Laura Derr Joins Authors Guild Of Tennessee

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. - May 27, 2014 - PRLog -- Laura Derr is a retired teacher and marketing professional living in East Tennessee.  A graduate of the University of Kentucky with a master's degree in English, she taught college English for 15 years in Virginia and Iowa.  In 1980, she co-authored a text book for a National Public Radio course on F. Scott Fitzgerald.

While raising a family in Cedar Rapids, she and her husband owned and operated a marketing research business for 17 years.  A native of Bluegrass Kentucky, she has a unique perspective on the Tobacco Wars of the early 1900s and how they affected three generations of her family.

Her book is:  Nick and Viola: A Kentucky Family Tragedy in the Tobacco Wars (1904-1911)

Nick and Viola is a family story about a neglected period of Kentucky history and traces the impact of the tobacco wars on three generations of the Muntz family. The story, lost for two generations, recreates a family’s experience before tobacco farmers had any safety net; when monopolies controlled the price of tobacco. In 1904 the American Tobacco Company (ATC) dropped prices for tobacco below the cost of production. Populist groups formed to “pool” or hold tobacco off the market to force higher prices. Because pooling was voluntary, tensions arose between neighbors who pooled and those who didn’t. Vigilante groups, known as “Night Riders,” attacked barns and crops, and sometimes beat and killed those who refused to join the pool. Nick and Viola and their relatives did not join the pool and suffered the consequences. A barn full of tobacco burned, a gunshot killed an innocent man, and a family fell apart.

In researching the book, Derr realized the story was more than a family history. “I found that the world of tobacco was a major theme in the book. All the rituals of tobacco—planting, tilling, housing, selling—were essential to the story of my family over three generations.” The economic and political pressures of the time were also key to the story. “I knew nothing about the tobacco wars when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. I heard stories about night riders, but never knew why they existed. Writing the book was like piecing together the puzzle of my childhood world. I began to understand the forces that created the world in which I grew up.”

Available in:
paperback (5×8, 194 pages) $11.28 when ordered $10.00 in person
Kindle E-book $7.99

Genre: Nonfiction

An Interview With Laura Derr

Why did you decide to write a book at this stage of your life?
The easy answer is that I am retired. I am an English major. I have more available time than I have had for the last forty years. But that is not why I decided to write this book.

I wrote Nick and Viola as testimony to the family we forget, the ancestors who struggled and laid down a foundation for the people we are today. My mother rediscovered Nick and Viola through her genealogical research. My father, who never knew the story of his paternal grandparents, found peace in its hard truths. I realized this story was also important for my children and grandchildren. And I hope it transcends my family and speaks to others who seek their own truths.

I also realized it was important to me. I grew up in the 1950s and 60s in the Kentucky Bluegrass world of tobacco. I experienced that world without understanding how it evolved and how it defined me. This book helped me stand outside that world and see the larger forces that shape us all. It has been a privilege to write Nick and Viola.

When You Hear …. is the result of these efforts. I have been humbled by comments from parents and grandparents who have affirmed that this book has encouraged a habit of praying in not only their young child’s life but theirs as well.

Why do you write non-fiction? Don’t most people want to read novels?
Yes, and that includes me! I love novels and the mythical worlds they create outside actual events. I actually began Nick and Viola as a historical novel. But I realized the temptation was too great for me to romanticize and embellish the actual events. Sometimes we need to present the truth with as much clarity as we can muster through deeds, court records and memories. In writing history, I had to do hard research, and in several cases I found that the historical records disagreed with my assumptions. Suddenly the reality was far more exciting than anything I could imagine.

Do you have a new writing project?
I love oral history, and I conducted oral history interviews with my mother and father before I wrote Nick and Viola.

Before that, I was involved in an oral history project in the 1980s in Cedar Rapids, IA. Interviews were recorded with over ninety seniors of diverse backgrounds, from manufacturing families who controlled wealth to Czechoslovakian immigrants who sought wealth. I am rereading these interviews to find a common theme for essays and possibly a book.

—Laura Derr