A Portrait Of The Author As A Young Woman

This spring, here at Chez Gauthier, we reorganized and cleared out some old photo albums. We came upon a picture that I would have loved to have used as an author photo at some point. Unfortunately, it was taken about five years before my first short story was published and somewhere in the area of twenty-plus years before my first book was published.

I suspect I didn't like this picture at the time it was taken. I often find I now like pictures of myself that I know I disliked years ago. In this case, in addition to looking young, which I appreciate above all else in photos of myself, I think I look booky and thoughtful, as if I'd just come from an author reading, one of those kinds that just go on and on, or a graduate school lit class. Maybe I just got home after sipping a little Chardonnay with some writers.

Those are all things I rarely do, by the way, except for, these days, drinking Chardonnay. So I guess it would be great if in a picture I could look as if I'd just done those things instead of looking as if I'd just watched part of a TV mini-series or read a back issue of Newsweek, something I may have actually been doing in this one.

We also found this picture of me working in the second bedroom of our first apartment. What is amazing about this picture is I work in this same kind of clutter now. And, because I cook a great deal and our kitchen and office are on different floors, I have set up a small work station like this in a spare bedroom in the house we're living in now so I am always close to a stove and a desk.

I actually had a flannel shirt on this morning.

I'm not sure what this second picture means.

How Do We Feel About Another Author's Photo Showing Up On Our Work?

 An Author Photo Mix-up

Several years ago (just a little over four, to be exact), I read Why Is Someone Else In My Book's Author Photo? by Caroline Leavitt at Salon. In it, Leavitt writes about finding out that the Chinese edition of her book, Girls in Trouble, carried another author's photograph. She found it "discomfiting" and said of herself, "I mourn."

Now, I have learned only a handful of things in my lifetime, but one of them is that I just can't predict how I will respond to any experience. Would I feel that "an author’s photo is the reader-writer connection...It’s a public acknowledgment that a real person — me! — spent four years agonizing and obsessing over the story"? Would I mourn?

My Own Author Photo Issue

Rosemary and Olive Oil, my short story that was published at Alimentum, does, indeed, include someone else's photograph with the author info. Oddly enough, she looks a little bit like Caroline Leavitt.

How upset am I about this?  I probably noticed it three or four months or so ago. I just got around last night to writing an e-mail to the Alimentum editor to see if the picture can be replaced with one of mine. I'm not going to send it for a few days so my OC readers can enjoy checking out the story and the mystery photo. So, no, it doesn't seem to be bothering me that much, and I'm happy to get a blog post out of the situation.

Why Am I Not In Despair Over This Misplaced Author Photo?

Rosemary and Olive Oil was my first published short story for adults, so it was a very big deal for me. To date, it is still my only published short story for adults, so it is still a very big deal for me.  I had to rework it a number of times. I've submitted many short stories over and over again, but Rosemary and Olive Oil went to the third publication I submitted it to. I put this down not to the splendor of the story but to having stumbled upon the perfect place for it. Alimentum is a journal of the literature of food, and Rosemary and Olive Oil is, indeed, a short story about food. Finding the perfect home for a piece of writing is difficult and, sometimes, as in this case, kind of magical.

I think this is running off my back for two reasons:

1. It didn't happen at the time of publication. My recollection is that Alimentum had just shifted from a print to on-line format when Rosemary and Olive was published. I don't believe it was using author photos with the bios at that point. I most certainly would have felt differently if this had happened with my shiny new story.
2. I'm a bit of an in-this-moment kind of writer. I tend to be involved with what I'm working on now and not that intent on what I did in the past. When speaking with reporters while promoting new books, I can recall them asking if I was excited about the publication we were discussing. I'd have to say, "Ah, I've pretty much moved on to the next book." Rosemary and Olive Oil was published more than two years ago. Yeah, this author photo thing is interesting and I'm going to address it, but I'm far more concerned with the nine chapters I'm revising of my work-in-progress so I can go on to Chapter Ten and, some day, an ending.

I'll be sending that e-mail to Alimentum's editor in a few days, and I'll let you know what happens. If I think of it. If I'm not tied up with something else.