Sold: “Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Life” by Todd Goddard

/6 Comments/in , , , /by

I’m very excited to announce that under the banner of my literary agency Philip Turner Book Productions I’ve sold Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Life to Blackstone Publishing in print, ebook, and audiobook, on behalf of my author client Todd Goddard, associate professor of literary studies at Utah Valley University.  This will be the first biography to chronicle the fascinating, large life of the acclaimed poet and fiction writer (1937-2016). Goddard will examine all aspects of Harrison’s creative life, and how he incorporated major life milestones in to his work. Among those momentous events:

  •  The fatal car wreck that killed Jim’s father and sister when he was twenty-four; he blamed himself as they were heading to a weekend stay at a family cabin for which Jim had intended to join them until his last-minute cancellation delayed their departure. The tragedy spiraled Jim in to a deep depression, while also spurring his dedication to writing, as he soon after published his earliest poems and met Denise Levertov who shepherded his first book to publication, a poetry collection from Norton.
  • Jim received an introduction to Jack Nicholson who became a patron, supporting him financially through the completion of the three novellas that would become the collection,  Legends of the Fall; this relationship led to work on film projects and relief from the money woes that had long burdened him. Through this he also formed associations with many Hollywood figures including Anjelica Huston, John Huston, John Belushi, director Bob Rafelson and his wife Toby, who had made the match with Nicholson, and Stanley Kubrick, with whom Jim played chess.
  • Working with publisher Seymour Lawrence, who embraced the idea of publishing a collection of novellas, an unorthodox experiment that other publishers of the day were not eager to take on. Interviews by the biographer with Harrison’s longtime agent Bob Datilla explore the relationship between the writer and publisher.

Harrison’s sense of place will also be key to the narrative, as Goddard explores the importance of landscape in Jim’s poetry and fiction, mapping his life and situating him topographically. This process will unfold throughout the book in a number of important locales, from the lakes and forests of Michigan, to the crashing surf of the Florida Keys, to Greenwich Village where he drank with Jack Kerouac at the Five Spot bar, to hardscrabble Durango, Mexico, as well as Montana, Hollywood, Arizona, and Provence, France.

Todd Goddard regularly teaches Harrison’s fiction and poetry, and has presented research on Harrison’s works for the Jim Harrison Society at the American Literature Association’s annual conference. His research is well underway, already taking him in to the Harrison archive courtesy of the late author’s estate, thanks to an introduction by generous executives at Grove Atlantic. The archive includes correspondence with Raymond Carver, Francis Ford Coppola, Annie Dillard, Louise Erdrich, Allen Ginsberg, Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Norman Mailer, Gary Snyder, David Foster Wallace, Terry Tempest Williams, and Tom McGuane.

Goddard is also in touch with the The Jim Harrison Author Page on Facebook, where more than 10,000 fans celebrate the writer’s life, from preparing a special cassoulet to arranging bookstore discussions of Harrison’s work.

In Harrison’s later years, he was twice a featured guest on Anthony Bourdain’s TV shows, gaining a status as an elder statesman of American letters and enlightened living. With such biographies as Madison Smartt Bell’s work on Robert Stone (Doubleday, published this month), and Blake Bailey’s life of Philip Roth (Norton, 2021), it’s a propitious time for this biography of Jim Harrison.

 

Read more

Sold: “WAR DIARIST: The Many Battles of Richard Tregaskis” by Ray E. Boomhower

/2 Comments/in , , /by

January 2021 update: The book on Richard Tregaskis will be published in Fall 2021. The author and University of New Mexico Press have settled on a final title: Richard Tregaskis: Reporting under Fire from Guadalcanal to Vietnam.
—
Delighted that I’ve sold Ray E. Boomhower’s WAR DIARIST: The Many Battles of Richard Tregaskis by independent scholar Ray E. Boomhower to University of New Mexico Press (UNMP) for publication in fall 2021. In 1943, combat reporter Tregaskis published GUADALCANAL DIARY, acquired by Bennett Cerf at Random House, which became an instant bestseller and the first book to emerge from the Pacific theater, when Americans had had little chance to read about the fighting there. Here are some grafs from the pitch letter I sent to the editor at UNMP, and photos that will be in the book, including one of the lanky reporter.

In 1942-43, Tregaskis (1916-73) was one of just two reporters “embedded” with US forces in the Pacific, before the specialized use of that term existed. He observed the fierce fighting between the Americans and Japanese, sending daily dispatches that had to be cleared by military censors before they could go to his editors at the International News Service. Some things he did not share with any editors or readers, as Boomhower writes:

“During his time on Guadalcanal, Tregaskis and United Press International reporter Bob Miller armed themselves with Colt 1911A1 pistols in direct contravention of U.S. War Department regulations prohibiting correspondents from using weapons. “We knew and the Marines knew that if we ran up against Jap[anese] snipers, they weren’t going to ask for our credentials.” Upon leaving Guadalcanal on a B-17 bomber, Tregaskis also helped man one of the plane’s .50-caliber machine guns and fired on an attacking Japanese Zero fighter.”

While breaking the mold for a war reporter, Boomhower notes that Tregaskis also harbored a distressing medical secret:

“Neither his colleagues in the field or his superiors at the International News Service knew that when he began his work in the Pacific Tregaskis had to contend with a recently diagnosed condition—diabetes, a debilitating disease that plagued his family.”

At one point, while briefly laid over in Pearl Harbor, he sent an expanded collection of his combat dispatches to a wire service editor who shopped the manuscript to more than a half dozen book publishers in NY. Bennett Cerf read it overnight and acquired the rights the next day. This became Guadalcanal Diary, an early example of “an instant book”; it was an immediate bestseller for Random House, and before WWII had ended, a Hollywood movie with Anthony Quinn, William Bendix, and Richard Conte.

At another point during Tregaskis’s reporting career, while covering combat action in Italy, the 6-foot, 5-inch tall reporter was struck by an artillery shell that punctured his helmet and nearly killed him. Following brain surgery—when a metal plate was inserted into his skull—and a difficult five-month recuperation back in the States, he learned to speak again by reciting poetry, and in June 1944 resumed work, reporting from the Normandy beachhead established on D-Day.

Boomhower’s book will chronicle Tregaskis’s whole story from before the war, and beyond. He was a Harvard grad, Class of ’38, whose classmates included Kermit Roosevelt, Joseph Kennedy, Jr., and the historian Theodore White. Tregaskis knew Ernie Pyle and the photographer Robert Capa.

I’ve found Boomhower’s writing in the sample chapters as alive and vivid about reporting under extreme and dangerous challenges as Tregaskis’s own indelible war reporting. By the late 1960s, more than three million copies of Guadalcanal Diary had been sold and it had been translated into twelve languages, including Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, French, and Danish. The book is in print as a Modern Library edition with an Introduction by Mark Bowden, while many of Tregaskis’s wartime dispatches are included in volume 1 of the Library of America’s book Reporting World War II. Ray E. Boomhower is senior editor at the Indiana Historical Society Press. He is the author of more than ten books including Robert F. Kennedy and the 1968 Indiana Democratic Primary (2008, Indiana University Press), which won the Indiana Center for the Book’s 2009 award in nonfiction.

Read more

Sold: Audio book rights for “Bring That Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop” by Nate Patrin

/2 Comments/in , /by

Excited to announce that I’ve sold audio rights to editor Madeleine Collins at Tantor Media for BRING THAT BEAT BACK: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop by my agency client, and contributor to Stereogum, Nate Patrin. The book is a close analysis of four creators—pioneering DJ Grandmaster Flash; sampling innovator Prince Paul; superstar mogul Dr. Dre and left-field curator Madlib—who’ve helped shape the sounds of what’s become one of the world’s most popular art forms, one beat at a time. I earlier sold print rights to Erik Anderson, editor at University of Minnesota Press, who will publish their edition in April 2020. #books #hiphop #sampling #audiobooks #publishing #criticism

Read more

RIP Ambassador Joseph Wilson—Proud Progressive Patriot and Friend to Many

/2 Comments/in , /by

One of my most treasured authors whom I cherished working with across three decades as an in-house acquiring editor for publishing houses was Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who died today in Santa Fe, NM, age 69. When Joe was on book tour for his 2004 bestseller THE POLITICS OF TRUTH–A Diplomat’s Memoir: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity (Carroll & Graf Publishers), he really enjoyed giving public talks, especially to students and faculty on college campuses. He would tell stories from his career as a 25-year US Foreign Service officer, with pinpoint memories of the countries he worked in, including in Niger and Iraq, which had so much topical relevance then, after America’s invasion of  Iraq was based in part on the false claim that Saddam Hussein had sought uranium in the landlocked African country. Joe extolled having a career in foreign service, and all but recruited  people to go take the State Dept’s Foreign Service exam. Of course, he also discussed what from his perspective had happened in the run-up to the tragic invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Notwithstanding the war we were entangled in, he espoused an uplifting message, a proud progressive patriotism that was a counterweight to the jingoism of his critics. Audiences found his talks very inspiring.

On MSNBC this afternoon, at the end of “Deadline White House,” host Nicole Wallace lowered her voice in respect, and offered a tribute to Joe. Relevantly, you’ll recall she had worked in the George W Bush White House. She began a little sheepishly, a nod I think to the fact that administration colleagues of hers—Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Scooter Libby—had been in on the targeting of Joe and his wife Valerie Plame*. Nonetheless, through some surprising circumstances she didn’t specify, she said that she and Joe had become friends at some point. (She didn’t say exactly when.) Turns out, that like me over this past summer, Wallace told her audience that she’d heard from Joe in recent months, with word of diagnosis of a terminal illness he’d received.

In the years since 2004 Joe and I would occasionally be in touch via email, and more than once after I became an independent provider of editorial services, he referred authors to me, including a retired ambassador like himself. From time to time we got together when Joe visited NYC**, but this past June Joe’s outreach came as a surprising message on the answering machine of my landline phone. His voice sounded a bit weak, and I feared he might be unwell. I called him back and he took little time to tell me he was very ill, with not a lot of time left to live. He told me he was surrounded by family and was at peace. He told me how proud he remained of the book we had worked on together, and said that whenever people praised it, he thought of me with gratitude. We texted each other periodically over the summer, and he wrote me after the Robert Mueller hearings. Judging by Wallace’s moving tribute, when she read from one of his messages to her, which was also about the Mueller hearing, it seems he let many friends know that he was ill, and reached out across his broad network of friends, sometimes opining on issues critical to our democracy.

It is especially poignant that Joe died today, when the emergence of another whistleblower is having a seismic impact in the politics of the day. A fateful NY Times op-ed by Joe, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” blew the lid off the Bush administration’s falsification of intelligence before the Iraq War. It is galling to me that Dick Cheney is still alive, and Joe Wilson is dead, a cosmic injustice of the first order. Below is text of a blog post I published in 2013, when MSNBC broadcast a special program called “Hubris,” based on the book of the same name about the Iraq War by David Corn and Michael Isikoff. I took that occasion to write a post about working with Joe, and am happy to also share it below.

—–

I vividly recall how the Bush administration pushed the country, and as much of the world as it could hector along with them, into invading Iraq. It was a mad, misguided rush, one that I was upset about at the time, and soon after became involved with personally and professionally. In July 2003, after Valerie Plame’s role as a CIA official was revealed in an infamous column by Robert Novak, I contacted Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, Plame’s husband. In the months before the invasion of Iraq, he had become a vocal critic of the rush to war, publishing a number of Op-Ed columns that drew on his experience of twenty-five years as an American diplomat, including his service as the last American official to meet with Saddam Hussein before the beginning of the Gulf War in 1991, and earlier, as a junior foreign service officer in Niger. In my role as an editorial executive with Carroll & Graf Publishers I was referred to Wilson by publishing friend, Barbara Monteiro. I contacted Joe and found he was interested in writing a book that would chronicle his years as an American foreign service officer; more recent events involving his fateful trip to Niger, where he was sent by the CIA to investigate the claim that Iraq had sought uranium yellowcake from that African country; and the unprecedented exposure of his wife’s CIA employment. Joe, as I soon came to know him, agreed to the offer I made, a contract was quickly signed, and he began working diligently on the manuscript.

Fortunately, when Joe retired from the State Department, a few years before the Iraq war fever, he had sat for a series of lengthy interviews with an interlocutor from State—a good custom at the government agency—setting his memories down in a proper oral history. He drew on this aide-memoir as he composed the diplomatic memoir that made up about 1/3 of the final manuscript. From the width of the spine in the attached shot of the book cover (designed by longtime Carroll & Graf colleague Linda Kosarin), you can tell it was a substantial volume, more than 500 pages, the heft aided by that oral history. As for his trip to Niger, the positions he took in opposition to the Bush administration while they were twisting intelligence and co-opting media during he run-up to the war, and events after the invasion, including the outing of his wife, he had little need of reminders. Joe delivered a very readable manuscript, and with a team of colleagues at Carroll & Graf we edited this draft on a crash schedule, and Joe quickly made key revisions to it, based on fast-moving events in the CIA leak controversy. Throughout, we kept a keen eye on breaking developments in the investigation in to how and why Valerie’s CIA employment had become a subject that administration officials felt free to discuss openly with reporters. Getting the manuscript ready for the printer was like aiming an arrow at a moving target.

The launch for the book, was in early May 2004, less than a year after Novak’s fateful column. Joe went on the TODAY show, Charlie Rose, and he did a ton of public radio shows. I went with him to many of those interviews, sat in green rooms with him, fancy and plain settings. It was as cool when he did Democracy Now with Amy Goodman, as when we went to Rockefeller Center one morning before 7 AM, to do the TODAY Show. His most interesting TV appearance was on “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” when Keith shared with Joe and the audience White House talking points supposedly rebutting the book. These had been sent to virtually all news outlets, including even to programs like Countdown, ones that weren’t having any of the BS from the administration. Olbermann held up the sheaf of talking points and tossed the papers around his set, as mockery of the Bush administration. The book became a bestseller on the NY Times, Washington Post, and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists. With Joe’s opposition to the war, and most of all the fact he’d been to Niger and vigorously debunked the fraudulent yellowcake claim, Joe had stepped across a tripwire that loosed Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby like a pack of dogs, with Karl Rove and Ari Fleischer chasing close behind. None of their talking points actually refuted Joe’s claims. John Dean gave the book a great review in the New York Times Book Review and it became a national hardcover bestseller in the Times and Publishers Weekly for about six weeks. This was Dean’s opening paragraph:

“THIS is a riveting and all-engaging book. Not only does it provide context to yesterday’s headlines, and perhaps tomorrow’s, about the Iraq war and about our politics of personal destruction, but former Ambassador Joseph Wilson also tells captivating stories from his life as a foreign service officer with a long career fostering the development of African democracies, and gives us a behind-the-scenes blow-by-blow of the run-up to the 1991 Persian Gulf war. As the top American diplomat in Baghdad, Wilson was responsible for the embassy, its staff and the lives of other Americans in the region – not to mention the freeing of hostages in Kuwait. He goes on to relate his eye-to-eye encounter with the wily sociopath Saddam Hussein; his return home to be greeted as a ‘true American hero’ by President George H. W. Bush; his stint advising America’s top military commander in Europe; and his time as head of the African affairs desk of Bill Clinton’s National Security Council, where he assembled the president’s historic trip to Africa while the ”Starr inquisition” into the Monica Lewinsky affair developed. Along the way he fell in love with and married a C.I.A. covert operative – a ”’willowy blonde, resembling a young Grace Kelly.”’

I should add the book was also a plea for Americans to be actively engaged in their citizenship, and to be unafraid if it became necessary to call one’s government to account. In 2010 The Politics of  Truth and Valerie’s 2008 book Fair Game: How a Top CIA Agent was Betrayed by Her Own Government, were jointly adapted for the feature film, “Fair Game,” with Sean Penn and Naomi Watts. I saw Joe and Valerie in NYC for a premiere reception and we have remained friends, more so than other authors I’ve published over the years. Joe and Valerie played a significant role in the events of our times, bringing the Bush administration before the judgment of history for its deceptions. I am proud of the role I had in bringing their story before the public. To read about other aspects of this case, especially the federal trial of Scooter Libby for his obstruction of justice, and the book I brought out in 2008, The United States v. I. Lewis Libby, along with Patrick Fitzgerald’s legacy as a federal prosecutor, please see this post.

*
Valerie Plame is currently a candidate in the Democratic primary campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives from New Mexico for the 2020 election and I have contributed to her effort.

**
In 2010, when Joe Wilson appeared at the NY Times Center for a panel discussion pegged to the 40th anniversary of the newspaper’s op-ed section, he invited me to come as his guest, and arranged so that I could share the green room with him, and the other panelists, Nora Ephron, Anna Deavere Smith, Roy Blount Jr., and Garrison Keillor. It was quite a heady night. Joe’s contribution to the Times op-ed page had come on July 4th weekend in 2003, with “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.” Here’s a NY Times video of Joe talking about how he came to write the op-ed.

 

 

Read more

Philip Marsden’s Solo Sail Along the Irish and Scottish Coasts

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Just got this beauty of a book in my mail chute from Granta Books in London. It’s written by British writer Philip Marsden, who is quite an able sailor. For his new book, he set out from near his home in Cornwall, sailing northward between the east coast of Ireland and the west coast of Scotland, then on his return journey southward hugging the west coast of Ireland. His destination was the Summer Isles across from the scenic village of Achiltibuie in Scotland. I’d read the first third of the book in a bound galley, but waited for the finished book which I knew would have good, detailed maps.

Reading a new book by Philip Marsden is a special treat because in 1995 I had the pleasure of publishing an early book by him as part of the Kodansha Globe trade paperback series. In his travel narrative The Crossing Place: A Journey Among the Armenians, Marsden crossed seventeen national borders, encountering Armenian communities throughout Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East, and Central Asia to meet monks in Venice, auto mechanics in Damascus, mercenaries in Beirut, and tailors in Transylvania, all in the shadow of the calamitous genocide of 1915 committed by the Turkish government.

I’ll add that I also have a personal connection to the eponymous Summer Isles of Marsden’s voyage. As chronicled in this blog post about the Scottish novelist Neil Gunn, with my wife, painter Kyle Gallup, we rented a sweet vacation cottage in Achiltibuie and took a boat trip through the magical isles. It will be a joy to dive back in to Marsden’s book this weekend, who another favorite author, Robert Macfarlane, has dubbed “a truly remarkable writer.”

Read more

An Award from the Peace Corps for Amb Vicki Huddleston’s “Our Woman in Havana”

/1 Comment/in , , /by

As I learned when I edited Tales of a Muzungu, a memoir by former US Peace Corp worker Nicholas Duncan (Uganda, 2010-12), there’s a tight community of Peace Corps veterans who support each other’s work and cheer their colleagues’ career achievements. The latest example of this relates to a book I developed with Ambassador Vicki Huddleston, which I also represent as literary agent, Our Woman in Havana: A Diplomat’s Chronicle of America’s Long Struggle with Castro’s Cuba. Huddleston launched her foreign service career when she was a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru from 1964-66. Her book has been awarded the Special Peace Corps Writers Award for 2019, with the citation below. Her book, and her whole career, has been a testament to the foreign service. I’m proud of her for winning this award from her peers, and pleased to congratulate her here on my blog. If you want to read a great book about Cuba and the history of US policy toward the island nation, I heartily recommend her imperative book. You may also visit the author’s website.

Vicki Huddleston Wins Special Peace Corps Writers Award For RPCVs 2019 (Peru)

Our Woman in Havana: A Diplomat’s Chronicle of America’s Long Struggle with Castro’s Cuba
By Vicki Huddleston (Peru 1964-66)

Ambassador Vicki Huddleston (Peru 1964-66) served under Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush as Chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. She also served as U.S. Ambassador to Madagascar and Mali. Her report for the Brookings Institution about normalizing relations with Cuba was adapted for President Obama’s diplomatic opening with Raúl Castro in 2014. She has written opinion pieces in the New York Times, Miami Herald, and Washington Post. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Our Woman in Havana chronicles the past several decades of US-Cuba relations from the bird’s-eye view of State Department veteran and longtime Cuba hand Vicki Huddleston, our top diplomat in Havana under Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush. After the US embassy in Havana was closed in 1961, relations between the two countries broke off. A thaw came in 1977, with the opening of a de facto embassy in Havana, the US Interests Section, where Huddleston would later serve. In her compelling memoir of a diplomat at work, she tells gripping stories of face-to-face encounters with Fidel Castro and the initiatives she undertook, like the transistor radios she furnished to ordinary Cubans. With inside accounts of many dramatic episodes, like the tumultuous Elián González custody battle, Huddleston also evokes the charm of the island country, and her warm affection for the Cuban people. Uniquely qualified to explain the inner workings of US-Cuba relations, Huddleston examines the Obama administration’s diplomatic opening of 2014, the mysterious “sonic” brain and hearing injuries suffered by US and Canadian diplomats who were serving in Havana, and the rescinding of the diplomatic opening under the Trump administration. Huddleston recounts missed opportunities for détente, and the myths, misconceptions, and lies that have long pervaded US-Cuba relations. With Raúl Castro scheduled to step down in 2018, she also peers into the future, when for the first time in more than six decades no one named Castro will be Cuba’s leader. Our Woman in Havana is essential reading for everyone interested in Cuba, including the thousands of Americans visiting the island every year, observers who study the stormy relationship with our near neighbor, and policymakers navigating the nuances and challenges of the US-Cuba relationship.

Read more

“The Mueller Report,” a Published Book Now Landing in Bookstores

/0 Comments/in , /by

A fascinating report by PW’s editor Jim Milliot from booksellers in the field on the editions of The Mueller Report now coming out. Scribner, Melville House, and Skyhorse had each announced print/ebook versions during the many months leading up to the report’s intensely anticipated release. Because they were only finally able to get their hands on the manuscript last Thursday—when corrupt Attorney General Barr finally deigned to let it be published—it’s been very challenging for them to get the book in to stores. Of the three I’ve only seen Scribner’s in a store so far. I found it it in a B&N yesterday, a big fat trade paperback printed on not-great paper with a white cover. I intend to buy the one coming from Melville House, which according to the article should be in stores Monday. It will be close to a mass-market size paperback. I’ve been following a multi-day thread live-tweeting the design, typesetting, and production of the Melville House edition by co-publisher Dennis Johnson (a great follow on Twitter, @mobylives), which he began writing last week as he and colleagues received the text in PDF and embarked on making it in to their distinctive rendition of of this vital document, an imperative book, indeed.

The Skyhorse edition may have begun landing in stores, but I haven’t seen it yet. That edition displays a questionable choice for Introducer: the odious Alan Dershowitz, frequent Trump partisan and FOX News regular. An ill-advised choice when you consider that FOX News viewers, even ones fervently appreciative of Dershowitz’s rhetorical support of the dangerous prez are not apt to buy a copy of The Mueller Report at all. They tell themselves and each other that the Trump-Russia connections are all made up anyway. Those FOX people would buy a report on Hillary Clinton, but that’s definitely not what we have here.

OTOH, the great majority of people buying the Mueller Report in book form are going to be critics of Trump who’ve been following #TrumpRussia avidly for more than two years; folks who detest Trump and want to see the end of his presidency will be apt to want either the Scribner edition, with commentary by Post reporters, or an edition that has nothing but the text of Mueller’s report, intelligently designed and typeset for an optimal reading experience, the Melville House edition. Why would they want to buy an edition with Dershowitz’s questionable gloss on it—a very-likely-to-be-tendentious view of events apt to let Trump off the hook despite his egregious misdeeds and transgressions? Indeed, there’s a funny line in the penultimate graf of Milliot’s story:

James Fugate, co-owner of Eso Wan Books in Los Angeles, also believes the report will sell very well. “There is huge demand for this book, and I have at least 10 preorders for this,” he said. “We ordered 50 each of the Scribner edition and the Melville House. I won’t touch the Skyhorse edition with the Dershowitz introduction.”

 

Read more

Sold: “The Twenty-ninth Day: Surviving a Grizzly Attack in the Canadian Tundra” by Alex Messenger

/0 Comments/in , , , /by

One of the most exciting things in my work as an independent editor and literary agent is when I have the opportunity to work with a new writer on their manuscript, helping them develop it to the point where a publisher later makes an offer to publish it. That is what’s occurred with writer Alex Messenger’s book, The Twenty-ninth Day: Surviving a Grizzly Attack in the Canadian Tundra, which I recently sold to Blackstone Publishing. They’re an Ashland, Oregon-based company that in the past couple years has grown from being a publisher of audio books only (several months ago I sold them audio rights to The Last Days of Sylvia Plath), to now having a full print program, with reissues such as Mr & Mrs Hollywood: Edie and Lew Wasserman and their Entertainment Empire by Kathleen Sharp (by coincidence I edited the original edition for Carroll & Graf Publishers in 2004) and new, never-before-published titles. Below is a lightly edited version of the pitch letter I submitted to editors with the manuscript, prompting the offer from Blackstone. 

A denizen of the wild places and freshwater lakes of northern Minnesota, by his early teens Alex Messenger had already gone on many wilderness and canoeing journeys, sometimes with his family, other times with peers through a local YMCA camp. The summer he was seventeen, a friend encouraged Alex to be a paddler on what would be his most ambitious trip yet: 

“’You should come,’ Mike urged me. Going on the Hommes du Nord expedition would mean spending forty-two days traveling through northern Canada, a near month and a half on trail, of whitewater canoeing, of portaging, of sleeping on a thin mat in a thin tent, forty-two days of dried food, adventure and fresh air.”

For the first twenty-eight days, Alex and his fellow paddlers confronted many difficulties in the Canadian sub-Arctic, including ferocious whitewater rapids that challenged their paddling skills, and an island locked in by shifting ice that barely allowed them to paddle their canoes away from it. The most dangerous animals they encountered were ornery musk-oxen. But on the twenty-ninth day all that changed when on a solitary hike Alex encountered a grizzly bear that attacked him. A life and death struggle ensued as Alex tried to retreat from the bear’s grasp, then bounced his heavy camera case off the bear’s snout, all before slipping in to a state of semi-consciousness. 

When Alex came to, he was alone, wounded and bleeding but somehow still alive. Forcing himself upright, he struggled back to camp in terrible pain from a severe thigh wound, where he was soon being treated by his resourceful companions who sought advice on emergency care from doctors back home via their satellite phone. An immediate evacuation was considered, but in the short term they resumed the canoe journey, hoping to reach the point on the map where the whole expedition was due to conclude at a remote fly-in village. In the days that followed, Alex tried to make himself useful on the water, helping to paddle when he could, though his injuries made the effort excruciating while aggravating the wound.  

A few days later, Alex, his fellow paddlers, and the camp directors back in Minnesota faced a difficult decision: let the party navigate to the village, or have Alex evacuated right then. I will let you discover their decision for yourself. 

The 85,000 word manuscript recounts an unusual coming-of-age story filled with inspiring descriptions of Arctic landscape, thrilling riverine adventures, and high risk adventure, all written more than a decade later from the perspective of a more mature Alex Messenger, who continues to enjoy wilderness camping and works in the outdoors and camping equipment industry with outfitter Frost River, for which he attends many trade shows; these will afford him an excellent opportunity to promote the book. 

Two comparable books that you might look to as models of success would be Between a Rock and a Hard Place by Aron Ralston and The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge, which it so happens I edited and published at Carroll & Graf in 2001. 

Below is an announcement that ran in the book industry newsletter Publishersmarketplace. The photographs illustrating this post are by Alex Messenger, whose Instagram handle is @messengerphoto. If you enjoy adventure and survival narratives such as  Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild (where by contrast the young protagonist did not survive his wilderness ordeal), Admiral Richard Byrd’s Alone, and Great Heart: The History of a Labrador Adventure by James West Davidson and John Rugge, then you’ll definitely enjoy The Twenty-ninth Day  when it’s published in 2019 or 2020.

 

Read more