A man quits his traditional job to become an organic farmer in rural Mississippi, and just when he’s becoming estranged from his wife and suffers a few more blows, he finds a dead body in his field.
So begins “Soil,” the novel by Jamie Kornegay — the bearded, smiling guy who runs Turnrow Book Co. — that just got picked up by Simon and Schuster with a fall 2014 release date.
Kornegay said that to his closest friends and family, getting signed with one of the so-called “big six” publishing houses in the country was exciting because they knew he’s been writing for years.
“Most everyone else never realized I was writing, so for them it was a great surprise,” he said. “Perhaps most surprising and humbling to me about this whole thing is the genuine excitement everyone has shown me.”
The body lying in the field, explained Kornegay, is the hook that will draw readers into the more subtle, artistic elements of the novel.
“The rest of it is about how he enacts this cover-up, why he did it, how he deals with it mentally, as well as the circumstances of his family and a deputy whose interest in them isn’t strictly in the pursuit of justice,” said Kornegay.
Kornegay said he was inspired by long drives from Water Valley, where he lived almost a decade ago with his wife, Kelly, to his job in Oxford. He had to use the backroads through Yalobusha and Lafayette counties, and his mind would turn looking out at the landscape.
“The landscape out there in the bottoms fueled my imagination and I conceived this story of the farmer finding a body and what he might do if he chose not to report it,” he explained.
The usual responsibilities of life got in the way of the book soon enough. In 2006, Kornegay and Kelly moved to Greenwood to start Turnrow and to settle down with three children, and most of the writer’s energies were focused on those enormous projects.
“But anytime I drove around looking at the land, the notion of this book would come back to me, and about three years ago I took a week off and went to the mountains to hash out the story,” Kornegay said. “Since then I’ve stolen a couple hours each morning before anyone woke up to write and rewrite, and I finished the final draft this January.”
Writers have surprising ways of tending to their crafts, since a person can pour years of work into something and never get paid for it. In an interview with the Paris Review, for example, the Mississippi-bred writer William Faulkner said that the best job for a writer is to be the landlord a brothel, since it’s quiet during the day, “and there’s enough social life in the evenings.”
Faulkner might have had a point, albeit a bit sardonic, but more often great writers come out of the woodwork of bookstores. The novelist Ann Patchett has her own bookstore in Nashville, and the prolific Louise Erdrich runs Birchbark Books and Native Arts in Minneapolis.
As for Kornegay, a bookstore, Oxford’s Square Books to be specific, was a way to make money while writing and also keeping himself in the literary loop.
“I studied writing at Ole Miss and after college it became apparent right away that I wouldn’t be able to earn a living,” he said. “So I took my first job in bookselling to be near writers and publishing professionals.”
Kornegay said that he thinks the bookstore-writer phenomena might be part of the book’s appeal.
“The media traditionally loves to focus on writers who have their own bookstores,” he said. “Hopefully this will bring a bit of national attention to Turnrow, maybe even shine a light on Greenwood’s burgeoning writers community.”
That community keeps growing. Between the British journalist Richard Grant, the brilliant Delta native Martha Foose, Mary Carol Miller, Peter Jenkins, Robin O’Bryant and Troy Carnes, all well-respected literary minds, Greenwood has become a sort of literary hot spot of the Mid-South.
With Kornegay’s newest addition to the Southern Gothic bookshelf, the world will recognize one more on the list.
• Contact Jeanie Riess at 581-7235 or jriess@gwcommonwealth.com.
