Here Nearly a Year

As I’ve seen others do in the time I’ve been here, I’m reflecting on my first year on Vocal. I suppose I’ve been successful. I’ve pissed off large numbers of people, which I’ve been told is a threshold of success. Thank you to everyone who has witch-hunted me. It means a lot.

In this past year, I’ve increased the amount of time I spend writing, the volume of material I’m writing, and the diversity of genres I’m approaching. I’ve met some amazing, talented people as well as a few sensitive people who don’t handle criticism extremely well, and various and sundry betwixt the two. I’ve also made some friends who seem to share some of my values, and I’m grateful for all of them (you know who you are).

I’ve grown as a reader and literary theorist through this platform, curating an intellectual space for myself in my home where I read, write, and play chess. It’s my favorite room in the house, a forest creek screened on my curtains, bookshelves and books and rocks and a velvet bench, soft lighting and a ceiling projector, a beautiful rug, and a chair that used to belong to a friend from my youth. The air feels different in here.

My greatest accomplishment this year (aside from resisting homicide) is the construction of my literary landscape and the creation of my ensemble cast from Masie Adams to Betty Blanchard and Carter Devreaux. I’ve finished the first chapter of my first novel and entered it in a first chapters contest, so you won’t be seeing it here, although I will continue to occasionally work a character sketch or vignette as background and notes for the larger work.

I’ve received some recognition for some of my pieces, and I looked through them for common denominators. Two genres emerged as dominant—southern and literary. I don’t suppose I know how to not be southern—I’ve never lived north of the Mason-Dixon Line (only Georgia and both Carolinas) nor west of the Mississippi. Hell, I’ve never lived west of the Tennessee River, either: Hendersonville, North Carolina is as far west as I’ve lived. It’s around the farthest north as well, roughly the same latitude as my current town in North Carolina. Southern voices have always been part of my environment, and those are the voices most organic to my experience.

Literary voice is also natural for me. I love a lot of the stuffy old bastards like Emerson, Eliot, and Matthew Arnold, to name a few. I equally love Mark Twain and Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, Robert Frost, Robert Pinsky, John Steinbeck, Joan Didion, Hemingway, Wallace Stevens, Alice Walker, and on and on. I love regional writers who write in the true voice of their native land. It takes a lot of confidence and courage to attempt it, but if you listen and you’re true to it, it’s the best thing in the world.

So, in my next year of writing, I’ll honor my heritage, which is diversely southern— country-meets-country club family and everything that goes with it. One of my grandfathers was a businessman, the other a farmer, and my father was a mechanical engineer. Oh, the stories I will tell. You see, people have been silencing me for my entire life. It’s not happening here. If y’all can behave, I may even tell you some James Brown stories.

The stories I’ve lived and observed have begun some kind of alchemy with what I’ve read, creating something brand new in my work. I’m also enjoying the process of identifying and nourishing my literary roots. This work, my husband, the chess, my first love, my friends, and the canon (it’s never let me down) have helped me through this year of tremendous loss. As some of you know, I’ve been under siege all year. I’m still processing it, and I am not signing a contract to be a perfect ray of sunshine. I’ll continue being true to the voice, the story, and my values. That’s what I’m here to do, with some craft polishing thrown in for good measure. That said, like everyone else, I have to occasionally take out the trash and clear space for the real work. I give myself permission to write badly when I need to.

In honor of my anniversary, enjoy this one from the Cowboy Junkies:

🥂