I met Amy Greene in the Vermont College undergraduate program. Her writing reminded me of Flannery O'Connor's, something I've never said or even felt about anyone else's. Her novel Bloodroot, to be published by Knopf this January, is a multigenerational saga set in the heart of Appalachia that centers on a young girl raised by her grandmother on remote Bloodroot Mountain, and the legacy of poverty and madness inherited by her twin children.
Amy is the first of my friends so far whose literary work has been accepted by such a prestigious imprint. Her success came about through a combination of innate talent, practical ambition, and her fortuitous attendance of the Sewanee Writer's Conference in Georgia, which led to her discovery of the perfect agent, and through this agent, a publishing contract with Knopf.
"I don't know if you're anything like me, kind of socially awkward?"
"Oh, boy," I agreed.
"We've probably talked about this before, I couldn't stand the idea of going to a conference and being kind of disingenuous and trying to talk to people I didn't even really want to talk to in order to try to make connections and network-but If you put yourself among your peers and people you admire, the connections happen naturally. Don't feel like you have to thrust yourself on anybody or sell yourself in any way, just go and talk about the thing you love, talk about writing, talk about the craft with people who are very eager to talk about it, that's what I've learned. The next thing you know, you're in a conversation with somebody who really admires what you're trying to do and wants to help you."
"I remember being freaked out by Vermont College residencies when I first went there," I told her. "because it was only a few people and I would project my whole impression of the outside world onto them, you know what I'm talking about, right? Then you realize that it's all writers, and this whole new thing opens up of relaxation and community and conversation once you overcome your own projections."
"Yeah, if you will throw out any preconceived notions that you have about anybody, because the ground that you're on when you go to a place like that, if you go to a writer's conference or to where we were at Vermont, the primary reason everybody is there is the same. You don't really have to think about what their life is at home, or-"
"You don't have to feel like an outsider for being a writer."
"Exactly. There's a community. You have that support network, and that's really important. I know I'm always beating the Sewanee drum in a way, but that was a major turning point for me. Vermont is really what gave me the courage to go to Sewanee and put myself out there, because I had such a good experience at Vermont and I loved it so much. But a lot of the people I met and loved in Vermont were older people established in careers, so we were not in the same boat. They weren't really struggling to be writers as a career. At Sewanee, when I went there, it was like a whole little world of thirtysomethings. That was the strangely wonderful part of being there. All these people my age who were trying to do the exact same thing I was trying to do. That's what made it such a unique experience. And I still am closely in touch with all of them. We kind of encourage each other."
A native of Tennessee, Amy says living in Appalachia feels like being quarantined from mass culture in a way, which gives it an air of the haunted. " When you're raised here, there's beauty about it, it's a beautiful place to live, there's good and bad, and I choose to stay here and live with not just good, the wonderful parts of being here. But there are bad too, but that's probably part of the struggle that makes you a writer, because you learn so much from it. I did this reading not too long ago, there was a Q and A session, and somebody was asking me, which I thought was a pretty good question, what will you take with you from here out into the world, and I said that I feel like it's kind of the magic, you know, the kind of mysticism and magic that I don't think a lot of people know about. And I think that's what writing is, I do think it's a kind of magic, that's what it feels like to me."
I had a great time at Vermont College too. The creative latitude enabled by their undergraduate and graduate programs made for one of the peak segments of my life so far, during which few years I studied transformative art, personal symbolism and other self-devised curriculae, completed three novels and two collections of short stories. After Amy and I made friends in the undergrad track, I'd gone on to grad school there. Her life went another direction. "Before the whole book deal happened, I was thinking about getting an MFA, but the whole point, for me, of getting an education was to get published, and once that happened, I wasn't really interested anymore."
Having recently fallen prey to an ill-chosen completely automated online publishing tool myself in a recent attempt to self-publish (my own fault really, for being too impatient to shop around), I asked Amy if she was satisfied with the final result, and whether or not there was anything she wished was in that hadn't made the cut for any reason? "I'm very satisfied with how the book looks, especially with the cover-you don't have a lot of say in that part of it, it's a crapshoot, you don't know what you're going to get, but I was super happy with the cover. They sent me a preview and when I pulled it out, I was so relieved. If I hadn't liked it, I'm sure I could have tried to change something, I could've tried to pitch a fit, but I don't know if it would have worked. That's kind of the way it's been at Knopf-everything is on this high level of quality. I would be shocked if they did anything I didn't like at this point."
"Well, congratulations, that's good to hear. I just had the opposite experience myself, pretty much. Two times so far, first the book showed up with no copyright then with the text on the left hand page, which is universally recognized as a sign of bad luck in publishing. Did I tell you about this already?"
"I have a copy, the back is illegible and really blurry. The picture on the back I can't really see. The front's not as blurry."
"Yeah, I just wish there was a person to talk to. The whole thing's automated."
"Yeah, I have a lot of distrust of the whole print on demand vanity press thing anyway."
"Tellin' ya."
"I think it's a racket. My brother got mixed up with this shady agent a long time ago, too, who had him pay to have his manuscript read."
"Sheesh."
"It puts less value on the writer, too. It's actually something special that we have, you know, it's something we are able to do that other people in the world are not able to do."
"I agree, it's a magical, marvelous thing and I wish it was in greater demand. Only because we're relegated to this consumerist capitalist thing, you know, which I wouldn't do if I didn't have to, but I'd love to get paid for what I see as my . . . " my voice suddenly embarrassed and sincere, "magic talent."
"It is, it absolutely is magic. When I wrote about ‘the touch' in Bloodroot, there are people in my family who are said to have it. I'm not one of those people, but then I thought, unless being a writer is a way of having ‘the touch,' then I guess I do. My experience has been different from most of the other writers I know, but I think it's like lightning striking in a way. There are so many writers that are just as good as me, who just haven't stumbled into what I have, that's what it feels like."
"You know, Amy, I'm writing about Vermont College a lot in this new book, and I'm writing about interviewing you, and I don't know if you want me to use your real name or fictionalize your name and fictionalize Bloodroot or-"
"Well I think if you're fictionalizing everybody else, you should go ahead and fictionalize me too, I think that would be more fitting."
"Sure."
"And feel free to make up stories about my lurid past as Bubbles LaRue the stripper or whatever."
"So far you're just my friend who's magically succeeded at writing . . . because my character is a guy who's trying to, and he's like scrabbling as a freelance journalist, meanwhile writing this book, and he's just published another book but he's having trouble with the $#@!ing self-publishing company you know, so you're sort of just my lucky friend. So far I haven't really characterized you beyond that."
"I think I've probably changed a lot since you and I talked last."
"You sound free."
"That's the way I feel. And I don't want to live my life in any other way. But if I had just stayed at home, if I hadn't gone to Sewanee? You have to take steps to try to make it happen. And I really believe you can, if you keep, putting one foot in front of the other basically and trying to make something happen, it will."
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