Notes of a Self-Seeker

Bill Porter was born in Russellville, Alabama, and grew up 20 miles north, in Sheffield. He went to the University of the South, and while he did graduate eventually, it took a while because he liked to travel in the spring. He also spent some time in the Marines to avoid the draft, after which he got married and finished his last few credits at Columbia in New York. It was there in the summer of 1964 that he read Vermont was losing population, so he and his wife Ruth headed to the green mountain state and drove all over, delivering his resumé to newspapers. The Rutland Herald hired him at $50 a week as a beginning reporter, and three years later he was the assistant managing editor. In 1973 he moved to Barre as the managing editor of the Herald's sister paper, the Times-Argus, and in 1985 he went out on his own as a writer. He prepared the annual report for Green Mountain Power for twelve years and won a prize for every one. While he was freelancing he also built up his farm, learned to be a pretty good mechanic, wrote a novel, and started Bar Nothing Books with Ruth. Bill had Alzheimer's for five years before he died in 2022, but he never stopped working on the farm.

Notes of a Self-Seeker is a novel about a divided country, the role of journalism in society, and the most tumultuous year in modern American history--no, not 2020, but 1968. Told from the perspective of a southern reporter who travels north in January to take a job on a Vermont newspaper, each of the thirteen chapters chronicles the events of one day in a year like no other. If you thought 2020 was a rocky ride, reacquaint yourself with the news of 1968. Reporting, writing, drinking, the cycle of a daily newspaper is the rhythm of Bud Willis's life, an unhealthy progression from job to job that lands him in a frigid Yankee backwater. He's an outsider and an insider, a reporter writing about events but also turning them into the record that history will remember, a southerner getting the inside scoop in a northern state, and before long he's caught between a scary police chief, an ambitious state's attorney and an unfolding story he can't quite wrap his head around. To make matters worse, Sy, the managing editor he has come to admire, is in a war to prevent his newsroom from unionizing.