Valerie Hector

Craft Show Confidential is a tongue-in-cheek send-up of the American craft show industry, delivered as the fictional memoir of Vanessa Nathaniel, a jeweler based in the Chicago area.  Nathaniel is writing in the year 2036, when craft shows, like dinosaurs, have disappeared from the earth, victims of e-commerce and audience fatigue. Now 76, she recalls the 27 years she spent on the road as a show-going single woman.  Nathaniel's life unfolds in three places: the studio, the booth, and the path to and from.  In each she undergoes eye-opening experiences, which reveal human nature for better or worse.  In Volume 1, "The Typewriter Age: 1988-1996," she tells her tale in 30 vignettes, most of them humorous, with titles such as "Living on Fumes," "Humping Wholesale," "My Little Mohawk," "Drive-by Ex-Boyfriend," "Problem in a Porta-Potty," and "Artistic Leech, Artistic License."  Along the way, the larger world changes.  Presidents morph from Reagan to Clinton.  Technology races from typewriter to computer. E-mails and websites are new and strange things. America launches the Persian Gulf War, a short-term effort to evict Iraq from Kuwait.  Global warming is not yet a pressing concern.  We learn how artists relate to these things. But the tone is light; the reading is easy. Nathaniel champions civility and plain old hard work, while skewering pomposity and image-driven egos. Her "femoir" may ruffle some carefully-crafted feathers, but it depicts a distinctively American way of life, and places craft show artists within a cultural context. Volumes 2 and 3, which cover the years from 1997 to 2014, will be published in the Fall of 2014. Volume 4, containing stories written by Valerie Hector's real-life craft show colleagues, is tentatively scheduled to be published in February, 2015.