Interview conducted by Dan Barth of the Redwood Coast Review 4/07

Daniel Barth: I’m interested in hearing more about something you said the other night at Mulligans Books about not wanting to be “a literary sharecropper.”

Bruce Patterson: That’s how I came out of the gate. After 32 years of taking my living straight from the dirt of Anderson Valley, I’m out of a job. The entire valley has changed in that time. The homesteader economy is basically gone. And then I wanted to try my hand at writing. So rather than send out manuscripts as an unknown, I did it myself, to put my foot in the water to see if I had anything there. And what I wrote about was a picture of time, 1975 call it, circa 1975, of Anderson Valley, the homesteader economy, the loggers, my jobs, the stuff I did.

DB: And a lot of that has disappeared.

BP: It has disappeared. I was lucky when I arrived. The people I worked with were pre-television, pre-chainsaw, pre-tractor.

DB: So, in deciding to do a book, did you have an idea of how many copies you wanted to print?

BP: Yeah, the per unit cost was there. The minimum I could go to was 900 copies. And my nephew was crucial in getting that done, or else I couldn’t have afforded it. Because what I wanted to do was create something unique, a memoir as short story, sort of listing the jobs and giving different views of what it’s like to be a woodcutter, a chokersetter, a timber faller, a ranch hand, whatever, some of the various jobs I did.

DB: So you found out you could do about 900 copies at an acceptable price. Who was the printer?

BP: I had two printers and a binder. My nephew, who is into creating corporate literature, was my production manager, and he handled that end. We went to a color printer for the photo pages, and a black and white printer for the text pages, and then hired a crew to assemble it by hand at the bindery, and then it was bound with the wire binding.

DB: What was your total production cost.

BP: About eight bucks a copy, which was a little bit over budget but not much.

DB: So in promoting the book then, for instance did you send out very many review copies?

BP: No. What I wanted to create was something for the local people, the old-timers, to do with their way of life and the way they made their livings, to make an impact on the local market. Nobody’s gonna give you anything, anytime you launch any business. You gotta understand that nobody’s gonna give you anything out of the kindness of their heart. So I just started with consignments in local markets, all the local video stores, a couple of the tasting rooms where I had friends. And my pitch to them was: I don’t want any money. Here’s six copies. Keep two copies free. I’d like you to read them, or give them away, or sell them. And once you sell out the other four you can pay me for them and I’ll return with more books. I didn’t even pitch a bookstore for three months.

DB: So you really did have a local, Anderson Valley focus. Did you advertise anywhere?

BP: Just the local paper [Anderson Valley Advertiser], not much in the way of advertising. No events or readings.

DB: Did somebody review it for the AVA?

BP: No. I did a fake review to try to promote it myself.

DB: Hey, that’s a time-honored tradition. Walt Whitman did that. So did Langston Hughes. And of course Allen Ginsberg was great at self-promotion.

BP: So what I’m really doing is dropping a pebble in water. By the time I pitched a bookstore—the first one was Mendocino Book Company [in Ukiah], the owner had already heard about the book.

DB: I heard you on the radio too.

BP: Yeah, Barry Vogel helped. He was nice enough to have me on his Radio Curious show on KZYX. But that was again about three months after I had hit the local shops. And I was on with Liz on KMFB and again on KZYX with Jimmy Humble. My original business plan was to spend three days a week on promotion, but I haven’t done that.

DB: But you haven’t approached bookstores outside of Mendocino County?

BP: Well, I’m in City Lights bookstore in San Francisco. I knew people there. And then I got into The Book Depot in Mill Valley.

DB: Have you had very many sales out of either of those?

BP: No. For one thing the selling point of my book is the cover, and bookstores don’t want to put them out that way, and they don’t like my wire binding. But the readers love it. You can lay it down flat; you can fold it over. It’s much more durable. If you keep it out of water your copy will last a hundred years.

DB: Has the book sold well? Have you sold most of your 900 copies?

BP: Yeah, I’ve got about 35 left.

DB: Great. And how did it come about that you got a contract with Heyday Books?

BP: Well, I had a two-track strategy, my maximum objective being to find a publisher, and my minimum being successful in the local market. Gerry Nicosia [who wrote the Introduction to Walking Tractor] helped me out with getting some blurbs from very important people, which helps. I wrote the book for people who don’t read, but to make money as a writer you gotta appeal to people who do read. So, I got blurbs from a Pulitzer Prize winner and some other influential people. That helped me get noticed. The way I got the contract with Heyday was another ripple. By making a stir in the local market—people saying, “Hey, this is really good, this is about us, our mountains, this place” —that created sales. Some of the small local stores really sold a lot of copies. Then there was a writer’s conference, North Coast Writers Conference, that I paid to attend, to meet publishers and agents. Malcolm Margolin, founder of Heyday Books, was there. My son and his wife had interned at Heyday Books, so I pitched the book to him. And they had already heard of it—my son had given them a copy—and the acquisitions editor had expressed interest. So we got together and I showed Malcolm my accounts and sales figures, and some of the blurbs and reviews and he looked at me and he said, “Hey, this is right up our alley. I gotta talk to my people, but it looks good.”

From that point forward I pretty much stopped promoting, and I signed a contract in December [2006], which gave me a cash honorarium, kind of buying out my business. So this existing edition will go out of print, and they’ll do a new edition, reedited, without the photos. I assume it will still be called Walking Tractor, but they might give it a different title. And the beauty of this is that it’s got me working on my next book instead of spending time promoting this one. I’m not stupid enough to think I can make it off of one book.

DB: So far then, are you happy, not just with the response to the book, but how you have come out monetarily. Have you made a profit?

BP: I would have made a lot more money cutting firewood. But I gave away a lot of copies to the old-timers I wrote about, their families and old friends. If I ran into them I would give them copies.

DB: In his introduction to Walking Tractor, Gerald Nicosia compares you to Kerouac in that you both bring an athletic, physical quality to your prose. And you and I talked about Ken Kesey in relation to logging. So I’m wondering if you have any particular literary models or influences.

BP: Well, I’m a high school dropout, pretty much self-educated, and I kind of got into American literature late in life. But you mentioned Ken Kesey. My first season setting choker I spent a part of the time in a pup tent in the woods, and I read Sometimes a Great Notion. And that was very impressive to me because of the language and the way it was structured. It really opened my eyes to what you can do with language. But, at the same time, I said, “Gee, this guy doesn’t know anything about logging.” So, thirty-five years later, you know, I wanted to put the reader into a chokersetter’s boots, and into a timber faller’s boots, because it does have that physicality. And it’s not like the old-timers had a “sense of place,” they were in their place—the mountains, the weather, the dirt, the wildlife, the change in the wind, all of it—it’s a physical existence, a total package.

DB: That’s a good point. For the original settlers of a place it really is all one thing.

BP: Yeah. And then the mountains make the people and the language. Gravity is huge in mountains. What is gravity in the Great Plains? So that affects the language and that affects the folklore. So much of a logger’s folklore has to do with a simple thing like gravity, like falling off a cliff.

DB: Falling off a log.

BP: Exactly. So I caught that, and that’s what I wanted to create, people in their place.

DB: I can’t remember if you mentioned it. Did you create a website to promote the book?

BP: Yeah, but I’ve taken a bath on that. Everybody does.

DB: That’s interesting, because that’s considered to be the model these days, the modern way to do everything—through the web.

BP: Yeah, I have a website, and I have some of the blurbs on there and whatnot.

DB: But it hasn’t done as much for you as personal appearances and radio interviews and getting the book into little local stores?

BP: Right. Proving myself in the local market. Because what I’ve written is about Anderson Valley and there’s nothing else like it. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but my books will sell in this part of Mendocino County for a long time.

DB: When you first got going on the book did you feel like you had any one goal.

BP: I wanted to create some cheap entertainment, and some beauty, and to do honor to the old-timers. When an old barrel-chested rodeo cowboy came up to me about three months ago and shook my hand and asked me if I’d sign his book, then right there I knew I was an artistic success. Commercial success is something else.

DB: You’ve really been pretty amazingly successful with this book, considering the contract with Heyday. So what’s next?

BP: Well the reason why I signed with Heyday, the reason why I sold out, so to speak, was that it gives me time to write. As far as promotion and keeping the ball rolling, word of mouth will carry you only so far, so I had to follow those ripples out. Now they take care of that. So I can just focus on writing. What I’m doing now is writing a second book. I’m in the seventh chapter.

DB: Is it more Anderson Valley stories?

BP: No, I switch it down to the Alexander Valley—Jimtown, North Healdsburg. I lived down there about two years off and on. I was switching my time between Yorkville and there. I worked grapes down there; I worked at a chicken ranch; I put a dump truck into the Russian River.

DB: So you have another book of stories to tell.

BP: It’s more like an autobiographical novel. But it’s the same kind of stuff. It’s a prequel.

An Interview with Bruce Patterson

Originally published in ForeWord Magazine.