Jake Grant reports from somewhere in Snow Hill
an irregular blog
Jake Grant’s “Smoke, or Hog-Wild Hauling,” was the last thing I edited at NCLR, though it was really Tom Douglass who did the bulk of it. Jake had sent to us from Snow Hill an unsolicited manuscript, nearly 250 pages, double-spaced and typed on a manual.
But what could we do with such an unwieldy thing? Tom said Let me see and read it and said Something has to be done; we can’t just send it back.
So I read it and agreed that it was an important manuscript by a powerful and sometimes outraged writer who had sensible and humane ideas that addressed the mess our modern world was making of East Carolina: pig farming, logging, environmental violence done to our land and those who work closest to it by the indiscriminate use of poisons.
But what? How? What would be my last NCLR issue was already full. So Tom took it home for a long weekend and emerged with the excerpt we were proud to publish. It was so far as I know the best job of editing I’ve ever known, a perfect model of maintaining an author’s language, style, organizational pattern and themes while whittling away 75% of his words.
As a bonus, Jake’s use of a Psalm for an epigram for “Smoke” helped resolve a raging issue that threatened our use of 10 Kent Williams illustrations, originally intended to go along with some excerpts from Mark Twain’s “The War Prayer.” Issues with the twin Twain estates had complicated our intention to the point that we were not sure we’d find an appropriate way to use Kent’s images. I emerged then from a Psalms-immersion with the text we published, in this same issue, using Twain’s title but not otherwise referencing him.
Jake drove trucks for a long time, hogs & logs mostly, and over a large swath of the U.S. He’s had a lot of time to ponder, and plenty of things to consider along his journeys, and in 2024, he’s still got a lot to say. An eternal optimist despite what all he’s seen, he keeps at it, I’m glad to report.
And so long as he’ll send ’em along, we’ll share his Letters from Snow Hill.
–Alex Albright
December 2, 2024
NCLR 1996, number 5, is available from ECU for $5!
