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The Writer I Was, 1983

8/5/2018

Lowell Mick White, writer, writer at work

I was going through a box and came across this photo of me, taken in Cox’s Mills in 1983 or 1984. I was 25 or so years old. Some things about the photo:

Three clocks and they are all set differently. This is something I would do in my Youth, a nod maybe to the Modernists or something. Or maybe I was just trying to keep track of when the bars closed. (No bars in Cox’s Mills, though).
A black & white tv my dad got me for Christmas in 1974 or so.
On top of the tv and beneath the clock are some envelopes containing notes on my novel-in-progress. Each envelope contains notes and drafts for a different chapter--an inefficient way to organize your work. Don't try this at home!
Beneath my work shirt, I am wearing a Gutter Brothers t-shirt. At some point I will do a post about the Gutter Brothers and Lowell Mick White Night at the Tex Lounge….
The typewriter is a Smith-Corona I bought when I started college c. 1976 or so.
The poster in back is for Bow Wow Wow when they played the Opry House in Austin. And it’s signed by Annabella! (Don’t know where that poster is now, sadly).
I think that's an outline of my novel on the wall next to Bow Wow Wow.
That’s a wooden giraffe on the windowsill.
Got my copy of War and Peace handy. It’s the Norton Critical Edition, Maude Translation. I might well have been typing up inspirational Tolstoy mots.
The loose-leaf binder holds the novel I was working on. On the cover of the binder? My backstage pass to the Clash! (From June, 1982).
In the foreground, a pamphlet of West Virginia hunting and fishing regulations.

The most remarkable thing: How fracking skinny I am! If anyone has a time machine, please go back to 1983 and buy me a pizza.

Lowell Mick White, Burnt House, Appalachia, West Virginia, fiction, novel, gothic, funny

You might be interested my novel about West Virginia--BURNT HOUSE.

Read it now!

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The Writings and Editings Video

8/3/2018

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So I glued together a bunch of the Writings and Editings photos I've been posting, and made a video. It makes my life look a bit more dynamic than it might really be, but I can live with that. But--here is some of what I've been doing (and you can do this, too).

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A Pair of Short Book Videos

7/18/2018

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Here are a couple of short book videos I made....

Allow them to inspire you to buy books!

THE MESSES WE MAKE OF OUR LIVES

THAT DEMON LIFE

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Writings and Editings XIX

7/15/2018

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It's summer and--as usual--I'm working on about ten projects at once, and thinking about five or six others. But--I'm getting things done!

A couple of suggestions that will benefit me but will benefit you more:

Go buy a copy of BURNT HOUSE

Then go check out NORMAL SCHOOL

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My Books in a Great Bookish Environment

7/15/2018

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The wonderful Kathryn Milan sent me these photos of a couple of my books on display at the Austin Central Library. Thanks, Kathryn! And thanks Austin Central Library!

Long Time Ago Good, stories, Austin, fiction, reading

That Demon Life, fiction, best novel about Austin, Austin, Texas, lust, laziness

Long Time Ago Good, That Demon Life, Austin, Texas, fiction, lust, laziness

Self-promotion:

Buy THAT DEMON LIFE here

Buy LONG TIME AGO GOOD here

Or--go to the new library and check them out!

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Readings and Ridiculosities Five: NS Episode 1

7/7/2018

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Here I am reading the first Episode from Normal School. Chapters 1, 2, and 3. Listen and be amazed! Then go over to Normal School and read the whole thing!

Readings and Ridiculosities Five: Normal School Episode One

And then go to Amazon and buy some books....

podcast, fiction, noir, academic, higher education, bad behavior

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Out of Context Excerpt 13

6/24/2018

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From Burnt House--just out!

Burnt House, West Virginia, Appalachia, fiction, novel, gothic

“Your granddad is the most impatient man I ever knew,” she said.

I said, “Well….”

“It’s true! I’ve known him almost sixty years!”

“Yeah?” I sat back, waiting for a story. That was always the best part of being home, waiting for a story. “Kline—well, your grandma, Alma.” Bess was still talking out the service window, bent over a table in the back room looking at me. “You remember how hard she worked, right?”

“Sure,” I said. “She was always doing something.”

“Okay, well, they used to keep chickens—everybody did, then, a long time ago. And Kline, he’s greedy as well as he’s impatient, and he always wanted more—more chickens, more eggs. Of course, it was Alma had to do most of the work, or the girls when they got big enough. But Kline would do one thing with those chickens by himself, and he didn’t trust anyone else to do it. He’d go out there to the hen house with an awl or a nail or a pocketknife and chip away at those eggs, pick the shells off so the baby chicks would be born a day or two early and start growing quicker. He didn’t trust nature. He couldn’t ever wait for nature.”

“Wow!”

“Oh, he’d go out in the garden and flick dirt off the bean sprouts when they were coming up, so they’d grow faster.”

I laughed at that one.

“You laugh, now, but that man can be terrible,” Bess said. “He did the same thing when your Aunt Irene was born.”

“No way!”

Bess stepped back from the window and went around and came out into the waiting room.

“It’s true,” she said. “Alma went into labor, or thought she did, and old Kline got in his truck and drove to Alum Bridge—that’s where the paved road from Weston ended in those days, at Alum Bridge, it was just mud between here and there. And Kline got his car out of the garage he kept it in and drove on into Weston on the paved road and he got the doctor.” Bess caught her breath, a gasp. “And so then he drove the doctor back to Alum Bridge, and they got in his truck and they drove back through the mud to Burnt House. And when they got here, Alma wasn’t in labor anymore.” Bess looked at me and nodded. So there!

After a moment, I asked, “And….”

“And so Kline told that doctor, he said, I’m not bringing you all the way out here a second time. He said, you need to get in there and get me that baby right now. Right now. And the doctor did it—brought out that baby two or three days early, a week early, I don’t know.”

“Wow.”

I thought of poor Grammaw Talbot. Back in one of those bedrooms, pregnant, sick and miserable. Alone, I guessed. Full of a baby. And how did that doctor get Irene out? Some drug? Did he cut the baby out of her? Pull it? Did he hook the baby to a chain and winch it out not really ready to live and leave poor Grammaw all ripped apart and bloody? Ah, wow. Disgusting. I almost felt a cramp myself. I never wanted kids. I touched my belly. Sick.

I said, “Jeeze.”

Burnt House, West Virginia, Appalachia, fiction, best novel, gothic, Lowell Mick White

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Twelve Things I Remember About Home

6/16/2018

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Coxs Mills, West Virginia, Appalachia, memory, history

1. The Mispunctuated Town
Cox’s Mills is a tiny place, even for West Virginia, with a population of maybe 75, two stores, a post office, a closed schoolhouse, and a church that holds services one Sunday a month. It lies stretched out along Rt. 47, following Pike Fork between Horn Creek and Hog Run. Cox’s Mills is “five miles from everywhere,” my grandfather used to say, if everywhere is defined as the surrounding communities of Burnt House, Auburn, Troy, and Alice. Alice is a ghost town anymore, but Cox’s Mills is not too different from the surviving other three, a small community, insulated and static, growing gently shabbier as the years pass.

On the map and in the postal directory the town’s name is spelled Coxs Mills, no apostrophe, apparently because map makers and zip code cipherers don’t like apostrophes. I’ve always spelled it Cox’s Mills, anyway, because I do like apostrophes and I like things to make sense. I’ve never heard anyone else offer an opinion about the spelling of the town’s name, and since I go there now only in memory I probably never will.

Coxs Mills, West Virginia, Appalachia, history, memory

2. Millstones and the Bridge Pool
My mother told me that the millstones for Cox’s mills had been just upstream from the bridge where Rt. 47 crossed Horn Creek and I tried several times over the years to find them, wading up the shallow part of the creek under a dark canopy of sycamores and willows, under a water gap and on up. I never found the millstones, and my guess is that they must have been buried under the silt and fine gravel washing off the hills, buried and lost like so much else. Below the bridge there was a large, deep pool where Pike Fork flowed into Horn Creek, and I did my first fishing there, catching smallmouth bass and bluegills. Sometimes I would fish off the bridge abutment, cringing when log trucks or well service trucks from Dowell or Halliburton raced by. In the lot next to the pool was an olive-painted corrugated metal building, an old gauging station for Eureka Pipeline that my grandfather had worked in. One damp December day a truck came and loaded up the building and hauled it off somewhere. In later years weeds grew around the old concrete foundation and multiflora rose snaked around a rusted old steam engine whose original purpose no one could tell me.

3. Hunting under the Hickories
I have been told that before the chestnut blight hit the eastern hardwood forests, chestnut trees were where you went to look for squirrels. It wasn’t unusual to see as many as thirty squirrels working in one tree. But the chestnuts are long gone, the remaining dead hulks chopped down and used for fence posts, long enough ago now that even the fence posts are gone, even though chestnut made the best and longest-lasting fence posts. Now the squirrels in our part of the country gather mostly around hickory trees. The leaves of the hickories turn bright yellow in the fall and stand out between the reds and browns of maples and oaks, and when I went hunting I would sit beneath the trees, quietly, beneath the soft falling leaves and hard falling green nuts. Squirrel season was the best time of year: the days were cool and usually sunny, and the woods were silent but for the falling leaves and the rustlings of small animals. One time I heard fallen leaves crackling—something moving—and instead of a squirrel a grey fox came over the edge of the hill. He trotted right toward me until, when he was six or seven feet away, I said, “Hello, little fox.” The fox stopped and regarded me for a few moments before angling off, circling around my hickory tree but still heading to wherever he was heading. I told my grandfather about the fox and he said, “I’d a-shot the son-of-a-bitch.”

4. Apple Trees
Below the house, along the creek, we had two immense apple trees. In a good year the trees would be utterly loaded, groaning under the weight of the apples. My grandmother would literally spend all day in the kitchen during apple time, canning apples, making applesauce or apple butter, the kitchen windows dripping with steam. The ground beneath the trees was pocked with holes and tunnels of ground squirrels that ate fallen apples, and beyond the fence, under the rocks, there were snakes, copperheads and blacksnakes, that ate the squirrels. At night deer would come down off the hill and eat apples, and we could sit in the porch and hear them chewing and sometimes choking. In the summer of 1988 the trees finally died, and the people who were renting the house cut them down, leaving the stumps standing high enough to run a clothesline from one to the other. After the trees died I lost interest in the place.

5. Farming the Hills
The hills there in that part of West Virginia are hills, not mountains, but they rise so steeply away from the road, away from the creek, that they hem in the sky and induce a sense of confinement if not claustrophobia. I remember my mother telling about her first trip away from home, to Iowa to visit relatives, and how sick the prairie landscape made her: All that space! There was nothing around to hold up the sky! No doubt flatlanders would get sick in Cox’s Mills, and feel trapped and nervous. In the days of my grandfather’s youth, the hills were still covered in virgin timber. His family—and the other pioneer families over along Rocky Fork and Old Field Fork—would work their way through the woods, uphill and down, cutting down the trees, selling the solid old timber, burning the rest, rooting up the stumps with mules, planting wheat the first year, corn the second, then grass for cattle, working on and on through the woods. He said the hills were so steep they had to plant the seed corn with shotguns—just stand back and fire it into the hillsides. But all that ended. Farming was difficult at any time in that country, a crazy idea, really, and impossible after the topsoil washed away, and so the farms died out and the trees came back, slowly, thin young forests that have grown more robust over the years. Still, my grandfather would say, “By God, when the Russians take over, they’ll have people out working on those hills again.”

6. My Palm Prints in Concrete
Sometime in late 1962 my grandfather poured concrete for a new walkway that led around the front of the house, from the front door to the East Porch. We were down that weekend and he had me put my hands in the cement to make a mark. I remember the icky texture of the cement—it was cold, and sticky, and I didn’t like it. My father took a nail and wrote my name and the date beneath the palm prints, and I guess it’s all still there. At least, it was when I finally sold the house. The concrete had buckled, bulged up by the roots of a maple tree, but my prints endured, faint and shallow but legible.

7. Our Hill
When I was very young my grandfather ran cattle on the front of the hill, the side that faced the house, and the cattle grazed the hillside down to short grass, dirt and a few blackberry vines. After he got rid of the cattle the hill began to regrow. Brush—filth, we called it—took over, mostly thorny multiflora rose and more blackberries, then a few trees began to poke through, sycamores at first and then maples and oaks. The top of the hill had been left wooded and was very dark and shady, and you would pass through those first woods and come out on a flat, more or less open area that had once been a planted field. Rocks had been pulled out to let the plow through, and were piled at the upper end. We had peach trees up there (peaches down below by the creek would not bear fruit), short lived trees that were all but dead by the time I began exploring the woods. The dead trees stood for years like skeletons until they began to rot and collapse into the brush. From the top of the hill you could see miles of land that was empty, used very hard in the past and now all but unsettled.

8. The Hay Barn and the Meadow
Directly across the creek from the house was a small hay meadow and an old barn. We used to get two cuttings a year off that land until people started running fewer and fewer cattle and no one bothered to come by and cut it. The grass would grow and fall over, pushed down by rain or pulled down by gravity, and there would be wide trails through it where deer would pass to get to the apples. The old barn where the hay was stored grew more and more decrepit over the years and became a home for yellow jackets and snakes. When she was dying, my grandmother would look out the window at the meadow, the wasted hay, and one time she said, “It makes me sad looking out there at that. You know some old cow’ll be wanting that hay this winter.”

Coxs Mills, Appalachia, West Virginia, history, memory

9. Pike Fork
On the maps the upper part of the creek is called Coxcamp Fork, but I never heard anyone call it that. The local name was Pike Fork, but I never heard anyone use that, either, at least on regular basis. It was just “the creek.” It ran through our property, separating us from the hill. As a child there in the summers I usually spent all day down in the creek looking for fossils, catching crayfish or trapping minnows. It never occurred to me to be lonely. I would be down at the creek all day, and then in the evenings I would go back up to the house. At night fog would drift down from the hills, and I always sat out on the porch and listened to the creek run, and I could hear crickets and frogs and other animals, and I could hear owls hoot, and deer stomp around by the apple trees, I could hear all the thick dark night noises, and once I saw a snake crossing the road in the headlights of an oncoming car.

10. High Water
In high water people upstream would throw trash into the river, sometimes plain garbage but more often large chunks of wood that were too expensive or impractical to haul off, like rotten lumber or trimmed tree branches or brush. As a very young child the junk in the high water always excited me—I imagined the old logs and boards as naval vessels, battleships—a fleet attacking the minnows! In very high water the creek would stretch clear across the meadow to lap at the base of the apple trees, and though our house was high enough up on the hillside that it never got flooded we could feel the rumble of the muddy brown water as it pushed downstream.

11. The Langford House
The Langford house was across the road and down a bit. The Langford family was long gone, died out or moved away, and the house was rented out occasionally to very poor families, until at last it grew too dilapidated and run down to rent to anyone. One night, after it had been vacant for a several years, my grandmother claimed she saw the house all lit up—glowing in the dark. My grandfather dismissed her, said she was probably dreaming, but I suspected ghosts. By that time I was living away from Cox’s Mills, and I was familiar with ghosts—not just the ordinary spirits that might take over a property, but ghosts that got inside your head, ghosts not only of the dead, but of the living, too, ghosts of family and ghosts of place, ghosts that can follow a person around and bother them with guilt and shame and regret that cannot be exorcised.

12. The Tree that Didn’t Fall Until Later
It was late when I arrived home for Christmas in 1981, driving in from Texas, and I was very tired, and I was hungry, and I wanted to sit around and decompress, but my grandfather was all agitated and he was saying “Where’d you park? Out by the barn? Well, you get out there and move your goddamn truck, there’s a tree a-going to fall on it.” He followed me out into the dark and pointed across the road into the night. He said there was a big tree over there that had been struck by lightning and might fall any moment. So I moved my pickup. The next day I could see a big oak that been indeed struck by lightning—there was a pale vertical stripe running the length of the tree where the bark had split away. But the tree didn’t fall—not then, at least. Years later when I sold the house I came by to take one last look around, and the new owner was walking me out to where I was parked. He was a nice man, retired and living alone, and he said he would take good care of the house. “I know all your family’s memories are wrapped up here,” he said. By that time everyone was dead and I didn’t really care, or thought I didn’t. I didn’t say anything. Then I looked up across the road—and the lightning struck tree wasn’t there! It had finally fallen, not down the hill but across it—but, still, the damn tree had finally rotted and keeled over, and for some reason I just didn’t know what to make of it. I stood there for a while, staring dumbly at the hillside, and then I got in my truck and drove on back to the new home I was trying to make in Texas.

(Originally published in You Are Here: The Journal of Creative Geography, Summer 2008)

NOTE: I decided to republish this little West Virginia essay as part of the run-up to the release of my West Virginia book, Burnt House.

BUY IT NOW!

novel, Burnt House, Appalachia, West Virginia, family, gothic, reading, Lowell Mick White, best WV novel

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Driving in the Rain and Driving at Night in the Rain

6/10/2018

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Driving in the rain is one of the best things in the world, right up there with beer and turkey legs and em-dashes. So imagine my delight when I found a video on my old phone of me--driving in the rain at night. Of course I posted the found video to Youtube, where it joined one of me driving in the rain during the day that I posted several years ago. And another of me enjoying the sublimity of a sudden thunderstorm....

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Where I Lived Then Now (III)

6/2/2018

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window to pee from, crime-ridden neighborhood, My Sharona, Mother Earth, beer, fun

This is where I moved after Redneck Village—the Tivoli apartments just off Riverside. My roommate was the infamous/legendary TWS and we had many adventures. My bedroom was in the center unit shown, and my window was that double one not quite over the front door.

The photo below is more or less the view from my window—that large flat surface is the roof of a strip mall and was, in 1980, the roof of Mother Earth, after it relocated to East Riverside. In the winter and spring of 1980 “My Sharona” was a big hit and all the cover bands at ME played it—ALL the bands! Every evening when I was trying to study the opening quickly-tedious bomps of “My Sharona” would come thumping up across the street and through my window…

Austin, Mother Earth, youth. beer, fun, 1980

Mother Earth, the people you want to be with, beer, happy hour, Austin, 1980

But—I loved Mother Earth. I’d go over for happy hour two or three times a week. It was cool and dark, and there were a bunch of middle-aged drunk regulars, and I enjoyed hearing their stories. Blind Bobby Doyle played piano on many nights—he was really good. Sometimes I’d stay on into the evening, sometimes I’d go home to do classwork, and on other nights I’d head on out to Antone’s or the Armadillo or wherever. Mother Earth was great.

And—there was another bar in the strip mall, TA Station, and a Conan’s Pizza, and a Safeway. Up the street was the Back Room and Paula’s Playpen. So there was plenty of food and beer and fun.

One night TWS and I were out and about, one our way to Spelman’s, and some cops pulled us over on West 6th, just past Lamar. TWS was driving. The cops made him walk the line, touch his nose, etc. The cops said that while TWS had obviously been drinking, he wasn’t drunk drunk. But he needed to go home—and so we drove back to our place, with the cops following. And then, of course, we walked across the street to Mother Earth. Austin!

There was some crime in our neighborhood, too. Someone (?) left the patio door open one night and we woke to find that TWS’s coin jar had been stolen, along with a few dollars I’d stupidly left sitting out. And then I got the battery stolen out of my pickup—not once but three fucking times, and the third time the thieves also cut the fucking battery cable, which was a pain to replace. And then someone(s) stole the license plates off my truck!

Oh—that window in the top photo. There was a kid named KH who used to come crash on our couch, and I got tired of him hanging around. One morning after Mother Earth closed he was out there knocking on the door—and so I urinated out the window on his head. Ha!

Also that window—one night in April or so I was studying and heard police sirens, and then saw flashing lights. I looked out my window. A car was pulled over right in front of my place. Behind the pulled-over car were two cop cars with three cops. As one cop approached the car, it tried to get away. Bang! Bang! BOOM! The cops opened fire on the car—two pistols and a shotgun. Whoa! Then the cops pulled the people out of the car and beat the shit out of them. I went outside to watch, along with most of my neighbors. The next day the Statesman said that there had been a stabbing at one of the bars way out on East Riverside, by Montopolis, and that the shot-up car matched the description of the car the fled the stabbing scene. (Though the car guys weren’t the stabbers, it turned out—they just had some weed in their car and were worried about getting busted).

So, overall…

East Riverside pros: easy access to beer and fast food, a window to pee out of.

East Riverside cons: crime, KH, police shooting people, “My Sharona.”

Verdict: my least favorite Austin residence.

best novel set in Austin. best Texas fiction, lust and laziness

You might be interested in my novel of Austin, That Demon Life....a novel of lust and laziness....

“That Demon Life has got Austin in its sway, or at least this novel's motley crew of characters. A horny judge, a defense attorney with an attitude, an entourage of petty criminals, a dating service maven, a self made internet porn star and a boy toy or two—they're all slouching toward Sixth Street and beyond. This is a fast-paced, hold-on-to-your-bar stool satire, a hilarious, stumbling romp through law and disorder, urban ennui and its after-hour antidotes, Texas-sized lust and doom.”
—Alison Moore, author of The Middle of Elsewhere and Synonym for Love,

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<<Previous

Ordinary Horrors

The Writer I Was, 1983

The Writings and Editings Video

A Pair of Short Book Videos

Writings and Editings XIX

My Books in a Great Bookish Environment

Readings and Ridiculosities Five: NS Episode 1

Out of Context Excerpt 13

Twelve Things I Remember About Home

Driving in the Rain and Driving at Night in the Rain

Where I Lived Then Now (III)

Lowell Mick White

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