A Stern Face
Local author pens, prints and distributes work

By Scott Nicholson

Peggy Poe Stern has brought the Appalachian tradition of self-reliance to a medium that isn’t exactly a traditional mountain craft, but still manages to capture a regional flavor.

Peggy Poe Stern combines an entrepreneurial spirit with a love of language, often selling books out of the trunk of her car. Photo by Scott Nicholson

Stern is the author of a series of books set in the local mountains, but she’s also printer, distributor, marketer, bookkeeper and critic of her own little cottage industry.

“I’ve been wanting to write ever since I was in high school,” she said. “I like to write about mountain people. I like to write about our heritage and our culture, but I’m starting to write some that aren’t so much mountain based.”

Her first book was the novel “Heaven High and Hell Deep,” and she said that after she wrote the book she tried to learn about how books were published.

Her husband was a land surveyor with his own printing equipment, so they decided to give it a try themselves.

They had everything they needed, but the bookbinding and paper-cutting equipment, and they went on eBay and got all the equipment they needed.

“I’m one of these hardheaded mountain people who believe you have to do everything yourself,” she said. “I learned that it’s work, but it’s fun, too. There’s a sense of satisfaction starting from the first page and finishing the entire thing and coming out with a finished product. It makes me feel like I’m giving people all of myself in my books, 100 percent of me.

“The biggest benefit of it is you print the books out as you need them,” she said. “You don’t have a large supply of them.”

She usually prints a few hundred copies of each book, generally in runs of 25 to 30, with a little technical help from her mate.

Her husband, David Stern, is part of her team, she admits, though they work together in other ways, too.

David wanted 12 children, but Peggy believes a woman “should meet a man halfway,” so she agreed to six.

She enjoys the marketing of books but finds it’s time consuming and detracts from her writing energy.

Currently, she’s just testing the local market, but as her books gain popularity, she will be seeking national distribution.

“I hesitate to turn something that I love into work, and when I get to that point, it’s going to become a lot of work,” she said. “I like the way I’m doing it, selling them out of the back of the car. It’s hands on and you can keep track of everything.”

She also resists the marketing notions of “branding” and “platform,” wanting her stories to stand on their own.

“I don’t want to have to sell myself,” she said. “I think the writer should be able to write, and the publishing company should be able to sell.”

She’s been a longtime member of High Country Writers, and said it helps to have a support group and peers who share a common interest.

Writers are notorious for sharing the frustrations of the craft and business, but are also encouraging when the struggle looks hopeless.

Her first book was written five years ago, and she wanted to explore a mountain voice and evolve it as she continued writing.

She recently finished “Above All,” a sequel to her first novel, which she is trying to release before Christmas.

Her other books came one after another as the ideas flowed.

“People ask me where I get my ideas and I say, ‘Oh Lord, I can’t stop them.’ I’ve got 10 ideas. I can work on three or four books in the same day and not get them confused. People tell me that’s unusual, but it seems normal to me.”

Readers are requesting other sequels, and she usually finishes a book with ideas about what will happen later in the characters’ lives if she revisits them.

“I don’t plot, I just sit down and start writing,” she said. “It’s character driven.”

She said she has a “little devil sitting on my shoulder and every time I quit writing, it slaps me upside the head and tells me to keep writing. There’s no end. Very often I wonder, ‘What’s the purpose?’ Then I get worried that I’m wasting my time. I don’t know if I ever get over it. I just keep trying to make the next one better, thinking, ‘Surely this will satisfy me,’ but it never has.”

One reader asked if she was glad to see her book in print, and Stern replied, “Actually, I’m concerned. I don’t know if it’s good enough. I haven’t yet written a book that I thought was good enough. If I did, I’d probably quit.”

She doesn’t like to re-read her own work, so she gets friends to edit for her.

Despite taking the marketing and printing chores upon her back, she’s sold thousands of copies of her books, mostly through word of mouth.

She also gets her books in local outlets not necessarily known for selling books, and even considered publishing the books of other authors to help offset the cost of buying printing equipment.

She realized she wouldn’t have any time to write if she launched a publishing company.

Other novels include “Tamarack,” “When Robins Weep,” “The Hills of Home,” “Stud from Horney Hollow,” “Mountain Splendor,” Blood Moon Rising” and “Wild Thing,” and the non-fiction books are “Mountain Talk,” and “To Everything There Is A Season.”

She said she gets most of the comments about the “Stud from Horney Hollow,” which she said tends to make older women giggle.

The hollow was named after a real place in Banner Elk and dedicated to a member of the Horney family.

She’s currently writing one called “Joppa,” based on the idea of what happens to a person’s mind or spirit while they are in a coma.

She’s written a couple of nonfiction books recently, but has no specific content direction in mind.

“I guess I’ll just keep on writing until I go busted,” she said.