Responding to SOS, Authors Offer Sustenance

William Shore, 34, is the policy director for Sen. Bob Kerry (D-Neb.). In his “spare” time he also is the founder and executive director of Share Our Strength, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that raises funds to fight hunger, homelessness and illiteracy.

Sorting through the mail one day, Shore came upon checks from Sidney Sheldon and Stephen King. The proverbial light bulb went off in his brain.

“I just thought there ought to be something you could get writers to do other than write checks,” Shore said.

The result of that brainstorm, an anthology called “Louder Than Words,” will be published Dec. 12 by Vintage Books. It contains original stories commissioned from such writers as Anne Tyler, Joyce Carol Oates, Madison Smartt Bell, Louise Erdrich, Ethan Canin, Scott Spencer, Mona Simpson, Carolyn See and 14 others.

Shore, an eight-year veteran of the staff of former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart, had no experience with editing or publishing when he dreamed up his latest fund-raising plan. At first he approached New York publishers with the suggestion that the project be handled completely on a nonprofit basis. Although he encountered some interest, Shore said he later recommended that the book be handled “like any other book.” Vintage gave him a $7,500 advance--”not bad for a collection of stories,” Shore said, and especially not bad since “I didn’t have any stories in hand at the time. All I had was a piece of paper saying I would have the stories.”

Each time Shore received a positive response from an author, he wrote back and asked for the names of other writers who might cooperate with his effort. Mostly, he said, he was met with great enthusiasm.

“People said things like, ‘Boy, no one has ever asked me to do anything like this before,’ ” he said. The response was so positive that close to 60 writers signed on. A second anthology with stories from “a very literary group” of writers that includes Alice McDermott, Bobbie Ann Mason and Russell Banks will come out next year, Shore said.

“Hopefully we can institutionalize it as an anthology that comes out every year or every other year,” he said.

Since some of the contributors are less famous than others, Shore said, “We’re hoping that the book will give a break to some newer writers who are trying to get better known.”

Shore’s enthusiasm clearly is shared by his contributors. Erdrich and Tyler immediately telephoned their support. Lee K. Abbott, whose contribution is titled “Here in Time and Not,” eagerly responded to Shore’s request for a story. “Hell, yes, count me in,” Abbott said. “If anything I do can end this national horror, then I will have accomplished more with this story, in practical terms, than any I have written before.”

Another contributing author, Michael Downing, wrote Shore to tell him, “I thank you for the privilege of giving away something of value. I typically find myself writing rather inconsequential checks which I try to inflate with good will and best wishes. It is a joy to know that my contribution’s value will appreciate because of your work and the contribution of others.”

To combat the manuscript-in-a-drawer syndrome, where writers might have shipped off a musty piece of work that had been rejected elsewhere, Shore gave his authors 18 months to submit their stories and asked for their “very best works.” Along with royalties, the authors have donated first serial rights, thus providing an additional source of potential income for SOS.

“We sold Anne Tyler’s story to Ladies Home Journal for $3,500, and Louise Erdrich’s to The New Yorker for more,” Shore said.

The success of Shore’s first literary venture has inspired what he calls “some spinoffs.” An avid fan of the late Red Smith, Shore contacted a group of sportswriters around the country and asked them to donate their creative time. A book of sports profiles will be his next project, Shore said, “and who knows what else?”

To date, Shore has received no response from the White House. He said, however, that readings from “Louder Than Words” are planned around the country, including one at Dutton’s in Brentwood.

Each year, SOS distributes “about a million dollars” in grants, Shore said. About 80% goes to soup kitchens, food banks, shelters and literacy projects in the United States. The remainder aids hunger-relief projects in North Africa and elsewhere.

R.I.P.: Inside Books, as flashy as it was glossy, has gone to the great magazine heap in the sky. The Miami-based monthly, billed as “the best-seller magazine,” was an attempt to offer slick literary criticism.

Sadly, the ornery Fessenden Review also failed to bail itself out financially and has succumbed to hard times.

A book with a title that should send most readers straight to the dictionary, by an author who teaches at someplace called Strathclyde University, has shown that big-name authors and 23-year-old literary prodigies are not the only ones to prosper in the current book market.

At a spirited auction in New York not long ago, the Literary Guild paid a “substantial sum” in “the six-figure range” to make “The Quincunx,” Charles Palliser’s first novel, a dual main selection. Its U.S. publisher, Ballantine hard cover, described the book as “coming out of nowhere.” Robert B. Wyatt, Ballantine’s editor-in-chief, also likened the 776-page “Quincunx” to “a kind of Wilkie Collins or Charles Dickens novel written by Umberto Eco.”

First published by Canongate, a small house in Scotland (where Palliser lives and teaches) “The Quincunx” also reminded Wyatt of “Watership Down,” “published first by a very small London publisher whom no one had ever heard of.”

A quincunx, by the way, is an arrangement of five objects in a square or rectangle, one at each corner, and one in the middle.