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The Story Keeper

By Lisa Wingate

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Chapter 1
This is the magic hour. This is the place the magic happens.
The thought unfolded soundlessly into place. Like a photographer’s backdrop unfurling behind the subject of a portrait, its shimmering folds catching my attention, bringing to mind a bit of advice from Wilda Culp, the person without whom I would’ve ended up someplace completely different. Somewhere tragic.
It’s strange how one person and a handful of stories can alter a life.
The trick, Jennabeth Gibson, is to turn your face to the magic hours as they come. I heard it again, her deep-raspy tidewater drawl the unexpected music of a bygone day. The saddest thing in life is to see the magic hours only as they float away.
They’re always a passing thing….
My first day in the war room at Vida House Publishers was a magic hour. I felt it, had an inexplicable knowing of it, even before George Vida shuffled slowly in the door and took his place at the head of the table to begin the weekly pub board meeting -- my first at Vida House. This meeting would be different than all other such gatherings over the years at a half-dozen companies, in a half-dozen skyscrapers, in and about Manhattan.
There was magic in the air here.
George Vida braced his hands on the table briefly before taking his seat, his gaze strafing the room with the discernment of a leathery old goat sniffing for something to nibble on. His gaze paused momentarily on the disheveled conglomeration of aging paper and envelopes stacked haphazardly at one end of the conference room. The pile, among so many other things, was Vida House’s claim to fame -- a curiosity I’d only heard about until today. One of the few remaining actual slush piles in all of New York City, perhaps in all of publishing. In the age of email communication, paper-and-print slush piles had quietly gone the way of the dinosaurs. Digital slush is smaller, easier to manage, more efficient. Invisible. It gathers no dust, never achieves a patina like the slowly fading fragments in George Vida’s relic.
Behold… Slush Mountain, the young intern who’d taken me on the new-employee tour had said, adding a grandiose hand flourish. It’s practically a tourist attraction. He’d leaned closer, then. And just FYI, don’t call it that in front of the big boss. George Vida loves this thing. Nobody, but nobody, touches it. Nobody asks why it’s still taking up space in the conference area. We all just pretend it’s not there… like the elephant in the room. Just so you know.
Slush Mountain was an impressive elephant. It took up a remarkable amount of space, considering that real estate in Manhattan is always at a premium. Its peak stretched almost to the antique tin ceiling. From there, the collection of envelopes, manuscript boxes, and rubber-band-wrapped papers slowly fanned outward toward the base, confining the conference table and chairs to the remaining three quarters of the room.
The intern’s information wasn’t new. George Vida and his famous pile of slowly decomposing, unreturnable manuscripts were legendary. Rumor was that he kept his mountain to remind the youngsters, hatched by an E-publishing generation, of two things. One, that unreturnable manuscripts are unreturnable because someone didn’t mind their P’s and Q’s, in terms of submission guidelines, and two, that success in publishing is about leaving no stone unturned and no envelope unopened. Slush Mountain stood as a reminder that publishing is a labor of love, emphasis on labor. It’s no small struggle to climb to a level where you might actually discover the next great American bestseller… and actually get credit for it when you do.
“Something to see, isn’t it?” Roger leaned in from the next chair, surreptitiously indicating Slush Mountain. Roger and I had been coworkers a dozen years ago, starting out at a publishing house that practically had its own zip code. He was streetwise and sharp, a Long Island golden boy who had publishing in his blood, while I was doe-eyed, dark-haired newbie who looked more like The Coal Miner’s Daughter than a New Yorker in-the-making.
I nodded, but focused on George Vida. I wasn’t about to be lured into talking in pub board meeting on my very first day… or ogling Slush Mountain. I’d never been quite sure whether Roger was a friend, or the competition. Maybe that was me just being jealous. I’d been pigeonholed in nonfiction and memoir for years, while Roger had managed to float from acquiring nonfiction to fiction, and back again, seemingly at will.
At thirty-one, I was starving for something… new. Some variety.
My cell phone chimed as a text came in, and I scrambled to silence it.
Not soon enough. Every eye turned my way. The moment seemed to last much longer than it probably did, my heart suddenly in my throat and beating at ten times the normal rate, my instinctive response to shrink, duck, back away, before a hand could snake out and grab my arm, compress flesh into bone. Some habits die hard, even years after you’ve left the place and the people behind.
I turned the sound off under the table. “Sorry. I usually leave it in my office during meetings, but I haven’t unpacked yet.” The excuse felt woefully inadequate. Doubtless, George Vida’s cell phone had never busted a meeting.
A sudden shuffling, rustling, and muffled groaning circled the table, everyone seeming to prepare for something. A horrifying thought raced past, What if cell phones in a meeting are a firing offense? Silly, no doubt, but I’d already left my last job, my apartment rent was due in a week, and over the past year, I had sent my savings, what little there was of it, to a place where it would only prolong a bad situation.
“Box.” George Vida pointed to the upturned lid of a printer paper box. The intern who had given me the tour snapped to his feet, grabbed the container, and sent it around the table. Blackberries, and iPhones, and Droids were then gently relinquished. No one complained, but body language speaks volumes. I was the class dunce.
Perfect way to meet the rest of the coworkers. Brilliant. They’ll never forget you, now. On the upside, they’d probably get a laugh out of it, and it never hurt to make people laugh.
Across the table, Andrew, the intern turned palms up when George Vida wasn’t looking. He grinned ruefully, giving me what was probably a twenty-two-year-old’s idea of a flirtatious wink.
I sneered back at him in a way that hopefully said, Forget it, buddy. You’re just a baby, and aside from that, I won’t date anybody I work with.
Ever. Again.
The editorial meeting continued then. The usual power play went on – editors with pull getting support for the bigger deals, the better deals, the deals with real potential. Various editorial team members stepped up in support of one another’s projects, their alliances showing. The sales and marketing gurus leaned forward for some pitches, reclined in their chairs during others. I took note of all the dynamics, mapping the lay of the land at the foot of Slush Mountain, and, quite wisely, keeping my mouth shut. Stacked in front of me, and in my office, were company catalogs, manuscripts, an iPad, and a laptop which would help to bring me up to speed. I hadn’t gotten that far yet, but I would. As quickly as possible. Once the building cleared out, I could dig in deep before drowsy eyes and a growling stomach forced me to the subway, where I would read some more on the way home.
Short night, early morning. Rinse. Repeat. By the end of the week, I’d be functional. Mostly. In next week’s pub board meeting, I could begin to contribute, a little at a time. Carefully. George Vida did not appreciate braggadocio – I’d done my homework. Buying projects and getting the support to make them fly off the shelves rather than fall off the shelves, was a matter of gaining the favor of the old lion.
“Hollis, if you will introduce us to the newest member of the Vida house family, we’ll adjourn this meeting,” he requested, and suddenly I was the center of attention again.
Vida’s secretary, Hollis — picture Jane Hathaway from the Beverly hillbillies, but a couple decades older – stood up from her chair, behind Vida and slightly to the right, her close-cropped gray hair making her thin face more angular and imposing. I’d heard she had been with Vida since 1967 when he took over the family newspaper business and began building it into a multimillion-dollar operation it was today.
Hollis’s long, thin fingers braced in backward arcs on the tabletop, her expression as stoic and seemingly detached as it had been that morning when she’d looked over the folder of contracts and paperwork I’d signed down in human resources.
“Let me introduce the newest member of our Vida House team.” Hollis’s gaze swept the table. “Jen Gibson comes to us from the nonfiction arm of Simmons International. She brings twelve years of experience in memoir and historical nonfiction. Her graduate work was completed at NYU, where she was the recipient of the Aberdeen Fellowship of Arts and Letters and the Steinbeck Fellowship. We are pleased to welcome her to the team.” Her regard settled on me, though she looked neither pleased nor unhappy. “If you will share a few facts about yourself that are not on the dossier, we will begin the process of getting to know you.”
“Thank you.” I did a split-second mental debate on whether to sit or stand, then decided standing made more sense, since I could see the whole table that way, and making connections with your coworkers is the first critical step to success in a new house.
I recapped my publishing history, all the while backhandedly thumbing for something else interesting to say -- something that wouldn’t make it sound like my life was all about work. It was, and I liked it that way. When you love what you do, you don’t mind devoting yourself to it. At times like this, I did wish I had something more colorful to share. Kids, house, a classy hobby like antique rose gardening or something. A childhood tale about where my love of stories began. Something having to do with bedtime tales at night and that one-treasured book received as a birthday present.
It was nice to imagine, but it didn’t solve the problem. When your past is a locked box, introductions are… complicated.
I finally settled for a quick recounting of a wild trip to a mountaintop in Colorado, to convince Tom Brandon to sign his celebrity memoir deal with Simmons, during a bid-off between several publishing houses. It was one of the greatest coups of my career, but also the closest I had ever come to plummeting to my death.
“You haven’t a really lived until you’ve slid off a mountain on a snowmobile and spent twenty-four hours huddled against a blizzard,” I finished, knowing that my new coworkers would assume I was desperately out of my element that night in the mountains, which couldn’t have been farther from the truth. After that experience, Tom Brandon knew things about me no one else in my adult life had ever known, but to his credit, he never revealed any of it during all the interviews and hoopla surrounding the book. By mutual agreement, we’d kept each others’ secrets. Action hero, Tom Brandon was a babe in the woods. And I was a backwoods girl in hiding. Neither of us wanted to rest of that story to be told.
“The search and rescue made for great publicity for the project, though, even if that was one seriously bone-cold night in the woods,” I finished, and my new coworkers laughed -- all except Roger, who gave me a narrow-eyed sneer. I’d forgotten until now that he was working for a competitor during that bidding war. I’d beaten him out.
He leaned close again as the meeting broke up. “I’ve never quite forgiven you for that Tom Brandon deal. That was sheer brilliance.”
“Oh come on, Roger. You know it’s not often I actually win one of our little battles.” It was the usual love-hate interplay. Roger and I had always been like siblings who couldn’t stand each other half the time and played nice the other half.
He pulled me into a momentary shoulder hug. “It all worked out. Losing that deal was what convinced me to start pursuing fiction.”
Quick, little stab-stab there. Oh that hurt. He knew I’d always had stories in my blood – that fiction was my real dream -- but when you’re successful in one arena and you’ve got bills to pay, it’s hard to take a chance on foreign territory.
Roger grinned, his lips parting over a mouth of straight, white teeth. The man did have million-dollar smile. A dealmaker’s smile.
He caught me looking at the slush pile before he turned away. “Fascinating isn’t it?” His breath brushed across my ear, minty fresh. Too close for comfort.
“Yes, it is.”
“Stay away from Slush Mountain. It’s the old man’s masterpiece,” a quick warning, and then he was gone.
I considered waiting around for a chance to casually tell the boss how thrilled I was to be coming here, but he and Hollis were enwrapped in conversation at the end of the table, so I gathered my things and started toward the door.
“North Carolina,” George Vida said just before I reached the exit. I stopped short, turned around.
The boss had paused to look at me, but Hollis was still sifting through papers, seeming slightly frustrated by the delay.
A thick, stubby, old-man finger crooked in my direction. “That’s what I was hearing.” He tapped the side of his face. “Reporter’s ear. I can usually pick up accents. I remember now. You’re a Clemson grad. It was somewhere in the paperwork, or Hollis may have mentioned it.”
“Must have been in the paperwork.” Hollis contributed dryly.
The boss smiled at me, his round cheeks lifting into an expression that reminded me of Vito Corleone in The Godfather. “You North Carolina girls should find some time to catch up. There are no memories like those of the old homeplace.” Still smiling, he returned to his paperwork, not noticing that neither Hollis nor I jumped into the homeplace conversation.
Somehow, I had a feeling we wouldn’t be sitting down for coffee and a sweet-tea-and-Magnolia chat anytime soon.

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