The Importance of Literacy in My Life, and Yours

by Wiley Cash

I grew up in a middle-class neighborhood called Forest Brook in Gastonia, North Carolina. Forest Brook was everything a kid could want in a neighborhood; it was full of both forests and brooks, and even now when I whisper the name, I feel just as much mystery and excitement as I did when I was ten years old. My younger brother and I spent our childhoods riding our bikes on dirt paths, wading through creeks, climbing up trees, and performing all the dangerous feats boys attempt when they grow up in a neighborhood like ours. Even though we spent a lot of time playing outside, we spent just as much time reading and being read to by our mom.

My parents’ second story bedroom windows looked out over an expanse of field behind our house. Dense woods bordered the field on either side. At that time, if you would’ve walked through the field for about two miles you would’ve eventually found yourself in a nice, upper-class neighborhood with a country club where my brother and I would eventually work as lifeguards. Just past the golf course that ringed the club was a tiny municipal airport with a beacon light that could be seen from my parents’ bedroom windows.

At night, after we’d taken our baths and before we’d said our prayers, my brother and I would sit in our mom’s lap in an old wicker rocking chair while she read to us. This ritual probably started when I was around three years old, and I would guess that I climbed down out of that rocking chair for the last time when I was six – only because I was too big to be rocked without my feet touching the floor, not because I no longer wanted my mom to read to me. After that I’d sit on my parents’ bed and listen while my mom read out loud and rocked my brother, who would climb down from that chair for the final time just a few years after me and join me on the bed, our mom still in the rocker, reading to us.

Those are very comforting memories: the sound of my mother’s voice close to my ear while she rocked me when I was small or drifting across the room to where I sat on the bed once I was older; the smell of Dial soap on my clean skin and the scent of the summer-warmed window panes as they cooled against the night air; the sound of chirping crickets lifting from the field behind our house. I remember these things as if they still take place each night; in my mind, maybe they do. I also have a clear memory of staring out the window and watching the beacon light at the airport as it revolved atop the tower, its beam strafing the field behind our house with a faint glow before disappearing, only to reappear seconds later. The beacon light was hypnotic; it lulled me to sleep more than the crickets or the rocking or the sound of my mom’s voice as it grew quieter and quieter while our eyelids grew heavier.

When I was twenty, my parents left our home in Gastonia and moved to the beach at Oak Island, North Carolina, roughly five hours east of where I’d grown up. A bridge connects Oak Island to the mainland, and from the bridge you can see the Caswell Beach lighthouse at the eastern end of the island. Not long after they’d moved, I was crossing the bridge with my mom at dusk; the lighthouse’s beam was just barely visible against the darkening sky. My mom looked at the lighthouse, and then she turned and looked at me.

“Just think,” she said, “whenever you see the lighthouse, you’ll know you’re almost home.”

I knew what she meant, and I appreciated the sentiment, but I knew that I’d never think of Oak Island as home, regardless of its beauty or the beauty of its landmarks. I still think of home as being farther west in North Carolina, at the edge of a little field in a neighborhood dotted with forests and brooks where a beacon light shines through the bedroom window while my mother reads stories to my brother and me.

Whenever I read, I may not always recall the sound of my mother’s voice or the sensation of being rocked, but I always feel the same safety and comfort I felt as a young boy watching the night creep across the field toward our house while the warm breeze rolled through the window screens. I can’t imagine a life that doesn’t include reading.

Even with that said, it’s amazing how often I take my literacy for granted, especially in my day-to-day life at the grocery store where I read labels on products, at the pharmacy where I read warnings on medicine, and at the doctor’s office where I read pamphlets and information about what may or may not be ailing me. I tend to think of my reading life as something I nurture in private, something I use to escape. But I’d be wrong to think of it this way; reading is something I use to survive, and if you’re reading this now, then you use reading to survive as well.

As an author who’s just published my first novel, I’m aware that reading has given me a job. But as an adult who uses my literacy each and every day, I’m aware that reading has given me the ability to thrive in a very complicated world. A 2003 federal study found that one in seven adults don’t possess the literacy skills to read beyond the level required of a children’s picture book. I can’t fathom the fact that so many people have never had the pleasure of opening a novel and escaping their everyday lives. Even more daunting and sobering is the reality that these people’s everyday lives are complicated by illiteracy; tasks that we take for granted – going to the grocery store, buying a plane ticket, writing a letter of complaint – are endlessly and unnecessarily complicated.

My wife and I spent the past few months searching for a way to give back to a reading community that has allowed my dream of being a published author to come true. The answer became clear one day after I opened UNCA Today, the alumni magazine of the University of North Carolina at Asheville. The magazine had profiled Amanda Edwards, a woman who’d been a good friend of mine while we were students at UNCA. Amanda is the Executive Director of the Literacy Council of Buncombe County in Asheville, North Carolina. I read the profile on Amanda, and then I called her about ways my wife and I could contribute to the amazing work the council is doing in Buncombe County. I began researching literacy programs throughout North and South Carolina, and I was shocked by what I discovered. According to the 2003 study, in North Carolina 14% of adults struggle with basic reading skills; the rate climbs slightly to 15% in South Carolina. On the bright side, I discovered that in many cities it costs as little as $25 to buy the materials that will teach an adult how to read. I can’t imagine a better investment in the future of an individual, a community, or a city. Think about what $50 or $100 could do for men and women in your community; then think about what $1,000 could do. With that in mind, my wife and I have decided that we want to raise thousands of dollars for literacy projects and public libraries throughout North and South Carolina, but we need your help.

Beginning on May 14, my publisher, William Morrow, is sending me on a fifteen-city tour throughout North and South Carolina where I’ll be holding events at some of the finest independent bookstores in the country. At almost all of these events, my wife and I will be donating a portion of the proceeds from book sales to local literacy projects and public libraries, and we’ll be encouraging booksellers and the public to give what they can as well. I’m proud that we’ll be partnering with the Literacy Council of Buncombe County, the group that inspired this idea, and I’m especially proud that we’ll be partnering with the Gaston County Public Library in Gastonia, North Carolina, where I received my first library card on the day I turned six.

I can never repay the gift the reading community has given me – for the memories of those nights in my parents’ bedroom when my mom read to us, for the times in my life that were so hectic or horrible that reading was the only thing I could do to escape – but this is a start.

If you’re interested in stopping by one of our events or learning more about the organizations we’re working with, please check out the tour schedule here. If you can’t come to an event, but you’d like to make a donation, please feel free to contact any of these organizations listed here or the literacy council or public library in your community.

In the meantime, read to your kids, read to other people’s kids, and, if you don’t think you’re too old to enjoy it, have someone read to you. It’s up to them whether or not they want to rock you to sleep while they do it.

What To Do When There's Nothing Left To Do

by Wiley Cash

When I was a kid, I watched the movie Space Camp. At the time, I was really interested in science, and, although I’d never even flown in an airplane, I was thinking it would be pretty cool to be an astronaut. To be honest, I was a pretty impressionable kid; I’d read Pistol Pete Maravich’s biography and started spinning the basketball on the tip of my index finger and wearing floppy tube socks. I’d been so blown away by M.C. Hammer’s album Please Hammer, Don't Hurt 'Em that, in the sixth grade, I plagiarized the lyrics to “Pray” for an essay on “how to make the world a better place.” With skills like that, being an astronaut would be simple.

Space Camp is about a group of kids who go to a camp at the Kennedy Space Center. One day, during a simulated launch, the gang is accidentally shot into outer space. Like anyone would be who isn’t old enough to operate a car, the kids face their share of interstellar challenges. One of those challenges has always stayed with me; at the end of the movie, they begin to run out of oxygen, and they have to hold their breath in order to survive. I’ll never forget that one character tells a story about a friend who can hold his breath forever just by thinking about French fries. This scene scared me to death.

I’ve never been one for cardio; I’ve never been a strong swimmer or a strong runner, and I couldn’t imagine being forced to hold my breath, regardless of what was on my mind to distract me. I was wrong; my first novel, A Land More Kind Than Home, sold to William Morrow in December of 2010, and it’s being released tomorrow, a full fourteen months later. I’ve been holding my breath for almost a year and a half. It turns out I do have the lungs to be an astronaut, or I can at least hold my breath long enough to help a young Tate Donovan and an even younger Joaquin Phoenix bring the shuttle home.

Over the past few months, especially the past few weeks, I’ve often felt like I was in a cramped shuttle cabin, growing light-headed and dizzy, blood pumping in my ears. I’ve spent less time thinking about the novel’s actual release and more time thinking about how to prepare for it. I’ve written blog posts, traveled to conventions, sat for interviews, and spent more hours than I care to admit plugged into Facebook and Twitter. For a guy who’s never downloaded a song and has no clue how to use an Ipod, it’s been quite an adjustment. To put it simply: I’m sick of me, and I’m sure other people have gotten pretty sick of me too. But such is the mania of publishing your first novel, or so I’m told by others who have done it.

It makes sense that preparing for it can make you crazy. Shortly after my book sold, one of my best friends and I attended a writing convention in Washington, DC that featured an acres-sized book fair, full of more tables and books and authors than I’d ever seen in my life. It seemed that there were more books than there were people to read them, and I remember asking my friend how I could ever expect my book to find its way into readers’ hands.

We like to think that the job of the writer is to write and that the job of promoting, toting, and devoting others to said writer’s book falls to someone else. For the most part, this is true. I have an absolutely wonderful publicity and marketing team on my side, and everyday I take several moments throughout my day to be conscious of my good fortune, to live in the moment and marvel at the incredible turn my life has taken. But that doesn’t stop me from lying in bed at night, wondering if there is more I can do to get my book out there: more booksellers to meet, more Facebook posts to post, more 140-character comments to tweet.

At least tonight will be my last night having thoughts like these.

My novel will be out tomorrow, and at this moment there is nothing more I can do to make that release any more or any less successful. Already I can feel oxygen coming back into the cabin. We’re going to land safely, and everything is going to go back to normal. And I can finally eat French fries without having to think about holding my breath.

A Land More Kind Than Home: A Love Letter to My Wife

by Wiley Cash

I met my wife in a bar in Wilmington, North Carolina. Once we started dating we wanted to tell people that we’d met in a bookstore or in Sunday school, but the “cute” story that follows made that impossible: the moment I met my wife I told her she looked just like Ashley Simpson; she responded by threatening to smash the bottle she was holding and using the broken glass to stab me. The actor Steve Buscemi had been stabbed in a Wilmington bar just a few years earlier while filming a movie with Vince Vaughn, so I knew she probably meant business. Some people meet and fall in love online or in coffee shops or through friends. I met the love of my life while staring down the wrong end of a Corona bottle. Steve Buscemi’d had Vince Vaughn to help him out on the night he’d been stabbed; I had my younger brother, who, at the time, was standing back and watching the scene with a thrilled look on his face, perhaps hoping he’d soon be telling this story to the cops. He didn’t; he told it at our wedding instead.

Obviously, the woman who would become my wife didn’t stab me. Instead, we spent the rest of the night talking. We talked on the phone the next day too – and the next. We spent a lot of time talking that summer, which means that I spent a lot of time talking and she spent a lot of time listening. One night, we climbed into an empty lifeguard stand on Wrightsville Beach, and
I spent hours and hours telling her all about this book I was going to write about an autistic boy who’s smothered during a healing service in a little church in the mountains of North Carolina. That night, she told me she had no doubt that my unwritten novel would be published. Over the next five years, she never wavered in that belief. I wish I could say that I shared in her
certainty.

I worked on the novel over the next three years and landed an agent in the fall of 2008. My agent and I spent several months revising the novel before submitting it to publishers. The novel began to take a new, more improved shape, and I truly believe the revisions made it a better book. But that didn’t keep a handful of editors from rejecting the manuscript. With each rejection, I returned to the novel in an attempt to improve it based on the editor’s suggestions and criticisms. This went on for several months until it seemed there was nowhere else to go. My agent told me that she was struggling with the revisions I’d made as well, and, if I wanted to part ways, she would certainly understand. I didn’t blame her; I was struggling too. I’d revised, reworked, and reimagined the novel to the point that I no longer recognized it; I couldn’t find the original thread of the story, and I couldn’t fathom the challenge of returning to the manuscript and attempting to untangle the mess I’d made of it.

One day, in February 2009, I mailed a letter to my agent, effectively ending our relationship. I couldn’t help but feel that in ending that relationship, I was also ending my relationship to the novel I’d spent four years writing and rewriting.

That evening, my wife came home from work and found me sitting on the couch; the look on my face must have perfectly portrayed what I was feeling.

“Did you mail the letter?” she asked. I nodded my head yes. Then she asked a question that only a woman like her can ask. “Do you need to go shoot basketball?” I nodded my head yes again. On our way down to the park near our apartment in Bethany, West Virginia, she devised a plan. “You can’t give up,” she said. “You got one agent; you can get another one.” Then, while she and I played HORSE: “Let’s go back to the novel, make a timeline, organize the chapters, and find the story again.” On the walk home: “Give it one more revision, and I’ll read twenty pages at a time and I’ll imagine that I’ve never read it before. This will work.”

By the time we arrived home, the roles we’d played since the summer we met were suddenly reversed; she became the one talking about the novel as if it was a done deal. I became the one listening, saying things like “That does sound good.”

I got back to work that night, and every night after I sat down at my desk and reimagined a novel I thought I’d finished years before. As soon as I’d written twenty pages, I’d print them off and give them to my wife. She’d read them, pen in hand, marking things that worked and things that didn’t and making comments in the margins. We’d lie in bed at night and talk about reorganizing the manuscript, discussing ways to make the opening pages more exciting and interesting.

There are two stories I remember from these nights. In one, my wife is reading a scene in the novel where an elderly woman confronts the charismatic pastor of her church; the scene is pretty intense, and it culminates with the woman down on her knees in front of the church, her hand thrust into a tiny box that houses a rattlesnake, the pastor standing above her calmly whispering threats into her ear. The scene came about two-thirds of the way through the novel, but my wife made an interesting suggestion. “This scene is horrifying,” she said. “Why don’t you use it to open the novel?” I gave it a shot, and those were the pages my new agent used to sell the novel to William Morrow. That night, after making a suggestion that would eventually change our lives, my wife dreamt that she was lying on the floor of a church and someone was standing above her, dangling snakes over her face before draping them across her body. She screamed so loud that I called our neighbors to let them know she was okay.

In another story, my wife and I are reading in bed. She’s reading the manuscript of my novel, and I’m reading a book on Abraham Lincoln. At one point, she lays the pages on the bed in front of her, sighs, and says, “This is amazing! This is how you write a novel!” I’d never felt such pride in
my life. When I looked over, I saw that she’d been reading Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. I figured it was better than her dreaming of being tortured with snakes, so I couldn’t complain.

My novel sold to William Morrow as part of a two-book deal, and I began writing my second novel in the summer of 2011. I was very fortunate to be awarded summer writing residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and soon we learned that my wife had been offered a job as an attorney with a great firm in Morgantown, West Virginia, roughly an hour and a half south of where we lived in Bethany. We quickly bought a house in Morgantown and moved all of our
furniture with the help of a few friends, and then I left for a full two months away. For two weeks, my wife worked her old job in Bethany until 5 p.m., and then she’d drive home, load up her car with stuff we couldn’t get in our first move, drive down to Morgantown, unload, and then drive back to Bethany and sleep on an air mattress. The next day, she’d go to work and do it all over
again. I was working hard on my second novel during this time, but I was also being very well cared for at these wonderful residencies. Even so, not once did my wife complain about how hard she was working or about how difficult the move was on her; not once did she ask me how much work I was getting done or make clear that my time away had better be worth it. She started a new job in a new city in early August; I missed that too.

My wife is the hero of my writing life; other teachers may have taught me more about writing and people in the industry may have taught me more about promotion and marketing, but no one has taught me more about dedication, patience, and kindness than my wife.

A few weeks ago, I received an early hard copy of my novel in the mail. I immediately opened it and inscribed the first page to my wife. Then I drove to her office and called her and gave it to her when she came outside. I won’t tell you what I wrote, but I will say I considered writing
something funny, perhaps “You look just like Ashley Simpson,” but I’d learned my lesson in that bar in Wilmington. Besides, we were alone outside her office, and there was no one around to call the cops in case she made good on her original threat.

It was a small gift, and there’s no way it can repay the gifts she’s given me. But it’s interesting that this newly published book is just as old as the story of our meeting, and, like that story, this book is just as much hers as mine.