Local writers release

diversity of new works
By Scott Nicholson
nicholson@wataugademocrat.com

Bigfoot, Bathanti, bushwhackers and a blossoming journey are among the new offerings from local creative minds.

Bill Kaiser of Deep Gap put years of research and writing into his first novel “Bloodroot.”

Kaiser said he wanted to capture the reality of the Blue Ridge Mountains during the Civil War.

“It’s a story about what happened in these Southern Appalachians during the Civil War when families began feuding with families,” he said. “It’s fiction but it mirrors what really occurred.”

Kaiser said the things that happened among families during the war still have their effects in some families that don’t realize the strife originated from the war. Kaiser, a longtime columnist for the Watauga Democrat, is working on a sequel to the book, set in the antebellum period with the same characters and setting.

“I’ve been a Civil War buff since elementary school,” he said. “I’ve studied and read dozens if not hundreds of books about events in the Civil War. When I became a resident of the mountains in Watauga County, I suddenly realized I had read nothing about the war in the mountains. That’s because there were no major military engagements in the mountains, but there was constant turmoil among Unionists, supporters of the Confederacy, deserters who hid in the mountains, and conscriptors who came into the mountains to capture the deserters.

“Later in the war, there were escaped Union prisoners who came through the area, and on top of that there were bands of bandits called ‘bushwhackers’ who preyed upon the local population.”

He interviewed local families who had generations extending back to that period and he became interested in telling a story that captures why there’s a lingering interest in the war and how if affects society, particularly the Southern society. “Look at the controversy over flying the Confederate flag,” he said.

Kaiser is a long-time member of the local group High Country Writers. He’s been a journalist for nearly 60 years, graduating from University of Wisconsin School of Journalism.

“I did learn that in fiction writing there is such a thing as your characters taking over the story,” he said. “If you’ve developed your characters as full-blown people, you will know when the story is right or not. The characters will let you know.

“That’s an idea that I scoffed out when I began writing fiction after a lifetime of journalism. The more I was writing, the more it became apparent. I hope my readers find the fictional characters I created reflect actual people.”

Bloodroot is available locally at the Wilcox Emporium, Black Bear Books, the Todd General Store, and Watauga County and ASU libraries.

Joseph Bathanti delivers a clutch of gripping stories in his new collection, “The High Heart,” which won the 2006 Spokane Prize for Short Fiction. The stories are linked and set in Bathanti’s hometown of Pittsburgh, Pa. The collection, from Eastern Washington University Press, follows the fictional life of Fritz and his parents.

Rich with religious references and full of young angst in an era when “angst” wasn’t the socially accepted posture of the average teen and emo was barely a gleam in a cutter’s eye, Bathanti doesn’t shy away from sex, menstruation, the cruel psychoses of the gym, cusswords, cigarette smoke, Carl Jung, thugs, strange relatives—in short, life.

Bathanti’s gift for powerful imagery is on prominent display here, with stories that range from plotted arcs to swift and incisive vignettes. A poet and creative writing professor at Appalachian State University, Bathanti has also published the novels “Coventry” and “East Liberty.” He’ll be talking about the book and signing copies at Black Bear Books in Boone at 6 p.m. on Fri., Dec. 7.

The newly released independent movie “The Long Way Home: A Bigfoot Story” is set in the wilds of western North Carolina, where director and writer Bubba Cromer plays a fictional reporter who is down on his luck, unemployed and drifting away on a sea of booze. Then he finds out that Bigfoot has been sighted in his former hometown and he investigates. Complete with rubber chickens, the “Mullet Man,” a drag queen, a strange cast of ruralites who play themselves, and settings that include a real backwoods trading post-slash-biker bar called “Scatterbrain’s,” the movie really has to be seen to be believed. Part documentary, part mockumentary, and part narrative thriller, you’ll never again hear the word “Romaine” without experiencing a shiver.

Former Watauga resident Tom Shook Jr., has released “Herb,” a coming-of-age story about a man’s life journey beginning in the North Carolina mountains during the Great Depression.

Herb is abandoned at a train station by his parents, and makes his way through the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Chicago racketeering world, merchant marines and investment real estate, as well as into the heart of one Sally Haak. Many of the experiences were inspired by Shook’s own life as a Navy veteran and stock trader.