BY RICK SKWIOT

A BAGWELL Oil truck creeps down Randolph Street in Cape Charles, Virginia (pop. 1,398), the first vehicle to pass since a red Ford pickup cruised by half an hour earlier. The driver spies Sheri Reynolds sitting in a rocking chair on the covered front porch of her two-story frame house and waves. She waves back and turns to me.
     "That's why I have to live here: I get to know the Bagwell Oil man!"
     Perhaps most any other novelist whose book topped the New York Times Bestseller List for weeks and sold a million copies, as did The Rapture of Canaan, might be tempted to move to Manhattan and cash in, socially and otherwise, on her fame. But Sheri Reynolds prefers the sleepy Eastern Shore, from which she commutes to Norfolk to teach fiction-writing at Old Dominion University.
     "I keep the dirt between my toes," she says, "so when I want to feel gritty I can just wiggle them."
     The words of a sensualist and woods woman. A writer wary of those who come at life solely through the intellect:
     "I never trust a writer who doesn't eat well. There's a confusion there between head and heart. Sometimes it's good to get a Hershey Bar and make a mess."
     A Southern writer (a limiting handle she argues with) who subscribes to the words of iconic Southern writer Flannery O'Connor: "Fiction operates through the senses." Reynolds puts it this way:
     "What you create in your head you have to experience with your body. You have to climb trees to feel the bark and get slapped by a branch. Then you can write about it You've got to get into your body and heart. Fiction must touch me in the senses to transport me to another plane."
     She's been doing just that-embracing nature, following her heart, and writing about how it feels-for much of her thirty four years.

Out in the Sticks

HER FIRST WORD as a child, she claims, was "book." This in Horry County, South Carolina. Up toward Conway but way out in the sticks. Past Galivant's Ferry. That's where you turn off.
     Even before she learned the alphabet she was stapling together sheets of paper and scribbling on them, telling whoever asked that she was writing books.
     Later she took to the woods to dodge piano lessons (a trial even with penciling in the notes on the sides of the keys). There she pretended to be Don Quixote, her favorite fictional character as a girl, and concocted adventures for him.
     "I didn't fit in. They were trying to make me into the girl I should have been. I didn't want to shop but to hunt with my dad. The men in my family were outlaws who didn't go to church and hunted out of season."
     The iconoclastic men, that's with whom she identified. They got to go out in the woods, just as the characters in her novels retreat there, far from the strictures and malevolence of society, to find safety and solace. They ventured out on calming waters.
     Ditto for Reynolds, who keeps a kayak in her back yard for trips out onto the marshes.
     "It was always impossible for me to find God in church but not hard to find God in a tree. I'm still a very spiritual person. But I find everything I need to sustain me in the natural world. I can't find that in the

Bible... I gave up the religion of my background, though I still write about fundamentalist Christianity, the narrowness and fear. You can't write a book about the South and escape the influence of the church. It's ingrained."
     She lifts her chin toward Chesapeake Bay, two blocks away. "The beach-that's my solace." That and the slow, small-town rhythms.
     "I love small towns. My writing needs a slower pace of life, but I need people around that I can get to. It's seasonal, and quiet in the winter."
     Though this September day seems quiet enough, too. Perfectly quiet: no traffic noise, no airplane noise, nothing, except for the chirping of sparrows that disappear into a tall oak across the street. Crepe myrtles line the block, their phosphorescent pink now fading. The guy in the red Ford pickup again drives by and again waves. Reynolds again waves back.
     "He drives by a lot. I don't know him, but I like him. He goes to the beach to watch the sunset."
     That friendliness without familiarity seems to suit her.
     "I like the way people stop by and talk, whether they know you or not. And no one knows me. I'm just the woman who sits on her porch. I love the anonymity. The town's small enough that I can ground my self. Sometimes I feel like a balloon filled with helium, and I get scared."
     That existential sense of lightness also haunts the heroines of her three published novels. Like Reynolds, they are not innately

rebellious but, out of necessity, make up their own rules as they go along: their own religions, their own stories, their own strategies for survival in a hostile world. Their lives suggest that living with your whole heart and whole body-along with your imagination-is the ultimate creative act.

Enter Oprah

DESPITE HER early inclinations toward books and making up stories, Reynolds didn't plan to be a writer when she entered college. A chemistry major, she thought she'd be a doctor. But her imagination got in the way.
     "I didn't like spending days in the lab. I wasn't precise. If my lab solution boiled over that was ok, just like with my cooking. I was daydreaming and writing stories and forgot to write my lab reports."
     That daydreaming, and her love of play ing with words and sounds-"Writing is as much in my ear as in my head"-drove her into literature.
     On an easy chair in her living room sits a needlepoint pillow reading "Davidson College." It was there, in North Carolina, that she won a writing award. She then followed her mentor and "hero," novelist Lee Smith, to Virginia Commonwealth University for graduate school. Her work there led to her first novel, Bitterroot Landing.
     Her second novel, Rapture of Canaan, at first had modest sales despite good reviews in the right places. Then Oprah Winfrey got hold of it. You could say that changed Reynolds' life. Or you could say it really didn't.
     "Oprah was a huge thing. I thought it was the biggest event of my life at the time. But I learned later it's the little, personal things that matter."
     The big, impersonal things-like the money Oprah's blessing brought-seemingly lay beyond Reynolds' grasp.