Dear friends,
Oy what a mess. Sometimes when I am overwhelmed with mess I try to contain it or partition it away from my life. Other times, I go towards it.
The Third Rainbow Girl will be out in paperback on January 19, 2021 and she has a new paperback cover, a photograph by West Virginia photographer Roger May of a mess of kudzu vines. You can graciously pre-order the paperback (for a friend?) here and here.
I didn't know much about kudzu until I saw Roger's photograph, aside from the fact that I'd seen in everywhere when I lived and traveled in Appalachia and knew vaguely that it was "bad." Brought over to the United States from Japan in the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia (bad things happen here!), kudzu was originally pitched to farmers by our government as a way to stop soil erosion on farms. The plant thrived in the southeast's hot and humid summers, climbing dense and fast over all other plants and trees, smothering and killing them by blocking their access to sunlight. Today kudzu covers about 7.5 million acres of land in the southeastern United States, growing up to a foot a day, with vines spanning as long as 100 feet at maturity. Pesticides and herbicides are sometimes used to kill it, though the only surefire way is to dig up and destroy its root crown, a fibrous knob of tissue that sits on top of the roots and can grow as big as a basketball. Barring this, some cities like Chattanooga and Asheville just send out goats and llamas to graze on the plant.
But what I didn't know is that kudzu also produces beautiful blooms that smell like sweetened grapes and when fed on by bees produce purple honey that tastes like grape jelly or bubblegum. From kudzu honey and oil, resourceful people in Mississippi, Alabama, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and others make soap, lotions, candles, and perfume. The fibers of kudzu are firm and proteinous and are used to make baskets, clothing and paper. Apparently, its a big treat for rabbits. In Vietnam, folks use the starch from kudzu in food dishes and thicken their sauces with it. In Japan, the powder of kudzu is used to make herbal tea and it is a fixture in traditional Chinese medicine to treat fever, headache, neck stiffness, and other ailments.
The mess can be joyful, erotic, full of light. The invasion can be the cure. <3
Lastly, if you're someone on your journey through your own book, consider checking out the Authors Guild Foundation's "From Manuscript to Marketplace Series." I'm honored to kick it off on Tuesday, talking with my editor Paul Whitlatch, executive editor at Crown, about the journey of The Third Rainbow Girl from idea to object, marketing a hybrid book that fits neatly into no genre, fact checking and truth in nonfiction, and lots of other secret "behind the scenes" details. You can register here.
That's all. Yours in the mess,
Emma