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.
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)
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.
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
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.
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!