“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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by Kelly Pickerill

Maggie triumphantly paraded her latest review acquisition at the desk last week: she got a copy of Mark Dunn’s new book, Under the Harrow. After she read aloud to us the description (it sounds great: some sort of social experiment where orphans are left to create their own society when the only books available to them are an encyclopedia, a bible, and a complete set of the novels of Charles Dickens), she turned to me and asked, “You’ve read Ella Minnow Pea, right?” I had to admit I hadn’t. “I’ve always meant to,” I said. I know it seems like I say that a lot. But as Mark just hinted at a few entries down, the list of books that we readers and (maybe more so) booksellers want to read is so long, and our stacks can get quite high, and there are always those books that get passed over time and again, waiting to catch our eye and interest when the time is right. Apparently, the time was right for Ella Minnow Pea; the book made it into my carry on for Thanksgiving vacation and I read it in a day.

As I recovered from stuffing myself with stuffing, Dunn swept me up into his “Novel in Letters” which features a fictional island people who revere a man named Nollop, the supposed author of the pangram sentence (one that uses every letter in an alphabet) “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” When the story opens, the “Z” in the phrase has just fallen off the statue of the island’s namesake, and the leaders of the community believe it’s a sign: no more Zs may be spoken or written. As other letters fall from the monument, more letters (and thus more words) are stricken from the islanders’ (and the book’s) vocabulary, until Ella decides that disaster is definitely imminent if something isn’t done. The best part about reading this book was getting a sense of the tedious work it must have been for Dunn to write during increasingly restrictive conditions. Dunn goes 165 pages, letters steadily dropping out of use, until he cannot write any word that contains B, C, D, F, J, K, Q, U, V, or Z, before he allows the characters to communicate using homophones and misspellings (“ph” for “f”). Prior to that point, Dunn just masterfully avoids words, which in most cases is undetectable. Brilliant. Or should I say, more acceptably to Nollop, astonishing.

I’m glad the stars aligned or the fates conspired or simply that two events — the arrival of a new book combined with my pushy coworker’s insistence (love you, Maggie) — coincided to put Dunn’s book in my path. Now I can’t wait to read his new one.