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  Painting the house that summer remains the hardest physical labor I’ve ever done. The ridiculousness of my method drew a few comments from neighbors, and I couldn’t disagree with them. Then again, I knew that I’d get a book written and they never would.

  Now, eight years later, the place wants paint again. Our finances are in better shape, yet I feel a need to readdress my fears—to be standing twenty feet off the ground worried about bees flying up my shirt, and then to do it again the next weekend, and the next, until the job is done.

  Like writing, painting puts me in a foul mood. I like people to offer their help, though I don’t really want it. I’m open to suggestions, though I won’t do the work any way other than what I’ve planned. I remain a family man, though the job will be done when it needs to be done and take as long as it takes and have priority over everything else.

  My parents are after me all summer to let them lend a hand. I try to explain that the work is proceeding on schedule, that it’s a hot, nasty job, and that they’re welcome to come and play with the kids but would be unwise to paint with me. I even warn them that they might find me in ill spirits. They come anyway, early one Sunday afternoon.

  On Sunday afternoons during painting, I tend to be mad because I’ve spent the coolest part of the day at church, only to have sweat running into my eyes by the time I get the ladder set up and the bucket stirred. I’m madder this day, since it’s mid-August and I’m working on the south side of the house.

  “You know, it’s a lot cooler around back,” my father says. “It’ll be like trying to spread tar here in front.”

  I explain that I intend to finish each side of the house before moving on to the next, even if that makes me the stupidest man alive. I don’t care how hot it is, I don’t want the place looking like a patchwork quilt. As regards the present day’s labor, I told them in advance that I’ve already done the picture window and the front wall as far as the door, and that if they want to come and help, the south side of the house is what will be painted today.

  “Your main concern should be your health,” my mother says. “You can always work on this side after supper.”

  “I’m going around back,” my father says.

  My mother keeps badgering me about finding her something to paint—preferably in back. She also wants me to be sure to “hydrate.” She tells me this often.

  “Dammit, Mom, I’m thirty-eight years old. I know how to hydrate,” I finally tell her. My father has come around the house and is looking at me as I say this. I try to talk nicer. “If you really want to do something, take the kids to the pool.”

  But she prefers to work, so I get down off the ladder to find her a bucket and brush.

  Seeing her mother-in-law painting, my wife suddenly has to help, too. This is the first time all summer she’s shown the inclination.

  Meanwhile, the kids are unsupervised and tearing up the house. I can hear them yelling and pounding across the floor. It’s very distressing how things are getting so far out of my control.

  “Could someone please take the kids to the pool?” I ask.

  Five minutes later, I’m in my swim trunks and sandals and shepherding my daughters to the car myself. Let the others paint the whole damn house if they want.

  But being a decent son at my core, I come back and apologize. My parents have driven a hundred miles, after all, and will have to travel home later, after being out in the sun.

  As it turns out, my mother doesn’t make it beyond twenty minutes. Her face flushes in the heat and her hands start trembling, so she leaves her brush and goes inside. My father soon follows, and then my wife, which lets me return to doing things the way I like.

  No more ill words are exchanged on the subject, and any sour feelings pass quickly. But I notice that I’m thereafter left alone with brush, paint, and a big, bare wall against which to test myself.

  CHAPTER 3

  Big Game

  It’s easy to gain the confidence of unpublished and small-time writers. They crave attention but haven’t received much of it. They’ll latch onto anything they think might elevate their status or give them a forum to express their views. I know this because I am one of the tribe.

  For the purposes of my own book-to-be, though, I understand from an early stage that I must have some name-brand authors on board. I need to bask in their reflected glow. I want to know whether Thomas Wolfe’s town has had an influence on their careers. I’d like to learn what training and what writerly habits have contributed to their success. I don’t want to dwell on their best work but to learn what they’re doing in the here and now, when their paths cross mine. One of my fondest hopes is that, if I ingratiate myself well enough, one or two will let me eavesdrop on their creative process as they write their next book. If and when it comes time for me to seek a publisher, their presence in my manuscript will lend it legitimacy.

  I’m unsure where to start.

  Charles Frazier is probably the biggest fish in the pond, but I want to have commitments from other authors before I try to approach him.

  I’ve never met Robert Morgan, but my company published the paperback edition of his first novel, so I have a means of introduction. Still, he teaches at Cornell now, five states away, and I’d rather begin with some face-to-face interviews.

  John Ehle lives close to where I do. But I’m told he’s in delicate health, having suffered from Parkinson’s for many years.

  I get the impression Lilian Jackson Braun is reclusive.

  I understand Patricia Cornwell is a handful.

  Unbeknownst to her, Gail Godwin becomes my choice for my book’s first interview.

  This is largely a matter of convenience. Godwin is giving a reading at the women’s college in the city where I live. The next day, she will be in Asheville autographing at Malaprop’s. That works perfectly for me, since I’ve planned a research trip to the mountains that day anyway. I’ll let her audition for me at the women’s college, after which I’ll introduce myself at Malaprop’s and lay the groundwork for an interview in the near future. She lives in New York State now, but she has a condominium in Asheville and visits in the spring and fall. When she’s in town, she takes tea and a New York Times on the porch at the Grove Park Inn. That would be a good place for us to get together. True, A Southern Family is the only novel of hers I’ve read. But I can brush up on her canon between now and the interview. I realize this is probably a half-assed way to prepare, but I’m not writing a dissertation on her, after all.

  I bring one of my daughters with me to Godwin’s reading. We arrive a few minutes early, but the lecture hall is already so crowded that we are forced to sit in the back row near the door, as others in search of seats stream in behind us. A representative of the college soon steps to the stage and informs us that, in view of the audience size, the event will be moved to the larger auditorium across the hall. My daughter is out the door like she’s spring-loaded. The first one in the other auditorium, she descends all the way to the front and sits in the middle of the first row. Our vantage point couldn’t be better.

  Gail Godwin is a gracious, deep-thinking, soft-spoken woman. She goes out of her way to compliment the intelligence of the young women of the college she lunched with earlier in the day. Her reading is well delivered but has a religious bent to it, which sets my mind to wandering. My daughter’s preference is stories about animals, so the reading holds limited interest for her, too, though she is impressed when I tell her I’ll be interviewing Godwin.

  It doesn’t work out quite that way.

  I pick up a copy of Godwin’s latest book at Malaprop’s the next day. As I stand in the autograph line, my conviction begins to wilt, the thinness of my justification for requesting an interview just now hitting home.

  Maybe bluster can carry the day. I step up to the table, my name and qualifications on the tip of my tongue. Godwin looks up at me briefly, then looks up again, quicker this time.

  Is it fear I read in her face? She’s an observ
ant woman; she’s not a famous author for nothing. She saw me in the audience a hundred and fifty miles away just last night, sitting in the front row, large as life. She must think I’m a stalker.

  Perhaps the interview should wait until later. I ask her to sign the book to my daughter, after which I depart the store quietly.

  I’ll have better luck with Sharyn McCrumb.

  I’m acquainted with a librarian who worked with her on a newspaper years ago. The president of the company where I’m employed is a friend of Sharyn’s who helped her with research on The Ballad of Frankie Silver. I once had dinner with Sharyn and several other admirers before one of Sharyn’s local autographings, though she may not remember me.

  If my Asheville friends can be said to have a patron saint, it is Sharyn McCrumb. Through fourteen or so novels and—at last count—two New York Times bestsellers, an Anthony Award, an Agatha Award, two Macavity Awards, a Nero Award, two Los Angeles Times Notable Books, and three New York Times Notable Books, she hasn’t forgotten that she, too, was once a writers’ group regular with big plans but little to show for them. My friends admire her because she always has time for people who take the craft of writing seriously—whether they’re successful or not—and also because she doesn’t suffer fools. Whenever someone tries to insinuate himself into the brotherhood by saying, “I plan to sit down and write a novel someday,” she comes back with something like this: “And I want to learn to be a brain surgeon, when I can find the time.”

  If you want a copy of a new Sharyn McCrumb book in western North Carolina, you’d better reserve it in advance or be on hand when the store unpacks the boxes, else you’ll have to wait until it’s back in stock. People appreciate her concern for Appalachian issues and her reverence for mountain history.

  Jack Pyle and Taylor Reese from my writers’ group have known her for ten years or more. In fact, they’re fictionalized as environmental commandos in The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, the second of Sharyn’s Appalachian Ballad novels. In that book, two boyhood friends are reunited as old men. Soon after they renew their friendship, one of them is discovered to have liver cancer. “I’m the sick one,” Taylor says. The incidence of cancer is uncommonly high along the river where Taylor’s character lives, and a paper mill that discharges chemicals upstream is very likely the culprit. As Taylor’s character grows sicker and they find no redress via newspapers, lawyers, and government agencies, the two old-timers grow militant. In their final, grand act together, they enter the office of the mill’s president, hold a gun to his head, and make him drink a Mason jar of rancid downstream water.

  Jack and Taylor showed Sharyn the grave—or graves, rather—of Charlie Silver. Charlie was murdered in 1832. Parts of his body, chopped up with an ax, were discovered at different times in different locations, and he was thus laid to rest in three graves. Convicted of the crime, his young wife, Frankie, was the first woman ever executed in North Carolina, though her guilt or innocence is debated even today. It is one of the state’s classic murder cases. It was Jack Pyle who, one rainy day in the late 1990s, held an umbrella over a photographer as he snapped the shot of the three graves that adorns the cover of The Ballad of Frankie Silver.

  Jack provides me Sharyn’s home address. In my letter, I describe the book I’m planning to write and ask if I can interview her. It is mid-December, which is bad timing on my part, but I understand she’s at work on a new novel, and I’d love for her to tell me about it.

  On December 24, I receive a Christmas card with a handwritten note: “Thanks for asking! I’ll be glad to do the interview. I wish there were a book in progress. There is a deadline, yes, so far no book. Can it wait ’til May?”

  Though it contains only a promise, the card is one of the nicest gifts I receive. Of course the interview can wait until May. That will give me time to prepare.

  I write on May 4 to remind her of our tentative plan.

  A reply comes ten days later. The date at the top of the page overlays part of the letterhead, and the several paragraphs of text are angled about twenty degrees off the vertical. “Blasted printer!” Sharyn has hand-scrawled across the top of the letter. She pokes fun at her state of disorganization, saying she can’t find my recent letter and so is using the December one; she later signs off with “Yours in the usual chaos, Sharyn the Unready.” In between, she proposes that we meet at the Reynolds Homestead—the childhood home of tobacco magnate R. J. Reynolds, located in far southern Virginia—where she will be giving a program one week hence. She says we can talk for however long I like after her duty is done.

  Maybe Sharyn’s informality puts me too much at ease. Maybe I’m too comfortable in having read seven or eight of her novels. Or maybe I just have no idea what goes into organizing an interview. Whatever the reason, I possess an unwarranted confidence the day I drive north to Virginia.

  The first sign that I’m out of my depth comes during the program. If Sharyn is disorganized, it’s only in matters nonessential. Here, today, she’s well coiffed, meticulously prepared, and much at ease before a gathering of fifty or sixty, most of whom seem to know her personally. Sharing the billing with her is Appalachian folk musician Betty Smith. They alternate. Sharyn reads excerpts from her Ballad novels, after which Betty performs the songs that inspired the prose. Betty has won a history-book award for a biography she’s written; she has also garnered numerous music awards and has done some recordings for the Smithsonian. I’ve never heard of her, of course. She performs on guitar and dulcimer, which I recognize, autoharp, which sounds vaguely familiar, and something called psaltery. Music, Sharyn explains, is of such importance to her that she compiles a special soundtrack for each new novel, which she plays as she writes. I’ve noticed the song snippets in her books but mostly skipped over them. I resolve to purchase a Betty Smith tape after the program and to get on the ball. If I’ve missed the importance of music in Sharyn’s books, what business do I have troubling her for an interview? They’re called “the Ballad novels,” for God’s sake! I sulk through the rest of the program.

  Afterward, Sharyn invites me to lunch with several of her friends from the audience. Then we go alone to the public library in nearby Stuart, Virginia, to talk. We find a quiet table in the back, where I set up my tape recorder between us.

  “Where are you from in the mountains, exactly?” I ask.

  She’s not from the mountains at all, though her father was.

  How could I not know that?

  I grow flustered, as is reflected in my subsequent questions. They’re so convoluted that they’re barely recognizable as questions at all. I ramble on and on, venting literary opinions, drawing parallels where none exist, speaking on Appalachian topics with the false authority that only a native New Yorker can muster. All the while, a private voice nags me: She’s the one who’s supposed to do the talking. The tape I am making will be painful to hear. I know that much already.

  Sharyn, God bless her, waits patiently until I’m finished, seeming not to judge. Her books have been translated into many languages. She’s been interviewed far and wide. She’s run into all manner of idiots. Her technique is to take the mess I’ve dumped in her lap, locate within it the germ of a pertinent question, restate that question clearly, and then answer it. I’m more thankful than I can say.

  “The first time I ever lived in the mountains was in 1980. I mean, my ancestors got to Mitchell County in 1790, but between them and me came World War II. So when my father was drafted and taken out of the mountains, he ended up marrying a girl from the coast, and he never got back.”

  Like Sharyn’s life itself, her books are neatly divided between the two distinct cultures of the lowland South and the highland South.

  The heroine of her early books is forensic anthropologist and amateur sleuth Elizabeth MacPherson.

  “That’s my mother’s side of the family,” she says. “That’s the flatland South. Those books are Jane Austen with an attitude. They’re cultural satires.”

  Elizabe
th MacPherson is not closely in touch with her Scottish roots. On the occasions when mountain culture does come into play—as in Highland Laddie Gone, which is set during a Scottish festival in the Appalachians—it is lampooned for its excesses.

  Those early novels and a couple of science-fiction satires—one of them the Edgar-winning Bimbos of the Death Sun—were produced under trying circumstances.

  “The first seven or so books were written by someone who had infant children, a day job, and was going to graduate school. Now, how much could you get done with those three things on your plate?”

  “About what I’m getting done now,” I admit.

  “I mean literally in diapers. I mean they were infants. With Bimbos, for example, I was working eight to five at the Virginia Tech film library, taking two classes per semester, and I was pregnant, at the throwing-up stage, and I had a book contract that said I had to get this book written in eleven weeks. And so I would finish this job at five o’clock, get something to eat, go sit at the typewriter, and write until eleven, and then go to sleep. And cry—sometimes just cry—because I was so tired. And then get up at seven o’clock in the morning and do it again. And so I have no sympathy for people—especially twittery old ladies—who say, ‘Someday, when I have the time, I’m going to write a book.’ ”

  Those early books were successful—perhaps too much so.

  “I grew up very much in this whole tradition of ‘I want to be a writer,’ without having any models. Nobody sits down and really talks to you about how the world works in a literary sense. So, for example, there are three ways to be known as a literary writer. You can go live in New York and work in publishing. You can get an MFA, preferably from Hollins or Iowa, or an undergraduate degree from Bennington. Or you can be a college professor, in English, at some accredited four-year school. And if you don’t do one of those three things, hello genre fiction. You write Moby Dick, they call it ‘The Hunt for White October.’