Good Ole Boy

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I love family stories. I love being reminded that only a generation ago, our parents might not have been able to go to school. I love my new home in the South where people tell me stories at the Harris Teeter meat counter about how it was to butcher “back home,” and students in my writing workshop at the senior center tell me about priming tobacco.

Tony R. Lindsay’s parents were from rural farm families in the Great Smoky Mountains. His mother, one of thirteen children, was motherless from the age of nine. On occasion, her father would ride off to look for another wife and might be gone for ten days, sometimes leaving the children with nothing but potatoes to eat. She left home when she was twelve to live with her sister in Knoxville, and became a seamstress in a sweatshop at fourteen.

His mother never went to school. His father, one of ten children, got as far as the eighth grade. Twice, actually. His coach asked him to stay in school so he could play basketball an extra year. But the nearest high school was too far away for his family to consider sending him.

Tony grew up in Knoxville, but spent summers and as many weekends as he could in the Gatlinburg area, particularly in Cades Cove, a sheltered mountain valley that was settled in the late 1700s. His was a church-going family—twice on Sunday, Wednesday night prayer meetings, Thursday choir practice, Friday night socials.

He graduated from the University of Tennessee and, before retiring, managed several factories in various parts of the country. He began writing about eight years ago when he read a quote on his older daughter’s bulletin board at the school where she teaches gifted students: “If you want to be remembered after you die, you must do something worth writing about or write something worth reading.”

“I figured it was too late for me to do something worth writing about, but maybe I could write something worth reading,” Tony says. So he went to critique groups and workshops, took copious notes, wrote and rewrote his stories about rural people, mountain people. He wrote about Homer Guthry and Elwood Hatmaker, young boys exploring the Cove; about Lefty Goins, proprietor of a roadhouse and brewer of moonshine; about Bluford Nodding, “a dim-witted, towering sequoia of a man,” who was never seen without his Bible. Collected now in Tattletale Roadhouse and Social Club, his stories are often seasoned by a salty religion and peppered with analogies like those his father used. “Hawkshaw smells like a wet turtle climbing out of a privy,” being one of the milder ones.

When not writing, Tony tools around in a 1966 pickup and likes to boast “that his wife and TV both work.”

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Go to www.secondwindpublishing.com for information about Tony’s book.

An Old Poet

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That’s part of John Knoepfle’s e-mail address – “old poet” – and that’s a fitting introduction to his poem, “thinking back these eighty eight years,” which I discovered in the current issue of New Letters.

I’m neither a poet nor qualified to review poetry, but I fell so deeply in love with this poem that I’ve been thrusting it into other writers’ hands, commanding them to read it.

Perhaps I love it because I’m from the Midwest, and one of John’s awards is the Mark Twain Award for Contributions to Midwestern Literature.

Or perhaps because “thinking back” is written the way memory works – “what do you remember old fox . . . what else quarterback sacked punt blocked/failed promises factory work” – and I write about memory and identity.

Or perhaps because he is a witness to history in this long, six-page poem – “and one sundays awesome silence/steaming the straits of solomon . . .I can tell you about shrapnel/how it drowns you in your own blood” – and I tell members of my Over-50 Writing Workshop that they must record, and pass on, the history they witnessed.

On his web site, John says, “I try to reflect a common quality that I have found in persons   . . . This quality does not reveal the aesthetically beautiful or the diamond-like intellectual fireworks that man is capable of, but it does reveal something basic and handsome about him.” In “thinking back” he reflects that quality in an old pastor, a clairvoyant, a hindu surgeon, the woman in selma, the kennedys, doctor king, the bus driver, and many more.

I would, if I could, thrust the entire poem into your hands. If you can’t find a copy of New Letters, let’s hope that “thinking back these eighty eight years” will appear in John Knoepfle’s 21st book of poetry.

 

 

 

 

Piles and Files

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By Janet Sunderland, Guest Author

In a 21st century family saga too long to tell, amid economic ruin and children back home, my husband and I moved out of the large office we shared and into my small corner writing room. It’s been a process, as they say.

We cleaned out bookcases lining the walls of the big office (hereafter called BO) and got rid of books we no longer needed. We even ended up with empty shelf space, an early-in-this-move miracle.

What do you do with an empty shelf? I collected all my various completed projects, films I’d worked with and publications I’d published in, and put them together. They filled the shelf. I was amazed, since feeling failure is far more common than feeling success. The dates on said projects go back more than thirty years.

Janet’s Big Office (BO) before the move

Son and his wife moved into BO. It suits them. He constructed a wardrobe where there was none and utilized the room’s tiny closet for shelves. His very large desk is against the bookcases; so if I have to find a particular book on a non-visible shelf, I squeeze between desk layers.

However, what I also discovered in this gigantic move were files and files and stacks of papers.

We culled five file cabinets down to two, tossing and condensing partly empty drawers. My husband isn’t ready to part with notes from his graduate school days, but those are boxed in the basement for some other year.

I also have too many journals, which I’m unwilling to part with, but I organized them, year by year, and numbered them. And thankfully, at least spacewise although not so lucky memorywise, in years past, I didn’t write every day. Now they grow exponentially because along with writing every day, I also save newspaper clippings. I’m becoming my mother. But I had an empty bookcase.

There are still stacks of paper. I can’t get to my writing desk, it’s covered; so I’m sitting here with the laptop on my lap, looking around our newly refurbished and painted little office (LO) and it’s “cozy” as my husband says.

In fact, it’s lovely. Jacaranda blue walls and lots of white trim. It’s a happy room. One thing about sons coming home to live is they know how to build and paint. I still have stacks of papers. And boxes of old family photographs in a closet. However, and this is the point, we’ve shed pounds and pounds of paper, and been forced to look though files.

And in the midst, a “duh!” moment arrived. I could scan and save. That’s my latest project.

I begin with the top page on a pile, scan it into the computer, and toss the paper. Now my files are digital and clearly labeled. I can add new ones without worrying about taking up space. It’ll take time, but it works.

I’m doing the same with photos. I can’t toss the old photos, but I can donate them to the historical society. Not all of them, but many. And I can, eventually, make online photo books for my children, using Shutterfly or Blurb, and then they are keepers of stuff rather than me.

A great anti-virus program and online backup are key to this endeavor. And flash drives. I’ve also saved the contents of flash drives to the computer desktop, which saves them to online backup. There may be an easier way, but I can only absorb so many learning curves, and saving them to the desktop is easy. The backup program does the rest.

And you know all those scraps of paper and Post-It notes? I gathered them, sat with a small flip notebook, looked at each one, and either transcribed or tossed. I’ve discovered Post-It tabs, so organizing the notebook into sections of ideas, books to read, stellar quotes, etc. was relatively simple, and I’ll find them when I need them.

I used to move every three years or so, and moving forced a clean-out, but then we settled into this old, big house, and stayed put. But this summer, chaotic as it is and not really allowing head space for writing in the usual way, I learned new skills as a writer.

One is to appreciate what I have accomplished in my mad dash through the years, but the other is to train a jaundiced eye on my research and re-evaluate what I need as hard-copy and what can be digital, including my own writing. I don’t need two, or three, copies of everything, and while hard-copy habits are hard to break, they are breakable.

You just need a nudge.

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Janet Sunderland is an actor, a writer, and with her husband, co-pastor of a progressive liturgical community. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications and venues, including, proudly, When Last on the Mountain. Her blog can be found at janetsunderland.wordpress.com.

 

Composting and Clearing the Way

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Granddaughter, Ella, in Ruth’s studio

On Monday, I return to North Carolina to begin the challenge of emptying out my mother’s home.  She lived at 5130 Oriole Drive in Wilmington, N. C. for 47 years. She is gone now, so it is up to my brother, sister-in-law, and me to begin to clear away all those objects that were a part of her long life.

She was an artist, so her studio alone could take months to go through. There are paints, brushes, canvases, papers for her collages, fabrics, books, notes, color charts, completed and uncompleted paintings, sketch books, art magazines—the list goes on.

So how does this relate to writing? If we write long enough and as diligently as my mother created her art, we too will amass piles of words. My office contains stacks of journals and old notebooks and files of stories and poems in various stages of completion. More files contain revisions—and revisions of the revisions. My computer holds documents that even the finder can’t find. I still have papers I wrote in college. Sometimes I wonder what is the point of all this.

My mother used to say, “I feel sorry for you and your brother when I’m gone. I can see you now wondering why in the world I kept all of this stuff. But I just never know what I might need.”

This is true of us writers too.

In Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg uses composting as way to talk about this accumulation of writing. We throw all these words together and let them mix, mingle, and transform, until a new story evolves.  “We must continue to work the compost pile,” says Natalie, “enriching it and making it fertile so that something beautiful may bloom and so that our writing muscles are in good shape to ride the universe when it moves through us.”

Janet Sunderland, whose prose poem (“News of My Death”) appears in the anthology When Last on the Mountain, is our guest blogger this week. In a recent note, she said, “This morning I wrote a blog post from a free writing piece I found layered into a yellow legal pad from—oh, eleven years ago or so. There are rewards for clearing and tossing.” (See her blog at janetsunderland.wordpress.com.)

So I’m taking my writing notebook to North Carolina. It will be hard to take apart and clear out my mother’s home, but I plan to spend some time documenting my discoveries. And I do believe that something beautiful will bloom from what she left behind.

Stay tuned.

In the meantime, read the next post, “Piles and Files,” about Janet’s discoveries while clearing out her office to make room for the return home of her son and his wife.

Writing an Enticing Cover Letter by Arlene Mandell

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I smiled, with both appreciation and recognition, as I read Arlene Mandell’s guest blog. I, too, have been amazed that people in my workshops have not given thought to their cover letters. Take a good look at her #4. And remember that you’re writing to human beings, people who want to be appreciated for their journal/website/whatever as much as you want them to appreciate the work you’re submitting.

Thanks, Arlene, for being our guest blogger this week.

Writing an Enticing Cover Letter by Arlene Mandell

Groan. I have to write a letter? Can’t I just email this brilliant essay? Or squander a 44-cent stamp and add a perky Post-It with “Please publish ASAP”? No, you cannot.

Having written 3,200 cover letters in the past 20 years, I haven’t wanted to spend too much time crafting each one, yet I want the editor to feel acknowledged and respected.

1. Create attractive letterhead on your computer. Don’t embellish with little feather pens or winsome kittens. Save it.

2. Write a basic bio of 50 words in third person, another of 75 words. Save them. Unless you’re applying for a scholarship, you need not mention where you went to college. If a publication specializes in the domestication of wild animals, you may add, “Onoria Jones raises Bengal tigers on her quarter-acre estate in Petaluma, CA.” Revise annually, adding more impressive credits, i.e., Winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize.

3. Reread the submission guidelines, underlining key elements: genre, number of poems, and, most importantly, the deadline.

4. If you have actually read the publication—a really good idea—mention specifically what you enjoyed before stating: “Thank you for considering ‘My Little Margie,’ a 700-word essay for your fall issue. If you are submitting several works, list them in a column. And if you’re submitting for the spring issue of Conifer Quarterly, don’t send photos of snow-covered cedars.

5. Now assemble the components: letterhead, introduction, specifics, and third-person bio. This should fit neatly on one page. As a postscript I always add: “Please recycle” since a coffee-stained, rumpled poem cannot be used again. Print two copies. One is for your files, as you will rarely remember the specifics of the submission. Proofread. Enclose SASE.

And now, I invite you to return to your writing, confident you have behaved in a responsible, professional manner.

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Arlene L. Mandell, who lives in Santa Rosa, CA, has published more than 500 poems, essays and short stories. Her chapbook, Scenes from My Life on Hemlock Street: A Brooklyn Memoir, is available free at www.echapbook.com/memoir/mandell.

 

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