Fall workshop activities include marketing the little gift book, How to Gossip Nicely: A Southerner Ponders the Grapevine. Available through amazon.com, this 40-pager contains much talk about casually communicated news. Just like the bad and good that can coexist in a real grapevine, there's damaging gossip and beneficial gossip. Bad gossip is downright snaky, but good gossip can be positively delectable.

Artist A. B. Moore, my niece who is a student at the Maryland Institute College of Art, created the marvelous cover art and line drawings; noted cook Betty Baird Rusher, my neighbor, provided some great recipes "from the grapevine;" and Robert Hill Camp, a Virginian who speaks the "King's English," did some artful "pruning" while serving as copy editor.