Charlottesville Daily Progress, VA
Thurs., Mar. 17, 2005

All about finding a niche

By Kate Andrews / Daily Progress staff writer

March 17, 2005

Standing in front of a sizzling professional oven, P.J. Forbes shed her
sweater.

She had eight hours of material to get through in 45 minutes Wednesday
afternoon, and things were going to get hot in this kitchen.

`I am compulsive, I am neurotic, I am a workaholic,’ Forbes announced to an
audience seated on wooden chairs. `This is an exceedingly competitive field.
Everybody thinks they can write a cookbook.’

Some of the junior leaguers and others in the crowd were a little taken
aback, given the innocent-sounding topic of `Community Cookbooks.’

Just as the prospective cookbook writers learned, you’ve got to find your
niche – a lesson learned by the Virginia Festival of the Book’s organizers.
The 11th annual festival started Wednesday and continues through Sunday.

In one afternoon, a participant could hear heart-rending poems about a
parent’s death, wild tales about Beethoven and Schumann and truths about the
cut-throat world of cookbookery.

Charlotte Matthews, a Piedmont Virginia Community College professor and
poet, read a `love poem to the men who mow the county graveyards’ at a
Gravity Lounge gathering of authors published in the `Tough Times
Companion.’

The mowers get paid per graveyard, which could encourage slipshod, hurried
work, but the men take pride, said Matthews, who noticed them at a church in
Free Union.

As Matthews read poems and listened to others, she minded her 6-year-old
daughter Emma, who slipped backstage for a moment to play with a drum stand.
As a baby in her tick-tock swing, Emma was `my first audience,’ Matthews
said.

She recalled one thing a student had said to her: `Reading my poetry gives
me a another chance to feel real.’

At Mona Lisa Pasta, audience members were a little slow to arrive, but a
couple dozen soon settled in to listen to Forbes, who oversaw the creation
of two cookbooks for the Junior League of Norfolk/Virginia Beach.

There are three all-important factors in writing a cookbook, she said: Is it
readable? Does it teach you something new? And do the recipes work?

People want short, easy-to-understand lists of ingredients, with serving
instructions, substitutions and photos. Lots of photos.

But pictures get expensive, budding cookbook writer Karen Beaver fretted,
and few people get advances from publishers for their cooking manuals. `It’s
really hard to think of the money it takes to get it published.’

Still, she has hopes for publishing her Armenian cookbook one day, including
recipes from friends’ grandmothers and stories from the land.

>From the pasta store to New Dominion Book Shop, the aroma shifted from
garlic and tomatoes to the powdery scent of aging books.

British cellist Steven Isserlis, enunciating his words carefully, described
Wolfgang von Beethoven’s flat, with scattered furniture, half-eaten food,
coffee spilled inside his piano and `an unemptied chamber pot in plain
view.’

The bear-like composer got irritated in a restaurant one night and threw his
beef soup in the waiter’s face, prompting Isserlis’ title, `Why Beethoven
Threw the Stew: For Musical Youths.’

The gray-haired crowd was older than the writer’s targeted audience, but
most were headed across the Downtown Mall for Isserlis’ concert with the
Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival.

There was only a brief period between book signing and tuning up, leaving
the busy Isserlis, in his own words, `panicked.’

But not too panicked to reveal his next book’s title: `Why Handel Waggled
His Wig.’

Contact Kate Andrews at (434) 978-7261 or kandrews@dailyprogress.com.