Southern Writers Magazine Southern Writers May 2018 | Page 5

Steve Yates
by Barbara Ragsdale
A
book titled Time is Short and the Water Rises tells about
humanitarian efforts to rescue 10,000 wild animals
from a rain forest that was going to be flooded. Time
was indeed short, and the water was coming from the new dam
whether the animals were saved or not.
While Steve Yates is not involved with saving animals, he
is actively, diligently involved with the University Press of
Mississippi and its 85 or more non-fiction books published
yearly. Yates’s daylight life is 50-hour work weeks consumed
with spreadsheets, sales reports, meetings, sales calls and
management. But, that’s not all. He’s also a published
author.
The logical question is when does he write? “I have to wake
up at 3:30 a.m. to have any writing time. I try to write during
lunch—if I can stay awake.” There are times when Yates can
be found writing hidden under a vaulting set of stairs at the
Mississippi Library Commission or one of two nooks at Jackson
State’s library. It’s either of those two places or his brown sofa at
home with a cat perched on each hip.
Yates describes writing as “being possessed or having a
long, barely controlled fit, a vision or hallucination.” What
some call a passion for writing, Yates defines as an obsession,
an alternate reality that can overtake him without prompting
or warning. “The only treatment for this condition is to finish
writing the story.”
While enrolled in the MFA program at a major university
tucked away in the northwestern part of Arkansas, Yates
received acceptance for a short story The Cow Doctor to be
published by The Laurel Review. That welcome endorsement
gave him the courage to keep writing.
Intrigued by his hometown’s most compelling and
mysterious haunted house tale, Yates researched to find out
what really happened at the “albino farm.” The Legend of the
Albino Farm required months of intense delving into the
massive family wills from the estate and the historical novel
blended fact with fiction from the urban legends repeated for
years by the townspeople.
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During the course of writing the novel, Yates found it
difficult to maintain a consistent writing voice and mood.
“The first chapters were like Poe and the middle chapters
were like a Lake Street Dive album, coy and driven.”
Yates credits his editor at Unbridled Books for saving the
manuscript by refining and emphasizing what was best in
the narrative voice.
When asked, as a published author, if there was anything
about the process that surprised him, Yates gave an insightful
reply. “There is nothing stranger in the world. You take
something you have labored to create then give it over to
mostly strangers. It’s the weirdest, most disorienting experience
I’ve ever lived through.” Because of his own experience, he
is more attune to the questions and fears from the authors
published by the university press.
A creative block can occur with most any medium or
intellectual pursuit. Yates seems to have found his own way
to overcome a hiccup that leaves writers suspended in midair.
“If I stop writing, I can always restart by rewriting and editing
what poured out in the dream. If the dream takes over and
stops again, then I know what I was writing wasn’t any good.
So, I quit.” Simple. Writer’s block is temporary—unless the
writer lets it go on longer.
His second grade teacher told the class, “Write a story.”
Yates wrote thirteen pages on the lined paper. Over time he
found beginnings hard to write, or so he thought. Now, if
they are troublesome, he just rewrites them.
Many authors see the future in ideas or visions. Yates
thinks in quiet dreams. “Matthew Hernando, a historian, and
I are working on a very curious manuscript.” That is the only
description Yates shares with Southern Writers. In addition,
“I’m researching the opioid crisis and thinking about a love
triangle and music, and how hard it is to make a splash as a
musician from the Ozarks.”
Once again, “the dream hasn’t started yet, but I hear its
seductive, compulsive music in the background all the time.”
For now, the stage is dark, only the center light glows to
remind us that Act One is still the quiet dream. Words aren’t
on the page yet, but Yates will let us know when the dream
becomes reality. ■
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