Off To Chicago (Tara Taylor Quinn)

I was asked to speak at the Midwest Literary Festival. Not a romance writers convention. Or a school. But a festival that celebrates books in the 'real' world. They expect more than 10,000 people to attend. Did you catch the part about it being a litearary festival? There are many in the world of books who don't believe popular fiction is literature. I've never understood the debate. Or even the reason there is one. Is there some literature president who's been endowed with special sight and can spot a literary work? And why? What's the point?

Well, I'm glad I asked because that seques into my answer! I majored in English in college - specifically American literature with a minor in English lit. I voraciously read and analyzed every piece of work I was given to read. I loved those years. Just as I loved the years between fourteen and seventeen when I read a romance novel a day. To me, the loves were synonymous. I was living in different worlds, with wonderful people, who taught me things about life and living. Some lessons were global in scope, some eternal, and some were momentary. I got these kinds of messages during both sets of years.

I did my undergrad work at a small, private university where faculty and students developed close mentoring relationships. (Not the kind that crossed the line. In all my years there, I never heard about anything like that happening.) I felt a particular kinship with the head of the English department, Dr. Gary Elliott. The man didn't let up, didn't understand an excsue if one hit him over the head, didn't take less than our best - and that included our efforts to think. How he knew if we were thinking our hardest, I don't know, but he did. And if we weren't he'd challenge us, sometimes in front of the class, sometimes one on one, but by the time I was a senior, I knew I was going to college to think and to analyze and its a habit I've never been able to break. Nor do I want to. What he taught me is that if we look at things, think hard about them, analyze how they make us feel, we live life on a deeper, fuller, richer dimension. We live life smarter.

So...what does this have to do about the literature debate? I will never forget the time when Dr. Elliott fell from his pedestal. He was speaking derogatarily about - you got it - romance novels. To hear him speak it was as though they were less than dirt. As I'd been taught to do, I challenged him. I asked him what made literature, literature and romance novels less than books? He said that literature stands the test of time. That it lives through the ages. He said that you could pick up any literary work 100 years after it had been written and learn about the mores of the times. I nodded. And felt a little cheap. I didn't read a romance for a couple of years after that.

And I grieved. Something was missing from my life.

I graduated from college, I certified to teach. I taught. And I grieved. From the time I was fourteeen I'd said I was going to write a romance novel. I finally consoled myself with buying one. Reading it. And then I had to have another, and another. I started to feel emotionally healthy again. Strong. And I started to believe, once again, that I was going to write one. I'd been a writer all my life. Kept journals. Wrote poetry. I'd been a stringer with the Dayton Daily News since I was sixteen. I was a writer. So I wrote. A really really really horrible glob of words that in no way could be deemed a story. But I had a woman in my head and she wouldn't go away. Over the next six years I wrote. I submitted. I was rejected. I'd never heard of writer's groups. I thought I was the only writer in the world except for those who were published and famous. And then came the day I got the call. (A lot happened in between, but this is a blog not a book!) Harlequin Superromance was going to publish my first book. I thought of all the people I wanted to tell. Dr. Elliott came to mind almost immediately. And stayed on my mind throughout the year of revisions and cover art and thoughts of bookmarks and booksignings. The day my box of author copies arrived I dropped the box in the foyer, ripped into it right there, and held my first book in my hand. I cried. It felt so good, so smooth. The cover was beautiful. Because it had my name on it! The smell was disinctive. And fabulous. I had a box of 48. One of them went in the mail the next day to Dr. Gary Elliott. And in the letter I penned I told him that it wasn't Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It wasn't David Thoreau. It wasn't Louisa May Alcott. But if he wanted to pick it up 100 years from now, he'd learn about the times in which we were living. He'd learn the mores. And more. He'd learn how women struggled and felt, how men were emerging. He'd learn about culture and court systems. I sent the book off into netherland and promptly forgot about it. And him. I'd done what I needed to do and was at peace.

A few weeks later I received a brief note in the mail. Dear Tara, Thank you for sending your new novel. I read it one sitting. It was quite good. Dr. Gary Elliott.

He read an entire, 384 page novel in one sitting. That says it all.

Wonder if he'll be in Chicago?