Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 30, 1994 TAG: 9412050079
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Another agent told her the same thing, but added that she'd love to see her second novel.
"At that moment I thought, there is no second novel," Schroeder, 43, recalls.
Schroeder struck gold with the third agent. The result, "Solitary Places," was released this week by the Putnam Publishing Group, eliciting praise from early reviewers.
Joan Schroeder has turned garbage into literary art.
The book is based - loosely, she says - on the real-life ordeal of the Kim-Stan landfill, the notorious dumping ground for out-of-state garbage that unified the small mountain community of Selma near Clifton Forge.
A teacher and free-lance writer at the time, Schroeder lived with her doctor-husband, Mark, and their three children one mile from the site. She smelled the sulfuric stench of garbage, felt the swarms of mosquitoes, watched pages from the New York Times flutter across the nearby graves of Confederate soldiers.
She became active in the grassroots group, Citizens for a Cleaner Environment, bringing national media exposure to the landfill through her essays, which she sold to the Times, The Baltimore Sun and The Philadelphia Inquirer.
But mostly, Schroeder did what she does best: She observed.
As real-life landfill opponent Alicia Gordon recalls, "Joan was just there watching us, quiet most of the time. And now I know why. She was thinking and putting it all in that little physical computer up there."
Sitting in the sun-filled studio of her Southwest Roanoke County home last week, Schroeder talked about her decision to tell the citizens' plight through fiction, using alternating first-person narrators.
"The longer I was there [watching the landfill fight], I realized the facts weren't as engaging to me as much as the people," Schroeder says. "I thought I could tell more truth through fiction than nonfiction."
The narrators are:
Reba Walker, the fearless, indignant loudmouth who crusades hardest of all - falling for a Richmond newspaper reporter along the way;
Sarah Rose McComb, who struggles with both her family's decision to sell the land to developers and her humiliated husband, Hunter, who is deteriorating from Alzheimer's;
The motherless Jesse Paxton, who deals with adolescent angst - and his dad's decision to work at the dump;
And spinster school-teacher Lucy McComb, who surveys her old homesite from a nearby grave, proving to know more than the living do.
Schroeder created Lucy to give the ground a voice. The character talks about life before the Buena Vista (literally, "good view") landfill, as well as the present and future conditions of the land. The philosopher of the novel, Lucy sets the scene:
The ground trembles beneath the weight of the trucks, well over a hundred of them coming each day now. So tiresome, an earthquake that will not stop. The men dig, bury the garbage, and the earth moves and changes, contaminated by unnatural compounds whose firm bonds will never break.
Schroeder concedes that Lucy's voice - "both eloquent and unpretentious," she says - most closely resembles her own. It's also a startling contrast to the down-home dialect of the other characters.
A Gettysburg, Pa., native, Schroeder believes the Selma scenario transcends geographic borders - which is why she hopes readers won't view her book as a novel about the Kim-Stan landfill.
"This book is about a terrible transgression that's happening all over, be it Disney or be it indiscriminate building of condos on the Blue Ridge Parkway. It's an issue of taking land, motivated by greed, and looking at what we're left with," she says.
"The ultimate insult is to throw trash on someone."
A framed cartoon above Schroeder's desk says more about her life than all the novels and how-to-write books surrounding it. Schroeder cut the clip from the New York Times Book Review when she was 8, and her artist-mother painted and framed it for her when she went away to college.
The picture is a scene from "Alice in Wonderland" with this caption: "It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place."
"I'm not sure why I kept it; maybe I knew my life would be frantic," says Schroeder, a confirmed nail-biter. "My mom must have known it would turn out to be the slogan of my life - just trying to keep all the balls in the air."
Schroeder struggles frantically to juggle family, writing and community work. The day her youngest daughter went to kindergarten five years ago, she started writing "Solitary Places," working at least five hours a day - three pages at a stretch.
Already an accomplished nonfiction writer, Schroeder was inspired by novelist Donald McCaig, from whom she took a writing class at Dabney S. Lancaster Community College. McCaig's help with her early fiction "was one of those things where you look back and go, 'This has changed my life.'''
McCaig calls "Solitary Places" a surprising novel - simply because nobody before had turned garbage into literature. "We all know the subject matter itself is out of sight, out of mind. But to focus our attention on it and make us learn something about ourselves as human beings is a pretty good trick."
Finding the time to write is especially hard for mothers, the Highland County writer believes. "Men have a tendency to say, 'Well, it's my job, dammit. And is dinner on the table?' But women are expected to do it all. I think the single greatest difficulty Joan had writing this book was giving up all the things she had to give up to make the time to do it."
A political science and English double-major in college, Schroeder considers herself a community activist. She helped start a cooperative nursery school in Clifton Forge, where she penned the first of her op-ed essays.
In Roanoke now for four years, she keeps up with local issues - the sign, "Lisa Merrill for school board,'' adorns her expansive front lawn. She's also following the current trash legislation in Congress, hoping to write more on the topic.
In a new essay called "The Afterlife of a Landfill," Schroeder wrote about a recent visit to Kim-Stan, where she ducked under the fence to observe and reminisce, and ended up losing one of her favorite earrings.
"Standing there fingering my empty ear, I knew all over again the horror of the Kim-Stan Landfill and others like it all across America," she wrote.
She also described the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality's recent refusal to allow a tour of the grounds by a legislative subcommitee - citing "the extreme soil contamination and danger of explosion." The irony isn't lost on Schroeder: The landfill is too dangerous for the bureaucrats to tour, yet they refuse to clean it up for the people who live there.
Schroeder hopes her book will help keep solid-waste issues at the forefront of citizens' and politicians' minds. There's a chance, too, that Hollywood may help: A Beverly Hills production company has optioned the rights to Schroeder's story. Charlottesville novelist Rita Mae Brown has committed to writing the screenplay for it, Schroeder says, and is talking to Sissy Spacek about a starring role.
Schroeder, meanwhile, is busy with readings and book-signings, and worrying about the time she spends away from her keyboard and her causes. Halfway into the first draft of her second novel, she's setting this one in the familiar environs of her hometown: the Gettysburg battlefield.
"The most interesting people in Gettysburg are the ghosts, truly," she says. Set in contemporary times, the book is about "a 16-year-old girl trying to keep a family together. There's also a vet whose family farm is on the edge of the battlefield, and he has his own Vietnam War ghosts."
As a child, Schroeder spent many hours observing life from the granite outcrops surrounding the battlefield. The 18th-century stone house she grew up in had bulletholes on the window sills and a hinged stairway step - where the residents hid silver during the Civil War. "It was a wonderful-slash-horrible place to grow up," she says.
For inspiration, snapshots of the battlefield line the bulletin board above Schroeder's desk. There's also a portrait of her favorite singer, Patsy Cline, who makes cameo appearances throughout Schroeder's work (Reba's cat was named for her in "Solitary Places.").
A bumpersticker she bought in Manassas that says "Disney's America: Our county, our future, our choice" is stuck to a file drawer. "That's there for irony," Schroeder says, ranting about "the thought of a Disney history park when they're only an hour and a half away from the real thing."
Irony, perhaps. But for a person like Schroeder, who knows a good cause when she sees it, the temptation is always there to pen a new essay, or start a new book.
"I tied my hands behind my back to keep my fingers off the keyboard on that one," she says. "I mean, I'd love to write a novel about Disney; it has equally horrible metaphors. But I think I've done that already."
Joan Schroeder will give a book-signing and reading from 3 to 5 p.m. today at the Rockbridge Regional Public Library, 138 S. Main St., Lexington (463-4324); at Roanoke's Ram's Head Book Shop, Towers Mall, at 1 p.m. Nov. 6 (344-1237); and at The Mountain Book Co., 310 W. Main St., Covington from 1 to 2 p.m. Nov. 19 (962-9196). Schroeder will also be among a group of regional writers featured at Radford University's "Books, Dreams and Literary Themes" luncheon at 11:30 a.m. Nov. 5 in the Norwood Center (633-2233).
by CNB