Someone To Crawl Back To - Softcover

Phillip Gardner

Softcover

ISBN 10: 188642098X ISBN 13: 9781886420984

Publisher: Bitingduck Press, 1900

Synopsis

SOMEONE TO CRAWL BACK TO is a novel-in-stories, a collection of hearts in search of what they¿ve always wanted or what they¿ve eternally lost. Set in small town South Carolina, those hearts belong to wrecker drivers, drive-thru fast food workers, college professors, bartenders, insurance and mobile homes salesmen. Their common ground is The Paradise Lounge. The death of a marriage, Joshua and Rene Serverance¿s, forms the spine of the book, but included in this small community of seekers are George Scarborough and his softball-playing wife; Evander Baker, who helps his sister bury a bag of chocolate chip cookies near the septic line; and Warren Oxendine, whose wife buys a vibrator at a yard sale. Structured more like a Robert Altman film than a traditional novel, reading SOMEONE TO CRAWL BACK TO is like going to The Paradise Lounge for a drink, slipping inside a patron¿s skin, going home with that person, then coming back to The Paradise and leaving with another sojourner of love.

About this title

From the Publisher:

It's finally here! For all of you readers who were fans of Which Way You Going, we now offer an entire book of short stories by Phillip Gardner. It includes Which Way You Going and Still Doing Time.

From the Author:

Some Biographical Trivia on an Unknown Writer--I was born into an agricultural community in eastern North Carolina, where I learned to work hard and to play hard. The summer I turned fifteen, I saved my grimy tobacco labor dollars and bought a set of cheap drums. The next year I played in an R&B band: horns, organ, the whole deal. I was sixteen, I was playing Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding, and I was getting paid for it. Our band had a regular gig in Raleigh every other weekend at a dive called The Keg, on Hillsborough Street--the main drag of NC State University. We usually played Friday nights, nine to one. I was sixteen, I was playing drums, I was playing music that moved every part of me, I was playing a regular gig in a university town--at a joint that was a titty bar. The rest of my life has been an attempt to sustain that level of successful living. At the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, my sophomore drama teacher gave me permission to write a play for my project. It was not a very well written play; in fact, I still remember the tenderness in her eyes when she said, "Phillip, this isn't a play. This is a teleplay." Then she showed me places where I'd written in details that nobody in the second row would pay attention to. Until that time I don't think I'd ever looked at movies as being written, if that makes sense. Later that year, I enrolled in a fiction writing class. I tried to write stories, but I found it frustrating because my stories always came to me in a non-linear fashion: "The cigarette smoke drifts up from the ashtray, and through it you see her bare shoulders, the red satin slip, the line of her hips, Miles Davis low and junk-inspired lingering like fog in the air." If this is a story, it comes to you left to right, one word at a time. But that is not how it comes to me; it comes full-blown all in an instant. And that was what happened to my attempt to write stories.

They came to me as movies. So I focused on songwriting. After graduate school, I played music for two years, then took up college English teaching, which has to this point satisfied my creditors. During the 80s, I wrote four screenplays, TV and film scenarios for a fellow at Twentieth Century, none of which sold, and short stories, and songs, some of which were published or recorded. In the early 90s, I was a South Carolina Fiction Project winner. Since that time, I've written screenplays, one of which is Necessary Evils, and more stories. I live in a small town in South Carolina, where I teach and write, exchange ideas for getting rich with my daughter, and play baseball with my son.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bitingduck Press
• Publication date: 1900
• ISBN 10: 188642098X
• ISBN 13: 9781886420984
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 164