In Search of the Greeting Card Poets

My wife is a greeting cards scholar, a human archive of Father’s Day and other card-sent messages for every occasion, committing them to memory as book-burning foes do great literature in Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451.”

No wonder it can take her an hour to select just the right card.

My own method is a bit more pragmatic. I call it close-my-eyes-and-pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey card buying. In and out in five minutes.

What I wonder after receiving cards, though, is who writes these suckers? Who belongs to this faceless literati, and do they know their iambics from their pentameters? Are they legitimate writers and artists with imagination and original thoughts? Or are they hacks and manipulators who strum heartstrings like banjos?

I envision a greeting card mill. Inside are not writers in the usual sense but doyennes of schmaltz, an assembly line of blue-haired grandmothers in tennis shoes, dabbing at their eyes with hankies while turning out verse for satin hearts and pop-up Santas.

My card savant tells me I’m wrong and points me in the direction of Erika Oller.

This peek at the creative process begins, high up the food chain of fertile minds, in Pasadena. It’s where my wife and I sit on a sofa, settling in comfortably, when a large German shepherd climbs onto her lap. He’s not moving.

“There’s a card,” says Oller, a painter and former social worker. “Only [in the artwork] he’d be twice as big, and you’d really be scared.”

Actually, this is life imitating card art. You can already buy Oller’s “Lap Dog,” which portrays a massive, spike-toothed bulldog contentedly seated on a woman in a chair like a fat Buddha while mostly blocking her from view. The expression on her melon face says she’s resigned to being pinned down until he decides to leave. The caption: “It’s Nice to Be Close!”

There’s other evidence that Oller is guided by personal experience: the card that shows two women on a beach, aghast at a bald man in a bathing suit as he walks past, flaunting his titanic belly just before he gobbles a hot dog. The caption: “Moving Violation.” Oller says the man is her brother-in-law.

Her keen observations, sharp wit and talent for painting have converged in these greetings for a decade, and she’s built a micro empire of cards, cocktail napkins, coffee mugs, wallpaper, T-shirts and gift bags.

It’s true that Hallmark Cards Inc. in Kansas City, Mo., and American Greetings Corp. in Cleveland are the Hertz and Avis of this industry, controlling 53% and 40%, respectively, of a “personal expression” market that generates $7.5 billion in annual sales. But Oller’s own yield, through Salt Lake City manufacturer/distributor Bottman Design Inc., is stratospheric for an independent entrepreneur. It rose to 431,000 card sales in the U.S. and abroad in 2001.

First she creates the images--some in watercolor, some in an oil process called monotype--then she writes the lines:

A female dumpling embraces a cat while blissfully reclining in a chair as three other cats watch from above. The caption: “Waiting Their Turn.”

A 400-pound cat looms on a bookcase behind two tiny women on a settee. The caption: “Fluffy’s House.”

Oller not only adores animals, she displays an acute awareness of ways that pets relate to humans, which accounts for their prominence in her work. “I’m more comfortable with them,” she says. “People can be awfully tiring.”

And obese. In Oller’s card universe of whimsy and irony, her human figures, especially the women, are often as wide-bodied as she is tall and slim. And frequently tempted by food. “I always felt huge as a young person,” says Oller, 59, “and that stayed with me.”

Over the years her bestseller has been a card titled “Happily Dying of Chocolate.” Her inspiration? “Me, myself.”

Another card shows a couple on a bench, their eyes on an aging woman with flaming red hair and sagging breasts in a mini-dress that exposes her bird legs. The caption: “Sixty Years in Sixties Dress.” Says Oller: “I always knew it would come to this.”

Her figures are not chic, highbrow or “people belonging to clubs,” she says. “I feel for people on the outside.”

An avid reader, she visualizes scenes from the books of some of her favorite authors, William Faulkner among them. “In one card, I have this guy who’s sort of a redneck hunched over with his shotgun, and he’s on the porch with his woman.”

Ignorant poor whites inspiring greeting card mirth? In Oller’s cosmos, everything seems possible. Everything but escape.

I shift uncomfortably on the sofa. Big Dog is back, and this time he’s eyeing me.

Hallmark is only one of almost 2,000 card publishers that operate in the United States. Yet this Mt. Rushmore of personal greetings is so synonymous with the industry that it’s spoofed on the Internet by a Web site titled “Hallmark Cards you’ll never see.” Sample: “Happy vasectomy!”

If not blue-haired oldies, it’s other forms of atrophy I expect when arriving at Hallmark’s headquarters in Kansas City--famous for its graceful residential neighborhoods, beef and a pair of declining sports franchises. It’s a cautious community, pleasant enough, but about as avant-garde as Oller’s mini-dress matron. You get the picture: Kansas City hip, a staff trying desperately to appear cutting edge while fighting back decay.

Actually, the opposite is true. The Hallmark crowd is eclectic, its creative staff (50 writers and 50 editors) having converged here from all points like desert nomads at an oasis. The present staff is thick with “formers.” There’s a former nun, a former minister, a former stand-up comic. Thirty-year veteran Ed Wallerstein prepped for card writing by getting a bachelor’s in engineering. Jim Howard was a “poet on food stamps” before joining Hallmark 26 years ago, and is now a screenwriter with a movie. Chris Conti is a former traveling salesman and carpenter. Renee Duvall worked in a Hallmark card shop. Linda Elrod is a former journalist, English teacher and secretary.

This variety just barely extends to racial makeup. One of the staff’s few African Americans is 36-year-old Lisa Langford, a former actress and L.A. resident with a Harvard B.A. in modern European history. She answered an Internet ad a couple of years ago that persuaded her to exchange life as a struggling actress in the city of gridlock and palm trees for a Hallmark moment in the Midwest. “I wanted to have a regular check, a home and some kind of security. I wanted to stop dieting. I wanted to stop talking in front of people who judge me.”

Langford finds Kansas City to be less friendly to blacks than Los Angeles. But the trade-off she anticipated--boredom--never happened. She too expected a Hallark staff dominated by “little blue-haired old ladies pecking away at typewriters.” Surprise. “I have never met a single group of people so diverse and absolutely out of their minds. That’s what makes the contrast between Kansas City and L.A. bearable. I can walk over (to colleagues) and be amused.”

A recent Hallmark progress report said: “Lisa has a soulful voice all her own.” Langford would add “sassy [and] quirky.” How sassy and quirky? On the cover of a striking Valentine’s card in Hallmark’s Mahogany line, targeting black consumers, is a photo of five swell-looking African American men. Inside, Langford writes:

Oooh!

How I love a Black man

on my mind!

Just the thought

sends chills down my spine:

Around-the-way boo

or Mr. Uptown,

High-toned Redbone

to deep luscious brown

Those beautiful

Brothas

just stay on my mind!

Off-the-hook style,

unique by design:

‘Bout it ‘bout it cornrows

and conscious dreds

Corporate fade

or goatees with bald heads.

Beautiful, talented,

oh how they shine!

No wonder my Brothas

just stay on my mind.

Where does the actress find her applause now? “I’m so corny,” Langford says. “I go into Hallmark stores and look for my cards.”

Langford’s verse extolling the “brothas” is printed with her byline, an unusual occasion at Hallmark. But as Ed Wallerstein explains: “You always remember the cards you write.” It’s impossible to forget at Hallmark, where the writers and artists mount their favorite creations in their cubicles like trophies.

The brevity is alluring for some of the writers. “It’s 25 words or less,” says Wallerstein, “not like trying to write a book.” Or the screenplay for “Big Bad Love,” an independent film released earlier this year that Jim Howard co-wrote with his brother, actor Arliss Howard. It’s his first screenwriting credit, and has in common with greeting cards “the weather of the human heart,” says the 45-year-old native of Independence, Mo.

One of Howard’s “son birthday” verses is a favorite among some staffers. Howard, whose oldest son is 20, wrote it five years ago after being inspired by a photo of a boy running along a fence. The verse’s ending: “And one day while I wasn’t looking--a blink of an eye--you just jumped the fence into manhood, an adult with a life completely your own.”

A more primal version of parental contact is under discussion in a colorful conference room where 10 writers, artists and designers, ages 31 to 50, are gathered around a table, ready to playfully exorcise their demons.

The hour of brainstorming is free-wheeling; the topic, “son birthday” for Hallmark’s mainstream Classic line. With editorial director Carolyn Esberg, 42, marking down ideas on a big board, the group tosses out examples of “things that parents do that really bother their sons.”

“Trying to use hip language,” someone says.

Esberg: “Can you give me an example?”

“Yeah, using words like hip.”

“Making generalizations, like you’re always doing this, you never do that.”

“When you’re grown and you hear that coat thing, too. You’re going out without a hat? You’ll catch your death.”

“The invasion of privacy. We had only one bathroom, so my mom would walk in on you and say, ‘You don’t have anything I haven’t seen before.’ ”

“Watch ‘Everybody Loves Raymond.’ The little digs. They sound like a compliment but they’re an insult.”

Esberg: “The backhanded compliment.”

“And parent predictions. Someday you’re gonna be interested in girls, and you’re gonna want that money to take them out.”

Esberg: “The whole idea is forgive us, we can’t stop being parents. That sounds promising.”

On they go, until someone comes up with the best idea yet: “We should all take up a collection for therapy.”

As I’m often reminded at home, cards can be their own therapy. Take Fresh Ink, the relatively new Hallmark line whose passionate editorial director is 33-year-old Conti, a goateed poet in T-shirt and blue jeans who was inspired to write by the verses of Robert Frost.

Fresh Ink sells especially well at college bookstores. The typical buyer is female, age 18 to 39, well-educated and turned off by traditional cards. A card written by DeeAnn Stewart catches my eye; the front is a period photo of one elderly woman speaking to another on a park bench. The caption reads: “Is it ‘butt naked’ or ‘buck naked’?” Inside it continues: “These are the kinds of questions I come to you for.”

Speaking the obscure tongue of card marketing, Conti talks about “emotional sharability,” envisioning how “butt naked” vs. “buck naked” may seduce a potential Fresh Ink buyer. “She’s a young woman standing at the rack and looking at those cards. She picks up this one. She sees these two old women. She thinks to herself, ‘This will be my friend and me in 50 years.’ ”

In a cubicle on another floor, 52-year-old Linda Elrod, who believes in aliens and life on other planets, says she sharpens her ear for dialogue by watching TV. She cites as an inspiration “24,” the Fox series starring Kiefer Sutherland as a tough federal agent named Jack Bauer. “He’s no wimp. So I’m gonna pretend I’m Jack writing this card to his wife.”

If only Elrod’s fellow writer in an ajoining cubicle could look to a TV he-man for guidance. “Here’s my challenge,” says Renee Duvall, 42, facing frustrating card-writer’s block over Mother’s Day 2003. Like Elrod, she’s assigned to write a $5.99 card that a husband would send to his wife. “We like to think people buying $5.99 cards like a lot of words,” Duvall says. “But I think the way men communicate is different than the way women communicate. So if this guy’s gonna plunk down six bucks, it can’t go on and on. That’s the challenge.” If this were a Father’s Day card to be sent by a wife, Duvall says, “I could gas on forever.”

Barbara Loots joined Hallmark at 20, and 35 years later, she’s a company superstar known as the “Queen of Hearts” whose sentimental cards sell big year after year. “I’m fresh on the trends, fresh on the feelings that are timeless,” she explains. “The only things that change are the circumstances of life. It’s speeded up, you’re busier than ever, relationships have changed. So how do cards address these relationships that were hardly acknowledged 35 years ago?”

Nourished by religion, Loots is a devout Christian who also writes spiritual cards. But she insists that she takes her cues on relationships from TV’s “Hollywood Squares.” “The humor, the trivia and the repartee they have tell you a lot about the culture,” she says.

Loots earned her Queen of Hearts title because of her Valentine’s cards. If you want a challenge, try picturing a devotee of “Hollywood Squares” writing this:

Before we were married,

I knew we’d be friends--

I’ve been falling in love ever after.

We’ve loved through the better

and lived through the worse.

We’ve thrived on sweet kisses and laughter.

I’ve felt from the start

so fulfilled and content

as your lover, your partner,

your wife . . .

And I know in my heart

that the best part of all is

I married my best friend for life.

How long did it take Loots to write that? “All my life.”

“The greeting card writer knows how to convey a feeling of trust, empathy, love, all of these human emotions,” says book editor Shirl Thomas. “You don’t have to be skilled at writing. You have to like people and care.”

Thomas speaks with authority. She’s working on her own book on card writing, drawn from 14 years of freelancing for numerous companies. She writes occasionally while teaching aspiring card writers in her Fountain Valley home. Her students range from homemakers to doctors and lawyers, from ages 16 to 90.

Her message to aspiring freelancers: abandon your get-rich-quick dreams.

Hallmark says its writers earn from $30,000 annually for newcomers right out of school to “up to six figures” for those with the company at least 25 years. They are, however, the industry’s wealthy class. (The company receives 1,200 applicants for staff writing jobs every year, but turnover is minimal.)

“I don’t think anyone can make a living freelancing,” says Thomas, who estimates that few of the nation’s thousands of freelance card writers make even $5,000 a year.

As Janie DeVos is learning. The former homemaker and advertising executive has been through two years of “very, very slim” earnings while writing for three card makers that accept up 25% of what she submits. “My husband just started his own company, so we need to sell cards now,” she says from her home in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.

Some card makers ask that writers create verse to match artwork. Others do the reverse, as in one set of lines that DeVos sold with no knowledge of the visual: “The difference you’ve made in my life would take a lifetime to explain. I’d rather take a lifetime showing you.”

Although freelancers are paid up to $450 per card, she generally takes in about half that, says DeVos, 43, who writes daily in her loft. “I say, OK, God, I need words. And then I start writing.” Not always is the Almighty in a giving mood. The yield: “If I write five verses that I like, that’s a good day,” says DeVos, a recovering alcoholic who specializes in “philosophical stuff.”

DeVos began pursuing this Holy Grail of card writing by reading books and articles, taking an online Internet course and assembling a portfolio of verses that she submitted to companies. The first one she composed, a birthday card, was rejected. But when she finally made a sale--for $25--she remembers the pumped-up feeling: “I’m in!” Not in big money, though. Although DeVos has her own company, called Rainy Day Creations, and a children’s book (“How High Can You Fly?”) coming out in July, the struggle continues.

The good news? Her hair is not blue.