When I sat down to craft my first novel at 42, I never dreamed that eight years later, I would have completed my third.  But I have. And I finished this one, tentatively titled THE FUNERAL DRESS, much as I did the first – sad that it was done.

I took this photograph in the Sequatchie Valley and referred to it often as I wrote this book.

Sure there are rewrites to do.  But then I need to consider other’s perspectives, concerns, dislikes, likes, etc.  And although there’s great good to come from that process, it will definitely be different for me and Emmalee, Nolan, Cynthia Faye, Leona, and the others from Cullen, Tennessee.

Family members have told me to take a break, rest for a while, do nothing.  But I feel at a loss.  My days are a little lonelier now, even though I have time to chat with friends and prepare for the Thanksgiving holiday.

Fortunately, there is another story begging for my attention, but I know I need to linger in this moment just a while longer, even if it is a bit uncomfortable.  I need to say a proper goodbye to this process, this journey, that carried me over a mountain and delivered me into a world that I love.

READ BETWEEN THE LINES celebrates "The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove." Pictured from left: Jola Burch, Madeline Cofer (wearing the very dress her mother-in-law wore to Madeline's wedding 50-plus years ago), Heather Romaniuk, Nancy Eskew, Lou Ann Wright, and Mary Ellen Stinchfield.

In July, I launched the GREAT BEZELLIA BOOK CLUB GIVEWAY. And today I announce the winners, READ BETWEEN THE WINES, a book club from Cleveland, Tennessee.

Now every book club that discussed THE IMPROPER LIFE OF BEZELLIA GROVE will receive a little something (should arrive next week!)  But our grand prize winners, the club that hosted the most authentic luncheon or dinner with a 1950s or 1960s theme, wins the following:

#1 Maizelle’s Pound Cake made by the author for the club’s November or December meeting.

#2 A Name of the group’s choosing (approved by the author) included in my third novel.

#3 A Skype, i-Chat, or Phone Call with Random House Sales Rep and Books on the Nightstand co-host Ann Kingman. Ann will highlight the best books of 2011 for book club reads and give you a peek into what’s coming in 2012.

#4 The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove necklaces that feature the new paperback cover (limit 12).

#5 Advanced Reader Copies (limit 12) of my next book. Be the first to talk about it!

READ BETWEEN THE WINES has been meeting once a month for nine years. They don’t have a favorite genre but love any book that encourages lively discussion. They pick a classic every Spring and loved to be pushed beyond their “normal” taste zone.  And with a name like READ BETWEEN THE WINES, I have a hunch they aways have a very good time.

Congratulations to this most wonderful and enthusiastic book club!

Emma Bell Miles

Jim Minick, a dear friend and author of the critically acclaimed, The Blueberry Years, introduced me to Emma Bell — a turn-of-the-century writer who lived only miles from my home here in Chattanooga. She painted and wrote both fiction and poetry, but it’s her daily writings documenting her hardscrabble life on nearby Signal Mountain that move me the most.

She wrote of mountain mornings, the heavy fog and lingering cold.  She wrote of the birds that warbled their songs and kept her company on lonely days.  And she wrote of losing her two-year-old son and the responsibility of preparing his body.  These words left me grieving her loss nearly 100 years later.

So I went to lift him in my arms for the last time.  But what a surprise met me when I lifted the cloth from his face!  The dreadful agony was gone; according to the Gaelic phrase, the Smoothing of the Hand.  The piteous gasping, straining mouth had eased into the old sweet petal-like curves; it was the mouth that had drawn his first life-milk from my breast, the lips that were always kissing me.  Such a fain mysterious smile, as when I have herd him chuckle in his sleep, and turned to wonder what he could be dreaming about.

As I spend day after day writing about the characters that move through the pages of my book, I turn to Emma Bell for encouragement, for knowledge, for inspiration.  I’ve been to her home place, to her grave, and to the library that holds her books and paintings and journals.

I feel her with me at times, and I can only hope she is guiding my hand as I tell my own story about a mountain woman who struggled to make a better life for her family.

Emma Bell Miles died too young, at 39, but our friendship has only begun.

Only one or two of the residents had lived their entire lives in Nashville, the setting for The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove was set.  Most, however, did spend their adult lives there.  It was fascinating for me to gain their perspectives about this story, placed in those final dark hours before the Civil Rights movement really took hold.  They were interested in looking back.  Instead, they wanted to discuss how things had changed in their lifetimes, for the better.  They were open minded and forward thinking, and I left wishing I could spend more time with them all.

At end of our discussion, a woman came up to me and wanted to ask a question that she had not felt comfortbale asking in front of the group.

“I just want to know if there is some romance in this book?”

“Yes,” I promised her.  ”More than in my first.” Then I shared with her a story about writing the love scenes for this book.  I explained how my daughetrs do not like to think of their mother knowing anything about a passionate sexual encounter.  I explained that I sent all of the love scenes to a friend and asked if she thought I had explained them appropriately, accurately, but a bit poetically.  My friend reported that I had hit the mark but that my girls were so going to know that I’d had sex now!

The elder woman and I laughed.  And she said, “Good, I still like a little action.”

I’m still thinking about that day and don’t know that I quite have the words to describe what it meant to me.  But I do know that I’ll be going back.

Two students were killed and the town was destroyed.  Several of us formed a small group, called RINGGOLD READS, and we have found hope and healing in books.  On this hot and humid and wonderful Friday morning in the South, it just felt much more important to share this with you.

Click here to read this beautifully-written article by Shelf Awareness columnist, ROBERT GRAY!

Note: My first novel, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen, was set in Ringgold.  The Chow Time, the actual dairy bar in town, was also destroyed.

Then The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove was released some six months later, and Jennifer posted a review.  She wrote, “I can’t recommend this book enough to you. If there is one book you  must buy this summer, this should be it. I will forever cherish the gift Gilmore has given to me, through the characters in this book and her overwhelmingly powerful prose.”

Of course, this caught my attention.  And of course, I loved it!  As did my my mother!  I posted a tweet and thanked her for her generous words, and it was only then that the real conversation began – one that has touched on race, prejudice, interracial relationships, children, and yes, the weather!

As a lover of books, it’s not a surprise as to how many book clubs I’ve belonged to over the years.  When Susan asked me to write about my favorite book club experience, it really was hard to limit it to just one. That said, I opted to write about the book club I moderate at my local independent bookstore, One More Page Books.

This book club doesn’t have a fancy name, it’s pretty simple: OMP Book Club.  That’s where the simplicity ends.  At each of our meetings, we have approximately 8-10 members joining us, the perfect size group for a book club discussion, in my opinion.  Our group is very dynamic; we have women of all ages and from all different backgrounds.  Some are single, some married, some widowed, some divorced.  Despite our different backgrounds, we are all able to come together and discuss something we all have in common: the love of books.

In the five months we’ve been together, we’ve discussed some pretty outstanding books, including Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin, Skipping a Beat by Sarah Pekkanen, Pictures of You by Caroline Leavitt , These Things Hidden by Heather Gudenkauf and Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese.

My favorite experience would have to be our first meeting, the one in which we discussed These Things Hidden by Heather Gudenkauf.  I admit, I was impressed with the turnout!  We announced the book club and gave customers just two weeks to pick up and read the book.  I’ll admit it, I prepared myself for failure.  I was certain that it would be just me and Eileen, the store owner, discussing the book.  When eight people showed up, I was floored. Considering the store had only been open for a few months I thought this was a tremendous turnout!

Since then, our book club has continued to grow, not only in size but in the friendships and relationships that have blossomed over the past few months.  It’s great to come to an event at the store and see other book club members in a social setting, or to talk to one another on Facebook or Twitter. It’s a bond that I hope continues to blossom; I am forever thankful to this group of women.  They give me an outlet to share and talk about books that I love. They trust my selection in books and I’m always impressed about the lively discussion we have surrounding each of the books.  They allow me to see other perspectives on the books we discuss, viewpoints I would have never discovered otherwise.

Now that Borders bookstores are closing, now is the time to take advantage of the wealth of independent bookstores many of us have in our community.  It is in these stores that readers are introduced to a completely unique community of readers and have the opportunity to form relationships like the one I have found at One More Page Books.

When Nashville flooded in May of 2010, Becky (also a mother, English teacher and tutor) spearheaded a campaign to put books back in Nashville’s affected classrooms. Her campaign, A DRY READ, was a huge success with hundreds of books being donated.

Here Becky shares her thoughts about the definition and power of book club.

Like most people who love to read, I spent long hours of my childhood with books.  My fondest early memories of my parents are those precious story time minutes before bed: my mother laughing so hard at Ramona and Beezus or Bunnicula she couldn’t keep reading; my father home from work, just out of the tub, smelling of Lava soap and aftershave, reading Charlotte’s Wed to me while I cried big, silent tears into his clean white T-shirt. I actually had trouble learning to read because I loved being read to more than anything in the world. It felt suddenly very unfair, very cold and lonely, to be asked to read a book alone, and in silence.

But just like learning to ride a bike, once I could do by myself, there was no turning back. I read with a voracious appetite everything I could get my hands on. To this day I think my own writing has been permanently helped (and hindered!) by Anne of Green Gables and three back to back readings of Louisa May Alcott’s An Old Fashioned Girl. I was content to read by myself, happy to have my books and those worlds all for me. But in eighth grade I had a wonderful English teacher who saw something in me; she nurtured my love of reading and did the unthinkable: she let me choose whatever I wanted to read for credit at school. That unthinkable freedom, paired with her careful responses in the reading journal I did for her, sparked something new in me: reading wasn’t just  good, it was empowering.

Everyone who knows me says they’ve always known I would be an English teacher, despite my thoughts of law school and journalism. My dabbling in music school was short lived; you can’t exactly curl up with your piano on a rainy day. It’s nearly impossible to keep an afghan on your lap while you play Beethoven. And a warm cup of cocoa? No way. It’s cold before the first movement of the sonata is done. Books were friendly things, even when the reading was hard or slow. But it was still so lonely when the book was done, the class discussions over.

Author Kelly O'Connor McNees with Blogger Becky Brothers

But at the end of graduate school,  I finally found a reading home with other teachers, the wonderful and dedicated teachers of Central High School in Louisville, KY. They face many challenges in their jobs, but they’ve never accepted the idea that reaching their students would include anything less than authentic reading and writing experiences. They are pressured every day by the state and local school boards to raise test scores, raise test scores. An endless parade of dumbed down reading curriculum is thrown at them. They are threatened. But they stand by their ideals; they know their kids aren’t fooled by programs and phony workbooks, bubble sheets and stats. These kids don’t buy what the system has to offer them, not believing in the promise of a diploma. So these brave teachers dig deeper into what really matters: Reading (with a capital “R”).

We would sit around the lunch tables in our break room, stuffing our lunches down for our 20 minute break, and talk books, non-stop. I was the new kid—a 23 year old teacher fresh out of grad school in 2001. I was overwhelmed by all of the stress every new teacher faces. My department chair looked at me and said, “Read something.” She was right. In the next few months, I read everything in our book room, a tiny store room stacked floor to ceiling with titles hand-picked by the teachers, not the school board, bought with money we raised ourselves. The school’s funding ran out in April. We were out of toilet paper and light bulbs. But we kept reading and buying new books and talking books at the lunch table and carrying over those authentic, grown-up conversations into our classes.

My classroom became a real reading group. I knew I had found a reading home because the other teachers, all of them, embraced what Mrs. Doctorman had let me do: kids in our classes also had the unimaginable freedom to choose whatever they wanted to read. And we let them have at it. My biggest challenge was scarfing down everything in the (then) tiny Young Adult section of Barnes and Noble and the great local indie, Carmichaels. I read Patricia McCormick’s Cut, Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, Walter Dean Myers incredible book, Monster, and countless others. I lay in bed at night worried about certain students, wracking my brain, “What would finally get Marcus to read?” The very best moments were when one of my students, especially when it was one who struggled to read, would be so moved by a book that he would jump in front of the class, voluntarily, and witness about what an amazing story he’d just read. One student was in a terrible accident while I taught there; she came back to school with mild brain injuries. She read Sharon Draper’s Tears of a Tiger, cover to cover, in 2 days. When she came back to school with it finished, she told me, “I’ve never read a whole book in my life. This is the first one I’ve ever finished. For real.” She was almost 19.

Our lunchtime round table was a place to really debate books. I’ll never forget coming to them all fresh off of reading Sapphire’s book Push. This was almost a decade before the movie; I’d never read a book so awful, so dirty, so honest. It was the perfect portrait of everything wrong with the world: incest, abuse, illiteracy. Some of my colleagues were scared to put it on their shelves. I told them they had to. We did. We almost got fired for it. We fought for it. Parents threatened us when we put books with gay and lesbian characters out for our students. We knew it was worth the risk.

I miss that book club, that breakfast club, the club of my kids and colleagues. I witness about books everywhere I go now. Finding the right book club is hard, just like finding the right book can be hard. Now that I use Goodreads and Facebook and Twitter, I’m connecting with like-minded teachers and readers everywhere and it’s a good fight. I know there are lots of struggling kids out there searching for something; they just don’t know it’s a book yet.

First of all, I want to say congratulations to the very talented, Susan Gregg Gilmore. She certainly deserves a spot on Target’s Emerging Author list and BEZELLIA is the perfect book to place on the shelf. I loved that book the minute I read it and I can’t believe it’s already out in paperback.

It’s not every day that two authors connect and bond as easily as Susan and I have. Since meeting each other less than two years ago we’ve become fast, steadfast buds. We’ve road-tripped together on several occasions and even tried to plan a bus tour around the South. We might not have the details down for that one, but I have no doubt we’ll be singing camp songs down the Dixie trails soon enough.

Me and Lisa relaxing on the beach a few days after SIBA.

My favorite memory with Susan was at the SIBA convention last year in Daytona Beach, Florida. SIBA is the acronym for Southern Independent Booksellers Association and Fannie Flagg (my literary hero) was the opening night, keynote speaker. I imagine that I must have been the first person to send in my check for the dinner (I sent it the day SIBA made the announcement – six months prior) and after it was over I told Susan that I was going to stand in line to meet her, no matter how long it took.

Susan who knew of my life-long admiration and awe for Miss Flagg, offered to go with me and the two of us lined up behind many other book lovers, each eager to take home a memory, an autographed book or a photograph with the one and only Fannie Flagg. Forty-five minutes later and just seconds away from my big moment, out of nowhere and much to my horror and downright mortification, I burst out crying.

Lisa still in shock after meeting Fannie.

I can’t tell you why or what in the world came over me but I could not stop the tears to save my life. Right before it became our turn to say hello, I scurried off through the crowd, informing Susan that I would not meet Fannie Flagg acting like a star-struck nincompoop. I was carrying on like I was preparing to meet Paul McCartney, for goodness sakes.

While hiding behind a column and chomping on the inside of my jaw to make the tears just stop for crying out loud, I hear my name called over the crowd. The next thing I know Susan has dragged poor Fannie over to me and now there’s nowhere to run. Naturally, Fannie could tell by my mascara smudges and red face that I was overcome with emotion but she never let on that she noticed. Susan and I were both bowled over by her grace and southern gentility.

I told Lisa it's clear who Fannie loves!

I have no idea how but something came over me and I wrestled up all my courage and asked if Fannie would consider reading my second book and possibly offering a quote if she was so inclined. After all, a blurb from Fannie Flagg would be my ultimate dream come true and this was my only chance to ask. As is the case with most happy endings, I am happy to report that not only do I have my Fannie Flagg blurb for my latest book, Yankee Doodle Dixie, but I have one from Susan Gregg Gilmore, too! After it was all over, Susan quipped that if she had known that all she had to do was break down crying in front of Fannie for a blurb, she would have done it first.

At a reading later that year in Nashville, Lisa shares all with a patient Fannie.

P.S. Don’t mind my red eyes and red nose in the picture. I’d just made a fool out of myself boo-hooing in front of Fannie Flagg.

Lisa’s first book, Whistlin’ Dixie in a Nor’Easter is available in paperback now.  Her second and the enchanting sequel to the first, Yankee Doodle Dixie, is due out in hardcover on September.

Now when someone asks me, “What is one of the best things to come out of being published?”, I have to say it is the privilege of calling people like Rebecca my friend.

Meeting people in person whom you’ve only known online is a lot like going on a blind date. You hope they’ll be as charming as their tweets and as clever as their blog posts and that they’ll think the same of you. When the person you’re meeting is an author whose work you’ve enjoyed, the anticipation is even more complicated. You love the work and want the person to live up to what you’ve imagined. When I first met Susan a couple years ago, I knew instantly that I didn’t need to worry. Susan IS the southern sweetness of her novels, and like her characters, she is willing to go beyond the idealized imagery of front porches and rocking chairs to explore the truth of southern experience, even when it’s not so pretty.

I’m thrilled to call Susan a friend and to be here celebrating the paperback release of The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove and Susan’s inclusion on Target’s Emerging Author list for summer. It’s been a real pleasure to watch Susan’s writing develop from Dairy Queen to Bezellia and into the novel she’s working on now (yes, I’ve read the manuscript, and she is really going somewhere new), but the real joy has been in forming an in-real-life friendship that not only met but exceeded all of my expectations. Happy Paperback Birthday, Bezellia Grove, and here’s to many more years of bookish joy, late-night French fry runs, and mid-afternoon margaritas with one of my favorite friends in the industry.”

When my super talented, french-fry eating blogger friend Rebecca Shinsky, creator of The Book Lady’s Blog, asked for names of panty-worthy authors (a term for literary adoration), Chris was my pick. I’d loved him since Midwives.

Who knew a few months later, I would actually meet him at the BOOKS ON THE NIGHTSTAND retreat in Manchester, Vermont. He did not disappoint. A great talent, for sure, but he’s also, and more importantly, a really great guy.

When I asked Chris about one of his most memorable book club moments, this is what he had to say.

I speak to a lot of book groups via speakerphone or Skype, and I always have a terrific time. It wasn’t all that long ago that my books sold briskly, but only among people related to me by blood. I try never to lose sight of that.

And the thing I love best is how candid readers are. The sort of women and men who commit themselves to book groups tend to view reading as a communal experience and are not especially reticent. They tell me precisely what they think of my books: What works and what doesn’t.

Not too long ago, I was speaking with a group that had just finished my 2004 novel, “Before You Know Kindness.” It was one of those discussions that would have made English professors proud of the way their students could put Tolstoy or Wolff in their place. (“The problem with Anna, Professor, and why she doesn’t succeed as a character. . .”) Even my reasonably healthy ego was a little ragged by the time the group had finished eviscerating my characters, my pacing, and my prose.

The next day I got an email from the group’s leader, thanking me for spending a half-hour with them the night before. Apparently, this group rates every book they read for posterity on a ten-point scale, as well as the author’s persona on the telephone or Skype screen.

“You were so charming with our group and so insightful,” the leader wrote. “We gave your book group presence a 9.6 to be precise.”

I noticed there was no rating for the novel, and so I wrote back, curious how the book had scored.

“Do you really want to tug at that thread?” the leader emailed me. I wrote her that I did.

“The book only earned a 4.1,” she confessed, and then added – apparently trying to make me feel better – “but isn’t it more important to be a good person than a good writer?”

I am not completely sure Hemingway would have agreed. But I appreciatedthe candor.

My sense is that if your book group dives into Susan Gregg Gilmore’s “TheImproper Life of Bezellia Grove” – new in paperback this week – you’llgive both her and her book a perfect ten.

Happy reading.

Chris Bohjalian’s thirteenth novel, “The Night Strangers,” arrives on October 4. Beware: It’s a ghost story.

And you can follow Chris on Twitter @ChrisBohjalian.