I’m a fan of music novels. Christy Alexander Hallberg’s Searching for Jimmy Page is a new favorite. To bring music alive via a silent, two-dimensional space isn’t an easy thing to do, but Hallberg does it well with this story. It’s fast-paced and palpable, and at the same time it’s dreamlike, ethereal. In this, the novel is itself like a Led Zeppelin song—or maybe like an album of previously unreleased Zeppelin tracks.
Luna Kane is a believable and engaging character, coming of age in a recognizable world that is fuller of pain than of joy, fuller of questions than of answers, and yet fuller of mystery than of misery. Hers is a world in which the living and the dead wield equal influence—or at least attempt to do so. It would be a lot for a young woman to navigate alone, but she receives significant support and grounding from Full River Connie and London Peter, both vivid characters.
Searching for Jimmy Page is a rewarding reading experience. I began it as a “car read,” a world I would enter when waiting here or there (a drive-thru, for example), but by the time Luna left Full River on the bus, I took the book from the car and was all in for the ride to the end.
So, I thought I’d look through the great reviews that readers have posted to Amazon and/or Goodreads and post some items with my sincere thanks for reading and for taking the time to review (and rate).
The first of the twelve stories in A Twilight Reel–the January story–is “The Wine of Astonishment.” Here’s Pisgah Press’s one-sentence description of the course: “In the opening tale, a local preacher is taken captive by a fallen predecessor and struggles to escape before his own sins bring him down as well.”
The opening lines of “The Wine of Astonishment”
Here are two comments specifically focused on “Wine”:
With “The Wine of Astonishment,” this anthology kicks off with an Edgar Allan Poe flavored story of temptation and desperation involving the preacher of a community church, a mystery woman, and a madman. The ending does not disappoint.
Cody also has this surprisingly great sense of horror and tension. I didn’t expect to read things that gave me a deep sense of unease and the occasional hair-rise on the arms, but I think Cody gives us a really good sense of the fear that comes from both emotional and physical bits of ourselves. I’d say the most notable stories with this kind of tension is the latter half of cold sweat in “The Wine of Astonishment.” . . .
The title of the story comes from Psalm 60, the third verse of which reads, “Thou hast shewed thy people hard things: thou hast made us to drink the wine of astonishment” (KJV). I’m not sure at what point this phrase grabbed me, but grab me it did. It seems to work perfectly for the story.
As for the story, longtime friend Tom DuVall experienced a captivity event like this one night when we were in high school and he was coming from Marshall to Walnut to spend the night at my house. Having known Tom for years now, I sometimes wonder if what he said happened really happened. I think it did, but it really doesn’t matter. The story came regardless.
If asked about an influence for the story, I’d have to say I owe the journey into the nighttime wilderness and the encounter with this creepy character to a favorite writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), and his classic short story from the 1830s, “Young Goodman Brown.”
I’m relatively new to memoir, but I can hardly imagine liking one much better than I like Livingston’s Ghostbread. It’s beautifully written, beginning to end. The short sections (chapters?) seem a poetic hybrid of confessional lyric and flash creative nonfiction. These provided me with intense emotional experiences of both the highs and lows of family and poverty, of growing up amid the tensions of these, of searching for identity and belonging.
Almost everything detailed here is completely outside my experience. I grew up with not only a mother but also a father and a brother in Protestant southern Appalachia, in a lower middle class family (with lots of extensions) in the same house in which my mother grew up. And yet, I felt–I feel–an intense resonance with Ghostbread, which, first, suggests that at its core the memoir tells a deeply human story and, second, attests to the richness and power of Livingston’s writing.
Songbirds and Stray Dogs is a novel of great characters. We’re immediately on the side of Jolene. We know that her poorly chosen lover and her shallowly religious aunt are going to reject her long before she knows, and yet we hope and stick with her. And she proves herself worth sticking with from beginning to end.
We’re immediately on the side of Chuck as well, who shows up in the second section of the novel. He’s in over his head in all kinds of ways–his past, his family, etc. But in spite of his past and present troubles with Jackson and his henchmen, he’s a good man–a very well drawn character. He’s subject to more than his share of violence, at the hands of wicked men and lost or near-lost women.
Surrounding these two–from the opening pages to the closing–are the good, the bad, and the ugly: the people of Beaufort, Aunt Rachel, lawyer Webb, Ruby, Jackson, Roy, that really big guy, Joe, the good police sergeant, the bad deputy, Dottie, Cora, Lulu, Cash, and others.
Meagan Lucas’s Songbirds and Stray Dogs tells an energetic and affecting story, from its opening secret to its final conflagration.
A poem for my father, Plumer Jean Cody (May 19, 1931 – November 7, 1996), who lay down in his soldier’s grave a quarter century ago.
The Veteran’s Cemetery, Early November
Early November, when his autumn work was done, he left us standing stupid and staring at the blue-brown of the coming Appalachian winter.
He left behind the shrinking garden, harvested, the expanding lawn, mowed its final time. He left behind the handy man who could fix anything,
took leave of the newly retired postal worker who never went postal, and abandoned his role as little patriarch, begetter of two sons.
He abdicated head-of-household status, in the house that was never his, left the loved wife of forty-two years and her overbearing weakness—
That night he shed this life like Wednesday’s dirty clothes and would have been surprised by all who braved early snows to watch him lie down in a proud soldier’s grave.
“Conversion” – After Donald Roy, the pastor of the Lonesome Mountain American Christian Church, loses the church building to the bank and runs off with the congregation’s remaining money and the wife of one of its members, the Islamic Community of Western North Carolina takes over the building and converts it to a mosque.
9/11 Memorial & Museum, visited in May 2018
A Cody among those lost on 9/11
Pano of one “footprint” at 9/11 Memorial & Museum (2018)
On that Tuesday twenty years ago, I was a couple of weeks into my first year of teaching at East Tennessee State University. I had two ENGL 1010 (freshman composition) classes that morning, one at 9:45 and another at 11:15. I arrived on campus early and closed myself in my office to do last-minute prep.
The earlier class was a strange one in which hardly anybody ever talked–not to me (unless called upon), not even to each other. Although cell phones weren’t quite as ubiquitous as they are now, I’m guessing that at least a few of these students were aware of what was underway in New York and DC. Nobody said a word.
I finished that first class by 11:05 and returned to my office for a few minutes, where I sat with my door closed and readied myself for the next class.
As I walked out of the office and down the hall to meet my 11:15 folks, thankfully a lively bunch so different from the group just before, I remember noticing a strange quietness and hearing snatches of conversations that struck me as odd. I walked into that talkative 11:15 class, where the students were in an uproar about what had happened that morning.
In other words, both towers had been hit and had fallen before I knew anything about it.
My students were telling me what had happened when my department chair, Dr. Judy Slagle, knocked on the door and said ETSU was closing. I let the students go, drove to Southside Elementary and picked up Raleigh, who was in 4th grade, and drove to our rented house on Franklin Street. The rest of the day was spent glued to the television.
As I think about it now, I realize that the change in the world–White “Christian” America’s sudden awareness of its vulnerability–is what made my story “Conversion” possible. As the world voiced its outrage against the devastation New York and DC (and Pennsylvania) experienced that morning, I felt a hope that violence and terrorism might draw the world’s humans together regardless of race, religion, nationality, and so on, but that hope was a pretty bubble that lasted only a moment. What was momentarily a colorblind humanity united against terrorists of any color or stripe unfortunately dissolved into the USA’s lengthy “War on Terror,” a war of mostly White against Black and Brown people, which has been too much like waging war on the wind or on ghosts, ultimately adding legions of ghosts to those of 9/11.
To be honest, I would rather have not been able to write “Conversion.” But it is written. If interested, you can read it at Still: The Journal or in my book A Twilight Reel: Stories.
A TWILIGHT REEL was some 25 years in the making. Three of the stories were written for my MA at Western Carolina back in 1995 (the early versions of “The Wine of Astonishment,” “Overwinter,” and “Grist for the Mill”). Another four were written around PhD studies, associate prof / Tenure & Promotion / full prof hoops (“The Flutist,” “The Invisible World around Them,” “A Poster of Marilyn Monroe,” and “Two Floors above the Dead”). The remaining five were written in the past 3-4 years (“The Loves of Misty Sprinkle,” “Decoration Day,” “Conversion,” “A Fiddle and a Twilight Reel,” and “Witness Tree”).
I find it interesting that the first story written for the collection–“The Wine of Astonishment,” set in January–is the first story in the lineup, and the last story written–“Witness Tree,” set in December–is the last story in this order determined not by chronology of composition but by the calendar months.
Is Runion, North Carolina, a real place? Well, yes and no. It was a real place in the early years of the 20th century. The town was built around a sawmill, and when the sawmill closed near the beginning of the Great Depression, Runion soon after became a ghost town. Little remains of it today beyond some concrete foundations of homes and the mill buildings, the mill’s concrete paymaster’s vault, and concrete works related to the transport of lumber, pre- and post-production. A TWILIGHT REEL reimagines Runion in its historical place, at the confluence of the Laurel and the French Broad, and invests it with characteristics of Marshall, Mars Hill, and Hot Springs, with a little bit of UNCA thrown in as well.
Cover and spine of A Twilight Reel: Stories: design by Jamie Reeves, photo by Joey Plemmons, photo concept by Raleigh Cody
My new book, A Twilight Reel: Stories, is set for publication on May 25 by Pisgah Press in Asheville, NC. The collection is made up of twelve stories, each set in a different month of 1999. The physical setting for all is my imagined town of Runion, North Carolina, which is on the French Broad River between Marshall and Hot Springs in Madison County.
Here’s a list of the stories included:
The Wine of Astonishment
The Loves of Misty Sprinkle
Overwinter
The Flutist
Decoration Day
Conversion
The Invisible World around Them
Grist for the Mill
A Poster of Marilyn Monroe
A Fiddle and a Twilight Reel
Two Floors above the Dead
Witness Tree
I thought I’d share some writing I did a few years ago about the setting, the use of place, in these stories.
When “place” is mentioned in relation to fiction, the first thing that comes to mind is physical setting. This is the world of the story. It may be anything from a solitary room to an overcrowded neighborhood, from Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi, to “dear dirty Dublin.” If the fiction is fully realized, we as readers will be able to enter this world, to see its colors and shapes, to hear its noises and silences, to smell its aromas and stenches, to feel its textures.
However, a sense of place in fiction is not achieved by the depiction of a physical setting only–its topography and wildlife and climate, its antebellum homes and filthy streets and glittering skyscrapers. There is a spiritual element to setting that is not inherent in the place itself but rather exists according to human experience of the place: an experience built up over time with thick layers of cultural, communal, familial, and individual histories.
I have chosen to place the following four stories in the environs of the fictional Appalachian town of Runion, North Carolina, “my own little postage stamp of native soil.” Appalachia is, I believe, a fertile subject for fiction that remains far from being exhausted. Jim Wayne Miller, a poet native to mountains not far from my Runion, says, “the Appalachian region of America, being neither north nor south exactly, neither east nor west, but a geographical, historical, cultural, and spiritual borderland, has an interesting and complicated past (and present)” (86). This quote implies that even though North Carolina may be considered part of the same “South” as Faulkner’s Mississippi, there is a sense that life in its western mountains is something other than life in what is traditionally known as “the South.” In fact, the spirit of the place, especially that of the more sparsely populated areas like Madison County (where I grew up and where I locate Runion), seems to make it as much the southern region of what some have imaginatively tried to create as “the state of Appalachia” as it is the western region of North Carolina. [Jim Wayne Miller was born in Leicester, NC, although he spent much of his creative life in Kentucky. Also, at the time I wrote this, I think I was unaware of the early American proposal for an actual State of Franklin that would have included at least some of western North Carolina.]
The idea that Runion is a part of some borderland has colored my intentions in writing all of these stories. In addition, I have sensed in Runion the “interesting and complicated past (and present)” to which Miller above refers. All of the stories are set in contemporary Runion (the late 1980s, the early 1990s). This time of stressful change–when the portions of mountain culture not capable of being made “quaint” for tourists are being absorbed into the world at large–highlights the lines of difference between generations and individuals as well as within generations and individuals. The conflicts that necessarily arise in such a situation are what the stories included here attempt to portray. [By the time I completed the collection, its twelve stories had settled into a single year: 1999.]
It was once upon a time in the Appalachian mountains that accents could change from hollow to hollow and hill to hill. Once, the answer to the question “‘Whose boy are you?’ coupled with the name of the branch on which one lived was sufficient to give one a sense of person” (Sprague 23). And again, a person born in this county or that remained a native of that place no matter how much of his or her life was spent elsewhere.
All that is changing. Life in Appalachia is slowly moving from its traditional isolated state to a backwoods version of the global community. For example, satellite dishes pimple the hillsides behind weatherbeaten mobile homes. They stand among the mossy gravestones of hilltop family cemeteries, eyeing the heavens. They perch on the ridgepoles of dusty barns. They function as a sign that the isolation of the past is being stripped away, and along with it the traditions which it nurtured and preserved.
My purpose in writing these stories is to attempt to capture in fiction some portion of this far-reaching transition. As the older generations try to hold on to what their world used to be, the younger generations are trying to transform that world or escape from it altogether. Those generations in the middle simply seem lost. Connected to the old and attracted by the new, they either freeze and wait for what is coming or run to meet they know not what. The conflicts that exist among all these generations are the stuff of which stories are made, and it is my hope that I am able to write some of the “true” stories taking place among the hills and hollows and communities that surround my fictional Runion.
Such fertile fictional ground is incredibly attractive for a writer who feels strongly toward the real ground upon which it is based. In the early part of this century, the actual town of Runion hung on a hillside above the French Broad River between Marshall and Hot Springs in Madison County. A sawmill town of over sixty houses, it died when the mill shut down with the rest of the country in the early 1930s. Today some scattered concrete foundations, the ruins of a one-room wooden schoolhouse, and a single line of jonquils blooming in what once was somebody’s yard are all that remain of Runion. This collection attempts to recreate Runion as if it had never faded out of reality, piecing it together with certain characteristics of the real Madison County towns that surround it–the river town personalities of Hot Springs and Marshall, the small college town atmosphere of Mars Hill–as well as other places that are better labeled villages or hamlets. I realize that four stories cannot create a complete town–Anderson gave twenty-two to Winesburg, Joyce fifteen to Dublin–but I feel I have made a good start.
A view from an elevated vantage point of the lumber and pulp mill nestled along the river with a hill in the background; ramps in the foreground leading to buildings.
The ruins of a Runion house, probably that of a mill owner, on the ridge overlooking the French Broad River, December 2019
Place is the basic point of reference upon which the stories in this collection are built. Every layered aspect of each story is affected by it; the fictional modes of “conflict, symbol, tone, style, etc., are all intimately related to Place and mutually interpenetrated” in a “unity” that “can only be intuitively grasped” (Foster 76). The experience of these characters and their stories would not be the same–in fact might not exist at all–without Runion. However, as Leonard Lutwack says in The Role of Place in Literature, “the qualities of [Place] are determined by the subjective responses of people according to their cultural heritage, sex, occupation, and personal predicament” (35). Thus, Runion would not exist without the characters and their stories; they are its living elements, defining its qualities and making it visible.
In his poem “Anecdote of Men by the Thousand,” Wallace Stevens writes,
There are men whose words Are as natural sounds Of their places As the cackle of toucans In the place of toucans. (51-52)
Stevens concludes with these lines:
The dress of a woman of Lhassa, In its place, Is an invisible element of that place Made visible. (52)
It is the people of a place that make this invisible spiritual element visible: their language, the interconnected colors and themes of their lives that are the visible manifestations of that place. Consequently, it seems to me that fiction attempting to take these invisible elements and make them visible for us as readers must necessarily be fiction of the place as opposed to fiction about the place. It is the fiction of Runion and of an Appalachia-in-transition that I have attempted to create in these stories.
The author at the graffiti ruins of the paymaster’s vault, December 2019
Works Cited
Foster, Ruel E. “Sense of Place in James Still’s River of Earth.” Sense of Place in Appalachia. Ed. S. Mont Whitson. Morehead: Office of Regional Development Studies, Morehead State University, 1988. 68-80.
Lutwack, Leonard. The Role of Place in Literature. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1984.
Miller, Jim Wayne. “I Have a Place.” Sense of Place in Appalachia. Ed. S. Mont Whitson. Morehead: Office of Regional Development Studies, Morehead State University, 1988. 81-99.
Sprague, Stuart S. “Inside Appalachia: Familiar Land and Ordinary People.” Sense of Place in Appalachia. Ed. S. Mont Whitson. Morehead: Office of Regional Development Studies, Morehead State University, 1988. 20-26.
Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1954. New York: Vintage-Random, 1990. 51-52.
Today, 13 April 2021, is the 278th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Jefferson, so I thought I’d share some of his best moments from his book Notes on the State of Virginia (1782). He wrote this book in response to a French friend who asked him to answer twenty-three questions about Virginia–about its history, geography, economy, and so on. Jefferson, at the time, was the initial drafter of the Declaration of Independence (1776) and governor of Virginia, resigning from the latter position in 1781. According to the editors of volume A (Beginnings to 1820) of the Norton Anthology of American Literature (9th edition), Jefferson
wanted especially to counter the notion, prevalent among European naturalists . . . that North American species, human and nonhuman, had degenerated and were inferior to Old World types. (711; emphasis added)
Here are a couple of my favorite excerpts from Notes:
on the idea that “our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them”: “The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg” (718; emphasis added). I have written elsewhere that we could replace the bit about “twenty gods, or no god” with the idea that “it does me no injury for” the ETSU men’s basketball team to take a knee during the national anthem; this respectful protest–during the playing of a song that was written when Africans in America were considered only 60% of a person–“neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
“I doubt whether the people of this country would suffer an execution for heresy, or a three years’ imprisonment for not comprehending the mysteries of the Trinity. But is the spirit of the people an infallible, a permanent reliance? Is it government? Is this the kind of protection we receive for the rights we give up? Besides, the spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless. A single zealot may commence persecutor, and better men be his victims. It can never be too often repeated, that the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest, and ourselves united. From the conclusion of this war [the American Revolution] we shall be going down hill. . . . [The people] will be forgotten, . . . and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war, will remain on us long, will be made heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion” (720; emphasis added). My reading of American literature and literary history, from Columbus’s first letters of discovery to now, have recently suggested to me that Jefferson was insightful–even prophetic–in his idea that from the American Revolution forward “we shall be going down hill.” The entire, the overarching American experience, beginning with Columbus, has been an experience of decay. Are we now arrived at the point of “convulsion” and expiration?
This is a haunting painting, I think, because the United States of America–represented here by the image of Thomas Jefferson, a white man–is haunted by a troubled history that has become its troubled present. Jefferson’s time was known as the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, the Age of Science. In Notes, he attempted to evaluate the slave population at his Monticello according to the period’s reliance on observation and experiment: sensory observation. I won’t repeat what he has to say about his slaves, but, in my opinion, he reveals a racist ignorance that is in stark contrast to his general political brilliance.
Just a few years beyond the setting of THE PRETTIEST STAR by Carter Sickles, sometime during the mid-‘90s in western North Carolina, which is a few miles south of THE PRETTIEST STAR’s Chester, Ohio, my wife had a good friend whose son was in a hospital dying of AIDS. Leesa went to visit him, taking our younger son with her. In the hospital room, while Leesa visited with her friends, Raleigh climbed up on the bed and sat feeding Allen one round Cheerio at a time.
Reading THE PRETTIEST STAR, I was reminded of those panicky days in the ‘80s and ‘90s that come to life so vividly in Sickles’s novel. The horrors of Chester were all around us throughout those days—whether the product of an ignorance weaponized by the fear at the root of hate or by simple, thoughtless ignorance alone. The Chester recreation folks drain the public swimming pool after the sick man, Brian, enjoys a momentary, ecstatic float on a hot day. His grandmother is kicked out of the town’s only sit-down restaurant for bringing Brian along for a meal. A passerby throws a soft drink in his face from the window of a pickup truck. Anonymous people call Brian’s home and whisper hate speech—the period’s version of hateful social media posts. The church joins in the fearful persecution, of course, smiling benevolently all the while. The universe of family, from the satellite cousins to the near moon of a father, fall away into the dark distance. Hospital staff won’t touch him.
In the midst of this, especially the abandonment by the caregivers (so different from many caregivers in the current COVID-19 devastation), I remembered Raleigh and Allen and the Cheerios. I’d always thought that a sweet story, but while on my deep dive into the world Sickles revives I suddenly realized that this simple gesture of a child must have shaken the world of Allen’s hospital room. I imagine Allen in Brian and his mother Suzy in Brian’s mother Sharon, and I begin to understand that such a kindness was beyond sweet. Far beyond sweet.
I mentioned this to Leesa after I’d finished reading THE PRETTIEST STAR, and she reminded me of a young nurse that day, who pulled her aside as Raleigh sat picking out one Cheerio at a time and said that she’d been afraid to go near Allen—afraid to treat him as a patient, afraid to treat him as a fellow, suffering human being. After seeing a child’s innocent act of feeding the sick and hungry, she said, she would no longer be afraid. I hope she followed through with that. I want to believe that she did.
This is what great and simple acts do to and for us. And this is how great stories powerfully told, stories like THE PRETTIEST STAR, connect us to our humanity and that of all—all—around us.
