Valerie Nieman v. 3.0

Writing is a tough business. It’s not laying bricks, sure, but it does demand the mental toughness to keep hitting the keyboard long after saner folks would have taken up orchid hybridization as an easier hobby. But we keep on keeping on, putting one word after the other. The late Octavia Butler, a black woman writer in science fiction (for far too long a bastion of white males), commented, "You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say that one of the most valuable traits is persistence." So – we work, in order to do better work. It’s an apprenticeship, and if we want to become better writers, we create journeyman efforts until we can accomplish a masterwork. We’ve seen a lot of advice for writers over the years – write every day, write so many words every day, take part in marathons like Nanowrimo. But the best advice I ever received came from the

Decent. That seems like faint praise, but good, decent, upright, honorable - words like that, describing people who are like that, say more than effusive puffery. Len Gross was a decent man, a good man, and seeing his name under "in memory of" on the last page of the School of Journalism newsletter this afternoon took me right back to those West Virginia newsrooms and the inevitable calls, unwanted on both ends, to find out what happened when a mine accident took a life. Len - later the Rev. Leonard Gross - graduated from the journalism program at West Virginia University in 1949 and went to work at various newspapers and TV stations around the state. In 1962, he went "over the fence" as we say and joined the public relations staff at Consolidation Coal Co ., one of the predominant corporations mining in the northern coalfields. It was inevitable that I would be calling Len after I graduated from WVU in 1978 and went to work in local newspapers. The relationship

The happiest days of my childhood, those I couldn't spend wandering the woods, were spent in a library. The small town library in Randolph , NY, was started as a private library more than 100 years ago, and was chartered as a public library in 1918. That's where I encountered Rachel Carson on the shelves of Natural History, and where I read biography and history and poetry - but fiction was reserved downstairs for Adults Only. Luckily, my mother would venture into the basement to keep me stocked with novels. My elementary school library was presided over by the estimable Mrs. Bohall, who made me a library aide. I enjoyed shelving books using the Dewey Decimal System, and still have the book ( Ocelot ) that I received as a gift at the end of the school year. The high school library led me to encounters with The Once and Future King, Uhuru, On the Beach , and The Lord of the Rings , while the J ames Prendergast Library in Jamestown offered opera recordings (and The Who)

I could start with the tent. Which was not where it started, but was in fact the most recent “rediscovery” of this strange and wonderful year. I will be going kayak-camping this fall, and so I needed a tent. But I thought I already had a tent – which I couldn’t find. So I hied myself off to Sports Authority (with a coupon!) to get a bare-bones backpacking tent. Mission accomplished. Three weeks later, with a (returned) ladder, I worked my way to the back of the loft in the shed and found – the original tent. Nicely packed in its blue stuff sack, complete and, surprisingly, without mold or mildew or rot. It’s been that kind of year. A year of rediscovery. Last fall, an e-mail out of the blue from Permuted Press started the process of bringing my first novel, Neena Gathering , back to life after 25 years out of print. New cover, new electronic edition, even a new voice for Neena through an Audible book.  An anthology on Persephone is going to reprint "Persephone in

                                      A bison from Font-de-Gaume (official photo) …We draw horned cattle with broad strokes, charcoal and ochre outline figures dropping into darkness…             I was a farmer, then. I wrote those lines as I watched cattle and deer on the hillside above our West Virginia mountain farm. I’d never been to Europe, never seen the cave art that I referenced in the poem. This month, I stood inches from Paleolithic art that had haunted my dreams then, and saw the bison and reindeer move. I was on a hiking trip in the Valley of the Vézère River , deep in the Perigord region of southeastern France. For several days, I stayed in Les Eyzies de Tayac , the “world headquarters of prehistory,” and walked to a few of the shelters, sites, caves, and museums dedicated to early humankind. This is the area where Cro-Magnon skeletons were first found, where Lascaux and the other pictured caves were discovered. Much was pillaged at the

I stopped by Cliff Garstang's blog to leave a guest post - you can read about the experience of having a long out-of-print novel come back to life here.

That's how Permuted Press thinks of it... The folks who want us to "Enjoy the Apocalypse" are bringing back classic post-apocalyptic novels of the '70s and '80s, including my 1988 debut novel, Neena Gathering . It will appear May 28 as an e-book, and as an Audible book voiced by the wonderful Cassandra Morris. To celebrate its new life after 25 years out of print, I'm doing a Goodreads giveaway - two signed copies of that original Pageant paperback with cover art by Keith Parkinson. Go here to enter! And visit Amazon to pre-order the Audible book.

It's always great to have a good friend come to visit. Joseph Bathanti, award-winning poet, professor and advocate for literacy - and a dear friend and fellow Press 53 author - will visit North Carolina A&T State University for workshops and a reading on Wednesday, April 3. Bathanti was named North Carolina’s Poet Laureate in 2012 by then-Gov. Bev Perdue, who noted his “robust commitment to social causes.” He first came to North Carolina to work in the VISTA program and has taught writing workshops in prisons for 35 years. North Carolina’s seventh poet laureate, Bathanti is a professor of creative writing at Appalachian State University where he is also Director of Writing in the Field and Writer-in-Residence in the University's Watauga Global Community. He is the author of several books of poetry, including This Metal   (St. Andrews College Press, 1996 and Press 53, 2012), two novels, Coventry (Novello Festival Press, 2006) and East Liberty (Banks Channel