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level of a twelve-year-old.
    But what really moved him was a lifelong desire to teach himself how to write. “Before you go to sleep at night, you say, ‘I haven’t got it yet. I haven’t got it yet,’ ” he once remarked.
    Billy is standing with me at the window when he spies the little red plane off in the distance to our right. “Just on time,” he says.
    It’s a moment before I spot it; looked at edge-on, it’slike trying to see a knife in the sky. The plane comes in right wing low but finally straightens when it’s just beyond the edge of the runway and maybe fifty feet off the ground. Unlike the jets that rumble the windows of the lounge, the little red plane is completely silent to us. It touches down opposite where we’re standing, then lifts back up, climbs, and starts to bank left past the far end of the runway.
    Billy taps his foot three, four, five times before he speaks. “Touch-and-go’s,” he says.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œThey’re doing touch-and-go’s. The student must have the plane till five.”
    â€œOh.”
    â€œWe can fit you in tomorrow, no problem.”
    â€œBut I live out of town. I’m heading home tonight.”
    And so I do, but not before Billy pours and caps me a coffee for the road, walks me to the parking lot, and elicits my promise to contact the flight school when I’m coming to the mountains again.
    I doubt I’ll take him up on his offer.
    I doubt he means it anyway.
    It’s hardly his fault my trip has been a failure. A hundred-and-thirty-dollar flight probably wasn’t going to buy me much understanding anyway. What I really need to do is meet some actual writers.

C HAPTER 2
    Authors Anonymous
    When you write a book, you expect it to impact the world in some small way, though you ought to know better. If you hope to see your achievement celebrated and instead find yourself a lonely supplicant, it is profoundly discouraging.
    My first book came out some years ago.
    I’ve never happened across anyone reading it on the beach, on an airplane, or in a library.
    I’ve never witnessed anyone buying it in a bookstore except at my autographings.
    I’ve watched boxes of my book leave the publisher’s warehouse in October and return unopened after the holidays. I’ve seen individual copies trickle back unsold, be-stickered, and battered.
    I’ve been politely declined when I offered to speak about being an author to my daughter’s fourth-grade class.
    At one autographing, I had a group of children feel sorry enough that they pooled their resources and bought postcards for me to sign, since they couldn’t afford the price of a book, intended for adult readers anyway.
    Eighteen months after publication, bookstore returns of unsold copies were so strong that I received a semiannual royalty check for exactly $1.01, meaning that, over the preceding six months, sales had exceeded returns by exactly one unit. I never cashed that check. I have it still.
    But I say it’s a pretty good book nonetheless. And I shouldn’t disparage its sales. It’s been through three printings and one foreign-language edition and remains a staple in its niche nearly a decade after publication.
    When the book-writing spirit again moves me, I decide to take as my subject mountain writers, from the iconic to the unknown. I return to Asheville several weeks after the Thomas Wolfe Festival to seek out a local writers’ support group. The largest such organization in the area is The Writers’ Workshop. On its advisory board, I see from its professional-looking newsletter, are such luminaries as John Le Carré, Peter Matthiessen, and Reynolds Price. Oddly, Alex Haley is listed as a member of the board—at the bottom and in smaller type—though it is years since his death; someone from the workshop apparently took pains to cultivate his acquaintance and will be damned if