Breeched  

Early March and spring is a dangerous breeched birth,

too soon and angry, crying out from the sky womb,

destructive in sudden life and improperly twisted,

blind and dogged for attention and proper sacrifice. 

The thawing ground turns its eyes in fear, hunching

its back and shoulders against the child’s rolling howls,

a hunger swelling and streaking down arms of hot light

in grasp for suckle upon the earth’s tired winter breast. 

Fracture  

The first lightning of the season visited last night,

sudden flashes like headlights brushing the house,

strobes in my writing room, hints of warm things

promised, but punctuated with the thunder’s delay,

its faraway caution rolling and tumbling the dark.

A subtle reminder that the change is seldom instant,

that lightning and thunder all at once should serve

as a warning, that you’re too close, the senses jolted

open and vulnerable. Seasons should yawn open.

No matter how cold you’ve become, how you despise 

getting up in the morning to the bitterness of the air,

warmth will return eventually, like treating frostbite,

first with cold water, then the careful adding of heat.

You must be patient, welcoming the delayed assurance,

or the moment’s brilliance will most surely take you.  

Waiting on biscuits and gravy   

The well pump between the fireplace and me

is bolted down on a banister and waterless.

The cast iron pots hanging near the fire

are hot but empty as always.  The framed

photos of pioneer men, women, and children

stare, naturally anxious about the next meal.

The pictures make me sad. I’m compelled

to scribble out the lost histories of these

long gone folk on dinner napkins and leave

them to be found. But doesn’t every found

relic here deserve its history restored? Every

random trombone, scale, ax and hammer,

guitar, oil lamp, framed fruit box label,

winter sled, two-man saw and coffee can. 

After a while it all lures you in and you’re

almost convinced that maybe the only

real things remaining are the constant snap

of the hearth and your own growling belly. 

The Importance of Place

Authors often speak on the importance of place in writing. It’s quite true. What better means of writing than through your emotional roots connecting to physical places. Take your readers to the where, and the why and who and what and when might fall into place for them in a way you’d hoped. The often intangible places are just as important. Writing about Appalachia, for example – writing as an Appalachian – feels different with each telling. Nevertheless, these stories are centered, obviously or subtly, with a specific cultural backdrop in mind. Remove that, or insufficiently allow it in as a character of importance, and something vital is missing.  
But as a writer you know this, don’t you? And like myself, you are constantly trying to do it right.

Since we know what to do and have taken up the challenge of striving to make it work, I’d like to take these moments to celebrate the joys and benefits of place-specific writing.

About half of my work in poetry is obviously rooted in physical place. Another portion implies a relation with place, another portion floats about in the mostly intangible locations that fascinate me. Poetry encourages me reach back into my experience as a human being and re-picture emotional events. Some are from my earliest memories, some from last week. Some are life changing moments, some are beautifully mundane.

Since so many of these poems are framed in location, the more I write the more reminders I plant where I dwell. When on a walk, or a drive, I am reminded along the way of my own narrative. These moments serve a few purposes: to keep me rooted in my past, to lead me to new thinking, and to remind me to keep writing. Keep writing. Keep writing.

Perhaps I’ll think again on how much I learned about myself and my family meditating on the scant remains of my grandfather’s cabin. Or on the Paw Paw trees my other grandfather planted. Or how tiny the alley along the side of the house I grew up in feels these days. When I see these places my mind rushes back to the emotional wrestling required for fashioning those poems. That place resulted in a poem, I’ll remember. That place feels different to me now. It is forever with me, no longer some fractured and nearly lost memory.

That awareness, that heightened sensitivity you learn for letting place jostle your memories, opens an endless well of matter. We simply have to notice connections. Always, you came from somewhere to be there, stayed awhile, and traveled elsewhere. Each place you rested deserves attention.    

After a while, these spots along our mental and physical map accumulate and we are hopefully reminded of what Silas House encourages us to believe and say about ourselves - I am a writer. If you doubt that, when the hesitancy creeps in, or you feel too emptied to put pen to paper, remember you have place to lean on. That Kudzu covered spot there along the side of the road, that “sitting spot” along the creek of your youth, that cemetery full of your past and future, or that special table in that restaurant where you fell in love, proves you have something to say.

The classroom on the third floor of Avery Hall was too hot. It was the middle of fall, but it already felt like winter outside. This was frustrating. My syllabus had us going outside for the exercise, but it was early November, and by the third hour of class it was near dark and too cold for much of anything. The building's heat, mercilessly floating to the top floor, had us all on slow roast. We would move the meditation lesson somewhere down on the cooler first floor.

During our last break, I searched for a workable spot with the privacy necessary to un-clutter our minds and do some sitting practice. There was no good place. On the other hand, I explained once all nineteen of us settled along both sides of the main hallway, if you can still yourself enough any place is a fine spot for meditation. It was where you went in your mind, not your body, after all.

Whatever happened would be all right. We would adjust to our environment, a sort of mantra for this Human Potential course I was teaching. The class, already taught at the university for thirty years, was just eccentric enough to be right up my alley. I knew I would learn as much as the students as the semester progressed, and I had. This night would prove that once again.

We were in the text covering emotions and feelings, had already spoken on identity, gender issues, human communication, emotional intelligence, and spirituality. We had tried to define prayer and even skirted along the topic of the essence of God and the soul. This sample of meditation was the challenging capstone experience for this week's meeting: the simple sounding, but elusive challenge of being present. Being here, now.

It was just us there for a time, but classes were about to dismiss for the evening. Soon there would be foot traffic and noise, distractions, an awkwardness of being seen doing something atypical, our backs against the walls, not moving or talking, eyes closed. Paying no mind to anyone passing by. I wanted to get started before all this unfurled around our conversation. We spoke briefly about posture, how to sit, types of meditation, clearing the mind, disconnecting, what to expect, the awareness of breathing. How to bubble up distractions, acknowledge them and politely shoo them away and refocus.

We sat still and quiet for only two minutes on the first round, trying to empty our minds completely or to contemplate a single theme or object. Then, as if just for us, what was usually the ignored background of a college evening intensified. Perhaps what was happening around us would have challenged even the greatest Zen master. The elevator bell rang, people piled out of classrooms and out of the building, the sounds of footsteps from the second floor pounded their vibrations through the ceiling, the building creaked, other footsteps stomped by atop the carpet and past our crossed legs. A few people giggled at our scene or were curiously quiet in wonder and, perhaps, respect. Students were warming up instruments down the hall, the soda machines were never louder, the fluorescent lights buzzed like insects over our heads, we could hear each other breathing, cars honked, engines revved, traffic noise floated in from the highway hundreds of yards away. My back ached. My eye itched. My leg was threatening to fall asleep in the half lotus position. Stomachs growled. Cell phones chirped. That was just the first two minutes.

We then tried five minutes. I felt torn between doing real sitting practice and remaining aware enough to make comments as their instructor when the exercise was over. Teacher vs. learner. Learner vs. teacher. I wanted both. To my amazement, there was very little movement happening, no shifting, no sighs of frustration. As all this bloom of normally ignored life increased, we were simply sitting, just being for a few precious moments. Where they went inside was up to them. Five minutes of complete stillness - while awake - for the average Millennial student must feel like an hour. Their minds are electrified all day with technology, and here I was asking them to shut down and willingly forget about the swarm of noise and movement, the temptation to look around, the accumulating Tweets and voice messages and Facebook notifications and texts and emails piling up on them.

The time was up and we dismissed, but I suggested that if anyone wanted to stay for a ten-minute sitting they were welcome. Four stayed, eager and ready. We began again, stilled and alone, as more students dismissed and walked by us like ghosts we could here but not see.

Sound is not always a bad thing. We often equate noise to negativity, neglecting our appreciation of pure sound. In the midst of this regular shuffle, where we had established ourselves as temporary sculpture, I was reacquainting with the sound of school. It reminded me of a personal experience twenty years earlier just a few dozen feet outside this building along the sidewalk.

It was the fall of 1989, the middle of my third year as an undergrad. I had moved out of the house and on to campus. I was struggling with my major, often with why I was in school at all, with relationships. I'd work myself silly – mistaking feverish activity with success – and eventually collapse, not coming out of my room for two days while I slept as much as possible. More than anything, I was struggling with me.

Much of college is a blur now. This memory, however, is clear and important for me. I'm walking to a class, it's the peak of color in a place I had yet to consider my mountains, I'm still high from recently watching Dead Poets Society, the air is cooling and winter reminds of its approach with every passing day. Homecoming has come and gone. Even in all this, I'm exhausted and nearly depressed.

As I pass Avery Hall, I have one of the first true epiphanies of my life. An awareness I'd seldom experienced pleasantly crept up. The music room window is open and someone is playing the piano. I hear it and actually listen. The music slows my steps. I look around, up and down, behind me. Something is happening. The wind picks up around my ears and waves my hair, it threads the half naked trees, scooting dry leaves past my feet with gentle scratches. Across the campus green, blindingly yellow Gingko leaves fall in sheets like rain, flapping against one another and spreading their instant carpet on the grass. There is laughter. A professor's lecture mixes in from an open window on a second floor. I feel the books cradled in my hand. The trees are rust and yellow and green and scarlet, framed up with the darkened brown of wet bark. The music is a soundtrack as all the moment's senses run together and overwhelm me.

At that moment, I knew, in that gut hunch you can trust, that I was in the right place. This was what college was supposed to be like. It was more than robotically filling a seat in a lecture hall. More than tuition payments and being handed a degree on a stage. It was the sensual I was plugging into for the first time, right there in such an unexpected place and time. A few moments later, overwhelmed with epiphany, I was hiding in the men's room, tearing up and embarrassed, my heart racing. I was finally ready to attend college.

Twenty years later I was leaning back into this memory there in that hallway, surrounded by new students and only steps away from that root of a spiritual connection I have with this place I call work and home. It was my hope that these students, patiently humoring their instructor, would eventually hear and see in a new way as well.

Alien Life

One of the things I most want in life I know will scare me the most when it happens: the official disclosure that alien life is real and that it, whatever it is, has contacted Earth. My days are often split between two worlds - the constant subtle and not so subtle itch of the Mountain Mysteries project over the last twenty years, and my mundane, mostly analytical professional life. Most of the day I'm too distracted by student-related number crunching and outcomes to be bothered by what's loitering during these same moments in the stratosphere and beyond our naked glance. I know this much about me, however.

If I were to dwell on it too long, to give the thought of our not being alone too much time in my day, I'd walk out of my regular life that pays the bills and end up a half-crazed hermit in a cave up on Cumberland Mountain meditating on just how small we actually are. This I know. The “what ifs” would simply take over. Proof would bring me back down to rejoin society where I would bask in that same smallness, but in the company of our new fellow life forms.

Contemplating and working toward understanding this mystery is worth the lifetimes spent pursuing the answers. I'd like to say the UFO subject has been an obsession, but it hasn't been. I think it scares me too much to obsess on it. Yet I am always looking up hoping to see something, anything that I can't explain away. I feel the air and know it exists, see its effects, but don't see it. I feel the same way, have the same confidence, about the idea of intelligent life beyond our little speck of significance in the universe and that they’ve been here for some time.

I've been fascinated with the idea of extraterrestrials since I was very young. Even before my mind was permanently blown after watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind at the age of nine. Across the street from Middlesboro's Park Theater on 20th Street where my family and I watched this film, was an even more important place - the library. It was in this county library where I first happened across all the paranormal books, before the word paranormal was knocked around very much. These books are still there. Not much new has been added to the collection since my grade school days. When I go back and look in those sections of the stacks, I am transported back to a nostalgic time when all things were possible. It was in a book, wasn't it? It must be true, everything I read about the Loch Ness Monster, Sasquatch, ghosts, and yes, UFOs and aliens. This was the reading I filled my soft mind with as a child. It has never left me. The movie only reinforced the utterly commonsense reality that we were not alone in the universe.

Now in my adult life, I hang on to these assumptions, hoping at least some of them are true. No real Bigfoot bodies have been found in the last twenty years, no Loch Ness Monster has washed up on shore, we still cannot prove or disprove ghosts and telepathy. But these days, the idea of alien life being for real offers the closest promise of verification in these mysteries. Whatever the truth is, I hope we learn something in my lifetime.

There has been a lot of chatter about the Obama administration perhaps finally being the one admitting to what the government has known all along - that intelligent life exists beyond our world and that they want to talk. More than half a century of constant UFO sightings has finally weaved a belief into the American public's opinion and our demand for disclosure of everything the world governments know is growing. Most people believe something about UFOs, either that they're government craft or alien controlled. Very few people disbelieve both and think all sightings are mistaken natural occurrences or hoaxes. That many believe in the latter encourages me. At least with my belief in alien life, I am not alone.

What scares me, however, is imagining what the reality must be like. It's surely some hybrid of human thought, some mix of our collective conscience. Just because the little grays get most of the attention doesn't mean that's what they really look like. I've asked myself what my reaction would be if, on some day after disclosure, I'm walking down the sidewalk and one passes me. My imagination doesn't go that far. Or, at least, what I'm willing to conjure up. When I looked at them I would see so much of my assumptions about the world melted away. If I think on it too intently I have a flash of panic that is impossible to explain. It reminds me of something I can’t name.

I'm of the opinion they may not be as intellectually advanced as we might hope. A technological trajectory has us accomplishing incredible space travel within a century. We won't look that different by then. We might not act that differently by then. Even if it happens a century from now, unless we take some drastic turn in our genetic manipulation, we, and our tendencies, will not have changed much. We would find ourselves perhaps exploring space locked in old ways.

These life forms then, even with their expected technology, may be dealing with the exact or similar cultural challenges. Death. War. Greed. Illness. Hunger. Overcrowding. Limited resources. Political strife. Dying resources. With questions of what a life means and how it came about. In other words, they may not have any more answers than we do – just the ability to travel greater distances with a dangerously curious tendency. When they do show themselves, it may be the same reason we would - because they're in need.

If, in fact, they show themselves and are so far advanced we cannot begin understanding them, we'll have potential big problems. One argument is that people are not ready, that societies would
collapse when we find out we're not at the top of the thinking food chain, or the feeding one. That there's competition right around the corner and it's been watching and judging us, grading us, perhaps coming back for visits having been here in the past throughout our growth as civilizations, even after assisting us with our civilization.

What would happen the day after finding these things out? How will I react if Obama did announce to the world such a stunning revelation, as the cameras turn to a “visitor” on national television? How will you react? How will the world react? I believe these are possibilities worth considering.

I suspect most of us aren’t ready. Most of us are too distracted by paying our bills, burying our heads under inane entertainment, and filling our houses with cheap trinkets, let along make thinking room for the reality of alien life walking down our neighborhood streets at night. What already crawls there is often frightening enough. I would both welcome and dread it. How could we ever really be ready for such a thing? More importantly, how are those in charge of the truth determining when we're ready?

Memoir for NaNoWriMo?

NaNoWriMo is technically about writing fiction but I’m bending their already flexible rules a bit more and planning an immersion in memoir next month. Last year’s NaNo writing is now novel length and I’ve timed completing its third edit by the end of this month. Just as last year was my first serious novel attempt, this will be a first effort at writing book length memoir. Equally challenging. Twice as scary.

As an essayist, I’ve written scores of autobiographical shorts, seldom intimate, usually relating to isolated events and ideas from recent life, things I can write before the mind’s emotional snapshots dry and fly away. The task of marathon writing about my personal experiences from earliest memory and then carrying that on in the following months, however, is daunting.

I’ve heard a human’s favorite word is their own name. We hear complaints occasionally about those doing nothing but talking about themselves in conversation. You would think, in general, writing about ourselves would be a piece of cake. That we’d welcome the organized opportunity. I think I’d rather be set afire in the middle of a glass eating contest.

There comes a point when you’ve run out of convincing excuses and the fear subsides. My time is now.

I think working from the “what if” of fiction was a helpful preparation. As I chased the slippery fiction of Black Mountain Light through the days I kept over-ending big mental rocks and uncovering my own non-fiction. I couldn’t help working in the occasional personal element, constantly weaving the road between personal truth and entertaining lies, of real and speculated history.

There were cathartic moments when I recovered memories I didn’t know could exist. I would be creating the experiential lives of characters out of thin air and suddenly find myself depending on the real as a tool for seeing. We do this a lot, of course, writing about things of which we have no real knowledge. That’s part of the challenge, to call into this realm a made up thing, a borrowed life, and make it real. Not just believable, but believed. Inevitably we must occasionally fall back on personal experience and empathy, the remembering and imagining.

X is what I remember doing in a similar circumstance. This character is similar to her and she’d react by doing X. If I were in that place I would feel X and then do X. Perhaps our unwritten memoirs are where the answers hide.

In that conversation with the barely real I would have flashes of the true, like vainly trying to speed read but only comprehending small amounts of the story, tantalizing fragments of a puzzle. Real and strangely evolved scenes from my life would come up for a gulp of air after spending my lifetime at the lightless bottom of the sea. That caused chain reactions of other memories. The snapshots were quickly becoming film.

So my memory has rebooted over the last year, energized further by past workshops with George Ella Lyon (Don’t You Remember?) and Karen McElmurray (Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother’s Journey) and devouring every autobiographical phrase ever penned by Chris Offutt (The Same River Twice and No Heroes) and taking Jason Howard up on his instruction that we “must discover, understand, communicate, preserve.”

Though I’m getting older and my memory isn’t what it used to be, at this mid-life point in life I’m actually remembering me more and more. The novel effort was intended for consumption from the beginning. I’m not so sure about the life story thing. I’m doing this for me. If, in the end, I can take the mundane and semi-exciting chapters of my life and sift them clear and beautiful upon the page, perhaps there’s potential for someone learning from them. In the end, however, it’s about re-meeting me.

From: http://www.writerscommunity.net/

Act of Writing: A Pleasant Struggle

Writing, for me at least, feels like a tug-of-war you can’t walk away from. The act of writing is the contest, a pleasant struggle, the grappling for more rope, the hope of pulling something valuable in your direction along with all your ideas and characters strung down the line with you. But when the contest is over, the rope relaxes. In life you walk away from the game. In writing you cannot walk away. The rope may slack and whatever mysterious possibility was on the other side of the contest may wander off or just stand there waiting, but you’re still holding the rope, your hands burning from the struggle, at the ready, never mentally letting go of the distraction of coming back.

There was a time when I infrequently picked up rope. It had burnt my hands. The game was too exhausting or frustrating. I didn’t know how to hold on. Now, I’m glad to say, there are very few days when I don’t manage writing at least an hour or more. And when I’m not writing physically, that slacked rope, the thought of getting back to the story, the wonder of what will happen, the pleasure of it, remains in my grip. And I love it. Whether anything comes of what I’ve wrestled, tugged, and fought, I’ve still been doing something I now must do – write.

Writing is difficult work. It’s supposed to be. Students often lament the difficulty of college. I remind them that it is the difficulty of school that gives it value. If it were easy more people would do it and its value would plummet. It will never be easy, but it does get easier. And any relief from writing anxiety and blocks is worth figuring out. I’ve read and been given endless varieties of advice on when and how to write, ranging from the same time everyday to when it hits, in the mornings or in the evenings, on lunch breaks, in the middle of the night, only on weekends, to keep a pad of paper by the bed, to always have pen and paper in the car, carry a recorder, hire a secretary. All of this worked for someone, sometime. The key is to have patience with yourself long enough to figure out what works for you. If a cookie cutter solution works too well we might end up with cookie cutter work.

We can separate being inspired to write from the ability to be in the act of writing. They don’t often coincide, as you’ll all agree. One does not guarantee the other. There are times I’m physically able to be writing but lack inspiration, or I can be inspired mentally and not capable of being in the chair longer than five minutes at a time, or spiritually attuned to something that feels like inspiration but is in a language I cannot translate. It’s like writing biorhythms. When they all mesh up it’s like hitching a ride on a blissful cloud of clarity. But that’s not often. Even then it’s always hard work.

One thing that helps is feeling choked off now when I’m not writing. Not myself. I like that place. Something percolates – some conversation between characters, some interpretation of a scene that looks like poetry, some attempt at drawing a metaphor – in every waking hour. And I couldn’t be happier; or more distracted. That’s the painful part, when the mind races faster than your world allows opportunities to act. It works as long as the distraction doesn’t turn to resentment.

I think aspiring writers sometimes mislead themselves into thinking great writing is easy. They’ll read something so incredibly good, so naturally flowing, so convincing and shaking, inspirational, that they mistake that enjoyed perfection as ease on the part of the author. I can say that when I’m “not in the mood” (whatever that means), I find myself getting energized while reading something I consider great. That usually works. Go back to the things that made you want to write in the first place. The root of your inspiration.

From: http://www.writerscommunity.net/page/3

Wal-"Mall" Concept Pitched to Big Coal

…this just in from The Turnip…

Wal-"Mall" Concept Pitched to Big Coal

Southeast Kentucky --- Top-ranked Fortune 500 company Wal*Mart announced plans today for piloting a new concept for stores – the residential Wal*Mall. “We’re particularly interested in trying the concept in rural Appalachia, and equally excited to be partnering with the coal industry – after all, coal keeps our lights on,” head spokesperson, Amy Bettering told a press conference at the state capitol today. “We can think of no better way of assisting in the responsible managing of past mining sites in these beautiful mountains. The people deserve what Wal*Mart can bring them.”

“The idea makes sense,” Brent Samuelson with the Center for Rural Re-Structuring, commented. “Especially with the declining popularity of rural malls due to Wal*Mart’s unfortunate impact on local economies, combining the indoor store-to-store mall concept with the company’s supply capability gives consumers the best of both worlds.”

The concept includes establishing Wal*Malls on prior mountaintop removal sites. Harding Leighton, manager of three Legion Acres surface mines in Kentucky, thinks the idea will fly. “This gives us just another opportunity to continue the wonderful reclamation work we’ve respected for so long,” Leighton said.

Rather than one large store, which can often frustrate shoppers in their search for items, there will be indoor open walkways, similar to malls, leading to item specific mini-stores. For example, personal hygiene items will be in one store, similar grocery items in another, and bathroom and kitchen supplies in another, all within a pleasant park-like atmosphere protected from the environment. Additionally, residential units, ranging from one-bedroom studio apartments to three-bedroom condos, will line the outer perimeter of the property and be located at limited spots within the mall itself, giving shoppers Wal*Mart access within walking distance 24-hours per day. Due to the possibility of protests, several stores may even opt for gated community status.

The first pilot location is scheduled for groundbreaking this summer on the Lone Tree Mountain site above Emptyheaded Hollow, Kentucky. Official say the published time allotment for public comment has passed.