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Big-name author happy to be in Sylva
For someone who’s been described as “approaching rock star status,” Tom Robbins seemed like a regular guy during a Saturday evening visit to Sylva. The best-selling author shared stories of his Blowing Rock boyhood before and answered questions after reading from his latest novel, Villa Incognito.
Robbins said his visit here was “like a homecoming” and told an assembled crowd of between 300 and 400 listeners that he was “born up the road” in Blowing Rock.
“I haven’t been back to Blowing Rock much, though,” he said. “I’m not sure when the statute of limitations runs out.”
 With that introduction, Robbins announced that he was a wanted man in his hometown because he had once robbed a bank there.
“I was about 7 or 8,” he said. “My friend Johnny and I went in with our cap pistols. We needed money for comic books.”
Plans for a big haul were foiled by an alert bank teller who had some little round firecrackers called “torpedoes” that exploded when they were thrown against a hard surface. The ensuing racket scared the would-be bank robbers, who hid out in the woods until dark, he said.
Robbins also told us he had felt at home the night before in Asheville where he stayed in a hotel near Thomas Wolfe’s home.
“My mother was a Thomas Wolfe fan,” he said. “My middle name is Eugene after the character in Look Homeward, Angel.”
Robbins, described as the “voice of counterculture” in an introduction by Western Carolina University English professor Newt Smith, even had a Sylva story.
“A few miles away from where I live in Washington state there’s a little town called Darrington where I’ve been to some bluegrass shows,” Robbins said. “When I found out a number of people who live there are from North Carolina, I asked if anyone was from Blowing Rock. What I found out is that they’re all from Sylva.”
Then he looked out over his audience and asked, “What happened here to drive all those people 3,000 miles away?”
Robbins garnered more laughs when he described his voice as “sounding like it’s been strained through Daniel Boone’s underwear. In my mind’s ear, I sound like Jeremy Irons, but when I hear my voice on tape, I realize it sounds like Billy Bob Thornton with a sinus condition,” he said.
Most places he apologizes for his accent, he said, adding that he didn’t feel the need to do that in Sylva.
“In my heart and in my voice, I remain a North Carolina hillbilly, and I’m proud of it.”
Robbins began his reading with a selection from his 1980 novel, Still Life With Woodpecker. He prefaced that reading by saying that while he tried to avoid being autobiographical (“I think people write that way because they don’t have the imagination to make things up”), every now and then, “something crops up.”
Continuing with his self-deprecating humor, he termed Villa Incognito, a New York Times best-seller, “the latest volume I’ve inflicted on the American public.”
Robbins proceeded to lose his place – twice – while reading from Villa. He apologized to his listeners, saying he hadn’t done a reading in more than a year, and promised to return to Sylva the next time he does a book tour so he can do a better job.
After taking questions from the audience, Robbins signed books from about 7:30 p.m. until midnight.
When asked why he writes, Robbins paused briefly and then said he’d never questioned it.
“I started writing when I was 5 years old,” he said. “I fell in love with books, and I announced to my parents that I was going to be a writer when I grew up.”
Robbins said his mother, a frustrated writer herself, encouraged his early literary efforts by stopping whatever she happened to be doing to act as his scribe in the days before he learned to write.
“She would sometimes change what I would say, and I would throw a tantrum if she didn’t put it back the way I dictated it,” Robbins said.
“I told that story to my editor, who said, ‘My God, Robbins. You haven’t changed a bit!’”
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