Now Touring: Quilting IsN'T Funny By Megan Dougherty

By Jake Finch

It was June of 2009. Melissa and I worked together for another magazine, no longer published. Working from home around a young kid meant (and still does) that I often worked late at night when the house was most quiet.

On this particular night, I had suffered through a hellish day of one problem after another and an awful lot of wrong recriminations about my part in said problems. Oh, and I had the flu. I was cranky and overworked. But we were on deadline and the Jiminy Cricket work ethic of mine wouldn’t allow me to turn the dang computer off!

Instead I opted to take a break by looking over some recent submissions. As an editor, I can share that reading submissions is a hit-or-miss kinda event. You’re hoping and wishing to be stricken mute with pleasure at someone’s design or writing abilities but you also know better than to mark those expectations too high.

Such was my mood when I opened up an email from this writer, Megan, who sent me three original articles for consideration. See, a few months before, Megan had already sent us a piece she’d written. It was very cute and we were going to take it, but then found out that she had already published it on her blog, The Bitchy Stitcher, which meant that we couldn’t publish it in our magazine. So we sent her back to the keyboard to come up with some new brilliance. And she did. Thrice. Wow!

I opened the first Word Doc attachment, began reading The Quilt Guild General Meeting and spit my wine out. Reactions to her next two attachments weren’t any more elegant, or cleaner. This is the email I sent to her as soon as I was done wiping up my mess:

“OMIGOD!!!! I am so happy I read these tonight, when I have the flu and feel like excrement. You made me laugh, and I didn’t think that was possible this week. I’ve sent them to my other editors. If they don’t laugh, they’ve got to be dead inside. Thank you for making my night. You are a very gifted writer and I’ll let you know what the others say. BTW, were you sitting in my guild meeting/shopping cart/sewing room when you wrote these?”

And thus a beautiful friendship was birthed.

Since then, Melissa and I have happily romped with this wunderkind of the quilt life as she’s managed to put into simple words the complexity of the quilter’s personality. We can’t put into words how much we anticipate each new article she writes for us under her Unraveled column! Each is a pleasure to read, even if she thinks that too many commas are the right thing in life. (Hence the eternal internal battle of AP Style versus Chicago Manual of Style that we battled!)

Always irreverent, but oh-so-true, Megan’s writing manages to grab that wonder and joy of creating while acknowledging our basic neurotic tendencies that should and do make us laugh at ourselves.

And that’s what her book is all about.

But, we’re following the blog tour steps of many others who have so well presented why you MUST read her new book. Instead we’re just going to give you a handful of things that you might not know about our Dear Miss Megan:

1. Even though every blog post she writes comes with a warning and disclaimer about her salty language, Megan in real life is ever the Southern lady and almost never swears.

2. She’s addicted to Cherry Pop Tarts and Dr. Pepper.

3. She designed our logo, our marketing materials and the first few issues of GenQ with almost no experience in graphic arts and magazine layout.

4. She cried like a baby when she held her first issue of GenQ.

5. She makes killer pie crust.

Buy her book, from her, from us (click here) or from anyone else smart enough to carry it. Enjoy her book. Because, as we know every day, if we aren’t having fun with our addiction, what the hell is the point of it all?