I was born in 1965 in Everett, Washington to parents too young. I was born small but still too large for my mother and my birth was hard on her. My father, side-by-side with his father, worked the freezers of a local dairy company and to this day I feel nostalgic when I drive by a dairy factory. In the end, my parents were equal to the task of raising me and raising me well but the doing of it made inroads into them, into their lives, that scoured away what joys in being young they might otherwise have known. They came home from work tired and went to bed tired and woke in the morning tired still. I remember trailers and mobile homes and tiny apartments but little in the way of conversation or music. I remember quiet and I remember books.
By the time I was old enough to read, I felt old enough to write. I spent weekends that became weeks that, at least once, stretched to months, with my paternal grandparents where my grandmother harbored dreams of writing romance novels. I remember the books from her correspondence courses and her old typewriter that she let me practice on. My earliest memory of writing is of sitting at that typewriter tapping out short stories of Twilight Zone episodes I had watched on my grandparents’ black and white television.
At some point, I came across a picture of Hemingway at his desk. He was still in the prime of his prime, sitting in profile with his fingers upon the keys of his typewriter—you couldn’t even see the desk itself, but you just knew it was there and that it had to be either grand or just some plain table. I kept that picture in my pocket for a long time and the first birthday gift I ever remember asking for was a desk like Hemingway’s, but I never found one.
I fell in love at 20 and at 24 my heart was broken. At 25 I met the great love of my life and married her and, somewhere along the line, she finally convinced me to give up the dreary, desperate world of restaurant work to write since that was all I wanted to do. I wrote a terrible novel and then another. I wrote a few short stories that were alright and that were published and I was paid for one of them and began to feel like a real writer. I began thinking of an old man and his dog by the sea and would tell my wife stories about him before sleep.
To support us, my wife remained with restaurant work I’d abandoned and I would drive her home every night after closing. While waiting for her, I’d sit and drink coffee and I’d often see a man sitting alone in a booth with his own books. He was architect and he was the loneliest man I’ve ever known. One night, apropos of nothing, he started talking about the audacity of General Lee dividing his army in the face of the enemy at Chancellorsville. I knew nothing at all of the Civil War and he shamed me for it asking why I didn’t know the first thing about my own country. So I picked up a general history and then another and a third and then gathered books on specific battles. The old man who I’d tell my wife stories of began to take better shape, gaining a history and, finally, a name. After a summer of reading, I sat down and began to describe Abel’s shack and his dog, his rifle and his crippled arm. Slowly, the book accreted detail to itself.
I worked steadily, producing a draft and then another. I managed two trips back east to visit the battlefields for research on Abel’s war and drew on what was outside my window for his northwest world. Sometime after high school, my father introduced me to the outdoors and together we hiked in the Cascades and the Olympics and on the wild north coast of Washington State. Something stirred within me, out in the wilderness, something in the breeze and the green and the moss and the stones resonated within me. I took trips alone into the backcountry where the stars were nothing like the stars over town and the darkness seemed somehow more absolute. I twice hiked the Wonderland Trail, which circles Mount Rainier, and came off the trail once at a high place and almost died for it. On a solo hike above Mowich Lake on Rainier, a black bear surprised me as I was eating a ham sandwich and I’ve seen coyotes slinking through the blasted fields around the ruins of Mount St. Helens. And as I walked in these places, seeing these things, I was crafting sentences and paragraphs and pages. Soon enough, the manuscript gained a title, Wilderness, and Abel Truman found a home amidst the sea stacks and weird rocks of Washington’s north coast.
But then I got sick. For weeks I barely left the house and for months I wrote nothing at all. I’d had no real success for years of work. I put the book away because what faith I’d had in it and in myself was lost and they were lost a long time. I was lost a long time. Eventually, I stumbled across a call for manuscripts for a magazine dedicated to Lincoln’s literary essence and recalled I’d once had a single paragraph in Wilderness (long since stripped out) where Abel watched the lonesome funeral train pass by in the distance. Finding the fragment, I rewrote it, researching the train’s route and making a story of Abel encountering it and, just like that, Abel came back to me. The writing was easy and it felt good; my fingers felt good doing it and my health improved. I sent the story in and it was accepted right away which gave me the confidence I needed to give Wilderness a final rewrite and sent it out into the world.
But I’m still looking for the right desk.
-Lance Weller
Join us Wednesday at 5:00 for a signing and reading to follow at 5:30 with Lance Weller. Wilderness is one of our favorite books of the year and is our September pick for First Editions Club.
Wilderness is published by Bloomsbury and signed first editions will be available at Lemuria for $25.
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When I heard 
How Black Mississippi Midwives Brought Me Home Again
In my own home Daddy was in charge of the checkbook, continually adding and subtracting, making sure the bottom line balanced to the penny. Mother, on the other hand, was in charge of the picture box, a tattered Keds shoebox stuffed full of family photos that spanned five generations. I’d pluck them at random and say, “Tell this one, Momma.”
An uncle killed in Korea, then a picture of his son — a near duplicate – with his own boy; depression-era dirt-farm poverty, then the first family automobile, shiny new; and skeletal, half-starved girls who later show up beautiful and buxom, with beauty parlor perms. There was direction to our story and it leaned toward hope. No single event was so burdensome or shameful that it could not be redeemed. The women who preserved my family’s history taught me early the truth in that old saying, “facts can explain us, but only story can save us.”
My breakthrough came while I was doing research in the oral history library at USM and happened to strike up a conversation with the department head, a scholar in Southern gender studies. I mentioned that I had come across many stories midwives until the 1940’s, when public health services began replacing them. I guess she noticed the dismissive tone in my voice. I may have even referred to them as granny doctors.
She firmly let me know I had missed the point. “You’re talking about black women at a time when they had less authority in their lives than anyone. Many were illiterate. When one chose to be a midwife, it was a challenge to the power structure, to the established order of being subservient not only to whites, but to black men as well. The vocation took them out of the home, away from their families and out of the domestic control of their husbands, and into the homes of other men, at all times of day and night. How were they to obtain consent for such an undertaking? Black women had no voice. To do this under their own authority would be futile. But to say, ‘God told me to do it,’ was a way of taking the decision out of the hands of those who normally regulated their lives. It was not sentimental to say God chose you. It was defiant.”
As for those superstitious practices like burying the placenta or putting a knife under the bed to “cut the pain”, she challenged me to look deeper for cultural explanations. “The midwives tended not only to the physical wellbeing of the woman, but to her place in the community, and in a larger sense, to the soul of her people. For four hundred years, the message of slavery was that a black man belonged wherever a white man told him. He could be sold the next day. Or his children. During Jim Crow, with sharecropping, black families couldn’t be sure if they would be in the same place year-by-year. Imagine a midwife, who takes the placenta and buries it, emphasizing the message, or perhaps the prayer, that this child belongs in the world, in a greater web of community, with his people. That he indeed has a place. Can you imagine the power of that?”
During my research I learned that during and after slavery these women tended to the soul and heart of the community. The slave master and the architects of Jim Crow derived their power by reinforcing the belief that God and scripture placed African Americans on the lowest rung of humanity. By treating their patients as deserving children of an inclusive God, the midwives subverted the message. They proved to young black girls that women could occupy powerful roles in the community. To black mothers that they were worthy of admiration and respect. These midwives were part of a resistance on whose shoulders King, Parks and Malcolm X stood.
I was privileged to interview several elderly women who had “caught” thousands of children in their communities. Over their lives, they had bonded communities together with a common sense of history, pride, and belonging. Being with them brought me closer to my own grandmother.
However, beyond these general comparisons any references to similarities between the two schools must be approached very delicately. Perhaps the best way to express the feelings the students at each of these fine institutions have for one another is to be candid. As many communication experts, psychologists and therapists recommend, openness, honesty and candor can often lead to better understanding between two parties whose opinions differ on certain topics. Or, as expressed in a more colloquial style, “Just put the hay down where the goats can get it.” So here goes; the Wildcats of Pearl River and the Bulldogs of Gulf Coast cannot stand each other. Their level of dislike soars to even higher altitudes when the two schools meet on the gridiron.