The King Sits in Dumfermline Town

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art, music, narration, Sir Patrick Spens, writing

Stained glass window from the Abbot House at Dumfermline

I’ve had the opening lines of “Sir Patrick Spens” running through my head for the last few days, probably because I’ve been thinking about narrative economy. And rarely will you find a more economical opening than this:

The king sits in Dumfermline town, drinking the blood-red wine.

“Where can I find a good captain to sail this ship of mine?”

Then up and spoke a sailor boy sitting at the king’s right knee:

“Sir Patrick Spens is the best captain that ever sailed the sea.”

And there you have it. We know that king. He’s idling away his time, he’s contracted for a new bride from Norway, and he’s eager to get to the business of siring heirs. With the wine in his blood, he’s growing impatient. But why won’t anybody sail over to fetch her? We know the reason. It’s a crazy mission this time of year to cross the North Sea. But he will not be brooked; he’s the king, and his word is law.

And we know that sailor boy, too. Eager to please, the little underling. Eager to show off his knowledge. So he “up and speaks,” and from that foolish remark the tragedy unfolds. Sir Patrick, his frightened crew, and “all the lords and noblemen” sail off to their doom. The blood-red wine foreshadows their fate.

A chance exchange of words sets off a chain of events, unforeseen by those who speak the words but inevitable as death itself. Now that’s narrative economy.

A New Author

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Goat Boy of the Ozarks, John Mort, novels, Ozarks, Springfield, writing

It’s always a great moment when you discover an interesting author who is new to you. That happened to me recently when I received a book by John Mort, who is not a new author at all, but an established author who I simply had missed.

I should have heard of John Mort before now, but somehow had not. He’s an accomplished writer who lives in Springfield, and who has a bunch of books out that he’s either written or edited. I finished Goat Boy of the Ozarks in the last couple of days and based on that one, I’m going to go looking for more.

The “goat boy” of the title is Johnny Bell, a sixteen-year-old who like most boys his age struggles with authority, his sense of self, and inconveniently frequent erections. But unlike most boys his age, he is the poorest of the poor, parentless, largely friendless, and suspicious of the social-service foster family with whom he is placed, although in his isolation he also leans out for the scraps of affection they offer him as well.

At first I found the title off-putting, unsure whether I was in for some sort of Ozarks gothic story, nature idyll, or what. But when I discovered late in the book what the “goat boy” referred to, it came as an unexpected and refreshing surprise as the book took a turn into the deconstruction of Ozarks genre mythology, an activity dear to my own heart. I suppose one could say that the storyline of the book follows the coming-of-age pattern, but there are other springs flowing through this parcel as well.

The narrative style is curious; it’s a bit jagged, with elliptical moments in which we have to figure out what happened in the interim, but after a while I got used to that method. I could tell I was in the hands of a writer with serious purposes, which gave me all the incentive I needed to persist despite my uncertainty.

After reading Goat Boy of the Ozarks, I plan to seek out more of John Mort’s work and give it a look as well.

A Writer’s Thanks

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books, Thanks, Thanksgiving, writing

Here are a few things I am thankful for today:

• Readers who like what I do and who post reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, and elsewhere.
• Readers who have comments, questions, or criticism and post them or e-mail them to me. Honest criticism is always appreciated, believe it or not.
• Book clubs! Some of the best times of my writing life have happened at book clubs.
• A publisher and editor who collaborate, respond, and always keep the best results for the book in mind.
• Organizations and civic groups that ask me to come speak to them. And especially libraries. Libraries are the secret weapon of democracy.
• Those who quietly and unfailingly support me as I work. God bless them, and God bless you all.

Favorite Ozarks Books – 7

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A Country Year, books, Jacks Fork, Missouri, nature, Ozarks, Sue Hubbell, Texas County, writing

I heard a presentation on Sue Hubbell’s A Country Year at the Ozarks Studies Symposium in West Plains last year, from Brian Hardman of the University of the Ozarks, and that presentation reminded me I had been intending to dig out this book and re-read it (I’m pretty sure I had read it years ago). But nearly a year passed before intention became act. Another reason to love books—they’re so patient with us!

A Country Year may remind you of Walden in its seasonal structure (spring to spring), or of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek for its devoted entomology, but those comparisons only go so far. For one thing, A Country Year is a quieter book, not as rhetorically extravagant; much of it was originally written for general-interest magazines, so the needs of the intended audience figure into that choice to some extent.

But something else that interests me about A Country Year is its practicality; it’s a working book, not the ruminations of a comfortable observer. When Hubbell writes about jacking up her truck to grease the wheel bearings, she’s not doing it to experience the rusticity of common tasks; she’s doing it because the truck needs greasing, and nobody else is around to take on the job. Real poverty runs through this book and informs it at every turn. For that reason, A Country Year speaks to the Ozarks experience in a particularly meaningful way. A transplant herself (who has since moved away), Hubbell wryly comments on the urbanites who relocate to a scenic patch of Ozark countryside, only to learn that their rural utopia comes with brown recluses and intermittent mail service.

A Country Year embraces both beauty and struggle. It’s unassuming but firm. And in those respects, it resembles a lot of the country folk I know.

 

Our Ozarks

Tags

magazines, Ozarks, writing

A new magazine is making a go at the Ozarks niche. It’s called Our Ozarks, and it’s published out of Ozark, Mo. So the name is propitious, anyway.

I’ve subscribed and will be interested in seeing how it makes its way through the shakedown months. So far, the photography looks good, but I think it’s still finding its way in the articles. Those who remember the Ozarks Mountaineer‘s long history will recall that it, too, tended toward very uneven articles . . . some terrific, some cliched. W. K. McNeil’s music history column was impeccable, and often the best thing in the magazine. The quality declined after Clay Anderson died in 2003, and eventually the Mountaineer succumbed. Larry Dablemont picked up the torch for a while with Journal of the Ozarks, which went its way in March of this year. It’s been followed by a magazine called Ozark Hills and Hollows, from Exeter, Mo., which now has several issues out. Haven’t gotten my hands on a copy yet, but from what I can tell, their photography looks very good. I looked at a copy online, and I was impressed by its range and by the professionalism of the design.

Both publications look great on the web. As my friends Emery Styron and Jo Schaper, formerly of River Hills Traveler, can testify, publishing a magazine is a constant grind, and someone who enters into it had better love their subject matter. (RHT is published from Neosho, Mo., now.) Advertising is the great challenge for small-circulation magazines, and I wish all three of these publications well. All three of them have Facebook pages, listed below.

Ozark Hills and Hollows Facebook Page

Our Ozarks Facebook Page

River Hills Traveler Facebook Page

 

 

Living with Loss

Tags

art, change, childhood, creativity, Crystal Payton, fiction, historical fiction, history, lakes, Leland Payton, literature, memory, Osage, Quincy, writing

A while back I shared a guest post from Dean Robertson about “home” – her recollections of her childhood home, leaving it, and returning years later. Since then that meditation has returned to me on occasion as I work on my next book.

The third book that I have set in the same river valley takes place about twenty years after This Old World‘s end. Some of the characters are still there, some are gone, and new ones have arrived. I’ve been thinking about the complicated emotions we experience when we see a place – our place – occupied by someone else.

Whenever I travel to Quincy, I like to drive by our old house on North 22nd Street, the house my daughter grew up in. For a while it was an unpleasant experience, as the house fell into disrepair (seeing its occupant appear in the police report was the low point). But now it has a new owner, bright shutters, newly planted flowers. So the drive-by is a cheerful one once again.

Still, it’s not my house any more. And even the most dutiful of owners is not me. So even positive change involves loss.

These thoughts were prompted today by the folks over at Damming the Osage, who posted a poem written by a gentleman not of my acquaintance, Rod Cameron of Raytown, Mo. It’s a lovely poem, followed by a reminiscence, of himself and his neighbors losing their land to the building of a reservoir. It’s a darn fine poem. Take a read.

What can we do with loss? Loss is built into our existence. Some losses are inevitable, but others (like the loss in the poem) are not, and we fight like devils to prevent them. In G.B. Shaw’s Major Barbara, a character says, “You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something.” Perhaps that aphorism can be reversed as well. When we lose something, we owe it to ourselves to learn from it – or at least to make it into a poem worth reading.

And so I return to the last few chapters of my novel-in-progress, thinking about my characters and their losses and their learning.

April in Missouri -for the Literary-Minded

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Blank Slate Press, Bonniebrook, Branson, Columbia, creativity, Kansas City, Missouri, Missouri Writers Guild, St. Louis, Unbound Book Festival, writing

There are lots of literary events going on in Missouri next month, some of which I’m involved with, some not. If you enjoy reading or writing, climb in the car and take a spring road trip!

First, there’s the Afternoon of Authors with Blank Slate Press event April 2, from 2 to 4 p.m. in the Central Library in downtown St. Louis. I’ll be joining two other BSP authors to talk about writing and to read from our work. I haven’t decided yet whether I’ll read from my most recently published book, This Old World, or from my work-in-progress, which I’m getting close to completing. I’m also looking forward to sharing some time with Cynthia Graham and John Ryan.

Next up will be the season-opening open house at the Bonniebrook Gallery, Museum, and Homestead near Branson on April 16. I don’t think I’ll be able to make that event as I have work-related travel, but I’m eager to get down there sometime this spring or summer. The open house runs from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and will include exhibits, craft demonstrations and vendors, presentations, and musical performances. Here’s a link to an earlier post about that event, including a schedule.

Then the following Saturday is the Unbound Book Festival here in Columbia. This is the initial year for that festival, and it looks very promising.

Finally, at the end of the month, is the annual conference of the Missouri Writers’ Guild. This year’s conference is in Kansas City, and includes workshops, master classes, opportunities to meet with editors and agents, and nonstop networking! I’ve been going to the MWG conference for years and always come away with something valuable, whether it’s an insight on craft, a new thought on marketing, or an important contact. Anybody who wants to take his or her writing to the next level needs to check out this conference.

So change your oil and buckle your seatbelt! It’s time to hit the road for literary adventure.

 

Guest Post – On Violence

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Alfred Hitchcock, Dean Robertson, film, The Wire, Torn Curtain, violence, writing

I guest posted over on Dean Robertson’s blog today with some thoughts on creating scenes of violence in my fiction . . . . and on experiencing them in the works of others. Here’s the link! Have a look!

“Home” – Guest Post from Dean Robertson

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blogs, change, childhood, Dean Robertson, Faulkner, Georgia, home, memory, ostst, St. Benedict, writing

From Dean Robertson, whose book Looking for Lydia, Looking for God I reviewed last month:

Home

A few weeks ago a friend and I walked to the Chinese restaurant near my co-op and brought back steaming cartons of vegetable lo mein, fried rice, two Spring rolls, and my favorite—roasted broccoli (enough to save for lunch the next day). The order—white cartons stacked neatly in a large white bag—of course included small packets of soy sauce and several fortune cookies.

I always look forward to the slight crunch and sweetness of fortune cookies after the salty Chinese food, but the two I grabbed that day were stale. I was on the verge of throwing them out, along with their predictions for my future, when the edge of a slip of paper caught my eye. It read:

“You will find luck when you go home.”

That piece of paper, greasy at one corner, wrinkled from its near-miss with the garbage, is taped to the door of my kitchen cabinet.

 “I know that our relationship to those places we inhabit and leave and for which we search is the informing metaphor of the spiritual life in any tradition and is, in fact, the governing reality in our lives; the spirit of place is in our bones” (Looking for Lydia; Looking for God, 116-117).

I grew up in the South, in the hills of North Georgia, and so—even more than most—I have that bone-deep sense of belonging to a place, of that physical bond with land. In his small novel, The Unvanquished, William Faulkner describes the forced and hasty departure from home of two boys, with their grandmother, just ahead of Sherman’s army on its March to the Sea. They take along basic provisions—and bags of soil from the plantation.

One morning about twenty years ago, one of my cousins and I drove out to the land where I grew up. We were going to see the log house my parents built which neither of us had seen since I left for college at seventeen.

After the house was built, Mother and Daddy carefully cleared narrow paths into the woods and down the steep hill between the house and the “patio,” a structure made entirely of mortar and large stones from the creek bank. On the day my cousin and I were there, all those paths were completely grown over; there wasn’t a trace of them. We sat for a few minutes, looking with a kind of hopelessness at the uninterrupted woods, seeing no possibility for navigation.

I glanced back and stepped out of the car. I walked cautiously, but without hesitation, across the overgrown yard and onto the path that led by twists and turns through a quarter acre of dense trees and underbrush to the edge of Cedar Creek. Those stones and trees, that path, buried in thick vines and roots and many seasons of leaves, are my bones.The skeleton of that land is my skeleton. I never faltered. My cousin followed. We sat by the creek for more than an hour without speaking.

There is a reason that all those houses and apartments and rooms over all those decades never quite satisfied my search for home. Not one of them, even the wonderful co-op, in the wonderful walking neighborhood where I live now, ever will be home.

Home is not a place, not a location, neither house nor woods nor hills nor any ocean. Home is, as Esther de Waal writes in her 1984 book, Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict, a sense of being “earthed;” it is the Biblical concept of stability or steadfastness.

Of Metropolitan Anthony, “a monk and a bishop,” she says only,

“He has found his centre of gravity; he is wholly inside himself. This is the stability of the heart.”

Home, the particularity of place, is significant because it points always to something beyond itself.

It points to home.

A hymn whose name and provenance I have forgotten includes this line:

“We are all God’s children; the journey is our home.”

And, finally, this road to our real home can never be easy. Benedict writes in his Rule of the novice monk:

“‘Do not grant newcomers to the monastic life an easy entry’ says the opening sentence, and the novice is to be left knocking at the door for four or five days. He is then warned about ‘the hardships and difficulties that will lead him to God’ If he promises perseverance in his stability after two months. . .If he still stands firm. . .he is taken back. . .and is tested again after six months, and then again four months later.”

Looking for Lydia, Looking for God is also available on Amazon.com.

 

Looking for Lydia, Looking for God

Tags

Aging, Bible, books, Civil War, Dean Robertson, history, Lydia Roper, Norfolk, reviews, Virginia, writing

I came by an interesting book the other day. It’s called Looking for Lydia, Looking for God, and it’s part-memoir, part-religious meditation, part-biography.

The story is this. The author, Dean Robertson (despite the unorthodox first name, Dean is female) had occasion to stay for some months at the Lydia Roper Home, a home for elderly women in Norfolk, Virginia, while recovering from a fall. During her time at the home, Robertson led a Bible study group with some of the women who lived there, starting with four and gradually growing to around a dozen. She also became curious about Lydia Hand Bowen Roper, the home’s namesake and inspiration. Some might say “curious about” is an inadequate phrase, preferring “obsessed with.”

In Looking for Lydia, Looking for God, Robertson draws together three threads: her personal journey from ailment to recovery, from withdrawn-ness to engagement; the stories of her Bible study group, the women who made it up and their encounters with Biblical texts; and the teasing-out of the sparse details of the life of Lydia Roper, whose husband, a wealthy lumberman, endowed the home shortly before his death in 1921. The result is an odd, charming, occasionally frustrating, immensely enjoyable book.

The women of the Bible Study group are a varied group, some inquisitive, some uncommunicative. Robertson portrays them vividly. For a sort-of memoir, the book is less forthcoming about Robertson herself. We learn that she is a retired academic who grew up in north Georgia, and not a whole lot else. This reticence is unusual for a memoir, and I found myself wishing for more internal revelation. Lydia Roper also remains stubbornly inaccessible to Robertson’s efforts at inquiry; she left little written record, and her family’s memories are vague. Robertson describes her frustration at her efforts to uncover more about the elusive Lydia:

At this point, the result is uncertainty, and all I can find is that sometime in 1920 or 1921, Captain John Roper either “built,” “established,” “donated,” or “founded” the Lydia Roper Home. The Home either was, or was not, intended as a haven for Confederate widows. Two sources say yes; a local historian who grew up in the area says, “The Confederate widows twist likely came about as a result of rationalizing having a Damn Yankee establish a very useful and needed charitable home in an extremely Confederate area. Even one hundred years after The War, partisan feelings about Northerners were still quite strong.” A family member says the original charter more likely read something like, “ … for impoverished white women in the city of Norfolk.”
       Well.

Anybody who’s engaged in research into an obscure historical figure or event can relate to that “Well.”

What holds these three threads together? To me, it’s the searching and the losing. The women of the Bible study group work their way through Old Testament and New, responding to the stories in conventional and unconventional ways, searching for meaning, consolation, and explanations, all the while growing older and more frail. They lose their faculties, their health. Dean Robertson keeps looking for Lydia, even as Lydia continually recedes on the horizon. Memories fail; stories prove untrustworthy; yet the effort rewards itself. The writing is literary and highly crafted, but not overly so; the characters of the women shine through.

The book contains a lot of discussion of the various characters in the Bible, particularly women. I’m just about the least qualified person in the country to talk about that element of the book; Bible study has never interested me. So I’ll leave it to others to judge the originality and soundness of the exegesis. I’m more interested in the human stories of the elderly women who gather in the second floor parlor of the Lydia Roper Home. And these stories – warm, touching, and often sad – are well worth the reading. Looking for Lydia, Looking for God is a lovely book, especially for the spiritually-minded.

It’s published by Köehlerbooks and is available from their website, as well as from Barnes & Noble and Amazon. You can learn more about Dean Robertson on her website.