My Old Alabama Family Stories

While I was writing those early novels to little acclaim and quite a bit of frustration, I was also writing short stories. I had in the back of my mind a collection of some sort. This was in the “early oughts” of the new century, and I had been a writer-in-residence at NC’s Peace College under the famous Doris Betts’ guiding hand. She encouraged both long and short fiction, so I forged ahead with both hands.

Anyway, I sent one short piece to Mike Aloisi, who publishes largely horror stuff, as I recall, but who wanted something new. I was more than pleased to get his reply that he’d accepted the story. However, I’d mentioned in my letter to him that the story was meant to be part of a collection. He inquired about the collection, and I told him I had maybe a half dozen written. “When do you think you’ll have the whole collection?” he asked. Gee, wow, he’s interested in a collection? “Um, maybe 6 months,” I replied. I finished it, he accepted it, entitled Sam’s Place – Stories, and he subsequently published the whole shebang.

About what? you ask. My father’s family were poor dirt farmers in middle Alabama prior to the Civil War, and they subsequently moved to northwest Louisiana, where they became struggling cotton farmers. My strategy in writing the collection was to transplant them back to Alabama (yes, there have been not a few wild and wooly characters in my family.)

Secondly I turned the social tables upside down. Meaning the (more or less) good, honest people in the stories were drifters, sometimes-grifters and patrons of the local pool hall. The completely dishonest ones were the city fathers, the local police and the”reputable” business owners. This was a trope of postmodernism that America got right, the rest of the U.S.’s version of it little more than self-indulgence. Too, it has been, in the scope of my poor, fairly uneducated family’s existence, the way of life in rural Alabama and Louisiana. That is, the store owners, police, et al, took all the advantage of these hardworking folk as they could manage.

Mike also had a book-on-tape, or whatever it’s now called, published of the book. I promoted the whole thing heavily and it sold fairly well, but I doubt Mike made his money back. I did have a book trailer video made myself. Don’t know if it helped sales, but I enjoyed the process.

But that wasn’t the end of my association with Mike and his thriving little publishing company. That’s coming up in the next post.