Have you?  Thanks to The Book House for hosting us today. Tony and I talked all about New Mexico, I left and immediately went and bought a taco at Nacho Mama’s up the street, home of the drive-through marg. 

Note that my foot is firmly planted on Libby’s leash. There was a cat in the back room.

Floor to ceiling books, a fan and a dog.

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Well… okay, so most people are not tuned in to the radio on Memorial Day Morning, but me and ol’ Charlie waxed poetic about the Art of Acceleration. Here’s a link if you’d like to give a listen to Off the Leash Behind the Mic on the Charlie Brennan Show. 

I tend to talk with my hands.

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We stopped at farmer’s markets anywhere we could.

If you’re in the neighborhood, or want to fly in for some strawberries or Kettle Korn, stop by the Webster Groves Farmers Market tomorrow, May 23rd, where my travelin’ partner and I will be signing copies of Off the Leash. Well, Libby will be on the leash, otherwise, she’d take off with the first person to offer her a scrap of meat. Look for Libby to be laying on her back, letting people rub her belly. Hell, I might do that if you buy TWO books!

Webster Groves Farmers Market, Big Bend and Old Orchard, at Gazebo Park. We’ll be there from 3:00 to 6:30 PM, rain or shine. Hope for shine.

The post Fresh Picked, Locally Grown, Locally Published appeared first on Jean Ellen Whatley.

So, today’s my birthday. I’ve been trying to be breezy about it. You know,  basking in the well wishes on Facebook, with all due thanks. Heading to New York tomorrow to see Paddy Boy, son number two. Even got free tickets to see Letterman! Too bad the guest tomorrow night is kinda lame — especially compared to the star studded line up so far this week. Oh well, I’m lucky to have gotten tickets at all. I should be happy.

Blame it on the Irish in me, I’m still feeling a little melancholy, can’t seem to shake it, kinda like shaking off this wicked winter holdover. I swear to God if I have to put on my black long-sleeve tee and trench coat one more time this spring, I’m going to run screaming down the street butt naked instead. Wow, that just made me feel better just visualizing the horror.

Had dinner with a bright and fascinating writer last night – not only does she write screenplays, but she’s got enough material from her personal life to eclipse my book, with a crackling dark humor. I dig that kind of style. She said something that stuck with me. She was talking about the urgency she feels to get her writing out there. “I don’t have any kids, this is what I can leave behind as my legacy.”

Well, I do have a passle of children, but I also understand the obsession to feel like you, alone, not as an extension of someone else, mattered. You had an impact. Every day, when I reach out to the next person and the next and the next, peddling my book, I feel like I’m able to make one more scratch on the wall of the cave we call this sweet earth. And, I am reminded particularly today, on my birthday, of my dear mother Beverly who never let me shirk from the courage of my convictions and my grandfather Booker, who upon seeing his newborn granddaughter, commented that I looked like Archie Moore, the prizefighter. Ironic that my buddy Archie was raised right here in St. Louis. Even has a star on the “Walk of Fame” in The Loop. He was ranked as the #1 light heavyweight of all-time by the International Boxing Research Organization in 2000 and was voted as the #1 light heavyweight of the 20th century by the Associated Press in 1999.

Suddenly, the melancholy clears, as the sun lands a punch on my soggy crop of dandelions. Here’s to Archie, Booker and Beverly — and a brief excerpt, from Chapter 12, I Know About You.  Thank you all for making me feel loved on my birthday and every day.

    She was all alone when she went into labor. Took a cab to the hospital, calling Kybie, the German lady who kept Garrett during the day, to come watch him and Don while she went to have another baby.

    “She looks like Archie Moore” was Booker’s assessment of his infant granddaughter after he and my grandmother Marie got there from Placerville. If you Google “Archie Moore,” you’ll see my baby picture there, I swear to God. Never mind that Archie Moore was a black man, whom God only knows how many uppercuts he took to the face. He was possibly the greatest light-heavyweight of all time. He was called the “Old Mongoose” and the “Ageless Warrior.” He scored 140 knockouts in a career that spanned from 1936 to 1963. The dude never lost his crown in the ring and in 228 recorded bouts, Archie was stopped only seven times. Okay, even if perhaps my mother wasn’t too thrilled being told that her newborn daughter looked like an aging prizefighter, maybe she willed his stamina on me. Ageless Warrior? I’ll take it any fucking day of the week.

Baby Jean – Booker was right.

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Sometimes I indulge in a little free verse. Sometimes I indulge in bars and shout “Free Bird!”  Anyway, hope you like it.

Desert Inn

Lovers, like impressions in clay
leave behind their sweetness.
Blue eyes, brown, this one, that,
a lifetime.

How many kisses in the dark?
Adoring, no hesitation, only love.

I welcomed you like the sun
pouring over me,
a golden glaze
never hardening.
Wraps round me now, a whiskey spun cocoon,
mere memories.
No regret.

I breathe. I live. I continue,
the sum of every tender touch.

Push into me with mercy, I pray thee, recollection.
Check your daggers at my door.
Screaming neon vacancy sign,
glowing evermore?

Kinda where I was going. Literally.

The post In Observance of National Poetry Month appeared first on Jean Ellen Whatley.

Thanks to The Jupiter Girls Book Club for posing with my book!  Will Skype for food. I’ll just eat mine here.

The post Warms the Cockles of This Writer’s Heart appeared first on Jean Ellen Whatley.

This is what happens when it either rains or snows continually for days on end. You wake in the morning to the dulled down, concrete colored sky, tree branches and leggy, brown rose bushes that you didn’t get around to properly pruning last summer, holding their crooked, gnarly fingers up to  the sky, futilely looking for some semblance of a ray.  This is full-on March madness.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It was two years ago today, on a merely rainy day as opposed to a blizzard, that the obsession took hold. Here’s a short excerpt from Off the Leash, Chapter Three, “Somebody Broke in Here in the Middle of the Night and Stole My Sanity.”  After, I promise, a moral to the story and a little something to brighten your day.

“Do the road trip anyway. Take the dog.”

I was wearing Don’s forest-green terry cloth robe. It’s heavy. Quality merchandise was the hallmark of his shopping habits all his life. It’s the one item I asked for out of all his things, my brother’s bathrobe, to keep me warm. It works. My house is so old and so cold; it leaks like a sieve. Every time I tie the belt around my waist, I think of Don with gratitude.

But on this particularly dreary March morning, my rebound was sagging. I was flat-out pissed off, fed up, sad and mad at the world. Not worth hanging, as my mama used to say. I was standing there in Don’s robe, looking out the window at the rain. I seemed to be doing that a lot lately—standing, staring out the window. I kept trying to shake the morose mood I was in to get back to the writing I was working on, when I looked down at my muse, my golden mutt, the girl who wouldn’t let me forget.

There was Libby, stretched out on the sun room floor with no fucking sun, and it hit me. I longed to be in the desert again. I longed for mountain vistas, wide-open spaces, where a person can see for sixty miles. I didn’t care if all I was looking at was mesquite trees or tumble weeds. I needed the sun. I needed the warmth. I needed the space. I needed to breathe. I had a few thousand dollars burning a hole in my pocket from my tax return, which most years went to things like past-due personal property taxes, overdue car registrations, mechanics, plumbers, tree-trimmers or pet groomers or, imagine this: vacations. This year it was going to be Jean’s turn. My very own version of Thelma and Louise, but one of us would have four legs! I was giddy from the crazy irresponsibility of it

Quit your job. Take off with the dog. Go see all those people you’ve been longing to see. Go back to North Carolina. Go back to Texas. Go back to New Mexico. Go all the way to California and find out if that Lester dude really exists.

I am telling you, the idea grabbed hold of me like an electrical current, the way it makes you shudder involuntarily, yet there’s something curiously arousing about it. Have you ever had such an obsession?

I had dinner last night with a friend who is a single mom with three kids, 15, 13 and 7. She also has a writing habit, (not to be confused with a riding habit.) Among the many things we alternately commiserated and chuckled about, money, men, and motherhood, the other “m” word came up repeatedly. That ol’ devil muse.  “Why do we do this? What’s wrong with us?” we looked at each other knowingly.  It’s almost like going to an AA meeting, except most writers I know drink while they’re talking about the monkey on their back. So why do we do it? Because we have to. We do it because it feeds something in us that cannot be sated by an alternate substance. We write, most of us with the intent to share our precious darlings. We write because we humbly believe that our words might illuminate, elevate, entertain, or soothe another soul, unless we douse our voice,  which destines us to become dour, defeated, dimmed, disappointed (let me see if I can come up with any more “d” words) demented and diminished people.  We do it, really, because we want to live forever, even better, bring someone else along for the ride to immortality.

Take my brother Don. My mother often  told a story about my late brother Don and the always ill-timed, coffee-clatching neighbor who would drop by uninvited and plop her broad behind in a kitchen chair and start yacking. My mother was a lot like me: driven. She had far more important things to do, like gardening, sewing, painting, drinkin’ and smokin’, doing the laundry and working a full-time job, than entertain some low-brow, idle gossiper with nothing better to do. Worse yet, when the neighbor lady would saunter in, my mom couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Don, who was probably four or five at the time,  did his dead-level best.

“I have a little Golden Book,” he valiantly tried to engage  Miss Blowhard in something more engaging than the drivel she was dishing out. Mom patted him on the hand. He walked away. Gabfest went on, and on, and apparently, on. Mom said Don came back to the table, sat down quietly, this time with the book in hand, probably The Poky Little Puppy, or The Little Red Hen. He waited for her to take a breath. “I have a little Golden Book, ” Don repeated in his very best inside voice, my mom responding, “you can show her in a minute, Don.” But girlfriend never missed a beat, never looked down at him so much as to wave off a fly. A few minutes later, by now my mother is probably breaking off bits of her coffee cup in her teeth,  Don roars, “I HAVE A LITTLE GOLDEN BOOK!”  The woman stops cold, looks at him, as if she never knew he was in the room, stumps out her cigarette in the ashtray, drains the last drop of coffee, as she says,”that’s nice, honey,”  got up and left.

For the rest of our lives, like any handed down stories which become infused into a family history, “I’ve got a little Golden Book,” became code for “I have something to say.”

Any time I question myself or feel discouraged about the work it takes to market a book after it is written, or try to push off  the unceasing words in my head that tumble out in the middle of the night, or while I’m vacuuming, or driving, or looking out a window, I think about Don,  just trying to get a word in edgewise. I can fall asleep at night, happy, because I have a little book with a golden spine in which his voice is still heard.

So, my writing sisters and brothers, never stop! Shout out loud. Get your words in edgewise. I HAVE A LITTLE GOLDEN BOOK! 

And, I have a photo of something beautiful, to brighten your day.

Orchid from the Missouri Botanical Garden

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Who needs a muse, when you’ve got Walmart?

The dogs and I went to run errands this afternoon. I needed a lint roller to get rid of the dog hair on my coat, from taking the dogs with me to run errands. I also needed a trash can with a lid to keep said dogs from digging chicken carcasses out of the trash. 

Click here to view the embedded video.

Back when I was a starving writer, two weeks ago, I had purchased some light bulbs at Walmart. They didn’t fit the socket. Lint roller, trash can and exchanging the light bulbs at said Walmart made for  quite a combo of found sound and visuals of bacterial producing proportions — a petri dish of American life, as only Walmart can deliver.

The line at the return counter, nine customers deep, was like a scene from Curb Your Enthusiasm, yet somehow, I managed to not pull a Larry David. Just about the time I was thinking my life is too short to wait in line for $4.99,  it was my turn, after the clerk cleared a stack of returned merchandise (I use the term loosely) in one fell swoop, by throwing it on top of a shopping cart overflowing with what my mother affectionately referred to as “job lot junk.” I was, I’ll admit it, almost tapping my foot by this time, hoping the dogs hadn’t broken out of the car and taken off with a family in a conversion van. I didn’t have a receipt. They gave me a Walmart gift card. Okay, fine. 

The store aisles were packed with shoppers,  giving me ample time to weave together the audio track of this tale.

“I like to get the box wine ’cause I can keep it next to the TV.”

“We need all associates to the electronics department. “

“Stop it, you’re pissing off my nerves.”

“Customer needs assistance at the ammo desk.”

I could have been a contender. It could have been me. Because just about the time I heard that page, blaring over the P.A. system, the gal who’d just issued my gift card at the customer service desk was making the rounds with all the cashiers filling up the return baskets again. “Anybody got any returns?” she hollered as she trolled for buyer’s remorse.  By now I’m in the check out line, populated with beef jerky, Hot Fries, Cosmo selling “the sex move to bring you closer, (it’s been my experience that the act alone necessitates proximity, call me old fashioned) and US magazine sporting Kourtney Kardashian’s tips on how to have it all.  The checker at my cattle chute had chicken. Raw chicken, which she offered up, in a scene reminiscent of the scene in Monty Python’s Holy Grail, “bring out your dead” as the cut up fryer was added to overflowing pile of return merchandise.

“Customer needs assistance at the ammo desk.”  It wasn’t me. Should have been me. I could have broken in to the rifle case, loaded that baby up and marched the return associate out to the dumpster, where 99% of all that crap will wind up anyway and demanded that she discard the chicken, instead of simply leaving it in the cart, which she rolled back over to the salmonella service counter, I’m sure for just a quick second, as she hopped back on her register to deal with the burgeoning line of people waiting to return crap. I could have,  but my dogs were in the car.

I’ve reluctantly conceded to shop at Walmart recently, despite my sociopolitical angst over their labor practices, because coffee beans are a dollar cheaper, dog food is two bucks cheaper and so are step-on trash cans with the pop-up lids.  I’ve rationalized shopping there because it’s actually closer to my house than the grocery store and my cousin Shirley is a Walmart greeter in Mineral Wells, Texas and I don’t want to do anything to topple the company store which has put bread on her table for some twelve years. But I ain’t going back there. No mo’, no mo’, no mo’, no more!

I got in the car, dogs were fine. I pulled out of the parking lot, stopped at the light. A white panel van passes by with a sign, “St. Louis Blues Tour.” I don’t need no stinkin’ blues tour, I just took one.

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Well, some of you…

Remy, the wonderful and pretty gal who owns Abode Coffee House in the hip, happenin’ burb of Webster Groves has graciously allowed me to come and do my dog & Jean show, on Friday, March 15th. Folks can get all wound up on coffee, or wind down with a glass of wine. She’s got good food too.

Now, one of the other good things about being back in the saddle in the freelance (no, it’s NOT free…) video business, aside from an occasional check, (as I continue to toil as a recently published author)  is that I get to meet some cool cats with great pipes from time to time. Such was the case with a musician who also does voice work to help keep the lights on at his abode. After he recorded a bunch of narration for me, and I was drawn in by his accent and story, (you know I’m a sucker for musicians, artists and young men who walk across continents)  I went to see Ashton Nyte play an acoustic gig at, you guessed it, Abode Coffee House. 

Click here to view the embedded video.

It was great. He’s great. Fascinating character, formed a successful gothic rock band called The Awakening in his native Johannesburg, South Africa, went on a 3-hour cruise (really it was a USA tour) and apparently met a remarkable women, who lives in, of course,  the hip, happenin’ burb  of Webster Groves. Ashton is a regular at this great, real, friendly, family operated neighborhood gathering place.

And now, I’m being allowed to do a video/book talk there, two weeks from tonight. They’re EVEN gonna let me bring my dog. Come and see us — I’m taking my new talk, How My Dog Saved My Life on its maiden voyage. If you’re in St. Louis, cruise on by.

Friday, March 15th, Abode Coffee House, 117 E. Lockwood Ave, Webster Groves, MO 63119 6:30 to 7:30 FREE! 

Here’s some of what you’ll get….

Click here to view the embedded video.

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The journey continues.

Amidst dreams fueled by my own shameless desire for fame (at least I’m honest) and those who lovingly feed those delusions (maybe, maybe not) that Off the Leash will eventually become a best seller, then a screenplay, and then of course an Oscar nominated film, where I’ll stride the red carpet confidently thinner and face lifted, somewhere amongst that fantasy lies the snow-turned-to-charcoal-slush mounds of the perilous here and now.

The way things have been going lately, a perp walk is more likely than red carpet. Let me tell you why.

In the past few weeks, as I’ve been notably negligent of all things related to my literary trajectory, I’ve been working like a fiend to dig myself out of the financial abyss of going off the leash some twenty months ago to write a book.

The risk continues.

And one could argue, on a sane, sunny day like today, so does the hilarity. With paychecks finally lining up, like so many airplanes stacked up atop a fog shrouded runway, legions of antsy passengers clamoring to deposit or withdraw, it is now, with fourteen day’s hindsight, easy to be breezy about the rigors of near poverty. Wasn’t so funny when I was standing in the lobby of a uptown hotel in Boston a couple of weeks ago, checking in, late at night, facing an early morning call time to field produce a video shoot with a fascinating multi-millionaire, (and I mean that in the nicest way) when what to my wondering dismay should appear but a handsome Hispanic gentlemen telling me there was simply nothing he could do to check me into my room. Alas, the client had not paid for my hotel in advance as she’d promised and alas, the meager but sufficient deposit I had made from the first of my planes to land had not been credited to my account. I had a whopping $8.92 in my checking account. This is problematic.

Secretaries in client offices who could authorize a credit card payment over the phone, had long clocked out for the night. Just about the time I was about to inquire as to the closest Salvation Army, my daughter in Memphis proved to be my salvation through the magic of instant transfer and with one more swipe, (well, actually two: my bank card at the desk and my key card in the door) I was in safe and warm, overlooking the luxe Boston skyline.

But I was whipped. It had already been a banner week, highlighted by process servers from our good friends at Chase-You-Down-Bank and Who’s-Stealing-Your-Wallet. These are minor, minor balances, I tell you truly, but even minimum payments fall by the wayside when one has fallen and it’s taken a while to get back up. Then the backhoe got me down. Seems the water company attempted (that being the operative, or inoperative word) to cut my water off, only to discover that the property this old house sits on is SO old that there’s no stop cock.

For all of you who are, like I was, eleven years ago hydrologically language challenged, (until I had a realtor and a plumber explain to me what a stop cock was as they searched in vain for the water vein in my yard) the stop cock is the thing they cut off when they want to cut off your water. To this day, they have never been able to find one of my property. So I’ve always secretly known that they were rattling their sabers with plastic swords, as I would diligently, albeit frequently tardily, get caught up on my water bill. This past week’s tactics were more like water boarding. The friendly folks at Mo’ Water sent a survey crew out, and invited all the other utility henchman to join in, populating my yard with a virtual rainbow of flags, so much as to make it look like the starting gate of a gay pride 5K. The backhoe is a ho’ nother story. Even though, my dear friends, I paid the Mo’ Water company in full, they continued to threaten to excavate my yard in order to find the stop cock for the NEXT time I’m late on my water bill. So far, I’ve held the bulldozers at bay.

Which brings me to the movies.  What with this being Oscar night and all, it’s a timely theme.  Time and again in my life, I come back to two signature films, not necessarily stand-outs in the annals of Hollywood blockbusters, nor on most people’s Top Ten list, but each of them for different reasons, have become emblematic to my life.

As I’ve oft cited in the past, one of my all time favorite movie scenes comes from THE LAST DETAIL. 

Click here to view the embedded video.

Of course, we all know that line know,  (recite it with me here)

“I am the mother fuckin’ shore patrol.”

Words to live by. Come and get me, all you phone, gas, electric, water MPs! Catch me if you can. I gleefully engaged in a little utility disobedience on trash day (you guys can come after me too…) by pulling up all the yard markers which have now been blowing in the wind for ten days, no backhoe in site.

I understand that this is immature. I realize this is irresponsible, but every once in a while, a girl just gets a belly full. I still am the mother fuckin’ shore patrol! That girl, yes, girl, because when I am in touch with my bedrock truest self, mirror be damned, I find that part of me which refuses to succumb. Some day I should probably grow out of this, but in the meantime, there is power (well, maybe not electricity) in this emotion. Oh if we could just somehow harness it. These are our lives we’re talking about here.  There should be no higher authority, above our own, at least not human or militarily. Spiritually, well okay, I humbly check to that power, but free will reigns supreme and I supremely, emphatically refuse to succumb, refuse to give in, refuse to take no for an answer when it comes to continuing to plod down the path of dreams yet achieved. It is rarely the beaten one.

Which leads me to scrambled eggs. And the next movie citation du jour. I’m a fan of dreamers who get back up and keep on keepin’ on. Who can’t relate to that guy? One of my all time favorite cinematic moments is the closing scene from THE BIG NIGHT

Click here to view the embedded video.

It is this simple act of making some eggs that gets to me. It’s what we do. We get up and make some eggs. We understand that in civilized society, whether we like it or not, conventions, restrictions, regulations and sometimes utility tyrants with heavy equipment throw mountains of baking soda on our fiery passions. We have obligations. People and pets are depending on us. They make our lives more meaningful. When stuff blows up, we sit down, have some food with the people we love and figure out what’s next.

Make some money. Make some eggs. Don’t let the world extinguish our dreams. The journey is worth it and so is the risk.

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