Chelsea Author Keeps Touring, Avoids Jail

by Raya Kuzyk, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 10/12/2005

In a recent review of shrimper-cum-activist Diane Wilson's September hardcover, An Unreasonable Woman: A True Story of Shrimpers, Politicos, Polluters and the Fight for Seadrift, Texas, the San Diego Union Tribune noted that the book "couldn't have come at a better time." And that was before they'd heard about the jail sentence threatening to concur with the author's book tour or the South Texas Formosa industrial plant explosion October 6 that Wilson had as much predicted in her book.

Unreasonable is the 400-page account of Wilson's battle to expose and immobilize Formosa Plastics, Dow/Union Carbide, and what she sees as other toxic Texas-based industrial plants that have been threatening the health of her town's residents and sea life. Just five days after promoting the book in a Sept. 28 Diane Rehm Show appearance and following a series of strong reviews from the Christian Science Monitor, Booklist and Library Journal (see also PW review, July 18), Wilson learned that a Texas court wanted her to immediately begin serving the six-month jail sentence she’d incurred for protesting at one of its plants in 2002. She originally was to begin serving the sentence in 2006. According to her lawyer, if Wilson enters Texas, something she intended to do as part of her book tour, she'll be arrested.

Since the book tour would have been snaking toward Texas right about now, Wilson's publisher Margo Baldwin of Chelsea Green, is extending the tour, having most recently scheduled Wilson as a keynote speaker at San Rafael, Calif.'s annual Bioneers Conference on Oct. 14.

Otherwise, Baldwin is addressing the interest generated by the jail threat, the chemical plant explosion, and an NPR interview, by ordering a 10,000-copy second printing. Baldwin also ordered a 5,000-copy printing of Molly Bang's YA graphic art title Nobody in Particular, which illustrates Wilson's fight, and arranged for the two to be presented in tandem at future events. Baldwin says she intends to "keep her [Wilson] on the road as long as possible and…press for Dow to drop the charges and/or the governor of Texas to pardon her."