A Map of the World

Circling Faith--out in April

2012-01-26T09:41:00.000-08:00

My co-editor Wendy Reed and I are excited about the upcoming publication of Circling Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality. We'll be blogging occasionally about the book at http://circlingfaith.wordpress.com/

Nesting

2012-01-04T12:52:00.000-08:00

Looking at the way birds have nested in a broken plastic sign I passed while driving to town today, it occurred to me that I love how birds will nest in any hospitable place.

(The image above is of artist Jenni Horne's bird's nest necklaces, one of which I gave to my sister for Christmas.)

One tough bottle tree

2011-11-27T14:58:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to post this image of a bottle tree on Crescent Ridge Road that made it through the April 27th tornado. I took the photo a month or so ago. Perhaps more on all that later.

Where Words Take Us

2011-09-02T13:25:00.000-07:00

Where Words Take Us

A few months ago my sister posted a quotation from Madeleine L’Engle on Facebook: “When you put something into words, it leads to so many other thoughts."
Her post got a lot of memory responses. From our cousin: “Ms. L'Engle was a guest in your home once, No? One of my mother's favorite possessions was my dog eared 5th grade paperback Wrinkle in Time she autographed then.”

Several people were surprised to learn that we knew Madeleine L’Engle, which led me to think about my own memories of how that happened.

I read A Wrinkle in Time for the first time in fourth grade, I think, then went on to all her other children's books. At the same time I was reading Wrinkle for the first time, my mother, a writer herself, was reading L’Engle’s books for adults, and in one of those books L'Engle said she looked like a giraffe, and so we all got the idea to send her a giraffe for her birthday every year, which we did for years. I remember a wooden one from Africa, in particular, that we bought at Pier One. She wrote thank-you notes to us, and we wrote to her, and since both she and my mother were active Episcopalians, Mom eventually invited her to come to a women's retreat at the Arkansas Episcopal church camp, Camp Mitchell, in 1982. (The photo is of them at camp. As it happened, I was busy in college and did not meet her—which of course I now regret. My sister remembers having lunch with her at our house, remembers that she was a “strong but understated” presence and that she laughed easily.) The funniest part of all this is that it seemed wonderful but not abnormal to me as a child.

I ran across the book while dusting a high shelf last year and decided to reread it, with trepidation, because I had such happy memories of reading and rereading and was afraid it might seem thin. But I fell right back into the power of the story, worrying when Charles Wallace was taken over by IT and then cheering Meg on as she fought to save him. I also found that, though I still identified with Meg, I had a new identification with her parents and their struggles, and a new appreciation for L’Engle, in 1962 creating a scientist-mother, a woman who held the family together while her husband was mysteriously away. I still attribute my love of old ladies, at least in part, to those three extraordinary women, Mrs. Who, Mrs. Whatsit, and Mrs. Which, funny and disorganized and oddly dressed but also wise and powerful.

Last night a good friend came by and was talking about Charlotte’s Web, which led to talking about other books we had read as children, and she said, “If one definition of art is that it fucks you up, A Wrinkle in Time was one of the first pieces of art I encountered. I didn’t know whether to love or hate Madeleine L’Engle.”

I had to think about that. And then I realized that my favorite books, my best reading experiences in fiction and, more rarely, nonfiction, have, yes, fucked me up. The novels I’ve entered the most thoroughly have taken me to places, worlds, eras that I can never experience in “real life.” I’m richer for them, and I think that the best writing really does return us to the world in such a way as to help us to live our own lives more deeply and fully, but those other worlds can be so compelling that our own lives may, for a time, seem pale in comparison. The battles we fight may seem minor compared to battling evil on Camazotz. And we probably will never get to tesser. I read more nonfiction now than I used to, and I’ve wondered whether that comes from a diminished willingness to enter that childlike reading state and then have to emerge from it, yet again.

My impulse, in closing, is to return to L’Engle’s statement: “When you put something into words, it leads to so many other thoughts." And I think that’s true, but what thoughts, and where? I’d like to think of a way to tie this up nicely. But I don’t really think it works that way. We flow in, we flow out, the tide filling up the pool and then receding, and we are both the tide and the pool.

When I wasn’t reading amongst tree branches on the roof of the neighbors’ garage, I had a favorite chair to read in, a wing chair whose “wings” sheltered me as I immersed myself in each new book, oblivious even to someone in the same room speaking to me. Eventually I’d notice the room getting dark, smell something in the kitchen, pull myself out of the book. After reading that way, I was always hungry.

"Snow" in August

2011-08-14T12:15:00.000-07:00

Around 1978 I was vacationing with my parents and sister in a rented condominium on Hilton Head Island. We’d been to Hilton Head several times before on our annual week-long summer vacation, making the two-day drive from Little Rock across the length of Tennessee and then through South Carolina to the ocean. Up to then, we’d always stayed in hotels at Hilton Head, eating breakfast of sweet rolls and orange juice and lunch of sandwiches and chips, spending the days on the beach or playing tennis or putt-putt, then getting squeaky clean and putting on fresh clothes to go out to dinner at a real restaurant. It’s been years since I was on the island, and I carry only a memory of much greenness, unmarred by billboards, open, flat roads, and miles of white sandy beach.

Of this trip, staying in the condo complex rather than a hotel, our last trip there as a family because I was growing up and my parents were growing apart, I remember two things: the first was meeting a much older man of 29 from New York (!) and having a brief, chaste romance enhanced by a walk on the beach under a full moon; the second was stealing a poem.

I didn’t steal it in the sense of plagiarizing it—I stole the physical poem, and I still have it, some 30 years later.

The owners of the condo had left old issues of The New Yorker in a neat stack on the coffee table. Then, and, I admit, even a bit now, The New Yorker represented to me all things urban, sophisticated, literary, educated—a world of city intellectuals far removed from my life in Arkansas. In one of those old issues I found a poem titled “Snow,” by Philip Levine. I didn’t know who he was, but I fell immediately in love with the poem. I was trying to learn to write poems myself, and this poem did so many things I didn’t know a poem could do: in a conversational voice, Levine created a scene that seemed real to me, a scene he knew from his own life, and filled it with memorable images, images of dirt and grime and confusion and anger but also of snow so beautiful that you recognize its beauty “Seen from inside a window, / even a filthy one like those / at Automotive Supply Company.” The poem moves from the utterly ordinary to the mythic: “spring grass is what the earth sang / in answer to the new sun, to / melting snow, and the dark rain / of spring nights” and concludes with a personification of snow as being like, or perhaps, by a kind of sleight of poetic hand, being “the tears of all / the lost souls” that “rose to heaven / and were finally heard and blessed / with substance and the power of flight” who “lay their / great pale cheek against the burning / cheek of earth.”

Some might find the ending a little sentimental, but it moved me, and moves me still, because of the compassion established in the beginning of the poem and the sheer heart of the speaker whose emotions are somehow involved in this description of snow in Detroit, Michigan, and yet not overtly described or revealed.

I loved this poem so much that—even though I revered printed matter to the point of near idol worship--I secretly, and carefully, tore it free from its stapled binding and kept it so that I could look at it occasionally for the kind of comfort it provides.

What good fortune that Philip Levine is our new Poet Laureate, and that his work will be newly before us.

More on him, his work, and recordings of his poems can be found at poets.org.

Here’s the full text of the poem:

Snow

Today the snow is drifting
on Belle Isle, and the ducks
are searching for some opening
to the filthy waters of their river.
On Grand River Avenue, which is not
in Venice but in Detroit, Michigan,
the traffic has slowed to a standstill
and yet a sober man has hit a parked car
and swears to the police he was
not guilty. The bright squads of children
on their way to school howl
at the foolishness of the world
they will try not to inherit.
Seen from inside a window,
even a filthy one like those
at Automotive Supply Company, the snow,
which has been falling for hours,
is more beautiful than even the spring
grass which once unfurled here
before the invention of steel and fire,
for spring grass is what the earth sang
in answer to the new sun, to
melting snow, and the dark rain
of spring nights. But snow is nothing.
It has no melody or form, it
is as though the tears of all
the lost souls rose to heaven
and were finally heard and blessed
with substance and the power of flight
and given their choice chose then
to return to earth, to lay their
great pale cheek against the burning
cheek of earth and say, “There, there, child.”

by Philip Levine

Literary Season in Alabama

2011-04-18T10:17:00.000-07:00

I always get a kick out of "literary season" in Alabama, which, in my mind, starts with On the Brink in Jacksonville in February and ends with the Alabama Writers Symposium the first weekend in May in Monroeville. It's mostly organized so as not to interfere with that other season in Alabama, the one that takes place in the fall. Last week was a good one: Wendy Reed and I turned in the final manuscript of our new collection of essays, to be titled Circling Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality (UA Press, forthcoming 2012); I had a great visit to Wallace Community College in Dothan, Alabama, where faculty, staff, and students made me feel very welcome as I gave a workshop and reading (thanks to Sally Buchanan for the photo); and, after a scary weather day on Friday, Saturday in Montgomery at the Alabama Book Festival held in Old Town (where we spied this bottle tree outside of Bottle Tree Pottery) was fine in all ways.
(Etymology-nerd note on the origin of the word tornado: it derives from the Spanish tronado, meaning thunder, and tornar, meaning to turn, so a tornado is a kind of turning thunderstorm.)

Art, Salvation, Faith, and Spirit

2011-04-07T12:34:00.000-07:00

I've been reading biographies and autobiographies of poets lately and just finished reading Mark Doty's Firebird. These words struck me, and I wanted to share them for other writers and artists. Doty begins a section near the end of the book with the sentence, "I believe that art saved my life. How is it that making sustains? I had these examples, this gift . . . ." He then recounts the various experiences in his life that were important to him in becoming a writer. He continues: "The gift was a faith in the life of art, or, more precisely, a sense that there was a life which was not mine, but to which I was welcome to join myself. A life which was larger than any single person's, and thus not one to be claimed, but to apprentice oneself to. In the larger, permanent community of makers, you could be someone by being no one, by disappearing into what you made. In that life your hands were turned, temporarily, to what beauty wanted, what spirit--not your spirit, not exactly--desired: to come into being, to be seen."

Today's Big Question

2011-02-27T12:43:00.000-08:00

First, I've just realized I write a lot about signs. I guess this is not surprising given that I am a compulsive reader.
On with the post, then. In answer to the question"Who doesn't love a camo hat[?]", found on a sign at a local restaurant that is, presumably, giving them away with a meal, I think we all know that my first response is likely to be of the smartass variety.
(In fact, I already own a knit camo cap that the dogs brought home. They bring a lot of things home, including a foam rifle case--though we don't have a rifle; a pair of tennis shoes in my size which I actually wear for yardwork; softballs, playground balls, rubber baseballs; gloves--generally not in pairs; dolls; various articles of clothing; and of course squirrel and bird carcasses and various deer parts. We have a don't ask, don't tell policy with the dogs on these things. I have no idea where they come from, the dogs or their gleanings.)
But back to the question. Considered more metaphysically, maybe a camo hat would be a nice thing to have every once in a while, when you're grubby but need to run by the grocery store, when you're present for something you'd rather not see or hear, when you don't wish to be the [fill-in-the-blank]-est person present.
Camouflage comes, not very interestingly, from the French word meaning "to disguise," but it gets better, because that word comes from a word meaning "puff of smoke" which comes in part from a word meaning "to muffle or cover up" (that's the -moufl- part of camouflage).
And a little muffling or covering up can be a good thing on occasion.
So who doesn't love a camo hat, after all? Not I.

Buy Hyacinths

2011-02-21T13:46:00.000-08:00

A week or so after Valentine's Day and then after Easter are good times to buy hyacinths and other bulb plants on sale at your local grocery store. I scouted them out yesterday and went back today, where the woman in the floral section offered me three hyacinths for the price of one. They'll bring pleasure for a few days in the big pot on the patio, while I'm waiting for the ones I've planted in previous years to come up. Then I'll put them in the ground for next year, near the base of a tree so I know where to look for them.

Each year I remember the story my mother told me, and the poem that goes with it. When she was a little girl, her older sister recited a poem to her. She loved it and asked her sister to write it down for her. "No," said her sister, "I'll teach it to you so you can memorize it. Then you'll have it forever."

The poem gets attributed to various sources, but I don't usually see it with the last three lines, as my mother taught it to me--having remembered it all her life, thanks to her sister:

If thou of fortune be bereft

And in thy store there be but left

Two loaves, sell one

And with the dole

Buy hyacinths to feed the soul.

For well we know--

Tis not by bread alone

That man is fed.

History Lesson

2011-01-15T12:51:00.000-08:00

Another good find, this time at Anne’s Tiques in Tuscaloosa, was a postcard with kittens on the front and the reverse stamped with a half-penny stamp and addressed to “Miss Willy, Holly Lodge, Victoria R?, Great Malvern.” It was postmarked May 23, 1910, from a town in Dorset. Victoria Road it was, and presumably the card was delivered safely, but who knows how it made its way to Tuscaloosa from Great Malvern.

The postcard is dated “23 – V- 10” and reads:

“I have sent you Saturday’s Daily Graphic
with some pictures of the King’s funeral. I like
the photo where the dog is following in the
procession. ............... It has been very hot here
the last day or two—quite a blazing sun—but
there is more breeze today. I expect it is very
hot in Malvern.
With love from J.”

I like the way the note makes a kind of a found poem as well as the respectful space to indicate a new paragraph as the writer shifts from news about the funeral to news of the weather.

The funeral in question was that King Edward VII (grandfather of King George VI, featured in the movie The King’s Speech). The funeral had occurred May 20. Pictures (but not the one of the dog!) can be found at The Royal Windsor Web Site

Is I Is or Is I Ain't a Southerner?

2011-01-14T12:52:00.000-08:00

(Note: This blog entry originally appeared on my webpage at Red Room: Where the Writers Are, where it was chosen as a featured blog of the week.)

Is I is or Is I ain’t a Southerner?

Lately I’ve had reason to question whether I am still a southerner. This may also involve questioning whether the south is still the south or just another identity group like model-train enthusiasts or sadomasochists.

I always thought I was. I grew up in Arkansas, in a family that had been there for a hundred or more years. I say “fixin’ to” and “might could” and “y’all” (always plural, never ever singular), and I call that heavy black thing you make cornbread in a skillet. I actually asked for one for my 18th birthday, and I still have it, along with my mother’s cornbread recipe. It seemed to me then a mark of being grown up. I’m not, however, a purist about never washing it.

I once, to my everlasting regret, voted Republican in a statewide primary race, having let others convince me that it would ultimately help the Democrat in the race. It didn’t, and I soiled my political soul for nothing. Otherwise I’m as yellow-dog a Democrat as they come. I like that other yellow hyphenate, too, the Yellow-Shoe Press, aka LSU, and their exceptional poetry series.

I always felt my spiritual home was more Boston than Charleston, but I don’t think I could stand the winters.

I’m lukewarm on barbecue and get a taste for it about once a year, if that. I can live without the blues. Greens, too, for that matter. I am the child of modest privilege, white, the daughter of a lawyer and a teacher, both well-educated, who provided me with vacations on Hilton Head and private high school and college and, most importantly, exposure to books, music, and art from an early age. We left the dinner table to look up words in the dictionary that we didn’t know, and a typical weekend afternoon might find us all in different rooms, companionably reading our books.

My grandfather was Bear Bryant’s first football coach, but I’ve lived in Tuscaloosa, the Bear’s lair, for over twenty years and have attended only one football game in all that time.

So when the debates begin: pulled pork or ribs? turnips or collards? Bama or Auburn? Cream gravy or red-eye? I sometimes feel sidelined, and I ask myself, to paraphrase an old song, Is I is or is I ain’t a Southerner?

I’ve never chopped cotton or killed a hog. I have never fried one single thing, animal or vegetable, in all my life, though I have been in kitchens and carports where frying took place. I don’t hunt, fish, camp, or even tail-gate. I haven’t been saved, not even once. My religious status would be best described as lapsed Episcopalian. I do not consider Jesus a close personal friend.

I also feel no affinity to the new southern hipsters, who knowledgeably debate the virtues of the different kinds of regional barbecue, collect primitive/self-taught/outsider/folk art, drive long distances into the backwoods to listen to blues music, call themselves locavores and corner you at parties to proclaim the wonders of swiss chard Picked Yesterday by Local Farmers in Your Own Community. Seems I’m neither old-school nor new-school in my Southernness.

My husband, a New Yorker by birth, said that this was the only region in the country you could live in where you’d even think about writing such an essay as this. That’s where I’m writing from.

Area of Refuge

2010-11-26T07:45:00.000-08:00

Just the sign itself has a calming effect. It made me think about what my "areas of refuge" are. Yours? (Picture taken at the Auburn University Hotel and Conference Center)

The end of one story, the beginning of another

2010-11-02T15:05:00.000-07:00

It’s 1980, and I’m walking downhill on a cobbled street above the town center in Bath, England. It’s damp and chilly, so I am almost certainly wearing my slate-blue belted trenchcoat and L. L. Bean boots. I’ve come to Bath by myself from Oxford, where I am spending the school year studying in the Oxford Overseas Study Course, a program run by playwright Francis Warner. We go to his apartment at the beginning and end of each semester for wine-and-cheese parties in his elegant flat near Walton Street, where the wallpaper has actual leaves pressed into it.

I don’t know whether I was thinking of Jane Austen or simply pondering the clouds (wandering lonely as one, surely) when a knot of rough-looking teenage boys began to call to me, trying to get my attention, daring to get closer as I walked on. I hadn’t yet seen the movie of A Clockwork Orange (I’ve still never seen it all the way through, having freaked out and left the theatre during the tennis ball scene) but they felt scary that way.

I was, then as now, bookish, so seeing a bookstore I took refuge there. I browsed, and waited, and then nearly forgot that I was hiding, as I looked through crowded shelves of old books. I picked up one with a weathered green cover, a book that had clearly spent some time out in the elements, The Cyclist’s Touring Maps and Gazetteer. I had gone on a three-day bike trip as part of my freshman orientation at Hendrix College, and I still had my green ten-speed at home. For the year at Oxford I had purchased a brown, three-speed Raleigh that got me everywhere I needed to go in style and relative comfort, provided I remembered to stay to the left.

As I browsed through the book, heavily annotated, I found all kinds of extras: not only marginalia but lists, clippings, drawings, directions. It felt like magic, like a map not just of cycling routes but of a life, mysterious, rich, adult.

Inside the front cover was written “A. J. Carle, ‘Beulah,’ Newlyn.”

Here is what I found in the book:
A clipping on “The Autumn Tints Tour” with map and directions, subtitled “31 miles—with plenty to do on the way, between Chepstow and Monmouth.” (On the other side is a short report headed “Combed Hair As He Drove,” featuring an apprentice electrician who was followed by an off-duty policeman who stopped him and charged him with dangerous driving. The electrician claimed, “I may have been pushing my hair out of my eyes, but I didn’t comb it.”)

Another clipping details another RAC Autumn Tints Tour, around Ross-on-Wye, and on a third clipping, a folded-lengthwise piece of newspaper, in a blank space, is written:
“Mill near Clapton
Possibility of fishing in stream near mill
Either the Axe River or a tributary
looks good”

On the back inside cover were drawings for a “Seaside Bungalow,” and on a thick piece of paper in the back were more drawings, carefully planned out and colored in.

There was a clipping titled “Top anglers on canal in Glo’shire” with accompanying map, and below that the headline “PUCKLECHURCH CLUB MAY YET BE SAVED.”

I found a slightly worn map from the Bristol Omnibus Company Limited, “Route Map of Country Services” and, on gray commercial paper towels with zigzag edges where they’d been torn out of the machine, notations, presumably by A. J. Carle, on fifteen or so little towns, their populations, and whether they had a cinema. The longest entry was on Sandgate, in Kent, pop. 2790: “Urban Dist. and Parish, and Seaside suburb, 1 ½ miles from Folkestone (35,000 pop.—with 5 cinemas, 4 of them decent). Is a family seaside resort in summer and is fed by soldiers from Shorncliff Camp all year round. The Camp is just outside (1/4 mile away) and it is a 4d to 6d bus fare into Folkestone. In Peacetime the Cinema had full houses at Midweek in Summer, and ¾ full in Winter. The Cinema had been allowed to become rather a ‘Fleapit’ due to poor decoration & seating. With personal supervision, etc., this could be altered, with chances of increased patronage. Cinema is decent building, with full stage, and they have run shows.”

Most intriguing were typed directions, on the back of a Masonic Lodge program from 1966, of directions from Bristol to Merriot [sic] Village, ending “Ask for the road to Boozer Pit. ‘Flaxlands’ is the name of Jim’s House.” Who was Jim? Why Boozer Pit? Some day, I thought, I would follow the directions and see what I found when I got there.

The final loose item in the book was a section of pages from a school notebook, about 6” by 8”. Handwritten in blue fountain-pen ink, with a fine cursive hand, it was a history of China from Prehistory to 1800, with a column for the date, a column labeled “Dynasty and Ruler,” two columns under a larger heading of “China” titled “Memorable Men and Events” and “Principal Artists, Monuments, and Art Developments,” and under the larger heading of “Concurrent World Events,” two more columns headed “Principal Artists, Monuments, and Art Developments” and “Memorable Men and Events,” eight pages in all, written on both sides.

I bought the book, of course, and when I left the bookstore the boys were long gone. I imagine I studied the book in my B & B that night, and I have kept it for thirty years, always thinking I would learn its story some day.

A few weeks ago I determined to clean out my shelves to make more room for poetry books, and I found the book in a safe corner where I had tucked it away. I looked at all the contents again, including a letter from my philosophy professor at Hendrix, John Churchill, who had been a Rhodes Scholar. It was a nice leisurely typed letter, apparently in response to one I’d written, with suggestions for pubs (among them the Trout and the King’s Head) and Evensong at Christ Church Cathedral, news from Hendrix, and political commentary—Reagan had just been inaugurated. It’s a time capsule of a sort, as well.

I don’t think I’d looked at the book since the birth of the internet, and it occurred to me that now, finally, I might have the research tools to find out more, literally at my fingertips.

I found information in civic land records for “Flaxlands” in “Boozer Pit.” The South Somerset District Council even has a map of where it can be found. No way to know who Jim was, however. I searched for the name A. J. Carle, along with his address, "Beulah, Newlyn" which took me to the Cinema Theatre Association in England via an old "Mercia Cinema Org Blog.” The blog entry listed a number of old cinemas, including:

“NEWLYN Cornwall
GAIETY Opened 1921. Architect: Cowell, Drewitt & Wheatley, Penzance. Prop., Reginald Hennessey. Reversed auditorium. By mid 1930s to Robert Thomas, Penzance. By 1941: (BTH) – Props. A. J. Carle, ‘Beulah,’ Newlyn. 357 seats. Prices 7d. to 1s. 9d. Continuous. Booked at Cardiff. Pictures and Variety. Proscenium width 24ft. Stage 8ft. deep. Phone Penzance 757. Station, Penzance G.W.R. To Harry Herbert Flower, Newlyn. By late 1950’s screen 17’ by 10’ 4”; RCA sound. Closed c.1970. Now restaurant. “

Aha!

I went to the Cinema Theatre Association webpage, sent an email, and a few days later heard from the Archivist, Clive Polden, that the gazetteer had been compiled by the late Mervyn Gould and that the Newlyn Cinema continues to function as a restaurant “and looks lovely, accessed via a footbridge over a stream.” He sent me a picture of the archives with volunteers and researchers at work, and one of the archives room, which I have posted, with his permission.

I’ve decided that it’s time for the book to end its long exile from England and today I put it in the mail to the Cinema Theatre Association so that others will be able to pore over it as well. I’ve scanned a few of the pages for memory’s sake and will of course save the letter from my philosophy professor, which is a part of my archive, not A. J. Carle’s, though I enjoy the idea of layered histories in one book.

This whole story reminds me of a wonderful film I saw once on PBS. A photographic archive of the twentieth century, housed at a country estate outside of London, is threatened with being purchased by a large photo archive business that plans to split up the collection. The staff, an oddball collection of experts in photography and history, attempts to make the case for keeping the collection intact by assembling the story of just one woman who can, almost miraculously, be traced from a childhood in Nazi Germany to life as an elderly street person in London, all via the photographs. So many stories in the photographs, they say, all lost if the collection is dissolved. You can guess what happens. It’s probably my favorite movie ever, and don’t know the title and have never been able to find it again, search IMDB and the BBC website as I may. If anyone knows of it, please do let me know.

Bottle Trees at Kentuck

2010-10-25T15:36:00.000-07:00

Here are a couple of pictures from my September 18th reading and writing workshop at the Kentuck Arts Center. There were glimmering bottle trees made by Steve Davis all over the courtyard. Thanks to the workshop participants, kids and grownups, for being there!

Finishing Projects

2010-08-25T08:58:00.000-07:00

I often (always?) have too many different creative projects going at once. Yesterday I took down the "story board" I had made for a collection of short stories I've been working on for several years. I'm calling the book Land of Opportunity because all of the stories are set in Arkansas and I always liked the old state motto. Taking down the physical representation of the book's stories and organization marked a turning point--it feels finished, and this weekend I sent out five stories for consideration at various journals. Three have already been published online: “Why I Live At the Albert Pike Hotel,” at http://asouthernjournal.com/Ezine/Archives/2007/2007v18horne.htm; “Other People’s Dogs,” at http://www.marckbeggs.com/ALF/2007/horne.htm; and “Sixteen Going On,” in Foliate Oak (that archived story is no longer available online). I still have the Arkansas license plate pinned to the board, along with the most astute advice I ever found in a fortune cookie: "Now is a good time for a bit of solitude."

A Kind of Optimism

2010-08-20T13:19:00.001-07:00

"Yes, King Cotton Is Open" reads this sign in Tuscaloosa. Make of it what you will, fellow semioticians! I call it a kind of optimism.
(You an click on the photo for a better view.)

Two books I love

2010-07-26T13:02:00.000-07:00

Last night when I stepped outside with the dogs, it was just dark, and the woods were lit up with fireflies, hundreds of them, from near the ground to head-high, as though someone had just turned on a light show. I think of this phenomenon as happening in the spring, and it's something I am newly delighted by every year, having forgotten it each time. There must have been a hatch of fireflies, I'm guessing, to have this sudden display. It's moments like this that remind me of the capacity of every moment to surprise, and of the possibilities of sacredness in everyday life. In the past year I've found two books, both published by the Princeton Architectural Press, that, each in their particular way, remind me to slow down, look around, breathe, and notice. I found The Day-to-Day Life of Albert Hastings on a sale table at Barnes and Noble in Little Rock last Christmas. The cover is apricot-colored with a hand-lettered title and looks kind of like a journal. The book consists of photographs by Kaylynn Deveney and text by Albert Hastings, 91 at the time of the book's publication. Bert Hastings was a neighbor of Deveney's in Wales, and her photos of him around his house, in his garden, making scones, even taking the sun in his driveway, with his captions, are both ordinary and beautiful, saying--without outright saying it--that each life matters immensely. The other book I've recently fallen in love with is A Year of Mornings: 3191 Miles Apart, a photographic collaboration between Maria Alexandra Vettese and Stephanie Congdon Barnes, who both live in towns called Portland, one on the east coast, one on the west. They each took a photo just about every morning for a year and posted it to a website,http://3191.visualblogging.com. The scenes are all domestic, from fruit to toast to socks to windows. The photos were taken without consulting one another, and it's extraordinary how often the two women's photos seem to converse with or mirror each other. Again, it's a reminder that, as Georgia O'Keeffe said, "Nobody sees a flower - really - it is so small it takes time - we haven't time - and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time." Less is the new more.

To Kill a Mockingbird--and I--turn 50

2010-07-11T13:54:00.000-07:00

I'm just back from the 50th anniversary publication party for To Kill a Mockingbird" in Monroeville, Alabama. It was hot, and we all sweated together on the courthouse lawn (I skipped the "Tequila Mockingbird" and went for a gin and tonic) and had a grand time talking about this specific book, books in general, and whether Katie Couric was going to show, and if the Jimmy Buffett concert at Gulf Shores would come off. I got to participate in the marathon reading of the book, seated in the judge's seat in the courtroom, and to hear my husband, Don Noble, read the final chapter from the courthouse steps and then toast the book with the assembled crowd. A highlight of the event was seeing a rough cut of Sandy Jaffe's film Our Mockingbird with a full (court)house of viewers. Sandy asked how many people there were not from Alabama, and at least half the room raised their hands. The rest of us applauded. People were there from Canada, San Diego, and who knows where else, not on the way somewhere else but because they felt moved to come to Monroeville and pay tribute to the book and its author. They were moved by the film, as well--and I think everyone felt a little astonished and happy at the power of literature and of this book in particular to bring people together.
There was, of course, a little buzz about whether Harper Lee might be present at some point, but I think just about everyone there knew it was unlikely, and didn't mind. It's exciting to see or meet the author of a book you love, but as Mary McDonough Murphy said on the piece Katie Couric did for CBS' "Sunday Morning," it's not about the person, it's about the book. I've even had the experience of meeting an author and wishing I hadn't. Writers put their best selves into their work and don't always measure up in person--and who could, on a day to day basis, be the ideal writer, any more than we, as readers, can always be the person the best books make us want to be?
The people of Monroeville obvously worked hard, and worked together, to make the event happen--and I hope they enjoyed themselves as much as I did.
Growing up with a lawyer father of my own who taught me the importance of respecting the dignity of every person, I can relate to Scout's--and Harper Lee's--admiration for their fathers. My dad started practicing law three days after I was born, and he remembers reading the book around the time it came out. Those were days of change, days of beginnings, and it's good to be here to look back on it all, and look forward to what's to come.

Monroevillanelle

2010-05-03T10:11:00.000-07:00

Monroevillanelle

—for John and Laurie Johnson

Queen Anne’s Lace, wild magnolia, honeysuckle interject
Punctuation marks in white against a green page of trees.
There are many roads to Monroeville, none direct.

You may plot a careful journey, coming and going, and protect
Yourself with city ways, but stop: open a window to the breeze
Where Queen Anne’s Lace, wild magnolia, honeysuckle intersect.

What keeps you moving forward is the need to reconnect.
You let the landscape guide you, following the hum of bees:
There are many roads to Monroeville, none direct.

Every May now, reaching country crossroads you elect
That road not taken, each new route unfolding in a moving frieze:
Queen Anne’s Lace, wild magnolia, honeysuckle sunlight-flecked.

At the center all paths lead to, you slow down and reflect
On the storied county courthouse, forever Harper Lee’s.
There are many roads to Monroeville, none direct.

All returns blend, departures blur, you resurrect
A self and place once lost, winter calm and summer ease.
Queen Anne’s Lace, wild magnolia, honeysuckle’s sweet effect:
There are many roads to Monroeville, none direct.

—Jennifer Horne

I had the pleasure of reading "Monroevillanelle" at the Alabama Writers' Symposium this past weekend, in the very town and at the very event that inspired the poem. It hasn't been published in a journal yet, but a couple of people asked for copies, so I'm posting it here.

It's been a busy time for literary festivity, with the Alabama Book Festival on April 17th, a glorious day both for weather and for writers, the Montevallo Literary Festival on the 23rd, the Slash Pine Poetry Festival on the 23rd-24th. The University of Montevallo is a quaint, historic campus with old-school hospitality and atmosphere (Hollywood, shoot a film here!) but a very contemporary literary festival with stimulating readings and conversation. Slash Pine, which occurs over two days in various venues around Tuscaloosa, fortunately did not encounter any actual tornadoes, though the downpours were tremendous. I loved the variety of readings and poets and the energy and crowds the festival brought out. Have you noticed, though, that once you've listened to a certain amount of poetry in a short amount of time, everything starts to seem like material for a poem? On about my 15th reading, I was thinking . . . "And the guy/three rows up/who keeps groping/his girlfriend's breast/from around her shoulder/and under her armpit/what is he thinking?/does poetry turn him on?/doesn't he notice she's leaning away?"
Time now to read, garden, rest, and contemplate . . . until fall, when the Limestone Dust Poetry Festival, which was cancelled on the 24th due to dangerous weather in Huntsville, will move to a new season. I'm looking forward to it already!

I've been delighted to have my book reviewed twice recently (links to the left of this post) but must clear up one bit of confusion I've apparently created by a couple of the poems in the book: although I lost my mother in 1994, and some of the poems are about her death, my father would like everyone to know that he is very much alive and practicing law in Little Rock. Long may he lawyer.

Reading, Writing, and Mental Health

2010-04-20T09:56:00.000-07:00

This past weekend I attended two very different, but very Alabama, events: the state book festival in Montgomery, Alabama, an all-day five-ring circus celebrating reading, writing, and publishing, and a memorial service on the grounds of Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa, the state mental hospital, locally referred to as “Bryce’s.” The book festival takes place over several blocks in Old Town Alabama, a grouping of historic buildings that reminds me of the Arkansas Territorial Restoration in Little Rock, Arkansas, where I had my first real job out of college, as a docent. Despite all the activity, everyone seems to slow down around old buildings, as though we are reminded that life is not all about rushing from place to place to place. I’m quite sure I saw fewer people on cell phones at the festival than I see on a daily basis around Tuscaloosa. On Sunday I drove down the long driveway of Bryce to the chapel, where I was happily surprised to see lots of cars parked all around the building; perhaps 150 people showed up for a ceremony commemorating and honoring the thousands of people who died while they were patients at the hospital, and dedicating a series of plaques that will stand at the old cemeteries where they were buried. The service opened and closed with a bagpiper, the haunting tones of the pipes filling me with a sense of melancholy and beauty simultaneously, somehow appropriate to where I was standing. Opened in 1861, inspired by Dorothea Dix’s efforts on behalf of the mentally ill, the historic grounds of the hospital will soon be purchased by the University of Alabama and a new, much smaller facility built. It’s the end of an era, and I was delighted to be able to tour the building in a group led by Bryce historian Steve Davis after the ceremony. As I walked the halls of the main building, I tried to imagine Sara Mayfield, journalist, novelist, sometime patient of Bryce, as she waited for her mother to take her shopping or walked to the dining room where she supplemented the meals with items she ordered each week from Sam Jackson’s grocery. Originally from Montgomery, Sara would have known the downtown streets I’d driven to the festival, might have visited her father, a state supreme court justice, at the state capitol on Goat Hill. And after 17 years at Bryce, she must’ve known all its hallways, its staircases, its grounds. If she were alive now, perhaps she would herself be reading at the book festival. Funny to think about.

Easter egg hunt

2010-04-01T14:45:00.001-07:00

I was asked today by an acquaintance whether I had any plans for Easter, and when I said no there was a brief, awkward silence. In the South you are expected to have plans for Easter. I’m not even that thing some used to scoff at in my church-going childhood, a Christmas- and Easter-only attendee.
Yesterday I saw a poster for a local Easter egg hunt that got me thinking about how much I loved them as a child. In fact, I would go on an Easter egg hunt right this red-hot minute. First, the dyeing—getting the brightly colored boxes at the grocery store, poking out the holes to set the eggs into, boiling the eggs and letting them cool enough to handle, dropping the dullish-colored tablets into vinegar where they fizzed and bubbled, carefully dipping the eggs into the chosen color—sun yellow, lizard green, robin’s egg blue—with a little wire implement just for dipping, the bounteous feel of it. Then, waking up on Easter morning and going out in the dew-damp yard in pajamas and bare feet, holding your basket filled with wildly green artificial grass (its winter counterpart was silver “icicles” for the Christmas tree), and searching out the eggs that you had dyed and that your parents had cunningly hidden, after you were in bed, in the mailbox, a clump of grass, on top of a fence post, in the crook of a bush, at the base of a gutter-spout, on the stone wall in the back yard, at the base of an oak tree. Still glistening, the eggs were perfect in their oval blue- or green- or purpleness, drops of dew still on them, the ordinary egg become extraordinary jewel. Even though they’d counted and hidden the eggs themselves, it seemed one always escaped my parents remembering and our finding, to be happened upon much later and discarded, or—if judged soon enough not to cause food poisoning—peeled, sliced, and eaten with salt.
We’d get new dresses for Easter, and little bonnets when we were young, so that we were pastel and perfect like the eggs, and we wore white sandals that you could run in after church while the grownups stood talking. When the organ blazed and the full choir sang “Jesus Christ is risen today-ay, Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah-lay-ay-loo-oo-ya,” it was exalting.
The world is waking up all around us here. When I went to the Dollar General store to buy envelopes, dog biscuits, and a hose nozzle yesterday, the man at the cash register and I discussed the nice weather and the possibility of rain for Easter. “I don’t mind,” he said. “Of course you might mind if you had an Easter egg hunt planned.” I agreed that rain was needed and even, mostly, welcomed this time of year, to bring everything back to life. Regeneration. “Yes,” he said. “Rebirth going on everywhere this time of year, isn’t there?”
Thanks, Dollar General guy, for Easter on a Wednesday afternoon.

Blues

2010-03-29T11:56:00.000-07:00

Spent Saturday night in Clarksdale, Mississippi at Clark House, a recently opened, beautifully renovated historic home near downtown, after lunch at City Grocery in Oxford and a little tool around Square Books. We were in Clarksdale for the launch of Delta Blues, a collection of mystery stories edited by Carolyn Haines, at the Ground Zero blues club, with proceeds going to the Rock River Foundation. I’m not a blues aficionado, and I’m pretty sure I got no right to sing the blues, but it was fun hearing a bunch of writers take the stage and sing and play their writerly hearts out for a good cause.
Whenever I arrive somewhere new, I like to get my bearings by taking a stroll, whether it’s just through the hotel lobby or around a neighborhood. It helps me feel located in that particular place, my temporary home. After we got settled into our room (I picked the one named Bottletree, of course), I headed out into the neighborhood, which borders Clarksdale’s downtown. As I walked down the sidewalk, big squares of concrete cracked and buckled by the roots of old oak trees, the wind came up, tossing the yellow jonquil blooms lining people’s yards. It occurred to me that I did in fact feel at home, and I realized that these streets I’ve walked out on from inns and hotels and bed and breakfasts in Clarksdale, in Montgomery and Monroeville and Montevallo and Hartselle, Alabama, in Inman Park in Atlanta, are like the streets where my grandmothers lived in Arkadelphia and Hot Springs, Arkansas, or the ones I rode my homemade skateboard down in Little Rock, Arkansas, where we lived on 2020 N. Arthur, an address my childhood mind free-associated with both clear vision and the knights of the round table. Forsythia was blooming, the flowering quince beginning to show its pink blossoms. I overheard the murmurings of a conversation taking place on a back porch. Someone drove up with a kid coming home from basketball practice. All around me, the houses, from grand nineteenth century to more recent twenties bungalows, seemed settled into their yards. A rainbow wind sock waved from the porch of a Victorian two-story, reminding me of an old lady with a bright scarf.

Bottle Tree arrives!

2010-03-19T08:40:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a red-letter day--a big box bearing my copies of Bottle Tree arrived at the door. I was tempted to hug the UPS guy but restrained myself. (Is this common among authors receiving their books?) By the way, here's where the phrase "red-letter," meaning "memorably happy," comes from: "the practice of marking in red the holy days in church calendars" (American Heritage Dictionary). Well, here's to a memorably happy day!

Unitarian Universalists

2010-03-01T13:21:00.000-08:00

I never expected to find myself in the pulpit, but yesterday I did, sort of, speaking to the Unitarian Universalist congregation of Tuscaloosa about the book I co-edited with Wendy Reed, All Out of Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality, and our second collection of essays which we've nearly finished but don't quite have a title for yet--our working title is All Out of Faith, Again. One of our contributors has suggested Altared States, an appropriate pun for this region of the U.S.

I had a warm welcome from the congregation, which I'd been meaning to visit for a long time, and met some kindred spirits.

Here's what I said about the new book, which we hope to have out in about a year:

"In looking at these new essays to see how to organize them and what to write about them in our introduction, we found, peculiarly, that fully half of our new contributors had written either primarily or marginally about clothing, mixing the sartorial with the spiritual.

I’ve been pondering this. I remember wondering, as a child, why I had to dress up to go to church and being told that it had to do with showing respect to God. I remember that it was really important to wear a slip with your dress. Was God some kind of fashion police? Did he only listen to those who were properly attired? To the degree that I conceptualized God independently of what I’d been taught in church, I think I would have said that this being we referred to as God was more present to me in the exaltation I felt in the high limbs of a tree I climbed or in the feeling of running barefoot across a soft lawn, than in the itchy tights and hard patent-leather shoes I wore to church.

Of course, we do say something with what we wear: I want to be comfortable, I love the color red, I’d rather blend in than stand out. It’s all very well to consider the lilies in the field, but a lily never experienced closet trauma or wondered whether the field made her butt look big.

So maybe clothing is an apt metaphor for the “fit” of religious or spiritual practice. The wrong one can make you feel as though you are spiritually holding your stomach in, as with a pair of too-tight pants. When you are wearing something that fits well and suits you, you feel good, unselfconscious, at ease."

Billy Collins reading

2010-02-20T08:50:00.000-08:00

Last night I had the great pleasure of hearing former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins read at the Hoover (Alabama) Library as part of the Southern Voices literary conference. Collins gave a very funny reading, ranging from playful to fanciful to surreal to satirical, at the end of which he reminded the audience that "all literature is about death," so "English majors are really majoring in death." (He noted that a number of the poems he had just read were set in cemeteries.) But we come to literature, he said, because, though the content may be sad, the form is happy--in other words, we will endure and even welcome dark subjects when they come to us with the satisfactions of literary form.
Collins' anthology of contemporary poetry,Poetry 180, developed for use in high schools but which I've used happily in both prison and university classrooms, is a fine resource for teachers but also an excellent choice for anyone who wants to read poetry but doesn't know where to start. Collins' avowed purpose with this book is "to beckon people back to poetry by offering them a variety of poems that might snag their interest. I am convinced that for every nonreader of poetry there is a poem waiting to reconnect them to poetry."
Last night's audience was already connected--in fact, we were an audience of early birds, as it turned out that tickets for the reading had sold out in the first four hours--but judging by the enthusiasm of the standing ovation and one "Whoo-hooer" sitting in the next row, lovers of poetry are all around us.

On the Brink

2010-02-15T14:00:00.000-08:00

This past weekend I attended the On the Brink literary conference at Jacksonville State University. Despite a rare snowfall which kept some of the invited authors from getting to Jacksonville, this small conference was well-attended and very enjoyable. The Center for Public Television crew and host Don Noble filmed three Bookmark episodes that will be shown this summer. Bookmark Producer Wendy Reed took this nighttime photo of the JSU campus.