Free Scribblers by Stephen Kirk Page B

company,” he says. “I was an insufferable little bastard.”
    In the mid-1960s, while working as a newspaperman, he wrote a novel of the Crimean War. His early, unsuccessful submissions were a Wyatt Earp novel and other Western fare—“not genre Westerns,” he hastens to point out.
    His devotion to writing became a point of contention in what was an unhappy marriage. Following a divorce—and much influenced in his mood by it—he wrote a medieval novel packed with murder, rape, torture, and other mayhem. One editor to whom he sent it scolded him for writing one of the most offensive things she’d ever read and then, in the same letter, invited him to submit something else. That should have told him he had talent.
    In the early 1990s, Charles began making frequent trips from Washington to his native North Carolina mountains, which rekindled his love for the region and led him to see it as a canvas for his fiction. He began writing the manuscript that became Hiwassee.
    Meanwhile, his professional career followed a downward course. He was demoted to clerical work at his lobbying firm, though he had eighteen years of service and was the senior member of the staff. A man “wedded to security,” he stepped out of character and resigned one day.
    A surprise was waiting in the mailbox when he got home that very evening: a book contract for Hiwassee, sent by the same publisher whose editor was so offended by his medieval story. It was a lightning strike. To that date, his best-known writing had been for a journal called Airport Noise Report.
    He took his sudden success as an omen. His wasted years of spare-time scribbling were reinterpreted as “fuel,” as anapprenticeship for the writing he meant to do now. He packed up and headed home. When his house in Arlington, Virginia, didn’t quickly sell, a friend loaned him money for a place in Burnsville.
    Hiwassee was a critical—if not a commercial—success. Charles had higher hopes for “Held in Equal Honor,” but when he sent it to his publisher, it was rejected without explanation. He worked up the nerve to demand some criticism of the manuscript and subsequently got more than he reckoned. Daniel McFee, the editor wrote, was a white man in a black skin, and the novel’s other black character tended so far toward the other extreme—toward defiance and belligerence—as to be cartoonish. The novel was flawed at a conceptual level. Readers would be offended by his handling of racial issues.
    â€œHere I was, a classic Southerner trying to heal the divide,” Charles says, “only to reveal myself a bigot.”
    â€œNo, no,” one of us protests.
    â€œWe don’t see it like that at all.”
    â€œThey’re just afraid to touch anything racial.”
    Still feeling the glow of discovering something we judge special, we resolve to prove our vision of the novel the true one.
    A better opportunity to get acquainted comes when Charles sends me a brochure for a writing seminar he is conducting at his house. “A day of retreat and creative expression awaits you in the beautiful Black Mountains,” it promises.
    â€œGetting Out of Your Own Way: Finding a Voice,” he calls the seminar. Charles feels he has some insight to offer into how a writer can step back and let his narrative voiceflow unimpeded. As for the credentials that give him authority in such matters, he summarizes the plaudits for Hiwassee and briefly touches on his forthcoming novel, which, knowing the old title has been rejected, he is temporarily calling “Heaven’s Fire.” He has circled that title on my copy of the brochure and penciled “Who knows?” in the margin.
    Not having the social sense to realize that the invitation is intended as a courtesy, I promptly send in my registration fee. Better yet, I resolve to bring the whole family to the mountains.
    Charles’s letter acknowledging