Intimations of Mortality

Ruth, myself and Preston Russell at the Savannah Book Festival in February.

Ever since I turned 70 last October I’ve been monitoring myself for signs of impending death or disability. No kidding. I’ve always been a hypochondriac, and getting older has only made me worse. Take what happened a couple of weeks ago. One Friday morning I got out of bed, had a peculiar buzzing sensation in the top of my head followed by a loss of balance, and soon afterward suffered a severe onset of vertigo, with all the disagreeable side effects. Convinced I was having a stroke and was experiencing my last few moments of existence, or at least of rational thought, I gazed soulfully up at my wife Ruth while we awaited the arrival of the ambulance, hoping to carry this last image of her beauty with me into the Hereafter, or the nursing home. She smiled nicely for me. Later, as the EMTs were carrying me out to the ambulance, all I could think of was, “Poor Ruth, she doesn’t know how to change the water filter!” Happily, for me at least, the outcome was not death or an accelerated loss of my reasoning powers (they were already failing in any case). I’m on the road to recovery and, as you can see, am back at the computer. If you read this, and it sounds like it was written by a demented rhesus monkey, I hope you’ll let me know. Now I’m off to change the water filter.

Solitaire

It's often said that writing is a solitary occupation. As a writer, I can confirm that. But once the lonely work of writing is done and the book is published, the writer is no longer alone. Week after week he or she travels from bookseller to bookseller, from library to library, mingling with a great many people and--if he or she is an introvert, as I tend to be--trying hard to seem at ease with everyone and be obliging and cheerful, all the while struggling to overcome the shyness that is the natural concomitant of habitual solitude.

Of course not every writer is such a confirmed loner. Many are supremely comfortable in their public roles. Not me. Around Burnsville I'm known as The Man Who Stays at Home. So as much as I've enjoyed the last five months of touring with my new book, and as kind as everyone has been to me every place I've gone, I have to confess I'm very glad to be at home again, at least for awhile, alone with my wife and my cat and my dog.

That doesn't mean I want to shut myself away from all human contact. I may be a loner but I do enjoy staying in touch with those I care about and who I hope care about me and what I do. That's why I established this website and this blog--I thought it would be a way I could communicate with my readers. Vain hope! Week after week I dutifully check the meter that measures the hits on my website, and guess what? With only a few exceptions, the only people who check my website are my webmaster Britt Kaufmann and myself. I set up this blog a little over a year ago, and since then a total of four people have left messages. One of them was Britt. Speak of solitude! Well, at least it's quiet...

Literary Hunger

It's been five long years since I toured with a new book, but starting July 4th I set out once more on what Sharyn McCrumb has called the literary migrant worker circuit. After launching Nor the Battle to the Strong on Independence Day at Malaprop's in Asheville, I visited Black Bear Books in Boone, Fireside Books in Forest City, Blue Moon in Spruce Pine, Phillips & Lloyd in Hayesville, The Literary Bookpost in Salisbury, Osondu Books in Waynesville and City Lights in Sylva--independents all, I'm pleased to say.

Those five years have made a difference. I'm older and a little slower and get tired sooner. But on the other hand, I feel more comfortable than ever before, and I think that's mostly because of the warm welcome I've gotten from the good folks who run the stores I've visited and from the readers who've come to meet me and talk about the new book.

Why? I'm not sure. But I'm willing to venture a guess. People who love books these days are hungry for a good, nourishing literary meal, and too often publishers are dishing out a scanty gruel instead. More books are being printed today than ever before, but the books themselves all too often fail to satisfy the serious reader's desire to consume fare of substance.

I don't know if my book measures up to that standard. That's not a judgment I'm entitled to make. But I do know that my intent was to write a book that serious readers can relish. And what's cheered me so, these last few days, is the readers and booksellers I've met seemed to recognize that intent and appreciate it for its own sake. They seemed grateful to get to know a writer and a book that might possibly fill their hunger for a good read as well as help fatten the author's royalty account or fill the bookstore's coffers.

Of course the readers had to take the book home and go through it and decide whether or not it met that expectation. Did it fill them up or leave them hungry? I'm curious. I'd like to know. Writing this blog, I sometimes feel I'm writing to myself, or to the empty air. I long for comments but up to now they've been mighty scarce. So this time I'm asking outright. If you've read Nor the Battle to the Strong, will you post a comment on this blog and let me know whether it fed you well or left you hungry? I look forward to hearing from you, even if you still want dessert--or maybe even another entree.

UNTHANKED ANGELS

As is more than amply evident from other links on this website, my new novel Nor the Battle to the Strong launches on July Fourth at Malaprop's Bookstore in Asheville. Just yesterday I received an early shipment of author's copies of the book, and if I do say so myself, it looks pretty darn good. Once again my publisher, Deric Beil of Savannah, has confirmed his long-held reputation as one of the finest book designers in the business.

Of course it's a delight for any author to handle his or her newest book for the first time--especially after a gestation period as long as this one (seven years from inspiration to publication). Naturally I basked for a while in a pleasurable glow, paging through the actual artifact after such a tiresome and often discouraging wait when the image of the book shimmered distantly in imagination only. But then I scanned the Afterword where I had acknowledged the help of those who had assisted me, and a ghastly realization struck me.

I had neglected to mention two of the people who had done the most for me! First among them is my dear friend and colleague Britt Kaufmann, who poured her incredible array of talents and boundless enthusiasm into designing this website; conceiving the composition of the cover; writing promotional materials without number; and arranging several interviews with me which have appeared, and will appear, in various venues. Nor was this all. A dedicated feminist, pacifist and indifferent student of historical fiction, Britt not only read my novel about the Revolutionary War, she found merit in it and even insisted with her typical passion that it offered important lessons for those like herself who harbor reservations about war. She has photographed me to such advantage that I actually appear presentable on this website, encouraged me when my own confidence flagged, cussed me out when I gave in to doubts and self-pity, and always resolutely believed in the importance of my work. Bear in mind that Britt is a stay-at-home mom with three young children, and also a gifted, oft-published and anthologized poet in her own right. She was busy enough without me. My wife Ruth and I call her our surrogate daughter, a title she tolerates, and we are more fond of her than we can say. But I have served her ill, and I am sorry.

The second person I neglected to thank is Bob Yankle of Burlington, the subject of my last log entry. It was Bob who encouraged me to take photographs with his personal digital camera at a cavalry re-enactment last November at Cowpens, SC and who spent most of the day shooting pictures himself, both of us hoping to capture an image that would suit Britt's book-jacket conception. Bob is a pro and this was the first time I'd ever used a digital camera, so it was sheer dumb luck that I got a shot which ended up on the cover of the novel. It's a credit to Bob's generosity that he assured me mine was the best shot. I may have snapped the picture, but we were both aiming to fulfill Britt's composition, so the final cover image is the result of a completely collaborative effort.

Why did I fail to mention Britt and Bob's help? I have no good answer save that I wrote the acknowledgements at the time of the original submission of the manuscript, years before my friends rendered their invaluable last-minute, pre-publication services. Then, when the galleys arrived a few weeks ago to be proofed--the time when I should've added a paragraph of gratitude--I fixated instead on the technical job of reviewing the typesetting and simply forgot to update my thank-yous.

So, my two unthanked angels, I hope you can forgive me for failing to praise you when and where I should've. My heart is full of love and gratitude for you both, and I assure you I'll try to make up for my omissions as I circulate on tour. People are going to know about what you did for me, I promise.

Strange Fates

My good friend Bob Yankle of Burlington, NC has sent me a striking photo he snapped of the equestrian statue of Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene at Guilford Courthouse National Military Park in Greensboro. It accompanies this blog. Greene is one of the chief characters in my forthcoming novel Nor the Battle to the Strong. I didn’t know much about him till I began researching the book, and as you’ll see if you read the novel, he quickly became one of my heroes.

During the Revolutionary War, from late 1780 through 1783 Greene was commander of the Southern Continental Army. Guilford Courthouse, fought on March 15, 1781, was his most famous battle. Though he didn’t win, he inflicted such severe losses on his British opponent Lord Cornwallis that His Lordship eventually limped up to Yorktown, Virginia where he surrendered to George Washington. It’s my opinion now that Greene probably had more to do, militarily speaking, with the winning of our independence than any other American officer.

When I was a child my family lived for a time in Greensboro. We used to picnic in a park there called the Battleground. Of course this was the site of the battle but to me it was just a place to go and eat relish sandwiches and drink Cokes. One fixture of the place did command my attention, though. It was the equestrian statue of Greene. I used to stand at the foot of that magnificent monument and admire the handsome figure on his great metal horse. I would read the names of his Southern battles emblazoned on the pedestal: Guilford Courthouse. Hobkirk’s Hill. Ninety-Six. Eutaw Springs. I wondered what those words meant and who the man was who fought in the places bearing such exotic names.

Now I know. And looking back on my boyhood, I marvel at the strangeness of fate. Of course it never occurred to me then that I would grow up and immerse myself in the life of Greene and come to admire him as I’ve seldom admired any leader of my own time—much less that I would live to write a novel about him. I guess all these years later I’m still, in some ways, that same little boy gazing up at that mighty figure on horseback. I’m much obliged to Bob Yankle for reminding me of that. Bob is a Navy veteran, a member of the Alamance Chapter of the Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, official photographer for the online magazine Southern Campaigns of the American Revolution (www.southerncampaign.org), and one of the finest people I know. Thanks, Bob!

Nor the Battle to the Strong

Anybody who’s checked my website knows I came to writing somewhat late in life, and that over the last thirteen years I’ve published four novels. At first, for a late-blooming beginner, things moved pretty quickly for me, with books coming out in 1996, 1999, 2001 and 2003. Then I pitched into an ambitious project—a historical novel larger in scale and more serious in content than anything I’d tried before. That book took me two years to research and write and another year to sell; then two more years had to pass while it waited its turn on the production line.

Now the time is approaching when it will finally see print. The launch date is July 4, a fitting date for a novel about the American Revolution. It’s called Nor the Battle to the Strong. The jacket cover has been designed. Any day now I’ll be proofing galleys. Soon review copies will be going out. Booksellers have already started to contact me about readings and signings. These are exciting days for any writer, but especially for one who’s nearly seventy, frets about the amount of fruitful time left to him, and has impatiently waited five years to see his next work go into print.

Not that I’ve been idle during that interval. I’ve written four other new novels, re-written two others, am working on a seventh, and have begun a sequel to Nor the Battle. My wife Ruth and I have also co-written a four-act play. We hope all these works can one day join their literary brothers and sisters on the shelves of booksellers and libraries or on the stage. But as anybody familiar with today’s publishing business knows, nothing is quick or easy or predictable. We’ll see what happens and anticipate good things.

Meanwhile, it’s a happy time for us. We’ve got a great publisher who’s turning out a high-quality book and working hard to promote it. We think it’s a good book. We hope you'll read it and like it and tell your friends about it. We think it says something important about our country, not just the America the 18th century but the America of today and tomorrow too. We look forward to taking it on the road. We hope it will make a difference. After all, that's why we write.

Masters of Place

Over the holidays I finally got around to reading an author whose work a friend has been urging on me for years—Ivan Doig. His memoir This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind (1978) evokes his native northern Montana and its people as powerfully does as Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa, and that started me thinking about the importance of place in the kind of writing that leaves its imprint on the mind long after the reading experience is over. Place can be a character in memoir, and certainly in fiction, as surely as any person.

Think of Hemingway’s Spain in Death in the Afternoon and For Whom the Bell Tolls. Or Cormac McCarthy’s Texas/New Mexico/Mexico border country in Blood Meridian or No Country for Old Men. Place doesn’t even have to be real to take on a forcible, memorable identity—witness Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. The fabulous Latin American republics of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Autumn of the Patriarch pulse with life as surely as does Joyce’s actual Dublin in Ulysses. Peter Taylor’s Tennessee, as it existed only a few years ago but in a wholly different age from ours, is as exquisitely preserved as in insect in amber in works like A Summons to Memphis and The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court. So is the quality of the New England light in everything John Cheever wrote.

Even genre writers—maybe particularly genre writers, of times past—were masters of place. One recalls Ernest Haycox’s rain-soaked, mist-shrouded Oregon; Alan LeMay’s parched Texas plains; Walter Van Tillburg Clark’s springtime Sierra Nevadas in The Ox-Bow Incident. We here in Western North Carolina have our own conjurers of our majestic highlands: John Ehle, Isabel Zuber, Ron Rash, Charles Frazier.

I used to do some teaching, and the thing that struck me most in the writing of so many of my students was an almost total absence of a sense of place. Instead, their writing was glib, clever, with-it and, well, superficial. Stories occurred in a vacuum, as if their characters lived and moved in some eerie, hermetically-sealed realm where there was no weather, no scenery, so smell, no texture or flavor. It was as if the out-of-doors—the natural world—had been banished and nothing remained but self-examination.

I fret that in this age of iPods, portable DVD players, MP3’s, and cell phones that can do everything but have sex, we are all getting locked into our own private cocoons and are losing touch, perhaps for all time, with the very environment whose degradation we bemoan.