Author Karen Karbo launched her trilogy of books on “kick-ass women” with actress Katharine Hepburn, following that with one on fashion designer Coco Chanel. But when the time came for the final volume, Karbo says it took her a bit more contemplation to settle on her subject.
“It couldn’t be that they were just these wonderful, iconic women, they had to be meaningful to me,” says Karbo, who spent part of her childhood in Orange County and now lives in Portland, Ore.
“And so Georgia O’Keeffe, her red poppy poster, that was my first grown-up poster,” she says, describing the moment she first started to think of the legendary American artist as a possibility. “Like it was not Led Zeppelin – ‘Oh, it’s décor!’ And I had it in my dorm room and I had in my apartment and it moved with me to so many places that there was no longer any place to put the thumbtacks in the corners.”
O’Keeffe had struggled to find her place in the world well into her 20s. Karbo felt a kinship there with her own life and the way in which the O’Keeffe poster had followed her through her early adulthood. The result eventually became “How Georgia Became O’Keeffe: Lessons on the Art of Living,” which brings Karbo to Orange County on Tuesday to speak alongside author Merrill Markoe at the Pen on Fire literary salon in Corona del Mar.
The book, as with its two predecessors, is what Karbo calls “biography you can use,” referring to the way it weaves together moments in O’Keeffe’s life to provide lessons on life for readers today.
“It’s a biography that speaks to the things that are important to me about her,” Karbo says. “And of course that necessitates telling some stories about her life. The book does kind of progress through life from beginning to end, and I tried to look at what we could learn by the decisions she made during that period in her life.”
Chapters are titled on themes that Karbo sees in different parts of O’Keeffe’s live: Defy, Grow, Adopt, and so on. She breaks down O’Keefe’s life in that way and concludes many chapters with a touch of advice for how you, the reader, might learn from the artist’s own journey.
“She took a job in South Carolina and she said, ‘I am here at the tail end of the world,’” Karbo says, offering an example of how O’Keefe’s thirst for a well-lived life might inform or inspire your own. “And she was vastly unhappy. But she said to figure out what she needed she needed to be there, and I think for us to know what our vision is, what we need to be, you need to be there.”
And while the technology of today that binds us together and eliminates much of the isolation O’Keeffe felt in that part of her life might seem to have eliminated the very idea of “the tail end of the world,” Karbo says what she hopes you get from that part of the book is that disconnecting a little bit from the hectic pace of modern life might give you room to find your own spark of inspiration.
The Pen on Fire Writers Salon will feature authors Karen Karbo and Merrill Markoe in conversation with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 15. The event takes place at Scape Gallery, 2859 E. Coast Highway, Corona Del Mar. Tickets are $20 and can be purchased at Barbarademarcobarrett.com/writerssalon
