Pat Ballard, the Queen of Rubenesque Romances, guested on the Health At Every Size Radio show with Dr. Peggy Elam this morning. She spoke about her fall 2008 experiences with gallbladder surgery, and how people of size can help ensure they receive good medical care.
Listen to and/or download the mp3 recording of the show here. (Right click on the link and "save as" to download.)
Pat Ballard has an article in the February 2008 issue of The Nashville Edition, the newsletter of the Nashville, TN chapter of the Women's National Book Association.
A sample:
For some of us, reality sets in and we find ourselves putting our dreams on the back burners of life in order to...well, to live. Raising our children, working at jobs we may or may not like, paying for the house, the car, college for the kids, and whatever else may show up at any given time.
But if those dreams have refused to go away, if they keep nagging at us, then maybe we need to take them out and re-examine them.
It has been my experience that ignored dreams turn into ignored needs. These disregarded needs, no matter how vague, can turn into unhappiness, discontentment, and an unfulfilled emptiness. They can lead to different levels of volatile unrest until a person can be miserable in the life they're leading because they're not furnishing an outlet for those needs.
You can access a PDF of the newsletter here. Scroll to page 7 for Ballard's article.
Pat Ballard's letter to the editor of the Nashville Tennessean was published today and deemed a "three-star" letter. Ballard wrote the letter in response to a Jan. 21 article about an Annandale, VA minister who put his congregation on a diet last year and is now a weight-loss guru.
Ballard wrote:
We're bombarded daily with the "obesity epidemic" rhetoric from every direction, but nothing infuriates me more than when a so-called "man (or woman) of God" take it upon himself to become a "diet guru," as in the article "Bod4God minister and author helps the faithful shed pounds," Jan. 21.
These people take scriptures out of context and try to indicate that they mean our bodies need to be a certain size before we can be acceptable to God, when the scripture plainly says that God looks on the inward man, not the outward man.
The word fat occurs 130 times in 105 verses in the King James Version, and not once does it say that being fat is a sin. In fact, you'll find quite the opposite, but I won't get into that.
So to tell me that my body can't "Glorify God" because it's a certain size offends me and the scripture says in Mat 18:6: "But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and (that) he were drowned in the depth of the sea."
The authors of three-star letters receive a small payment and are invited to an annual banquet hosted by the newspaper in their honor.
Ballard, the Queen of Rubenesque Romances, is author of several books featuring "big beautiful heroines:" Dangerous Curves Ahead: Short Stories, Wanted: One Groom, Nobody's Perfect, His Brother's Child, A Worthy Heir, Abigail's Revenge and The Best Man. Her first nonfiction book, 10 Steps to Loving Your Body (No Matter What Size You Are) will be published by Pearlsong Press later this year.
The December 2007 issue of Pat Ballard's e-newsletter, The Queen's Proclamation, has been published. Read it here.
Past issues of the Queen of Rubenesque Romance's newsletter can be accessed in the newsletter archives at the Pearlsong Press website.
Enjoy!
Lisa Klobucar interviews Pat Ballard, Queen of Rubenesque Romances, in Elegant Plus magazine.
A sample of the Q & A:
EP: The lead female characters in Abigail's Revenge and A Worthy Heir are Plus-size women who face personal and emotional obstacles by other characters within the book due to their size. Do you feel that larger women are treated in a similar fashion say within the workplace, their homes, or in general by society overall?
PB: Yes. I use these other characters in my books to bring out the issues that larger women face. I always have the "opposition" character that I use as the mouthpiece of what we hear and have to deal with every day in our society.
EP: Your books have an underlying tone of self-acceptance and even on your website you have "10 Steps to Loving Your Body." Do you feel that in today's thin-centric society it is important for women of any size to wave their self acceptance banners and proclaim "I like who I am?"
PB: In two of my books, Nobody's Perfect and A Worthy Heir, my heroines come into the story as self-confident women. There's a lot of "me" in those heroines. In three of my books, His Brother's Child, Wanted: One Groom and Abigail's Revenge, I've brought the heroines into the story not quite as confident. The reason I did this is because I wanted to address some of the issues that most of us have had to deal with, or are still dealing with when it comes to self-acceptance. But what I try to accomplish at the end of my books is to have all my heroines, and hopefully the reader, feeling so good about themselves that they want to walk out into the street and shout, "Hey world! I like me just the way I am!" No matter what size they are. My goal is to remind all women....of any and every size that we're okay just the way we are.
Read the entire interview here.
The September 2007 issue of The Queen's Proclamation, the newsletter of Pat Ballard, the Queen of Rubenesque Romances, is now available online.
You can read current and past issues of the newsletter online in the Pearlsong Press newsletter archives.
Enjoy!
Nashville's Tennessean newspaper has published a letter to the editor from Pat Ballard commenting on a news report that Tennessee is the "fifth-fattest state."
The article Aug. 28, "Inactive residents anchor Tennessee as fifth-fattest state" by Claudia Pinto, is just another ripple in the tidal wave of fat-phobic hysteria that we're being drowned in.
So we have the "Fat because we're inactive," the "Fat is Contagious," the "Fat is caused by a virus," the "Fat is raising our insurance rates," and the ever popular "Fat causes 300,000 to 400,000 deaths a year," as quoted by "assistant professor of medicine" Dr. Kevin Niswender.
Surely the "assistant professor of medicine" must know that as of April 2005, the Centers for Disease Control has had to retract their "400,000 deaths a year attributed to poor diet and inactivity" figure to 112,000, and surely he would know these figures were printed in the Journal of the American Medical Association. But 400,000 deaths sounds much more frightening, doesn't it? And scare tactics gets us on diets.
The article states that Tennesseans have gotten fatter since 2004. Probably. That's what dieting does. It makes us fatter. The National Institutes of Health (a government run organization) and other studies show that 98 percent of people who lose weight gain it back within five years. And 90 percent of those gain back more weight than they lost.
So, each time we're slammed with a wave of hysteria, we go on diets. Then we gain it back and more to go with it. Yes, we're probably getter fatter. And it's the government's fault.
Ballard, the Queen of Rubenesque Romances, is the author of 6 romance novels and a short story collection, all published by Pearlsong Press: Wanted: One Groom, Nobody's Perfect, His Brother's Child, A Worthy Heir, Abigail's Revenge, The Best Man, and Dangerous Curves Ahead: Short Stories.
The lead story in the August 17-23, 2007 issue of One Paper of West Nashville is a feature on Pearlsong Press, author Pat Ballard, and Peggy Elam.
Click here for a PDF of the scanned article. The full text is below.
Books to enlarge the spirit
by Paul Erland
When writer Pat Ballard and publisher Peggy Elam met and formed a working relationship, they found what every heroine in every romance novel longs to find: a match made in heaven.
Elam is founder and president of Pearlsong Press, an independent publishing company devoted to enlarging readers' perspectives; Ballard is an author with a wide perspective, so to speak, and large and lovely heroines. Pearlsong has published seven of Ballard's books of romance fiction featuring females at peace with their pulchritude. There is an eighth book under contract, a work of nonfiction.
Ballard was the first author Elam published. The ladies met after Elam, a licensed psychologist and a writer herself, wrote to Ballard to commend her for a letter to the editor she'd written about the bashing of fat people. Elam was starting a Health at Every Size support group in Nashville; she invited Ballard, who came, and the two were able to talk -- a lot, as one one other person ever came to the meetings.
Ballard, who grew up in Mississippi, was a plump and happy child until the age of 11, when she picked up a women's magazine that informed her that she was far from the feminine ideal. She embarked on the long and tortuous road of dieting accompanied by eating disorders. At the age of 33, having weathered anorexia and bulimia -- "I had the willpower to starve myself to death," she says -- she finally found the strength, with the help of her husband and son, to love the body God gave her.
As the scales fell from her eyes, she gained confidence, and she saw that others looked at her differently. She gained perspective. When she sat down to write -- something she'd always loved to do -- she brought that perspective to the romance genre, hardly a hotbed of hefty heroines.
"I wanted to write books to inspire people," she says. She wrote four, self-publishing them all, with Big Beautiful Heroines as protagonists -- heroines who would never go on a diet just to get a man but would get the man nevertheless. She met Elam, who wanted to get into publishing, to promote the philosophy of Health at Every Size, and the rest, as they say, is herstory.
Elam, with a bachelor's degree in journalism and English and an M.S. and Ph.D. from Vandy, envisioned Pearlsong Press as the culmination and crowning touch of everything she'd done. In her multifaceted career she'd been a journalist and a poet, appeared on TV and spoken on radio, worked with people with eating disorders, and set out to be a healer and psychotherapist. "Pearlsong" is a name that came to her in a meditation, and it nicely brought into harmony a number of themes: The Pearl River runs through the part of Mississippi where she was born; the pearl is her birthstone; Pearl is a nickname for Peggy; and the pearl is a lustrous gemstone created out of strife. As the oyster heals itself, a pearl is formed -- something to sing about.
Pearlsong republished Ballard's four existing novels, all in 2004, as well as a collection of unpublished short stories, Dangerous Curves Ahead. The novel Wanted: One Groom (set in Nashville) was followed by Nobody's Perfect, His Brother's Child, A Worthy Heir, Abigail's Revenge (a romantic suspense novel) and The Best Man. All the books are available through online booksellers, through various bookstores and through Pearlsong Press. Elam handles editing, layout and design, formatting and the thousand-and-one other details involved in getting manuscripts ready for print, as well as post-publication promotions. The books are produced by Lightning Source, a print-on-demand service.
"We're environmentally friendly," Elam says. Her company is also diversity-friendly, publishing works and offering products that celebrate the beautiful array of body types and sizes -- that encompass the whole of humanity. Pearlsong Press has published seven authors (and has two more under contract), including Pattie Thomas (Taking Up Space, "a road map through the minefield of the 'war on obesity'"), Jack Adler (Splendid Seniors), Judy Bagshaw, who also writes about plus-sized heroines, and the dimunitive (4 foot, 8 1/2 inches) Ellen Frankel (Beyond Measure, a memoir of climbing Mt. Everest and discovering something about herself).
Ballard, a member of the Romance Writers of America, has become known as the "Queen of Rubenesque Romances." She does trade shows and speaking engagements to promote her books, which have sold steadily since 2000, and her message, which is that a woman can be large and sexy. Her next book will be called 10 Steps to Loving Your Body. Commandment number 9 on that maxi-manifesto is "Stop apologizing for your size."
Working in the realm of romance may be the best way to spread the word; about 50 percent of all fiction sales in the U.S. are romance novels. College-educated women make up the largest percentage of readers. And by letting her readers know that they've got nothing to be ashamed about in regard to their bodies, Ballard is simply following a time-honored maxim -- the one that says literature can be very broadening.
A text box at the end of the article says:
The books of Pat Ballard are available at online booksellers such as www.amazon.com, www.borders.com and www.powells.com, as well as at www.pearlsong.com -- order from the latter and you'll receive an autographed copy. They are in stock at Borders in Brentwood. For more information about Pearlsong Press, visit www.pearlsong.com
The June 2007 issue of The Queen's Proclamation, the e-newsletter of Pat Ballard, the Queen of Rubenesque Romances, has been published and is available online at http://www.pearlsong.com/proclamation/proclamation2007/proclamationjune2007.htm.
You can also access current and past issues of The QP at the Pearlsong Press newsletter archives: http://www.pearlsong.com/newsletterarchives.htm.
Enjoy!
The WorldCat.org website lists some of the libraries in the U.S. with Pat Ballard books in their collections:
A Worthy Heir: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/69671381
His Brother's Child: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/69671428
Abigail's Revenge: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/64427962 and http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/64427962
Wanted: One Groom: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/48210463 and http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/57625617
Dangerous Curves Ahead: Short Stories: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/56946853
Nobody's Perfect: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/57565279
Charlie Lovett: The Program
A new weight loss clinic in New York City has an offer for you -- given them $5,000 and they'll make you as thin as a supermodel. You can eat whatever you want and never gain an ounce. Tempted? Fledgling journalist Karen Sumner would be -- if only she had $5,000. When Karen finally walks through the blue and gold doors of The Program, however, she's on the trail of the hottest story of her career. If she and her friends are right, The Program is doing something even worse than creating an army of unnaturally thin women. Library Journal calls The Program "a lively first novel. Highly recommended."
Linda C Wisniewski: Off Kilter: A Woman's Journey to Peace with Scoliosis, Her Mother, and Her Polish Heritage
Even before she was diagnosed with scoliosis at 13, Linda Wisniewski felt off kilter. Born to a cruel father in the insulated Polish Catholic community of Amsterdam, New York, she learned martyrdom as a way of life. Off Kilter shows her learning to stretch her Self as well as her spine as she comes to terms with her mentally deteriorating, widowed mother and her culture. Only by accepting her physical deformity, her emotionally unavailable mother, and her Polish American heritage does she finally find balance and a life that fits. Maureen Murdock, author of Unreliable Truth: On Memoir & Memory, calls Off Kilter "a courageous, insightful book, particularly relevant for anyone who grew up feeling physically 'different.'"
Pat, Ballard: The Best Man
Sparks fly the night Lana Clarke meets to plan her sister's wedding -- and not just because curvaceous Lana announces she's stopped dieting and doesn't care if she's fat as maid of honor. The strong-willed sister of the bride attracts the attention of the groom's devastatingly handsome best man, Anthony Angelino. But when the sparks become flames, Lana's in trouble. Tony's first wife died mysteriously. Will Lana be next?
Judy Bagshaw: At Long Last, Love
Big beautiful --and in some cases slightly more mature -- heroines grace the pages of this collection of romantic short stories by Judy Bagshaw.
Jack Adler: Splendid Seniors
An inspiring ensemble of 52 people whose accomplishments after age 65 remind us that creativity, passion & influence can not only flower in later years, but bear delicious fruit.
Mary Saracino: The Singing of Swans
"The Singing of Swans is a remarkable narrative calling--even compelling--us to connect with our own ancestral roots, to seek our own inner wisdom, and to reclaim our own inner voices!" --Margaret Starbird, author of The Woman With the Alabaster Jar & Mary Magdalene: Bride in Exile
Ellen Frankel: Beyond Measure: A Memoir About Short Stature and Inner Growth
"If you have ever measured your height or your weight and felt good or bad about yourself as a result, you need this book. In its pages, Ellen Frankel makes an important contribution to human liberation by telling the most fabulous story that can be told, the story of a person coming fully into her own. This book is thought-provoking, heart-rending, and a genuine solace for people of all sizes." --Marilyn Wann, author of FAT!SO?
Pat Ballard: Abigail's Revenge
Injustice, romance and suspense smolder in a small Southern town. Romantic suspense from the Queen of Rubenesque Romances, Pat Ballard.
Pattie Thomas, Ph.D.: Taking Up Space
"Thomas's incisive blend of sociological inquiry and personal narrative amounts to a provocative treatise on fat oppression in our culture. Taking Up Space is a kind of roadmap through the minefield of the 'war on obesity,' and it offers protection to the reader ready to fight for cultural change surrounding the meaning of fatness." --Kathleen LeBesco, Ph.D., author of Revotling Bodies: The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity.
Anne Richardson Williams: Unconventional Means: The Dream Down Under
Shattered by family tragedy in the early 1960s, an upper-middle-class Southern teenager finds solace in art and literature. Decades later she is called to the continent whose literature once comforted her, and to a magical connection with an Aboriginal woman transcending race and half a world.
Pat Ballard: A Worthy Heir
When Pam Spencer sees the newspaper ad seeking "a worthy heir" to Fiona Bainbridge's millions, she jumps at the chance to get her brother the medical care he needs after a job-related accident. But Reese Bainbridge, Fiona's handsome grandson--and jilted heir--rushes home in anger when he hears his grandmother has moved Pam and her brother into the family mansion. Sparks fly--and Pam is up to the challenge.
Pat Ballard: His Brother's Child
One party, one silver-tongued, double-talking stranger intent on winning a bet, and Faith Carr ends up betrayed, alone, and pregnant. When Edward Brenner shows up on her doorstep intending to right his brother's wrongs, she's scared and vulnerable. But she agrees to marry this stranger to give the baby a father, although keeping him at a distance. She doesn't realize that Edward fell in love with her the moment he saw her. Will her battered self-esteem allow her to see the truth--and her own beauty?
Pat Ballard: Wanted: One Groom
Wealthy Hanna Rockwell will lose her home and her inheritance unless she marries by her 30th birthday. She's stunned when Matt Corbett, the faded rock start she worshipped in her teens, accepts her brother's offer to bail him out of financial trouble if he'll marry her. Her teenaged fantasies come to life--bringing a few surprises with them.
Pat Ballard: Nobody's Perfect
Nella Covington can't believe she's agreed to marry arrogant Samuel du Cannon, even if it IS only a marriage of convenience. He needs a mother for his young son, and she needs to keep her childhood home. If Sam's work keeps him on the road enough, she won't have to deal with him much. Sam's never been attracted to plus-size women, so they won't be tempted to have a real relationship. At least, that's what they keep telling themselves--
Pat Ballard: Dangerous Curves Ahead: Short Stories
Ten romantic tales pack suspense and sizzle into this collection of short stories featuring amply curved women.
