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July has been another jam-packed month at the various Blackwater Press locations! The biggest news is that we now have distribution in both the UK and the US and Canada. While direct sales will always be the most lucrative way for us to sell books, most shops would rather not deal with a publisher directly, so a distributor is needed. We are now represented in North America by SPD; tell your favorite local shops! Something Steve, Sally, Lucy, and Flòraidh are excited about is that SPD urges their publishers to use pet pictures in their social media. We can definitely do that!

The other big news is that on July 15 we published our fifth book, The Various Stages of a Garden Well-Kept, by R.R. Davis. The first reviews are in:

All the more impressive when considering that “The Various Stages of a Garden Well Kept” is author R. R. Davis’ debut as a novelist, this original and exceptionally well written collection of memorable characters and an inherently interesting and narrative driven story of the emigrant in America is an especially and unreservedly recommended addition to personal reading lists and community, college, and university library Contemporary Literary Collections.

And, on the evening of July 26, Malaprop’s Bookstore in Asheville hosted Bob in a live stream event. He and Patricia Furnish discussed his writing process, the importance of perseverance and being comfortable with rejection, and cats, punctuated with readings. Thanks to all at Malaprop’s for a great event!

But Bob’s is not the only Blackwater book garnering praise! Melanie McGee Bianchi’s The Ballad of Cherrystoke and Other Stories continues to gain strong reviews, including an article in Asheville’s MountainX, highlighting some of the unexpected humor in the ‘dark and moody’ collection. Read the full article here.

Jordan Zachary, writing in the Southern Review of Books, has this to say:

Through a range of characters and shifting points of view, the collection offers up a poignant critique of the wave of gentrification mountain cities are currently facing, and the financial divide that creates. 

Read the full review here.

Our next book will be out on September 23^rd. Check out the trailer for The Stone Maidens by Ioulia Kolovou below:

And one more review for good measure: “Kolovou has written a novel full of grace, humour and loss. In “The Stone Maidens” the political is personal, the personal is historic, and the storytelling moves with ease…a beautiful book.”
– Elizabeth Reeder

Available for pre-order very soon!

It’s difficult to believe we’re already halfway through this year! We are busy preparing our next six books for (hopeful) publication in the next six months. If you’ve ever wondered what a publisher does, it’s a combination of reading, editing, emailing, coordinating, researching, typesetting, filing, thinking about metadata, marketing….a little bit of everything really, especially when we’re only three or so people.

Our next book, The Various Stages of a Garden Well-Kept, publishes on July 15. This is a novel set among three generations of the Kageorge family in the past and present. It has six narrators, one of whom is Frieda, a cat. Family secrets are uncovered, seeds for future happiness sown, all leading to a happy.

Curious as to why the significance of the dianthus? Pre-order and you’ll be among the first to know!

On the 24th we published The Ballad of Cherrystoke and Other Stories by Melanie McGee Bianchi. If you haven’t ordered this yet, you really should. This book is the Appalachian literature the world needs: totally free of nostalgia and sentimentality. Here’s the latest review: “So many of the finest American short stories have been rooted in an almost palpable sense of region and Bianchi’s debut collection carries that great tradition into rural and small-town Appalachia. […] Her characters’ lives are often as ramshackle as the crowded digs they share, but stubbornly resilient and full-voiced. Bianchi is a talent to watch, and the voices of her characters, spilling off the page, demand to be listened to.” Wayne Price, author of Furnace and Mercy Seat.

And, the author herself spotted copies on the shelves of her local bookshop, Malaprop’s, in Asheville, NC! Do you want to see copies of Blackwater Books on the shelves of your local shops? One of the best ways to help is to spread the word; just go into a shop and suggest the manager be in touch about stocking our books. It’s Small Business Week in the US and what better way for small businesses to support each other than through personal recommendations?

Speaking of short stories, our second contest closes on June 30. There’s still time to submit on the theme of Ink, and remember there’s a cash prize! Full details here.

You’ll have seen our short story contest is open once again this year, and thank you so much to all of those who have already submitted, responding to our theme of ‘ink’. 

The short story is a beautiful thing, and just over a week ago, a man who left an indelible mark on the form sadly passed away. His name was Roger Angell, and as well as being a revered sports writer, for a long time he was also the Fiction Editor at the New Yorker. In this role he shone a spotlight on many of the most interesting writers in the world, each taking the form in their own unique direction. In no small part it’s because of him that the New Yorker has continued to shape the evolution of the short story.

One of the writers he gave a chance to and continued to edit afterwards at the magazine was called Donald Barthelme, and this man is possibly my (John’s) favourite writer – ever! Possibly. Barthelme’s short fictions were absurd and funny and clever and wonderful. If you’ve read any of his work, you’ll know he loved to experiment with language, and often his stories didn’t really read like stories. Some people have described them as word collages, some people have called them Impressionistic Fictions (ooh la la!), some people call him a Stylist, similar to Robert Coover or maybe Grace Paley. I’m not sure any of those descriptors really work, or perhaps they all do a little. Needless to say, he was a true master of the short story, uncompromising in his style, and if it weren’t for Roger Angell giving him a chance, and nurturing his writing for years afterwards, it’s highly unlikely Barthelme would have gone on to complete all of the remarkable stories he did. And I’m sure the same could be said for many other writers!

Now, I didn’t get to meet Roger Angell, however thanks to a friend of mine that was lucky enough to spend some time with him, I do have a tenuous connection! When this friend told Roger (can I call him Roger?) about my admiration of him and of Barthelme, Roger told him to share with me a little memory he had.

A deadline was looming for the magazine, and Roger was doing his final edits for the issue, in which Barthelme had a story featured. In this story, Barthelme (as he would) wanted to insert a full page consisting solely of the word Butter.

Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. Butter. 

Something like this. It would have filled three columns in the magazine. Of course, this would probably have been awkward for Roger to swing on any week as Fiction Editor at the New Yorker, as if he allowed Barthelme to get away with that, it would be pretty hard to explain to future contributors why he was asking them to cut far more reasonable portions of their work. However, this week in particular Roger really didn’t have a choice in the matter, as already he had been told he would need to shorten the piece to fit the magazine’s makeup for that week’s issue.

So, Roger called Barthelme up. He said, “Donald, how do you feel about cutting out some of the ‘butter’ stuff? The thing is, if we don’t the story won’t fit.” To which Barthelme paused, and then replied, “Well, okay. But no more than two spoonfuls.” 

A tenuous connection, but it’s mine! Thank you, Roger Angell. 

Don’t forget, the deadline for Blackwater’s short story contest is the 30^th June. We’re very much looking forward to reading your entries!

It is difficult for a man to speak long of himself without vanity; therefore, I shall be short. – David Hume, My Own Life

Exciting news from Blackwater Press! We’re about to launch a new book series, and we need your collaboration.

Interesting Lives is our forthcoming series of non-fiction (autobiographies, memoirs, letters, and life writing) from the so-called long eighteenth century, c. 1650-1820.

During our researches, we have come across many incredible individuals who led extraordinary lives, and experienced in a few short decades things that would personally take us three lifetimes to go through. Many of these people, though, are virtually unknown today, and we believe they are fascinating enough to be of much greater interest. Maybe these stories have remained tucked away in dusty attics in manuscript form (oh what exciting finds those are!); maybe they have been published in uninformed versions and left to be forgotten. Maybe they just feature in a footnote as a by-the-way, when really they deserve a whole book to themselves.

We’re here to salvage these stories from oblivion.

History, after all, is made up of stories: the stories of the people, who lived in the midst of all this change and unrest.

Why do we need your collaboration? Because although we have ideas about some of these lives, many are still out there waiting to see the light. Maybe you know of an archive holding obscure manuscripts; maybe your grandmother’s attic has a stack of letters no one has had the heart to throw away because they contain some incredible stories about someone’s life; maybe your heart is sore when you see a terrible edition of an otherwise fascinating autobiography; maybe your PhD research deals with one such Interesting Life and you have great plans for it.

We’re the people for you.

Below is a list of some Interesting People whose lives we would love to have better-known, but we are open to considering any life writing from the long eighteenth century that you believe deserves a new edition.

Mme. De la Toule * Frances, Lady Vane * Teresia Constantia Phillips * Laetitia Pilkington * Catherine Jemmat * Mrs. Coghlan (Margaret Moncrieffe) * Mrs. Billington * John Clerk of Penicuik * Alison Cockburn * Charlotte Charke * Johann Joachim Quantz * Franz Benda * Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf * Sarah Osburn * Frederika, Baroness Riedesel * Elizabeth Drinker * Anna Green Winslow * Sarah Wister * Grace Growder Galloway * Lady Murray of Stanhope * Lady Grange’s letters from St Kilda * Henriette Campan * Any Native American or slave narrative that isn’t already available * Matthew Arbuckle * James Erskine, Lord Grange * John MacDonald the travelling footman * Lady Anne Barnard * John Home * Rev. Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk * Elizabeth Carter * Mme d’Aulnoy * Charles Perrault * Flora MacDonald

Please write to Vivien and Elizabeth at submissions@blackwaterpress.com with the subject line Interesting Lives to discuss your ideas. We can’t wait to hear from you.

May flew by! We’re excited to be less than a month away from publication of Melanie McGee Bianchi’s short story collection The Ballad of Cherrystoke and Other Stories, available for pre-order here. If you are a lover of the short story, we promise it doesn’t get much better than this.

‘The complex, the quirky, and the sublime are interwoven with humor, love, and above all, grace, in contributing to a tradition of powerful storytelling. The landscape is steeped in the voices of the people.’

– Tony Robles, author of Cool Don’t Live Here No More – A Letter to San Francisco and Fingerprints of a Hunger Strike

For more Cherrystoke reviews click here, for Elizabeth’s conversation with Melanie click here, and to check out the book trailer click here. Click, click, click!

And there’s more! In July we’re releasing Robert R. Davis’s debut novel The Various Stages of a Garden Well-Kept, and it is also available for pre-order, with publication in mid-July. This is a heartwarming and quirky tale of three generations of the Kageorge family, as they navigate through life and unearth the family secret that unites them. Read Davis’ blog post here about the inspiration behind the story, and watch his talk with the real-life Frieda Kahlo the Cat (a major character) here.

Speaking of short stories, our second contest on the theme of Ink ends on June 30, so there is still plenty of time to enter. All pertinent details as to entry requirements and prizes can be found on this page.

In our efforts to become a continue our growth as a press, we now, thanks to the funding from the Charleston Area Alliance, have digital review copies of our books available on Edelweiss. Edelweiss is a popular book industry platform where publishers, reviewers, librarians, and bookshops can read, share, and review before publication. We’re just getting to grips with all the bells and whistles, but we’re glad to be there and see how much interest our titles are generating. Please tell the bookshops, librarians, and book influencers in your life that they can find us there. Our authors are now listed on Storygraph, as well as Goodreads, so if you’re a user of either (or both!) please give us a review.

We’ve added more photographs to the companion website for Tuscawilla: Stories of a Farm, and have a blog post by Kaaren Cary Ford telling of her mother’s welcome to the farm after her marriage in January 1948.

I forgot to mention that as newlyweds my mom and dad, Mary Elizabeth Reaser Cary and George Edward Cary, lived in the cottage behind the brick house. Imagine my mom’s surprise (dismay) when she was carried over the threshold to find a bathtub full of baby Tamworth pigs under a heat lamp. I don’t remember exactly why the pigs were in the bathtub, other than they needed a place to stay extra warm. As you can probably guess baby pigs are very cute, but they make lots of noise, and after a while there is a smell. Then, one night in the middle of the night, mom and dad were awakened by a great noise—cow bells clanging, pots and pans being banged together and people making whooping and hollering noises. All of this racket was because Ralph Warren and others had come to serenade them, an old tradition among the Cary friends. The fun part was when dad was made to push mom up and down the farm lane in a wheelbarrow of frozen manure. Lesser women would have gone home to their parents, but mom stuck it out and thoroughly enjoyed all her years at the farm.

If you’ve ever attempted to write anything more creative than a shopping list, you’ve probably felt the dread of that blank page staring back at you. The white expanse of infinite possibilities, a world too dauntingly large to take that first step into it … Right?

Well, you’re not alone, and as the saying goes, commune naufragium, omnibus solacium. Which basically means that grief, when shared, doesn’t smart quite as much. It is honestly SUCH a common feeling among writers! I’m sure many can relate: you finally sit down and open a document, THE document; you stare at it for a minute (or 10), and suddenly you get the urge to put up that shelf that’s been sitting in the corner for three months. Or you remember that odd pain you got in your back last week and start looking up symptoms on the internet, and after 45 minutes you know everything about cervical spondylosis in the Humboldt penguin. Or you spend an afternoon perfecting the layout, formatting, pagination, font, size, colour etc. only to end up not writing anything anyway.

Whether it’s writing a thesis, or a poem, or a novel, or even just a letter, starting feels like the worst ordeal. The utter panic of having to sift through the thousands of options available can sometimes feel too much.

I’m here to give you one tip to get over that fear.

Yes, one tip. And it’s an easy one.

DIRTY THAT PAGE.

That is really all there is to it. Do not keep that page immaculate. Once you have ‘soiled’ that uninterrupted vastness, you have a grip on it. You have conquered it. Whether you’re staring at a computer screen or a paper notebook page, it’s the same.

Have a title? Start with the title.

No title? Maybe there’s a quote that fits what you want to say: write it down.

No quote? Try bullet points. At random, without following a scheme or an order: just write bullet points. You’ll fix the plan later.

No exact plan? Write down your ‘why’. Why do I want or need to write this? Start with that. The magic will unfold as your thoughts make their way onto the page.

No ‘why’, but just a desire to express yourself? Doodle, or paste an image that inspires you onto the computer document.

I hear your brainwaves: but what if it doesn’t turn out perfect, if I start my thoughts in the wrong order, if I don’t put my best foot forward? What then? Will I ever be able to improve it or will my writing be too far gone in the wrong direction?

Well, there is no limit to how much you can edit (but this is a story for another time). You can absolutely perfect anything you write, and turn it into your masterpiece.

But you’ll never have a masterpiece if you don’t start, right?

That’s why I entreat you to just attack that blank page. Once that first ink, or those first words or images are on there, I promise you it will all gradually fall into place.

(And when you’re done, of course send it over to us at Blackwater Press!) ;-D

I could give you all the facts – names, dates, places, relationships – of my family history, and you would fall asleep quickly. I know this because I would drop off into a deep slumber myself in the telling. And yet, hidden in the dry folds of this history, there was a story to be told. While I grew up in my family’s house, the untold secrets of the past rattled about the closets and slowly trickled out, waiting to be discovered. Gradually, I gathered a loose framework of a past comprised mostly of empty spaces. A lot of empty spaces. A paint by number project with no key to correlate which color belonged to which number. It was time for the fun to begin – the unleashing of my imagination. I spent countless hours sitting in coffee houses, and countless more sitting at home late nights with intense conversations with my cat, as I poured my stream of consciousness onto my computer keyboard. I found that giving each of the major characters a voice in first person permitted me to get into each their head and to flow out of their thoughts and observations. Eventually, I had favorite personalities to inhabit – Marieta as a child, Irini as she crossed the ocean, and Frieda the Cat (my confidant throughout the process). Unfortunately, I was unable to properly confer with these three favorite characters, as Irini was long gone, Marieta was lost deep in dementia, and Frieda, well, she’s a cat. As I worked my way through to my own generation, I began to take great liberties in actual events and in the characters themselves. While Herman Kageorge is largely based upon myself, he is not me, though I have used many anecdotes from my own life to create his story. The hardest part to me was deciding who to give admittance to and who to delete from the story. And then there was the challenge of blending ninety years’ worth of snippets and short choppy chapters into one smooth story. My solution – adding the constants of the garden, the coffee houses, and of course, the observations of Frieda the Cat.

We’re very excited that Davis’ wonderful novel – The Various Stages of a Garden Well-Kept – will be released in Spring 2022.

So long, 2021. We really hope that all of your Christmas and New Year plans haven’t been totally sabotaged by the most unwelcome of guests, Corona, and that you’ve been able to spend some quality time amid friends and family (and books and booze, of course!). Strange as everything may have been, we have thoroughly enjoyed Blackwater Press’ first full calendar year, and are so proud of how everything has turned out. Much of this has come down to all of you: the people who buy our books, who use our editorial services, engage with us on social media, and just generally encourage us when so much of today’s world seems designed to make small businesses fail. It means a lot! The three books below are the result of our work, and with reprints of Tuscawilla: Stories of a Farm and I Piped, That She Might Dance having just arrived, we are glad they’re going down well. And yes, they’re available for purchase here 😉

We are also very pleased to see so many authors trusting us and our editorial services. Back when we were writing the business plans for Blackwater Press a year or so ago, the model we hoped for involved funding our own publications through our editing work, and now that we’ve started to build a strong reputation this seems to be working. Our manuscript assessment service has a waiting list of two months, and we firmly believe that every author who comes to us gets a lot closer to being published in the places they want to be following these reports. But hey, don’t take our word for it: It was a tremendous pleasure to work with Blackwater Press on a manuscript evaluation for my forthcoming novel. The feedback was perceptive, insightful and also very supportive and encouraging. Awesome! (Jayna Sheats, author of Hanna’s Climb) So there you go! A quick reminder that our 2022 short story contest is now open; we’re delighted to once again see your submissions start to pop into our inbox. Head HERE for full details. And with that, we’ll see you in 2022. We have HUGE plans for the coming year, so stay tuned, and have a happy new year!

Happy 30-Days-After-Halloween

Forgive me for bringing up ghosts in the wrong month, but I was battling some seriously scary deadlines in late October. Now that it’s mid-November, I have a lull from work and more time to dwell on the dark side.

My house is a very small, middle-aged cottage that turned 60 this year. It has a view of Chestnut Mountain and Frady Mountain from the back hill and a curious flyspeck of a kitchen with no windows. I make food for my family in this kitchen, but I’m not quite sure how it really happens.

Last week, I brought home a smoked ham-hock to make a pot of split-pea soup. That thing looked enormous, sitting on my countertop. Aggrieved, obscene. When the butcher shrink wrapped it and handed it to me in the grocery store, it had no vibe at all. Somehow it grew to own the space.

And ever since last winter, whenever I stand at the sink, I sense a presence behind me, watching: a thick, hovering something that clears off in the nanosecond it takes to turn around. I grew up in much older, much creepier houses: houses with outhouses still on the property; houses that had rooms my friends refused to enter — houses well within their rights to be haunted.

So I’m a little annoyed that some half-baked phantom has decided to show up in a home that still has a mortgage and its original wiring.

I think most of the characters in my short stories live haunted lives. Siobhan in “Ballad of Cherrystoke” is haunted by memories of her vibrant, pre-accident self. Yuri in “Abdiel’s Revenge” moves in with a woman twice his age and finds he’s also taken on her family’s legacy: a two-century-old murder and its seemingly immortal aftermath. One of the four Brandons in “Bad Tooth Brandon” is haunted by the death of his lover, a soldier; meanwhile, the story’s narrator moves away to escape the specter of her gentrifying hometown.

We’re all haunted by something. Sometimes by more than one thing. So I guess I can handle an occasional unexplainable kitchen presence. Maybe I’m just inside these walls way too much — but for me, getting to work from home is a privilege that’s worth any poltergeist.