To begin with some Etc. that I feel to my soul . . .
and . . .
and . . .
and . . .
He said . . .
She said . . .
They said . . .
and furthermore . . .
and . . .
and finally . . .
Memes, Etc.
Words & Music by . . .
Michael Amos Cody
Forthcoming
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.
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.
Mama Always Grew Asparagus
Many Are Going Astray
Make America Green Again
Many Avaricious Goons Around
Monsters Always Go Amok
Mamas Applauding Grabbing Ass
“Make America Great Again” (MAGA) is an empty slogan that sways only those unable to consider its meaning (or rather its lack of meaning). In the right world context and with the right motivations and considerations of all, I could perhaps get behind the idea “Make America Great” (again, as long as the implication is not “and to hell with the rest”), but the addition of “Again” throws the phrase into nonsense. Simply put, never was there a time in the past—implied by “Again”—when the U.S. met every possible definition of “Great” for every individual citizen existing at that time. Absolutely never. Regardless of which political ideologues (so-called conservatives or so-called liberals) might wield such a slogan, it rallies only thoughtless, selfish people who interpret it according to some imaginary time/place they’ve romanticized the country as being good for them and their kind (and probably only for them and their kind).
Monkey Apes Gorilla Ancestors
Mikey Ate Goddamn Anything
Morals Are Going Away
Mean Abhorrent Grubby Abominable
Song Stories: “The Bells of Vimperk”
Back in 2014, Leesa and I traveled with a group of friends to Vimperk, a small town in the southwestern portion of the Czech Republic (aka Czechia). A bunch of us lived for a week in a hostel on Vimperk’s beautiful cobblestone square. At least that’s where we slept. During the day, we were on the run, offering a softball camp for youth and English camp for adults. In the evenings, we did a good bit of sightseeing.
In the middle of that week, I played a concert for the town. We found advertisements for this event scattered around Vimperk when we arrived.
It was a terrific experience all around.
In 2015, Leesa and I decided—for a number of reasons—not to go back, but we really missed the place and the people and turned our eyes toward 2016. Meantime, I began to think about a song for Vimperk.
One of the surprising things about that 2014 trip came in the form of good sleep. I’m a white-noise sleeper. I keep a fan running beside the bed every night, not for the breeze but for the steady sound of it. Not only would the hostel where we slept be without a steady hum to lull me to sleep, but also there were bells. Bells, bells, bells all through the night. The clock tower in the square rings its bells every fifteen minutes—one bell for the quarter hour, two for the half, three for a quarter ’til, four for the hour with these last followed by the deeper, louder bell tolling the hour itself. I couldn’t very well pack a fan for the trip, so I bought some melatonin and hoped for the best.
But it wasn’t long before something—the Old-World ambiance; tiredness from travel and engaging with the Czechs (young and not so young); running to take in the sights; something—lulled me to sleep and gave me a good night’s rest every night. Sure, I was to some degree roused from sleep every quarter hour, but rather than being annoyed at the interruption or unable to get back to sleep, I felt a distinct sense of peace and comfort from lying down to rising up.
During 2015, when I both wanted to write a song for Vimperk and knew, at the same time, I couldn’t go back that year, the image of those bells became the spark that lit my way into the lyric.
The bells of Vimperk ring the quarter hour through the night.
Hear their voices on the air!
And the bells of Vimperk sing that everything’s all right—sleep tight.
All is well down in the square . . . and quite like a prayer.
That’s where the song started.
I’m not going to write much here about what went into the two verses. Suffice to say that they contrast the two worlds as I thought about them at that moment. The first verse is set somewhere like Johnson City or Asheville or Nashville, the second in Vimperk. You should be able to figure out my feelings about these contrasting cultural experiences.
This is a noisy world that clamors for my short attention—
Talking heads that blather on and on and on.
The streets are filled with sirens—some real and some legendary—
From the setting to the rising of the sun.
Come Friday night the bars are loud and crowded with the lonely,
Seeking some attention or some means of escape.
I leave my car downtown and take a taxi home,
Where stone awake my mind drifts half a world away.
The bells of Vimperk . . .
So, that’s the first verse. Here’s the second.
Music echoes through the sunlit streets of cobblestone.
It’s “Country Roads” by an accordion band.
And the old men on the stage hold lovers in their laps and squeeze them,
Making the music everyone can understand.
Come Friday night the pub’s alive with flutes and fiddles and guitars
That long past midnight fade to soft lullabies,
Sung in harmonies that carry me home,
Where warm and weary I lie down and close my eyes.
The bells of Vimperk . . .
I was told at the beginning of the 2014 trip that many Czechs love John Denver’s “Country Roads.” (Actually, I learned many years later that they prefer a Czech version from one of their own singers.) When we first arrived at the door of our hostel on the cobblestone square, a small festival of some sort festival was happening. On a stage beneath the clock tower, an accordion band was playing—can you believe it?—”Country Roads”!
To the bridge!
The world is older there,
But it’s somehow younger, too.
When the ground beneath my feet is shaken,
I go there and find my faith renewed.
The bells of Vimperk . . .
The bridge of the song tries to feel its way to an idea I find difficult to express. Vimperk has been there in hills so much like our own for more than twice the lifetime of the U.S. In 2014, our final team meal was at a home on a hill above Vimperk. The house itself was as old as the US. Pictured below, the Black Gate on the hillside beneath the castle was built in 1479, which is a century and a half before the Puritan Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts Bay to establish Plymouth Plantation (1620).
I feel certain that the place’s feeling younger (while being so much older) has to do with a number of things. First, I’m sure those of us who love Vimperk and the people we know there tend to romanticize its Old-World beauty, the slower pace of a small town, the foreignness and yet familiarity of it, a kind of fairytale quality that radiates from its castle and cobblestones and surrounding forests. We don’t see the drugs, which are surely there. We don’t see much if any of the poverty, which is surely there. We don’t see much of its prejudices—against the Roma (so-called “Gypsies”), for example. We don’t see much of the ignorance and meanness and violence that are surely there as well—I mean, come on, they’re mostly igno-arrogant white people like us, aggressive and colonizing in both large (global) and small (local) ways.
What we do sometimes see, however, at least among most of those we come in contact with, is a way of relating to one another that often seems lost here. One quick example: in the softball camp setting, an atmosphere of caring for each other and cooperating with each other is evident. Rarely here in the U.S. would you see teens willing to play with the little kids without being made to do so. That happens all the time at camp without any teen tantrums. At lunch, you’ll find tables made of up teens who are sitting and eating with kids much younger than themselves.
So, anyway, Leesa and I returned to Vimperk in 2016, and I performed another concert and enjoyed the opportunity to play “The Bells of Vimperk” for our friends in Vimperk. Below is a phone video of that performance.
Recently I played a backyard concert at the Barnett Patio here in Johnson City, and my son Raleigh sat in on bass (along with my friend Jimmy on percussion). I don’t know if Raleigh had ever even heard “The Bells of Vimperk,” but at the end of the night, he said, “Deddy, that might be your best song.” I’ll take that!
This is a noisy world that clamors for my short attention—
Talking heads that blather on and on and on.
The streets are filled with sirens—some real and some legendary—
From the setting to the rising of the sun.
Come Friday night the bars are loud and crowded with the lonely,
Seeking some attention or some means of escape.
I leave my car downtown and take a taxi home,
Where stone awake my mind drifts half a world away.
The bells of Vimperk ring the quarter hour through the night.
Hear their voices on the air!
And the bells of Vimperk sing that everything’s all right—sleep tight.
All is well down in the square . . . and quite like a prayer.
Music echoes through the sunlit streets of cobblestone.
It’s “Country Roads” by an accordion band.
And the old men no the stage hold lovers in their laps and squeeze them,
Making the music everyone can understand.
Come Friday night the pub’s alive with flutes and fiddles and guitars
That long past midnight fade to soft lullabies,
Sung in harmonies that carry me home,
Where warm and weary I lie down and close my eyes.
The bells of Vimperk ring the quarter hour through the night.
Hear their voices on the air!
And the bells of Vimperk sing that everything’s all right—sleep tight.
All is well down in the square . . . and quite like a prayer.
The world is older there,
But it’s somehow younger, too.
When the ground beneath my feet is shaken,
I go there and find my faith renewed.
The bells of Vimperk ring the quarter hour through the night.
Hear their voices on the air!
And the bells of Vimperk sing that everything’s all right—sleep tight.
All is well down in the square . . . and quite like a prayer.
4th Tuesday with a Crotchety Old Man
Although I hope that the voice in your head sounds reasonable as you read the following (if anybody reads the following), feel free to hear it in a “You-kids-get-off-my-lawn!” tone if you’re into that kind of thing (and I know many of us are into that kind of thing these days).
The Republican Party no longer exists. . . .
My parents were Republicans and good people. My in-laws were Republicans and good people. I had—have—many friends who were—are—Republicans. These folks—from my parents to current friends—hold conservative values on government and economics. All well and good.
Or rather, all was well and good until actual Republicans and conservatives disappeared from this world by 1) leaving it like my parents and in-laws have done or 2) hiding—voiceless—in a daze of shock and disbelief at how their party and its ideology have been hijacked or 3) drinking the Kool-Aid and crossing over to the side of the hijackers.
Yes, the Republican Party—the GOP—still exists by name and in the news and on election ballots, but its traditional values have been trampled in the mud of their own sweat and blood by the mean and the ignorant and the arrogant, by downright idiots and the downright power hungry and the downright power hungry idiots. I know Jesus warned against calling anyone a fool (Matthew 5:22), but these days I find that admonition more difficult to abide by than most of the Ten Commandments.
Today’s so-called Republican Party is characterized by fear and its brood—anger, jealousy, anxiety. Shame and guilt often accompany fear, but today’s “Republicans” seem dead to these, probably, I think, because they no longer have a moral compass and thus lack any capacity for guilt and shame.
The things so-called Republicans fear are many: fear of the Other (typically identified by the shallow markers of skin color and makeup), fear of sharing (power, prestige, money, etc.), fear of losing (power, prestige, money, etc.), fear of the future, fear of the past (history as it actually happened, for example, or wrongs committed for power, prestige, money, etc.). Many Republicans of today (like their idiot golden—more orange really—idol/idle leader) do not recognize and will not admit these fears, but this is where the above mentioned ignorance and arrogance come in.
Conservative values are characterized not by what is right or wrong but by what is likely to keep them safe from the many, many fears they have (see above) and keep them comfortable in their judgments of what they deem right and keep them smug in their self-righteousness—all with an attitude that says, “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, y’all sit down and shut the fuck up a minute. We got this.”
Here’s an idea. Fear the Super Pigs, why dontcha:
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Saturday Song Stories (on Sunday): “This Is Not All”
“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!
June 12 — “the 12th of June”
Wishing a happy birthday to Leesa! Age is just a number (for the most part — excepting the odd pain here and there), and she doesn’t look or act her age in all the best ways!
This year, I gave her what I gave her last year — tickets so see and hear Keb’ Mo’! (We saw him with Lane and Raleigh in Boone last year. This year the two of us saw him in Morganton.)
Kevin wished Leesa a happy birthday from the stage of CoMMA (City of Morganton Municipal Auditorium) and played a song she’d requested via text: Hand It Over. As Leesa said, “It brought the house down!”
He also ended the show — maybe the next to last song — with Leesa’s other favorite, a song that you could easily imagine he wrote about her: She Just Wants to Dance!
And here’s a little something in celebration of her from her other favorite singer/songwriter: Soulmates!
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Anthologies
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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.”
- Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology from Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. (Vintage), introduced by the amazing Stephen Graham Jones. Check this out: “a celebration of Indigenous peoples’ survival and imagination, and a glorious reveling in all the things an ill-advised whistle might summon.”
- 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.”
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Matthew 6:24
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He is a man of
deep ignorance,
extravagant arrogance,
blatant immorality,
and no heartfelt convictions
(not counting those thirty-four, of course).
—
He is a man who cares nothing
about you or me,
about our lives in America,
or
about America itself.
—
He is a celebrity
(celebrated for being a rich ass)
and nothing more,
a third-rate stand-up comedian,
maybe fourth-rate.
—
He is the leader of a cult known as his “base”
(consider the adjectival meanings of base).
He has captured the devotion of that base
with a slogan (MAGA, catchy but meaningless),
a ridiculous little dance,
and lies as big or small as needed.
—
If you support the man
after his conviction on thirty-four felony counts,
after his attaches on women,
on immigrants (fleeing to the United States–
not to take your jobs
but to find, they hope, better lives),
on those with disabilities,
after he has attacked anybody or said anything
he thought might get him some masturbatory applause,
then I can’t help thinking that,
at some level,
you are like him.
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Song Stories: “I Could Be the One”
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.
More later!
I Could Be the One
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 . . .
