The fruits of labor

This week a friend brought me some Japanese persimmons from her tree. I’d never had any before and discovered they are delicious sliced thin on spinach or arugula salad, with olive oil, red wine vinegar, salt, and pepper. Their color alone is a welcome blast of brightness on a gray fall day.

Today at the Tuscaloosa farmers’ market I was able to buy some Arkansas Blacks—a variety of apple I’d heard of, along with another, Ben Davis, from my cousin Jim Few, but had never gotten to try. The skin is reddish, but on the darker side of red, and the flesh is crispy and firm. It reminded me most of a MacIntosh.

Despite not having tried one until now, I’ve already titled a short story with the name: “Arkansas Blacks” will appear in the collection Tell the World You’re a Wildflower, coming out from the University of Alabama Press in Fall 2014. Given my home state’s history with school desegregation, a reader might initially assume that the plot will have something to do with race. In the story, however, two sisters grow up on an apple farm, and the Arkansas Black is one of the varieties they grow.  

You find out the title’s meaning early on, right after the first three introductory paragraphs, in the section titled “Fire”:

We came around the corner of the house, our mouths purpled with berry juice, and in our father’s excited state—he had seen the smoke and come in from the orchards—we must have looked horrific, like ghouls. He screamed. Then he shouted at us: “Where have you been? You’ve killed your mother!” We believed him. He himself looked like a spaceman, garbed in protective gear and mask for spraying the trees, which were under attack from worms. The Arkansas Blacks, with their characteristic shiny, dark peels, were hit hard by the worms. Like everyone else, we had Ben Davis trees too, but they were not much good for just eating.

Yesterday I got the copyedited files of Tell the World by email to review. Just now, writing “copyedited,” I debated whether a hyphen should go between “copy” and “edited.” I’m partial to hyphens, but the Chicago Manual of Style, which the Press uses, is not, and Webster’s, the standard dictionary, tends to combine rather than separate words like “backseat,” so I’ll need to go through and consider the closed up (closed-up?) words on a case-by-case (case by case?) basis. I’m glad the editor flagged these things for me to think about, and after a quick review of the document I’ve already seen at least one instance of her saving me from an error that would have been distracting or confusing to readers.

Lots of details—but it’s exciting to be at this stage in the book’s life. After the copyeditor is finished, the book will move on to design and then production. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a publisher—one with experience and expertise—to create a book.

Where do you find community?

Having just returned from the Louisiana Book Festival in Baton Rouge, home of Community Coffee, I thought this would be an appropriate time to write about community, and how you find it.

I’ve come to appreciate the literary community I have in Alabama, what I imagine as a safety net of connections all across the state. We meet at the symposium in Monroeville, the book festival in Montgomery, a book signing here, a performance there. Sometimes we meet at a funeral for one of us. I don’t see these people every day or even every month, but I know they’re there, and not just through electronic media. I know because a book that someone thought I’d enjoy shows up out of the blue, or the invitation arrives to write something, or the phone call comes to catch up and share each other’s news.

I’ve sought out community at times, joining a church or group or cause based on a need to feel more a part of my area, less isolated. I appreciate these chosen communities as well, although the ones that have occurred organically sometimes turn out to be a better fit.

For several years I was part of a summer program that took University of Alabama students to Ireland, and there I learned about and began to attend the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo, Ireland. I’ve been there five times now, and made friends with others who attend, and even had a hand in bringing Irish poet and anthologist Joan McBreen to Alabama for readings. I knew when I started going to the Yeats School that I was looking for a connection to poetry outside of the U.S., beyond AWP and the MFA scene, but I had no guarantee that it would lead to these friendships and to the enrichment of my own writing. Ireland, roughly the same size and population as Alabama, is a home away from home for me now. For various reasons, I skipped the Yeats School this past summer and found myself immensely homesick for it.

When I was invited to submit something—a poem, story, or essay—to the collection that became known as The Shoe Burnin’: Stories of Southern Soul, I was initially trepidatious. I was going to go out in the country and burn shoes and spill my guts? This did not sound like me. But I am committed to trying new things even if they don’t always work out. I decided to go. I could  always leave early. Turns out it wasn’t so much about the collection as the group of people that gathered around to create it: musicians and writers and organizers and editors first, publishers and designers and promoters and readers and festival-goers next. What happens when everyone decides to make something happen no matter what? A group commitment developed, an ethos of generosity and mutual respect—in a word, a community. I found myself grateful to be a part of it, enriched by the new people I was meeting, challenged to do more than I’d thought I could.

As a writer I’m often a loner—and I need to be to get to that deep place that writing comes from—but the places I belong remind me that we all need to be connected, whether you find community or it finds you.

A P.S.: They've been thinking about community at Poets.org as well. This link takes you to poems and essays  for further reading:
http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Community-as-Collaboration.html?soid=1110705357409&aid=5rManhqr11A

Photo: Wendy Reed, Susan Cushman, and Barbara Brown Taylor discuss "Circling Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality" at Avid bookstore in Athens, Georgia.