Upcoming Events

May
13
Wed

I’ve got a couple events coming up this summer you might be interested in:

Dialogue & Scene Workshops with Karen Stolz

Location: Writers’ League Office, 611 S. Congress Ave, Suite 130, Austin

Popular Writers’ League instructor Karen Stolz returns to Austin to teach two craft classes for fiction writers.

And:

The 23nd Tallgrass Writing Workshop

will be held June 26-28, 2009. The workshop is a weekend summer session sponsored by the Center for Great Plains Studies, Division of English, and College of Liberal Arts & Sciences and sanctioned by the Western Writers of America, Inc. The workshop format includes small group presentations by faculty, provides opportunity for discussion and personal consultations.

By Karen

Posting at last

May
26
Mon

My webmaster will be proud I am finally posting something.  I have time because I’m between spring semester and summer school. Hooray. I am getting a little rest, pleasure reading, working on some projects.   I was recently promoted from instructor to tenure track asst. professor, where I teach.  It’s a big deal.  I worked hard to get it.

How do you teach 4 classes every semester and also get some writing done? Breaks.  Breaks in between semesters.  Eventually I’ll have to learn how to write even during semesters.  More than I currently do, anyhow. This fall, actually, I have one course off for the first time since I’ve been teaching here. So I will have my Fridays to write.  Divine.  

This summer I’m hoping my cowriter Herman Wright and I will finish the novel based on real events we’ve been working on for awhile, ARVETTA.  It’s taken some time to fine tune the thing, but we both care about it a lot.   Writing is tough stuff.  All the revisions.  But that’s the life of writing. 

Off to bed to read MIDDLESEX.  It’s a good book.  Long. But good.

 

By Karen

Raves for WORLD OF PIES

Apr
21
Mon

“This novel is as American as apple pie–Texas style.  Yahoo!”

—Rita Mae Brown, author of Six of One, Loose Lips, and Bingo 

 

“I think [WORLD OF PIES] is a charming book and Karen Stolz’s talent shines forth like a jewel. Annette, Texas is a place that I believe readers will want to visit again and again.”

—Gloria Naylor, author of The Women of Brewster Place 

 

“If Karen Stolz’s first novel were a pie, it would be the lemon meringue of your childhood–crusty on the outside, sunny but a bit tart inside, and topped with a dreamy confection…Irresistible.”

—Mary Willis Walker, author of All the Dead Lie Down 

 

“Karen Stolz’s WORLD OF PIES is a charming portrait of small-town family life. It will make you wish you grew up with Roxanne!”

—Ann Hood, author of Ruby and Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine 

 

“Life in Annette, Texas, is as American as apple pie and lemon Cokes and Dippity-do…Karen Stolz serves up a smoldering, wised-up sort of wholesomeness–sweet yet daring, nostalgic but far from prim.  Like a good girl, Stolz never goes too far; like the very best writers, she has a knack for making the page blush.”

—John Taliaferro, author of Tarzan Forever 

By Karen

Raves for FANNY & SUE

Apr
21
Mon

“A delightful story that brings back so many fond memories of my own childhood.  I hadn’t thought about that wonderful aroma of fresh fudge for many years and when their babysitter made fudge for them on New Year’s Eve, I could practically TASTE it…..This is a book that I will highly recommend to my reading groups…and as a gift to mothers and great aunts who might otherwise be turned off by the sexually explicit novels of today.” 

—Caryl ByDash,  By-Dash Books ‘N Thing, Incline Village, NV

 

“Open this perfect time capsule of a book and experience a double helping of Karen Stolz’s gift for finding the miracles in everyday life wrapped in the bittersweetness of nostalgia for a time  you’ve never known!”

—Sarah Bird, author of The Yakota Officers Club

 

“If God is in the details, and I believe She is, then Fanny and Sue is a work of domestic divinity.”

—Mary Willis Walker, author of The Red Scream and All the Dead Lie Down

By Karen

Interview with Karen about WORLD OF PIES

Apr
21
Mon

How would you describe WORLD OF PIES in twenty-five words or less?

Roxanne’s summers in a small Texas town teach her everything about the power of family love and the comfort and joy of pies, baseball, and lingerie.

Was there any particular incident that motivated you to write WORLD OF PIES?

The first piece I wrote was the chapter that I call “Your Mail Lady.”  The stimulus for this was seeing a very tall, slender woman delivering mail in the neighborhood. I had never seen her before, and I thought about how when I was a girl it would have been so exotic to see see a mail lady delivering our mail. I thought then about how young girls sometimes idolize women they admire to a kind of feverish pitch that is like a crush.  Once I had the place - a small town - and the starting time - early 60’s, it was easy for me to plumb my own small town childhood memories for jumping off places for the book. 

Read More »

By Karen

Indulge in sugary ‘Fanny and Sue’

Apr
21
Mon

Depression-era family tale delights
By Sharyn Wizda Vane
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, March 30, 2003

If you thrill to the domestic nitty-gritty of life — what someone wore, ate or listened to — Austinite Karen Stolz’s new novel will pique your interest. If you’re a devotee of the idylls of a storybook prewar America, all the better. 

If you’re a plot fanatic — well, you’re likely to be left wanting. Like Stolz’s 2000 hit debut, “World of Pies,” “Fanny and Sue” is less a novel than a series of interconnected set pieces, following the twins of the title through the adventures of their Depression-era childhood and teenage years. Told from the alternating perspectives of each girl, these stories evoke the same home-centered charms of small-town existence as “Pies,” despite being set in the big city of St. Louis: This is the kind of life in which Mom rolls biscuits each morning and the girls fashion handmade valentines. 

Indeed, there’s a sweetness to “Fanny and Sue,” one that will be familiar to Stolz’s fans (even without the recipes that dotted “Pies”). Family dinners, sewing lessons and school dances are all rendered in loving detail, a paean to an imagined simpler time reminiscent of Fannie Flagg’s newest, “Standing in the Rainbow.” Even the family’s financial troubles during the depth of the Depression are tinted by a certain cinematic romance — the twins’ mother rolls those biscuits extra-thin to make extra for the men begging at the back door. 

That’s not to say there isn’t hardship in Fanny’s and Sue’s lives. One of the strongest sections follows Sue to quarantine in the hospital because of scarlet fever. Here Stolz takes the time necessary to sketch a third-grader’s terror at having to leave her family, pausing to parse Sue’s inability to imagine six entire weeks away from her home. “I couldn’t believe this. What was six weeks? It was like six years, to me, in my mind and heart. And I hadn’t even gotten through one whole week yet.” At home, Sue’s absence makes Fanny realize her sister’s unusual talents: “I mean, I started to realize that Sue was smarter than me about some things, and it bothered me no end.” 

Elsewhere, troubles are skittered over and forgotten: their mother’s miscarriage, a cousin’s bout with polio. These bumps in the road are dealt with so lightly that they don’t add the depth that would elevate “Fanny and Sue” beyond a sweet tale. 

But the confectionlike charm of dipping into a world punctuated by Christmas made special simply by a breakfast plate of bacon is infectious in Stolz’ hands. OK, so “Fanny and Sue” won’t change your life. But it just might make for a delicious Sunday afternoon. 

Sharyn Wizda Vane is the Statesman’s book editor.

By Karen

Double the sisters, double the charm

Apr
21
Mon

Twins take turns narrating coming-of-age tale

Fanny and Sue
Karen Stolz (Hyperion, $22.95)
06/15/2003 By PAULA FRIEDMAN / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

In Austin writer Karen Stolz’s warm and humorous Fanny and Sue, her second novel (her first was 200l’s World of Pies), she tells the tale of twin sisters raised in St. Louis during the Great Depression. The sisters take turns as speakers to travel from childhood to the beginning of their adult lives, though Ms. Stolz begins the novel by speaking in the third person about them and their family, a strategy that makes sense because of her main characters’ youth. When the twins do take over, they differentiate themselves less by speech styles than by pointedly polarized temperaments and interests. Fanny enjoys drama and risk; Sue remains self-contained and bookish. In the first chapter (Sue’s), she describes Fanny’s behavior after she burned her arm in a kitchen fire: Writing at school was hard with her arm bandaged up and hurting, and sometimes I heard her whimper a little when she was writing essays for Miss Binkbaum, like ‘Why the Pilgrims Gathered for a Feast.’ ‘They just do,’ I heard her mutter. And ‘They were hungry, why not?’ I could actually see Miss Binkbaum fighting off the urge to put Fanny back in the cloakroom… 

Ms. Stolz’s strategy of endowing the twins with opposite traits and alternating narratives works for the most part; nevertheless, readers may find themselves anticipating too easily what each will say, and when. The author might have done well to shake up the symmetry a bit more. Still, readers will find much to charm them in the mishaps and the successes of both Fanny and Sue. It seems that one or the other always is in some kind of bind, whether or not it’s her fault. Sue catches scarlet fever and is quarantined for six weeks in the hospital; the ever-impatient Fanny scars her arm with hot popcorn grease. The twins simultaneously hit their teens and more opportunities for mischief (Fanny pretends to be her sister when talking with one of Sue’s admirers). Additionally, the family faces hardships, among them job and food shortages. While many of these trials are depicted with pitch-perfect suspense, their sheer numbers run the risk of numbing the reader. As readers, our feelings tend to build with building drama, and Ms. Stolz too often suddenly and happily resolves problems, leaving the family intact and seemingly unscarred. Fanny and Sue is a charmer, but it’s tempting to start second-guessing each situation as to whether it may – perhaps this time – end with one of life’s usual and unalterable changes.

Freelance writer Paula Friedman lives in Oakland, Calif. 

By Karen

Review: Book takes readers to time of innocence

Apr
21
Mon

from the Amarillo Globe-News

In this second novel, Karen Stolz returns us to a time of innocence - a time when children not only respected their parents but openly expressed their love for them, too. It was a time when family meant everything. 

Following identical twins Fanny and Sue Logan during their growing up years in Stolz’s hometown of St. Louis, we soon find that though the girls look alike, their personalities are opposites. From birth to death, the sisters’ strong connection may strain, but never break. 

The saga from birth in 1920 to death in 2003 becomes an adventurous ride the reader will be delighted to undertake. Choice phrasing and just-the-right amount of historical reference suggest the author might have time-traveled to understand her scene so well. 

In alternating chapters, the girls take turns in sharing their points of view. Soon, the reader can almost distinguish them by their choice of words; but as with twins in real life, one must peer closer to decide which girl is which. 

In childhood, one suffers a bout with scarlet fever and one is left with a slight scar - a distinguishing mark but not as important as the differences in budding temperaments. 

Through the Great Depression, the family reflects experiences of others across the nation. Lay-offs, money problems and hunger afflict the Logans, but they continue to help families worse off than they are. Two families live in a home meant for one and somehow become stronger from the experience. 

As in her previous award-winning book, “World of Pies,” the Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate once again scores high marks. “Fanny and Sue” is sprinkled with the tastes, scents and touches of life that draw the reader in for an intimate glimpse of a time of innocence. 

A book to be read slowly in order to savor the details.

- Deborah Elliott-Upton

By Karen

Review of World of Pies in MOSTLY FICTION

Apr
21
Mon

A Review by Shannon Bloomstran 03-03-03

We meet the titular Fanny and Sue in 1926 as six-year olds twins, identical in every respect except personality and follow their lives until 1940. The slim story follows them through illness, accidents, and just the sheer joy of girlhood. The two love each other quite deeply, although a little warily at times. Flamboyant, theatrical Fanny reeks of self-confidence even as a seven-year old. She feels, “Sue couldn’t help doing foolish things…When God had let them grow together there inside Mom, he had just poured in the smarts a little unevenly.” This comes from a girl who contemplates dropping her baby brother out of their apartment window. Most adults would probably disagree with this view of the “smarts,” most labelling Sue, “the good twin,” even though she is given to tattling and has just a tad too much self-righteousness. Sue,who vows early on to become a schoolteacher, wonders “if God had given Fanny a smaller heart than normal.”

Stolz alternates using Fanny and Sue as the narrators, at first it is difficult to keep track of which twin is which, the girls even suspect their father can’t tell them apart, although that doesn’t last for long. Stolz works hard to keep the language simple and childlike, which is not to say childish. It is quite a trick to have young girls at the focus of story without it becoming precious or cutesy. The girls seem real, although I did think their characters seemed set too early on. The girls, outgoing Fanny and bookish Sue, did not really change throughout the story, only the outward manifestations of their personalities changed as they grew. Some may find this realistic, although I found it a bit too convenient. I was reminded throughout the book, of Tony Earley’s marvelous study in minimalism, Jim the Boy since both books tell sweet stories with neither flounce nor flurry. 

The story is really a collection of anecdotes about the girls in a more innocent time. Popping corn on the kitchen stove, using bluing to whiten the wash, and making homemade fudge may read like science fiction to some. The two girls live with their family in St. Louis, which is where I live now, and is part of the reason I was drawn to the book. It really could have taken place in any big city but Stolz does include a few details about life here; her foreword says she drew on her father’s St. Louis childhood. I don’t know what it says about St. Louis, but most of the institutions she mentions are still alive and kicking. The Fox Theater, the Muny Opera, Crown Candy Kitchen, and Ted Drewes Frozen Custard Stand are all Gateway City landmarks. If you’re ever here, I strongly urge you to visit at least Ted Drewes, purely for its, ahem, historical value. The custard is pretty good too.

The stories sprinkled throughout Fanny and Sue are at once quaint, wool bathing suits and streetcars, and terrifying, bouts of polio and scarlet fever in the days before antibiotics. She also gives the girls a terrific set of supporting characters, who stay true to the historical time period and more importantly, stay true to the girls. The story may lack a lot of flash and action, but it more than makes up for it in heart.

By Karen

Reviews of WORLD OF PIES

Jun
01
Thu

School Library Journal

A collection of bright, lighthearted yet poignant stories about a close-knit family. The portrait of Roxanne, a small-town girl growing up in Texas in the ‘60s, begins with pie-making lessons from Mom during her 12th summer and continues until her own preteen daughter’s instruction in pastry making begins. Roxanne’s father runs a small shop selling bras and corsets, a source of embarrassment for the whole family, but a lucrative business. In the first episode, her mother rouses the town’s ire by insisting that a pie baked by one matron’s maid be entered in the local fair under the baker’s own name-never mind who paid for the ingredients and provided the kitchen. Roxanne supports her mom, but quakes at the thought of the taunts she could receive when school starts. When she is 15, her mother becomes pregnant. An only child, the teen is both mortified and jealous, and feels guilty for having such thoughts. In the following story, at 17, the protagonist describes parking in a quiet spot with her current boyfriend and being caught almost in the act by Officer Fenster. In a subsequent chapter, she is a college freshman when her father dies suddenly; the grieving family is sustained not just by relatives and friends, but by the whole community. Growing up in a family and town such as this one rings true for the `60s, and the characters are just as real and revealing today.

—Molly Connally, Kings Park Library, Fairfax County, VA
Copyright © 2000 Cahners Business Information.

BookPage
June 2000
Review by Linda Stankard

If you’re feeling stressed, but can’t afford that getaway weekend in the Caribbean — don’t despair. Grab your lawnchair, find a patch of filtered sun, inhale deeply and enter Karen Stolz’s World of Pies. Although set in the turbulent ’60s, this novel about growing up in a small Texas town will fill you with a sweet nostalgia that goes down as easily as Mabel’s Angel Food Cake with Chocolate Sauce. (Recipe included!) Comfort food recipes are, in fact, sprinkled throughout World of Pies, but Stolz’s real accomplishment in this taste-tempting first novel is the delicious batch of episodes she has baked up for us about the life of Roxanne Milner, a baseball-loving tomboy whose first-person narrative rings with the honest emotions — the exhilaration and devastation, the confusion and wonder — of growing up. In the hot summer of ‘61, 12-year-old Roxanne would rather be out pitching balls to her cousin Tommy than in the kitchen rolling pie dough, but the ensuing pie fair has the townswomen in a baking frenzy as they strive to perfect their individual recipes for the contest. But “at the eleventh hour,” to her mother’s delight and her own surprise, Roxanne develops an interest in the art that affords the mother a chance to teach and the daughter to learn. “And it happened,” she says, amazed at her ability to be gentle and precise. “I got the feel of the dough and learned how to make a decent piecrust.” The lessons she learns are not confined to the kitchen as race becomes a factor in the pie contest, the Vietnam War looms, and she gets her first, less-than-riveting kiss. While trying to figure out boys, and believing she will never look “right,” Roxanne experiences the consequences of taking a stand against racism in her small hometown, she gains insight into the complexities of her parents’ marriage and eventually explores her own burgeoning awareness of the increasingly attractive opposite sex. Stolz packs a lot into 153 pages. Written with a flair for understatement and the telling detail, this humorous, relationship-rich tale is wholly satisfying. It may be a slim volume, but I found it a deep dish, full of insight into the human heart. You’ll want to savor Roxanne’s adventures along with her recipes, so you may want to bake ahead. Then you won’t have to stop turning pages to check the oven! Lemonade, anyone?

By Karen