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  My solution is to clean out a drawer of my dresser and store the Asheville papers there until I have a chance to read them. When that drawer fills, I take the papers out and pile them on the floor in front of the dresser. A knee-high stack grows, then a second beside it. When my wife complains, I spend a couple of hours stripping the papers of everything I never intend to read anyway—advertising circulars, coupons, comics, want ads, business page, auto page, real-estate guide—which leaves only the front section, the local section, sports, and arts and entertainment. I then have a single stack of manageable proportions. I transfer it to the master bathroom, which I keep in such deplorable condition that my wife long ago moved into the bath down the hall with our daughters. I empty the hamper and put the papers in there, making a place for my dirty clothes on the floor between the hamper and the bathtub. Watching the unread papers burgeon has by now become a pastime. Though I strip the new papers upon their arrival, the stack climbs the entire height of the hamper, then grows out the top so that the lid stays permanently open. At this point, my wife tells me I’m eccentric.

  I eventually cancel the subscription. The papers, still mainly unread, find their way into a twenty-gallon plastic storage container in the crawlspace, and the clothes go back into the hamper.

  So it is with all the background material I accumulate. I buy books on Asheville history and titles by writers connected to the area. What I can’t find new I track down through rare-book dealers. Not knowing how many John Ehle or Ann B. Ross titles I ought to read—or whether those authors will consent to an interview, or even whether I’ll need them in the book at all—I strive to collect their complete works. I completely fill a bookcase; I stop counting at two hundred titles.

  Meanwhile, there are magazine articles, free local weeklies, tourist brochures, maps, correspondence, and such. These go into the dresser drawer where the newspapers once found a home. As for titles too obscure for even the rare-book dealers, I track them down in libraries and photocopy them complete. These, too, go into the dresser. I fill one drawer, then a second, then ultimately a third, culling and consolidating my underwear, socks, and T-shirts to make room.

  I haven’t a prayer of digesting all this stuff. Every book I read seems to recommend three or four others; the more I do, the farther behind I get. What I really need is to move to Asheville for a year and live the local culture, but that’s not going to happen. My opportunities for writing are limited to Saturdays, Sundays, and weeknights after the kids are in bed and the house is tidied up, which is generally around ten.

  Though I hold a regular job and haven’t missed a day in fifteen years for reasons other than funerals and my kids’ illnesses, people often ask my wife if I’m a stay-at-home dad. Perhaps their observation has merit, even if they’re wrong on the facts. I live a protracted adolescence for the sake of writing a book that may never see print and may attract few readers even if it does.

  And then there’s middle age. I develop a scalp condition characterized by angry pimples all over the back of my head that burn like fire. With it comes dandruff so severe that I can shake my head and watch it fall like snow. The dermatologist advises me to start washing my hair with tar-based bar soap. On the way out of his office, I pick up a brochure on my condition. As is the custom in such literature, the picture on the front shows a victim with what must be the worst case of the disorder in recorded history; he looks a good deal like Norman Mailer but has what appears to be thick white moss growing profusely from his ears. I buy tar-based soap, which costs eight dollars a bar. The good news is that it will last forever, since it won’t give up any lather no matter how long and hard it is rubbed. I switch to a popular dandruff shampoo, which corrects the problem within a couple of weeks.

  There are other indignities, too. My hair is overtaken by white; my pants strain to popping, as I refuse to go up a waist size; I grow tits. But the worst trouble is my eyes. I do close reading all day at work off a computer screen, then come home and read into the night. Some mornings when I wake, I have pain in one or the other of my eyes so sharp that I can’t hold it open. It might be five minutes before I can begin to use the eye, which remains sensitive to touch, light, and any breath of moving air throughout the day. It is more often the right eye than the left but has never been both on the same morning. I assure myself it’s muscle cramping, the result of holding a short-distance focus for extended periods, though that’s largely a guess. I don’t really want to know for sure, not until I get my book written.

  The writers’ group meeting begins with someone reading a brief communication from Jack Pyle and Taylor Reese, who are wintering in Florida. They have an autographing scheduled for next month, when they’ll be back in the mountains.

  Next, Terri, the group’s president, circulates a magazine article entitled “First Fiction Highlights” and reads an e-mail from Linda Worth, a poet who has attended only one of our meetings but wants to remain in touch nonetheless. Linda reports that she is a regular at open-mike nights at her favorite chain bookstore, that she’s had a poem accepted by a literary magazine at a community college—her first success—and that she is being mentored in her writing by a neighbor who is a retired English teacher. She wants to make it to more of our meetings—mettings actually, as I see when I obtain a copy of her missive. Linda hopes we haven’t forgotten her.

  I am traveling to the writers’ group less frequently as time passes. It is hard to motivate myself to get up at six-thirty on a Saturday morning and make a six-hour round-trip drive for the sake of a two-hour meeting. This particular Saturday, I am the scribe of the monthly minutes, which I will take home, type up, and submit for mailing to all the members. Bryan Aleksich has recently joined the group, but he’s not present today.

  It seems to me that the tone of the proceedings has changed. The husband and wife who ran the meetings when I started coming have together survived a house fire and separately suffered back surgery and an auto accident. They no longer attend. And one of my favorite members, retired professor Gerald Gullickson—a monument to endurance who once published six hundred poems in fly-by-night magazines in the span of two years—has died. We seldom read from our work anymore. And the complaining about agents and editors seems more strident.

  Since the members still see me primarily as a representative of the industry, rather than a fellow writer, I am saddled with a small share of the blame for the state of publishing, or so I feel. This is especially true since my company rejected manuscripts by several members.

  “Don’t you find that to be the case, Steve?” I might hear, after a discussion of the misspellings rampant in commercial books.

  Or “Have you seen any of that at your company, Steve?” following a lament about midlist authors having their contracts dropped by publishers.

  I shouldn’t overstate the case. But I sense an undercurrent.

  After reading the communication from Linda Worth, Terri, the president, tells how she’s been working twelve-hour days lately, and so has little time to write. She is awaiting word on a novel submission to a publisher out west.

  The lady next to her reports that she has two novels being handled by two different agents. Those agents have supposedly received positive comments from publishers but no offers.

  The lady next to her describes the travel articles and the memoir she is writing and passes around a pamphlet about the Kentucky Book Fair.

  Next is an elderly gentleman working on a manuscript about a one-eyed Scottish terrier.

  Joanne reads what she calls a “bug poem,” which proves to be exactly what it claims. She says parents and kids love them, though she has had no luck getting them published.

  Suzanne says she is putting together a song collection. I wasn’t aware we did songs.

  Caroline is waiting to hear the results of a contest in which she’s entered a novel manuscript.

  Nancy, one of our guests this day, is writing a memoir in her mother’s voice.

  Jonathan, our other guest, is
working on a novel and some short stories. He says he used to write screenplays and television scripts. He once made a living writing continuity—the bridges between segments—for old television programs like The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show.

  A good portion of the meeting is given over to a discussion of Bill Brooks, a local community-college instructor and author of commercial Westerns.

  Cynthia tells how she was recently devastated by Brooks’s critique of her work in a writing class of his. The substance of his comments never comes quite clear in the telling, though one of the principal points seems to be Brooks’s judgment that her novel needs more “layering.” Cynthia comes back to the word several times.

  It is quickly apparent that the man has a reputation. A couple of members hasten to Cynthia’s defense.

  Steve Brown was skewered in a Bill Brooks class when he turned in a portion of one of his mystery novels.

  “Don’t ever try to write first-person in a man’s voice,” Brooks once scolded longtime member Vickie. “You just can’t pull it off.”

  Other sympathetic voices join in.

  There isn’t a thing wrong with Cynthia’s writing, someone says.

  Cynthia writes simple, straightforward, old-fashioned, good stories.

  Just because they’re simple on the surface doesn’t mean they lack depth.

  The consensus seems to be that Bill Brooks is a good writer and an experienced teacher, but that he ought to be more sensitive in his criticism.

  There’s nothing to be gained by making things personal.

  He’s a skilled writer, all right, but he shouldn’t try to evaluate work outside his genre.

  The purpose of a critique is to point out areas for improvement, not to tear someone down.

  Virginia, a soft-spoken elderly woman, is currently taking a class from Brooks. The students must turn in a love scene. Since two of the characters in her novel-in-progress are homosexuals, she has tried her hand at putting gay love on the page. She hasn’t heard back from Brooks but is now beginning to worry, she tells us.

  Everyone gets a laugh out of that.

  “Good luck,” someone says.

  “Better buckle your chin strap, dear.”

  So that’s the way I report it in the minutes when I get home. I summarize the members’ various writings, submissions, contest entries, and conference experiences, but my longest paragraph is devoted to Bill Brooks. Never having met the man, I chide him for his harshness toward student work, which I tie to his being a rough-and-tumble Western feller. I laud those who would challenge his notions with scenes of gay couplings. I understand the group’s minutes to be of the character of in-house memos, so I feel confident in expressing myself freely. I believe I’m defending the wronged. I also think what I write is kind of clever.

  It appears I’m mistaken.

  During my few years of sporadically attending meetings, only a couple of people have made themselves unwelcome. One was a poetry-writing hard case of a mountain man who, the first time someone tried to inquire about his work, answered, “I write what I write. You think you can do better?” He never came back. Others have been openly critical of the group’s commercial orientation, which hasn’t helped their popularity.

  I send the minutes to Terri, who photocopies and mails them.

  A few days after that, a separate mailing arrives from Cynthia.

  “This is in response to the minutes of the recent meeting,” it begins. “I feel my remarks concerning Bill Brooks were taken out of context.”

  Cynthia says she has enjoyed her instruction from Brooks and hopes to enroll in more of his classes in the future. While it is true that he said her work would benefit from more layering, she feels his remarks were delivered in the spirit of helpfulness.

  She would never seek to criticize Brooks or any other fellow writer, she says.

  It goes on for a full page.

  I call Cynthia to apologize. She says she bears me no ill will; she wrote her letter when her feelings were running high; indeed, she’s been worried she offended me.

  I also call Steve Brown, who says he doesn’t know what the big deal is, that I just reported things as they happened.

  I also call Jack Pyle, who wasn’t at the meeting but is a pretty good judge of fairness. He is surprised at Cynthia’s follow-up; it looks to him like I was pretty straightforward. But of course, he can’t say for sure.

  I appreciate the support, though I suspect Steve and Jack are being nice. I really don’t know what my future reception at the writers’ group will be.

  Self-publishing liberates the group’s members.

  Eileen Johnson, a sharp-dressing, well-spoken woman in her seventies, is the first to drag a toe in the water. Eileen and her husband, a retired naval officer, spent six years traveling through every state in the country in their motor home before settling in the North Carolina mountains. They live in Old Fort, located at the base of the last big push up the Blue Ridge to Asheville. The building of the railroad westward from Old Fort by convict laborers in the 1870s is the subject of The Road, John Ehle’s classic novel. That monumental effort opened Asheville to the outside world. You’re unlikely to travel that same six-mile grade via Interstate 40 today without passing a few broken-down vehicles unable to make it to the top.

  After her move to North Carolina, Eileen began taking trips to Ireland, the land of her ancestry. Struck by the many parallels in folklore, dance, music, and crafts between Ireland and the southern Appalachians—attributable to the Scots-Irish migration of the nineteenth century—she resolved to write a book on the subject.

  When it comes time to see her manuscript into print, Eileen doesn’t even consider submitting to agents or commercial publishers. “Going through an agent, even in a best-case scenario, it might be three or four years before I could hold that book in my hand,” she says. “And besides that, I’d have to go through all the aggravation.”

  She contacts eighteen or twenty companies that advertise themselves as book printers, only to find that many of them deal mainly in stationery and wedding invitations and merely dabble in books on the side.

  She finally learns that the best friend of self-publishing writers resides in Nebraska, a company with a 250,000-square-foot plant devoted exclusively to short-run book production of two hundred to five thousand copies. Those interested can obtain a free kit that exhaustively details the company’s many options relating to cover design, photographic reproduction, typefaces, page counts, paper stock, bindings, proofs, shrink-wrapping, shipment, and many other things, along with all the itemized costs pertaining thereto. For a fee, the company’s designers will provide as much assistance as the writer desires. Other fees are levied for acquiring an International Standard Book Number, creating a bar code, and filing with the Library of Congress. The company can also supply counter displays and print postcards, bookmarks, brochures, and posters advertising the book. Its sales pitch to writers focuses on its two- to three-month turnaround time, the high degree of control its customers retain over design, production, and sales, and the 40 to 400 percent profit realized by some of the books it prints.

  Eileen titles her effort More Than Blarney: The Irish Influence in Appalachia, creates her own imprint—Wolfhound Press—and, given her subject matter, publishes under her maiden name, Eileen McCullough.

  By the time the book comes out, she has traveled to numerous seminars on Irish subjects and procured address lists of her fellow attendees. Her initial sales are to these people, whom she targets by direct mail. In peddling her book, she much prefers speaking to Friends of the Library organizations and appearing at storytelling festivals and book fairs to signing in bookstores.

  Her book is sold in scattered outlets in the mountains and, to her great pleasure, in a couple of stores in Ireland, but truth be told, it is available at relatively few places. Still, she is well satisfied with the venture. She clears enough profit from her thirty-five-hundred-dollar investment in a thousand copies of More Than Blarney
to finance the printing of another book and to pay for a couple more trips to Ireland. She wishes only that she had hired an editor to catch some of the errors that leaked into the book.

  It is Jack Pyle and Taylor Reese who spread the self-publishing fever. Having already written a pair of gardening books for a small commercial publisher, they have in place a network of bookstore and gift-shop contacts throughout the mountains.

  In quick succession, Jack underwrites the publication of a couple of mysteries—the second of which is The Sound of Distant Thunder, which he once submitted to my company—then a novel called After Many a Summer, then a large-print collection of short stories, all through the same Nebraska printer Eileen discovered, all in the company’s standard 5½-by-8½ paperback format. Meanwhile, Taylor puts out two collections of homespun humor and a memoir of his boyhood.

  All of this enhances their attractiveness to groups looking for speakers. Counting their gardening books, they now have their own mini-store of nine titles. If a person who stops at their table doesn’t like mysteries, he or she might be receptive to humor or short stories. Like Eileen, they keep their expectations realistic—Jack contracts mainly for print runs of two thousand copies—and realize a satisfactory profit. They are persuasive spokesmen for controlling one’s own fate, rather than praying for the kindness of commercial publishers.

  In Jack and Taylor’s wake come self-published historical novels, memoirs, mysteries, a young-adult novel, travel narratives, an account of spiritual awakening dedicated to Buddha, Grandpa Stories, Earth’s Only Paradise, a book boasting an improbable back-cover endorsement from Desmond Tutu, and others.

  Spirits run high. High jinks abound.

  In the absence of any book reviews to draw from, and having few contacts in the publishing industry, the members write blurbs for each other’s work.

  “A delightful new series character has been born … sure to make a hit with mystery fans,” Jack Pyle writes for a friend’s book.