THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, March 25, 1995 TAG: 9503250352
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B7 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY BILL LOHMANN, RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Medium: 80 lines
Back home in South Carolina, where she lived on a dirt road that ran off another dirt road, Sheri Reynolds could walk outside and - at the top of her lungs, for no apparent reason - scream, ``I'M THE SOUTH CAROLINA HOLLERIN' QUEEN!''
You can't pull that sort of stunt in Richmond's Oregon Hill neighborhood, where she lives now.
You don't have to be around Reynolds long to determine she's fun, genuine - and an awfully good writer.
At 27, she has the happy task of balancing youth and success simultaneously.
Her first book, ``Bitterroot Landing,'' which she wrote for a novel-writing workshop at Virginia Commonwealth University, caught the eye of a big publishing house, G.P. Putnam's Sons, which published it last month. The book has been picked up as an alternate selection-of-the-month for the Literary Guild book club, paperback rights have been sold, and there is preliminary talk of a movie.
Tom DeHaven, a local writer who taught the workshop, called Reynolds ``amazingly talented.''
``I'm not surprised the book got published because I think it's a wonderful book,'' he said. ``But the odds are against young writers.''
Putnam also has signed Reynolds to a contract for two more books.
She would have been delighted if ``Bitterroot'' had been picked up by a respectable regional publisher. Before she discovered Putnam had purchased the rights, she was beginning to wonder whether it would be published at all. Then she received a late-night telephone call from her agent on the West Coast.
``I'd just done a reading, and I'd gone out with some friends,'' Reynolds said. ``I didn't get home until about midnight. There were some messages on my answering machine from my agent, and they were frantic. I was listening to the messages when there was another ring and it was her. She said, `Sit down!' Then she delivered the news about Putnam.''
When Reynolds sat down to write ``Bitterroot,'' she set out to retell a Bible story.
In the Book of Judges in the Old Testament, a woman named Jael gave refuge to Sisera, a Canaanite military leader fleeing the Israelites. She invited him into her tent. She gave him milk and let him sleep. Then she drove a tent peg through his head.
Reynolds intended to place Jael in a modern setting and develop her character from childhood, in an attempt to explain what would make a woman lure someone to his death.
The book, though, is a dark story of incest and sexual abuse. Dark, though, with a light in the window.
Jael, a chronic victim, finds strength within herself.
The question everyone asks Reynolds is whether ``Bitterroot'' is autobiographical. It's not.
In elementary school, Reynolds wrote stuff such as the entertaining sixth-grade composition she dug out of her parents' closet over Christmas. It was about a plane crash, a neat trick since at that time she'd been neither in a plane crash nor in a plane. In high school, she tended to write ``anguished, when-will-I-be-loved poetry,'' she said.
But somewhere along the line she announced she wanted to be a doctor. She enrolled at Davidson College as a premed student. Organic chemistry, however, stopped her cold, which made her warm to her writing.
She lists a few of her current interests: mortuary science, eugenics and medieval religion. When she's working on a manuscript, she will walk for hours, creating the story in her head, and then barricade herself in her apartment and write it all down until she drops.
``One of the things I'm learning quickly is this is something I love,'' she said. ``I don't ever expect to get rich from my writing. I don't really want wealth. I want to be able to go out and eat if I feel like it, and I want to be able to walk into a bookstore and buy a book if I feel like it, and not have to say, `Oh, God, how long before payday?' I'm not dreaming of buying a house in Paris. I'm dreaming of buying a dresser. All I really want is some place to put my clothes. That would be cool.'' by CNB