You have to be a special sort of carpenter to work at Scott Davis's construction company. During lunch breaks, Davis may ask you to read a manuscript, help plot a storyline or do some proofreading. That's because when he isn't renovating houses, Davis is running a small publishing house for little-known writers.
Once a fledgling writer himself, Davis, '70, took up carpentry in 1975 to pay the bills. He obtained a general contractor's license in 1979 and started a Seattle company, now with half a dozen employees, restoring period homes.
Meanwhile, he kept hammering away at his writing. He won the Washington State Governor's Award for his book, The World of Patience Gromes: Making and Unmaking a Black Community (University Press of Kentucky, 1988), and helped run the Northwest Review of Books. But after he was unable to get his manuscript about hitchhiking in Syria published, he concluded that New York publishing houses don't like to take risks. That prompted him to start his own desktop operation. Founded in 1994, Cune Press (named for the ancient cuneiform script) aims to make good but unknown writers available -- and appealing -- to the public through a series of anthologies. The first volume came out last September. An Ear to the Ground: Presenting Writers from 2 Coasts is a collection of short essays by 75 North Americans, illustrated with original portraits of all the authors. Sixteen of the writers and artists are from Northern California.
To find his unknowns, Davis held an essay competition, advertised in journals and phoned literary hangouts in faraway cities. He included some people "because they were doing interesting things with their lives and some because they were really good writers even if their lives were not that interesting." Two contributors with unusual occupations are Cheryl Shuck, who owns a detective agency, and Russell DeGroat, who air-dropped chickens for the CIA during the Cold War in an effort to get hungry Albanians to revolt against their Communist government.
Among the delights in this smorgasbord: Linda Elegant recalls the hushed-up death of a Mexican boy in a Western railroad town in 1958; Jan Haag finds broken china from a Japanese internment camp; and [Name Withheld] remembers the overcooked omelet on the day she was to have an abortion.
Davis calls the collection "a snapshot of America." Robert Brake's essay -- included on the advice of one of his carpenters -- bemoans unfair stereotypes about North Dakota. More serious themes range from sibling rivalry to an encounter with Mohammad Ali. Some writers venture abroad. Sean Bentley's "Night Train to Pisa" cleverly captures the paranoia of an Ugly American who starts to fantasize about communists, Palestinians, Nazis, pirates and gypsies when his train stops suddenly in the middle of nowhere.
The essays are paired with good-humored author profiles contributed by the writers' friends. Says Davis: "The great failure in publishing is that we don't give the public the information they need to get excited about the author." Still, William I. Lingeman III might have done without the world knowing that, dispirited over his rejection slips, he once climbed onto the ledge of his basement office and threatened to jump.
For Davis, the philosophical glue that binds these disparate lives together is the search for "local truth." America no longer has a national culture, he says, but there still exists a substantial cultural life that is geographically or philosophically local. "Local truth is specific, not watered down for mass consumption," says Davis.
He also solicited pieces from three better-known writers who represent his philosophy: Arun Gandhi (grandson of the Mahatma), Czech President Vaclav Havel and screenwriter Horton Foote, who wrote the screenplays for To Kill A Mockingbird and Tender Mercies.
By New York standards, some of Davis's marketing methods are as unconventional as his double career. He conducts author parties in private homes and solicits subsidies from local businesses, ranging from Microsoft Corp. to Frank Lau Jewelry. Davis also exploits the Internet, both to market Cune Press books and to peddle authors' manuscripts as the "first literary agent on the Web." He and his publishing partner, Steven Schlesser, expect to break even in six years on the roughly $350,000 invested to start the press and publish their prototype anthology.
Davis, who has also been a social worker and city planner, graduated from Stanford in 1970 with a BA in English and honors in social thought and institutions. But one of his proudest achievements was climbing the North American Wall at Yosemite. Davis and a friend were among the first non-pros to conquer that and other routes on El Capitan. "We were average guys, weekend climbers," he recalls. "We learned rock climbing on the sandstone walls of Stanford. If we could do it, anyone could."
These days, Davis is content to be climbing up ladders -- in both businesses.
Sandip Roy is the editor of Trikone Magazine. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies.
