The Written Word

Several years ago, at a Dickens of a Christmas event in Historic Downtown Franklin, the Council for the Written Word rented and staffed a booth to display our books and promote our literary projects, including an anthology with 31 local authors.  We were a non-profit organization with our goals – to educate, encourage, and empower local writers and the written word.  We researched and documented our literary heritage.  We have on our website, the names of 450-plus persons who have lived in Williamson County and written and published at least one complete book.

Frequently, people would see our name and for some reason assume we were a religious organization.  That probably explains a conversation that took place.  A lady from out of town, who was attending the festival, came to our booth and asked a question which took all of us by surprise.  She wanted to know if John, the Baptist, baptized Jesus in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.  Did he, should he baptize Jesus in the name Jesus?   Reaching into my Sunday school background, I came up with the “to fulfill all righteousness” response from Jesus, and admitted that I knew of no precedent for ritual or verbiage for baptism prior to John’s baptism.

She had been a Baptist, but now was non-denominational having found something more spiritual, she said.   Among her new-found faith she referred to tongues and snakes, and signs and wonders.  From her mannerisms, speech, and dress, I would have thought she might have more likely been an Episcopalian or up-scale Presbyterian, not someone with Pentecostal inclinations.

Many of our Williamson County authors write in the religious or inspirational genre, possibly half of those in our bibliography. Much of our heritage and current successes have been from historical fiction or non-fiction, much of it focused on the Battle of Franklin and life in the mid- and late-1800’s.  Our Williamson County writers Hall of Fame includes noted historians—Virginia Bowman, Jim Crutchfield, Vance Little, Rick Warwick, and Robert Hicks.

In 1993, when The Council began its research, we found 98 Williamson County published authors.  We published a small bibliography and presented our first Hall of Fame award to Virginia Bowman who at the time was the County historian.  Since that time we have worked with the Williamson County Library to put our bibliography on line.  If you google Council for the Written Word and find the home page and click on bibliography you find the full list of biographies and titles.  This is a continuing work in progress.  You may know a local author whose name is not included in our bibliography.  If so let me know and I can follow up for inclusion.

The first time I put my writing in book form, I was not aware of the vast heritage of Williamson County literature.  We find that people are impressed and surprised when they learn that we have 450-plus authors, past and present.  When I first published my play, To Think As a Pawn, the first question was, “is it about chess”, a logical question.  It was a good title and indicative of the plot, but I don’t know that anyone in Williamson County had published a play before 1990.  For my next book, I chose the title Politics, Preaching & Philosophy, thinking nobody would ask what the book is about.  Instead they have asked, “Are you a preacher?”

Back to our original premise, there is (or was, maybe not so anymore) a consensus that the published written word in Williamson County is either some commentary or exposition on the inspired word of God, or a stratagem of troop deployment and pageantry of the Confederate Army.  Consequently, most of local authorship was religious, or historical and archival narrative related to the War Between the States, specifically the Battle of Franklin.

Persons who teach creative writing often repeat the expression “finding your voice”, which defines your interests, knowledge, passions, and whatever grammatical skills you have found to convert thought to a readable configuration of written words.  I have often wished I were more astute in local history, or trained in the art of ministerial eloquence, to more easily fit the paradigm of local literature.

When you go to our website bibliography, you will find as many writing styles and subjects as you find listed authors.  The goal of the Council is to promote writers and the written word, religious or secular, fiction or non-fiction, poetry, humor, memoir, essay, and sponsor events– workshops, book-signings, lectures, and readings.  I am grateful to the Council for being supportive of my effort to find my voice in a play, a memoir, short stories, and essays.  My third book title was Random Thoughts Left & Right, which I also have not been able to explain, but a lot of people have read it, right and left.

Creative Writing 101

I frequently have opportunities to work with teachers and young writers in middle and high schools. I remind them of the accepted truism in writing, “Don’t tell me; show me.” I recently helped judge a writing assignment on a simple subject of Summer Vacations. Almost without exception, the pieces were simple narrative with interspersed emotional adjectives—fabulous, wonderful, exciting, fantastic, and similar words to express degree of enjoyment. There were few examples of sensory or visually emotive phrasing.

I am in awe of our classroom teachers who teach grammar and creative writing to a generation academically inhibited and semantically impaired by twitter and facebook. I don’t have the patience or skills to teach in the classroom. I often make author visits hoping to encourage or inspire students to write as an artistic venture of expression.

The focus of my writing is political, theological, and philosophical argumentation with occasional touches of irony and sarcasm. I often include ambiguous sentences that convey two conflicting opinions in a single sentence. Sometimes I do that to teach, sometimes to inspire, and usually to confuse as much as possible. Quite often in the effort to persuade, I neglect the simple figures of speech and sensory expressions that make reading fun.

I will share with you one of my favorite examples of “good writing” from my earlier book The South Side of Boston. This book is a memoir, simple stories told from the viewpoint of an eight-year-old boy in 1944. In the book he (me in third person, when I remember to so designate) explains the simplicity of southern axiomatic culture, and the complexity of southern mythology and philosophy within the academic limits of a second-grader in a one-room school in rural Williamson County.

In the narrative of the memoir, on his first day of school at the age of seven, he used poor judgment in continuing a game of cowboys and Indians beyond the attention span of another first-grader, who then beat the crap out of him. The fight was interrupted by older students, and the novice pugilists were taken to the teacher, Miss Gardner, to impose the proper disciplinary action.

The narrative continued as follows: (pp. 22-23) Miss Gardner didn’t whip me. She did something worse than that. She made me sit on her lap in front of everybody while she explained why little boys shouldn’t fight. I still had some swelling and dried blood from Donald Meacham five minutes ago and she didn’t have to tell me again. I wished she had been the young, pretty teacher that got married and moved to Nashville. I could hear Joe and Bobby laughing at me. I closed my eyes and pretended that she really was young and pretty. She had on a scratchy dress, like a feed-sack, not soft like Mammy’s flour-sack dresses. It was green and orange, about the colors of tobacco-worms and pumpkins. The colors were bright like it had never been washed. She had on some perfume that was the same kind and about how much was in a bottle that got broken at the dime store one Saturday night, and we had to open both back doors, because people were getting sick and about throw up. I kept sliding off her lap and she held me real tight. Her breasts hung down over her belt and over her round lap so there wasn’t any place for me to sit. I squeezed my eyelids real tight and tried to imagine how the young, pretty teacher must have looked. I could still hear Joe and Bobby laughing at me, and all I could see was the pumpkin and tobacco-worm feed-sack dress, and Miss Gardner’s wrinkled face, and was feeling sick from her perfume and wishing I could slide off her lap and through the cracks between the planks in the floor.