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Author reprints 'Miracle' he says rolled out of him By BILL VARBLE "A Miracle Every March" had a lot against it. It was a book with too many miracles, too much history, too many foreign characters. As one literary agent wrote to author Gail Myers, "It's too soft for today's tough fiction market -- and it lacks Americans in the book." Myers hadn't been able to help himself. The story had rolled out of his typewriter, just rolled out like it was being written by somebody or something beyond his control. All he had to do was type. Photo by Steve Johnson Gail Myers will re-release his novel "A Miracle Every March" more than 20 years after it was first published by a now-defunct Texas company. He will read from the book Wednesday night in Ashland. That was more than 30 years ago. Now "A Miracle Every March" has been released again. Myers plans to read from it at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at Bloomsbury Books in Ashland with a little help from a friend. "I somehow conned (Ashland actor) Lee Carrau into reading with me," says Myers, 76, of Jacksonville. He found the book's background and setting and many of the characters back in the 1940s as a free-lance photographer working with a writer friend. The two World War II veterans were hired by Holiday magazine to follow the trail Hernando Cortes blazed from Vera Cruz to Mexico City in the 16th century. The trek passed through remote mountain villages where change was almost imperceptible. Myers met farmers, woodcutters, gamblers, village witches, merchants, an occasional bandit. Years later, after he'd gone on to a career as a college administrator in Texas, Iowa, Pennsylvania and Ohio, he was musing about windfalls -- "kind of a dreaming thing," he says -- and the theme began to mingle with people he'd met in Vera Cruz back in the '40s. Soon a story took shape. In the book, a rebellious young teacher is sent to remote La Vista to start a school and bestow on the village the miracle of literacy -- and because bureaucrats want him out of the way. La Vista has a history of miracles, some tragic, some comic. A fire created a smudge that saved the avocado crop. A flood swept a flock of sheep through the streets, killing a man but delivering a windfall in livestock. A lottery scam backfired on foreign perpetrators when the villagers pulled a switch. The villagers initially resist the idea that the teacher, El Maestro, is much of a miracle. But as they move toward trust, he winds up learning more than he teaches. "It just happened," Myers says of the story. He's no believer in the occult, but when he sat down in the mornings to write, his typewriter was almost like a ouija board. He'd heard about such things but hadn't believed them -- "Until this manuscript flowed out," he says. "A Miracle Every Day" was turned down by Alfred A. Knopf and others and finally published in 1975 by Naylor, a small Texas publisher that went out of business after selling about a thousand copies. "I can't believe my book bankrupted them," Myers says, adding he prefers to blame bad Texas poetry that the company seemed compelled to print. When he moved to the Rogue Valley a couple of years ago he discovered three boxes of the books. He'd cornered the entire world supply from the court-appointed conservator (but turned down a chance to pick up 10 skids of unbound volumes). With 180 books on hand, he re-designed the dust jacket and had it printed locally. Bloomsbury decided to carry the book in line with its goal of supporting regional writers, Karen Chapman of Bloomsbury says. And so a book about miracles is reborn -- sort of a small miracle in itself. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA