Selected Nonfiction
He died of lung cancer, bent in body from the efforts of growing the very leaf which consumed him. He left behind all but one of six children, land in fallow and an obdurate mule who would know another man’s yoke. Born in the day of Chekov and Twain, I’m not sure this quiet man ever read a story. Robbed of childhood, he learned young that the family could not consume more than the dust or mud and his sun-freckled hands might yield.
Witness
(Excerpt)
​When the cold pushes its leaves off, I can see the tall granite Confederate soldier rising high atop an obelisk on the square’s grassy lawn. Chip, they call him, for the piece broken off the brim of his hat in a failed erection attempt. Do what you want with that, dear reader. Chip’s ass end perpetually moons the north, his chiseled face searches the pastoral southern landscape, once a bloodstained battlefield. The Battle was fought as a reactionary matter, blown bridges had trapped the armies too near each other. When pontoon bridges were secured, the armies pulled and drug their brokenness up the Macadamized pike, soon to be Highway 31, to yet other killing fields in Nashville. They left behind 2,300 dead, another 7,000 wounded, scattered carcasses of hoofed animals. The ground was frozen and, besides, there were too many to bury at once. And so, the dead, so numerous one could not cross the Columbia Highway without stepping on a chest or leg, were collected and stacked in the limestone-walled cellars of the great plantation homes, the Carter House and Carnton and others. And some men, it’s said, weren’t dead but unconscious, and awoke into a nightmare, sandwiched between corpses, in cellars dark and cold. Their cries were heard through the floors. For a winter, the stacked soldiers decomposed under the great homes, and others, left behind as wounded, suffered and died, or lived as half men in the wallpapered parlors and libraries of the great homes. And with their dead and deformed, too, the departing armies left behind an unnamed anxiety and fear in the community, as well the stench of rot which would persist longer than the war itself.
Blurred Lines
(Excerpt)
Maybe not ironically, the generation of writers to which O’Brien and Carver belong was spaced approximately equal time distance as Hemingway was from Twain. Could there have been a Nick Adams entering an Indian camp, reflecting on his own mortality if Hemingway had not grown up the son of a physician? Would we know of Krebs, have a window into the struggles of a Marine isolated in a world too slow and mundane for the young man he has become? And if no Krebs, would there be a Paul Berlin standing in the sea, star-gazing imaging himself in a Paris walk-up with the lovely Sarkin Aung Wan alongside. And if not for the stories of In Our Time Raymond Carver might have died an obscure poet and the late twentieth century revival of the American short story would not have occurred.
On Marxisim & Climate Change
(Excerpt)
Consider the modern office worker who gets her day started dropping a packaged ground coffee she never sees or touches into a Keurig, takes it with her into her car, mechanically opens the garage door, and, enclosed in an automobile, drives to work alone, parks in another garage, walks into a climatized office building and spends the day interfacing with a screen. At the workday’s conclusion, she stops the car for fuel – scanning a card and self-pumping through a machine, then brakes for groceries. The store is a large chain, the food wrapped, unnaturally dyed in some instances to meet aesthetic expectations. She purchases brand names familiar through advertising and checks herself out through another machine. Returning back home, she will park in the garage and enter the building without seeing any neighbors. She could go her entire day without seeing the sky, touching soil, or speaking. As we have become separated from nature in our daily lives, we are less aware and, therefore, less sensitive to the environmental destruction that our means of technological consumption cause.
Decades before Darwin visited the Galapagos Islands, a Scottish botanist trekking the Appalachian forests of Tennessee and North Carolina collected and, later, introduced the native fir that still bears his name. John Fraser didn’t live long enough to see his “discovery” become one of the most popular Christmas trees in America. In fact, he likely never heard of the idea of decorating a tree to celebrate the season.
Not anymore. I’m a lot older now (that’s fact), and wiser, too (that’s hope). On this warmish late March day, I sit to write with no sense of urgency to make the grass grow, just an appreciation for the bird chirps, the branch sways, the multiple shades of green filtering the sun’s set over my lawn that’s embedded in a healthy Middle Tennessee oak-dominant forest. At least on my “watch” (it’s literally been just me watching), this plot has seen no fertilizer, herbicide, disease treatment, mowing or irrigation that wasn’t generated by the ecosystem itself.