"small towns, where my mind gets stuck"

Gettin' those golden synchronicities with S. G. Goodman & Martha Park. And a tiny challenge.

In last week’s FIELD TRIP I featured Tennessee writer and illustrator Martha Park, author of the beautiful new essay collection WORLD WITHOUT END, in the Good Southern Women Q&A Series. (I’m breathing new life into said series this summer, for real! Expect to meet several more artists over the next three months.) Last Thursday Martha paid us a visit at The Porch, and we chatted about the book and its themes and the writing life and all that. She spoke so eloquently about her work while I sat there wishing I could scribble notes or record the convo. She talked about the way Biblical stories take on new meanings over time, never meaning just one thing; they can mean new things to you depending on where you are in life, and indeed the same might be said of all stories we return to over time. (Which is one of the beautiful uses of art, generally: that every revisit with a piece reveals us newly to ourselves.) She talked about how her father’s sermons reflected this gift of rediscovery and re-visions: In them, he returned to Biblical stories again and again, finding new interpretive paths along which to lead his congregation.

She talked about uncertainty—which essay after essay grapples with so elegantly—and I thought about how her writing seems to appreciate ambiguity, to hold it up as a powerful place to be, gently championing the art of writing that does not argue a clearly-defined meaning or agenda. There’s so little of that these days, right?

And there was more... Thankfully one of our audience members, Sara Delheimer, posted a few choice bits on IG:

I really enjoyed reading WORLD WITHOUT END, but I think I might love returning to it all the more, opening it to re-read passages I’ve underlined and think about what they mean for me and how that meaning may have changed. There are some banger sentences within. Martha’s voice is the quiet-and-restrained-but-strong type that sneaks up on you with the weight of its ideas. A weighted blanket of a voice? Maybe so.

The evening also included one golden synchronicity that I haven’t yet mentioned to anyone. “Golden synchronicity” is my term for when moments when isolated sensory stimuli—which could be phrases uttered by a stranger, fleeting sights, an idea reverberating, a color or sound or song—from one’s immediate external world seem to speak clearly to one another over a short period of time. When it happens, it feels like a mysterious gift. I try to pay attention.

As I was looking over my conversation questions, waiting for Martha and others to arrive at the Porch House, I connected my phone to our bluetooth speaker and made a flash decision on a background tunes while people filed in. In the “New release from” category, Spotify was hawking me a new single by the Kentucky artist S.G. Goodman, and this seemed possibly apropos, given that we’d be talking about essays located in the South, so I hit play, figuring whatever the alg served up after it would also be the correct vibe.

Goodman’s new song “Snapping Turtle” began, and a little ways in I caught a line that becomes the song’s refrain:

Ooooh, small towns, where my mind gets stuck

That simple refrain—it encapsulated something that I think feels germane to Martha’s book (and in her GSW interview; see the last question): a sense of abiding curiosity (and trouble, and ambivalence) about Southern places where we have formative experiences, where the land and people and history, present and past, all bleed together in moments that lodge deep within us. Where the questions begin and won’t quit; where the questions lead to more questions. Where an image, so fleeting in real life, stays with you for eras, its meaning changing like the patina of an old truck.

It wasn’t exactly a direct connection, this line and her book—if the song had mentioned, say, the Ark Encounter or the torreya tree or ivory-billed woodpeckers, I woulda spit out my beer—but a shared current of the kind that always makes me feel like I’m receiving a message, a friendly nod, like, yup, keep a-goin’ down that trail, babe. There’s something here for you.

If “Snapping Turtle” and the two tracks accompanying it, “Satellite” and “Fire Sign,” are an indicator, S.G. Goodman’s forthcoming album, Planting by the Signs, is going to be absolutely amazing. (That title, omg! And the storytelling in “Snapping Turtle” is just…fire. I love the echoey, scraping-the-sky ambient texture of the song, too.) Would that I could get her to do the GSW Q&A one of these days…. (Someone send this to her…I’m summoning you now…)

So it’s not only Lorde summer and Wet Leg summer, it’s S.G. Goodman summer? Here. For. It.

Oh, and the day after the conversation, I came across this:

A tiny challenge:

Because this was a Porch thang, we wanted the audience to have a chance to write. So I came up with some prompts based on Martha’s book. The one she and I chose to offer the audience was this:

Describe a place in the South where you’ve witnessed some kind of change, whether to the landscape, to the people and built environment of the place, or both.

As always, it was delightful to hear what a few folks wrote about. One woman wrote of a big magnolia tree from her childhood that had actually grown smaller due to her mom’s avid pruning over the years. Another wrote of a railroad terminal in a tiny Southern town, where she got married. Another still wrote of familiar buildings of her youth, how they’ve been added onto, how jarring it is to see them that way when she returns home.

I love listening to how people write about places of significance to them. It never gets old.

The other prompts I considered were these:

Write about a time when your faith was called into question. (Doesn’t have to be religious faith, just faith in something.) What were your sensory perceptions of that moment? Can you picture the room, the surroundings; can you smell or hear this place?

What does faith look like for you today? What images do you associate with it? Describe a setting where you feel connected to others by some kind of belief system, no matter how secular it may be or seem.

Let me know if you try any of the above. And here’s one more, from our conversation: To begin writing about a place, draw it first.

Songs for the week (Songs FTW!):

“Snapping Turtle,” by S.G. Goodman: A beautiful, aching song in every way:

Speaking of great image-making, there’s a lot of that happening on the new album from Friendship, a band I’m newly exploring. I love that this slow-burn track below begins with the line “‘02 Corolla / Blastin’ the heat.” (There is a shitty old Corolla at the center of The Come Apart. 😉 After hearing this song I immediately tried to convince my daughter to name her new band LIL COROLLA. I regret to inform that she declined.)

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