John Ramsey Miller

My wife’s bank was purchased by this other huge bank with offices in San Francisco and she was in that fine city all week, while I was at home with the chickens and dogs. Monday she went to Alcatraz Island and took the tour. She called me to say that she couldn’t believe how bleak the place was and how small the cells were. I knew that already since I’ve been in prisons before. And I reminded her that she had been there too, albeit only in the visitors area.

When I was photographing country music artists for album covers and magazine features I went to “The Walls” in Nashville with Tammy Wynette and Mel Tillis to photograph their concert for CBS Records. I got pictures of Tammy walking around in a huge room filled with a few hundred inmates armed only with a microphone, and she was a safe as she would have been sitting at home, where she actually died some years later. One of the inmates was also taking pictures and I talked with him about photography. The walls was a gothic prison where Burt Reynolds filmed the Longest Yard. Tony M., the inmate with a camera, was there doing 54 years for armed robbery.

A week later, I was approached by the warden at the prison (who later lost his job and, if memory serves, went to prison himself for borrowing money from inmates) who said Tony had asked him if I could help him set up a photographic darkroom for use by the inmates who put out the prison newspaper and I agreed. I looked at the space, which was across the main yard where the inmates spent their days. I designed a well-equipped darkroom, which Tony was to run. Tony was a very nice guy for an armed robber. In fact he was a nice guy period. The inmates liked him because he furnished them with pictures for their loved ones. In exchange they traded him things for the pictures, which is how prisons work.

For a period of a few weeks I would present myself at the gate and the guards would open the gates and let me in and I would wander to the designated darkroom space. I had nothing to fear because the inmates knew I was helping Tony, and I walked around unaccompanied by guards as safe as a newborn puppy. I went everywhere with Tony and being under his protection and I spent a lot of time talking with inmates. I taught Tony how to use the equipment I selected, and he was a natural. After Tony was moved to a newly built facility two years later I would take my wife and two-year-old son to visit him on Sundays and my son would sit in his lap.

Later I went to Leavenworth, Kansas to photograph Johnny Paycheck in concert in that federal facility, and it turned out that the warden was a nephew of Bill Monroe, the Bluegrass Icon. Bill Monroe was a casual friend of mine, and I had done a couple of his album covers. I was invited to go coon hunting with him. The warden gave me the celebrity tour, and I visited the rooms where the Birdman of Alcatraz had done his bird thing. The bird man was a cold-blooded sexual predator and murderer who had a soft spot for birds. The warden told me that the birdman killed several inmates after he’d raped them and that was the reason he was never released on parole. Hard to imagine Burt Lancaster filming a scene like that for the movie. I met well-known mobsters, a Brinks truck robber, killers of people with Federal implications, and other famous criminals. It was the kind of tour normal people didn’t get. That day I was with the warden, who walked around without an escort. I was amazed.

In 1981 I was living in New Orleans, and one night at a dinner for a mutual friend (Tony Dunbar, a lawyer who worked for Amnesty International). I was seated beside Sister Helen Prejean who lived in the projects and ran a ministry from her apartment. She worked with death row inmates. This was before she wrote DEAD MAN WALKING and I found her brilliant and totally delightful. She asked me how I felt about the death penalty and I said I was all for it. Long story short she said if I knew the inmates she worked with I couldn’t hold that belief. Two years later I found myself on Death Row setting up a formal portrait studio in the main hallway and loaded film in a cell on death row at Angola. During those two years I had spent untold hours negotiating with attorneys, inmates, and prison officials in order to do portraits of the men under sentence of death. In 1981 executions had been halted for a few years, and the big burn was in the works as cases wound through the courts. I met and photographed Elmo Sonier (Son-yay) one of the two men turned into one for the movie. The other was Robert Lee Willie, I didn’t photograph him. Elmo was one of an impromptu two-man team who raped a teen-age girl and murdered her and her boyfriend. The pictures ended up running in John Grisham’s The Oxford American in the largest selling issue in its history. The pictures, formal large-format portraits of smiling men dressed in street clothes ran years after the men in the pictures were executed. The handcuffs and leg shackles didn’t show in the portraits. If you saw MONSTER BALL, you saw Death Row and depictions of the guards. None of the guards were pro death penalty (at least they told me they were against executions) because they spend their days with the men they would have to help kill.

I have never written about prisons in my books, even though I am familiar with them and got to know more than a few inmates. After that series, I lost interest in photography, and began writing. When those men were executed it depressed me. I was depressed because I felt deep compassion and empathy for the victims, and I felt a sense of wasted lives of the inmates. I look at the pictures of smiling death row inmates and I try to imagine how their victims saw them in their last moments alive. It was impossible to imagine these men as cold-blooded murderers, but they were, and had done horrific things I won’t go into here. They did the crime and they each paid the price society exacted. As long as people harm others, prisons will be necessary. A lot of prisoners shouldn’t be there, but a lot should and have to be. The death penalty has the purpose of making certain that people who are executed never kill again. But the truth is that killers don’t think they’ll ever be caught, much less convicted and executed. It isn’t a deterrent. And it is certainly barbaric. Not much I can do about the people in there, but I can live my life hoping I can help someone make better choices, and know they are valuable.

Here I go wandering again and not blogging about writing, but talking about my life. (It’s all about me). Everything is about writing because our sum totals go into everything we write. The fact is that people flat amaze and astound me. That’s a huge part of why I write, and the people I’ve been fortunate enough to know furnish parts of the characters I put on paper. It seems to me that we all have an amazing capacity for doing good things and being positive influences on people in our lives. At the same time we all have the capacity (hopefully unrealized) for channeling evil and destroying lives. Although most of write about evil, it rarely if ever wins in the end, and good triumphs in the end. I like to think life is like that and good will always shine through and prevail.

By John Gilstrap
http://www.johngilstrap.com

It’s June, so another graduation season is drawing to a close. In high schools and colleges all over the United States, proud students are donning caps and gowns, and posing for pictures with even prouder parents and grandparents. Late spring is the time of unbridled opportunity. Those young men and women literally own the future—their own, to be sure, but also mine, by extension. Given the inherent joy of the season, I wonder why so many adults seem to take pleasure in screwing it all up.

When the announcement is made at the family dinner that young William or Wilhelmina has a computer science degree or a business degree, or that they’ve been accepted to the law school of their choice, the sense of approval is palpable. Everybody knows that those kids are set for life. Their future will be filled with money and material gain.

Have you noticed that music majors or creative writing majors or acting majors don’t receive the same universal acceptance? Is it because the presumed path to wealth isn’t quite so linear? Is it because liberal arts and social sciences aren’t as important to society as harvesting a new crop of lawyers? This bothers me.

I find it difficult to believe that at the doddering age of 21, every law school inductee is truly pursuing his or her passion. I could be wrong—I’ve spent a lifetime being wrong many, many times—but whenever I see a newly minted lawyer or accountant, I get the sense that in more than a few cases, their beaming smiles are reflections of just their own ambitions, but those of Mom and Dad as well.

Maybe I don’t want to see so young a person with so pedestrian a dream as being a lawyer or accountant. Age forty-one is the time for 12-hour work days and heavy responsibility, not twenty-one. Is this really their dream? For some, yes. For many, I suspect no.

You want to see lofty dreams? You want to be inspired by a youthful spirit? Sit down and talk to those creative writing students and the musicians. They know that the odds of success are stacked against them, but they don’t care. They’ve got a passion, and they’re going to pursue it to the end, until they either succeed or are forced by finances or a broken spirit to declare defeat.

If they beat the odds—and let’s face it, they are long odds—naysayers will pronounce them to be “lucky.” But that’s only if the success is huge. Like George Clooney or John Grisham huge.

Otherwise, in my experience, people will find a way to diminish true success and turn it into something less than it is. It’s only a TV movie, not a real movie. It’s only being published by a small press, not a major house. It’s only the Washington Opera company, not the Met. It’s only the touring company, not Broadway. Sure, he made it to the Chicago Bears, but he never made it above second string.

It’s a shame about William. He never really made it. Never mind that William is doing what he loves.

I feel sorry for the kids who have been career tracked by their parents. It’s foolish to think about becoming an artist, they are told, because it’s impossible to make any money at it. They’ll prove their point by reciting a litany of one hit wonders and abject failures from among their own childhoods. Give up now, son; you’ll never make it. This from the same mother or father who said never give up on the soccer field or in Math class. Those are important. Without the connections and the A-plus report card, Harvard is off the table, don’t you know.

I know that I am painting with a very broad brush here, but I’ve known these parents. I’ve had to justify why I was ruining my own son’s chances at success by not shipping him off to boarding school where he could start networking at age fourteen. (I’m not making that up. I turned the debate around, though, when I asked the overachievers why they were willing to surrender custody of their adolescent children at the moment in their lives when they most needed the steady hand and constant love of their parents.)

So listen up, graduates: It’s your life now. You have the God-given right to live it as you please. If acting like you’re forty when you’re 20 years younger is your thing, then go for it. But if you want to start a rock band or become a poet or set a new standard for sculpture, this is the time. If it doesn’t work, how much harm can you do to an accounting career that hasn’t started yet?

How do you even know that you want to be an accountant if you haven’t tried a dozen other things? I’ve got nothing against accountants, don’t get me wrong, but this is an important life choice. Suppose you hate being an accountant? Changing your mind becomes a lot harder after you’ve got kids and a mortgage, and I think that the seeds of doubt over what might have been if only you’d tried could be crippling.

I say if you’ve got talent and a dream, pursue the hell out of it. This is the time. Success only comes to those to endeavor to achieve it. Failure only comes to those who surrender.

And to surrender without trying, well, that’s just cowardice.

John Ramsey Miller

As if authors weren’t insecure enough… the sky is falling …again.

“Holy shades of the terror, Danton.” For as long as I’ve been in this game, the publishers, agents and editors have said things have never been worse in publishing, and everybody was always looking back at the “good old days.” Maybe this time they are right. If not worse, certainly our world has changed forever. And it could get worse than it is. The shakeout is not over, but there seems to be a lull in reorganizing and reshuffling at the major houses. At least it appears the wholesale bloodletting has slowed for the moment. The publishing behemoths seem to have reshuffled their cards and, leaning the fat, have resettled on their foundations. Some are acquiring books again in increasing numbers.

I’m not a businessman, but this is what I’ve managed to figure out:
More than usual even, booksellers don’t want to tie up capital in excess inventory. Most bookstores have lots and lots of books on their shelves, and the object is to roll inventory as often as possible. Thousands of books come out. If the author is new to them, and unless the buzz is enormous, they order as few copies as possible. If those sell, they might buy more, but normally they wait to see what the demand is before doing so––ordering as people ask them to. They order their stock based on the past sales of a book by a previously published author. On a clever or lucky buy, they will sell the books before they have to pay for them. Even though they can return books to the publisher for a refund, it’s a pain to lift them up and place them in boxes for shipping them back where they came from. With paperbacks they can just tear off the covers and ship them in envelopes to get credit, or a refund. I’m not sure exactly how the flow of funds between entities works because it’s irrelevant to me. Probably they send each other checks in the mail.

This is how it seems to go. If your book sells five copies, next time the store will order up to five, but probably less than five. If you are lucky, the people who bought the last book liked it enough to buy another book you wrote. But they might order it from Amazon, so the book the seller bought in anticipation of another sale to the same [hopefully loyal as if there were such a thing] customer, gets his feelings hurt and his computer places a black ball by your name.

The good old sink or swim move. A publisher pre-sells your book to the tune of 5,000 copies. They print 10,000 copies, ship the five they’ve sold, and put the other five in a warehouse in Soprano, New Jersey just off the turnpike near a group of storage tanks filled with things like food-grade motor oil. In the good old days the IRS allowed publishers and record companies to write off the (unsold inventory) boxes of books while the pages yellowed and the glue got stiff and lost its ability to hold things together. They do not tell anybody your new book is coming out, or brag about it when it does, (which is the sink-or-swim or natural selection). If it starts selling they will promote it because that makes sense. But the IRS decided this writing off inventory for years was a bad thing (on the order of writing off three-martini lunches) and put a stop to it. Martinis are great business greasers, and I believe that the captains of industry made better decisions while under the influence thanks to the 3ML. The loss of the three-martini lunch write-off did more to kill liquor sales than prohibition, but that is another story.

The way publishing works is the sort of thing you tell a room full of potential authors at your local high school if you want to nip future competitors in the bud. But seriously, authors need to know that no matter how good their books are, there’s slim chance they’ll rise to Dan Brown’s status.

The really dedicated upcoming talent will do as we authors have done and ignore the incoming rounds, forging ahead with laptops open and take our places on the shelves. The truth is, the odds are always stacked against us, and it’s the bean counters who make the decisions about our careers, not the editors and salesmen who actually like us and love our books. Always remember the words of Michael Corleone; “It’s just business.”

What I’m actually saying is that we authors are not selling dreams, which is what we think we are doing when we get into this life, we’re actually supplying a widget for the buying public and our careers depend on how many of them want to dream with us by purchasing our gizmos.

When I spoke to my local high school’s writing class the other day, I asked how many intended to become writers. I told them that when I was their age I didn’t think I’d make my living writing. I told them that life would lead them where it wanted them, and like me, although I didn’t set out to become a storyteller, the stories just began to pile up in my head and I just decided to put them down. I might not have done so had I known the probability of ever being published, but luckily I was ignorant of the astounding odds against me. I told the young people that once they discovered what they loved doing, they might be lucky enough to make a living at it as some of us have. I know the writing side pretty well, but the business side of the industry is impossibly murky. Sure there’s no security, and the work is really hard …if you do it right.