Louis Rubin: Writer Turned Publisher

You're a writer. You teach writing. You're a friend to writers and an encourager of writers. We've had a long career doing editing work. Now you're involved in publishing. You've found it a publishing company here in Chapel Hill. And you're also very actively involved into very passionate avocations, fishing and baseball, both of which you've written about I think. I came to Chapel, came to the University here in 1967. I've been teaching since 1948. The thing that I've written most about it's been the literature of the South and its relationship to the history and to the general life in the South is just something that's always fascinated me and I've just written about it and continued to write about it. This is all supposed

to be passed and everything. And yet if you think of what the standard themes and so forth in Southern literature have been, just ask yourself how many of them are exemplified in Walker Pressies novels. For example, class, the role, the sense of role, the sense of the aristocracy, the sense of the historical past and the comparison with the past, the notion of decline and fall. Walker Pressies is full of this. And as far as the minute observation of people and social types, he's better at that than any writer I know. He can exactly place a person socially and exactly where that person belongs socially and everything. Well now, how can you do this? He does this because he is very much involved in this supposedly gone, disappeared community, but isn't supposed to exist anymore in the modern world. And yet Walker Pressies can read the signs beautifully. And I think he's a perfect example of just

what he says isn't so, which is that this thing goes on. One of the very best discussions of some of these topics you touched on here is an essay of yours that's in your last book of essays, Gallery of Southerners, the final essay in the book called The Bow Weevil, The Iron Horse in the End of the Line, in which you discuss your experience as a boy growing up in Charleston with a small gas electric train called The Bow Weevil. I've always thought of that little train as an emblem of change. Seeing it as a child, seeing it various stages in my life, seeing the station where it used to be and where it's gone. When I was a child, I used to see it as a web going out, it was leaving. I used

to wish I could get on the train and ride it, you see. And I never did. I tried to do it once when I was about 25 or 26 and had been taken off two months before. That is, there was still a train running, but it was no longer that little coach. Using that, I just tried to play along with the idea of change and time and the way that we look on those things as loss. And yet, we are what we are in. Our identity comes out of the way that we see our lives in time. And the perspective of looking back, but not from easy nostalgia, but exploring the relationship of the past to the present is the literary dimension that I think is so important in Southern literature. I happened to be driving from Charleston to Chapel Hill, and I was come through Hamlet, North Carolina, which is where that little train went. So I went there and I had gone there once. I met a

point of going there and taking that train at the time that they had just taken the little entrance off. And that was in the early 1950s. So, well, I happened to be driving through there. It was about dinner time, and I decided I would go have lunch at that little cafeteria if it was still there downtown. It was only a couple of blocks out of the way. And I drove there. And of course, there was the old station, just like it was, with the little tower and everything. Of course, there were very few passenger strangers anymore, coming through there, but the station was a couple of them, in fact, whereas when I, first time I'd seen that, was doing the war, when I was going through there on troop trains, it was always crowded and everything. And then I went over to the little railroad, the little railroad hotel, and went into the dining room. Well, I had once had breakfast the day that I'd come down there. I think it was about 1950 or 51. This was, let's say 1974, I don't know. And it seemed exactly the same almost. People's is a hot day, and the fans were droning, and, you know, the people sitting around and

talking, and kept as one thing, it struck me. There were four girls seated in the booth across the way, and one of them was black. And I realized, now, 25 years ago, that would have been impossible. Those, those girls could not have had lunch together. And I just thought of how much effort, and rhetoric, and talk, and money, and wasted energy, and hatred, and all such a thing had gone into the attempt to keep those girls from having lunch together. And yet, they were, they were having lunch together, and it hadn't changed. It was still that railroad station, this little southern town, and that, but there was this black girl. And it seemed to me, all right, can I looking back at the past and feeling, well, isn't it, the automatic feeling that I'd have, at the station, by it deserted in note frames, and thinking of it, all right, if in the, the true little train, no, no long since gone, symbolically, the price, if the price of having that girl, that black girl, be able to sit

and have lunch with the others, and all that matter, but the end of racial tensions and sort of things in the, so, symbolically, that was a price, the price had to be paid for that, was the, was the end of that little train, and the railroad, in other words, time. I couldn't kick at the price, and that's the point. That's, that's the way things are. Well, your teaching is also involved, as we said, teaching a writing, and you have taught some writers who have gone on to be very successful writers. I think one of your earliest students was John Barth. That's right. It's been downhill ever since. Now, he was a student in my, very strong, very creative writing class of John's happens. I don't look at taught him anything. I might have encouraged him a little. I've had quite

a few good writing students, and I still have a few good writing students. I don't teach, I want to make this plain though. I don't teach creative writing and all that I make professional writers. I couldn't, I mean, that's a pretty inefficient way to do it. If you get an occasional Lee Smith or Annie Dillard or John Barth or somebody like that, that's fine, but considering how many students you teach and how few of them become professional writers, that wouldn't seem to be a very economical expenditure of time, but I don't think that's the point of teaching creative writing. I think that it's good for people at a certain stage in their lives to be able to use language to put fiction and poetry together, and understand who they are, and whether they go on and write or not is at least of it. You have been very much involved in writing and all of its aspects from the creative side to the publishing side and the editing side, an experience of several decades I suppose

at this point. That experience must have led somehow to your desire to sort of take matters into your own hands and start your own publishing company. What made you think you could do it? Well, in late December of 1981, I was at New York for the Modern Language Association meetings, and I was taking part in a program on contemporary Southern writing, and we got to talking on the program. How difficult it was for a young writer to get published, a good young writer these days, fiction being so hard to sell, and Roger, you know that as a book trail, just how difficult that is. And because of the publishing situation in New York in particular, well, it's very difficult for a publishing who has to come

out on a novel, unless they can sell 10,000, 12,000 copies anyway. And with all the mergers in the conglomerates and everything else and so forth has gone on in publishing, the ability of a publishing house to do what the big trade publishing houses had done for so many years, which was to take a good young writer who was promising. And to publish two or three books by that writer knowing they're going to lose money on those books, but because it was simple because they thought it was their duty to nurture literature, and also because they thought the wrong one would come out. Well, this is increasingly hard to do anymore. And unless they think they can sell that writer's novel, let's say the movies, or the TV, or at least the book clubs, or at least the paperbacks, they can't take a chance. And this is where things have gotten. I was just thinking who would publish some of my best writers now, best students now, who would publish John Barth's first novel, The Floating Opera?

I'm not sure they could get published now. That's why I got thinking, well, why don't I publish novels? Well, obviously in order to do this, you've got to publish nonfiction to pay for the novels. And that's how this thing started. I mean, I'm again thinking about it on the train going back from New York, and I took the train back, you see. I hate to go out on the plane in New York and December because you're never going to get out of it now. And so this thing started, and I was thinking just in terms of a little regional house. But as you know, this is the idea sort of mushroom, does it were? And now we have a small national publishing house on our hands. We can only publish one fiction title, a list right now. And I hope this will change. But actually, in terms of this list, those books that we're publishing, we have this one fiction title. And if we sell every copy of the first printing of that book, we'll still lose a little money on it. But I'm not saying that I'm just publishing the nonfiction in order to publish a fiction

because that's not true. I enjoy the nonfiction. And I think it's good. But the fiction in order to really love, yeah. Well, you must realize that a lot of well-intentioned people and even intelligent people have had the notion to do this kind of thing in the past. But what's made the difference in your situation that's allowed you to actually bring this about to really make it into a reality? Perhaps you saw that special report in publishers weekly back in the fall of 82 about what's going on in publishing. The small houses are the ones that are able to make money, simply because they don't have this enormous overhead and they can push their books. And they don't have to keep a big staff occupied all the time. And I also thought that, all right, I'm going to get involved in a publishing house. The thing to do is to do it right to get professional people involved in all levels and really sell books because if you can't sell the books, there's no point in publishing the books. So I went in and I will say, the one thing I'm very proud of is

I did go out and get the right people to help me. Chapel Hill is full of a lot of people. Chapel Hill was a perfect place for that. I mean, let's George Scheer, for example, who's, you know, one of the top book people in the country right here in Chapel Hill. Well, I went after George and I got him and it took some getting too, let me tell you. But it worked. So George was able to advise you on the more practical aspects. That's right. And George was also able to do for us what was extremely difficult. And I'm not next to impossible to do is because his own sales firm is a good firm. He was able to line us up similar firms throughout the country. So that we are able and we can count on getting our books into bookstores, which is, as you know, is the hard thing. Yeah. The general public is not really aware of what goes on between the publishing of a book and how they show up in bookstores. I don't think most people stop to think that

there's a very involved and interesting process that goes on there. And it's mastering that part of it, the distribution and production and economics part of it that you really had to go out and get to help with people like George Scheer and George Kecher. George Kecher. Right here in Chapel Hill, right over in Chatham County with one of the finest book designers in the country. It's George Kechergis. And I got Joyce in on the thing very early. And so whatever my worries, maybe with this publishing house, there's certainly not going to be that our books are not going to look good and are not going to be done well. I mean, it couldn't be done better. It was part of the evolution of meeting people, the thing that changed your mind from doing a small regional press to being a small national press. It's the way the books developed, the response to the books, the sales organization that began developing to market those books. And the people that got interested in the kind of books. And then, as you know, the real coup was finding that we could publish Vermont

Roisters by Memoirs, my own country's time. Now Vermont, writing for the Wall Street Journal, and he was out of the journal for so many years, he has a wide, really ship all over the country. And we just didn't, we couldn't publish that book on a regional basis. It was in the point we wouldn't want to. And then in our books, all of our books, if you think about it, and the first list of books, when we were only publishing five, they all have a regional identity. But that's not the thing that's important about it. You don't think about it. The train wreck book, for example, which a marvelous book. Almost all those train wrecks took place in the Appalachian Mountains. Right. Now this is a book called Scalded a Death By The Stone, which is stories and photographs and songs on train wrecks in the Appalachians. And the train wrecks that were made in the songs. Well, it isn't that there were more train wrecks in the Appalachians than anywhere

else in the country, because they weren't. Actually, there were more train wrecks in New York and Pennsylvania. They just didn't sing about the song. That's what they wrote the song about. And so forth and so on. Each one of these books has a regional identity. And yet, that's not what's important about it. And I think that's what I've always felt that the South that was needed in the South, that is a genuine national, national press, which still was Southern, but not in that restrictive kind of way. Right. Well, maybe we should back up a minute. We've gotten a little bit ahead of ourselves. We should say that the name of this publishing company is Al Gaunquan. Yes, we compile lists of literally hundreds of names. And then the question was, we started thinning them out, and then you had to check and make sure they weren't used, and some of the very best ones that we came up with already were already in use. Well, getting back to Vermont Roister, it was actually part of his attraction to this

publishing house had to do with its smallness in a way, did it not. Yes, Vermont could have published his book in New York, but he found two things. He found one that most of the New York houses wanted to make him, wanted him to make it more controversial, more so than he wanted it to be. And also, as he said, frankly, he said, once he was satisfied that we had the capitalization, and we had the sales force, and we had the proper design and things like that, that he would really rather be, you know, number one on our list, the number 25 on McMillan, or something like that. And so anyway, I'm glad he thought so. That entails with it, of course, the wonderful personal attention that when you think of the traditional history of publishing that authors always got, that people were publishing them because they believed in them, because I liked what was going on, and the editors were able to spend time with the author, and the author was even able to meet the person

doing the design and so on. Right, precisely. Only place that it can happen now is in the small price. That's right, because unless you happen to be a star, if you've got an advertising budget for a book, let's say a $50,000, that seems like a lot of money. Now, now to get your book into the big book chains, they're going to want you to have a certain amount of advertising budget. All right. And I can touch your book. That's right. So all right. So the money that, let's say that publishing house A in New York can devote to advertising, almost all that money is going to be pushed under these blockbuster books, as I call them. And the other books are going to have to make their own way. And that makes it very rough for the other books. They're caught in that business, and it's a trap that they're caught in. And I think that the rise of a small publishing as a viable economic venture is probably going to help that in the long run. Well, one of the problems with the so-called

blockbuster complex is that all the advertising and all the money that goes into it is virtually never realized in the book store sales of the book. It comes from subsidiary rights, as we were talking about earlier. And now, a lot of the subsidiary rights money seems to be drying up so that publishers are taking a bath on some of these so-called blockbusters. And a lot of the big publishers are in trouble as a result of it. Well, you say you're going to do five books. Just briefly, what are the other books on the list? The one biomefiction is a marvelous book called Passing Through A Fiction, because by Leon Driscoll in Kentucky, it's a series of related stories, continuing stories about a family, very zany family, rural Kentucky family. It's sort of a Southern book, and yet it's very new. I mean, it's not the old stereotype Southern business at all, but it's still deeply

Southern in that sense. It's very extremely funny. And I think Driscoll did a marvelous job with this book. Well, it's his first book of fiction, yeah. And then we have a book called When the Water Smokes, Peltier Creek Chronicle by Chronicle that is by Bob Simpson. He is a writer down in Moherde City, and a writer, he's a naturalist and a writer about the water and so forth and so on. And I had always admired the weekly pieces he did in the Rolling News and Observer. It's what's Sunday, it's what's section. Beautiful, written things, not, you know, not the usual journalism at all. And so when we came up with this idea, I wrote him and asked if he was interested in developing and working up a book, and he was, and he's built a beautiful book. It's a marvelous book. It's about a year on the water. And you follow it and it follows around the razor, an old boat being sunk

in a stone. And they buy the book for $300 and raise it and refurbish it and then use it all around through the waters. And finally, at the end of the year, they go down, all the way down in the coastal waterway to Florida. And it's a great deal of natural observation and marvelous things. And they're like a pet order, a baby order that took up with them. They had to teach you how to fish and things like that. And Simpson's a beautiful writer. So that book, we think, is very good. And then the railroad book, Scalded Death by the Steam in which the author, Katie Letcher-Lyle, and Lexington, Virginia, who's formed a student of mine years back, she's written five or six straight successful children, young adult novels. And she likes to sing music, you know. And I used to remember hearing her sing the record of C&O number five and things like that. So I proposed to her that she do this book in which she takes some of the famous train wrecks that made songs, C&O number five.

And of course, one of the best moments is the record, the old 97. Right, go back and find out the actual history of what that wreck was all about and give a detailed account of that and then tell a little about the music and discuss the way in which the song is either true or untrue to the facts of the wreck. Well, once she got going on that, there was just no holding her. I mean, she ran down the wreck. She ran on eyewitnesses to wrecks that happened 75 years ago and families and things like that and then crabble amount of stuff. And it's come out, it's just fascinating. She turned up photographs. It's never been published of all these wrecks. And of course, the thing is filled with gore and things like that. And it should satisfy several appetites. That's right. Southern Gothic, in a sense. That's right. The other book is another very interesting book. Again, by a former student of mine, and now with Sylvia Wilkinson, she was a graduate student at Holland's College years ago. Sylvia's always been crazy about automobiles. And very much so, she could

take them apart and put them back together. And she's been involved in sports car racing, Formula One racing, I think, as far as Formula A, I forget. I mean, she's been the time of a Paul Newman's Camman theme. And she's been very much involved in that. Well, she grew up right here in Durham. And she's always been interested in the stock car, as you see. Well, what I asked you to do was to go back and find the people who were the pioneers in stock car racing. And you know, stock car racing has evolved over the last 30 years from a little backwards thing into this enormous industry with them. They have 150,000 people turned up for a race in Ash and Charlotte. Charlotte, you know, something like that. Well, those people, you know, most of us two people in their 50s and 40s and 50s and 60s. And

so Sylvia went and found these people. And most of them are very high up in the racing business now, like Bill France, who runs NASCAR. And that kind of person. And she found these people, interviewed them, wore the interview into first-pressure narratives. It's wore them together. You see such a series of first-pressure narratives. Oh, history. Something about the early days of stock car racing. And it's just, and we've got a great collection of photographs, more than 100, I'm going to go with it. And anybody that has that sense of that period in the south, it's interesting if you're interested in stock car racing, but also if you're just interested in the culture, because that is a whole culture. Because I'm biased, but I think it's marvelous stuff. That book, by the way, is called Dirt Tracks to Glory. And we should note that those books were going to start showing up in the bookstores in September and October of this year. Well, somebody else who's going

to show up in the bookstores in September, October of this year, is Lewis Rubin, who's a number. Book is this for you at this point? Well, I don't know. Some are 33, 34, a nice round number. Well, this book is called The Even Tempered Angler. And a name obviously evocative of a couple of other books about music and fishing that we might think of. In this book, you're making a case for the aesthetic superiority of one of your great passions. Yes, this is a book in defense of bottom fishing. And the benefit of the uninitiated bottom fishing is... Well, bottom fishing is when you get out in the boat and you

anchor the boat, whether it's going to be fish, preferably on saltwater. And you put some bait on your line and you lower it to the bottom and you wait. And the fish come to you. And that is to me... Possibly the homeliest form of fishing. In fact, my great-grandfather told me one time that you can tell a fisherman by how deep his hook goes into the water. The lower the hook, the lower the class of fishermen. That's right. He was a truck fisherman. A dry filament, of course. Well, this is a book I just had a lot of fun. But in the middle of the winter of the full last, I just decided I started writing a little essay with the intention of being humorous and developing this little book, which is just sort of a disquisition, tongue-in-cheek on the superiority of this particular kind of fishing for the philosophical form of fishing to all the other kinds. And each kind of fisherman, you see, has a certain kind of mystique. And of course, the truck fisherman, they're the worst of all. The mystique and the less fish.

That's right. And they do more reading about fishing, you see. And the reason they read about the fish is the most of the time they can't fish. So they might as well. That's right. So they work up enthusiasm for reading. Well, one of the interesting things that you do in the book is to create a kind of rogues gallery of types of fishermen, the trout fisherman and the deep sea fisherman and the bass fisherman and other kinds of sports fishermen, all of whom, according to you, exhibit somewhat similar characteristics. And as you say about bottom fishing, bottom fishing is not just a sport. It's a way of looking at the world. And presumably, according to that notion, these other types of fishing are other ways less interesting, presumably, of looking at the world.

I just sort of took off, you know, I didn't intend to write a book, but the next thing I knew, I'd done it. I think I wrote it in about four weeks. I don't know. That doesn't count revision. Well, it's a beautiful piece of writing. And it is very thoughtful in many places, though there's high humor in it as well. And it's the kind of book that becomes a small little cult classic, I think. That's the destiny for a book like this. I hope it does, and I hope the cult's not too small.