Every year between Christmas and Epiphany (January 6), I read James Joyce’s “The Dead,” widely regarded as one of the best short stories ever written in English and the final story in the classic collection Dubliners. The setting is the “Misses Morkan’s annual dance” and dinner party. The hostesses are elderly Miss Kate and Miss Julia Morkan and their niece Mary Jane. The main character is Gabriel Conroy, Julia and Kate’s nephew, whose mother was their late sister.
The party breaks up late, and Gabriel and his wife Gretta make their way through cold and snow to a Dublin hotel for the night. But before they leave the Morkan house, Joyce creates a beautiful scene in which Gretta is standing on the first landing of the stairs, where she is listening so somebody up above playing the piano and a man singing. Gabriel stands at the foot of the stairs looking up at his wife:
He stood still in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air that the voice was singing and gazing up at his wife. There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. Her blue felt hat would show off the bronze of her hair against the darkness and the dark panels of her skirt would show off the light ones. DISTANT MUSIC he would call the picture if he were a painter.
Later, in their hotel room lit only by streetlights, he asks her about the song she heard, and she tells him it was “The Lass of Aughrim.” When he asks why the song made her cry, she tells him the story from her girlhood, when she was loved by a boy named Michael Furey, who used to sing that song to her. When Gabriel breaks out in peevish anger – just before, he was lusting to get her into bed – and says something cutting about her wanting to visit her native region to rekindle her young love of this Furey boy. That’s when she tells him that Michael Furey is dead. Joyce writes, “Gabriel felt humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the evocation of this figure from the dead, a boy in the gasworks.” He becomes even more flustered when he learns that the boy died of a lung condition and overexposure to the weather when he visited her on a cold and rainy night out of a desire to see her one last time before she left for school.
Gretta cries herself to sleep and leaves Gabriel standing by the window and looking out on the night. He feels tenderly for her having spent all their years together, even their most intimate moments, with this secret “locked in her heart.” He feels sad for himself and for her as he realizes that he perhaps has never loved anybody – not even Gretta: “He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love.”
Joyce’s great story “The Dead” ends, appropriately, with what I consider to be one of the most beautiful paragraphs ever written in English:
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely in the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
I find this so moving that a few years ago, when I was somewhere – Gatlinburg maybe – on a writing weekend away, I attempted to capture some hint of the emotions this conclusion of “The Dead” inspires in me. Below is what I came up with.
Michael Furey Is Dead
She stands on the stair and listens to the waltz floating down from above, Her face half hidden in shadow half in light. The ghost of a sad smile trembles on lips freshly colored with care, And I tremble at the sight and I wonder what she might be thinking.
She doesn’t know that I saw her as we walk side by side on the street, Both acting just like we didn’t feel what we felt. My tongue tripping over her mystery, hers trying to cover it up. Then I ask her if she’s well, Then I beg for her to tell what she’s feeling.
Oo Oo Oo—Michael Furey is dead—Oo Oo Oo
Deep in the days of a cold and wet autumn, they took waltzing walks in the wood. A delicate boy and a handsome young woman they were. She was an orphan with her aunt until winter, when she’d pack up and go back to school. And he worked in the mines, and he coughed all the time they were dancing.
[Waltz-rhythm interlude]
The weather turned black before she was to leave, the rain fell without taking a breath. Her dark-haired boy waited wet and alone ’neath the trees. She’d been back to school for only one week when the letter arrived from her aunt. And it brought her to her knees with its news of Michael Furey’s passing.
Oo Oo Oo—Michael Furey is dead—Oo Oo Oo
I stand by the window and listen as her sobs subside into sleep And look for the ghost of the boy who died for love of my wife. The stars hang in heaven like the caught breath of snow or like sparkling rain in dark hair. And I tremble at the sight, and I wonder what she might be dreaming. And I tremble deep inside, and I’m afraid of what she might be dreaming.
Oo Oo Oo—Michael Furey is dead—Oo Oo Oo
I played this song live a few times soon after I wrote it, but I’ve never recorded it. I need to do some simple recording soon so that I don’t lose it. If I get the chance to record one last album, I’ll maybe close it with “Michael Furey Is Dead.”
According to Mountford Writing, a blurb is “the effusive (and sometimes elusive) praise you see on book jackets — ‘Brilliant debut…’ — enticing readers to pick up a novel or memoir and take it home.” And according to Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer’s Fiction Courses newsletter, blurbs fall into the category of “love ’em, hate ’em, gotta have ’em.”
I don’t know if blurbs sell books or not, but I’ve been fortunate to land some prize ones for Streets of Nashville. This seems a good place — and time — to share what they are saying about the novel (“they” being fellow authors). See below in alphabetical order.
Michael Amos Cody does a fantastic job creating interesting and empathetic characters, especially his protagonist Ezra, a budding songwriter whose perilous odyssey through the streets of Nashville is much more than grist for the mill—it’s also a heart-rending exploration of music, violence, and the power of friendship. STREETS OF NASHVILLE is an intelligent, heart-felt novel with plenty of authenticity to make it sing. Cody is a talented new voice in Southern fiction whose stories will appear on bookshelves for many years to come.
From the opening chapter of STREETS OF NASHVILLE, Michael Amos Cody’s prose is packed with enough stopping power to send the bullets flying off the page. Dialogue and storytelling ring together like the chords of a song . . . and what a chilling song it is.
In STREETS OF NASHVILLE, aspiring songwriter Ezra MacRae is on the brink of success after years of struggle—until he becomes a witness to a brutal triple homicide on Music Row. Though the masked killer spares Ezra, he doesn’t leave him in peace, haunting and threatening him at every turn. As Ezra balances his dreams of writing songs with a dangerous cat-and-mouse game, the mystery deepens, pulling him back to his North Carolina mountain roots. With rich detail and gritty suspense, Michael Amos Cody delivers a haunting tribute to the resilience needed to survive—and thrive—in the heart of Music City, solidifying him as one of the region’s most compelling voices—a talent I’ve admired since I read his debut novel, GABRIEL’S SONGBOOK.
An elegantly written, mysterious and electric crime novel. Michael Amos Cody’s experience as a Nashville songwriter and encyclopedic knowledge of country music bring STREETS OF NASHVILLE to life.
Kirkus Reviews “has been an industry-trusted source for honest and accessible reviews since 1933 and has helped countless authors build credibility in the publishing realm ever since.” Kirkus says:
An aspiring songwriter in the late 1980s finds himself at the center of a string of Nashville murders in Cody’s thriller.
Ezra MacRae is originally from small-town Runion, North Carolina, and moved to Nashville to be a professional writer of country songs. In the small hours of Easter morning in 1989, however, he finds himself a witness to a shooting on Nashville’s famous Music Row. To his surprise, the killer leaves him unharmed; later, however, the murderer develops a preoccupation with Ezra, harassing him with phone calls and other behavior that escalates to outright stalking. The shooter, Hugo Rodgers, is a former record promoter with a violent and traumatic past. Ezra spends the next week trying to aid local police and protect Benny Jack, an unhoused street singer who caught a stray bullet during the shooting. With the police hot on his tail, Hugo lures Ezra back to Runion for a final confrontation. An epilogue provides a cliffhanger that allows for a continuation of the story. Overall, this is a fast-paced, sometimes coarse, thriller about how desires can become twisted when repressed. The decision to include Hugo’s point of view is a bold but successful move that builds rather than lessens tension. Cody establishes an earthy, authentic sense of place through his prose; there’s an authentic Southern flair to the settings and characters that can feel homey or seedy, depending on the scene. The narrative is interspersed with lyrics to songs Ezra is writing, bringing an elevated lyricism to the page. . . . Ezra is a likable protagonist, as well—sensitive, ambitious, and down to earth, with enough hidden depth to make readers want to spend time with him. Rodgers, meanwhile, is the perfect foil—a despicable killer who becomes even more chilling as his violence spirals out of control.
A bold thriller, set in the music world, that leaves the door open for a possible sequel.
Cody’s STREETS OF NASHVILLE is a lyrical love letter to the musicians who built the city as well as a powerful exploration of friendship and brutality. With his authentic, empathetic voice, Cody is a welcome addition to Southern crime fiction. I look forward to more Ezra MacRae stories to come!
Ezra MacRae is on the precipice of accomplishing a long sought dream when he witnesses a gruesome murder and becomes the target of a psychopath who will make your skin crawl. Cody’s insight into the songwriting world and late ’80s Nashville brings a richness to this story of ambition and greed.STREETS OF NASHVILLE glows with authenticity and heart.
At once an absorbing crime story and an insider’s love letter to a bygone place and time, STREETS OF NASHVILLE grabs ahold of the reader and doesn’t let go. Michael Amos Cody has written a murder ballad to make the bards of Music Row envious.
What a rollicking narrative! Here in Michael Amos Cody’s novel is not only a page-turning murder mystery but also a love song to Nashville’s not-so-distant past, a time raw with possibility. While the setting grounds the narrative, the characters—especially our man Ezra—are riveting. With attention only a musician could mark so brilliantly, Cody has put flesh on characters by turns creatively stricken, comfort-yearning, seedy, and dangerous. STREETS OF NASHVILLE is not just powerful. In all the best ways, it is provocative, a wily rounder of a novel.
Thanks to all these terrific writers and new friends! Thanks as well to Madville Publishing and Kim Davis!
I’m looking forward to Streets of Nashville. I’m confident I’ll spend some time on a top-drawer Whiskey review for that one if it’s even in the ballpark of your previous work. I still recommend A Twilight Reel every chance I get.
Published May 27, 2021
This book of stories was more than twenty-five years in the making. I began it while working on my Master of Arts in English at Western Carolina University under the direction of Rick Boyer (before Ron Rash landed at WCU). Three stories–“The Wine of Astonishment,” “Overwinter,” and “A Poster of Marilyn Monroe”–appeared in my WCU master’s thesis in 1995. The work continued until I finished the final story–“Witness Tree”–in May 2019.
Many of the stories were published as stand-alones through the intervening years:
“Overwinter” (Yemassee 1997)
“The Wine of Astonishment” (Short Story 2000)
“A Poster of Marilyn Monroe” (Pisgah Review 2005)
“The Flutist” (Yemassee 2014)
“The Invisible World around Them” (The Chaffin Journal 2014)
“Two Floors above the Dead” (Tampa Review 2017)
“Conversion” (Still: The Journal 2021)
Thanks to Andy Reed, Pisgah Press, and all who have supported A Twilight Reel over it’s 1,039 days in the world through review, purchase, reading, and on and on. It means a lot.
My blogging schedule calls for some monthly writing on writing every first Wednesday. I missed it by a couple of days. . . .
So, here’s some brief news about what’s going on in my writing life.
Gabriel’s Songbook audiobook “cover”—photo by Ed Huskey; original design by Andy Reed and Michael Cody; audiobook adaptation by Jamie Reeves
When the Spring 2024 semester ended, I spent a couple of weeks in May driving over the mountain to Asheville, where I wound up at The Talking Book studio to record my own narration of Gabriel’s Songbook. Dave Burr was the engineer, and I had a great time working with and getting to know him. The audiobook is now out in the world. It’s available on a number of platforms—Libro.fm, Spotify, and others. It should appear soon on Audible.
I’m no actor. I’m no voice actor either. But I don’t cringe when listening to the finished version, which makes me think that it’s all right. Give it a listen!
Bouchercon 2024! According to the website, “Bouchercon® is the annual world mystery convention where every year readers, writers, publishers, editors, agents, booksellers and other lovers of crime fiction gather for a 4-day weekend of education, entertainment, and fun!” This is my first time to attend this convention, which meets at the end of this month (August 28 – September 1) in Nashville.
Cover of the Bouchercon Anthology 2024
Every year Bouchercon puts out a call for traditional crime short stories related to the conference’s host city. Having lived in Nashville through my twenties, I thought I’d give it a shot. I’d recently been working on a novel called Streets of Nashville (see below), which features a main character named Ezra MacRae. In the novel, Ezra is about five years into his attempt to establish a viable career as a songwriter, so I thought I would write a short story that explores Ezra’s backstory a little. My submission to the Bouchercon anthology was “I Could Be the One.” It tells of Ezra’s first days/months/year in Nashville as he tries to find his footing on Music Row. I looked through my song catalog and landed on an old piece of mine—”I Could Be the One,” of course. (Read more about the song here.)
The story was accepted and will be included in the Bouchercon anthology for the Nashville conference! I look at this as a fine feather in my cap. The anthology will debut at the conference and afterwards be available wherever books are sold. I still love Nashville, even more than thirty years gone from it, so I’m looking forward to reading the other stories in the anthology as well.
I wrote “I Could Be the One” in October 2023. As soon as I finished it, I jumped on another anthology opportunity.
I spent November 2023 writing “Carolina,” based on Texas songwriter Robert Earl Keen’s song of the same name. It’s a bit of a murder ballad and includes suggestions of a man perhaps murdering his lover while sleepwalking. Whether he’s sleepwalking or not, he finds her (after she’s left him) and then wakes up later to find her dead.
This scenario immediately made me think of my work with the writings of Charles Brockden Brown, who wrote a couple of pieces in the late 18th / early 19th centuries about sleepwalking and murder. The first is his novel Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799). In 1805, Brown published a piece of short fiction titled “Somnambulism. A Fragment.” In this story, a young man named Althorpe fearfully obsesses over the safety of his beloved on a nighttime trip she is beginning with her father. Althorpe walks in his sleep and finds her in the night and murders her, bringing his obsessive fears to life—without knowing it.
In the song, the ill-fated girl is named Lily. I kept the name for my story and made her the centerpiece of a conflict between two men: the violent Al Thorpe and Asheville PD detective Eddie Huntly. This story was so much fun to write!
“Carolina” will appear in Madville Publishing‘s Wild Wind: Poems and Stories Inspired by the Songs of Robert Earl Keen. The book is scheduled for release on November 19 and will be available wherever books are sold.
Streets of Nashville is my second novel (third book of fiction). On April 15, 2025, Madville Publishing will release the novel into the wild world (whatever form that takes after the November election)! From the above, you can gather that its main character is a songwriter named Ezra MacRae, five years into his attempt to establish a viable career on Nashville’s Music Row. I won’t say much more about it right now. Madville’s editor and I are working with the final proofs of the text, so I should soon have an advance reading opportunity available for pre-release reviews. In the meantime, you can read the query letter that I sent to Madville, which led to acceptance and the start of the publishing process. (Thanks to the great Alex Kenna for providing this query letter space!)
This is a secret cover reveal! I’ll do a more public one on my socials as soon as the text of the book is finalized. For now, we’ll see if anybody actually reads this blog. And if anybody does, they’re the first to lay eyes on this cover.
“This Is Not All” is a new song that has been with me for a while. In fact, I’ve had much of it written for several years, so I suppose it’s more accurate to say that it’s a newly completed song. It’s so newly completed that I haven’t even learned it yet. Still, that didn’t stop me from trying to play it at a recent gig on the Barnett Patio. I flubbed a bunch of it, especially toward the end, but it’s now out there in the world. I’ll continue to work on the music, but I feel like the lyrics are finished and say what I want them to say.
The first verse began with hiking a trail—going on a ramble, as my friend Scott Honeycutt calls it. The lines borrow some sentiments from Emerson, Thoreau, and Dickinson (and many others, I’m sure). We too often go out into nature, as Emerson and Thoreau caution us, looking for the big payoff in the scenery—a dramatic waterfall, the colors of autumn leaves, the mountaintop view of distance (even to the moon). Emerson writes in “Beauty,” the third chapter of Nature, “Go out of the house to see the moon, and ’tis mere tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey.”
But the trail offers much at which to wonder that is seen only if we turn our eyes away from the big picture, away from the big expectations, and look down—not necessarily down, but just look.
Not all the wonder along the trail is to be found in woods and sky— look closer. It’s the tiny frog hidden in clover and that creature in the dust with a hundred legs or more. It’s in how I find my way home and that flower I never noticed by the door.
I like the last two lines in particular. Have you ever thought about how wonderful it is that you can—as long as you have a sound mind—find your way home? And you probably know many different ways to get home. Consider the Keb’ Mo’ song “More Thank One Way Home.” Take that as realistically or metaphorically as you wish.
As for the last line, Emily Dickinson writes in her poem 446 (Franklin; “This was a Poet”) that the poet
Distills amazing sense From Ordinary Meanings – And Attar* so immense
From the familiar species That perished by the Door – We wonder it was not Ourselves Arrested it – before –
(*Attar = fragrance)
Here, Dickison suggests—as Emerson does in his essay “The Poet”—that the poet (or the poetic eye) sees the richness, even the strangeness and wonder, in the familiar. Although those without the poet’s vision are subject to a kind of “ceaseless Poverty,” we still have the potential to understand and be enriched through that vision. That is, once the poet points out the wonder in the “familiar species / That perished by the Door”—”that flower I never noticed by the door”—we are enriched second-hand.
The second verse of “This Is Not All” sticks with wonder and the wonderful:
Not all the wonder along the way is waiting somewhere far ahead— look closer. A little boy runs in cape and mask, another stands shirtless in a barnyard banging a drum. A little girl learns to cartwheel, And another stands by the road and sticks out her thumb.
The idea here is that when we travel, whether on the road or trail or metaphorically through life, we often let the destination or goal loom so large in our minds that we ignore or lose sight of what is wonderful “along the way.” Consider the old adage that the journey is more important than the destination. The “little boy” is my son Raleigh, who had a vivid imagination and a love of costume.
The image of the other boy is from my travels at some point some years ago. I was driving in Indiana or Illinois or Iowa—somewhere with corn to the horizon. Just off the interstate was a large farmhouse, a big barn to the right of it (in the background, corn to the horizon from which a storm approached). In the barnyard, this kid—a teenager, at least—sat behind a full drum set and seemed in the middle of a massive rock ‘n’ roll show drum solo. A vivid, amazing scene!
The cartwheeling and hitchhiking girls are less real images than they are contrasts in innocence and experience, security and danger. But each of these has in it an element of wonder.
The song takes a dark turn to look at evil. The third verse recognizes that we leave ourselves open to the threatening workings of evil if we believe that it exists only in obvious places—”the terrorist and thief.”
Not all the evil in the world is in the terrorist and thief— look closer. It’s in the thousand faces of ignorance— political and corporate and religious. It’s in the hate and hunger and the trumped-up fights that pit them against us.
Ignorance is possibly the worst evil in our world today. Many of us seem to be getting to the point where we can’t see anything except through the lenses of ignorance, rage, and prejudice, our desire to win at all cost (while too ignorant to count the ultimate cost), our desire to “own” ______ [insert your fear/hate here], the devotion of our time and minds and hearts to conspiracy (which even if real probably has little to do with you and your little you might brighten). Charles Dickens wrote in his last scene with the Ghost of Christmas Present about “a boy and girl” that Scrooge spots hiding under the skirts of the Ghost’s robe, children [y]ellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish. . . .” When Scrooge asks if they are the children of the Ghost of Christmas Present, the spirit answers,
“‘They are Man’s. . . . And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware of them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it! . . . Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse! And bide the end!'”
Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol
In our devaluing of education and of ourselves along with it, we have opened the door wide to all sorts of evil. The ignorant parents and grandparents and legislators slander teachers as misleading and “indoctrinating” their students. The ignorant revel in their ignorance as their badge of difference from the educated and the expert. (This is what Dickens refers to when he writes, “Admit it for your factious [that is, divisive] purposes, and make it worse!”). Thomas Jefferson—author of the U.S. Declaration of Independence—wrote elsewhere that “the spirit of the people [is not] infallible” and we “will become . . careless. A single zealot may commence persecutor, and better men be his victims.” I think the “single zealot” is now among us in Donald Trump, who is Dickens’s boy Ignorance personified. Beware! “Deny it” and experience the “Doom” he brings.
And yet perhaps there is still goodness. Fear and hate cannot survive honest expressions of love between people, between peoples, between us. Someone who becomes friends with—who comes to love—that which is feared, be it a skin color or a faith system or an identity (LGBTQ+) or whatever, usually finds it difficult, if not impossible, to fear and hate the person that has now become, to them, a human being—recognizing another as a human being, as a child of God (if you will). And that’s what it’s about, I think, opening up of ourselves to see the humanity in everybody. It is in this recognition and love that fear and hate begin to wither and die for lack of nourishment.
That said, I suspect we’re too far gone into ignorance—and an arrogance that prevents us from recognizing our ignorance—to survive.
Still, for the song, I lifted up my mind and heart and wrote a bridge and a fourth verse and tied it all together with a refrain “This Is Not All,” which first appears after the second verse and then repeats after the third and at the end.
The means of control are more than out of our hands— they’re far beyond our reach. But we can love, and love’s the root and height of all and love’s the root and height of each.
Not all the goodness in the world is to be found in church and child— look closer. It’s in the unshackled hearts that lift us high above the right or wrong or Right or Left— my friend’s warm hand in mine and true emotions honestly expressed.
This is not all, no, this is not all! Out there is more than we can own, more than we can protect. This is not all, no, this is not all! Out there is more than can be known, so much more than we expect. This is not all!
This Is Not All
Not all the wonder along the trail is to be found in woods and sky— look closer. It’s the tiny frog hidden in clover and that creature in the dust with a hundred legs or more. It’s in how I find my way home and that flower I never noticed by the door.
Not all the wonder along the way is waiting somewhere far ahead— look closer. A little boy runs in cape and mask, another stands shirtless in a barnyard banging a drum. A little girl learns to cartwheel, And another stands by the road and sticks out her thumb.
This is not all, no, this is not all! Out there is more than we can own, more than we can protect. This is not all, no, this is not all! Out there is more than can be known, so much more than we expect. This is not all!
Not all the evil in the world is in the terrorist and thief— look closer. It’s in the thousand faces of ignorance— political and corporate and religious. It’s in the hate and hunger and the trumped-up fights that put them against us.
This is not all, no, this is not all! Out there is more than we can own, more than we can protect. This is not all, no, this is not all! Out there is more than can be known, so much more than we expect. This is not all!
The means of control are more than out of our hands— they’re far beyond our reach. But we can love, and love’s the root and height of all and love’s the root and height of each.
Not all the goodness in the world is to be found in church and child— look closer. It’s in the unshackled hearts that lift us high above the right or wrong or Right or Left— my friend’s warm hand in mine and true emotions honestly expressed.
This is not all, no, this is not all! Out there is more than we can own, more than we can protect. This is not all, no, this is not all! Out there is more than can be known, so much more than we expect. This is not all!
[Due to excessive commenting from Russian bots, I have stopped allowing comments on this blog. If you are not a Russian bot (or a bot of any other persuasion) and would like to comment, please email me at michaelamoscody@gmail.com.]
I’m late to this anthology party, but I’m glad to be here finally and having fun.
What party? Again, I’m late to this, but it seems that a whole new world of opportunities has opened for creative writers of fiction (flash fiction and short stories), poems, and creative nonfiction (again, flash and short). The literary and not-so-literary magazines were once about the only places I could go to try and publish my short stories individually, but now I’ve sat up and taken notice of several anthologies looking for material that I might’ve already written or might yet write.
I’ve had a couple of gratifying successes so far. . . .
Every year, Bouchercon (aka the World Mystery Convention) publishes an anthology of traditional crime stories set in or related to the city hosting that year’s meeting. This year, Bouchercon 2024 meets in Nashville, TN. So, I took an old song of mine — “I Could Be the One” — and used it as a prop in a story about theft of intellectual property on Music Row. The story was accepted! The anthology titled Tales of Music, Murder and Mayhem: Bouchercon Anthology 2024 will be released by late August. Here’s a link to the now closed call for submissions I responded to. Every year, the Bouchercon anthology benefits a charity local to the host city, and this year, sales of the anthology will benefit Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. And get this — Dolly is writing the introduction! More on this anthology as the publication date comes nearer.
One thing I think is cool about “I Could Be the One” is that it turned out to be a prequel to my novel Streets of Nashville, forthcoming from Madville Publishing in April 2025. More on that soon as well.
My next anthology success will appear in Madville‘s Wild Wind: Poems and Stories Inspired by the Songs of Robert Earl Keen, coming in November 2024. Here’s just a bit about what’s in it: “The poems and short stories here are each inspired by Keen’s songs, some expansions of themes of Keen’s songs, others move in creative directions suggested by the characters in his work.” I found a Keen song called “Carolina” and built from its lyrics a story of the same name. Keen’s lyrical story is set in Asheville, NC, and includes hints of sleepwalking and murder. I had some fun adapting some of my scholarly interest in Charles Brockden Brown — his use of somnambulism and a couple of his character names — into a piece of crime noir.
(Not sure if that’s the official cover pictured)
In addition to these two successes, I have two hopefuls out there — one “on submission,” as they say in the biz, and one I’ve just begun writing. I’ve already submitted “Pontiac” in response to Cowboy Jamboree Press’s call for an anthology to be called Texas Wind, intended to be a collection of creative nonfiction and fiction “incited” by Texas-based songwriters such as Guy Clark, Keen, Nanci Griffith, Jerry Jeff Walker, Steve Earle, and others. My story is based on Lyle Lovett’s song by the same name from his 1987 album of the same name (his second album). Here’s hoping! (If you’re writing and have something that might work for Texas Wind, submissions are supposed to be accepted up until August 1, 2024.)
The other hopeful will be — I have only a couple of ideas and a couple of paragraphs so far — submitted to the Bouchercon 2025 anthology call for submission. The meeting will take place in New Orleans, LA, so the stories should be set in or related to the Crescent City. I read a lot about that area in James Lee Burke‘s Dave Robicheaux novels, not that I’m going to do anything other than be inspired by Burke’s magnificent prose. Again, I have only a couple of paragraphs, which I like, but I haven’t found a story yet. I’m thinking about my Dr. John Riddle, Professor of English from Runion State University, who is in New Orleans for a literary conference. Something bad’s going to happen, I guess.
As you can tell from my experiences above, these are generally themed anthologies. They’re organized around a central idea or subject. For example, the call for submissions might be for an anthology of stories related to a particular place or a particular genre or a particular person and so on. And these are often the brainchildren of smaller presses — that is, not something the big publishing houses are interested in.
Here are some examples:
Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology from my heroes at Madville Publishing. Here’s a bit about what’s inside: “54 poets’ takes on often-unsung facets of this diamond in a rhinestone world—calling in Dolly’s impeccable comedic timing, her lyric mastery, her business acumen, and her Dollyverse advocacy.”
Burning Down the House: Crime Fiction Incited by the Songs of the Talking Heads from Shotgun Honey. Here’s what’s inside and why: “A charity anthology to benefit the fight against climate change, . . . a dazzling exploration of what crime fiction can entail — deftly mixing grimy crime, small-town grit lit, literary noir, and tales that blend crime with speculative fiction, sci-fi, road trip comedy, magical realism, and horror.” Also from Shotgun Honey, Thicker Than Water, “tales featuring female protagonist who navigate the precarious boundaries of the darker spaces of humanity,” created and sold to support breast cancer research.
Motel: An Anthology, from the folks at Cowboy Jamboree Press. Several of my X friends have pieces in Motel. Here’s bit about what’s inside and why: “On lost, lonely highways, deep in the American heartlands and skirting the shady edges of cities, once ubiquitous motels have faded, some into ruin, others transformed from way station to permanent residence. MOTEL captures the heartbreak, desperation and indeed magic of motels.”
Bishop Rider Lives: An Anthology of Retribution and A Beast Without a Name: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Music of Steely Dan from the folks at Down & Out Books. Beau Johnson’s Bishop Rider lives again in the former: “The fifteen stories in this anthology both brand new tales and written by some of the biggest names working in crime fiction and horror today. . . . Come for the rage, stay for the dismemberment. See how a dead man makes them burn.” And in the latter, “These twelve tales interpret shady pasts, dubious presents, and doomed futures. There’s no hiding inside a hall of rock and sand from stories as deliciously wicked and terrifically twisty as the jazz-rock noir that inspired them.”
[Due to excessive commenting from Russian bots, I have stopped allowing comments on this blog. If you are not a Russian bot (or a bot of any other persuasion) and would like to comment, please email me at michaelamoscody@gmail.com.]
I don’t think “I Could Be the One” is among my best songs. I like the chorus really well, musically and lyrically, but I’m not wild about either the verses or the bridge. I wrote it back in the 1980s as one of my few attempts to write something commercial for Nashville.
I was rarely any good at such attempts.
Recently, however, in my expanded creative life writing fiction, I was able to borrow that good chorus from the song and use it in a short story that I also titled “I Could Be the One.”
Here’s the chorus as I revised it for the short story . . .
I could be the lover of your dreams I could be the stitch to bind your seams I could be strong when your strength is gone I could be the one When the nights are cold and you’re so blue You need somebody warm to hold on to Girl, don’t you run to no midnight sun I could be the one
I wrote the story in response to a call for contributions to an anthology that is likely to be pretty widely read, and I was blown away when I received the acceptance email. As Agatha Christie famously said, “Well, here’s to crime” (that’s a red herring).
I also made the story a prequel to my next novel, Streets of Nashville, which Madville Publishing will release on April 15, 2025. To learn a bit more about the process leading up to the contract for Streets, check out my query letter via the great Alex Kenna‘s blog that features samples of this important step in the publication process.
While I can’t say much more about the short story yet (contract pending), I’m terrifically excited about where it is ending up. I hope you’ll read it if you get a chance.
I have watched you be deceived by men with silver tongues Their pretty lies just go straight to you heart And I have wished it could be me that you run to in the night Oh, I would hold you and never let you fall apart
I could be the pleasure in your dreams I could be the stitch that binds your seems I could be strong when your strength is gone I could be the one
When you go to bed at night, do you lie awake and cry, Wondering why true love is so hard to find? If I had the nerve, girl, I would walk right up to you And let you know the love you’re looking for is mine
I could be the pleasure in your dreams I could be the stitch that binds your seems I could be strong when your strength is gone I could be the one
Some night in this lonely town I’m gonna be there when you turn around Maybe then you’ll finally see That I’m right on time with the love you need
I could be the pleasure in your dreams I could be the stitch that binds your seems I could be strong when your strength is gone I could be the one When the nights are long and you’re so blue And you need someone to hold on to Girl, don’t you run to no midnight sun I could be the one
P.S. Here’s the initial catalog entry for Streets of Nashville . . .
[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.
