The tastemakers

The Pulpwood Queens drink pineapple champagne punch and talk about love, death and the accuracy of war reporting. In their matching pink T-shirts, leopard-skin-print shoes, signature tiaras and rhinestone pins, they have come from Monroe, Mt. Vernon, from as far away as Shreveport, La.

They have left their cars alongside of FM (“farm to market”) 728 or in the red-dirt parking lot of “Beauty and the Book,” which is Kathy Patrick’s bookstore/beauty parlor and also her home.

Sitting in Patrick’s living room, which is also done up in pink and leopard skin, the 30 or so women eat potluck off of Styrofoam plates: coconut-coated chicken skewers and spicy hamburger casserole. In a bit, they will head to the dessert table for warm banana pudding or a little lemon meringue pie.

There are a few men present, husbands who stand uneasily in the kitchen, eat fast, keep their eye on the back door. They’ve known for a while that their wives belonged to this book group and that it was sort of wild. They’re here tonight to see the author of this month’s book, “The Canal House.” Mark Lee is also a screenwriter, playwright and former foreign correspondent who’s come in from Los Angeles.

Patrick introduces Lee, who is a fair, blue-eyed man with a quiet mien more stereotypical of a scholar than a war reporter or even screenwriter. She tells him how much she “just loved this book” and that he is an author to watch because she “just knows” he will keep on writing great things.

Patrick is a Kansas girl, but she’s lived in Jefferson for almost 20 years. She has a blond fall teased high above her tiara and gold glitter makeup around her eyes, and she stretches her “I’s” and her “A’s” wide and tight as Saran Wrap over a salad bowl. Her voice is ripe with local phraseology.

It is also ripe with authority. The Pulpwood Queens are not just any book club. They are the book club that, last June, kicked off “Good Morning America’s” Read This Book Club. Patrick’s choice of “The Dive From Clausen’s Pier” sent sales through the roof (though Patrick says she has yet to hear one word from author Ann Packer). Moreover, this is not just a book group, it’s a book group franchise. What started as six locals has in the past two years grown to almost 300, with 13 chapters across Texas and Louisiana.

This is why Lee, veteran of off-Broadway and many Hollywood pitch meetings, is here telling the Queens about how the personally significant year he spent reporting in Uganda inspired this book.

With their rhinestones and leopard skin and banana pudding potluck, the Pulpwood Queens may look like the antithesis of the New York publishing chic elite, but beneath those tiaras is the newest marketing force in a flailing multi-billion dollar industry.

And the Queens know it.

What is happening here, quietly, in Jefferson, Texas, population 2,100, is the collision, and collusion, of several potent cultural forces at work in the combustible publishing industry -- regional color and national mega-marketing, plain-folks intimacy with an eye on the camera.

But mostly, it’s proof that even amid our high-tech, mondo-corporate culture, the little guy can still get a piece of the action. All it takes is a little ingenuity and a lot of moxie.

Lee, for his part, arranged this trip himself. He knows, from experience, that unless you are J.K. Rowling or Hillary Rodham Clinton, your publisher is not going to send you on a 20-city book tour. He also knows that book clubs drive the fiction market, as much as anything can drive a market so impossible to predict. Many mid- or low-list authors now automatically create Web sites devoted to their books, do phone interviews with book groups around the country, and generally throw themselves at the public like an alchemist tossing powders on a flame, hoping for that magical explosion.

Lee sent Patrick his book -- a story of love, war and moral choices among characters who include a foreign correspondent, a photojournalist and a doctor/relief worker -- with the knowledge that if she picked it, his sales would instantly increase by at least 300, not to mention the inevitable word of mouth and displays in an array of bookstores across the South. When Patrick chose it for June’s read, he was happy to log on to MapQuest and figure out just where Jefferson, Texas, was in relationship to the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.

Patrick genuinely liked the book and that Lee was willing to come down. She believes in books, but she knows that if her literary word spreads just a little wider, her taste a proven commodity, she might carve out a national niche for herself. If leopard skin and tiaras are what it takes, so be it. She would like to quit trying to make ends meet selling Pulpwood Queens paraphernalia and doing hair. She would like to send her kids to good colleges, to work on the memoir she wants to write.

So here they are, drinking champagne pineapple punch and talking about Lee’s characters as if they were real people.

“What I want to know is, why did Daniel have to die?” one queen asks.

“Why was Julia even with Richard? Did he love her? I don’t think so, I think she was just a possession,” another says.

It is early summer, and what is happening in Kathy Patrick’s living room is one part Empire of Oprah, one part “Steel Magnolias” and one part Walt Whitman standing on the street corner hawking “Leaves of Grass.”

MAKING OF A QUEEN

The potluck runs until after 10, and that’s not counting cleanup, but Patrick’s Grand Voyager -- “I hate that car, but it hauls” -- grinds onto the asphalt of the Whistlestop Inn’s tiny parking lot just after 9 the next morning. It is almost 80 degrees already, humidity something like 90%; the hollow breath of the car’s air conditioning is almost visible when she opens her door.

Patrick is wearing her own hair, which is short and professionally blond, and a diaphanous black blouse over a black tank top and olive green satin pants. No pink, no leopard skin, no rhinestones, though her tiara is in the back.

Today, Lee will meet the Shreveport Queens at Tower Bookstore, one of the few independent bookstores left in Louisiana, Patrick says. “I called them and said, ‘Why don’t you start a book club?’ and they said, ‘We’ll pay you to come down and start one,’ and now they’ve got more than 80 members, very different from the Jefferson Queens, real Southern ladies.”

She navigates through the two streets that constitute downtown. Jefferson is not a standard stop on anyone’s book tour. On the banks of the Big Cypress Bayou, the town is about 3 1/2hours east of Dallas and seems more Deep South than Old West. Mention that to a Jeffersonian, however, and you will be told We Are Texans, Honey.

You will also be told that this town was, until 1873, the second-biggest river port and the fifth-most-populated town in Texas. The boom years ended when the U.S. Corps of Engineers blew up the Red River Raft -- a natural log jam that kept the water level in the bayou high enough for steamboat navigation. As hoped, this opened up the river above Shreveport. For Jefferson, though, it was like pulling the plug in a bathtub -- the water and the money and the people slowly drained away.

But Jefferson knows a little something about do-it-yourself ingenuity too. In the 1950s the local garden club mounted a historic-preservation drive and now almost 100 buildings are listed with the National Register of Historic Places. Oddly enough, it is the self-proclaimed B&B; capital of Texas, with more than 60 such establishments going.

Patrick drives Lee past shady lawns and grass-riven streets, a coterie of antique stores, several boat tours of the bayou, and a romantic carriage ride. This is not at all what he had expected. From his home in Mar Vista, the words “east Texas” evoked an endless dust-blown horizon. Instead, he is staying in the nautically themed Captain’s Quarters at the Whistlestop Inn, which includes a fully renovated railroad car on the side lawn.

But Patrick is almost exactly as he pictured her. Exhaustingly energetic, endlessly loquacious, sympathetic, empathetic and on top of every little thing in town, she embodies an archetype -- the woman found at the center of whatever cultural nexus is available, from L.A.’s Blue Ribbon Circle to the Lion’s Club Ladies Auxiliary in River City, Anywhere.

“As my aunt would say, she’s a talker,” Lee observes.

As she pulls out onto Interstate 40 east, Patrick raises her voice above the AC and explains that she first came to Jefferson in 1987 to visit her sister, who had just bought a historic home. Before she knew it, she had bought one too and turned it into a bed-and-breakfast. She met and married her husband, Jay, who works for Computer Task out of Buffalo, N.Y. They had two daughters, Helaina and Madeleine, which quickly made running a B&B; a bit difficult, so they quit.

“All my life I’ve had my nose stuck in a book. My mother, she was real pretty, always thinking about her appearance, and that’s probably how I got into cosmetology, but I’d always rather be reading.” So she got a job in a bookstore in nearby Longview and worked her way up to being a buyer, then a book rep, for Southern Territory Associates, a bookselling group.

“I got to go to New York,” she says. “I loved it, I couldn’t believe it, talking nothing but books all day long.”

Then, in 1999, her boss explained kindly that so many of the independent bookstores in the area had closed that the territory could no longer afford a rep. She was heartbroken.

“My sister said, ‘Why don’t you open a salon?’ ” she says, “and I said, ‘I’ve done it.’ Then she said, ‘Why don’t you do the bookstore too?’ And I thought, ‘Oh, wouldn’t I like to get ahold of some of those authors, ‘cause they’re in their own worlds and don’t even know what they look like.”

She opened the shop in 2000 and coaxed Kimberly Willis Holt, who had just won the National Book Award for children’s literature, to come out for seven events at local schools. Holt also received the first “Goddess Makeover” for authors -- hair, skin, nails, the works. Patrick started a book club a few months later, modeled in part on Jill Conner Browne’s “Sweet Potato Queens” and named for one of the area’s biggest industries.

Six women showed up for the first meeting. They got good press almost at once, in part because the store -- touted as the country’s only beauty parlor/bookstore -- had a high local-color quotient, but mostly because Patrick makes things happen.

Last year, she and the Queens found themselves featured on “Good Morning America” twice. Heady, but also a lot of work. A Lot Of Work. “I was running all over Texas, all over Louisiana, introducing authors, setting up clubs, making phone calls in my car,” Patrick says. “And I was losing money.”

Her original business plan -- that the club members would buy the books from her store -- failed almost immediately, because the women went instead to Amazon.com. So Patrick designed Pulpwood Queen T-shirts and pins and key chains, which she sells from a leopard-skin travel bag she takes with her everywhere.

And she started charging $25 a year to belong to the Queens. In return, she picks the books, supplies book-guide questions and occasionally authors, organizes extracurricular events like parade floats and Girlfriends weekends. She is putting together a “Pulpwood Queens Cookbook” and has plans to shoot a pilot for a TV show about the group.

“Our goal,” she says, checking the rearview mirror, “is to promote literacy. The Sweet Potato Queens are all about having fun, and we have fun, don’t get me wrong, but I want to do something more.” She takes a breath before listing the many fine activities the groups promote in their communities.

Kathy Patrick has told the story of her life in just about 20 minutes. She believes in the spoken word just as deeply as the written one.

TAKING INITIATIVE

Mark Lee has many things to say about various topics, but Patrick’s seamless stream of consciousness pins him to his seat now and then. When she moves out of her personal history into the Scandalous State of Publishing, though, he jumps right in. Among authors these days, conversation often heads right to the Complaints Department. Not enough money, never enough money, not enough publicity, a market at once over-saturated and perpetually mishandled.

When Lee signed on with Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, he had already planned to supplement whatever publicity tour they had planned -- it turned out to include only the West Coast -- with one of his own. “The Canal House” is his second novel; his first, “The Lost Tribe,” put out by Picador, did not do terribly well. This time, he was ready to go for broke. He hired his own publicist, paid for handsome cards directing people to his Web site, offering himself for phone interviews with book clubs.

Algonquin’s publicity director, Michael Taeckens, immediately put him in touch with Patrick.

“Authors are realizing that they cannot expect their publishing houses to make their books a big hit,” Taeckens says. “Because the market is so saturated, and there is only so much we can do. ‘The Canal House’ is a perfect book group book -- I remember reading the manuscript and just seeing the reader’s guide in my mind -- and I knew Mark would do a fantastic job. And Kathy is just amazing.”

Lee tells Patrick this. “Oh, isn’t he sweet,” she says. “I just love Michael. I just love Algonquin. I knew as soon as I saw it was an Algonquin book that I would love it. They have such a good eye.”

As book clubs have gained influence, their leaders are increasingly market-savvy, perusing the publishing catalogs rather than the bookstores for their next pick, getting galleys from publishers or even authors. Because of her background, Patrick has a pretty good idea of what happens between the moment of inspiration and the remainder pile. She thinks what Lee is doing is smart. They agree that publishers tend to spend too much money promoting too few books and have a narrow, and wrong, idea of this country’s reading public.

“People here buy books,” Patrick says. “And not just regional authors. I don’t understand why book tours are always in the same places -- the East Coast, Chicago, maybe Seattle, maybe San Francisco, maybe L.A.”

They talk about the narrow selection offered by Wal-Mart and Target, now two of the largest booksellers in the country, and bemoan the death of the independent bookstore, where iconoclastic owners could push up the sales of a wide variety of titles. Lee blames corporate greed and terminal consolidation, but Patrick thinks human nature might have something to do with it.

“Some people actually like the chains better because they are anonymous,” she says. “People think if you work in a bookstore you’re smart, maybe smarter than them and they don’t want to talk to you, don’t want you asking them questions that might make them feel dumb.”

This pushes Lee back in his seat again.

“I never in a million years would have thought of that,” he says after a minute. But Patrick has circled back to the importance of getting writers out more. “A friend of mine saw Tony Bennett sittin’ all alone at this table at a bookstore in New York,” she says. “They should send Tony Bennett down to Jefferson, or even Shreveport. We’d have lines around the block. He would move some books.”

ROAD TRIP

The Shreveport Queens are a slightly different demographic than the group in Jefferson. There is a lot of white hair teased high, and many of the tiaras are more symbolic than substantive -- the type a little girl might wear at a birthday party. But there are tiara-shaped cookies, perilously pink, and Patrick is greeted with a murmuring ripple of excitement that extends itself to include Lee.

As he goes into his speech, the 48 hours he has spent amid the East Texas drawl makes itself heard. He drags on his vowels, abandons final consonants, leaves his hometown of Santa Barbara far behind. The women here are more reticent, in part because the bookstore ambience makes this a more formal “writer’s talk.” But book club culture abounds.

The wall behind where Lee stands is devoted to Oprah’s picks, a table to the Shreveport Queens, and most of the fiction displays are of the book club oeuvre, which leans toward the domestic, the familial, occasionally historic but more often nostalgic: “Three Junes,” “Ash Wednesday,” “Two Gardeners,” “My House in Umbria” and in a synergistic burst “The Book Club” -- a novel following the lives of women in a book club.

The next stop is the Squire Creek Country Club, a beautiful new clubhouse overlooking a beautiful new golf course designed by Tom Fazio, the renowned architect.

A few red brick McMansions are on their way up along the back nine with more to come. It is the 18-hole Xanadu of James Davison, owner of Davison Transport, which is based in Ruston.

Here, the tiaras are smaller, classier, might possibly be real, and the women represent the industries of the area -- hardwood and sinks, glass and real estate.

Their hair is not big, not even for fun, and they have really good shoes and handbags, but they are very happy to see Patrick and Lee, happy to wear leopard-print camisoles and pink T-shirts, amazed that Lee would come to Choudrant and eager to grill him with questions about Julia and Richard and why Daniel had to die.

In the car, Patrick picks up their conversation as if it were a bit of tatting she had set down for a while. Lee nods and laughs, but his mind is elsewhere. “If you told me a week ago that I’d be driving around a $45-million-dollar golf course in North Louisiana as part of a book tour,” he said into a small pause between Squire Creek and Jefferson, “I would have never believed it.”

BEAUTY, BOOKS

There’s a lot of construction going on in Jefferson -- besides the cafe, a big new antiques mall is in the works, a hotel is being renovated and a couple of new restaurants are just about to open. Things in general are looking up.

At Beauty and the Book, Lee thanks Patrick for what she has done. He’s met at least 150 queens, all of whom now own an autographed copy of his book. He’s checked his numbers on Amazon since he began his home-grown tour, and they’re up, which is heartening.

“You’re going to do great,” Patrick tells him. “The book is going to do great.”

She is standing in the corner of her shop, which is a wild amalgamation of literature and cosmetology. Tiaras are everywhere. Even after three days, she is an unlikely figure, but she seems to know exactly of which she speaks and it is easy just to believe her.