On March 21, 2008, as I was leaving Forbes Library in Northampton, MA, I noticed what looked like a bag of popcorn in a cake holder at the check-out desk. Next to it were flyers advertising a fund raiser; a handout entitled “The Friends Edible Book Event Guidelines” said “your edible book is your interpretation of a book you find of interest.” Entries “must be 100% edible and preferably fresh!” The popcorn bag was an interpretation of Tomie dePaola’s The Popcorn Book, a cake and covered with red and white striped fondant with real popcorn overflowing the bag.

The idea of an Edible Book was intriguing, so I took an application. After showing it to my partner Scott, we decided to create our own edible book. After batting around ideas, we settled on gingerbread cookies in the shape of birds in homage to Audubon’s Birds of America. Our entry garnered two awards: ‘Outstanding Sculpture,’ and ‘Most Likely to Pass for Sculpture in Our Living Rooms.’ 

Edible books have been around formally at least since the turn of the millennium, when co-founder Judith Holmberg of Santa Monica, CA got the idea during a 1999 Thanksgiving dinner with book artists. The festival honors French gastronome Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826), famous for his book, The Physiology of Taste. Since 2000, Edible Book events have been held in Australia, Brazil, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, and Russia. The organizers are generally art centers, academic institutions, restaurants, and book arts spaces, and sometimes libraries. More info about the international event can be found at the books2eat website.

Here in Northampton anyone can create an edible book: kids, adults or any combination. Attendees (who don’t have to be creators) get to admire the entries, and judges come up with clever awards for each. Then everyone chows down and eats the ‘books’! Past entries and awards have included a Catcher in the Rye made out of vegetables, dip and rye bread [‘Best Veggie Pun’]; Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham made of green eggs and ham [‘The Al Gore “Let’s Be Green Award”’]; a Very Hungry Caterpillar fashioned from cupcakes; and "How to eat a poem" in which the words of the poem were inscribed on refrigerator magnets made of chocolate wafers covered with white icing [‘Most Metaphorically Layered’]. You can see photos of past entries at the Edible Book Northampton Facebook page.

This year I created an edible Friends of Dorothy and enlisted the help of Scott McDaniel, my collaborator on Birds of America. We used images of Dorothy’s companions from my title page. They were made out of fondant decorated with black food color markers. The title cookies were based on the shiny green letters on the cover that look like an Emerald City. I made gingerbread with honey instead of molasses and with green food coloring, sprinkled with green shiny sugar sparkles. They were set on a jelly roll sponge cake, to represent a page in a book. Our Friends of Dorothy was awarded ‘The Follow the Rainbow Brick Road Award.’ Most of the title was consumed at the event, but a week later, I still have a fair amount of sponge cake and much of the three companions. The cake may end up in tiramisu.

This past August, I did my first book tour. The International Wizard of Oz Club was holding its annual convention in Pomona, which is about an hour east of LA. I was on the program to talk about my book, and also had a special book signing slot in the dealers room. My friend, retired librarian Steve Klein, put me in touch with the West Hollywood branch of the Los Angeles County Public Library, and we scheduled a reading. Palm Springs was hosting a ComicCon, and the Prism Comics folks who support queer fans and creators invited me to join them at their table. I now had three venues: the OzCon at Cal Poly in Pomona, West Hollywood Library and ComicCon at the Palm Springs Air Museum. This lead to an almost 3-week trip to Southern California, flying in to LA on Aug. 8 and out of Palm Springs on Aug. 27. 

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I got a rental car at the LA airport and spent the afternoon of Wed Aug. 8 with my cousin Margot Parker, who was delighted to learn about my reading in West Hollywood. Then stayed overnight with my friend David Chun in Santa Monica, who put out his copy of my book for me to sign.

POMONA
Drove to Pomona on Thursday and checked in at the Kellogg West Conference Center at Cal Poly. Oz Club Board member Gina Wickwar couldn’t attend and was greatly missed. Angelica Carpenter, another Oz Club friend, suggested I donate a book to Gina and Angelica would have all the Board members sign it. So I dropped into the Board meeting to offer a book. 

​Angelica has written books about L. Frank Baum, his mother-in-law Matilda Gage, and about other authors of kids books, and we had arranged to share the rental of a table in Baum’s Bazaar (aka the Dealers Room). I spent most of Thurs afternoon making the table look pretty. Friday afternoon I gave a talk about the implications of my research for Oz and for the real world. I was in a big auditorium, and there was a medium-sized crowd, including a smiling Steve Klein who came out from Long Beach just to hear me. Lots of laughter in appropriate places and many good questions after

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I was back in LA from Mon Aug 12 to Thurs Aug 23. I saw cousins and old friends from high school and college, bought show tune recordings at several used record stores, and went country dancing and inside roller skating. When I explained I was in Southern California on a book tour for FRIENDS OF DOROTHY, many folks expressed interest in my book and I got to give them shiny marketing cards.

​4) The TABLE OF CONTENTS (second page after cover) has most chapters, appendixes and sections highlighted and you can jump directly those.
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​I am the author of a new book, “Friends of Dorothy: Why Gay Boys and Gay Men Love The Wizard of Oz.”

Researching, writing and getting this book out there has been a long process (twenty years!), but things have accelerated in the last few weeks. As a first time author, I thought readers might be interested in the process of writing, publishing and marketing my first book. As well as reflecting on the past, I will be talking about what is happening currently with the book: readings and other special events.

So, what is the story with Oz and gay men? It’s not simply a matter, as many people assume, of gay men being into Judy Garland. I have interviewed over 100 gay Oz fans and it turns out gay men are also fans of the Oz books, as well as Wicked and The Wiz. Also my respondents became fans when they were as young as 3 or 4 or 5 years old. Even if their first exposure to Oz was the MGM film with Judy Garland, they were not signing on to fandom because they gave heard that Judy is a gay icon, or that they themselves were aware of being gay. Something is going on at a much deeper level. Themes of all sorts in stories set in Oz resonate with young gay boys. “Friends of Dorothy” details the existence of the Oz-gay connection, presents responses of individual fans to Oz stories, and then puts the phenomenon of gay love of Oz into a broader social and cultural context.

Stay tuned and I look forward to your responses here!