Many thanks to Simmons Buntin and everyone at Terrain.org for Stutter-Step: Poetry, Prose + Window Views, an excerpt from Glass Cabin. The excerpt includes artwork by Dan Shafer from the book as well as readings by Tina and me of the poems.
UAB Magazine features Glass Cabin in its fall issue. Many thanks to the folks at UAB’s Central Communications for writing the story and for coming out to the cabin to take photos in the hot summer.
Next up, Pinch Gut Creek —
Below is a list of the places where Tina and I will be reading, signing books, and yes, occasionally dancing on our Glass Cabin Tour. If you’re interested in having us dance and read at your place, or give a creative writing workshop, send us an email at southverve at gmail.com. We were asked to put together a playlist for our reading at Pink Porch Market, which took me back to my high school cassette-making days. Check it out and check back here for times and places as our dance card gets filled in —
ORDER of DANCES
Monroeville Literary Festival — Weekend, February 28, 2025 (tba) — Monroeville, Alabama
Hoover Public Library — Sunday, December 15, 2024, at 3pm — Hoover, Alabama
Denison University — November 20-22, 2024 (tba) — Granville, Ohio
Pinch Gut Creek — Sunday, November 10, 2024, at 2pm — Trussville, Alabama
Birmingham Arts Journal Reception and Reading — Sunday, October 27, 2024 — Leeds, Alabama
Solar Tour Alabama — Saturday, October 5, 2024 — Blount County, Alabama
Southern Exposure Films Premiere — Friday, September 27, 2024 — Birmingham, Alabama
Standard Deluxe — Thursday, September 12, 2024 — Waverly, Alabama
Auburn Oil Co. Booksellers — Wednesday, September 11, 2024 — Auburn, Alabama
Opelika Public Library — Tuesday, September 10, 2024 — Opelika, Alabama
AWC Conference — Saturday, September 7, 2024 — Orange Beach, Alabama
Harding University — Thursday, August 22, 2024 — Searcy, Arkansas
Wednesday Night Poetry — Wednesday, August 21, 2024 — Hot Springs, Arkansas
page and pallete — Saturday, August 3, 2024 — Fairhope, Alabama
Water Is Life — Tuesday, July 30, 2024 — Summer Reading Zoom Talk Series, Alabama Rivers Alliance
The NewSouth Bookstore— Thursday, July 25, 2024 — Montgomery, Alabama
The Birmingham Newcomers — Tuesday, July 16, 2024 — Hoover, Alabama
Pink Porch Market — Thursday, May 23, 2024 — Oneonta, Alabama
Plenty Downtown Bookshop — Monday, May 6, 2024 as part of Sawmill Poetry — Cookeville, Tennessee
Vickey’s Place — Sunday, April 28, 2024 — the Banks of Big Canoe Creek
Wednesday Night Poetry — Wednesday, April 24, 2024 — virtual reading
Thank You Books — Sunday, April 21, 2024 — Birmingham, Alabama
Glass Cabin is out in the world today! Just want to thank Pulley Press and all the wonderful people there who helped make this book. Pulley Press’s mission is to publish and celebrate rural poets. The poems in Glass Cabin chronicle the thirteen years Tina and I have spent building our home and living on Hydrangea Ridge.
I’m excited to say that Pulley Press contracted Tina and me to write a book of poems about living in our glass cabin. The book has just been published, and you can now order Glass Cabin.
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Building the cabin continues. Slowly. Everything we do is by hand. If you’re interested in knowing more about our life as writers, beekeepers, first-time builders and homesteaders, tadpole raisers, meadow makers, hawk watchers, and native plant propagators, you can go to my blog, Glass Cabin Diary, or you can go to our Instagram @glasscabindiary.
“Necessary Weight, Necessary Time” is the essay Tina and I wrote for What Things Cost: an anthology for the people: (University of Kentucky Press, release date March 7). Our essay is about the power and ache of work in our lives. We are very proud to be part of this wonderful book that is a fundraiser for the Poor People’s Campaign.
After the pandemic, Tina and I visited places and read from our books, This Ditch-Walking Love and Known by Salt. We’re grateful to the people who had us out and the audiences that attended. Below is the record of places. The Salt Love Tour is now over. But soon, the Glass Cabin Tour will begin.
Friday, February 23, 2024 at Triana for Smithsonian’s Crossroads: Change in Rural America
Thursday, November 9, 2023 at Jasper County High School
Tuesday, March 7, 2023 at The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Thursday, October 27, 2022 at Southern Connecticut State University
Wednesday, October 26, 2022 at Gateway City Arts in Holyoke
Monday, October 24, 2022 at Belding Memorial Library in Ashfield
Tuesday, October 18, 2022 at The Lava Center in Greenfield
Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at Kennesaw State University
Wednesday, March 2, 2022 at Wednesday Night Poetry in Hot Springs
Tuesday, March 1, 2022 at Harding University
Monday, February 28, 2022 at Hendrix College
Thursday, February 24, 2022 at Ferus Brewing
This Ditch-Walking Love won the Tartt First Fiction Award and is now in print. I want to thank Joe Taylor and everyone at Livingston Press at the University of West Alabama for choosing my collection of stories. I’m honored to receive the Tartt.
Ditch-Walking is set in the Murphrees Valley section of the Cumberland Plateau where ridges lift above what creeks and small rivers have made. No matter where you dig, shovels and rockbars hit chert, causing the ground to spark. That difficulty of breaking the land is heard in the way people speak here. It is rural and hilly here. Ravines spill into creeks that feed into the Locust Fork River. A chicken plant is the biggest employer. People work there or on farms, in the local schools, stores, churches, and the church of Walmart.
Because the characters in This Ditch-Walking Love don’t have enough money to carry them, they rely on a network of plateau fields, creeks, woods, and clay roads. It might be enough, a field row in August for walking and gathering tomatoes and okra up, or a bluff for jumping off of into the Fork, or a drive out to Jick’s Chevrolet just to see his hellfire cars. These are the places everyone goes to, looking for what they can’t make full on their own.
The stories in Ditch-Walking are first person accounts—two brothers searching for the dead body of a friend, a passerby happening upon a lynching, a daughter plotting against her grieving mother, and a nephew who finds a Ferris wheel instead of arrowheads buried on Brown’s land.
I’ve always written for the people I worked with in the watermelon and cantaloupe fields of South Georgia where I grew up, people defined by sweat and work and lots of laughter because laughter was the only counter you had for dealing with what was hard in your life. Their voices have given me my voice as a writer. My hope has been to give them stories in return, stories they could take part in. The people I’ve gotten to know on the Cumberland Plateau are not so distant. These stories are for them and for you.
Here is a review of Ditch-Walking from the Alabama Writers’ Forum—
I grew up in South Georgia on a small farm. We had cattle, peanut and melon crops, and pines for cutting. Days were for working, nights for walking the dirt road that split the land, and in winter, the sky. My writing comes from the humid air, the sand-grit of that place.
In 2024, Pulley Press will publish Glass Cabin, a book of poems Tina and I wrote about building our home in rural Alabama. We have been building for thirteen years now. The work goes slow because everything we do is by hand. By hand because of the costs, because we have other jobs, because we need to write. You can read more about us and our life on Instagram @glasscabindiary and at my blog, Glass Cabin Diary.
My collection of stories, This Ditch-Walking Love, winner of the Tartt Fiction Award, is set in the Murphrees Valley section of the Cumberland Plateau where I now live, where ridges lift above what creeks and small rivers have made. Because the characters in these stories don’t have enough money to carry them, they rely on a network of plateau fields, creeks, woods, and clay roads. It might be enough, a field row in August for walking and gathering tomatoes and okra up, or a bluff for jumping off of into the Locust Fork River, or a drive out to Jick’s Chevrolet just to see his hellfire cars. These are the places everyone goes to, looking for what they can’t make full on their own. This Ditch-Walking Love was published in 2021 by Livingston Press. I’m recording an audiobook of Ditch-Walking.
My novels Birmingham, 35 Miles and Snakeskin Road are about environmental disasters in a future South. Birmingham, 35 Miles follows a group of clay miners left behind to live in a dust bowl in Alabama. Snakeskin Road follows one woman leaving this dust bowl for what she hopes is something better. Both novels were inspired by summers of drought when I worked the melon fields, inspired by the people I worked with. My chapbook of poems, Weathervane, meditates on the connection between family and nature.
I’ve also received fellowships from Hot Springs National Park, Alabama State Council on the Arts, and Georgia Council for the Arts. I teach creative writing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Thank you for visiting. You can reach me here, southverve at gmail.com.
