Telling a Story at The Monti

Growing up, I was always happy when we were invited over to the Waughs’ house for supper. Mrs. Waugh was the only person I knew who still made country ham and red eye gravy, but that was not the main attraction. The main attraction was her husband, Jim Waugh, who ranks as one of the best story tellers I ever knew. After supper, he’d stretch with his hands on the back of his neck. He’d get a certain knowing twinkle in his eye and look around at all of us as we waited to hear what tale he’d tell—maybe it would be about his time as a soda jerk in his hometown drugstore or maybe it would involve some ornery so-and-so he’d met on the road selling pharmaceuticals, or maybe (this was my favorite) he’d tell about how he met and fell in love with the prettiest little girl he’d ever seen.

I remember how the room would go still as he was talking, how we would all together be transported back to the place and time he described. I’d watched carefully because I wanted to be able to tell such stories myself. I was hoping that I growing up, I would encounter some interesting things to tell stories about and that I would learn how to tell them –make that room go still.

Honestly, I think I have yet to accomplish this goal. As I grew up, I found that I was terrible joke teller, and while I could tell a tolerable story, it would never live up to the Jim Waugh standard. So, I quit trying to mesmerize my friends over the dinner table and switched over to the written word. On paper, I do better. I can take my time, go back and revise. I can write and rewrite until my story unfolds exactly as I hear it in my mind. I’ve grown accustomed to this brand storytelling, to the idea that eventually, readers will encounter my tale in their own quiet rooms. This is immensely satisfying, and in many ways it beats telling stories in bars and dining rooms--where a tale can be subjected to interruptions and background noise….

So imagine my reaction a few weeks back when Jeff Polish, the founder of The Monti (http://www.themonti.org/ ) , asked me to tell a story at one of his storytelling shows. The rules: my story has to be true, it has to be twelve minutes long, and no notes are allowed. In other words—no hiding! No hiding behind the fiction, no hiding behind a text, and no hiding behind a nice big podium. It’ll be just me and my story. This is a terrifying prospect, but also it is the kind of challenge that I need to take on now and then.

Getting ready for the event has been an interesting process, and it’s been more like my normal writing work than I thought. The story still needed a shape, a beginning, middle and end. It needed a hook, an arc, and a good payoff. I had to review my history for the right details to tell the story. Once I had all of my material gathered and organized in my head, I started telling the story—to myself, to my dog, to every friend who would listen. Towards the end of this week, I had to start bribing my buddies with glasses of wine so they’d listen just to it one more time. Everyone (except my dog) reacted differently to different parts of my tale. This led to many changes in my story—a phrase added here, a section deleted. It was editing with an audience.

My story has gotten tighter, and I hope, better, over the course of this week, but it’s interesting that it will not take its final form until I stand in front of the Monti audience tonight and hold forth. Though I have a good idea of what my story will be, this is not like releasing a book. I’m giving up a measure of control to the moment. There’s something exhilarating about this notion, though it’s terrifying as well. I know that when I walk up in front of people this evening, I will do it in honor of our storytelling friend Jim Waugh. I hope I will do him proud.

Lynn York is the author of The Piano Teacher (2004) and The Sweet Life (2007). She lives in Chapel Hill, NC. Her website is www.lynnyork.com.

Characters I Have Known

Can you read a person like a book? A character that saunters into your path where suddenly your head snaps up and a part of you comes to attention? I know that feeling. It can happen in what we might call the natural world or in those so many of us live in as we create novels of all genres.

Characters have a certain way of speaking, of cracking a line, of giving the eye that causes us to lean in a little closer and listen to the story that is about to be told. 

Recently when author friend Shellie Rushing Tomlinson and yours truly hit the road in search of story we discovered one at every turn. We also encountered a few characters along the way. One of the most memorable being the one and only Mr. Jack Reed of Tupelo's well known Reed's Gumtree Books. He decided to pull up a chair and captivate us with some true tales of the business, of the things his seen come and gone, and how staying young at heart and having hero's is real important to living a good, long life. 

I think if we hadn't had another book event in Nashville we would still be there, trying to get just one more antidote out of the man that was full of them. Overflowing he was. But here's the thing. Shellie and I were both ready to talk about ourselves, our radio shows, to interview other customers, and, yes, even each other but when Mr. Reed walked in it was all over. And we both knew it, too. 

Here's why. 

When a character comes calling you have to have your listening ears on. Pricked up high. So that suddenly a bonifide whistler of a man comes waltzing through the back door of your mind, you have to just decide whatever that other thing was - it can wait. That blind snake milker living down in those swamps - oh, yes, there's a story there that woman longs to tell. That old woman rocking and reminising. That baggy man shuffling his shoes in the dirt of wasted dreams. Here's the deal American Idol will be there next week. That list of things to do to get published - one more day. All those unopened bills, well - if your staring down cutoff day - give it an hour. And give that character their due while their willing to talk. Just like we did Mr. Reed.  

Because the fact is -

We don't know when that opportunity will roll its way around again if ever. I've lost a few good characters in my life. Some to the wicked wracked out strange tragidies. Some with faces so young they are now immortal. Some just to the ever moving hands of time. I never felt as though I had captured any of them, spent enough time with them, listened to enough of their stories. 

I feel the same way about the characters who have been knocking on my door, well, now nigh for a decade. One with a foot stomping impatience waiting for her story to be told. And yet, I've been writing and living and running and puttering - in other words living this big old, wonderful, messy life. But - those characters - they tell me time is not waiting for me to set aside my precious hours in neat packages to listen to them. 

No more than real folks do in this real, natural world of hours. Babies don't want for us to slow down before they grow up, lovers don't wait for us to make time for one more dance, grandparents don't wait to tell us one more story before they go. 

It's up to us. Purveyors of characters such as we are. Storytellers, story seekers, greedy story grabbers one and all. 

Here's to all the wild, wooly, wonderful characters in this life and from beyond the page who dare to  inhabit our worlds and in the process give us half a fighting chance to capture a moment of their light. 

River Jordan is a Storyteller. She lives in Nashville with her husband and their big, white, lap dog where she also produces a weekly radio program on Radio Free Nashville 107.1fm.  She is captivated by the new book cover of The Miracle of Mercy Land (Random House/Waterbrook) due out September 7, 2010. For more information on the author, her work, and the radio program visit http://www.riverjordan.us 

The Future of Publishing

Not very long ago I had the pleasure of presenting at the Dahlonaga Book Festival. One of the panels featured myself, Catherine Coulter, and a bevy of other talented authors. We were asked to share our thoughts on the future of publishing. As none of us have crystal balls, we surmised to the very best of our abilities our thoughts on what the future of publishing might hold.

As I consider the advanced me of technologies in just the last few years, the hushed anticipation of the new Apple reader tablet, the Kindle’s and Sony Readers, the new Droid, Apple, Google phones and so on – to touch the hem of the future of publishing is beyond most of us. Except for this fact – writers have great imaginations. If we apply that portion of our minds to this riddle and not our logic over our last royalty statement, or the daily reports on how many bookstores are downsizing or closing, or how many mergers are now making publishing houses as confusing a conglomerate as our national government – then I think the pictures we’ll get are a little more true to the fullness of possibility.

What do I see? Technology becoming so integrated into our lives that reading something not presented through an electronic, super-sonic, magnetic, magical airwave Internet source will seem archaic to all but the antiquities collector. Oh, gasp if we must but just think how many years ago we didn’t even have cell phones or email and now how do we function in this business without them today?

Personally – I love hardback books of quality with paper that has been hand selected and where every element of creative design went into telling that story in the printing and publishing process. I understand how valuable this experience is. I understand the poetic romance of a great bookstore with a little bell that rings when I push open the door and lose myself in the most exotic, glamorous selections made by someone who owns that store and owns it because they are hooked beyond reason on this thing that love called books. But no matter how much I value these experiences, as I lay in front of the fire last night considering this blog and my words, I realized the truth as I know it, my concept of publishing, is already history.

I closed my eyes and thought about publishing ten years from now. Then twenty. Then fifty and beyond. I only made it as far as one hundred years. That’s when I realized that I am the antiquity. That someday, these precious hardback, signed first editions that I possess will be collectors items. (For this reason I am willing them to my grandchildren and buying as many as possible to add to their collection.) The second part of my understanding is that ultimately, it’s okay. The future comes toward us everyday bringing new challenges and answers. We are on the cusp of some of the most astounding developments and changes that writers or readers have ever seen.

Perhaps in the not too distant future, a great-grandchild of mine will open a book simply by pressing a button on their personal electronic device and in their very hands the 'page' of a book will appear – no Kindle or Apple reader needed. Perhaps – like pop-up books of old, portions of those books will become three dimensional and be acted out in 3d movie fashion right there on their desktop. Perhaps – the reader will wear virtual glasses to allow them to enter and move freely about in the world of the author’s creation. Who knows where the wings of time will ultimately take us.

All that aside, here is the most important thing to me. Even if I die with the knowledge that the books of our present are also a thing of our past, I will also know that writers will continue to be born into this world. The very art of storytelling will never die. It’s as much a part of our spiritual DNA as, “Let there be light.” We were created as part of a great, eternal story that is everlasting. And we were created to create. To tell the story of being human, of what it was like to live and laugh, to love and lose, to love again, to be born and die. In this great universe there cannot be a human race without writers and storytellers, the chroniclers of this wild adventure, this wonderful, bittersweet journey. What would be the point if someone didn't do the tellin'? From cave pictures to stories around the fire, those told on southern summer porches, and in the boardrooms up there in New York City - the tellin' continues. It always will.

The future of publishing? It lies just out out of my reach beyond my lifetime. But the future of storytelling? Oh, trust me - its in great hands.

River Jordan
" Kirkus Reviews described, The Messenger of Magnolia Street, as "a beautifully written atmospheric tale." It was applauded as "a tale of wonder" by Southern Living, who chose the novel as their Selects feature for March 2006, and described by other reviewers as " a riveting, magical mystery" and "a remarkable book."Her third novel, Saints In Limbo, was reviewed as a Southern Gothic Masterpiece by Paste Magazine.
Ms. Jordan teaches and speaks around the country on "The Passion of Story", and produces and hosts River Jordan Live radio program on WRFN, Nashville. River lives with her husband Owen Hicks, and their Great Pyrennees lap dog, Titan in Nashville, Tennessee. She thinks about where stories come from - places and people and moods of the heart while rocking on her front porch. And long after the sun sets over the ridge, she waits for the moon to rise, watches the stars come out, and stares off into the blue-night sky believing with all her might.

BREATHING WORDS

When I was a child I had this belief that when you were born you had a certain amount of words assigned to you and stored up (who knows where) inside your body. When you used up your allotment of words you fell over dead. Truth. I swear. I simply believed it with all my heart. It’s why I would sit wisely at my Grandmother’s feet as she and the old women who had come to visit from down the dirt road would huddle by the fire and talk and talk and talk. And there I am listening to all this gossip about whoyoucallit and whatshisname and whatshedid and I’d think to myself like a little sage, “So many words being lost, lost, lost. They are just wasting their lives!” But of course I never brought it up because I was planning to live for a long, long time.

Now when I mention this my mother asks me with a horrified expression, “Where in the world did you get such an idea?” I honestly say, “I don’t know.” I believed that way before I could talk which explains why I was such a quiet child. They thought I was simply well behaved. I was actually trying to remember to save the words for something really, very, important. This was easier when I was very young and content to be alone. It became tougher and tougher when I was taunted by Diane Bagget in the 2nd grade EVERY SINGLE DAY who promised she was going to whip my butt on the long walk home. (Now, I don’t remember why she wanted to do such a thing because like I said, I was a quiet and given to mindin’ my own business and had not TAUNTED her. But never mind all that because I had to waste some choice words to try to reason with her or to talk tough enough to escape a beating.)

It was third grade when I found out about the trees, those blessed creatures of God’s creation that feed us air. In other words - oxygen. “Which of course people need,” the teacher said, “TO BREATHE! (Emphasis mine). Something broke inside my mind, like an old, dusty, place being cracked open. The one that holds old ideas that don’t fit anymore. And a new truth replaced that spot somewhere in the Cortex of my brain. We breathe in oxygen. The trees feed us air. Our words are limitless! I can tell Diane Bagget to kiss my fuzzy head and drop dead without ME not dropping dead in mid-sentence! Oh, the wonder, the bliss, of possessing the freedom to communicate without self-censure.

I literally skipped all the way home from school that day. And I remember rushing up the stairs and into the house and explaining this glorious concept of OXYGEN and breathing and words forever to my Mother and her saying something like, “Well, of course that’s the way it works.” Just as if all people in the world are born knowing this. I bet I was a little more jovial and talkative than usual from that point on. Okay, maybe more talkative but no more jovial.
But now, here I find myself all these years later and words are still what I’m made up of whether it’s writing them, saying them, or just contemplating their purpose and their power. And that leads me to return to that childhood notion on occasion and dust it off, shake it and hold it up to the light. I mean, What if?

What if our words were as measured as our days and the two were intrinsically linked together? What would we say and what would we refrain from saying? As writers, as storytellers, where would we invest our courage and our passion?
With the turn of the calendar, I’ve been mulling over the old and the new, looking at 2008 and wondering what’s in store for us this year. And amazingly, for reason I’m not sure of, my thoughts turned immediately to this collective of jazzy, southern authors on, A Good Blog is Hard to Find. To the authors whose words grace these pages, and to the readers who follow those words like bread crumbs in the dark.

As the Good Book says, “Without a vision the people perish. Therefor, write the vision . . . ” and I thought of how I felt that this year, maybe more than any year that I’ve been aware of, I feel that people in our country are longing for a vision. That there are silent voices crying out for someone to paint a picture, to remind us of who we once were, to paint a picture of who we still could be. Maybe that’s why my thoughts straight here. As writers, particularly Southern writers, we are bridges to the past. There is no doubt or question about that. But I also feel we are conduits to the future. That just as surely as we can capture the past, preserve it, and breathe new life into it, we can reach out and touch a future that’s worth pulling into the present. I feel with all my heart that our words are meant to champion what is worthy of the human soul, to protect and promote it for all its worth. Whether we’re literary writers, mystery writers, writers of fantasy, sci-fi, true crime, or romance hot enough to make a girl blush, there’s power in those pens. And if there has ever been a season in all our sloppy solitude, in all our glorious, messy lives I think it’s now. I think the world needs its storytellers to act as mapmakers for the future. To paint a picture with our words that our children’s, children’s children can walk straight into. After-all, if our words did measure our souls in syllables, we would want a few of those to be a part of something larger than ourselves, and something that outlasts us for a very, very long time.

Hoping that 2008 brings wonders to your world. Happy New Year!


RIVER JORDAN is a storyteller of the southern variety and has been cast most frequently in the company of Flannery O’Connor and Harper Lee. Jordan’s novel The Messenger of Magnolia Street, (HarperSanFrancisco) was published in January 2006. Kirkus Reviews describes the novel as “a beautifully written atmospheric tale.” The Messenger of Magnolia Street was applauded as “a tale of wonder” by Southern Living Magazine, who chose The Messenger of Magnolia Street as their Selects feature for March 2006, and by other reviewers as “a riveting, magical mystery” and “a remarkable book.” The novel was also selected by as a major book of the month release for a major book club publication.Ms. Jordan teaches and speaks on ‘The Power of Story’, and produces and hosts the radio program BACKSTORY, on WRFN, 98.9 FM, Nashville Saturday’s 4:00-6:00 CST. She has just completed a new work of fiction. Jordan and her husband live in Nashville, TN. You may visit the author at www.riverjordan.us

Richland Balsam Epitaph

by Pamela Duncan

High in the Blue Ridge stands a graveyard, one of many on these mountaintops, eerie aeries where the dead stand erect, monuments to themselves. Richland Balsam does not sound dead or dying. Words rich and land and balsam ring full and heavy with sap and life: verdant, aromatic, green words. But only ghosts abide here now, ghosts of greenness, straight and sharp as needles, rising from the mountain, accusing the sky. Hollow white bones deny the sun with silvery glint. Falling corpses lean together, cry and tremble above decaying brothers. Richland Balsam mourns.

Before death, light lived here, thousands of feet above sea level, a sacred cathedral, hushed and quiet and cool. Sunlight filtered gently through evergreen mesh and tended earth swollen soft and full with blessings of rain. Mosses, lichens, ferns, shrubs – so many living things thrived beneath the sheltering canopy of Red Spruce and Fraser Fir. Inviolable and pristine, it seemed. Perhaps then, as now, merely a dream: secluded haven for fragile things.

Then the killers came, invisible, insidious, launched by millions unaware of their power to ravage, in a war instigated by ignorance and waged by apathy. Now acid rains, and where nature reigns, one law exists: survival of the fittest. This holocaust appears irreversible.


A few years back, some friends and I followed the Blue Ridge Parkway from Boone to Cherokee, NC. Although I'm a native North Carolinian, it was my first real trip on the Parkway, and I wanted to see it all, every mountain, tree, leaf, and hawk. One friend, a botanist, raved about the incredible beauty of a particular trail on top of a mountain called Richland Balsam (short for Richland Mountain of the Balsams). At 6,410 feet, it's the highest peak in the Great Balsam Range separating Haywood and Jackson Counties.

"You won't believe how lovely it is," my friend told me. "It's so green and perfect and pure, shadowy and cool. It's like stepping into a fairyland, a magical place."



At milepost 431.4, however, the fairyland is gone. The 1.5 mile nature trail still loops around the top of the mountain, and it is still a beautiful place, but now it winds through weeds and the rotting remains of Red Spruce (Picea rubens Sargent) and Fraser Fir (Abies fraseri [Pursh] Poiret). Defenders of Wildlife lists this type of forest as the second most endangered ecosystem in the United States. My friend told me that, although there is no concrete proof, scientists believe acid rain is responsible. It weakens the trees' resistance to the aphids which literally suck the life from them.

"But there must be some way to reverse this, to save these trees, this habitat," I said.

"No, there's really nothing anyone can do. All of these trees are dying now, and that means the fragile plant, animal, and microbial life that can only exist in their shelter will die too."

Later, excited by a mini-nursery of spruce seedlings apparently flourishing beneath a huge tree, I asked, "But won't these grow and replace the dead trees?"

"That tree is dying and, without its protection, the seedlings will die too. This forest may never grow back, and even if it does, it probably won't be in our lifetime."

In the silence that followed, the wind pushed pale dead trunks against one another and, as they moaned, I felt a raging inside myself at the needless loss of this small forest, or any part of the environment that humankind has damaged or killed.


I cannot accept feeling helpless. The only way to cope with my anger and sorrow is to do something. Whether or not Richland Balsam is lost, I must do something. I'm not a scientist, a leader, a crusader, or a reformer. The steps I take are small, but important to my peace of mind. Everyone can recycle, conserve, and protect, and there are numerous resources available to tell you how to do these things.

The point is to DO them. Every day. For the rest of your life. I've been as guilty as anyone of forgetfulness, laziness, or blatant indifference, but Richland Balsam changed my attitude. I saw one real result of apathy, and realized my responsibility. It's like voting. You may think, "What good can one individual do?" But the combination of every individual effort amounts to an incredibly powerful force that may just keep what's left of this planet, our habitat, alive.

Writer Robert McKee says, “Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.” I believe that has always been the case and always will be. So, as a writer, there’s something else I can do. I can tell the stories of places like this in our Appalachian mountains, places that are dying or disappearing at a terrifying rate. I can tell the stories of the people who live there, too. I can put the idea into the world that they are part of our history and our future, and that they are worth protecting.


(Novelist Pamela Duncan is the author of Moon Women, a Southeast Booksellers Association Award Finalist, and Plant Life, which won the 2003 Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction. She is the recipient of the 2007 James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South, awarded by the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Her third novel, The Big Beautiful, was published in March 2007. Visit her website at http://www.pameladuncan.com/.)

Telling the Story behind the Story (Or How I FINALLY Learned to Sell my Book!)

Authors are expected to be able to talk about their books in such a way that they sell the books. As in, “Tell me about your book.” Insert deer in the headlights look here because that’s me. And that’s some of my friends. Accomplished and talented writers who have written masterworks and couldn't’t tell you what their book was about if their life depended on it. The Creative Director of the publisher of The Messenger of Magnolia Street happened to fly into Nashville prior to the book making it to the printed completed page. He tells me a day prior to his arrival, “I’m looking forward to really hearing you describe your book. To tell me what it’s about.” Now this is after he has read the book, the entire publishing house has read the book, and they have bought and are publishing the book. The thing is, they want the author to describe exactly what type of book it is.
Okay, fine. I stay upstairs in my office working on this for about 3 hours. Then I venture downstairs and tell Mr. Wonderful, “I’ve got it. It’s good and it’s kinda spooky.”
“You’re a writer,” he says. “Go back upstairs until you can come up with something better than that.”
And then like a petulant thirteen year old I’m stomping back up the stairs whining and mumbling under my breath. But I never really did come up with something better. Not exactly. Because what I told the Creative Director, the Marketing Team, the Sales People and readers at all the speaking engagements time and travel permitted was, “ The Messenger of Magnolia Street is an Allegory about the things that are disappearing from the South. Well, more-so, about our ability as a society to listen. To remember. To tell and share stories. That our stories are becoming homogenized by our dependence on mass media. And somehow that mass media is telling us who we are. It’s about a battle between good and evil that is truly a symbolic representation for the battle that lies before us and within us.
This is about the time that peoples eyes turned glassy and rolled up in their heads. The fact is, people were not looking for a scholarly dissertation on the cultural relevance of the art of storytelling. They were looking for a story. Something to read that carried them on a journey.
And it’s not that all that I said about the book wasn’t true because it was, but it’s not the way to tell a story about a story. I know better. Really.
So it struck me as pretty funny when I was at the Kentucky Book Fair in Frankfort this year and showed up to my assigned table to find it laden with books and I’m talking laden that things took a turn. There was a mountain of beautiful hard back editions and paperbacks and even a big stack of my first novel, that mysterious, little, unknown gem, The Gin Girl. Oh, no, I’m thinking. I’ll be sitting behind this pile of books all day, sight unseen, and have to crawl out of here on my hands and knees to save face!
Then a lady picks up one of the novels, leans over the pile until she can see my eyes, and asks, “What’s your book about?”

And suddenly as if I had been sprinkled with the fairy-dust of my ancestors, I slid into my native tongue (backupinthererural) and said:

“Look here,” pause to catch a big breath, “It’s about this good ole boy from a small town in Alabama whose heart is just flat out broken when his Mama dies, so he takes off for the big city of Washington, DC and gets himself this important job with this powerful, southern Senator. Well, he stays there TWELVE YEARS if you can believe that and hasn’t even been back home once, so he is mighty shocked when he comes in from work one night and finds his brother AND his old high-school girlfriend waiting for him so that they can beg him to come back home because something mighty strange is going on. So he does. He goes home and before too long at all he is losing all that citified slickness like a snake sheds it’s skin.”

“He is?” she asks me, her eyes getting a little wider, leaning in a little farther over the stack.

“Sure thing. And the next thing you know he is back in his old, blue jeans and boots and riding around in the truck with his brother Billy and his old hound dog, Sonny Boy while they are trying to figure out what is happening. Why things are disappearing. Important things like peoples memories and their stories and even all that crystal, clear water down at the springs just drying and gone to the point nothing is left but fish scales and old bones.”
“Is that a fact?” the woman asks and holds the book, looking at the cover.

“Oh, yes mamn, it sure is. And then he is also spending quite a bit of time with that girlfriend - her name is Trice and she just a little special herself because she was found in a well when she was just a baby and that it's the book too but what I'm saying here is so you know there is going to be some sparks flying between them before long. You can’t just put a boy and girl together or near ‘bout any age riding around in a pick up on a spring night without there being developments. Well, I just don’t need to go there do I?”

“No, you are right about that. Matter of fact that’s how me and Earl started out courting, just riding around in his pick-up.”

“So you understand that all this is going on while they are trying hard to figure out what kind of strange things are happening but in the middle of this mystery they are eating biscuits and gravy down at their Aunt Kate’s diner and Nehemiah is remembering all the things that home is. And maybe just all the things that Washington isn’t even though those folks from Washington come looking for him to take him back. And get this,” I stand up now and lean over to tap her on the back of the arm, “An angel with an attitude is telling the whole story, watching everything and writing it down.”

“Really?”

“I ain’t lying. Really. And time is running out fast and they have to figure it all out before it's too late and the whole town disappears.”

“Oh,” she says, “I just have to have this book!”

And so did a whole lot of other people. And I didn’t have to crawl out of there at all. Matter of fact I left that day having learned something. Something I should have learned when the book first came out. How to tell the story behind the story.

Now I don’t think when my publisher asked me to describe the book that this was what they had in mind. Writers are taught to develop an elevator speech about their books to pitch them in a hurry. This means that if you step onto an elevator and there before you stands Steven Spielberg and he just happens to turn to the assistant as the doors shut behind you and says, “If only I could find a new movie project to work on. You know, just something good and a little spooky.” (Alright, alright - so he doesn’t say exactly that.) But the general idea is you have three minutes if you are lucky or until the next floor to convince Mr. Spielberg that your book is the thing. That it has layers and nuances and characters and love and forgiveness and poetry and place and mystery and history and laughter and by God, all the wonderful pathos that makes this life what it is.

I don’t think the southern allegorical references would capture the heart of Stephen Spielberg any more than any other reader. And, unless, the elevator was very slow, or broke down, I don’t think I’d get to morph into my family reunion tongue and tell him the whole story. I still don’t have a great elevator speech for anything. Ask me for a quick answer and your just as likely to get that deer in the headlights stare as you ever were. From the meaning of life to what I had for lunch to the weather. The fact is, there is no easy answer. And the story within the story is as convoluted and beautiful and messy as the story of being human. Maybe that’s our job as writers, to tell the story in out fiction that can’t be captured in a short-hand language that should be reserved for fortune cookies.

So here’s what I think I’m going to do. Should I step into an elevator with Mr. Spielberg, I’m going to slowly turn around and push that button that says STOP and once the elevator comes to a screeching halt and I have Mr. Spielberg’s full attention I’ll say, “Look here - I've got a story about southern biscuits and love and pick-up trucks and old dogs and the mystery that makes life worth living so listen up. There was this good old boy from Alabama whose heart just broke when his Momma died so he takes off and goes on up to the big city of Washington. DC that is . . .” (An audio podcast of this blog is available here. )

RIVER JORDAN is a southerner with a global perspective. Primarily, she’s a storyteller of the southern variety and has been cast most frequently in the company of Flannery O’Connor and Harper Lee and on strange occasion - Stephen King. Jordan’s writing career began as a playwright where she spent over ten years with the Loblolly Theatre group and received productions of her original works for the stage including Mama Jewels: Tales from Mullet Creek; Soul, Rhythm and Blues; and Virga.

Jordan’s novel The Messenger of Magnolia Street, (HarperSanFrancisco) was published in January 2006. Kirkus Reviews describes the novel as “a beautifully written atmospheric tale.” The Messenger of Magnolia Street was applauded as “a tale of wonder” by Southern Living Magazine, who chose The Messenger of Magnolia Street as their Selects feature for March 2006, and by other reviewers as “a riveting, magical mystery” and “a remarkable book.”

Ms. Jordan teaches and speaks on ‘The Power of Story’ around the country and produces and hosts the radio program BACKSTORY, on WRFN, 98.9 FM, Nashville Saturday’s at 4:00-6:00 CST. She has just completed a new work of fiction and a collection of essays. Jordan and her husband live in Nashville, TN. You may visit the author at www.riverjordan.us

I’ve been thinking a lot about stores lately. About stores and the way they make writers. Just about every writer I know of has a store of some kind in their past. Lee Smith—the Patron Saint of Southern Writers—often talks about the influence of growing up in her father’s five and dime in downtown Grundy, Virginia. Pamela Duncan (whom I call “Sister,” like any good Southern man would call his female best friend) recently posted right here about growing up listening to her grandmother, who was a wonderful store in her own right. Lots of Southern writers will tell you about grandmothers or Mamas or aunts being stores that taught them how to tell a story. One of my favorite writers, Thomas Hardy, soaked up much of the knowledge he would later use in his writing by attending the many square dances where his fiddler-father and uncles performed almost every week. Willa Cather’s most beautiful novels are the ones that were most heavily influenced by the store she lived in, a store populated by sad and beautiful immigrant women who would become the basis for such strong characters as Alexandra in O Pioneers and the title heroine of My Antonia.
I had so many stores I’ve had to sit down and make a list of all of them, and it’s been near impossible to figure out which was the most important.
First, there was the literal store I grew up in, my aunt’s little jottemdown store that served the tiny community of Fariston, Kentucky. Dot’s Grocery. If you don’t know what a jottemdown grocery is, that’s the kind of store you never, ever see any more. It was called a jottemdown grocery because on the counter there always laid a big, ragged, spiral notebook. At Dot’s, it was usually one from the Dollar General, bought twenty for a dollar at the start of the school year, more than likely with a red cover. Each page was headed by the name of a local community member. When they’d come in and get their groceries, Dot would figure up their tally and then they’d turn to their page and jot down the amount they owed her, which would be paid whenever their paycheck came in. Jottemdown. That’s what everybody called such stores back then, which really wasn’t so long ago. This was in the 70s and 80s, before WalMart took over America, back when a widow woman like my aunt could start her a little store in a little bitty house close to the road with a few candy bars, cigarettes, a good cold pop cooler, and actually see it grow.
Lots of people never paid off their credit at Dot’s Grocery, but every day they offered their stories, which I was always eager to hear. I loved to be in Dot’s Grocery with the big Stokermatic stove that got so hot it sometimes glowed red and the shelves and shelves of diapers and canned soup and Zagnuts and the big, terrifying, gold-framed picture of the blonde-headed Jesus looking down on us with longing in his sad blue eye, as if he too wanted to be part of the conversation. Here I learned about Mamie Spurlock’s kidney problems and Lester Conley’s many inabilities and Hy—short for Hyacinth—Shepherd’s affair with Vestal Stacy, who just so happened to be the preacher at the Holiness church where she was the choir leader.
But I learned more than just gossip: I learned about kindness when my aunt Dot grew sorry for poor mothers and gave them gallons of milk, erasing their marks in the notebook after they had left. I learned about boundaries when aunt Dot would run the same girls off if they had figured out she was kind-hearted and started to take advantage of her. I learned, by studying her in moments of silence, about being blue, which is something she went through her whole life, and is something people rarely talk about these days. In Dot’s moments of blueness I learned about silence—the nit nit of that red plastic clock that hang behind the register—even though she hardly ever stopped talking when she was in a good mood.
People in my family rarely stopped talking. We were raised to believe that it was impolite to let a silence fall. We told stories to survive. One of the few places in the world we ever hushed up—and rarely even there—was another store I grew up in: the Lily Holiness Church, where I spent two or three nights a week and every Sunday morning of the first seventeen years of my life. My brain and soul have the scars to prove it.
Despite how it messed me up to be raised going to church so much, I have accepted that that store was integral to my becoming a writer, and to my becoming a person. Here I learned how to observe, how to memorize, how to study people properly, and from different angles. There is not much formality in the Holiness church (one of its true qualities), so I was often allowed to stretch out beneath the pews, where I could closely—and unbeknownst to anyone else—study the lower parts of people. You can learn a whole lot about people from studying them only from the knee down. Some people never polished their shoes, for instance. Some people polished their shoes to a fare-thee-well. Some people come to church with mud caked on their shoes. These are important details to writers.
The most fun was to be beneath the pews when everyone started “shouting,” which is when they would holler out and dance in place and speak in tongues. I laid there and imagined an earthquake had come, or that God was holding the floor at opposite corners and bending it up and down to have his way with his Children. Sometimes I would doze off and awake to silence—very rarely, but sometimes, usually only when someone had just finished speaking in tongues and was waiting for the translation—and I would be assured that the Rapture had come and I had been the only one Left Behind. When this happened I always raised up too quickly, knocking my brains out on the hard underwood of the pew, the hit plomping out into the quiet of the church like a baseball being struck by a fast bat.
I learned the power of music and the hugeness of words was reinforced to me every single time someone would get up to testify and poetry would mysteriously fall out of their mouths. These were good, hard-working people who didn’t have much else but going to church, and when they stood up to give their testimony, well, it could make a believer out of anybody.

As a Holiness boy, I did everything with the other church members. We went to Mammoth Cave together. We ate together at least once a week. We sought each other out at the junior high, desperate to find companions that would not cuss nor talk about sex all day long. We went roller skating together on Gospel Night, all of us wearing our matching t-shirts that said HOLY ROLLERS on the back while we skated to the Singing Cooke Family or the McKameys. And all the time all of these people were telling stories, using words in a beautiful way.
The most important store, however, was my own family. We Southern writers tend to always go back to them, sooner or later. They’re all the material we’ll ever need.
My family was—is—loud and fiery. They grow tender as easily as they grow angry. And they know how to tell a story. They exaggerate, they zoom in on the perfect detail, they establish a rhythm. These are three of the most important thing a writer can learn.
There was my Uncle Dave, who was also an accomplished quilter, taught by his mother during an especially bad winter when they couldn’t get outside to work on anything else. But he was an even more accomplished story-teller. He told epics. Often family gatherings turned into a listening session when Dave would hold court, everyone gathered near while he kept us on the edges of our seats, either telling a ghost story or a funny story or some adventure he had had at some point. My favorite was the one about him riding a mule in the house just to scare his mother.
“She was cutting a big hen up to fry,” he’d start out. “I believe it was Christmas. Or Thanksgiving one. I don’t remember which. But she was hard at it, son, cutting that hen up, and I rode that old mule in real easy, real slow, gentle as you please, and got him right up behind her and all at once she felt his breath on her neck and she turned around—real real slow—and then she was eye to eye with that big old nasty mule and she just throwed that hen right up in the air and run out of the house.” He went into a fit of laughter, and through his glee, puffed out the rest: “And. That. Little woman. Never was afraid. Of nothing. But that liked to scared her. To death.”
I knew that one was too good to pass up; I used it in my first novel and received dozens of letters about that scene alone.
He sang little songs:

Oh, I had me a little chicken and she wouldn't lay nary egg

I took and poured me some hot water up and down her leg.

And the poor little hen hollered and the poor little hen begged,

But then the poor little chicken laid a hard-boiled egg.

He had dozens of those.
There was, most of all, my aunt, Sis, who always had a Winston planted firmly between her teeth. Sis loved music better than anyone I have ever known. She must have had ten thousand record albums, which I was assigned to keep in alphabetical order even though she never put them back where they belonged. Sis was ten years older than my mother and had taken on the position of grandmother in my life. I stayed with her as much as possible—often to escape going to church—but mostly because she let me do whatever I wanted. With Sis I could set up and watch the Late Movie, or Johnny Carson, or reruns of “The George Burns Show.” She’d make chocolate fudge at midnight, let me drink coffee, had me read articles out of her True Story magazines to her while she rested her eyes with a washcloth across her forehead, the blue smoke of the Winston twirling between us.
Sis did not have great judgment, bless her heart. She took me to see The Exorcist when I was four years old, for God’s sake. But her bad judgment was my great fortune, because every Saturday she and I went “yard-saling,” her favorite and most oft-used verb. And on these yard sale and flea market trips, she let me buy any book that I wanted. She had bought me a guitar in the hopes that I might become the next Eddie Rabbit, but when that didn’t pan out she realized that I might not have the desire to be a country singer but I sure had the determination to be a writer. So she bought me books. One of those books was Peyton Place, by Grace Metalious, which I found at the bottom of a greasy cardboard box at the flea market.
“Aye Lord, that’s a good’n right there now, I tell ye,” she said, talking around her cigarette, squinting at the cover of the book through the smoke. “I read that when it first come out, twenty year ago. It was a scandal, that book was. You’ll love it.”
I was nine.
So, that day she bought me two of the most important gifts anyone has ever given me: a tattered paperback of Peyton Place, and a ginormous Royal typewriter, which was solid metal. The typewriter was as big and brown as a small tank; it must have weighed two hundred pounds. Me, Sis, and the man who had sold it to us had to carry it to the car. But I ended up writing the first draft of my first novel on it.
Even though Peyton Place was considered incredibly dirty when it first came out in the 1950s, there is no denying the beauty of the prose in that book. Its influence can be found in all of my descriptive writing and also in the ways I try to get at the operations of a small town’s heart. In a way, I’ve always been trying to write a book that Sis will love as much.
There was also Mamaw, who always sprinkled new colloquialisms into her tales. Among my favorites was when she told me the story of my grandfather coming to the boarding school where she was a student to whisk her away on a date against the schoolmarm’s wishes. Mamaw sat on the couch, wrapped in a sweater and hunched over the heat register in the floor even though it was June outside, and said: “I stood up there on the big high porch and seen him down there on his little horse,” she said. “That mountain was steep as a calf’s face but buddy he just rode right up there and got me. I wrapped my arms around his waist and never did look back.”

I could go on and on. Those are only three of the storytellers—or store-keepers—that I was lucky enough to hear throughout my childhood. And what made this store—the family store, you might say, if you choose to be as corny as me—so particularly wonderful was that it was always populated by loads and loads of people. There was always a big bunch of people in my house, streaming in and out at all hours, staying for supper, staying the night, staying for a week or two sometimes. And they all told stories, they all used language in a specific, beautiful way that I just absolutely soaked up.
I have an image of myself as a childhood that I have more than likely made up. But it most likely happened at one point. Sometimes I see myself as a eight year old, standing in the middle of the living room, which is absolutely filled with every person in my family, all of whom are caught up in the act of telling a story. Some of them rear back and laugh, slapping their knees, probably laughing at their own jokes. Some dot Kleenex to their eyes, upset by their stories. Others are so caught up in telling their stories that they barely pause to breath or check to see if anyone is listening to anymore. A murmur that rises to a roar that threatens to blow the roof right off my childhood home’s house. The power of words, rising and rising.
That’s what is always present at these stores we writers remember, whether that store was the family or the church or a real little jottemdown store: words. Sentences. Stories. Language.
We survive because of stories. We live to tell our tale, to hear a tale told, to be part of a tale that is in the process of happening, just so it can be told later. People might think we Southerners are all ignorant and illiterate but secretly we’re all obsessed with words. I’m thankful for that, because otherwise I wouldn’t get to do what I love for a living. So every book I write is for the people who made me, the stories that made me. For the words.