Although I hope that the voice in your head sounds reasonable as you read the following (if anybody reads the following), feel free to hear it in a “You-kids-get-off-my-lawn!” tone if you’re into that kind of thing (and I know many of us are into that kind of thing these days).
The Republican Party no longer exists. . . .
My parents were Republicans and good people. My in-laws were Republicans and good people. I had—have—many friends who were—are—Republicans. These folks—from my parents to current friends—hold conservative values on government and economics. All well and good.
Or rather, all was well and good until actual Republicans and conservatives disappeared from this world by 1) leaving it like my parents and in-laws have done or 2) hiding—voiceless—in a daze of shock and disbelief at how their party and its ideology have been hijacked or 3) drinking the Kool-Aid and crossing over to the side of the hijackers.
Yes, the Republican Party—the GOP—still exists by name and in the news and on election ballots, but its traditional values have been trampled in the mud of their own sweat and blood by the mean and the ignorant and the arrogant, by downright idiots and the downright power hungry and the downright power hungry idiots. I know Jesus warned against calling anyone a fool (Matthew 5:22), but these days I find that admonition more difficult to abide by than most of the Ten Commandments.
Today’s so-called Republican Party is characterized by fear and its brood—anger, jealousy, anxiety. Shame and guilt often accompany fear, but today’s “Republicans” seem dead to these, probably, I think, because they no longer have a moral compass and thus lack any capacity for guilt and shame.
The things so-called Republicans fear are many: fear of the Other (typically identified by the shallow markers of skin color and makeup), fear of sharing (power, prestige, money, etc.), fear of losing (power, prestige, money, etc.), fear of the future, fear of the past (history as it actually happened, for example, or wrongs committed for power, prestige, money, etc.). Many Republicans of today (like their idiot golden—more orange really—idol/idle leader) do not recognize and will not admit these fears, but this is where the above mentioned ignorance and arrogance come in.
Conservative values are characterized not by what is right or wrong but by what is likely to keep them safe from the many, many fears they have (see above) and keep them comfortable in their judgments of what they deem right and keep them smug in their self-righteousness—all with an attitude that says, “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, y’all sit down and shut the fuck up a minute. We got this.”
Here’s an idea. Fear the Super Pigs, why dontcha:
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“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!
Wishing a happy birthday to Leesa! Age is just a number (for the most part — excepting the odd pain here and there), and she doesn’t look or act her age in all the best ways!
This year, I gave her what I gave her last year — tickets so see and hear Keb’ Mo’! (We saw him with Lane and Raleigh in Boone last year. This year the two of us saw him in Morganton.)
Kevin wished Leesa a happy birthday from the stage of CoMMA (City of Morganton Municipal Auditorium) and played a song she’d requested via text: Hand It Over. As Leesa said, “It brought the house down!”
He also ended the show — maybe the next to last song — with Leesa’s other favorite, a song that you could easily imagine he wrote about her: She Just Wants to Dance!
And here’s a little something in celebration of her from her other favorite singer/songwriter: Soulmates!
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[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.]
He is a man of deep ignorance, extravagant arrogance, blatant immorality, and no heartfelt convictions (not counting those thirty-four, of course). —
He is a man who cares nothing about you or me, about our lives in America, or about America itself. —
He is a celebrity (celebrated for being a rich ass) and nothing more, a third-rate stand-up comedian, maybe fourth-rate. —
He is the leader of a cult known as his “base” (consider the adjectival meanings of base). He has captured the devotion of that base with a slogan (MAGA, catchy but meaningless), a ridiculous little dance, and lies as big or small as needed. —
If you support the man after his conviction on thirty-four felony counts, after his attaches on women, on immigrants (fleeing to the United States– not to take your jobs but to find, they hope, better lives), on those with disabilities, after he has attacked anybody or said anything he thought might get him some masturbatory applause, then I can’t help thinking that, at some level, you are like him.
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I’ve lived in the United States of America for sixty-five years. I’ve been teaching American literature for the last twenty-seven of those.
My American lit surveys–particularly the sophomore-level general education version–begin with indigenous creation stories and trickster tales before moving to the letters of Cristoforo Colombo, i.e., Christopher Columbus. From there, it’s on to the writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas and the American Puritans (including those we typically style as “Pilgrims”). My students and I then read from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, usually winding up the semester with poets Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.
Having gone through some portion of these writings–in both undergraduate and graduate courses–every semester, I have come to believe that the one consistent American experience is that of decay, in all its not-so-varied noun and verb meanings:
to decline in health, strength, or vigor
to fall into ruin
to decline from a sound or prosperous condition
rot
gradual decline in strength, soundness, or prosperity or in degree of excellence or perfection
destruction, death; Merriam-Webster identifies this meaning as “obsolete,” but I think we have a good shot at bringing it back
The United States of America has decayed to the extent that it’s no longer even half of what it thinks itself to be. And if the USA is supposed to be–as it thinks it is–God’s gift to the world, it is now a cheap knock-off of the nation initially imagined, of the nation it might have been if it’d been able to live up to its own ideals and fend off the inevitable decay.
As Emily Dickinson wrote,
I reason, we could die– The best Vitality Cannot excel Decay, But, what of that?
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.
[Much of what is below was originally posted on September 6, 2023, but kind of a lot has happened since then! So, here’s the year-end edition.]
I did a lot of writing in 2023.
In January, I signed up for an online class on writing grit lit led by writer Sheldon Lee Compton. Three of us worked with Sheldon for a couple of weeks (maybe more). In the process, we wrote four pieces of what turned out to be flash fiction, each with a different focus; on one, for example, we were to create the piece (narrative, character, etc.) using mostly dialogue.
I titled my dialogue piece “Abyssinian Night.” Mystery Tribune picked it up for its online daily fiction archive back in April or May, I think. You can read it here if you’re interested. The story had at least one reader! My X (not ex-) writer-friend Casey Stegman wrote this and linked the story: “Another story this year that I enjoyed the hell out of is this one from @DrMacOde (published by the always amazing @MysteryTribune).” Remember Casey’s name!
One of our other assignments for that workshop was particularly focused on setting. I wrote a piece I titled “Holy City Buskers,” which was accepted for online publication by The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. The story went live there in early December. You can read it here if you’re interested.
I wrote two other pieces from Sheldon’s grit lit workshop – “Bell-Eye” and “Penny and the Beast.” I submitted both a couple of times to no success before deciding not to send them out anymore. Instead, I’ll keep them for myself and make them available here when this site is revised (hopefully in the first part of 2024).
In late August, I completed what I think was my first more-or-less traditional short story since the publication of A Twilight Reel. For the longest time it went untitled, and I referred to it as “Something Unspeakable,” a working title taken from what was – again for the longest time – its opening phrase: “Something unspeakable now lives in our woods. . . .” Eventually, as the character and voice of the story developed, I adopted the title “Payne Mountain,” for the place where the majority of the story is set, a mountain above Runion named after the family living there as the story begins. With help from writing friends Tonja Matney Reynolds, Pat Hudson, and Chris McGinley, I refined the voice and finally finished the story, now out on submission at a handful of places. Here’s the first paragraph as a bit of a teaser:
That evening, half a century ago now, just after supper when we had moved out to the veranda to worship the last light, something unspeakable asserted an ear-shattering claim on our fifty acres of forested mountainside. What we heard began as a forlorn howl, such as some creature might make if it returned to its den to find the place and its little ones destroyed, a howl that escalated into a scream of rage. Its echoes spread invisible fire through the woods and sent us scrambling for our front door, imaginations terrorized.
from “Payne Mountain” by Michael Amos Cody
I spent the last quarter of 2022 and most of 2023 in the “querying” stage. (For those who don’t know, “querying” is the hopeful, humbling, humiliating, hopeful again act of writing to literary agents and publishers/editors to ask if they are interested in representing/publishing my work. The vast majority of these queries either go unanswered or answered briefly with a note that might be summarized in four words: “not-interested-good-luck.” But that’s the way it is for 99.9% of us who engage in this writing business. (For an example of this process, you might want to check out the September 5 episode of Writer’s Bone podcast with National Book Award winner Tess Gunty.)
I completed the first draft of this new novel, Streets of Nashville, late in the summer of 2022, aided by a week-long residency in Laurel Cabin at Wildacres in the North Carolina mountains. In the excitement of new creation, I prematurely submitted the novel to a few agents and publishers who (rightly?) rejected it. Since then, through the semesters of Fall 2022 and Spring 2023 and on into the summer, I revised the novel a dozen times, guided by helpful comments from a few friends, particularly my colleague Michael Briggs.
Here are the two main paragraphs of the query letter:
It’s 1989, and Nashville feels like a city on the knife edge of uncertainty. Violent crime escalates, even on hallowed Music Row. The city’s streets fill with strangers. Its music industry faces the death of traditional practices as the digital age looms. The anxiety of change cracks the façades of “Music City, U.S.A.” and “Athens of the South,” revealing an unacknowledged darkness.
In the early hours of Easter Sunday morning, gunfire echoes along 17th Avenue South when four people are shot. Tenderfoot songwriter Ezra MacRae—out on the town to celebrate the first good fortune he has had with his songs—witnesses the shooting, but the masked gunman spares him. But why? While Nashville Metro PD’s investigation progresses, the killer develops an obsession with Ezra—calling him, following him, haunting his dreams, but not eliminating him. Ezra tries to carry on with his songwriting, maintain his day job cleaning pools, and assist in the investigation as he can. When the seemingly methodical mind behind the Easter killings begins to unravel, the violence—including the threat to Ezra—escalates in Nashville and moves toward a final confrontation in an isolated farmhouse near Ezra’s hometown of Runion, in the North Carolina mountains.
Major Update: Here’s a surprising saga of success rising out of failure. As mentioned above, in the excited flush of new creation, I submitted what amounted to a first or second draft of Streets of Nashville to a few agents and publishers. One of the latter was Madville Publishing.
Original Madville submission was sent in the second or third week in September 2022.
After it was sent, I continued to learn more about my story and continued revising. Sometime in November or December, I received important feedback from my colleague Michael Briggs regarding one of most important and difficult relationships in the novel. I began to revise accordingly over the winter holidays.
On January 23, 2023, I received two things from Madville: 1) a pass on the novel, but which time my response was “of course and rightly so” and 2) some useful comments from Madville’s fiction reviewer.
I accepted the rejection and continued forward with revisions that were making the novel better and better (in my opinion, at least)
In May, I submitted the novel to a publisher I had really high hopes for and strong interest in, but even as I submitted the MS, I knew it was much longer than the publisher was interested in; still, the publisher remained interested in reviewing my work, so while I waited, I started an intensive mid-summer revision to reduce the word count from 106,000 (I think the original Madville submission was 92-96K words) to somewhere in the mid- to upper-80K range.
I think some miscommunication occurred between this desired publisher and me. When I wrote to say I was working on reducing the word count, the publisher—who still hadn’t rejected the novel—thought I was going to send the revision when completed. At the same time, I thought I was in the still-waiting-to-learn-if-you’re-interested stage. By the time this miscommunication got sorted and I sent the shortened manuscript in late September 2023, the publisher wasn’t going to be able to get to it until January, so I settled in to wait.
On October 12, my wife and I were taking part—as crawling audience members—in a Johnson City poetry pub crawl. On the walk between our second and third stop, I received an email from Madville (now some nine months after the rejection of Streets of Nashville). The initial email said that some old queries were being gone through, and mine looked interesting. Had they ever requested the manuscript? It just so happened that the acquisitions reader was looking for reading material. Before I could reply, I received an email apologizing for the confusion after the realization that they had, in fact, already seen and passed on my novel.
I went ahead and responded with this: “Yes, your reader responded to my first draft, which I submitted way before it was ready. The novel has gone through many revisions—guided by your reader’s comments and those of other beta readers—since September ’22, which I think is when I originally submitted it.” Only that and nothing more.
Here’s the next email I received a couple of minutes later: “My reader says he’d read it again if you want to send it.”
Reader, I resubmitted the manuscript the following morning, October 13, 2023.
On Friday evening, November 3, I was playing the season finale gig at the Barnett Patio. At some point, my phone vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it out and glanced at it and saw that I’d received an email from Madville. Figuring it was a closer-but-still-no-cigar note, I put the phone back in my pocket and played for my people. As soon as the gig ended, I had to hop in the car and drive two hours south to Union, South Carolina, to participate next morning in the Upcountry Literary Festival held at USC Union. I’d forgotten about the Madville email until I was in the drive-thru line at a McDonald’s just south of Hendersonville, NC. I placed my order as I rolled forward, I opened the email and read it carefully a few times. By the time I reached the pick-up window, I knew Streets of Nashville had found a home.
I have signed the contract. The completed manuscript is due to Madville by July 1, 2024, and Streets will hit the streets in early 2025.
During the year as I was revising Streets of Nashville, I spent significant time drafting a new novel with the working title Avalon Moon. This first draft currently stands at roughly 77,000 words (271 pages in typescript), and I think that I’m 5,000 words or thereabouts from typing THE END (which I actually never do). Back in the spring of 2023, I submitted the first fifty pages to a competition called the Claymore Award, which is associated with Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. In July, I learned that Avalon Moon had been selected as a Finalist for the Claymore in the category of Southern Gothic (it’s actually more Appalachian Gothic). While my submission wasn’t the ultimate winner in that category, I consider its achievement of Finalist status to be affirmation of the novel’s potential
I started the ball rolling with an Asheville company called The Talking Book to record an audiobook of my first novel Gabriel’s Songbook. Time and quiet recording space have been hard to come by, but I hope I’ll be able to do some—if not all—of the recording by the end of January 2024.
Another new thing I’ve done here at the very end of the year is write a couple of short stories specifically for proposed anthologies. The first—completed and submitted by the end of October—was for possible inclusion in the Bouchercon 2024anthology. The second—completed and submitted by the end of December—was for possible inclusion in an anthology based on the lyrics of Texas songwriter Robert Earl Keen. I really enjoyed writing these stories and have fingers and toes crossed for the success of each and both!
Who’s Gabriel Tanner, you ask? He’s the central figure of my first novel Gabriel’s Songbook.
The paperback cover from 2017
Yes, he’s fictional, but I know him pretty well. He’s a lot like me in some ways–all right, many ways. But in other ways I won’t go into here, he’s not. In addition to Gabriel’s Songbook, he’s featured in “A Fiddle and a Twilight Reel” from 2021’s A Twilight Reel: Stories. And you’ll probably not be surprised to learn that he’s a background character (but never “on stage”) in my new manuscript novel “Streets of Nashville,” as well as one of the featured narrators in my work-in-progress “Avalon Moon.” So, he’s been a busy guy.
I have a file that I keep on my fictional town of Runion and its people. The file includes dates all the way back to 1818. The note on Gabriel Tanner, whose first name seems to mean, in Hebrew, “devoted to God” or “hero of God,” was born to Kirk and Maggie James Tanner on March 8, 1959. He has a brother named Butler, a cousin named Carter “Cutter” Clements, and a wife named Eliza Garrison Tanner, to whom he has been married twice.
How did I pick March 8, 1959, as his birthdate? The 1959 comes from my interest in having him be roughly the same age I am, and I was born on November 25, 1958. More particularly, I picked March 8 because it was on that day in 1983 (I think) that I recorded “Thunder and Lightning” in Nashville. I was in Bullet Recording on Music Square West (17th Avenue South) with my producer Earl Richards and an amazing group of studio musicians. For several days, we’d been tracking songs for my second (unreleased) album, to be titled Waiting for the Night.
March 8 (a Tuesday in 1983) was the last day of laying down basic tracks for the album, and we had maybe two or three hours of studio and musician time remaining. So Earl asked if I had anything more that I wanted to record. “Well,” I said. “I have this new one that we could try.” (I said something like that. This was forty years ago today, you know, and I was twenty-four years old.) I played the song through once for the musicians, and they were ready to record. I doubt that it took more than a couple of takes to capture the track.
Oh, man, it was gonna be a hit! So said all who played on it and heard it. But it was not to be, as the album never saw the light of day.
Several years later, the “Cody Band” version of “Thunder and Lightning” made it on an Asheville, NC, radio station’s River Rock album and became a local–even regional–hit, making the list of top five requests of the day (alongside Prince, Madonna, and others) for several weeks in a row and subsequently picking up over one thousand plays between January and August.
The song was–and still is–terrifically important to me, so you can understand how its original recording date of March 8 would be assigned the birthdate of Gabriel Tanner.
. . . for my contribution to politicizing Christmas.
People exist in this world who believe that certain other people have been waging a war on Christmas. People exist in this world who believed — and maybe still believe — that the 2016 election of Donald Trump was a win for Christmas in this (nonexistent, in my opinion) war.
Consider these 2022 Christmas “tweets” (still a stupid thing to think of as a meaningful pronouncement). Really think about them, setting aside our tendency to valorize our own or demonize the other.
Now honestly, which seems most in keeping with the Christmas spirit? Which the most respectful of the season and its origins? Can the Christmas spirit, given its source in Christ, be shared through sarcasm and bitterness?
I recently completed my annual reading of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, first published on 19 December 1843, one hundred seventy-nine years ago. In “Stave Three: The Second of the Three Spirits,” telling the story of Scrooge’s time with the Ghost of Christmas Present, Scrooge connects Christmas with Sundays (“‘seventh day'”), when the shops are closed and thereby the poor are deprived of a meal. Speaking for himself and the whole family of Christmases past, the Ghost of Christmas Present says,
“There are some upon this earth of yours, . . . who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived.”
What the Ghost of Christmas Present suggests here is that there are those who claim Christ/Christianity/Christmas whose lives and deeds in this world are carried on as if Christ/Christianity/Christmas are names only, dead things that “‘never lived.'”
And now I’ll stray off into a couple of related asides. . . .
Almost one hundred years after Dickens, Joseph Campbell wrote a passage in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces that, from the moment I read it, put me in mind of Donald Trump and his “kith and kin”:
The inflated ego of the tyrant is a curse to himself and his world—no matter how his affairs may seem to prosper. Self-terrorized, fear-haunted, alert at every hand to meet and battle back the anticipated aggressions of his environment, which are primarily the reflections of the uncontrollable impulses to acquisition within himself, the giant of self-achieved independence is the world’s messenger of disaster, even though, in his mind, he may entertain himself with humane intentions.
Christians are Easter people, not Christmas people (and certainly not 4th-of-July people). For Christians, Christmas has no meaning without Easter.
Now, here’s a very recent bit of aggressive ignorance from one of Trump’s kith and kin. Congresswoman Lauren Boebert dismissed the Cross and the sacrifice upon which true Christianity is based, suggesting that Jesus wouldn’t have had to die if he’d had enough AR-15s “to keep his government from killing him.” Yes, she really said that.
I used to love hearing my cousin Darwin Reeves sing a 20th-century hymn titled “Ten Thousand Angels,” written in 1958 by Ray Overholt. The chorus goes, in part, like this:
He could have called ten thousand angels To destroy the world and set Him free. He could have called ten thousand angels, But He died alone, for you and me.
An important verse of the song goes like this:
To the howling mob He yielded; He did not for mercy cry. The cross of shame He took alone. And when He cried, “It’s finished,” He gave Himself to die; Salvation’s wondrous plan was done.
This is based on Matthew 26:53, in which Jesus says as he is arrested in the Garden of Gethsemene, “Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?”
But according to Boebert, Jesus should have been like Neo and asked for “guns, lots of guns”:
I hope that true Christians — not Xians — will call out Boebert (and her kith and kin) for such crass abuse of their faith and such overt kissing of the gun lobby’s “butt.”
I had some other stuff, but I think I’ll save it for my next 4th Tuesday Political post.
In the meantime, Merry Christmas to all — and all means all, y’all — and a healthy and happy New Year!
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)
