“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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