Margo Hammond

[November 5th, 2008]

You really should read: Between the Covers: The Book Babes’ Guide to a Woman’s Reading Pleasures

Lit critics Ellen Heltzel and Margo Hammond (from St. Petersburg, Fla., and Portland, respectively) founded a long-distance friendship based on reading books, writing about books, and writing about reading. In 2002, the pair finally teamed up professionally, calling themselves (only half-seriously) the Book Babes. Their stories and columns encourage readers to reimagine their relationships with books; the inventive, genre-defying lists in Between the Covers attempt to catalog the broad interests of real women. TONY PIFF. 1 pm Saturday, Nov 8. McMenamins Stage.

What’s your personal writing ritual?
Three words: coffee, coffee, coffee.

What are your favorite themes to write about?
Books are better than Botox.

The most beautiful word in the English language is:
Book Babes. Oops, that’s two words. Sorry.

What authors made you want to pick up a pen in the first place and why? Or name an inspiring, amazing piece of work.
Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, a clever rumination on storytelling and the many different ways a writer can choose to write that stars you, the reader.

Fight Club time: If you could fight one author (or critic), who would it be and why?
Stephen Colbert: I’d like to see if I could keep up with his razor-sharp wit.

Name a book that you think is highly overrated. Be honest.
Moby-Dick: If ever a book needed an editor, this is it.

Dream project:
Collaborating with Garrison Keillor on a book about the 10 Most Important Midwestern Authors of All Time.

Most recent nightmare:
The President of the United States admits he doesn’t like to read.

Your cure for writer’s block:
Three words: coffee, coffee, coffee.

Pessimistic question: Will you keep writing even after people stop reading?
Bite your tongue. People will never stop reading.

Optimistic question: Kittens? Discuss.
Kittens grow up to be cats, one of the most complicated creatures on earth, so don’t underestimate the power of sentimentality.

Please paste a short paragraph from a story, poem, article, blog post, etc., you’re currently working on below:
BLOG FOR POWELL’S BOOKS WEBSITE: Don’t knock movies as a way to get people to pick up a book. Edith Wharton made a comeback as a bestselling novelist 72 years after she won the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence, when Martin Scorsese made a film based on the novel. Hollywood has always mined books for story ideas, but it used to be that only bad books made good movies. Now great movies are being based not only on classics like Wharton’s but also contemporary literary fiction, from Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. And inevitably these movies send viewers back to read the book. In other words, associating reading with a pleasurable activity like movie-watching can lead to more reading.