Scribblers Read online

  Eighteen months after publication, bookstore returns of unsold copies were so strong that I received a semiannual royalty check for exactly $1.01, meaning that, over the preceding six months, sales had exceeded returns by exactly one unit. I never cashed that check. I have it still.

  But I say it’s a pretty good book nonetheless. And I shouldn’t disparage its sales. It’s been through three printings and one foreign-language edition and remains a staple in its niche nearly a decade after publication.

  When the book-writing spirit again moves me, I decide to take as my subject mountain writers, from the iconic to the unknown. I return to Asheville several weeks after the Thomas Wolfe Festival to seek out a local writers’ support group. The largest such organization in the area is The Writers’ Workshop. On its advisory board, I see from its professional-looking newsletter, are such luminaries as John Le Carré, Peter Matthiessen, and Reynolds Price. Oddly, Alex Haley is listed as a member of the board—at the bottom and in smaller type—though it is years since his death; someone from the workshop apparently took pains to cultivate his acquaintance and will be damned if they’ll let him out of a commitment. The Writers’ Workshop offers seminars for beginning writers, children’s writers, screenwriters, short-fiction writers, teenage writers, and single writers. It sponsors a short-story contest with a first prize of six hundred dollars—good money for that sort of thing.

  When I see that the workshop is putting together a new critique group, I arrange to take half a day off work to attend the organizational meeting. It is my first long venture from home since replacing my car’s water pump, so I keep an eye on the temperature gauge on the hard slog up the mountains. But it isn’t until I’m idling College, Patton, and the other downtown streets futilely looking for a parking spot that the needle starts rising. I leave my car in the deck behind the civic center and walk.

  Downtown Asheville provides a colorful contrast to the traditional, conservative values of the high country. Those expecting the Bible Belt are in for a funky surprise.

  This area of the mountains has been a spiritual center since the time of the Cherokees. Asheville sits atop America’s most powerful vortex—this according to metaphysical author Page Bryant and local swami Nostradamus Virato. Vortexes are bioelectric energy points spread across the globe like acupuncture points on the human body. A vortex occurs at the junction of “ley lines” on the earth’s surface. Twenty-four vortexes have been identified between Black Mountain, to the east, and Waynesville, to the west. A vortex is a place of high energy in a small geographical area, whereas a “power spot” is the site of a lesser concentration of energy in a larger space. Mount Pisgah is the area’s principal power spot. As such, it is home to Asheville’s “Watcher,” or guardian angel. How all of this came about is not entirely certain. Some say the quartz-filled mountains exert a “piezoelectric effect.” Others maintain the area is blessed because the people of Atlantis settled here upon evacuating their dying continent.

  You’ll hear a lot of this kind of stuff when you come downtown.

  New Agers flock to Asheville like conventioneers to a titty bar. The town has been called “a City of Light for the New Millennium,” “the San Francisco of the South,” and “America’s New Age Mecca.” In attitude, it is said to be kin to places like Sedona, Arizona; Santa Cruz and Marin County, California; Boulder, Colorado; Maui, Hawaii; and Seattle, Washington. Its downtown is the province of hopheads and health-food mavens, pamphleteers and tattoo freaks, ponytailed men and hairy-legged women, lost souls and Chosen.

  Since I’m early for my meeting, I duck into Malaprop’s, Asheville’s noted independent bookstore. The place captures the town’s contrasts pretty succinctly.

  Malaprop’s is one of the stores credited with pushing Cold Mountain early on and helping to launch that book’s great run. At the front, looking out on Haywood Street, is a stained-glass commemorative window bearing the facial likenesses of some of the area’s signature authors—Thomas Wolfe, Gail Godwin, Robert Morgan, Fred Chappell, John Ehle, Wilma Dykeman, and mystery writer Elizabeth Daniels Squire.

  At the table by the window, bathed in its colored glow, sit a heavyset, fiftyish woman in boots and a jean jacket and a delicate girl of about twenty with at least a dozen piercings in her ear. They hold hands and speak intimately.

  In the corridor leading to the bathrooms is a bulletin board crowded with brochures for Kirtan devotional chanting, multifaith healing services, bliss gatherings, drumming workshops, Zen Shiatsu Asian Bodywork, Capoeira Angola Afro-Brazilian Martial Arts, and other things incomprehensible to me.

  The bookstore shelves bear such labels as “Lesbian Fiction,” “Gay Fiction,” “Gay and Lesbian Nonfiction,” “Goddess,” “Channeling,” “Shamanism,” “Mind-Altering Drugs,” “Pagan,” and “Crystals/Alien.”

  At a small desk about halfway to the back of the store is today’s featured writer, a children’s author who has come to autograph copies of his book. He tinkers with the boom box he brought with him, which begins to play what I take to be a recording of him reading his book. That technique will guarantee his isolation, I’m afraid.

  On my way out, I stop by the racks of free magazines to collect some samples. These aren’t real-estate guides and used-car locators. I take copies of Spirit in the Smokies (“A magazine of New Paradigm Living”); Asheville Global Report, an anti-law-enforcement rant; Critter (“Animal adoption and education in Asheville, Buncombe, Madison, Henderson and Haywood Counties”); Eco Voyager (“Changing the world one community at a time”); New Life Journal (“Healing & whole foods in the Appalachians”); Southern Voice, a gay and lesbian publication; Community Connections (“Serving Western North Carolina’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered community”); Forest Advocate; Wild Mountain Times (“A journal of the Southern Appalachian Biodiversity Project”); and Creations (“Inspiring the soul thru healing, creativity & down-to-earth spirituality”).

  Half a block from the store, a Jesus-looking young man tries to stop passersby. He eyeballs me, hesitates, but then sees the publications I’m carrying.

  “You look like a pretty open-minded person. Cool,” he says.

  I’m the farthest thing from cool, as we both can plainly see. Besides, I don’t respond well to flattery.

  He lives on a ten-acre commune with twenty other people, he tells me—or maybe it’s a twenty-acre commune with ten other people. They’ve built their own shelter from scraps and are trying to raise their own food. At his feet is a stack of comic books, one of which he offers me now.

  He and his mates are selling the comics to help support themselves. Any donation, he says, will help them in their effort toward “building a society that doesn’t suck.”

  I wish him luck in that. “But I just got all of these magazines for free,” I say.

  The Writers’ Workshop is headquartered in the Flatiron Building on Battery Park Avenue, an eight-story version of the New York landmark. I am the second person to arrive. The offices are on the third floor. The door is locked, so I sit in the hallway on a padded bench opposite four or five folding chairs.

  Over the next thirty minutes, I see why the workshop has so much seating outside its door. Enough would-be critique-group members show up to fill the available space, but no one from the organization comes to let us in. Among my new friends are a woman freelance writer and editor who has recently moved to the area from Atlanta and a pair of lovebirds who sit too close together and will be all over each other the first chance they get. The girl says she sells vacuum cleaners door to door, a line of work I thought passed from existence decades ago.

  We tell each other what kind of material we write. Though we’ve all come to join a critique group and don’t require the workshop’s blessing to go ahead and inaugurate one now, no one takes the initiative. In fact, I sense a general relief that such a group will not come to pass. As we say our good-byes, the young lady prevails upon the freelancer to review a portion of her novel-in-progress. Almost as a
n afterthought, the freelancer volunteers that she belongs to a smaller writers’ group that meets at a branch of the local library on the second Saturday of each month. When I express interest, she takes my name and address and promises to send me directions to the library.

  I have no real expectation of hearing from her, but a letter arrives within a couple of days.

  My first impression of the writers’ group—uncharitable, I admit—is of age. Liver-spotted skin here, a worn-out hip and a bad limp there. Gnarled hands, stooped backs. Once I pay the group’s yearly fee, I become the junior member by ten or twelve years, and I stand a good quarter-century below the average age. This is one of those associations where people gather to applaud each other’s unpublished poetry, for the privilege of having their own praised in its turn.

  They are pleased to have me, especially when they learn I am an actual full-time editor for an actual publishing company. Despite my saying that I come as a fellow writer, and not in any official capacity, they seem to believe I’m a talent scout looking for material. Any questions about publishing are referred to me. When they take me at my word on matters as diverse as contracts, distribution, and design, all of which are outside my expertise, it confirms my opinion that they’re amateurs.

  Actually, I misjudge them on all counts.

  I understand this when it comes time to put some of my own material on the line. The members are intimately familiar with each other’s writing; they exchange manuscripts individually and read poems, stories, and essays aloud to the group. By contrast, I am rather cryptic about the book I’m planning and about why I feel a need to travel a hundred and fifty miles to the Asheville area to participate in a writers’ group. Though they never push me, I sense that I should either offer something of my own for public consumption or explain myself in greater detail.

  My choice is an old piece of fiction that has been sitting in a drawer for years. Alone among my stories, it still gives me pleasure.

  When I was twenty-two and taking a fiction-writing seminar in graduate school, I wrote a story that was recommended by my professor for publication in the literary magazine put out by my university. From there, it was selected by the great John Updike for reprinting in the Best American Short Stories series—all without my having put it in the mail anywhere. That was my first publication, and it remains the greatest stroke of luck of my life.

  But I like the story I bring to the writers’ group better. It concerns a man who, having lost an arm in an accident, resumes his avocation of refereeing high-school basketball games. Not fully recovered from his injury and out of practice, he makes a couple of bad calls against the home team, but the crowd members—many of whom know of his troubles—greet him with scattered words of encouragement rather than boos. Strangely, this provokes him to call fouls on the team’s star player. Though they’re beginning to get heated, the local folks continue to restrain themselves. Finally, on an inbounds play where the home cheerleaders are stationed, one of the young ladies leans into his ear and makes a quiet comment that turns him red—and starts him on his recovery.

  The story brought me the finest rejection letter I’ve ever gotten. “Everyone here who read this found it a funny, accurate, and beautifully developed little study in psychology,” an editor at The New Yorker wrote me. She generously suggested I try the Atlantic, Esquire, and GQ.

  I chose instead to revise the story a year later and mail it back to The New Yorker, at which time I received a form rejection with a handwritten postscript that my editor friend was no longer with the magazine. As is my custom, I left the story to molder after that.

  But now, for the benefit of my writers’ group, I tighten it by three pages, eliminate an extraneous character, and change the title. It is leaner and faster than what I sent The New Yorker—and a good bit better than anything I’ve heard at our monthly meetings, in my estimation. I make fifteen photocopies for the benefit of anyone who’d like to examine it more closely after my reading.

  The story begins with the referee’s shoe coming untied. His partner, thinking he’s doing a favor, halts the action while the accident victim goes to one knee and tries to fix his lace. It’s a newly learned skill, and a difficult one, and he’s having to perform it under pressure in the most public of settings.

  I’m barely done describing how to tie a shoelace with one hand and giving the background on his accident when I’m interrupted.

  “Thank you, Steve. That’s a good story.”

  “Shall I continue reading?” I’ve barely finished three pages. I have fifteen to go.

  “No, I think we have a couple of others who’ve brought material today.” This is the group’s director. “Thanks for sharing it with us, though.” Then, turning to the members, he says, “Does anyone want to comment?”

  “It’s a very good story. I enjoyed it,” someone says.

  “Yes.”

  “I agree.”

  There is a pause.

  “It gets started kind of slowly,” someone offers.

  “It does begin slowly.”

  “With today’s readers, you’ve got to hook them early.”

  “If you don’t grab them in the first page, they’ll move on to something else.”

  “There are demands on everybody’s lives. You’ve got to get their attention.”

  “Don’t bore people. Don’t waste their time.”

  “You ought to take your main action and move it up front.”

  The director thanks me again for sharing.

  “The writing really is beautiful,” someone says.

  “I agree.”

  “Bring it back when you revise it. We’d love to hear it again.”

  I carry my fifteen copies home.

  One interesting thing about the members is their simultaneous love of books and hatred of mainstream publishing. Fortunately, their feelings don’t extend to me as a representative of the industry, but neither do they strive to hide them in my presence. These are people who feel they’ve been wronged. They’ve been belittled, bilked, screwed, and shat upon by editors, agents, get-published-quick scams, magazines, book publishers, contest chairmen, and assorted others. A few have achieved modest success, but none has reached the plateau to which they’d like to ascend, and the shortsightedness, the lack of imagination, the greed, and the herd mentality of publishing people are held to be at fault for that.

  Bitter though they are, and grouse though they certainly do, they’ll never stop reaching for the prize. They’ve all been deeply touched by books. They’ll keep attending conferences, exchanging manuscripts, corresponding with kindred spirits, entering contests, subscribing to writers’ magazines, introducing themselves to booksellers, hobnobbing with insiders, reading the classics, researching the market, looking for an angle, practicing their craft, submitting their work, and consoling each other as long as they draw breath. This at an age when most of their peers are enjoying their ease.

  Frankie Schelly writes social-issues novels that fare well in the various contests in which she enters them. But when it comes to publication, her tale is one of unleavened frustration. She wants commercial success and refuses to lower her sights. At meetings, her talk is always of hiring and firing agents, a cycle of expectations raised and then dashed.

  Steve Brown gave up his job in the prime of life to write full-time. He doesn’t know how he’ll face his kids if he doesn’t find success, after they’ve seen him put himself in a position of dependency. He confesses to me that he wouldn’t even have a car to drive if his mother-in-law hadn’t leased him one. He runs up quite a tab, too, joining writers’ organizations, attending conferences out of state, and establishing acquaintanceships with editors and agents. He has a series of four mysteries with a Generation X female protagonist, as well as a couple of mainstream novels, but no publications, and little promise of any.

  Jack Pyle and his good friend Taylor Reese have cowritten a couple of gardening books for a small commercial publisher, which they sell out of
the trunks of their cars. They are regular speakers at bookstores, garden shops, and library gatherings through parts of four states.

  These are a few of my new friends. Privately, I hold myself superior, since my idea is so much better than any of theirs. It’s axiomatic that a writer judges his peers by what they have in print and himself by the stories playing in his head, which are of a higher realm than anything he’ll ever get on paper.

  There’s a portion of my house where, to get up under the eaves to paint, I have to tilt the ladder at an uncomfortably low angle, so my head is only about a foot higher than my knees. And the sideways slope of the land is such that I can’t even the ladder by laying a board under the lower side. Rather, I have to put a thick board under the lower end and a thinner one on the high side.

  Anyway, I am precariously in the air painting as quickly as I can when I feel the feet of the ladder start to slip backwards off the boards. Suddenly, I am riding the top of the ladder down the side of the house. There is nothing to grab onto and nowhere to jump. I steel myself to land chest-first on the heat pump from a height of ten or twelve feet. I don’t know if I holler or not.

  I am saved when the ladder’s feet slide all the way off the boards and dig into the turf and stop. The only harm is a couple of furrows in the lawn and matching scratches down the side of the house. There is nothing to do but adjourn inside for a drink and a towel, try to set the ladder more firmly, and have at it once more.

  I’m not fond of symbols and metaphors and seldom understand or even recognize them when I see them. But I know my major preparation for writing a new book to be a symbolic act.

  The spring before I started my first book, it so happened that our house needed painting and we didn’t have the money to hire someone to do it. In accordance with my practice of always doing things the hardest way possible, I spent my spare moments from May through October—nights, weekends, days off—first scrubbing the boards clean with a bathroom brush and a bucket of bleach mixed half and half with water, then painting the whole thing with a three-inch brush, or rather several of them in turn as they wore out or gummed up and stiffened. At first, I understood no connection between that labor and my writing, but I gradually came to see it as steeling myself for the long, solitary desk work ahead.