Scribblers Read Online Free Page B

they’ll let him out of a commitment. The Writers’ Workshop offers seminars for beginning writers, children’s writers, screenwriters, short-fiction writers, teenage writers, and single writers. It sponsors a short-story contest with a first prize of six hundred dollars—good money for that sort of thing.
    When I see that the workshop is putting together a new critique group, I arrange to take half a day off work to attend the organizational meeting. It is my first long venture from home since replacing my car’s water pump, so I keep an eye on the temperature gauge on the hard slog up the mountains. But it isn’t until I’m idling College, Patton, and the other downtown streets futilely looking for a parking spot that the needle starts rising. I leave my car in the deck behind the civic center and walk.
    Downtown Asheville provides a colorful contrast to the traditional, conservative values of the high country. Those expecting the Bible Belt are in for a funky surprise.
    This area of the mountains has been a spiritual center since the time of the Cherokees. Asheville sits atop America’s most powerful vortex—this according to metaphysical author Page Bryant and local swami Nostradamus Virato. Vortexes are bioelectric energy points spread across the globe like acupuncture points on the human body. A vortex occurs at the junction of “ley lines” on the earth’s surface. Twenty-four vortexes have been identified between Black Mountain, to the east, and Waynesville, to the west. A vortex is a place of high energy in a small geographical area, whereas a “power spot” is the site of a lesser concentration of energy in a larger space. Mount Pisgah is the area’s principal power spot. As such, it is home to Asheville’s “Watcher,” or guardian angel. How all of this came about is not entirely certain. Some say the quartz-filled mountains exert a “piezoelectric effect.” Others maintain the area is blessed because the people of Atlantis settled here upon evacuating their dying continent.
    You’ll hear a lot of this kind of stuff when you come downtown.
    New Agers flock to Asheville like conventioneers to a titty bar. The town has been called “a City of Light for the New Millennium,” “the San Francisco of the South,” and “America’s New Age Mecca.” In attitude, it is said to be kin to places like Sedona, Arizona; Santa Cruz and Marin County, California; Boulder, Colorado; Maui, Hawaii; and Seattle, Washington. Its downtown is the province of hopheads and health-food mavens, pamphleteers and tattoo freaks, ponytailed men and hairy-legged women, lost souls and Chosen.
    Since I’m early for my meeting, I duck into Malaprop’s, Asheville’s noted independent bookstore. The place captures the town’s contrasts pretty succinctly.
    Malaprop’s is one of the stores credited with pushing Cold Mountain early on and helping to launch that book’s great run. At the front, looking out on Haywood Street, is a stained-glass commemorative window bearing the facial likenesses of some of the area’s signature authors—Thomas Wolfe, Gail Godwin, Robert Morgan, Fred Chappell, John Ehle, Wilma Dykeman, and mystery writer Elizabeth Daniels Squire.
    At the table by the window, bathed in its colored glow, sit a heavyset, fiftyish woman in boots and a jean jacket and a delicate girl of about twenty with at least a dozen piercings in her ear. They hold hands and speak intimately.
    In the corridor leading to the bathrooms is a bulletin board crowded with brochures for Kirtan devotional chanting, multifaith healing services, bliss gatherings, drummingworkshops, Zen Shiatsu Asian Bodywork, Capoeira Angola Afro-Brazilian Martial Arts, and other things incomprehensible to me.
    The bookstore shelves bear such labels as “Lesbian Fiction,” “Gay Fiction,” “Gay and Lesbian Nonfiction,”