Category Archives: reading

Writers, Editors and Books equal Genius!

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Jack’s Wednesday guest blog is late again – –

Wendy and I watched a movie last week that brought back a lot of memories. The film was called ‘Genius’ and starred Colin Firth and Jude Law.

The movie opens with a view of the Scribners building in New York and that brought back the first memory. When we owned a bookstore in Big Stone Gap we always had to have some first editions of ‘The Trail of the Lonesome Pine’ (published by Scribners). My job was to find good first editions cheap so we always had them in stock.

The film then moves to a nondescript guy coming into one of Scribners’ editor’s offices holding a handwritten manuscript. This turns out to be Thomas Wolfe! I knew the name but not much more. The movie then continues to cover their work and personal relationships.

When Wendy’s book ‘The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap’ was accepted by St Martins she was allocated an editor (the lovely Nichole) and we made a number of journeys to the ‘flat iron’ building in New York. So I was able to observe the relationship between an editor and author close up, and that was fascinating. Of course technology has moved on since the days of Thomas Wolfe, so instead of a handwritten pile of pages it all went back and forward over the internet. Also, there were many others involved – not just proof readers, but legal experts, folk checking references and even the designer of the cover!

And yet, the conversation was very much the same: it is YOUR book; I am here to help you make it as strong as possible. Cut this. Yes, I mean it. Of course I want to hear why you don’t want to cut it. Yes, okay, we’re still going to cut it.

When Wendy laughed at some point in the dialogue between editor and writer, I asked her why. She said, “this is an old dance. The editor is paid to have opinions; that’s what Nichole always said. And then they have to second guess themselves all the way, while the writer wants to do the right thing but doesn’t want to admit they might not have done it right in the first place. In the end, all you can do is what you did and launch the thing and let it go.”

Fair enough…..

A Life’s Work Rolls On – –

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Jack’s guest post is a bit late this week, because Wendy beat him to it on Wednesday – –

When I first met Wendy she was working as a community storyteller in Kingsport, Tennessee. She used her skills to help folk in a housing project engage with the world outside through telling their stories of re-entry from prison life, from their native Appalachian towns, and from learning about other cultures through her telling them stories.

Throughout our time together she has used these storytelling skills as well as her writing to continue supporting various communities – refugees and asylum seekers in England included. She worked with the Muslim moms there to help them tell their own stories and again learn about other countries from children’s storytelling, and also teaching them to tell stories in their community.

On arriving in Scotland she quickly set up a storytelling cooperative called ‘Storytelling Unplugged’ which ran afterschool clubs and library events as well as activities in health centers and even in the only Scottish children’s hospice. Eventually she wound up on The Scottish Government traditional arts committee.

She is the only person to have served on both the US and Scottish storytelling national governing bodies.

All of that led eventually to where she is now – in Appalachia as the Executive Director of GMEC (Graduate Medical Education Consortium of SW Virginia – a real mouthful!).

So now she brings together all of that plus a PhD in Folklore and a Masters in Public Health and an enthusiasm for foraging and gardening to (drum roll please)….

bringing together medical students and trainee doctors to learn how to interact with their often misunderstood patients through programs of community nourishment and a mixture of storytelling and writing. All of that and encouraging youngsters to become medical professionals and others from outside Appalachia to relocate here and set down roots.

Wendy puts the community into medical community, and I am proud of her! Especially when her whole use of storytelling to build trust and combat misinformation landed her on NPR last week. Their program THROUGHLINES was doing a conspiracy theory and medical misinformation blog post, and they interviewed her as one of their experts. Hers was the final quote of the whole program, speaking the truth by saying that the truth mattered. In fact, it is a matter of life and death.

I am proud of my wife’s accomplishments, but listening her talk about people telling the truth might have been my proudest moment yet!