Every year between Christmas and Epiphany (January 6), I read James Joyce’s “The Dead,” widely regarded as one of the best short stories ever written in English and the final story in the classic collection Dubliners. The setting is the “Misses Morkan’s annual dance” and dinner party. The hostesses are elderly Miss Kate and Miss Julia Morkan and their niece Mary Jane. The main character is Gabriel Conroy, Julia and Kate’s nephew, whose mother was their late sister.
The party breaks up late, and Gabriel and his wife Gretta make their way through cold and snow to a Dublin hotel for the night. But before they leave the Morkan house, Joyce creates a beautiful scene in which Gretta is standing on the first landing of the stairs, where she is listening so somebody up above playing the piano and a man singing. Gabriel stands at the foot of the stairs looking up at his wife:
He stood still in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air that the voice was singing and gazing up at his wife. There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. Her blue felt hat would show off the bronze of her hair against the darkness and the dark panels of her skirt would show off the light ones. DISTANT MUSIC he would call the picture if he were a painter.
Later, in their hotel room lit only by streetlights, he asks her about the song she heard, and she tells him it was “The Lass of Aughrim.” When he asks why the song made her cry, she tells him the story from her girlhood, when she was loved by a boy named Michael Furey, who used to sing that song to her. When Gabriel breaks out in peevish anger – just before, he was lusting to get her into bed – and says something cutting about her wanting to visit her native region to rekindle her young love of this Furey boy. That’s when she tells him that Michael Furey is dead. Joyce writes, “Gabriel felt humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the evocation of this figure from the dead, a boy in the gasworks.” He becomes even more flustered when he learns that the boy died of a lung condition and overexposure to the weather when he visited her on a cold and rainy night out of a desire to see her one last time before she left for school.
Gretta cries herself to sleep and leaves Gabriel standing by the window and looking out on the night. He feels tenderly for her having spent all their years together, even their most intimate moments, with this secret “locked in her heart.” He feels sad for himself and for her as he realizes that he perhaps has never loved anybody – not even Gretta: “He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love.”
Joyce’s great story “The Dead” ends, appropriately, with what I consider to be one of the most beautiful paragraphs ever written in English:
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely in the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
I find this so moving that a few years ago, when I was somewhere – Gatlinburg maybe – on a writing weekend away, I attempted to capture some hint of the emotions this conclusion of “The Dead” inspires in me. Below is what I came up with.
Michael Furey Is Dead
She stands on the stair and listens to the waltz floating down from above, Her face half hidden in shadow half in light. The ghost of a sad smile trembles on lips freshly colored with care, And I tremble at the sight and I wonder what she might be thinking.
She doesn’t know that I saw her as we walk side by side on the street, Both acting just like we didn’t feel what we felt. My tongue tripping over her mystery, hers trying to cover it up. Then I ask her if she’s well, Then I beg for her to tell what she’s feeling.
Oo Oo Oo—Michael Furey is dead—Oo Oo Oo
Deep in the days of a cold and wet autumn, they took waltzing walks in the wood. A delicate boy and a handsome young woman they were. She was an orphan with her aunt until winter, when she’d pack up and go back to school. And he worked in the mines, and he coughed all the time they were dancing.
[Waltz-rhythm interlude]
The weather turned black before she was to leave, the rain fell without taking a breath. Her dark-haired boy waited wet and alone ’neath the trees. She’d been back to school for only one week when the letter arrived from her aunt. And it brought her to her knees with its news of Michael Furey’s passing.
Oo Oo Oo—Michael Furey is dead—Oo Oo Oo
I stand by the window and listen as her sobs subside into sleep And look for the ghost of the boy who died for love of my wife. The stars hang in heaven like the caught breath of snow or like sparkling rain in dark hair. And I tremble at the sight, and I wonder what she might be dreaming. And I tremble deep inside, and I’m afraid of what she might be dreaming.
Oo Oo Oo—Michael Furey is dead—Oo Oo Oo
I played this song live a few times soon after I wrote it, but I’ve never recorded it. I need to do some simple recording soon so that I don’t lose it. If I get the chance to record one last album, I’ll maybe close it with “Michael Furey Is Dead.”
According to Mountford Writing, a blurb is “the effusive (and sometimes elusive) praise you see on book jackets — ‘Brilliant debut…’ — enticing readers to pick up a novel or memoir and take it home.” And according to Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer’s Fiction Courses newsletter, blurbs fall into the category of “love ’em, hate ’em, gotta have ’em.”
I don’t know if blurbs sell books or not, but I’ve been fortunate to land some prize ones for Streets of Nashville. This seems a good place — and time — to share what they are saying about the novel (“they” being fellow authors). See below in alphabetical order.
Michael Amos Cody does a fantastic job creating interesting and empathetic characters, especially his protagonist Ezra, a budding songwriter whose perilous odyssey through the streets of Nashville is much more than grist for the mill—it’s also a heart-rending exploration of music, violence, and the power of friendship. STREETS OF NASHVILLE is an intelligent, heart-felt novel with plenty of authenticity to make it sing. Cody is a talented new voice in Southern fiction whose stories will appear on bookshelves for many years to come.
From the opening chapter of STREETS OF NASHVILLE, Michael Amos Cody’s prose is packed with enough stopping power to send the bullets flying off the page. Dialogue and storytelling ring together like the chords of a song . . . and what a chilling song it is.
In STREETS OF NASHVILLE, aspiring songwriter Ezra MacRae is on the brink of success after years of struggle—until he becomes a witness to a brutal triple homicide on Music Row. Though the masked killer spares Ezra, he doesn’t leave him in peace, haunting and threatening him at every turn. As Ezra balances his dreams of writing songs with a dangerous cat-and-mouse game, the mystery deepens, pulling him back to his North Carolina mountain roots. With rich detail and gritty suspense, Michael Amos Cody delivers a haunting tribute to the resilience needed to survive—and thrive—in the heart of Music City, solidifying him as one of the region’s most compelling voices—a talent I’ve admired since I read his debut novel, GABRIEL’S SONGBOOK.
An elegantly written, mysterious and electric crime novel. Michael Amos Cody’s experience as a Nashville songwriter and encyclopedic knowledge of country music bring STREETS OF NASHVILLE to life.
Kirkus Reviews “has been an industry-trusted source for honest and accessible reviews since 1933 and has helped countless authors build credibility in the publishing realm ever since.” Kirkus says:
An aspiring songwriter in the late 1980s finds himself at the center of a string of Nashville murders in Cody’s thriller.
Ezra MacRae is originally from small-town Runion, North Carolina, and moved to Nashville to be a professional writer of country songs. In the small hours of Easter morning in 1989, however, he finds himself a witness to a shooting on Nashville’s famous Music Row. To his surprise, the killer leaves him unharmed; later, however, the murderer develops a preoccupation with Ezra, harassing him with phone calls and other behavior that escalates to outright stalking. The shooter, Hugo Rodgers, is a former record promoter with a violent and traumatic past. Ezra spends the next week trying to aid local police and protect Benny Jack, an unhoused street singer who caught a stray bullet during the shooting. With the police hot on his tail, Hugo lures Ezra back to Runion for a final confrontation. An epilogue provides a cliffhanger that allows for a continuation of the story. Overall, this is a fast-paced, sometimes coarse, thriller about how desires can become twisted when repressed. The decision to include Hugo’s point of view is a bold but successful move that builds rather than lessens tension. Cody establishes an earthy, authentic sense of place through his prose; there’s an authentic Southern flair to the settings and characters that can feel homey or seedy, depending on the scene. The narrative is interspersed with lyrics to songs Ezra is writing, bringing an elevated lyricism to the page. . . . Ezra is a likable protagonist, as well—sensitive, ambitious, and down to earth, with enough hidden depth to make readers want to spend time with him. Rodgers, meanwhile, is the perfect foil—a despicable killer who becomes even more chilling as his violence spirals out of control.
A bold thriller, set in the music world, that leaves the door open for a possible sequel.
Cody’s STREETS OF NASHVILLE is a lyrical love letter to the musicians who built the city as well as a powerful exploration of friendship and brutality. With his authentic, empathetic voice, Cody is a welcome addition to Southern crime fiction. I look forward to more Ezra MacRae stories to come!
Ezra MacRae is on the precipice of accomplishing a long sought dream when he witnesses a gruesome murder and becomes the target of a psychopath who will make your skin crawl. Cody’s insight into the songwriting world and late ’80s Nashville brings a richness to this story of ambition and greed.STREETS OF NASHVILLE glows with authenticity and heart.
At once an absorbing crime story and an insider’s love letter to a bygone place and time, STREETS OF NASHVILLE grabs ahold of the reader and doesn’t let go. Michael Amos Cody has written a murder ballad to make the bards of Music Row envious.
What a rollicking narrative! Here in Michael Amos Cody’s novel is not only a page-turning murder mystery but also a love song to Nashville’s not-so-distant past, a time raw with possibility. While the setting grounds the narrative, the characters—especially our man Ezra—are riveting. With attention only a musician could mark so brilliantly, Cody has put flesh on characters by turns creatively stricken, comfort-yearning, seedy, and dangerous. STREETS OF NASHVILLE is not just powerful. In all the best ways, it is provocative, a wily rounder of a novel.
Thanks to all these terrific writers and new friends! Thanks as well to Madville Publishing and Kim Davis!
I’m looking forward to Streets of Nashville. I’m confident I’ll spend some time on a top-drawer Whiskey review for that one if it’s even in the ballpark of your previous work. I still recommend A Twilight Reel every chance I get.
Published May 27, 2021
This book of stories was more than twenty-five years in the making. I began it while working on my Master of Arts in English at Western Carolina University under the direction of Rick Boyer (before Ron Rash landed at WCU). Three stories–“The Wine of Astonishment,” “Overwinter,” and “A Poster of Marilyn Monroe”–appeared in my WCU master’s thesis in 1995. The work continued until I finished the final story–“Witness Tree”–in May 2019.
Many of the stories were published as stand-alones through the intervening years:
“Overwinter” (Yemassee 1997)
“The Wine of Astonishment” (Short Story 2000)
“A Poster of Marilyn Monroe” (Pisgah Review 2005)
“The Flutist” (Yemassee 2014)
“The Invisible World around Them” (The Chaffin Journal 2014)
“Two Floors above the Dead” (Tampa Review 2017)
“Conversion” (Still: The Journal 2021)
Thanks to Andy Reed, Pisgah Press, and all who have supported A Twilight Reel over it’s 1,039 days in the world through review, purchase, reading, and on and on. It means a lot.
My blogging schedule calls for some monthly writing on writing every first Wednesday. I missed it by a couple of days. . . .
So, here’s some brief news about what’s going on in my writing life.
Gabriel’s Songbook audiobook “cover”—photo by Ed Huskey; original design by Andy Reed and Michael Cody; audiobook adaptation by Jamie Reeves
When the Spring 2024 semester ended, I spent a couple of weeks in May driving over the mountain to Asheville, where I wound up at The Talking Book studio to record my own narration of Gabriel’s Songbook. Dave Burr was the engineer, and I had a great time working with and getting to know him. The audiobook is now out in the world. It’s available on a number of platforms—Libro.fm, Spotify, and others. It should appear soon on Audible.
I’m no actor. I’m no voice actor either. But I don’t cringe when listening to the finished version, which makes me think that it’s all right. Give it a listen!
Bouchercon 2024! According to the website, “Bouchercon® is the annual world mystery convention where every year readers, writers, publishers, editors, agents, booksellers and other lovers of crime fiction gather for a 4-day weekend of education, entertainment, and fun!” This is my first time to attend this convention, which meets at the end of this month (August 28 – September 1) in Nashville.
Cover of the Bouchercon Anthology 2024
Every year Bouchercon puts out a call for traditional crime short stories related to the conference’s host city. Having lived in Nashville through my twenties, I thought I’d give it a shot. I’d recently been working on a novel called Streets of Nashville (see below), which features a main character named Ezra MacRae. In the novel, Ezra is about five years into his attempt to establish a viable career as a songwriter, so I thought I would write a short story that explores Ezra’s backstory a little. My submission to the Bouchercon anthology was “I Could Be the One.” It tells of Ezra’s first days/months/year in Nashville as he tries to find his footing on Music Row. I looked through my song catalog and landed on an old piece of mine—”I Could Be the One,” of course. (Read more about the song here.)
The story was accepted and will be included in the Bouchercon anthology for the Nashville conference! I look at this as a fine feather in my cap. The anthology will debut at the conference and afterwards be available wherever books are sold. I still love Nashville, even more than thirty years gone from it, so I’m looking forward to reading the other stories in the anthology as well.
I wrote “I Could Be the One” in October 2023. As soon as I finished it, I jumped on another anthology opportunity.
I spent November 2023 writing “Carolina,” based on Texas songwriter Robert Earl Keen’s song of the same name. It’s a bit of a murder ballad and includes suggestions of a man perhaps murdering his lover while sleepwalking. Whether he’s sleepwalking or not, he finds her (after she’s left him) and then wakes up later to find her dead.
This scenario immediately made me think of my work with the writings of Charles Brockden Brown, who wrote a couple of pieces in the late 18th / early 19th centuries about sleepwalking and murder. The first is his novel Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799). In 1805, Brown published a piece of short fiction titled “Somnambulism. A Fragment.” In this story, a young man named Althorpe fearfully obsesses over the safety of his beloved on a nighttime trip she is beginning with her father. Althorpe walks in his sleep and finds her in the night and murders her, bringing his obsessive fears to life—without knowing it.
In the song, the ill-fated girl is named Lily. I kept the name for my story and made her the centerpiece of a conflict between two men: the violent Al Thorpe and Asheville PD detective Eddie Huntly. This story was so much fun to write!
“Carolina” will appear in Madville Publishing‘s Wild Wind: Poems and Stories Inspired by the Songs of Robert Earl Keen. The book is scheduled for release on November 19 and will be available wherever books are sold.
Streets of Nashville is my second novel (third book of fiction). On April 15, 2025, Madville Publishing will release the novel into the wild world (whatever form that takes after the November election)! From the above, you can gather that its main character is a songwriter named Ezra MacRae, five years into his attempt to establish a viable career on Nashville’s Music Row. I won’t say much more about it right now. Madville’s editor and I are working with the final proofs of the text, so I should soon have an advance reading opportunity available for pre-release reviews. In the meantime, you can read the query letter that I sent to Madville, which led to acceptance and the start of the publishing process. (Thanks to the great Alex Kenna for providing this query letter space!)
This is a secret cover reveal! I’ll do a more public one on my socials as soon as the text of the book is finalized. For now, we’ll see if anybody actually reads this blog. And if anybody does, they’re the first to lay eyes on this cover.
Back in 2014, Leesa and I traveled with a group of friends to Vimperk, a small town in the southwestern portion of the Czech Republic (aka Czechia). A bunch of us lived for a week in a hostel on Vimperk’s beautiful cobblestone square. At least that’s where we slept. During the day, we were on the run, offering a softball camp for youth and English camp for adults. In the evenings, we did a good bit of sightseeing.
In the middle of that week, I played a concert for the town. We found advertisements for this event scattered around Vimperk when we arrived.
It was a terrific experience all around.
In 2015, Leesa and I decided—for a number of reasons—not to go back, but we really missed the place and the people and turned our eyes toward 2016. Meantime, I began to think about a song for Vimperk.
One of the surprising things about that 2014 trip came in the form of good sleep. I’m a white-noise sleeper. I keep a fan running beside the bed every night, not for the breeze but for the steady sound of it. Not only would the hostel where we slept be without a steady hum to lull me to sleep, but also there were bells. Bells, bells, bells all through the night. The clock tower in the square rings its bells every fifteen minutes—one bell for the quarter hour, two for the half, three for a quarter ’til, four for the hour with these last followed by the deeper, louder bell tolling the hour itself. I couldn’t very well pack a fan for the trip, so I bought some melatonin and hoped for the best.
But it wasn’t long before something—the Old-World ambiance; tiredness from travel and engaging with the Czechs (young and not so young); running to take in the sights; something—lulled me to sleep and gave me a good night’s rest every night. Sure, I was to some degree roused from sleep every quarter hour, but rather than being annoyed at the interruption or unable to get back to sleep, I felt a distinct sense of peace and comfort from lying down to rising up.
During 2015, when I both wanted to write a song for Vimperk and knew, at the same time, I couldn’t go back that year, the image of those bells became the spark that lit my way into the lyric.
The bells of Vimperk ring the quarter hour through the night. Hear their voices on the air! And the bells of Vimperk sing that everything’s all right—sleep tight. All is well down in the square . . . and quite like a prayer.
That’s where the song started.
I’m not going to write much here about what went into the two verses. Suffice to say that they contrast the two worlds as I thought about them at that moment. The first verse is set somewhere like Johnson City or Asheville or Nashville, the second in Vimperk. You should be able to figure out my feelings about these contrasting cultural experiences.
This is a noisy world that clamors for my short attention— Talking heads that blather on and on and on. The streets are filled with sirens—some real and some legendary— From the setting to the rising of the sun. Come Friday night the bars are loud and crowded with the lonely, Seeking some attention or some means of escape. I leave my car downtown and take a taxi home, Where stone awake my mind drifts half a world away.
The bells of Vimperk . . .
So, that’s the first verse. Here’s the second.
Music echoes through the sunlit streets of cobblestone. It’s “Country Roads” by an accordion band. And the old men on the stage hold lovers in their laps and squeeze them, Making the music everyone can understand. Come Friday night the pub’s alive with flutes and fiddles and guitars That long past midnight fade to soft lullabies, Sung in harmonies that carry me home, Where warm and weary I lie down and close my eyes.
The bells of Vimperk . . .
I was told at the beginning of the 2014 trip that many Czechs love John Denver’s “Country Roads.” (Actually, I learned many years later that they prefer a Czech version from one of their own singers.) When we first arrived at the door of our hostel on the cobblestone square, a small festival of some sort festival was happening. On a stage beneath the clock tower, an accordion band was playing—can you believe it?—”Country Roads”!
To the bridge!
The world is older there, But it’s somehow younger, too. When the ground beneath my feet is shaken, I go there and find my faith renewed.
The bells of Vimperk . . .
The bridge of the song tries to feel its way to an idea I find difficult to express. Vimperk has been there in hills so much like our own for more than twice the lifetime of the U.S. In 2014, our final team meal was at a home on a hill above Vimperk. The house itself was as old as the US. Pictured below, the Black Gate on the hillside beneath the castle was built in 1479, which is a century and a half before the Puritan Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts Bay to establish Plymouth Plantation (1620).
I feel certain that the place’s feeling younger (while being so much older) has to do with a number of things. First, I’m sure those of us who love Vimperk and the people we know there tend to romanticize its Old-World beauty, the slower pace of a small town, the foreignness and yet familiarity of it, a kind of fairytale quality that radiates from its castle and cobblestones and surrounding forests. We don’t see the drugs, which are surely there. We don’t see much if any of the poverty, which is surely there. We don’t see much of its prejudices—against the Roma (so-called “Gypsies”), for example. We don’t see much of the ignorance and meanness and violence that are surely there as well—I mean, come on, they’re mostly igno-arrogant white people like us, aggressive and colonizing in both large (global) and small (local) ways.
What we do sometimes see, however, at least among most of those we come in contact with, is a way of relating to one another that often seems lost here. One quick example: in the softball camp setting, an atmosphere of caring for each other and cooperating with each other is evident. Rarely here in the U.S. would you see teens willing to play with the little kids without being made to do so. That happens all the time at camp without any teen tantrums. At lunch, you’ll find tables made of up teens who are sitting and eating with kids much younger than themselves.
So, anyway, Leesa and I returned to Vimperk in 2016, and I performed another concert and enjoyed the opportunity to play “The Bells of Vimperk” for our friends in Vimperk. Below is a phone video of that performance.
Performing “The Bells of Vimperk” for the first time in Vimperk on Tuesday, 12 July 2016
Recently I played a backyard concert at the Barnett Patio here in Johnson City, and my son Raleigh sat in on bass (along with my friend Jimmy on percussion). I don’t know if Raleigh had ever even heard “The Bells of Vimperk,” but at the end of the night, he said, “Deddy, that might be your best song.” I’ll take that!
This is a noisy world that clamors for my short attention— Talking heads that blather on and on and on. The streets are filled with sirens—some real and some legendary— From the setting to the rising of the sun. Come Friday night the bars are loud and crowded with the lonely, Seeking some attention or some means of escape. I leave my car downtown and take a taxi home, Where stone awake my mind drifts half a world away.
The bells of Vimperk ring the quarter hour through the night. Hear their voices on the air! And the bells of Vimperk sing that everything’s all right—sleep tight. All is well down in the square . . . and quite like a prayer.
Music echoes through the sunlit streets of cobblestone. It’s “Country Roads” by an accordion band. And the old men no the stage hold lovers in their laps and squeeze them, Making the music everyone can understand. Come Friday night the pub’s alive with flutes and fiddles and guitars That long past midnight fade to soft lullabies, Sung in harmonies that carry me home, Where warm and weary I lie down and close my eyes.
The bells of Vimperk ring the quarter hour through the night. Hear their voices on the air! And the bells of Vimperk sing that everything’s all right—sleep tight. All is well down in the square . . . and quite like a prayer.
The world is older there, But it’s somehow younger, too. When the ground beneath my feet is shaken, I go there and find my faith renewed.
The bells of Vimperk ring the quarter hour through the night. Hear their voices on the air! And the bells of Vimperk sing that everything’s all right—sleep tight. All is well down in the square . . . and quite like a prayer.
“This Is Not All” is a new song that has been with me for a while. In fact, I’ve had much of it written for several years, so I suppose it’s more accurate to say that it’s a newly completed song. It’s so newly completed that I haven’t even learned it yet. Still, that didn’t stop me from trying to play it at a recent gig on the Barnett Patio. I flubbed a bunch of it, especially toward the end, but it’s now out there in the world. I’ll continue to work on the music, but I feel like the lyrics are finished and say what I want them to say.
The first verse began with hiking a trail—going on a ramble, as my friend Scott Honeycutt calls it. The lines borrow some sentiments from Emerson, Thoreau, and Dickinson (and many others, I’m sure). We too often go out into nature, as Emerson and Thoreau caution us, looking for the big payoff in the scenery—a dramatic waterfall, the colors of autumn leaves, the mountaintop view of distance (even to the moon). Emerson writes in “Beauty,” the third chapter of Nature, “Go out of the house to see the moon, and ’tis mere tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey.”
But the trail offers much at which to wonder that is seen only if we turn our eyes away from the big picture, away from the big expectations, and look down—not necessarily down, but just look.
Not all the wonder along the trail is to be found in woods and sky— look closer. It’s the tiny frog hidden in clover and that creature in the dust with a hundred legs or more. It’s in how I find my way home and that flower I never noticed by the door.
I like the last two lines in particular. Have you ever thought about how wonderful it is that you can—as long as you have a sound mind—find your way home? And you probably know many different ways to get home. Consider the Keb’ Mo’ song “More Thank One Way Home.” Take that as realistically or metaphorically as you wish.
As for the last line, Emily Dickinson writes in her poem 446 (Franklin; “This was a Poet”) that the poet
Distills amazing sense From Ordinary Meanings – And Attar* so immense
From the familiar species That perished by the Door – We wonder it was not Ourselves Arrested it – before –
(*Attar = fragrance)
Here, Dickison suggests—as Emerson does in his essay “The Poet”—that the poet (or the poetic eye) sees the richness, even the strangeness and wonder, in the familiar. Although those without the poet’s vision are subject to a kind of “ceaseless Poverty,” we still have the potential to understand and be enriched through that vision. That is, once the poet points out the wonder in the “familiar species / That perished by the Door”—”that flower I never noticed by the door”—we are enriched second-hand.
The second verse of “This Is Not All” sticks with wonder and the wonderful:
Not all the wonder along the way is waiting somewhere far ahead— look closer. A little boy runs in cape and mask, another stands shirtless in a barnyard banging a drum. A little girl learns to cartwheel, And another stands by the road and sticks out her thumb.
The idea here is that when we travel, whether on the road or trail or metaphorically through life, we often let the destination or goal loom so large in our minds that we ignore or lose sight of what is wonderful “along the way.” Consider the old adage that the journey is more important than the destination. The “little boy” is my son Raleigh, who had a vivid imagination and a love of costume.
The image of the other boy is from my travels at some point some years ago. I was driving in Indiana or Illinois or Iowa—somewhere with corn to the horizon. Just off the interstate was a large farmhouse, a big barn to the right of it (in the background, corn to the horizon from which a storm approached). In the barnyard, this kid—a teenager, at least—sat behind a full drum set and seemed in the middle of a massive rock ‘n’ roll show drum solo. A vivid, amazing scene!
The cartwheeling and hitchhiking girls are less real images than they are contrasts in innocence and experience, security and danger. But each of these has in it an element of wonder.
The song takes a dark turn to look at evil. The third verse recognizes that we leave ourselves open to the threatening workings of evil if we believe that it exists only in obvious places—”the terrorist and thief.”
Not all the evil in the world is in the terrorist and thief— look closer. It’s in the thousand faces of ignorance— political and corporate and religious. It’s in the hate and hunger and the trumped-up fights that pit them against us.
Ignorance is possibly the worst evil in our world today. Many of us seem to be getting to the point where we can’t see anything except through the lenses of ignorance, rage, and prejudice, our desire to win at all cost (while too ignorant to count the ultimate cost), our desire to “own” ______ [insert your fear/hate here], the devotion of our time and minds and hearts to conspiracy (which even if real probably has little to do with you and your little you might brighten). Charles Dickens wrote in his last scene with the Ghost of Christmas Present about “a boy and girl” that Scrooge spots hiding under the skirts of the Ghost’s robe, children [y]ellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish. . . .” When Scrooge asks if they are the children of the Ghost of Christmas Present, the spirit answers,
“‘They are Man’s. . . . And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware of them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it! . . . Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse! And bide the end!'”
Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol
In our devaluing of education and of ourselves along with it, we have opened the door wide to all sorts of evil. The ignorant parents and grandparents and legislators slander teachers as misleading and “indoctrinating” their students. The ignorant revel in their ignorance as their badge of difference from the educated and the expert. (This is what Dickens refers to when he writes, “Admit it for your factious [that is, divisive] purposes, and make it worse!”). Thomas Jefferson—author of the U.S. Declaration of Independence—wrote elsewhere that “the spirit of the people [is not] infallible” and we “will become . . careless. A single zealot may commence persecutor, and better men be his victims.” I think the “single zealot” is now among us in Donald Trump, who is Dickens’s boy Ignorance personified. Beware! “Deny it” and experience the “Doom” he brings.
And yet perhaps there is still goodness. Fear and hate cannot survive honest expressions of love between people, between peoples, between us. Someone who becomes friends with—who comes to love—that which is feared, be it a skin color or a faith system or an identity (LGBTQ+) or whatever, usually finds it difficult, if not impossible, to fear and hate the person that has now become, to them, a human being—recognizing another as a human being, as a child of God (if you will). And that’s what it’s about, I think, opening up of ourselves to see the humanity in everybody. It is in this recognition and love that fear and hate begin to wither and die for lack of nourishment.
That said, I suspect we’re too far gone into ignorance—and an arrogance that prevents us from recognizing our ignorance—to survive.
Still, for the song, I lifted up my mind and heart and wrote a bridge and a fourth verse and tied it all together with a refrain “This Is Not All,” which first appears after the second verse and then repeats after the third and at the end.
The means of control are more than out of our hands— they’re far beyond our reach. But we can love, and love’s the root and height of all and love’s the root and height of each.
Not all the goodness in the world is to be found in church and child— look closer. It’s in the unshackled hearts that lift us high above the right or wrong or Right or Left— my friend’s warm hand in mine and true emotions honestly expressed.
This is not all, no, this is not all! Out there is more than we can own, more than we can protect. This is not all, no, this is not all! Out there is more than can be known, so much more than we expect. This is not all!
This Is Not All
Not all the wonder along the trail is to be found in woods and sky— look closer. It’s the tiny frog hidden in clover and that creature in the dust with a hundred legs or more. It’s in how I find my way home and that flower I never noticed by the door.
Not all the wonder along the way is waiting somewhere far ahead— look closer. A little boy runs in cape and mask, another stands shirtless in a barnyard banging a drum. A little girl learns to cartwheel, And another stands by the road and sticks out her thumb.
This is not all, no, this is not all! Out there is more than we can own, more than we can protect. This is not all, no, this is not all! Out there is more than can be known, so much more than we expect. This is not all!
Not all the evil in the world is in the terrorist and thief— look closer. It’s in the thousand faces of ignorance— political and corporate and religious. It’s in the hate and hunger and the trumped-up fights that put them against us.
This is not all, no, this is not all! Out there is more than we can own, more than we can protect. This is not all, no, this is not all! Out there is more than can be known, so much more than we expect. This is not all!
The means of control are more than out of our hands— they’re far beyond our reach. But we can love, and love’s the root and height of all and love’s the root and height of each.
Not all the goodness in the world is to be found in church and child— look closer. It’s in the unshackled hearts that lift us high above the right or wrong or Right or Left— my friend’s warm hand in mine and true emotions honestly expressed.
This is not all, no, this is not all! Out there is more than we can own, more than we can protect. This is not all, no, this is not all! Out there is more than can be known, so much more than we expect. This is not all!
[Due to excessive commenting from Russian bots, I have stopped allowing comments on this blog. If you are not a Russian bot (or a bot of any other persuasion) and would like to comment, please email me at michaelamoscody@gmail.com.]
I’m late to this anthology party, but I’m glad to be here finally and having fun.
What party? Again, I’m late to this, but it seems that a whole new world of opportunities has opened for creative writers of fiction (flash fiction and short stories), poems, and creative nonfiction (again, flash and short). The literary and not-so-literary magazines were once about the only places I could go to try and publish my short stories individually, but now I’ve sat up and taken notice of several anthologies looking for material that I might’ve already written or might yet write.
I’ve had a couple of gratifying successes so far. . . .
Every year, Bouchercon (aka the World Mystery Convention) publishes an anthology of traditional crime stories set in or related to the city hosting that year’s meeting. This year, Bouchercon 2024 meets in Nashville, TN. So, I took an old song of mine — “I Could Be the One” — and used it as a prop in a story about theft of intellectual property on Music Row. The story was accepted! The anthology titled Tales of Music, Murder and Mayhem: Bouchercon Anthology 2024 will be released by late August. Here’s a link to the now closed call for submissions I responded to. Every year, the Bouchercon anthology benefits a charity local to the host city, and this year, sales of the anthology will benefit Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. And get this — Dolly is writing the introduction! More on this anthology as the publication date comes nearer.
One thing I think is cool about “I Could Be the One” is that it turned out to be a prequel to my novel Streets of Nashville, forthcoming from Madville Publishing in April 2025. More on that soon as well.
My next anthology success will appear in Madville‘s Wild Wind: Poems and Stories Inspired by the Songs of Robert Earl Keen, coming in November 2024. Here’s just a bit about what’s in it: “The poems and short stories here are each inspired by Keen’s songs, some expansions of themes of Keen’s songs, others move in creative directions suggested by the characters in his work.” I found a Keen song called “Carolina” and built from its lyrics a story of the same name. Keen’s lyrical story is set in Asheville, NC, and includes hints of sleepwalking and murder. I had some fun adapting some of my scholarly interest in Charles Brockden Brown — his use of somnambulism and a couple of his character names — into a piece of crime noir.
(Not sure if that’s the official cover pictured)
In addition to these two successes, I have two hopefuls out there — one “on submission,” as they say in the biz, and one I’ve just begun writing. I’ve already submitted “Pontiac” in response to Cowboy Jamboree Press’s call for an anthology to be called Texas Wind, intended to be a collection of creative nonfiction and fiction “incited” by Texas-based songwriters such as Guy Clark, Keen, Nanci Griffith, Jerry Jeff Walker, Steve Earle, and others. My story is based on Lyle Lovett’s song by the same name from his 1987 album of the same name (his second album). Here’s hoping! (If you’re writing and have something that might work for Texas Wind, submissions are supposed to be accepted up until August 1, 2024.)
The other hopeful will be — I have only a couple of ideas and a couple of paragraphs so far — submitted to the Bouchercon 2025 anthology call for submission. The meeting will take place in New Orleans, LA, so the stories should be set in or related to the Crescent City. I read a lot about that area in James Lee Burke‘s Dave Robicheaux novels, not that I’m going to do anything other than be inspired by Burke’s magnificent prose. Again, I have only a couple of paragraphs, which I like, but I haven’t found a story yet. I’m thinking about my Dr. John Riddle, Professor of English from Runion State University, who is in New Orleans for a literary conference. Something bad’s going to happen, I guess.
As you can tell from my experiences above, these are generally themed anthologies. They’re organized around a central idea or subject. For example, the call for submissions might be for an anthology of stories related to a particular place or a particular genre or a particular person and so on. And these are often the brainchildren of smaller presses — that is, not something the big publishing houses are interested in.
Here are some examples:
Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology from my heroes at Madville Publishing. Here’s a bit about what’s inside: “54 poets’ takes on often-unsung facets of this diamond in a rhinestone world—calling in Dolly’s impeccable comedic timing, her lyric mastery, her business acumen, and her Dollyverse advocacy.”
Burning Down the House: Crime Fiction Incited by the Songs of the Talking Heads from Shotgun Honey. Here’s what’s inside and why: “A charity anthology to benefit the fight against climate change, . . . a dazzling exploration of what crime fiction can entail — deftly mixing grimy crime, small-town grit lit, literary noir, and tales that blend crime with speculative fiction, sci-fi, road trip comedy, magical realism, and horror.” Also from Shotgun Honey, Thicker Than Water, “tales featuring female protagonist who navigate the precarious boundaries of the darker spaces of humanity,” created and sold to support breast cancer research.
Motel: An Anthology, from the folks at Cowboy Jamboree Press. Several of my X friends have pieces in Motel. Here’s bit about what’s inside and why: “On lost, lonely highways, deep in the American heartlands and skirting the shady edges of cities, once ubiquitous motels have faded, some into ruin, others transformed from way station to permanent residence. MOTEL captures the heartbreak, desperation and indeed magic of motels.”
Bishop Rider Lives: An Anthology of Retribution and A Beast Without a Name: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Music of Steely Dan from the folks at Down & Out Books. Beau Johnson’s Bishop Rider lives again in the former: “The fifteen stories in this anthology both brand new tales and written by some of the biggest names working in crime fiction and horror today. . . . Come for the rage, stay for the dismemberment. See how a dead man makes them burn.” And in the latter, “These twelve tales interpret shady pasts, dubious presents, and doomed futures. There’s no hiding inside a hall of rock and sand from stories as deliciously wicked and terrifically twisty as the jazz-rock noir that inspired them.”
[Due to excessive commenting from Russian bots, I have stopped allowing comments on this blog. If you are not a Russian bot (or a bot of any other persuasion) and would like to comment, please email me at michaelamoscody@gmail.com.]
I don’t think “I Could Be the One” is among my best songs. I like the chorus really well, musically and lyrically, but I’m not wild about either the verses or the bridge. I wrote it back in the 1980s as one of my few attempts to write something commercial for Nashville.
I was rarely any good at such attempts.
Recently, however, in my expanded creative life writing fiction, I was able to borrow that good chorus from the song and use it in a short story that I also titled “I Could Be the One.”
Here’s the chorus as I revised it for the short story . . .
I could be the lover of your dreams I could be the stitch to bind your seams I could be strong when your strength is gone I could be the one When the nights are cold and you’re so blue You need somebody warm to hold on to Girl, don’t you run to no midnight sun I could be the one
I wrote the story in response to a call for contributions to an anthology that is likely to be pretty widely read, and I was blown away when I received the acceptance email. As Agatha Christie famously said, “Well, here’s to crime” (that’s a red herring).
I also made the story a prequel to my next novel, Streets of Nashville, which Madville Publishing will release on April 15, 2025. To learn a bit more about the process leading up to the contract for Streets, check out my query letter via the great Alex Kenna‘s blog that features samples of this important step in the publication process.
While I can’t say much more about the short story yet (contract pending), I’m terrifically excited about where it is ending up. I hope you’ll read it if you get a chance.
I have watched you be deceived by men with silver tongues Their pretty lies just go straight to you heart And I have wished it could be me that you run to in the night Oh, I would hold you and never let you fall apart
I could be the pleasure in your dreams I could be the stitch that binds your seems I could be strong when your strength is gone I could be the one
When you go to bed at night, do you lie awake and cry, Wondering why true love is so hard to find? If I had the nerve, girl, I would walk right up to you And let you know the love you’re looking for is mine
I could be the pleasure in your dreams I could be the stitch that binds your seems I could be strong when your strength is gone I could be the one
Some night in this lonely town I’m gonna be there when you turn around Maybe then you’ll finally see That I’m right on time with the love you need
I could be the pleasure in your dreams I could be the stitch that binds your seems I could be strong when your strength is gone I could be the one When the nights are long and you’re so blue And you need someone to hold on to Girl, don’t you run to no midnight sun I could be the one
P.S. Here’s the initial catalog entry for Streets of Nashville . . .
A few years ago (never mind how many), Leesa and I drove to DC to spend a couple of days in the city and take in a Keb’ Mo’ concert while there. Leesa has developed a friendship with Kevin—we get to call him Kevin—over the years (and I’m part of it by proxy), so as is usual for us, we got to go backstage after the show to say hello. As we stood outside his dressing room, Kevin introduced us to his co-star for the evening, who was none other than Taj Mahal. But another less recognizable face was there that evening, and Kevin introduced us to him as well. (Leesa likes to say Kevin introduced us as if we were just as famous as anybody else, which is his generous nature.) That other face belonged to David Brooks, who is a conservative political and cultural commentator whose writing appears often in the New York Times.
Having met Mr. Brooks in that way, I tend to notice his writing when it crosses my field of vision. This past week I saw his name on the NYT Sunday Opinion page. His beautiful essay, which I hope you will read via the link, is titled “How to Stay Sane in Brutalizing Times.” The essay walks us through some “tragic” (in a good way) dispositions of sensibility and mentality, and Brooks summarizes his purpose like this:
I’m trying to describe a dual sensibility—becoming a person who learns humility and prudence from the Athenian tradition, but also audacity, emotional openness and care from the Jerusalem tradition.
His use of the adjective tragic doesn’t seem intended to relate exactly to its meaning in the catastrophes of ancient Greek dramatic tragedy, in which some great hero is ultimately destroyed—or at least brought low—by some fatal flaw such as pride. No, Brooks uses tragic in a less bombastic, less catastrophic sense. What he suggests here is that we look at the world and ourselves in realistic and humble ways, that we live prudently and not arrogantly, that we keep ourselves open to the good and the bad that will come our way and not close ourselves off as being above or beyond the reach of our need and that of others, of relationship, of our humanity in common with all.
One key idea Brooks offers is that our tendency to separate, our increasing tendency to rage, our tendency to dehumanize—desensitize us to the world in which we live. And in our desensitized state, we lose track of the wondrous beauty in nature and in each other. When we could be expanding, growing individually and communally, we are instead contracting into tight balls of rage, anger, and—the root of these—fear.
Such a state of being wadded up tight leaves us unable reach out to others, to feel with and for them, to feel sorry for ourselves for the right reasons such as the joy and fellowship and discovery we’re missing. This also is present in Brooks’s essay, probably nowhere more so than this paragraph:
. . . most people — maybe more than you think — are peace- and love-seeking creatures who are sometimes caught in bad situations. The most practical thing you can do, even in hard times, is to lead with curiosity, lead with respect, work hard to understand the people you might be taught to detest.
This passage, especially its phrase “lead with curiosity,” made me decide to focus this 3rd Saturday Song Story on “Sense of Wonder,” a song I wrote with Mark Chesshir sometime back in the late 1980s. I don’t remember the exact division of labor, but my guess is that Mark wrote most of the music while I wrote most of the words.
Here’s the first verse, sung over an appropriately B-minor chord progression:
A rose, unnoticed, blooms and dies to bloom again— So many such gifts return to Sender unopened. Calendar days fly off the wall in whirling wind, And still the journal lays, blank pages from beginning to end.
Somewhere along my journey to becoming an English professor, I learned that the journal “lies” instead of “lays,” but setting that aside, I like the image of a natural world—embodied in the rose—full of amazing events that fail to amaze us because—busy and distracted—we pay so little attention. I also like the images of the flying calendar days I remember seeing in old TV shows and movies and the journal pages flipping through in the same whirlwind.
Next comes the second section of the first verse:
The treadmill world is small— No place for standing tall— Where the heart is a sleeping giant To be feared and kept tied up.
I’m particularly fond of the image of the heart as like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. Do we fear our hearts and the acts of feeling, caring, and courage they are all capable of leading us into?
The chorus will grow as the song continues. This first chorus is short: “Racing the rain and chased by the thunder, / Hold on to a sense of wonder.” We threw in the “oh-way-oh” to mimic the moaning voices of those working through enslavement and imprisonment.
Here’s the two halves of the second verse:
The spark of childhood put away with childish things Leaves the good life tasteless and in need of some leavening. Look to the magic of youth— The no-holds-barred search for truth. The heart is a sleeping giant. Take a chance and wake it up.
Do we take 1 Corinthians 13:11-12 a little too literally? A capacity for joy — a sense of wonder — enriches our lives no matter how old we become. Both positive and negative examples of this are all around us in the people we share family and community with.* One of the ways in which an energetic, youthful sense of wonder can be realized — perhaps the main way — is to “take a chance” and wake up our hearts, unbind them, and let them rise.
The second chorus is longer:
Oh-way-oh — racing the rain and chased by the thunder— Oh-way-oh — walking the world and stalked by the hunger— Oh-way-oh — senses dull from the attack they’re under— Oh-way-oh — hold on to a sense of wonder.
I like these lines. Even more so than back yonder in the 1980s, our senses are constantly under attack, pummeled by media of all kinds and the excessive drama that all of it seems to wield in ever more dangerous ways. Our senses are drowning in information and misinformation “supposed to fire [our] imagination” when it in fact robs us of imagination, one of the main gifts that should be original in each of us.
And yet the rose continues its amazing cycle of life, which is the idea behind the song’s short bridge:
It is not for things to wonder at that we lack In this catch-as-catch-can struggle with the hourglass.**
We must raise our gaze from our navels (or anybody else’s navel) and take in the world — move through the world — with a sense of wonder.
A rose, unnoticed, blooms and dies to bloom again— So many such gifts return to Sender unopened. Calendar days fly off the wall in whirling wind, And still the journal lays, blank pages from beginning to end. The treadmill world is small— No place for standing tall— Where the heart is a sleeping giant To be feared and kept tied up.
Oh-way-oh — racing the rain and chased by the thunder— Oh-way-oh — hold on to a sense of wonder.
The spark of childhood put away with childish things Leaves the good life tasteless and in need of some leavening. Look to the magic of youth— The no-holds-barred search for truth. The heart is a sleeping giant. Take a chance and wake it up.
Oh-way-oh — racing the rain and chased by the thunder— Oh-way-oh — walking the world and stalked by the hunger— Oh-way-oh — senses dull from the attack they’re under— Oh-way-oh — hold on to a sense of wonder.
It is not for things to wonder at that we lack In this catch-as-catch-can struggle with the hourglass.
[The Mark Chesshir lead guitar break!]
Oh-way-oh — racing the rain and chased by the thunder— Oh-way-oh — walking the world and stalked by the hunger— Oh-way-oh — senses dull from the attack they’re under— Oh-way-oh — hold on to a sense of wonder.
*I read something recently that said the old grammatical rule of not ending a sentence with a preposition is on its way out, going the way of the injunction against the split infinitive. I’m giving it a try, but I’m not comfortable with either change.
**Here the phrase “catch-as-catch-can” joins with the second verse’s phrase “no-holds-barred” to reveal my long-held obsession with wrestling as the most apt metaphor for our relationships with the world, with each other, with our faith, with God.
