The Founding of the Book Woman Club

So a couple of people have asked me, "What is this Book Woman Club"?  The Book Woman Club started in 2005.  I sew cloth book marks and hand-write stories on the back of them. These bookmarks carry the stories of women that are a part of the Book Woman Club and they meet in my imagination!  The Club has some regular on-going members....woman that I created; earthy, book loving, and adventurous!  Some are artists, some have beautiful souls, some have dark pasts, some are a little crazy, some are intellectuals, some have no sense at all!  All of the regulars are little bits of me!  (You that know me, know that I am a true Gemini - many personalities and a little bit crazy!)  And so the stories of these regular on-going members have lively, adventurous tales to tell, and like me, they just love to read!  They share their lives, their personalities, their secrets, their dreams, their troubles and their joys.  Since 2005, I have sold probably 250 bookmarks and have recorded the fragments of these on-going stories in a log. It is from this log that I share the stories of the Book Woman Club on this blog!

Besides the women that come from my imagination, there are real woman who have been added to the club by a friend or by a loved one.  At every festival, I have blank Book Woman Club Bookmarks.  Women give me the outline of a real woman's life that they want to honor, and they go and shop.  When they come back, I have used the information from my interview with them, (combined with my imagination), to create a custom story.  The purchaser has the option of adding that women to the Book Woman.

The "Bessie Davis Hudson" is based on a real woman...a life shared with me at the New York State Fair by her daughter.  Mrs. Hudson's daughter was brought out to the Fair by a friend who had bought a Book Woman Club Bookmark from me at the Syracuse Peace Council Arts and Crafts Festival.  Mrs. Hudson's daughter and I, along with her friend, ended up taking over a tram station and closing it down for two hours, while Mrs Hudson's daughter told me about her mother.  Mrs. Hudson had died when her daughter was 12 years old.  The pain of that loss stood with us in the tram stop as fresh as the day that Mrs. Hudson had passed.

The story told to me that day was powerful.  Mrs. Hudson was a remarkable woman, filled with love for her family.  But - the story was too long for a small fragment on a bookmark.  So I made the daughter a quilt, her mother's hand reaching down from heaven holding a heart - holding her love and her pride at the woman that Mrs. Hudson's daughter had become.  I wrote a story about Bessie Davis Hudson on that quilt, taking the two hour story told to me that day at the State Fair and weaving it into a tribute to this mother.  I had the honor of telling the story to Mrs. Hudson's daughter in her home and in the presence of one of her sons.  And yes, Mrs. Hudson's daughter got her Book Woman Club Bookmark, a story fragment written on the back, and a promise to honor Bessie Davis Hudson as an ongoing member of the Book Woman Book Club.  She has become the club's founding member, where she lives everyday in my imagination and now - in yours!