Dr. Lewis B. Turndevelts Big Book of Forewords | Page 5

high
profile of professions, it's not without its share of curious celebrity.
Perhaps exaggerated stories of the lavish lifestyles we foreword writers
lead have become too prevalent. Tales of gold-plated bidets that spout
champagne; urban legends of wardrobes made from nothing but sloth
hides; rumors floating around the schoolyard about the house up on the
hill owned by a madman who has built his own time machine from
discarded engines off '68 Cobra Jet Mustangs. Well, I won't deny them
as false - primarily because they're more exciting than the truth, and
good stories should live on - but it does hit at the double-edged blessing

and curse of the trade. Foreword writers are just famous enough to be
misunderstood oddities, but not obscure enough to just be left alone.
I hope this new book will help to straighten out and clean up that mess.
I fully expect that once people have the opportunity to experience the
power and grace of a whole collection of forewords, instead of just the
random one here and there, that this misunderstood but necessary art
form will finally be thrust into the limelight of public conscience to be
scrutinized and defined and appreciated once and for all. I'm also glad
that I can be the catalyst for this change. I am willing to give up my
own personal privacy to the benefit of this greater good. I am sure that
at first the constant interviews and media attention will feel strangely
narcissistic and pretentious... but I'll get over it. It's a small sacrifice to
make in order to receive so much understanding from the world.
But once people have come to terms with the what and why of
forewords, they will eventually get down to the who. Who are these
writers? And more importantly, who am I? Who do I think that I am?
Who has written treatises on who I probably think that I am? Who
further has editorialized those treatises with the so forth and the so on?
These are all excellent questions.
Instead of answering them directly - please, let me keep a shred of
mystery for the media hounds to sniff out - I would like to give you the
brief synopsis of my literary journey, told not through lyric prose but
instead through the broken stuttering of the common man.
1962. It was a harsh winter in South Carolina. However, seeing as I
lived in South Dakota, I only gave it a casual thought. Personally, I've
always been of the opinion that once a country has so many states that
you have to further break them up into geographical namesakes, well,
that's just too much of a good thing. But still geography intrigued me as
far as I needed it to, and being a fellow "Southerner" I was busy
keeping up with the regional home of my favorite author, Jesse L.
Butterfield. As a young lad I would spend hours and hours during that
and many other snowbound weekends poring over Butterfield's work.
They were rich and satisfying crime novels. And there were only two of
them. And I was not the best reader in school. But these books

captivated me, each centered on the small town dealings of an
honorable cop in the corrupt, seedy underbelly of rural South Carolina.
His tales were populated with interesting and bizarrely idiosyncratic
characters (read: suspects), all with sinister motives, and all spouting
severely flamboyant backwoods Southern-isms, such as "You'uns
coppers t'aint ne'er gonna step foot one on my property, no how!"
So I guess you could say that reading that sentence is what made me
decide to become a writer. But I didn't just rush right into it. No sir,
that's not how things are done in South Dakota. In fact, I purposefully
decided to wait many years until just the right time to begin honing my
craft, and in the meantime determined that it was best to simply begin
building life experiences about which to later novelize. In fact, I made a
list of things that seemed to be essential fodder for book writing, for
quaint and nostalgic flashbacks, and planned out the next few years of
my life in order to fit them all in and keep myself on a schedule. Some
of the many activities that I willingly took part in for the sake of the
greater literary good included: 1. A traumatic and short-lived career in
little league baseball, complete with catching my first and only
centerfield fly ball with my head. 2. A science experiment gone
horribly wrong that culminated in a brief expulsion from school, and
afflicted my lab partner with a lazy eye. 3. Letting two friends talk me
into throwing rocks at passing cars, one of which turned out to be my
Mom's. 4. An