WELL READ Magazine December 2022

Untethered: Faith, Failure, and Finding Solid Ground Laura Whitfield When Laura Whitfield was fourteen, her extraordinary brother, Lawrence, was killed in a mountain climbing accident. That night she had an epiphany: Life is short. Dream big, even if it means taking risks. So, after graduating from high school, she set out on her own, prepared to do just that.

Laura spent her first summer after high school on North Carolina's Outer Banks, a magical few months filled with friendships, boys, and beer. There she met a handsome DJ who everyone called "Steve the Dream," and risked her heart. When September came, Steve moved to New York City to become a model --prompting Laura to start thinking about modeling, too. After just one semester of college, still seeking to fill the void left by her brother's death, she dropped out and moved to New York to become a cover girl. But while juggling the demands of life in the big city--waiting tables, failed relationships, and the cutthroat world of modeling--she lost her way.

A stirring memoir about a young woman's quest to find hope and stability after devastating loss, Untethered is Laura's story of overcoming shame, embracing faith, and learning that taking risks--and failing--can lead to a bigger life than you've ever dared to imagine.

"The writing is engaging and welcomes the reader into the author’s story and thoughts . . . telling a story that is unique to her yet in which readers will recognize the ebbs and flows of tragedy, challenges, and joy we all experience in life." The BookLife Prize Laura grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina, the daughter of a journalist and a teacher. She has been an advertising copywriter, newspaper columnist, staff writer for an international relief agency, travel writer, blogger, teacher, communications director for several nonprofits, and personal assistant to a New York Times bestselling author.

SCAVENGER HUNT

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A LOWCOUNTRY LEGEND - BEAUFORT’S BELOVED TOOTIE

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HELLO POETS! An exciting collaboration

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TO ADD TO YOUR READING LIST

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A ROUNDTABLE ON WILLIAM GAY’S LITERARY LEGACY

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WATCH THIS

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LOVE, MILLIE by Michael and Donna Chapman

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ANNIE’S ANTICS WITH ANNIE MCDONNELL

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DO YOU KNOW JOE?

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AUTHORS INTERVIEWING AUTHORS

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MARK YOUR CALENDARS

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TOO GOOD NOT TO SHARE

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CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

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NETWORKING

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WHAT’S YOUR STORY?

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OFF THE PAGE WITH RIVER JORDAN

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

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Follow us on social media DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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WELL READ MAGAZINE’S GOOD NEWS GROUP

Join WELL READ MAGAZINE’S good news group on Facebook to find out more about the authors and contributors you see here. Lots of great extras like reviews, events, personal stories, things to celebrate, and opportunities to win free books directly from the authors in each issue!

NOW LET’S HAVE SOME FUN! Rules for the Scavenger Hunt: Find this image somewhere on the following pages.

Post WINNER! in a new post on the good news group.

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SCAVENGER HUNT

Tag me (Mandy Haynes), and you’ll win a copy of WALKING THE WRONG WAY HOME (featured on the back cover of this month’s issue) by Mandy Haynes.

I’ll announce the winner in the good news group and connect you with the author.

All we ask is that you leave an honest review and tell everyone your good news. I can’t wait to hear what you think!

DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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A LOWCOUNTRY LEGEND

Tootie was loved by all, especially by the Beaufort store owners on Bay Street. At Christmastime, when they gave Tootie presents and wished him the happiest of holidays, oftentimes he broke down in a veil of happy tears of gratitude.

It meant so much to Tootie to be remembered.

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BEAUFORT’S BELOVED TOOTIE

A Lowcountry Legend Beaufort’s Beloved Tootie

by Geralyn Ryan and Donna Chapman The last stop before you hit the Atlantic lies a sleepy southern town where a future legend relocated with his family and called Beaufort his home.

Wilson Lane Bourke was born December 10,1931 in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Luckily for everyone in Beaufort, he and his family moved to South Carolina when he was a young child. Affectionately known by his friends and family as “Tootie”, Wilson never let his physical and mental limitations bring him down.

Tootie’s tender heart and gentle demeanor, coupled with

DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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A LOWCOUNTRY LEGEND

his bright, giving spirit, made him Beaufort’s hometown treasure. Tootie’s love for Beaufort, its citizens, and his pure, childlike understanding of the world around him translated into a heart of caring and sharing that enabled him to improve the lives of all he touched.

Always helping others, Tootie swept sidewalks in front of Bay Street businesses, carried groceries for elderly patrons, and worked unofficially as a school crossing guard to help children cross the road to and from school safely. He would pick up lunches for teachers, assist with parking school buses, lead all of the parades held in Beaufort, and help direct street traffic when needed.

It’s no wonder Beaufort’s citizens loved and depended on Tootie.

In gratitude for Tootie’s efforts, he was presented a Beaufort City Police hat and whistle which he wore proudly.

But the best example of how Tootie’s sincere belief in the goodness of others helped improve the

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BEAUFORT’S BELOVED TOOTIE

community happened in the early 1960’s when Tootie sat down to eat his meal at a segregated white restaurant. The restaurant owner couldn’t convince Tootie to take his order to go, as was the custom. By doing this, Tootie unknowingly played a pivotal role in the desegregation of Beaufort’s white restaurants and businesses without court orders, demonstrations, or violence of any kind.

Pat Conroy’s depiction of Tootie’s historic integration of Harry’s Restaurant in downtown Beaufort was captured in his cookbook, Recipes of My Life.

Tootie was known by other variations of his nickname. “Tootie Fruitie,” “Toots,” “Tootsie,” and “Tooda-loo” most memorable is “Mr. Fruit” as he was characterized in Pat Conroy’s novel, The Prince of Tides.

DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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A LOWCOUNTRY LEGEND

Geralyn Ryan, better known as Gerry by all of her friends and family, recently met several Robert Smalls alumni who were Tootie’s classmates. They all had happy, fun memories of Tootie.

Miss Lucille recalled, “Tootie knew everybody. He went to high school - he always went to high school - never went to junior high! He went to tenth, eleventh and twelfth grade, and when Tootie got tired of one class, he went to another.”

Tootie also had a homemade sling shot that he never left home without being tucked safely in his pants pocket.

Michael Chapman, a childhood friend and native Beaufortonian recalled, “Tootie loved to take small bets from folks that didn’t believe that he could hit a target with his sling shot from ten yards. PING! He hit the target every time. Tootie let out a deep belly laugh as he gladly collected his winnings.”

Gerry holds a sweet childhood memory: “As I was daydreaming and lollygagging behind my father and sister in Edward’s Department Store, I noticed Tootie pumping one penny after another into the bubble gum machine.

I wondered, what’s he going to do with all that gum?

Then daddy called me out of my dreamlike state, and I ran to his side. We left the store, and there was Tootie on the front sidewalk with his hand full of brightly colored

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BEAUFORT’S BELOVED TOOTIE

gumballs, offering them to children.

That memory takes me back to a simpler, innocent time in Beaufort.”

Donna Chapman adds yet another heartwarming memory, “My earliest recollection of Tootie was when I saw him riding his bicycle around town. He would gleefully blow his whistle and ring his bike bell and greet everyone with a warm smile. I always waved and smiled back at Tootie. Those were good times.”

Tootie was cared for much of his life by his sister, the late Rose Bourke Harvey. After her passing in 2002, Tootie lived with relatives, and enjoyed his final years at the Ridgeland Nursing Center, where he acquired many new friends.

Gerry, who loved Tootie from childhood, visited him at the nursing facility in 2010. When Tootie saw Gerry and realized that he had a visitor from Beaufort, he threw up his hands in a waving gesture to gather folks closer. When he had their attention, he shouted, “Hey, everybody!” pointing to Gerry as he cried jubilantly, “She came to see ME!” He reiterated the same bold statement as he pointed once more at Gerry.

“She,” Tootie shouted with joy, then pointed back to himself, “came to see ME!” One of Gerry’s classmates discovered where Tootie

DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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A LOWCOUNTRY LEGEND

resided and was determined for him to lead the 2010 Beaufort Christmas Parade.

Sadly, this was his final parade.

On Saturday, February 9, 2013, Wilson Lane Bourke “Tootie” departed this life. He was a lifelong Christian and went to be with his Savior.

He left behind family and friends and a lifetime of lovely, cherished memories for fellow Beaufortonians.

Tootie was truly one of a kind.

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BEAUFORT’S BELOVED TOOTIE

Gerry often thinks about how excited Tootie was when she visited him at Ridgeland Nursing Center, “He was so happy to be remembered.”

It’s heartbreaking that this local legend, someone who did so much for others and took such joy in being remembered, has no headstone to mark his grave.

So Gerry Ryan and Donna Chapman decided to do something about it. They’ve started a fundraising project to purchase a headstone for Tootie and you can help!

Contact Marshel’s Wright-Donaldson Home for Funerals to make a charitable donation by check or postal money order. Please indicate on the check that this donation is for the Wilson Lane “Tootie” Bourke headstone purchase fund.

Note from the editor: I never met Mr. Tootie Bourke, but I fell in love with his story after reading about him on Donna and Gerry’s social media accounts. I’d just published my novella Oliver when I learned of Tootie and the similarities between my fictional character and this real life “character” caught my attention. I had to know more about him. I reached out to Gerry and Donna who happily shared their favorite Tootie stories and I’m proud to share them with you. I hope it helps them reach their goal to honor Beaufort’s beloved Tootie.

DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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HELLO POETS!

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HELLO POETS! An exciting collaboration

25 Hottest Authors, Artists, and Advocates of 2023 is looking for THE Hottest Poet of 2023 and they’ve asked WELL READ Magazine for help.

The grand prize winner will be published March 2023 in their annual magazine that will be available for purchase in print and digital form, 25 Hottest Authors, Artists, and Advocates of 2023, and promoted throughout the year. The winner will also have a podcast interview and an article written about them in Ladies Literary Entertainment.

Finalists will have the opportunity to be published in future issues of WELL READ Magazine.

Submission guidelines: Contributors should include only one poem per submission. All work must be typed (preferably in 12 point, Times New Roman), and single-spaced (not including stanza breaks). Include the title of your work on your manuscript. Please send the submission as an attachment, use HOTTEST POET OF 23 in the subject line, and include a short first person bio in the body of the email.

To enter the competition, send your submission to wellreadmagazinesubmissions@gmail.com no later than February 28th.

DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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WHAT ARE YOU READING?

You Want More: Selected Stories of George Singleton Thirty stories, collected in one volume for the very first time, from one of the South's best known and most acclaimed short story writers.

With his signature darkly acerbic and sharp-witted humor, George Singleton has built a reputation as one of the most astute and wise observers of the South. Now Tom Franklin introduces this master of the form with a compilation of acclaimed and prize-winning short fiction spanning twenty years and eight collections, including stories originally published in outlets like the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Playboy, the Georgia Review, the Southern Review, and many more.

These stories bear the influence of Flannery O'Connor and Raymond Carver, at other times Lewis Nordan and Donald Barthelme, and touch on the mysteries of childhood, the complexities of human relationships, and the absurdity of everyday life, its inexorable defeats and small triumphs.

Assembled here for the very first time, You Want More showcases the body of work, hilarious and incisive, that has cemented George Singleton's place among the South's greatest living writers.

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TO ADD TO YOUR READING LIST

Staff Picks by George Singleton It's Father's Day 1972 and a young boy's dad takes him to visit a string of unimpressive ex-girlfriends that could have been his mother; the unconventional detective work of a koan-speaking, Kung Fu-loving uncle solves a case of arson during a pancake breakfast; and a former geology professor, recovering from addiction, finds himself sharing a taxicab with specters from a Jim Crow-era lynching. Set in and around the fictional town of Steepleburg, South Carolina, the loosely tied stories in George Singleton's Staff Picks place sympathetic, oddball characters in absurd, borderline surreal situations that slowly reveal the angst of southern history with humor and bite.

In the tradition of Donald Barthelme, T. C. Boyle, Flannery O'Connor, and Raymond Carver, Singleton creates lingering, darkly comedic tales by drawing from those places where familiarity and alienation coexist. A remarkable and distinct effort from an acclaimed chronicler of the South, Staff Picks reaffirms Singleton's gift for crafting short story collections that both deliver individual gems and shine as a whole.

DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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“Susanne Davis’s Gravity Hill delivers the goods: hers is a heartfelt story of loss and renewal, populated with characters who are �awed, feisty, and entirely sympathetic. At the heart of this story is Jordan Hawkins, an irrepressible young woman whose grief over her brother’s death triggers the risky behavior and impetuous decision-making that will send her down roads she had not meant to travel. Davis has a gift for dialogue and vivid description; her details about agricultural life, the family dynamic, and the rules of the road are evocative and precise. It’s both a pleasure and an honor for me to endorse Gravity Hill, a story to which readers will be drawn and by which they’ll be rewarded.” — Wally Lamb, New York Times bestselling author of We are Water and She’s Come Undone

Gravity Hill Susanne Davis

TO ADD TO YOUR READING LIST

Sugar Baby and Other Stories by River Jordan "River Jordan is a holy truthteller who can make even the bad things in life seem as sweet as sugar. The stories in Sugar Baby and Other Stories are as real as life itself, but the language River uses to coat the pain is something from another world. Writer, storyteller, heart healer. River Jordan is simply the best." Wiley Cash, author, The Last Ballad A union soldier who deserted, a scared girl in an abandoned, antebellum home, a gravedigger looking for a wife, seven sisters who will kill to protect each other, a stake-out at a rundown hotel, a Spanish priest trying to save his people from the Spanish flu, a young girl sneaking off with an encyclopedia salesman, an old woman aiming to use her last bullet. a woman framed for murder on All Saints Day, a one-eyed outcast who lives down by the river.

The characters in Sugar Baby and Other Stories are infused by desire, touched by love, and seeking retribution and redemption at every turn. Sugar Baby is storytelling of the highest order, plucking up the reader and transporting them to a world of mystery, spirituality, violence, love, and everything in between.

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Promise by Regina E. Williams A story collection that will have you laughing, have you crying, but most of all… have you thinking.

We come into this life knowing what brings us pleasure and pain; what we want and need.

We are then taught to distrust what we know. It is only in the university of life that we slowly regain our knowing, where we begin to again trust our instincts and those things our bodies tell us to be true; where we experience pain, joy, grief, pleasures and hopefully love.

These stories cover a span of many years, situations and locales but the reality is that place matters only in our consciousness, in our memories; a holding place. Each tale offers a brief reflection of some of those markers on the journey from self to self.

DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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Sarah Booth Delaney My

ystery by Carolyn Haines

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Pause by Sara Stamey First Place, Somerset Award for Women’s Fiction Lindsey Friedland, former river-rafting guide and avid outdoorswoman, has hit the worst stretch of water she's ever faced: divorce from an abuser, breast cancer, menopause symptoms that her friends seem to have paddled serenely by.

And she's lost sight of her dream of becoming an environmental journalist.

Lindsey needs to get her spark back.

Dear Diary, Disastrous blind dates so far: The walking cologne bottle. The "really want a gal to give me babies" guy. The pushy past-life reintegration facilitator.

Will Lindsey make it past the rocky shoals of family upheavals, job crises, sexism, and ageism... not to mention toxic love traps? Does "happily ever after" now mean settling for occasional (but hot!) sex with Mr. Maybe? Can she reclaim her journalism dream?

Dear Diary, I'm tired of being tragic. I'm sending off my article about the bulldozers versus the baby owls.

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“Stamey’s lovely, inspiring, often funny novel… will touch the hearts of readers…. Stamey’s achievement is the realistic, down-to-earth, eminently relatable Lindsey and all she offers contemporary readers.” Publishers Weekly Booklife Review “Sara Stamey does for fiction what Cheryl Strayed and Elizabeth Gilbert did for memoir…” USA Today Bestselling author Mindy Klasky Sara’s journeys include treasure hunting and teaching scuba in the Caribbean, backpacking worldwide, operating a nuclear reactor, and owning a farm in Southern Chile.

Returning to her home town in the “far corner” of the Pacific Northwest, she taught creative writing at Western Washington University for several years. Now focused on her own writing, she shares her creekside land with wild creatures and her cats, dog, and paleontologist husband Thor Hansen.

A lifelong outdoors enthusiast and ardent supporter of environmental causes, Sara enjoys hiking and showshoeing in the nearby Cascades mountains, swimming and snorkeling, cycling, and gardening. She looks forward to an upcoming return trip to Greece and many more travels as research for her novels.

Sara with husband Thor, windsurfing with their dear departed companion Worf.

DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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ADD TO YOUR READING LIST

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Jump start YOUR writing with this free eBook!

Electrify your writing with nearly 100 tips from bestselling and awardwinning authors.

Click HERE for your FREE COPY

DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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Kaleidoscopic Overtones of Life Reflections by Kimberly Ellen Dredger

This gathering-basket of words holds holiday tales and critter stories, tales from the Greatest Generation—real and fictional, and a thought-provoking mystery.

But gathering baskets often contain a bug or two; you will come face to face with descriptions of loss and grief, and possibly even a monster.

Kimberly Ellen Dredger is a poet and writer. She is the author of Begin Again, a novel exploring a young widow’s trials as she learns how to live alone.

"There lies a comforting familiarity within these pages, like glancing a friendly face in a crowd or hearing a loved melody from the long-forgotten past....Kimberly has written a beautiful collection of remembrances - A must read - With a nostalgic cadence and brutal honesty, she reminds us all to live an authentic life..." - Michael Scott Garvin, Award winning, best selling author of A Faithful Son, Aunt Sookie & Me and Ophelia’s Room

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Murder Under A Bridal Moon: A 1930s Mona Moon Mystery by Abigail Keam Release date is 11-4-22 Mona Moon is planning her wedding to Robert Farley, Duke of Brynelleth, when her preparations go haywire after one of her maids is found murdered. With just days before the blessed event, unwanted guests invade Moon Manor throwing a wrench into Mona’s plans and making it more difficult to seek the truth. Now Robert is a suspect in the maid’s murder. A missing gold brooch and twenty fivedollar bills are the only clues Mona has to find the murderer. She must clear Robert from suspicion or he will call off the wedding, saying he refuses to taint Mona’s good name. Can she discover the killer before the wedding, or will the murderer witness the breakup between Mona and Robert? Was that the intention all along? “…Miss Abigail’s skilled humor, colorful characters and conflicts keep the pages turning.” Five Star Reader Review

DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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TO ADD TO YOUR READING LIST

The Cicada Tree by Robert Gwaltney The summer of 1956, a brood of cicadas descends upon Providence, Georgia, a natural event with supernatural repercussions, unhinging the life of Analeise Newell, an elevenyear-old piano prodigy. Amidst this emergence, dark obsessions are stirred, uncanny gifts provoked, and secrets unearthed.

During a visit to Mistletoe, a plantation owned by the wealthy Mayfield family, Analeise encounters Cordelia Mayfield and her daughter Marlissa, both of whom possess an otherworldly beauty, a lineal trait regarded as that Mayfield Shine. A whisper and an act of violence perpetrated during this visit by Mrs. Mayfield all converge to kindle Analeise's fascination with the Mayfields.Analeise's burgeoning obsession with the Mayfield family overshadows her own seemingly, ordinary life, culminating in dangerous games and manipulation, setting off a chain of cataclysmic events with life-altering consequences-all of it unfolding to the maddening whir of a cicada song.

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TO ADD TO YOUR READING LIST

One Must Tell the Bees: Abraham Lincoln and the Final Education of Sherlock Holmes by J Lawrence Matthews When those harrowing words ring out during a children's entertainment in Washington on the evening of April 14, 1865, a quickthinking young chemist from England named Johnnie Holmes grabs the 12-year-old son of the dying President, races the boy to safety, and soon finds himself enlisted in the most infamous manhunt in history.

One Must Tell the Bees is the untold story of Sherlock Holmes's journey from the streets of London to the White House of Abraham Lincoln and, in company with a freed slave named after the dead President, their breathtaking pursuit and capture of John Wilkes Booth. It is the very first case of the man who would become known to the world as Sherlock Holmes, and as readers will discover, it will haunt him until his very last.

At a time when Western history is being reexamined and retold, old heroes cast aside and statues torn down, and even the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, "the Great Emancipator," is questioned, One Must Tell the Bees is a timely reminder that our history deserves to be understood before it is entirely undone.

DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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“I enjoyed the retro feel of this novel and its callbacks to themes with 80s-themed slasher films and other sub-genres of horror. It is, however, very gory, so if you’re sensitive to that aspect of horror readers will want to take some caution. While the situations are action-packed and sometimes deadly for the Division X crew that they take on the book takes on a lighter tone with its dialogue and characters...”

–NetGalley reviewer

Division X August Hill

"If you love a fast-paced sexy suspense story, complete with New Orleans voodoo, some very flawed characters ...this book will keep you up well past your bedtime to finish reading it." -Pat Stanford, Past President of The Florida Authors and Publishers Assoc.

FIRE IS THE TEST OF GOLD Elizabeth Randall

“Beautif�lly wri�en with raw insight and a quick wit. A stor� of three generations of women that find st�eng�h in one another, despite the g�ip of an intolerable past.”

–Carine McCandless, Author of The Wild Tr�th, the New York Times best selling follow-up to Into the Wild.

The Summer of Grace Karen Jones

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The Bystanders by Dawn Major (Moonshine Cove Publishing, 2023) THE BYSTANDERS , weaves together small-town eccentricities starting with the invasion of the Samples family to Lawrenceton, Missouri. Townie, Eddy Bauman, and newcomer, Shannon LambSamples, come of age in the 1980s when big hair is big and Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” blasts over the airwaves, but they couldn’t be more different. The real town of Lawrenceton and the surrounding area were part of the Louisiana Purchase.

Centuries later, the old-timers still speak Paw Paw French and time-honored traditions run deep.

Told through linked narratives–Major subtly explores the psychological phenomenon known as the Bystander Effect.

As William S. Boroughs said: “There are no innocent bystanders…What are they doing there in the first place?”

The characters often feel they are mere witnesses to what life throws at them, incapable of change. THE BYSTANDERS—sometimes light and humorous, other times dark and tragic–pays homage to Americana and the rural people of the Northern Mississippi Delta region of Southeast Missouri.

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Ninety-Nine Fire Hoops: A Memoir by Allison Hong Merrill “The reader can’t help but hang onto her every word . . . A surprising but compelling memoir of resilience and family.” —Kirkus Reviews “Ninety-Nine Fire Hoops is an enthralling and thought-provoking memoir . . . [A] charming aspect of the book is the beautiful representation of Taiwanese culture and Chinese history. Extensive details of rituals and traditions feel exotic . . . Merrill writes with intensity and simplicity; you cannot remain untouched.” ––Literary Titan, 5-star review “Ninety-Nine Fire Hoops . . . is a poignant and compelling memoir. . . . The viewpoint [Merrill] presented was uniquely centered in religion and ethnicity yet was universal as the skillful words touched on the basics of human motivation. I finished reading the story with tears in my eyes, as it was one of the most expressive accounts I have ever read. Merrill opened my eyes to the vulnerability of the immigrant experience . . . I can recommend Ninety-Nine Fire Hoops . . . for anyone who enjoys a combination of women’s literature and a human interest story.” —Readers’ Favorite, 5-star review DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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The Birth of Death: the Origins of Art in the Caves of France by J M White This book narrates a series of visits to Paleolithihc caves in France and reflects on the birth of art and awareness of death.

J. M. White The moon journeys around the earth, the earth around the sun, so it has been for as long as humans have inhabited this globe. The seasons wander on their rounds. And now this weary traveler looks out upon the world where every day is its own journey, as is each life and so, as Basho poignantly tells us, “the journey itself is home”. We prepare, such as we can, take what we think is needed, and set out.

Some never return. The journey is dangerous, filled with peril. We venture into far-flung places where we walk on narrow rocky paths, peer into deep precipices, journey near the edge and at each moment the end is near, nearer than we dare to think. When I return from the latest adventure I throw open the windows, air out the house and settle at my desk.

Yet, when I am sitting at home I watch the clouds windblown across the sky, or hear the whistle of the train, lonesome in the distance, and it draws me to the dream of wandering.

Before long I feel the tug of some invisible force and know it is time to pack my bags and continue on this journey. I assemble my papers, prepare my manuscripts, and find a blank journal. It’s time to go.

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ADD TO YOUR READING LIST

The Latch by J. M. WHITE

J. M. White The moon journeys around the earth, the earth around the sun, so it has been for as long as humans have inhabited this globe.

The seasons wander on their rounds.

And now this weary traveler looks out upon the world where every day is its own journey, as is each life and so, as Basho poignantly tells us, “the journey itself is home”. We prepare, such as we can, take what we think is needed, and set out. Some never return. The journey is dangerous, filled with peril. We venture into far-flung places where we walk on narrow rocky paths, peer into deep precipices, journey near the edge and at each moment the end is near, nearer than we dare to think. When I return from the latest adventure I throw open the windows, air out the house and settle at my desk. Yet, when I am sitting at home I watch the clouds windblown across the sky, or hear the whistle of the train, lonesome in the distance, and it draws me to the dream of wandering. Before long I feel the tug of some invisible force and know it is time to pack my bags and continue on this journey. I assemble my papers, prepare my manuscripts, and find a blank journal. It’s time to go.

DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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“Lisa Parker possesses the perceptive eye of a photographer and the truth-telling, visionary voice of poet. From the orange trumpet vines and sycamore trees of northern Virginia to the “crushed velvet walls” of the Metropolitan Opera, each precise, wondrous image in The Parting Glass transports the reader. As Parker shows us how to look at these beautiful, sometimes broken, sometimes aching landscapes, she tells an important story about the places we call home, the terrible weight of grief, and love—always love.”

—Carter Sickels, author of The Prettiest Star

“In a cautionary tale of Silicon Valley, Brendon Meagher is a modern-day Tommy Wilhelm for fans of Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day. Overby delivers a poignant look over the cubicle walls of a high-tech start-up and into the lives of hard-charging acolytes.

Filled with love and loss, and propelled by the looming promise of financial windfall, this debut is not to be missed!”

—Jeffery Hess, author of No Salvation and the Beachhead trilogy

REMEMBERING WILLIAM GAY - LOST AND FOUND

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A ROUNDTABLE ON WILLIAM GAY’S LITERARY LEGACY

LOST AND FOUND A ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION ON WILLIAM GAY’S LITERARY LEGACY Introduction by J.M. White An earlier version of this roundtable discussion, conducted via email, was hosted by Suzanne Kingsbury and published in the Chattahoochee Review, Fall 2018/ Winter 2019, Volume XXXVIII, Numbers 2 & 3 by Perimeter College at Georgia State University. It dealt primarily with the story of finding and editing the manuscript of William Gay’s novel The Lost Country. For the purposes of this publication, I have broadened the scope of the conversation to include all the posthumous works that have come to light so far. These include Little Sister Death, Stoneburner, The Lost Country, Fugitives of the Heart and now this collection of short stories. The publication of this collection of short stories marks the fifth book published from the William Gay archive.

Soon after William’s death in 2012 I was asked by the family to review his archive and was totally surprised to find such a wealth of material. He had been writing all his life and had managed to save most of what he wrote. He DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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came into his own stylistically when he was in his thirties and was writing at the peak of his performance from then until his death but, ironically, he didn’t get anything published until he was fifty-nine years old. Consequently, most of the material he wrote from age thirty to age fiftynine was in the archive.

Working on The Lost Country was our first project since there was a contract on the book, and it was much anticipated by his readers. A small group of people formed organically and, more-or-less spontaneously, to work together to get this material typed and edited. These included Susan McDonald, Shelia Kennedy, Lamont Ingalls, Paul Nitsche and me. Michelle Dotter at Dzanc Press entered the picture fairly early and brought the resources of Dzanc Press to bear on the project. This basic team prepared The Lost Country and Little Sister Death in rapid succession. As more time passed and this material began to be read people would get in contact and the team began to expand to include Matt Snope, an English professor who specializes in Southern Literature, Dawn Major, who wrote a master’s thesis on William and George Dilworth who turned out to be an eagle-eyed proofreader.

Joe Tidwell is a Southern writer and playwright who has been transforming William’s books into scripts and showing them around Hollywood. Greg Hobson, a professional photographer and graphic designer, supplied original photos and some graphic design. Randy Mackin teaches English literature at MTSU and had William lecture at his classes and Brodie Lowe and Jon Sokol are

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Southern writers who also helped with this collection.

Suzanne Kingsbury and Sonny Brewer were both close friends of William and both contributed along the way as well.

What follows is the roundtable convened by Suzanne Kingsbury for the Chattahoochee Review article re-edited with new material. Suzanne put together some questions, which appear in bold script, and sent them out to the people who had been involved in The Lost Country editing process. I have added some new questions (my questions are bold and in italics to distinguish them from Suzanne’s original questions) and sent them out to the original team of editors plus Matt Snope, George Dilworth, Joe Tidwell, Randy Mackin, Greg Hobson and Dawn Major. This expanded the scope of the original roundtable to include everyone who had a direct hand in the editing process and broadened the scope of the roundtable to include all William’s posthumous works.

Introduction by Suzanne Kingsbury If you knew William Gay, you have a story about William Gay. An iconic, timeless, literary giant, William Gay was also one of the most beloved writers of the deep South and beyond. The author of three internationally acclaimed, award-winning novels and three short story collections, William was a rough-cut genius whose work climbed out of the hollows of Tennessee and took the literary world by storm.

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I first met William Gay at a reading in Oxford, Mississippi at Off-Square Books, where the literati and book-obsessed gathered a few times a week to hear some of the best writing of our generation. By that time, I had studied his work. The pages of his novels had become softened from my constant touch, dog-eared, and hacked up with pen marks, until finally he arrived in Oxford.

My publisher had sent a copy of my first book to him for a blurb, and I was given the dictum to find out if that would actually happen. He was outside, smoking a cigarette. In the breathless way of any die-hard fan, I tried to explain the depth of my feelings about his books while he smoked and stared at the sidewalk. Eventually, we came to a long pause. Finally, William looked up at me and said, “You want to get a drink?”

That was the start of our friendship. Perhaps everyone who knew William felt a special kinship with him, as though he’d allowed you into the secret hermitage of his literary mind. But I sometimes wonder if anyone really knew him in the way he knew, profoundly knew, the characters in his books. To be friends with William was to feel inspired and loved by him. He had a fantastic mind, and a wonderful dry sense of humor, and people wanted to be near him. William’s friendships were built around the centrifugal force of the art—of which he was a procurer— music, film, and literature.

And that’s what we talked about, riding through the South on our way to conferences and readings. We were

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quiet, too, for long swaths of time. We both loved Dylan, and that’s how I remember the auditory soundtrack on those drives with William. We were both on book tour at the same time, and we often found ourselves at swanky hotels, William was always getting shepherded to special dinners with media and breakfasts with film directors.

After one such event, we were walking down the balcony to the parking lot. “Well,” he said with that wry smile, “back to the trailer and the three-legged dog.”

William’s death in 2012 was and was not unexpected.

He was an unapologetic smoker, and he drank perhaps to alleviate some of the shyness he’d borne throughout his life. He exercised only when walking with his dog in the woods to pick ginseng by Swan Creek.

The news came to me one cold evening up north, and I don’t think I’d ever felt grief like that before. I wanted to hear his soft voice again, get a hit of the dry humor, hear him recite poetry one more time, show me one of the paintings he’d just made. Perhaps what struck us all most was the literary force that was William Gay had run itself out with this death.

When in 2015, we began hearing that a few of his lost novels had been found, a collective sigh of relief came from the literary world. Perhaps the publication of his posthumous work satisfied a fantasy that may be common to all of us—to experience again the person we thought we had lost.

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Most people have stories about the first time they met William Gay. He was iconoclastic and that was apparent as soon as you laid eyes on him. He was also gentle and curious about human nature and what made great art. Can you talk about the first time you met him?

MICHAEL WHITE: For many years I did technical writing for non-profit organizations, and one of my best clients was in Hohenwald, a small Tennessee town of about three thousand people. I read Provinces of Night and The Long Home and was astonished that a writer of his power and talent had been born and raised in this obscure little rural town. I started asking around, but no one knew him. A few people knew some of the family members, especially William’s Uncle Scott, who was a famous psychic. However, Scott had been dead for several years, so that was no help.

I drove around different parts of the county and asked at local stores and in neighborhoods. One woman was raking leaves in the front yard. I asked if she had ever heard of William Gay; she leaned on her rake and looked at me, "Yes, I've heard of him, but I don't think you should go

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looking for him. I hear he might pull a gun on you." I went on my way, more intrigued than ever.

Eventually, I found a farmer who knew one of William's daughters, and he told me how to get to her place. When I drove up to her house, the yard was full of old vehicles, four wheelers, motorcycles, go-karts, trucks, the earth mostly bare, un-mowed clumps of weeds here and there. A young woman came out of a house carrying a boy on her hip. It was his youngest daughter and she assured me it would be alright to go see him and gave me directions. I couldn't believe my luck.

I followed her directions to Grinder's Creek Road and pulled up to the first trailer on the right, a dilapidated single-wide on a scruffy lot. An old white pit bull came across the yard, and a man stepped out. He called the dog Knuckles and said he wouldn't bother me. I had a copy of Provinces of Night in my hand and introduced myself. He invited me in, and I stepped through the front door into his living room. There was a couch and an overstuffed chair.

Both had their legs removed, so they sat on the floor.

There was a coffee table covered with magazines, an ash tray overflowing with cigarette butts, and across the room was a state-of-the-art flat screen, a stereo component system with big speakers and shelves full of CDs and DVDs. He motioned for me to sit down. He agreed to sign my book. But as he did, I could tell he was very uncomfortable. Obviously having fans drive up was not one of his favorite things. I thought I should beat a hasty retreat as soon as possible. I decided to ask a couple of DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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questions before I got out of there and left him alone.

"If you don't mind, are you working on anything new?"

"Yes, I just submitted an article to Oxford American, about Harry Smith."

"Harry was an old friend of mine."

William looked up quickly and gave me a piercing stare.

"Really, you knew Harry Smith?"

"Yep, I loved Harry. We were friends for the last three years of his life. He was an amazing guy."

"Well, shit, I wish you had come around here before I submitted the article, I tried to find someone who knew him but couldn't make contact with anyone."

I could see a change come over William as I told him stories about Harry Smith. He was now totally relaxed and more than happy to sit and talk for a while. I was relieved but still thought the wisest thing was to get out of there and not sit around talking for a long time, so I quickly thanked him and got up to go. As I was leaving, he invited me to stop back next time I was in town, and I was off.

I was amazed after reading his books to find him living in such circumstances, although that type of lifestyle was certainly reflected in his books. It was one of those great meetings that happen from time to time if you are lucky.

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LAMONT INGALLS: I first met William through Michael White.

Michael and I met in March 2001 in Lebanon, Tennessee. Michael told me about William Gay, “this novelist living in Lewis County,” and suggested that I read his books.

I was born and raised in Nashville and have been reading Southern writers since the mid-1960s, when I found Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury at the Nashville Public Library. Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy were also long-standing favorites. I had not previously heard of William Gay. After returning to my cottage in Florida, I read William’s first two novels, The Long Home and Provinces of Night, and became a self-confirmed admirer of this talented, insightful, and somewhat enigmatic author. So, when I met William in Hohenwald in the spring of 2005, I was already enamored of his well-phrased dialog and his characterizations of both person and landscape. With Michael—whom William sometimes called “the Professor”—as an intermediary, I spent a fine spring evening listening in on William’s comments about literature, at his home, well-furnished with music, movies on tape and DVD, and shelves and stacks of books and magazines, and more magazines and books.

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That evening we found a mutual literary territory in McCarthy and O’Connor and a shared admiration for John D. MacDonald’s books featuring Travis McGee, a “knight in tarnished armor” who lives aboard a houseboat in “Fort Lauderdamndale.” Another MacDonald, Ross, a writer of detective tales, was also favored by William.

At that first meeting I also witnessed William’s ability to recite long passages from Flannery O’Connor, an admirable and entertaining skill. He was fabled for having a photographic memory, and I could readily attest to this gift. I recall this first gathering at his cabin as just a simple sharing of two-three hours, probably ordinary for William, but auspicious for me. I had met a few authors before, in New Orleans and Washington, DC, but this quiet evening get-together beside Swan Creek is one I continue to treasure.

A few years later, Michael asked me to work on a book of William’s collected prose that Michael’s small publishing house, Wild Dog Press, was producing. I readily agreed, honored to support William’s literary legacy. Michael compiled the book from William’s previously published prose: short stories, essays, and music criticism. As a lagniappe, the book, Time Done Been Won’t Be No More, included color plates of eight of William’s paintings. I worked on this book as designer, proofreader and editorial consultant, and it was published in 2010. In early 2018, Anomolaic published William’s Southern detective noir novel, Stoneburner, another production of Team Gay.

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SHELIA KENNEDY: I first saw William at literary events in Nashville and Clarksville and, as luck would have it, on the set of That Evening Sun (the movie based on William’s short story I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down). One of the farms used for that film is the family farm of my brother-in-law, so my mother and I went to East Tennessee for the final night of filming; William and his family were there.

Fast forward to the following summer when William was speaking at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville. A friend and I went to see him. I had photographs that my sister had taken during the filming of the movie to give to William. When I presented them to him, he gave me his phone number and asked that I call him. I had a broken ankle that summer and had plenty of time to read and talk, so I would call William and we would talk about books and music.

In 2010 and 2011, I gladly volunteered to be William’s driver to and from Clarksville for the Clarksville Writers Conference—more time to talk. I think the last time that I saw William was at The Southern Festival of Books in October 2011. The chairwoman for Clarksville Writers Conference wanted him to participate in the 2012 conference and told William that he could do whatever he wanted at the conference and asked what he liked most DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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about coming to Clarksville. He said, “Riding around with Shelia and talking.”

SUSAN MCDONALD: I knew William through my relationship with Michael. I went to his readings, visited him in his home, and accompanied him to appearances on occasion. He was such a humble and likeable man that people were enthralled to be in his presence. We were told that during a teaching stay at Sewanee, the students loved him and took every opportunity to hang out with him. He was really a character from his own books, somewhat shy and almost embarrassed by adulation, transparent, generous, appreciative, candid, homespun in his manner, and full of dry humor. In early February 2012, Michael and I were very excited because of an impending visit from William.

The day before his visit, we learned that he had died the night before. He was not well due to a heart condition but was reluctant to spend much time around doctors, which, in retrospect, might have hastened his death.

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GREG HOBSON: The first time I read anything William had written was just a lucky accident. I had ridden my motorcycle to a small Kansas town that was home to a bookstore where I’d gotten good deals in the past. I was looking through shelves of hardcover books whose pages had been marked along their top edges with streaks of black ink designating them as “cut-outs”— books someone had deemed not worthy of buying at full price. I saw Provinces of Night and chose it simply because I liked the cover.

At home, I was just a page or two into the story when I realized I had stumbled onto something special. A few pages farther, and I knew I had stepped into something beyond special and was reading a piece of true literature that was taking me well into a place where only the rarest talent lived. I turned back to the beginning and gave the book a fresh start, this time taking it in much more slowly and savoring every sentence.

Before long, I dug out a yellow highlighter and began marking passages I found especially wonderful. A half hour later, I noticed that page after page contained more yellow than white. I got on the Internet and sent off for The Long Home and Twilight and I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down, and I read whatever I could find about William Gay. This was fall of 2007. I was 58, and what amazed me more than anything about the man was that he’d gotten nothing published until he was 55 years of age (or maybe older I discovered when I learned that William granted himself a dose of creative license when it DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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came to his date of birth).

Curious and hungry for more than I would ever find this way, I looked up his address and wrote him a letter telling him how his words spoke to me and asking when his next novel would be published. I had included a stamped selfaddressed envelope, hoping he would write back. But that’s not what happened. After a few weeks of checking my mailbox, I realized how foolish I’d been to think an author of his stature would take the time to write a letter to someone he’d never met or even heard of. That was my mindset when my phone rang one afternoon in early 2008 and a string of long, kindly-spoken vowels asked me if this was the right number for the guy who’d written the flattering letter.

I remember being nervous as hell, like a child in the presence of his hero. I kept calling him sir and he kept telling me that there was no need to call him that. We were about the same age he said, and it made him feel weird, not to mention old, for me to use that elevated word to address him. I also remember feeling like I was talking way too fast and no matter how hard I tried to slow down, my voice seemed like an auctioneer’s compared to the one on the line.

We spoke for maybe an hour that day and I would call him a few times until eventually, with his permission, I drove from Wichita to Hohenwald with my four-month-old English Setter. We’d kept it informal and vague as to when I might be in his neighborhood, so when I knocked

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on his screen door, I wasn’t sure how welcome I would be.

The uneasiness didn’t last long. The voice I had come to look forward to on the phone, spoke from the cool shade inside his modern log cabin. “Come on in.” I asked him if I could bring my dog in from the car and he said “Sure, I love dogs. Bring him on in.”

Someone had poisoned his dog a while back and by the attention he gave Curly, I knew he missed him a great deal. I had promised myself not to take up too much of his time, but I’d brought one of my better still cameras with the hope of taking some photographs. In fact, I had called his publisher about that very thing, and he had encouraged me to get some new shots because he wasn’t all that fond of the ones he had. I mentioned this to William, and he grumbled that he didn’t much like to have his picture taken. I let it go.

In a short while, one of his sons, Christopher, showed up with his guitar and a soft smile and little to say that went beyond sincere politeness. I decided to wrap things up and let the man spend time with his kid, and was saying my good-byes when William said, “I thought you were gonna take some pictures. You ought to get some of Christopher while you’re here.” This, I learned over the next couple of years was typical William Gay. When it came to his kids, the world was a different place. Entirely changed and for the better.

We would talk on the phone every month or so, and when Michael White asked me to help put together a one-man

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show of William’s paintings, I made sure that Christopher was an integral part of the goings-on by hiring him to perform some of his music at the Southside Gallery in Oxford. William did not drive, nor did he enjoy crowds.

Christopher solved both issues by doubling as chauffeur for the trip, and then being at his father’s side to help him make his way through the press of well-meaning admirers.

Oxford is a place where writers occupy a position that many college towns reserve for coaches of nationally ranked football and basketball teams. In this environment, William was beset for hours by fans of his writing and, to a much lesser extent, now his visual artistry. Eventually his close friend Tom Franklin whisked him away from the crush and humidity. Clearly, the evening had taken its toll.

Since his death, I have often seen something I thought he’d find interesting, and I reflexively think of calling him like I used to. Anyone who admires the man and his work is now, along with me, forever in debt to Michael White who has thrown himself at the gargantuan task of taking faint scribbles inside hundreds of spiral notepads and turning them into entire books filled with the near magical prose of William Gay – a writer whose name will one day be spoken in terms not unlike those used to describe another writer who spent a good deal of time in Oxford. If that sounds adulatory, place your bet now. Let’s make it the price of a beer. In five or ten years, let’s meet up in that little bar there on Oxford’s Square that William liked to haunt. You can buy me a drink.

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MICHELLE DOTTER: My first job in publishing was as an intern at MacAdam/Cage, which had acquired William's Twilight and The Long Home from Macmurray & Beck. They were the first books you saw when you came in the door, shelved right next to The Time Traveler's Wife. The Lost Country was under contract and slated for publication, though it kept getting moved back; many of my first months there were spent answering phone calls from readers who wanted to know when The Lost Country was coming out.

So, in that way, this book has been unreal and sort of mystical to me for a long time. I never got to work with William directly, which will likely remain one of my big publishing regrets.

RANDY MACKIN: I actually sought William out, so there was nothing serendipitous about our first meeting. The November/ December 1999 issue of The Oxford American arrived in the mail, and my eyes caught a few lines that I couldn’t ignore from William’s short story, “My Hand Is Just Fine Where It Is”. It said, DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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“The night before they went to the motel for the first time she twisted his mouth down to hers and said against his teeth, I think you are trying to corrupt me. He didn’t deny it.”

Those words pale in comparison to the lyrical, beautiful prose I found in the rest of that story and all the others, in the novels, even in our conversations, but there was something in those couple of lines that made me have to read more. That issue included a brief interview and mentioned that William lived in Hohenwald, less than a half-hour from where I live in Linden. My initial reaction was, who is this guy and why haven’t I heard of him? I didn’t show up on the doorstep of his Little Swan Creek cabin, but the following October, at the Southern Festival of Books, between sessions, we spoke, made a brief connection about where we lived, that we both grew up in the South, and I asked William to think about coming to MTSU where I teach and speaking to my literature classes.

He did so the next Spring, the first of many trips we made to the university over the next eleven years.

We rarely hear about manuscripts being discovered posthumously. Most writers leave behind manuscripts in progress, half-finished stories, but aside from the “bigs”—Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, the early stories of Capote, and one Seuss book—it is not usual that we see a full manuscript. Can you talk about how

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The Lost Country and the other books in his archive were discovered?

MICHAEL WHITE: A few weeks after William died, William’s youngest son called to say he and William’s other son, Chris, had three tubs full of William’s notebooks and would I like to come and help him figure out what was in there. I stayed up most of the night sorting the notebooks into piles based on the characters. William’s writing was nearly indecipherable. Many of the notebooks were filled front to back with tightly written script; many of the pages had notes on the sides of the pages and across the top margins, and lots of them had writing on both sides of the page. He did not cross his t’s or dot his i’s, so many of the words were very difficult to make out.

As I was going down through one of the tubs there were some pages of typescript, yellowed typewriter paper with notes penciled in between the lines and in the margins.

They were loose in the tub between a couple of the yellow pads and spiral bound notebooks he was fond of writing in. At first, I thought it was corrections William had wanted to make, but when I looked closer it wasn’t William’s handwriting; then suddenly I realized, with a shiver, they were annotations by Cormac McCarthy.

William had mentioned Cormac McCarthy had read an early draft of Provinces of Night and had commented on it line by line. I was relieved to see the McCarthy annotations.

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It didn’t take long before I saw pages with the names of Edgewater and Roosterfish in some of the notebooks. I knew they were characters from The Lost Country. There were over fifty notebooks and I wound up sorting them into piles by categories like "Works in Progress," "Published Short Stories," "Music Writing," and "Notebooks from Provinces of Night." There was also a typescript of a rather long story about a character named Pepper Yates. It was one of the funniest pieces of writing I had ever read.

I felt like a dragon sitting on a horde of gold and gems.

William Jr. agreed I could copy them. It was an excruciating job. There were notes on the tops of the pages, and the text ran right up to the edge of the pages. I had to hold it on the copier just right to get it all to copy.

When he hadn’t written on both sides of the pages, William had made notes on the backs for inserts he wanted to put into the text on that page. I had to watch for those and make sure the copies were associated with the proper pages. None of the pages was numbered, and in some of the notebooks there would be multiple stories. Sometimes stories or episodes from the novels would start or stop in mid-sentence, and a different story or episode would start up on that page or the next page.

It was obvious there was a significant amount of unpublished material. In one of the notebooks, I found a synopsis of The Lost Country in a draft of a letter to an agent. I ran across a second synopsis, this one for a book called Fugitives of the Heart. I re-sorted the material to 72

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separate The Lost Country from Fugitives of the Heart and used the two synopses to help figure out what went where.

In one of the tubs, I found a large sheaf of typescripts, and, luckily, this one was in pretty good shape; the pages were numbered and in order. Here was another complete novel, this one with two main characters, one named Stoneburner, who was a private detective, and another named Thibodeaux, who was on the run with a beautiful blonde and a briefcase full of cash. It was an amazing story. There was an old sheriff obviously modeled on Buford Pusser, a local legend in middle Tennessee who was the inspiration for the movie Walking Tall. As I started reading it, I remembered William talking to me about the fact that he had written a novel in the style of a hardboiled detective story and had a publisher ready to publish it. He called it film noir on paper. Then, just as he was ready to publish, Cormac McCarthy released No Country for Old Men, a story about a drug deal gone wrong, a protagonist with a briefcase full of money, and an old sheriff on his trail. William decided that if he published his novel, it would look like he had stolen the storyline from Cormac, and he was already sensitive to comparisons of his style with Cormac’s. So, as he told me, he withheld the manuscript from publication.

Once I had gone through all the notebooks, I got back with William Jr and Chris, and we discussed what to do. They encouraged me to work with the papers and mentioned that there could be more in the attic of the house where they were raised. I eventually went to the house, and it DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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was there I found the bulk of The Lost Country in the attic of the old house William moved out of around1992. He had built the house and raised his four children there.

Bookcases took up one whole wall of the attic and were filled with paperback books, covered with a deep layer of spider webs and dust. I had never seen so many spider webs—they hung from the rafters like Spanish Moss, like gossamer. The floor of the attic was covered with magazines, I immediately saw Rolling Stones and Playboys along with some more literary stuff like Harper’s and The Atlantic. At the end of the bookshelves, I found an old cardboard box and when I looked inside it was full of hundreds of pages of old cheap typing paper in various stages of decay, some pages with numbers, most not.

When I got home, I showed Susan the box. She opened it with a mixture of curiosity and repulsion on her face because the box smelled like stale smoke mixed with mouse droppings and was covered with a deep layer of grime. The paper was cheap and yellow and brittle with age, some of the pages crumpled and creased, a hodgepodge with no order that I could discern. I saw that Edgewater and Roosterfish were in there along with an array of other characters that I didn’t recognize.

I remembered William telling me he couldn’t find parts of the manuscript and didn’t know what to do about it. We talked about rewriting it, but it was obvious from this and other conversations that he had no interest in rewriting.

For him, once the pen had moved across the paper, there was no going back.

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I knew from the work I had already done on the notebooks that the main characters in The Lost Country were Edgewater, Roosterfish, and Bradshaw, and it didn’t take long to notice all three of those names. The papers were not in any order. There were many pages with other names that I didn’t recognize. I started sorting the pages, and, in the end, I had five stacks of pages. They were stacked based on the names of the characters that showed up on those pages. I could easily see that I had a big portion of The Lost Country here and that some of what I had was the same as what was in the notebooks, although it seemed that some was not. Then I had three stacks that had other characters and represented different time frames as well.

One seemed to be set in the 1800s with horses and wagons, another in the 1930s, and finally, one big stack that represented events in 1980 with characters named Binder and Corrie. This turned out to be the manuscript of Little Sister Death.

In The Lost Country papers, I was thrilled to find one page that had “The End” written in pencil at the bottom. And there were pages with handwritten page numbers in the bottom right-hand corner and the page with the words “The End” was numbered 231. By the end of the week, I had all the pages in plastic sheet protectors and had two three-ring notebooks, one for The Lost Country and one for Little Sister Death. It seemed I had most of The Lost Country in order. Only about half of the pages were numbered, so that presented another puzzle, although it wasn’t too difficult once the story line became apparent.

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However, there were some gaps in the typescript and especially at the end of the book.

This is a remarkable story because you were able, in a sense, to walk around in the mind of a genius. I remember William telling me that as a boy he used to skip school to write. He would find a spot under a tree to wile the day away, working on stories. Because he sometimes did not have a pen, he’d use a stick from a tree and scrape out the inside of a walnut hull for homemade “ink.” What was astonishing, when he showed me the early writings, was the quality of that young William’s work. He was a protege, and the stories came out almost fully formed. He told me his editing consisted of handwriting the book. With that in mind, what did it entail, typing the notes for this manuscript into book form and editing the final version?

MICHAEL WHITE: William never looked back, and once something was written, that was that. When he started getting published in 1998, he had an archive of four unpublished novels and was working on new things all the time. His old work, like Stoneburner and The Lost Country were just old manuscripts to him, and, apparently, he had lost track of them. He knew he had written it but had no idea where they were located. Perhaps his ex-wife Diane had put them in the attic after he moved out. Who

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knows? It is still a mystery.

It took about two years to get everything in the archive typed up, to edit the parts altogether, and get it into a final draft. We had some hopes of being able to scan the typescripts and work on them from a scanned copy, but the pages were old, and the typewriter print wouldn’t read on the scanners in a way that would allow us to manipulate the text. So, we were stuck with typing everything, the handwritten manuscripts and the typescripts, into the computer.

Susan and Shelia were the first on board and did the bulk of the typing. Plus, Lamont has been the editor of my little press (I brought out two of William's books while he was alive), and Lamont worked on those as well as all the other books my press published (eight and counting). Then Paul got in touch and offered to help, and everyone contributed by reading and reading and reading again, making sure the story fit together properly and correcting typos, etc.

Luckily, we had all the story. Team Gay has done Little Sister Death, Stoneburner, Fugitives of the Heart, and The Lost Country all discovered in the archive along with this collection of short stories.

SHELIA KENNEDY: Michael emailed me in July of 2012 and told me that he had sixteen notebooks from William and wanted to know if I was interested in helping.

I jumped at the chance! William’s handwriting made the job difficult, but the more I typed, the easier it was to read.

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His vocabulary kept me referencing Google to see if what I typed was actually a word, and I found that not only was it a word, but it was also the perfect word for the situation.

Google was also a huge asset with brand names and song lyrics or literary references. William did not write scenes in order, and he wrote along the margins, sometimes indicating where to include those lines, although often I had to use my own judgment.

Susan and Michael were also typing, and by October 2012, at the time of the Southern Festival of Books, we had assembled a rough draft of The Lost Country. Michael and I met Tom Franklin and George Singleton, both authors and friends of William’s, to discuss what we had found. I remember telling Tom that I felt like we had a great piece of work but really didn’t have “the end” of the novel. In our rough draft, we had placed the scenes in order—and there was an end— but there was not enough material to get to that end. Little did we know that in the treasure trove of notebooks that Michael would deliver to me from another trip to the attic, we had the missing section. Edgewater is in the cafe when a young man approaches him and is pimping his wife on their honeymoon. She is the girl with Edgewater at the end!

SUSAN McDONALD: The transcription of William’s work was at the same time exciting, challenging and daunting--exciting due to participation in the discovery of William’s unpublished work; challenging due to the

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difficulty of deciphering his penmanship and inserting his marginalized notations in the text in order; and daunting due to my self-imposed obligation and responsibility to accurately convey the meaning and intent of his words.

Once I got past the condition of the pages which were often yellowed, ragged and stained from coffee or god knows what, it was a delve into a heretofore undiscovered world. Once I felt I had correctly transcribed a thought or an especially profound scene it was often time to stop and savor it. Since Michael was close by, I usually called him to share and marvel at it. The process for me was akin to a visit from William as his persona was so reflected in his work so it was both a pleasure and yet there was an admonition: “don’t screw it up”!

PAUL NITSCHE: In April 2014, I received the first manuscript of The Lost Country from Michael.

He told me I was the fourth person to read the book. As a fan long awaiting The Lost Country, this was quite a moment. I worked on the manuscript for the next four months, arranging scenes, editing and proofing, right up until it was delivered to Dzanc in the fall of 2014. Once Dzanc created the proof copy, I again contributed more editing and proofing. Working on the manuscript of The Lost Country has been one of the DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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highlights of my life.

MICHELLE DOTTER: The Lost Country was pretty daunting. Michael White and his small band of William's friends and fans had already worked their fingers to the bone getting the manuscript to a publishable state, but the big question remaining was whether to edit the book heavily, as we might any first-draft book, or whether to let it stand pretty much as it was. This was an issue we debated for a long time here at Dzanc before it finally fell to me to make the decision.

Ultimately, I chose to do a very sparse edit, looking for factual errors, typos, and grammatical issues only. I'm not sure it's the decision everyone would have made. William's style is lush and dense—a good friend of his told me, with a smile, that William would never use one word where three would do. There were lines we could have cut, or scenes we might have trimmed. But given that this book was found in the attic after William's death and pieced together page by page, I was concerned about authenticity.

I want everyone who reads this book, who loves William's work, to see him in it, and not to question whether any quirk of dialogue, description, or voice is the work of some other, invisible hand.

William often talked about his belief in the supernatural, his surety that there was, indeed, more

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than the human condition. He had an understanding of the occult as something to be both curious about and wary of. He knew its dangers perhaps because he had psychics in the family. When I told him once about fooling around with a Ouija board, he said his previous experience with one was so intense, he cracked the board in half and threw it in a dumpster. The singer songwriter Marshall Chapman, who was a good friend of William’s, has said that he has visited her in dreams.

Did you feel William “with” you at any part of the process?

MICHAEL WHITE: No, not in any way other than the absolute thrill of reading his unpublished manuscripts. I helped with some of the typing, and one night I was typing a section from a notebook and ran across this: I drove the dark highways with the radio tuned to a country music station. I felt myself drowning, inured in woes in a phantasmagoric landscape of lost love and betrayal until these folk became real to me, I was one with them. Ultimately the night and the beer and the trusting black road and the music seemed to alter my very consciousness, making me a character in this single unending epic song that came to seem not to be a song at all but some folk stories whispered and told by a vast and infinitely crowded cast of folk who moved irrevocably toward infidelity with masochistic glee and a dread and near mythic inevitability.

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It was a West Texas night. The moon tracking high above me rendered the silver landscape cold and surreal. I stopped and cut the lights, the switch. Silence descended and I got out into it. The desert looked timeless. Save the dark highway beseeching it, this could be the desert of ten thousand years ago or of some vague and unchartered future. I turned. The truck looked anomolaic, Fortean. Above me the dark bowl of the night sky was shot with pinholes of light. I urinated and lit a cigarette. The horizon where the highway and sky met tugged me gently as if bound to me by a webbing of invisible wire and I got back into the truck and drove on.

The thrill of reading something like that for the first time was indescribable. I immediately sent it around to the team. We had no idea where it fit or which book it belonged to, since William would write segments of works in progress in whatever notebook was “at hand”. However, that passage turned out to be the ending of Stoneburner and, like so many other pieces, there was nowhere else it could fit.

SHELIA KENNEDY: I actually did feel William’s spirit as I worked on the manuscript. The intensity of his eyes in a framed photograph on my bookshelf kept me working to get it right.

LAMONT INGALLS: Throughout the recovery and editorial processes, William’s written voice remained in

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the present as a guide. So, yes, he was with me in this sense. William’s unique and imaginative voice telling the stories of his country, principally the Harrikin and Ackerman’s Field, and peopled by his characters continues always. The essence of William Gay’s singular artistry remains. So, yes, he was “with” me in this sense.

For those who knew him, it was clear that William’s least favorite part of the writing process was publishing and promotion. When the New York Times called to ask him if they could feature him, he refused, saying to me, “I don’t want one of them New York reporters coming down and seeing where I live.” This was before he moved to the cabin, when he was still living in the trailer. I remember his telling me, after one fairly strenuous book tour, that he was thinking of going back to drywalling. He said there was a meditative peacefulness to it. He would write all day in his mind and come home to put it on paper. I’m curious about the way the manuscripts went into the publication process without him.

LAMONT INGALLS: In early 2013, the manuscript of The Lost Country was essentially ready to circulate to potential publishers. There was a long process of ensuring that the rights reverted to the William Gay estate following the bankruptcy and death of the original publisher at DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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MacAdam/Cage. Once this legal matter was settled, The Lost Country could be circulated unencumbered.

The rights for The Lost Country and Little Sister Death, another novel recovered from the attic in Lewis County, were acquired by Dzanc Books. Little Sister Death is William’s Southern gothic retelling and updating of Tennessee’s Bell Witch legend. The novel, which I also edited and proofed as a member of Team Gay, was published by Dzanc in September 2015. The Lost Country was published in July 2018.

MICHELLE DOTTER: I wasn't the one who acquired The Lost Country. I actually inherited The Lost Country from my predecessor at Dzanc, Guy Intoci, but William Gay had been on my radar a lot longer than that. As I said, my first job in publishing was as an intern at MacAdam/ Cage, which had acquired William's Twilight and The Long Home from Macmurray & Beck.

After MacAdam/Cage dissolved and the Gay family was finally able to get William's rights back, they approached Dzanc in part because Guy Intoci and Pat Walsh were associated with the press. Guy, Pat, and I all worked at MacAdam/Cage together, and I know they were both very excited to finally be bringing this legendary book out for William's fans, who have been incredibly loyal and patient. That neither of them was working with Dzanc by the time The Lost Country was ready for publication is just one of those funny turns of publishing. I feel like I

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inherited so many people's love and hopes for the book, and I wanted to honor those hopes above all else.

In terms of promotion, all I can say is we were extremely lucky that this book already had an audience, as well as a group of dedicated fans and friends ready to champion it.

Michael White and company, as well as Sonny Brewer, the dedicated folks at the Southern indie bookstores, and the whole vast host of William's devoted readers have helped us spread the word, and we've been grateful for good coverage from significant papers and magazines, too.

Sales have been looking good so far, and everyone—from readers to booksellers—has supported us and the book from day one. This has truly been a work of love, and certainly not just by me or the press. I've heard that William was a very good man, a kind man, and it seems he left a mark on a lot of people, who were willing to go the distance and help us get this lost novel into the limelight.

Not least of all, Suzanne Kingsbury.

William’s work was immediately recognizable, and many of the landscapes and some characters repeated themselves. After his second book, Art Winslow, book editor for The Nation, summed up his work in the New York Times, saying “…his mountain folk are still seeking, with lives of unquiet desperation, what is ever tantalizingly close and for a few heartbeats within their embrace.” Do you feel his novel, The Lost Country, is a DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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departure in any way from his others?

PAUL NITSCHE: Within the posthumous releases, The Lost Country is more consistent with William’s other work. Little Sister Death and Stoneburner found William playing within the horror and crime genres that he was fond of. When I would come across pictures of William’s cabin, I would study the background book shelves for authors and titles. Among the stacks, one could see Stephen King and Daniel Woodrell titles, authors that certainly influenced Little Sister Death and Stoneburner, respectively. These novels are stylistically a bit of a departure from his other books. The language and vocabulary are simpler, less developed, and are most likely a stab at popular fiction by William. The Lost Country, on the other hand, seems to be a full clasp of William’s southern gothic writing and style. Like the novels published during his lifetime, The Lost Country follows characters on the fringe of society, some making bad decisions, some villainous, others trying to just get by.

These folks feel familiar to the William Gay reader, as does the landscape, which swings from the bucolic to the apocalyptic. Using his crafted language and phrasing, William describes the journeys and humorous antics of some of his most memorable characters. The Lost Country is one of William’s greatest artistic statements.

LAMONT INGALLS: The exacting use of language that

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is often poetic, the creative description, the idiomatic conversations and humor, the fully developed characters, and the sense of inevitability that mark William Gay’s writing are all especially evident in The Lost Country.

However, there is a sense of “lostness” in Edgewater that I think is different in degree from characters in his other novels. Others are rooted in place and families, in Ackerman’s Field or the Harrikin, and have local histories and kinfolk that are part of their stories. Once Edgewater heads away from Memphis and his brief and tenuous connection with Claire, and toward a reunion, vaguely sensed, with his dying father in East Tennessee, he is traveling through a countryside in which he is unknown to all he meets. He has no kin along all his highways or in the towns and hamlets he wanders into as he travels toward the remnants of his family, presumably in Monteagle, Tennessee. Likewise, the land itself does not seem to contain any portion of his previous history, no memories to which he might momentarily connect. There are no towns through which he may have once passed, or persons he may have previously encountered. As in the traditional song, “Wayfaring Stranger,” Edgewater is “traveling through a worrisome land,” although without the pilgrim’s hope for fulfillment at the end of the road.

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who have a passion for it. When you read widely in a subgenre and you still respect and love a writer, you know he's doing something very right. William Gay's writing astonishes me every time I crack open one of his books, and in addition to reaching lifelong fans, I hope we've honored his memory in our treatment of it, and that he'd be pleased by the efforts of so many of his devoted friends.

Obviously, we are all huge fans of his work, please talk about what drew you to his work and how you found your way to help edit his posthumous books?

MATT SNOPE: In 2003 I was in Las Vegas, it was 112 degrees in the morning, and my then-wife gave me Provinces of Night for a birthday gift. She’d learned about it because I was really into Tom Franklin, but I’d never heard of William. I was impressed with the gift since there wasn’t as much online in those days as now, but she’d found out about it. I started reading it and was blown away by the prose, earthiness, and William’s use of metaphor.

Passages that he has related as elating for him to write are

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also ecstatic for the reader, and I was hooked.

Years went by after William died and The Lost Country languished in uncertainty. When it finally came out, I thought: Fuck yeah—William lives! I was very moved by Michael’s afterword in The Lost Country. I actually cried and so reached out to Michael offering editing help and a familiarity with William’s work and Southern Gothic and grit lit in general.

DAWN MAJOR: At first, I was drawn to his work because I was personally interested in writing horror, and I read Stephen King’s blurb about Twilight being the scariest novel of 2007. From there I was hooked. I was in graduate school at the same time I found my way to William’s works and my critical thesis advisor wisely suggested I choose to write about someone who was relatively unknown, not an author who had been written about so many times there would be little new to say. The amount of academic articles tackling William’s work was limited and none of them asserted my argument which was that in addition to being a wonderful Southern Gothic writer, William also belonged on the shelves of authors of horror and magical realism and that he was building a Southern

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legendarium around the town of Ackerman’s Field and his haunted forest, the Harrikin. While I was only required to research and write about one of William’s novels to support my thesis, I felt William deserved more and I ended up writing about his entire body of work and twice the amount needed. My critical thesis advisor also suggested that any chapters I wrote could be later published in literary journals. Fortunately for me, the editor of Five Points Review was at my graduate lecture where I spoke about William’s world-building techniques and particularly how that played into his artwork. After my lecture Megan Sexton asked if I would write an essay about his paintings and that essay was published along with an interview conducted by Michael White with William in the 2020 edition along with images of William’s paintings and an image of his map of Ackerman’s Field and the Harrikin. I’ve since lectured at the Lost Southern Voices Conference twice and plan to be on a full panel in 2023, unless something like a pandemic occurs.

GEORGE DILWORTH: Six years ago, I was rummaging through a basket of books for sale at a small local business and came across a title that caught my attention, Provinces of Night by William Gay. I had never heard of Gay, but I saw the Cormac McCarthy quote inside that provided him with the title. I paid a dollar for the book (virtually new) and took it home, where it sat on my bookshelf for almost a year until a nephew told me 90

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he’d read an extraordinary book recently called Twilight. When he told me the author’s name, something clicked in my head, but when I didn’t come across the book at home, I went to the library and found The Long Home and Twilight. (My heroes were Wolfe, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, O’Connor, Saroyan, McCarthy . . .) I read The Long Home first and had not been enthralled by a writer’s words like that since I read Look Homeward, Angel at sixteen!

Twilight was mesmerizing, stunning, and it felt like I was reading the best of all my heroes condensed in this one incredibly gifted writer. Of course, I found my copy of Provinces of Night and afterwards began looking for everything I could find that he’d written. I wanted to know everything knowable about the man who wrote these poems of prose. It made me heartsick to think that William Gay had only been eight hours away from me all these years and I had not heard of him. I kept expecting to be disappointed at some point with a story, essay, or book, but it was not to be, I remained enchanted and hungry for more. I recognized what J.M. White, Ingalls, McDonald, Nitsche, and Kennedy were doing out of pure admiration for Gay’s body of work and wanted to thank and encourage them to stick with it to the end. So, I wrote to Michael at the address I found in my copy of Time Done

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Been Won’t Be No More. He was kind enough to reply and we found ourselves corresponding. In a considerate act of generosity (to stave off my craving) he sent me three or four pages from Fugitives of the Heart to feast on and tell him what I thought. I printed it off and read it several times, operating on what my wife calls my “teacher spirit”, correcting punctuation, spelling, adding and removing hyphens, making comments, etc. I mailed it back, hoping to be helpful, and apologetic if it appeared otherwise. To my good fortune and delight, Michael welcomed the additional assistance and has continued to allow me the privilege of playing a tiny part in bringing this hypnotic material to print.

RANDY MACKIN: After discovering William’s work in 1999, I read everything I could by him and about him.

Lucky for those of us who so admire what William was able to do, that first novel was followed fast upon by another and his first collection of short stories, plus William was being published in all those magazines whose editors had rejected his work earlier in his career. I knew William had considerable unpublished work, he had told me so, and that was no surprise considering he’d been writing for decades, honing his craft. No writer suddenly bursts into the literary landscape with a novel as fully imagined and realized as The Long Home without having spent years developing such a distinct voice. We had talked extensively about The Lost Country, William had shared parts of it with me and others in manuscript, and 92

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we discussed the problems he had with his publishers and with completing the novel. He told me that he’d gotten all The Lost Country’s characters back to Ackerman’s Field and he just didn’t know what to do with them, couldn’t find an ending. I was happy to see that book in print after his death because I knew it contained some exceptional writing, as good as anything William had written. And so too, I was thrilled with the publication of Little Sister Death and Stoneburner, the former I knew existed and the latter a book I’d never heard about. When Fugitives of the Heart came out, I emailed Michael to thank him for all the work he’d done on William’s behalf because I knew he’d faced what must have seemed an insurmountable challenge and offered my help. Michael, within days, sent the manuscript for this collection and invited my edits.

JOSEPH G. TIDWELL III: I had never heard of William Gay until a director friend of mine in Los Angeles told me my work reminded him a lot of this Southern writer named William Gay. I’m going who the hell is William Gay? “Man, you need to read this guy’s stuff. He creates the same kind of characters and landscapes you write about in Mississippi.” After several months I had lunch with him again and that’s when he handed me DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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a copy of Provinces. Well… I couldn’t put the book down.

I bought every bit of William’s writing I could find. Then one day I found this email address for one JM White in one of the books. I can’t remember which book it was, but I wrote a note to myself and forgot about it. Several months later, going through my stack of torn papers, stained bar napkins, a couple of notated parking tickets and other notes on this screenplay I was writing at the time, I ran across the memo and thought what the hell, if something comes of it that would be great. I emailed JM White. If you know anything about living in LA and you deal every day with some of the “sweet assholes” in the film business, you realize that most emails are usually unread. I was expecting that. It’s amazing how one little email can create such a wonderful tempest in your mind when I did get a return from JM White. I called him and we talked for a while about novels and short stories and other writing, and the subject moved to screenplays and the film business. I mentioned to him that, if the occasion ever arose, I would be very interested in doing the screen adaptation from one of William’s novels. Well… to my great surprise he mentioned Stoneburner. It took me about eight months to write the script. I tried to stay as close to the novel as I could as William changed locations a lot without any transitions. Which is hard to do in a film. If I’m correct William said this was his “Film Noir on paper.” Believe me, I wanted to include transitions along the way, but Michael lovingly held my feet close to the fire. He’s pretty damn quick and handy redlining your shit

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so I held even closer to the novel. To make this short, the rest is history. I am honored that Michael gave me a chance to be a part, even though in a roundabout way, of William’s life and legacy. As I was writing the script, I could feel William’s presence and I would occasionally talk out loud to him as to how he meant a certain scene to play out. I love painting pictures with words, and as you all know, William held a wide paintbrush with many colors. I feel we would have become good friends had we met. It’s a shame that the world has lost this great treasure but what he left us in his characters and stories is priceless and I shall never forget that. My life and writing and artwork have been influenced beyond my wildest dreams

by William Gay. Thank ya buddy wherever you are, wish I could have a drink (or eight) with you right now. And thank you Michael White for the opportunity. I would love to create film projects from some of his short stories. What a hoot that would be...

If you have a favorite William Gay story, please share it with us?

MATT SNOPE: I unfortunately never met William but in the early 2000s I designed a class in Contemporary Southern Literature for a community college, and both Tom Franklin and William were so nice and easy-going

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about me using their writing for the class. I talked on the phone with Tom, William was a little more reclusive (yet very happy to have his work studied at the college), but both were easy to interact with, no egos or pretentious bullshit. I also always chuckle thinking about how William knew Stephen King was gonna call him, but he let the phone ring. That is punk rock.

SUSAN MCDONALD: I was moved by William's shyness and humility even after he was a well-recognized and respected author. He seemed to suffer a little by being in a large public event during which he had to read or speak. As soon as his part was over, he wanted to "get out of there". On one occasion at a radio event in Franklin, Tennessee which was held in a venue that sold food, the owner asked him to stay and eat and William just wanted to leave and go home. We had picked him up and were driving him back so were happy to do what he wanted.

But we knew he had to be hungry because he had not eaten for hours. The owner then asked if he would like some food to take away and William was thrilled with the offer. He asked "Do you have any fried green tomatoes? and fortunately they did. So, William left with a box full of fried green tomatoes and barbecue and was delighted.

One year at the Book Festival in Nashville where William was a speaker, tables were set up after events so authors could sign books. I was in line to get a book signed by Charles Frazier and happened to be standing next to Mrs.

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Frazier. We somehow began talking about William who was at a table nearby. She said that Charles was very anxious to meet William but had not had an opportunity and was afraid he would leave soon, so Michael and I took him over and introduced him to William. They turned out to be admirers of each other.

RANDY MACKIN: No way can I limit my experiences to a favorite story because in every encounter—mostly in my car, or on the phone, or visiting in the book-lined walls of his home—something memorable happened. One story, however, seems particularly important and appropriate to this collection. In March of 2011, when I pulled up to his house for a trip to MTSU, William was coming out the front door onto the porch. He was wearing his usual: jeans, a print shirt, tennis shoes, and he was slipping on what he called his “writer’s jacket,” a black sportscoat with satiny lapels, something he’d purchased at a Goodwill store. He was carrying a Mason jar of black coffee. As soon as he sat down in the car—no hello, how are you, chit-chat— William said, “I finished a new story last night.” On our way back to Highway 412, following the curves of Little Swan Creek and cutting through that morning’s fog, William told me about the story, with a working title of “Ashes of Love” from the old Jim & Jesse song—a tune he said was quoted in this tale about a penis in a fruit jar and the man who finds it and tries to blackmail an old woman to fulfill his own designs on her granddaughter. I told William I’d love to read it. He said it was still in DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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longhand, but I could take a look if he ever got it typed up.

Of course, that didn’t happen. William was gone less than a year later. But, that day in two of my classes, William shared the news about his story with my students, told them how the idea had originated from a twenty-year old newspaper clipping about a woman who’d robbed her husband’s corpse of his private part because she didn’t want him enjoying it in the afterlife, the unfaithful way he had in this one. My students heard firsthand from a writer what it was like to finish a story but also how that piece of fiction developed from a stranger-than-fiction real event, and how William had shaped it into an exploration of human nature and selfishness and manipulation. I did not see that story until I began editing this manuscript, and there it was, with a different title— “Tidewater’s Eden”— and I think it’s the best piece in his collection, an example of William at the height of his writing powers.

DAWN MAJOR: I didn’t know William personally. He passed away before I was even aware of his writing. My experiences all relate to meeting those who knew him. If I met an author that I knew was a friend of William’s, I would make a point of getting a story out of them. George Singleton was the keynote speaker at my graduation when I got my MFA in creative writing and when I met him, I immediately asked him to share William Gay stories with me. In truth, I was nervous because George is one of my all-time favorite short story writers. I wanted to ask him about his work, but I basically skimmed over him and 98

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launched into William. It was kind of rude really, but I’ve embarrassed myself before in front of writers I admire and I’m sure to do it again. George is as likable as his stories and was gracious about it. Later that night, we were all hanging out in my dorm room and in walks George with a case of PBR and those stories about William. I still have one can of PBR from that night. As for the stories, I’ll let George share those when William’s biography is published.

MICHAEL WHITE: After William died, I spent as much time as I could afford in Hohenwald and interviewed all his family members. There were no phone calls involved, I just showed up at their houses and everyone seemed happy to see me. At first, I wanted to call and make appointments but quickly learned that the Gay family didn’t operate that way, it was perfectly fine to just drop in whenever I was in town. So, I would sit there with a yellow pad on my knee and take notes while I asked them questions about their life with William. Once, talking to his brother Cody, he told me about a time William was living in an old house and when he would visit, they would sit and talk in the living room and there was this big spider who would inevitably come out and roam around the room. Cody eyed the spider and motioned to William to make sure he saw it, but William’s only response was, “Yeah, he lives here.”

That was William, he never owned a gun, and never hunted and never killed a thing, not even a spider.

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Please describe the role you have played in helping work on his posthumous books.

MATT SNOPE: I was living in Atlanta and had lots of time on my hands due to poverty and unemployment, so I first worked on helping edit the novel Fugitives of the Heart. I have a pretty light touch when it comes to editing William, because I find his work so beautiful, and so much of it has a final draft quality to it, probably because while working his construction day jobs, he was writing in his head.

DAWN MAJOR: I’ve actively sought literary journal editors to publish William’s short stories and books. The James Dickey Review published “The Dream” in Vol. 2019 along with an introduction from me and how the story was acquired. As I mentioned previously, Five Points Review published my essay, “A Window into William Gay, A Southern Writer, A Southern Painter,” as well as an interview with Michael White and William in 2020 edition Vol. 19, No. 3. Along with the essay and interview, one of William’s paintings was featured on the cover with seven images of William’s paintings and the map of Ackerman’s Field in the middle. I was interviewed about William with Five Points Review for their podcast in December 2020, where I included information about upcoming publications for William.

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For me, it’s not just about publications, but about reaching professors, teachers, and the public. In 2019, I presented at Georgia State University’s New Voice Graduate Conference where I discussed William’s methodology and treatment of the supernatural. I also lectured about mapping and William’s treatment of the fairy tale during my internship. During the pandeminc, Five Points Podcast interviewed me in 2021. I lectured at the Lost Southern Voices conference on William, and it is the plan to do a full panel at the conference in 2023. We are also in discussions with the Decatur Library to have a showing, but I don’t want to say too much and jinx it. The result of bringing William and work to the forefront coupled with my enthusiasm, I’ve discovered professors have added William’s stories to their curriculum, which I think is simply wonderful.

I provided editorial assistance on Fugitives of the Heart and Stories From The Attic I’m still seeking other journals to place articles about his work. Just recently Well Read Magazine offered to publish a four-part series on William Gay, and I wrote the October and November articles—“An Exploration of the Supernatural in the Works of William Gay” and “Mystery Outside the Frame: An Analysis of William Gay's Literary Landscapes.” The September edition includes quite a bit of photos of William as well as biographical. The final part features an unpublished excerpt from The Long Home which was cut by William’s publishers. I was thrilled to work with Well Read who allowed me a lot of freedom. It turned out great.

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GEORGE DILWORTH: Since Fugitives of the Heart through Stories From The Attic, I’ve helped with the editing of manuscripts. To have played the least part in this project to publish William’s contribution to literature has been an incredible privilege and delight. A highlight in my life for which I am most grateful.

RANDY MACKIN: My work on his posthumous books has been limited to this collection, but I’m so proud to have been invited to participate, and I’m grateful beyond measure for what the William Gay team has done to get as much of his work in print as possible.

What is your favorite book by William? If you have a favorite quote from any of the books, please share it?

DAWN MAJOR: Because I’m a huge fan of the modern fairy tale; I naturally gravitate towards Twilight. It was also the first novel I read of William’s so it’s sentimental for me. What William did in Twilight was similar to what Angela Carter did with her collection of short stories in The Bloody Chamber. William basically rewired the fairy tale, “Little Red Riding Hood,” and gave it a modern twist, but he also recognized that, at the heart of most fairy tales, there’s an element of terror.

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As to favorites, just one? Really? I must mention Provinces of Night, because I love Uncle Brady’s character. Uncle Brady was the deciding factor in my conclusion that William’s works could be viewed through both a realistic fictional lens and a speculative fiction lens.

It’s kind of brilliant really. If you choose to negate the paranormal and contend that those supernatural elements in his works can be explained away by dreams, dementia, poor vision or old age then William’s endings become vaguer. However, if you practice the willing suspension of disbelief, meaning Uncle Brady had the powers he claimed to possess, then the evil wizard won. I also love the Oedipus Rex connotations surrounding that novel…Uncle Brady killed his father to be with his mother. It amazes me that William was completely selftaught based on the sheer number of allusions from philosophy, literature, religion, music, poetry, and even physics; one would think you were dealing with an academic who had an extensive education.

I cannot possibly stick to one quote, either.

When you see “Somethin’s goin to happen” it means something terrible is about to occur. This phrase occurs in Little Sister Death, Twilight, and The Lost Country and each time the protagonists ignore the warning or omen it’s to his (protagonists are male) detriment. I always imagine William chuckling to himself when he wrote that phrase.

In Little Sister Death, Swaw and Binder both think these words while in the orchard, in Twilight Sutter is described as waiting outside for Tyler and waiting for something to DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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happen, and in The Lost Country Sudy tells Edgewater she saw an omen and she speaks these words like some portent of death. Readers familiar with what happens after these words occur in a William Gay story should recognize the protagonist is in for a ride, and not a joy ride. I liken it to scrying in a mirror and repeating a spell three times. If words are magical, and I believe William felt they were, then “Somethin’s goin to happen” is a curse.

The second example isn’t just one quote or phrase. The four pages (98-101) prior to Book Two of Twilight are way too long to quote, so I’ll just mention what I found appealing. The real-time narration is momentarily suspended as the supernatural world of the Harrikin opens its doors to Tyler and Sutter. It starts with instructions told in second-person point-of-view giving the reader directions to the Harrikin, and William piles on poetic language here—the initial sentence lasts six lines. William ends it by telling the reader the antagonist (Sutter) and protagonist (Tyler) are “fleeing chronologically” backwards. Essentially, they’re going into the past.

Finally, I love the language of the scene described below from Provinces of Night because it’s so beautifully constructed and I can envision it even better because William (maybe) painted it. Michael White pointed this out to me, and I tend to agree.

The feeling that off somewhere in the bracken man and boy still walked rose in him nor would it abate.

With their steps locked in sync with his, they paced

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him in the silent black wood, passed through the boles of trees like revenants. A moon the color of yellowed ivory cradled up out of the dark and he could see them moving through the trees transparent as water, insubstantial as a handful of smoke (72-73).

The cover for Time Done Been Won’t Be No More is a twilight scene of a white cottage set back from the road with smoke piping from the chimney and in between the woods, if you look closely, are these dark forms that don’t seem to belong to the painting, but you can easily imagine they’re the revenants Fleming walked amongst.

MATT SNOPE: While Provinces remains my favorite and I think William’s magnum opus, I keep returning to Little Sister Death. I’m a skeptic of supernatural things by nature, but there’s something generally creepy about that book, and I can read it over and over. I love its blend of almost clinical descriptions of evil, violence, insanity, and incest, yet it’s also a semi-autobiographical book about William trying to be both a writer and loving family man.

GEORGE DILWORTH: I suppose it’s possible to have a favorite book by William, but when you read them over and over as I do, your favorite is ever-changing. Right now, it’s Fugitives of the Heart. Before that, it was The Lost Country. For short stories, as a main-line addict, there are too many favorites to choose from…however, high on

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the list would be The Paperhanger, Sugarbaby, and Nighttime Awakenings. Sugarbaby is a gem of a tragicomedy. A commentary on a man’s (mostly) futile attempts to humble himself and conquer his pride. Gay could have included the quote from Jeremiah 17:9 on the title page: “The heart is more deceitful than anything else and mortally sick. Who can fathom it?” A simple tale, yet, soaked with insight on the nature of man.

As far as a favorite quote, there again, from the works of Gay you’re asking the impossible. There are simply too many. However, because they are so easily found in all his books, I shall select one for the pure joy of setting it down.

“Lying there sleeping on the mossy concrete, his face jerking with the troubled passage of his dreams, he is provisionally still brother to all humankind. He has strayed far from the ways of men, but there has always been a kind of twisted logic to his violence. The things he desired and struggled for made a kind of sense. Revenge, avarice, a thirst for power. The things only dreamed by normal men. Their own secret dreams made carnate and ambulatory. Silver threads, thin and frayed though they be, hold him yet to the ways of the world. Here in the night they part and the ties give one by one and he falls away like some winged predator into another country, dark and unmapped and turbulent, so that he is finally free from all restraint, lost.” (Twilight, pg. 139,) Interesting note: I could not find the word “carnate” in any of my dictionaries. Going online, I discovered that the

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word can only be found in the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary and is compatible with “incarnate”. Reading Gay is also a fun and fascinating study of words.

RANDY MACKIN: While his novels are outstanding, I think William was at his best when composing short stories. We talked about short fiction a great deal in our literary conversations, he equated short stories with poetry in that both genres try to take a lifetime of experience and compress it into a few lines or a few pages. William believed that short stories were more difficult to write than novels because every word is important and there’s none of the wiggle room that a novel might provide the writer.

Story endings were important to William, he told me that he worked diligently on the closings of stories, trying to get the endings exactly right. When “I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down” was adapted into the film, That Evening Sun, William told me he felt the filmmaker did an excellent job taking his short story and expanding it into a full-length feature—except for the ending which William referred to as a “big group hug.” He acknowledged and understood that filmmakers have different audience concerns than writers, but I remember him talking about how hard he worked on that story’s ending. Because of that revelation, I tend to look at the endings of William’s stories because they garnered so much of his attention.

The closing lines of “I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down” are among my favorites: DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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"Why I believe we've crossed over into Alabama, Meecham told himself in wonder, and in truth the icelocked world was evolving into a landscape sculpted by memory. The ambulance swayed past curving lazy creeks he had fished and waded as a boy, winding roads dusted white as mica in the moonlight. // He pressed his face to the glass as a child might and watched the irrevocable slide of scenery—tree and field and sleeping farmhouse.

He studied each object as it hove into view and went slipstreaming off the dark glass to see if it might have something to tell him, some intimation of his destination.”

We have brought out four posthumous novels and this collection of short stories, now that we can see the full extent of William’s lifetime of literary effort, what insights about his work have you gained from working on these books?

MATT SNOPE: I know I’m biased but I am so thankful that the team has worked on, literally rescued, these posthumous works. I mean, it’s tragic to imagine these works sitting in dusty obscurity in an attic somewhere.

Also, although similarities galore exist between Cormac McCarthy and William, I’d put William at his best up against Cormac any day. Don’t get me wrong – Cormac writes like a motherfucker – but William has a sense of

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compassion and a sense of humor that’s often missing in Cormac, even though both have similar backgrounds and write about some similar things. Where Cormac is jaded and bleak, William brings an innocence and curiosity about the world that is very touching.

RANDY MACKIN: As an academic, posthumous works have sometimes been difficult for me to accept. I’ve had something of a change of heart, though, while helping edit this collection. We’ll have very little unpublished material from William after these words are in print. Like true addicts, we’ll crave another fix. I’m glad to see all these final words—fully formed short stories, fragments, meanderings, whatever they might be—finding a home between the covers of a book. Are these posthumous works in their entirety as good as the books published during William’s life? Some, yes; others, no. But they are essential and need to be published because these words are all we have. Here, the concern of editors is the reading public, those out there who won’t be sated until they have access to all of William’s words. It is for them, I think, these remaining pages need to be in print.

GEORGE DILWORTH: Gay has been fairly criticized at times for redundancy. I, too, have seen what the critics saw . . . only differently. Earlier in his life, we know that Cormac McCarthy pointed this out to him, and I think William took it to heart. Afterwards, when he was DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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redundant, he did it deliberately. Usually, repetition calls for attention, a closer look, a second thought. I believe he used it that way to make you recall a scene or image and because he liked the way it sounded and what it said to him, and he chose to keep it. (Might he have said, “Who’s telling this yarn anyway?”) With the posthumous works, beginning with the early written Little Sister Death, I began to see the way William honored the scribes who had inspired and taught him so much through his own original, authentic language. Michael’s afterword in The Lost Country, linking the genres with books and author’s Gay admired, was fascinating and fit well with my thoughts on the matter. William Gay is something new, a product of all his influences forged in fire. His is a rich, vivid, and haunting voice like no other.

DAWN MAJOR: What pleased me the most from reading/editing the final works, was the validation I felt about claiming William was creating a Southern mythology. These works continued to support my theory.

There are probably some folks out there who disagree, but for me, he employed the same world-building techniques—painting, mapping, meticulous attention to climate, terrain, plant life and wildlife, and repetitive settings and characters—as famous world-building authors such as J.R.R. Tolkien. I suspect, if he had the education, background, and time that someone like Tolkien had, Ackerman’s Field and the Harrikin would have been articulated at a far grander scale.

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William was also a master metaphoric writer and he often used poetic tools, the symbol being one of my favorites.

Common symbols one should look for from William’s work are black dogs (Faustian connection), clocks, calendars, windows, mirrors or something reflective, hornets (shout out to Stephen King, I believe) and snakes.

Many of his classic symbols have to do with his treatment of time. I believe one reason his work is so episodic is because he didn’t view time linearly; his plotlines jump around sometimes because time doesn’t really exist in this neat chronological manner and that concept ties into William’s philosophy.

William published three novels while he was alive, The Long Home, Provinces of Night and Twilight so now we have added an additional four: Little Sister Death, Stoneburner, The Lost Country and Fugitives of the Heart. He also published three collections of short stories, I Hate to See that Evening Sun Go Down, Wittgenstein’s Lolita and The Iceman, and Time Done Been Won’t Be No More and now we have added this final collection. How would you judge the material that we have published posthumously against the material he published while he was alive?

MATT SNOPE: This is a great question. I genuinely think William would be overjoyed that his output extended beyond what he published in his lifetime. He probably DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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would have been annoyed by me because one thing I’ve always been a bit on the fence about his use of the comma splice. But at the same time, it gives his writing a unique character, and having a corpus of writing published while he was alive helped with the posthumous stuff.

SUSAN MCDONALD: I believe the posthumous works are as good as those published while he was alive.

However, without the meticulous care and concern of James Michael White, none of the posthumous works would have seen the light of day. Having been a witness to the jumbled state of the unordered notebooks and scattered writings discovered in that attic that ultimately became the posthumous writings, it took countless hours, days and weeks spent out of love and respect for William putting the writings into the order in which William intended so they could be published.

GEORGE DILWORTH: Obviously, I value every piece of composition ever published by this man. Gay was at the peak of his powers long before his death and the work discovered at his home, and in the attic of his former home, contained material both old and new, none of which I consider to be inferior (some unfinished and groping about with ideas perhaps, but not inferior). Therefore, I find the posthumous material equal to (if not surpassing) the material published prior to his death.

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Feel free to add any thoughts, observations, memories, etc. if you have anything you want to say.

RANDY MACKIN: Looking back, it seems odd to me that William and I never talked about spiritual matters, or the afterlife, or what notions we had about those issues. A few months after William’s death—and just weeks after his youngest daughter Laura’s passing—I met William’s other daughter, Lee, for lunch at a Hohenwald restaurant.

We reminisced, swapped stories, talked about what might happen next with his work. Lee, also now deceased, made a couple of comments that have always stuck with me, and I don’t think she would have minded me sharing them here. Lee said, “Daddy always wanted to see a ghost.” She thought her father had questions about the life after this one and seeing a ghost might have proven to him that existence does go on in some form after we have “shuffled off this mortal coil.” And she told me this story: the day Lee went to the mortuary to pick up William’s ashes, someone’s phone rang while she was waiting, and the person had a whippoorwill ringtone. Lee said a sense of calm passed over her, as if her father was sending her a message that everything was okay, that he was where whippoorwills call as they do in many of the quiet moments of his fiction. Wherever William is, I hope it’s a place like the one the autobiographical Edgewater found when he waked after a forlorn night in the woods, quoted

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from a manuscript page William shared from The Lost Country: "But his heart was lifting and his feet felt fleet and light.

The day was new and unused and this day was one that had never existed before and he saw it as a footpath that led into a world that was sensual and many faceted and complex beyond his understanding, but for the moment he was comfortable in it and roofs and shelter and ill weathers were things of no moment. He thought the only dwelling he needed was the unconfined and unwalled world itself."

MATT SNOPE: If there is an afterlife, I know William is in a good place. I imagine him with his feet in a cool creek, happily writing longhand on legal pads. I know that his life wasn’t always easy, but I am so glad he stuck to his guns and pursued his gift. The world’s better for it. I also think he’s a good role model for men, in that William was both tough as jerky and also, obviously, very sensitive, observant, and poetic.

DAWN MAJOR: It was a great honor to be part of this process. While this is the “end” of his final works, it’s really the beginning of my journey with William because (to the chagrin of my poor husband), I’m never going to stop talking about him. I hope to continue to write, lecture, and advocate for William. In fact, the reason I started

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blogging and advocating for living Southern authors on my website www.dawnmajor.com was because I saw the need after working with Team Gay to promote Southern authors. Because William’s work is so varied there are multiple avenues to explore and potential for academic research. I touched on his treatment of time and road narratives in the article about his paintings (another vast subject) I wrote for Well Read’s November edition: “Mystery Outside the Frame: An Analysis of William Gay’s Literary Landscapes.” I also wrote about supernaturalism in the October edition of Well Read: “A Southern Mythology: An Exploration of the Supernatural in the Works of William Gay.” While this article is very thorough, I seriously think I could write an entire book on the subject. The reason it is so important we continue to delve into these different areas is because there is so little academic work out there on William. It is hard to imagine, but it is true. I also believe we could open William’s readership up if he landed on some other bookshelves and since he was blending genres, he should be considered not just as a great Southern Gothic writer, but also as a horror and magical realism writer.

SUSAN MCDONALD: It was clear from his works, from his manuscripts and notebooks. that he was unorganized and severely lacking in resources, even enough notebooks so that he did not have to write in margins or on the back of pages. To think of what he could have accomplished by having equipment such as DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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computers on which to compose, edit, and save copy would have increased the number of his works, saved those that we know were lost and added to his legacy although he may not have ever wanted to write in any other way but longhand.

William was a man of great curiosity in almost every area of literature and music and if he met someone versed in an area in which he had little knowledge, that person had his unwavering attention while he listened and learned. I am most captivated by William's nature to be drawn to the paranormal, occult, and mysterious. This was evident in his desire to personally pursue the Bell Witch legend and the resulting impact it had on him. He felt something unearthly, and it stayed with him after leaving the scene where it all happened. His scenes set in cemeteries, forests, any place in "full dark", and abandoned shacks and cabins created a visceral aura of apprehension, fear, evil and even horror. In Little Sister Death the snake was a metaphorical example of this.

I think of William as personified in The Lost Country by Edgewater, a man with great principles who couldn't put up with any bullshit, who guarded his privacy and was always searching. I know he loved his children to a fault and that he was grateful for his friends, but I believe he thrived on being alone to think, write and create.

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Note from the editor: This wraps up the four part series on the interesting work, art, and life of William Gay. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. I can’t thank the members of TEAM Gay enough for sharing these stories with our readers.

I’ve been a fan of William Gay’s work for years but I wasn’t lucky enough to meet him. Learning about who William was a person, and who he was as a friend, has been a great experience.

I want to thank J. M. White for sharing his fantastic introduction of William in September’s issue, William Gay: A Life of Writing, and for this month’s article. A special thanks goes to Dawn Major for her incredible work for October and November’s essays. A Southern Mythology: An Exploration of the Supernatural in the Works of William Gay, and Mystery Outside the Frame: An Analysis of William Gay's Literary Landscapes.

It was an honor and a pleasure.

Some exciting news to add - In November, Dawn Major was awarded a grant through Georgia Humanities to do an art exhibit with William Gay's artwork. The exhibition will be at the Decatur Library in their new exhibition space, starting in January of 2023 and ending in March with a full panel discussion at the Lost Southern Voices Festival.

A project that celebrates forgotten and underappreciated works and their authors—lost southern voices.

Visit The William Gay Archive to learn more.

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THE PIT by William Gay (The unpublished chapter of the original manuscript now known as The Long Home)

His name was Dallas Hardin, but this had not always been so. Growing up in Cullman, Alabama, he had been named Herrin. His legs were long and ungainly and leant him a stilted birdlike look so it was inevitable that folks would think of him as Heron. Behind his back. Nobody ever thought it to his face; early on he had displayed a natural facility for cutting folks with pocketknives and before he was eighteen he had waylaid and killed the man he suspected of impregnating his sister, not out of any deep filial affection but out of some fierce sense of pride and outrage, the feeling that the fatal deed had been contemptuous of him, had deemed him no threat to be reckoned with. Folks knew he did it but they didnt say that to his face either. He had carried the body to an abandoned houseplace and rolled it off into a dry cistern and covered it with stones. So he was Mr Herrin to his enemies and acquaintances. He didnt have any friends.

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He was still Mr Herrin that day in August when he was on his knees a few yards from his whiskey still. He had the blade of his pocketknife under the root of a stalk of ginseng and was carefully prying it free when he heard the hammer click back and he was running from the ground up with feet and arms as well: in the interval between the dry click that might have been a stick breaking but was not and the voice calling "Hold it" he was up and gone. The man watching his flight down the blued length of rifle barrel stayed his fire not out of any compunction for backshooting but out of simple awe that human legs could so devour the distance. He was fairly flying toward the mouth of the hollow. The government agent just lowered his gun and watched him go and stood grinning and listening to the brush pop in a volume that diminished with Herrin's progress and then squatted down to rest his legs and to wait for the three men at the hollow's cedared mouth to step from hiding.

Which they did. Herrin was three days and nights in the Falkville jail while his young wife pleaded with her father to sign his bond. So on the fourth night he was able to arise from beside her sleeping body and with shoes and overalls in his arms pass naked and spectrelike from the musky dark of the cabin to the shadow-latticed moonlit yard. He pulled on the overalls and shoes and then moved furtively out of the yard.

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He fled through the sleeping countryside he had been raised in without looking back or to the side. The moon rode high and remote over his left shoulder, wrought his shadow fearful and twisted ahead of him on the dusty roadbed. All elbows and joints and angles he looked like something halfcomical and half menacing, some dark experiment gone awry and escaped.

He crossed the Tennessee line on the back of a sideboarded truckload of scrapiron, old cultivators and hayrakes and mowers chained and unsure of their moorings so that they kept him wary and constantly shifting his position among these mobile and deadly shadows.

Known now to himself as Dallas Hardin (the Hardin after a gunfighter he read about in a Street and Smith western magazine) he progressed across west and toward middle Tennessee and besides the clothing he wore he possessed three things: a pair of dice, a pack of cards, and a fighting cock. The dice were loaded and the cards marked and if there had been any way to shave the edge for the cock he would have done that too: the cock he bore along in a burlap bag like a bright familiar and fed on corn he husbanded from farmers' fields, perhaps the selfsame farmers he had relieved of greasy greenbacks, them cursing their dead roosters but dragging out their

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wallets to pay him. For the cock was vicious, an ugly composite of meanness and ambition, a scaled-down and feathered model of himself perhaps.

Swinging east through Lawrence county he misjudged a farmer's gullibility and the number of his sons. He lost the cock and a fiftydollar set of cockheels he had in turn stolen from somebody else and he lost as well a great deal of the skin off his face. He awoke a mile down the road face down in a gully choked with old castoff autotires and old carseats and a motley of garbage.

If a man can be said to have a start in life then surely this was his. Going back up the road his mind seethed with rage, sorted among such poor reprisals as were available to him: a kind of twisted honor forced him on, a need for balancing things to the level of the distorted and counterweighted mental scales he went by.

From the edge of the woods he watched them scurrying out of the blazing house like rats, framed black and depthless and insectsize against the moiling orange, darting in and out the flames like some anomolaec byproduct of the fire itself. So distant it seemed a dollhouse burning silently away in the night, furiously animate dolls harrying into the earth yard such chattels as they could and whirling back for more until the decking went and he could see for a moment the stark outline of the rafters black against the turmoil then they fell too in a

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crescendo of sparks rushing upward and they ran out this last time and aligned themselves at the periphery of the quaking heat and just watched it burn.

Lying in the brush he watched it and he had no name for what he felt. There had been bestowed upon him some dark gift of power and knowledge and freedom. His pockets were empty and his ribs throbbing yet in the space of seconds he had relieved a man of what had taken him a good portion of a lifetime to accumulate: with a match to be had for the asking he had seen home and possessions go shrieking upward into the night, left them worthless bits of ash to drift and fall like anomalous snow.

By fall he was coming up the old Natchez Trace and his possessions had increased to include a gaudily spotted horse like something evoked live and snorting from an electric dayglo circus poster and a pearl-handled .32 automatic plated with nickel. Still keeping to the woods and backroads and always suspecting pursuit from one quarter or another he was almost constantly on the move, though he did not know where he was going. He divined rather than thought that he was headed someplace he would recognize when he saw it. He was just going.

Leaving in his wake a thousand small plagues, the seeds of untold others. He was what the wife did not tell her husband when he came home at night, he was where the

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rent money went on Saturday. What he saw that he wanted he took and already behind him were rising tales about this gaunt outrider but by the time they were told once he was gone, rolling steadily north like some malign cell infecting others as he went.

Heavy timber he moved through here, great yellow poplar three feet in diameter quickly baring in autumnal winds, he moved through the bluely translucent light of Indian summer and a great stirring of leaves, huge golden leaves as big as his hand. A man with nothing much ever to say passing through a land that was itself inundated in silence, just the click of the horse's hooves on an occasional stone and the weary creak of the harness, the cries of geese borne south and their cries so faint and high his face upturned to watch them go might have dreamed them.

Just at dusk he passed a community called Napier, no store or post office, simply a warren of houses huddled together as if in protection from something unnamed biding its time in the gathering night or just some idiosyncratic conspiracy of carpenters: fording a stream in a rising fan of water opaquely silver in the waning light and the clatter of steel on stone he stopped out on a high packed roadbed and in the murky dusk below was a brush arbor, faint singing, families strung out across the fallow fields with lanterns and into the scrub timber and the

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lanterns winking at him through the boles of trees like fireflies.

He camped by the site of an old abandoned iron ore mine and late that night heard in the darkness the sound of a horse approaching up the Trace, whoever it was drawn to his fire. He could smell the horse and he strained to see but he could not. There was a wind restive in the trees and he could see the slim pines rocking to and fro and he could see behind them a constant wave of other trees in motion too and the air was full of leaves he could hear but not see: the world looked chimerical, illusory, then against this tapestry a horse and rider gaining solidity as if he were watching the spectral reformation of the past, ghostly revenant from these old mines or wraithlike cutthroat up the Trace from old Natchez.

Yet the wispily bearded face beneath the flatbrimmed hat was benign. When Hardin pocketed his pistol and stepped from the brush he'd been concealed in the face turned toward the sound and looked up from the fire lacquered red with its flames as if Hardin himself was the interloper and not this roundfaced young man in a circuitriding preacher's frock coat sitting with his hands extended to the fire.

"Hidy."

Hardin didnt reply. He went back to eating hardtack from a bag and offered it once but the man shook his head

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no. When Hardin put away the hardtack he took up a quart jar of whiskey and drank and wiped a sleeve across his stubbled face and silently offered the jar as well but the man again shook his head.

"I been preachin over at Napier, we havin a meetin over there. You know where Napier is?"

"I come through it."

This young man of God seemed restive, intent, perhaps whatever demons he'd exorcised from others had thrown their lot with him. He seemed unwilling to let Hardin go unsaved: he began to preach at him in a curiously stilted voice. He took out his Bible and read from it by the flickering light, tilting it so that the failing fire washed its pages in a wavering light faintly strobic in random irregularity, read Hardin the doings of old men long dead Hardin had barely heard rumored and he thought he'd never heard a stranger tale.

Hardin sat for a time listening and then he said, "I've thought some about takin up that line myself. The money's easy and I reckon a preacher must get a right smart of pussy."

"Do what?" The preacher closed the book and turned to where Hardin watched him from the log he sat on and the face he peered at looked far away and abstracted. The fire was dying, a wind blew, a few sparks shot upward. The trees sighed. The thin bearded face with its nocolor eyes

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just watched him, remote below the ruin of a hat, this preacher seemed a thing of no moment, just something the night had conjured up for Hardin's amusement.

"I member when I was a boy I used to go to them tent meetins and brush arbors," Hardin said. He drank from the jar, set it between his booted feet. "Them preachers'd get to windin up about ten o'clock and everbody hollerin and talkin in tongues and all you'd have to do was take them old gals by the hand and guide them to the woods.

Time you got em laid down they'd done be ready and they'd be haulin their drawers down, and it was like they was pullin em down for Jesus."

The preacher's face was young, unformed: below the wispy red beard he looked ascetic, remote, as if the workings of the world did not quite go to suit him and he had already achieved a certain remove from it and shared no complicity with its faults.

"I guess they's sin most everwhere," he finally said.

"There most surely is," Hardin assured him and then fell silent, drinking again from the jar, canting it against the windy stars to gauge its contents. "Have a little drink."

"I reckon not. I dont hold with spirits." He sat staring at Hardin as if Hardin was not flesh and bone bound by the ways of law or natural order but some diabolic manifestation given brief corpeality and set across from him to test the depth of his salvation. "I got to get on," he

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said uneasily.

"Not just yet," Hardin said, a voice devoid of threat or request, a voice you might use to make a comment on the weather. Then they sat in a deepening silence, a sinister silence that wore on and on and when Hardin showed no inclination to break it the preacher said: "I aint but nineteen year old."

"Nineteen," Hardin said ruminatively. Though he was only two years past it himself he seemed to view nineteen from some lofty structure erected from years. The preacher seemed unformed, naked, clay the years would shape to their liking. "When I was nineteen I'd done everthing I could think of and was on the road day and night huntin for more," Hardin said. "I wish I could swap places with you awhile. I bet you aint never done nothin. I bet you aint never even eat no pussy."

No reply. A curious desperate silence, a heartfelt wordless admonishment for whatever desire for companionship had drawn him toward this light.

"Have you?"

The round face sweeping the circle of windy trees, the windy night might blow up other travelers, a cataclysmic shift of the earth's poles, a miracle bright and incandescant in October dark. "I never heard of no such," the preacher said in a low voice. His eyes were held hard and fast by the nickelplated pistol Hardin was holding on his knee, not

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pointing, just dandling it there, a child fondling a toy.

"Bein it's supposed to be a sin I figured you was at least on speakin terms with it. You aint never preached a sermon against it?"

"No." "Get you a little drink there."

"I dont drink."

"Then it's high time you started." He swapped hands with the pistol and handed the jar across the dying fire and the preacher held it a moment and then smelled it and looked back at Hardin's nocolor eyes and raised the jar and took a birdlike sip. He swallowed a time or two.

"Good aint it? Get you anothern."

The preacher drank again and set the jar aside and his lips began to move as if he were praying to himself.

When he got underway before first light he left the preacher's horse but the morning had a hint of winter to it so he took the frock coat and the heavy woolen shirt the preacher had been wearing. The preacher sat on a log and watched him turn pockets wrongside out until he found the little poke of nickels and dimes and the few crumpled bills. The horse's breath steamed in the cold air. First light showed a ghost of frost on the ground, spectral fall of ice silver in the morning light tending away to nothing northward along the Trace, and with the first warmth of

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the sun there was a sere brittle smell to the woods. He mounted, the saddle creaked, his eyes swept the burntout fire and the preacher's vacuous eyes but did not remark them, they were yesterday, used up, forgotten. He turned the spotted horse and was gone into the mist so abruptly the preacher might have thought him the protagonist of a nightmare save for the sound of hooves and finally that was gone too.

The nights were cold now and there was a steely threat of winter in the air. The air looked blue as smoke and the world smelled crisp and dry. Cold came in the nights and hovered on in the mornings and he rode now with an old blanket cut like a poncho. Along about midmorning the day would warm briefly then with the afternoon's slant light it would again grow chill. He felt it must be November.

He crossed through a place called Metal Ford and he saw no soul about: cut timber as if this had once been a lumber camp. Old tilting shanties gray and weathered so that looked like nothing man had had a hand in, just something that had happened. Machinery left for the oxydization of the weathers, old saws long unsharped, thickened with scaly orange accretions of rust. Silence here palpable, dense, he caught himself listening for voices, the ringing of axes, the slide of timber through the brush. He heard only the liquid call of a thrush and the

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cawing of crows, dislocated, far from any cornfield he had seen. He seemed the only soul in all the world. Old unglassed windows caved and blind. Buildings left to the dirtdaubers and rats and foxes. They smelled of burntout fires, the dead ashes of the past. He found nothing worth salvaging.

On past here he began to come upon the wreckage of houses, once he saw with interest an intact barn roof sitting in the middle of a fallow field, its tin a warm umber drawing off the light. A wide path through the timber where the horizon had been cleft by a blow of unimaginable magnitude, the trees wrenched branchless, twisted and splintered, shards of lumber and sections of houses perched in trees where folks had never built them.

A shanty on a hillside that had simply collapsed on itself, folded, its tarpaper roof still skewered by its rusted stovepipe.

The evidence of all this disorder awed him a little, he would have liked to see such a storm but he couldnt have said from where. Veering off the stormpath as if wary of its imminent return he came onto a steadily rising countryside, a gradual ascension through thinning timber and looking back the world he'd come through lay a dreamy tapestry of pastoral colors, shrouded in vague mist and fading out now that he no longer needed it.

Graves. A series of them enclosed in a rusted fence.

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Old graves from the look of them, sunken, the earth fallen cleanly downward in oblong obscission as though gravity was forcefully aberrant in this sacred spot or had had a deeper attraction for the earth. Yet the markers were newlooking. He read them from horseback. Elder Spiess, Elder William, Elder Kirk. Others. Here were the graves of women. A few of a more diminutive size. All had perished alike on April 24, l884. For a reason he couldnt fathom the place fascinated him. A reaper gone berserk or drunken, flailing tirelessly and indiscriminately with the scythe.

A worn road followed along the backbone of the ridge and he crossed narrow flinty fields of acidlooking land and halted near the summit. Below him a house set on a Vshaped plot of land at the mouth of a hollow, behind it the timber thickened and he could hear the far spill of water and from where he sat the horse he could see its white fall cascading down a bluff. A stream lay like a coiled ribbon of silver. A thread of smoke curled from the chimney. He sat and watched the house for a time. After awhile the back door opened and a woman came out and threw dishwater into the yard and turned and went back in. He heard the screendoor slap to.

He dismounted and took a coiled rope off the saddle and unrolled it and picketed the horse and fed it shelled corn from a flour sack. He took out some hard bread and pieces

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of fried meat scorched and blackened almost unrecognizable with smoke and came back through the windy sedge to the crest of the ridge and sat against the bole of a whiteoak and ate, chewing slowly, wiping his greasy fingers on the legs of his trousers. After he ate the last of the meat and bread he went back to the horse and got the fruitjar and drank and carried it back with him to the oak.

A man came out of the house and walked across the yard. He walked with a stick. He was bent over so that from where Hardin sat he could see the humped flesh where it pressed against the white shirt and he could see the back of the man's head. His hair looked black for one so wracked with whatever afflicted him. He walked on scanning the ground and he seemed to be searching for something he'd lost. Where the bracken thickened near the spring he went out of sight into it and it was a few minutes before he came out. Hardin rolled and lit a cigarette, sat smoking. He watched with an air of infinite patience, there was no look at all in his eyes, as if by some dark alchemy he controlled the events unfolding and whatever transpired here would be just what he wanted to see all along.

A darkhaired girl who appeared to be five or six years old came out and began to throw rocks at a few scragglylooking chickens. He could hear the chickens

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cackling and taking on and see them running about the yard while she peppered them with rocks. The screendoor flew open and the woman came onto the porch yelling something and the girl cut down on her with a rock. She ran across the porch and into the yard and grasped the girl up like a sack of grain and shook her. She carried her tucked under her arm back inside and Hardin could hear the girl's outraged yell and the door fell to again.

The man came out of the woods. He was carrying a jug along in his hand and heading for the porch. Well, Hardin thought to himself. Is it water or not? Why not a bucket, if it is? What have we got here, anyway? He knew it wasnt water. If he wanted water he would have sent the woman.

The day wore on. Four or five cars came in the course of the afternoon, no one lingering to visit. Few even getting out. The man or the woman would come out to the car then back to the house and return to the car. Money would change hands. The first time he saw light gling off a bottle, he said well, well, well, though he knew already it was a bootlegger.

Late in the afternoon the woman came out to the end of the house and hiked her dress and pulled down her drawers and squatted in the earth yard. In a minute she arose and pulled her underwear up, let the skirt fall.

Hardin sat watching her with his expressionless face. She went back in.

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Just about dusk she came down from the house toward the barn carrying a milk bucket in her hand. In the hall of the barn she hung the bucket on a nail and went into a crib and came out with a lardbucket of sweetfeed and carried it into the cow stall. She came back after the bucket and commenced milking, the milk singing off the rim of the pail.

Going back she passed a stall out of which a hand seized her and jerked her into the haysmelling dark. She stumbled wideeyed through the opening and a fist caught her alongside the head and she toppled sidewise and fell heavily against the unchinked pole wall and slid to the floor. The bucket of milk slammed against the opposite wall and poured foaming down it and puddled then seethed across the floor in a miniature tide of chaff and humus. She was on her hands and knees. Light fell in latticed segments through the slotted walls. "Goddamn," the woman said thickly. She turned her head from side to side slowly. She looked up. Up at this tall gaunt figure leaning stilted on unlikely legs, strange goat's eyes staring down at her and his hands already working at the buttons of his jeans. "You son of a bitch," the woman said. "You dont have to come on so rough. I dont know why you cant just ask like anybody else."

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WATCH THIS

HIT PLAY

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WATCH THIS

HIT PLAY

HIT PLAY

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LOVE, MILLIE by Michael and Donna Chapman

In the land where trees grow tall and children are small lived a tiny girl with a big name. Millicent Elizabeth Spencer.

The girl had trouble making friends at school. School made Millicent unhappy and she cried most every day. She kept her head bent so her dark curly hair hung over her face to hide the tears in her large dark eyes.

One day, Millicent was sent to a different school. Her new teacher, Miss Carolyn, smoothed the curls from Millicent’s tender face. Then she lovingly introduced her to the class.

On that day, Miss Carolyn’s love and warmth pierced through the veil of Millicent’s tears. With her brown eyes shining and no longer hidden behind her curls, Millicent looked up at her new teacher and classmates and said, “My name is Millicent, but you can call me Millie.”

Later when the children went out to play, Millie asked Miss Carolyn if she could hold her hand. Walking hand in hand with her teacher as the autumn leaves swirled about their feet the trees didn’t look so tall and the child didn’t feel so small.

“Look!” cried Millie as she stooped to the ground. “A red heart just for you!”

Miss Carolyn hugged Millie and tucked the precious gift in her dress pocket. “Thank you, Millie. Your joy makes my heart as light and bright as this heart shaped leaf.”

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In the course of time, as small children do, Millie grew up and moved away from the tiny town and the school where Miss Carolyn taught. She grew strong and no longer felt small or that the trees were so tall, but she never forgot Miss Carolyn.

Many years later, Millie returned and went to find Miss Carolyn at her old school. The principal was sad to tell Millie that Miss Carolyn was sick and unable to care for herself. Her family had moved her to a nursing facility.

Millie went quickly to visit her teacher.

As Millie came into view, holding a card and wearing a big smile, Miss Carolyn recognized Millie’s long dark curls and shining brown eyes.

Through her veil of tears, Miss Carolyn cried, “Millie, you came to see me!”

Millie bent over her white-haired teacher and slipped the gift in her soft paper-thin skinned hands.

To Miss Carolyn’s delight, a small red heart shaped leaf dropped out from inside the card simply signed To Miss Carolyn, Love Millie.

A more beautiful sight had never been seen by the nursing staff as the young woman with the dark curly hair tenderly brushed the older woman’s snow-white hair from her face.

Millie whispered, “Miss Carolyn, I have moved back to stay, and will visit you every day. I’ve become a teacher just like you. I will always love you.”

Miss Carolyn looked at Millie with tear-stained cheeks and whispered, “I love you too, Millie.”

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LOVE, MILLIE

A note from the author: Michael and I want to dedicate Love, Millie to the memory of Pat Conroy. His first love was teaching, and this the 50th anniversary of The Water is Wide.

Michael and Donna Chapman are husband-and-wife writing team who live in Port Royal, South Carolina.

Michael is a native-born son of Lowcountry. Born and raised in Beaufort, Michael is the youngest of four brothers, and is a veteran first responder. He retired December, 2019.

Donna was born at Camp Pendleton, California. She moved with her military family to Parris Island, South Carolina, at the age of 12. She chose a career in early childhood education from which she retired in June, 2019 after 30 years of teaching.

They are the parents of two grown sons and have three beautiful granddaughters.

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ANNIE’S ANTICS WITH ANNIE MCDONNELL

ANNIE INTRODUCES JAMIE GEHRING Madman in the Woods: Life Next Door to the Unabomber by Jamie Gehring This is the first month that Annie’s Antics appears in WELL READ, and because it’s the last month of 2022 I wanted to share my favorite book of the year. Jamie Gehring has been chosen for several reasons. I absolutely adored her book. I was enamored with her story and how she told it. I loved the cover of the book. It was a very exciting read. Jamie is also funny and full of life and by the time I closed the book I felt like I’d become a friend of hers. It’s a very intimate story and I have a feeling we will enjoy more of her writing in the years to come.

I’ve chosen her debut book Madman in the Woods: Life Next Door to the Unabomber as my favorite book this year! I highly recommend it.

My review is below, followed by eleven questions. I’m using the Proust Interview model to learn more about authors beyond my typical interview questions. The authors chosen each month are authors that I believe were born to shine and what we learn is always cool and interesting.

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Join me as we learn more about Jamie Gehring, an Author Born to Shine!

Jamie Gehring is a Montana native who grew up sharing a backyard with Ted Kaczynski, the man widely known as the Unabomber. She was featured in Netflix’s Unabomber — In His Own Words where she discussed her family’s role in Ted’s capture. Jamie not only lived this true crime experience, she wrote an award-winning book about it.

Madman in the Woods: Life Next Door to the Unabomber was a 2022 Zibby Awards nominee and has been awarded the Pencraft Book Award for Literary Excellence in the category of memoir and the first place winner of the Firebird Book Awards in the categories of memoir and nonfiction, first time published.

Annie’s FIVE STAR Review: See the world of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber through the eyes of his young neighbor, Jamie Gehring, while he lived in Lincoln, Montana. Jamie knew him since she was a toddler until his arrest when she was sixteen.

The story that she shares with us is personal in both a heartfelt and terrifying way. Your heart will warm and then chill one paragraph later. It is such a moving read.

I read Jamie Gehring’s book and then I listened to it on audible because I really enjoyed “Madman in the Woods”.

Once I heard she was the audible narrator, I couldn’t wait to hear this Ted Kaczynski story in Jamie’s voice.

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Left: Copy of one of the newspaper articles that ran after Ted Kaczynski's arrest, calling attention to the "soft-spot" he had for children, specifically Jamie.

Right: Jamie Gehring in the early 80s in her dad's Oldsmobile Cutlass, the same vehicle that Ted would sit in the back of.

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on the Netflix Unabomber Documentary, so I knew she was special and had an on air talent.

There were times when I could hear her voice cracking because I could tell she wanted to cry. There were other times where I felt her angst so clearly I wanted to jump through my iPad and hug her. I felt her heart. She puts it all out on the paper.

“Madman in the Woods” is loving, touching, creepy, and lyrically written. You can sense Jamie Gehring’s wish for a proper understanding to the Unabomber’s crimes and activities.

She researched diligently back as far as his infancy and childhood because she wanted there to be an explanation for what he was doing besides simply being Evil. I felt her heart’s cry seeking that answer, just so much as I am sure Ted’s family wished, too.

Wait until you see what a gifted writer she is. Jamie has a certain tempo to her story. I loved how she makes you slow down at certain parts and really listen to what she is saying. I was enamored. She was reminding us how important these parts were to Ted’s story, and to her story!!

I would tear up.

This true crime story is written like no other I have read.

There is a sense of heart in the undertow of this devastation. The warmth that the author shares breaks your heart. We have to remember that this is not just Ted’s story; it’s Jamie story of the entire Gehring’s family. It is a

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story about the victims.

I am honored and touched that she shared her story with us. And I’m sure you will feel the same way.

There are so many books on the Unabomber, but this is by far my favorite. I think it’s because of the seriously intimate writing. It’s almost like it can’t quite possibly be real, but it is. That is the significance of the story. Not many of us are neighbors of a killer. She makes this awareness clear.

Also, I’d like to add that this wasn’t a story about the Unabomber written in a clinical fashion like so many others. Jamie writes with a personal narrative of her memories and interactions with Ted. I felt every emotion as she walked the path of life with him around the same woods where they lived.

She also discusses all of her sources, which will easily lead you to more if you choose to fall down the rabbit hole like I was when I found her book.

I am left deeply satisfied now, maybe my quest is over.

Thank you Jamie for opening your world so that we may have a better understanding of America’s most awful terrorist, serial killer, well - the Madman in the Woods!

5 Stars!

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Left: The family, three strong. Tammie (Mom), Butch (Dad), and Baby Jamie.

Above: A photo of the infamous cabin taken by Butch Gehring after the Unabomber's arrest.

Left: Young Jamie bringing in the firewood. The small panes of glass behind her are the same ones she looked through to see her hermit neighbor, "Teddy."

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1. What is your greatest fear?

On a recent trip to Mexico I discovered that scorpions are pretty close to the number one spot for “greatest fear.” But I think my greatest fear is a tie between being burned alive and being roommates with Shelly Knotek (as can be read about in, “If You Tell” by Gregg Olsen.

2. What is your greatest extravagance?

We just installed a sauna in our home. When I am sitting within the Nordic White Spruce walls, I can’t believe this is my life. I feel so grateful for this extravagance! It’s quickly become my favorite date night, followed by a cup of Sleepytime tea and an episode of White Lotus. “This is 40ish!” I still love a rock show and a few shots of whiskey on occasion and I hope I always do. But I am completely at peace with staying in for a sauna session on a Friday night.

3. What is your current state of mind?

I am in my 40s and unapologetically my authentic self. I am so at ease with myself and what I have accomplished (professionally and personally). My current state of mind is definitely a mix of peaceful and proud, sprinkled in with occasional overwhelming grief and a bit of impostor syndrome.

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4. What is the quality you most like in a man?

This may be a pretty unpopular answer, but I am a hopeless romantic that still finds chivalry endearing. I love when a man holds a door for me. My love for my husband was forever cemented after he swam across a frigid mountain lake with me on his back. I am an independent and capable woman, but there’s something irresistible about a man that wants to take care of you when you need it.

5. Which words or phrases do you most overuse?

Incredible! I overuse this word, especially when I am excited about something. The first radio interview of myself I listened to, I physically cringed each time I heard the word repeated. I am better about it now, but old habits die hard.

6. Where would you most like to live?

I would love to have a condo in Vail, Colorado, a home on the beach in Cayucos, California, a log cabin in Lincoln, Montana, and a small flat in Barcelona, Spain. So far I am zero for four.

7. What is your favorite occupation?

It sounds cliche but being “Mom” still ranks at the top for me. I have been all kinds of “Mom” during my life: 152

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Breadwinning Mom, Single Mom, Homemaker Mom, and Writer Mom. Every single role has had immense challenges, but they have all been the most rewarding and fulfilling occupations. Don’t get me wrong, I still complain about the “invisible labor” of mothers and the intense emotional and physical demands of the position, but it still remains my favorite.

8. What do you most value in your friends?

I have incredible friends. We can go months without talking and then pick up exactly where we left off, which is exactly how friendships during this season of life need to be. I also love that I can confide anything in them without judgment. Love my tribe!

9. Who are your favorite writers?

Toni Morrison is one of my very favorites! When I read, “The Bluest Eye” in college I was so inspired by her prose and genuine gift for storytelling. Most recently I really enjoyed “Inside Passage” by Keema Waterfield and an alltime favorite of mine is “Educated” by Tara Westover.

10. How would you like to die?

I hope that I die of old age. Old enough to be a grandmother, but still independent. Ideally in my sleep, in the cabin of my dreams in Montana. Pines swaying DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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outside, a fire in the woodstove, and the sound of the wilds outside my window. Selfishly I want to fall asleep next to my husband.

11. What is your motto?

“If it were easy everyone would do it” definitely became my favorite motto while writing my book. Writing a book and getting it published was one of the most difficult things I have ever done. I received plenty of rejections on my manuscript in the first couple years of writing and learning about the book industry. Reminding myself of the level of difficulty inherent in writing a book, especially about such an emotional subject as one’s life, was important to keep top of mind for me.

Buy Your Copy of Madman in the Woods: Life Next Door to the Unabomber HERE. Publication in April of 2022 connect @jamiegehring.com or instagram.com/ jamiegehringauthor

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Annie McDonnell The Write Review Author of Annie’s Song: Dandelions, Dreams & Dogs, Book Reviewer, Author Interviewer, Teacher, Speaker, Writer, Author Consultant, Co-Admin. At World of the Write Review Book Club, Blogger, Author online event planner.

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DO YOU KNOW JOE?

You May Know Joe Palmer, But Did You Know…?

Mandy Haynes I met this character at Story and Song Bookstore Bistro about five years ago. We were both there for a book event for the incredibly talented author Bren McClain. Before I knew it we were sitting at Amelia Island Coffee swapping stories. We both were on the tail end of edits of our manuscripts and neither one of us had any idea what we were going to do next - we just wanted to write.

I got to know Joe over several cups of coffee - we’d meet to celebrate publications, events, and other writerly things to celebrate - shoot we met a few months ago to celebrate surviving the pandemic. But Joe’s received some exciting news that can’t wait for coffee. I wanted to share it here, but before I do, I have one question - do you know Joe? You may know Joe Palmer as the award winning author of A Mariner’s Tale, but did you know he was a Navy medic?

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brilliant, Hawkeye Pierce type surgeon named Roger Moebus. He gave me pretty much the equivalent of a twoyear surgical residency. I left the service and got hired right off to be an operating room tech at St Vincent's Medical Center in Jacksonville. But when I told them about the training I got from Dr. Moebus, they promoted me to surgeon's assistant, which was basically like a physician's assistant except I worked in the operating room. That's where I met Pam. She was an x-ray tech and assigned to the operating room to do in-surgery orthopedic films. I commented to the intern how cute I thought Pam was and he dared me to ask her out. I did right then and there. We had our first date that weekend and have been together ever since. We got married three months after we met on April 15, 1978, forty-four years ago,” says Joe. Joe decided not to stay in the medical field and got his BA in English, minoring in literature at UNF in 1983. He became a newspaper reporter instead of a doctor and worked for three newspapers, the Florida Times Union being the last one.

“I was the sole reporter for its Fernandina Beach Bureau. Over the years, I'd done quite a bit of investigative reporting,” Joe recalls. “My background in investigative reporting paid off in 1987, I think it was, when the State Public Defender's Office branch offered me a job as an investigator, explaining that it wouldn't be much different from doing investigative reporting. I did it for two years and finally decided to go out on my own as a private investigator. I was a couple or three years into that

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part of my career when the Nassau County Sheriff and his Chief Deputy got indicted for drug trafficking. The sheriff's defense lawyers hired me to handle the defense investigation. While I was doing that, I drew the attention of the Federal Public Defender's Office and they recruited me as an investigator. I did that from 1995 until I retired in 2012 as the Middle District of Florida’s first Chief Investigator. Pam and I returned to Fernandina Beach in 2005 when I transferred to the FPD's Jacksonville office.”

But Joe’s first love was feature writing because it's more like story-telling. If you live in Fernandina Beach, you may remember his Cup of Joe column for the NewsLeader. It was during that time Joe sharpened his writing chops, developed a large following, and started thinking about writing a novel.

“Pam and I had bought an old 1969 classic sailboat and I began restoring it as my retirement project. I was working on it one hot summer afternoon, sort of daydreaming and listening to a song by my favorite recording artist, Mark Knopfler called, "In The Sky", about a sailor who built his own boat and sailed all over the world until he was old and deaf. There's a beautiful verse in it that goes, "And the vagabond wind whispers over the bay, and the songs and the laughter are carried away." It gave me goosebumps as I envisioned this old sailor, "The hard-bitten stranger, deaf as a post, stands at the fire, where the poet's dreams roast. He can't know the story, he can't feel the pain, and all of the glory falls around him like rain, in the sky." I thought to myself,

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damn, this song could be turned into a novel. I came home that night and began writing A Mariner's Tale.”

Jack Merkel, the protagonist in Joe’s novel, is a hardbitten sailor in the story, as well as the father Joe always wanted but didn't have. He drew upon his love of sailing, rebuilding an old sailboat, his work as a medic and surgeon's assistant, and his days in the courtroom doing criminal defense. Joe also worked part time at a local marina where he kept his boat, and quickly caught on to marina life and the salty characters in them, which helped him form Jack Merkel's Marina and Boatyard and the guys who worked for him. Joe started writing his novel in August 2015 and finished on March 4, 2017, the first anniversary of Pat Conroy’s death. Says Joe, “ A bit of serendipity there I reckon.”

But, I saved the best for last.

Did you know A Mariner’s Tale was optioned for film in 2022? Monica Tidwell with Tristan Productions, Inc. based in New York City fell in love with Joe’s debut novel and wants to see it on the big screen! Exciting news for all of us who know Joe, and for all of the readers who haven’t met him yet.

Next cup of coffee is on me buddy!

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Find out more about Joe, his novel, and his big spoiled pup Harley here and follow him on social media.

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Having Fun with Hank Phillipi Ryan and Hannah Mary McKinnon

by Linda Rosen

What are you doing on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 12:30 p.m.? Whatever it is, stop for a half hour and join First Chapter Fun with Hank and Hannah. You’ll add so many books to your TBR pile, you’ll need to buy new bookshelves!

Shortly after Covid 19 hit, best-selling author Hannah Mary McKinnon came up with a way of supporting other authors during lockdown. I’ll let her tell you all about it and how Hank Phillipi Ryan, a multiple award-winning

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author, joined her and where these two incredible women took this nugget of an idea.

Linda: Hannah, since you’re the one who had the idea for First Chapter Fun (FCF), let’s start this Q & A with you.

Please tell us where you were when the notion of FCF came to you. In the shower? Driving? And, why you wanted to create this fantastic Facebook group.

Hannah: It was thanks to a great and very enthusiastic group of author friends. Back in March 2020, when Covid first hit Canada, about 14 of us were discussing, via Messenger, how we could help promote one another and give our books a boost. One evening I half-jokingly offered to read the first chapter of their novels on Facebook and Instagram and started the very next day.

Shortly afterward I had over 40 daily readings lined up and the rest, as they say, is history. I read or 53 days in a row (didn’t think the “must do hair and make-up” thing through very well), introducing viewers to a new novel and author each day.

We now have readings scheduled until fall of 2023. All the previously aired episodes are saved and can be viewed at leisure. It’s a wonderful community where we share the love of books, and introduce new and/or new-to-you authors every week. Our goal is to support authors and publishers as much as we possibly can, and to keep your “to be read” pile completely out-of-control. So far, or so we’ve been told, we’re succeeding.

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Linda: Hank, how long after FCF was active on Facebook did you join Hannah and how did that come about?

Hank: Well, I started as a huge fan. I was completely hooked on FCF, and adored listening to Hannah read. And getting to know all the other listeners, even before we named them the Funsters. The amazing Samantha Bailey introduced me to Hannah, and Hannah offered to read my new book, THE MURDER LIST. I was thrilled. And it was an amazing experience.

I knew Hannah had a new book coming out, SISTER DEAR, and if I remember correctly, I offered to read for her. She agreed, and it was such an honor. She told me that she was stopping the show after May, and I was crushed!

So I will admit, I got her in a headlock and backed her into a corner and convinced her that she should continue it.

And that we might...share the adventure. I mean--it was too fabulous a creation to have it vanish.

Hannah: my neck is still sore. Hahaha! Joking. I’m so pleased Hank convinced me to continue.

First Chapter Fun wouldn’t be what it is without her!

Linda: How do you choose the books you read? Is it on a first come first serve basis and has that changed since you started, now that you have so many more submissions?

Hannah: At the very beginning it was me contacting my author friends, telling them about the project and asking if they’d like me to read for them. Now it’s a combination contacting people we know, being contacted by authors for DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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whom we’ve read before, receiving direct requests from authors, publishers, publicists - there’s a real mix. As we’re fully booked until the fall of 2023, we’re currently not scheduling any more reads but may reopen to submissions later in the year.

Hank: And we keep a thoughtful and diverse mix of genres and authors, too, debut and veterans, so our reads are always a surprise for our Funsters. Our goal is to serve all kinds of readers and authors, and to keep everyone’s tobe-read piles growing and growing. First Chapter Fun is all about discoverability whether it’s finding a new book by a favorite author – or finding a brand new author!

Linda: How many members did FCF have when it first began and how many do you have now? And how many episodes of FCF have you had to date? Did you even dream it would go on for this long? Both of you please chime in here.

Hank: If I told you how many members, it would be wrong, because the numbers go up and up and up. Hannah and I adore to get to be the ones who admit the newcomers, and we welcome them with open arms. Er, books. We are past 4000 now, and wow. And as we answer this, we are at 305 episodes. Hilarious. And that it would go this long? Well, one read at a time. But yes, we are fully booked! And we are tempted to add more days, but do NOT let us. We have to write!

Hannah: I think at the very beginning, the first episode on

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March 17, 2020, when I read Woman on the Edge by Sam Bailey, there were perhaps ten people and it grew from there day after day.

As Hank mentioned, I’d planned on stopping after about six weeks, and here we are, almost three years later – with lots more to come :-) Linda: You each read the first chapter of a novel submitted by an author. I know from listening to FCF and having my own first chapter read, which I want to say was an incredible experience hearing Hannah’s fabulous British accent read my words, how do you each plan for your reading? How long do you rehearse?

Hannah: I print out the chapter and read it through a few times, marking any words I don’t know the pronunciation of, trying out character voices to distinguish them from one another, making notes and highlights for tone and emphasis. As for the accents, I can do a couple of different UK regional ones, and a decent Irish one, but I’ll never, ever, be able to read with a North American accent. I always end up sounding like Sandy Cheeks from Spongebob.

Hank: (I am practicing doing an English accent. But it will never work.) And I agree, I print out the chapter, and read it out loud a few times, marking inflection and attitude. It’s a big responsibility, and a challenge, and we want to make our authors happy, so we work to be as professional as we can be. I always imagine the author

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listening--and that’s my inspiration. And terror.

Linda: Bloopers and tech issues often happen when going live on Facebook and Instagram.

Both of you handle them with such ease and make it all fun. Tell us about the worst one you’ve experienced, the one that really had your heart pounding.

Hannah: As we broadcast on Instagram and Facebook simultaneously but from two different devices, the biggest challenge is when one platform isn’t working. That can be frustrating as we’re live on, e.g.

Facebook, and fiddling around trying to get a connection on Instagram. The audience is very forgiving though, and we’re incredibly grateful for that!

We had a funny episode when my printer went off in the middle of the reading, just after I’d told a bit of a spooky story. Turned out it was one of my sons who’d printed stuff and forgotten I was online. Never a dull moment, as we like to say!

Hank: Ha! Never a dull moment. The phone rings, or Alexa goes off, especially when there’s an author named Alex or Alexa, or Alexis. (I finally unplugged it.). Once, early on, when I was still terribly nervous, I thought I had lost a page of a manuscript, and, on the air, I was SO baffled. I was baffled, it turned out, because though I had practiced reading on the computer (never again), the printer printed it wrong. And even after 43 years as a reporter, reading scripts live on TV, sometimes with no 168

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preparation at all, I was a deer in the headlights. It turned out fine, but it was a learning experience.

Linda: In addition to being best-selling authors writing novels that keep us on the edge of our seats, turning pages, you are both graphic artists. Your videos, trailers and graphics for each book are fantastic. Please, tell us which one of you is the true artist and how you make those intriguing videos. Do you have a favorite? Did you even know you had this talent?

Hank: Oh, thank you! I love making them, and I am still surprised at how much fun it is. It takes some thought, frankly, and some inkling of what a good promo is. I imagine: If I were the author, how would I want this to be?

It’s fun, and incredibly rewarding, making little movies like that. Where do the ideas come from? Not a clue. And I’m so delighted when the authors are happy with them.

Hannah: I do the static graphics, website design, and swag designs, but Hank is the true master of those teaser videos. She surprises me twice a week, every week!

Linda: FCF has been going on for close to three years and has made many changes. Please tell us how it’s grown and where do you plan on going with it.

Hannah: Initially I broadcasted to my Facebook Author Page and my Instagram account, but since Hank and I joined forces we created the dedicated Facebook group that has over 4,000 members, and our Instagram account

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that has nearly 2,000. We also post fun facts about the books and our authors. We like to get the community involved so we have “What-cha-readin’?” and “Can We Talk” posts to generate involvement and discussion. Those are a lot of fun.

Hank: And we now have First Chapter Fun swag!

Fabulous T-shirts and mugs and hoodies and aprons, in all colors, all with the logo Hannah designed. Some of the Tshirts have special FCF sayings, like “Not Right Now” and “Stay Safe, Stay Kind.” But you’ll have to come to our readings to find out what that means. And I make a book promo video for each guest, so I get to develop a new skill!

Hannah: Who knew being an author meant doing all these things, too? And it’s so. Much. Fun. And don’t forget the pajamas that say “Not Right Now” which still makes me laugh.

Linda: Yes, FCF has grown and you’re doing so much more than you originally thought you would. I imagine the experience has changed you both in some fashion. Please give us a peek into that.

Hank: Ha. I am now the world’s greatest expert on what makes a good first chapter. And what doesn’t. It has most assuredly affected my writing--I now imagine Hannah or me reading my words out loud, in front of all the Funsters, and wow, my inner editor goes to work. We could teach a class for writers about it, I’m sure. Pacing, setting,

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character, action, stakes. It all has to be there, and in the fantastic ones, it is.

Hannah: What Hank said! Also, I’m quite tech savvy but it was still a steep learning curve at the beginning, but I’ve been able to help other authors with that, too. That’s what the writing community is all about, after all. I’m so pleased we can give back via First Chapter Fun, and provide a twice-weekly bubble of happiness for people to escape into. With everything that’s been going on since the pandemic started, I’ve really needed it, too.

Linda: Has there been anything that came along, new relationships or new endeavors, while doing FCF that you never expected?

Hannah: Building the community and watching it grow organically has been such a wonderful thing. It feels like I’m sitting down with friends and I absolutely love that.

Also, most may not know that Hank and I had only met once, very briefly at a conference before we teamed up for First Chapter Fun. Now we talk/text almost daily (and multiple times daily) and have become great friends. That relationship is a gift I treasure and may not have happened without First Chapter Fun. Hank: SO agree. MULTIPLE times. I laugh every day at how close Hannah and I have become, and, random thought from the other day, I realized I have no idea which of us is taller. But even though we were trapped in the pandemic, every day I think about how much bigger my

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world has become. It is a true joy.

Hannah: I think we’re the same height - 5 feet 8 inches (or 173 cm if we go metric)!

Hank: Ha! And every time Hannah gives the weather report from Toronto, I have to convert to Fahrenheit. And she gets to put my Boston temps into Celsius. So it’s also an education experience! Happily, we are in the same time zone.

But one serious thing? Hannah and I are now the world’s experts on what makes an effective first chapter. It’s quite life-changing.

Linda: Please tell us how we can join First Chapter Fun and how we can access previous editions to hear the first chapters you and Hank have already read.

Hannah: You’ll find us on Facebook www.facebook.com/ groups/firstchapterfun and on Instagram www.instagram.com/firstchapterfun and our website www.firstchapterfun.com All of the previously aired episodes are saved and available on both platforms (Media / Videos on Facebook, and Reels on Instagram).

Hank: And want an apron or a hoodie or a mug? You can do your FCF shopping here! (We dare you to try to resist.

Everything is adorable!) https://shop.spreadshirt.com/ firstchapterfun

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Linda: FCF is a true silver lining that came from this awful Covid pandemic. Thank you both for bringing new books and new authors to so many readers, adding to our TBR piles and giving the FCF community 30 minutes of pure pleasure every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon.

Linda Rosen’s books are set in the “not-too-distant past” and examine how women reinvent themselves despite obstacles thrown their way. A central theme is that blood is not all that makes a family– and they always feature a piece of jewelry! Her debut novel, The Disharmony of Silence, released in March 2020 and her sophomore novel, Sisters of the Vine, one year later, from Black Rose Writing. Linda was a contributor to Women in the Literary Landscape: A WNBA Centennial Publication for the Women's National Book Association and has had stories published in online magazines and print anthologies. She is a member of the Women's Fiction Writers Association and the Women’s National Book Association where she is Selections Coordinator of the Great Group Reads committee which curates a list, published annually, of novels and memoirs perfect for book clubs.

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Hannah Mary McKinnon was born in the UK, grew up in Switzerland and moved to Canada in 2010. After a successful career in recruitment, she quit the corporate world in favor of writing. While her debut, TIME AFTER TIME, was a rom com, she transitioned to the dark side thereafter. Her suspense novels include bestsellers THE NEIGHBORS, HER SECRET SON, SISTER DEAR, YOU WILL REMEMBER ME, and NEVER COMING HOME. Hannah Mary will return to her romantic roots in 2023, releasing not only a thriller called THE REVENGE LIST but also THE CHRISTMAS WAGER, a holiday romantic comedy, which will publish under the pseudonym Holly Cassidy. Hannah Mary lives in Oakville, Ontario, with her husband and three sons.

Connect on Facebook and Instagram @HannahMaryMckinnon, and on Twitter @HannahMMcKinnon.

For more, visit www.hannahmarymckinnon.com

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Hank Phillippi Ryan is the USA Today bestselling author of 14 thrillers, winning the most prestigious awards in the genre: five Agathas, five Anthonys, and the coveted Mary Higgins Clark Award. She is also on-air investigative reporter for Boston’s WHDH-TV, with 37 EMMYs and dozens more journalism honors. She’s the only author to have won the Agatha in four different categories: Best First, Best Novel, Best Short Story and Best Non-Fiction.

Her 2019 standalone, THE MURDER LIST, won the Anthony Award for Best Novel. Her 2020 book, THE FIRST TO LIE, was a Mary Higgins Clark Award nominee, and her current thriller, HER PERFECT LIFE, received starred reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. Her upcoming novel of suspense is THE HOUSE GUEST. Connect on Instagram and Twitter @HankPRyan and on Facebook @HankPhillippiRyanAuthor.

For more, visit http:// www.HankPhillippiRyan.com

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MARK YOUR C

The spot to find upco Writing Retreats, and 176

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CALENDARS!

oming Author Events, Workshops Near You DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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A Novel Idea: A Five-Part Novel Writing Series with Cooper Levey-Baker and Brian Petkash From planning to publishing, this series will take you through all the essentials you need to help turn your book idea into a reality.

Local authors Brian Petkash and Cooper Levey-Baker will explore the fundamentals of storytelling from crafting your setting, characters, and plot, to revising your work and submitting your manuscript for publication.

This series is open to all ages, levels, and genres of writers, as well as those interested in learning more about the craft of novel writing.

Drop-in to one, or all parts of this dynamic series.

You lucky Sarasotians!! These events are free - join Cooper Levey-Baker, Brian Petkash, and guests by clicking the links below to register online.

3-4 p.m. Monday, November 14, 2022 3-4 p.m. Monday, December 12, 2022 - writing characters 3-4 p.m. Monday, January 9, 2023 - writing plot 3-4 p.m. Monday, February 6, 2023 - revising 3-4 p.m. Monday, March 6, 2023 - submitting your work Selby Public Library - Jack J. Geldbart Auditorium 1331 First Street Sarasota, FL 34236

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MARK YOUR CALENDARS

Brian grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, a focal point of much of his writing (and much of his sports heartache). A former high school literature and creative writing teacher, he lives in Tampa with his partner Celeste and works as a marketing professional in both the game and comic book industries.

Brian holds an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Tampa. His work has appeared in El Portal, Bridge Eight Literary Magazine, Southword, and Midwestern Gothic.

Mistakes by the Lake, his collection of stories published by Madville Publishing, is out now.

Cooper Levey-Baker is a writer and journalist. His fiction has appeared in the Sierra Nevada Review and Burrow Press's Fantastic Floridas series, and his journalism has won multiple awards from the Florida Magazine Association and the Florida Society for Professional Journalism. Dead Fish Wind is his first novel.

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TOO GOOD NOT TO SHARE

I love finding treasures on authors’ websites as I create the ad pages. This month I found a magic recipe box…

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TOO GOOD NOT TO SHARE

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To find the original blog click here.

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I am novelist Claudia H. Long, and here you can read all about me, my historical fiction novels, and follow the latest book news and events. I’m a weaver of words, catcher of dreams, and chronicler of the spaces between the lines in the history books: women’s stories, women’s dreams, her-story. In my alternate life I’m a new grandmother of two spectacular grandsons, mother of two marvelous kids, chocolate-loving lawyer-mediator, wife and cook.

My books live in rich historical settings that show the lives, loves, and lusts of women immersed in a society that they want to be a part of, but as themselves. Jewish women living as Catholics in colonial Mexico.

Professional female writers struggling to effect change in early 20th Century California. Crypto-judaic feminist historical fiction sounds like a mouthful, but at their heart my books are sweeping romantic tales.

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CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Reading period for publication in January, February, and March issues of WELL READ ends December 18th.

The next reading period will be announced soon.

Click here for more information

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NETWORKING

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Pat Conroy Literary Center 601 Bladen Street Beaufort, SC 29902 Thursday through Sunday noon-4:00 p.m.

Other times available by appointment

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NETWORKING

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NETWORKING

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WHAT’S YOUR STORY?

If you have a story you’d like to share in the WELL READ Magazine, I’d love to hear it.

Readers that includes you!

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WHAT’S YOUR STORY?

We love our readers and you will always have a place in the magazine to share your news.

I’m looking for pets to feature on our If Our Pets Could Talk page, authors’ art, photos of your local bookstores, and libraries.

Send orders for pages, stories, as well as any questions about the magazine, to wellreadmagazine@gmail.com

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OFF THE PAGE

A monthly column that takes us off the page and into the life of

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River Jordan is The Power of Story….

Signs On a book tour for Praying for Strangers: An Adventure of the Human Spirit I encountered a few unexpected turns in the road. I had flown into Portland and had a lovely event at Powell's Books and then traveled by rental car the next day to the beautiful city of Bend. What I hadn't expected to see en route was Mt. Hood looming ahead of me covered in snow. What I had not expected was the flashing red signs from the Department of Transportation that said, "Warning! Winter Driving Conditions Ahead!" followed by a really, sweet suggestion that now would be a good time to pull over and put on snow chains.

I didn't have snow chains in the rental car. Besides the fact that I'm a flatlander from the Gulf Coast of Florida who can drive blindfolded through a gator swamp at midnight (which might explain why I just loved the novel Swamplandia - follow the NY Times review link here. ) but driving in snow - forgetaboutit! But here I was with a reading and signing at my own book event at a bookstore on the schedule. I had to get to Bend and going over Mt. DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

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Hood seemed to be the only way to get there. As the snowplow cleared the road of last nights ‘dumping' as the ski lift girl called it, I ordered a double espresso to steady my nerves. "Flip-flops" I told her. "I left my boots and packed flip-flops."

A much caffeinated and rock-n-rolled writer via Sirius satellite later, I rose to a crest in the Oregon outback where a road sign declared Warning! Abrupt Edge Ahead! I wanted to pull over and snap a shot of that sign but everything really was an abrupt edge and there wasn't room. What there was room for in those following hours was time and space for me to ponder and consider the moments in life where the unexpected assails us. It happens to most of us at some time. A real life attack that is usually right out of the blue. It can be as mundane as a health check-up where concerns arise, or as public and heart-wrenching as Sandra Bullock's love-life in past years. These surprises don't seem to come with warnings.

There isn't an alarm tone on our calendars that says, "Slow down and stand strong as just ahead there is . . . " - and from there we can fill in the blank to read: challenging medical report, betrayal by a loved one, job loss or the unexpected death of a friend. I've experienced every single one of those and each of them caught me by surprise.

People tell me that sometimes even a surprise success can trip us up; find us on edges we never imagined possible.

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(That one I'll have to take their word for.)

Once upon a time and many moons ago my youngest son was skiing on Taos Mountain. Unknown to his mother he had taken a ride up to one of the larger slopes. He was only in Kindergarten and although an agile athlete and promising skier he had no business being as far up on as he was. He discovered a very literal abrupt edge and skied right over the side of the mountain. Thankfully, he also managed to grab a tree limb on his way over the mountain and he hung on. For a long time. For what most likely seemed to those little hands like an eternity but eventually a couple of expert skiers caught sight of his jacket in the tree limb and managed to rescue him and get him down the mountain.

Driving through those open skies and looking off into the high desert of Oregon I thought about what our options are when we hit those unexpected places in life. Man for eons has desired a crystal ball of sorts, for something, someone to light the way into the future. To please at least warn us of what is to come so that we can manage at best to avoid or steel ourselves to heartbreak and pain. But life is as bittersweet as it gets. It's always going to have corners for us to turn and places where holding on to the thing we find closest at hand is what we've got to do. Be it our faith, the hand of a friend, or the words that we write to keep us sane. We continue.

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I love the scene with Harrison Ford's character Rick Deckard in Blade Runner when he falls over the edge of the rooftop and finds himself hanging on for dear life by only a few fingers. That's exactly where I've felt I've been in life. Like my son hanging on in that tree, like Rick Deckard hanging on by a thread, and nothing ever seemed to be leading up to those moments. They were just upon me with a startling quickness.

What I have realized in the course of the past few years as I've offered silent prayers for strangers who crossed my path was that we all have moments, days, years that we need to be rescued. And we all have those moments where we have this incredible opportunity in the midst of our ordinary daily routine to effectively be someone's hero. It's the everyday person who speaks a soft word of encouragement just in time that lifts us to a place where we may - well, survive. Because some days, just continuing to breathe, to get out of the bed, to put one foot in front of the other is a major victory.

I've had those moments, the ones where everyday heroes delivered me. One was where a nurse silently brushed my hair away from my face while I lay exhausted, alone, miles from home, and shivering after giving birth.

That spirit of kindness and compassion was never forgotten. That same compassion comes to mind when I remember a friend's mother opening her door to me at

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WELL READ MAGAZINE

OFF THE PAGE WITH RIVER JORDAN

midnight where she found me in tears and wordlessly held open her arms. Those moments of tender connection helped me step away from the ledge, so to speak. And while life didn't exactly get easier, it became possible to navigate the circumstances that had knocked the wind out of me. There are High Holy Weeks, and day's such as Christmas and the National Day of Prayer that tend to turn our thoughts a little more outward towards our fellow man and the state of the world. All wonderful when Peace abounds I say. But much more comforting, lasting, and real, when the rubber meets the road of our human condition and we meet each other in the process.

Abrupt Edges? They happen but thankfully so does survival from our darkest days. And while we may honestly never look back and laugh at what we experienced, we can look into the future certain that life continues in spite of us and because of us. Together, we shall move forward if not fearlessly then at least with a little less trepidation and a whole lot more humanity.

River Jordan is an author, speaker, and teacher. As a southerner with a global perspective she is a passionate advocate for the power of story. River's writing career began as a playwright and she spent over ten years writing and directing. She is the bestselling author of four novels, three spiritual memoirs, and one short story collection. As a critically-acclaimed author her work has been most frequently cast in the company of such writers as Flannery O'Conner, William Faulkner, and Harper Lee.

DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE NO. 22

199

Walking the Wrong Way Home

by Mandy Haynes Walking The Wrong Way Home takes you inside the extraordinary lives of ordinary people. Where hidden secrets are brought to light and burned with past regrets in brush piles in the mountains of East Tennessee or used to set fire to the mass produced tall and skinnies taking over East Nashville.

Between the pages you'll meet Penny, an eighty-seven year old widow who sleeps in her red shoes, Jimmy, a quiet auto mechanic whose memories are never silent, Jewel a young girl who sees beauty everywhere, even though she's lost almost everything, and Willie, a thirteen-year-old who faces his worst fears only to find out that the truth is scarier than any haint or ghost story he's ever imagined. There's Elma and Roy, a couple who've been married for over forty years. Elma realizes on her sixty-third birthday that it's not too late to live her life, but it takes Roy two weeks to notice.

Spanning nearly twenty decades, the struggles and victories these characters face are timeless as they all work towards the same goal.

A place to feel safe, a place to call home.

“Hard to believe this is Mandy Haynes debut short-story collection. Sixteen of them that took me a long time to read because I didn’t want to move on from Elma and Ray, the first story where Haynes found her title, “I took a deep breath and realized I was just walking blind, so lost in my thoughts. I’d meant to go home, but I was walking the wrong way.” Or leave the preacher man’s wife, Cora, though not so much her husband, Vernon Messiah Jackson Jr., and his outbursts of “SANCTIFY yourself in the Lord!” from the pulpit. “Tippy Toe” is about a wedding, and it’s holler-and-thigh-slapping funny. Or Millie, a waitress at a diner, and Tipsy, a pregnant teenager “who walked up to the counter and climbed onto a stool. No regard for the fact that her behind was barely covered as she hitched her leg onto the seat.” Or the woman who waits and waits in an old Vega in the freezing cold for her boyfriend to come home from the road, a guitar player born Charles Edward “but then he heard Van Halen for the first time and changed his name to Eddie.” Or True and Mable and Jeremiah in “Her Baby Will Sing,”when I realize Mandy Haynes is a modern Kate Chopin. Or James the librarian and Lorn whose “voice was unexpectedly deep and smooth, like she’d been smoking unfiltered cigarettes since she was a toddler.”

Unlike Lorn, Mandy Haynes’s voice is clear and pitch perfect. I could go on and on because her characters are now a part of my life. And I miss them already.” Five Star Review from author Darrelyn Saloom Mandy Haynes is the author of two short story collections, one novella, the editor of a fantastic anthology, a freelance writer, owner of three dogs write press, and editor in chief of WELL READ Magazine. Writing and sharing stories is her passion. She lives on Amelia Island with her three dogs and one turtle all rescues who did the rescuing.