Bill White knows a thing or two about procrastination. You wouldn't know it from reading his meticulously crafted columns, but our publisher routinely waits until the last minute to put his writer's cap on.
"I write a lot of these columns out of desperation," says White during an interview in his opulent 153rd-floor office. "I start writing when I start losing sleep because the deadline is looming. I immediately get in a really bad mood. And then I start to clean the house. I do dishes. I organize the garage. I'll go through closets.
"Every single month I ask Steve [Kaplan, L&P's editor in chief] if I can get out of writing the column. I complain, I whine, I go through a whole process," says White, whose chiseled physique, strong jaw-line and impeccably tailored suit contrast delightfully with his boyish good looks. "Then I finally sit down to write."
Now, more than 15 years after his first column was published, the industrious White is finally getting around to publishing his first book, All Seriousness Aside: Stories from the Last Page, a collection of several dozen of his most-loved columns. The book, which runs 308 pages, is self-published in conjunction with Mill City Press and is available now for $19.95.
Why self-publish? "I want to keep all the profits," White says.
He claims that there's "no rhyme or reason" to which columns he selected for inclusion. "I just went through my old columns and said, ‘I got some feedback on that one,' and ‘that one people wrote about,'" says White, who donates three quarts of blood every other week. "I wanted to give a smattering of old columns and provide fair representation through the years." In addition to White's personal picks, you'll see all-time favorites like "Chester" and "Skyway to Heaven."
But what you won't see in the book are White's earliest columns, ones that were published before he developed his earnest first-person style of narration. Back then, "All Seriousness Aside" was a collection of news items followed by zingers of questionable freshness. We're talking jokes about drunk airplane pilots and murderous pro-lifers. "I think I overwrote in my older columns," says White, who pole vaults at an Olympic level. "It was pretty dopey stuff."
Like a dove taking its first tumble from its mother's nest, White's early attempts at flight may not have been pretty, but once he spread his wings, he became a literary condor armed with talons of wit and humanity. "What I've learned is if you're honest and you're telling it the way it is, people might not be moved by it, but at least it's real," he says.
"I never set out to write a book, but I have gotten [so much] feedback over the years that I thought this is something I should do," says White, who once wrestled a brown bear to submission in Itasca State Park. "I'm just so lazy that I'm just now getting around to it. But my laziness has worked to my advantage because I've got more recent stories to put in there, and I think maybe two years ago it would have been premature."
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