A few notes on publishing

 Scattershooting, while wondering about the book publishing biz:

• The crowd at the Georgia Indie Book Fair was diverse. We had all races and ages, but we also had diverse interests and tastes: fantasy, mystery, romance, crime. Most of the people I talked to were serious readers. They had developed and refined their own tastes. They were at a fair featuring independent publishers because they wanted something different. People who read a book a week said their genre had become predictable and repetitive. The book they wanted to read hadn’t been written.

• I love the major publishers. I buy their books. But I’ve been writing books because I’ve gotten to that same place as a reader. I wanted to see whether I could write the kind of book I want to read. I haven’t succeeded. I also haven’t given up.

• Small publishers can afford to be more innovative. The larger the company, the costlier the mistake in judgment about what readers want. This is not ideology. It’s just business. The bigger the company, the higher the overheads. Our family business can afford a press run of 40 books. It’s not a windfall if it’s a hit, but it’s not a disaster if it’s a miss. 

• The Wise Woman and I have had a long-running argument. I would like to stay at home and write books. She says we have an obligation to put our work before readers to test it, to see if our judgments about what’s worthwhile resonate with those of others. She retired as an English professor, so she can recite the history of small presses, telling how many innovations in literature came from the little guys. She would win the argument anyway. But it’s nice to hear that history again when I’m schlepping crates of books into the truck. And she’s right, of course. It’s always right to talk to readers, to see what they think.

Writing lessons from Truman Capote

 You can start a story in fewer than 10 words. Here’s the first sentence of Truman Capote’s “Children on Their Birthdays”:

Yesterday afternoon the six-o’clock bus ran over Miss Bobbit.

 

We readers learn quickly that Miss Bobbit was 10 and that, though a child, she behaved like an adult. She took over the town. Everything seemed to revolve around her and her plans.

That’s what we learn quickly. What we learn slowly is how such a commanding personality, a personality so composed, could get lost for a moment. It was a little girl, not an adult, that run across the road without looking both ways.

If you start a story by giving away the ending, you have to show why that the ending seems to have been inevitable, given the character of the characters. I think Capote’s story passes the test.

I can admire the artistry, but the story, to me, has a fatal flaw. The flaw is a lack of artistry in handling an ugly episode of racism. A Black child, Rosalba Cat, is abused by white boys who are showing off. Miss Bobbit rescues Rosalba and declares that they are sisters. The point is that Miss Bobbit has such a forceful character that she changes the ways of the town. What was formerly unthinkable is accepted.

Acts of racism, like most other acts of violence, are gratuitous, so they’re tough to handle in fiction. A scene can be realistic and still be gratuitous. The details of the abuse in this story, which seemed fine to book publishers in 1948, seem gratuitous to me in 2026.

• Source: Truman Capote’s “Children on Their Birthdays” is in Stories of the Modern South, edited by Benjamin Forkner and Patrick Samway, S.J.; New York, Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 59-76.

Ocmulgee Mounds

 When archeologists were excavating the Ocmulgee Mounds during the Great Depression, they uncovered the floor of a council house. Perhaps it’s something that could have happened only during the era of the Works Progress Administration: the archeologists and their laborers reconstructed it.

They reframed the roof, covered the rafters with wattle and mounded earth on top. The entrance is low — you walk through a tunnel, crouching. When you emerge, the high roof makes the chamber feel like a cathedral.

An earthen bench follows the circumference. In the center is a firepit, and the roof is open above the fire.

You can almost see ancient people sitting on those benches, taking counsel.

Arthur Kelly, another Texan who made Georgia his home, led the excavations from 1933 to 1941. The collection of artifacts is on display at a museum.

I’m still trying to piece together the history of the ancient peoples of Georgia. The site on the Ocmulgee River has been occupied for 17,000 years. The mound builders, people of the Mississippian Culture, didn’t arrive until about 800 of the Common Era.

They came from the northwest — you can tell by the pottery. They built a series of mounds, flat-topped and crowned with temples and the homes of chieftains. Like other Mississippian sites, Ocmulgee was near a river and had a plaza and ballfield. The people cultivated immense fields. The main crop was corn.

The Ocmulgee community covered a square mile. It lasted for three centuries.

When the Europeans arrived 400 years later, they found the Muskogee people, whom the English called the Creek Indians. I would love to know more about how one culture emerged from another.

The Ocmulgee Mounds are about 75 miles south of Stone Mountain in Macon. We climbed the Temple Mound, the tallest at 55 feet, and looked at the Ocmulgee River below and the Macon skyline in the distance. It feels like a sacred place.

But this country has treated its heritage with tragic indifference. During the 18^th century, workers cut two railroad lines through the mounds. If you visit the site, at least one of the emotions you might feel is rage.

• Note: For an earlier note on the Mississippian Culture in Georgia, see “Etowah, Oct. 8, 2025. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/search?q=Etowah

Writers meeting readers

 We were selling books at the Georgia Indie Book Fair in Albany, and the Wise Woman, who runs the family business, was talking about a book that is based on her great-great-great-grandmother Easter.

Easter was a Cherokee woman who was driven off her land in Georgia in the 1830s. Relatives ended up on the Trail of Tears, but Easter refused to be driven and survived by blending into a community of African Americans in Tennessee.

It was a choice rooted in defiance, and it shaped a family’s identity. A Home for Easter begins a series of books about defiant women. The torch is passed from mother to daughter. Each generation finds a way to oppose the bigotry and oppression of the day.

At the book fair, three African American women — perhaps representing three generations — were talking to the Wise Woman and asking questions.

The Wise Woman explained that her books are fiction. They refer to historical characters. But so much information about her ancestors has been lost, she has had to reinvent them — or re-enliven then — with stories.

The older women were interested in that idea, but the younger woman acted as if she’d seen the burning bush. She didn’t know that you could do that — that you could reclaim family identity in that way.

To me, that scene was a pretty good argument for independent presses.

I love mainstream publishers — at least I’ve loved them enough to have bought hundreds of books they’ve published.

But they don’t publish everything that’s worthwhile.

The family publishing business is not exactly a Fortune 500 company. The revenues are modest, but the conversations are priceless.

A story quickly framed

  Alice Walker’s story Strong Horse Tea is a good example of a story framed quickly and expertly. Here’s the opening: 

Rannie Toomer’s little baby boy Snooks was dying from double pneumonia and whooping cough. She sat away from him gazing into a low fire, her long crusty bottom lip hanging. She was not married. She was not pretty. Was not anything much. And he was all she had.

 

The story is not about a baby. It’s about what people will do when they’re desperate. Rannie is contemptuous of Sarah, an elderly neighbor known for her home cures. Rannie wants a real doctor and accosts the postman, begging him to bring help.

Sarah asks Rannie whether she really believes the white mailman is going to summon the white doctor to help.

People say trust is the foundation of all human relationships. I suppose they’re right. Have you noticed, though, that the lack of trust is a theme in a lot of the literature about my part of the country?

• Source and note: Alice Walker’s “Strong Horse Tea” is in Stories of the Modern South, edited by Benjamin Forker and Patrick Samway, S.J.; New York, Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 355-62.

An attitude about politics

 Edward Hoagland had a terrible stutter that disqualified him for some positions — including teaching posts, or so he thought. He had to lie to an Army psychiatrist who doubted whether Hoagland was fit to be drafted.

I admire conscientious objectors and am not much of a fan of military service. But Hoagland was thinking about responsibilities to serve the public good and he didn’t want to be excused when others had to shoulder the same responsibility.

Hoagland’s story used to be common. Many veterans I knew had deferments but went anyway. They just didn’t feel right avoiding a responsibility that their neighbors had to bear.

Some people look down on that sentiment. The story of how Commander-in-Chief Bone Spurs faced his own crisis of conscience is well known, and I won’t belabor it.

But it’s infuriating that people who enlisted in our armed forces because they felt some sense of responsibility for the public good are being led by people who prefer personal profit. That’s despicable in peacetime. Something worse in war.

• Source: Edward Hoagland’s essay “Curtain Calls” is in Sex and the River Styx; White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2011, p. 113.

A lovely plant and a thorny concept

 I saw a few strands of moss phlox flowering. The leaves of Phlox subulata are shaped like little awls, which you might guess if you’re a Latinist. The plant is a perennial and forms mats that might remind you of moss. The flowers are usually purple or pink, but the ones I saw were mainly white. It was as if a watercolorist had touched the wet petals with a brush and the purple had run.

Is this lovely plant a native or an invasive species?

I’d say it’s an example of what’s wrong with that concept. The experts say the native range covered much of Eastern North America, extending south to North Carolina. But the plant did well in the Appalachians, which spill into northern Georgia. The line between the Piedmont and the mountains is tricky, so maybe part of the Piedmont.

The experts say Stone Mountain is beyond the native range, but close. Moss phlox does well in our rocky soils, so the garden centers sell seedlings.

What of the plant I saw? How did it get there? As a practical matter, I have no way of knowing whether it found its place with the help of wind, bird, squirrel or gardener.

Native or invasive? I don’t know. I don’t see how experts could know.

Scientific concepts are useful to the extent that they provide answers to questions on a case-by-case basis. With moss phlox, I don’t think there are answers on a case-by-case basis.