Jamie Kornegay says the outlines of his first novel, “Soil,” came to him over a decade ago while he was driving through the hills around Oxford. In the years since, Kornegay has been layering the story, revising and working out its details.
“It takes years and years to accumulate and work it all out,” said Kornegay, the proprietor of Turnrow Books in Greenwood.
The longtime bookseller will celebrate the launch of “Soil” with a signing and reception at Turnrow before setting off on a lengthy tour to sell his novel at bookshops throughout the Southeast.
Kornegay, 40, has been a writer and a voracious reader nearly all his life — he started writing movie and music reviews for his hometown newspaper while still in middle school — but “Soil” will be his first published book.
“I’ve written two other novels that just weren’t up to snuff in my mind,” Kornegay said.
The meticulous work he put into the manuscript for the novel clearly paid off. The novel is being published by Simon & Schuster, one of New York’s largest publishing houses, and has received numerous positive reviews ahead of its debut. Two Roads Books, a London imprint of Hodder & Stoughton, will publish “Soil” in the United Kingdom and Australia.
The novel follows Jay Mize, an idealistic soil scientist who sinks all his family’s assets into an attempt to build a new kind of progressive farming in the Mississippi hills. The weather turns, Mize’s crops founder, his relationship with his wife sours and Mize finds himself alone on the farm, growing paranoid and facing down bankruptcy.
When he finds a corpse in his flooded field, Mize — worried that he’s been framed by his neighbors — decides to hide the body instead of reporting it to the authorities, inviting suspicion, intrigue and madness into his increasingly confused and decaying world.
“Soil” has received a warm reception so far from Kornegay’s fellow booksellers, who have been keenly awaiting the novel’s release. A reading by Kornegay at the American Booksellers Association’s Winter Institute in February in Asheville, North Carolina, caused a stir, and the book was named to the Indie Next and Indies Introduce lists, both lists of recommendations compiled by independent booksellers.
Kornegay said his own background as a bookseller — he worked at Square Books for seven years before opening Turnrow in 2006 — has helped attract attention to the book.
“All you need is a fair shot,” he said. “Then it’s sink or swim.”
A native of Batesville, Kornegay said he’s wanted to be a writer since he was a kid. In elementary school, “I had a teacher that I credit with really catching my interest. She recognized that I was interested in stories and encouraged me to write.”
He started off contributing reviews to The Panolian in Batesville and then wound up editing and producing a two-page spread on arts and culture in the paper for all of high school and much of college. “It was crazy. It was wonderful because it gave me this platform for my voice.”
The position allowed Kornegay to land interviews with an impressive array of writers and musicians, including Ian MacKaye of the punk band Fugazi and with authors Donna Tartt, Willie Morris and even Nicholas Sparks, whom Kornegay interviewed shortly after the publication of the bestselling writer’s first book. A piece of advice that Tartt gave him when he was still a teenager has stuck with him, Kornegay said: “She told me that you have to resign yourself to a life of poverty.”
As a journalism major at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Kornegay was drawn to novelist and short story writer Barry Hannah, who taught creative writing at Ole Miss, and wrote stories for the Daily Mississippian, the university’s student newspaper. Once he graduated, Kornegay went to work at the Oxford Eagle, editing the newspaper’s weekly culture supplement, Oxford Town. After a year at the Eagle, Kornegay left to work at Square Books. He booked author events, oversaw marketing and advertising and helped produce the weekly Thacker Mountain Radio program during his seven-year tenure at the store.
All the while, Kornegay was working on fiction of his own.
Fred Carl Jr., the founder of Viking Range Corp., recruited Kornegay to move to Greenwood in 2006 to launch a new bookstore downtown. Launching and running the bookshop and raising his three children — Sophie, 10; Bay, 7; and Ruby, 6 — with his wife, Kelly, meant that work on his novel often got pushed aside. It also helped provide perspective and experience that Kornegay has been essential to his growth as a writer.
“Until I moved here and really started into business for myself, had kids, it was all superficial,” he said. “You have to experience life to have something to write about.”
Kornegay said he’s thrilled to get the chance to sell a book of his own. As a bookstore proprietor, he is also looking forward to getting an in-depth look at how other independent bookstores operate — and excited about the publicity that Turnrow is getting in the media from reviews and profiles of “Soil” and its author. “I’m really as excited about all the attention this will bring to Turnrow as I am for my book.”
Kornegay said he’s already hard at work on his next novel, waking each morning well before dawn to write before heading to open up the store.
“It’s pretty well firm except maybe the last quarter,” Kornegay said.
Kornegay said the next novel takes place down in the Delta. Working and living in Greenwood has given him plenty of good material to draw from and adapt, from characters and tales to anecdotes and odd turns of phrase. Delta folks, Kornegay said, have a talent for “conversational storytelling” — a trait he said has also made Turnrow an appealing destination for nationally and internationally known authors on tour promoting their own books.
“I’ve never lived anywhere where people are so forthcoming with their stories,” Kornegay said. After nine years in Greenwood, he said he’s ready to start working some of the Delta into his fiction. “There’s so much to say about the Delta. You can’t just traipse in and start writing about it.”
Contact Bryn Stole at 581-7235 or bstole@gwcommonwealth.com.
