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Inprint Reading on the Green: Katherine Center & Emily Fox Gordon

Presented by Inprint at Discovery Green

April 8, 2009

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Inprint Reading on the Green presents Katherine Center (pictured) reads from her new novel, Everyone Is Beautiful; and Emily Fox Gordon reads from her debut novel (and third book), It Will Come to Me. A night of much wit and laughter by two terrifically talented and humorous Houston authors.

From the author of The Bright Side of Disaster, the entertaining and ultimately poignant story of what happens after happily ever after: how a mother of three recaptures her sense of self and falls in love with her husband all over again.  Everyone is Beautiful, A Novel, Katherine Center .

Lanie Coates just piled everything she owns into a U-Haul and drove with her husband, Peter, and three boys (all under four) across the country. She’s left her helpful parents, her mom-friends, and the comforts of home behind—all because Peter got into graduate school. Even though Lanie wants to help him follow his dreams, she suspects that she’s ignoring her own. If only she could remember what they were.

And that’s just it. Lanie can’t shake the feeling that important things from her pre-mom life have gone missing: her marriage, her ambitions, her body. She feels homesick, capsized by motherhood, and just dead certain that she is no longer fabulous. Not even close.

When another mom humiliates her at the park, Lanie decides it’s time to retool her life. She sets change after change in motion, hoping to recapture her lost self. But she also creates ripples that will come to threaten everything she holds dear. In the end, Lanie must figure out once and for all how to find herself without losing everything else in the process.

Katherine Pannill Center started writing fiction when she was in sixth grade, when she and her two best friends filled countless spirals with stories about meeting Duran Duran at the mall and bewitching the band members into falling in love with them. These stories involved kissing, weeping, limos, the occasional log cabin, and many gentle blankets of snow.

Around that time, Katherine also started keeping journals, logging with great sincerity every detail of middle school life as she knew it. Lists of friends! Lists of boys! Lists of must-have shoes! Lists of personal flaws and areas for improvement! The journals (though not the lists) continued through college, and now Katherine has storage boxes of them taking up far too much room in her attic.

Katherine always intended to be a writer. At St. John’s School, in Houston, where she clocked her K-12 years, she generated stacks of poems, school newspaper columns, and short stories. At Vassar College, she majored in English, wrote short stories, lettered her poems onto metal signs that she put up around campus, and wrote a novella (which won the Vassar College Fiction Prize).

Not too far out of college, she met the guy she would get to marry a few years later. On that first night, he held the car door open for her, made her laugh so hard her face hurt, and--he says--knew by the end of the evening that she was the one. On their second date, Katherine almost choked to death on a pancake.

Around that same time, Katherine won a fellowship to the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program, where she taught Freshman English and earned an MA in Fiction. She also co-edited fiction for the literary magazine Gulf Coast.

After graduate school, Katherine held a number of crazy jobs and a few sensible ones. Her favorite job was teaching creative writing to little kids through a program called Writers In The Schools. She also liked working in her uncle’s “Used, Rare & Out-of-Print” bookstore, an old house with many reading nooks and a secret door, which has now been sold and turned into an Italian restaurant.

Katherine grew up in Houston, the middle of three very close sisters. Her older sister, who has beautiful red hair, worked as a journalist for many years and now teaches French. Her younger sister, who has beautiful green eyes, is a lawyer with a serious knack for decorating. When they were younger, their house was a cacophony of stereos blaring from each room, blow-dryers, and phones ringing. Back then, they sometimes got so mad at each other they threw shoes. Now, they are all great friends.

Katherine’s parents are both Texans with charming accents. Her dad is a lawyer and her mom—among many other things—crossbreeds Brahman cattle with Herfords at her ranch.

Katherine’s husband Gordon is a sixth grade teacher at the school she herself went to, and he likes to joke that they met in his class. They have two feisty and impossibly sweet young children—a girl and a boy—who love to give hugs, turn on the hose, raise and lower the driver’s seat in the car, run the bath faucet, squirt hand sanitizer, eat lollipops, sweep rain puddles, dump out raisin boxes, stand on the dining table, unfold folded things, listen to stories, and give people presents (like sticks, pieces of cardboard and grocery receipts from their mama’s purse).

If you ask Katherine’s 4-year-old daughter what Katherine does for a living, she will tell you that her mama “is an author. Just like Richard Scarry.”

The first novel from the acclaimed memoirist Emily Fox Gordon is a tart, intelligent comedy of manners set on the campus of a large Southern university. It is also a story about the comforts and grievances of a marriage of longstanding -- about change and continuity and the possibility of renewal in midlife.

Ben Blau is the reluctant chair of the philosophy department of The Lola Dees Institute, surrounded by a bestiary of academic innocents and opportunists. His wife Ruth -- a writer whose early literary success never quite blossomed into a career -- nurtures sometimes noisy and sometimes private rebellions against the conventions of academic life. Their lives have settled, if not always comfortably, into a dull ceremonial round of convocations, committee meetings, and pot-luck dinners. To Ruth it seems that nothing will ever change.

Except that this year a new couple has arrived on campus: an ethereal, celebrated young memoirist and her husband, an intellectual jack-of-all-trades and perpetual misfit. Something about these two throws the staid academic world of the Lola Dees Institute into comic chaos and revives Ruth's hopes that she might become once again the writer she used to be.

Emily Fox Gordon's astringent depiction of academic life and her mature, finely wrought observations about marriage and relationships make It Will Come to Me is a complete delight -- engaging, wise, superbly written, and very, very funny.

Emily Fox Gordon has published personal essays in Boulevard, Salmagundi, and The American Scholar, among other literary magazines. Her work has won two Pushcart Prizes and has been shortlisted in Best American Essays, and three of her essays were anthologized in the Anchor Essay Annual.

An essay about her hospitalization as a teenager at Austen Riggs formed the basis for Mockingbird Years (2000), a memoir which was also a critique of psychotherapy. Mockingbird Years was named a New York Times Notable Book and was chosen as one of Amazon.com’s top ten memoirs for the year. It also received glowing front-page consideration in The New York Times Book Review and was subsequently translated into Hebrew and Chinese.

Gordon has been awarded residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell colony. She has developed a strong interest in teaching as well, and has taught workshops at Rice University, Houston’s INPRINT program, and the University of Wyoming. Her new memoir, Are You Happy?, began, like its predecessor, as an essay. Emily Fox Gordon lives in Houston, Texas.


This reading is presented by Inprint, a literary arts nonprofit organization whose mission is to inspire readers and writers, in partnership with Discovery Green Park. Inprint receives support from The City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance and the Texas Commission on the Arts.