The Bear Bryant Funeral Train (2007)

This is a book I edited. The first edition had been declared out-of-print due to a plagiarism controversy/literary misunderstanding, however you want to see it. What I saw was a good book that deserved a second chance at life.

Jake Adam York saw the same thing.

Early on I had the idea to reassemble the collection using Brad's original graduate thesis as a manuscript, which would then be bolstered by an academic apparatus similar to that of a Norton Critical Edition. This remained just an idea, however, until I became aware of Jake's fierce defense of Brad's literary technique on the storySouth blog. Was he willing to redesign that elegant argument for print? He absolutely was. Before long I also had two other great writers on board, Michelle Richmond and John Dufresne, as well as Professor Emeritus of the University of Alabama, Don Noble. But it was Jake who set the table.

On 15 December 2012, Jake suffered a fatal stroke, and left holes in the hearts of all who loved him, who worked alongside him, who learned from him, who read his work. He was merely forty years old: It's hard not to imagine how we've been robbed of decades of powerful, insightful poetry and impassioned prose -- quite possibly even of an eventual Poet Laureate. Upon hearing the news, I sought out his prose poem "Leaving Alabama" which, near the end, advises:

Drive one last time along the river, and don't think how the morning sun lights it till it looks like molten steel [...] Look straight ahead. Adjust the rearview mirror. Adjust the rearview mirror. Feel it warm beneath your hand, its box of river and sun and steel and shadow. Ignore your heart rising to your throat, this terrible relapse. Think of everything you hate. Everything. Then pull the mirror down.

Jake, I did not know you well enough. But I do know that when your mirror was pulled down, so unceremoniously and by a hand not your own, there was no hate anywhere in sight. You've taken too much love with you for that. We'll miss you, buddy. Say hello to Jeanne and Wayne and William for us in the meanwhile. Peace.

Sing a Song of Bradbury

On the fifth of June, in this Our Year of Predicted Apocalypse 2012, the planet Venus -- guiding light of ancient mariners, namesake of love goddesses from all cultures, bright twinkle making her the celestial object most often mistaken for a UFO -- transformed into a pinhole shadow while traversing the surface of Sun. Under cover of this rare astronomical event, Ray Bradbury -- usually associated with the redder, colder, farther planet of Mars -- slipped forever from our own surly Earth.

Though he will likely always be shelved as such, Bradbury never much cared for being labeled a "science fiction author." This was a misnomer from the start, applied by Doubleday at the release of The Martian Chronicles in 1950. Fair enough for that book, but even by then Ray had moved from the genre-driven pulps to the "slicks," including a special Halloween edition of Mademoiselle built around his short story "Homecoming," not to mention four appearances in the Best American Short Stories anthology series (thrice with stories not of rocket ships but of racial strife). And as anyone who reads beyond the title knows, Chronicles isn't really about Mars: it's about exploration, ambition, the folly of human desire -- the burgeoning space-age was merely a handy metaphor. And Bradbury examined far more than Mars over the course of his 50-year career. No matter the locale -- romantic, foggy Ireland; quirky but bitterly divided Mexico; Civil War battlefields; China circa 400 AD; his own Rockwellian, fictional Green Town, Illinois -- he mostly charted another striated, romanticized crimson landscape: the Human Heart.

After receiving the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2000, Bradbury got busy refocusing the lens on his long career. As part of that process, Sam Weller's authorized 2005 biography, The Bradbury Chronicles, goes a long way, cataloging Ray's disparate achievements. His work appeared in decades of publications ranging from Captain Future and Weird Tales to The Saturday Evening Post and Redbook. Commissioned by John Huston to write the screenplay for Moby-Dick. Winner of the 1968 Aviation-Space Writers Robert Ball Memorial Award despite having never flown in a plane (though he eventually did fly after the age of 60, Bradbury steadfastly refused to learn to drive). Friendships with Alfred Hitchcock, Christopher Isherwood, Ray Harryhausen, Aldous Huxley, Forrest J. Ackerman, even Walt Disney (for whom he wrote the original voice-over narration for the Spaceship Earth ride in EPCOT). A fistful of Cable Ace Awards for the seven-year television run of The Ray Bradbury Theater, itself primed by years of work in radio and theater, including his own Pandemonium Theatre Company. Not bad for a wide-eyed kid who once stood on Hollywood sidewalks, hawking newspapers to movie stars.

Equally important to this legacy was the assemblage of Bradbury Stories, a companion for the older The Stories of Ray Bradbury. Over the course of his career, Bradbury published over 600 tales; these two volumes taken together showcase a third of that output, and are a perfect jumping-in point for someone just discovering his work. Even then, the new will seem warmly (if strangely) familiar: the pages bubble over with motifs and storylines that have been either formally adapted or outright stolen to fuel an untold number of films, television and radio shows, comic books (including many issues of Tales from the Crypt and episodes of The Twilight Zone -- to which he surprisingly contributed only one official script, being deeply dissatisfied with the resulting episode). Tellingly, Bradbury Stories reaches page 125 before yielding a bona-fide sci-fi story, and even then it's a chapter from Martian Chronicles.

Still, his most resonant and probably most widely read work is the one that looks most penetratingly into the future: Fahrenheit 451. Though he was essentially rejected by sci-fi's hardcore community for not engaging in harder science, few of its other citizens turned in work so socially prescient: the prevalence of advertising; the numbing escape of reality programming; the easy distractions of prescription drugs; false news as entertainment. It's easy find a censorship message, given the book-burning "fireman" career of the main character, Montag -- but as his boss, Chief Beatty, explains: "Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then ... they'll be happy. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with." Beatty isn't talking about an imaginary, totalitarian future, but about our Here And Now. 451 isn't about a society sadly, unjustly deprived of books. It's about a non-reading society that couldn't care much less about books or reading -- in any format.

As Weller has it, Bradbury used fiction to predict the past while staying nostalgic for the future -- a seeming impossibility that yet perfectly sums up the man's outlook. Indeed, to read Bradbury is like sitting on the porch of a twilit summer evening: soon the golden leaves will tumble like nature's confetti, but for now, move to stand barefoot on the new-mown grass, cool as a shadowy woodland stream. Listen to the metallic wail of cicadas in the fading cotton-candy light. Watch your shadow dissolve behind you and know that if you keep enough love in your heart, you will Live Forever.

Thank you, Mr. Bradbury. Thank you. Godspeed.

Originally published in the Mobile Register, August 05 2012

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Does the blood move in your hand, does that hand move to touch metal, does that metal move to touch Space? Do wild thoughts of travel and migration stir your soul? They do. Thus you live. Therefore God lives. You are the thin skin of life upon an unsensing Earth, you are that growing edge of God which manifest itself in hunger for Space. So much of God lies vibrantly asleep. The very stuffs of worlds and galaxies, they know not themselves. But here, God stirs in his sleep. You are the stirring. He wakes, you are that wakening. God reaches for the stars. You are His hand. Creation manifest, you go in search. He goes to find, you go to find. Everything you touch along the way, therefore, will be holy. On far worlds you will meet your own flesh, terrifying and strange, but still your own. Treat it well. Beneath that shape, you share the Godhead.
     -- Ray Bradbury, from Leviathan '99

William Gay: Literary Legacy Will Have Lasting Resonance

Remembering that night, November 2001, Southern Writers Reading. Interrupting the Alumni Grille portion of the evening to announce to the gathered souls in Theatre 98, who then erupted in cheers, that, just in from Hohenwald, William Gay had entered the building. Rest in peace.

William Gay -- a drywall hanger, house painter, and ginseng root gatherer from tiny Hohenwald, Tennessee -- kept a dark, dark secret for more than five decades of his life: He was one of the most brilliant literary minds of his generation.

Even to those who knew him well, this was apparently a facet of his life unrevealed during the years he spent doing practical labor to feed his family: "In a lot of ways it was like being in a closet. You really didn't go out on Monday morning and talk about the sonnet you wrote over the weekend." But Gay never thought of himself as anything other than a writer, "the highest thing," he believed, "that you could aspire to do."

To the literary world, it was a spring-loaded surprise, tripped with the 1999 publication of his first novel, The Long Home. That James A. Michener Memorial Prize-winning book was quickly followed by a second novel, Provinces of Night, and I Hate to See that Evening Sun Go Down, a collection of stories previously published in magazines such as GQ, Harper's, the Oxford American, and the Atlantic Monthly. Stephen King declared Gay's third novel Twilight (which features an immoral undertaker far more wicked and dreadful than any sparkling vampire or werewolf) to be the best book of 2007.

The 55-year gap between Gay's birth and the beginning of his publishing career is often mentioned as though it was time (and therefore art) criminally lost, though Gay himself apparently did not see it that way. He spoke in near-Buddhist terms of his journeyman process, of being at first more purely interested in the beauty of language over the movement of story, which earned him no publication credits. Having spent zero time in creative writing workshops or even speaking much with other writers (excepting a somehow unsurprising correspondence with Cormac McCarthy, in the time before McCarthy became a household name), Gay knew no mentor or peers to help direct his powerful natural talent. He was, however, a voracious reader -- it was nearly impossible to name a classic novel or a comic book with which he was unfamiliar -- and found lessons enough in studying Thomas Wolfe and Flannery O'Connor. And while drawing pay as a carpenter, he made more serious work of studying the people around him, their motivations, their flaws, their humor, their loves. Eventually, his narrative strategy took an organic shift toward more concrete storytelling, and editors and agents began taking notice -- but all that early concentration on crafting language would pay off: it is now difficult to uncover an article or criticism about Gay where he isn't compared, favorably, to William Faulkner.

Equally like Faulkner, Gay wrote of salt-of-the-earth Southern-born characters: bootleggers and juke-joint owners, young lovers trapped by the ghostly wrongs of their accidental lineages, carpenters and blues musicians, angels and devils incarnate. In short, ordinary people who find themselves walking the razor divide between Good and Evil, often then forced toward the hard choice that cuts down the middle. They swerve and collide upon harsh, illuminated landscapes: achingly described versions of the rural Tennessee that Gay observed and loved firsthand -- a knowledge that provides anchorage and manifest for his grander gestures and symbols.

While his themes are not exactly the stuff of musical comedies, his prose is not without levity, often downright hilarity: At the 2001 session of Fairhope's literary Southern Writers Reading series, Gay brought down the house reading a scene from Provinces of Night about two men using bricks to secure a blow-up doll beside a rural mailbox. (And for those fortunate enough to have heard Gay read his work aloud, it is impossible to view his words upon a page -- whether it is crafted prose or an off-the-cuff answer to a question in an interview -- without hearing his distinct voice: a Tennessee drawl more personal than merely Southern, so rich as to have often seemed like a language unto itself.) He was a master at what Bram Stoker referred to in Dracula as the King Laugh -- things are never so terrible that human beings will cease to find humor. Not, at least, without ceasing to be human.

Though lauded by the writing and reading community, Gay himself was uneasy with success and the cultish attention that sometimes came with it. Same as Ken Kesey in the wake of his Merry Pranksters celebrity, he viewed it as a distraction and hindrance to creativity. Thanks to an utter lack of pretension, it was no artistic affectation that he would rather work than answer the phone or the door. Even so, visitors were regarded with compassion and generosity, no matter the hour of the interruption. And after dispatching callers with whatever answers or advice he felt was best given, Gay would be inevitably drawn back to his writing table and the plain drugstore-bought tablets and notebooks into which he preferred to draft his stories -- perhaps inspired by the interlude. No work, no experience would be wasted.  

Surprised by his seemingly blunt arrival and shocked by his sudden death, the literary world will never be without William Gay. There is still a novel, The Lost Country, somewhere out there in the aether, and a plethora of nonfiction writing -- much of it about music, his love of which was barely eclipsed by his love of literature -- waiting to be collected. For years to come, the rich ferocity of his already available works will enthrall, electrify, magnetize, and inspire -- paraphrasing from The Long Home, these are the things time will not take away from us.

Originally published in the Mobile Register, March 04 2012

Wayne Greenhaw: The Unflinching Observer

A decade ago, I was introduced to Wayne Greenhaw with the words, "He's a friend of Harper Lee." The Mobile Register had recently published a short essay of mine on Ms. Lee; because many in the area love to discuss her, I'd subsequently met many "friends of Harper Lee." (In this neck of the woods, "knowing" Harper Lee is akin to having "been at Woodstock" in 1969: If half as many aging hippies who claim to have been at that festival actually were at that festival, attendance would have numbered in the many millions.) So I shook Wayne's hand with a kind of gentle resignation, thinking, "Sure you are."

He met me with a look I came to know well over the resulting years: a shiny-eyed wink coupled with a wry grin transmitted through pursed lips, the look of a man with a funny secret, a secret he was looking to share with just the right person. He was, after all, wearing a funny shirt, one of those tropical print jobs usually donned by gringos in an effort to validate their citizenship in Margaritaville. What friend of Harper Lee would wear a shirt like that?

Turns out, Wayne Greenhaw.

Prior to knowing Wayne, my ideas of the writing life could be somewhat romantic and limited: wild-haired semi-recluses who observed from afar, perhaps so dedicated to literary craft they were effectively detached from mere human interaction, thus able to comment objectively. Wayne taught me otherwise. Wayne went out and bravely touched the world, and that makes all the difference.

He made his life and his career upon the Alabama earth where he was born and raised, or, rather, forged: Wayne overcame disfiguring polio by a combination of sheer will and the freedom provided by voracious reading while marooned in a body cast after corrective surgery. Early on, he made a habit of difficult, probing questions; upon quizzing his grandfather as to why some of his cousins had participated in a Klan march through his hometown of Tuscaloosa, he was told, "They don't have any sense. But you do." This was a responsibility Wayne took to heart as a reporter in Montgomery, seeking to uncover injustice, to expose those who abused or even simply neglected their power, to give voice to those being denied their say. The list of those he intimately profiled or interviewed (and often befriended) is a Who's Who of the Civil Rights era: from Martin Luther King to George Wallace to Presidents Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton, Wayne covered them all. In the course of a career that included over twenty books, he also managed to scoop the national media not once but twice: beating by a day Seymour Hirsch's famous expose of the My Lai Massacre, and later outing feel-good memoirist Asa "Forrest" Carter as a staunchly racist pro-Segregationist (the author of The Education of Little Tree was the James Frey of his day).

Wayne could have easily angled his career differently, moved up the journalism chain-of-command, probably landed a Pulitzer or two while reporting for the Grey Lady herself. Instead, as Wayne Flynt pointed out in his eulogy, Wayne was the first phone call made by national correspondents who wanted to know what was going on in Alabama when a political story started breaking. He was the man on the ground. He was the touchstone. He held the truth. And all those other boys with their offices in bigger cities, they knew it.

Despite the often painful truth-telling that compelled him, Wayne was a happy man, one of the happiest I've ever known. He relished travel, particularly to his beloved second home of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where he'd once done some drinking with Jack Kerouac (and a locale which explains his love of tropical shirts). If he discovered some new music that thrilled him, he was quick to provide copies for his friends, sharing his enthusiasm. He sought good company and conversation, especially in context of gourmet food and drink. Munificent as he was, his heart belonged to Sally, his wife of four decades, with whom he explored the corners of the world (but always ending up back in either Mexico or Montgomery with their dog, Ellie). And though indeed happy, like the best champions, he was not necessarily satisfied. That much is evident in the fact that he never stopped working; his final book, Fighting the Devil in Dixie, is arguably his best, outlining his time in the trenches, placing him firmly within the history he sought to cover, recalling that the hard work done back in the opening moments of the Civil Rights movement only paved the way for the hard work we must all continue to do.

In February, I traveled to Florida to participate in a writing conference; Wayne was there as well, promoting Dixie. On a panel with three other authors of Civil Rights books, he told a story I'd not heard before (and I'd heard Wayne tell a million), of being clubbed from behind one night while inserting his key in his apartment door. His reporting of Klan members and dirty politics had earned him more than a reputation as a skilled wordsmith -- it also earned him a concussion. And rather than shrink back, Wayne Greenhaw wore his bruises like a badge of honor. He never stopped filing stories. And forty years later, here he was with a nationally acclaimed book, recounting it all.

I was struck anew, then, by this warm and generous man I'd known for years -- a drinking buddy, a confidant, a rascal of a guru if ever there was one -- reminded of his honorable place in an otherwise brutal history. We often view our friends as simply our friends, rarely taking time to consider how their works have shaped them, and how these works have, in ways large and small, equally shaped the world we live in. Or how this, in turn, makes us responsible for shaping our own world in whatever ways are available to us. Wayne Greenhaw persistently chose the tools of Truth and Joy, and he worked to shape his world despite all resistance. We should all work so hard, for so long, towards such an accomplished ending.

Originally published in the Mobile Register, June 19 2011

Poems Jeanne Leiby Was Glad to Know

This post was part of the "Poems I'm Glad to Know" series the Southern Review Lagniappe blog featured for National Poetry Month 2011; it originally appeared there on 4/19/2011. I am reposting it out of the utmost respect. Godspeed to you, Jeanne. It will always be the poets.

POEMS I'M GLAD I KNOW (Jeanne Leiby's 2011 National Poetry Month Picks)

Not only was it difficult to pick only five poems, it was extremely difficult to pick single pieces by poets whose work I have loved for so long. Nevertheless, here are five poems that have shaped me as a writer and reader:

"What Work Is" by Philip Levine (This poem -- above all else and every other piece of writing I’ve ever read -- has had the biggest impact on me. It taught me there is poetry in the industrial landscape of my native Detroit and its suburbs. No lesson has been more significant to me as a writer.)

"Poetry" by Marianne Moore. (I remember reading this poem in my introduction to poetry workshop at UMich, a course taught by the great writer Richard Tillinghast. It was eye opening to discover poetry can have wit and humor. The phrase "imaginary gardens with real toads in them" still hangs above my home computer.)

"In the Waiting Room" by Elizabeth Bishop (although it was really hard to choose between "In the Waiting Room" and "Filling Station" and let us not forget "The Man-moth." Okay, yes, this is three poems instead of one.)

"1st September, 1939" by W. H. Auden (I was introduced to this poem via the play The Normal Heart by Larry Kramer. Just after graduating from college, I moved to London. It was the first West End play I ever saw, and the production starred Tom Hulce who was just off his Academy-award winning performance in Amadeus. It was the first time I experienced -- and internalized -- the interaction between poetry and performance.)

"View With a Grain of Sand" by Wislawa Szymborska. (I love the poetry of Wislawa Szymborska, and if I ever get to publish her, I will be a happy editor.)

-- Jeanne Leiby, 1964-2011