Is that what good friends do?

This hasn't been the best day. I guess I broke a cardinal rule by posting a comment on Facebook about how disappointed I was that none of my novels sold very well. A former longtime friend (it was Matt Paust, you read it here first!) then ripped into me and said, "Then you're not really a writer, and you never really were a writer. A REAL writer doesn't give a shit about how many books he sells and being famous and sucking up to the critics and getting rich off it. A REAL writer writes no matter what" (which, by the way, I actually do, even if I'm not sending it out as much). 

He then went on to seriously claim that if I had taken his suggestion for a title change for The Glass Character (including the word "girl", because a lot of novels had the word "girl" in the title then), it would have been a success. He even suggested, after it had already been published, that I change the title and just go to another publisher and ask them to re-publish it under the new title. Ummm. Matt. That doesn't happen.

I think this guy has some aggression problems, and at one point broke off his compulsive commenting on this blog because I wasn't doing the same thing on HIS blog. I don't see comments or reviews as a tit-for-tat thing, but that seems to be how the game is played now. Authors even agree to post five-star reviews for each other, never having read the books. It happens all the time, in fact, it's standard now. As a thirty-year veteran of actual book reviewing, I have a little bit of a problem with that. That's not reviewing the book, it's barter, and I'm not going to get involved in it.

I know something about this guy, he's a white American retiree who lives in Virginia and was a newspaperman way back when, and is volatile and prone to explosions, but I never thought he'd start blasting me publicly for no good reason I can see. Being told I'm not a writer and never was a writer is kind of like saying, "Hey, you don't have Type O positive blood at all! It's RH negative. You don't deserve to be Type O positive because you just want to be famous." Wha - ??

If he knew anything at all about me, which after all these years he clearly doesn't, he would know that the written word always was, and ever shall be, not just an activity but my ground of being. As for being famous, I see what fame does to people and I can certainly live without it. But it's painful to me to realize that you can spend literally years of your life crafting and pouring your soul into a novel that even gets good reviews, then have it sell so poorly that no publisher will ever want to deal with you again. It's like having nobody come to the party. It hurts. If you have a literary reputation at all, it will soon fade into a ghost.

Personally, I see nothing wrong with seeing publishing as a business, and writers wanting to be successful at it, and even - if they can - make a partial living at it. Very few can live solely off their sales. Awards go down OK, too, though it's taboo to say you want or (worse) deserve one. But publishers can't live on air any more than authors can. 

In my comment I used an analogy of putting time and love and effort into preparing a sumptuous feast, then having nobody show up to eat it. But if you care about THAT, then you're not a real chef, and you never WERE a real chef. What happens to the food after you cook it and lay it out on the table is completely irrelevant. 

It'd be nice if we could just not give a rip (or pretend not to, which is what Matt is doing) and write only for ourselves - and while I'm writing a novel, I am completely absorbed in the work. But then comes another process, which I think is the next step towards having somebody actually READ what you've written, and we should not be treated like whores or "not really writers" or denigrated in any way because we need to pay the bills, or at least have the gratification of communicating something to another human being. 

I knew this would be a touchy subject because it seems absolutely taboo, and I almost never see anyone write about it (and now I see why - people would rather not be publicly gutted on a Wednesday afternoon). But I didn't expect a merciless tirade from someone who used to support me. By the way, this same Matt Paust featured my third novel in a blog post called "Friday's Forgotten Books", and was puzzled that it upset me to hear my novel described that way.

In some weird way, he seemed to want some  sort of control over it. He wanted me to call it Glass Girl, and if I had called it Glass Girl, which is an utterly nonsensical title, he said it would've been a great success and gotten me a movie deal. By then, "girl" titles had already fallen out of fashion due to lameness, not to mention sheer glut.  But if I care about my title or any of the rest of it, I'm "not really a writer and never  was really a writer". (Kind of a double message, wouldn't you say? Or just hypocrisy.)  I feel like that poor sap in the old TV show Branded, getting all his  stripes ripped off one by one and pushed out into the wilderness, while the doomy-sounding drums played behind him.

Someone I know has suggested jealousy as his motivation. Could be. I am not saying this to be unkind, but as a writer, he's just not terribly good. He asked me to review a book of his (self-published) short stories, and it was awkward, because they weren't really short stories - mostly a lot of rambling and crude jokes. ONE story stood out as completely memorable. If only he could have done more of those! His father forced him to learn how to hunt (this was the U. S. South, after all) and shoot a rifle, and he shot a rabbit.  While they were eating it for supper that night, he bit down on a piece of buckshot. So I tried to focus on that one powerful story and gloss over the rest.  He had already left an effusive review of The Glass Character on my Amazon page, so obviously there was a  sense of obligation to him (which is NOT the same thing as writers being supportive of each other). But I just can't bring myself to play that "one hand washes the other" thing. 

Meantime, though I've tried to hold the hurt away from me, I'm not doing a very good job of it. My best writer friend David, who would never ever do such a thing and DID see the need for getting our work out there, recently died, so I really have no one else to turn to who would understand. Oh, I can just picture how he'd react to Matt's words! The righteous indignation! He once called someone who had treated me badly "an insect", which practically made it all better. 

Sadly, about half a dozen of my most cherished friends have died over the past several years. Why? People in the arts don't take care of themselves, maybe (or so they say), and most of my friends are (were?) older by quite a lot. At any rate, this is probably why I don't do a lot of extended writing on this blog any more. I just post stuff that's fun and that won't get me hung out to dry, like I just did. 

Matt, Matt. Shame on you! I am so disappointed. As a person, I assumed you had more common decency than that. You could have been a lot kinder and more understanding towards a fellow writer.  And you weren't. 

Is that what good friends do?

The many Matts

Even if he did call my novel "forgotten" (which it IS, damn it) in one of his columns. Oh well. I don't know if I could've gotten that novel written without his support.

Do you think I'm on a kick here with these giffy-slide-show-type-things? Could be. Takes up less room, anyway.

The Matt Paust Show: Killer Kids

This is the closest thing I'll ever have to The Matt Paust Show. It's about a hideous crime committed back in 1992, in Gloucester, Virginia, Matt's beat when he was a reporter. I think of him then as the old-school newsman, tirelessly tracking down clues, getting the story beneath the story, wearing out shoe leather. Probably with a hip flask in his pocket and a hound dog named Beauregard (oops, cancel that last detail). Wish I had a picture of him. Sometimes, rare times, you click with someone you've never met and you somehow keep an eye on each other, make each other laugh and know that you're friends. Such a one is Matt.

Portrait of the Reporter as a young dog.

Harold Lloyd: somebody up there likes me

Blogger's Note. The long drought is over! Finally, a review - and not only that, the kind most authors would kill for. And the fact that it's by  Matt Paust (posted on his Mutable Blog as well as Facebook) just makes it better, in my eyes, and more worthy of posting here. It's my novel and I'll brag if I want to.

The Mutable Blog

it can change on a whim

Sunday, April 27, 2014

Carpet Ride to Magicland

In case the name doesn't ring a bell, he's the guy with the straw hat and Woody Allen glasses, in the suit, dangling from a clock on the side of a building so far above a busy avenue the cars below look like ladybugs on wheels.

 Harold Lloyd.

Movie comedian of the silent 1920s. Called himself the “Glass Character” because his trademark glasses were fake. No glass in them. The guy was a nut. Blew one of his hands to Kingdom Come fiddling with what he thought was a stage prop bomb. It was real. Deliberately gave himself powerful electric shocks to get his hair to stand straight up. Did his own stunts—the clock dangle, the shocked hair, pretending to trip and stagger on building ledges up in the sky, netless—a brave, some would say foolhardy, genius. Nut.

Knowing this and being acrophobic, I can't watch his movies anymore. It even scares me to look at the photos. I'll let Margaret Gunning watch the movies and look at the photos, and I'll read her reports. Well, then again, I don't have to anymore. I've read her book, The GlassCharacter. It's all in there.

Margaret, poor girl, is in love with Harold Lloyd. It started out as just a fascination with soundless images. Love snuck up and struck her dumb somewhere amid the exhaustive research she was conducting for a book about what was then still just a fascination. Love. Alas. Margaret is happily married and has two lovely daughters and four darling grandchildren, yet is far too young to leap the gap into the day when her beloved Harold held sway with the girls of a baby Hollywood. Fortunately, for her and for us, she's a novelist. She has the skill to weave the magic carpet to carry her backward in time to those days of yore, those Harold heyday days, and set her gently down along the path the love of her dreams must follow should he wish a rebirth in the imaginations and hearts of admirers forevermore. She's woven that carpet. It's large enough to take us with her on that long strange trip. I rode along on a test flight. We made it back, and I'm still agog.

When we stepped off the carpet in la la land I saw that Margaret had changed. No longer the familiar author of two of my favorite novels—Better than Life, and Mallory—she'd become sixteen-year-old Jane Chorney, a virgin and erstwhile soda jerk in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with a terrible crush on movie idol Harold Lloyd. Soon after we landed, Margaret /Jane (and later “Muriel”, as you will learn) decided to pack up her meager belongings, cash in her chips (two cents shy of fifty bucks) and head to Hollywood and into the arms of her eternal love. I might have tried to instill sense in her were I anything more than invisible eyes and ears. Unfortunately I had lost my voice and corporeal substance upon alighting in the Santa Fe dust.

So it was off to Hollywood via a wearying, bumpy bus ride, Margaret/Jane/Muriel full of glitzy dreams and innocence, and me hunkered weightless, mute and unseen on her delicate shoulder.

I won't say more. I took no notes and had to avert my gaze any number of times during moments that really were none of my personal concern.

The Glass Character is Margaret/Jane/Muriel's story, not mine. What I did see and hear, 

and learn during our holiday in history is captured with such lucid, insightful poignancy I 

can't help but wonder if Margaret didn't in fact remain there, dictating her journal to a 

holographic image of herself in the distant future tapping on a keyboard somewhere in a 

place called Coquitlam, B.C.

Everybody read this

http://mdpaust.blogspot.ca/2014/01/404.html


This gets into "issues" that I can barely approach, though I know I will have to eventually. That is, if the power doesn't go out. 

A Little Bitty Tear (and/or: a special guest appearance by Matt Paust!)

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Hello, Matt!

Compare and contrast!

This one's for Matt: a Merry Very Crispness

 

 

 

 

 

 

For my friend Matt Paust, the Hemingway of the Henhouse (his name inspired by this rare photo of Ernest H. at the DayGlo Hotel in Ketchup, Idaho: I don't know how he kept all those cats away).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Written by the Hemingway of the hen house: Matt Paust's close encounter

Capt. Love's last command

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I stifled a curse when I heard the beep beep

beep.

Another traffic jamming electric cart. 

 I'd soon be upon the damned thing

 in my usual hurry

 to get the shopping done

 and get the hell out.

Someone less able than me,

self-destructive I guessed

in my least charitable way.

Someone stuffing greasy chips

into his or her face,

stuffing his or her beeping conveyance

with ever more bags of cheap deadly calories,

or shooting the shit

with another witless old fart,

both oblivious to me

as they block the aisle

in their GOD DAMNED ENTITLEMENT!

I round the corner and there he is.

Yes, a he,

a gaunt, tall ancient he.

Enormous bearded head,

white hair on top

and under chin,

milky eyes rolled inward,

parchment lips agape.

The head is erect,

but dead.

The old man is dead,

body propped in its cart

like the dead El Cid

strapped on his horse by Jimena

to save Valencia,

and yet...

Somehow the cart moves,

small, herky jerky moves,

forward and back,

and around,

this way and that,

beep beep beep,

as if its dead commander

still tries to drive.

I walk carefully around

this curious grotesque

to find the spices

and then the beans.

A couple more aisles

I must traverse

before I can leave

this crowded, cursed place.

Several more times

I meet the dead shopper.

Is he following me

or what the hell?

Each time we pass

I study him harder,

with quick glances

to catch a vital sign.

I wonder why he's alone.

If he's dead, how are the purchases

filling his cart?

A respect for him sprouts in my head.

There's no fear in his face,

nor defeat in his frame.

He's not dead but he's close

and it frightens him not.

He's an old sea captain I begin to think,

a mariner once,

an adventurous man,

who thrived on the challenge,

the danger of imminent

untimely death.

 

He's Eric the Red

returned from the dead.

He's Ahab and Blackbeard,

Morgan and Kidd,

the spirits of skippers

who handled the helm,

whose lives became legend

inspiring us still.

And that's when I saw her,

as I pieced it together,

this towering figure

nearing death in his cart,

refusing surrender

despite all the odds

overwhelming his body,

every breath that he took.

She stood there behind him,

far enough back so I couldn't be sure

she was with him at all.

She looked lost,

nearly helpless,

bent and frail thin.                                         

I studied her face,

but like his it was closed

to strangers it seemed.

She was looking at something

only she seemed to see.

I walked on past her,

wondering anew,

and that's when I heard it:

a murmuring sound.

It was her or him or both in tune.

I turned to look and sure enough,

she'd moved closer to him and was leaning in,

and I wondered if I could tell by the voice

or the voices if two,

what clue I could take from the tones I might hear.

Does she know this old warrior,

does he know her, too?

Would I hear impatience or grumble or scorn?

Would they speak at all, would their faces reveal?

I saw the cart move.

It turned toward the woman

and the old captain's spirit

I could see had joined hers.

There was movement, animation

in that bearded large face.

Her body was bobbing a little with life,

and I heard it then, the sound unexpected.

It was thin, it was fragile, but it held its own.

It chased away dread, frustration and worse.

Their doom imminent, the bodies for sure,

but their spirits were stronger than ever, I knew

when I heard it from her,

her giggle.


                                                            Matt Paust

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

                                                                  

Hemingway in the henhouse

Scent is tied to memory: just ask Proust (my neighbor who lives across the street), who triggered a flood of childhood images by eating a whatever-it-is with stuff on it. He dunked it into his cup of tea like a doughnut (note: NOT a “donut”), and thus released memories of eating that same whatcha-ma-callit when he was just a tot.

I am sure this goes back to some primitive structure in the brain, something we evolved on top of (i.e., layers and layers of evolutionary upholstery over that reptilian core). But we still have it. I have it. You have it. Matt Paust has it.

It? What is it, you say? Keep reading.

Matt is someone I e-mail with every day, sometimes many times a day. We “met” in that strange non-meeting way people do through the internet, in this case through a blog I wrote on Open Salon called The Glass Character.

I used to think I had about six readers, and maybe I did, although if I got six comments they all seemed to be from Matt. This was somehow encouraging, because I didn’t expect any at all.  My current blog keeps telling me I’ve had 22,000 views or something like that, which seems highly improbable, but there it is. Quite possibly, all of them are Matt too.

We have almost nothing in common except a lifelong devotion to the word (meaning the written word, not the gospel). He goes by many aliases, which makes me wonder sometimes, it really does. Norm Hawthorne, Chicken Maaaaaa(aaaa)n, Clark Kent, and many others: every time I visit his blog(s), it has all changed. He’s an award-winning former newspaperman, though in his bio at the back of his new book of stories he calls himself “a former award-winning newspaperman”, implying that somehow or other those awards no longer apply. But I think they do.

Right now he lives in Virginia with his family and his chickens, and a more tender shepherd of chickens you never saw. He grew up in Wisconsin, middle America, which is maybe why I was thrown off by his accent on his YouTube videos, which to my ears sounds more urban than rural.  But some people lose their accent along the way, or take on a new one. Sort of like a blog identity, you know? Like a snowman being rolled (or a snowball rolling down a hill), we build up layers, yet the old ones remain inside, pure and untouched.

When he told me his new book was about (or at least was related to) the ownership of guns, I think I involuntarily yipped. I am a Canadian, and though Michael Moore’s stereotypes of us can be ludicrous (happy little beavers who don’t lock their doors), they’re right on the money about some things. Most people I know would approach a gun like a poisonous snake, or at least a museum piece under glass, untouchable by all except Mounties, hunters in red plaid jackets, and aboriginals.

It’s just different here. We don’t have “the right to bear arms” (which a friend of mine insists is actually “the right to bare arms”, meaning Americans can wear t shirts all year), nor do we “pledge allegiance”, to a flag or to anything else. Pledging allegiance feels foreign, strange, though I do remember standing up and singing God Save the Queen every morning in grade school, which is in itself pretty bizarre.

That’s not to say we aren’t patriotic or faithful to the True North Strong and Free (“with glowing hearts we see thee rise”!).  It’s just different. We stand on guard. And stand on guard. And stand. . . It’s repeated so many times in our national anthem that it must mean something. No rocket’s red glare, no bombs bursting in air, just. . . we stand on guard. For thee.

This issue of Canadians and Americans exists: it’s like sleeping next to an elephant and praying it never rolls over. Some believe we’re treated like a poor cousin, but I have another theory: it all comes down to population base. We have approximately 1/10 the population of the U. S, spread out over an even larger geographical space, with a fraction of borders or divisions, provinces instead of states (and somehow those two terms have a markedly different flavour).

Some still perceive us as one more state that will soon surrender its identity and join the Union. I remember some time ago, maybe decades, when someone – surely it must have been an American tourist – made the comment, “oh well, Canadians and Americans are pretty much the same, aren't they?" That’s like saying Italy’s the same as Switzerland. All on the same continent, aren’t they?

This arouses in me not so much the spirit of the beaver as the porcupine. It gets my back up. We evolved differently, we’re historically different (one great writer, hell if I remember his name – maybe Robertson Davies – said, “A Canadian is an American who rejected the Revolution”: so in a sense, we seceded before there even was a Union).  The stereotypical Canadian is self-effacing and mild and doesn’t want to touch a gun or make any sort of trouble. 

According to humorist Will Ferguson (and the country produces more than its share of funny people: Mike Myers, Jim Carrey, Howie Mandel, and some really good dead ones like John Candy and Leslie Nielsen), a Canadian not only apologizes when someone bumps into him, he apologizes when he bumps into a chair. But guns, oh my. There are those guys in red plaid jackets, yes, and of course some Indians (as some people still call them) going after moose meat to make pemmican, and the RCMP, who have taken to using tasers in the last few years (sometimes with fatal results). But the rest of us? It’s like saying we have the right to bear light sabres or something.

So I have Matt’s new book in my hands, a handsome volume with a provocative cover: a young girl who looks like a Catholic schoolgirl, except that she’s packing heat. A Little Red Riding Hood who can definitely take care of herself. Thus the title of the book, If the Woodsman is Late: Tales of Growing Up in a Society that Respected Personal Ownership of Firearms.

Firearms! Whew, whoooo: let me blow the smoke off that one! But let us also take a deeper look.

Matt’s book is a mix of short fiction and memoir (and by the way, folks, I am NOT writing a formal review of this book because reviews take me bloody forever, literally weeks, and besides I charge for them).  Sometimes this works, other times it’s disconcerting. But disconcerting isn’t always a bad thing.

The more firearm-related stories can pack a wallop (i. e. there’s a piece of fiction where a man and his girl friend are ambushed by two murderous low-lifes, and in self-defense he fires: “The eyes opened very wide and very quickly as the copper-jacketed slug raced toward them at 860 feet per second about four feet away. It hit one of the eyes, creating a hydraulic effect that released a misty cloud of blood, brain fluid and bits of eye as my second bullet caught the robber just under his chin.”)

Is this neo-Spillane, or something out of a Scorsese movie like Raging Bull where the black-and-white blood explodes from Robert DeNiro’s face in slow-mo? I don’t see how one can remain detached from such a description: “the eyes”, indeed. Not his eyes. Objectifying the prey. The Canadian in me quails, but then I must ask myself: if I was standing next to a loved one and we were both about to die and I had a gun, what would I do?

I’ve thought about this already, for reasons that aren’t clear. Say, if I was babysitting my grandchildren and some menacing lowlife broke in, and he had a gun, and the kids were screaming, and he was stupid enough to drop it or I kicked it out of his hand. . . Yes, I know what I’d do if I absolutely had to, but only if I could get the goddamn thing to fire.

But here I was going to talk about smells. It’s strange, but some of the stuff he writes about, which seems about as far away from my own experience as it can be, triggers (pardon the expression) something deep in me. He talks almost lovingly about guns, it’s true, even names them sometimes (or someone else does). He confesses that his first boyhood gun inspired not so much love as lust. But then there’s the first time he experiences “the smell of a gun that had just been fired. A wild, acrid exotic smell, the likes of which I’d never tasted previously yet somehow knew to be authentic.”

For me, on some level, this was a Proustian/madeleine-dunked-in-chamomile-tea moment, because I do remember something like that smell. We didn’t have real guns around – oh wait, didn’t my older brother Walt have what we called a bb gun? Pellet gun. A Daisy? Air rifle, maybe. Not sure. I was very small, and a girl, who therefore wasn't supposed to understand. My brothers had fake Western guns that didn’t shoot anything, but that’s really not what I remember. I remember caps, rolls of paper that had bits of explosive in them that could be “let off” by being struck with a rock or hammer or something (never a gun). And there was that hot, sulphury, fire-and-brimstone smell.

They used to “let off” worse things. Back then, in about 1959, a boy of ten like my brother could walk into a corner store (in Canada!) and buy something called “four-inchers”: firecrackers that could do a lot of damage, particularly to anthills. Kids weren’t exactly frontiersmen then, but they could tinker with the symbols, Roy Rogers pistols in holsters, or they could “play war” with plastic hand grenades and tie me to the central pole of  the canvas tent we pitched in the summer, a “prisoner”.

There are lots of stories here that pertain, and some that don’t, to the topic of firearms, that uneasy subject which makes Canadians squirm. Reminiscences of an old-school newspaperman, of experiences in the army, even sports: and one very strange piece of fiction about a man who gets as disoriented and lost as Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond and has a kind of inexplicable religious experience. The football one I can’t relate to, as it’s a language I just don’t speak and probably never will. But then, I don’t speak gun either, yet some of these pieces (too short, many of them, I wanted more) got to me, shook me up.  (Note to author, you should’ve left out the one about trying not to pee, it’s a little over the top. Pee shows up in three or four of these. Once, I think, is enough.)

But I digress. I have a favourite:  Death in the Tall Grass, and it’s about Matt’s first experience as a hunter and the family’s insistence that they eat his kill for dinner. Unfortunately it’s a tough, stringy old rabbit imperfectly picked clean of lead shot, so that the boy bites down excruciatingly on a pellet: “The jolt shot across and up with a shriek from the right side of my face deep into the cerebral cortex, leaving me frightened and undone.” A clang that goes through the bones and into the floor. Does the gun shoot back?

I’m sure Hemingway never ventured into a henhouse, unless it was to pick off a few for lunch. Or maybe he liked his eggs fresh.  When I’m proofreading my work for glitches and it gets pretty close to finished, I always hear myself saying: OK, if I were Hemingway I could make this a lot better, but I’m not Hemingway, I’m Margaret Gunning, so this is the way it’s going to be. Maybe Matt does the same sort of thing. 

It’s strange to see this guy puttering around happily in his yard, a protective man to be sure, writing about guns. Some of the fiction, particularly a story where a blameless black man is shot by a fake white cop, is gory but does not strike me as “pro-gun”.  The subtitle of his collection strongly implies that society no longer respects personal ownership of firearms. The truth is, some societies are downright afraid of them.

As the saying goes, guns don’t kill people; people kill people. But the homicide rate is lower here: by how much, I’d have to look up. If guns are around, if they are to hand and you can easily grab them, aren’t they more likely to be fired? Statistics seem to bear this out. If someone burst through the door and I shot him in the head and it turned out to be a neighbour whose house was on fire, well then. . . See, I could’ve thrown a stapler at him and it might have had the same effect.

It’s just a different way of thinking, of living. We’re leery of guns, sometimes very negative about them; Americans seem more comfortable with them, and it is written into their Constitution that they have the right to own them: no, not to own them but to “bear arms”, a very different thing. We can’t, but I don’t remember ever seeing a campaign to change that. 

And yet, and yet: implicit in that all-important “stand on guard” is having the means to protect that precious border from violent intrusion.

And let’s face it: you can’t do that with a stapler.

http://www.amazon.com/IF-WOODSMAN-LATE-Respected-Ownership/dp/161434499X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319481250&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/EXECUTIVE-PINK-Mathew-Paust/dp/1609105745/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319481280&sr=1-1

http://honest-food.net/2008/12/30/classic-civet-of-hare/

Margaret's links:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1896300693/qid%3D1064537730/sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr_11_1/103-6792065-9634225

http://www.amazon.com/Mallory-Margaret-Gunning/dp/0888013116/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319992815&sr=1-1