“Here’s the juice children: If you want to be a writer, if you want to create a Persona and a body of work that is woven in the golden thread of Truth, then you must, before anything else, go out into the world and do some serious looking around . . . [A writer] must listen to the way people talk, and watch what they do, and in the process get his hands dirty, get his heart broken, sin a little or a lot, get shot at maybe, find himself afraid, and come to know what being lonely and tired and angry really means. He must learn that passion, if it is real, has consequences, and one of them may well be the grave. There is no other route to being an artist, here endeth the lesson.” (16-17)

“For once, I was encouraged in my flight by a wise, if contentious, comrade: the switchman Frank Smith, who knew things deeply, and felt them deeply; whose mind seemed to have opened like a lotus flower since I had been away.”

“One night, Frank drew his pistol from his back pocket–it was a Colt Peacemaker .22, which he still owns and still threatens me with from time to time–and drew the hammer back. Time for you to go to college my man, he said. College or death: not even The Old Man had couched it in those terms. So it was that I loaded up my red Volkswagen²¹ and went of to Academia, this time with the intention of learning and not amounting . . .”

“At my beloved University of Mississippi, I came to learn that ideas were important, but they meant nothing, were mere empty utterances, without experience to shape them and make connections among them. Existentialism, nihilism, Augustian grace, negative space, surrealism: when I met them in college, I recognized them as old friends. I had already met them out at sea, or on the railroads in perilous dark.” (41-42)

Howard’s essay, “Railroad As Art,” is excerpted from Sonny Brewer’s Don’t Quit Your Day Job: Acclaimed Authors and the Day Jobs They Quit. Howard is the author of three critically acclaimed novels on the civil war: The Black Flower (1997), winning an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a New York Times Notable book; The Year of Jubilo (2000); and The Judas Field (2006). Pelican Road (2008) is a departure from the American civil war era and takes on a subject near to the author’s heart: the railroad.

Sonny Brewer will be signing Don’t Quit Your Day Job at 5:o0 tonight. The collection includes essays from John Grisham, Pat Conroy, Suzanne Hudson, Brad Watson, Steve Yarbrough, Tom Franklin, Rick Bragg, and many more.

Read excerpts from John Grisham, Pat Conroy.

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Like most of us, John Grisham bumbled around a lot until he found his niche in the world. Not like most us, he became the best-selling author we know today. His essay gives us a glimpse into this young-hearted journey.

“My career sputtered along with little to add to the resume. Retail caught my attention, primarily because it was indoors, clean, air-conditioned, much softer than, say, asphalt or plumbing, and I applied for a job at a Sears store in the mall. The only opening was in men’s underwear, and since I was in college and needed the money, I reluctantly hired on. It was humiliating . . . I tried to quit but they gave me a raise. Evidently, the position was difficult to fill. I asked to be transferred to toys, then to appliances, but they said no and gave me another raise. (These were not big pay hikes, mind you.) I became abrupt with customers, and I am compelled to say here that Sears had the nicest customers in the world. But I didn’t care. I was rude and surly and was written up on a occasion by the ‘shoppers,’ spies hired by Sears to buy things and fill out reports. One of these ‘shoppers’ asked if he could try on a pair of boxers. I said no, said it was obvious to me that the boxers in question were much too small for his rather ample rear-end. I handed him a pair of XLs, said I was sure they would fit fine, and he didn’t need to be trying on our brand new underwear. He took offense. I got written up, but they still wouldn’t transfer me. I asked for lawn care. No. I finally quit when a customer with obvious hygienic deficiencies insisted on returning a three-pack of low-cut briefs. Other minimum wage paid jobs came and went, none as exciting as selling underwear.” (109-110)

Editor Sonny Brewer will have a signing and reading for Don’t Quit Your Day Job on Wednesday, December 1st.

Read an excerpt from an essay by Pat Conroy.

Signed copies of John Grisham’s new novel, The Confession, are available!

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After completing his freshmen year at The Citadel, Pat Conroy goes back to spend the summer with his family. A summer of work is on the horizon for him and his mother has some ideas about that. She introduced him to Father Stewart in Omaha. Enjoy this excerpt from Conroy’s essay entitled “Deacon Summer”:

“‘I’m the pastor of Holy Family Parish on Izard Street, located in the center of the ghetto. We’ve been trying to do outreach programs that will meet the needs of the our parishioners . . . I can give you free room and board. I can’t say the work won’t be dangerous but it will be satisfying. I have three young men from the seminary who’ll be spending their Deacon Summers at my parish. Two nuns will be doing social work. I can offer you a strong sense of community and can assure you that you’ll be doing work that will make the Near North Side a better place. We can offer you . . .'” (61-62)

“I interrupted him saying, ‘I can’t take a salary, Father. Father I come from the weirdest family on earth, and my father won’t let any of us have a paying job.'”

“‘That’s what your mother said. I find it strange. May I ask why?'”

“‘It’s a long story, but father’s something of an asshole, Father. Pardon my French,’ I said. ‘The Depression made him weird.'”

“‘Then consider yourself hired, Mr. Conroy,’ Father Stewart said.” (62)

. . .

“By July I had nearly completed my census of the whole parish when I knocked on the door of Yunca Matkovich. Many of the neighbors had warned me about approaching Yunca, using words like addled, schizophrenic, and crazy as hell to describe her. Though I had come accustomed to people answering the door with revolvers in their hands, I had never encountered anyone like Yunca Matkovich . . .” (67)

“‘May I come in and ask you some questions? I’m taking a census for the Holy Family Church.'”

“‘Please sit down in my living room.'”

“When I sat down in an armchair, roaches scattered across the floor, and I had to compose myself to keep myself from gagging. She had been born in Poland, she told me, then filled out the details of a most unlucky life. Six months ago she had gone completely blind. She’d never seen a doctor because she couldn’t afford one since someone had begun stealing her social security checks. I tried to turn on a lamp  but there was no electricity . . . Opening the door off the kitchen, I saw the outline of the sink and a commode in the lightless room . . . I looked at the black walls, aware only of a secret abhorrence of something staring back at me. I felt a movement in the impenetrable blackness of those walls; then slowly as my eyes adjusted, I processed the scene with a horror coming over me that I’d never felt before when I realized that I was looking not at a color, but a billion-footed colony of roaches . . .”  (68-69)

I enjoyed this essay so much so I am not going to tell you what happens. The rest is up to you. Editor Sonny Brewer will be having a signing and reading for Don’t Quit Your Day Job on Wednesday, December 1st.

Although Pat Conroy will be not be visiting Lemuria for his new book, My Reading Life, we do have signed copies available. Click here to read more about Conroy’s reading memoir.

Click here for other blogs written for Don’t Quit Your Day Job

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That’s Santa Sonny Brewer with John Evans when he came to Lemuria last year.

Below you will find a letter Sonny wrote to accompany his new book, Don’t Quit Your Day Job. After some conversation between Sonny and John–filled with a wonderful misunderstanding about the book–Sonny decided to collect stories from writers about the day jobs they quit. I loved the letter Sonny wrote so much that I decided to share it with you here. Don’t let the seriousness of the letter fool you. Sonny is always up to something–as writers often are when there is no 9 to 5 job. Last December Sonny was Santa. I wonder what he’ll be up to this December when he comes to Lemuria?

Dear Booklover,

P. J. O’Rourke said, “Creative writing teachers should be purged until every last instructor who has uttered the words ‘Write what you know’ is confined to a labor camp . . . The blind guy with the funny little harp who composed the Iliad, how much combat do you think he saw?

Like O’Roarke, William Faulkner had his own take on the Other Commandment for writers, the one that goes, “Thou shalt not quit thy day job.” Faulkner, who won the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature, had, twenty-five years before, worked at the post office in his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi.

Mister Faulkner was known to say, “One of the saddest things is that the only thing a man can do for eight hours, is work. You can’t eat for eight hours, nor drink for eight hours a day, nor make love for eight hours a day.”

He must have been determined to give something else (writing, we may assume, perhaps a glass of whiskey on the side) a whirl when he tendered his resignation to the postmaster. “I reckon I’ll be at the beck and call of folks with money all my life,” he said, “but thank God I won’t ever have to be at the beck and call of every son of a bitch who’s got two cents to buy a stamp.”

The authors in this book have tried their hands at some of the same jobs you have held, or still keep. They’ve worked on the railroad, busted rocks with a sledgehammer, fought fires, wiped tables, soldiered and carpentered and spied, delivered pizzas, lacquered boat paddles, counted heads for the church, sold underwear, and, yes, delivered the mail. They’ve driven garbage trucks.

And, like Williams Faulkner, they have quit those jobs.

And like Faulkner they write. They tell good tales. If you wonder what work preceded their efforts to produce a great pile of books, if you would like to know how they made the transition to, as William Gay said, “clocking in at the culture factory,” then this is the book you’ve been waiting for.

Sonny Brewer, Editor

Fairhope, Alabama

Don’t Quit Your Day Job: Acclaimed Authors and the Day Jobs They Quit is available now. You can reserve a signed copy online or call the bookstore 800/601.366.7619. On December 1st, Sonny will be signing and reading from his book. Don’t Quit Your Day Job is also the December selection for our First Editions Club.

Stay tuned for excerpts from the anthology between now and December 1st.

Click here for other blogs written for Don’t Quit Your Day Job

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