Official Web Site of Laura Treacy Bentley

Edwina Pendarvis and Christina St. Clair, gifted writers and co-authors of Between Two Worlds: A Biography of Pearl S. Buck (translated by Berlin Fang), stand near the home where Pearl Buck was born in Hillsboro, West Virginia.

Buck won the Pulitzer for her novel,The Good Earth, and the Nobel Prize in Literature. This captivating new biography has just been published in Shanghai, China in both English and Chinese.

Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press

http://www.sflep.com/

We're so lucky to have Eddy and Christina standing by for the next couple of days to answer your questions about them and their new book.   Ask away!!

~SEVEN THINGS YOU PROBABLY DON'T KNOW ABOUT ME~

                     Eddy Pendarvis   

1. One of my most treasured souvenirs is a holly leaf from the garden of the cottage where Thomas Hardy was born.

2. I witnessed a murder when I was six months old—my mother’s mother was shot by a man who had gone crazy because his wife had left him.

3. One of my roommates kicked Jack Kerouac out of a party at our house.

4. My favorite “eating alone” food is spoonfuls of peanut butter and marshmallow cream out of the jars.

5. I learned how to read from comic books (Little Lulu is still my favorite).

6. One of my fondest memories from college is sitting with two or three friends on top of a dragline, talking all night—we did this fairly often; there was a lot of construction near the university. It was in Florida, and the pine trees with Spanish moss made beautiful silhouettes against the night sky.

7. When I was lucky enough to spend a week in China, I was surprised to find that I felt really relaxed and at home there (and I hardly ever feel relaxed and at home). This was in the mid-1990’s and the outskirts of Beijing still seemed “countryish,” with wide streets and the only outside lights being those 1940s-looking strings of colored Christmas-tree lights.

Born in Floyd County, Kentucky, Edwina (Eddy) Pendarvis lived in coal country in eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia until her family moved to Disney country in Florida. Back home again by the time she was thirty, she earned her doctoral degree from the University of Kentucky and then taught at Marshall University for almost thirty years. Her most recent poetry collection is Like the Mountains of China, and her most recent prose collection is Raft Tide and Railroad, a family memoir, mostly about her uncle, Donald Johnson, a “coal baron” and breeder of thoroughbred race horses. Both of these books are available from Blair Mountain Press http://www.blairmtp.com/www.blairmtp.com/Welcome.html.

Eddy has co-authored several books on education; and in addition to the Pearl Buck biography, co-authored with Christina St. Clair, she’s written biographies of William Faulkner and Jean-Paul Sartre, published in dual-language editions by the Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press. Eddy is currently shirking responsibility by reading science fiction novels about the colonization of Mars.    

~SEVEN THINGS YOU PROBABLY DON'T KNOW ABOUT ME~

Christina St. Clair

1. I was born at home and named after Christina, the neighbor who helped my mother deliver me.

2. When I was ten, I often rode my bicycle on a busy road to a horse stables in London where I mucked out the stalls.

3. I left home when I was fifteen to live in a bedsit near Honor Oak in London.

4. When I was sixteen, I sold American newspapers in Pigalle, a racy suburb in Paris, home of the Moulin Rouge.

5. I used to gallop my mare, Baby Doll, amongst white-tailed deer in fields bursting with Queen Anne’s lace.

6. I once rescued a black snake that was badly tangled in deer netting by cutting away the nylon strands that were choking it.

7. I used to have a labyrinth in my backyard that I built from bamboo poles and twine.

Christina St. Clair has been a shop girl, a chemist, a pastor, and an au-pair girl. She moved to Kentucky in 1996 to pursue her dream of becoming a published writer. Since arriving in Kentucky, along with getting degrees in philosophy, spirituality and women’s studies, she has won an award for young adult fiction and has won several writers’ retreats. She has published essays, articles and fiction. 

Visit Christina's website at http://dawsoncreekpress.com/christina_st_clair