Royal Oaks Ladies Club Event, Houston

Elizabeth Kidd with Meta

Valerie Koehler, Nancy Corkill, Meta

By Nancy Corkill

You may leave Texas, but Texas never leaves a native-born Texan.  Meta Strauss, with Texas blood surging their her veins,   moved to Sonoma, California, in 2005 and began writing short stories.  Her fellow writers in the Sonoma Writer’s Alliance encouraged her to expand her clever fictional pieces about Texas into a novel.  Voila, Meta’s first novel, Saving El Chico, was released in 2015.  This funny, character-driven book tells the story of a present-day small Texas down dying from drought.  Inspired by Meta’s mother’s home town, it’s a tale of courage, inspiration, imagination and laugh-out-loud humor of Texans determined to survive.

An enthusiastic audience of long-time friends and reading devotees welcomed Meta to a ROCC Ladies Association-sponsored author event at the Club on Friday, April 28^th.  Meta read from her work and spoke about her journey of maturing from a fledgling writer to novice publisher of her book.  Meta’s long-time friend Nancy Corkill, who was an early reader of Saving El Chico prior to its publication, was honored to introduce Meta to her Royal Oaks friends.

Valerie Koehler, owner of Blue Willow Book Shop, West Houston’s premier Indie book store on Memorial Drive at Dairy Ashford, graciously attended the April Club event.   Valerie arrived with copies of Saving El Chico and following her talk, Meta autographed her book as she met and spoke with attendees. 

Royal Oaks is full of readers!  The ROCC Ladies Association book group, led by Linda Botchlett, meets in the Ladies Locker Room the last Wednesday of each month.  Ladies who are members of the Ladies Association are welcomed into the group’s fun discussions of the book selected by members to be read, enjoyed and discussed.  The ROCCettes, founded in 2000, just as the community was being settled, continues to meet monthly in member-homes and always has a waiting list.  Liz Arend and Sarah Holm coordinate activities for the ROCCettes.  A third, smaller group is led by Aileen Hansen.  Meta was thrilled to attend both the ROCCettes and ROCCLA April meetings.