Many thanks to Simmons Buntin and everyone at Terrain.org for Stutter-Step: Poetry, Prose + Window Views, an excerpt from Glass Cabin. The excerpt includes artwork by Dan Shafer from the book as well as readings by Tina and me of the poems.
We had no rain in October. It was a quiet month here, good writing weather and working outside weather. We got down to Sally Branch several times with friends. And Rachel and Nigel came over to help us put in gutters for a rain catchment system in need of rain. We traveled to Cades Cove, had a picnic on the knoll we always go to off Hyatt. Then up to Cincy. Back home for over a week now we’ve been sick, slow movers, ratioing the last few gallons of water in our cisterns. Then this morning a juvenile bald eagle came out of the mist from Sally Branch to light in the crown …
UAB Magazine features Glass Cabin in its newest issue. Many thanks to the folks at UAB’s Central Communications for writing the story and for coming out to the cabin to take photos in the hot summer. You can read it here. * photograph by Andrea Mabry
Bham Now has included Glass Cabin as one of their books this fall you don’t want to miss. Much thanks to Jordyn Davis for including us. * photograph by Jennifer Alsabrook-Turner
The Caroline Marshall Draughon for the Arts & Humanities at Auburn University and Alabama Writers’ Forum hosted Tina and me back in September for a week. We visited high school and college classrooms and OLLI, gave a workshop at Opelika Public Library, a reading and conversation at Auburn Oil Co. Booksellers, and a workshop at Standard Deluxe. The 280 Boogie at Standard Deluxe is where Tina and I first kissed. It was great to be back there. Everyone at Auburn welcomed us. Thank you!
Tina and I enjoyed our time getting to talk with participants at the AWC Conference and lead a workshop at Orange Beach Waterfront Park. Much thanks to Jennifer Horne for inviting us to the conference.
I tell people, the gift of living in our glass cabin is how Hydrangea Ridge draws us outdoors to nature so that we might draw nature in. These ten acres have become the rhythm of our days and our writing. The gift of touring with our book has been how folks draw us out, wanting to know about the creative life we’ve built. And how, in turn, they share with us the creative lives they are building for themselves and others. Arkansas was a high point, having time to talk with Darlene about the quilts she makes, how quilt-making has been part of her life since she was young. She has a great …
Tina and I spent Thursday at Harding University. We had the opportunity to talk with a classroom of thoughtful creative writing students about building a writing life. That evening we read to welcoming faculty and students. Thanks, Paulette, for bringing us to Harding! We’re back home at Hydrangea Ridge now where we spent the day getting honey from our bees. It’s night, and still the honey is dripping.
Went out today to get honey. Roo, at one time our smallest hive, is now the only producer we have. The bees made it through the dearth. The dearth is late summer when little is blooming, but that will change with the coming fall wildflowers. We took six frames from the top super, left them four. It was good to see the hive healthy, thriving, full of bees. As Pop says, “Nothing like fresh honey.”
The Sentinel-Record wrote this article about our Glass Cabin book tour in Hot Springs. You can read it here.
Tina and I enjoyed out time in Arkansas, visiting friends in Hot Springs and reading at Wednesday Night Poetry. WNP has held a poetry reading every week since February 1, 1989. It is “the longest-running consecutive weekly open mic series in the country, perhaps the world!” Tina and I were the featured readers for week number 1856. Kai Coggin (WNP host), you’re doing wonderful work. Truly, Hot Springs is a wonderful community, a place that always feels like coming home for us.
At page and palette, we saw family and old friends, while also meeting new folks. We got to dance to a band playing one of Dail’s favorite songs, “One Way Out.” We saw a live oak over 400 years old. And Rita took us around, showing us Fairhope, telling us how much it’s changed from the Fairhope she knew growing up. Tina even got to swim in the cold water of Fish River. One of the gifts of our book tour is getting to know the people and places we visit.
Thanks to everyone at the Alabama Rivers Alliance for interviewing Tina and me for their Summer Reading Zoom Talk Series, Water Is Life. You can watch it here.
Much thanks to Alabama Writers’ Forum for their review of Glass Cabin. You can read the full review here.
Tina and I had a wonderful time at The NewSouth Bookstore in Montgomery! Thanks to everyone who came out to here us read.
Wanted to share this review of Glass Cabin in the Daily Yonder. Above is an excerpt. You can read the full article here.
Here’s a link to Tina talking about cornbread – the making of it and her family’s history of making it. Tina also reads her poem “Nothing Else” from Glass Cabin. All of this is part of Rural Remix’s podcast series Rural Food Traditions. And here’s a YouTube video about the podcast and a link to the page that includes Tina’s recipe. Much thanks to all the folks at Rural Assembly (who are partnered with the Daily Yonder) for putting this together.
My neighbor called to say Tina and I are famous after he saw our picture on the front page of The Blount Countian. Famous or not, we’re grateful to Irene and the editors for the article about our book, Glass Cabin.
Much thanks to author Erin Pringle for reading Tina’s poem, “Making Church Glass Ours” on Sunday for Wake to Words and Brew Some Coffee. You can watch the video here.
This morning, a storm came through and filled our rain buckets full. Then this evening another storm passed by, but just the tail end of it, clouds leaving a pocket of sky for the sun to sink into before setting over Cherty Ridge.
Southern Literary Review has posted a review of Glass Cabin. Above is an excerpt. You can read the full review here.
Thanks Dawn and Mary for having us out to read and sign books at Pink Porch Market! We were asked to put together a playlist, which took me back to my high school cassette-making days, and led to a proper hoedown before the evening was done.
Tina and I enjoyed our time reading and taking questions in Cookeville, Tennessee at Plenty Downtown Bookshop as part of the Sawmill Poetry Series. Thanks, Erin, and everyone who came out to see us.
Much thanks to our friend Vickey for hosting us on the banks of Big Canoe Creek for a reading and book signing this past Sunday. It was wonderful to meet and talk with y’all who were there.
Thanks Kai Coggin for including us in Wednesday Nigh Poetry’s virtual reading. You can watch a video of Tina and me reading two poems from Glass Cabin here.
Glass Cabin is out in the world today! Just want to thank Pulley Press and all the wonderful people there who helped make this book. The poems in Glass Cabin chronicle the thirteen years Tina and I have spent building our home and living on Hydrangea Ridge.
and everyone who came to the book release for Glass Cabin this past Sunday, April 21. We had so much fun reading, taking questions about the poems, about our Glass Cabin, and just getting to talk to everyone. And, we sold out of books!
Finally had time this week to hang two photographs by Richard Bickel — J.R. and Ebony at Turner Landing, and Mileena, Logger’s Daughter. Richard very generously allowed us to make these photographs the covers for our books. Mileena is the cover of Tina’s collection of poems, Known by Salt. J.R. and Ebony is the cover of my collection of stories, This Ditch-Walking Love. We are grateful to him for that. His work connects with what we write. We first came across these photographs in Richard’s book, Apalachicola River: An American Treasure, Faces Along the River. We came across that book in Ada and Dail’s house on St. George Island when we visited them. …
who invited Tina and me to read our poems about tornadoes, their devastation, and discuss the connection between tornadoes, religion, and politics in Alabama for an upcoming film. You can find those poems in Tina’s book, Known by Salt, and in our book, Glass Cabin. * In addition to the poems, I read the postcard op-ed I wrote for the New York Times after the tornadoes came through in April 2011. Below is a link to that Times essay. Underneath is the essay I wrote a year later on the anniversary published by the Birmingham News. “What the Wind Carried Away” — New York times “Living with the Reality of Tornadoes” — Birmingham …
Rural Assembly visited our home this past week to film Tina making cornbread and reading poems. The podcast will be released this summer. Just wanted to say thanks to the folks at Rural Assembly (who are partnered with the Daily Yonder) for driving down and spending what was a gorgeous spring afternoon on Hydrangea Ridge.
Backstory — Late fall every year, I drive over to my neighbor Nick’s house and we go into his yard searching for blueberry sprigs small enough to grip at the base of the stem and tug loose from the earth. We set the bent roots down in a bucket of water, and I carry that bucket home sloshing in the bed of Ruby, our ’98 Dodge truck. As many have told me, and it’s true, “You can’t kill a Dodge.” Usually, I plant the sprigs right away, but one time I waited four months before taking them out of the bucket — had too much else going on and couldn’t get to the …
That’s what our friend (also named Jim) calls the new 550 gallon cistern Tina and I got for the rain catchment system we’re building. After years of hauling water, I’m trying to shape water’s path now through hoses and filters and pumps.
It was a week of getting over being sick, of catching water for the cistern, and building a blueberry sprig fence for me. It was a week of planting asparagus, milkweed, hollyhocks, gladiolas, four-o’clocks, and one dandelion in the old garden for Tina. That dandelion we found blooming in a ditch. Tina has tadpoles now to feed cucumber slices. The bluebirds have come back to the cedar house our neighbor Nick gave us. The hawks have been all around, looking for a place to build a nest. Sunday is the day we listen to WWOZ out of New Orleans and make mimosas and waffles and dance to celebrate the week’s work. This Sunday, …
Woke up this morning to a fog over Cherty Ridge. Soon the sun will break up the fog and the mist will come up to the house, then fall back to Sally Branch that lies between us and Cherty, become a dense bank we can’t see through. All morning this will happen until the fog vanishes completely.
Just got the ARC of Glass Cabin. Book is beautiful. Thanks, Pulley!
Unfortunately, Tina and I were sick and unable to make it to the Monroeville Literary Festival. Hopefully, we’ll get over there some time in the future.
You can now pre-order Glass Cabin. It will be released on April 23.
Tina and I gave a reading and workshop on Friday, February 23 in Triana as part of the Smithsonian’s Crossroads: Change in Rural America. We just wanted to thank Laura Anderson and the Alabama Humanities Alliance for sponsoring what was a wonderful event.
Pulley Press interviewed Tina and me about our upcoming book, Glass Cabin. You can read it here.
We can hear the frogs now. They have laid the first eggs of the new year in the puddle up the road from us—it’s one of the first signs of spring we look for. But the rains have stopped and the puddle is drying out. So Tina scooped up some of the eggs and brought them home to place in casserole dishes of water. Soon those dishes will be full of swimming tadpoles.
Just wanted to share the cover for our upcoming collection of poems, Glass Cabin! It will be released in March.
I want to thank the editors at High Horse for publishing two poems–“Turkey Vultures” and “September Prayer”–from our upcoming book, Glass Cabin.
I want to thank Alabama Writers’ Forum for this review of This Ditch-Walking Love, winner of the Tartt Fiction Award in 2020. Ditch-Walking was published by Livingston Press in 2021, and I’m working on an audiobook of these rural Alabama stories. You can read the full review here.
Turkey vultures, six-seven of them, came to visit the day after rain. Sally Branch to the sky was all mist. Mist was all we could see. And the turkey vultures took refuge in the leafless branches just northwest of the cabin. First time they’ve come this close and stayed. Usually they’re wheeling the sky into place.
We got a dusting of snow and a cold spell. Had to fill up as many blue jugs of water as we could and bring them inside. The outside tanks are frozen. Had to cut wood to feed vestal, so she can keep us warm.
“Necessary Weight, Necessary Time” is the essay Tina and I wrote for What Things Cost: an anthology for the people: (University of Kentucky Press, release date March 7). Our essay is about the power and ache of work in our lives. We are very proud to be part of this wonderful book that is a fundraiser for the Poor People’s Campaign.
Tina and I will be reading on March 7 in Chattanooga as part of our Salt Love Tour.
I’m excited to say that Pulley Press, whose mission is to highlight rural writers, has contracted Tina and me to write a book of poems about living in our glass cabin. The book will be released in 2024.
Many people to thank for the first leg of The Salt Love Tour—Laura and Caleb at Untethered: Poems and Stories at Ferus Brewing in Trussville; Julia, Ty, and Hope at Hendrix College; Paulette at Harding University; and Kai at Wednesday Night Poetry in Hot Springs. Thanks to all of you for hosting us and our writing!
Tina and I are going on tour! First stop, we’ll be reading this Thursday, February 24, 2022, at 7pm at Ferus Brewing in Trussville as part of Untethered: Poems and Stories. Hope to see you there.
I just want to thank Brian, Liz, and Chip at DISCO for hosting an evening of The Ditch Love Blues. And I want to thank everyone for coming to hear stories from This Ditch-Walking Love and songs from Chuck Butterworth. It was a lot of fun and great to be a part of the DISCO creative community again.
Join me, singer-songwriter Chuck Butterworth, and The Whiskey Thief Saturday at DISCO in B Town for an evening of The Ditch Love Blues
The Road Less Traveled is a documentary that tells the story of JOBA Gallery in Apalachicola, Florida. The documentary is a tribute to the artists who have given readings, showings, and concerts at JOBA. Tina and I are two of those artists. At the 11:45 minute mark you can hear Tina read poems from Rooted by Thirst. And you can hear me read “Jick’s Chevrolet” from my story collection This Ditch-Walking Love. Many thanks to Jenny, Beth, and Dave for letting us be a part of The Road Less Traveled. Every town needs a JOBA Gallery, which is the heartbeat of the Apalachicola creative community.
Worked today on a simple shelf made from crepe myrtle limbs my neighbor pruned and held back for me. “They were too pretty to throw in the woods,” he said because of their lack of rough bark. I was dealing with limbs that had bent their way for years towards the changing angle of the sun. This kind of work is inexact, I warn you, but I worked towards a semblance of straight, bending the frame this way, that way. I even walked the corners across the deck until they stood upright. Tomorrow I’ll shift the corner legs and walk them again because my eyes see different after a full night’s sleep. Tomorrow …
This Ditch Walking Love has won this year’s Tartt Fiction Award. I want to thank Joe Taylor and everyone at Livingston Press at the University of West Alabama for choosing my collection of stories. I’m honored to receive the Tartt. Ditch Walking is set in the Murphrees Valley section of the Cumberland Plateau where ridges lift above what creeks and small rivers have made. No matter where you dig, shovels and rockbars hit chert, causing the ground to spark. That difficulty of breaking the land is heard in the way people speak here. It is rural and hilly here. Ravines spill into creeks that feed into the Locust Fork River. A chicken plant …
Sewed rye under the power lines and down the ridge past the dogwoods. Had sewn rye in late October to keep our dirt. A stand took but is having to work through the new leaf cover, so I’m spreading a second round. * I’ve been selecting for cedars when thinning. Cedars last forever from what I can tell. They keep our home hidden from the road, and after a rain, walking through cedars will lift you earth to branch. * Because sometimes the seasons dictate what you do, and the need to stay warm, which means cutting firewood has overtaken every chore, except on this day, we’ve opened the windows for the wind …
Didn’t cure enough wood from last winter, so I cut trees for January, February, March. Already we’re breathing fires into vestal each morning over ash and coals. Between two dogwood stands out west, a V for sighting Cherty Ridge. This year in that V, a scuppernong vine. I’ll pull it from the branches when the rains stop. But it is something, that tendril reaching out, twining where there had been gravity and air.
I tell you, sometimes it feels as if I’ve waited this life for summer to end. And then in the cool I’d forgotten, an ease to living.
And it broke after the hurricane hit south, hit people I knew. In the vacuum, cold, cold air sweeping away the hot summer that at times we thought would not end, the heat in the earth and the sun was just too much. Then the aftermath. I drove to South Georgia to cut up trees that had been upturned and twisted at the rot. One tree knifed a branch through the roof of my father’s house. Other branches fell their way on top of his pottery studio. So many branches—those on the fence line, those in the drive, everything covered in a quiet layer of needle and leaf, everything smelling of pine. Now, …
All month the clouds stacked high as soon as the sun set behind Cherty, and the purple, orange, pink—a hue turned down here, brightened there—changed minutes, but the clouds were ships sitting in the afternoon like people have said, they didn’t move. By morning, we had a creek of mist above Foot Creek diffuse up the ridge to our home. Couldn’t see until the fog settled back and held together into creek again. Diffused creek, this was our breath until the sun got high enough to dissipate our breathing. Then the clouds rolled over the skylight fast. There were the two afternoons at Cliff Tops, us sitting in the rocks, the sun’s low …
With the deck done, August days are spent outside behind the close trees, west where the sun can only get through branch by branch, leaf by leaf just a little. Cherty Ridge has turned dusky in the sun’s shadow, the sun reaching over it, not casting upon it. The sun will set behind it soon. Between the oak, the one with the scarred hull where I cut a low, large branch years ago, the oak has wept dead wood all summer, the collar on the branch stub closing in on the black center where worms have taken root in the weeping. Between the scarred oak and the maple that has finally grown bigger …
Sometimes it’s the rain that puts the work here to a halt. Here in the heat of it, in the humidity and storms, I know the truth—summer is almost gone. And this summer the storms have been plenty, no drought in sight. In turn the air has thickened and the days I finish working on the cabin’s deck, my clothes are soaked. I have to lay them out on the plywood floor to dry. The same as when I worked my brother’s watermelon fields as a teenager. Once you do something like that, spend days cutting melons and lifting them from the sand, handing them off down a row of workers the same …
The wind come up and the thunder with it, a storm just below us on Pine Mountain shoaling clouds into the heat and the blue here. I have not heard the leaves stirred like this in sometime. That was back in March. So I put up all the saws, the boards, the tools, vowing one day I’d have a place for them and wouldn’t have to put them under cover when the threat of rain was close. But it won’t come here, I think, the storm won’t make it. We’ll get the cool wind from Pine Mountain, we’ll get the clouds shoaling, the ones empty of water now, and the leaves acting so …
The sun is too much. I go to work. I sweat it out. But I can’t keep down in the heat, and the water breaks don’t lift the dizziness from me. Even this wind that’s come up to cool dies out, and the sun comes on stronger.
We hiked Braziel Trail into the Sipsey and stopped where gravity took the creek through the air. That falling went through me to the pool of boulders in the canyon like it went through the moss bank dripping water to the bedrock. At the edge one tree gripped the rushing and leaned out. In the Smokies two weeks later on the trail to Andrews Bald, we saw a root in a rock flow. And next morning at the Townsend Y, we sat beside the bend in Little River, finning our feet under the slick rocks, our ankles getting cold, pulled and turned. Back home the storms have come after two weeks of dry. …
Found what I believe is a promethea silkmoth on one of the west windows camouflaged by the wood frame. It didn’t go, not even when the wind caused the wing’s blue eyespot to twitch, until night.
At not quite the center is a tulipwood, too thin to survive for long. Many of them died a year ago in the drought—they’re on the land, dead standing—but this one reaches into a large pine’s branches with new leaves. Yesterday I took firewood from the bed of the truck and set stick atop stick against two sides of the tulipwood’s trunk to make a stack as tall as me. The pieces fell, and afterward I saw my body in front tripping before the falling wood until covered. A phantom ache like the one I’ve had since last spring when I set a wood plate full of sunflower heads, cut from the stalk …
Cut from a red oak on my neighbor’s land, these rounds have been split and stacked to dry for next winter.
Slowly through the switches we left the dead. Broom sedge and branch wood, shedding skin to bone. One of them rain-sun, more cloud than anything else hours. The minute the light made it, green petals became white, our bones mist. The woods will be dogwood white soon. Low trees, they hide halfway up the oaks all year. Yesterday the turn we took from Oneonta unhitched tree from hill. Another month of leafing and rivering and our cabin will be hidden as if it never existed. The hawk, the one that cries out on the northwest border moved in closer. Wonder when he quits circling to take up at the far oak again. That …
There is a flow to the house, the way the wood runs. I always see it as river for everything was shaped by water, Tina says. To be in the cabin is to be in the water of pine and cedar light makes into breath.
Where the rain stopped, a river of smoke like you said, bending to the valley. It is late afternoon. The sky’s clouds are steel, the maple closest to our cabin, branch red, the plum green, white. Further out is the smoke where the hawks made turns all week. I looked and looked for them, could only hear their calling for, one hawk trying to catch the other. Now, the bats. They like to swing round the red oak at dark, flip their wings closer until they recognize the echo of my face. They dive and circle like that buzzard I saw over my father’s field just above the bitterweed, their shadows making lines …
We left the Ouachita Range for our Red and Sand. In between, the Delta’s black dirt and squeezebox silos and flat horizon towns refusing to rise once we reached them. We crossed the steel bridges that stitch the Mississipp bank to bank, and we breathed in all this river town dirt slowly, hoping to keep it with us long after we dipped down to Orleans before coming home. Above us now are the clouds Tina calls slate—long gray-white and unfurling with edges blue and pink. The color comes from the light blue sky we get when our winters turn cold. Our winter garden is gone except the rosemary, sage, and parsley. The house …
— this essay appeared in the Birmingham News print edition April 27, 2012 Out here in the grove of broken trees between Amory and Sheridan roads in Pratt City, Alabama, the wind hurries through, pushing at the new green. But the vines of wisteria and the suddenness of dogwood leaves have yet to overtake the large oak and pine trunks snapped off by last year’s tornado. They still stand like upturned hands of splintered bone, still point at the sky for answers. On April 27 Pratt City along with other Birmingham suburbs, and towns in southwest Alabama, in Mississippi and, in Georgia were hit by massive tornadoes that took apart people’s neighborhoods, took …
