ramblings

Sometimes I write things that I don't want to go through the effort of formally publishing, but I do think some folks might like to read. If you really love what I'm doing with words and in the world, this space is for you. 

Thank you. 

*ramblings* ungraciously stolen from Jenny Moyer

Jack “Ti Jean” Kerouac, my first entry in this journal, and I am at your grave in Lowell. I have finished a graduate program in English and your life is the one I want to honor. And I want to show you gratitude as well. Without your novels, I’m not sure I would’ve found myself. I certainly wouldn’t’ve found my freedom, which is what led to my true independence.

It's a windy day. The kind that nearly knocks you over. The cemetery is peaceful and the stretched out cotton ball clouds are moving steadily across the bluest sky I’ve seen in weeks. Truly. I know cemeteries are quiet places, but I am always in awe of just how quiet they are.

There is a man pacing the block where you rest and I can’t help seeing you in his stout frame and white-headedness, wearing a plaid shirt and black slacks. Your uniform to a T.

I have never felt so comforted by a grave. I am leaning into your 2014 memorial marker the way you lean into loved ones you’ve missed for longer than you’ve ever missed someone. Thank you for being my comfort. For teaching me that there is something wholly human about misery and that running from pain is impossible, so we might as well sit with it. I’m not naïve. I know that you struggled to learn this yourself, so your novels saved me at least half a lifetime of pain. But, like Ginsberg said to you and I’ve claimed, “We got too much else to do besides suffer.”

An aqua mylar balloon floats stringless over my head and nearly into the old maple, maybe sycamore – I can’t tell from here – that was probably young when you were young. It floats in and out of sight and I think about letting go. Letting go of suffering. Letting loss be part of the cycle and not such a heart-stopping tragedy. Letting go of endings so that new beginnings can flourish in that compost of life, the turnover.

Grad school is brutal. I’ve rarely written for myself in two years and now, at your grave, the feelings pour out like water over rocks.

I am grateful.

I am grateful.

I am grateful.

This balances all the hateful bitterness I’ve carried over a lover who scorned me when I needed him most. The first person I trusted with my heart since the boy who brought me to you. The man who gave me the cat I named for you. Ti Jean. You would adore him. And here I can let go of the hatred to make space for gratitude – because we got too much else to do besides suffer.

I came here alone. My first proper road trip alone, at least this first leg. This feels only right, only appropriate. This is a moment I needed to experience unrushed, in solitude.

Have people always walked in graveyards here? For exercise? Or is this something the new millennium has brought us? I ask because a nurse walked by. Your elderly ghost seems to have gone home. But I figure if you haven’t been reborn or redistributed into a dozen different lifeforms by now that you still haunt this town yourself. I know your legacy lives on. You still inspire so many. Myself included.

I am grateful.

If there’s one thang I know, it’s how to burn a bridge while I’m still standin’ on the sonofabitch.

August 1, 2026

I’ve spent a lot of time agonizin’ over and confused by why I can’t seem to break into markets that, by all perceivable means, should welcome my more regional style poems. Appalachian poems. Southern poems. Genealogy poems. Poems that I wrote to sound like me and my Pawpaw and my Momma and my Dad and Grandad and my cousins on my Momma’s side. Poems that I wrote the way I wrote because I want folks to feel the rhythm and read the beauty of a tongue that is being scrubbed away by the shame we’re steeped in ever’time we open our mouths outside of our small towns and hollars. I’ve gotten a few in here’n’there. But, most often what happens is that I get a rejection and then I see the latest edition, and everythang in that journal is polished, standard academic English. (I guess I should get that from the previous issues, but when I read “we want something different, something unique,” I take that at face value.)

Well, recently, after gettin’ a residency with a packet full of these poems as my writin’ sample, I decided to try to get some of ‘em published. Rejection after rejection on most of ‘em. A few are gonna come out in journals and a few were shortlisted for a big prize. But what’s really stuck in my craw is a response I got from one of the editors offerin’ to take a poem “with significant revision,” primarily to scrub out the dialect. A few other comments about the content, which really were just runnin’ into the point and still missin’ it. But, some people step on the shovel blade and hit themselves in the face with the handle instead of pickin’ it up to dig into the discomfort and discover the source of that dis-ease. The latter I’ll forgive. The dialect part? In a regional writing journal? Naw.

How dare you? How can you call yourself a representative of a region whose rich and diverse linguistic expressions and varieties you clearly don’t respect? How can you seriously expect people to learn to love that landscape and it’s layered, fertile linguistics if you polish it out of ev’ry piece you publish?

Truth is, without the dialect, these particular poems are nothin’. They lose all that makes them special, and they lose the very link to my family line that I’m tryin’ to honor through this collection I’m workin’ on.

Truth is, a view such as this one indicates a flattened perspective, and a narrow goal for who to reach with this work. An audience of academics and elites in an echo chamber is one I’d rather be criticized by than accepted into.

Truth is, even beyond my reaction to the disdain for dialect, I’m comin’ from a lineage of writers who aim not for fittin’ in with what’s already happenin’, but strive for something that feels real to the people it represents. Somethin’ that takes a risk but knows the risk is what is right. Somethin’ that flows and leans into rhythm and is meant to be read with soul. This particular insight hit me last night when I was watchin’ What Happened to Kerouac? Stunning braided documentary in its own write (right), but what got me was how every person interviewed venerated Jack for the way he stuck to his spontaneous prose approach and how he leaned, full-force into the feel of the language in his work. They all spoke to how Ti Jean had the skill and the intelligence to write pretty, polished, standard English, but that he chose, to the detriment of his commercial success (at least, for the most part, in his lifetime), to take the risk of doin’ somethin’ deemed in those days to lack skill, forever trapped between apotheosis and damnation by literary critics and publishers who decreed themselves the all-knowing authorities on the written word. Not to equate myself with Jack, but this shit with the dialect, well, it feels like that. It feels like knowin’ that somewhere in some place more posh than ever I care to be, someone’s sayin’, “that’s not writing. That’s typing.” So go on and shovel shit on my name if that’s how you feel. I’d rather be notorious for being my real self than be known for a polish that ain’t true.

In my shock, I shared screenshots of that response and “acceptance with strings” with a few fellow Appalachians. One said, “oh, I think Ann Pancake would have something to say about this.” Another, a dear friend, a college Dean, and fellow Appalachian writer, Stephanie Tolliver Hyman, had an even more intense reaction. She went on for several minutes about how she’d’ve lost it if someone’d told her to quell her mother tongue, to erase her identity and very soul for the sake of publication.

And y’know what? She’s right. People like us, we don’t write for the folks who think they know best or the people who want to polish out the rough spots. We write for the people who’ve never seen themselves reflected in a novel before; those who’ve never read a poem and felt it roil in the pit of their stomach with a truth they didn’t realize writers or “the literary type” could possibly understand; the folks who’ve known little more than discrimination and judgement that’s triggered by the way we sound when we talk; the people who carry the weight of discouragement in their vocal cords, knowin’ that they’ll be put to trial just because their English ain’t purdy enough; the youth who could never get into the popular books or much of the literary canon because it was all too foreign, steeped in a properness we waddn’t raised with and middleclass lifestyles entirely alien to our land-rich, money-poor worldviews.

The writers who’ve made me feel seen and known? Dorothy Allison. Tiffany McDaniel. Scott MacClanahan. Ann Pancake. Donald Ray Pollack. Robert Gipe. People whose writin’ actually leans into accent. People whose writin’ doesn’t shy away from showin’ the beauty and humanity and the raw, undiluted truth of what it means to be of these mountains, to be of the South, in ways that cain’t be extricated from the landscape or the language that’s just as much a part of these regions as the people and the plants and the animals.

And don’t get me started on these people who call Allison and McDaniel “trauma porn.” If you cain’t stand it, it ain’t for you. Cause there’s plenty of people like me who need this literature, regardless of your discomfort with it. If it disturbs you to see the truth of lives that’ve known real darkness, good. “Art should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed,” (or something like that). Literature is meant to expand your horizons, to show you sides of humanity you’ve never encountered to help you cultivate empathy, and people like us’ve been swept under the rug in favor of the middle and upper classes for far, far too long.

Don’t get me started, either, on how women get called out for their “trauma porn,” while men get lauded for it. I’m Drag Queen level-sass looking at you, Cormac McCarthy. Not your fault though. I still love your style, Cormac.

Back to the thesis: You cain’t erase a person’s dialect and think that the soul of the piece is still there.

If this whole “present it polished and the folks will read the accent and dialect anyways” perspective worked, I wouldn’t’ve run into some smug yuppy schmuck in Elk Gardens going on and on degrading the “fat and simple-minded” people of Southwestern Virginia he encountered on his vacation to the region. This outsider, steeped in his privilege, went on and on to some strangers where the trail forks about how vacant and empty-headed and uncivilized these mountain people are. I blocked his exact words from my psyche, cause my rage was white-hot and blindin’ at that point, but the ignorance and judgement and discrimination and the “I-am-above-these-backwards-hillbillies-ness” of it is chokin’ up my throat and crushin’ my heart, even now, months after hearin’ his bullshit. Part of the most crucial work of literature, especially literature of place, is to fight the kind of ignorance that had me wantin’ to fight some white man in the woods. (Please understand, I may be educated, but the core of me was raised to fight first and get away before the law comes. Questions be damned. If I gotta ask questions, then I didn’t need to throw hands.) This was just one example. I encounter this so often outside my region and at the institution where I work it makes me sick. Sometimes even my doctors cain’t understand me, and I find myself unwittingly maskin’ my accent and dialect more and more now; a shame-based compulsion I’d eradicated years ago, now rearin’ its ugly head again.

And maybe, for the people who hate dialect in writin’, it’s comin’ from the shame they themselves feel, shame that was etched into their bones ev’rytime a classmate or a teacher told them that the language of their home life weren’t acceptable in school or in their future workplace. If that’s the case, I apologize, and I hope you find ways to reclaim yourself, to heal from these small wounds that compiled into one big trauma you cain’t even see clearly anymore.

So, please, tell me again how my dialect is “gimmicky.” Insinuate that I somehow am wearin’ a costume instead of writin’ the way that I know’ll reach the people I actually care to reach when you say that written accent is “inadvertently satirical.” Throw me under the bus as “cheesy” because reading dialect makes you uncomfortable (read: no matter how much we may tout dr. vay [Vershawn Ashanti Young] and Asao Inoue and bell hooks, we still think you need to operate in the cleansed, white, male, straight, middleclass Strunk & White standard English to earn recognition). Mansplain to me that it’s unnecessary to convey speech in the written word when you yourself cain’t parse a truly thick hollar accent when you encounter it in the wild (if you even encounter it in the wild). I’ll keep takin’ this risk of writin’ this way. Cause I could write purdy if I wanted to. In these times when I choose not to, I don’t want to. It’s intentional. If you are disturbed, you should be. If you are comforted, wonderful; welcome home, d’jeet yet?

The truth is carried just as much by the way the words are on the page as it is by what the words themselves say. If I polish out the grit, what’s reflected ain’t what was intended. The purpose is eradicated. The piece is now pointless.

One thang I can say: At least I just wrote this anonymous hit piece that’ll likely see few eyes instead of sending the ragin’ rantin’ email I really wanted to send.

         Either way:

         I strike the match

         watch the flame catch, wickin’

                 down the stick

                 click-snap-crack

                                 smell of gas

                     dried Christmas tree tinder

                                 d

                                     r

                                 o

                                         p

                     the burnin’ thang

         lettin’ the blaze erupt

                     ignitin’ this bridge

         while I’m fuckin’ standin’ on it