Creative Work

Writing Life 2022

I enjoyed my writing life this year. Although the majority of my productivity has taken place, in confidence, between the right side of my brain and an array of hard and virtual drives, I got somethings out into the world.

Leesa says when she sees the blue screen she knows what’s happening.

A number of blog posts. I set up a monthly schedule that’s I’ve more or less kept to. First Wednesdays are for writing/reading posts (like this one). Second Mondays are for whatever I feel like writing about. Third Saturdays are song stories. Fourth Tuesdays are supposed to be posts about politics, but I haven’t been very successful with these, as everything I think of seems to be darker and of meaner spirit than I want to be.
Short stories. I published one short story this year. “Jamboree” appeared in the Winter 2022 issue of my favorite online periodical Still: The Journal (#38). The good folks at Still included it among the journal’s Best of the Net nominations. The only other bit of news worth reporting about new stories is that I finally made some good progress toward finishing–but still not finishing–a story that I’ve been holding onto for years. It has been in progress and untitled for a good while, but I’m thinking now that it will be named something like “Payne Mountain.”
Gabriel’s Songbook (Pisgah Press 2017) is now five years old. Some folks have read it recently and really liked it, which makes me quite happy. I’ve done a number of podcast appearances to talk about A Twilight Reel, but Gabriel hasn’t gotten that kind of love. Until now. Back in September, Christy Alexander Hallberg interviewed me for her terrific podcast Rock Is Lit, which profiles “rock novels.” The episode “dropped” on December 8, and I’m really happy with it. The conversation about the novel was both good and fun, and I was really pleased with the follow-up discussion that Christy had with Frye Gaillard and Peter Cooper, the latter of whom walked on suddenly two days before, on December 6, from an accidental and traumatic head injury sustained a few days before.
A Twilight Reel: Stories (Pisgah Press) passed its one-year publication anniversary in late May of this year. Not long after that I learned that the collection won the Short Story / Anthology category of the Feathered Quill Book Awards 2022. Chris McGinley wrote a great review of it, and Meagan Lucas published Chris’s words in her Reckon Review on September 30. I still believe A Twilight Reel is a really fine book, and I hope that one of these days it’ll be better known than it is.

Streets of Nashville

At the beginning of 2022, I had a work-in-progress (WiP) about a Nashville songwriter named Ezra MacRae. I’m not sure how many words I had on it at that time. I’m thinking around 20K. I’m also not sure when I attached the working title, but I’m calling it Streets of Nashville until somebody with power tells me to call it something different.

Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure I had that title before I submitted some pages of it for workshopping at Hindman Settlement School’s Appalachian Writers Workshop in July 2021. Most of my classmates in the workshop fell in love with a character Benny Jack, who was in a dire situation at the end of the section they read, which ended at what is now page 41 of the novel. Somebody suggested #SaveBennyJack, and the workshop folk carried on with that. [An interesting tidbit: much of the meeting-Benny-Jack section was written for Gabriel’s Songbook but got cut for reasons I won’t go into here. Suffice to say, Benny Jack exists much more comfortably–and much more effectively–within Streets of Nashville.]

By May 2022, I had somewhere between 20K and 30K words. On the 25th of the month, I was in Durham for my granddaughter’s graduation from high school, and the night before the ceremony, I was sitting in our AirBnB watching Wiley Cash interview one of my heroes, James Lee Burke, about Every Cloak Rolled in Blood, his 40th novel. Cash asked how Burke is so productive. Burke said he wakes up every morning–that’s every morning of the year except maybe Christmas–with a scene or two in mind. Then he writes at least 750 words on the scene(s), and by the end of a year, roughly, he has a novel. I decided I’d try that method for the following few weeks, and it worked for me. By the time I left on July 4 for my writing residency at Wildacres in the North Carolina mountains, I was approaching 70K words. Then, by the time I left Wildacres on July 10, I had completed a first draft of just over 90K words.

I’d proven to myself that I could write a book of fiction in less than twenty-five years! This was the amount of time that passed between first words and publication for both Gabriel’s Songbook and A Twilight Reel.

Between mid-July and now (approaching mid-December) I’ve made four more passes through the novel, the current draft of which is at 102K words.

All along, I’d been focused on trying to tell a good story. I’d thought it might be a mystery, but then I realized I didn’t know how to write a mystery. So, I just stuck with the good story idea. After the first draft was finished, I learned from Google that I had been writing a suspense novel:

suspense: the main character may become aware of danger only gradually. In a mystery, the reader is exposed to the same information as the detective, but in a suspense story, the reader is aware of things unknown to the protagonist. The reader sees the bad guy plant the bomb, and then suffers the suspense of wondering when or if it will explode.
“Is Your Mystery a Mystery?”

Just for fun, here’s what my writing screen looks like when I’m working. This is the opening paragraph of section VII.

I started writing fiction in the early 1990s, using the old WordPerfect/DOS. I got used to the look replicated above. By the time my university offices began switching me to Word, I found I didn’t like writing in black letters on a white background. So, I figured out how to get my blue screen with my white or gray letters, and I was on my way.

I’ve sent Streets of Nashville to a couple of agents and a couple of publishers, but I think I’m going to put off going further with that process until after the first of the year. But a couple of folks have it in hand right now who could just blow me away if they said yes to representation and/or publication.

Avalon Moon

In the meantime, I have no time to sit on my nonexistent laurels, so, while I begin sending Streets of Nashville out into the world, I’m over 25K words into the next novel, which I’m calling Avalon Moon. I like where it’s going, and those who’ve read some of what I have seem to like where it’s going, too. I’m trying something different this time out, with a handful of different points of view, one of which is my old friend Gabriel Tanner. Like A Twilight Reel, this one hangs pretty close to Runion. The story will include wolves, a river island, preproduction work for an adaptation of a Ron Rash novel, a mysterious document over two hundred years old, and many of the Runion folks I’ve worked with before.

A Young Woman’s Reckless Behavior in Section III

750 Words a Day

I’ve always been an inspiration writer—not an inspirational writer, of course, as that’s a different thing. No, whether I was writing songs or academic essays or fiction or this blog, I awaited inspiration to begin or continue or finish a piece. I’m still like that to a large extent, I guess, but I started a new practice near the end of May 2022 when I listened to author Wiley Cash interview my favorite contemporary novelist James Lee Burke.

At the time of the interview, which took place on the 25^th of May, when my older granddaughter graduated from high school and I turned 63.5 years old, Burke was promoting the publication of his 40^th novel. Cash asked him how he managed to be so consistently productive.

“750 words a day”

I immediately said to myself, “I should try that.” So, I did, starting as soon as Leesa and I returned from the graduation celebration in Durham.

At that time, I was maybe thirty-five thousand words into the first draft of a novel that I’m calling Streets of Nashville. I’d begun serious work on the story in July 2021, and my goal was to try and finish an initial draft of sixty to seventy thousand words by the time the fall semester of 2022 began in the third week of August.

I got started with Burke’s 750-words-a-day plan by Friday, May 27^th, and I stuck with it, writing at least that many words daily and often a few more. By the time I hit mid-June, I was feeling good enough about my progress that I thought I could finish the first draft during my writing residency at Wildacres in NC, which was scheduled for July 4-10. I still thought this even when I blew past sixty thousand words and knew that the story was going to demand more than my earlier guesstimated word count.

The draft stood at something over seventy thousand words when I arrived at Wildacres Retreat on the afternoon of July 4^th. During my writing time there, from Monday afternoon through Saturday evening the 9^th, I finished the first draft—right around ninety thousand words.

Laurel Cabin at Wildacres Retreat. This is how it looked while I was in there writing.

Now that the semester is underway, writing time is limited, so I’m unable to write 750 words a day, but I’ve devised a schedule (of sorts) that is allowing me to write around three thousand words a week (750 X 4), and I’m okay with that. I’m into a fourth draft of Streets and beginning to send it out in search of a publisher, and I’m over sixteen thousand words into the first draft of another novel with the working title Avalon Moon.

A TWILIGHT REEL: STORIES

My new book, A Twilight Reel: Stories, is set for publication on May 25 by Pisgah Press in Asheville, NC. The collection is made up of twelve stories, each set in a different month of 1999. The physical setting for all is my imagined town of Runion, North Carolina, which is on the French Broad River between Marshall and Hot Springs in Madison County.

Here’s a list of the stories included:

The Wine of Astonishment
The Loves of Misty Sprinkle
Overwinter
The Flutist
Decoration Day
Conversion
The Invisible World around Them
Grist for the Mill
A Poster of Marilyn Monroe
A Fiddle and a Twilight Reel
Two Floors above the Dead
Witness Tree

I thought I’d share some writing I did a few years ago about the setting, the use of place, in these stories.

When “place” is mentioned in relation to fiction, the first thing that comes to mind is physical setting. This is the world of the story. It may be anything from a solitary room to an overcrowded neighborhood, from Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi, to “dear dirty Dublin.” If the fiction is fully realized, we as readers will be able to enter this world, to see its colors and shapes, to hear its noises and silences, to smell its aromas and stenches, to feel its textures.

However, a sense of place in fiction is not achieved by the depiction of a physical setting only–its topography and wildlife and climate, its antebellum homes and filthy streets and glittering skyscrapers. There is a spiritual element to setting that is not inherent in the place itself but rather exists according to human experience of the place: an experience built up over time with thick layers of cultural, communal, familial, and individual histories.

I have chosen to place the following four stories in the environs of the fictional Appalachian town of Runion, North Carolina, “my own little postage stamp of native soil.” Appalachia is, I believe, a fertile subject for fiction that remains far from being exhausted. Jim Wayne Miller, a poet native to mountains not far from my Runion, says, “the Appalachian region of America, being neither north nor south exactly, neither east nor west, but a geographical, historical, cultural, and spiritual borderland, has an interesting and complicated past (and present)” (86). This quote implies that even though North Carolina may be considered part of the same “South” as Faulkner’s Mississippi, there is a sense that life in its western mountains is something other than life in what is traditionally known as “the South.” In fact, the spirit of the place, especially that of the more sparsely populated areas like Madison County (where I grew up and where I locate Runion), seems to make it as much the southern region of what some have imaginatively tried to create as “the state of Appalachia” as it is the western region of North Carolina. [Jim Wayne Miller was born in Leicester, NC, although he spent much of his creative life in Kentucky. Also, at the time I wrote this, I think I was unaware of the early American proposal for an actual State of Franklin that would have included at least some of western North Carolina.]

The idea that Runion is a part of some borderland has colored my intentions in writing all of these stories. In addition, I have sensed in Runion the “interesting and complicated past (and present)” to which Miller above refers. All of the stories are set in contemporary Runion (the late 1980s, the early 1990s). This time of stressful change–when the portions of mountain culture not capable of being made “quaint” for tourists are being absorbed into the world at large–highlights the lines of difference between generations and individuals as well as within generations and individuals. The conflicts that necessarily arise in such a situation are what the stories included here attempt to portray. [By the time I completed the collection, its twelve stories had settled into a single year: 1999.]

It was once upon a time in the Appalachian mountains that accents could change from hollow to hollow and hill to hill. Once, the answer to the question “‘Whose boy are you?’ coupled with the name of the branch on which one lived was sufficient to give one a sense of person” (Sprague 23). And again, a person born in this county or that remained a native of that place no matter how much of his or her life was spent elsewhere.

All that is changing. Life in Appalachia is slowly moving from its traditional isolated state to a backwoods version of the global community. For example, satellite dishes pimple the hillsides behind weatherbeaten mobile homes. They stand among the mossy gravestones of hilltop family cemeteries, eyeing the heavens. They perch on the ridgepoles of dusty barns. They function as a sign that the isolation of the past is being stripped away, and along with it the traditions which it nurtured and preserved.

My purpose in writing these stories is to attempt to capture in fiction some portion of this far-reaching transition. As the older generations try to hold on to what their world used to be, the younger generations are trying to transform that world or escape from it altogether. Those generations in the middle simply seem lost. Connected to the old and attracted by the new, they either freeze and wait for what is coming or run to meet they know not what. The conflicts that exist among all these generations are the stuff of which stories are made, and it is my hope that I am able to write some of the “true” stories taking place among the hills and hollows and communities that surround my fictional Runion.

Such fertile fictional ground is incredibly attractive for a writer who feels strongly toward the real ground upon which it is based. In the early part of this century, the actual town of Runion hung on a hillside above the French Broad River between Marshall and Hot Springs in Madison County. A sawmill town of over sixty houses, it died when the mill shut down with the rest of the country in the early 1930s. Today some scattered concrete foundations, the ruins of a one-room wooden schoolhouse, and a single line of jonquils blooming in what once was somebody’s yard are all that remain of Runion. This collection attempts to recreate Runion as if it had never faded out of reality, piecing it together with certain characteristics of the real Madison County towns that surround it–the river town personalities of Hot Springs and Marshall, the small college town atmosphere of Mars Hill–as well as other places that are better labeled villages or hamlets. I realize that four stories cannot create a complete town–Anderson gave twenty-two to Winesburg, Joyce fifteen to Dublin–but I feel I have made a good start.

A view from an elevated vantage point of the lumber and pulp mill nestled along the river with a hill in the background; ramps in the foreground leading to buildings.

The ruins of a Runion house, probably that of a mill owner, on the ridge overlooking the French Broad River, December 2019

Place is the basic point of reference upon which the stories in this collection are built. Every layered aspect of each story is affected by it; the fictional modes of “conflict, symbol, tone, style, etc., are all intimately related to Place and mutually interpenetrated” in a “unity” that “can only be intuitively grasped” (Foster 76). The experience of these characters and their stories would not be the same–in fact might not exist at all–without Runion. However, as Leonard Lutwack says in The Role of Place in Literature, “the qualities of [Place] are determined by the subjective responses of people according to their cultural heritage, sex, occupation, and personal predicament” (35). Thus, Runion would not exist without the characters and their stories; they are its living elements, defining its qualities and making it visible.

In his poem “Anecdote of Men by the Thousand,” Wallace Stevens writes,

There are men whose words
Are as natural sounds
Of their places
As the cackle of toucans
In the place of toucans. (51-52)

Stevens concludes with these lines:

The dress of a woman of Lhassa,
In its place,
Is an invisible element of that place
Made visible. (52)

It is the people of a place that make this invisible spiritual element visible: their language, the interconnected colors and themes of their lives that are the visible manifestations of that place. Consequently, it seems to me that fiction attempting to take these invisible elements and make them visible for us as readers must necessarily be fiction of the place as opposed to fiction about the place. It is the fiction of Runion and of an Appalachia-in-transition that I have attempted to create in these stories.

The author at the graffiti ruins of the paymaster’s vault, December 2019

Works Cited

Foster, Ruel E. “Sense of Place in James Still’s River of Earth.” Sense of Place in Appalachia. Ed. S. Mont Whitson. Morehead: Office of Regional Development Studies, Morehead State University, 1988. 68-80.
Lutwack, Leonard. The Role of Place in Literature. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1984.
Miller, Jim Wayne. “I Have a Place.” Sense of Place in Appalachia. Ed. S. Mont Whitson. Morehead: Office of Regional Development Studies, Morehead State University, 1988. 81-99.
Sprague, Stuart S. “Inside Appalachia: Familiar Land and Ordinary People.” Sense of Place in Appalachia. Ed. S. Mont Whitson. Morehead: Office of Regional Development Studies, Morehead State University, 1988. 20-26.
Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1954. New York: Vintage-Random, 1990. 51-52.

Noisy World

This is a noisy world that clamors for my short attention,
Talking heads that blather on and on and on . . .
“The Bells of Vimperk”

It really is a noisy world. It’s noisy with talk shows and screaming matches, with tears and laughter, with machinery, with so-called reality TV and podcasts and the oral diarrhea of all politicians and too many of the politically engaged and the meaningless niceties on the insincere and the feckless reasoning of the pseudo-intellectual or the real intellectual and the bootless rage of the arrogant ignorant or the simply ignorant ignorant. The list could go on.

But as some elements in the list above suggest, the world is not only aurally noisy but also emotionally noisy and spiritually noisy. Our greed is noisy. Our joy is noisy, which can be beautiful, but our culture pushes the idea that to be truly celebratory, our celebrations must be over-the-top with senseless, pointless screaming and jumping up and down — witness any game show, any clot of people upon whom turn the cameras of The Today Show or Good Morning, America. The world grows nosier and noisier with silent people staring into their screens with headphone stuffed in their ears. (My telephone just lit up without making a sound or vibrating, but it pushed this at me: “Trump’s 2020 campaign team is in hot water after inviting people to ‘send a brick’ to Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer’s offices.” Behind my eyes as I read that, some voice like my own growls, “WTF?” Silent noise!)

The ringing in my ears is most probably from my days of making loud music in clubs and studios, but still I blame the noisy world for it. They’re with me all the time — the noisy world and the ringing ears. My quiet times are marred either by ringing or by the hum of a fan meant to mask the ringing. Maybe some deep meaning is somewhere in that.

My own noisy mind complains that I’m wasting time here and that I should get to work, even though it’s Saturday morning:

“The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.”

So, I’ll get to work, but I’ll leave the blog with this that I read this morning, sitting in my CRV (with over 355,000 miles on it) at Buc Deli Drive-Thru and waiting for my tenderloin biscuit with added tomato, mustard, and jalapeños, sided with cheddar rounds and an unsweet tea:

To be alone by being part of the universe–fitting in completely to an environment of woods and silence and peace. Everything you do becomes a unity and a prayer. Unity within and without. Unity with all living things–without effort or contention. My silence is part of the whole world’s silence and builds the temple of God without the noise of hammers.
Thomas Merton, from “January 18: An Ecology of Silence,” A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journal (this excerpt written in January 1953)

Throwback Thursday

I thought I’d wander back through diaries that I kept on and off for several years and see what I could find with today’s date, 6 December. I found a couple: one from 1977 and one from 1981. Both are back in my Trekkie days, which were, admittedly, not fanatically so. I liked the show but didn’t let it take over my life. I called my diary Captain’s Log and used a few different dating systems, both of which are translated with the transcriptions below. I’m going to try not to edit the writing, so that my mistakes in spelling and grammar stand.

Captain’s Log: 120.677 [December 6, 1977]
It’s 8:00 AM and snowing. It really looks good. I told Phil on Saturday that it was gonna snow today. I hope to pass all of my tests and go to ballgame tonight. At the ballgame I hope to see Madison beat Reynolds and Leesa. . . . Lord, be my guide this day
Captain’s Log: Supplimental
Today has ended rather boring, but well. I made 84 on my Math 110 test so I’m out of there with an 87.
It continued snowing and freezing the rest of the day so the games were called (I didn’t get to see Leesa). We all sat around tonight listening to music then watching “Houston, We’ve Got a Problem” . . . . God be praised!!!

Okay, so I was a first-semester freshman music major (flute) at Mars Hill College when I wrote this. I was living on campus in Spilman Hall. My roommate was Johnny Sawyer, with whom I’d grown up in Walnut. He was hardly ever there, so it was like having a private room. The Phil mentioned is Phil Shuford, who lived across the hall with his roommate Yogi Something. I don’t know where Yogi is, but Phil lives in Ozark, Missouri. We’re friends on Facebook. The math course I reference was an early computer course, in which we learned to create those punched cards that were the apps of 1977. And in those MHC days, Leesa was in my heart and mind but not with me. She’d begun her career at Creative Hair Design in Asheville and was working hard to build a clientele and support herself and Lane, who was seventeen months old at the time.

Captain’s Log Stardate 8112.06 [December 6, 1981]
As seems almost usual for me on Sunday morning, I woke up ill at the world. The Lord knows how hard it is for me to get up before 11 AM. I almost decided not to go to church, like every Sunday, thinking that I got nothing from the small, country service. Then I realised, as always, that they are my people and, even though I may get nothing from the service but seeing them and feeling their friendship, that is enough. Then I also come face-to-face with the fact that the singing I dread with such passion is for them and not for me, and that, being graciously given the gift from God, it is my duty to sing for them. It should also be my desire to do so. Well, Allen met me at the door asking if what he heard about me signing with Capitol was true and he was followed closely by Butch asking the same. I quickly gave them my practiced explanation about Townhouse but they were still pleased. When time for me to sing came around, as I was getting my guitar, Raymond spoke up about my struggles with my music and my witness for the church and my hopefully impending record deal. Then totally unexpectedly he suggested a standing ovation for me and I was overwhelmed. If it is not the Lord’s will for me that this all go through all right, He sure is planning to teach me a great lesson in disappointment. Even at that, though, this morning was a great blessing, and I am very thankful for all those people there.
As far as my music and my career go, I am constantly trying to ask with a sincere heart that the Father’s Will be done and not my own. I could live with losing this deal but not with going against His plans for me.
Oh, in church I sang “A SONG FOR CAROLINA” and “DEAR MOTHER”.
The rest of the day was the usual big chicken dinner and lazy Sunday afternoon. I did, however, add music to and edit some lyrics I wrote last night called “DO YOU EVER MISS ME”
We practiced for the Christmas program this evening then I returned home to watch “YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN” on the tube.
As always it is quite late as I write this so I’ll sign off for now…MC…”Dear Mother, I know He’ll come again”

I’d left Mars Hill College two years before, December 1979, in the middle of my junior year, and transferred to Belmont College in Nashville for the spring semester of 1980, to study music business. But it was too much business and not enough music, so I stayed only one semester before transferring to UNC-Asheville–as an English major–for half the fall semester of that year before quitting altogether. I lived at home in Walnut, writing songs and playing solo at different events and venues around the area. I had a manager named Ron Weathers, who worked out of Asheville, and we’d spent some time in Nashville, where Earl Richards recorded my songs for his publishing and production companies. Earl had cut a deal with Townhouse Records, which was distributed by Capitol Records, and my first album was in the works.

The Townhouse/Capitol thing eventually fell through. Although I probably still have the lyric somewhere, I don’t remember anything about “Do You Ever Miss Me”; most likely it was a Leesa lyric. I remember singing “A Song for Carolina” at a couple of big events, one of which was the ceremony in Raleigh, North Carolina, celebrating Liston B. Ramsey’s ascension to Speaker of the state’s House of Representatives, but again, I remember little about it. “Dear Mother” I still perform now and then.

Mountain Heritage Literary Festival, etc.

On Friday, June 15, I spent the morning driving from Johnson City and East Tennessee State University to Harrogate, Tennessee, and Lincoln Memorial University. The 13th Mountain Heritage Literary Festival took place over that weekend. It was my first time to attend such an event, my first time to lead a fiction workshop.

I had five good folks in the workshop–Sue, Rebecca, Sam, Luke, and Mike. I decided to call it “Song Scenes.” I’d selected a handful of narrative verses from songs I like. We began with the first verses of Springsteen’s “Thunder Road,” McDill’s “Good Ole Boys Like Me,” and Carpenter’s “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her.” We discussed the narrative elements — how (and what) the writers of these songs achieved in such a short space. Their overnight assignment was to take a verse I handed them and 1) figure out how it works, just like we’d done in class, and 2) write something of their own in which they attempted to evoke the same narrative ambience using some or all of the same elements. All five of them came up with terrific stuff, and I was so pleased with their work and their discussions. Thankfully, they seemed to enjoy the workshop as well, so maybe I’ll get to do this again someday.

The whole weekend was great! During the day, we had the workshops, special events (presentations, performances, and so on), and when everything was finished in the evening, many of us gathered on the dormitory’s patio with guitars and other instruments and beverages in red or blue Solo cups, enjoying the company until late.

One view from Pinnacle Overlook near Cumberland Gap

Morning hike, Saturday, 16 June 2018

GABRIEL’S SONGBOOK, Reviewed by CHAPTER 16’s Tina Chambers

Through a Great Wilderness / Chapter 16: A Community of Tennessee Readers, Writers & Passersby / 23 May 2018

It’s a very old tale—boy meets girl; boy trades girl for a shot at fame; boy comes to regret that last part. Gabriel’s Songbook, a debut novel by Johnson City author Michael Amos Cody, is a love song to music—creating it, performing it, and generally being passionate about it. What it is not is a love song to the music business.

Twenty-one-year-old Gabriel Tanner leaves his new wife, Eliza, and his little hometown near Asheville for the chance to prove himself in Nashville. He’s hoping for a big break, but reality sets in as soon as he arrives: “Young men with guitars awaited country music stardom on every corner, warbling songs about trucks and alcohol and mamas and cheating hearts, guitar cases opened at their feet. Grungy kids Gabriel’s age or younger, looking both frightened and defiant, one moment weaved and bobbed through the starry-eyed sidewalk crowd like the children they were, the next disappeared into some black hole of a bar.”

Gabriel’s Songbook chronicles the talented-but-naïve young musician’s ups and downs with a vast array of music-business figures: managers, producers, label executives, promoters, engineers, disc jockeys, contract lawyers, marketing consultants, bandmates, writing partners, hair stylists, and wardrobe consultants. They all have big plans for him, but eventually he comes to understand that they’re all working their own angles, which are not necessarily to his benefit. Through it all, Gabriel works hard to remember why he’s doing all this, and what he’s given up along the way. He goes back to the night he saw the new girl at their high school in the crowd at one of his shows:

In the purity of that moment—filled with music and Eliza—I discovered a light. A guiding star, as I’ve always imagined it. Over the years, even in times when I felt most earth-bound, I kept sight of that star in the heavens. When I sat in some darkened room with my guitar in my arms, trying to fit words to music, it hovered above me like a muse invoked. And when I finally got a real stage and an audience made up of more than friends and family, it became a spotlight, or the spot-lit reflection of myself in some pretty woman’s smiling eyes. I followed that star … without question, through a great wilderness and some of my wildest dreams.

Such dreams don’t always survive the trip, though Gabriel’s love for music endures: “This part, the writing of lyrics, I loved most of all about songwriting, even on this edge of exhaustion,” he remembers. “The soul churning. The stirring up of memories and feelings and dreams. The strange sensation that I was a bystander watching as the page filled with these things put into words.”

Through flashbacks, dream sequences, song lyrics, and even ghostly visitations, readers can watch Gabriel learning lessons the hard way, as he is transformed from a romantic idealist into a hard-drinking, hard-living “almost was,” often at odds with family and friends. Cody brings to life Gabriel’s passion for his art and his ambition to succeed in music, deftly portraying the anguish of unrealized dreams made even more bitter by regret.

A graduate of Auburn University, Tina Chambers has worked as a technical editor at an engineering firm and as an editorial assistant at Peachtree Publishers, where she worked on books by Erskine Caldwell, Will Campbell, and Ferrol Sams, to name a few. She lives in Chattanooga.

What’s Next?

Now that the 2018 spring semester is over and I’ve gotten past the always-surprising empty feeling of not knowing what to do with nothing much to do, I’m starting to think about what’s next.

Teaching: That’s easy. This summer I’ll teach ENGL 2110: American Literature I in Summer I and ENGL 3956: Fairy Tales for the Ages in Summer II. Then in Fall 2018, I’ll teach ENGL 4012: American Novel (Gothic Edition), ENGL 5500: Nineteenth-Century American Poetry, and ENGL 5950: Methods of Research. I’ll also direct one honors thesis. So, that’s the rest of the year taken care of as far as teaching goes.

Academic Writing (Scholarship): Co-editors Robert Battistini and Karen Weyler and I will, I hope, complete the editing of The Literary Magazine and Other Writings, 1801-1807, Volume 3 of The Collected Works of Charles Brockden Brown. I have a number of projects that I’ll eventually go ahead with, but I don’t feel pressured to do so in the immediate future. I want to write an essay on a little known early American poet named Samuel Joseph Smith. I will complete (and attempt to publish) an edition of a little remembered nineteenth-century American novel by Catherine Ann Warfield titled The Household of Bouverie; or, The Elixir of Gold (1860). I would eventually like to write and publish a significant essay or a monograph on American Indian literature.

Creative Writing: I’m three short stories away from completing a twelve-story collection tentatively titled A Twilight Reel. The collection is a made up of often interrelated stories that take place over a year in Runion, Madison County, North Carolina, my “little postage stamp of earth.” Each of the twelve stories takes place in a different month in 1999. I’ve completed drafts of the stories for January, February, March, April, July, August, September, October, and November. So, most every day this summer, I’ll be working on the stories for May, June, and December, each of which is in some stage of drafting.

I have some significant work done on two different novels: A Summer Abroad and Antaeus. Although the latter is the more advanced — at over 230 pages so far — I recently realized that this should probably be the third in a group of novels featuring a character currently named Ezra MacRae. As a result of this realization, I’m also beginning another novel — tentatively titled Chart Hits — to be the first featuring MacRae. Not sure how that will play out. The other piece, A Summer Abroad, is based on the summer of 1979, which I spent traveling around Europe with AESU 616.

Finally, I have a batch of (mostly) new songs that I hope to recored together as a new album sometime in the next year. One song, “Freedom, Love, and Forgiveness,” is older — from the 1990s — but in recent years it has been revitalized as Leesa and I sing it together. A new song that seems to be grabbing people’s attention is “Complaints.” A couple of songs grew out of lines that Gabriel Tanner writes in Gabriel’s Songbook; I liked the fragments I wrote for the novel, so I fleshed them out in to full songs: “Siren, Sing” and “Catch That Train.”

I guess I’m planning like I’m in my thirties, even though I’ll turn sixty this year. I’m certainly happy to have accomplished all I have so far, but chasing all these other projects seem to keep me vital and happy.

“Fiesta”

April 22 is the anniversary of the 1983 release of my one-and-only 45 rpm single. It was “Fiesta.” This year’s anniversary was the 35th. I find it difficult to realize that at fifty-nine years old, thirty-five years was over half a lifetime ago for me.

My aunt Ernie (aka Ernestine Plemmons) made this cross-stitch piece for me sometime after the release of the record, probably for my November birthday or for Christmas in ’83. It sits on my home desk (although not in this exact position). The artwork is that of the record’s cover sleeve. A similar rose also appears on the record’s label.

A few years ago I was playing at Good Stuff in Marshall, in its original location, and a forty-something-year-old girl, whose name I don’t remember and whose self-control was beered-up and loose, started calling out for “Fiesta.” (She called out other things as well, but I’ve chosen to forget them.) Anyway, I started the song and got a few lines into it, when suddenly my memory ran out of the chords. I couldn’t remember it. My only actual record release . . . and I’d forgotten how it went.

That night I could only shrug and move on to another song, but within a couple of days, I’d relearned it. Now I usually include it in all my solo shows, and it’s fun to play. And I know of at least one person for whom it’s a favorite.

In my novel, Gabriel’s Songbook, the story of the writing of the song “Lacy” is the story of another of my early songs called “Daisy.” (I was looking for something that worked like the word Daisy and used Lacy long before I knew somebody by that name.) But the novel’s story of the record release of “Lacy” is the story of the release of “Fiesta” and the non-release of the album that was to follow.

Given that I probably wrote the song a year or two before its release on 22 April 1983, the song is maybe thirty-seven years old. And while the recording is nostalgic and out of date, the song has held up fairly well, I think. I can only hope that its writer has done so as well, but then again, I’ve got about twenty-two years on it!

GABRIEL’S SONGBOOK: Update

Gabriel’s Songbook has now been out in the big wide world for three weeks or so, and folks are beginning to read and respond. So far, responses have been good! And in the name of shameless self-promotion, I thought I’d share a few comments:

(1) Last week I went to Michael’s book reading in Asheville. It is always special to have the author read & discuss his book, but even more so when parts of the book are sung! I really enjoyed the reading & discussion that followed. . . . I have been snuggled up with the book all week. It is great! As you can imagine, his writing is very lyrical. It is also very vivid, bringing to life the town, scenery and people in the book. I was expecting a story about being conflicted between art & business, but to have a love story as well? It’s a very enjoyable easy read. You won’t be disappointed! Thank you Michael Cody for sharing this touching story.

(2) It’s difficult to put down. Exceeding descriptive expectations. But not surprised by how great it is. The reviews on the cover are spot on!

(3) I’m starting Chapter 14. This is one of the best books I’ve read in years. The story is a page-turner. The writing is remarkable.

(4) This book was a page turner for me! I recommended to all my friends!

(5) A fantastic book! It’s real. It’s heartbreaking and yet full of life and love. Michael Amos Cody paints the scenes with words that place you in the middle of it as if you were there. Just like his songs…it captures your heart and you are changed for the better.

(6) This is the best book I’ve read in several years. The story is compelling and touching. It was hard to put it down the three nights it took to read it. Not only is it a great story, but the writing is brilliant. One of my favorite, though little known, authors is Robert McCammon and one reason is that his prose is magical. I got the same feeling with Michael Cody’s storytelling. The wordsmithing itself is just incredibly good.

Are you a songwriter or an author? Or do you just love music and/or great literature? Have you ever aspired to be successful as a musician? Or have you wondered why some people “make it” and some don’t? Have you ever played in an original or cover band? Have you ever been involved in any way with the music industry, with managers, promoters, promisers, game players….? If so, you will LOVE this book.

I wish I could write as well as the author so that i could better express how much I enjoyed this book. This is a MUST read for anyone who has ever been involved in or infatuated by drama that is the music industry.

P.S. And wait until you meet the Turrenok brothers in Chapter 13.

(7) LOVE the book!

As you can imagine, I’m really tickled with these reactions. And I’d be tickled with yours, if you have a chance to read the novel and will take a moment to post a word or two about it. Even if you don’t like it, I’ll still be tickled at your having read it.

Just follow one or all of the links below and let me know what you think:

Gabriel’s Songbook at Pisgah Press

Gabriel’s Songbook at Amazon

Gabriel’s Songbook at Barnes & Noble

Gabriel’s Songbook at Goodreads

Wonder if I’m on Ebay yet. . . . Just checked, and I am!