Interview: Local Publisher Mary Holliman

The office for Pocahontas Press is a paper-filled room at the back of Mary Holliman’s Blacksburg townhouse. She started the company more than 20 years ago, after a short story by her father turned into a bigger project.

The idea of creating an outlet for personal stories grew until Holliman eventually transitioned from her position as a research editor at Virginia Tech to editor and owner of her own company full-time. Now, Pocahontas Press works to publish a variety of books, including autobiographies and personal histories.

The following are a selection of questions and answers from a recent interview with Holliman.

Q: How did you get Pocahontas Press started?

HOLLIMAN: Well, that’s a fairly long story. Back in the late ‘70s, I wanted to write an article about my grandmother. I was thinking about submitting it to Reader’s Digest or some place like that.

… I knew that my dad was getting ready to retire from his teaching career, and I knew that he wouldn’t live but three months, and that he wouldn’t have anything to do. I forgot that he lived in Florida and could garden all winter, so he lived for twenty some years. But I asked him to write down what he remembered of his mother so that I could add it to my article. She was the first woman on the school board in 1900 or something in the community where they grew up.

Anyway, so then I got [a new] job and got to working on some other things, and I kind of forgot about it. Then … a little bit later that decade, I was working with a team of women … in the food science department. We were publishing a national magazine for the National Sea Grant Program. We weren’t sure we were going to get the grant for next year. …

We decided that we were such a good team that we would organize as a private company and maybe get the contract to do the magazine separately from the university if we didn’t get it through the university. At that time we picked the name, because we would be the first women-only publishing company in Virginia, so we picked the first first lady of Virginia for our name.

Well then, we did get the grant, and then I got an appointment to go work in the DC office … for a couple of years. … They kept on doing the magazine for several years, but I didn’t get back to it.

Then I came back here as research editor for Virginia Tech, and that was a full-time major job. It took me a while to get that, you know, to get settled into the new job. … About that time, say, 1983 or so, my father sent me, through my sister, five notebooks full of all of his notes. What had started out to be his memories of his mother turned out to be his autobiography.

… I’d been working doing a lot of computer work in the ‘70s in the main frame and trotting over and picking up print-outs from wherever it was in Burruss Hall and all of that. I felt fairly familiar using the computer. I even had a machine that I could take home so that I could work on the computer at night when it wasn’t so busy. You plugged it into your phone. So I felt pretty computer literate, but at the same time, I thought I would never get a computer for my own home. It would be an absolute was of time and effort.

I got nine pages into [typing] that manuscript and realized I had left out a paragraph and I was going to have to re-type nine pages to get it back where it belonged. I thought, “I will never get through this whole book this way.”

… I mentioned it to a friend, one of my jogging partners, and she said, “well, I have a friend, and he has a student who just got a job up in DC, and they’re providing him with a computer and all, so he’s selling his whole outfit.”

At the time, Virginia Tech would help you buy a home computer, but the whole cost was going to be around $3,000. This student was selling everything, including a desk and a printer and some programs for $800. So I bought it. It was a Commodore 64. Then I had to go take classes about how to use … a PC.

At the time, there was a Commodore 64 club. … So I learned how to use [the computer], and I typed my dad’s book. Then I thought, “Well, now that I have a computer, I have to make it pay for itself.” So I regenerated the idea of Pocahontas Press in about 1984.

… Another friend was only working part-time at the time, so she was working with Pocahontas Press. … We were trying to encourage community organizations like Ruritan, or Chamber of Commerce, maybe, or Rotary Club [to write.] We made presentations at a Rotary Club in Buchanen to [convince] each person in the club to write something about a major member of the club that had been a community leader. This would be kind of a memorial to somebody important in the community. It wouldn’t actually be a published book, necessarily, but it would be enough of a thing that it would be worthwhile in the local library or the local school system libraries and that sort of thing.

While we were beginning to work on that, and I got things organized, and legally set [Pocahontas Press] up as a small corporation and that sort of thing. I consulted with various people in town, and one of them said, “You should talk to Bud Smith,” who was at the time teaching in the English department.

… [Smith] helped me get started. He sent me a manuscript, and he said, “I’d like you to read it.” It was the life story of Chief Big Eagle of the Golden Hill Indians of Connecticut, told in the chief’s words. [Smith] said “I’ve submitted this to a national contest, and if it wins, then they will publish it. But if it doesn’t win, I want you to publish it, because the chief has had a heart attack, and I want this to come out while he’s still alive.”

The main publisher that had done [Smith’s] other books wasn’t going to look at it for a couple of years. So I read it, and I thought, “This is so good that there’s no way it can’t win first.” But it came in second, so I published it. That was “Quarter-Acre of Heartache,” and that was my first book.

Then a history professor … and editor of Lyric magazine, decided … he wanted to publish something that his grandchildren, who lived in Vermont and Italy, would know him better by, because he didn’t see them as much as he wanted to. So he came to me and suggested that I publish his poetry book. So I did.

… It was great poetry, to start with. Also, [since he was] editor of a magazine that published poetry, everybody that wanted to be published in the magazine bought a copy of the book. So we had a best-selling poetry book, which doesn’t happen very often. But that got me started in publishing poetry. And so that’s how we got started.

Q: Are the books that you publish usually autobiographies and things like that?

HOLLIMAN: Yes. That’s what I started to publish, and that’s at least half of what I’ve done.

We [also] made it a practice to do a poetry book a year. When I started having interns, the poetry book was something that an intern could design and finish in a semester’s work. So most of the poetry books that I’ve published in the last fifteen or twenty years have been designed by an intern.

Q: Do you do the editing of manuscripts?

HOLLIMAN: I edit, and I sometimes edit manuscripts for other publishers as well, particularly scientific textbooks. I’ve done that for several companies … and I’ve done some textbooks on my own.

One particular one that sells around the world is called “Keys to Soil Taxonomy.” That is produced by the soil survey, and it’s an international, worldwide description of all the soils in the world.

… I publish it in a form that’s field-usable. That is, it’s sewed together, and it’s small, or as small as we can make it. It used to be an inch thick and 4 by 6. Now it’s 2 inches thick and it’s 5 by 9, but it’s still something that you can handle easily in the field. If it gets wet, it won’t come apart. … When you’re out studying soils, you’re not necessarily doing it in sunshine and perfect weather.

… I edited the first edition [of “Keys to Soil Taxonomy”] about 1990. I edited it for the soil survey, and it was published by Virginia Tech, by the agronomy department.

They soon discovered that college departments aren’t set up to handle book sales to bookstores, where there are always returns. Say 24 students are signed up for a class – [the bookstore] will order 24 textbooks. But not all the students buy a textbook; they may get an older edition or share, and so some are returned. Office staff that’s busy typing exams and letters for professors and that sort of thing can’t really handle that kind of thing. So the agronomy department decided that I should do it at Pocahontas Press from then on. So that’s what I did.

Q: I’m sure you meet a lot of interesting people, but I was wondering if there’s any one particular story that sticks out to you.

HOLLIMAN: Well, there are a couple. There’s one that we just did, it came out this spring, by Robert Vanluyn, who was a child during World War II in Holland. He’s written his life story. He came to this country, got a degree in engineering at Tech, got a job with General Electric, and worked himself up to senior management and so on. And that’s a well-written and well-edited book – his wife edited it. It’s a good story.

And then there’s Michael Kosztarab – Dr. Kosztarab – who grew up in Hungary. He was about 17 when the Germans invaded in World War II, and he was arrested because he was helping somebody. So when they conscripted all the young men to go to the German army, he was in jail, so he didn’t get conscripted. He thought that, actually, he was very lucky that he got jailed for a few days, even though his parents didn’t know where he was and they were really worried about him.

Then he became a professor at a university in Budapest. … When the Russians came in ’56, [Kosztarab and his wife] escaped – they had to leave their baby behind – it’s a wonderful story. I won’t spoil it, you’ll have to read the book.

They came to this country, and he got a degree and had to learn English. Then he worked in Maryland for a while, but eventually got a Ph.D. and came to Virginia Tech, and [is] worldwide known for entomology. …

I’m working on a book right now by a man who grew up in poverty in Puerto Rico in the 1930s, but … his parents made sure that [he and his brother] got a high school education, which is very unusual for people from their circumstances in Puerto Rico at that time. Then he got drafted in World War II.

After the war, [there was the] GI bill and he came to Virginia Tech and had some interesting experiences here. He met a girl from Radford, married her, and got his engineering degree. He worked in the Far East for a while and had his own company in Puerto Rico for a while.

Then he joined USAID and spent three tours of duty in Yemen under three different governments. [He] got awards from the government for building sewer systems and water systems. One village would get a well and pumped water so they didn’t have to walk back and forth a mile carrying jugs, and then another sheik in another village would say “If they’ve got one, we want one!” After he left Yemen, he built roads and airports and things in Afghanistan and worked in Central South America as well. …

Q: What’s the time frame from the original manuscript to getting a book published and distributed?

HOLLIMAN: Well, of course, writing the book, if it’s an autobiography, may take a long time. Once we get a manuscript, I usually edit as I’m formatting. Not everybody would do it that way. Of course, partly [that’s because] I’m working with people that are already literate – they’ve written research papers and things, … so you’re not having to do basic editing like if you working with … freshmen, which I have done a lot of.

You can probably get a book out within six months if everything goes right, but you want to allow a year, I think.

First, you want to take a few pages of the manuscript and find a design … that the author likes. I’m not going to publish anything that the author doesn’t like, and I’m not going to rewrite anything. The author is going to have the final say about things like that. Very seldom do they argue with me.

So you have a manuscript, and you decide on a format. A page size, a type font, and some way that you’re going to handle things. That’s what Brian, [my intern,] is beginning to work on now. … So once you get a format, you’ve got to bring the text into that format and then it has to be proofread, and changes may be made. If you’re going to put in pictures [you have to add those.] Sometimes they may be illustrations, but sometimes they may be family photographs, snapshots and things. So all of that has to be arranged.

Then you finalize the copy. Right now it’s much easier – it used to be [that] a lot of this was done with the print shop doing the typesetting. Twenty-five years ago, the print shop would typeset and you’d proofread that and approve the format or not, and now all of that’s done here. You send the printer a PDF file that they can just set up and print from.

It’s a lot more fun in some ways than it used to be. Except, I used to enjoy going over to the print shop and proofreading things backwards, because the text is backwards and upside down. … Sometimes that backfires – I misspelled “speech” once in a headline.

Q: Are there any other projects you’re working on right now?

HOLLIMAN: I’m working right now with a colleague named Gavin Faulkner who has a company named Rowan Mountain Inc. He’s an excellent designer, and he’s taking over a couple of my books that are major design efforts, more than editing.

Besides books, we’ve been doing newsletters for different groups around town. The major one right now is the Valley Interfaith Child Care newsletter. I’ve also done a newsletter for the Blacksburg Sister City program, and I did the AARP newsletter for a couple of years. Those are the three most recent ones anyway.