Fragments From Floyd

Update: This is a more recent version than that posted Monday Morning. Current time, 6:00 Monday evening. Thanks for suggestions. Keep'em coming!
Editorial Department
XYZ Books of Erewhon
Erewhon NT, 20000

Dear Editors:

My wife and I march to the sound of a drummer that our boomer, post-child-rearing cohorts cannot hear. Our friends saw in their newly-empty nests the freedom to travel widely and return home to familiar and comfortable suburban neighborhoods. We set our hopes on finding an imagined home place in very rural Virginia where the living wasn’t necessarily easy. We cared less about seeing the world than finding home, finally, in our own forest and fields. And we were willing to make sacrifices to find it.

Our gamble began with good fortune when I found a job as the only physical therapist in the tiny town of Floyd, in Floyd County, Virginia—a county so unhurried that to this day it has but a single traffic light. I pitched camp here alone a year ahead of my wife, living in the clouds in a small cabin off the Blue Ridge Parkway (described in part in “Eagle Wings” in the writing sample). Two years later we found the place we had dreamed of: eighty acres of mountain land and a redeemable century old farmhouse with his-and-hers outhouses. But as some things fell together in our quest for bucolic bliss, others fell apart. I lost my job in physical therapy, and tossed the profession in after it.

Suddenly I was waking up every day to the freedom of empty time here in the wilderness without purpose as my wife left in the dark to win the bread. Writing became a way of making sense of this new geography of rural midlife crisis. And before long, it seemed I was leading field trips again, describing to my web-log readers what day to day life looks and feels like from our quiet creek valley. Our home on Goose Creek is a destination toward which I had been moving for almost thirty years. The book that describes getting here—but especially being here—is called Fragments: Field Notes from an Appalachian Year.

The overall length of the nature-memoir will consist of some fifty-five thousand words. The core of the book (which is completed) contains approximately eighty descriptive and contemplative vignettes (averaging around five hundred words each) that carry the reader through the seasons, starting in summer when my uncertain adventure began. The introduction and threads of narrative between sections will flesh out the larger story to bring the reader along as we move through new terrain during this surprise sabbatical at home in the Blue Ridge.

The book shares some elements with several related works. Comparable seasonally organized natural histories and personal narratives include A Country Year, Sue Hubbell’s seasonal autobiography which gives an account of her solitary life alone among her beehives, exalting everyday wonders and the economies of nature to a place of high praise. Bernd Heinrich spins descriptive vignettes from his Year in the Maine Woods living in harmony with nature when “the subtle matters and the spectacular distracts.” In Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden, Eleanor Perenyi uses garden stories to draw lessons for daily living. Annie Dillard sees the ordinary with new eyes in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I count myself fortunate to have seen her “tree with the lights in it” in my own wanderings and regard nature as Dillard does with a mystical reverence and awe. Fragments: Field Notes shares with all these books the invitation for the reader to slow down and comprehend the extraordinary world we can know through all the senses fully engaged.

Ten of my essays have been accepted for broadcast on our local NPR affiliate in Roanoke, Virginia. One of my stories appeared in the national magazine, PetLife, and another is scheduled for inclusion in a future issue of the Birmingham Arts Journal. I am co-founder of the online Ecotone site where “people write about place”. My photojournal weblog, Fragments from Floyd (http://fragmentsfromfloyd.com) is visited each week by a thousand writers and readers who are representative of the potential buyers of the book that I offer. They come from urban places across the US and the world, curious to see what life is like in our Blue Ridge home place.

Fragments: Field Notes is an unpretentious and genuine testament of one man’s wonder of the world, and it is a world that readers already enjoy sharing. The book provides a variegated and pleasantly unpredictable mixture of topics and voices from day to day— from nostalgic narrative to self-mocking wry humor to highly sensory and evocative poetic prose. The scope of the non-fiction writing and the story that it tells will attract readers who enjoy the rich detail of country living/ It will also be of interest to those who are considering the risks and the pleasures of rural retirement in out-of-the-way places, and the southern Appalachians in particular. And it will represent hope to those living in the cities who long some day to break free of hurry and urban stresses that suck the tranquility and beauty from their days.

I am a veteran of twelve years of classroom and field experience as a biologist/naturalist/teacher, then as many years as a caregiver as physical therapist. My breadth of experience infuses the book with unique insights, humor and sensitivity. While I tend the farm and serve as domestic engineer and writer-in-residence, my wife works as a hospital pharmacist in nearby Blacksburg, Virginia. Our two grown children live in South Dakota and British Columbia, having fallen rather far from the tree.

The short writing sample included here captures only a brief glimpse of the book. Also included is a small sample from my collection of digital images depicting details from our little domain that may be used to enhance the visual appeal and authenticity of the book.

I would like XYZ Press to consider publishing this book. Please find a stamped, self-addressed mailer for returning the manuscript to me as well as an envelope for corresponding with me by regular mail. I look forward to hearing your response to the manuscript.

Sincerely,

Frederick B. First, Jr.