GEORGIA—AND READERS—ON HER MIND

Columnist and Wilmette resident Georgia Garvey likened an interminable respiratory infection to a drawn-out Allman Brothers song. She also transported her readers to summery days when the trill of an ice cream truck meant anybody with working taste buds turned into Olympic sprinters dashing to a sound.

And, in another column, written near Thanksgiving 2020, Garvey presented a get-together of years—including Great Depression/ Prohibition’s 1933 and pandemic-ridden 2020 and 1918—and imagined a dialogue among them in a support-group setting over Zoom: 1933, speaking to 2020, who hadn’t seen a bartender in almost nine months: “That sounds stressful. Try not seeing one for 13 years some time.”

2020’s response to 1933: “At least you didn’t have to deal with a pandemic.”

1918: “Um … .”

Fun stuff, in a particularly worrisome, challenging year.

“Now that I think about it, I guess, I am mostly writing an advice column—only the advice travels in a circle, from me back to me,” Garvey, 47, writes in the Introduction of her first book, Everything Is Going To Be OK (Until It’s Not) (Creators Publishing, 2023), a collection of her columns.

“My writings,” adds the former Evanston resident, “are a conversation with myself, and often they’re a journal of my never-ending battle—one fought by the week, by the day, by the minute—to avoid living either in the future (with worry) or in the past (with guilt).”

Garvey’s near future will find the mother of 7- and 5-year-old sons, minus her laptop, at The Book Stall in Winnetka on January 18, when the former Chicago Tribune reporter and Chicago Tribune Media Group editor is scheduled to discuss her compilation of essays that ranges from the joys and demands of motherhood to her abhorrence of camping to her gratefulness for kindness to the wild, weird history of pets in her house.

Some of her columns are serious and thought-provoking. Some are edgy and clever and reveal Garvey’s humility and self-deprecation. Others are whimsical and observational.

“Almost definitionally,” Garvey writes, “someone who has so many words squatting in their brain that they have to evict some onto a page for another person to deal with is kind of … strange.”

But essential, too. That’s why Garvey, then an editor for local weeklies published by Chicago Tribune Media Group, insisted on resuming the publication of columns after cuts and buyouts had gutted staffs in 2020. A newspaper without a columnist’s voice is a Reese’s Easter Peanut Butter Egg without the peanut butter. Woefully hollow.

Georgia Garvey then appointed herself to serve as a columnist, a position she held for 18 months before opting to take a buyout herself in 2021 and becoming a syndicated columnist for Creators Publishing, an imprint of Creators. Her punchy writing style is anti-highfalutin. If you’re looking to consume complex, sentence-packed paragraphs, look for a medical journal detailing the latest research on autoimmune diseases.

Garvey’s lucid weekly columns appear in dozens of local newspapers across the country.

“I felt strongly about providing a local column for the readers,” says Garvey, the recipient of Peter Lisagor and Illinois Press Association awards, among others. “Many of the columns I chose to run in my book ran during the pandemic, which was such a bizarre time in our country, in the world. Rereading them was like opening a time capsule.

“I remember taking my kids to a playground one day and hearing a man, walking his dog, say to me, ‘Hey, your kids can’t play here. COVID’s still around.’ I wrote about my frustrations and the confusions during the pandemic. I shared a lot; readers got to know me.”

Georgia was born in Philadelphia, moved to Greece with her family six months later, and returned to the United States as a first grader. Her surname—Evdoxiadis— was a nightmare for teachers taking attendance on the first day of school.

Flummoxed teacher: “Georgia Ev … ”

Compassionate Georgia: “Here!”

She lived in New Orleans for several years and later attended Parkway South High School in Manchester, Missouri, near St. Louis. Not surprisingly, Garvey wrote for the student newspaper and participated in debate and mock trial. She graduated from Columbia College Chicago with a degree in journalism.

Garvey’s first post in journalism was that of a newspaper intern at Arlington Heights-based Daily Herald, in 2003. Her first newsroom shift started at bright-eyed 2 p.m. and ended at bleary-eyed 1 a.m.

She had met her future husband, University of Kansas alumnus Tim Garvey, when both waited tables at Pete Miller’s in Evanston. They started dating in 2000 and got married in 2007, two years before Georgia began her 12- year tenure with Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Tribune media outlets.

The talented fiction writer in Garvey lurks. It’s only a matter of time before her modernday adventures of a Greek goddess gets published and enlarges Garvey’s ample fan base.

There was nothing mythical about Garvey’s late grandmother Katerina, to whom she dedicated Everything Is Going To Be OK (Until It’s Not). Katerina had to drop out of school in the third grade to work for her family as a subsistence farmer in a Greek village.

“My grandma had a hard life,” Garvey says. “She worked in the fields most of her life. But she was always cheerful, always positive. She was a smart woman. I still talk to her today. She’s like my guardian angel.”

Poignant passages about love and kindness punctuate several of the pages in Garvey’s book. They’re welcoming heartbeats.

“We need love,” she declares. “We need to be entertained and inspired and distracted. We need the pieces we lack, and we get them from outside ourselves.”

And kindness, she points out in the Acknowledgements, is in no danger of slipping to runner-up status to callousness.

“Thank you to all the people in this wonderful world who try their best to be kind,” Garvey writes. “There are more of us than there are of them, and don’t you ever forget it.”

For more information about Georgia Garvey, and to read her past works, visit georgiagarvey.com. Garvey will speak about Everything Is Going To Be OK (Until It’s Not) at The Book Stall, 811 East Elm Street, Winnetka, on January 18 at 6:30 p.m. Visit thebookstall.com for more information. Her book is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, and Apple Books.