Circling Home

Next week my latest book, CIRCLING HOME, hits the stores. The University of Georgia Press's release of this story about exploring the mile around our eastside Spartanburg home is not an event that will shake the book universe. There isn't a multi-city book tour in the works unless you count my commitment to read or sign books in Greenville, Columbia, Asheville, Black Mountain, and Sylva.

There was no prepublication review in NEWSWEEK, TIME, or THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW. There's no hype on talk radio. John Grisham's backlist has nothing to fear this week from my approaching Amazon sales numbers.

In an age where blockbusters rule, the publication of CIRCLING HOME is a small but welcome (by me and hopefully a few thousand others) light coming on in the sparsely populated room of contemporary literature.

I choose to toil in a genre whose audience is tiny. I write "literary personal narratives." It's a form of storytelling that grew out of poetry and literary fiction. They're hard to describe.

"Is it a novel?" someone will inevitably ask when they pick up the book at a book signing. "Well, no, it's a personal narrative," I'll answer, or "It's a story, but a true story from my life told using the techniques of fiction," I'll try and explain, digging a deeper hole with each qualification.

Also, when given the choice of what category to assign the book, UGA deemed it "nature writing." I'm happy with that, but in the world of marketing that pushes it into an even smaller room of literature. Being a "nature writer" today is a little like being a old-time English ballad singer in an MTV world. When was the last time you saw a nature writer on Oprah?

But a little confusion of purpose doesn't diminish my excitement. I've worked five years on this book and there were times when I thought I'd never finish it. After that, there were moments when I worried that I would not be able to find a publisher and it would join three or four other long prose projects of mine on the trash heap of abandoned manuscripts.

Georgia took it and they're excited about it. They made it one of their lead titles on their impressive list of 20 or so new books this fall. They will do a good job of pushing out into the channels of distribution available to a university press. There will be reviews and a few of them will surprise me. My last book from Georgia, CHATTOOGA, somehow caught the eye of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, and the review of it there generated letters from far and wide. If I get lucky a similar surprise may await the publication of CIRCLING HOME.

The most exciting thing about CIRCLING HOME though has nothing to do with national distribution or a few literary readers in far-away cities. This book is a story about the place I love-Spartanburg-and the creek that runs through it, Lawson's Fork. It is a 200-page story about a single speck of land. When we moved here I took a plate and drew a circle on a topo map of the area. I vowed to explore every single area of the circle and write about what I found there. That's what I did.

CIRCLING HOME is not a local history book, but there is history in it. It's not a memoir exactly, but there is a personal story line that reveals my life, as the flap copy says, "of limited commitments," in the years before I came to settle with my family on the east side of Spartanburg. It's a book about freedom and settlement, two subjects everyone encounters at some point.

If you want to read CIRCLING HOME you'll need to look around a little. Wofford's Ben Wofford Books is a loyal outlet for my titles, so you might try it. The chain stores like Barnes & Noble might carry CIRCLING HOME, or they might not. There's always the web. That's the book business today.

Better yet, come to the "book launch" on Monday, November 19th at 7:30 p.m. It's at Hub-Bub's Showroom on South Daniel Morgan Avenue in Spartanburg. You'll get to hear me read a section of the book and ask some questions about how I came to write 200 pages about circling my tiny corner of the universe.