I have now written eleven shelf-inches of books. About one sixth of a Stephen King.
The photo above was taken at one o’clock in the afternoon of Friday, July 21. A shelf with one copy of all the stuff I’ve written in bookish format, including three short-story compilations. It’s a sort of good-luck charm, a gumption talisman. “I’ve done it before…”
The one near the left side, the gray one called Foreman, that’s the new one. Came in on Monday. I started reading it last night, always a fascinating feeling. It’s super familiar, of course, since I lived with it for seven months while I was writing it. But it feels really different as a solid, brickish object, and going through it from the beginning starts to read like it’s (finally) something external to me. I read that first chapter last night, and I thought, “If John McPhee wrote fiction, this is what it would be like.”
For Angie Torvala, the only woman road foreman in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, some things never change. Snow. Broken equipment. Road complaints.
But in the midst of that stability, some things do change.
Her daughter Esther, about to leave for college. A world that Angie never knew.
Her summer boyfriend Grant. Maybe around no longer, maybe becoming something more.
And the innumerable, quiet tragedies that an isolated winter can bring.
Want one? Let me know.
Herb Childress 