Scribblers (23 page)

I learn these details from Joan's website. I also learn from the website that Grace likes the meatballs with rice. Hannah prefers them with potatoes and Amelia with noodles.

Popular mainstream women's writers like Joan Medlicott know how to take care of their readers. Besides Meatballs and Prunes, the website offers recipes for Grace's Multicolored Vienna Cake, Cold Zucchini Soup, Cheesy Cauliflower Bake, Apple Oat Bran Muffins, and Avocado and Pineapple Dip. It also includes biographical material on Joan; a schedule of her appearances; information on large-print editions; synopses of the novels; reader's guides; a map of Covington; photos of Joan with some of her fan clubs; review excerpts; readers' testimonials; personal statements from Grace, Hannah, and Amelia, Amelia's addressed to
“Mes amis”;
and contact information for Joan.

“Let me put it this way: I am accessible,” Joan tells me. “On the back of my books is my address and e-mail. People can contact me. There's no mystery. The minute I get a letter from somebody, I answer it immediately. I just sent out a mass mailing to people in my address book, letting them know that the third book is coming out in paperback this month, and the fourth book is coming out in hardback. I have been deluged with mail. People say, ‘How kind of you to think of me' and ‘Thank you for not forgetting me.' People write me for recipes. Even though they're in the books, they still write, and I will immediately send them a copy, gladly.”

Ann B. Ross's website has tips for writers and outlines of future Miss Julia books.

But Jan Karon puts out the best supplementary material for readers.

In her newsletter,
More from Mitford,
you can learn what Jan is reading.

You can also find out what movies she and her daughter are watching.

You can read about the real-life village of Mitford, England, a third the size of the fictional town but just as quirky and quaint.

You can meet the good folks who make Mitford quilts; who write poems about Mitford; who bake Esther Bolick's Orange Marmalade Cake, the series' signature dish; who read their children the Mitford books as part of their home-school curriculum; and who dress up like characters Miss Sadie, Winnie Ivey, Cynthia, Father Tim, Olivia Davenport, and Esther Cunningham to hold a Primrose Tea.

Like the books themselves, the supplementary material is mostly fun but occasionally poignant. You'll meet a woman in the final stages of cancer, a wife with multiple myeloma, and a lady recovering from hip replacement, all of whom take solace in Mitford. Indeed, by means of electronic bulletin boards, the series' fans have fashioned a long-distance support group in the very image of Mitford, a town that doesn't exist.

Of course, there are sales opportunities to be had, too. Readers of the Mitford newsletter are encouraged to purchase not only the principal volumes but also holiday boxed sets; children's books by Jan;
Patches of Godlight: Father Tim's
Favorite Quotes,
supposedly recorded in Father Tim's own handwriting; and Mitford-themed Hallmark merchandise.

Publishers like popular mainstream women's writers for the same reason seniors like Meatballs and Prunes: they move product. But that's not to say profit is what mainly drives the authors.

“It is my intention to give my readers a sense of hope,” Jan Karon once told a public-radio interviewer. “I want my readers to love this town and love these people. To go away from their heartache and go into this town and find it real. People ask me, ‘Is Mitford real?' My answer is, ‘Yes, Mitford is real.' And you know why? It is simply a town where people still care about each other and where old values still work. I live in a town like that, so I know it is real.”

C
HAPTER
11

The Worthies' Parade

Over time, I quit traveling to my writers' group meetings. There comes a point when I need to do more writing and less hobnobbing. Once I have a firm deadline, I can't afford to give up any more Saturdays. Moreover, since beginning my book, I'm on my third decrepit, high-mileage car, this one farther down the path to the boneyard than the others ever got. On my last trip to the mountains—to Blowing Rock to look at old issues of the
Rocket,
then south on the Blue Ridge Parkway for a publication party and autographing in Asheville—my would-be chariot overheated so badly that I had to shut it down three or four times and wait for it to cool. It has a leaking head gasket, I'm told. It can limp around town, but I'm afraid to run it hard.

Even though I'm absent in body, I pay the dues to maintain my membership, which enables me to keep in touch with my friends' doings via the minutes of the meetings.

For nearly a year and a half, the members comprise a nomadic tribe. One month, I read in the minutes that the group must find a new space, since the branch library that hosts the meetings will be undergoing renovations. The first temporary quarters is a place I've never heard of called the Unity Center, near the airport. Following that, the group meets for several months in the downstairs community room at the library in Weaverville, north of Asheville. Then comes a full year at the fire station in Skyland, a stone's throw from the branch library being upgraded. You park in the lot with the flagpole, I read, and then ring the buzzer at the door on the right and take the elevator located to the right through the second set of doors.

The group holds together just fine through the moves. In fact, attendance is higher than when I used to go. There's talk of putting out a newsletter in addition to the minutes, of starting a group website, and of sponsoring a group table at events at the Asheville Mall and the Grove Arcade. Eileen Johnson reveals at one meeting that the group's origins can be traced to the Blue Ridge Romance Writers back in 1981 or 1982. The next month brings word that one of the founding members is writing a history of the group. Though this doesn't promise scintillating reading, it does speak to the group's spirit, longevity, and closeness.

The members submit their poems, stories, articles, memoirs, and novels to contests, magazines, agents, major houses, regional companies, and self-publishing printers. They report back on book fairs, conferences, and seminars they've attended in Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, St. Petersburg, Key West, Chicago, Iowa, Maui,
and elsewhere. They sign their books whenever the opportunity presents itself and drum up what publicity they can.

The new blood includes a community-college instructor working on a children's book series, a budding suspense novelist who used to write scripts for Hollywood, and a partner in the eatery located next to the Weaverville library. What the restaurateur writes isn't quite clear to me, but I do know from the minutes that at least one longtime member can vouch for her lasagna. Later, I read that, as part of National Novel Month, she's completed a fifty-thousand-word manuscript in thirty days. There's also a Thomas Wolfe scholar who's written a book identifying the real people and places in
Look Homeward, Angel
and is trying to find a publisher for her manuscript about Wolfe's Asheville homecoming in 1937. And there's a local native now living in Australia who returns to the North Carolina mountains for part of the year and wants to publish in the United States.

The most interesting newcomer is a man who's written a novel inspired by
Paradise Lost.
He's read three hundred volumes in preparation for the task, having gone so far as to retrace Milton's research on angels.

I read passing mentions of this man over the course of several months. When he finally accepts a turn as taker of the minutes and later becomes part of the rotation, he elevates what for others is mundane reportage into a kind of art. He warms up by lambasting the shortsightedness of editors, quoting from rejection letters received by Kipling, Faulkner, Emily Dickinson, and William Golding. He muses over the definition of an essay. He includes in the minutes an article from a major paper on primary and secondary
imagination and the craft of the novelist. He laments the narrowness of the Western canon. He reprints blurbs for a novel by Andrei Codrescu, who will be coming to North Carolina for a conference. He defines the differences among gothic, neo-gothic, and horror fiction. He bemoans the way bookstores divide fiction among genres, since his own novel, despite its classic roots, would likely be banished to the horror section, to be thumbed by raincoat-wearing perverts. When it appears that the money for the branch library's renovation is in danger of being reallocated elsewhere, he lists the county commissioners' addresses and phone numbers and encourages protest.

As does anyone who bares his heart so freely, he occasionally oversteps his bounds. During one meeting, as I understand it, my friend Bryan Aleksich offers advice on avoiding a common computer problem. The newcomer subsequently writes five paragraphs in the minutes explaining how utterly wrong Bryan was, citing his own extensive computer training and ten years' experience in the field. If I've read Bryan's personality correctly, he's more likely to appreciate the knowledge than to take offense at the correction. But all the same, the matter could have been handled better. And though I've never met the man, he gets my blood pumping with this quote from John Gardner he includes in the minutes: “One should fight like the devil the temptation to think well of editors. They are without exception … either incompetent or crazy.”

Month by month, I follow his quest for publication as it assumes a familiar arc: he's looking for an agent for his novel; he's discouraged by the cost of hiring an editor to
get his manuscript into shape; he finds an editor and is invigorated not only by her work but also by her offer to submit the novel to a friend of hers at St. Martin's; he eagerly awaits word from the publisher and begins a sequel in the meantime; his optimism wanes as a month passes, then another; he receives a rejection notice; he sends a batch of queries to other publishers, apparently without much luck; he seems to reconcile himself to print-on-demand or self-publishing.

Print-on-demand technology, a frequent topic of discussion at the writers' group meetings, shows promise of being a great equalizer for the members. My friends envision the day when bookstores will be places where people go to have the books of their choice printed fresh on the spot. When there is no longer a need for standing inventory, the interests that control printing and distribution will no longer hold sway, since it will be as economical to print single copies of books by unknown authors as by John Grisham. Likewise, traditional rejecters like agents and editors will no longer stand between the members and the reading public. A new dawn is at hand.

An exchange of e-mails after one of the meetings shows how swiftly reality hits home. The members have been discussing the costs charged by a couple of print-on-demand publishers. Steve Brown, who apparently did not attend the meeting and is reading the minutes a couple of days later just as I am, knows of a cheaper and better alternative and broadcasts an e-mail to the entire membership.

Jack Pyle sends a reply to Steve, in which he points out the near-impossibility of getting one's print-on-demand
titles stocked in chain bookstores and the continuing second-class status of self-published writers.

What follows is a lively debate between the group's two dominant voices—sent to all the members—over the realities of new-technology publishing. Steve says wide distribution of one's print-on-demand books is possible; Jack says it's fantasy. They good-naturedly parse words in each other's e-mails. To Steve, a
buyer
is someone who purchases books for a chain. To Jack, it's someone who buys.

Steve finally clarifies his position by saying it's feasible to get print-on-demand books distributed if you convince the chains you're a serious multibook writer and not a one-or two-book hobbyist. He says one of the main impediments to distribution is the refusal of many self-published authors to seek out editorial help. The result has been a high incidence of poorly written material. He tells of some chain stores where staff members entertain themselves by circulating self-published books in which they're marked all the misspellings and other blunders.

These comments draw fire from a couple of members who are one-book self-published writers but who emphatically
do not
consider themselves hobbyists and who care every bit as much about their craft as any multibook author does.

Steve nimbly pulls his biscuits from the fire while still maintaining his position. He says he certainly wasn't referring to the members in question, but that quality control
is
a serious problem in self-publishing.

Among those who consider the print-on-demand option is Bryan Aleksich, indefatigable as ever.

Bryan and I exchange letters now and then. He sends me tips on material for my new book and magazine clippings related to my old one. He's taken to writing guest editorials, and he occasionally encloses samples of those. When he learns that the Hendersonville paper welcomes only two such editorials a year per writer—a limit he reaches by February—he begins writing for the Asheville paper, too. He submits accompanying illustrations, which are professional enough for the papers to run.

As for his novel, it is named a semifinalist in one national contest and a finalist in another. He pays to have the manuscript scrutinized by three separate editors. He submits a twenty-page sample as part of a writers' conference in Athens, Georgia. It comes to the attention of a senior vice president at Simon & Schuster, who asks to see the entire novel, then passes it to a subordinate. It's returned a month later with a letter telling Bryan how close he came to publication.

In the minutes from one of the writers' group meetings, it's reported that Bryan is hard at work on a dozen novels. This must be mistaken. To my knowledge, his Cold War story is the only one he's ever written. He once told me that, instead of looking in the mirror and seeing someone who's spent thirty-odd years writing a novel, he prefers to view himself as having written a dozen different novels from the same source material. That distinction was apparently lost on the minutes-taker.