Tag Archives: Jack Beck

Memories and – memories – –

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Jack is late again – –

Every year around this time we were among the favored few that got an end of year letter in the mail from our dear friend Lindsay. Lindsay’s letters were reverse works of art; where everyone else’s holiday missives groaned with good cheer, his just groaned.

Wendy and I still quote what we consider the best line ever from his 2010 card: My sister’s house is sinking down a mine shaft. The council engineers don’t think they can save it.

 Everyone who received his Christmas Cheerless letters felt honored and we would all exchange comments about it wherever we were in the world.

Lindsay left us a few years back, but he will never be forgotten. So – to continue his tradition, here’s a few highlights of the low points of my year.

Dead Furnace

At the start of the year our gas fired central heating furnace died and it took a month to get a replacement, so we used our wood stove to keep heat in the house – –

Health checks

I passed out while getting ready for bed one night and had a whole host of health checks which showed me to be in perfectly good shape!

Scotland

We returned to Scotland in June and I got my first foray over the ‘Rest and be Thankful’ from Arrochar to Iveraray – wonderful views! And then we all caught COVID.

New stove

Our old woodstove had been cheap and too small so we invested in a much better and more efficient one. We also learned about using well-seasoned wood! The guy who took the stove out for us said it was a wonder we hadn’t burned the house down or asphyxiated ourselves on noxious fumes.

Storm damage

We caught the edge of hurricane Helene and lost sections of our recently installed metal roof. To my amazement our insurance company promptly paid for a replacement and local roofers did a magnificent job. We were trapped in the house for a day while they heaved sharp sheet metal shards over the sides of the roof. It was an experience.

Wendy

Wendy produced, researched and presented a series of radio shows that aired across the Appalachian states. Then the funding body cancelled the grant. She joined some of her writing friends for a couple of weeks in Mexico and discovered its health system was cheap and efficient because she had an emergency EKG. (She’s going to be fine.)

So there it is, dripping with Christmas cheer – or something, anyway. Fa la frigging la.

We’re sure that 2015 will be just wonderful – – –

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…..