There are people who write, and then there are writers. They are not the same. When I lived in New York City, I knew a guy who went to all the right schools, knew all the right people, and attended all the right parties. After he wrote a good, first book, he was pushed to the head of our class, and for fifteen minutes was a minor celebrity. There was only one problem. Not only did he hate to write, but he needed high octane additives in order to meet his deadlines. After a second, underwhelming book, he wrote very little. His current career, however, teaching writing and talking about writing, continues to thrive.
Taylor Brown is a writer. Since 2016, St. Martin’s Press has published his novels: Fallen Land, The River of Kings, Gods of Howl Mountain, Pride of Eden, and Wingwalkers. He has also written essays for The New York Times, Gun and Garden, The Bitter Southerner, and his website bikebound.com.
Taylor and I first met in a shared office space in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, where we both rented desks for $100 a month. Although there was an ever-changing cast of characters, the anchor tenants were Alicia and Jeff. A pretty, sassy, Steel Magnolia, Alicia missed her calling as a Gunnery Sergeant at nearby Camp Lejeune. Not only did she run her hair salon with a similar iron fist, she knew more about running a successful business than most of the professors at the nearby business school. Initially, I thought Jeff, the big, buff, New Jersey transplant who was always bellowing on the phone, was in witness protection. However, I quickly realized that he could never be a snitch. More than our comic relief, he was our in-house bullshit detector. He kept the slimy businessmen in check, but more important, he never let any of us take ourselves—or our successes and failures—too seriously.
When Taylor Brown first came into our office, I did not know that he was a writer. Quiet, friendly, and soft spoken, he told me that he did some kind of computer wizardry called “optimization.” He tried to explain it to me, but my eyes glazed over. I hate computers, had no idea what he was talking about, and quickly changed the subject to his slightly battered, but still bitchin’, BMW sedan. I was impressed when he told me about all the endless mechanical repairs he did himself to keep it on the road. However, when he told me he that he and his dad built custom motorcycles, I was truly impressed.
Our first landlord had made a fatal mistake: he included unlimited printing and coffee in the price of the rent. Initially, this attracted me and a number of other professional writers. Over the years, poet Jason Frye, journalist Kevin Maurer, novelists Wiley Cash and Taylor Brown, and copywriter and paddlemonster host, John Beausang, rented desks or offices. All of us put in long hours in the chair every day. Maurer, the New York Times bestselling author of No Easy Day, Damn Lucky, Rock Force, American Radical, Gentleman Bastards, No Way Out, Lions of Kandahar, Hunting Che and Valley of Dreams, was the consummate pro. He churned out books, profiles, reportage, and war correspondence, faster and more unsentimentally than anyone else. One day, I saw Kevin toiling at his keyboard and asked him what he was working on. Without looking up, he said, “Diggin’ holes, man, diggin’ holes.” In other words, writing is just work and the harder you work, the luckier you get.
Everyone in that office shared a love/obsession for writing and worked unlikely side jobs in order to buy the time to do it. When I was a kid, my mom’s longtime boyfriend, artist Robert Irwin, told me never to expect to support myself with art. He advised me to always have a day job or a side hustle. In Bob’s case, he played ponies, with great discipline and diligence, at Hollywood Park and Del Mar. The reason was not just to support yourself financially, Bob explained, it was also to buy your creative freedom. If you had to please a patron, university administrator, gallery owner, or studio head, your artistic autonomy was compromised.
While Jason Frye was an excellent poet, he also worked as a certified BBQ judge, ghostwriter, editor, food critic, and published a guidebook a year. Even after he signed a multibook contract with St. Martin’s Press, Taylor and his father continued to run bikebound, “your online destination for custom, classic, and retro motorcycles from around the globe.” While I was writing my books Thai Stick, Law and War, and Breathe, I coinvented a combat rescue boat, ran a start-up, sold boats and trained various U.S. government agencies. Even Kevin Maurer, as successful as he was, was not above taking the occasional non-writing gig.
What I liked the best, and miss the most, about that office was the generosity of my colleagues. Jason Frye helped me edit my book, Thai Stick, Kevin Maurer got me an agent, and when it came to negotiating film rights with Hollywood, I was a fount of unsolicited advice. Whenever one of our new books came out, we showed up for signings, bought copies, and did our best to lift each other professionally. Why? Not only were we all flying without the nets of university jobs and tenure, we were also all familiar with what Taylor best described as “the dark, sharp edges of life as an artist.” In our own ways, each of us was “scribbling in a dark room in a cold house, trying to write your way into some kind of warmth or security.”
It was Jason Frye who first told me that Taylor wrote fiction and that it was good. I was not surprised, because writing requires the same kind of quiet and ultimately futile determination as working on old, temperamental German cars. I am a hopeless reader of fiction. In fact, I was such a bad English literature student in college that my professor, novelist Mary McCarthy, suggested that I read detective novels after I complained that Henry James’s Princess Casamassima “was boring.” I write nonfiction books, review nonfiction books, edit nonfiction books, and write nonfiction articles. I almost never read fiction, with one exception: Taylor Brown.
Taylor’s latest book, Wingwalkers, is a series of interwoven and ultimately intersecting love stories set in the South during the Great Depression. The first love story is between Zeno Marigold, a damaged, drunken, bloodied but unbowed World War I fighter pilot and his redheaded, wingwalking lover, Della, “The Daring Devilette.” The second is a family love story about the brothers Faulkner. The third and final love story is between Taylor Brown, his beloved deep South, and his muse, William Faulkner.
As a student at University of Georgia, Taylor was drawn to Faulkner for the simple reason that, “No other writer I’d known could wield such biblical thunder from the tip of his pen, calling up whole family histories and generational sagas with such power. Lightning seemed to flash in his books, driving straight into the bloody legacy of the South.” Like William Faulkner, Taylor believes “in the power of ancestors, of those who’ve come before us. Whether they exist in some metaphysical way, or only in our own minds—this doesn’t matter to me. We keep them alive, and they do the same for us. As Faulkner said: ‘The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.’ Amen.”
After Taylor read Joseph Blotner’s biography Faulkner, he felt like he had “opened an old trunk in the attic of Rowan Oak [Faulkner’s Oxford, Mississippi, home], where I might look for clues to this part of the man’s life.” When he learned that the novelist and his brothers were all pilots, he “felt a secret kinship,” because Taylor and his late father were also flight enthusiasts. Not only had a balloon crashed on the Faulkner’s henhouse when William was a boy, the brothers had built a flying machine out of his mother’s beanpoles and wrapping paper, and tried to fly it off of a bluff behind their house.
Wingwalkers took flight after Taylor learned that a teenaged William Faulkner had traveled to Canada during World War I, posed as a British expat by faking a British accent, added a “u” to Falkner, and forged a letter of recommendation from the fictional English vicar—Reverend Mr. Edward Twimberly-Thorndyke—and joined the Royal Air Force as a pilot. Although there is no record of the great American novelist ever flying in Canada, much less in combat, when World War I ended, not only did he return to Mississippi in the blue uniform of the RAF, he now had a limp from a fictional accident, and told people that he had a metal plate in his head. “His sins seemed those of embellishment, amplification,” wrote Taylor, “his imagination too big for well-grounded reality.”
In Chapter 36 of the Blotner biography, Taylor read that while attending the 1934 New Orleans Mardi Gras, William Faulkner had gone to an airshow at the Shushan Airport that featured air races, barnstorming, and wingwalking. The day after the airshow, he showed up at a friend’s house, looking “ravenous and hung over.” After a large breakfast, Faulkner told “a disjointed, nightmarish tale of accepting a ride from two motorcyclists, a man and a woman. They were aviators at the meet, and he had joined them in drinking, flying, and carousing.” “Here was the open door, the waiting cockpit—the story asking to be told,” wrote Taylor, “Those two aeronauts came to me quickly, born fully-fledged on the page.”
At that time, Taylor had just published his first novel Fallen Land. For more than a decade, he had written with great discipline, weathered the inevitable letters of rejection, and lived a monastic life in order to do it. “My first novel had been published—my dream!” he recalled, “But I was hurting inside.” Part of the reason for his pain was that his beloved father, Rick Brown, had recently died in a motorcycle accident.
Taylor rode his motorcycle to New Orleans and spent weeks in the Upper Ninth Ward retracing Faulkner’s steps in Pirate Alley. In the bars and cafes that his idol once frequented, Taylor began to write Wingwalkers. During his time in New Orleans, Faulkner was similarly heartbroken. He had fallen in love with a young artist, proposed, and she rejected his offer. “I knew he’d walked these same cobbled streets and alleys with his heart a broken thing in his chest, and so we walked together at times,” wrote Taylor, “I’m not ashamed to admit that in months to come, when faced with certain challenges of heart or career that I knew he’d understand, I sent summons his way for assistance. I prayed to Faulkner.”
To Brown, Wingwalkers is not just a book about death-defying feats of courage and love, it is also about writing and “what it’s like to write such stories, daring to put one’s heart high on wings for all to see. Oh, to fly into the world of story and imagination, soaring among great cathedrals of cloud, and then to return to the ground—a heartbreak every time. A seeming fall from grace. But we get up, don’t we? We brush ourselves off, we let our wounds heal, and then we look again to the sky. We dare.”
What continues to impress me the most about Taylor Brown is that, irrespective of the success or failure of his books, the good or bad reviews, or the lure of Hollywood, he continues to write with the same diligence that a mason lays bricks, a logger falls trees, or a fisherman hauls traps. What many fail to realize about writing is that it is a craft, not an art. If you spend enough time in the chair, however, one day, just maybe, like the Japanese carpenters who can match wood grains and construct entire houses without nails, as Taylor is learning, your craft can become art.