guest speaker Mr. Martin Foster 8/13/09

9 present today.
Mary Dolberry, Cathy Palmer, MoonPie, Cheyenne Duncan, Paulette Moore, Leah Wilson, Martin Foster, Ray Edwards, Jack Willoughby.

This was a different sort of meeting today. Mr. Martin Foster came from Huntsville with copies of his book, Night Café, which he distributed and personalized for each person present. He also brought two hardcopy books of poetry that his father (also named Martin Foster) published titled Nature Poems. He asked for volunteers to read a poem of their choosing. MoonPie and Paulette Moore did so. MoonPie’s poem was “The Water Trough” and Paulette’s was “Dixie Born.”

We had readings of his short plays. This was unique as none of us had ever done anything like this! He said he had attended Eugene O’Neil workshops in the past in New Hampshire. To participate in these workshops, you wrote plays and read them before judges. Unfortunately, his were not picked as winners. But we felt as a group that they were professional and interesting.

He discussed why he wrote Night Café. It started out to be a play, and then ended up being a book. He mentioned three or four movies he watched to research Van Gogh. One was done by Kirk Douglas. He also visited many art museums to study Van Gogh’s paintings. As an illustrator for his book (both inside art and cover art) he got Don Howard, an illustrator for the Disney movie, The Lion King. This really added flavor to the book! Mr. Foster did not intend for his picture to be on the cover, but Mr. Howard worked it in, with many small details that were pointed out. He had shared parts of his book with another author. This person plagiarized parts of the manuscript that Mr. Foster generously let him look at.

The theme of Night Café was “the Hell of schizophrenia.”

Mr. Foster told us different rankings his book had on the Internet on Amazon and Swapfree. His book is selling quite well in the United Kingdom. He found his publisher, Llumina press on the Internet. He said a lot of people want to write books and will say they want to be published. However, only one out of ten of these people do succeed in becoming published authors.

MoonPie, Paulette, Ray, and Jack read parts in the plays. These were “Dixie rainbow”, and “A Reunion of the Blue and Grey.” These had never been read before in public.

Mr. Foster has written four plays for competition. These are titled, “Rattle,” “Spirit of St. Louis,”, “Hook or Crook,” and “Dr. R.”

Paulette Moore also volunteered to read the Don McClean song, “Starry Starry Night” which was about Van Gogh.