{"id":5875,"date":"2015-02-13T14:18:11","date_gmt":"2015-02-13T19:18:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/?p=5875"},"modified":"2015-02-13T14:53:25","modified_gmt":"2015-02-13T19:53:25","slug":"author-to-author","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/author-to-author\/","title":{"rendered":"Author to Author"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lee Smith \u201967 asks Beth Macy M.A. \u201993 about Factory\u00a0Man.<\/em><\/h3>\n

If glowing reviews are any indication, Virginia author Beth Macy\u2019s [M.A. \u201993] debut book\u00a0Factory Man<\/em>\u00a0may be one of the most talked-about nonfiction books of last year. Combining brilliant reporting and masterful storytelling, Macy shows the struggle of blue-collar Americans trying to compete with cheap Chinese labor. In an age when countless American jobs have been lost to outsourcing, the title character, John Bassett III, refused to let his family-owned furniture plant\u2014as well as its workers and the small town they call home\u2014become the next victims of globalization.<\/p>\n

Macy, formerly a longtime reporter for The<\/em> Roanoke Times<\/em>, spoke about her book with friend and fellow Virginia writer Lee Smith \u201967. They talked about finding stories, colorful characters, and growing up in a blue-collar town.<\/p>\n

Lee Smith:<\/strong> Beth, we\u2019ll get to Factory Man<\/em> in a minute, but the very first thing I\u2019ve got to say to you is how proud I am of you! Having known you for all these years and watched your steady rise to become the writer who could write this amazing book, which is very personal to me too\u2014not only because we both come from southwest Virginia, but also because I\u2019m a merchant\u2019s daughter myself. You came over to Grundy in 1992 to do a story on my daddy, Ernest Smith, closing his dime store after running it for 50 years. It was a sad time. But now you\u2019ve got a happy story, which is the opposite of that\u2014and of just about every other story which has recently come out of our Appalachian region, in fact.<\/p>\n

So, tell us, how did you find this story? Or how did it find you?<\/p>\n

Beth Macy:<\/strong> In 2011, I ran into a photographer friend, Jared Soares, who for about a year had been driving down to Martinsville and Henry County and documenting the aftereffects of globalization on that area. He had amazing, moving pictures of what it looked like to be displaced from your job, including a food pantry that distributed food via an old textile conveyor belt. It was a place where the director could tell what people used to do by their ailments: the furniture workers were missing fingers, and the ladies who\u2019d sewed sweatshirts had humpbacks. He proposed that we do a series together, and my newspaper editor saw it as a win-win.<\/p>\n

Smith:<\/strong> So how did you find John Bassett III?<\/p>\n

Macy:<\/strong> I started with the notion of writing stories to go with Jared\u2019s work, and in the process of doing pre-interviews, I took a friend who owns a furniture store out to breakfast just to pick his brain. He said, \u201cYou know there\u2019s somebody still making furniture [at Vaughan-Bassett Furniture]. His name\u2019s John Bassett, and he took on China in a court of international trade.\u201d<\/p>\n

I saw it initially as a profile, my favorite kind of story to write. And I saw that it had worldwide fingers. Real heft. You could chase it to China and Indonesia, and tell this big story through this one family and the two very different choices it made with regard to offshoring. Then, once I met John Bassett, he\u2019s just a character. There\u2019s nobody like him. We\u2019ve been through all the emotions. We\u2019ve hated each other. We\u2019ve admired each other. We\u2019ve probably spoken 500 times.<\/p>\n

Smith:<\/strong> That\u2019s what you do. You get people to tell you things they don\u2019t even know they\u2019re gonna say. But I think of you as a people writer, not a business writer. How\u2019d you overcome that?<\/p>\n

Macy:<\/strong> He taught me a lot. Also, I didn\u2019t read anything fun for a year. Oh my God, I read The Economist<\/em>! I read Thomas Friedman books, everything I could get my hands on about globalization and China. I both read and listened to a wonderful book called Factory Girls<\/em>, the story from the other side of the globe. I had no idea it was the largest human migration in history, when people went in from the countryside to work in those urban factories. \u2026That gave me the idea [to go to Indonesia], along with that displaced worker asking me to go interview her replacements. \u2026But like anything, one person tells you a story, then you read about it, and the next time you hear it you have more context to ask a better question. I\u2019d never had a whole year to work on something and you just keep piecing at it.<\/p>\n

Smith:<\/strong> You couldn\u2019t have done this book without that time. And you had to deal with people who were reticent, various CEOs who were closing factories down. How\u2019d you overcome that?<\/p>\n

Macy:<\/strong> They thought I was coming to it with an agenda to make \u2018em look bad. And I get that. It\u2019s hard to drive through Bassett and not see it as a ghost town and wonder, could things have gone differently? I was nearing my deadline, and I\u2019d come to the point where I\u2019d accepted that Bassett Furniture [CEO Rob Spilman] wasn\u2019t ever gonna talk to me for this book. I just kept asking. I\u2019d call or email. And then a relative intervened on my behalf and said, \u201cShe\u2019s gonna write this book anyway, and it would be great if it didn\u2019t come out minus your point of view.\u201d The CEO said he\u2019d give me an hour and he ended up giving me three. He didn\u2019t enjoy it.<\/p>\n

Smith:<\/strong> He needed to talk, too. I mean, he had a point of view he also wanted to get across!<\/p>\n

Macy:<\/strong> Rob pointed out that the company probably wouldn\u2019t be in existence today [without the closures]. The shareholders were raising hell. John would say, \u201cI don\u2019t think we had to close \u2019em all,\u201d and that\u2019s what the people in Bassett say too. There\u2019s a scene in the book where Rob makes his kids watch this TV show on the day they closed one of the factories. And the kids are mad and crying, and I thought, that\u2019s really interesting\u2014that he wants them to hear what they\u2019re saying about their dad so they can understand what\u2019s going on in the community at school and know why people are hurting. That gave me appreciation for the tight spot he must have been in, too. And I think that made the book a lot better.<\/p>\n

Smith:<\/strong> This story is such a big story, and what you have managed to do is get all of these people\u2019s points of view, the tight spots everybody was in. I think that\u2019s what makes it such a remarkable book. I think what I\u2019m hearing you say is that the book you came up with was not necessarily the book you thought you were writing at the beginning. What surprised you the most?<\/p>\n

\"Lee<\/strong><\/p>\n

Macy:<\/strong> The material itself was so colorful. I mean, the sales manager and his affairs. The pilot landing without the landing gear! You couldn\u2019t make it up! I thought I was setting out to tell what was clearly a hero story, which it is in many ways. And I imagined it would end with that triumphant moment where JBIII is announcing the reopening of the vacant factory next door. And then on one of my last couple visits of Bassett, I was driving back, and I got super emotional, literally crying in my car thinking about all those people\u2019s stories. The way they kept those bricks from the buildings as keepsakes. And then at the end, when the guy chunks off mortar from a brick and hands it to me so gently, like he\u2019s passing a baby.<\/p>\n

Smith:<\/strong> That was so amazing. But people did that when my father\u2019s dime store was blown up, too. There are levels where this book touches me everywhere.<\/p>\n

Macy:<\/strong> I thought I was writing a book mostly about Galax, but really it was mostly a book about Bassett because those are the people I fell in love with, and their desperate need to have their story told for all those people in Washington and New York who\u2019d never bothered to see what globalization had fully wrought.<\/p>\n

Smith:<\/strong> Yet the book ranges all the way to Indonesia\u2014what was it like to go there?<\/p>\n

Macy:<\/strong>\u00a0That was where that particular worker\u2019s furniture was now being made. It took me six to eight months to talk Stanley Furniture into letting me see the furniture factories they use there. They let us go into three. And it was all very managed. But they let me see a good variety, from what I would consider semi-rough working conditions\u2014people not wearing shoes and walking on splintery lumber culls\u2014to a factory so clean you could have eaten off the floor. What struck me the most, in the rougher ones, you could really picture that this was what Bassett, Virginia, was probably like in 1910, with sharecroppers joining the cash economy and walking in with lanterns in the predawn to go to work at Bassett Furniture. \u2026 It was not unlike what I saw there, where just a few years earlier people were growing their own food and working in rice paddies. I saw the parallels, and you could see how it had improved their lives, having that work. Because the pace is so much faster and things moving more quickly to find the cheaper wages, it\u2019s gonna happen to them. Just like they took the work away from the Americans, someone is probably gonna take it away from them. They\u2019re very aware of that.<\/p>\n

Smith:<\/strong> To make that connection, again, is an example of how this book always goes the extra mile. I want to get a little bit personal for a minute. Where were you born? What kind of a child you were? When did you first know you were gonna be a writer?<\/p>\n

Macy:<\/strong> I\u2019m from a little town in Ohio called Urbana. It was a factory town dominated by one industry that made airplane lights. My mom worked in the factory when the economy was good. And my dad painted houses when he wasn\u2019t too hungover, and my mom ran the family, and my grandmother lived next door and spoiled me and taught me how to read when I was four and really made me want to be a good student. You said before, people will talk to me. I can remember hearing my mom talk around the table, was the gas company gonna come and shut off our heat? And because I grew up like that, I\u2019m really interested in those kinds of stories. It\u2019s something you can\u2019t fake. People sense I\u2019m empathetic with them. One of the displaced workers at Stanley Furniture, when I asked for her phone number, she gave me her mom\u2019s number because she knew hers was about to get cut off. Not that I\u2019m in that same situation as she is now, but there\u2019s something in me that makes me wanna tell her story. It\u2019s just as important as everybody else\u2019s story, but these stories never get told.<\/p>\n

Smith:<\/strong> I\u2019m just so glad that you\u2019re telling them, Beth, in Factory Man<\/em>. People want to know about lives other than their own. They care about other people. It\u2019s just we\u2019ve got to give them a chance to, and that\u2019s exactly what you\u2019ve done.<\/p>\n

From \u201cThe Daily South,\u201d Southern Living<\/em> magazine\u2019s blog, July 15, 2014. Reprinted with permission.<\/p>\n

Photos by David Hungate<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Tom Hanks’s production company, Playtone, plans to adapt Macy’s book into a miniseries for HBO.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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