Always Stories

Soon, the green at Bicentennial Mall and spaces inside the Tennessee State Library & Archives and Tennessee State Museum will be swarmed by organisms in maybe the truest of symbiotic relationships: readers and writers.

One can’t survive without the other, and the Southern Festival of Books, now in its 37th year, ties together these opposite ends of the same spectrum in a polished, organized, fluid, and seamless way.

The collaboration works so well because words are the common bond, the gift humans possess like no other living creature. We are all writers and practitioners of language — speaking, text messaging, emailing, tweeting. Without words, where would we be?

Perhaps now more than ever before, we’re seeing why words matter, how their use divides us or unites us, and how we hope words can salve and heal our wounds.

As readers, sometimes we forget that writers are readers too. Writers don’t exist in a vacuum. They may be the world’s most prolific readers but are shouldered with the enormous responsibility of putting words together for others to enjoy or repudiate, laud, or despise — risky business, at best.

At the Conference on Southern Literature years ago, Allan Gurganus, from the stage of the stately Tivoli Theatre in downtown Chattanooga, told a capacity crowd, “Reading is inhaling, writing is exhaling.” That relationship works in reverse for our festival as well: writers are exhaling, readers are inhaling.

More than two decades ago, in the summer of 2003, I was a contributor in poetry at the Sewanee Writers Conference, and looking back now, I realize what a stellar lineup of writers was there to visit, lecture, lead workshops, and create another symbiotic environs for growth and shared experiences.

Aside from the conference founding director Wyatt Prunty and conference “get-it-done” master Kevin Wilson (before his success as bestselling author) whose morning announcements at the SWC are legendary, writers included Richard Bausch, Robert Haas, Romulus Linney, Jill McCorkle, Mary Jo Salter, Alan Shapiro, and the late Barry Hannah, Randall Kenan, and Mark Strand, my mentor for the 10 days.

While I can’t relate here all the stunning moments of that conference, I do want to tell you about two that are unforgettable and address precisely what writers try to do and are expected to do for readers.

At his craft lecture, Mark Strand took the lectern and told the story of a war veteran who carried in his vest pocket a notebook where he recorded his experiences on the battlefield, his fears and moments of uncertainties, the atrocities he witnessed, the acts he performed.

During one skirmish, the soldier was shot in the chest. The bullet penetrated the notebook, passed through it, and wounded the man, but he recovered from his injuries. The notebook, stained with blood, was damaged; parts of the stories the soldier scribbled there were ruined, lost forever when his daughter found the notebook after the man died.

Strand’s question was this: as writers, do we fill in those gaps, make up what’s missing to tell the man’s story, and in doing so, does the story still belong to the soldier or to the writer whose imagination fleshed out the destroyed words?

We all sat stunned by the question which Strand left unanswered.

Shortly afterward, a rumor circulated among conference attendees — the way rumors do, quick and unfettered, and this one probably started by Strand himself — that the story he told was made up, a fabrication, but so real and detailed that everyone took it for gospel.

Therein, as they say, lay the lesson: the writer’s job is to take whatever is given and create the memorable, the tale that people want to read, discuss, tell others about, debate, remember.

On another afternoon, Professor Haas delivered a remarkable craft lecture, but what I remember most was his reading that began with him reciting these lines from his poem, “The Beginning of September”:

“The dangers are everywhere. Auxiliary verbs, fishbones, a fine carelessness. No one really likes the odor of geraniums, not the woman who dreams of sunlight and is always late for work nor the man who would be happy in altered circumstances. Words are abstract, but words are abstract is a dance, car crash, heart’s delight. It’s the design dumb hunger has upon the world. Nothing is severed on hot mornings when the deer nibble flower heads in a simmer of bay leaves. Somewhere in the summer dusk is the sound of children setting the table. That is mastery: spoon, knife, folded napkin, fork; glasses all around. The place for the plate is wholly imagined. Mother sits here and Father sits there and this is your place and this is mine. A good story compels you like sexual hunger but the pace is more leisurely. And there are always melons.”

Haas reminds us that the best writers see in the world those things that the rest of us overlook or take for granted and imbue them with meaning we hadn’t thought of ourselves.

In the last part of that quote, Haas speaks to the writer’s responsibility to bring order to the world, to put everything in place — like children setting a table — so that others can see what the world looks like when order is restored, when the chaos of fishbones, auxiliary verbs, carelessness, car crashes, and abstractions is absolved, when we slow down — like the poet — to see deer eating flowers in a “simmer of bay leaves” and know that nothing is lost or broken in that moment of beauty and truth, to paraphrase Keats. When the “place for the plate is wholly imagined.”

Later in the same poem, Haas writes: “There are not always melons / There are always stories.”

That’s why we’ve been gathering — readers and writers — at the Southern Festival of Books since 1989, because “There are always stories.” I’m so glad we have writers willing to tell the stories and readers willing to listen.

 

Copyright ©2025 by Randy Mackin. All rights reserved.