK!!! Nothing like viewing my world through someone else’s eyes, and camera. My place is a jungle. So named over twenty years ago by a tired four-year-old returning from a day in the Blue Ridge Mountains. She haughtily disputed her grandfather’s assurance, “We’re almost home,” by complaining, “No we’re not, I can’t see GG’s Jungle.”

This jungle is where I write. Laptop in my – well – lap, looking out my front windows into my own personal tangle of English ivy and Georgia hardwoods. Years ago, our children certified my front yard a Wildlife Habitat and hung a wooden chimpanzee in the trees. Deer nibble the shrubs, foxes nose around, and hawks hunt hapless chipmunks.

Like Sheldon on Big Bang Theory, where’s your “spot?” Your favorite place to settle down and slip into a fictive dream.

My little corner of the world sort of mimics Stephen King, who also writes in a corner. Since I’m comparing myself to the greats, I also scribble on strips of paper like Edgar Allen Poe, and on index cards like Vladimir Nabokov. I haven’t yet written in the nude like J. D. Salinger, but I’ve come close and I understand the strategy behind it, as did Victor Hugo who locked away his clothes to avoid the temptation of going outside.

Although I sometimes recline, I couldn’t write lying down like Mark Twain. But I have written drunk like F. Scott Fitzgerald and standing up like Ernest Hemingway. I might write in a shed like George Bernard Shaw, if it was air conditioned.

I’m not fussy like John Steinbeck, who always kept exactly twelve perfectly sharpened pencils on his desk. And I’m not superstitious like Truman Capote, who wouldn’t begin or end a piece of work on a Friday, and never allowed more than three cigarette butts in his ashtray.

I am like Raymond Chandler, in respect to output being irrelevant. James Joyce considered two perfect sentences a full day of work, whereas Jack London, William Golding, Norman Mailer, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Thomas Wolfe wouldn’t rest until they reached daily quotas into the thousands.

Adopting someone else’s practice won’t invoke genius in me. The best work ultimately comes from one’s own eccentricities. Working jigsaw puzzles and driving are two of mine. Something about focusing on the mechanics involved releases the creative side of my brain.

I fully understand why writers are often considered reclusive. When I am in seriously creative mode, I’m required to live within, socially withdraw so that every drop of my emotional energy goes into the craft. That, more than anything, explains GG’s Jungle.