J.C. Sasser
Jana Sasser was 13 when she got the idea for her first novel. She knew that stories require unusual and interesting characters. She also knew she had just met the closest thing Metter, Georgia, had to Boo Radley.
He was a barely educated man in his 60s, a likely paranoid schizophrenic who lived in a one-room shack out in the sticks. The home had no power or water, and was nestled in not so much a junkyard as a junk museum. Out here in the wild, he made his own primitive art and recorded his own rock ‘n’ roll boogie on a home tape recorder.
When she heard one of his tapes, she took her mom’s Cutlass Supreme — “We learn to drive when we’re, like, 7 in Metter,” she explains — drove to his shack and struck up a friendship that would last for years.
“He was the most fascinating creature I ever met,” she tells Free Times. “He was a genius. He made his own guitar, he wrote songs and he was an artist. He couldn’t separate fact from fiction, though, which made him a little bit dangerous.”
Not long before his death in 2011, he said he hoped she was still writing a book about him.
That book — the Edisto Island author’s first — has finally been published. Titled Gradle Bird and delivered under the handle J.C. Sasser, the novel has received early praise in the indie book world and put the author on a 30-city book tour.
While the plot involves, as in real life, the unlikely friendship between a young girl and a local outcast, that’s only part of a very spooky sort of tapestry. Gradle Bird, 16, arrives in a small Georgia town with her grandfather, Leonard, who is intent on fixing up a decrepit (and literally haunted) old family home. While Leonard is forced to recall some terrible family secrets, Gradle is out running with the local bad boys, ultimately forsaking them to protect the object of their abuse — a deeply unbalanced local artist and singer named Delvis.
While Gradle Bird bears many of the usual trademarks of Southern Gothic fiction — old homes, grinding poverty, dementia, a recluse and a thick haze of religious mysticism — Sasser also finds her own Southern-fried magical realism amidst all the swampy flora and exotic fauna. It’s otherworldly and other-weirdly.
The road to publication was fraught with as many tangled paths, treacherous waters and bad turns as a Georgia forest. Sasser went to college, earning a degree in biology from the University of California, Irvine (which clearly came in handy describing the many swallowtails, hawk moths, anoles, dragonflies of Gradle’s backwoods environment). She then got married, had kids, and took a job with corporate America. The book project was something she squeezed in daily between the hours of 3:30 to 6 a.m.
First, she wrote another novel, which went nowhere. Her agent dropped her.
That’s when she decided to tackle that story about her guitar-playing pal in the shack in the country. A new agent loved it, but didn’t want to marry it. Changes were suggested. She tried making them. It wasn’t enough.
She shopped the book around to smaller publishers, and finally got a bite from Koehler Books. A contract was signed.
This time, it was Sasser who put up her own roadblock. She told the publisher she wanted to rewrite the book he had already agreed to buy.
“He said, ‘Most publishers would probably walk away from you,’” she recalls. She gave him that option.
Happily for both, he didn’t take it.
While it’s hard to judge the success of a new book from a new author, Gradle Bird at least seems ready for takeoff. The Southeastern Independent Booksellers Association have selected it as a Spring Okra Pick, and it has been named September’s book of the month by The Pulpwood Queens Book Club, which is the largest book club in the world.
It has also been named one of the 15 2018 selections for the annual Trio Project. Through this unusual new marketing outlet, new novels are paired up with a songwriter and a visual artist, who in turn write a song and create a work of art based on the book. The results are installed as part of a touring exhibit that will begin later this year.
It was a long gestation process, but now things appear to be working out.
“Absolutely,” Sasser says when asked if it was a difficult project. “And one well worth giving birth to.”
What: J.C. Sasser
Where: Books on Broad, 944 Broad St. (Camden)
When: Thursday, June 29, 5-7 p.m.
Price: Free
More: 803-713-7323, booksonbroad.com
