Fragments From Floyd

I feel it, don’t you–the turning inward that comes in these shorter days? The earth and I tilt away from heat and light, from the exuberance of summer, and now past the decline of fall, I settle here in the womb of early winter.

What is it I expect to find in this moment, this one room, a single lamp beside me the only sun. Nothing but my fingers move, my mind wanders in place, I wait.

It is nothing less than everything I want to grasp. Its secret is in the passing present–infinity; in the space under the waiting palms of my hands, resting–the cosmos.

We are given so much wisdom in small things. Be still, and know.

When I browsed across this image of the repeating pattern of an aloe plant yesterday, patterns in my own archives came to mind–of the beauty and mathematical order of nature–this millipede image I’ve superimposed here, in particular.

I follow the spiral toward the center. Until spring. And then…

That’s a borrowed phrase–as some may remember–used to describe a perceived deficit during GB the Elder’s reign. He lacked any clear port to steer toward in his administration. Unfortunately, the current Potentate the Younger suffers no such lack of vision. It’s what he sees so clearly as his mission that scares the daylights out of me.

Sorry, that is only a tangent taken once the post title popped up there. I want to think about more important matters than presidential manifest destiny. I need to be considering in the months ahead The Goose Creek Vision Thing.

With the coming of autumn, I feel less and less the pull of the currents that have swept me along for the past six months, the past 18 months, really, since Slow Road was dropped on my doorstep in April 2006.

Winter ahead holds the potential for a kind of stillness, for waters wider, deeper and less irresistable in its tug on my time and energy. I hope to be able to steer this tiny craft in the direction I chose. But where do I chose to go with the short days of the winter months, chill dark days that I hope will become a time to take stock and draw up the map of where to go from here? I really need the vision thing.

While there are a couple of larger destinations I might plan for, it is in the coalescing of a vision for another book that needs to take the highest priority. What will be its audience, its tone and voice, its composition, feel and character?

I have just started (yet again) to brainstorm some of these issues–a process whose results will constantly change. Here’s a beginning on answering “What will a reader come away with?” and of course one book at least from this source can’t begin to meet all these reader needs. But its a start. Your input is welcomed, of course.

What would you like to see in a full-color nature-centered book of Fragments images and text? What would make you pick it off the shelf and take it home–for you or your children or grandchildren (small, growing or grown-up?)

• They will want to know more and more about more and more, begin to build relationships and memories in the out of doors
• They will gain an enhanced sense of seasons and when and where to expect certain creatures again next fall or summer
• They will come away more with a sense of and care for nature than lots of factoids about it
• Parents will be encouraged and empowered to go outdoors with their children and begin the conversation with nature, guide their kids toward spontaneous discovery and play, using their muscles, senses and imaginations
• A new or renewed appreciation for the world not made by man
• A slower sense of time, a reduced sense of hurry, the ability to be a passive watcher and an active seeker
• Learn to see beyond the surface in the natural world
• Look for lessons in the ordinary, for pattern, shape, texture and the relationship of form to function
• They will be excited about what can be learned and experienced by paying attention to things and places once ignored or taken for granted
• Find meaning and significance in living nature, the lessons it has to teach about cooperation, recycling, economy and time
• Gain a better sense of themselves in the grand scheme of things and begin to comprehend their connectedness to the living world
• They will feel compelled to take better care of the planet the more they learn of it
• Rekindle curiosity to know more as they come to distinguish one kind of similar thing from another, to notice differences where there had been only like-ness

I am grateful to Jerry Haines for bringing Slow Road Home into the view of readers in the DC area and beyond in his column, Road Reads, in the Washington Post Travel Section. The brief review is online now (you may have to register) and will be in print in the paper on Sunday, May 20, 2007; Page P02

This mention represents a disproportionately wide reach for a small book about small things from a small place. I look forward to finding out that even in the bigger burgs and busier burbs, there’s still a receptive heart for words about places that are slow. And quiet. But not ordinary!

From the unpredictable alchemy of connection between new readers and the story of Slow Road Home, this writer’s journey has taken much of its energy, enthusiasm and joy. You just never know what new friends, places and opportunities to share will open up, even from the least threads of synapse. And this is no small thread.

The summer, until late August, is open for book travel and talk. I’m hoping I’ll become plesantly “booked” and that this web of conversation with the words of the book and the photo-images will continue to grow and blossom.

Note: There’s also a link to the WaPo piece from the “What Readers Say” page on the book website.

Speech to Text Update:
I’ve been training Dragon naturally speaking for couple of months now, and it’s finally starting to get a little smarter. I’m using it for almost all my e-mail, which saves me thousands of keystrokes everyday. (I’m using it to dictate this post, and that process of speaking text is coming more easily. It is improving my diction, and possibly will make it possible someday for me to speak with the intelligence of a six-year-old when leaving a voice message on an answering machine. One can always hope!) I still can’t trust it completely, and have to carefully proofread everything — especially at work with patient evaluations and related medical paperwork. I understand that the medical transcriptionists at the hospital across from the clinic are using the program extensively in medical dictation. It may not be perfect, but my wrists and plums are thankful for the technology.(Note the unintended fruit in the previous uncorrected sentence).

Speaking of Ergonomics:
If I read or used a laptop in bed, I would be more interested in this product called LapDawg. It’s a little pricey, but considering the cost of wrist, shoulder or neck problems that are made worse while reading or using a laptop keyboard, it’s really pretty good deal. I’ll be able to recommend it to my patients, many of whom read in bed and to whom I offer the advice: put the bend in the book take it out of your neck. Simply propping a book on a pillow in your lap is one step in this direction. But this little stand is way better.

Summer Writers Workshop:
I just got the brochure from Hindman Settlement School regarding their summer writers workshop. I came home from this workshop in 2005 profoundly changed by five days among top tier Appalachian authors. I’m seriously considering going back this year to hang out among the likes of Lee Smith, Robert Morgan, Sharyn McCrumb, Joyce Dyer, Silas House, Meredith Sue Willis, Jack Higgs, Kathyrn Stripling Byer, Lisa Alther, George Ella Lyon, Gurney Norman and others. I’m in Kentucky is not one of those places you would pick out to go with the end of the hottest month of the year, but the suffering should be far outweighed by the inspiration, motivation, and encouragement but hopefully become from the investment of the week on Troublesome Creek.

Finally, Google Book Search will carry you to a page where parts of Slow Road Home can be viewed.

You can see the front and back cover in color. You can peruse the table of contents.

And you can see parts of many but all of not so many of the 108 vignettes in the book. Why? Because I chose the option to make 20% of the book readable.

But I would have chosen to make more contiguous pieces readable so once a potential book buyer begins reading for the flavor of the book, they could complete the thought to the end of the piece. With the exception of a couple, none of the short passages in the book is longer than two pages, so I’d have been happier to have the limit at two contiguous pages. But Google didn’t give me that option.

And I find this read-from-the-book function doesn’t work for me using FireFox. I have to switch to MSIE. Will you let me know if your experience is the same? I’m in communication with Google about this, and they were unaware of the problem with FireFox. I need to know if it’s just me.

I’m wondering how much I’d give away to make the whole book readable. Would that make it MORE likely for a browser to purchase the book, or LESS, having access to it all via Google Book Search? Your thoughts…

(If this way of seeing excerpts doesn’t work for you, I’ve pulled some together on the book website, here.

I feel the first stirrings out of hibernation after a long winter of oblivion to writing, speaking, thinking about Slow Road Home or whatever might come next.

I’ll have at least two events between now and the middle of April to make me think in concrete terms about the future of my writing and photography–two complementary passions I hope to bring together in new ways in the coming book year.

For both my events (in Wytheville VA and Birmingham AL) I will arrange for a digital projector to run a little pictorial preamble before my discussion about writing, Goose Creek, sense of place, and Slow Road Home.

I think if listeners can gain a visual context for the story, it will mean so much more to them. Do you agree?

And so, even if “whatever comes next” borrows heavily from SRH, it is a second step I think worth taking, plus of course adding some new material as well. Details very much TBA.

But the book year is about to bloom. What it took to make me realize this is the call I got yesterday requesting more books for my best public perveyor to Floyd visitors: Bell’s Studio and Garden on Main Street, just down from Oddfellas Cantina.

I am so proud to have my book on their checkout counter. If you come to town, be sure and stop by to see Billy Bell’s incredible photographic prints, JoAnne Bell’s glass creations, and other pieces representing local craftspeople. Plus, it’s just such a nice place to hang out and get a sense of the heart of Floyd.

Here’s David St. Lawrence’s account of the Bells’ fine establishment, written at the time of their opening–coincidentally taking place the same day in April that 1100 copies of Slow Road Home were delivered to Goose Creek! Find store hours and more details on my Nameless Creek site.

I don’t have many photos of this place where Goose Creek and Nameless Creek come together. And yet, this is one of my favorite places on our land, visually, even though it is very near the road. (You can just see the barn roof near the upper edge of the scene. I’m literally hanging from a tree trunk to get this picture from the top of a rock bluff. You see what risks I take for you, blog readers!)

But more than what meets the eye, the whole notion of convergence, of flowing together to make a larger stream–of water, of experience or of thought–is somehow central to this process of becoming and belonging.

Convergence, a coming together. The making of wholes from fragments. There is something in this.

I have a place I hope to go and a vague map of how to get there, but I need your help.

Many people have been disappointed that Slow Road Home does not include the images–either based on their expectations from knowing Fragments, or to more casual browsers at places like my recent winery book table, seeing the full-color cover and sadly finding no color inside.

Whatever comes next in the way of printed matter will include color images. Now just exactly what form that will take is where I need some feedback. And I’m in the very early stages of this process so don’t even know what to tell you is on the menu. I do have some early ideas though.

Of course the images will come from Goose Creek mostly, from Floyd County exclusively. And there will be text that either seeks out an image after being written, or more likely, that springs from the images once they are brought home to be contemplated–much in the way I have been taking “ordinary” landscapes during the past couple of weeks and saying a few words about the where and the so-what of them (even though the writing is not terribly polished or for a book audience.)

The color-image book would also go back and select a few of the Slow Road pieces that already have images from my archives that I’ve used to illustrate those pieces in my “photomemoir” presentation.

It might be arranged seasonally, where one option for a part of such an arrangement would be to have 4 to 6 set camera points (here at home) with images taken from that exact camera position in each of the four seasons.

Another way to organize would be topically by chapters: the creek, the dog, the woods, the barn, nature, etc. (The image with this post, by the way, was taken facing south along the creek from just down on the creek from the place where this image you saw a few days ago was taken. Tomorrow, a view NORTH along Nameless Creek from the same tripod position.)

The book’s images and words should to tell a story, reach some destination, leave the reader with a sense of the whole of this little microcosm (both the outer and the author’s inner landscape). I should paint some of myself into the images and the narrative that goes with them. Just how to do that is what I’m thinking a lot about just now.

I just wanted you to know, and to think and feel along with me as I show you little bits of this process here from time to time. There is some kind of method to my haphazard madness–I just have to find out what that it is all about.

In usual fashion after I have made a major purchase (a rare and usually long-contemplated crisis in our household), it seems that a combination of curiosity and angst makes me go looking to see what kind of damage I’ve done. (the “you coulda had a V8 reflex, I suppose.)

And, as I imagined, the reviews of the telephoto lens I’ve purchased are all over the map. I think the consensus among those people that are not absolute purists on the Nikon Forums is that the 18-200mm lens will do exactly what I expect it will do, provided my expectations are realistic for a consumer grade lens with an 11 factor zoom.

I have, however, decided for the time being to keep the D70 body and the lenses I have, as the three lenses and two camera bodies will be interchangeable. It would be a luxury, granted, to have a backup camera (as opposed to selling it and making a little bit to replace the cash outlay about which I feel some small degree of guilt) but I have in the past done without a camera for more than a month while my mine went back to Nikon for repair, and I never want to do that again. Funny: it was the $1200-1500 I expected to make in the sales of my present equiptment that tipped me toward this purchase, and now I’m waffling on that. Oh fickle man that I am.

However, says the devil on my left shoulder, remember that since you have gone to digital as-needed printing for Slow Road Home, there won’t be the big outlay for a thousand books like there was last year. This year, you can move your focus (no pun intended he assures me) to photography, and this camera is a lifetime investment that may in turn bring you income! (I like the way that Rascal Rationalizer thinks!)

Frankly, part of my decision was ergonomic: especially the 80-200 lens is heavy and difficult for my hands to hold, and I’m not able to very quickly (or comfortably) change lenses when the need arises suddenly. Having a single lens that will in most cases cover from wide-angle to telephoto will be a real joy, while the quality may not be 100% of what it would be with a professional lens. I am, after all, more interested in getting the shot than in a shot being perfect; it is more about making a memory money.

Heck, nothing I have written is perfect by a longshot, and yet it has often been satisfying to have said it. I have similarly-realistic expectations for the photography, and perhaps both imperfect expressions taken together will come close to saying what it is that I want to say. I think that’s an obtainable objective for any future marriage between images in words and pixels.

“There is nothing ordinary” I said in the author’s note to the book. And yet, I realize I’ve let our close-at-hand human habitat become just that: nothing but the background canvas on which the more immediate and seemingly-relevant events (most of them indoors and by way of a computer monitor) take place.

One of my New Year’s goals is to reverse this relative numbness and indifference to those fragments of ordinary life here that, four years ago, became new to me because they were new to you, the readers of this blog. Of course, that readership has been replaced by fresh batches of visitors several times over, and so I hope to recover a sense of newness in this new year, see the familiar through new eyes as if waking from a long sleep. And I’ll take the risk of showing or telling you something I’ve shown or told before.

Here’s an example: in all my archives of images, until yesterday, I had never taken one from just off the back porch facing the pasture, the barn and the valley of Nameless Creek. I guess I just thought since it was not ten feet from the house, it wasn’t image-worthy. It is the view we see when we put the dog’s bowl out on the back porch in the mornings.

And yet, it is the still-life tableau before us far more often than quick glimpses of the back reaches of the creek in the gorge at the far end of our property. This is a look out our window, so to speak–the beauty we can touch with our eyes. This is the light that comes to us in early January facing south as the sun rises over a frosty field while we are still in our slippers.

There is the barn–again, and I will stop apologizing for showing you yet another image of it. And the little bridge over the branch flows under the bridge, still babbling with the rains of New Year’s Day. You can see the mailbox–the one near the right margin of the cover of the book, and the maple tree, also on the book cover and seen again up closer, backlit on the blog a few days back. The road and creek pass just front and back of the tree.

And look: the tiny HeresHome sign that faces the road. I remember what a wonderful day it was in November, 1999, to plant that aluminum “flag” and claim this place for our family. And–I didn’t know it then–to share our ordinary with readers and viewers all over the world.