Barbara Worten, Author of Chatterbox: Stories From A Noisy Life

Join us for a fun-filled reading with author Barbara Worton. Her memoir Chatterbox: Stories From a Noisy Life is a non-stop adventure down memory lane full of vignettes and characters that we can all relate to. As food takes center stage in her book, Barbara has promised to bring some goodies to share with the audience. So come on in and enjoy the storytelling from this delightfully noisy book.

Copies of Chatterbox will be available for purchase and signing.

“Everybody has something to say in Barbara Worton’s Chatterbox, her right-of-passage memoir. Barbara’s cinematic writing takes us through the door into the kitchen and living room of her home in 1950s Long Island. You can smell the sauce, see the plastic slipcovers covering the furniture, and feel the fingers pointing at you as Barbara uses her voice to remind us of where we came from. Her family is our family, con voce or silently loud. It is personal as it is universal. Her essays are small touch points that trigger definitions for ourselves. It is a read to remember.” — Rochelle Udell, Creative Director

About Barbara

Barbara Worton is an author, poet, playwright, blogger, and songwriter. Her books include Bedtime Stories: The Short, Long and Tall Tales of a Sleepwriter and the award-winning children’s book Too Tall Alice. She coauthored the choreo-poem If I’m Talking, Why Aren’t You Listening? with Linda Dini Jenkins and the web memoir and blog The Adventures of The Baker’s Daughter with Rochelle Udell. Barbara’s story “London Calling” appears in Memories of John Lennon, edited by Yoko Ono.

Her writing has also appeared in literary journals and women’s service and business publications, including The Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, Ovunque Siamo, The Paterson Literary Review, VIA: Voices in Italian Americana, and Platform Review. Her writing and publishing career includes editing and ghostwriting for publishers in the US and UK, working as an advertising copywriter and as a writer for some of the world’s largest household-name organizations. She was an Associate Producer on the independent film Surviving on LES, which won the Chelsea Film Festival Audience Feature Film Award and the Bowery Film Festival’s Feature Film Award. Barbara is a member of the Italian American Writers Association, writes songs as a member of Laverne + Ralph, and lives with her husband Geoff in New Jersey. For more information, visit www.barbaraworton.com.

About the Book

To be seen and not heard was never going to happen forBarbara Worton, a.k.a. Chatterbox. Talking, which she started doing in full sentences at fourteen months, is in her DNA. Her Italian American mother was a champion talker. Her German Dutch father had to be a listener. Her mother’s parents and ten brothers and sisters all talked at once. Music, both recorded and live, played constantly. Life was noisy, and Barbara watched and cataloged what she saw and heard -- then and all through her life.

As only a true chatterbox knows, Barbara winds and weaves through stories from her Long Island childhood to life in the present. Each of her forty-three mini-memoirs paints a portrait of what makes the everyday beautiful, giving readers a wonderfully detailed glimpse into memories like being in her grandmother’s kitchen (where making pasta sauce was almost a “military maneuver”). With wit and poignancy, she wrestles with the world’s paradoxes and recalls moments that show just how much we all have in common.