Summer Work
There's always work to be done. I hope your labors this season have been driven by whimsy, joy, and necessity.
Most of the time, I start my writing day on the front porch, pen and notebook in hand, a book of poems and a cup of coffee or strong tea with milk nearby. I think about the day past, what I saw and heard and felt, ideas and questions I’m mulling over, funny things my children did or said, that one moment of human interaction I witnessed that seemed potent or strange, and then I start writing in my notebook—images and descriptions building toward sentences, sentences building toward quick scenes or sudden insights. Often, as well, I get distracted. These days, it’s the bees. I’ll be trying to get something down, and find myself just staring at the breezy, slow-circling dance of bees in the oregano and lavender, the nodding stalks as each bee bumbles off. Or the thrum of bees in the sunflowers, the small iridescent mason bees at work in the pale, late-summer columbines. The bees have gone simply wild over the rose of Sharon, sometimes crawling over one another into the same blossom, a buzzy, living skin of them on the tree.
And then I look down and haven’t written anything for the past ten minutes! Or I have, but it’s all about bees and not about plots points for the next novel or whatever else it is I’m supposed to be working. Usually when this happens, I get frustrated with myself. Lately, though, I’ve been trying to roll with it, attempting to make what’s right in front of me my work, these silly sentences about bees and blossoms, the basil harvest, the apples to slice and freeze for winter pies. Things happen in their own good time. I’ll keep working. I’ll get to that email, that next scene in the story. Summer seems to me the time to let your work wander a bit, buzz hungrily, clumsily from flower to flower.
The Entire Sky
It’s here. The cover of the next novel. Can’t wait to get this one into your hands in 2024!
New Poems
I’ve got some new poems over at Terrain.org. The good folks there always make them look so darn pretty!
Country Music
Finally, let me digress a bit: I want to like Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond.” In the tradition of great geographical country titles—think “Boulder to Birmingham” or “Amarillo by Morning”—I dig this one, and it earns bonus points for tapping into another great country music tradition, class consciousness. The stripped down musicality, the raw emotion of the delivery, Anthony’s wonderfully powerful and raspy voice—all that’s fantastic. The lyrics, though, just plain don’t work; they’re too easy, falling quickly into meanness and wrong-headed mythologies. But that, sadly, is much of popular country music these days.
I teach a class called Rural America in Contemporary Literature, Song, and Film, and so figured I’d offer some recommendations below. These artists are singing truer, more complex stories about rural America, about small towns and country folks. Some are celebrations, some are critiques, but all are harder won, wiser, and just really good to listen to when you’re out on the road. Love to hear any recommendations you might have for me!
Jason Isbell, “Last of My Kind”
Mickey Guyton, “All American”
The Chicks, “Goodbye Earl”
American Aquarium, “A Better South”
The Carolina Chocolate Drops, “Country Girl”
Supaman, “Why”