David Wayne Hampton:

A poem by Jim Wayne Miller

2011-10-05T06:40:00.000-07:00

Getting Together

Suddenly old friends are in the house. Laughter.
Separated years back, we've wandered around
lost in the American Funhouse. Together again,
what a crowd we are! The walls are angled
mirrors multiplying us many times over.
Each one of us sees the friend he knew
standing back of the one this friend has become,
and shyly, like an unacknowledged companion,
confused by all this familiarity, unseen by our friends,
stands the person we know we are. Laughter.

Moving through the crowd, I realize
I've gradually got used to walking around
in my life a huge elongated trunk and rippled face,
a bulging wrap-around brow, moving on stumpy legs,
my belt just above my shoetops, my chin
riding level with my fly. I have forgotten parts
of myself, my ears lie curled like lettuce leaves,
my hands grow right out of my shoulders,
no wrists or arms or elbows in between.

Glancing past familiar strangers, I try
to hold out a hand to someone who holds out a hand.
Laughter! We hold back all but the little horrors.

from The Mountains Have Come Closer. Boone: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1980.

Got Any Fries With that Shake?

2011-08-23T11:06:00.000-07:00

I was sitting at my computer desk working on some lesson plans for the upcoming school year when I felt a little jittery inside, like I was on an airplane experiencing some turbulence. I turned to the window to see if maybe I just ate some bad barbecue and was feeling a little lightheaded. The Venetian blinds were rocking back and forth. I felt like little hiccups were undulating through my chest. Slightly alarmed, I got up and walked out into the hallway and continued listening. A couple of lockers faintly rattled. Is it going to get worse? Should I vacate the building? A few other teachers were meeting in a classroom when I barged in on them.

"Do you guys feel that?" Two of the teachers gave me funny looks like I was on something, but the third said, "You know I did feel a little tremor."

Little?! I thought. But it turned out he was once stationed in Okinawa, so he was used to earthquakes. Since Facebook is blocked at my school, I couldn't instantly check to see what other folks were saying. The US Geological Survey web site finally confirmed it. A 5.9 earthquake occurred at 37.975°N, 77.969°W, or roughly between Charlottesville, Richmond, and Fredericksburg, Virginia. The television reports so far that there is no major damage, but that people in DC and NYC have been evacuated from some buildings and subways. A little spooky, but I am relieved that no one is hurt.

Update: There has been a buzz for about an hour after Fox News (consider the source) reported that a police officer stated the Washington Monument was leaning after the earthquake. Every social network has gone ape about it, even some people posting pictures, but no one of any authority has confirmed or denied it. Now, it's been a while since I've been to DC, but I do remember that the Washington Monument is tapered, by 1.3 degrees I believe, from the bottom to the top, so from almost any angle one looks it will seem to tilt. Surely some geometry math-type people out there can confirm this and end this shoot-from-the-hip editorial pseudo-journalistic rumor. "Fox News: when there's nothing real to report, make something up (or quote an analyst and make him/her out to be an expert)!"

The Sting

2011-06-06T10:16:00.000-07:00

One sunny afternoon last week I sent my two children out on the back deck to play with their toys for a little while while I washed dishes and watched them from the window. It was one of those rare moments when my eight-year-old daughter and four-year-old son were both playing nicely, and I enjoyed watching them. Every now and then they had to run down and grab a toy that had fallen through the rails of the deck. I was scrubbing a pot when I heard a horrendous scream, followed by my daughter yelling, "Daddy!"

Well, I just knew my daughter had done something mean and my son was running in to tattle on her, until I recognized the pitch of my son's crying as a "pain" cry, not "I got my feelings hurt" cry (There's a difference, and parents out there know what I'm talking about!). My daughter said there were a bunch of flies buzzing around under the deck and he started crying and swatting at them. She yanked him away and pushed him to the back door, she said. I looked at his lip and noticed a white spot encircling a small red dot. A bee sting. I hollered for my wife, who immediately gave him a shot of both children's Tylenol and Benadryl while I investigated.

More precisely, it was a Yellow Jacket. The nest, about the size of a softball, was right under the deck where my kids were playing. I tried looking for an angle so I could squirt the little devils with my wasp and hornet spray, but it was under the low end of the deck. It would require me to climb under it to get at them, and I wasn't about to be trapped under there squirting spray and them swarming all around me. I then remembered what my dad once did.

When my sister was four she got stung several times by a hornet's nest that was built under a piece of playground equipment in our neighborhood, one of those old animal rockers on the giant spring. I remember her rocking back and forth and crying as they swarmed around her. My father, being an aficionado and master of fire as a means to solve all pest problems (you should see him work on voles), made a torch out of old dust rags, then doused it in gasoline. He waited until dark when all the hornets returned to the nest and them ambushed them. I was told to stay in the car, but I remember an unknowing neighbor coming out on their front porch and yelling at my dad, wondering if he was an arsonist setting fire to the playground. No, just teaching them "damn bees" not to mess with his little girl.

I made my torch with a bamboo stick and an old towel, then liberally sprayed it with WD40 (less explosive and lower combustion temperature, I thought) and waited until dusk. My wife's chief concern was that I was going to set the wooden deck on fire, so I assured her by stretching the garden hose around and having an extra bucket of water to put out the torch. The kids watched from the kitchen window, my son's upper lip swollen and puffy like one of the cast members of Cats. Boy, those yellow jackets didn't know what was going on! Their little wings were just singeing right off as they dropped to the ground. The few that initially got away tried attacking the torch, flying into it like moths to a flame, literally. When I saw charred wasp paper falling from under the deck, I decided my job was done. I then shot the deck for a few minutes with the water hose.

My son, thank goodness, was not allergic. After a few hours the swelling went down, and we kept asking him to breath deeply for us just in case he had an asthmatic reaction. And just to let you know, I don't normally derive pleasure from torturing animals by setting them on fire. But when it comes to my family, I will avenge!*

* This is where my wife would roll her eyes and give me the "You've got to be kidding" look. I would then have to refer to the time I saved her from the grub-eating skunk, but that's another story.

Television Show's Depiction of Kentucky Un"Justified"

2011-04-12T18:00:00.000-07:00

Though I'm not from Eastern Kentucky, I've visited and passed through enough times that I was interested in seeing how FX's new show Justified portrayed the area and its people. I felt like I was watching an episode of The Dukes of Hazzard meets The Rifleman. Though filmed in Western Pennsylvania rather than the scrub hills of southern California, it still has that flavor of Appalachia run through a Hollywood filter: the stubborn, drunken, "aw, shucks" drawling hillbilly vs. the savvy, smug outsiders. You might as well brew a pot of raspberry truffle coffee with Maker's Mark; that's about the taste it left in my mouth.

Does it make for good television? I suppose. The storyline is well-written enough. It's about as accurate to Kentucky, though, as any wild-west trope was for 1950s television. No, you won't see tumbleweeds blowing down Main Street, nor will you see people sitting around a moonshine still listening to bluegrass music and waiting to fill their mason jar (we keep our stills hidden pretty good). So, no offense to fans of the show, but I hope that people aren't watching it and thinking, "Those Appalachians are crazy." Try watching an episode of Jersey Shore and see if you can say the same thing about The Garden State. I would hope not every resident acted like Snooki or The Situation.

A Poem by Kevin Young

2011-03-24T17:47:00.000-07:00

I took my Poets & Writers Club to Lenoir Rhyne University last month on a field trip to tour the campus and see a poetry reading by Kevin Young. What a lively performance! My high school students were much more engrossed in Young's choice of topic and style than even when we saw W.S. Merwin (the U.S. Poet Laureate) last semester. I now have a new favorite.

"Ode to Chicken"

You are everything
to me. Frog legs,
rattlesnake, almost any
thing I put my mouth to
reminds me of you.
Folks always try
getting you to act
like you someone else --
nuggets, or tenders, fingers
you don't have -- but even
your unmanicured feet
taste sweet. Too loud
in the yard, segregated
dark & light, you are
like a day self-contained --
your sunset skin puckers
like a kiss. Let others
put on airs -- pigs graduate
to pork, bread
become toast, even beef
was once just bull
before it got them degrees --
but, even dead,
you keep your name
& head. You can make
anything of yourself,
you know -- but prefer
to wake me early
in the cold, fix me breakfast
& dinner too, leave me
to fly for you.

from Dear Darkness (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008)

Mightier Than the Sword, But Still Dependant on Who Wields It

2011-03-18T07:00:00.000-07:00

Quill, n. An implement of torture yielded by a goose and commonly wielded by an ass. This use of the quill is now obsolete, but its modern equivalent, the steel pen, is wielded by the same everlasting Presence.

Ink, n. A villanous compound of tanno-gallate of iron, gum-arabic and water, chiefly used to facilitate the infection of idiocy and promote intellectual crime .... most generally and acceptably employed as a mortar to bind together the stones in an edifice of fame, and as a whitewash to conceal afterward the rascal quality of the material.

from Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary

Toast on a Heel

2011-01-18T16:10:00.000-08:00

My wife prides herself in speaking properly, being an elementary school librarian and teacher. I also make it a point to speak clearly and correctly, especially when teaching. However, I am a firm believer in "code-switching," the ability to speak appropriately depending on the social situation. When I'm not at work, or giving a reading or presentation, I allow my speech to relax and fall back on the Southwestern Virginia dialect I grew up on. My wife notices it even more when we drive up to Woodlawn, Virginia, to visit my parents. Though she won't admit it, my wife has a bit of her own Burke County, NC, dialect when she's at home. I thought I caught her the other day using it, but was humorously mistaken.

We were with her parents one weekend, when talk turned to breakfast. I already knew she didn't like eggs, but when she said she didn't like making "toast on a heel," I thought she meant "hill," because she pronounced it more like "heeyuhl."

"What do mean? Do you think it toasts differently at higher elevations? Are you afraid it's going to slide off your plate and roll to the bottom?" I asked. She just gave me that look she normally does when I make completely no sense, which is quite often sometimes. "You said you didn't like making toast on a 'heeyuhl.'"

"No, I said 'heel.'" I then immediately got what she meant, but just to be funny I kept yanking her chain.

"Fill in the blank for me -- 'Jack and Jill went up the _______.'" I swear she said it the same way at first, then corrected herself when she realized I was making fun of her.

To be fair, she always teases me whenever I talk about "strawburries" and "blackburries," or when I say I have a load of clothes in the "warsh," so I can't really tease her too much about it, but the running joke continues.

By the way, I like eating toast on a "heeyuhl," but not on a "heel." Those end pieces always taste like the plastic bag they came in to me.

A Poem by Charles Wright

2010-12-22T09:16:00.000-08:00

Christmas East of the Blue Ridge

So autumn comes to an end with these few wet sad stains
Stuck to the landscape,
-----------------------December dark
Running its hands through the lank hair of late afternoon,
Little tongues of the rain holding forth
--------------------------------------under the eaves,
Such wash, such watery words...

So autumn comes to this end,
And winter's vocabulary, downsized and distanced,
Drop by drop
Captures the conversation with its monosyllabic gutturals
And tin music,
---------------gravelly consonants, scratched vowels.

Soon the came drivers will light up their fires, soon the stars
Will start on their brief dip down from the back of heaven,
Down to the desert's dispensation
And night reaches, the gall and first birth,
The second only one word from now,
--------------------------------one word and its death from right now.

Meanwhile, in Charlottesville, the half-moon
Hums like a Hottentot
----------------------high over Monticello,
Clouds dishevel and rag out,
The alphabet of our discontent
Keeps on with its lettering,
-------------------------------gold on the black walls of our hearts...

from Locales: Poems from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, edited by Fred Chappell

"Daddy, He's on My Side Again!"

2010-11-23T07:23:00.000-08:00

“Daddy, he’s on my side again!” my sister would say as I inched my finger closer to the back seat stitching that designated the line that we were not to cross.

“No I’m not,” I would say teasingly, wiggling my finger to within a millimeter of the line.

My dad would groan and grip the steering wheel a little tighter. “If you two don’t stop fighting, I’m turning this car around and going home, and we’ll never go to Disney World again!”

"I'm not fighting, she started it!" I would say. It's a wonder my dad didn't turn the car around. We didn't deserve those Mickey Mouse ears. Later, I think Dad pacified us with buying us each one of those Yes & No Invisible Ink Game books he probably picked up at a gas station.

This morning I read the headlines that fighting broke out between North and South Korea on an island near their disputed border. Though I am by no means making light of this situation, as casualties on both sides were suffered, I can’t help but be reminded of how two siblings taunt and fight with each other when they aren’t getting along.

Pyongyang, a high military commander of the North, warned the South to stop their military drills on the island of Yeonpyeong. This island sits on the edge of disputed waters. “Don’t taunt us!” he seemed to be saying.

What does South Korea do? “You can’t tell us what to do!” Not only did they disregard the North’s commandment, but they fired artillery into disputed waters. Though far from the shores of North Korea, the South basically stuck their thumbs in their ears, wiggled their hands, and gave the North a raspberry. “Nyeh, nyeh, nyeh-nyeh-nyeh!”

Well, that infuriated the North, so they decided to wipe the smart-alecky smirk off South Korea’s face by throwing a sucker punch. The South got back on their feet and the fight ensued – for an hour! There hasn’t been fighting like this since the end of the Korean War.

When it was all over, the news reported casualties on both sides, though it sounds like the North got roughed up a little more. They’re still running their mouth, though, saying they’ll do it again if the South comes even within 0.001 millimeter of their border. “Yeah, try it again, I dare you!”

The problem is, if the North and South are squabbling siblings, who’s going to turn the car around and not take them to Disney World? “Daddy, he’s touching me again!” I sure hope they don’t come running to Uncle Sam for help. We’ve been Daddy to enough countries who haven’t been playing fair lately (Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran) that I don’t think there are enough corners in the world to set some of these red-headed step children in “Time Out.” And there are only so many times you can “warm” a child’s rear end before they get used to the spanking.

from “North, South Korea exchange fire; 2 marines killed” by HYUNG-JIN KIM and KWANG-TAE KIM, Associated Press, November 23, 2010

A Bone To Pick With Blake Shelton

2010-11-05T06:50:00.000-07:00

It's not an uncommon topic in Country music. Heck, you could say Country music helped perpetuate the image. Marty Stuart sang "Hillbilly Rock." Dwight Yokum sang about "guitars, cadillacs, hillbilly music." Go back to the early days of American music in the 1920s and 1930s and you will see that Country music was originally called Hillbilly music. Carrying on the tradition, Blake Shelton's "Hillbilly Bone," brings the old tropes back to life.

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against Blake Shelton. This song, however, has more to do in my opinion with just being an all-aroung good ol' redneck than being a hillbilly. Perhaps the term "redneck" has been overused in country music lately. Trucks and mud, hollerin' Yeehaw!, grits, and firearms -- check. But is this an original song? Hardly. It starts out with a contrast of "I got a friend in New York City/ He's never heard of Conway Twitty." Hank Williams, Jr. used that already in "A Country Boy Can Survive" -- "I got a friend in New York City/ He never calls me by my name, just Hillbilly."

You might think I'm not a fan of country music, but Blake Shelton's song is an example of everything that's wrong with country music these days. Trace Adkins, who brought us such "gems" as "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk," joins Shelton in the chorus of his song, "Hillbilly bone -da-bone-da-bone -bone." Now, Trace Adkins could kick my ass for sure and not raise his boot very high, but I don't think Trace Adkins has put out anything worthy to be called country music since his debut album "Dreamin' Out Loud."

Maybe I'm thinking too much about the poetics of a country song, when most folks want something to raise hell to or crank up on their radio on the way to work. But if I could play the guitar, I think I could write me some Country songs, and maybe do Hillbilly right for a change. But that's just me.

More Emily Dickinson Parodies

2010-11-01T06:43:00.000-07:00

It's that time of year again, as my American Lit. students study Emily Dickinson. Here is another round of imitation and parodies of the great poet recluse. There are the usual, but great, standbys of fart humor, but also some newly-delved topics of gaming "noobs" and the Youtube sensation Ray William Johnson. Enjoy (or not)!

My life sucks, and here's why
I sit in my room
and make myself cry.

My poems are sad and full of despair
It's too bad
No one cares.

I live by myself
with my 40 cats
and we all indulge
in their tuna packs.

I live alone
I have no friends
and this is how
my story ends.

--Caitlin, Logan, and Jhamil

Heart! We will destroy him!
You and I -- tonight!
You will bring the shovel for the grave --
We will be free by morning light!

When we are done, we need to flee --
Or else on a noose we will be.
Haste! Time is running short.
We will soon forget him.

-- Kasey, Angel, and Caleb

I heard a guy Fart When I Died
The smell in the room
was like the smell in the air
between the passes of gasses.

The noses around -- had pinched them closed
And breaths, were being held
for that last rip -- when the big one
was smelled -- in the room --

I willed my nostrils -- closed them up --
How powerful that smell be
Fresh air -- how I longed for --
and I loathed that darn guy.

And shoo -- loud and rumbling fast --
between the stench and me
And then I breathed my last breath --
--as I cried sweet liberty!

-- Garrett, Brandon, and Mary

This is my letter to the Noobs
Who don't play MLG --
Those worthless noobs and scrubs--
Those not as good as me.

My skills, they are the greatest
You will ever see--
For my skills in Halo--
They come from MLG!

--Matt W.

Tribute to Ray William Johnson

The creepy guy-- stares back at us --
with a look that wants too much --
And a deer that's never felt the run
of a nice -- failure -- Drunk

He speaks with lips that make us laugh
But never have ended squaids
And talks with careful seriousness
that has never been dissed

The Youtube man is straight and forward
Great enough to feel
But who is to say, on the other side,
He's not the one who's trollin'?

Ray William is a wonderful thing
That sometimes shows Fatty Spins
But while we try not to crack
The two camels is what breaks us

-- Andrea and Aimee

A Poem by David T. Manning

2010-10-10T19:14:00.000-07:00

Hankie

That fresh white linen hankie
your wife pressed & folded
with such love fits nice
in your clean shirt pocket.

Then you hachoo!!
You blow & fold it neat.
You blow & fold, blow & fold,
blow & fold again -- then

you wad the damn thing up
into something useful, so
it's ready for that
water-cannon sneeze, for those

green giant ropes of snot
that rattle out of your skull
like log-chains over a F-150 tailgate.
Yes sir! That's a good big whitish

rag now you can roll a man-size
cold up in and stuff it
in the ass pocket of your Levis
until it's too wet to sit on.

from Detained by the Authorities (Pudding House Publications 2007)

WV Governor Sues the EPA -- It Must Be Election Time

2010-10-07T13:54:00.000-07:00

"West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin (D) on Wednesday announced the state is suing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over its crackdown on mountaintop-removal practices by the coal mining industry.

"Manchin, at a morning news conference at the state capitol, said the lawsuit had been in the works long before the death of Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) — a staunch defender of the state's mining industry — in June, according to The Associated Press. Manchin spoke of Byrd’s legacy and pulled out a copy of the U.S. Constitution, as Byrd often did on the Senate floor, and quoted the 10th Amendment, which deals with states' powers, the AP reported."

"Manchin’s announcement comes as he finds himself in a dead heat with Republican John Raese for Byrd’s seat. Manchin’s troubles for that seat — despite his high approval rating as governor — have been used to illustrate the problem some Democrats are having in being linked to President Obama and national Democratic leaders. Raese has steadily improved in the head-to-head race, and edged ahead in a recent Rasmussen poll."

It must be election time. Is it just me, or does anybody else see the connection between West Virginia Governor Manchin's announcement to sue the EPA with his race against Raese for Sen. Byrd's seat in Congress? What was he thinking? -- "Here's a sure way to get those fence-sitting voters and fat cats to vote for me instead of voting Republican, attack the very organization that's looking out for the interests of the little man, the EPA." It's a shame that politicians use their power to promote themselves at the expense of everyone else. And so many folks (Republicans) are making the EPA out to be some organization that throws its weight around, sticking its nose where it doesn't belong. What about Big Coal? Hasn't he been doing that for over 70 years to the residents of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Virginia? How have they fared as a result?

"EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said in a statement when they were released that the “people of Appalachia shouldn't have to choose between a clean,  healthy environment in which to raise their families and the jobs they need to support them.”

It must be election time. The lines are being drawn -- and polarized. Republicans are swarming like buzzards around Obama and the Democrats, ready to swoop in for the kill. And it's not going to be a pretty sight. There won't be any winners in this election, I'm afraid. We're all going to lose.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said in his essay "Nature" that someone may own the land, but no one will ever own the landscape. It belongs to everyone who gazes upon it. That's not really true anymore, as coal companies are removing the landscape, the very horizon that Emerson said we needed. "The health of the eye demands a horizon," he said. So what's going to happen to us when that landscape is gone, and is replaced by valley fill, flat land not good for anything but scrub grass. We've got cheap energy, but we are living along a Martian landscape.

from "W.Va. Gov. Manchin sues EPA over mountaintop removal" By Darren Goode, in The Hill

Dueling Frequencies

2010-10-03T19:34:00.000-07:00

I took my family to Beech Mountain this weekend for Autumn at Oz, the one time of the year they re-open the 1970s theme park Land of Oz (see my previous blog entry on this). They had a great time, of course. My daughter dressed as Glinda the Good Witch and my son the Tin Man.

The weather was great. It was a clear, blue-sky day with not a cloud in site. We were about to leave when I decided to take a scenic drive around the north side of Beech Mountain (my wife would claim I took a wrong turn). I was listening to my usual radio station, WNCW 88.7, which always has a great program called "Going Across the Mountain" on Saturday afternoons, the best and longest bluegrass program you can find on the radio. I wasn't paying close attention to the music, though, as I was driving around looking for the way down, er... I mean looking around. The DJ came on the radio and announced "You are listening to 88.7 WMMT in Whitesburg, Kentucky...." I had one of those "What the?!" moments like I had heard it wrong, but I hadn't.

Here I was on top of Beech Mountain, North Carolina, listening to a radio station broadcasting from Whitesburg, Kentucky, where my good friend Wiley Quixote (Jim Webb) DJs. I was just there this past July on the radio myself (see previous post). By the time I stopped saying, "Cool!" over and over the frequency started switching between WNCW and WMMT to the point that my daughter started laughing. It was Alison Krauss and Union Station vs. Gary Stewart singing "She's Acting Single, and I'm Drinking Doubles."

I was told by my friend Jim Web that at one time many folks could listen to WMMT in NC, but when WNCW started broadcasting in 1989 their frequency overpowered all of the listening range for WMMT in NC. I guess at this altitude, and being on the north side of the mountain, there are still pockets that are shadowed and still within range.

"Hey, Honey! It's 'Dueling Frequencies!'" I laughed. My wife wasn't as impressed. It would've been really funny if Eric Weissburg had started picking against Arlo Guthrie or something like that.

She wryly responded, "Let's just hope Jeb and Zeke don't jump out of the woods and see your 'purty' teeth."

"Jenny, we're on Beech Mountain. We're more likely to see Mr. Moneybags step out of his million-dollar chalet walking his Pomeranian on a Gucci dog leash. I'm more likely to be labelled 'deranged hillbilly' in this neighborhood!"

Bob Dylan, the Hillbilly

2010-09-21T17:17:00.000-07:00

In an interview with Rolling Stone, John Mellencamp comments on directing Bob Dylan's video for "Political World."

"Bob said one thing over and over: 'Don't make me look stupid.' I said, 'We're in videos, we all look stupid. Who has a video where they don't look stupid? .... We get along well. He's a hillbilly. I laugh so hard when I'm with Bob. I call him 'Bob-aloo.' Bob does things his way, and so do I, and sometimes we pay an awful high price."

The term "Hillbilly" must be evolving in its usage. Mellancamp, born in Indiana, might not have seen many hills growing up, but Dylan was born in Minnesota, the same heartland region I would say as Mellencamp. Having left the hills of Appalachia or the Ozarks, the term Hillbilly has found new life. Clearly used in an affectionate manner, perhaps Mellencamp's use of "Hillbilly" is a generational thing, like calling Dylan "old fashioned" or an "old fart," or someone who's backwards or set in his ways. I think if I called my dad a Hillbilly, however, he'd wallop me with a Chardonay bottle!

from Rolling Stone September 2, 2010

What Makes It Taste Better -- Now Available!

2010-09-20T12:56:00.000-07:00

For years I've been wanting to publish my own book of poetry, hoping that I would someday win a contest and get my foot in the door. I mean, how else do you do it? Having poems published in poetry and writing journals, I knew that someone out there thought my work was good. Many times over the years my writer friends and fellow SAWC members have nurtured and supported my work. This summer I said to myself, "What am I waiting for?"

I discovered a website that brings print-on-demand to the desktop -- Lulu.com. I have heard pros and cons about the website, but when I started looking around Lulu, I realized how simple it could be. As the chef in Ratatouille said "Anybody can cook," I'm here to say "Anybody can publish."

Maybe I'm destroying the mistique of publishing, that if anyone can do it, then there must be quite a bit of amateurish stuff out there. Maybe so, but it isn't easy either, let me say. There are many steps to the process, and a lot of trial and error, but it is feasable.

So, without further ado, I present my first poetry book collection What Makes It Taste Better. Some of my friends who have helped me in encouragements have been gracious enough to provide back-cover reviews:

"In David Wayne Hampton’s first collection of poems the world is always at summer, with somewhere nearby “the ploink, plunk, brunk of the water/ the high hat, pat-a-slap tap/ of silver.” He gives us the kind of food we want on a green summer day- from doughnuts to ham hocks to Cheerwine, to Moonpies- and good family stories to listen to while we munch. Don’t make the mistake of dismissing these poems as light, however: “it’s not the eureka moment/ but the long, slow continuing” through these poems of place that makes the reading of them as satisfying as an afternoon swim at summer camp. Hampton’s southern Appalachian world is light-filled, but within light dwells the possibility of all colors, including the darkest ones. “Don’t call us backward” one poem admonishes, “we walk in the same direction as you/ just not in such a hurry.” Don’t hurry through Hampton’s collection; you’ll be glad you lingered awhile.”
-Dana Wildsmith, Author of Back to Abnormal

"Clever parodying, curious and playful lines make WHAT MAKES IT TASTE BETTER verge on the educational and insightful, yet with humor, not pedanticism. Here I found out that the mullet haircut was once called the 'Carolina Waterfall' and that blackbirds and boogers have more than a little in common. The poems’ humor saves them, in that tongue-in-cheek way that disarms any resistance to their charms. David Hampton’s clever word-play with classical and modern themes reminds me of the work of the legendary Louise McNeill. This book made me laugh and cringe, sometimes in the same instant."
– Ron Houchin, author of Museum Crows

"In this wryly observant first collection, David Hampton gives us an insider's view of life in these post-millennium Appalachians. What makes it taste better? Humor which manages to be all at once ironic and compassionate. A sense of history, and of one's own place in it. Precision of language and the joy of its tang on your tongue."
-- Pauletta Hansel, author of Divining and First Person

Thank you to all who supported me in this endeavor! And thank you to all who take a chance in purchasing a copy! I hope you enjoy it.

A Trip to the Farmer's Market

2010-09-19T10:15:00.000-07:00

I was trying to find the Thomas Wolfe House yesterday in Asheville on a family outing (my internal "man map" was off) when I turned off the exit for the WNC Farmer's Market. I decided to stop there instead, and I was glad I did.

This is the time of year in the early fall that farmer's markets get one last resurgence of business before the winter lull. I like the concept of farmer's markets. Why buy produce that shipped from California or by boat from another country when you can get fresher seasonal fruits and vegetables while at the same time supporting your community of local farmers? For many people, and some restaurants, farmers markets are a vital outlet for buying and eating local produce and other wares year round. For me, it had been a while.

Being near Hendersonville, NC, I immediately remembered that the apples were in season. The kids were hungry for a snack, so my daughter and I grabbed a peck bag and started browsing the different varieties. There were several I remembered from years ago when I used to work at a summer camp in Hendersonville during the summer and fall seasons, like Honey Crisp and Winesaps, but there were several varieties that I had never come across before.

For example, if you like Golden Delicious apples, try finding Ginger Golds. Smaller, but much sweeter with a thinner skin. There was another odd-looking apple that I had to try -- Sheepnoses. They had the skin texture of an old-timey pear my grandmother used to grow near her house, with an elongated shape. The flesh was a little dry, but sweet and, I swear, almost tasted like a pear. My kids went crazy over the Ginger Golds, especially my son who normally can't chew the peelings.

There was also a small bakery there that had a really good fried apple pie. Of course, there were pumpkins and gourds galore as well, some so big I thought my kids could have used them for canoes. All in all, it was a fortunate mistake to stop there, and for folks who have never been or not been in a while it is well worth a visit. I bought a whole bag of summer squash, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, and okra for $4. Can't beat that with a stick.

A Poem by John F. Keener

2010-08-27T12:25:00.000-07:00

Migration

I dream of mountains where I don't live
And scarce recall but for old connections
Circled round, made course corrections
And put down here, so here I live

I dream of roads where I don't walk
Ones that go slender on the senses
Sweetened along by rot-sweet fences
But my feet are here, so here I walk

I dream of jobs that I don't work
And never could, the good Lord knows
For money grows where money grows
And its roots run here, so here I work

I dream of places I don't belong
Not precisely, not anymore
And even if I did before
I belong here now, and that's what's wrong

from the Appalachian Journal 26:2 (Winter 1999)

The Rose or the Cabbage

2010-08-25T12:52:00.000-07:00

"The question of common sense is always 'What is it good for?' -- a question which would abolish the rose and be answered triumphantly by the cabbage." -- James Russell Lowell

I came across this quote in my class textbook today that I hadn't noticed before. In teaching Romanticism, I discuss how the Romantics reacted against the Age of Reason's philosophies -- that science was the answer to all life's questions. I will admit that Romanticism had its faults; real life is not ideal or beautiful or mysterious sometimes. Too often, though, I throw away the rose for the cabbage -- I focus only on the practicality or usefulness of things, but ignore the felicitous beauty of other things. Practical and useful things bring contentment, sure (TV remotes, can openers, for example), but it's the beautiful things that bring joy and renewal to our lives.

Case in point. Because the doctor told me my bad cholesterol is too high, he strongly suggested I start getting more exercise and eating better. I started walking in the evenings in my neighborhood because it was the most practical use of my limited time, and thus fulfilled the doctor's prescription for me. I didn't much care for it at first. I wanted to be hiking or mountain biking in the woods somewhere, not walking in a circle past rows of suburbia housing. When I started looking for the beauty in the seemingly mundane, though, things changed. I noticed how the woods smelled differently as I passed the undeveloped lots, how houses even had different odors as I walked past the open garage doors. Looked up and traced the zig-zag silhouettes of bats against the evening sky as they flew from one street light to the next. Heard at least four distinctly different insect sounds (crickets, cicadas, katydids, and one I can't identify). Totally useless and impractical pursuits, I know, but well worth my attention. The laps passed effortlessly.

Eating better, that's a different story.

On the Radio in Whitesburg, Kentucky

2010-08-18T06:54:00.000-07:00

I was up in Whitesburg, Kentucky, the last weekend in July to camp and do some writing. My friend and fellow poet, the infamous Wiley Quixote (Jim Webb), owns a private campground on top of Pine Mountain called Wiley's Last Resort. He also DJ's on Appalshop's WMMT 88.7 in downtown Whitesburg. After a fruitful day of writing and relaxing, he asked if I wanted to be a guest on his radio show "Appalachian Attitude." All of a sudden I went from being Thoreau, leading a simple life led close to nature (Wiley actually has a "Walled-In Pond" on his property), to having my voice broadcast all over Eastern Kentucky and the World Wide Web . I was excited, honored, and a little nervous. I called my wife to tell her to listen online at 5pm on August 2nd, but unfortunately she had to take the kids to a doctor's appointment. I didn't think to call anyone else in my family. I also didn't have much time to prepare. Wiley wanted me to read some of my poetry and talk about my life as a writer, so I found some poems and took a few notes for myself.

I had a blast! I didn't have to wear headphones, but I had one of those big microphones on the swing arm to speak into. Knowing a little bit about me, Jim prompted me with questions which I didn't have much trouble coming up with something to say. Unlike most guest writers, I didn't have a book of poetry or my novel to promote, but I did have a caller. During a public service announcement, the red light started flashing, silently signalling a call. It was Walter B. Lane, who lives in Letcher County, I believe. He remembered when I was an editorial assistant at the Appalachian Journal and corresponded with him on several occasions, particularly on a poem ("The Way North") of his the Journal published. He said he appreciated the encouragement I gave him in my rejection notices. That made the whole interview worthwhile, I think.

WMMT didn't post the interview in their online archive, or one earlier in the year by fellow poet and SAWCer Dana Wildsmith (which I would love to listen to), but if ever they do I will provide a link for anyone interested. I wasn't a brilliant orator, but I had fun. And, again I apologize to the feline-lovers out in radio land when I joked during the traffic report about not having a cat to throw in front of a steam roller on Madison Avenue!

What's In A Name

2010-06-24T23:35:00.000-07:00

Why do poets use their middle names? I thought about this from time to time. Maybe its for the name recognition, to sound more important or distinguished or to distinguish themselves from the thousands of other names that sound similar. Then there are some writers that use initials for their first name, middle name, or both, like Frank X. Walker or R.T. Smith. As a fledgling writer, I once thought of penning my name as D. Wayne Hampton, but it reminded me too much of my Freshman dorm-floor nickname, so I chucked that idea. I don't know about other folks without asking them, but I do have a reason why I use my full name.

My father's name is David Wilson Hampton. He wanted so much to make me a Junior, but my mom would not hear of it. As a compromise, he named me David Wayne Hampton. However, as I grew up I became more aware that only my middle initial was requested when filling out forms, so people always asked, "Oh, so are you a Junior?" to which I would vehemently reply, "No. I am not!" It got on my nerves pretty quickly.

When I was 13 my family physician picked up my father's folder by mistake instead of mine. I was there for a routine physical, and when the doctor walked in with a chart in his hand, he said, "Whoops. I think I got the wrong one. You didn't recently have a vasectomy, did you?" Not something a pubescent boy really wants to know about his father. The images conjured up in my mind that day are still etched in the back of my skull.

As a teenager I was very self-conscious about being my own person and not wanting that association with my father. When I opened a checking account, I insisted using my full name as my official signature on my checks. When I got my driver's license, I signed my name in full. As I've gotten older, though, I regretted making such a fuss about it, especially in front of my father whose pride was probably hurt a little each time I wanted to distinguish my name from his. I'm still glad I'm not a junior, but I'm proud now that I share my first name and middle initial with my father. An added bonus -- in college he would sometimes let me cash a check originally written out to him, and my AAA account states I've been a loyal member with them since the sixth grade.

As a writer, I admit I wanted my name to be less common. David is such a common name, and everywhere I've lived since college there has been another David Hampton in the phone book. When I began working at the Appalachian Journal at ASU, where I attended college, I noticed how many other writers I met or came across in my work had the same middle name as me: Jim Wayne Miller, Richard Wayne Hague, and longtime editor of the AppalJ Jerry Wayne Williamson. As a joke to pass the long office hours of proofreading and transcribing, Jerry and I came to the conclusion that it was the perfect middle name. We even tossed around the idea of giving everyone on the editorial board the middle name of Wayne in an upcoming issue just to see if anyone would notice. We never did, but it became the running joke for a while.

I hope when people see my name in a journal or literary publication, they won't think I'm being pompous or self-important because I use my full name. It does take up more space on a line, but in one way I'm just carrying on a tradition of literary nomenclature, right?

Froggy went a Boarding, and He Did Ride

2010-06-09T05:34:00.000-07:00

After picking up my 3-year-old son at daycare the other day , instead of going into his usual babble about what he did or who wouldn't share their toy with him, he started blurting out, "Froggy! Froggy, Daddy!" At first I thought he was just talking about a toy he had dropped the day before in the back floorboard. I had already pulled out onto the road by that point.

"Daddy will get it when we get home," was my rehearsed reply.

"No, Daddy. Look!" I looked in the rear-view mirror, and he was pointing at my driver's side window. A tree frog must have dropped from an overhanging limb while I was parked. He was wide-eyed and clutching frantically to the glass with his little webbed feet, looking back at me at eye level. A little startled at first, at a stop sign I quickly pulled an empty drink bottle out of the floorboard and cut the top off it with my pocket knife, hoping do a little wildlife rescue. A car pulled up behind me, however, so I drove off before I could get out and catch it. It began to crawl down the glass like it was about to jump from my car.

"No!" I cried.

"What wrong, Daddy?" my son said, very concerned. I was not going to let this thing take a plunge to its death on my watch, so I started to roll down the window in hopes of catching it before it committed froggy suicide. Here I am, driving down the road with my hand out the window trying to scoop up a hitchhiking amphibian.

That's when it hopped into my car. Thankfully it didn't go for my face, because I probably would have swatted out of reflex and killed it. Instead, it landed on my dash. I could see it now, the thing was going to climb down my defrost vent and get stuck, shriveling up and leaving a stench of baking frog meat in the afternoon sun. Instead it proceeded to climb down the crack between my car door and the dash. My son was going nuts now, "Get it Daddy, get it!"

I pulled into a church parking lot and opened my car door. It had safely clung to my door, like it would crawl under a layer of tree bark. I caught it in the plastic bottle, and allowed my son to take a minute to look at it. It was breathing feverishly, like it thought we were going to eat it. There weren't any trees around nearby, so I placed it under a bush next to a tombstone in the cemetery. I'm sure someone at the church saw me and wondered what I was doing at the grave site.

No flowers, just leaving a frog.

Emily Dickinson -- Imitation and Parodies

2010-03-30T13:15:00.000-07:00

My students are once again studying American poetry, so I had them imitate one of Emily Dickinson's poems. Here is a selection of a few I thought really stood out. Some are sincere imitations, while others are just plain wacky. Enjoy!

I remember once
where once was us
yes -- we were once
but it twas the past

To dwindle in the past
is where you'll find me last
I can taste your bitter words
enveloped inside myself

the untangible ticking
that time's supposed to heal
But I shall ponder on
to the last of my appeal

-- Tina Vue and Tou Keng Yang

Fart! We will hear it!
You and I -- today!
You may feel the warmth it gave --
I will smell it!

When you are done, please tell me
That I may straight leave!
Haste! lest while you're gagging
I remember forever!

-- Amanda Matney and Brandi Harris

I'll tell the truth because you can't --
There is no need to cry
You're sad too much, let's see a smile
Happiness is good -- Surprise!
You're kind of crazy -- can't be pleased
Try and have a good time
Come on and smile now Emily
The world is really kind.

--Daniel Padula and Trever Miller

Oh -- my -- lord -- Emily
Honestly -- what -- is -- with --
these -- dashes
They -- are -- so -- annoying --
Like -- a -- cup

It's -- like -- those --
business -- names --
Save -- a -- Cent
Rent -- a -- Car
All -- making -- no -- sense
Whatsoever --

You -- would've -- been --
great -- at -- Morse -- Code--
Oh -- m-y -- st-op --
ta-k-ing -- ov-e-r
my -- poe-m yo-u stup--id d-ashes
Cu-r-s--e yo-u Emil ------------------

-- Josh Kincaid

Why is my Blog Site a Target for Spam?

2010-03-17T04:38:00.000-07:00

It's been worse over the past couple of weeks. Solicitations for female Viagra, shoes, something in Chinese I can't read, and someone who just says I have a "genial" post. I wonder if anyone else out there is getting the same. Perhaps it's because I have been inactive for a while on my site, and browsers think I wouldn't notice, except for the fact I have my comments moderation function turned on. Any advice on how to be less of a target, anyone?

I Finally Finished My Novel ... Now What? (or So What?)

2009-08-31T12:25:00.000-07:00

In the summer of 2005 I began what started as a short story about a boy going to college and working at a pizza delivery store. It was based in part on my experiences as a college student and pizza guy. The story continued to grow roots and branches until I realized I had the makings of something bigger. I continued working on my "novel" off and on in the following years, periodically writing poetry when I didn't have huge chunks of time to devote to prose writing.

I didn't mention this to many people. I mean, it seemed every writer had an unfinished novel they were working on, and they never seemed to have it finished. I didn't want to be one of those writers of the "Great American (Unfinished) Novel." I told my wife about it a few times, who nodded her head and replied, "That's nice," and then dismissed it when I had trouble telling her what the story was about. Who can blame her? I might have read a chapter or two over the years at some SAWC meetings, but other than that I felt I shouldn't talk it up if I didn't have a "finished" completed novel.

This summer, four years after starting it, I can safely say that I have a finished product, tentatively titled The Slow Constellations Wheeled On. Of course, finished is a relative term, as I expect to do some tweaking or overhauling of the story after having a few close writer friends do a critical reading of it. The ending was the hardest part I found. The closer I came to the end the more difficult it seemed to draw most of the loose ends to a close. I felt like I was trying to tie the end strings of a mop head together. When I did finish the last chapter, I printed the 247-page hard copy and read from the beginning, making notes of the character's names, fixing inconsistencies between details in the story, and looking for grammar and usage mistakes. Then I revised the whole thing on the computer.

Now what?

I read an article somewhere, and conversing with a writer friend about her own novel confirmed it, that the one thing I had to have in order to make my novel marketable is a "dust-jacket" summary of what the novel is about, so when someone asks me what my book is about I can have an answer for them. The following is a rough draft of what I think a good description would be. I don't want to be too specific in giving away details, and I don't want to be too vague, but I tried to describe it in a way that people could relate to its thematic elements.

"A coming-of-age story about Randall Spivey, a boy trying to survive the college scene in a small mountain town on his own in the absence of family support, balancing school and his job as a pizza delivery person, wanting to make it on his own yet battling the despair and loneliness that both pulls him to and repels him from his troubled life at home, facing hardships that challenge him emotionally and spiritually and bring him to the edge of the abyss."

The synopsis needs work, for sure. Eventually I hope to send my novel out to some recognized contests that offer the winner a publishing contract of some sort. I think I have something worthy of being shared with others. I've heard the hardest avenue to take is to send it to an agent. However, I am prepared for a future time when I realize that I will never publish it unless I go "vanity" and publish it myself (in which case it probably won't be published) and just chalk it up to a labor of love.

I'll keep you posted.

My Ipod Shuffle List, Almost Random

2009-08-10T17:09:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been over at Facebook and seen where people are posting the next 10 consecutive songs on their Ipod shuffle feature (as a way of sharing their musical tastes?), and thought I would try that out myself. I haven't had my Ipod for a year yet, and am still figuring out how to use it (you should have heard me cuss when I first got it). I have learned that the shuffle feature is not truly random, as it will play songs by the same artist back to back or sometimes three times in a set of 10 songs. So I find myself "fast forwarding" to the next song (do people still say that? I know it's reminiscent of cassettes, and "rewind" is even more so). Here is my list of 25 consecutively different artists from my Ipod . To be honest, I only cut 4 songs out that were repeat artists.

1. Drunken Angel -- Lucinda Williams
2. Rainy Night in Georgia -- Hem (a Brook Benton cover)
3. Temporarily Blind -- Built to Spill
4. Ten Degrees and Getting Colder -- Nanci Griffith (a Gordon Lightfoot cover)
5. West Liberty -- Glossary (the best Southern Garage Rock band no one's ever heard of)
6. Short Life of Trouble -- Carolina Chocolate Drops
7. Whistling in the Dark -- They Might Be Giants
8. High Life -- Counting Crows
9. Psycho Killer -- Talking Heads
10. Happy Birthday -- "Weird Al" Yankovic
11. You Might Think -- The Cars
12. If I Could -- Jack Johnson
13. Again & Again -- The Bird & the Bee
14. Joy of Love -- Victoria Williams
15. Godspeed -- Mortal ( a Christian Industrial Metal Band from the '90s, no kidding)
16. Escape (The Pina Colada Song)-- Rupert Holmes (I know, but it's a guilty pleasure)
17. New Slang -- The Shins
18. Whatever Way the Wind Blows -- Kelly Willis
19. Nobody Gets a Smooth Ride -- The Choir
20. Just How Lonely -- Southern Culture on the Skids
21. Pretend -- King's X (one of the most eclectic heavy metal bands in their day)
22. Oh Molly Dear -- B.F. Shelton (an oldie but a goodie)
23. Past the Mission -- Tori Amos
24. Sandy Land -- The Whites (from "Down From the Mountain" O'Brother Soundtrack)
25. Gin and Juice -- The Gourds (a Snoop Dogg cover, I'd call it the "Hick-Hop" version)

I don't consider myself a music snob, unless it's that modern top 40 corporate mess, but if you are like me you like what you like. One thing I will say about Ipods, I forsee the death of the concept album with this new techology where you purchase only the songs you want. For me, I couldn't listen to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon or The Beatles Sargeant Pepper's albums without listening to the whole thing. Each song fits with the next one and connects to the one before it in some way. It's kind of like what happened to album artwork. In a way it died with the vinyl record. Most of the time ITunes doesn't have the album artwork of CDs I transfer to my playlists, anyway. I hope, however, that there will always be those dusty music stores you can walk into and dig through record bins or pick out a use CD for 3 bucks while listening to the cashier's album pick of the hour.

If You Can't Duct It....

2009-07-05T17:57:00.000-07:00

I embarrassed my wife over family vacation a couple of weeks ago. We took our two kids to Myrtle Beach, and stayed at the Hampton Inn. It wasn't cheap, of course (we'd been paying on it since last year), but it was nice, let me tell you. I was a little dissappointed in the front desk's service, though.

We were fixin' to head out to the beach when the bottom of my sandle came loose and started flapping like a flip-flop every step I took. It was a K-mart special, and I had them for three years, so I wasn't surprised. The kids were tugging at my arm to hurry and get out to the sand when a thought came across my mind, "If only I had a little duct tape."

Like many folks, having a roll of duct tape handy is about as important as a Leatherman tool or a Swiss Army knife. I always keep a roll in my car, and in my desk drawer at the high school where I teach. I go through a roll of it a semester, and its mostly students who need it -- ripped notebook covers, ball caps with the plastic adjuster torn in back, you name it. I won't go into all the creative, and ludicrous, things I've done with duct tape. People have already written books on that.

I figureded about five or six wraps around the back of my sandal would last me at least until the end of the day. Come to find out then that I didn't have a single roll in the van. I remembered the little sign posted in the hotel room stating for any necessities their guests might have forgotten to pack -- toothbrush, razor, needle and thread -- to see the receptionist at the front desk. Despite my wife's eye-rolling, I was sure that if they had toothbrushes they surely would have a roll of duct tape behind the counter. "I'm sure that's something that gets asked of them all the time," I assured my wife. She took the kids around the corner to the side lobby to hide.

When I asked the guy at the front desk if he had any duct tape, or even electrical tape (trying to broaden the options) he looked at me like I'd just asked him for a kidney. I should have known better. The guy looked like some model off the cover of GQ magazine. I told him my sandal was falling apart and I just needed about an arm's length worth. "Well, we don't keep that up here," but in a professional tone said, "but I could call our maintenance man on the radio to see if he has any." He pulled out his radio. "Jerry, are you busy right now?" From the radio I heard a crackle and the sound of an electric drill in the background. "What!?" said the guy on the other end. "We have a gentleman at the front desk who is in need of...."

By that point I was embarrassed that the guy behind the counter interrupted the maintenance man from what he was doing just for duct tape, so I told him not to worry about it. "Well, what room are you in. We could send it up to you later." The thought of room service bringing a roll of duct tape on a silver platter crossed my mind, and I told him to forget it -- I was going out with my family to the beach and wouldn't be back for a few hours. I was also more embarrassed that the maintenance man was probably wondering what idiot would go on vacation and not keep a roll of duct tape under his passenger seat, so I just put up with the flip-flopping until the end of the day and then threw the things away.

"You really showed the color of your neck just now, didn't you?" was my wife's reply when I came back empty handed. She had that I-told-you-so look on her face. "This isn't the Clampett Mansion." Just to rib her a little, I replied, "Well, if we stayed at the Sea Mist or some place a little less fancy, I bet they would have had a roll of duct tape behind the counter! Or Motel 6, 'We'll leave the light on for you -- and a roll of duct tape in your bedside drawer.'" It would probably get more use than that Gideon's Bible, not to be blasphemous or anything.

Moral of the story: Buy an economy pack of duct tape and then keep a roll everywhere you might need it, even if you have to sneak it into your wife's van without her noticing.

My wife's moral of the story: Don't ask the front desk clerk at a 4-star hotel for duct tape. You might as well try asking him for a Skoal Bandit or a Slim Jim.

A Poem by R.T. Smith

2009-05-25T06:03:00.000-07:00

Directly

"I'll get it directly," she'd say, meaning
soon, meaning, when I can, meaning, not
yet, bet patient, the world don't turn upon
your every need and whim. Or "the dogs
will be back home directly, I reckon,"
"the preacher will be finished," "your daddy
will see you," "supper will be laid out"--
all "directly," which never meant the straight
line bewteen two surveyor's points or
an arrow's flight, but rather, by the curve,
the indirect, the arc of life and breath,
and she was right, and when she passed
or was passing, I could not say which,
in a patchwork quilt, the makeshift room,
the sweet hymn notes sung neighborly
across the hall, she whispered, "Learn to tell
what needs doing quick as a bluesnake
and what will take the slow way, full
of care and mulling, be fair in every
dealing with beasts and people and all
else alive, and surely, my dear, He will
come for you in His good time, the way
He comes for all of us, directly."

from The Oxford American, July/August 2003.

Poem

2009-05-12T12:37:00.000-07:00

Collegiate Poetus (Family: Egotistae)

These aspiring writers,
gathered poets,
form like anthills,
busy workers
at political correctness,
carefully carrying granules
of dirt and scraps of metaphor.

They are everywhere,
crawling, darting
from sidewalk cracks
and coffee houses.
They congregate
on college campus malls,
can lift a hundred times
their weight in redundancy.

But be careful
how you wield that
hard, country sensibility
not to disturb their habitat,
their tiny burrows,
colonies of complacency.
Walk lightly when wearing
your thick-soled
brogans of criticism,
for open toes
bruise easily
in Birkenstocks.

A Poem by Gwendolyn Brooks

2009-04-24T11:12:00.000-07:00

The Preacher Ruminates Behind the Sermon

I think it must be lonely to be God.
Nobody loves a master. No. Despite
The bright hosannas, bright dear-Lords, and bright
Determined reverence of Sunday eyes.

Picture Jehovah striding through the hall
Of His importance, creatures running out
From servant-corners to acclaim, to shout
Appreciation of His merit's glare.

But who walks with Him? -- dares to take his arm,
To slap Him on the shoulder, tweak His ear,
Buy him a Coca-Cola or a beer,
Pooh-pooh His politics, call Him a fool?

Perhaps -- who knows? -- He tires of looking down.
Those eyes are never lifted. Never straight.
Perhaps sometimes He tires of being great
In solitude. Without a hand to hold.

from Black Voices: An Anthology of African-American Literature (1968).

People Get Mean When Times Are Lean

2009-04-09T10:32:00.000-07:00

Wouldn't it be great to have so much money you don't know what to do with it? Want a bigger cement pond out back? No problem. Someone cons you into buying Central Park in New York? Oops. Unfortunately, most of us can't be that carefree and spend-easy with our money as the Clampetts. We have to be a little more careful with how we use it, except I have been known to pick my teeth with a dollar bill, but only if the corners are really crisp. And, hey, you can't spend a used toothpick.

I've almost stopped going to Blockbuster Video. Before last weekend, it had been months since my wife and I rented a movie. To try to save money, we've decided to just watch the movies we already have. For our kids, we even put all their DVDs in an album so they can browse through their 50+ collection of Spongebob and Scooby Doo. But my wife just had to see Twilight, so we took the whole family to Blockbuster and spent over $25 on rentals for us and the kids. That made me kind of sore, spending that much money on DVDs that we have to give back in a couple of days. When my wife and I finally settled down to watch her movie, it froze up on us about halfway through. Of course when I turned it over to look at the underside, it was loaded with scratches. We live on the other end of town, so I wasn't about to go over there that night to get another copy. I figured I would get my money back on that rental.

The next week after work I took all the movies back and explained the problem with the Twilight DVD. They asked, "Why didn't you call us about the problem?"

I replied, "What do you mean? It was after 11 when we realized the problem."

"Well," she said, rather curtly, "we don't do refunds on scratched rentals. We only do exchanges. But I'll make an exception this time."

I felt a little indignant about it, and thought an exchange wasn't good enough, especially since I've always thought their rentals rather pricey to begin with. But I was glad that I'd be getting my $5 back. At the same time, another customer was cussing a different Blockbuster employee because he wouldn't accept his membership application. He didn't have a copy of his credit card with him, just the number, and he couldn't understand that the employee needed to see a name next to the number on a card, without seeming to accuse the guy of using a stolen number. Then the customer cussed the other guy more when he ripped the application and threw it in the trash can, claiming that someone might steal his credit card number off the unaccepted application. My complaint seemed minuscule.

Directly afterwards, I stopped for gas. When I went in to pre-pay, now standard since people began driving off without paying for their gas in record numbers, there was an old man who handed a couple of already-scratched $10 tickets to the cashier behind the counter. The cashier gave the man a puzzled look and told him that they weren't winners. "What do you mean, no winner?" The man complained. I deducted that the guy might be farsighted. "Fine. Just give me a couple more of the number 47s," he said, handing the cashier a 20. The cashier gave him a dirty look. "And no need to get an attitude about it," said the man. "Y'all are the ones making your money off of these."

I know times are hard for everyone (except for maybe coal companies and liquor stores). I see more and more people lose their tempers or show their rear ends over money, more so than usual. I was raised to always be tight-fisted about money anyway, so I've been guilty of raising a fuss or two at restaurants and return counters when I don't think I'm getting my money's worth, or going back to the grocery store when I've had a 3-dollar item double scanned by mistake. I've also seen a rise in con-artist scams, honest but naive people thinking they can get something for next to nothing from these charlatans. I think it was Mark Twain that said, "The lack of money is the root of all evil."

I don't know if I'm going to loosen my grip anytime soon, but after this week I might think about being a little more considerate when it comes to my money disputes after seeing how other folks have been reacting. Maybe I should take some advice from the writer and cynic Ambrose Bierce and his book The Devil's Dictionary in this definition, "Money -- A blessing that is of no advantage to us excepting when we part with it." In truth, though, I favor one of Jed Clampett's quotes more, "If money were skunk oil a hound dog couldn't smell me."

Mountains Mourn Over Renowned Moonshiner's Death

2009-03-23T10:55:00.000-07:00

The distinguished and sometimes notorious moonshiner Marvin “Popcorn” Sutton died a week ago today in Cocke County, Tennessee, at age 61. Like many descendants of Scotch-Irish settlers, he followed in the tradition of making homemade liquor, building a reputation as being one of the south's top makers of white lightning. He also achieved a cult-hero-outlaw status through various documentaries on the moonshine tradition and through an autobiography entitled Me and My Likker.

But unlike the romantic notions of moonshining as a hardscrabble, yet noble way of survival in the Appalachians, and part of our cultural heritage, it unfortunately is still illegal (Uncle Sam wants his taxes). Already on probation for a July 2007 state charge triggered by a still explosion, and having prior convictions for moonshining and felony assault with a deadly weapon, a raid on Sutton's property last year turned up three 1,000-gallon stills, more than 800 gallons of moonshine, ingredients to make sour mash, and of course guns. Most of the moonshine he kept in a shed and a junk school bus on his property.

This time the sentencing, an 18-month term in federal prison followed by three years on supervised release, was too much for him. His wife found him in his beloved Ford Fairlane parked out in his barn, engine running, apparently dead of carbon monoxide poisoning. No one really knows why, but perhaps he thought prison would be the death of him, and decided to leave this world on his own terms.

This blog post is by no means a proper eulogy for the man whom thousands knew as a gentle soul. Others I'm sure pay a greater tribute and are much more vocal and outraged by his death. I just wanted to light my candle for him as well. To many he was the romantic notion of the moonshiner, like Uncle Jesse on The Dukes of Hazzard, "never meaning no harm," "making his way the only way he knows how." It is disheartening to me, however, that something couldn't have been done to prevent the loss of such an iconic figure. He will be sorely missed by many, and hopefully never forgotton.

source: J.J. Stambaugh, "Moonshiner 'Popcorn' Sutton May Have Committed Suicide, in Knoxnews.com, March 16, 2009.

In Imitation of Emily Dickinson -- More Parodies

2009-03-19T10:57:00.000-07:00

It is that time again when I begin my poetry unit with my students. To help them overcome their fear or disdain in reading poetry, I have them start by reading Emily Dickinson, perhaps not someone's first choice. We discuss her life as a recluse and her unique style of rhythm, capitalization, and punctuation. Then I have them pick one of her poems to do an imitation/parody. When I explain that a parody is like a "Weird Al" Yankovic song -- in a sense you are imitating the rhythm and rhyme of the poem but coming up with your own words -- they warmed up to the activity. Here are just a few examples of my students' work:

Much Sadness is divinest pain --
To an Emo eye --
Much Pain -- the starkest of Darkness --
'Tis not the Majority --
In this, as all will never prevail --
Ascent to darkness -- and you will be sane --
Demure -- you're straightaway to a painful pathway --
And handled with a pitiful sadness chain.

----- by Thoua Chue and Wa Xiong

Tell a lie, but tell it good.
Success is in successful lies,
not bright for our firm delight.
A truth lies superb surprise,
as thunder to the children's nightmare
with dreams of lies.
The lie must blind gradually
or every man be able to see.

----- by Matt Timmons and Elizabeth Burleson

This is our letter to the class.
We never heard a worse song
than Mr. Hampton's sing-a-long.
For this, we hopefully won't get bashed.

Every week he hands out tests
in his gray little sweater vest.
He tried to sing us Gilligan's Island.
It's pretty sad because we think
he tried his best.

----- by Megan Morehead, Luis Diego, and Alex Wells

I included this last poem to show I'm not above a good-humored joke at my expense. As an illustration of how Emily Dickinson used almost exactly the same tight rhythm and meter in her poetry, I demonstrated how you could almost take any poem of hers and sing it to either the tune of Gilligan's Island or The Yellow Rose of Texas. Try it sometime for yourself. It works!

SAWC Reading in Portsmouth, Ohio

2009-03-16T10:46:00.000-07:00

The Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative (SAWC) will be hosting a reading on March 28th at Ye Olde Lantern, located at 601 Second Street in Portsmouth, Ohio.

The reading takes place during the Appalachian Studies Association (ASA) conference weekend at Shawnee State University. Ye Olde Lantern is the local place for poetry readings, and is located a short walk from the campus center.

The reading will start at 7pm and be a combination of poetry/prose and music. Though I'm not sure of the lineup yet, I anticipate a large group to read and play, seeing that many people will be there already for the ASA conference, and that we have the place reserved until 11pm. I myself plan to attend, and am looking forward to not just reading some poetry but seeing the sights along the Ohio River town. I might even drive a little further north and visit the serpent mound outside of Peebles. Houston (my wife) gave me the "all-clear" to launch on this adventure, provided I change all poop diapers and wash the dishes between now and then!

Update Tues. March 24th -- The SAWC lineup for Ye Olde Lantern is as follows, and in no particular order whatsoever:

Hilda Downer
Don Boklage
Mike Henson
Dana Wildsmith
Sherry Stanforth
Jim Webb
Frankie Finley
Pauletta Hansel
Eddy Pendarvis
and me, of course!

Poem

2009-03-04T10:39:00.000-08:00

Bee Swarm

The air was quiet in the back porch sun,
save for what I though was a breeze
drifting down from the treetops where I sat.
So soft at first, I didn’t notice that
the whisper was not whistling branches,
not the rasp of twig on limb,
but a droning buzz drawing closer.
Something zipped past my ear,
catching my lazy eyes in the direction
of an approaching swarm of honey bees.
I bolted from the concrete steps,
spun and wove around like a drunken boxer,
swatting the air hastily as if stung.

This roiling fist of wings, enveloping,
swirled instead around a center,
an atomic nucleus, as the queen
herded her hive to a larger nest.
Around the eaves of my house they clung,
rolled in the air like cloud vapors, rose
faster than I could run around to
the front yard to watch them continue,
down the driveway, across the road,
neighbors wondering what I was chasing.
Barefoot and panting for breath, I watched
the glistening coil disappear into the woods.
I longed to sprout cellophane wings,
to follow her secret pheromone trail
where a hollow tree or rock crevice
waited for her and her horde.

Brad Pitt to play a Nazi-Scalping Hillbilly in New Tarantino Film

2009-03-03T11:25:00.000-08:00

Quentin Tarantino is known for exploring the B-movie genre, movies he says he enjoyed watching as a kid. For Kill Bill, it was the Japanese Samurai movies. In Grindhouse, a double feature including the two films Planet Terror and Death Proof, he explored the 70's exploitation film. Coming out August 21, 2009, Brad Pitt will be playing the part of Aldo Raine, who Tarantino describes as, "not your Warner Bros. 1950s WWII hero, this is a hillbilly straight from the mountains of Tennessee," in a new Tarantino movie called Inglourious Basterds. The story takes place in WWII France, where Brad Pitt's character leads a rogue band of men who torture and wreak havoc on all Germans, filling a mandated quota of 100 Nazi scalps per man.

Of course, I am always skeptical of films that pander to the crazed, violent hillbilly stereotypes. It's a typical villain format whenever a script writer or producer wants to fill the part of an evil, sadistic, demented, and somewhat ignorant antagonist. Just give him a hick accent and a greasy ball cap to wear and, voila, you got your bad guy. There are your heavy-handed hillbilly villains like in the movie Deliverance or more modern films like The Hills Have Eyes and Wrong Turn, but then there are the more subtle hillbilly villains. For instance, notice how Randall Flagg in the miniseries of Steven King's The Stand has a Travis-Tritt-style mullet and blue-jean jacket. Or how about Zorg in the Sci-Fi movie 5th Element, who has this otherwise ambiguous Southern hick accent. Heck, even Billy Bob Thornton, who has been called the Hillbilly Orson Welles (in a respectable sense), plays a demented mechanic in the movie U-Turn.

Though this isn't the first time that Tarantino dipped into the Southern/Hillbilly inkwell, from my recollection this is the first time a hillbilly character has taken center stage. From the
Quentin Tarantino Archives, Aldo Raine's opening monologue is posted, "… I sure as hell, didn't come down from the goddamn Smoky Mountains, cross five thousand miles of water, fight my way through half Sicily, and then jump out of a fuckin' air-o-plane, to teach the Nazi’s lessons in humanity.” Knowing what a method actor Brad Pitt is, I'm at least interested in seeing how he pulls off this Sergeant York-turned-sadist character, and how believable vs. laughable this character is. You can watch the movie trailer for Inglourious Basterds and draw your own conclusions. Perhaps Tarantino is exploring the "hixploitation" genre in this film.

If you are cheap like me, though, you'll wait until it comes out on DVD and rent it.

A Poem by Michael Chitwood

2009-02-19T16:55:00.000-08:00

On Being Asked to Pray for a Van

My evangelical brethren have let me know,
via the quarterly fundraising letter,
that they can't get the gospel around
because their van has given up the ghost.
God in the machine, help them.
I lift up their carburetor and their transaxle.
Bless them with meshed gears and a greased cam shaft.
Free their lifters.
Deliver their differential
and anoint their valves and their pistons.
Unblock their engine block
and give them deep treaded tires.
Their brakes cry out to You. Hear them, O Lord.
Drive out the demons from their steering column
and come in to the transmission
that they may know the peace of passing.
Minister even unto the turn indicator.
Creator Spirit, Holy Maker of the Universe,
give them gas.

-- from Spill (Tupelo Press 2007)

A poem by Yusef Komunyakaa

2009-02-09T10:59:00.000-08:00

Work

I won't look at her.
My body's been one
Solid motion from sunrise,
Leaning into the lawnmower's
Roar through pine needles
& crabgrass. Tiger-colored
Bumblebees nudge pale blossoms
Till they sway like silent bells
Calling. But I won't look.
Her husband's outside Oxford,
Mississippi, bidding on miles
of timber. I wonder if he's buying
Faulkner's ghost, if he might run
Into Colonel Sartoris
Along some dusty road.
Their teenage daughter & son sped off
An hour ago in a red Corvette
For the tennis courts,
& the cook, Roberta,
Only works a half day
Saturdays. This antebellum house
Looms behind oak & pine
Like a secret, as quail
Flash through branches.
I won't look at her. Nude
On a hammock among elephant ears
& ferns, a pitcher of lemonade
Sweating like our skin.
Afternoon burns on the pool
Till everything's blue,
Till I hear Johnny Mathis
Beside her like a whisper.
I work all the quick hooks
Of light, the same unbroken
Rhythm my father taught me
Years ago: Always give
A man a good day's labor.
I won't look. The engine
Pulls me like a dare.
Scent of honeysuckle
Sings black sap through mystery,
Taboo, law, creed, what kills
A fire that is its own heart
Burning open the mouth.
But I won't look
At the insinuation of buds
Tipped with cinnabar.
I'm here, as if I never left,
Stopped in this garden,
Drawn to some Lotus-eater. Pollen
Explodes, but I only smell
Gasoline & oil on my hands,
& can't say why there's this bed
Of crushed narcissus
As if gods wrestled here.

--from Neon Vernacular (University Press of New England, 1993)

Stock Car Racing and The Last American Hero: An Interivew with Bob Cole

2009-02-06T13:40:00.000-08:00

The following is a part of an interview I gave 12 years ago for an Appalachian film class I was taking at the time at ASU in Boone. My professor, J.W. Williamson, suggested I interview a man by the name of Bob Cole, who lived in Todd, just outside of Boone. I met him in the Hardee’s dining room at New Market Center, and we talked for about an hour about his knowledge and experience in stock car racing and film. He currently runs a large beekeeping operation, and travels around the world to teach how to cultivate bees. He also had a storied past that I felt, as an undergraduate, I only scratched the surface. He mentioned that he worked as an actor, consultant, or stunt driver on 11 different movie and television films, most notably Dukes of Hazzard, Where the Lilies Bloom, and the main topic of our conversation a film entitled The Last American Hero, starring Jeff Bridges. The movie was based on a Tom Wolfe article in Esquire magazine called "The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson, Yes!" in 1965.

I thought for years after transcribing the article to post parts of it online for the benefit of anyone interested, and only now have got around to it. I felt inspired to go back to look at this interview by a student I had last semester, whose grandfather turned out to be non other than Bob Cole. I’m sure she thought I was crazy when I very avidly said, “Really!! I know him! I interviewed him in college.”

Interview with Bob Cole

DH: In The Last American Hero you played the part of Mr. Collins, is that right?

BC: Marshall Collins. He was a Federal Marshall who was in charge of the ATF, alcohol, tobacco, and firearms people. It was a federal occupation instead of a county or a State. It’s like your Federal Marshals are today.

DH: How did you get that part for the movie?

BC: Well, I had been in an earlier film in this area called Where the Lilies Bloom.

DH: What were some of the more memorable experiences about The Last American Hero in particular and was it any different than some of the other movies you played a part in?

BC: Basically the thing that was the most memorable in my particular case was the directors asking me to find locations and people and set up situations where they could do their filming with them. If you find a good location and find the right props and people to go with it and you will find out that it works along pretty well. That to me was the challenge of the whole thing over the rest of it was to find those things that would fit those things the director would work with. They want three locations for a shot. They go to each one of the three and check them out, and the one that they like is the one they use for the shot. Some are better than others. Some have better lighting, some have better scenic values, some have better areas that you can magnify what you are doing and others you want to not have anything detracting from the focus of the shot. It depends on what they wanted and what they are working with.

DH: The scenes that you played a role in, where were they filmed at?

BC: They were filmed out in the Crowder’s Mountain area, which was outside of Gastonia. We had found that they needed the mountain top thing to coincide with how Wilkes County sort of lies out over there. Remember this is Junior Johnson’s area and the area that he lived in is just east of North Wilkesboro. So we tried to find something that looked fairly similar to that. Crowder’s Mountain was the closest. They didn’t want to stay up in this area [of Wilkes/Watauga Counties] to shoot because it was too far from an airport. See, your “rushes”, your filming of each day is sent to Hollywood for processing, so you have to have a ready availability of transportation by air to get them there. And then they are back the next day. They go out in the afternoon, they are processed that night and the next day they arrive back. What you are doing is the scenes you shoot today you review the next night so that anything needs to be corrected or be re-shot you can do it while everything is fresh and still there and is available.

DH: So what they filmed for the day they sent all the way back to Hollywood to process it out and then sent it back to the locations where the filming was being done.

BC: We called those the “dailies”. In other words, you always go through your daily shooting on the day after in the afternoon after you had your dinner. In that way the director and the assistant director can script people and all of this can have a look-see at it. Sometimes they allow the actors and other people to sit in on it and I being a director’s assistant, a director’s and producer’s assistant. I was able to work with that to see just what they needed further. If they needed something then I had to sort of round it up and get it worked out. We didn’t have to shoot too much over but occasionally there would be things they wanted a little better, better visibility, maybe. The lines could, of course, be dubbed in later. You have to have as good a shot that first round as you could possibly get.

DH: You had mentioned you were a stunt man, and that kind of makes sense because that one scene in the movie where Junior Jackson zooms by in his Mustang and you are forced off the road down into a ditch.

BC: Tumbled off into a creek and it was thirty-four degrees when I did that scene. It was pretty cold, and we did it twice.

DH: So Junior Johnson was a consultant and technical advisor for the movie. You knew him from racing, but did you work with him much as far as the movie was concerned?

BC: Well, I would ask him on things when we were doing racing shots. I’d say “Junior, do you think there is any way to improve it?” He would say,“Well, you could have brought so-and-so up a little closer and made things a little more believable.” What we were after was intense believability. When you don’t have the believable characteristics in any shot that you make you are setting up comedy. Comedy is not what you are shooting. You are shooting a believable sequence in people’s lives and how they react and work with them and so forth and so on. Jeff Bridges was nice to work with. He was a great young man. We had a lot of fun. Jeff Bridges was very happy when they would let him drive the Mustang, which we didn’t do a whole lot because of the fact that we only had three of them and we didn’t want to waste one. We did a lot of voice coaching for the actors and actresses who were from Hollywood, especially Geraldine Fitzgerald who is a very famous Irish actress and she had a very decided Irish accent. But we broadened it out a little bit and she worked with that. She and I would just go off and take her dialog, her script for the day, and just go through it and go through it and go through it until she had a pretty sustainable country sounding accent.
Junior is a very likable person, and he came up the hard way and he spent some time in jail because of what he did. His family and his family’s family have been involved in some type of moonshine or liquor making in the Wilkes county area. Of course, that was the biggest industry in Wilkes County and they needed to have it delivered so certain people with high powered cars would drop out on the road in the evening and go to Richmond or Roanoke or Raleigh, clear down to Charleston, South Carolina, and carry whiskey that far. And that was prior to plastic jugs. Everything was in glass, glass or in tanks. Some of the bigger runs had special tanks that were curvatured to the body of the car and put into the boot and everything. In fact, if you had a spare tire and had to go into the back seat…

DH: You were in trouble, then I guess.

BC: Uh huh. Overload springs, the whole smear.

DH: I believe they put extra springs so when they were loaded down it would look normal and it wouldn’t look like they were riding low. There was a book I was reading called Dirt Tracks to Glory about stock car racing. It had a lot of different interviews. There was one guy, Banjo Matthews…

BC: He was a race car builder from over in Asheville. He just passed away this past year, Banjo Matthews. He lived over in the Asheville area and he did a lot of driving setting up at Weaverville at the little race track they have there. Banjo was a good car driver and a good builder. He built some of the finest racing chassis that has ever been on a dirt track. And he did a real good job for paved tracks as well, but dirt tracks he could build a chassis that was absolutely safe where you wanted it you put it there and it stayed there. He was a good builder, run a big automobile parts house in west Asheville.

DH: Lamont Johnson, he was the director and you were the assistant director to him?

BC: I was an assistant to the director and to the producer as well, who was John Rogers. We worked together in finding all the locations and the places we wanted to shoot and the race tracks we wanted to use. See, Ned Jarrett, who at the time we did the shooting was the entrepreneur and the manager of the Hickory race track. He was an old friend from many years and we were able to use his facility in some of the earlier filming that was done. And then the track at Martinsville, Virginia and so forth. We were going to do some work in Charlotte or perhaps at Daytona, but the money wasn’t there and so we had to curtail a little bit of the more grandiose plans for the movie. This was a Twentieth Century Fox film.

DH: One thing I noticed about the movie was it was more or less a biography, but they changed some things. For one thing they changed his name to Junior Jackson in the movie…

BC: This had to be done because of some family commitments that he had made that they wouldn’t use the Johnson name. That was part of the deal with Twentieth Century Fox, not to use the Johnson name.

DH: Also, I guess this maybe wasn’t written into the plot in order to make this a more exciting movie, but Flossie who was his high school sweetheart…

BC: Who was his wife, but are now divorced and he’s remarried.

DH: Right. But was that just Hollywood wanting to put in the track groupie…?

BC: Flossie came later in his racing career, and this was something that occurred after his first year or two in racing. She was his high school sweetheart, but they wasn’t that marriage inclined until after he rubbed some dollars and got more so on his feet. And he was also trying to pay fines against the family because of the bootlegging activity, you see. He had a world of things to pay off. That’s one of the reasons why he did go into racing because there was a legal way of earning money without going around running hooch to all these different places that were buying from him.

DH: In the movie, the scene where you blow up the still, is that kind of the same time when they confiscate the seven thousand one hundred gallons of moonshine in actuality from his father Glen. Does that coincide…

BC: This is primarily of the same and estimate that this occurred, although many years later. It was one of the largest seizures in Wilkes County. They used every subterfuge in order to conceal their operations and to cover them up and mask about so that the Feds, the ATF people did not come upon them and blow them up and wreck their still equipment and everything.

DH: I was reading somewhere that when stock car racing was really starting to get popular some of the race tracks were trying to make laws to where if you have ever been arrested you couldn’t race, are you familiar with that?

BC: This was a thought at one time which some of what we call the do-gooders. The do-gooders out vote a lot of people in some things, but not in this sport. A lot of people in the racing game were, of course, well trained in that they had been in high-speed chases and things of this nature due to moonshine running. They knew roads, knew how to set up cars, knew how to drive in particular circumstances, and they had a lot of guts.

DH: The movie The Last American Hero for some reason didn’t do too well in the box office and they ended up taking it back and editing it and then re-naming it Hard Driver?

BC: There is one thing you have to say about The Last American Hero. It continues to play on television. HBO and some of the other outfits as well as the, even the Family Channel. They run the film every so often. Action, on the satellite channels, they run it about every three to five weeks. WGN in Chicago runs it every six weeks.

DH: Yeah, I didn’t know it still got that much air time on television.

BC: You know how I know? Residual checks.

DH: You still get commission, then.

BC: We were promised a piece of the action for the work we did in addition to our regular salaries.

DH: If you don’t mind me asking, about how much do you get every time they show the movie on T.V?

BC: Ninety dollars. And when you think of all the people involved who had this part in their contract.
Incidentally, this Last American Hero group was one of the better crews that I worked with. When they first came to this area to shoot they did not have certain people with them that would be part of what we called the crew. Like construction coordinator, painter, various prop men and the wardrobe people and all that. They asked me for suggestions. I went right back into several of them I had to work with and pull people out there I thought were exemplary in the way they did their thing and the degree of completion in all of the projects they worked with.

DH: You said you knew Junior Johnson. How did you get to know him?

BC: Through racing. If you’re in racing sooner or later whatever you are doing and what you are involved in you rub elbows with a lot of people and you get to meet people at the tracks. I know Kale Yarborough and a whole flock of others, the older drivers. Some of the newer people I don’t know at all because I have not been actively engaged in it or going to races or being in the racing circle for a long time. This film just happened to be something that was sort of tailor-made for what little knowledge I had about it and how I could help them set their things up and we were able to get thirty to thirty-five of the real good NASCAR drivers to drive in a lot of the sequences. See, we interplayed what you saw on the screen was actual races which were going on at that time. Then you take the sequences of the actual races and you tailor them in to fit your script so that things work out and that you get a legible continuation of the story line that you are working with and so forth.

DH: There were a lot of old drivers that when they started to race on these big super speedways were afraid to race on it, weren’t they? Because of the speeds were getting so high that…

BC: Well, you age out and your reaction time gets slower and you have to be well aware of that. For instance, it takes an almost instant recognition of the situation you’re in at a hundred and ninety-five miles and hour versus ninety-five miles an hour. It has to be that quick. And actually when you are driving at the super speedway speeds you have to be driving from the third to one half of the track in front of you. That’s why you have spotters up on the roof who were talking to you on the radio telling you what’s happening in front of you before you ever get to it. But sometimes it happens right in front of you and he (the spotter) never gets a chance to open his mouth before you are into something. One thing you never do. You never drive into the smoke because you don’t know what’s in there. You learn that a long time ago, even if you have to tag and hug the wall to break your speed down.

DH: Because you don’t know what’s on the other side.

BC: You don’t know what’s in the smoke there. If you have a car crossways in the track you got a hundredth of a second to recognize it. If you are doing a hundred and fifty, a hundred ninety miles an hour you can’t believe what a stop that is. I’ve tagged the Darlington wall at a hundred sixty-five miles an hour. That’s where you get your Darlington stripes on the outside of your car.
DH: I hear you did some work in television as well.

BC: I have been in a number of different things, mostly a lot of the Dukes of Hazard episodes. We did a lot of the driving in that.

DH: As a stunt driver?

BC: The General Lee, yeah, we drove those. That big ol’ Dodge, we wrecked about nine of them.

DH: There’s one thing about the Dukes of Hazard, show that always amazes me. No matter how many times that Dodge Charger gets into a crash-up it gets into it always pulls away without a scratch.

BC: Well, you have three vehicles. One that you are shooting with, one they are fixing and they hope to fix. But you always keep three on hand of anything that you are working with that has to be in scenes. When the Director wants something in a scene he wants it. It can’t be in the shop. You got to have one ready to go. They got to mirror one another, be absolutely the same paint job, same scratches, same dents, same dirt. Everything’s got to be just so.

Taking a Break, Y'all

2008-08-13T00:11:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure if I have much of a readership, but I've found lately that this blog site of mine has felt like a daunting task hovering over me. "I need to write about my trip to Gettysburg, I should write about my daughter and I going camping at Lake James," or thoughts like that have been plaguing my mind.

I originally started this blog to document some of my life and thoughts as a writer, but now have decided to use the time and energy I had been channeling into this and spend more time really writing or just being with my family after work, instead of sitting in front of the computer.

I'm going to take a six-month sabbatical. However, if anyone wants to drop a comment just to say "Hi," I'd would be more than happy to respond.

In the words of Bob Ross, "I'd like to wish you all happy painting, and God bless!"

Poem

2008-07-23T21:12:00.000-07:00

Hunter, Hunted, and Mountain Biker

On the back of Pinnacle Mountain,
down roads where you rarely see
people traveling about,
rocks rise out of the gravel and dirt
like bony spines of ancient dinosaurs,
and trees are hunched and gnarled,
limbs twisted by winter winds,
now brushy and dark green
with oak leaves and acorns.

Skidding around a corner,
a dark figure on all fours
catches my eye
and locks my brakes.
Ten yards ahead,
in a sunlit patch of road,
dark bristly fur,
too big to be a dog,
the brown nose gives away
the bear cub’s identity.

But mine must have been confusing
to him, maybe never having seen
a boy on a bike,
round wheels instead of legs
on a steel-framed skeleton carcass.
What are wheels to a creature
who can climb rocky crags
and steep ridges
I wouldn’t attempt to clamor up?

----- Instinct identified me well enough,
----- and with a low moan, the cub
----- runs back into the dark green shadows.
----- I didn’t stick around to meet his mother.

The next week I met its poacher
in a red and faded pick up truck
creeping up the same road, slowly.
A gray, long-eared hound dog,
skin and bones, wearing a body collar,
was bolted by a leash to the hood.
Standing with a purpose, it leaned forward
like a rock climber, pulling on her lead rope,
a surfer on a Chevrolet wave,
sniffing the air, first one way,
and then the next.

The man looked just as confused
as the bear the previous day
to see a boy on a bike,
coming down the mountain,
out here where his thoughts
had possessed the solitary wilderness.
As we passed each other
on the narrow, rutted road,
he lifted his hand.
I nodded my head and smiled,
caught a glint of corn liquor
in his red and faded eyes.

----- We momentarily shared the silence,
----- save for the whirring and creaking
----- of his 4-wheel drive,
----- and then we were masters
----- of our surroundings once again.

from Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel 11 (Fall 2004) 25

Two Poems by Carl Sandburg

2008-07-18T00:41:00.000-07:00

Soup

I saw a famous man eating soup.
I say he was lifting a fat broth
Into his mouth with a spoon.
His name was in the newspapers that day
Spelled out in tall black headlines
And thousands of people were talking about him.

When I saw him,
He sat bending his head over a plate
Putting soup in his mouth with a spoon.

Sky Pieces

Proudly the fedoras march on the heads of the some-
what careless men.
Proudly the slouches march on the heads of the still
more careless men.
Proudly the panamas perch on the noggins of dapper
debonair men.
Comically somber the derbies gloom on the earnest sol-
emn noodles.
And the sombrero, most proud, most careless, most dap-
per and debonair of all, somberly the sombrero
marches on the heads of important men who know
what they want.
Hats are sky-pieces; hats have a destiny; wish your hat
slowly; your hat is you.

from The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, 1970.

I'd Like to Tell That Officer Where to Park It

2008-07-14T17:05:00.000-07:00

No offense to officers of the law (except for the one that pulled me over Memorial Day a few years ago and said I was doing 70 in a 55 -- when I was only doing 60, at the most!), but I took this photo at a rest stop somewhere off Interstate 77 a few weeks ago while on a Civil War class field trip. A blog about that adventure later. I probably could come up with a better caption than this, but maybe someone out there could comment and come up with a better one.

Space Age Outhouse for Johnny Law?

When Smokey's not on your tail, a place to rest his?

State Trooper Poopers?

Darn Nuts!

2008-07-14T10:04:00.001-07:00

Since my daughter was two, she loved watching The Andy Griffith Show. To her, though, it's called watching Barney Fife. She also liked those Hillbilly Darlings. She asks me why it's in black and white about every other time. I tried telling her the world didn't have color back then, but she knew I was teasing.

Over the years I explained that people on television pretend to be other people, and that Barney Fife's real name is Don Knotts. The other day she was watching Scooby Doo on Boomerang and Don Knotts was making a voice appearance on the show, playing himself dressed as Barney Fife. I sat down next to my daughter and said, "Wow. Barney Fife is on Scooby Doo." She turned her head to me, rolled her eyes, and said, "No, Daddy, it's not Barney Fife. It's Darn Nuts!"

Writers Swap Poetry at Country Store

2008-06-06T10:41:00.000-07:00

The next day after the Rita Riddle Book Release (see Apr. 22nd blog), SAWC joined other writers from Floyd, Virginia to read and share their work at Floyd's Country Store. We all had a great time. I got to see how revitalized downtown Floyd had become since I last travelled through there about 15 years ago, and since it has become an official stop on Virginia's Crooked Road Heritage Music Trail. It just came to my attention that there was an article published in the Floyd Press on May 1st about our poetry reading by Colleen Redman, who also attended and read some of her work. You can read it at her blog:

Loose Leaf Notes: Poets at the Floyd Country Store

Some great photos of the event were taken as well. As for the last photo, all I can say is that I was in a deeply reflective pose and was NOT asleep while Jim Minnick was reading his poem (in case you were wondering, Jim!

Hank Williams' Last Words

2008-06-04T10:26:00.000-07:00

We met, we lived, and dear we loved,
then comes that fatal day,
the love that felt so dear
fades far away.

-- At a gas station in Oak Hill, West Virginia, the driver, after finding him dead, found this on a slip of paper clutched in his hand.

[from Kevin C. Stewart, "Silenced", in Appalachian Heritage 35:4 (Fall 2007) 78.]

Poem

2008-05-29T12:07:00.000-07:00

No Regret

When life gets easier
and the corners of my mind
stop spinning from frustration,
I will shine like city lights
off in the distance
of a desert night.

----- I will laugh with my head back
----- so my white teeth show
----- the color in my cheeks.

When life is less bitter
and the hobgoblins of little minds
fade into the background static,
I will ring like wedding bells
on a pristine afternoon
with a tone clear and warm.

----- Everyone is holding hands
----- and the air is swirling
----- with apple blossoms and honey bees.

When everything is going right
and the black clouds of despair
are brushed away like dusty cobwebs,

----- will you run with me
----- down highway 64
----- to the county line, and beyond,
----- peel the past from our foreheads,
----- let the wind catch our innocence,
----- and listen to the steel belts play
----- a back-beat rhythm
----- to a traveling tune?

When it is all over,
and the pain no longer covers
my eyes with a jaded veil,

----- I will cast my bitterness
----- into the fiery furnace
----- and ride the sooty smoke
----- like a drunken Phoenix
----- into the topaz-blue sky.
---------- And as I look down
---------- at my pallid reflection
---------- will I say, without doubt
---------- that I had a good life?

from The Broad River Review 36 (Spring 2004) 21.

British Blue Collar, or Why I Love Watching Eastenders

2008-05-21T12:04:00.000-07:00

I've never liked watching soap operas. I remember growing up and being subjected to them by my babysitters. General Hospital. As the World Turns. The tediously slow storylines. Years later I tried watching Days of our Lives in college when I had my leg in a cast from a skiing accident. Call it experimentation; I didn't inhale. Truth was I couldn't get into stories about rich people's "struggles." People always seemed to dress nice, had perfect complexions, perfect teeth, and lived in big houses. The settings were also so fake. Outdoor scenes always seemed to be shot on some sound stage with fake snow and plastic trees.

A few years ago I happened upon a BBC show called Eastenders. I had trouble sleeping, and was flipping channels at 11pm, drinking a beer and eating a few pickled sausages. PBS was rebroadcasting the British soap, albeit six years behind. I was instantly hooked. Being an English teacher, I was drawn into the British dialect and colloquial phrases often used around Albert Square. I also found a down-to-earth quality in the characters and storylines. What American soap opera is about blue-collar workers struggling to survive in a middle-to-lower class neighborhood? Sure, the whole show is filmed on a studio lot, and I've never been to England, but there is a sense of realism and community that I'm drawn to. Not everyone dresses to the nines, some characters have wrinkles and don't bleach their teeth white, and some characters are just plain homely, but that's real life.

My favorite family is the Slaters. If the story were cast and filmed in the States, I would imagine the Slaters as country rednecks in the truest sense, but not in a malicious way, similar to the old television sitcom Roseanne. Hard-working, hard-drinking, blood-is-thicker-than-water kind of family. They fight amongst one another, but will stand up for family, almost in a clannish way (like they did for Little Moe). In fact, the first episode I watched happened to be the one where Kat reveals to Zoe that she is not her older sister but her mother by way of their pervish uncle Harry. Now, I am hesitant to compare that to the hillbilly stereotypes of Appalachia where it is thought that through inbreeding we all are our own grandparents or something, but there it is nonetheless.

My wife bought me a book about Eastenders off of Amazon UK. Though published in 2003, the book has already spoiled some of the upcoming story lines for me (seeing that PBS is currently showing episodes from 2002). I already know that Janine will marry Barry the used car salesman then die, and that Zoe and Anthony don't end up together (I was so rooting for them in a Romeo and Juliet, or Hatfield and McCoy kind of way). Call me a pansy for watching soaps, but I challenge anyone to find an American soap opera as edgy or as gritty as Eastenders. So, sod off!

On Publishing Poetry

2008-05-06T13:00:00.000-07:00

"I think for a lot of young writers, in particular, especially those coming out of MFA mills (and especially the programs that don’t quite “get” contemporary poetry, which is to say most of them), I think the transition to becoming a practicing writer can be a daunting, even crushing task. It’s when most people stop writing. They find that the context they had for poetry in school no longer exists in the “real” world and don’t know how to build one out of whole cloth. These are the people for whom contests exist, and it’s why I think they’re ultimately damaging. For one thing, the odds are preposterous. For another, unless they actually know the work of the judge, and know who the judge is, there is no way to ascertain if there is any reasonable expectation of even being competitive. They send in their money and their manuscript, they hope and they can feel crushed if they lose, sometimes again & again & again. Where if they would just get together with their friends and publish one another, they would be making enormous headway much more quickly. And their books would be reaching the right audiences. Which is (again) why it’s far better to have a volume published by Pressed Wafer, if you’re a New England poet, than in the Yale Younger Poets Series."

-- from Ron Silliman's Blog

I loved this exerpt so much I had to pirate it from a fellow blogger friend of mine (I hope you don't mind, Carol). I can relate to coming out of college and finding that my inspiration doesn't come as easily as it did, where I was once surrounded by like-minded souls, that academic atmosphere. I have had to find it in other places, maybe not whole cloth so much as in patches and swatches.

I have even thought about getting my MFA in Creative Writing sometime in the near future, not to have the title but to further develop and challenge my writing. Otherwise, I feel that my writing might inbreed and turn sterile without some fresh genes infused into it. Plus, I would get a 10% raise as a teacher for holding a masters degree. That's the selling point to my wife and family, who may see my poetry writing as a hobby.

As for looking to poetry groups for fostering and inspiration, they are great when you can find people that nurture and help feed you, and visa versa. When you get a room full of writers together, the air seems denser from the weight of everyone's ego (come on, you know it's true! I've been guilty of feeling self-important, too). I have also learned from experience that I have to have a tough skin when it comes to sharing my work, regardless of whether it is an editor, a judge in a writing contest, or my own peers, taking criticism with a grain of salt. I can choose to use that salty criticism for seasoning and consideration, despite how much it stings, or I can toss it over my shoulder like it was spilt on the table. Either way, I have to tell myself that I love what I do and that's why I do it. Publishing is just the final step in the writing process. One must take it or the other steps are futile.

A Poem By Andrew Hudgins

2008-05-06T12:30:00.000-07:00

Southern Literature

She hunched in the back seat, and fired
one Lucky off the one before.
She talked about her good friend Bill.
No one wrote like Bill anymore.

When the silence grew uncomfortable,
she'd count out my six rumpled ones,
and ask, noblesse oblige, "How ah
your literary lucubrations

progressing?" "Not good," I'd snarl. My poems
were going nowhere, like me -- raw,
twenty-eight, and having, she said,
a worm's eye view of life. And awe --

I had no sense of awe. But once
I lied, "Terrific! The Atlantic
accepted five." She smiled benignly,
composed and gaily fatalistic,

as I hammered to Winn-Dixie, revving
the slant six till it bucked and sputtered.
She smoothed her blue unwrinkled dress.
"Bill won the Nobel Prize," she purred.

If I laid rubber to the interstate,
and started speeding, how long, I wondered,
how long would she scream before she prayed?
Would she sing before I murdered her?

Would we make Memphis or New Orleans?
The world was gorgeous now, and bigger.
I reached for the gun I didn't own.
I chambered awe. I pulled the trigger.

from Locales: Poems from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, 2003.

Poem

2008-05-02T12:02:00.000-07:00

Todd, NC

Elkland, once a boom town of Watauga County,
where the railroad from Abingdon ended
to drop off passengers and load timber.
The giant engines spun on a turntable
to head back the other way.

Hotels, stores, banks, and taxi service
sprung up like mushrooms in a narrow valley,
shared by the South Fork of the New River.
Loggers and saw mills made their truck ready
to be hauled back the other way.

With the forests stripped of their hardwoods,
the Virginia-Carolina came less frequently
until, nothing to haul and no one to bring,
like locusts they swarmed to other prospects,
to make their living in other ways.

The railroad gone, the tracks were taken up,
its steel sold cheaply to the Japanese,
just like New York’s Sixth Avenue El,
scrap metal turned to weapons of warfare
used against our own Pacific Fleet
to send our boys to a watery grave.

Rita Riddle Book Release

2008-04-22T12:22:00.000-07:00

It's not often that I get to moonlight as the poet and writer afficionado, but this week I get a chance to read other's work as well as my own.

This coming Thursday the 24th there will be a tribute reading of Rita Sizemore Riddle's posthumously published collection of poetry All There Is To Keep, at Radford University, Radford, Virginia. The event will be held in the Flossie Martin Art Gallery at 7:00 pm. The Southern Appalachian Writer's Cooperative (SAWC) donated funds to publish this book, Iris Press worked diligently in putting it together, and all proceeds from the sale of her poetry book will go to a scholarship for an RU creative writing student. Rita passed away in 2006, but left her mark on the world through her personal, unapologetic, and touching poetry. A small group of her friends and fellow writers will read select poems from her book. Speakers are: Dana Wildsmith, Felicia Mitchell, Jim Webb, Beto Cumming, Ron Houchin, Jack Higgs, David Owens, and myself.

On Thursday, April 25 of this week, in conjunction with the Riddle reading, some of us, including others that couldn't make the Radford University engagement, will read some from our own work from 3:30-5 at the Floyd Country Store in nearby Floyd, Virginia, with writers from that neck of the woods as well as from other stretches of the Appalachians. I'm excited not just to be sharing my poetry with others, but that their famous Friday Night Jamboree follows our reading from 6:30 until 10 or 11. I'm looking forward to listening to some good Ole Time and Bluegrass music I grew up on living around Galax, Virginia.

Jesus In My Heart

2008-04-18T11:56:00.000-07:00

My daughter came in from running around in the yard the other day and exclaimed, "I know that Jesus is in my heart. I can feel him jiggle when I run!" After cautiously listening to her chest and ruling out a heart murmer or some other ailment, I replied, "Yep. That's him all right."

Sometimes I wish I could go back in time and be a child again, when I understood the ways of the world in simple terms. Up was up and down was down. Right was right and wrong was wrong. Then you get older and and more intelligent and things get complicated. Suddenly answers to questions became less simple and more convoluted. It took a while for me to come to grips that, although there will always be absolute answers to some things, sometimes I just had to admit that I just didn't have an answer, accept that I might never know the answer, and have faith that God knew what was what and he'd handle it.

Jesus said to his disciples after they tried turning some children away from him, gathering the little ones in his arms, "Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs." (Mark 10:13-16) Like my daughter looks to my wife and me for guidance and care, sometimes I forget that I have someone to rely on as well.

To be a child again! Maybe I need to get out and go running in the yard more often.

A Poem by Jim Wayne Miller

2008-04-03T12:15:00.000-07:00

Why Rosalie Did It

Because talk in the town
had the galvanized taste
of tap water standing
too long in pipes

because dogs ran loose
sniffing each other's rear-ends
while people walked
their personal devils on a leash
or carried them, like cobras
in a laundry basket

because all the talk
the telling and recollecting
enlarged, clarified nothing
but wore memory away
so when Mrs. Curry was killed
crossing the road to her mailbox
she became no more
than a dead dog on the interstate
run over and over (in the telling)
until nothing was left but
a scrap of hair in a bloody spot

because they refused to interpret
("that's just his way")
("well, he was a Meadors")
("them Jacksons is like that")
because the 40-watt bulbs
at the head of stairs
were one with their little economies
of word, of thought

because, stopped on the street
in front of the hardware store, talking,
they were like horses standing
side by side, head to tail,
swishing flies off one another

because they knew
everything
about everybody

knew when her Daddy died
choked on a piece of beef
at Purcell's Family Restaurant
after church
he had a polaroid of Roma Strickland, naked,
in his wallet

because they knew
or thought they knew
everything
about everybody

because you were naked here anyway
Rosalie came up from under the bridge
at the end of town

--her jeans and shirt and underwear already
floating downriver—and
ran buck naked down Main
at 4:30 in the afternoon
blonde hair flying
tan all over
(they didn't know that, for instance)
no white skin where she'd worn
any two-piece bathing suit

because at least for the two minutes
it took to jog past the Dollar General,
past Western Auto, All Star
Realty and Auction, and on out
to where she'd parked her Datsun
by the picnic tables
the boys from the Job Corps built

nobody moved
nobody spoke

nobody knew what to say or think.
There wasn't a sound
except her bare feet touching lightly
on the astonished sidewalk
nothing moved
except her reflection running with her
in store windows.

(from Brier, His Book. Frankfort, Kentucky: Gnomon Press, 1988.)

Fixin' to Spring

2008-03-25T16:46:00.000-07:00

It was a warm day the Saturday before Easter, and my daughter and I went for a walk in the woods behind our house. The trees were just beginning to show that touch of red when you looked out at the treetops. Otherwise, everything still looked winter-dormant. The only exception was a rogue peach tree on the edge of the woods and our yard where my wife's grandfather used to dump their food scraps. It's pinkish white blossoms were beautiful against its green leaflets, but it never beared any fruit larger than my thumb. What really knocked me out and got me to thinking about spring was this huge patch of blue Periwinkles (Vinca minor) out behind the woodshed. It covered hundreds of square feet. If it weren't for the poison ivy that I knew lied just under the surface, I would have dived face first into them. My daughter almost did just that, but settled on making a little mini-bouquet of them to put in her pocket.

The "Hillbilly as Monster" Rears His Ugly Head Again

2008-03-19T12:19:00.000-07:00

It's nothing new in movies. The evil hillbilly stereotype has been seen since the silent film era in movies such as Stark Love , later on in talkies such as Child Bride, and in modern classic horror films such as Deliverance. Recently in the past couple of years there has been a rash of horror movies set in Appalachia or using Appalachian hillbilly stereotypes to evoke fear or elicit a dark humor as in Wrong Turn, The Hills Have Eyes, and The Descent. Once again, Hollywood is demon-hunting in the hollows of Appalachia. In February, a Pittsburgh casting company had an open casting call for "Shelter," a horror film starring Julianne Moore that began shooting in Pittsburgh this month. The call was for people with an "otherworldly" look, described in the script as people who were "insular and clannish," and because of this have an inbred look to them.

The Ku Klux Klan once made posters depicting black men as monsters kidnapping white women, and during WWII our own government printed grotesque and evil-looking posters depicting the Japanese as slant-eyed brutes. These depictions are clearly offensive by today's standards and should never see the light of day in any form of media. Though I am not making an equal comparison between ethnic racial stereotypes and regional stereotypes of Appalachia, I always find it curious that Southern and Appalachian stereotypes continue to be perpetuated in society today.

This is not a new debate, to be sure, and in many ways it has been continued in part because we've allowed it. It is still recognizable to today's media-stoked society, a society that thrives on labels and typecasts and token characters. Comedians like Jeff Foxworthy and Larry the Cable Guy use stereotypes like these in their skits, but the difference is that they are considered "one of us." It's funny rather than offensive because we laugh with them.

I think it's safe to say, though, that Southern Stereotypes (take Baby Doll , for instance) as well as Appalachian stereotypes as evil, sexual deviant, or monstrous is in no way excusable, no matter how casting directors or movie scripts word it. There is a little justice in the world, though. West Virginia governor Joe Manchin's office objected to what it termed as an "insensitive casting call" on the part of the casting director of "Shelter." The casting director has since been fired. The movie is still being filmed as planned. The show must go on, right?

(from Brown, David M. "Film's Casting Call Wants That 'Inbred' Look". Pittsburgh Tribune Review Tuesday, February 26, 2008; and "'Shelter' Movie's Casting Director Fired." The Charleston Gazette.com. Tuesday, March 18, 2008)

Poem

2008-03-13T12:22:00.000-07:00

Peoria, Texas, March 22, 1891

After some delay I am finally
getting around to writing you.
Them seeds and beans come through
all right. I am very thankful.
People are later planting this spring.
We had a big snow the first of March,
but prospects are still good for
at least a tolerable early crop.

I would like to see you out here
this fall, or later in the summer
when I can feed you on melons
from the patch I’m going to plant
behind the new school house.
You promised to come soon and
it is about time you was deciding,
but I fear that promises is all I have.

Tell your brother John I said
for him to come out here to east Texas
where he can farm right for a change
instead of plowing on rocky hillsides,
where he can get land so level and rich
it will make his eyes water to look.
A man can make an honest living out here,
can get all the work and land he wants.

Write me a long letter about home.
Give me all the news from Sevier County.
Tell your family I think of them often,
but don’t hug your sisters too hard
for they sometimes giggle and break wind.
Right now I’m sure you are all in bed asleep
under the same moon that’s full as a dinner plate.
I hope you are sleeping peaceful.

You asked about my health this winter.
After I got accustomed to the weather
which is about as cold as any in Tennessee,
I manage to eat well enough, though I miss
your cooking, your biscuits, and your smile.
I still am the tallest man in town,
and have not lost weight since last we met.
Board and washing is included in my wages,
but not a woman’s care.

I lifted your letter out of the office on the 20th.
Let me hear from you soon so I can plan.
If you want to come ahead I will assist you.
The country’s health and wages are all right.
We will have our own pastor and
a nice new church at the end of town.
My land will be six miles west of Hillsboro,
and two miles south of Peoria
when the deed comes through.
But a man can only wait for so long.
I promised your dear Maw I would
take care of you should you come.
Bring me all the news of home yourself.

Yours,
J.B. Sherfly

Parody of Emily Dickinson

2008-03-07T12:17:00.000-08:00

I'm as big a fan of Dickinson's work as the next poet, but I also like taking a friendly jab at her poetry because it's fun. This past week I had my 11th-grade English classes read some of Dickinson's work, and we talked about her peculiar life as a recluse. I then assigned students with a partner to come up with an imitation or parody of an Emily Dickinson poem. Here are a few interesting ones to come out of this. The first one is a tribute to the college basketball fans, and the second one, well, at least I can tell the students had been paying attention to my lecture.

March Madness Makes Divinest Sense
by Stephen and Brett

March Madness makes divinest sense --
To a discerning Eye
the Brackets -- make no sense
To the Number 1 seeds
In this, not all, prevail
To the Elite 8 -- great success
The Final Four -- a young boy's dream
And cutting down the nets -- Priceless

As I Lied in Bed and Pondered About Sleep
by Aaron and Andrew

As I lied in bed and pondered about sleep
I thought about all the guys I would never meet
The darkness of my bed reminded me of night
Because of my Dying Eye I saw the slant of light
My favorite thing in the world is that long black hearse
and to see my boo the pastor at church
I can't stop talking about Death
because the Goth kids in the future will give me mad respect
wild and adventurous like Tom Sawyer
It's two in the morning, all alone,
now where's my lawyer?

Today Is My Son's First Birthday

2008-02-28T13:01:00.000-08:00

Before he was born, I wondered how I could love another child as much as I loved my daughter, who was three at the time. I worried because I knew I would not be able to give him every ounce of attention as I had been to my daughter the last several years. She is all girl, but definitely a Daddy's Girl as well. There was also something different about having a son that I didn't fear when I had my daughter. I feared he would be like me. I wasn't the strongest kid on the playground or the smartest kid in the classroom, was shy and timid at times, and my feelings got hurt easily. Of course, I feel I have overcome these hang-ups (and then some) as an adult, but I can't quite shake the concern that one day he's going to find out how much he may be like me, and hate me for it.

I will say that raising two children is not twice as hard as raising one, but exponentially more difficult. The feeding, changing, bathing wasn't new and as welcomed as when we just had our daughter to care for. Even after my son was born, I felt like he didn't much care for me at first. I can't remember exactly when that changed, but I can remember a couple of months ago setting a ball cap on his head that I was wearing, and playing Peekaboo with him. He pulled the brim of the cap down over his eyes and pushed them back up and just giggled. He got such a kick out of that. He looked so much like me in that ball cap that I just wanted to say "That's my boy!"

I'm proud of both my children, of course. My daughter is in Pre-K now and is writing her ABCs and talking to me about what she did at school each day. I'm especially proud of my son, though, because he's my son. I've come to the realization that I will always love him no matter how much or how little he turns out to be like me, or how much he wishes he weren't like me. He is a Hampton, and from a long line of hard-headed, hard-working, soft-hearted men.

Happy Birthday, my son. I love you.

Poem

2008-02-19T14:06:00.000-08:00

Under the Couch

A Barbie shoe, eleven cents for the offering,
half a Nilla wafer and three bobby pins.
A giant cockroach, belly up
to preaching the evils of Black Jack.
Two squares of Cap'n Crunch,
a subscription card to Good Housekeeping, "Uh-huh!"

A gingerbread man from Candyland,
balled-up foil wrappers of Hershey Kisses.
A broken crayon, Hot Magenta,
a tube of Chapstick I'd been missing.
Beer bottle caps, a toe nail clipping,
and the dust-bunny choir sang a soft, "Amen."

I'd Like to Blow the Top off Their Mountain

2008-02-12T11:49:00.000-08:00

For those who, like me, are advocates against Mountaintop Removal, I wanted to share the following cartoon from the New Yorker. From what I have viewed of Hamilton's work (I admit I have a subscription), this is typical of his cartoons, portraying the smugness and complacency of the white-collar, upper class social elite. I'm not sure if this particular cartoon is making fun of the heartlessness and flippancy of the Big Coal grandfather, or comparing those who are against Mountaintop Removal to little granddaughters with trifling and childish requests, little kids that don't understand how the grown-up world works. Either way, It's not a laughing matter.

(from The New Yorker, Nov. 19, 2007, p78)

A Poem by Robert Morgan

2008-01-28T12:17:00.000-08:00

Canning Time

The floor was muddy with the juice of peaches
and my mother's thumb, bandaged for the slicing,
watersobbed. She and Aunt Wessie skinned
bushels that day, fat Georgia Belles
slit streaming into the pot. Their knives
paid out limp bands onto the heap
of parings. It took care to pack the jars,
reaching in to stack the halves
firm without bruising, and lowering
the heavy racks into the boiler already
trembling with steam, the stove malignant
in heat. As Wessie wiped her face
the kitchen sweated its sweet filth.
In that hell they sealed the quickly browning
flesh in capsules of honey, making crystals
of separate air across the vacuums.
The heat and pressure were enough to grow
diamonds as they measured hot
syrup into quarts. By supper the last jar
was set on the counter to cool
into isolation. Later in the night
each little urn would pop as it
achieved its private atmosphere and
we cooled into sleep, the stove now
neutral. The stones already
pecked clean in the yard were free to try
again for the sun. The orchard meat fixed in
cells would be taken down cellar in the
morning to stay gold like specimens
set out and labeled, a vegetal
battery we'd hook up later. The women
too tired to rest easily think of
the treasure they've laid up today
for preservation at coffin level, down there
where moth and rust and worms corrupt,
a first foundation of shells to be
fired at the winter's muddy back.

(from Groundwork. Frankfort, Kentucky, Gnomon Press. 1979)

Literature and the Land

2008-01-16T11:03:00.000-08:00

Here in the Appalachian Mountains, there is a special bond between the Land, the People, and the Literature that seems to exude from this region like sap. One of the best Christmas presents I received this year, besides the little tins of gourmet coffee my mother gave me, was a book from my father and stepmother by Georgann Eubanks entitled Literary Trails of the North Carolina Mountains: A Guidebook. Many people have put together travel guides of North Carolina in the past, from touring the back roads to Hollywood film shoot locations, but this one I found delightfully different. Not only are there detailed directions, points of interest connecting place with the authors who stayed there or wrote about it, but the whole book is peppered with authors’ poems, fiction excerpts, and commentary on the place or setting. From Paula Steichen describing her grandfather Carl Sandburg, Robert Morgan describing the French Broad steamboat The Mountain Lily, to Sharyn McCrumb writing about Frankie Silver, this book runs the gamut with 18 tours of the North Carolina Mountains through the eyes of the writer. Some literature references surprised me, like the fact that Henry James once stayed in the Biltmore House and criticized it for being so isolated in such an impoverished part of the country. Some of Eubanks praises for the showcased writers or transitions into the literature excerpts do seem saccharine or forced, but this isn’t a book of literary critique, and reference books aren’t expected to wax poetic, so I can overlook it considering the monumental research from so many varied sources and the detail that went into this book. I’m looking forward to taking this book on a few adventures this summer for sure!

The Old Kentucky Home

2008-01-16T10:57:00.000-08:00

In the process of reading the above-mentioned book, Literary Trails of the North Carolina Mountains, I found a particular author excerpt catching. Poet and Asheville native Michael McFee wrote an engaging account just for this guidebook on his experiences discovering Thomas Wolfe’s home, and I thought I would share it with the Wide-Web World:

“When I was growing up in the mountains, from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s, Asheville wasn’t such a groovy little city, Thomas Wolfe’s name wasn’t so ubiquitous, and his mother’s boardinghouse wasn’t yet an official historic site. “The Old Kentucky Home” was just 48 Spruce Street, where Tom’s brother Fred offered occasional tours of the twenty-nine rooms. He didn’t seem to like the house or his family very much: when my mother and I first visited, in 1968, I remember he pointed out, unapprovingly, where his famous younger sibling crept along the roof to sneak into a female guest’s room.
“A few years later, after I read Look Homeward, Angel (at sixteen: just the right age, just the right place), I went back solo, and the ramshackle place was much more interesting: it had become Wolfe’s “Dixieland,” and its drafty high-ceilinged rooms – some dim, some sunny – seemed haunted with ghosts of stories, the place itself a rambling gossipy character.
“I headed off to college in 1972 to study design, but soon transferred to Wolfe’s alma mater and decided to become a writer myself. When a dozen-storied hotel opened right across Spruce Street from his house in the mid-1970s, I heard that copies of Look Homeward, Angel had been placed in each bedside table drawer, beside the Gideon’s Bibles. Who could resist such a detail? I put it into a poem called “Asheville,” which was ironic, allusive, and dreadful.
“Graduate school, marriage, work, child, and parents’ deaths – it was decades before I got back to what had become the Thomas Wolfe Memorial. In fact, it was almost too late, after the devastating arson of 1998: I didn’t visit again until the fall of 2002, when a huge blue tarp still covered the partially collapsed roof, the north side of the rambling house was all plastic and tarpaper and 2 x 4 braces, and smoke damage haunted the windows. Four years into its restoration, the sun did not shine bright on “My Old Kentucky Home,” and it didn’t look like it ever would again.
“Memorial Day weekend, 2004. I stand where I rattled the chain-link construction fence only twenty months earlier, but can barely believe what rises before me: the Thomas Wolfe Memorial, gloriously intact, painstakingly and sympathetically resurrected. In fact, the old boardinghouse roof, the exterior yellow paint, the interior plaster, the furnishings – everything looks just like it did the year Tom left for college at Chapel Hill.
“But, appropriately for the nature of this particular place, it’s not overdone, a lifeless museum of early twentieth-century Americana. As I stroll through the house – around Julia’s kitchen, up the creaky central stairs, past the bed where W.O. unwillingly spent his last days – it’s easy to imagine that the family or boarders just stepped out and might be back shortly.
“Which is to say: The place feels exactly right. Like home, again.”

--- Michael McFee, quoted from Literary Trails of the North Carolina Mountains: A Guidebook, by Georgann Eubanks (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007.)

On a last note, there are other great commentaries on Thomas Wolfe to be found in the Fall 2007 issue of Appalachian Heritage, including another Old Kentucky Home discovery account by Kentucky native Gurney Norman.

Poem

2008-01-07T13:57:00.000-08:00

Durazno Dulce

It's January,
and I'm eating a ripe peach.
The cool flesh quenches me
like a South Carolina breeze
off the distant mountain ridges.
I can almost taste the sweet clover
growing between the orchard rows
when I close my eyes and chew slowly.

It's funny,
that this fuzzy, half-eaten fruit
is from the country of Chile
and not from Greer, or Cooley Springs.
Though I've been down Highway 25,
long before it turned four-lane,
I can't quite picture the towering Andes
or feel the wind from their snow-capped peaks.

The New Year

2008-01-03T12:46:00.000-08:00

My wife commented to me a few days ago how she didn’t see what the big deal was about celebrating the new year, except an excuse to close businesses early on December 31, (“so everyone can go out and get drunk and party”), then everything being closed on New Year’s Day (“so everyone can sleep in and recover from their hangover”). Though I at one time partook of New Year’s festivities and all its merry-making while in college, I now see it as on the same level of importance in my life as Groundhog Day. Still, my wife’s vexation of not being able to shop at Sam’s Club on New Year’s Eve got me considering its importance.

It’s a time I’ve always stopped and considered the future, of what may come for the following year. As a young man in high school and college, a year was a lifetime. It was full of possibilities and anticipated summer adventures, a year to meet new people. I anxiously awaited those adolescent milestones into adulthood: 13, high school graduation, 18, 21, college graduation. It was also a time for me to reflect back on previous years, to look back and see how far I had come. It was a time to recount the good times and bad times I had experienced. When I was younger, though, there was less to reflect back on.

Now the years I have been on this earth stack behind me like second-hand books, one on top of the other, and the ones on the bottom of the stack get harder and harder to pull out and read. I can look at my life in decades, layers of strata in ancient rock, buried under the fresh thin layer of silt that is 2008 (those of you over 40 are probably laughing at me right about now). In 1998 I graduated from Appalachian State, enrolled back into ASU in the graduate program because I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life, met my future wife, and worked as an editorial assistant for Jerry Williamson at the Appalachian Journal. In 1988 I was in eighth grade living in Hillsville, Virginia, wearing blue jean jackets with the patches, arm wrestling in math class, and wondering how I was going to get the courage to ask Rhonda on a date (or maybe it was Chandra – I had a thing for girls from Sylvatus). In 1978 I lived in Greensboro, North Carolina, my favorite television show was Sesame Street, I couldn’t tie my shoes, and I often loved to dance and make funny faces in front of my 1-year-old sister to get her to laugh. So much has happened in between that I couldn’t possibly begin to recount.

Now at 33, married with two children (and basically settled), an upcoming year is like chump change, not even enough to buy a can of soda at a convenience store. The only mileposts in my life now are looking forward to watching my children grow, that and my retirement in 23 years. I know it seems like I’m wishing my life away, but I assure you I am content with the predictable, methodic pace my life is taking because I share it with people I love, my wife and kids. Predictable is good, and there is always the possibility for the unexpected adventure. I just have to be more patient.

Mountaineers Do It Again

2007-12-19T08:37:00.000-08:00

How about them Mountaineers?

You can see more pics at Blue Ridge Blog.

http://blueridgeblog.blogs.com/blue_ridge_blog/2007/12/appalachian-sta.html

Poem

2007-12-05T13:12:00.000-08:00

Cold

Starts with the wind,
distantly
howling and scraping
blindly
through skeleton trees,
rolling
down the mountain,
gaining momentum,
darkly
drawing the night closer,
slaps
against our clapboard house,
squeezing
creaks and moans,
twists
frame and rafters,
foundation footings.

A sudden silence,
quietly
slides like mercury
under doors,
window panes,
along hushed floors,
climbs
my footboard,
slips
under the corners,
quilted covers,
curling
around my toes,
settling
among bare-boned ankles,
siphons
what little warmth
can cling to me.

Poetry Still Inspires

2007-11-15T12:14:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I have a good day of teaching. In one of my classes, I am currently teaching how to do a research paper. I usually choose modern American poets as the topic because it does not require a huge amount of reading to get into a writer's work, and there is such a huge list to choose from. In one of my general level classes, a student chose Nikki Giovanni as his poet. He had been having some trouble getting into researching her biography and finding a poem to critique, until he came across "All Eyez on U." "Hey Mr. Hampton!" he said to me. "Did you know that my poet wrote a poem about 2Pac?" "Oh, yeah." I acted like I forgot. "What does she say about him?" He then warmed up a little more to reading about her life, especially once he realized that she wasn't one of those "boring dead white guys." Today in class he very animatedly told me that he just found out she had a tatoo on her arm that said "Thug Life." He was pretty impressed by that. I can't take the credit for his inspiration into poetry, though. All I did was point him in the direction I thought he would like to go.

A good collection of Nikki Giovanni's poetry is entitled Love Poems, which includes the tribute poem to 2Pac Shakur.

I Love This Time of Year!

2007-11-07T06:49:00.000-08:00

This photo was taken along the Boone Fork Trail near Blowing Rock, NC, which loops around Price Park just off the Blue Ridge Parkway. The resolution would have been better if I had my digital camera with me. This is just a scan from 35mm film. I love the fall, the leaves changing, the weather getting colder, the smell of woodsmoke from someone's chimney on the air. Even the sound that falling leaves make as they scuttle across the driveway or tumble over one another is elating.

My First Published Magazine Article or Hillbilly Heritage Comes to Paris

2007-10-30T13:01:00.000-07:00

And only one so far. I would like to say that it was my world-renowned knowledge of Appalachian Culture that got me the job. In reality, it was probably because my e-mail address had the word "hillbilly" in it that I was approached by a French magazine for English language learners to write an article. Today in English, a magazine out of Paris written for French-speaking people learning English, wanted me to write about "hillbillies" and the "mountains" of Appalachia. The editor, who was British, specified to focus on not just the place but the people as different from the rest of the U.S. He mentioned that everyone in his office thought of the Rockies when American mountains came to mind. I tried the best I could to explain it clearly to someone who had never visited the U.S. I also wanted as best as I could not to perpetuate the hillbilly stereotype, but to identify it as an economic and social class marker, a scapegoat for which most world cultures have an equivalent. The following article was published last November of 2006. The hardest part of writing this I remember was converting all measurments to the metric system. Them crazy Europeans and their precise measurements!

The Appalachians: My Hillbilly Home

When my grandfather was a young boy, he would sometimes follow the smell of an oak wood fire into the Buck Woods where the old-timers secretly made moonshine – corn whiskey, to be precise. They were mighty suspicious of visitors, but since my grandfather was too short to shoot, they let him watch. My grandfather also liked to eat the sour mash they fermented to make the alcohol and the men would sometimes give him a cup of this “shiner’s porridge”. Whether he got drunk from this or not, my grandmother wouldn’t say. It would seem too “hillbilly” to her, I suppose.
Hillbilly wasn’t a name to use in polite company, but it was there, the stereotype of the Appalachian Mountains: the lazy, bearded man in dirty clothes, sitting outside his log cabin with his dogs, no shoes, no teeth, a moonshine bottle in one hand and a shotgun leaning against the wall beside him. Or the woman: barefoot and pregnant, a child on one hip. That was the image that came to everyone’s mind when they heard I was from the mountains, because that is how the rest of the country saw us. I talked different, I acted different, and I ate different food. When I opened my mouth, people automatically wanted to deduct 100 IQ points.
As I grew older, though, I learned to be proud of who I was and where I was from, and learned to love that which made the Appalachian Mountains different from the rest of the United States.

Small is beautiful
They barely cast a shadow, as mountain ranges go. Only a few peaks reach over 1,800 meters. At a distance, their gentle and forested hills may seem mundane for travellers accustomed to the Rockies or Alps, but the Appalachians are a unique island of tradition surrounded by the ever-changing waters of pop culture and progress. From their deep cultural heritage to the rich colors of the autumn foliage, their history and scenery are worthy of discovery.
Stretching 2,570 kilometers from Newfoundland, Canada, to Alabama in the southeast, they are one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world, having eroded from Himalaya-like peaks to their present size. The first to discover and settle the area were the American Indians. Later, the Scotch-Irish settled in the coves - some say it was because the area reminded them of the highlands they left behind. Many were devout Presbyterians, but they also brought their love for fiddle music and making whiskey.

Families and Feuds
What makes people from Appalachia different than the rest of the country could best be summed up in three factors: family, land, and time. There are stronger ties to family and tradition here in the mountains. Vendettas have been declared over blood ties - the famous Hatfield and McCoy feud is an example. In my area, there was a feud between the Allen family and law-men that finished in a shootout at the court, today called the Carroll County Courthouse Tragedy. Families stick together around here, for good or bad.
People also feel a closer tie to the land in the mountains. There is a sense of belonging to the mountains, of them defining who we are. What part of the mountains someone is from can be just as important as the sports team for which one cheers - so West Virginians, for instance, are fiercely loyal to their state. They have to be because of all the jokes that get told about them.
Time is viewed a little differently here in the mountains, and there is a friendliness and hospitality that is found more in the Appalachians than elsewhere. Whenever I leave the mountains and visit places like New York City, for example, I realize how much I miss expressions such as “Thank you” or “Excuse me.”

Not one range, but many
The Appalachians are really not one but several mountain ranges, each with distinctive geographic and cultural differences. To the north there are ranges such as the Adirondacks of New York and the Poconos of Pennsylvania. These are wonderful places to visit, don’t get me wrong, but being from the South I am naturally inclined toward the Southern Appalachians such as the Blue Ridge Mountains, which run from Virginia through North Carolina. They get their name from how the dark green of the summer forests look blue in the distance, rather as the nearby Smokey Mountains get their name from the blue-gray haze that veils the summits. Autumn is one of the best times of year to visit them, as the leaves lose their green color, revealing deep reds, oranges and yellows.
When it comes to recreation, camping and hiking are popular activities. Practically every park or national forest has miles upon miles of well-maintained trails and campsites. One of the most famous is the Appalachian Trail - a 3,478 kilometer footpath crossing 14 states from Maine to Georgia. Whitewater rafting and kayaking are also favorite pastimes with many world-class rapids here. Believe it or not, winter offers opportunities for skiing as well – the season is much shorter than in northern Appalachia or the Rockies, but places such as Beech Mountain in North Carolina and Snowshoe Mountain in West Virginia offer comparable conditions. “Spelunking,” or cave exploration is another popular recreational attraction. Kentucky is most famous for Mammoth Cave National Park, the longest recorded cave system in the world. More than 570 kilometers have been explored and mapped.

Bluegrass and Country
The Southern Appalachian region is also rich in the cultural legacy left by our Scotch-Irish ancestors. From the settlers’ love of music developed two styles that are distinctly American: Bluegrass and Country. Though not as internationally popular as Rock ’n Roll or Jazz, they all originated from the same old-time sound. From the beginning, the Scotch-Irish fiddle was accompanied by the banjo, an instrument used by African slaves. Guitars were added much later, as well as the mandolin. The music was used as a means of entertainment at dances, and of storytelling, passing folk tales down to younger generations. Only later did Bluegrass legend Bill Monroe give it a title, after the blue-hued grass of Kentucky.
Once called “Hillbilly music”, the name "Country" developed as record companies tried to meet an urban demand for a traditional sound of rural, “country” people. The birthplace of country music isn’t in Nashville, but in Bristol, Tennessee – the place where the famous Carter Family, whose tight harmonies defined the genre, first recorded their songs (recently made famous by the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?). Today, Country and Bluegrass music has experienced a renaissance, both mainstream and in smaller circles. Festivals such as Merlefest in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, celebrate country and bluegrass greats new and old every spring.

The Moonshine Boys
They were called the Robin Hoods of their time, roaring down the backwoods roads and over bridges, their big engines heralding their approach. With moonshine bottles rattling together in the back, they outraced the police with their hard-driving skills, delivering their cargo to the big-city bars and bringing the money home to support the family. Called "moonshine" because it was made by the light of the moon, this illegal whiskey-making was a profitable enterprise at a time when jobs were scarce. So, to avoid getting caught, young men would rebuild their car engines to enhance performance and outrun the police. Soon, they began to argue about who had the fastest car, deciding the contest with late-night races around a farmer's field. This is the unlikely origin of one the USA's largest spectator sports: Stock Car Racing. Better known today as NASCAR (National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing – memorize this and you win the admiration of thousands of fans!), it originated in the Appalachian region. The Dukes of Hazzard television show and movie attests to this legacy.

Don't Believe What You Hear
Over the years, the stereotypical hillbilly image has been romanticized in historic figures such as Davy Crockett, or seen as comic in television shows such as The Beverly Hillbillies, and even portrayed as evil and monstrous in movies such as Deliverance, where sadistic and depraved hillbillies harass, torture, and sexually molest a group of canoeists from the city. Don’t worry; the only things I’ve ever encountered canoeing and rafting around here are mosquito bites and a sunburn.
In reality, every society has its hillbilly. For the English, the lower class of ridicule was the Irish. For the French, it was the Belgians. For us hillbillies, it is the summer tourists from Florida who don’t know how to drive in the mountains, but that’s another story.
Many people laugh when we call the Appalachians “mountains,” and I can understand that, having myself traveled through the Rockies. But what the Appalachians lack in height, they make up for in depth -- of history, culture, and charm. To the rest of our country, they are like the wise and eccentric uncle of the family. Besides, to call them “hills” seems too condescending. Certainly, when I am on top of Mount Mitchell, with miles and miles of mountains rolling like waves around me, I can’t help but feel like I am standing on top of the world.

* * * *

[Insert shameless self-promotion here] By the way, I'm available for freelance writing if any editors are interested!

SAWC's Fall Gathering at the Highlander Center

2007-10-22T12:28:00.000-07:00

This past weekend I fellowshipped with poets and writers of the Southern Appalachian Writers' Cooperative (SAWC for short) at the Highlander Center in New Market, Tennessee. It was a fantastic time of socializing, reading work, and workshopping our writing, and, of course, swarping. We had about 12 or so people there, smaller than last year's group, but had some wonderful new members attend for the first time (I hope to see you guys, er, gals again Jenny, Jennifer, and Susan, at next year's gathering, or sooner). Unlike other poetry workshops I have been to, the small atmosphere and camaraderie to me tends to foster a trusting, relaxing, and fun. In my 12 years of writing I've discovered in me a regional, Appalachian voice that feels at home with this loosely knit group of writers and varlets. I've been going almost every year since 1999, and until the group is overrun by terrorists (or Republicans) they will always be considered my family of writers.

I also took a scenic drive to Tennessee via the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Smoky Mountains. I took some great pictures at Graveyard Fields in which the fall colors seemed to pop out of the landscape, seen here. These photos hardly represent how they actually looked, though. Even though it was cloudy, the oranges, reds, and yellows shined like sunlight.

Also, at Jennifer's request this weekend, I have posted below one of the poems I read this past Saturday, "Grandma's Kitchen." If you don't like the poem, you can blame her (ha ha).

Poem

2007-10-22T12:27:00.000-07:00

Grandma’s Kitchen

My wife won’t stop
for mom and pop restaurants,
but rather enjoys the consistency,
the glossy, dim-lit sterility
of Outback and Applebee’s.

One cold Christmas day,
traveling back from my folks,
the only sit-down place open
for miles in any direction
was Grandma’s Kitchen.

A little barn-framed building,
next to a truck stop where
the pavement ended in ruts
and the air was chicken-fried.
I was ready to claim my stake.

“She’s not my Grandma,”
my wife said with upturned brow,
“probably some sweaty cook
dropping ashes in the French fries,
scratching himself with a spatula.”

I just looked solemnly out the window,
thought of corn bread and beans
and the coffee I was about to receive.
While she drove away in my truck, I thought,
she must not be that hungry.

Return to Oz

2007-10-17T12:04:00.000-07:00

In 1979, my father took our family to a theme park called Land of Oz. I was only five at the time, but I remember how much I enjoyed it. I remember the costumed characters, Dorothy's house, and the witch's castle. What I remember the most was the yellow brick road, made of yellow glazed bricks. Located on top of Beech Mountain, North Carolina, a ski resort town, the theme park eventually closed in 1980. It is now owned by a real estate company that turned it into a summer home, gated community.

A couple of weekends ago my wife found out that, for one weekend a year in October, Emerald Properties and the town of Beech Mountain host Autumn at Oz, in which they open what is left of the theme park and invite food vendors and merchants who sell Wizard of Oz memorabilia.

My wife and I took our daughter, but thankfully left our 8-month-old son at home (it was chilly and wasn't stroller accessible). The leaves had just begun to change color, so it was beautiful. The chairlift for the theme park had long been dismantled, so we took a hayride to the top (they also had a bus). The first thing I noticed when we got to Dorothy's house and the farm was how smaller everything looked now. Of course, I didn't expect it to be just like it was when it was open 27 years ago, and some people might have found it a disappointment if they were expecting that, but we had a blast. I loved it because I was reliving a fond childhood memory. My daughter loved it because of all the people, actors and visitors, that dressed up as characters from the movie. Some of the original attractions of the park are all but abandoned, like the cowardly lion's den or the hot air balloon (seen here). The yellow brick road, made of bricks that had been pottery-glazed yellow, had been patched over the years with yellow spray-painted bricks, but the magic was still there.

There was a time or two that we had to wait in line, as the crowds backed up, but the scenery was beautiful enough that I didn't care. I picked Beech nuts for my daughter and I to nibble on while we waited. Afterwards, we drove to Valle Crucis to get a snack at the original Mast General Store, and do some shopping.

For those interested in the former theme park, the Appalachian Cultural Museum in Boone, North Carolina, part of Appalachian State University, has an exhibit and information on how Land of Oz and Tweetsie Railroad (still in operation) brought commerce to the mountains in the 1970s.

Public Broadcasting is in Danger

2007-09-30T13:08:00.000-07:00

Both public television and public radio are in danger of severe government cuts and possibly a total cut of funding that, without it, could mean the closure of rural and minority radio stations and public television stations that cannot afford equipment for the government-mandated switch to digital broadcasting, for example.

You might be saying, "So what? I don't watch PBS or listen to any radio station below 92.1 on the FM band, much less AM. Why does it matter? Just raise money in other ways instead of using taxpayers' money to fund something most people don't listen to." Well, it should matter to the 80 million public television viewers and 32 million who listen to public radio. Public broadcasting is one of the few journalistic and artistic outlets that is free from commercial influence (media conglomerates who dictate what can be broadcast or what musical artists can be played) and political influence (Corporation for Public Broadcasting receives two-year advance appropriations, a firewall between public broadcasting's programming and the undue influence of Government).

Now, I'm no politician or expert on the runnings of the government, but the way I see it without this funding, these monies allocated to public broadcasting, it will be all about the money, and nothing else. Those who will suffer the most are small television and radio stations who offer needed public services to small, rural communities. Already the majority of all media and broadcasting is controlled by commercial giants such as Disney or McDonald's, and major record labels dictate to radio stations what musical artists they can play (see Don't Buy It: Get Media Smart ). Isn't the government supposed to protect and ensure our freedom of speech and freedom of the press, especially from itself and the Capitalist economy it promotes?

Please click on the link to the right, or check out Tell Them Public Matters and make your voice known to your senators and congressmen and women, and tell them public broadcasting matters!

Poem

2007-09-28T06:59:00.000-07:00

Good Evening, Suicide

Evening rushes in on blue sky veins,
throbbing parallel lines of life
pushed against the sharp autumn sunset.
They spill their secrets to the horizon,
bleeding oak red over the shaded hills.
Leaves fall limp to twilight’s breath,
sink slowly to the ground as slit wrists.
Its tepid bath grows a moonless dark.
The winter stars slip through the drain
when I’m not looking.

from Iodine Poetry Journal 7:2 (Fall/Winter 2006/2007) 17.

History, But Not Really Hillbilly

2007-09-24T06:52:00.000-07:00

On Sunday night, the History Channel broadcast a two-hour program on the Appalachian people called Hillbilly: The Real Story, hosted by Billy Ray Cyrus. Considering the title, I expected a piece on the historic, social, and economic influences on the Appalachian region and how it shaped our country's perception and stereotypes of us. It was very informational and entertaining, and focused on many of the important events that shaped the region. They could have easily called it The Appalachians, however, as the direct mention and explanation of hillbilly stereotypes was sparse. They also neglected to mention what I felt were key components of our region and culture.

There were many good segments to the program, the origins of the Scotch-Irish settlers, and particularly the piece on the Overmountain Men and the Battle of King's Mountain, which was fought against the British in 1780 in Cleveland County, North Carolina, not far from where I live. There was a very lengthy piece on Matewan and the Battle of Blair Mountain in Mingo County, West Virginia, in which union mine workers marched in rallying protest against the autocracy of big coal companies (see Denise Giardina's novel Storming Heaven). I was surprised, though, that such a lengthy piece neglected to mention how coal company speculators tricked landowners into selling the mineral rights to their land, or the current coal mining practice of mountaintop removal. Perhaps that would have been too political or controversial for them. There was also an interesting and respectful piece on snake handlers and their religious beliefs, which is unique to our region. Moonshine making and stock car racing got a considerable nod. The story mainly focused on the Flock family racing team, and I was disappointed there weren't mention of other moonshine-runners-turned-racers such as Junior Johnson. There was also a considerable segment on the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and its creation of the Fontana Dam, the tallest dam east of the Mississippi, and how it affected the economy after the Great Depression.

In the end, I felt the program ran out of time before it ran out of things to discuss. The last three minutes or so barely mentions the history and influences of Appalachian music on popular music today. No mention of the Carter Family or early "Hillbilly" music, or the birthplace of Country music, Bristol, Tennessee/Virginia. Throughout the program there were a peppering of explanations as to how and why the mountain and Hillbilly stereotypes were created, but not enough explanation to suite me. This program could have easily been a two or three part series. If I could pick one thing to criticize the most it's the lack of detail in how the media, the sole culprit, perpetuated the Hillbilly stereotype even today . I learned some things I didn't know, though, and I would recommend anyone to watch it whether expert or novice on the subject of Appalachia. There are far worse things to watch on TV these days.

The show will run for a few more nights: September 24 12:00 AM, September 27 8:00 AM, September 27 2:00 PM

Billy Ray did have an astute thing to say in conclusion, that the Appalachians aren't just a part of America, but that "We are America." Still, if I were an outsider watching this program, I would conclude that the Hillbilly stereotypes were all true, as this program merely explains and, I think, reinforces them.

Digging With a Plastic Shovel

2007-09-19T12:10:00.000-07:00

It was that time of year again when I cleaned up my summer garden, pulling blighted and dried up tomato plants, shriveled vines, and sundry weeds to pile in the compost. I watered and watered and hardly got one tomato that wasn't split or blossom-rotted, so it felt good to wipe the slate clean, to discard the frustration and failings of a dry summer. Now that the rains are returning, my plans were to put out some cool weather crops like spinach, cabbage, and fennel.

It had been a while since I did something with my four-year-old daughter, so I took her with me to the back yard. As much as I enjoy playing Barbies or Teddy Bear dress-up, I savor the times when I can do work outside that doubles as play time for her. I got out her pink wheelbarrow and plastic rake and shovel, along with my own wheelbarrow and yard tools, and began pulling up the tomato cages while she yanked up clumps of grass. It takes twice as long when she helps, but I wasn't in a hurry as there is still plenty of daylight in the afternoons. When we were finished, we carted it all off to the compost pile at the edge of the woods. Then it came time to till. She was right in there with her yellow plastic shovel, hacking at the dry ground and throwing dirt in the air over her shoulder. I wanted to tell her to let me soften the ground with my mattock first and then she could make little rows for the seeds, and tried explaining to her just that. Her efforts were futile, but she was having too much fun.

Her efforts reminded me of how many times I concern myself so much with getting to the end result, that I don't enjoy the process of doing it. My grandpa told me as a child many times that I wasn't doing something right, then make me watch while he showed me the correct process. He meant well, of course, but by then I had lost all interest in what I was doing. Sometimes, there are more ways of doing things than the right way or the wrong way. For my daughter, it was the "fun" way, maybe the "longer" way, but not necessarily the "wrong" way. So I gave her some room and let her sling that yellow plastic shovel. While I tilled the rest of the garden, I gave her room to dig her little four-inch-wide hole, where I later let her plant some cilantro. There will be time when she's older for lessons on spacing and planting depth, and all those other little nuances of gardening.

Poem

2007-09-13T07:47:00.000-07:00

The Summer Camp of Love

I was so high that summer
- - - - - The world was unclouded and bright
- - - - - - - - -Taking hits off the Holy Spirit
- - - - - - - - - at the Chapel Woods campfires
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Getting ready for the bridegroom
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Trimming our wicks, we knew
- - - - - - - - - He was coming with sound of trumpets
- - - - - - - - - And we would forever stand atoned.
- - - - - For those who repented of their sins,
cast their earthly vices aside,
- - - - - were the first to get stoned.

from Iodine Poetry Journal 9:2 (Fall/Winter 2008/2009) 40.

Those Who Can't, Teach

2007-09-07T06:53:00.000-07:00

Walt Whitman worked for a while as a teacher in series of windowless, poorly heated, one-room schoolhouses for almost no money. While teaching at one school, he wrote to a friend, "How tired and sick I am of this wretched, wretched hole! — ... O, damnation, damnation! Thy other name is school-teaching." --- from The Writer's Almanac

There's an old saying that goes, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, write." Or there is the other adage, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach." Though I don't always like my job (and who doesn't hate their job at times), I have a problem with people who believe this. In one aspect, I sometimes wish I could devote my entire day to my writing. I feel I would not only become better at it, but would eventually find a publisher and be able to sell my work. However, I have a family to support, and no guarantee that weeks and months and years of writing would produce a New York Times best seller, thus pulling me out of the grips of poverty. So I teach. People who have never taught have trouble understanding that it takes more than knowing something to teach it. I know a little bit about a lot of things, and a lot about some things, but getting in front of people who generally have no interest in what you are saying to begin with, and present this lesson of information in such a way to be both interesting and entertaining, is a daunting task. Then there is the issue of maintaining discipline in the classroom. Some teachers are such pushovers that students can get away with anything and, therefore, learn nothing. There are also some teachers that are so strict that flexibility and creativity are stifled and learning becomes a military drill that most students buckle under and give up. I would say that managing behavior and discipline in class is three-fourths the job of teaching in a public school, and if that can't be accomplished it doesn't matter how brilliant of a mind the person has. I can do any job that someone throws at me, and I have done many (dishwasher, busboy, pizza delivery, meat clerk, landscaping), but the hardest job I have ever worked at is what I am doing now, teaching. And its the hardest jobs that one must love in order to keep coming back to it day after day.

So as much as I agree with Whitman's sentiment above, I will have to say that I do "do." I live, I write, I teach.

Hillsville Flea Market and The Battery-Powered Squirrel

2007-09-05T06:49:00.000-07:00

Flea markets, you either love them or hate them. If you live in Hillsville, Virginia, however, it doesn't make much difference. In a town where the average population is 2,700, come Labor Day weekend the number of bodies soar to 650,000 -- that's on average the number of people who visit every Labor Day weekend to brave the crowds, mud, and shopping buggies (and the occasional motorized scooter) all in the name of a good find.

I spent seven years of my childhood in Hillsville, Virginia, and learned early on the history of its Labor Day flea market. Starting as a gun and knife show at the VFW building and parking lot, over the years it spilled across West Stuart Drive down what's called Hunley's Field. Like a kudzu vine it twisted its way up both sides of the street to the downtown area of Hillsville and another large section called Bowman's Field. If you walked every aisle in town it would take you all day. If you walked every aisle and looked at even half of the booths and vendors it would take you all weekend, and even then you might not see it all. In middle school, my friends and I would ride our bikes into town and ditch them behind the elementary school, then proceed to walk around for the remainder of the day looking at stuff. We mostly bought cheap Rambo-style survival knives, ninja throwing stars, coins, baseball cards, or comic books. Today a few friends and I meet every year to walk the rows and look for interesting items (seen above: Alan, Marty, and me). Of course, there is a lot of the same junk, and some outrageous prices for that junk, but there are also good finds to be had, and some pretty odd finds as well.

A few years ago my friends and I began scoping the booths for the oddest items we could find, seeing who could come up with the strangest, kitschiest, most outrageous item imaginable, or whatever tickled our funny bone. My friend Alan discovered a toy vendor who had something called The Battery-Powered Squirrel, in its original box. Underneath the title it boasted "with secret mystery action." Well, we just had to find out what that secret mystery action was, but the guy would only open the box to let us look at it. Inside was something that looked like roadkill. It's natural animal fur was peeling away from its metal body. The guy wanted $125 for it. Needless to say, we didn't buy it, but we've been on the lookout for it again ever since. This past Saturday we came across two items, a ceramic bank of Santa Claus holding a kitten riding on the back of a pig -- $100 (Alan would have bought it if it had one less zero in it) and a mechanical toy in its original box called The Happy Naughty Chimp (no secret mystery action, though). I almost bought it, but thought my children would just be scared by it. Marty found a captain's hat, but wouldn't buy it even though I told him I would put on a wig and be Tennille. We topped our morning's search off with lunch at the local Mexican restaurant, the Rio Grande. Some chimichangas and a pitcher of Dos Equis hit the spot, and gave us inspiration to walk around for a few more hours. No Battery-Powered Squirrel was to be found, but there is always next year.

Poem

2007-08-22T08:43:00.000-07:00

Aunt Beulah Sounds Off

A pioneer-island in a world that has
no use for pioneers – the unsplit rock
of Fundamentalism, calomel
clan-virtues, clannish vices, fiddle tunes
and a hard God.
--Stephen Vincent Benét

Don't call us backward.
We walk in the same direction as you,
just not in such a hurry to discard
the old for the new.
We're content with our pace, thank you.

Sure, while you may have been the first
on your block to listen to your records in stereo,
to install an 8-track player in your Pinto,
to fill your CD tower with the latest music,
we were already making our own,
hewing out tunes on fiddle, dulcimer, and banjo,
not from woofers or tweeters, but from our own hands it flowed.

Restless and discontent city-folk
with your throw-away culture,
media-stoked and commercially corrupt,
defiling your identity,
defining yourselves with store-bought trinkets,
and what you can't buy right away, you rent,
no money down and take years and years to pay.
I'm sorry, but that's just not our way.

And we aren't so out of touch
that we don't know
about microwave ovens and bread machines,
but biscuits rise better
in four hundred degrees
of cast iron and oak kindling.
Microwaves are good for warming coffee,
but not cold kitchens in winter.
As for chopping firewood, my callused hands can deal with the splinters.

Tradition is our identity,
and change does come slow, I'll admit.
But when it does, we don't forget
how we were raised, preserving,
passing on the memories
of the way things used to be.
You say it's not your bag, and that's just fine with me.

in Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel 7 (Fall 1999) 27.

View From Rough Ridge

2007-08-21T11:51:00.000-07:00

One of countless scenic views along the Blue Ridge Parkway, Rough Ridge is just about a mile north of the Linn Cove Viaduct (near Linville, NC), and a short (albeit strenuous) hike up a trail. Spring and early summer is the best time to visit, as the white Mountain Laurels and pink Rhododendrons are in bloom, seen here. Late summer and early fall are also great times as the rare Blue Ridge Goldenrod and Heller's Blazing Star are in bloom, both on the Federal Endagered Species list. I'm hoping to head back up there before the leaves start changing color to get some more photos.

This view is looking south.

Bluewashing the Mountaineer

2007-08-09T07:09:00.000-07:00

I just read an interesting article in the Winter 2007 issue of the Appalachian Journal about a trend in media and popular culture towards the portrayal of the Hillbilly or rural stereotype. Back in the late '60s, there was a huge movement in pop culture toward the portrayal of mountain and rural life, for good or bad, as seen for example in television shows such as Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, and Hee Haw, not to mention the extensive advertising of Mountain Dew's "It'll tickle yore innards" or "Get that barefoot feeling," ending, I believe, with the cancellation of the Dukes of Hazzard in 1984 (at the hands of a ratings battle with Knight Rider, a sleeker, more modern hot rod). Since then, the media's fascination with rural, redneck America has been in a lull. According to Douglas Reichert Powell, the author of this article, the country, rural, hillbilly stereotype is making a comeback, a renaissance if you will.

With the popularity of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, there has been a revisiting of rural stereotypes in movies and television. Powell's main focus is on the television show My Name is Earl, which milks both the noble mountaineer stereotype (country folk are essentially good people) and the hillbilly fool (country folk are ignorant, white trash, and laughable) There is also the hillbilly as monster and sexual predator stereotype (see movies such as Deliverance, A Face in the Crowd, and Baby Doll), but that could be a whole other discussion by itself. I tend to agree on most points with Powell's argument, but I feel that the stereotypes are no more in the forefront of the media today than they have been in the past 20 years, or at least I feel he didn't quite make his point in the article. Stereotypes have always served the same purpose -- to allow society to recognize an individual by attaching a group label. Granted, stereotypes always contain kernels of truth. There are people in Appalachia with bad oral hygeine who married their first cousin and live in a trailer with three or more dogs under their porch. But that doesn't mean it's fair to attach those characteristics to everyone who lives in Appalachia. I agree the most with Powell that when shows such as My Name is Earl try to challenge a white trash stereotype, there is an irony there that "[the media] need[s] the legibility, the recognizability of the stereotypes they propose to undermine in order to get the audience undermining the stereotypes with them." Despite how bad stereotypes are, then, they serve a purpose and are necessary, even for the purpose to turn right around and challenge or destroy them. Though Powell did use the term "hillbillyland" in the first first sentence of his article, he didn't give credit to the author who coined the term, J.W. Williamson, and wrote the book on hillbilly stereotypes in the media, Hillbillyland: What the Movies Did to the Mountains & What the Mountains Did to the Movies (1995).

I close with this final thought. If the masses of America need stereotypes, simple labels, to define an individual or a character in a television show, what does that say about the imagination of the American public?

Source: Powell, Douglas Reichert. "'Bluewashing' the Mountaineer: A Recent Television Trend" Appalachian Journal: A Regional Studies Review. 34:2 (Winter 2007) 206.

Poem

2007-07-28T21:18:00.000-07:00

Posteriors in Perspective

festive
festoons of
fabulous fannies
down the sidewalk
march proudly behind
women who know
what a caboose is

pedaling
bicycle buns
perch precariously
on tiny padded pedestals
and watch from above
while the legs
get all the credit

shivering
skinny dipping
bare white buns
shining in the sun
laughing, swimming
not so secretly
among sweet shrubs
and the summer shade
of rhododendrons

wonderful
wide loads
dimple-cheeked thighs
wearing elastic pants
wandering the aisles
at Wal-Mart
and whispering
against one another
as they brush past
with their shopping carts

Daisy Dukes
double take
low riding and
dropping out the back
should be a sin
mere inches of ragged
Levi demons
daringly dressed or
denim deficient?
it depends on the degree
of degradation

More Poetry for the Masses

2007-07-27T19:59:00.000-07:00

I'll be the first one to admit that the people who tend to admire poetry the most are also poets themselves. Sometimes a clever metaphor or allusion is lost on those who are not used to reading poetry. Poetry tends to be more concise, to say more with fewer words. Like eating Campbell's condensed soup straight from the can, poetry can be a little strong for many palates. From my high school students, to my parents, to even my wife, poetry is not something that is usually read. It wasn't always that way, though. At one time, poetry was included in newspapers and popular magazines. Many poets became household names, such as the Fireside Poets of the 19th century, or such poets as Robert Frost or Maya Angelou. I wonder, though, if the fault lies entirely with the modern, technology-savy-yet-unliterate average Joe or possibly with poets themselves.

In an essay written by John Barr, president of the Poetry Foundation, entitled "American Poetry in the New Century," Barr declared, "American poetry is ready for something new because our poets have been writing in the same way for a long time now. There is fatigue, something stagnant about poetry being written today." Poetry has been largely absent from public life, whether the classroom, bookstore, newspaper, or mainstream media, they all have "a morale problem," that poems are written only with other poets in mind. For that reason, according to Barr, they do not sell. He thinks poets need to write poetry that is more robust, resonant, and above all, entertaining. In one section of the essay entitled, "Live Broadly, Write Boldly," he urged poets to be like Hemingway and seek experience outside of the poetry circles or academia establishments. Take a safari, run with the bulls, go marlin fishing, just get out and experience life. That is what he believes the public will connect with -- real life.

I think Billy Collins is such a successful poet (having sold over 500,000 books of poetry) because of this, besides the fact that he is good at what he does. He comes to the reader unpretentious with poems about everyday occurences that end up being slightly more than that, and leaves us with something understandable to think about. I am no Billy Collins (watch him to become a household name someday), but I strive in my own writing to appeal not just to the poet but to anybody willing to take the time to read a poem. Am I successful in this? I think the jury is still deliberating on that.

Source: Goodyear, Dana. "The Moneyed Muse." The New Yorker. February 19 & 26, 2007. 122-135.

A Magnificent Time at Malaprops

2007-07-17T21:13:00.000-07:00

This past weekend’s reading of SAWC members at Malaprops was a success! Granted, only 20 people were in the audience, seven of them being those of us who were reading our work, but we had fun and I think the rest of the audience enjoyed it too. It was also a good opportunity to promote our new issue of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, our yearly literary journal.

Several of us stayed at Jim Hinsdale’s house the night before, and drove up from Tryon to Asheville Sunday morning. We did a little walking around beforehand. Jim Webb (of “Get In, Jesus” fame) bought a pair of sandals at Mast General Store. Dana Wildsmith made a comment on the friendliness and energy that seemed to exude from the passersby on the street. Asheville is an eclectic city, you have to admit. As we were walking back up the street toward the obelisk, we were stopped by a girl who honestly admitted she was having a bad day and hoped one of us would buy her a beer. So floored by her frankness, Jim gave her a few dollars and told her he hoped her day got better.

We decided a beer was a good idea, so we popped in to the bar across the street from Malaprops, where Frankie Finley and Jim Minick were also meeting us. I’m not a big drinker (anymore), but I was a tad anxious, so a tall ale was just what my nerves needed. Hilda Downer and Jane Hicks were waiting in Malaprops when we arrived. Jim Hinsdale was also there with his wife Kay, and he opened the reading for us. I read three poems, the first one being “A Picture’s Worth,” which is included in the new issue. I think I did well. I might have tripped over a word or two, but I didn’t care (thank you, C2H5OH). The events coordinator at Malaprops said we were welcome to schedule another reading like this next year, so I guess we passed the audition, so to speak. For anyone who would like to pick up a copy of volume 12 of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel for only $5 (or back issues for only $4), please contact me at: hillbillyland2@yahoo.com or our editor, Frankie Finley at: frankiefinley@yahoo.com. By the way, check out the cover art. Frankie’s partner Beth is a landscape architect and artist., and did an excellent job.

Poem

2007-07-09T09:30:00.000-07:00

Hi-Fi Stereotype

“And after all that is come upon us for our evil deeds,
and for our great trespass, seeing that thou our
God hast punished us less than our
iniquities deserve and hast given us
such deliverance as this;”
Ezra 9:13

When John Boorman directed
Ned Beatty to drop his pants
and squeal like a pig for
local actors pretending to be
some crazed mountain men,
dirty, bent with bestiality
(“If there were ever any
degenerate red-necks,
they are these two”),
did they think that
somewhere in those
twisted hills,
those hollows
of American darkness
crawled the real thing,
toothless crackers,
moonshine-drinkin’
hillbilly inbreds
whose sole desire
was to gleefully molest
unsuspecting city folk,
young men who just wanted
to canoe a little white water?

No Shucking The Corn,
no Old Joe Clark,
just wicked crackling,
sharp cutting chords,
banjo strings plucking
in the background,
over the rapid’s roar.
As the water carried them,
they paddled urgently,
with fearful and tense bodies,
peering into the forest’s edge,
surrounded on both sides
with the unfamiliar, therefore evil.
You know he’s coming for you,
Lucifer of the mountain laurels,
Beelzebub of the brambles,
while Eric Weissberg
picks his way through
brand-new Pioneer
surround-sound speakers.
I never knew a banjo could make
such a harrowing sound.
Paddle faster.

A Poem Accepted -- Yeehaw!!

2007-07-08T18:05:00.000-07:00

Not Yay, or Yipee, which can denote sarcasm, but a full-fledged Yeeeeehaw (or maybe Yahooooo would be better, which comes from deeper in the throat and belly when yelled). I got an e-mail from the journal Appalachian Heritage that they liked one of the poems I sent them. "The Night I Met Franklin Graham," will be published this fall. For those who have never heard of the publication, it is an Appalachian regional literary magazine (some people say the Appalachian literary magazine) out of Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. The college was founded on the belief that anyone from the Appalachian region deserves a college education regardless of socioeconomic status, so every one of its 1,500 students admitted gets a 4-year-tuition scholarship. Its programs also focus on preserving and promoting regional culture through literature, history, the arts, and so on. So it's even more of an honor for me to be a part of that, however small that may be.

I'm also excited about next Sunday. Our literary band of varlets, the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative (SAWC), will be having a reading (including little ol' me) at 3 pm at Malaprops Bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina. Many writers will have books to promote and I believe our latest issue of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel will be available as well, showcasing samples of everyone's work. As I've mentioned before, I'm a little nervous. I'm used to audiences of high school teenagers who usually only pay attention to half the stuff I say. It's a little different reading poetry to a group of adults, when people are trying to catch every word and nuance I utter. I haven't decided what I'm reading yet, either. Maybe I should just break the ice like Carl Sandburg used to -- arrive wearing overalls and a checkered work shirt and play some folk songs on my guitar first (to hell with what Robert Frost said about playing tennis without a net). Now, if only I knew how to play guitar.

Finally Enjoying Summer Vacation

2007-06-26T13:54:00.000-07:00

I know I shouldn’t gloat. Most people don’t get 8 weeks off for the summer. As a teacher, however, I really believe it makes up for the grief we have to put up with from administrators, parents, and students for the rest of the year. Therefore, I’ve learned to savor each day and make it count. Last week I took the family on vacation to Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg, Tennessee, which for me isn’t really much of a vacation now that we have an infant and a preschooler [Didn’t get to stop at Hill-Billy Village this time around -- Shucks! (see May 25th entry)]. They had fun, so I guess that’s what counts. This week, though, has been wonderful. This morning, for instance, I got up at 6:30 and fixed me breakfast – grits, toast, and coffee. Then for the next two hours I listened to public radio while writing and revising some poetry. I made breakfast for my daughter, who woke up wanting to watch Barbie Rapunzel. Then I cleaned the kitchen, straightened up the house, and washed a couple of loads of clothes while the wife tended to our newborn son. By that time, it’s late morning and I’m ready for whatever the day has to offer. Of course, by middle of August I’ll be going stir crazy, ready to get out of the house and back to work. But that’s six weeks away.

Poem

2007-06-22T13:02:00.000-07:00

A Vexing Conundrum

so much depends
on what?

and who left the
wheel barrow

out in the rain
rusting

red while they sat
inside

dreaming of chicken
dinners?

Yusef Komunyakaa on Poetry

2007-06-13T08:39:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite contemporary poets, Komunyakaa has some very astute things to say about modern American poetry, about what it is and what it should be.

"There's a sameness about American poetry that I don't think represents the whole people. It represents a poetry of the moment, a poetry of evasion, and I have problems with this. I believe poetry has always been political, long before poets had to deal with the page and white space .... [I]f you were to take many magazines and cut the names off poems, you would have a single collection that could be by any given poet; you could put one name on it, as if the poems were all by one person. True, a writer can say almost anything in America and have it completely overlooked, yet I think we should have more individual voices."
from "Lines of Tempered Steel: An Interview with Vincente F. Gotera," Callaloo 13:2

I Didn't Teach Her to Catch Fireflies

2007-06-12T08:39:00.000-07:00

At least I don't remember. I was busy enough teaching her to use the potty last year and brush her teeth, that I can't rightly recall. Yesterday evening I was watering my garden when my 4-year-old daughter ran in front of me, trying to get under the sprinkler. I didn't want her to get wet and dirty in her good clothes, so to get her out from under me I told her to go catch fireflies. I pointed toward the edge of the yard, where it was shaded by the woods. The lightning bugs were just beginning to blink. She took off down the hill, hunching low and looking in the taller grass with her arms outstretched. No sooner had I watered a few tomato plants when she came running up to me. "Look what I caught, Daddy!" She had not one, but two little fireflies in her hands. She even had her hands cupped carefully enough not to squish them. I told her to point her finger up, and we watched them climb to the highest point of her hand before taking flight and disappearing into the growing darkness.

Poem

2007-06-04T19:55:00.000-07:00

Illumination, To Everything Turn

Light is given out in unequal measures,
doled out hastily and without favor.
It is taken back sometimes just as quickly
as the setting sun or a final breath.

It screams through morning curtains,
cold, hungry, and wanting to be held,
sings with the sweetness of a mother’s caress,
and dances from windowsill to front porch steps.

The warm air holds its reflected glow,
sunning bicycles in the front yard,
burns red as a scraped-knee afternoon,
as driveway stones sweat in the humidity.

Serendipity is the cool kiss of evening,
while amber rays wink around tree branches.
It sifts through rusty back porch screens, and rests
with content like old lacquer on ladder-back chairs.

But the rising moon has a sad green glow,
shining through door cracks with a wave of dismay.
It washes cold around the footboard with deference,
and as the tide retreats back from where it came,
it settles on the skin like a froth of quilted lead.

in The Broad River Review 37 (Spring 2005) 71.

Hillbilly Hotspots

2007-05-25T12:29:00.000-07:00

I've had a fascination for anything hillbilly ever since I first dived, head-first, into a Coca-Cola cooler and pulled out a cold glass bottle of Mountain Dew with the outhouse, pig, and gun-toting mountain man logo. Even in the 1980s, bottling companies were still reusing them. My grandmother used to work as a cashier at a gas station/general store out in Woodlawn, Virginia. Oftentimes I would stay with her at the store, walking around the aisles or sitting on the front porch with a bottle of Mountain Dew and a candy bar. Down the mountain from where we lived, in Cana, Virginia, was a produce stand and tourist stop called Mountain Man. Its sign had the same bearded man with a frayed hat. I haven't been there in years, so I don't know if it's still there, but they used to have regular bluegrass music performances from a flatbed trailer.

I later learned that back in the 1960s there was a trend for anything country or hillbilly -- usually for comic effect. This trend gave birth to the Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, and the Dukes of Hazzard. Advertisers also jumped on the bandwagon, and many businesses in the Appalachian region touted "hillbilly" in their names. I know of several, some I've been to and some I've only seen in postcard pictures. My new favorite is Hill-Billy Village in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. In the midst of the fancy laser tag, bungee jumping, go-cart racing, there is a little oasis of yesteryear. It was the first tourist stop on the whole strip, before anything else was there. Sure, it's run down today, but if you want a coonskin cap, Indian moccasins, or a rebel flag T-shirt this is the place to go. And if you follow the signs to the very back (sorry, no photographs please) you end up on their back lot where they keep a replica of an old cabin and moonshine still. It is oooold, but has a kitschy quality to it. If you are in the area and like kitschy, then you have to go to Hillbilly Golf in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, as well. The whole miniature golf course is built on the side of a hill. You even have to ride a trolly to the top, it's so steep. My wife is rolling her eyes right now. Some people just don't appreciate good hillbilly culture.

(Note: This blog entry is not intended in any way to stereotype, degrade, or trivialize mountain life in the Appalachians or Ozarks. There are many folks that believe the Appalachian American is the last ethnicity that is still safe to make fun of without reprecussion from the politically-correct minded. I feel that if there is to be any fun made of mountain folks, it should be done by mountain folks themselves. This is why Jeff Foxworthy can tell Redneck jokes, because he is one, and why I feel justified in doing the same. And if you come to my house, I'll show you my shotgun to prove it.)

Submitting Poetry -- Aaaarrrrrgh!!

2007-05-18T12:42:00.000-07:00

To become a published writer, one has to submit, and submit, and submit. It is good to know the type of poetry a journal or magazine publishes in order to estimate if your style or particular poem might be what they are looking for. More often than not, it's not. So I usually have work sent out to several places at a time. When one comes back rejected, I usually either evaluate why, maybe make some tweaks to them if its been several months since I read them last, and send it back out, or just take the same hard copies out of the returned rejection and into a new envelope ready to send somewhere else. One must not get discouraged.

Recently, however, my work hit a new low. I sent a group of poems to the magazine Now & Then, which is a regional and Appalachian magazine that publishes poetry among other things. I read a few issues of it the last time I was at the library. The upcoming theme was "wildness." I picked several I thought were fitting of the theme. I mailed it on May 10th. I got it back on May 16th with my original cover letter and a small note from the editor at the bottom dated May 13th that stated my poems weren't what she was looking for. Now that may be, but talk about rejection! My poetry spent more time in the mail than it did on her desk waiting to be considered! Well, at least I can now consider sending them elsewhere, instead of waiting months to a year for notification.

Poem

2007-05-09T18:36:00.000-07:00

Ham Hocks

While eating a funnel cake I saw him,
walking down from the uphill side of Main
where factory houses are stacked like cards.
That day he must have felt a little out of place
with the starched collars and tourist faces
of the Harland County Apple Festival,
tall, gray hair in a cowlick, wearing work boots
and overalls without a shirt,
looking like he had just awakened
from a third-shift-induced slumber.

I sat on a curb as he crossed the street
to a hippie vendor counting change.
"Where are your ham hocks?" he asked,
clearing sawdust from his throat with a loud hawk,
looking red-eyed and clearly confused.

"We sell hammocks, man – woven by Mayan Indians,"
the vendor replied with a faint smile and a nervous tug
on the shirttail of his sweater.

He spat on the ground beside him.
"I read your sign from my front porch,
walked all the way down the hill...,
aimin' to get me some ham hocks."
Hands in his pockets, the long-haired vendor
only shrugged his shoulders and smiled again.

The old man walked out into the street
among the crowds of balloons and baby strollers,
squinted his eyes at the vendor's sign above,
and scratched the stubble on the end of his chin.
He walked up to the booth once more,
stooping to get under the canvas awning.
"So you don't sell ham hocks then?"
he asked again in a querulous voice.

"Nope," the vendor answered with finality
and, almost mockingly, asked
"What are ham hocks?"

With a look like a slap in the face,
the old man backed away, bumping clumsily
into a young couple eating candy apples.
I turned to sneeze,
blowing powdered sugar off my paper plate,
but lifted my head in time to observe
the old man slip behind the vendor's booth
unnoticed by others,
hook the toe of his brogan
around a corner pole.
The falling canvas captured
the hippie and two customers
as a cowlick head of hair
sauntered away, disappearing
behind a bee-swarmed dumpster.

in Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel 7 (Fall 1999) 26.

Poetry Reading at Malaprops

2007-05-04T12:14:00.000-07:00

The date is finally set for SAWC's (Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative) poetry reading at Malaprops in Asheville, NC. After a few changes in schedule from last mention, it will be held on Sunday, July 15 at 3pm. All in all, seven of us will reading, which is a good number for the 45 minutes they are giving us. Our illustrious co-coordinator Frankie gets all the thanks for setting this up for us. Though Asheville is not far from where I live, some folks are driving from as far away as Virginia, Kentucky, and Georgia. I'm excited about going, and it will be great to see old friends that I normally see only once a year. I'm a little anxious as well because public reading has never been my strong suit when it comes to sharing my writing with others. Mainly it's the reading aloud to strangers; I've gotten better about reading in front of people whom I know.

Several of our folks who are reading even have books to promote, seeing Malaprops is a bookstore. Though I don't have one of my own to tout, SAWC's newest edition of our journal Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel is coming out soon, and might possibly be ready to share with our audience. I have a poem that will be in it entitled "A Picture's Worth," that I will probably later post after it is published. Though SAWC may not be a nationally-known group, I feel a part of something larger than just the mountain South. I'm in a community of like-minded people who enjoy writing, Nature, the Appalachians, and who aren't afraid to stand up for social injustices of the region.

For more information on SAWC (like the history, or our mission statement), see the links list on this blog site.

James Still's Poetry Besmirched

2007-05-03T12:16:00.000-07:00

A student in my American Literature class was interested in writing his research paper about James Still, an Appalachian author from Kentucky, but couldn't find any poetry of Still's on the internet. "Jack" is a self-proclaimed "good ol' boy" who had no interest in poetry before, but I convinced him to look into poets like James Still and Jim Wayne Miller because they wrote about such things as hunting and the outdoors. That piqued his interest a little, so I brought a copy from home of Still's Wolfpen Poems for him to skim through. After looking through the slim volume of poetry, he gave it back with a page bookmarked for me to photocopy for him. I can't remember the poem right offhand, but I immediately noticed the page edges, especially his bookmarked page, were covered in dirty, greasy thumbprints. I looked at his hands, which were calloused and stained from where he had been working on something in Masonry class before. I was taken aback at first, my out-of-print copy smudged with reddish orange, but I got to thinking how James Still would probably welcome the stains. Whether it was red North Carolina clay or black coal dust from Kentucky, it wouldn't matter. Still' s writing reflects his connection to the earth, as in his novel River of Earth, just as those smudges were inextricable from the pages of my book. He apologized when he realized what he did, but I did the best I could to play it off as not a big deal. Maybe James Still will leave a lasting thumbprint on him.

Poem

2007-04-25T12:55:00.000-07:00

Love and Less

Somewhere between Rolling Rocks
and morning light,
between neck and collar bone,
piecemeal tokens of
flowering purple affection,
touched lightly with a morning buzz
and your limp arm over
my wrinkled consciousness.

Somewhere between Sunday morning
and sausage biscuits,
the cashier at Hardee's
with a careful glance,
feigning apathetic eyes
over the rim of her thick glasses,
hands us our tray,
gives away what she really thinks
of missing buttons
and my lipstick collar,
concealing gleanings
of that glaucous night before.

We sit, wondering and knowing
in a window booth,
silently chewing the sobering direction.
Clarity advances
with each church-bell chime
from First Baptist down the street,
like a grandfather clock,
and our seconds together compete
against throbbing temples and
an almost soothing indifference,
telling us our time has been eaten
to tabletop crumbs.

I left you my phone number
and you left me no choice
but to leave you, back turned,
at the steps to your apartment.
Neither one of us knew
where it would go, or end,
from free beer and an invitation.
After a week of turning away,
my memories turn a lighter hue
in compliment with the
blood-shade bruises in the mirror.
You fade to pallid skin in my mind.

in The Broad River Review 35 (Spring 2003) 30.