Today we shine the spotlight on Barry Wightman and his new novel,
Pepperland,
available today!
From the blurb:
What happens when one revolution dies and a new one begins?
Think the Ramones meet Jane Fonda meets Bill Gates—a love story—where one woman has all the power.
She asks him—do you want to play your little rock 'n’ roll songs or change the world? He says—both.
Pepperland is a ‘70s rock and roll race through the heartland of America—a love letter to the power of new-fangled computers and the importance of a guitar pick. Pepperland is about missing information, missing people, missing guitars, paranoia, Q & A, brothers, revolution, Agents of the Federal Government, IBM, Hugh Hefner, a Dark Stranger, love, death and the search for it amidst the wreckage of recession-wracked, entropically rundown mid-seventies America.
Sound familiar?
An excerpt [Source: JSK Communications Inc.]:
Side 1: Wouldn’t it be nice?
Track 1: May 4, 1970, 2:15 a.m.
“I’m not sure you’re up to this—I’m sorry, your name. What is it? Martin Alan Porter?”
She doesn’t look up from the screen. I’m a distraction.
“Call me Pepper.”
One with the computer terminal, fingers flying on the keyboard—sprays of
keystrokes, slowing, accelerating, waves synced with the riffs and rhythms in her mind—
she’s fully connected, hard-wired to the vast, all-powerful mainframe computer system
arrayed behind the glass wall in the university data center.
The young woman stops. She brushes strands of hair from her face, loops them
behind an ear, picks up a pencil, taps the table.
“Pepper.” She raises an eyebrow. “You’re kidding.”
I’ve pulled up a folding chair, timidly located it across the wide table from her in
one of the University of Michigan computer labs. I’m nervous about getting too close—
she is intimidating. I’m here because she’s got something I want—the password, the
completely unauthorized underground skeleton key to the computer lab kingdom
representing complete freedom and unlimited systems access, available only to the elite,
the elect.
It is a blow against the Empire.
How cool.
The problem?
First, she’s a girl, the only one in the smart boys club that is the computer science
department. Second, she is stunningly gorgeous—this is no Dobie Gillis smart girl
Zelda.1 She uses no makeup, which is fine by me—I ask you—what’s not to like about
getting back to nature if you’re this smart and foxy? Third, she has a reputation as a
monster programmer and again, she’s got that password—she hacked the password.
She asked about my name. I adopt a casual, off-hand story-telling manner, “It all
started with my dad. See, he’s an old baseball …”
“You strike me as the type who’s all for tearing down walls and making things
happen as long as it doesn’t interfere with your comfortable honky life. Or golf game.”
“Huh?”
“Are you committed?”
“To what?”
She sighs. “Look, I can tell you’re pretty smart and you have been recommended.
We’ve had those two classes together—”
It’s true. She was the one sitting aloof in the back of the classroom, not part of the
scene, yet somehow shining with an aura of inaccessible brilliance. It’s evident she’s
much smarter than me. One time, a visiting professor asked some bizarrely tough
questions and on the fly she created an algorithm so new and unexpected, so clearly
correct, he was forced to concede even a girl might have a shot at a career in computer
science.
The fact that she—this woman—even acknowledges my existence is cause for
jubilation.
But her question—her accusation really—is valid. Am I committed? And to what?
She returns to the keyboard, playing the keys, intensely, artfully, lost in her
programming, her coding. She’s probably skulking about in the online bowels of the
administration mainframe checking my transcript, verifying my technical worthiness.
Later, she’ll tell me that mentioning her appearance and relating it in qualitative
terms and referring to an early ’60s black and white TV comedy in which a very smart
but goofy-looking female character is named Zelda, indicates that all is lost.
From an olive drab rucksack festooned with embroidered rainbowy peace signs and
Vietnam War Moratorium buttons, she removes a black notebook about the size of a
clipboard—riffles through it, places it by her side. Reading upside down, I see that she’s
consulting an elaborate handwritten table containing both alpha and numeric information.
I cannot discern its purpose. With a slender finger, she follows the x and y axis locating
multiple mysterious glyphs and sums.
I say nothing. I want the password.
Freedom.
About the author:

A rock ‘n’ roller at heart, Barry Wightman blends music, mayhem and high technology in his debut novel Pepperland due out this spring from Running Meter Press.
Born in St. Louis, raised in Chicago and New England, Wightman, a business major at Principia College in southern Illinois, claims he should’ve been an English major. Living for many years in Chicago and Minneapolis, he raised a family with his wife Jill, and spent thirty years in the high tech industry, traveling the world, spending time in Silicon Valley, with countless trips to Asia, Australia, and much of the rest of the world. After all that, he earned an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2010. He currently serves as vice president of marketing at Forward Health Group, Inc.
Wightman is Fiction Editor for Hunger Mountain, a literary journal based in Montpelier, Vermont. He is a talented voiceover professional and a Wisconsin Broadcasters Association award-winning essayist, whose work has been heard on WUWM Milwaukee Public Radio.
Wightman is a reviewer and editor for the Washington Independent Review of Books. His music and book reviews have also appeared in various publications in Chicago, Milwaukee and Washington D.C. He is a voting member of the National Book Critics Circle.
This writer and lover of literature has lived in Elm Grove, Wisconsin since 2005. He is married with three grown children and plays guitar and keyboards in a rock ‘n’ roll band, The Outta State Plates. [Source: JSK Communications Inc.]
Thanks for stopping by. Until next time,
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