Wilding

Photograph of bluebells courtesy of sxc.hu and John Evans of Winchester, UK

Love the sound and flavor of words, love wandering in the wild? If so, then I'm suggesting an online read, lovely and long for an online piece (hat tip #PrufrockNews): "The word-hoard: Robert Macfarlane on rewilding our language of landscape." 

Macfarlane's praise for the fine discrimination in words about nature is wonderful, and reminds me of a book that has influenced me when I have written about the western North Carolina mountains, where I went to high school (Cullowhee) and where I return several times each year: Smoky Mountain Voices: A Lexicon of Southern Appalachian Speech Based on the Research of Horace Kephart. (Jacket copy: A stingy man "won't drink branch water till there's a flood," and it is "a mighty triflin' sort o' man'd let either his dog or his woman starve." Some places are "so crowded you couldn't cuss a cat without gettin' fur in your mouth." For almost thirty years Horace Kephart collected sayings like these from his neighbors and friends in the area around Bryson City, North Carolina.) The Kephart-based dictionary was created by two professors at Western Carolina University, Hal Farwell and Karl Nicholas. I've also been inspired at other times by regional dictionaries and grammars (as in Catherwood.)

Here's a taste of why you might want to read Macfarlane:

Eight years ago, in the coastal township of Shawbost on the Outer Hebridean island of Lewis, I was given an extraordinary document. It was entitled “Some Lewis Moorland Terms: A Peat Glossary”, and it listed Gaelic words and phrases for aspects of the tawny moorland that fills Lewis’s interior. Reading the glossary, I was amazed by the compressive elegance of its lexis, and its capacity for fine discrimination: a caochan, for instance, is “a slender moor-stream obscured by vegetation such that it is virtually hidden from sight”, while a feadan is “a small stream running from a moorland loch”, and a fèith is “a fine vein-like watercourse running through peat, often dry in the summer”. Other terms were striking for their visual poetry: rionnach maoim means “the shadows cast on the moorland by clouds moving across the sky on a bright and windy day”; èit refers to “the practice of placing quartz stones in streams so that they sparkle in moonlight and thereby attract salmon to them in the late summer and autumn”, and teine biorach is “the flame or will-o’-the-wisp that runs on top of heather when the moor burns during the summer”.

In a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary there has been “a culling of words concerning nature. Under pressure, Oxford University Press revealed a list of the entries it no longer felt to be relevant to a modern-day childhood. The deletions included acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture and willow. The words taking their places in the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voice-mail…

And now, back to galleys and my own playing with words--I'm on my second read of Maze of Blood. One more, and back it goes. It'll be out  exactly a year after Glimmerglass...

The House of Words (no. 2): To persist or not to persist

2. To Persist or Not to Persist

Hey, there’s a reason that most books are not about writers! Oh, there may be a coming-of-age novel now and then—covering that period of a writer’s life when he or she is not yet a writer, and therefore packed with homely and interesting non-writer events. Often these are events (or people--parents, often--those people who love us and attempt to save us from the garret)that get in the writer-protagonist's way and stand as mighty obstacles that must be opposed or crossed or circled in order to go forward.

Once the heroic act of evading or battling these opponents is past, writers spend a lot of time sitting in the corner and typing. Many of them spend hours in the corner clutching their respective malfunctioning heads and wasting perfectly good afternoons of sun and frolic.

Is this interesting from the outside? I shall tell you.

No, it isn’t.

No matter how absorbing the work is, the act of making it is probably not what we as readers want to read about. So books about writers tend to stop where the writer catches a glimpse of the promised city of garrets glimmering in the distance. Soon he or she will be sitting in his or her own poky corner and scribbling away--or perhaps clutching the recalcitrant head. And that ending, combined with the thought of the many books writers make that are not about writers, may possibly suggest to you that there is a world packed with lively pursuits, out there.

So if you decide to quit the word trade and do something else entirely, never feel bad about it. Life awaits you.

After Ghosts, Marsha Parker left the world of publishing despite the fact that she had a fancy agent and was touted as extraordinarily promising, and then she built a very different world for herself. Now she had met some setbacks, but all writers meet setbacks of some sort. Why did she take her toys and march away to the West? She wasn’t crazy about the publishing scene. Not crazy about it in the least, in fact. It occurs to me that she probably wasn't crazy about the fact that a movie appears to have been made (roughly based on the book and with the same title) without any mention of the fact to her--and therefore without any author royalties. And she certainly wasn’t fond of what people said she needed to add to her books.

What did she do?

She and her then-husband built the marvelous Smoke Ham Farm (with restored Finnish and Scandinavian outbuildings, full of charm and character and history.) Marsha raised obscure, finicky breeds of sheep that were always trying in the most exciting manner to flop over and die or to give birth in the middle of the night, and she established a regular menagerie of other animals (and peacocks! I want some!) She started a business that allowed her to travel, write, and use her creativity in ways that would have surprised her younger self. She runs an online site called The Scarlet Letter where she sells, among other curious and interesting things, her own museum reproduction needlework samplers based on work from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, books, and antique European and American needlework samplers. I admire the fact that she didn’t like the publishing scene and therefore just strode away; I admire what she has done since.

That admiration doesn’t keep me from respecting and admiring friends who made another choice. In fact, I know people who wrote book after book before the first—or sometimes the second—came along. Those are brave, persistent souls with a touch of the Mad Hatter that allows them to stay on at the great Tea Party, moving round and round until they find a small or large piece of buttered luck.

At many points I could see three choices in front of most of the other young writers I knew—persist and take joy in the work, be a bit of a melancholic looney (the worst choice but often taken, depression being one of the substances swirling in the writer's magic ink bottle), or give up and do something else.

Why did I persist?

Let's ignore my raging obsessiveness for a moment. Let's ignore a rather mad ability to dream while in the middle of mayhem, quite helpful to a writer-mother of three. Those slightly abnormal qualities assist, but they don't explain. Let's also ignore the fact that I'm not irreplaceable in any of my working capacities except as the writer of my particular books and as the mother of my particular children. And in both of those areas, perhaps I could do better. In fact, I hope to do so.

Why did I persist?

Because I am in love with playing with words and learning to make (for a writer is always starting over) stories and poems. Very simple.

***

Illustration: Sampler by Susan Singleton, kit for sale at The Scarlet Letter. "Designed after a mid-eighteenth century New Hampshire sampler, this piece is delightfully naive with its oversized animals, insects, and birds. Around 1760, the New-Hampshire Gazette began publishing advertisements for girls' schools, placed by female instructresses, emphasizing a curriculum of practical as well as decorative needlework. While this sampler is atypical of most of the recognizable schools of New Hampshire (i.e. the bird and basket designs of Canterbury, the dark green linsey-woolsey grounds on samplers of Dover, and the house and barn samplers of Portsmouth), it is significantly stylized to suggest that it was taught by a particular teacher, who could have been advertising for more pupils at that time. Stitches used in the sampler are cross, back, and satin. Stitched on 35 count linen, it will measure approximately 15" x 22-1/4", and is recommended for intermediate level needleworkers."

Paean to The Long Grass Books, no. 4: In the Morning

Update, 13 June: Now this must be what contitutes the thing known as "perfect timing." An interview with Philip Lee Williams, done several years ago, has just come on line at The Istanbul Literary Review. It's an enlightening encounter between Phil and William Walsh. Phil talks frankly about worldly success, his books, the assaults on his heart, introspection, publishers, and much more.

Here's a clip: "To me, the great part of being a writer is the writing. All the rest of it is business stuff. When something great happens with the business stuff, you have two hours of happiness. When something really hideous happens, you say 'crap,' and you have two hours of being disgusted. It really isn't much more than that after you have been around for a long time. You don't sit around and get ecstatic except when you write. And of course I treasure it when someone says they love my work."

* * *

In a world where poetry professors gift their own students with major prizes and one little monkey scratches another's back, I'm reluctant to review this nature book, because the author is a penpal of mine. I've never met him, but we've exchanged many emails since 2001, when we were supposed to be on a panel together. Thanks to a bad back, we didn't meet at the Southern Festival of the Book, but now when I read In the Morning: Reflections from First Light, I know a lot about the author and the people and places he mentions.

So this will not be a review.

It will be, however, an attempt to shed light.

Feel free to leave a comment, as always, but if you have any questions for the author, ask away, and I'll pester Phil for an answer.

In the Morning is a classic Long Grass Book. I imagine that many people won't recognize the publisher: Mercer University Press. The copy I ordered is a trim, well-made hardcover, and the fact that Mercer chose to publish Philip Lee Williams is a credit to the press.

In the Morning is Phil's twelfth book, a kind of love song to his home state, its flora and fauna and people; in the past few years, the state of Georgia has been regularly laureling him with awards for his body of work (novels, poetry, and nonfiction), so the feeling must be mutual. Phil's a creative man, and he's a notably kind and tender-hearted man, so all the attention he has gotten lately seems especially pleasing.

To show the spirit of the book, I'm going to offer a variety of passages from it. And I'll append a few comments from other people who have admired its qualities.


***

Now, though, the mud has been washed away, and once more the creek is shining, sparkling. Murphy and I have come down to look for stones and artifacts, and already I have found an enormous amethyst crystal, pale purple and perfect, and a rim-sherd from a clay pot made on this land more than a thousand years ago. p. 28

At first, they appear almost black, like charcoal outlines in a book of nature identification, but soon their raw sienna paints itself on their flanks. The ivory spots that speckle the fawns come out like constellations. And their eyes are brown, what I see in the mirror each day, but much more alert, purposeful, and unknowing. The doe's right ear flops toward something I cannot hear. p. 34

Crickets that produce these sounds also have "ears"--on their front legs. (Stridulating grasshoppers have "ears" on their first abdominal segment.) Some species can make sounds at a mind-boggling 100 kilohertz, though humans wouldn't know it, since the higher range of our hearing ability is about 20kHz.

Which means that what we hear of this morning cricket chorus is a fraction of what's actually out there. (Lest we feel superior, one species, the snowy tree cricket, actually recites the temperature. Add forty to the number of chirps it makes in fifteen seconds, and you'll have the temperature in Fahrenheit. Science is full of fascinating and moderately useless bits of such information.) p. 64

It's early on a foggy spring morning, and we have already uncovered the clear outlines of the fort, bastions and all. We have found the skeleton of a man who we believe is Lt. Coytmore. We know his body was buried inside the fort, and it's the only such burial here. Looking on his skeleton, laid out neatly, I feel a shudder of sorrow for the man and his stupidities. p. 101

The mangrove-lined shore was probably half a mile away. Our houseboat bobbed several yards behind me in the Gulf of Mexico. I remembered well enough what you do not do around a shark: thrash and make a lot of noise. So here I was, in the middle of a spreading pool of blood, wearing sneakers. The shark came up then, and I could see his blood-drenched mouth and the 3-inch-long teeth and his wild, dead eyes. p. 120


***

Georgia writer Philip Lee Williams communicates both the wisdom we gain from the wilds and the wisdom we gain from science in language we want to read aloud for its sheer beauty.
--Betty Jean Craige, author of Eugene Odum: Ecosystem Ecologist and Environmentalist


Wise, engaging, and unfailingly profound, In the Morning awakens our weary senses to a whole cascade of mornings...
--Amy Blackmarr, author of Above the Fall Line and Going to Ground


Like morning itself, this book is quiet, gentle, and enlightening.
--Janisse Ray, author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Wild Card Quilt, and Pinhook


...Williams has found nature where millions of us live--just as Thoreau once found it on the edge of bustling, antebellum Concord.
--Edward Larson, Pulitzer Prize winner for Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial
*