My Book on Modern-Day Alabama

The time to write the modern-day Alabama book has come. After years of chipping away at the research, the planning, the flip-floppng about its style or genre, and now in more recent years writing dibs and dabs here and there (there are about 13,000 words so far) . . . now, sitting down to write it once and for all is the task at hand. There are no more excuses, no pressing obligations, no other due dates to publishers or editors, no classes to teach, no grant funded promises to make good, no freelance work to do . . . there is only one thing left: to write this book that I have been talking about for so long now, to say my peace about Alabama, what I see here, and what I have come to believe about what I see here. This Writer-in-Service Residency that the Lillian E. Smith Foundation has provided will give me two weeks to sit down, in relative isolation, away from my ordinary life and away from my family and friends, to write, hopefully with a clear head.

The title I am using is: You Can't Know Where You're Going (When There's Something in Your I). The title sums up my life in Alabama and how I have never really known what was going to happen next, my research about Alabama when I really didn't know what I was looking for, and my fellowship with the Surdna Foundation when quite literary there were times that I didn't know where I was going. The parenthetical subtitle intimates how pervasively Alabama has influenced my ideas and my life, having lived here all my life, and how much I have realized the extent of that influence.

I grew up in the post-Civil Rights South, a fact that I have been almost obsessed with for most of the last ten years. I see sub-text in everyday situations down here that most people don't have any idea is there, or don't want to admit is there, or don't want to discuss. I have paid close attention in my reading to how the South morphed during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, and close attention in my life to how it has morphed in the 2000s and 2010s. Too few books have dealt with the modern South, and even fewer with modern Alabama. Books like Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz, Dixie Rising by Peter Applebome, and The South of Haunted Dreams by Eddy Harris are all insightful and well-written, but what I have to write will be nothing like any of those.

Even though I don't endorse it as a solid strategy to my creative writing students, the poet Richard Hugo wrote in his widely read advice book, The Triggering Town, about letting the poem write itself; instead of sitting down with directed intentions to write a poem about x, y, or z, just sit down and start writing to see where it leads. That's kind of what I'm going to have to do to write this book . . . and like another poet, William Wordsworth, wrote in his much earlier work, the "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads, this work must be my reflections on the "spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions."

If you are unfamiliar with my work or this project that I am working on, the book is intended to be an exploration of my life in Alabama and my ideas about life in Alabama, and the culmination of my 2009-2010 Surdna Foundation fellowship project, when I was driving around the state to explore and to interview people.