Lisa Barr Illustration by Barry Blitt
Lisa Barr slides out of the booth and stands to greet me. Even surrounded by the brunch crowd at The Original Green Bay Café, there’s little mistaking the petite spitfire in the dress.
Barr, in fact, practically pulsates. It’s not long before the truth comes out: she admits to being a little wired on caffeine.
But this shouldn’t come as a surprise, she tells me. It’s merely a daily ritual. So much so that her husband, David, bought her a sign that could be mistaken as a mantra.
“Get me the coffee,” it goes, “and nobody gets hurt.”
Good thing she’s had her coffee. And yet the Original Green Bay Café is typically a place reserved for the author to decelerate from the daily grind. The buttery pancake yin to her up-tempo yang.
I can see why. A chalkboard on the far wall is filled with menu items written in electric-colored chalk. The wooden booths feel cozy. The word quaint comes to mind. It’s as if the entire state of Vermont were being represented by a café in Winnetka.
Barr orders a grapefruit juice, followed by an omelet with spinach, Swiss cheese, mushrooms, potatoes, and a side of rye toast. Her preference for most, if not all, of the above is to be cooked well done (burnt). Barr is a woman who knows what she likes.
How far would you go for your passion? This is the question at the heart of her debut novel, “Fugitive Colors” (Arcade Publishing). Her novel won the Independent Publisher Book Awards gold medal for Best Literary Fiction 2014 and first prize for Best Unpublished Manuscript at the Hollywood Film Festival (Opus Magnum Discovery Award). Having just returned from a whirlwind trip to Israel, Barr’s novel will be published in Hebrew in the fall.
“Fugitive Colors” tells the story of Julian Klein. A young, idealistic Jew growing up in 1930s Chicago, Klein rejects his orthodox upbringing in favor of his true passion: painting. Absconding to Paris, Klein is quickly caught up in the artistic freedoms of the City of Lights, or what Hemingway referred to as a “moveable feast.”
Klein, however, is the only expatriate at his feast. Once there, he meets the aspiring yet inferior German artist, Felix von Bredow, and the talented French painter Rene Levi, along with Levi’s girlfriend Adrienne and Charlotte, a promiscuous artist’s model. And yet, the creative Eden the friends enjoy in Paris cannot last. It’s out of this ever-rising backdrop of World War II that Barr weaves a tale of love, lust, deception, and revenge; where you can almost feel the world lurch as the Nazi party comes to power.
Says Barr, “Ironically, [Adolf] Hitler’s war started with art, and it’s the piece of Holocaust history that’s continuing 70 years later —still making front-page news.”
Hitler was himself an unsuccessful artist who had been denied admission to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. In “Mein Kampf” he attacked modern art, labeling avant-garde found in Cubism, Futurism, and Dadaism — among other disciplines — as “degenerate.” When the Nazi party came to power, classical portraits and landscapes in the vein of the Old Masters of Germanic origin were deemed the aesthetic ideal. All other plundered paintings were to be burned or sold to further the Nazi war machine.
Even today, it’s estimated that at least 100,000 pieces of artwork have not been returned to their rightful owners.
In 1991, Barr was a young journalist serving as managing editor of “Today’s Chicago Woman.” She still remembers being sent on assignment to cover the “Degenerate Art” exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago. What struck her in that moment was a poignant feeling some authors spend their whole lives searching for. She had found a story that needed telling.
She would find the time to actually write it years later. She was in Jerusalem, placed on a nine-month bed during the pregnancy of her first child. At the time, the graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University was living in Israel, working as a reporter for The Jerusalem Post. All that energy had to go somewhere. She invested it into the first draft of her novel.
“I never get writer’s block because I don’t have time for it now,” says Barr, who has three teenage girls at her home in Deerfield — or what she refers to affectionately as “Drama Central.” Barr has a beautiful home office, she tells me. But there’s the laundry, the dogs — all these distractions. So she retreats to the nearby Starbucks. Each morning, after dropping her daughters off at school, she has a 20-minute coffee date with her husband. Then she writes for close to three hours, looking up only to greet friends and acquaintances — the other regulars.
Barr tells me she’s halfway into her next novel. “I find myself very excited to get to the computer and write,” she says, adding that she’s finally getting to the evil characters, of which she’s “having a blast” writing.
With a second novel coming and more than 20 years experience as a journalist under her belt (she covered the famous handshake between the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the late Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization Yasser Arafat at the White House) the sky’s the limit for Barr. She also is the editor and creator of a racy parenting blog, titled GIRLilla Warfare, which generated over 100,000 responses — from Singapore to Australia —on a single story. (“It struck such a nerve that it was gangbusters,” she notes.)
But at the end of the day, Barr is still the same energetic regular at the caffeine-packed haunts she regularly attends in the North Shore. “She’s a regular here,” the waitress whispers to me after she zips off. There’s something nice to be said about that.
