What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
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Stephanie Storey Author of 'Raphael, Painter in Rome' Stephanie Storey grew up in Hot Springs and says she started writing when she was 7 "at my parents' kitchen table overlooking Lake Hamilton." That first book was titled "Horty the Hog Goes to School" — because, she says, there had to be a Razorback — and from that time on, she told everyone she wanted to be an author. Everyone told her it was a fine hobby, but she'd need a career. APRIL 19-25, 2020 WHAT'S UP! 9 Stephanie Storey is the author of "Raphael, Painter in Rome." (Courtesy Images) GO ONLINE! Stephanie Storey Buy "Raphael, Painter in Rome" wherever books are sold. Read more about Storey at stephaniestorey. com. See Books in Bloom Page 10 Kelly J. Ford is the author of "Cottonmouths." (Courtesy Images) GO ONLINE! Kelly Ford Buy "Cottonmouths" wherever books are sold. The paperback will be released in June. Read more about Ford at kellyjford.com. Kelly J. Ford 'Cottonmouths' Kelly Ford grew up around Fort Smith, went to high school in Cedarville, then college at the University of Central Arkansas, where she started in pre-med but "couldn't pass chemistry." "I ended up with a degree in English because I was a reader," she says, "but I didn't really have any thoughts about what I would do when I graduated. It was pretty much a blank for me. One of my friends said she was moving to Boston, and she asked me if I wanted to come. It was a free ride out of town, and I had nothing else going on." Ford says she's been "a 9-to-5'er pretty much my entire life." "When I graduated from UCA, they had given us a handout of jobs English majors could have — and I had crossed off everything." It took awhile to find her niche, but she's been an IT project manager for a little over 20 years now, and is "so grateful to have a day job that's reliable and consistent." She's also been writing since college, "played around" with screen writing and photography, was interested in animation, "until I finally landed on novel writing." "'Cottonmouths,' which came out in 2017, is about a college dropout who returns to her hometown and reconnects with a woman she loved as a teenager, only to become entangled in a backwoods drug operation," Ford says. Ford explains she was going through a breakup and was visiting some friends in Conway when they started talking about how a lot of the town had been being ravaged by meth. "It was new and kind of shocking, but I also knew people who had had issues with substance abuse and alcohol abuse and been involved with meth, so the elements kind of coalesced into 'Cottonmouths.' The written record says it took about 11 to 13 years for this book to come to light, and only about 1% of the first draft ended up in the final copy. It's never a straight path. There's always lots of revisions." Ford is currently working on a novel about a group of friends in Arkansas who were involved in the disappearance of a man when they were in their teens and their efforts not to be implicated as adults. Storey had also illustrated "Horty the Hog," so going to Vanderbilt University to study art history and studio art made sense. Primarily a painter while she was in college, she spent a semester at the University of Pisa in Italy where she "met a guy named Michelangelo." She was obsessed and wanted to know everything about his life, but her first novel, "Oil and Marble: A Novel of Leonardo and Michelangelo," was still some years down the road. During that time, she was a television producer in Los Angeles for big names including Alec Baldwin and Arsenio Hall, along with the Emmy-nominated "The Writers' Room" on the Sundance Channel. It took a health scare in 2011 to send Storey back to her writing desk seriously. "I had one of those moments when you realize life is short, and if life is short, and we don't get as much time as I was under the impression we did, I'd better do what I wanted to do," she says. "Oil and Water" was published in 2016, "Raphael" earlier this year. "Overall, the reason I write what I write about these world-changing artists is that too often we put these artists up on pedestals, they're untouchable geniuses, removed from us," she says. "I am determined to make them human, to take them off of those pedestals, to show they faced the same struggles, the same self- doubt, and overcame enormous obstacles, just like you and I. "Raphael became an orphan at 11. He died alone when he was 37. He could have been overcome by sadness and loneliness and anxiety, but instead he was consumed by beauty and made it his mission to paint the world the way it should be. And that right now is what's important about that book, that Raphael never stopped trying to bend the world toward beauty."