My love for cinema was fostered by my aunt, Sis, who influenced me tremendously as a young artist. When we went to the movies or watched TV, we watched what she wanted to watch, which gave me an early education in films that most young people were not watching at the time.

Our local movie theater was the Corbin Cinema, which had two screens, upon which the same two movies played for at least two weeks (I remember that E.T. took over one screen for months because people kept going to see it). Children’s movies were not as ubiquitous as they are now, and the films shown at the Corbin Cinema were sometimes blockbusters but just as often they were quiet films that catered to rural, working class audiences. I saw some of my favorites of the period there, including dramas like Coal Miner’s Daughter, Tender Mercies, Urban Cowboy, Witness, Norma Rae, Terms of Endearment, and The Trip to Bountiful, simply because they were the films Sis wanted to see. But two in particular during that time became influences on my forthcoming novel, The Tulip Poplars.

I was only thirteen when I saw Places in the Heart, and it certainly wasn’t made for a boy my age, but I loved it so much that I saw it not only with Sis but also forced two of my best friends to go back and see it with me. They didn’t really feel it as deeply as I did but they were good friends, so they hung in there for me. Places in the Heart has a terrible title, sounding more like a Hallmark Movie of the Week, but it was a huge critical success, and it still holds up today, with a tornado sequence that is among the most powerful weather scenes ever put on film, with very little in the way of special effects. It was nominated for seven Oscars and won two, including one for the legendary lead performance by Sally Field (who famously accepted it by exclaiming “You like me!”).

I could go on at length about this film but the main reason it became an influence on this novel is the way it looked at racism in a small Southern town. I am from a sundown town, which was the site of a notorious white riot in 1919 known as the Corbin Expulsion. Although the novel is not about this terrible event, the riot is a plot point in the book that sets a lot of its action into motion. The opening scene of Places in the Heart shows a white sheriff being accidentally shot by a young Black man. The townspeople immediately lynch him, then drag his body to the sheriff’s wife so she can see what they have done. They’re surprised to find that she is not pleased. Later, the town is shocked when she takes in a Black man to help her raise the crops, leading the KKK to terrorize her family.

The film is a memoir; its director, Robert Benton, is looking back on his own childhood. I think it must have been this film that first made me think I wanted to write about the way racism shaped my childhood. But it took me many years to figure out how I could best do that with exploiting someone else’s experience or story. I believed I managed to do it in this book.

I was also struck by the way it uses gospel music throughout, as in the beautiful opening that is setting up so much of the film for us. I loved its white shots that showed the beauty of rural spaces, capturing the way the air feels by showing gently lifting tree limbs or bending grasses in a breeze, the way the light falls through the leaves. I appreciated the way it explored fidelity and forgiveness (in its moving last scene all the film’s characters—even the ones who have died and the ones who would not be allowed to sit together in the Jim Crow South—take communion together). Most of all, I loved the complexity it brought to these working class and poor rural characters, who were full human beings and never caricatures. I was thinking of all these things while writing The Tulip Poplars.

But I also wanted The Tulip Poplars to be a sweeping story. An epic that spanned six decades and showed a changing Appalachia and America. I wanted to suggest wide vistas. I hope the book feels as if it plays against a wide canvas. The kind of novel that would need to be a big screen experience. So of course I was thinking of the films Sis and I watched on her solid wood floor console television that must have weighed half a ton. Much like we only had two screens at the local cinema, we only had seven channels for most of my childhood: CBS from Hazard, ABC and NBC stations from both Lexington and Knoxville, WGN, and WTBS. The latter two mostly played reruns of television series and, best of all, classic movies.

That’s where I would have first encountered the astounding work of director David Lean. Two of his films became influences on The Tulip Poplars.

Ryan’s Daughter, released in 1970, is a loose retelling of Madame Bovary, but set in Ireland in the year following the Easter Rising. It is a story of forbidden love—the main theme of The Tulip Poplars—because the titular character, a small-town Irish woman, falls in love with a British soldier, which has ramifications that change the community forever. The film was judged harshly by critics but was a huge box office success, and although I see the issues with it (especially some of the stereotypical portrayals of Irish people), I still admire its cinematography, performances, sound designs, production design, and so much more. It’s wide shots of the Irish coast and mountains are breathtaking, something I try very hard to achieve in passages from my novel. Watch this short scene and think about the way Lean is immersing us in the place.

We feel as if we are on that beach and in that little town. Look at how he captures the shadows of clouds on the land and ocean. I can feel the ocean wind in this scene. I can feel the salt in the air. A film has many elements that conjure these sensory effects—sights, sound effects, music, camera angles—but in a novel, the writer has only their writing. To create a cinematic experience on the page I must first observe intensely, which is why I tell anyone who wants to know that writing is fifty percent observation and fifty percent writing. I must pay attention to the way clouds move across landscapes in a way a non-writer would not. My hope is that what I see in my head transfers to the page so that my reader travels to the locals of The Tulip Poplars, which range from mostly Eastern Kentucky to other places such as Brooklyn, Greenwich Village, Lexington, Louisville, and Cincinnati.

Lean’s more famous film is Doctor Zhivago (1965), another forbidden love story with wide vistas. So, just what I needed to watch to help me capture these same things. Again Lean is using locale, weather, sound, and much more to place the viewer solidly where he wants them to be. There is the famous sleigh scene that takes us to the Russian winter:

Since a large part of the action of The Tulip Poplars happens from 1918 to the 1930s, my characters are often traveling by train. In each instance I wanted the reader to feel the action of the train arriving into the station and rattling down the tracks. I wanted them to see the passing landscape and smell the soot from the coal-fired engine. Watching the many train scenes from this film helped me to conjure that on the page.

One of my favorite directors is Terence Davies. He’s best known for memoir films like Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes and period pieces like Benediction and The House of Mirth. Sunset Song is his most controversial film, with some of his admirers dismissing it, but I think it is a powerful rural epic about the strength of a woman up against terrible obstacles. Few films conjure community, and especially what’s great and terrible about a close-knit community, as well as this one does. There’s one scene in particular int he film that destroys me because it is so beautiful. It’s simply different groups of people in the place walking to church together. Somehow it takes me back to the Sundays of my own childhood. But it is also a scene that gives so much dignity to agricultural people, and one that shows the countryside in such a beautiful way. The scene is overlaid with a chorale performance of “All in the April Evening” but listen for perfectly-placed church bells in the distance at the end of the one-minute scene. I wanted scenes in The Tulip Poplars to play like this in the readers’ minds:

Another film that Sis took me to the cinema to see as a boy that I most likely would not have seen otherwise is The Color Purple, which came out in 1985, when I was just turning fourteen. The novel is one of my favorites and probably the book that changed me the most, but I read it as early as I did because of this powerful film. Historically epics like this that play out over many decades with large casts of characters focus on white people but The Color Purple introduced a new kind of epic. Spielberg employed many of the devices used by directors of epics past to make sure the audience understands that this is a generations-spanning saga, often using wide shots, overheads, and large pans to create the feeling of a large canvas. Note this long shot (no cuts) that follows Shug and Celie as they walk through a field of purple flowers while Shug talks about her definition of God. It is lush and bright. We are luxuriating int he beauty of the world that Shug is celebrating. Notice the sound design: a perfect layering of their footsteps, birds and insects, and a church choir singing in the distance.

To write a scene like that I would have to imagine all of the the variables at play. Not only the swaying purple flowers, the costumes of the characters, what props they might be carrying (the umbrella), but also think about the way the sun would have felt on their faces. I would need to concentrate on what they are smelling, the textures at hand, and what sounds are important for the scene. Somehow I must weave all of that together in a way that doesn’t make the reader feel overloaded by descriptive writing yet immersed in the scene. The Tulip Poplars is also a subtle environmental story about the connection between nature and the spiritual. I hope I created scenes that approach the beauty, subtlety, and profundity of a perfect scene like that one from The Color Purple.

The last film on my list that I think of as being hugely influential on The Tulip Poplars is one from the classics Sis and I watched on WTBS or WGN. How Green Was My Valley is a John Ford masterpiece from 1941 that centers on a Welsh coal mining village undergoing a change in its way of life. Its a nostalgic but gritty film that was nominated for ten Oscars and is widely considered a classic. It is another example of giving dignity and complexity to rural working class characters, using music to inform the viewer, and showcasing the importance of sense of place. Notice in the following scene how the landscape is always there, even when its in the background. Looming mountains, old trees and wide pastures. In this scene, a coal miner’s daughter, Angharad Morgan, leaves the church after marrying the wealthy mine owner’s son even though she is in love with the village pastor. Only her face and body language tell us of her despair, and then we get the sad shot of him watching from the trees.

So much is conveyed in such a short scene. Yet once again I must remind you that the filmmakers have much at their disposal—cinematography, music, costumes, the movement of the camera, the screenplay, the performances—to get across what they want the viewer to know.

In a novel, it’s just me, working with words to try to create these scenes in readers’ minds, to take readers to a place and time, to elicit an emotional reaction to the action at hand. I hope I did that in The Tulip Poplars, and if I did it’s because films like these helped me to understand how to attempt to do it, and reminded me of the tools at my own disposal to help me put on the page what I am seeing on the screen of my own mind.

I hope my new novel will feel like a cinematic experience to you in that it plays out in your mind, but I want it to be a literary experience in the way that everything is conjured through the words. That’s what I love most about writing and hopefully it’s what readers love the most about reading. Film and literature are different beasts, but one can inspire the other, and cinema has certainly been an influence on my own writing, thanks to that little cinema with two screens, to classics on TV, and to my film-loving aunt who helped shaped my cinematic mind.

Preorder The Tulip Poplars.

When I knew I was going to be able to write an epic love story like I had wanted to for years, I realized that I needed to read as many epic love stories as I could. Of course, when we say “love stories” we often mean books about deep longing, loneliness, and heartbreak even more than they are tales of living happily-ever-after.

When I’m working on a novel I often let the universe guide me to what I need to sustain me. Often this happens by pieces of art showing up in my life unexpectedly and repeatedly. A book that happened with was the Booker-longlisted novel The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies. Published almost twenty years ago, in 2007, it kept popping up at many bookstores I visited and in social media posts by others. The last time this happened I was walking along the Thames in London, browsing at the many little wooden book bins that were set up down the promenade. There it was, again, but this time in its striking British cover. I liked the way it felt in my hands. The heft of it, the size of it, the texture of the cover and the paper. It had appeared in my life once again and this time I knew I needed to check it out. As soon as I delved in, I knew it was a book that could help me understand how to write the book I wanted.

The Welsh Girl is about longing, duty, belonging, and identity—four themes that are omnipresent throughout The Tulip Poplars—but it is also about history, and in reading it I saw that showing my own characters against the backdrop of history—and using real historical events—was the best way to tell their human story. I didn’t want The Tulip Poplars to have an agenda. I had no interest in writing a polemic. But the very existences of a gay couple and an interacial couple are political, particularly in the time period I was writing about (1918-1976). This was a time period in which the existence of gay people went from not being spoken of at all to the Stonewall Riots. This was a time period that included both Jim Crow Laws and the Civil Rights movement. Reading The Welsh Girl helped me better understand how to write out of a sense of subtext instead of beating my reader over the head with any kind of politics. I simply allowed my characters to live their lives during the time period and the way their lives had been politicized by the larger culture was clear.

This novel also reminded me of the value of multiple POVs. Although most of the book is told from the point of view of the titular Esther, a shepherd’s restless daughter who is carrying a big secret, we also get chapters from Karsten, a German prisoner of war with whom Esther falls in love, and Rotherham, a German-Jewish refugee sent to the Welsh countryside to interrogate a Nazi prisoner. This aided in giving me a nudge to do the same in my novel, which ends up with five main POVs.

Finally, The Welsh Girl luxuriates in sense of place, and it was important for the land to live vividly in my own book since at heart it is also an environmental novel about the way we depend on the land and how failure to protect it will lead to our own demise. Davies shows how the Welsh countryside is both prison and protector, something that my own characters would be able to relate to well. And he shows how the land and its creatures are always connected, even when we don’t want to be, another theme in The Tulip Poplars that I didn’t know the two books shared before I read this one. More on that when we get to my entry on the influence of Richard Powers’ The Overstory. Witness this lovely passage:

…He told her about cynefin, the flock’s sense of place, of territory.
She’d heard the word before, of course, but the importance of the concept had escaped her as a child. Now Arthur spelled it out. How it would be impossible to farm on the open mountain if the flock didn’t know its place. The sheep would scatter to the winds otherwise. It was why farms hereabouts were only ever sold along with their flocks. No one would buy a patch of land alone. What use would it be? You could try to put new livestock on it, but they’d be gone in a season…Mostly he speaks of cynefin with a kind of reverence, with pride even—not least, as he’s told her several times, because the English don’t have a word for it. As if it’s an essentially Welsh quality.
But how, she demanded, did the sheep know where they were supposed to be? ‘It goes back to olden days,’ he began. ‘Back then, shepherds stayed with their flocks all year…they even followed the sheep into the mountains in winter. And those shepherds kept their beasts in a certain patch, until over the years the flocks learned where they belonged.’

Madame Bovary is certainly one of the great works of literature that deals with issues of belonging and longing, so of course I felt I had to read it, too. I was shocked by how accessible and modern-feeling it is. I read the remarkable 2011 translation by Adam Thorpe that helps to make it feel more that way than previous translations have, but regardless, the themes of the book remain relevant, more than two hundred and sixty years after it was published in the way it looks at fidelity, societal constraints, and unfair expectations put on women while excuses are made for men.

Emma Bovary is a romantic dreamer when she marries a man who can not live up to her expectations and she turns to adultery, lavish spending, and extravagances that ultimiately lead to her death. She became a major influence on one of the secondary characters in The Tulip Poplars, an older woman who struggles to overcome the cruelties and heartaches that were heaped upon her as a child.

One of the things I love most about Madame Bovary is how Flaubert refuses to judge his lead character. He simply presents the story in all of its complexities. The novel famously became the subject of an obsenity trial—perhaps more because the French in power were upset by the way it revealed hypocrisies of bourgeois life than any kind of morality issues with its protagonist.

But of course Flaubert is well-known for the precision of his language, rumored to have been obsessed with finding le mot juste. I am always striving for that, as well, but I was also taken with how cinematic Flaubert’s writing is, employing cliffhangers, visuals, crisp dialogue, and always carrying us along so that we can see it all in our mind’s eye in passages like this:

The rain was no longer falling; day was breaking, and on the leafless apple trees, the birds stayed motionless, ruffling their little feathers in the cold morning wind. The flat country stretched out as far as the eye could see, and the clumps of trees around the farms made, at rare intervals, deep violet patches on this vast gray surface that fused the horizon with the gloomy tint of the sky.

or

Charles was surprised by the whiteness of her nails. They were glossy, fine at the tips, buffed more thoroughly than the ivories of Dieppe, and almond-shaped. Yet her hand was not beautiful, not pale enough perhaps, the knuckles a little dry; it was too long as well, and its outline had no soft curves. What was beautiful about her, was her eyes; although they were brown, her lashes made them appear black, and her glance reached you candidly with a guileless daring.

Madame Bovary is also well-known for its brilliant psychological acumen, something that is at the heart of all great novels, and a trait I very much wanted to give to The Tulip Poplars. I am sure I did not achieve it to the level of Flaubert but his novel helped to guide me in my attempt, and in creating my own characters I was influenced by perfect passages such as this one: This life of hers was as cold as a barn…and boredom, that silent spider, was spinning its shadowy web in every nook and cranny of her heart.

When I am writing a novel I try to not read books that are too similar in plot or even psychology or philosophy. But I do look to books that are speaking to similar themes, and ones that have strong tones so I can expand on my own similar themes and create my own tones for the novel I am creating. Mostly I look to books that are similar in scope and both these books arrive at epic stories by centering on intimate moments, something I hope I achieved in my own book.

Preorder The Tulip Poplars.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about a favorite line of mine from the 2023 film All of Us Strangers. To my mind this movie is the most profound understanding of the trauma experienced by many LGBTQ people. It’s difficult to describe the plot without giving away major aspects but I can tell you that in this fantasy/romance the main character, Adam (brilliantly played by Andrew Scott) discovers that he can still visit his long-dead parents in his childhood home. In essence he gets to come out to them as an adult, even though he will always be twelve to them, the age he was when they died.

When Adam comes out to his mother—who may be a ghost or may just be imagined in his desire to kickstart his writing—she is not as accepting as he would have hoped. She says things like “They say it’s a very lonely kind of life” and “I’m not sure how I feel about it” and “No parent wants to think that about their child, no parent I know.” She died in the mid-1980s and she’s still of the time period’s mindset, as she may very well have stayed even if she had lived. In the moment Adam doesn’t let her know how much she has hurt him, but tears come to his eyes. Later that night he tells Harry, his neighbor and new love interest, “Things are better now. Course they are. But it doesn’t take much to make you feel like you felt back there again, skin all raw.”

No matter how old we get or how much knowledge or confidence we gain, shame can still rear its head on occasion. Pain and trauma linger just under our skin, regardless of how thick it has become. My story of growing up a skinny, bespectled gay boy in a rural Southern town isn’t unique, and you can imagine how often I felt like an outsider in my family, my school, and my community. In my church I felt downright damned. When I was bullied it was usually because I was considered a sissy and/or because of suspicions that I was gay. I was 14 years old at the height of the AIDS crisis in 1986 and there was no worse insult than to call someone gay, no more inflammatory accusation than to say someone might be carrying the disease.

As I write this we’re only four days into Pride Month and already I feel pummeled. After posting a short video on social media showing joyful celebrations at our local Pride festival, I was overwhelmed by hateful, vulgar comments. I would post a picture of them here, as I did on my ephemeral Instagram story, but I don’t want to give them any more power or energy. Suffice it to say they were full of bigotry, vile meanness, and ignorance. The same things I’ve heard all my life, featuring words such as “abomination”, “groomers”, “evil”, “sick”, “sinners”, “repobate minds”, etc. Those are the least vulgar ones.

I can handle being called names. As Generation X children we were taught that sticks and stones could break our bones but names could never hurt us and for the most part I drew strength from that saying. As someone who has been in the public eye for twenty-five years (with most of the years as a politically-outspoken, out-gay liberal Appalachian environmentalist) I know better than to read comments on social media or to pay any attention to direct messages, emails, or letters (although the latter are especially hard for me to ignore or discard). Mostly I roll my eyes or shake my head at the miserable people I encounter this way. Even so, each time I’m called those tried-and-true derogatory names, it registers somewhere in me.

There’s another moment in All of Us Strangers where Adam discusses his childhood with his long-dead father—again, either a figment of his imagination or a ghost; we’re never sure which. His father is sorry for the bigotry he displayed to his son. “You told me not to cross my legs, like a woman, over and over again,” Adam tells him. “I still think about it everytime I cross my legs.”

I certainly felt like my body langauge was always under a microscope as a young person. I learned to box, and grew to love playing and watching basketball. I made sure my wrist was never limp as that was a constant sight gag on television back then, as any gay character was sure to draw big laughs from the studio audience or the canned laugh tracks. I tried to “butch up” my walk, mimicking my father’s swagger. But I especially monitored how I sat, and often failed. This shows up in my recent poetry collection, All These Ghosts, in the third stanza from my poem “Porches, Early 1980s”:

My sister and her boyfriend
are swinging so high their feet
almost touch the cool haint-blue
ceiling. She has torn down a
spider’s web and is teasing
him with it but his gray eyes
are on me. Why’s he set like
that? he asks and she doesn’t
understand so he explains:
Like a girl. And talks like one.

I wrote that poem thirty-some years after that moment. Obviously it stuck with me. The shame. The way his words felt like a punch in my stomach. The way remembering the words right now still make me feel a little sick.

I felt the same way when I saw my social media timelines full of hatred and disgust for Pride Month over the last few days. I felt the same way when I saw that a sitting member of Congress, Andy Ogles (R-Tennessee) tweeted “Homosexuality has no place in America” and “Happy Nuclear Family Month” only one day into Pride this year. He deleted the post after the outraged reaction but did not say he didn’t actually believe this, or apologize for it. He was only expressing what so many people feel, after all. This is only the latest blatantly homophobic statement by people in the highest halls of power in our country. I could easily list dozens more. My point is that it never ends.

My point is also that it’s getting worse. That’s not just my opinion; statistics prove it too. A recent Gallup poll showed that public support for marriage equality in this country is down six percentage points in the last three years. I believe the reason why is because the leadership in this country is constantly encouraging bigotry and vitriol. Pride, for many people, including allies, is a time of both celebration and protest, but it has increasingly become a time for the bullies to get louder.

I don’t bring any of this up for a pity party, and I never want to be part of any kind of suffering Olympics. Perhaps I am bringing it up simply to say that All of Us Strangers is one of my favorite movies because it is resonates so deeply with me. Not only as a gay film but as one that is about the way we are defined by our parents, whether we want to be or not, and how many of us only come to understand them better once we are older.

But maybe I’m writing this because I want more people to understand that Pride is still needed because there are still people being shunned, negated, belittled, abused and even killed for being LGBTQ. Pride is still needed because so many of us are unable to feel safe when we walk down the street and hold the hand of the person we love. Pride is still needed because some child is having to watch how they sit out of fear that they will be mistreated or made fun of. Pride is still needed because the bullies are still bullying, and they’re doing it more often than they did even a year ago. If you love an LGBTQ person, don’t just tell them. Show them. By standing up for them in every way you can.

-end-

You can watch All of Us Strangers for free on Tubi or stream it at any streaming service.

My forthcoming novel, The Tulip Poplars, is a sweeping romance set from 1918 to 1976, centering on a gay couple and an interracial couple who do everything they can to be with the person they love in a time when the law, and the whole world, is telling them they should not be. It’s also about a piece of land that keeps drawing them back home, no matter where they roam. The Tulip Poplars comes out October 13 and you can pre-order it here. One of the reasons I wrote it is because of the rare romance I witnessed in All of Us Strangers.

In 6^th grade my teacher was named Uldean Black and she chose me to write the class play that year. She saw me as a writer. In 7^th grade my English teacher read my writing and gave me books that opened my world. Her name is Sandra Stidham. When I was 25 and trying to figure out what to do with the novel I had just finished the writer Lee Smith, my literary mother, took me under her wing and guided me to the Appalachian Writers Workshop at the Hindman Settlement School, where I found a core community that has continued to carry me through my highs and lows. There I also found Mike Mullins, the director at Hindman, who stepped in as a surrogate parent when I needed him the most, and who helped to pave the way for me in the Kentucky literary world. I also found George Ella Lyon, who took me seriously and gave me my first blurb and was kind to me, always. Later, George Ella and I and several other writers worked together in the fight against mountaintop removal. One of the things I’m most proud of is that we fought back. In that fight, Wendell Berry became another mentor for me, and like a good father figure he gently corrected me when I was wrong and told me when I had done right. I found people who were tender, kind, honest and loving.

The older I get, and the longer I am a writer, the more I understand that, as the Beatles have taught us, “all you need is love”. And I’ve found so much love and acceptance in Lexington since I moved here eight years ago. Among writers, and the LGBT community, and in the Episcopal church, which has welcomed me as I am. A few months ago, I and other writers were asked to contribute lines to the new sculpture downtown to capture our feelings about Lexington. My poem goes like this:

A little fire

when others left us

out in the cold.

Our city of refuge.

This city has been that for me as a gay person, as an Appalachian refugee, and as a person of faith.

Before that, the community of my childhood lifted me up as an artist. I’ll only mention the ones closest to me tonight, but there were others. My Aunt Sis bought me my first guitar and said, “Here, now, go be the next Eddie Rabbit.” She bought me my first typewriter and said, “Take this now, and write the next Peyton Place.” She took me to see films that I was too young to see, but that became foundational for me as an artist: Tender Mercies, The Exorcist, Terms of Endearment, Coal Miner’s Daughter. My cousin, Eleshia, let me roll down the windows and hang my body out the window while she played music as loud as it would go and drove fast on the winding country roads.

I was so lucky to have parents who didn’t dismiss my dream of being a writer. Instead, they scraped and saved to buy me the World Book Encyclopedia. My mother took me to the library, and we all know libraries are the epitome of equity and civilization. My father did not scoff when I declared at the age of twelve that I wanted to be a writer. They were my first models in social justice. I often saw them quietly helping others, not asking for recognition. My mother worked in the lunchroom at our elementary school and later I would be told by grown classmates that she often bought them clothes and slipped them money for food. My father spent his free time helping people in the community who needed him. My parents worked all the time because they had been raised in deep poverty and they wanted to make sure that I would not have to experience that.

And they stood by me, even when I was causing big trouble because I could not bear to silently witness injustice. As a senior in high school I was the editor of the paper and I excoriated a group for their blatant classism in a long, controversial editorial that ended up with me being physically attacked by a teacher. This was my first lesson in the power of the written word and its ability to change things. “If you’re making people mad, then you must be doing something right,” my aunt told me.

I grew up across from the foot of a ridge where pine trees and tulip poplars gathered around a creek lined with mossy rocks. There was a steep hill perfect for sledding. In the pastures my childhood best friend Donna and I often laid among the swaying grass to watch the clouds and have existential conversations at the ages of nine or ten.

This was a wild place.

Then one day, bulldozers converged and for the next couple of years this precious place became an open wound. As the grandson of a coal miner in a family that had risen out of poverty due to the mines, for the first time I had a deep understanding of paradox and complexity. But most of all I saw the injustice at hand in the way our commons—air, land, water—were polluted. That strip mine set up a little fire in me that never has gone out and writing has been my greatest outlet for naming injustice and fighting back.

Now, I believe, we are up against the worst injustices of my lifetime. Fascism is moving across the world like a gathering storm, and its eye is posed over the United States. One of the reasons this has happened is because there is less empathy in our country than there used to be. There is less empathy partly because fewer people read. Cruelty is celebrated and laughed about. Arrogance is rewarded instead of ostracized. Art is negated, and tenderness certainly is. We are living under a regime that never speaks of love and does not truck in beauty. I believe art, and especially literature, can fight fascism, and cruelty, and hard-heartedness. I know that it can change people’s minds and hearts because it has changed my own. When I read The Color Purple in the ninth grade, my heart and mind were cracked open. Other books have been life-changing for me, too:

Fair and Tender Ladies by Lee Smith

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Beloved by Toni Morrison

The Dollmaker by Harriette Arnow

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

Jonah’s Gourd Vine by Zora Neale Hurston

Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

My Antonia by Willa Cather

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse by Louise Erdrich

There are others. And there are also films, paintings, plays, songs. So many songs. I believe that art can change the world. I believe that art makes us more empathetic. That’s why we all must fight for it. Some of us by continuing to create it. But all of us in refusing to allow it to be negated by legislators or the larger culture, whether it be the art contained in banned books or the art of drag.

We are living in a time when people are being put on lists because of how they identify, a time when poets and nurses are being murdered in the streets for protesting. We must stand up for them by making art and by speaking up, no matter the cost. But most of all by holding onto love and empathy. Some of my favorite lines I’ve written are in a poem called “A River” (full poem here and below) and I want to aim for the close by reading them to anyone who has felt negated or belittled or targeted in this era of new cruelty. The lines go:

You know yourself,

so only be yourself

and do not fret, for if more

could be like you, they might

be free themselves.

As a writer, I want to create more empathy, to conjure hope, to put more tenderness and love into the world even while naming its evils and uglinesses, and to always fight back, to name evil and speak out against atrocity. Sometimes love requires that. I speak out because I love my country. I speak out because I love my state. I write because I want to change the world, even if it’s the heart of only one reader. And I believe that if we do all of these things with love as the propellent, our fight is just.

-end-

The title of this essay is a referene to a favorite song by Mary Chapin Carpenter:

Mentioned:

I’m not saying these films are for everyone; with my taste, they’re often not for everyone. I’m going to be brief with my reasons why but hopefully some of these mentions might lead you to some movies that you love. I’ll post my favorite books and music of the year soon.

It was a great year for films, and here are my twelve favorites in no particular order.

Hamnet-I know that lots of people are hesistant to see it because of the subject matter (death of a child) but the film handles that so well that ultimately it’s not as much about that as it’s about the way art can carry us through the worst trials. I loved this novel so much that I was afraid the film wouldn’t live up to it but I think it does, although it is its own separate piece of art completely. Rarely has the forest been captured so perfectly and Jessie Buckley’s performance is one for the ages. I love how the motif of the cave is carried throughout the film (the cave in the woods, their bed, the children’s bedroom, the dining table, the stage, etc.). the way the four elements are referred to throughout. This is the only movie on my list that I saw twice this year and it was even better the second time. The first time I was moved by it, but the second time, tears streamed down my face more than once, especially at a pivotal scene where Buckley goes silent then bursts out with a primal scream that captures profound grief in a way I’ve never seen before.

One Battle After Another-I went into this movie not expecting to like it and I came out loving it. It is thrilling, a complete entertainment from beginning to end, but also profound and moving. I enjoyed seeing DiCaprio play a parent, I loved the way Regina Hall delivers the most centering moments of the film without a word (one of the best, most underrated performances of the year), and the car chases (which I am a sucker for) were outstanding. This is a film that is so much about our current moment that it is hard to beleive it was conceived years ago. The score is also great (and owes a debt to my favorite film composer, Bernard Herrmann).

Train Dreams-This movie is also based on a favorite book of mine, one that I thought was unfilmable. But the filmmakers managed to capture the spirit of that novella perfectly. This is a meditation on loss but also on the wonders of the ordinary, the way the extraordinary is happening all the time, and often without our noticing it. It’s full of melancholy and the most beautiful images I saw in film this year. It’s also about work, which one rarely sees in movies. Felicity Jones uses about fifteen minutes of screen time to completely charm the viewer and Joel Edgerton carries us through all the turmoil in capable hands. Train Dreams gutted me, but in all the best ways.

The History of Sound is the most underrated film of the year. It should have been nominated for so many awards but barely made a blip on the awards circuit. I think one reason is because it’s a nonsensational look at a gay relationship. Another reason is because it’s all about restraint and the filmmaker took that very seriously. The movie refuses to telegraph anything to the viewer and features two of my favorite performances of the year by Paul Mescal (who plays a Kentuckian) and Josh O’Connor (who shows up in three of my favorites this year). The singing scenes are achingly beautiful. I loved the two short stories this is based on, too, by the way. They appeared in my favorite book of 2024.

Weapons is perhaps the most widely seen movie on my list, and with good reason. It’s difficult to so expertly pull of the balance of comedy and horror but this movie did it. I loved the imagery, the performances, and most of all the way I couldn’t predict where it was taking me. It’s Hitchockian and Carpenteresque but also completely original. And Amy Madigan gives one of the best horror performances ever.

Sentimental Value is a family drama, which is among my favorite genres, but it is also original in its delivery. The characters are complex and compelling. It’s beautifully filmed and heavily influenced by Bergman but also very contemporary and its own creation. I’ve thought a lot about this film since seeing it, and the more I think about it the more I like it and what it says about the way family shapes us in good and bad ways.

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. I really liked the first Knives Out movie, couldn’t finish the second one, and absolutely loved this third entry. First of all, it’s a brilliant mystery that makes perfect sense, with no plot holes. Secondly, and more importantly, it is a saccharine-free mediation on belief, faith, and how often organized religion gets in the way of those things. Josh O’Connor is the main reason to see it and this is one of his best performances.

Frankenstein is one of my favorite novels and I’ve never seen a film of it that worked for me, but the latest version did. Even when it strays from its source material it makes sense. I’ll admit that I wasn’t on board for about the first hour but eventually I was swept away by the film and I especially loved Mia Goth who perfectly captures the nature of goodness. It’s also beautiful to look at and that was made even better for me when I learned that very little CGI was used. For example, the ship trapped in the ice—the framing device for the film—is an actual ship that was built specifically for the movie, which I thought was amazing for contemporary filmmaking. Jacob Elordi also did a great job of humanizing The Monster. By the third act I didn’t want it to end.

The Secret Agent is a totally misleading title for this film but it’s doing something similar to the plot. I don’t think it gives too much away to tell you that the briliant thing about this movie is that it’s about a man caught up in the government and police corruption of the dictator-ruled 1970s Brazil. However, we’d expect him to be a secret agent or at least an agitator but he is simply someone who got on the wrong side of a powerful man. It’s a reminder that within a fascist regime all of us are at risk and a reminder that you don’t need to be political to be threatened and harrassed by the political party that is in charge. The lead actor, Wagner Moura, is getting a lot of buzz for his role, and rightly so, but I also loved it for its rich cast of secondary characters, its cinematograpy, its huge canvas, and so much more. It’s a feast for the eyes, whether an epic Carnival scene or the wide shots of 1970s cities and countryside. It’s a long one, but I was never bored or impatient and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I saw it.

On Swift Horses is not a great film. There are huge plot holes that were most likely caused by questionable editing. But despite its faults, I loved watching it. I always love a film that looks at the lives of rural working class people in complex ways and this one certainly does, while also being a fascinating look at the lives of gay people in rural places in the past. It’s not going to be nominated for any awards or very much attention at all but I think Elordi’s performance here is just as good as his in Frankenstein. And it contains my favorite song written for a film this year, “Song for Henry” by Loren Kramar. I understand this is far from a perfect movie but I still think it deserves more recognition than it received.

On the surface The Mastermind is about an ordinary man who fancies himself intelligent enough to pull of a big art heist. He’s not, and he makes a big mess. It’s a quiet, slow film that might test the patience of some viewers, but I thought it was an excellent character study and a great time period piece that uses 1971 to pinpoint the moment when so many Americans had begun to question their government, their churches, family structures, and more, and the way that paradigm shift did such deep damage. Josh O’Connor, as always, is excellent.

Eddington is not a very likable movie. I was turned off by the way it seemed to be superior to anyone who had a thought about COVID protocols, judging those who were strident mask-wearers and those who refused to maskup. It’s also just too soon for a pandemic movie—we lived it so we don’t really want to relive it this soon. Its also a sanctimonious film that wants to criticize gun violence while also delighting in putting incredibly violent scenes on-screen. While I acknowledge these were major issues I also have to admit that I have continued to think about this movie and its qualities ever since I saw this many months ago. In retrospect it’s a prophetic film about the dangers and horrors of AI data centers more than it is about COVID. The performances and images have stuck with me and even though I did not enjoy the rising tension that never lets up during the film I also liked seeing something that made me feel things so viscerally. I think this movie will gain respect in years to come. And Pedro Pascal is especially good.

Other films I enjoyed even if they didn’t quite make my top 12: Kiss of the Spiderwoman and The Phonecian Scheme. Movies from this year I want to see but haven’t been able to yet: Rebuilding, Blue Moon, The Testament of Ann Lee, No Other Choice, Peter Hujar’s Day. My only dig at a film is that I did not care for Marty Supreme. In fact, I was offended by it. I hated how the film demands that I admire the lead character even though there is nothing to admire about such a charmless, lying, cheating, conceited crook and I was disgusted by its treatment of women, who are only there to adore the lead character (for no good reason).

But there is a plentitude of great stuff out there to watch. I hope y’all enjoy some of these. Let me know which ones you loved or didn’t in the comments.

1.

Our property is near the center of a medium-sized city but we have old trees, a gurgling creek, and the best sledding hill in our neighborhood, which is full of children on any given snow day. We managed to find the most rural-looking piece of property near the center of Lexington. We see foxes scampering across our yard so often that we call our place Fox Hill.

Last night, Christmas Eve, we were preparing to go to the midnight Christmas Eve service at our church. Just as I stepped outside to take the dogs for a walk I surprised a fox that was standing near our porch, surveying the evening from the top of our little hill. We both froze in place, twelve feet apart. Instead of darting away, she considered me for a moment. Our eyes locked for what must have been fifteen seconds but felt much longer. She was so close I could smell her musky scent. Her eyes caught the light from one of our lit windows. An encounter with a truly wild thing has some kind of magic about it and in this case she seemed as mesmerized by me as I was by her. Strangely, she did not seem to be alarmed by the dogs—a beagle snorting in her aroma and a completely uninterested yorkie-poo—and instead seemed fascinated by them. After this brief exchange she trotted away, swallowed up by the shadows. I imagined her slender legs stepping gingerly into the creek as she made her way back toward her den.

2.
Months ago, when Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington D.C., made a principled and diplomatic appeal to the president to have mercy on immigrants and LGBTQ people, many who were in fear of losing their rights under his administration, she became a folk hero to millions who were moved by her fierce yet polite stand and a villian to millions who were appalled that she dared to challenge their idol.

At a cocktail party I mentioned how proud she made me to be an Episcopalian and someone in the group scoffed and said, “You don’t actually believe in all that stuff, do you?” I was so taken aback by this rude response that I didn’t reply for a moment. This person was not someone I knew well and I didn’t think I should have to justify what I believe or don’t believe so I simply said, “It’s more complicated than that,” although I didn’t owe them any kind of response at all. They felt so repulsed by the idea of organized religion that they felt free to criticize it to someone who participates in it. I get that, to some degree. Religion has done so much damage to so many. But it is easy to forget that it has also done much good. I try to consider everything with nuance, especially these days when I think absolutism rules the roost.

And here I wish to be completely vulnerable and honest and say that I have always been a person of faith who has many doubts. But most of all, I love the mystery. Often, when I think of the God of my Understanding, I think of it as The Great Mystery. I am not sure of anything at all but I know that I want to believe in something. I think most of us do. I’ve had to do a lot of thinking and studying to get away from many of the ideas I was taught as a child, but I have gotten there, and I’ve arrived at this comfortable place of loving the ceremony and the scriptures and so much more of it while also keeping my doubts alive and embracing the mystery.

3.

At church, the first song was “O Come, All Ye Faithful” and by the end I was in tears. The music was a mighty wave crashing over us. The organ and the horns, especially the trumpet. But most of all, the voices, united. Everyone singing, relishing the remarkable lyrics, a collection of beautiful words: joyful, triumphant, adore, abhor, begotten, exultation, glory, Word. When people sing together, God listens, because there are few things sweeter or holier than community.

Above is a short audio excerpt from one of the songs at the service.

The music and singing moved me so deeply that I couldn’t help but cry. But it was more than the music, of course. I wept not only for the beauty of art but also because ever since I was a little child, since before I can even remember, belief has been drilled into me, and even when I don’t believe, there is still that little fire burning in me. Sometimes dim, sometimes quiet, sometimes so low it barely puts out any heat. But always there, nonetheless. Faith was instilled in me as a child and therefore I am touched by studying on it, but I am also moved when I wonder how much I believe in it.

I was moved by the mystery, and by the hope. Because no matter what you believe, the story of Christ, especially His birth, is one of hope. No matter what you doubt, the story of the nativity and of what comes after in Christ’s life is about the desire to be good, the possibility of being good and doing good.

To be honest, I was also thinking of myself when those voices and instruments were raised in glorious sound. I was thinking of how I was sitting in that small pew with my shoulders touching my husband on one side and my dear friend on the other and all three of us were gay men who had had to hide, who feared, who were treated badly because of our gayness at some points in our lives, sometimes for years and years. Even today we cannot move through the world as openly as straight people. Even today we do not have full rights. Even today we constantly fear that we may lose more of the rights we’ve fought for. Much of that meanness directed at us was conjured by religion. What moved me so deeply was that all three of us managed to keep that little fire burning enough to come to this church for a midnight service and to be moved by all of it while also aware of all the complications. Belief can be fluid. And there is a beauty in that, too.

And I cried because I was proud of us for having found the helpers, too. Because we all three managed to find people who loved us for being completely ourselves. Because we all three feel part of a congregation where we are welcomed as we are. Where we are not treated as special, but simply as equal. That’s all we ever wanted. To find a church where we are thought of as children of God, and nothing else.

4.

At the end of the Christmas Eve service we all lit candles. The lights were dimmed and we sang “Silent Night” together. Community, again. Holy, holy, holy. We need it more than ever these days. Social media has made us less social. We have to seek each other out. We have to talk to each other instead of at each other. I believe we have to condemn atrocity and stand against the rise of fascism. Sometimes we have to speak out and other times we have to work quietly, in the shadows. We have to draw boundaries with those who continue to support cruelty. That is part of my spiritual practice and my ethical code. That is part of my religion. But I believe that any activism must be rooted in being conscientious. If we are to make a change in the world it must begin with empathy.

5.

This Christmas Eve was unnaturally warm here in Kentucky. I am assuming it was a good winter’s night for the fox looking for food in our neighborhood. Perhaps she was doing more than hunting last night. Maybe she was out for a stroll on a beautiful night, drawing in the smells, the sounds, the sights, the tastes, the textures in ways only an animal is able to. I wonder how the December water felt to her paws when she stepped into the creek. I wonder how her den must have felt when she returned home. Did she collapse onto her sleeping place tired from her midnight jaunt? Does she, too, believe in something she does not understand? I wonder if there was magic for her in our encounter.

I do not understand the natural world completely, and I am glad that I don’t. Therein lies the mystery, and the magic. I am able to believe in it nonetheless. I am able to understand that God is conjured when voices unite but also when a fox pauses to look over the land from the top of a hill.

As a child I was taught that animals talk in human voices at midnight on Christmas Eve. If a human tried to hide and witness this it would not happen. This is a beautiful story, full of mystery for a child, or anyone who believes it. Now I see the way we are always putting humanness on animals to create stories, believing that they want to be more like us, or that it elevates them to take on human qualities. I don’t believe they want it. We are not gods to them. I know now, they don’t need us at all.

-End-

Notes: The title of this short essay is from the wonderful Iris Dement song “Let the Mystery Be”. It has become a cornerstone of my spiritual practice. You can watch it here:

I didn’t take any video of the first song of the Christmas Eve service at Christ Church Cathedral in Lexington, which is mentioned in this essay, but you can watch a snippet of a later song here that was filmed clandestinely by someone:

Merry Christmas.

My first murder-mystery, Dead Man Blues, came out this fall, and many people have asked why I’d want to delve into the world of genre-writing, especially crime fiction. The simplest answer is that I’ve always loved this kind of book and murder-mysteries are comfort reads for me. Growing up, I got most of my books at yard sales and two authors you could almost always find there were Agatha Christie and Stephen King (you could also always find Danielle Steele and V.C. Andrews, but I never developed a

taste for those books…not that there’s anything wrong with them). I learned how to write plot by reading Christie and King. Christie, in particular, was an author I turned to in times when I needed to chill out and disappear into a book. My favorites of hers are the Jane Marple mysteries. I love Hercule Poirot, too, but Miss Marple reminded me of people I knew. Some of my older aunts could have easily been her. They were just as intelligent and nosey and elegant. And I loved her home base—the little village of St. Mary Mead, England, which came vividly to life on the page for me; one of my first lessons in sense of place writing. My favorite Christie novel, by the way, is The Murder at the Vicarage. which is Marple’s first appearance in a novel, and is set completely in St. Mary Mead.

You might notice that I always refer to Dead Man Blues as a murder mystery. One reason is because I like how old timey that sounds. To me it conjures the formula that is at the heart of these kinds of book: there is a murder (or murders); there is an investigation, largely done by way of interviewing a cast of suspects and leaning on the intuition of the lead character; and there is a big reveal where everything is explained, often with a group of people in one space.

That gets me to my reason for loving murder mysteries: they offer comfort to me because of the formula. It allows me, as the reader, to know what to expect while also using an element of suspense to keep the pages turning. Throughout my book tour over the last couple of months, people have asked me many times why we like to read crime fiction. As one person put it, “Why in the world do we want to read about murder as a way to escape?” I think the reason is because these kinds of books offer us a kind of order that we rarely get in the real world. In murder mysteries, justice is usually served. The murderer is caught and punished for their crime(s). Often, in real life, things aren’t so neatly wrapped up. Trials drag on forever, corruption often intervenes. People get away with murder because they have money. Sometimes murderers are never caught. So it gives us comfort to know, going into a book, that the crime will be solved and that someone will pay for what they’ve done. That’s certainly the case in Dead Man Blues. And I think series, in particular, like the Marple novels, or other series that I love, are often successful because they are set in places that become familiar to the reader. Dead Man Blues is the first book in a series (I’m working on the sequel now, and it has already been sold and slated for publication) and it centers around Cedar Lake and the little town of Shady Grove, which is described this way:

Shady Grove was a town of 998 souls that straddled the Kentucky-Tennessee state line. The border ran directly down Main Street, which sometimes caused traffic to be stopped so tourists could have their pictures made standing on the yellow line. No one really seemed to mind, though. The lake brought business to town and most of the out-of-towners were so happy to be vacationing that they were mostly in good moods. Even the Yankees, generally.

This was a bright little town where the sidewalks were always swept, the two small parks on either side of town were always mown and full of overflowing flower pots, and houses actually had picket fences around their yards, gingerbread decorating their eaves, and American flags leaning from porch posts…Main Street was lined by neatly kept stores, many of which were outfitted with bright neon signs, such as Howard’s Hardware; Baker and Butcher, where one could buy doughnuts, birthday cakes, pork chops, or baking hens; Newberry’s department store; Ray’s Ready-to-Wear, where mothers bought the clothes they couldn’t make themselves for their children and husbands; Sue Ellen’s Swell Closet, where the mothers treated themselves; the Hair Port Beauty Salon;State Line Jewelry. Shady Grove possessed seven churches: Methodist, three different kinds of Baptist, one small Catholic church, a Church of God (which people just called “the holy roller church”), and on the very edge of town, an AME. The closest thing to a bar in town was the Shawnee Pool Room, which had a license to sell beer and did a brisk business in Stroh’s and Pabst Blue Ribbon.

And there was the courthouse, looking more elegant than it had a right to, three wide columns supporting the high ceiling of its porch, surrounded by huge oak trees that had been planted in the 1830s and a towering Confederate memorial that had been installed sometime in the 1920s when the entire South started its nostalgia campaign for the Lost Cause…

In all of my writing, I love capturing sense of place, but it’s particularly important in this book, and that was inspired by the way locale serves such a great purpose in some of my favorite series, particularly the Vera Stanhope novels, the Three Rivers novels, and the Shetland novels, all by Ann Cleaves, my favorite living mystery writer. There are two reasons I love her books: her characters and her sense of place. Other series that have been particularly important to me are the Grantchester mysteries by James Runcie and the Father Brown mysteries by G.K. Chesterton. I write more about sense of place in mystery series in an upcoming essay that will be published in Crime Reads, which I’ll link here once it’s up. You might notice that I have a particular love for British mysteries, and I was using their model in writing Dead Man Blues (and its sequel).

I alternate between reading profound, language-driven literary novels and escapist suspense fiction. There is the suggestion in our culture that the profound literary novels are more important and harder to write. But writing genre is equally difficult and requires a whole other skill set. So I do not want to infer that writing genre is inferior in any way when I say it is comfort reading and comfort writing. I simply mean it is different from my literary writing.

That’s one reason I am using a slight pseudonym, to differentiate my mysteries from my literary novels. Using S.D. House allows me some freedom to say that this is meant to be escapist fiction where the main focus is to keep the pages turning. However, that does not mean that I sacrifice description, or characterizations, or sense of place, or even language. I want every sentence to sing in whatever book I write. But it does mean that I know my main purpose in these kinds of books is to entertain. So I employ devices such as cliffhangers to end chapters, foreshadowing, withholding information, planting evidence, and other elements that only show up in murder mystery writing in this particular way. And to be honest, the pseudonym is also because of some complicated contractual stuff that is too boring to explain.

Why mystery? Because it was a joy to write. Because we need mystery in our lives. Because we need to be able to close a book where everything is wrapped up in a neat little bow (that doesn’t—and shouldn’t—happen as much in literary writing). Because we all like to try to figure something out. Because we need ways to escape right now more than we have in a long time. I hope that when you pick up Dead Man Blues the real world will fall away for a few hours as you live in the world of Cedar Lake. So I’ll leave you with a brief description of the lake and hope that you might decide to travel there fully soon by reading the book:

Dave closed his eyes for a moment to relish the sun on his face. When he reopened them he was taken aback for a moment by the deep blue of the lake on either side of him. Every day he was stunned at least a little bit by how beautiful it was. Not only the water, but also the rocky banks that made the lake so clean and clear, the lush green mountains rising along its edges, the rich smell of it all. Cedar Lake was known for possessing the widest stretches of any lake in the Tennessee Valley Authority. People often referred to its “big water,” which he could look out and see right now…The sky was the color of faded jeans and the rich smell in the air reminded him why this has been named Cedar Lake—thousands of cedars stood sentinel along its shores and constantly eased out their aromas. When he was a boy those cedars had stood at the tops of the ridges along the winding banks of the Big Laurel, the Cumberland, and the Wolf Rivers, whose green waters and round stones had been covered by the lake, just as the rich bottomland that had spread along their edges for centuries had been taken by the rising waters of the dammed rivers to make this lake.

I based Cedar Lake on the two lakes I know best. Laurel Lake, which I grew up near in Southeastern Kentucky, and Dale Hollow Lake, which stretches across the Kentucky-Tennessee border. These are places full of beauty—and mystery.

P.S. While I have you, I’d also like to share the music of this book with you. It’s especially handy to have this playlist if you want to listen while you read along. The music was hugely helpful and influential to me. I am hopeful that each of the books in this series will be named for a particular song. These are the ones that served me best during the writing of the book, and that show up in its pages.

You can listen on YouTube here.

And on Spotify here:

Alright, let’s go to the lake.

I must have been in fourth grade when I learned my first poem. I suppose “Trees” by Joyce Kilmer was taught to most school children back then, and although its rhymes are simple and its reasoning romantic, there is profundity and resonance within its short lines that move the reader and state a truth that most of us would agree with: no manmade art can compete with the beauty and mystery of nature. Published in 1931, it remains one of the most widely read poems of all time and has been so popular over the years that it even became a much-recorded song. My favorite recording of it is the one by Mario Lanza.

All these years later, the poem continues to be a touchstone for me. As a child I felt like it was articulating something that I was unable to. I believe that is one of the great responsibilities of writers; we are meant to examine abstract notions that most people struggle to articulate and put them into words. As a nine year-old I already understood the power a poem could hold, and I was deeply moved by the poem, which I learned by heart. But it wasn’t until I was twelve, and in seventh grade, that I witnessed someone else being deeply moved by poetry.

I’ve often talked about my English teacher, Sandra Stidham, who was known as a rigorous but caring teacher. She could strike fear in the hearts of her students with one glance or soothe them with quiet loving and encouragement. I remember it being the first day of class (it may not have been; memory is tricky that way) when she stood before the class and read Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “God’s World,” published in 1917. The poem began “O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!” and continued to center on the way that the natural world was too beautiful to bear. I had sometimes felt this way, too. Even now I often mourn the loss of some wonderful thing before it has even began to pass on. This is a concept that was famously explored in a scene from the 1999 film American Beauty when a character watches a plastic bag and leaves being blown about in the wind and is moved to say: “Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world I feel like I can’t take it, and my heart is just gonna cave in.”

Ms. Stidham finished the last lines of the poem:

Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me,—let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

And I was amazed to see tears in her eyes. I had never before seen an adult moved by a piece of literature other than the Bible, and this one moment gave me permission to no longer hide my love for the written word that I had carried with me as long as I could remember. I think it was also instrumental in me becoming a writer myself. Ms. Stidham did lots of things that school year that helped launch me. She recognized that I thought like a writer, she brought in books from her personal library and loaned to us, she read my short stories I was secretly writing and gave me feedback. It only takes one teacher who is going the extra mile to unlock something in us, and she was the main teacher who did that for me. There were others, but none of them made the impression that she did.

Around this same time I had discovered William Wordsworth. I was constantly watching old movies on TBS and one they ran often was the beautiful 1961 melodrama Splendor in the Grass, written by William Inge (who would later become one of my favorite playwrights with plays like Come Back Little Sheba, Picnic, Bus Stop, and others). I related to the way the film explored rural life, sexual repression, and manic depression—all things I was familiar with in our little town—and a large waterfall even served as a central set, which I also loved because nearby Cumberland Falls was the site of many of my own teenage adventures.

The film’s title comes from a Wordsworth poem that is recited a couple times and I was so taken by the movie that I sought out the poet and became especially enthralled by his poem “The World is Too Much With Us”, which explored the way people had chosen industrialization over nature. This held special power for me since at the time I was seeing my community be overtaken by a strip mine that not only led to noise and water pollution but also destroyed our roads and even relationships between neighbors.

I found Whitman, poems that have also stuck with me throughout my life. Through my love for The Color Purple I discovered the poetry of Alice Walker. I loved Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Lucille Clifton. James Still’s poems helped me to understand the culture I was from in a deeper way. His poem “I Was Born Humble” once again helped me to understand my deep connection to the natural world. His “Death of a Fox” made me meditate more deeply on how to be more empathetic.

More and more I was finding that poetry could put into words my strongest and hardest-to-grasp emotions. I filled notebooks with my own (bad) poetry and (slightly better) short stories. The short stories immediately garnered more praise from the few people I allowed to read them and so gradually I began to focus more on prose. I spent years reading and studying fiction, eventually surrendering to it completely. My first publications were stories and I started a novel in college; six years after graduating it was published and I became known as a fiction writer. Occasionally I wrote a poem but I mostly kept them in my notebooks; over the years I published only a few poems in small literary journals.

During the hardest period in my life, when I went through a tumultuous divorce and simultaneously came out, poetry was a balm that carried me through. Especially Mary Oliver, whose words seemed to have been written just for me during this rough time. Her poem “Wild Geese” has saved lives, and along with books, music, films, dogs, the natural world, and a handful of people, it saved mine, too. The opening line of the poem, “You do not have to be good” was a life changer for me. I was raised in a strict fundamentalist sect that taught me the only way to be good was to deny most of what made me a human being, that the way to be good was to judge others and help them see the error of their ways. The poem goes on to encourage the reader to accept themself and to celebrate themself. A piece of literature was once again there for me when I needed it most.

So, about fifteen years ago, I started taking poetry more seriously. In 2008 I wrote a play called Long Time Traveling that was about a mechanic who realizes he is a poet so he decides to quit his job and pursue his passion, much to the chagrin of his wife. This change illuminated the huge divides in their relationship. It was not only about marriage but also a metaphor about the way so many people I knew were resistant to change with the election of Barak Obama, simply because of race. Because the main character writes—and recites—some of his poetry in the play I felt this gave me the perfect excuse to start taking some poetry classes myself. I had never been formally trained to write it the way I had been fiction (I earned an MFA in Creative Writing focused on fiction-writing from the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing).

Malcolm Gladwell made famous the concept that to achieve true expertise in any skill a person has to practice the craft for at least 10,000 hours. Well, I’m not sure I agree that there is a set time one must invest but I do know that to do something well you have to spend as much time as possible studying it, learning everything you can about it, practicing it. So that’s what I did with poetry. I took classes offered by poets I admire like Maurice Manning and Marianne Worthington and sat in on lectures by great poets like W.S. Merwin, Kathleen Driskell, Rebecca Gayle Howell, Crystal Wilkinson, George Ella Lyon, Greg Page, Molly Peacock, and others. I studied closely the work of essential poets like Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, Lyrae Van-Clief Stefanon, Eavan Boland, Donald Hall, Ada Limón, Frank X Walker (whom I especially admire for the way he uses the human story to comment on larger social issues), Nickole Brown, Jane Kenyon, and Paisley Rekdal. I picked the brains of acclaimed poets I was fortunate to be in conversation with, such as Wendell Berry, Jane Hicks, bell hooks, Barbara Kingsolver, Ron Rash, and Lisa Parker. I attended the readings of as many poets as I could. Most of all, I read and I wrote. And wrote and wrote, learning from my mistakes, leaning on the generosity of friends and family who read the poems and gave me feedback. My poems were mostly rejected by the magazines and journals I submitted them to but a few were published here and there. I was fortunate in that a couple of my poems gained a large life online. For the past few years my poem “New Year Prayer” gets shared often on New Year’s Day. When Loretta Lynn passed away my poem “At the Opening of Coal Miner’s Daughter” was widely shared on social media and reposted by several country music stars, which allowed it to gain even more traction. Some of the poets mentioned above encouraged me to keep writing poems, and their belief in me was pivotal. Still, I wanted to make sure that I felt confident in what I was doing, that I did not feel like a fraud when I called myself a poet, before I started reading poems in public or even thinking about the idea of putting together a collection. So I kept my head down, and I kept studying and writing.

But then, in 2023, Governor Andy Beshear appointed me as Poet Laureate for the Commonwealth of Kentucky for two years. Immediately some people questioned this designation, saying that I shouldn’t have been chosen because I wasn't a poet. What they were really saying is that I wasn’t known as a poet, but as a fiction writer. That’s an unfair judgement, I think. Just because they didn’t know I had seriously studied the craft for years was all the determination they needed. Is a poet still a poet if they have not published a book of poetry? I would say they are. Besides, in Kentucky, it is not a requirement to be poet to be named as Poet Laureate and other writers primarily known for prose had preceded me. Still, the sting of rejection from some made me want to get more of my poetry out there.

When the governor was elected for a second term he asked me to write a poem for his second inauguration. Writing an occasion poem is a daunting task because a poem is usually organic in nature. This one, in particular, had to speak to as many people as possible. I rarely write with an audience in mind and instead focus on what is in my heart that I badly need to say. So, instead of thinking about how I could write a poem that would please as many people as possible, instead I focused on what we as a Commonwealth had been through together over the past few years. So I wrote about surviving a pandemic and two major natural disasters by leaning on each other, and it worked.

The inauguration, which also featured Tyler Childers, Ben Sollee, and others, was widely watched. “Those Who Carry Us” was published. The poem was well-received enough to garner interest from some publishers who wondered if I had a collection ready to publish. I didn’t feel I had enough poems to put together in one volume that had a continuous theme but I did feel the urge to write more poetry, so I spent the next year focusing primarily on that. I wrote about the deep sense of timesickness I’ve had for years now—a pining for a place and time that no longer exist. The first section serves as a kind of memoir of my youth and family stories I heard growing up. The second section focuses more on forming my own identity and on love poems (to people, dogs, a donkey, music, the natural world, places, words, even to an old sewing kit) and the third section of poems center on loss, not only through memorial poems to my loved ones but also to musicians such as Sinead O’Connor, John Prine, The Everly Brothers, and Hazel Dickens. Some of the poems study on the despair of living right now, and how we find hope.

So, All These Ghosts is a poetry collection that is about the past but also about this moment. It’s about what we can learn from looking backward and how we can apply that to our current situation. It’s about being haunted by a place and a people but also about being the haunter who often wanders back into these times and places.

Am I a ghost wandering among them when I step back in time? Or am I living with ghosts? I think the answer is both, and that’s what I want to explore in All These Ghosts. When I decided to focus on putting a collection together I felt daunted by my own imposter syndrome. But I hunkered down and honed my craft. I challenged myself to write poems that fit within particular forms. The book includes sonnets, pantoums, haikus, haibuns, sestinas, a ghazal, shaped poems, free-verse, “after” poems, and more. I wasn’t sure if I was a real poet or not. But now I am proud of this book and the poems within it. I hope you’ll enjoy them and that someone—even if it’s just one person—can find something in the poetry that can carry them the way so many poems have carried me over the years.

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Come see me on my autumn book tour. All the details are here.

Recommended poets mentioned in this post:

Joyce Kilmer
Edna St. Vincent Millay
William Wordsworth
Walt Whitman
Alice Walker
Robert Frost
Carl Sandburg
Lucille Clifton
James Still
Mary Oliver
Maurice Manning
Marianne Worthington
W.S. Merwin
Kathleen Driskell
Rebecca Gayle Howell
Crystal Wilkinson
George Ella Lyon
Greg Pape
Molly Peacock
Elizabeth Bishop
Lyrae Van-Clief Stefanon
Donald Hall
Ada Limón
Jane Kenyon
Frank X Walker
Nickole Brown
Paisley Rekdal
Jane Hicks
bell hooks
Barbara Kingsolver
Ron Rash
Lisa Parker

First of all, I want to recognize that we are gathered here today in the middle of Pride month and to say Happy Pride! Pride is a celebration but it is also a protest. Pride started with a small group of people fighting back. And it still matters because so many still hate LGTBQ people, because we are still constantly trying to negate our existence, because there is still so much legislation being passed to erase us. But we won’t back down. Pride is still important because so many of our fellow Americans still get mad that Pride exists. It’s important because so many of us are still being ridiculed, shunned, and even killed for being LGBTQ. So we must keep fighting back and celebrating the beauty of otherness.

It is incredible to see so many of you here today. You’re here because you believe in democracy. We’re here because we love our country. Because we know that this nation was founded to reject oligarchy. Yet in Washington DC today the streets are being pummeled by tanks because of one man’s fragile ego. Perhaps even worse, in DC today members of Congress continue to lick the boots of a man who wants to take away the rights of not only women, not only LGBTQ people, not only people of color, not only immigrants. He wants to take away the rights of everyone except himself and his bootlickers. He wants to take away the foundations of American democracy.

We have now gone through almost ten years of this with this wannabe king. I know that all of you, like me, are weary. Many of us have been fighting back our whole lives, not only for ourselves, but for others. We are sick and tired of having to resist. But we cannot give up. I know that you, like me, often feel powerless and at your wits’ end. But we have to keep going. We have no other choice. We have to do it for the ones who want to be here but can’t.

We have to do it for our children whose rights are being threatened, whose educations are being taken away so this wannabe dictator can build a dumber constituency. We have to do it for our colleagues in the arts, humanities and sciences, who work is being threatened. We have to do it for people living with HIV/AIDS, both here in the U.S. and abroad, because this would-be king want to cut hundreds of millions of dollars for prevention and treatment that has saved millions of lives. We have to do it for journalists, whose work and lives have come under threat from the rhetoric of this hateful administration. We have to do it for our elders, who have worked their whole lives and are having their retirement taken away and medical care threatened so he can line his own pockets. We have to do it because the bigger threat than Trump is the people who voted for him and continue to defend him.

Often I feel like I don’t know what to do. Often I even feel hopeless. But then I remember that the people have the power to make real change happen if they will just embrace it. That’s what happened at Stonewall and in other protests for LGBTQ rights in DC, San Francisco and even here in Lexington, Kentucky. That’s what happened during the civil rights movement in Montgomery, in Greensboro, in Nashville and right here in Lexington, Kentucky.

I believe the best way we can fight back is at the local level. Here in Kentucky, we have one of the worst licker of Trump’s boots in the country as one of our members of Congress: Andy Barr. When the Episcopal Rector Marian Budde beautifully begged Donald Trump to have mercy on immigrants and LGBTQ people, Barr immediately did Trump’s bidding and bitterly criticized her. Yet when a member of Congress was thrown to the floor and arrested two days ago for daring to ask Dog-Killer Kristi Noem a question, Bootlicker Barr said nothing to defend his own colleague.

He isn’t serving Kentuckians. He’s serving a wannabe King and we have to get him out of office.

Now he’s running for an even bigger seat, the US Senate seat that will be left vacant by McConnell. We have to do everything we can to make sure he doesn’t win in 2026. This is how we affect change. If we can get these bootlickers out of office Trump will have no power. Let’s vote for senators who will represent us. We can make a difference. We are doing it by being here today, and I am so thankful to all of you for your determination. In closing:

No Bootlickers, No Kings.

No Bootlickers, No Kings.

No Bootlickers, No Kings.

See more pictures and videos from the rally at the instagram account @ SilasHouse

Then I thought about the simple message of the prayer bench, “All creatures great and small,” a line from the Anglican hymn “All Things Bright and Beautiful” (words 1848, melody 1600s), which features this refrain:

All things bright and beautiful,
all creatures great and small,
all things wise and wonderful:
the Lord God made them all.

The verses of the song go on to list all the things in the world that are holy, including little birds and flowers, sunsets, rivers, and many other things we take for granted daily. The point of the song is that everything that is, is holy (as Merton wrote), and that the environment is precious, that every tiny part of it matters in the larger picture.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately. As I think about everything that is endangered, my chief concerns of the moment are the rights of others and the environment. And while bigoted legislation at least has the possibility to be overturned eventually, devastation of the land cannot be recovered as easily. I shudder to think of how much of the land, sky, and water is endangered right now.

While some say that I am overreacting in these fears, I believe that all of us are under-reacting.

I am fortunate to attend a church that focused its sermon that day—as it does always—on love and forgiveness, two of the foundations of faith. I attend an Episcopalian church that focuses on helping others instead of judging. I thought about all the church services happening across the land and I know from personal experience that many of them are focused on shunning those who are the Other, whether they be immigrants, LGBTQ people, or others. I was raised in that kind of church, and left it when I was about sixteen. I’ve experienced both great love and great damage in those churches.

The thing is that when most people think of Christians these days, they think of the latter kind of church I’m describing, not the former. Christianity has been hijacked by a loud, empowered lot who are distorting the message of Christ to fit their own agendas instead of adhering to his message of compassion and humility. More and more I see them turning it toward nationalism, which I believe is a very dangerous road. They have taken up so much of the air in the conversation around Christianity that they had distorted not only the very message of the faith but its ultimate goals for many. So many around the world now associate Christianity with discrimination and judgement that I am more comfortable calling myself a person of faith. [I explored much more of that in my twelve minute talk on what I call “the Secular Holy” when I spoke recently at the Festival of Faiths, linked above]

I will not allow them to take my faith from me. I’ve held onto it my whole life, even though I’ve always felt it offered me comfort more than answers, even though the churches I attended made it clear that they didn’t welcome who I really was (as a gay person, as a liberal person, as a questioning person). But early on I understood that church and God are two very different things, just as religion and faith are. One of the things I love about my faith is that it is The Great Mystery. I don’t have the answers, and that’s part of the beauty. And to a large degree, one’s faith is a personal thing. While so many in the Religious Right have increasingly trumpeted their religiosity and used it for their own agendas in every way possible, the Religious Left has tended to stay quieter and is especially hesitant to use their faith in the many battles that have to be fought in the culture wars and the newer battle for democracy.

The Religious Right has politicized LGBTQ issues, the environment, reproductive rights, and much more, claiming that their views on these issues are the moral high ground and usually viewing anyone who supports LGBTQ people, believes in climate change, or has a different interpretation of choice than they do, is a sinner. It has become quite common for Republican politicians to call Democrats demonic or Godless. Trump—a man who has repeatedly said that he has never asked God for forgiveness, a man who cannot name a single Bible verse, a man who thinks that II Corinthians is called “Two Corinthians” (just about anyone who has studied the Bible would refer to it as “Second Corinthians” in speaking about it)— often pushes the rhetoric that Democrats are not people of faith.

Trump’s hand-picked Senior Advisor to the White House Faith Office, Paula White, has said that “Saying no to Donald Trump is saying no to God.” That’s some scary—and blasphemous—stuff. She has said that anyone who is against Trump (like Democrats) is part of a “demonic network” and that liberals “mock people of faith” (which blatantly insinuates they are not people of faith themselves). She says so much it’s hard to keep up, but this one terrifies me, too, mainly because she said it and yet she still received a White House position: “Wherever I go, God rules. When I walk on White House grounds, God walks on White House grounds. I have every right and authority to declare the White House holy ground, because I was standing there and where I stand is holy.”

Lord, have mercy.

I think among the reasons a lot of progressives don’t talk about faith more are four in particular: 1. it is a private matter, 2. they don’t want to weaponize it in any way, as so many conservative Christians have, 3. faith is too complicated to articulate briefly; it requires a longer conversation than one can have on social media, and 4. people don’t want to be painted as bigoted because they’re declaring themselves as believers.

I would venture that for most progressives, their faith is a matter of mystery and questioning. This is not the way evangelical Christians are raised to think about their faith. Anytime I had questions as a young person in church I was usually told to not question God or I was reminded that “God moves in mysterious ways”. And most conservative Christians go to churches where they are encouraged to evangelize and even outwardly judge others in order to save them from the fires of hell they might bring upon themselves otherwise. Conservative Christians are taught to talk about their faith constantly but progressive denominations tend to not teach this.

The thing is, more people of faith who are also progressives—or Democrats, or liberals, or whatever you want to call people on the Left—need to be talking about their faith as we fight back against the rising threats to our democracy. I’m not saying we should use our religion/faith the way that people like Jerry Falwell, Franklin Graham, and Paula White have. But I think we need to let people know that we exist, and that we vote, that our values do not make us nonbelievers, or demonic.

I’ve been particularly inspired by the way Kentucky’s current governor, Andy Beshear, a Democrat, talks about his faith openly and complexly. Anytime he speaks of his faith he is almost always talking about how it has taught him to be good to others and to treat everyone equally. That’s a message anyone should be able to get on board with. And talking about his faith certainly hasn’t hurt him—he’s the most popular Democratic governor in the United States and maintains huge approval ratings in the deeply red Commonwealth of Kentucky. People respond to his message of kindness and they never feel as if he is weaponizing his faith, but being genuine when discussing it. We need more politicians who are willing to do the same.

Pete Buttigeig has also been very open about his deep faith, which is doubly important since he is not only a politician but also a gay man—and LGBTQ people are often accused of being Godless (despite the fact that a recent poll found that 77% of LGBTQ people believe in God). I wrote about how important his visibility has been to me, especially as a person of faith, in this essay.

Kamala Harris has always been vocal about her strong faith but refused to weaponize it in any way. In her memoir she wrote of growing up being exposed to the Baptist faith and Hinduism. She is a member of a Baptist church and in her memoir she wrote that her “earliest memories of the teachings of the Bible were of a loving God, a God who asked us to ‘speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves’ and to ‘defend the rights of the poor and needy.” Despite a lifelong faith, her belief system has constantly been questioned by racist, antisemitic, and xenophobic attacks that suggested her knowledge of Hinduism and marriage to a Jewish man somehow negated her Christianity.

There are many other members of the Religious Left, too, and I am thankful to them. Rev. Traci Blackmon has repeatedly warned progressives that they should not be quiet about their faith and has emerged as a major activist and leader who is inspiring others to speak out. There’s Rev. (and Senator) Rapahel Warnock, the progressive Jesuit priest James Martin, the influential pastor John Pavolitz, who has done so much good work, and many more on the national stage.

But I believe we everyday people of faith who are progressive…we’re the ones who need to be speaking up more, the ones who need to refuse to allow our religion to be taken from us by a vocal, vitriolic lot intent on declaring all of us unworthy of God. We can do that as simply as mentioning our faith in conversation or presentation. We don’t have to evangelize, but we need to make ourselves known. We cannot be invisible lest people believe that we don’t exist. Personally, I believe it is especially important for us to be leaders in the Resistance.

The greatest contemporary example of this, of course, is Mariann Budd, the Episcopal bishop of Washington who made international headlines when she dared to beg Trump to show mercy to people during the National Prayer Service the day after the inauguration while Trump glared and Vance pouted petulantly. The Right had a meltdown, saying she had politicized the pulpit (despite the fact that their preachers do that constantly and despite the fact that I find it hard to see how asking to show mercy to people is politicizing anything). In turn, she became an inspiration to many, not only because she dared to speak about compassion to a president who delights in rejecting it, but because she did it with grace and intelligence. She reminded many that the very act of standing up for kindness is now considered an act of defiance under this regime and its apostles.

And now, an admission that brings me, quite circuitously, back to where I began: when I saw that lovely prayer bench with the beagle, fox, cardinal, and other creatures great and small, I wanted to tell people about it. I wanted to take a picture of it and share it on Instagram. Then I thought, “But people will think I’m just virtue-signaling by showing that I’m in church.” And then I thought, “And some others might think I’m conservative just because I’m a Christian.” And I thought “I don’t want to have to go into the tangled complications of explaining what all I believe in.”

I put all of this aside that Sunday morning in our Episcopal church to hear the singing, and the sermon, and even to kneel on that little bench to join in the prayers of the people, to say the Lord’s Prayer aloud, to be still and thoughtful after I had received the Eucharist. I relished the discomfort offered by the bench. While beautifully decorated and well-padded, the kneeler is not meant to offer the greatest comfort. I relish the bit of pain in my legs when I kneel there to study on what I believe, what I hope for, and what gives me the greatest sorrows and worries. The pain centers me and reminds me of what I believe in.

Obviously I ultimately decided to share the picture and some of my own story. But for the most part I can do that while also retaining that most sacred private thing for myself. I can let people know I am a person of faith, a Christian, and release myself from worrying what they might think that means, because I want them to not make judgements based on bits of information. I try to always remind myself that people, for the most part, are good. I believe that, even in dark days like these when I see so much meanness being broadcast by those in the highest seats of power. I believe that perhaps even more in dark days. “In a dark time, the eye begins to see,” Theodore Roethe wrote, and that line has been a mantra for me ever since 2016. I believe that most people are good because that is what my faith teaches me.

When I’m reading fiction, I tend to prefer novels over short stories, but this collection of linked stories blew me away. The History of Sound is arranged in an unusual way: each of the twelve stories has a companion piece, but they are related in interesting and unusual ways, sometimes separated by centuries or forms. The writing is gorgeous, managing to luxuriate in language without ever being pretentious, and each story captured me completely with their deep emotion and incredible craft, whether due to sense of place, characterization, pacing, dialogue, or any other of the foundational elements that Shattuck uses so perfectly here. I was surprised that this book didn’t show up on more awards lists and best-of-the-year lists. A film of the title story—about an early 1900s Kentucky singer who falls in love with a songcatcher he travels with—is coming soon, starring Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor.

I have read everything ever written by Carys Davies and I have loved them all, with West being my favorite…until I read Clear. It’s hard to talk about the main reason why I love this novel without giving away an important, and surprising, twist, so I’ll only say that this novel transported me to a time and place I didn’t know much about in rich language and with memorable characters. Davies is one of our best writers. Clear is very short but it’s an epic nonetheless.

James is not so much a retelling of Huckleberry Finn as it is a reimagining of the whole world of that story through the point of view of the man we have always known as Jim in the original book. It is creative, complex, funny, sad, and every sentence is beautifully crafted. A real joy to read.

I’m a Colm Tóibín devotee and his Brooklyn is a favorite novel of mine, so I was a little nervous about him writing a sequel to it. But Long Island did not disappoint. Instead, it expands and complexities the beautiful story of Eilis Lacey in all the right ways. In Long Island she returns to ireland and questions every decision she has made since moving to America. It’s an intimate, calming character study wherein it seems not much happens but you will be enthralled anyway, by the characters, by the setting, and by the masterful voice.

Sipsworth is such a sweet book that some people might mistake it for being light. It is anything but. It’s a deep meditation on grief, loneliness, aging, and, overall, being kind to one another. The story of an elderly woman who doesn’t realize how alone she is until she befriends a mouse, it’s also about the importance of community. All of the characters are interesting and endearing. I’ll never forget it.

Films

All the film titles link to their trailers.

Conclave. The inner workings of the Vatican when choosing a new pope, but played as espionage, with incredible performances by the whole cast (but especially Lithgow, Fiennes, and Rossellini), a perfect score, beautiful cinematagraphy, and richly imagined set and production design (for example, their living quarters look more like sleek office spaces, leaning on the blurred lines between money and religion), incredible pacing, and some of the most memorable imagery of the year. This is probably my favorite cinematic experience of 2024.

A Real Pain was the biggest surprise of the year for me. I went in not knowing much about it and came out having felt many emotions. I literally laughed and cried and everything in between. The film manages to be funny while also being about a Holocaust tour—no small feat. But really it’s about residual pain and the way it has an impact over generations, and how we all react to it in different ways. It’s profound and relevant, very funny, and deeply moving. I love a talkative film made for grownups with no bells and whistles, just solid storytelling, and this movie certainly fits that bill. I don’t think either of the leads—Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg—have much acting range but they’re perfectly cast here. My one criticism is that Jennifer Grey isn’t given enough to do.

Small Things Like These is based on one of my favorite books of the last few years (the author is Claire Keegan) and the film is a faithful adaptation, so faithful that some audience members may not be able to follow all of it if they haven’t read the book, which is a problem for the film, as it should be an entity that can stand fully on its own. Besides that, I loved everything about it. The colors, the quality of light, the weather, the quiet, the metaphorical imagery (the crows as the nuns! the geese as the girls!). There is a lot of quiet, which may also bother some viewers, but that’s a big part of the book, too. You will spend a lot of time watching Cillian Murphy drive a truck and walk. But his face, even his body language, is always telling you much more. A brief scene with Emily Watson wherein a transaction with a nun plays more like a mob deal is so well done that her ten minutes onscreen holds more power than most actors can wield in an entire film. By the time you reach the deeply moving ending you’ll be entrenched in this world, and be thinking about how you will react when you witness atrocity and injustice.

His Three Daughters. I’ve not seen much talk about this movie at all but I was mesmerized by everything about it: its play-like structure; the completely individual and incredibly watchable performances by all three leads: Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen, and Natasha Lyonne (if she doesn’t get an Oscar nomination for this it’ll be a travesty); and the crisp writing that keeps revealing more layers right up to the last scene. You can find it on Netflix.

I went into The Last Showgirl solely for the performances of Pamela Anderson and Jamie Lee Curtis but came out loving not only those, but so much more. Filmed in gauzy bright hues that capture the gaudy depression, abandon, and beauty of Las Vegas, this is a great sense of place film. I enjoyed most of the writing and the music, but also vulnerable performances by Dave Bautista, Kiernan Shipka, and Billie Lord. The main thing I came away feeling was how humane the whole film is, whether I’m seeing Curtis’s character dancing in defiance of beauty standards and ageism or witnessing Anderson’s character insistence on holding onto her dream. This movie is about being an artist at heart, about not getting the break, being a parent, aging, and being a dreamer. It devastated me in ways I did not expect and I found it to be very effective filmmaking on many fronts. I always have a preference for films that accurately portray working class life and I think this one did a particularly good job of it.

Other films I loved this year include: Civil War (it looks like it’d be standard dystopian fare but it’s actually a nuanced look at ethics and journalism); Wicked (hugely entertaining spectacle), A Complete Unknown (director Mangold has a deep understanding of music and artistry, even if I do have some caveats about it, which you can read about in this essay); Babygirl (smart and sexy, but the more I think about it the more questions I have about intentions); Heretic (I’ve never seen a horror film with so much dialogue, and it’s very well-written), Furiosa (not as good as Fury Road, but still thrilling; I’ve never seen a George Miller film I didn’t love [Babe is my favorite by him]); Caddo Lake, (hard to talk about without giving away the twist), and Longlegs (completely creates its world with vibrancy, it’s haunting if imperfect).

TV Shows

My favorite show of the year, hands down, is Ripley, the latest interpretation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel. The Talented Mr. Ripley. The 1999 film is a favorite of mine but this eight part series is just as good, albeit a very different entity. The tension is palpable, the performances are superb, but the best thing is that every single frame is a perfectly composed piece of art. It is among the most beautiful-to-look-at series ever made. And the writing is excellent. Not to be missed.

The fifth season of “Fargo” (FX/Hulu) (each season stands on its own so you can start with any season) is probably the best entry in the entire anthology series (I also love season two; each season stands on its own so you can start with whichever one you want). Juno Temple, Jon Hamm, Lamorne Morris, and Jennifer Jason Leigh are all fabulous and the story is endlessly surprising and original.

The first season of “Bad Sisters” (Apple) was so good that I didn’t want there to be a second one, but I ended up loving it almost as much. The show is funny, charming, and compelling, and this season explores grief in a deeply authentic way. Even when it veers off into the absurd, as it does in the last episode a bit, I was still with it every step of the way, and that entire cast is fabulous.

“Somebody Somewhere” (MAX) is one of the best shows about rural, working class life ever made. No other show I know of shows LGBTQ people in a rural setting, and certainly not with this much complexity. I thought the second season of this show really dragged but it returns the glory of its first season in its third, and final outing.

“Say Nothing” (FX/Hulu) is a gritty look at the Troubles mainly from the point of view of IRA member Dolours Price. The two actresses who portray her are phenomenal and should be getting all the awards, and the production overall is pretty flawless. Incredibly underrated.

“Black Doves” (Netflix) is kind of standard spy fare (and sometimes too violent) but it is elevated by complex characterizations and the actors who portray them, including Ben Whishaw, Sarah Lancashire (I’d watch her in anything) and Kiera Knightley.

While I’ve featured on fictional shows here as my five favorites, I also really loved the docu-series “Kings of Tupelo” (Netflix) about an Elvis impersonator slash conspiracy theorist who gets in way over his head. I don’t know why it hasn’t gotten more buzz; it’s funny and sad and bingeworthy and one of the best sense of place shows I’ve seen in a long time.

To begin, a disclaimer: I love Bob Dylan and I love the new film, A Complete Unknown. What follows is not meant to negate either, but it is meant to critique the way Appalachia, Appalachian people, and women so often get cut out of the narrative.

A Complete Unknown, directed by James Mangold (Walk the Line, Girl Interrupted) and starring Timothėe Chalamet (Bob Dylan), Edward Norton (Pete Seeger), Elle Fanning (Sylvie Russo, a fake name, but based on Dylan’s girlfriend at the time, Suze Retolo), and Monica Barbaro (Joan Baez), covers the period from when Dylan first arrives in NYC and makes his debut album to when he controversially goes electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. One of the best things about the film is that it doesn’t try to be one of those biopics that tells a whole life story. Instead, it is more like a memoir, delving into one pivotal and defining time in an artist’s life. It’s concisely told and thematically sound in a way that not only tells us something about this period in the artist’s life but also manages to use this one period to deliver the larger message about the artist’s whole life: he was true to his art, no matter what.

So, I do not expect the film to cover every aspect of Dylan’s life in any way. Anyone who knows much about Dylan and music at the time will understand that there are composites (the blues musician Jesse Moffat is not real and is likely an amalgamation of all the Black artists who had a profound impact on Dylan’s life), and that sometimes time is compressed, that there are speculations (the conversations between all the characters, for example) and complete fabrications to serve the story (Cash was not at the ‘65 festival and therefore could not have given Dylan the pivotal pep talk; Guthrie never gave Dylan a harmonica; Dylan never appeared on Seeger’s TV show, etc.).

But there is an omission that is troubling to me for two main reasons. First of all, because its inclusion could have made the film better and more layered. And secondly, because it’s another instance of an Appalachian—and a woman—being completely cut out of the narrative despite having a major impact on the story and the themes. Jean Ritchie is never mentioned and does not appear at any point in the film.

Jean Ritchie is from Eastern Kentucky. Her family, who sang and preserved songs, are one of the main reasons that dozens, if not hundreds, of songs have survived. She popularized the dulcimer, which later went on to become parts of the acts of Joni Mitchell, Cyndi Lauper, Sarah McLachlan, and others. When she left home to go work at the Henry Street Settlement School in New York City, Ritchie took her music and culture with her. When others heard her singing at work they encouraged her to start playing in some of the coffee shops and bars in Greenwich Village. She did and she is widely credited as being one of the first to do so. She was so instrumental in the Folk Movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s that she is known as “the Mother of Folk”. She was one of the architects of the Newport Folk Festival, being one of the seven original directors of the gathering, beginning in 1959.

But she started popularizing folk music in New York City as early as 1948 (when Bob Dylan was seven years old) along with Guthrie, Max Brand, Seeger, and Alan Lomax (also featured prominently in the film). By 1949 she was a regular on WNYC, where she shared the Appalachian songs preserved and arranged by her family in Viper, Kentucky. By 1951, a full decade before Dylan ever pursued singing, she was signed to Elektra Records and began releasing albums that served as the foundation for the folk music revival that would explode and reach full commercialization within the next two decades. Artists such as Dylan, Baez, Dolly Parton, Judy Collins, Emmylou Harris, Kathy Mattea, Joni Mitchell, and others have all cited her as a major influence. Baez once said this of her: “As the ‘Mother of Folk,’ Jean is a living museum of impeccably rendered songs passed down from singer to singer, influencing and inspiring generations.” By the 1950s Ritchie was probably the most visible Appalachian in the world, regularly appearing on radio and television to talk about the importance of her culture. In 1955, NBC News even went to her family’s home in Kentucky to examine Christmas traditions of the Appalachian people.

Because of her high, sweet voice many sometimes thought that Ritchie was a timid, fainting presence. She was anything but. She was fierce, keenly intelligent, formidable, and she never minded letting people know what she thought. And when she heard “Masters of War”, one of Dylan’s most popular and endearing songs on the 1963 album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, the recording that first made him a national sensation, she let him know how upset she was that he had used her family’s melody for the arrangement of the song “Nottamun Town” without giving her or them songwriting credit. “Nottamum” is a phonetic distortion of the place name Nottingham and the song most likely originated as part of a mummer’s play She first recorded “Nottamun Town” almost a decade before Dylan released “Masters of War”. The song itself was first documented by the most famous songcatcher ever, Cecil Sharp, during one of his trips to visit the Ritchie Family in Eastern Kentucky in 1917. While the words had existed in many forms before that, the melody of the song was created by the Ritchie Family and further fine-tuned by Jean Ritchie herself. Yet Dylan gave her zero credit for the creation of the song even after he knew she was responsible for it. He is one of our greatest songwriters and artists and I love his music (Desire is among my top five favorite albums). But that doesn’t mean I cannot or should not criticize artists I love, and I wish he had done a better job of rectifying this oversight and of respecting her.

Dylan had heard the singer Jackie Washington perform “Nottamun Town” at Gerde’s Folk City (a venue featured prominently in the film). Washington had learned it directly from Ritchie. [This is detailed in the book Baby, Let Me Follow You Down by Eric von Schmidt and Jim Rooney]. Dylan’s lyrics are completely different, yet in a recording by Lomax in 1963, Dylan never acknowledges that the music was written by Ritchie, instead claiming he wrote it in Putney, England. He likely is referring to the lyrics (which he did write) but when a songwriter says he “wrote” a song this should also mean that he wrote both the lyrics and the music.

Now this is where things get a bit complicated for some (but not really), because this is folk music, and the act of borrowing melodies is a long-established tradition in folk music. However, that tradition is usually only seen as acceptable when a songwriter’s identity is lost to time. In this case, Ritchie had recorded her own family’s arrangement with her own touches in 1951. In response, Dylan said that he did not realize that Ritchie was the author and assumed it was penned by a songwriter lost to time. Ritchie only wanted her and her family’s contributions to be known, especially once the song became widely known. Despite owing her a great deal of credit not only for this song but for the folk revival, period, Dylan turned the whole thing over to his lawyers, who eventually settled with Ritchie in exchange for $5,000 against all future royalties, according to Howard Sounes, who did extensive research as the author of Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan (Ritchie also told me this version herself). This is a song that is now considered a classic and appeared on a multi-platinum album. Yet Ritchie is still not listed as a songwriter on any of the album’s materials. To their credit, many music scholars do now often acknowledge her when they write about the song. Dylan, to my knowledge, has never written about this, but does mention Ritchie in volume one of his memoirs, Chronicles, although he is keen to point out that hers was not a commercial enough sound: “The women singers in folk music were performers like Peggy Seeger, Jean Ritchie and Barbara Dane, and they didn’t translate well to a modern crowd.”

Now I am not saying that this should have been covered in A Complete Unknown. It would have been an entire subplot that would have gotten too in the weeds. However, since the film is so much about an artist choosing his art over what is commercial it is interesting that the woman who truly refused to be commodified to fit a particular commercial mode as an Appalachian singer is left out of the narrative. Instead, Dylan is deemed the great hero of artistry who will not bend to the will of producers. I acknowledge that Dylan is an original and a rebel. But I also put forth that Ritchie was the bigger rebel in her refusal to meet the whims of what a modern audience wants. She did her own thing and didn’t make a lot of money because of that and is being cut out of the narrative. Dylan did his own thing and made a lot of money for it and is the subject of a major film.

I share all of this history and opinion that is bound to anger some to make my case that Ritchie should have at least been a named character in the film, not so much because of her writing not being acknowledged as the melody for “Masters of Wars” but because she represents the huge influence Appalachia played on the folk music revival that led to the huge commercial success of artists such as Dylan (who has sold in excess of 150 million albums), and many others. She should have been a character who was used to represent that this music would not exist without Appalachian musicians, people, and culture. Although I don’t believe the movie does enough to acknowledge the influence of Black musicians and culture on Dylan’s music it does at least attempt to do that by the creation of the fictional blues musician and the presence of Odetta onstage when Dylan goes electric. But they do not even attempt to give Appalachia a real piece of the pie for the music that it helped create.

Mangold, the director and co-writer of the film, knows better. After all, his direction of Reese Witherspoon playing June Carter Cash, who took her Appalachian heritage very seriously, in Walk the Line won her an Oscar. That film also failed to recognize the role of Appalachia in the creation of country music but the research for it would have had to have made this influence hugely clear. And Hollywood knows better. But Appalachia almost always gets the short shrift in film (there are exceptions: Coal Miner’s Daughter and Matewan being the two best).

And we all know that women too often get cut out of the picture in Hollywood. Including Jean Ritchie’s formidable presence in the film could have very much helped A Complete Unknown be more complex. The movie fails the Bechdel Test (as first pointed out by my friend Jess Miles, producer of the forthcoming podcast “Mountain Laurels”, which will focus on Appalachian women), which is basically the measure of female representation in a film. To pass this test a film must have three components: it must (1) have at least two named women (2) who talk to each (3) about something other than a man. Just one scene of Ritchie and Baez discussing the way Appalachian people and culture shaped folk music as it became known in the 1960s could have given so much more complexity to an otherwise beautiful film that I enjoyed very much. Just one scene of Ritchie and Dylan talking about this influence and how important it was to shaping his sound could have provided another layer to an already layered piece of art. And by doing so it could have also paid tribute to one of the people—Jean Ritchie—without whom the career of Bob Dylan would have been vastly different.

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Note: I have only listed the accomplishments of Ritchie that have to do with this film and its time period, but I hope people will learn more about her. This piece on the Library of Congress website offers wonderful insights into her life and includes recordings of live performances. I wrote this remembrance of her the day after she died. She was also one of the great environmental writers and activists of her time. She wrote masterpieces like “Black Waters” and “Now is The Cool of the Day”. Her album None But One was chosen as the top critics’ pick by Rolling Stone in 1977. She even helped to popularize “Amazing Grace”, especially with her iconic performance of it at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival. She remained active in the environmental justice and civil rights movement into her eighties. I was privileged to be in protest with her against mountaintop removal when we sang and spoke together in New York City in 2006. She is one of the architects of American music and should be remembered as such. She was my friend, and I loved her.

Note 2: Despite my criticism, I loved A Complete Unknown because it is a deeply moving look at the power of music and staying true to yourself as an artist. It’s one of my favorite films of the year, which I’ll be listing here soon. I think the film belongs to Edward Norton, whose performance as Pete Seeger is incredibly nuanced and powerful, but I was also impressed by Monica Barbaro as Baez. The color palette, the sound design, the cinematography, the set design, all are top-notch, making it one of my favorite films of the year. I am not a fan of Chalamet, although I know many are, so I will leave it at that.

I read Bastard Out of Carolina when I was twenty-one years old, the year it came out. It was a thunderstorm in my hands, a novel with so much power it threatened to rise up and take flight. I had never encountered characters like these in literature before even though I had always known them in real life. Dorothy wrote about the people that most Americans never want to have supper with. Rough, tough, hard-working, hard-fighting people caught up in cycles of poverty, sexual abuse, physical abuse, domestic abuse. They are misunderstood, hard-headed, discarded by their own country. She wrote about waitresses and mechanics, men who stood around in the dirt yard kicking the tires, women who worked all day then came home and cooked supper and cleaned house. They smoked and drank and fought and loved. They were like the people I grew up with. My family, my community. But I had never seen them presented so complexly on the page before because lower working class and poor people are usually caricatures in all of our media: film, especially, but literature, too.

The literary world can be monied and snobby. Its elite judge you based on where you went to school (which is most often determined by how much money you were raised with), where and who you are from, and who you know. Many of the writers whose names you know can afford publicists and a whole machine that gets their work read. Most of them (not all) come from money.

Dorothy Allison was one of the first writers I knew of to defy that. She wrote about the way rural, working class people and artists are underestimated and belittled and held back. Most frightening to pearl-clutchers in the worlds of academia and literature, she talked about it in all of its rawness and complexity. The literary world had to accept her because her books sold, because so many readers loved her. But she refused to play the game. She called them out for their snootiness and most of all she remained completely herself. She was brusque, and vulgar, and worst of all to them was that she was always country. They like when that sells books but a whole lot of folks in that world don’t like to be with people like that. Those with money have their own clubs and they don’t like interlopers.

The literary world doesn’t easily welcome in people like Dorothy Allison. So she just broke down the damn door.

You may sense here a bit of anger and resentment from me. And you are right. Because I have always felt out of place in the literary and academic world. I’ve always found them to be snobby places that often make me feel inferior. I can take that; I’m used to it. But what has always miffed me is seeing other writers treated that way. I have overheard people in the publishing world negate and dismiss Dorothy because of their lack of understanding of the way poverty shapes one’s worldview. Because so many of them cannot understand what it is like to not have parents they can count on to give them money if they are ever broke. So many of them cannot understand what it’s like to build a life out of nothing, with no generational wealth, with no home to run to if you find yourself in trouble. Many of them don’t understand what it’s like to have to do the gig because you need to pay the bills, not so you can buy a second (or third) home.

I’ve always been protective of Dorothy. Not because she needed anyone to protect her. She could absolutely take care of herself. But I loved her, and we always want to protect those we love, even if they don’t need it. One time I listened as she read an essay about being abused as a child and I was inconsolable afterwards. I looked at her beautiful, strong hands, but my eye was drawn to her small wrists. I could see her as a child as she stood on that stage, and thinking of her abused was devastating to think on. Afterwards, she hugged me and told me to not cry but I could only think of someone hurting her, and that killed me. I was angry at that man who had done her so much harm. I wanted to go back in time and help her. I’m not sure why it had such an impact on me that night. Perhaps I was just emotionally fragile. But it’s a testament to her words and how effective they were. Because in some way her writing always moved me that deeply.

She was so tough and fierce, yet so vulnerable and tender. I loved all four of those qualities about her but it is her tenderness I hold onto the most.

I witnessed a lot of that in the last year and half after Dorothy’s beloved partner passed away. She was in deep grief at her loss and we often texted about it. Right after Alix passed away I sent a spread of food to her via a food service there where she lived in California. A cake, a chicken pot pie, some vegetables and coffee. All of it came separately, strangely enough, and the person who delivered the chicken pot pie didn’t ring the bell. They left it on her doorstep and sent me a picture of it there. I didn’t see their text right away but when I did, I called and told her to go get it. By the time she got to the door it was gone. Someone had taken it. I wanted her to have a full meal. Since I didn’t live close I wanted to send my love via food, the best way Southerners know how to do that. So I was angry that it had been stolen and voiced that to her but she told me to let it go. “Honey, they probably needed it worse than I do, so it’s where it needs to be.”

She often told me of what she had dreamed at night. Mostly about Alix, but also about the far past. Running the fields of her childhood. Wading in a clean creek. She always had a story for me. She called me “darlin” and “my Double Creek boy” because she liked a poem I had written called “Double Creek Girl”, about a girl who is underestimated because of where and who she is from. A girl a lot like her.

As I write this I start to share so many stories of time with her but then I realize I shouldn’t, that I don’t want to. They were private but also I am being selfish in my grief. I want to keep them for myself. But one more, to give you another look at her.

For years I had worked closely with a well-known literary center that hosts a variety of activities for writers and one year I talked Dorothy into coming to be one of our faculty members, mostly so I’d have a way to spend time with her that would also involve her getting paid. She flew out from California and stayed a couple nights with us, then I drove her to the workshop where we’d spend one night and she’d do her job there. About ten minutes before her session I saw she wasn’t there and feared she had lain down for a nap and failed to wake up. She had been tired the entire trip, worn out from doing several gigs in a row and working round the clock since she was one of the fiction judges for the National Book Award that year. She had brought along an entire suitcase of books she had to read for the judging. I sprinted down the stairs to her room and she opened the door with her bedsheets wrapped around her.

“I’m running late because there were no towels, which I didn’t figure out until I was already in the shower, and there was also no soap or shampoo.” She was laughing, enjoying the story, telling it in a self-deprecating way, as if she were the one at fault. “I rinsed out my hair anyway but then I saw there’s no hair dryer. But I’ll be on time.”

She wasn’t put out at all by this but I was mortified. I had talked this place up and was responsible for her being there and her room had not been readied for her properly. I told her I’d run find some towels and to take her time but she put her hand on my wrist. “These bed sheets dried me off just fine, darlin, so don’t worry about it.” I didn’t mention that her hair was still damp because I knew she would say that was no problem, either. She arrived onstage right on time and gave a talk that is still legendary for people who were in attendance. Basically it was a sermon about the power of the written word, especially in representing those who are often dismissed and negated. At the end of nearly every paragraph she’d shout “Glory!” like the Southern preachers so many of us had grown up hearing. But her exclamation was about art and celebration, not judgment or wrath. All these years later, writers who were there still quote lines from it.

We went home the next day and she stayed the night. We had a great time, eating, laughing, telling stories. She had an early flight the next day, and we had to get up at five in the morning so I could take her to the airport. Later that day I was cleaning the guest bath and realized that I had failed to put out any body wash or shampoo for her there, too. But she hadn’t said a word and when I called her that night and told her how embarrassed I was about we spent a few minutes with nothing on the phone line between us except laughter.

These are little moments I’ll remember. There are many others. We were mostly together at literary gatherings. New Orleans. Chattanooga. Atlanta. Louisville. New York City. And what bound us the most at those was being outsiders together.  Being raised in trailers and little bitty houses. Loving pinto beans and salt pork and cornbread. Making it even if we were considered uncouth.

The first time I met her I had been invited to the Fellowship of Southern Writers gathering in Chattanooga to accept an award and she immediately took me under her wing. This was less than ten years after Bastard had blown my mind wide open. She had read my first novel and told me she loved it. I was shaking all over, nervous that one of my heroes was speaking to me, unbelieving that she had actually read my book. Years later I told her that there was no wonder she liked Clay’s Quilt since it was so influenced by Bastard Out of Carolina. Even the beginning of my first novel borrows from hers, with the main characters all crammed into a car in a dangerous situation.

I am rambling in my grief, I know. I am angry in my grief, too. That’s clear here. I have a chip on my shoulder about the way the world, especially the writing world, looks at people who weren’t raised with money. So did Dorothy. She’d be the first to tell you that. The chip wasn’t put there by us, but by the world.

The main thing I want to ask of you is to read Dorothy Allison’s work. Keep her alive by keeping her words alive. Read her novels, Bastard Out of Carolina and Cavedweller, her best known works. But also, the absolutely perfect short book Two of Three Things I Know for Sure where she writes one of the lines that has become a mantra for me: “Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I'd rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me.” Read her short stories collected in Trash, where she takes the power away from that terrible word being applied to human beings by showing the complexity of those who are so readily called that. Read this incredible speech she gave when accepting the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement. Read “This Is Our World”, a foundational essay for me where she writes “I think that using art to provoke uncertainty is what great writing and inspired images do most brilliantly. Art should provoke more questions than answers and, most of all, should make us think about what we rarely want to think about at all.”  Watch her on Charlie Rose in 1992. Read her poems, where she luxuriates in the joys of the body and tells the hard truths. She was also interested in that, above all else. “I want hard stories,” she once wrote, in an essay I use in every writing workshop I teach. “I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling.”

I love her and I miss her.

This is the second entry in a series where I talk about some of my favorite films and give you my perspectives on why I love them so much and why they have been influential on my writing. My hope is to not only offer you my thoughts on them but to also give you direction/links to other analyses or discussions of the films.

So let’s discuss my favorite horror film, The Exorcist.

Sometimes people are surprised that The Exorcist is one of my favorite films. They say to me that it’s just not that scary or that it’s just a standard horror movie that is now best watched for the camp factor, that it’s dated. They are wrong on all counts. It’s true that audiences are much harder to scare now. When the film came out in 1973 it was perhaps the most shocking film to ever be shown at mainstream cinemas. People reportedly fainted and vomited at screenings (although some reports claim that the studio hired these people to do this for publicity; as I understand it there is no documented proof of that; you can watch a short documentary on the phenomenon). I was only a year old when the movie came out but all through my childhood I remember people talking about how shocking it was to hear and see a child actor saying and doing some of the things that Linda Blair, as Reagan, does in the film.

Last Halloween I was fortunate to see The Exorcist on the big screen for the first time and I was really disappointed to hear people laughing while watching it. I felt as if they were laughing out loud to signal that they thought a particular image or sequence was hokey or campy. Honestly, must of the laughter felt performative to me. But maybe that’s just because I love the film so much and I didn’t like hearing it laughed at, which means that it wasn’t being taken seriously. I think that anyone who sees it as just not scary or as dated is missing the whole point.

Now this part gets a little graphic, but we’re talking about a really graphic film, so bear with me. To me it is still quite shocking to see a little girl doing what she does with that crucifix or shoving her mother’s face in her crotch, killing at least two people by forcing them to fly out a window and down a flight of stairs, peeing in the floor, vomiting on a priest…I could go on. The film is full of scenes that are still truly disturbing and I feel badly for anyone who is so desensitized that these scenes don’t faze them.

While those scenes are disturbing they are not what has scared me so much while viewing and thinking about the film. I am always scared by movies and books that deal with the devil, and particularly with devil possession. As a child my family attended a very conservative evangelical sect. In this church devil possession was taken very seriously and on at least one occasion I was present when someone was brought in who was reported to be possessed by demons. I recall one instance when a woman was carried in and laid down on the altar, writhing and screaming in pain, her body and face contorting. The memory is fractured for me—I see it more as a series of photographs being thrown down on a table—possibly because I’ve blocked some of it out since I found it be traumatic. I recall a preacher standing over her, “casting out demons”. I remember the congregants of the church gathering around her and praying fervently. I remember being incredibly scared, not only of the woman, but mostly that the devil might be cast out of her and find its way into me. That’s what happens in The Exorcist, after all, and I had been taken to see the movie by my aunt, Sis, who is mostly responsible for my love of cinema. However, she took me to a re-release of the film when I was only eight or nine years old. She didn’t have the best judgement, but she loved movies. You can read more about her in this evergreen piece I did for Salon, “The Devil and Aunt Sis”, which was published a few years ago but is still widely read every Halloween season. The result of being a little Holiness boy combined with seeing The Exorcist is that I was convinced I would become possessed by the devil. It haunted me for years. Recently I read the novel (every October I read a horror novel), to which the film is very faithful, and I still couldn’t sleep with it in the same room; I kept it in a cabinet in the kitchen.

So, what is scary is that The Exorcist paints a very convincing picture of the possibility of evil taking human form.

But what I love most about The Exorcist, and what those laughing viewers might be missing, is that it is much more than a horror film. Instead it is a profound look at faith, doubt, and the mystery of belief. That is something I have been examining and questioning all of my life. I left that Holiness sect as a teenager, losing much of my community, culture, and family in the process, but I have never left my faith behind, even when I have doubted it. The Exorcist examines the frightening aspect of losing one’s faith, as Father Damien Karras has. One thing the novel and film does so well is look at the way guilt and regret are involved in questioning one’s faith. Encountering evil helps him with his crisis of faith because to be shown true evil is to more seriously consider that if the devil exists then so must some great force of good, which we usually call God. Much has been written about this aspect of the film, so you can look for those analyses on your own. This very short documentary offers many insights from the author of the novel, William Peter Blatty, and the director of the film, William Friedkin, on the subject:

So, first of all I love this film because of the profound way it looks at a subject that has been a major part of my life, and my work. In many of my novels, poems, plays, and short stories I am examining my own faith, the existence of evil, and how we react to doubt and meanness. I believe that one reason this issue wends through all of my writing is because of this foundational film, which made me think seriously about these thoughts as a child. I am unsure if I would have been able to come to the hard decision to leave that little country church as a teenager if The Exorcist had not made me think so seriously about doubt, faith, and what lies between.

Secondly, I just think it’s a perfectly executed film, and apparently the Academy agreed because it received ten Oscar nominations, winning Best Sound and Best Screenplay. It is one of the Academy’s great injustices that Ellen Burstyn, in her turn as Reagan’s tortured, once-Atheist, mother did not win. The special effects were mind-blowing for the time period (the head turning completely around was much-discussed at the time), the cinematography is incredible (perhaps most famously captured in this still from the film that was later used in the widely seen poster depicting the priest arriving in the fog):

The tension builds slowly but perfectly. It is a slow boil that never lets you out of its grip, even when the film is operating more as a drama about a mother who is mostly worried about her daughter because her ex-husband has mostly abandoned his child for a new life. At its heart the movie is about a mother trying desperately to save her beloved daughter. There is also the skillful use of subliminal imagery and superimposing throughout the film (the most famous example showing below) that gets beneath our skin, startling us without us totally realizing what has unsettled us so much. This was especially effective in theaters as the viewer couldn’t slow down the film or go back and rewind, sometimes leaving them to question if they had actually seen something or not. It’s the most brilliant usage of that technique ever on film.

You can look at all the subliminal imagery and superimposing used in the film in this short video:

I could go on at length about the many aspects of The Exorcist that make it a great film but what I love most about it, perhaps strangely enough, is the way it uses sense of place. This is a device that is important to me as a novelist, and one that I employ a lot in my work. I want my readers to feel as if they have traveled someplace when they are reading my work. Whether it be somewhere they know well or are new to, it is my responsibility to build that world and present it to the reader on the page. When someone is reading my writing I want the real world to fall away, I want them to feel as if they are stepping into the piece of writing and its world. When I am watching The Exorcist I am able to step into Washington D.C. and specifically the Georgetown neighborhood.

I tell my students all the time, however, that a place cannot be chosen at random. Using a particular place must serve the story, and in The Exorcist the location is perfect because of D.C.’s landscape but also because if the devil lurks anywhere it is in our nation’s capitol, where greed so often leads people who set out to serve their country to sell their souls for money. But what is most brilliant is that Georgetown has perhaps the highest concentration of Catholic nuns and priests in the country, many of them located at Georgetown University, the oldest place of Catholic education in the nation.

D.C. is a place of beautiful houses and neighborhoods. The music that is famously associated with the film, “Tubular Bells,” is played most blatantly in a scene where Ellen Burstyn’s character, Chris, walks home from work and spies on some priests. You can watch it here:

I’m such a film nerd that I did the walk myself and recreated the scene the last time I was in DC. If only I had had a knitted cap, complete with pom pom.

The stairs that are so famously used in The Exorcist, are real, and located in Georgetown. One can still visit them today. Just above them looms the house that was used in the film, too, although a fake room exterior was built that put Reagan’s bedroom closer to the stairs so it’d be easier for her to toss Dennings and Karras out the window [well, Karras sacrifices himself (in true Christ-figure fashion] by jumping out the window, but he is driven there by the demon that he takes from Reagan). And of course I’ve visited the house and the stairs, and had to pose there, too, because I’m just that dorky.

DC serves the story throughout, and there are many other scenes that use the city, the canal, Georgetown University, the churches. It is a film that is rich in detail in every way, but particularly in sense of place, and I appreciate that craft. Noticing things like this has made me a better writer.

The Exorcist has been ripped off so many times since it premiered that it is easy for modern audiences to forget how original it was. Every aspect of the film has now been used in thousands of inferior productions. Even the recent reboot of the film franchise didn’t seem to understand the profundity of the OG. In my opinion the only film in the franchise that is truly good besides the original is The Exorcist III, which delivers real scares and returns to the main themes of evil, doubt, faith, and also takes on the question of madness versus religious ecstasy. It is so good because it was written and directed by Blatty, the screenwriter of the original film and the source novel.

This a quick look at why I love this film so much and I hope that people will continue to watch it for all of its great qualities, and to take it seriously. One of my Halloween traditions is to watch it every year. It has had a huge impact on me as a writer and as someone who is examining faith and doubt in my own work. The most important thing about art is that it be complex, and The Exorcist is much more than a horror film, more than a drama. It delves into our deepest fears, desires, and sorrows.

FYI: The Exorcist is now available to watch for free with a subscription to Max but you can also stream it on any streaming service.

Last week I had the great honor of watching my favorite film, Tender Mercies, with one of its stars, the wonderful Tess Harper, on the big screen, and then having a public conversation with her about it. More about that in a bit, but first I want to tell you that that event got me thinking about how much cinema has contributed to my life as a writer, so I want to start a series where I talk about some of my favorite films and give you my perspectives on why I love them so much. My hope is to not only offer you my thoughts on them but to also give you direction/links to other analyses or discussions of the films.

First up: Tender Mercies.

When Tender Mercies came out in 1983 the studio didn’t know what to do with it and only played it in a handful of cinemas. Star and co-producer Robert Duvall claims the studio’s lack of interest was because of their inability to understand Southern culture and country music. But it received plenty of awards attention, including garnering five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. Although a box office bomb, it became widely watched on HBO the year after it was made and eventually found a whole new audience once video rentals began. Before long it became a word-of-mouth sensation and is now considered a classic. You can find more details and analysis of the film here.

I was eleven when the movie came out and although I can’t remember for sure I probably found it through my aunt, Sis, who was my main source of movies and who loved country music so much that she would have probably rented it based on its thumbnail description: A broken-down country singer tries to put his troubled life back together. There was a little gas station, McClure’s, just up the road from her house, that kept a rotating dozen or so VHS tapes they rented out. We would have gotten it there. McClure’s also had the best cheeseburgers, with an entire slice of sweet onion, the freshest buns, and juicy tomatoes that always seemed to be so fresh they must have been plucked from the garden out back. But I digress.

I don’t recall the first time I saw it but I know that I’ve seen it many times and that by my mid-twenties I considered it my favorite film.

I love Tender Mercies for the way it uses quiet, for its wide shots of the lonesome Texas landscape, for its use of color (vibrant reds appear throughout, often juxtaposed with the brown fields and the drab colors worn by Harper’s character), for its subtle, understated performances, for its perfect screenplay, containing dialogue that is simultaneously rich, poetic, and sparse, even often monosyllabic. I love the way it shows people of faith in a nonjudgemental light. I especially love the way it portrays rural characters as complex human beings, something that is very rare in movies. Of course I love its sense of place as well. The place serves the story throughout.

Let me pause here to pay proper homage to its screenwriter, Horton Foote, who is best known as a playwright but who also wrote three of the most perfect screenplays ever: Tender Mercies, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Trip to Bountiful (a film I’ll surely discuss here eventually). Early on in my writing career I was in the same room with him, at a reception for the Fellowship of Southern Writers, where I was being given an award. I was actually only about six feet away from him at one point and I was so overwhelmed by my admiration for him that I was unable to approach him and thank him for his writing. This was about six or seven years before he passed away. I’ve regretted not speaking to him ever since. (Note: if you ever have the chance to thank an artist for how they’ve enriched your life, do it) He remains a literary hero to me. You can see a brief interview with him talking about the origins of Tender Mercies here.

I believe watching Tender Mercies is one of the best writing lessons any writer can have because it teaches us how much we can do with what is unsaid. It reminds me to use colors in my writing and to have colors—and a color scheme—in mind even if that doesn’t show up on the page. It reminds me to always have the landscape of the place in my mind when writing, to embrace effective, understated dialogue over explosive talking. It shows writers how everything must serve the story at hand. One thing the film is known for is that scenes don’t really resolve. It’s unusual and disorienting but also haunting and effective. In this incredibly powerful two minute scene, Duvall’s character, Mack Sledge, pours his heart out to his wife after the death of his daughter and at the end of the scene she…walks away. Watch, and then we’ll discuss further.

What I love about her reaction is not that she is being dismissive or unkind. The character, Rosa Lee, is simply doing what she does so beautifully throughout: she is letting him be. She is giving him his space to grieve and not making it about her. Some audience members find it to be a strange response to his monologue but to me it epitomizes what is so wonderful about her character. Watch here for an excellent breakdown of this scene.

During our conversation after the screening at the Kentucky Theatre, I asked Harper about creating Rosa Lee. She told me that the main thing she did was write this on her script: “But Mary kept all these things in her heart”, from Luke 2:19. She said that she is not one who usually quotes scripture but it seemed to be a good guide for how to deliver this character. After she told me this I can see that throughout the film her character is often watching from afar, tucking away little wonderful moments. As in what is perhaps the most famous scene from the film, when Mack is talking with his stepson Sonny and showing him chords on the guitar (“D as in dawg”):

All the while, Rosa Lee is working in the background, as she often does throughout the film (she is almost always working: ironing, folding clothes, pumping gas), but she’s also taking everything in as she works. In this scene she’s appreciating how her son has come to admire his stepfather. The very last scene focuses on Sonny and Mack throwing a football to each other on the barren Texas plains but then our attention shifts to Rosa Lee, watching from behind a screen door. The look on her face assures us: everything is going to be alright. That look is all we need as an audience that has invested our time in characters we come to care for deeply in only ninety minutes. Now, with all of this said it may come across that Harper’s character is simply the watching housewife, a thankless supporting role that is so often given to women in films. But in fact Rosa Lee is the beating heart of the film. She is the tender mercy that is given to those who need it throughout. But Harper chooses to never play her as treacly or mealy-mouthed. She shows that tenderness can often be entwined with toughness. She’s firm, strong, sometimes seemingly emotionless, but always full of grace and mercy. And it’s important to point out that although I’m not showing them here, she gets several wonderful scenes where she is holding forth and not just watching in the background. Watch an old interview here with her talking about Rosa Lee and the film.

Tender Mercies is perhaps most widely known as Duvall’s greatest performance (watch him talk about it here) and while I agree that is is a thing of rare beauty, I am just as blown away by Harper’s quiet and nuanced portrayal of Rosa Lee. She told me that she felt she was able to play her so effectively because Rosa Lee is such a rural, working class character, and Harper had been raised as rural and working class herself. She’s from the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas, after all. As a writer who is always seeking to complexity and even understand rural characters in my work, this is important to me. As someone who believes that rural working class people are often negated and even erased from most American media these days—even literature—this is important to me. And Harper is ethereal throughout the film, with skin that fairly glows and bright blue eyes to which the camera is always drawn. As Rosa Lee she is beatific, which of course makes sense when we know her ultimate motivation for the character is Mary, the mother of Christ.

You may know Tess Harper from Crimes of the Heart (her performance captured her an Oscar nomination in 1986), The Man in the Moon (1991), No Country for Old Men (2007) or “Breaking Bad” but my other favorite role she created was in the beautiful film Loggerheads (2005), where she gives a complex performance as a woman torn between her duties as a preacher’s wife and being the mother of a gay son. It’s a hidden gem, she’s excellent in it, and if you love a good Southern family drama filled with great performances and a lovely script, you should check out.

I’ll share one more scene with you because it’s one of my favorites, and because it shows how effectively Foote uses dialogue. It’s efficient but full of emotion. In the scene, Mack’s estranged daughter is visiting him unexpectedly, and she makes a surprising request. Look at what is not said and how economically things that are said are stated.

Also, of course, look at the lovely performance from a very young Ellen Barkin who more than holds her own with her scene partner, the accomplished Duvall. I have been thinking a lot about this scene in particular as I have tried to process the way contemporary TV shows so often rely on the explosive to get across emotion instead of using the more realistic introspection, quiet, and even silence. So many TV shows today, for example, believe the only way to express anger is through a character using the most insulting, vulgar language as possible, often leaving me to feel beaten up. Nearly everyone in contemporary television is so angry all the time. It wears me out. Just look at a few minutes of shows like “The Bear”, “Beef”, “The Perfect Couple”, or practically anything on the big streamers. Often it is simply lazy writing, and it shows up so much in today’s streaming television. It cheapens drama when a writer only uses the explosive. Tender Mercies shows how real drama is most powerfully shown in what is not said, in reactions that rely on silence from the actor instead of vomiting strings of attention-seeking dialogue that is meant to shock but in its constancy has only become boring.

I suppose some people don’t like Tender Mercies because of that quiet. Yet to me that is one of its best qualities, along with the aforementioned performances, sense of place, and screenplay. I love it because it reminds me of the way people I grew up around talked to each other and acted with each other. I love it because it feels real to me. It feels honest. And that’s what I want from a piece of art.

FYI: Tender Mercies is now available to watch for free with a subscription to Amazon Prime.

In many ways I think that a short story is more akin to a poem than it is to a novel. Like a poem, a short story deals in economy and tends to revolve around one moment. The canvas is smaller than a novel. However, a novel is no more important or grand than a poem or a short story. It is simply a different beast. I have spent as many years on some short stories as I have on novels. Others I have written in a very short time. “Foxgloves” is one of the latter. Despite the fact that the story was written in just about two months’ time, I spent a couple years turning the idea over in my head, thinking about it, studying on the proper way to tell it.

One of the questions that people ask me the most about writing is how I avoid writer’s block. The main way I stay productive is to have several projects going at once. Most of the time I am simultaneously working on a poem, a short story, an essay, a piece of journalism, and a novel. At least five writing projects are going on for me at all times. I always imagine them being on a stovetop. One of them has just been done and is ready to be eaten. One is just starting to boil. One is simmering. Another needs more salt. One is on the burner but not yet turned on. So, I first began thinking about the story that would become “Foxgloves” as I finished up my last novel, Lark Ascending.

The basic premise is that a man struggling with Alzheimer’s reveals to his daughter and grandson that he had loved another man in his youth and that he never really got over him. It’s a shock for them both, especially the mother, and for the grandson it has deeper layers because he, too, is closeted and trying to figure out how to go forward properly with his own life.

The first lesson for any writer is to always be on the lookout for a good story. The idea came to me because someone I knew revealed a similar secret while going through Alzheimer’s. In that case it was an old woman who revealed to her daughter that she had once had a dalliance with another woman. The daughter was so shocked that she denied this could be true and chalked it up to the disease. She simply could not accept this about her mother. As soon as I heard about this I knew I wanted to write about it because the story made me think about how we can never completely know our parents and how we all have secrets, some that we are never able to articulate…what if we are someday incapacitated in a similar way and our disease reveals the secrets we have carried with us? A good piece of writing, for me, always begins with a question of “What if?” and "that inevitably leads to “What next?”

I had my premise but I just had to create my characters. Although the real story had involved an old woman I wanted to write mine about an old man. I imagined my own grandfather’s physicality even though he had nothing in common with the character I named James Robert Carter (although he is mostly called “Papaw” in the story). The character is completely fictional otherwise. I based the main character, Thomas, on one aspect of myself…really on an alternative "What if?” version of myself. In this case, I thought about when I was a senior in high school and received a full scholarship to the prestigious journalism program at Western Kentucky University. I didn’t take it because my mother was ill at the time and I felt that two and a half hours would be too far from home. This decision greatly altered the course of my life in many ways. In the story, Thomas has taken the scholarship and has now returned to his small Eastern Kentucky town to work at his hometown newspaper. He is harboring a deep pining for a man he met in college—a man who is now at seminary to become a minister in a church that would not accept him as a gay man. I’m getting all of these details just by continuing to ask that “What if?”:

“What if Thomas is in love with someone he can’t be with, similar to his grandfather?”

“What if the main reason they can’t be together is because the man he loves is a reverend?”

“What if Thomas feels like he is frozen?”

“What if the grandfather keeps revealing more details of his relationship to Thomas that helps Thomas to understand his own pining better?”

Along the way, as always, I’m learning more about my characters and their place and situation by being on the lookout for details that might make them into more interesting and richer characters. One day I was working in my yard and saw that some foxgloves I had planted last year were in a glorious bloom. They’re some of the most beautiful flowers you’ll ever see. I had forgotten I had planted them the previous year and was surprised to find how well they had thrived. I had thought they were an annual and would not come back. So I read up on them and found this interesting detail on a gardening website: foxgloves are biennial plants, which means that unlike perennials, which come back every year, and annuals, which last only one season, a foxgloves takes two years to fully flower before dying out. That made me think about what a great symbol the flower could be for a man who is able to revisit an old love before dying, to be a metaphor for second chances or even being of two minds.

So, I made the grandfather a flower gardener. This seemed like a good action that he could be doing even in the midst of his illness. A friend of mine who is a great writer had to stop writing when she developed terrible dementia because she’d go back to the page to work on her novel but couldn’t recall what had led up to where she was in the book, making it impossible for her to write. So she turned to painting and gardening for her creative outlets because they didn’t require remembering in the same way writing did. So I wrote a passage like this that helps the characters take shape:

The foxgloves are his favorites, though. Even on the first day of September, when their blooms are long gone, having shone through the gap between spring and summer, he pauses at them, running their leaves between his thumb and forefinger. He is as loving to the crisp, dry sections as he is to the few leaves that still hold green. “I like their name,” he tells me, just as he has said to me many times before. “I like that they only bloom in their second year, and then they die. But before they die, they shed new seeds to start new plants.” Weeding and worrying over the flowers is like prayer for him. When his hands are busy, they seem to turn the engine of his mind more forcibly.

Once I had the foxgloves as my main metaphor everything else fell into place. Working with flowers made me think about the importance of a grave once someone close to you has died. And, not to give too much of the story away, but since the lost love is long dead, it would just be too expected for the grandfather to ask his grandson to take him to visit the man’s grave. Instead, he asks him to take him to a place where he was very much alive with the lost love as a young man. A river where they swam together. In many ways a river is the opposite of a graveyard: one is all about the living and the other seems to be so much about the dead. When I’m writing it’s important for me to fully see and experience the world I’m creating on the page as vividly as possible. So I visited a riverbank on the Cumberland River and described it in the story just as I experienced it:

We arrive at a bank where the river sups at the sand. Willows lean over so that the ends of their long fronds barely touch the water. Gray rocks show here and there along the shore, leading the way to a high cliff standing over the river. In my grandfather’s time, I can imagine a place like this full of wild boys jumping from the cliff and splashing in the river. Nowadays kids go to pools and waterparks, but it must have been unusual to claim it for just the two of them that day so long ago.

I also surrounded my writing area with photos not only of foxgloves but other important elements of the story: a mountain graveyard, a swimming hole, a highway through the mountains, a little farm house.

Music is always a huge part of my process so I thought about songs that went well thematically with the story. Often I return to favorite albums and become obsessed with them again. When I was working on “Foxgloves” I had recently returned to my favorite Emmylou Harris album, Cowgirl’s Prayer, and found that the lead song from it worked perfectly. “High Powered Love” is about longing for an obsessive love again, about the way age helps us to know what we want more fully, and it reminds me that passion like that can happen at any age. John Prine’s music is a touchstone for me and in writing about an old man who is in some ways being discounted by his own daughter I thought of the Prine classic “Hello in There”—probably the best song ever written about “old people”—and listening to it helped me to get some of the nuances about aging and loneliness into the story. I also listened to Prine’s “I Remember Everything” over and over because it’s about the memories of love that stick with us no matter what and in it I could hear my character’s voice. “Old Flowers” by Courtney Marie Andrews” is one of my favorite contemporary ballads and the piano in it sounded like this story to me. The fact that there’s lot of flowers imagery in it helped, too. Matraca Berg’s powerful “O Cumberland” has long been one of my favorite songs (it is foundational for two of my novels, The Coal Tattoo and Southernmost) and I listened to it over and over as I finessed the drive to the Cumberland River in the story. It’s one of the best songs ever written and listening to good writing certainly makes us better writers, just like reading good writing does. My favorite scene in the story is when the grandfather goes swimming so I knew that I wanted a joyful soundtrack for that. Loudon Wainwright III’s “The Swimming Song” was the perfect one for that and helped me to make that a scene of pure happiness and freedom. There are other songs on the soundtrack, too, which you can listen to on Spotify.

Most of all I wanted “Foxgloves” to be about the power and the danger of secrets. The grandfather’s admission is not the only secret that is revealed in the story and I love that element of it. That’s the kind of thing that just happens when the writing is going well. More layers begin to appear and take shape properly. When that happens you know you are cooking with grease. “Foxgloves” is one of the best things I’ve written, I think, because it does exactly what I set out to do with it. Those characters live vividly for me and I can see it in my mind’s eye. I hope you will read it and enjoy it.

Complexity is the opposite of stereotype.

This is something I’m often reminded of when I’m reading, or writing, or watching television and film. The most stereotypical portrayals of any marginzalized group, whether they be Appalachian, LGBTQ, or BIPOC, are ones that rely on simplistic notions of who people are. They tend to villify or to romanticize people and cultures without understanding historical or cultural context. They buy into easy definitions and generalizations.

I always tell my students that a sure way to stereotype a particular group is to lean too heavily on only the depressing elements. Think of the concept of “poverty porn”. The reason so many people love certain pieces of literature or film—I won’t name specific examples because I don’t want to give them more air—is because they provide a look at the despair of poor people so that the viewer can say “Well, at least I’m not like them. I’m superior.” 

On my last book tour I was in a city far from home and a woman who was a longtime reader of mine came to the event and brought along her husband, who was new to my work. “When reading Lark Ascending I thought, ‘Wow, this guy is good at capturing despair,’” he said, with a big smile on his face. “But then I thought, oh, he’s from Appalachia. Of course he understands despair.” He wasn’t being malicious. He was simply basing this observation on what visual media had been teaching him his whole life. He intended to give me a compliment as a writer but accidentally insulted my place and people. In the moment I was struck by his comment but later, as one does, I thought of the perfect response; I wish I had replied with “Well, if you think our despair is thick in Appalachia you ought to see our joy.” One test for a piece of art’s complexity on a people or culture is to think about if the art relies primarily on despair to portray them, or if there is cultural joy present to make it a truly complex illumination. “Show us the despair and the joy,” I tell my students.

All of this is to reiterate that I believe the reason that both All of Us Strangers and The Starling Girl were completely overlooked by the Oscars is because they portray people and cultures in their full complexity. I’ve seen some people saying the same about Ava DuVernay’s Origin, based on Isabel Wilkerson’s bestseller Caste, but I haven’t had the opportunity to see that one yet.

The Starling Girl is one of the most complex looks at rural and working class life that I’ve ever seen. The characters are never caricatures and are never judged because of their class or place in the world. They are not shown as dumb and mired in the despair of poverty. Nor are they shown as saints or magical country folk who have an uncanny connection to nature, as we often are when filmmakers want to offer a positive view of us. They are not people who lead dull existences because of where they’re from or their class. Theirs are lives of observation and thought. They are faulted but they are also interesting and wonderful. They are full human beings who are not defined by their place and class but also not apart from them. It’s a fine balance that writer and director Laurel Palmet pulls off perfectly. While fundamentalism and hypocrisy are obviously the culprits of the film the religiosity is, again, not the result of the place, but simply a part of it. The lead character, Jem Starling (beautifully played by Eliza Scanlan) is a thoughtful, observant, and intelligent “old soul” who wants more for herself than her parents want for her. She ends up having what may or may not be an affair with her youth pastor (since he is older, there are complications about power that eventually make the viewer question what exactly the relationship is). The youth pastor, Owen, is played by Lewis Pullman, who gives the character so many layers that he adds layers to the film itself, leading to the kind of cinematic experience that deserves conversation afterward. There is plenty of joy, too, which is often manifested through dance for Jem Starling, and it’s particularly interesting to see how that expression of self evolves over the course of the film, from her being the obedient member of her church dance troupe to challenging the boring choreography of the group to literaly dancing on her own by film’s end.

            It’s important to think about the way The Starling Girl uses a rural place in the film to serve the story, as well. Set in rural Kentucky (and filmed there, too, in the lush beauty of Oldham County). Almost always in films set in rural places, the place will be portrayed as backward, behind the times, a place to escape, a place full of dullards who are all obstacles in the way of the more forward-thinking lead. This film could have very easily gone down that path and even gets close to the last detail in that list. But it doesn’t go there, revealing the complexity of most of the characters (a father who is hemmed in by his own guilt about being closeted after the loss of his “best friend”, a mother whose desire to protect her daughter leads to her hurting her, etc.). The characters dress like any Americans would for their class and time period (rural characters are usually only shown in gingham, flannel, and overalls), drive cars that are of the time period (usually rural characters always drive cars that are thirty years old, the rustier and more precious the better), and even get references to pop culture and the larger world. The cinematography captures the quality of light present in summertime Kentucky, too, from the bright outdoors to a particularly beautiful scene filmed in the woods during the gloaming when lightning bugs are drifting up from the forest floor.

 But most American audiences don’t want their rural places to be portrayed with too much complexity in literature or film because we’re not used to that. Ever since the beginnings of cinema we’ve been fed a specific idea of who country people should be: simpletons, bigots, murderers, animals. In most films about rural places, the idea is to make the audience—who are overwhelmingly not rural—to give them someone to look down upon. That doesn’t happen in The Starling Girl, and I believe that’s why the awards totally overlooked it. Filmmaker Palmet refuses to simplify any of it and has gained the respect of many for it, even if we’re not the ones who hold the reins of power in Hollywood.

In All of Us Strangers, the lead character, Adam (exquistely played by Andrew Scott in what should have been a nominated role) is dealing with deep grief. He’s writing about his parents, who died when he was twelve, and he never has properly dealt with that loss. But as a gay man in his early fifties he’s also starting to deal with all of the trauma he experienced as an LGBTQ person who grew up in an incredibly homophobic time and is now living in a time when much of that rhetoric is being spoken not only by school bullies but also by people in the highest places of power (see footnote). At one point Adam says “It doesn’t take much to make you feel the way you felt back there,” referring to how easy it is to be rushed back in time to the way so many LGBTQ people are treated as young people, particularly by the people meant to love them the most as well as by strangers, and particularly in the past.  No other moment in cinema has ever explored the trauma of the existence of LGBTQ people (especially of a certain age, the ones of us who became teenagers near the height of the AIDS epidemic) as fully or as beautifully. In fact, I have never before seen this kind of trauma examined in a film. When I saw it in the cinema, several people around me burst into tears at that comment. The weeping was the cleansing kind, though. Finally, someone was articulating what we had been carrying in our bodies for decades. As the movie went on it became clear that finally the LGBTQ experience was being examined in its deepest complications and most of all it is a movie that is in no way made for a straight audience (as Maestro most definitely is) or by straight people (Maestro, again).

All of the above might lead you to think that All of Us Strangers leans heavily on the despair. But it is full of joy as well, shown through scenes of intense intimacy, dancing, the balm of creating art, and celebratory music.

But again, most audiences want their LGBTQ characters to be the way they expect: either dying, miserable, conniving, or—more often these days—people whose only role in life is to dance the night away with no responsibility, endless wealth, and a witty straight sidekick. The miserable, conniving queer is how Bradley Cooper chose to portray Leonard Bernstein, one of the genuises of the twentieth century, instead of showing him as a complex person. Even though Bernstein’s own wife seems to have accepted who he was the film doesn’t. The film judges Bernstein harshly and the last act of Maestro delivers exactly what mainstream audiences want of their LGBTQ characters. By the end of the movie we’re clearly being told that the hero is his long-suffering wife, who allowed him to act on his gay desires while suffering beautifully as she dies. Meanwhile, he is a melting mess on a dancefloor who has betrayed his whole family because he’s selfish. That’s the message, and that’s the main reason that it’s an insult for Cooper to be nominated for playing Bernstein. There is no historical or cultural context as to why Bernstein does the things he does and we only see him through a judgmental lens. With that said, I do have to say that Maestro is a true achievement in filmmaking on a production level, and it features a ferocious, lovely performance by Carey Mulligan. But it does a disservice to Bernstein as a fully complicated human being…the main thing that a biopic should do.

I’m not saying that straight actors should never play gay characters. But I am saying that if they’re going to do so they need to strive to understand the complexity of being a gay person in the world. It’s epecially insulting that one of the best gay actors of our time, Andrew Scott, was overlooked by the Academy when they gave nominations to such a terrible interpretation of being a gay person by Cooper and also nominated straight actor Sterling K. Brown (normally a brilliant actor), who plays his gay character in American Fiction by portraying him as a straight man. For the first time ever in Oscar history gay actors have been nominated for playing gay characters (Jodie Foster in Nyad and Colman Domingo in Rustin—update, neither of them won, which means that still no gay actor has ever won an Oscar for playing a gay character ). Theirs are brilliant performances because Foster and Domingo are playing them as fully complex people, not just as gay people. It’s great that finally gay actors are playing gay characters and getting recognition for it, but it’s too little too late, and there’s never been any mainstream outrage about it, just as there is never any mainstream anger about the way rural people are constantly negated and simplified in most films. And the way films about rural and working class people are constantly overlooked.

Inevitably someone will read this and tell me that there are bigger things to worry about. Well, of course there are. But when people say that they’re really just saying “I don’t care about this”, which is what Hollywood has been saying about rural, working class, and LGBTQ people for more than a century now. And that’s certainly what the Oscars have said by overlooking The Starling Girl and All of Us Strangers, not only great pieces of filmmaking art, but also two of the most beautiful and complicated looks at their respective cultures ever.

The Starling Girl is now available to watch on Paramount Plus/Showtime with a subtraction or can be streamed anywhere.

All of Us Strangers is now available to watch on Hulu with a subscription or can be streamed anywhere.

Footnote: When Tom Woods, a state senator in Oklahoma was recently asked about the death of a nonbinary student in his state, he said that LGBTQ people are “filth” The current top candidate for governor of North Carolina, and the current lieutenant governor of that state, Mark Robinson is campaigning on bigotry. He is calling for trans people to be arrested, he claims God “formed” him to fight LGBTQ rights, says that straight people are superior to LGBTQ people, and has cast doubt on the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust. Meanwhile, Trump recently promised to ban gender-affirming healthcare for trans youth, has spent a lot of time on his campaign attacking hospitals that provide treatments and is calling for a federal law to recognize only two genders if he’s re-elected.

1. There is no contest for me on what has been my favorite film of the year. The Starling Girl is the movie I have thought the most about and the one that has stuck with me the longest. I’m haunted by its beautiful performances, its succinct and elegant script, and by how perfectly it uses the Kentucky countryside where it is set and where it was shot. Few films these days use sense of place so well to serve the overall theme and very rarely are rural people shown as complex and complicated. They certainly are in The Starling Girl. I would say that it contains some of the most authentic portrayals of rural life that I’ve ever seen in a movie. Some of my attachment to this movie certainly stems from the fact that I was raised in a strict fundamentalist sect/church much like the one in this story of a seventeen year-old girl who has an affair with her youth pastor. I loved everything about The Starling Girl, from the phenomenal performance by Eliza Scanlon and the nuanced antagonist perfectly played by Lewis Pullman to the cinematography in the scene set at dusk with lightning bugs rising up from the forest floor. You can stream it anywhere. A sweet bonus: Lord Huron did the music and wrote a song for the movie that deserves awards attention (“Ace Up My Sleeve”). My Best Picture.

2. I loved the book Killers of the Flower Moon so I went into this film with some trepidation, even if was made by one of our best and most consistent filmmakers, Martin Scorsese. I was happy to encounter a rich saga that manages to fully immerse us in the time and place so vividly that the three and half hour run time flies by. I was especially impressed by the quiet, layered performance by Jason Isbell (making his big screen debut). But the film belongs to Lily Gladstone. Every time she is on screen it is impossible to look away, and often she is forcing you to look at things you may want to turn away from. Her portrayal of Mollie Burkhart is full of pain but also joy, and everything in between. As if that is not enough reason to see this film, I think the screenwriter, Eric Roth, and Scorsese pull off a remarkable feat. Best seen on the big screen but see it wherever you can. My Best Actress.

3. In Monica, a trans woman goes home to help care for her estranged mother, who is suffering from dementia and may or may not recognize her. The film insists on being quiet and subtle, avoiding any big emotional outbursts or dramatic moments of reconciliation. Most of the action in this film is reactions and while I tend to love that, some people may find it too slow and dull. I felt like it was a meditation on family in all of its complexities. And the lead performance by Trace Lysette (which ought to be Oscar-nominated) makes it an unmissable film of the year. Shoutout to Graham Caldwell, a Louisvillian who makes a big impact in a beautiful performance from a child actor.

4. Alexander Payne is one of my favorite directors. He made two films I deeply love (Nebraska and About Schmidt) as well as many others (Election, The Descendants, etc.) that I admire. The Holdovers didn’t disappoint and the more I think about it, the more I love it. I love everything about it: the story, the richly drawn characters, the soundtrack, the sense of place, the production design, the costumes, its leisurely pacing, the way it takes a turn that makes it a whole different film than I thought it was going to be, the way it critiques academia, the performances, and so much more. To me it felt more like a novel than a film and I mean that in the best way possible. My Best Production Design.

5. Anatomy of a Fall takes an old idea—the courtroom thriller—and gives it new life; even its title seems to be a nod to one of the classic courtroom films of all time, Anatomy of a Murder. That new life is breathed into the genre by focusing more on the domestic and less on the sensational. The most suspenseful part of this film centers on the relationship between a mother accused of mother and her son who is torn on what to believe. The writing is crisp and real. To my mind it is the best screenplay of the year (just watch the lengthy argument scene—it’s electrifying dialogue, and I’m not even being hyperbolic). There is not a wasted word here and certainly no aggravating exposition. And the performances are all pretty phenomenal. My Best Screenplay.

6. Rustin is a formula biopic movie in that it takes a chapter from a real person’s life to illuminate the struggles and triumphs of their entire lives. Despite that, Rustin feels fresh and original in the way it tells its story. It’s perfectly paced and anchored by my favorite male performance of the year so far in the lead, Colman Domingo. This film tells the important story of the way Bayard Rustin has been mostly erased from civil rights history because he was gay. The third act is especially powerful, which I appreciate since a lot of biopics of this nature tend to fizzle out at the end. But this one comes to a rousing conclusion that is equally empowering and moving, all directed by my fellow Kentuckian, George Wolfe. My Best Actor.

7. I did not think that I would even like a film about a wrestling family, much less end up choosing it as one of my favorites of the year, but The Iron Claw stole my heart. It eschews any kind of toxic masculinity you might expect while also refusing to make fools of those in the wrestling world. A compelling, endearing cast and a story that would be unbelievable if it wasn’t true. I’ve always been a sucker for authentic portrayals of working class life and especially of rural and/working people shown as complex human beings. Some aspects of it remind me of one of my favorite movies, Urban Cowboy, which had to have been an influence (it was certainly an influence on my first novel, Clay’s Quilt). This was the biggest surprise of the year for me.

8. Poor Things. A visual delight from beginning to end. The movie has fun with its vulgarities (rarely has the olfactory been so broadly explored in a film as in this one, from farts to body odors) and there is more nudity and sex here than in any film I’ve seen in a long time; I admired the way it refused to be sanitized in its subject matter. It’s gritty but also tender, especially in the third act. I thought the second act dragged a little bit (“I get it!” I wanted to yell at the screen) but the first and third acts are really great. Everyone is at their best but Mark Ruffalo was the standout for me.

9. Of all the films on this list, Passages is the one that is most likely to alienate the most viewers but I believe that’s because it is so accurate in its storytelling. It was given an NC-17 rating for its sex scenes and I think unfairly so. There is nothing more graphic here than seen in most R-rated films but in this case they are gay sex scenes, which nudged it to a harsher rating. At its core this is a movie about the complexities of fidelity. It’s complicated and beautifully acted and directed. One thing in particular I liked about it is the way it puts us in Paris in all of its grit and authenticity (you’ll find no sparkling scenes of the Eiffel Tower in this film) and the clever ways it aligns us with the characters in moments of discomfort.

10. May December is probably one of the more widely talked about films of the year. People tend to either hate it or love it. Even though it is making my top ten list I am not sure I can honestly say I loved it. But I can say that I found it mesmerizing to watch and that I’ve continued to think about it. Those are two traits that always make me appreciate a film. In the film, a woman in her fifties played by Julianne Moore is still married to a man in his early thirties with whom she sexually abused when he was a child. So: disturbing stuff. An actress played by Natalie Portman is visiting to interview them for a film based on them and in doing so reveals old and new fractures. I liked the way the Savannah and Tybee Island locations were implemented and the two female leads but the standout here is Charles Melton in a career-making performance. Most Disturbing Picture.

11. Past Lives. Another slow and steady boil with beautiful performances, this debut film by Celine Strong is a powerful look at the many ways emigration changes people’s lives and how we can never completely leave our home countries, no matter what. It’s more romantic than most films I love, but it’s one that has really stuck with me this year. My Most Romantic Picture.

12. Some people will find The Miracle Club too sentimental, and honestly, it sometimes is. But it’s also a remarkable commentary on friendship, grace, and the idea that everything that is, is holy. This is a feel-good film with some remarkable performances by some of our most reliable actors. There’s a scene where Dame Maggie Smith is lifted out of a bathtub that I found to be deeply moving in its beauty. My Best Feel Good Picture.

13. The Son is a film hardly anyone saw, apparently, but it makes my list because I have kept thinking about it, because it’s the kind of film-made-for-adults (Ordinary People, Kramer vs. Kramer) that rarely get made these days, and because of the haunting performances by its entire cast, headlined by Laura Dern (always stunning), Vanessa Kirby (always brilliant), and Hugh Jackman (at his best here, I think). This is a profoundly sad and quiet film in which the smartest move is that nothing you think is going to happen happens, until it does. I watched it on Netflix. Written and directed by the man who made the much more widely seen Anthony Hopkins/Olivia Colman film The Father. My Saddest Picture of the Year.

Other films I really liked: Saltburn (I have mixed feelings about it on the way it generalizes class but was totally entertained), Knock at the Cabin (I’ll always be a Shyamalan devotee), Boston Strangler (gives new life to an old story), M3gan (the funniest film I saw this year), Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (great script, nuanced performance by Rachel McAdams), Cassandro (Gael García Bernal as a gay wrestler) and Of An Age (sweet, quiet Australian film). And I loved Barbie, but I’m just kind of tired of talking about it. I was moved by it, entertained by it, and I really enjoyed it. I did not think it was perfect (that whole Will Ferrel hunting for Barbie sequence, for one thing).

Disappointments: I was not a fan of Oppenheimer. I know I’m in the minority. Briefly, I did not love the way women were portrayed in the film and I thought a film about one of the greatest tragedies in human history should have contained more emotion. To me the whole thing was overwrought and most of it takes place in a boring-to-look-at conference room. The Exorcist (1973) is one of my all time favorite films so I was excited about this reboot. Alas, The Exorcist: Believer starts out strong and peters out pretty quickly. The worst part of it is that it’s just not scary, and it certainly isn’t profound.

One need only listen to “Some Misty Morning”, a duet between Logan Ledger and the exquisite Erin Rae, to know that Ledger is one of the best singers working today. The thing is, every song on the album Golden State shows that off, over and over. This is a stellar collection that puts the emphasis on great music, period. Golden State is the kind of record you can play to carry you through the day.

The next time someone tells you that country music is dead tell them to listen to Brit Taylor’s Kentucky Blue (produced by Sturgill Simpson and David Ferguson). The fiddle leads much of the music throughout the record but the constant is Taylor’s knowing vocal delivery that reminds you of exactly what country music truly sounds like. Along the way she celebrates rural life, dogs, and love while offering countrypolitan heartbreak or critiques of mainstream country’s obsession with men who all sound alike. She even branches into country pop with “For a Night”, proving she can do it all. Brit Taylor is the real deal and I hope her audience continues to grow. This is not only one of my favorite albums of the year but also one of my favorite country albums in recent memory. To see why, just give the title track, “Kentucky Blue”, a listen.

I love everything about Boomerang Town by Jamiee Harris. So much that I have listened to it over and over, from beginning to end, ever since it came out. There’s the title track, a perfect meditation on the dreams of people who might be suspecting of having none at all. The empathy it takes to pull off a song like that shows up throughout this lovely album, often in songs that are heartbreaking—but the kind of heartbreaking that is also a balm. That’s best articulated in “How Could You be Gone?”, a track that deeply explores all the layers of deep grief in a way that few other pieces of art have managed to do. There’s the clever wordplay and foot-tapping tempo of “Fair and Dark-haired Lad” (a song I can’t help but to sing along with), the complex poetry of “Good Morning, My Love” and the bloom of hope and joy found in “Love is Gonna Come Again”. Boomerang Town begs—and deserves—to be heard in order as a complete piece of art. It is such a beauty.

I wrote about this album for Salvation South this fall and I’ve been listening to it ever since. In my feature, “Voice Like a Church Bell”, I spend time talking about that incredible voice and her precise songwriting, as well as the lovely production of Freeman’s latest album, Do You Recall. If you’re not already a fan of Freeman, get on board. All the songs could be documents of the small-town, working-class life that is rarely seen in contemporary media. In our interview Freeman told me “People have certain ideas of what it means to be Appalachian and I just want to be not the example but one example of what that looks like, so that’s what I wrote about on this record.” She certainly accomplished that, and much more. Listen to the title track here.

Weathervanes, Jason Isbell’s sixth studio collaboration with the 400 Unit, is among his best three records ever. As I wrote in my feature, “Jason Isbell Is Finding His Purpose”, for Time back in June, the album operates as a collection of precise short stories, full of imagery and sensory details: a woman “in the moonlight, digging up the garden bed,” “a warm wind blowing in the laundromat” with “a young man crying in a cowboy hat,” a landscape where “the highway’s straight and night’s so still.” The songs are full of desperation, beauty and wit, populated with everyday Americans fighting tremendous battles but also living lives of complex joys and sorrows. I would also argue that Weathervanes contains some of Isbell’s best vocal performances, especially on the plaintive “Middle of the Morning”, which is one of my favorite songs of the year, and “King of Oklahoma”, which has quickly become a fan favorite. This is an album you should own a physical copy of.

Abby Hamilton has become known as a lively and mesmerizing live performer and has certainly kept the roads hot lately opening for acts such as Kelsey Waldon and Tyler Childers. But recordings capture her mesmerizing vocals and lyrics beautifully, too. As much as I love seeing her live I love spending time alone with her recordings so I can hear all of the nuances of her singing and her songwriting. #1 Zookeeper (of the San Diego Zoom) is her debut full-length album and it announces a vital new talent, packed with thoughtful and infinitely singable tracks. One of my favorites is the haunting ballad “Soccer Field”, which might be described as Phoebe Bridgers meets Bruce Springsteen but I think it’s more accurate to say it’s completely Abby Hamilton (just listen to all the emotion in her delivery of the line “Just because it wasn’t real to you/doesn’t mean it’s not real to me”.)

You’d be hard pressed to find a more positive and profound album than the latest one from Hiss Golden Messenger, Jump for Joy. The upbeat sound is sometimes deceptive—in the title track the narrator happily sings “Gimme apocalypse” against piano and drums that would sound at home in a honkytonk or a fundamentalist church either one. This is a deeply intelligent concept record that demands your full attention from one of our best contemporary songwriters and one of the tightest bands around.

Miles Miller is one of my favorite new singers and songwriters and his debut album, Solid Gold, is—no pun intended—about as solid a collection of songs as you’re liable to find. His voice reminds me of the suave crooners of the 1980s like Steve Wariner, Lee Roy Parnell, or Dan Seals, and his songs are built to last. There’s so many great one tracks that it’s hard to name a favorite, so I’ll tell you my top five: the title track, “Highway Shoes”, “A Feeling Called Lonesome”, “Don’t Give Away Love” and “In a Daze”. Do not miss out on this one.

Some of you may be surprised to find this one on my list but the truth is that it is one of the best albums of the year, with four of my favorite tracks released this year— “River”, “Used to be Young”, “Flowers”, and “Thousand Miles”. It makes for a powerful collection from one of my favorite pop singers.

Tommy Prine first had me when I heard the great line “You remind me/of every single dogwood tree” in the title track for his debut album, This Far South. The thing is, every song has at least one line like that, a line that works so perfectly with wordplay or embedded rhyme or imagery, that I get drawn into this album over and over. It’s been one of my constant plays this year. I love it from beginning to end. Standout tracks for me besides the title track are “I Love You Always” and “Elohim”.

There’s a lot about death and rebirth on Zach Russell’s debut, Where the Flowers Meet the Dew. Sometimes these are delivered in waltzes like “I Thought I Was the Trees” and other times in a rockabilly/funk delivery on a number like “Born Again”. Russell’s music isn’t easy to categorize and each track opens a whole new universe of sound and thought, which makes the whole thing even better. Just witness the leap from “Playing House” to “Take Me Back to Tennessee”. Each track is so expansive that it’s hard to believe this is his first album.

The Returner is Allison Russell’s second album and it’s a celebration of survival that serves as a pointed sequel to her 2021 solo debut, Outside Child, which focused on trauma. Despite being joyful, The Returner still tackles big issues while also expanding Russell’s sound to a more epic canvas. This is one to listen to with your earbuds to get the full experience of the soaring string section on the title tracks, the precision of “Demons”, or the layered vocals on the spectacular closing track, “Requiem”. One of the main things I love about these songs is how often they go places I am not expecting.

One of my favorite albums of recent years was I Walked With You A Ways by Plains, which came out last year. Plains is Waxahatchee and Jess Williamson. The latter made one of my favorite albums of this year, which No Depression wrote about here. I love the songs, every one of them, but for me it’s mostly about the way Williamson sings them. She sings with such pining and deep emotion that she always makes me feel something. My favorite song from this album is “God in Everything”. If you’ve read my novel Southernmost I think you’ll see some similarities between her thoughts on the Divine and the way Justin in my book creates his own theology.

If you know much about me you probably know that Tyler Childers is a collaborator and friend of mine, so you might think this is a biased pick. I truly believe I am being objective when I tell you that this was one of my favorite albums of the year despite my closeness to it. This isn’t even because working on the video for one of its tracks—“In Your Love”—earned me a Grammy nomination along with the other producers (the ceremony is February 4—wish us luck). It’s simply because this is a great collection of songs, from the barn-burning opening track to the superb covers of “Space and Time” by S.G. Goodman and “Help Me Make It Through the Night” by Kristofferson, to everything in between. It's also important to note that the Food Stamps absolutely tear it up on this album, proving they are one of the best bands working today. If you haven’t seen them live, try your best to do so. I wrote about the album for The Bitter Southerner in my feature “The Evolution of Tyler Childers” and I hope you might give that a read. Here’s the Footnotes video for “In Your Love”—a sort of Pop-Up video version where I give you behind the scenes information, such as why that wedding ring quilt is so important, and much more.

I don’t usually put Christmas records on my favorite albums of the year lists but Happy Holiday! by My Morning Jacket is one of the best and will now be dragged out at the beginning of the holiday season every year. From the perfect cover of The Band’s underrated “Must be Christmas Tonight” to originals like “Feelin’ Sorry” or a “snowy” cover of their own classic “Wonderful (The Way I Feel)”, there’s not a bad track in the bunch. The perfect way to close the year from one of my favorite bands of all time.

Forgive me for being late in posting the eleventh of eleven posts I’ve been doing every four days during Lent as a sort of online devotional in offerings of beauty. These posts include poems, passages, songs, film clips, stories, and more for you to spend time with each day. They’re meant to help you think about being creative, observant, empathetic, and/or still. Throughout this time I have offered very little or no context but for this last one I’d like to comment a bit.

Days 37-40

April 4

“The one who sings prays twice.” —St Augustine

I grew up in a very strict independent church, a sect of a Holiness church. There were damaging things about it but there were certainly wonderful things, too. The older I get the more I try to recognize the wonders of that childhood church as much—if not more—than the hurts of it. The music of my childhood church was completely emotional: either heartfelt, beseeching laments or raucous barn-burning songs that used elements of the blues and rock ‘n’ roll. Our church was filled with great voices but also drums, cymbals, electric guitars, bass guitars, and—above all—the piano, which was most often played in the style of Jerry Lee Lewis more than in the style of the stereotypical-little-old-lady-in-the-country-church. Sometimes the songs moved me to tears because they were so full of emotion. Other times I couldn’t sit still because they had such a good beat. The main thing is that I never felt closer to God than when the music was playing at the church. Not so much during the fire and brimstone sermons and the endless altar calls. But God lived in the music. When I converted to the Episcopal Church about ten years ago I found myself deeply moved by its music as well, despite how different it was from the rousing, raw songs of the church I grew up in. The poetic lyrics, the rousing organ—the notes of which sometimes make the entire church vibrate magnificently—and most of all, the voices, united, singing in community. When I hear those voices rising together the sound speaks to something in my bones and blood. And perhaps even to something beyond. To sing is a holy thing.

April 5

REDBUDS

Wintertime is difficult for me: I hate the cold and I feel the effects of a gray sky and less light. So I am always anxiously awaiting springtime. I never feel as if it is truly here until the redbuds bloom. They give me the satisfaction that I’ve made it throughout another long, gray, cold time. They give me hope that blue skies await.

In each of my novels, a specific tree is important. In my second novel, A Parchment of Leaves, a young woman who is recently married and has to leave her family takes a redbud tree with her to symbolize her homeplace and her people. As she faces hardships she could not have imagined, the tree is a constant altar for her. When it is young she goes to it and whispers “Live, little tree,” without realizing that she is telling herself to hang on, that she will make it through. As the tree ages she presses its leaves against her eyes and feels its trunk as a balm that comforts her.

April 6

Shelby Lynne and Allison Moorer have long been two of my favorite singers and songwriters. Here they cover Nick Cave’s masterpiece with precision and power that is hard to find. I hope you will close your eyes and listen.

INTO MY ARMS

I don't believe in an interventionist God

But I know, darling, that you do

But if I did I would kneel down and ask Him

Not to intervene when it came to you

Not to touch a hair on your head

To leave you as you are

And if He felt He had to direct you

Then direct you into my arms

Into my arms, O Lord

Into my arms, O Lord

Into my arms, O Lord

Into my arms

And I don't believe in the existence of angels

But looking at you I wonder if that's true

But if I did I would summon them together

And ask them to watch over you

To each burn a candle for you

To make bright and clear your path

And to walk, like Christ, in grace and love

And guide you into my arms

Into my arms, O Lord

Into my arms, O Lord

Into my arms, O Lord

Into my arms

And I believe in Love

And I know that you do too

And I believe in some kind of path

That we can walk down, me and you

So keep your candle burning

And make her journey bright and pure

That she will keep returning

Always and evermore

Into my arms, O Lord

Into my arms, O Lord

Into my arms, O Lord

Into my arms

—NICK CAVE

April 7

To me, this poem is about doubt. As I read it, Rossetti is lamenting the fact that she cannot completely believe in Christ as divine, although she wants to. There is deep respect for the Messiah in the poem, but no complete surrender to belief in Him. I believe that doubt makes faith stronger. I believe that challenges to faith make it stronger. I believe in questioning, always. My favorite part of religion is the mystery, which is the part that church leaders too often use to frighten people. I don’t want to be afraid of the mystery—I want to embrace it. So some days I identify with strongly with Christina Rossetti while other days I identify more with Dolly Parton’s ideas of strong faith, which we will look at in the entry for April 9.

GOOD FRIDAY

Am I a stone, and not a sheep,

That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross,

To number drop by drop Thy blood’s slow loss,

And yet not weep?

Not so those women loved

Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;

Not so fallen Peter, weeping bitterly;

Not so the thief was moved;

Not so the Sun and Moon

Which hid their faces in a starless sky,

A horror of great darkness at broad noon –

I, only I.

Yet give not o’er,

But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;

Greater than Moses, turn and look once more

And smite a rock.

—CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

April 8

There are a whole lot of people today calling themselves people of faith who believe they have an inherent right to judge and condemn those who are not like them. These people seem so miserable to me. I hear their ranting and their judgement and their vitriol and sometimes I want to yell at them. They are, after all, trying to inflict their own beliefs on others—by using legislation—and they are doing great harm to me, my children, and many others. So I am angry at them a lot of the time. Other times I feel sorry for them that they have so little color and nuance in their worlds. I want to tell them how much happier they’d be if they’d just let others be. Merton knew what it was all about.

Easter Sunday

Some days I’m full of doubt like Rossetti and other days I believe with everything in me. My whole life has been a seesaw between these things, but always the faith has won out at the end of the day. This song wasn’t written by Dolly Parton—Don Francisco wrote it—but it seems tailor-made for her. It’s a song of complete belief and deep faith and it has one of the most magnificent choruses ever written. No matter what you believe, a song about rebirth and salvation is a pretty powerful thing. Especially when it’s performed by singers like Dolly Parton and this incredible chorus.