As a contractor, Joe Cottonwood made it a rule to avoid potential clients with white carpets. He knows he won’t get along with them, that they have unrealistic expectations of the world, and they aren’t going to like Cottonwood’s “rougher,” more “rustic style,” he says. He expects things to get rough, a bit dirty. That’s the ethos that guided him through more than 30 years of remodeling and rebuilding jobs near his home in La Honda, California, and through four novels, four young-adult books, a book of poetry, and his latest offering, 99 Jobs: Blood, Sweat and Houses, a look at the “construction life,” as he calls it.
“I don’t go for fancy stuff,” he says, speaking by phone. “That’s part of my construction style, and it’s also part of my writing style. I’m not looking for pretty metaphors all the time and that kind of thing. I just get to the heart of it. That’s pretty much what my construction is, too.”
Click for full article:
Joe Cottonwood tells the life story of a contractor through a series of jobs.