Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Writing

“Your Accent! You Can’t Be from New Orleans!”

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When you’re born and raised in a city like New Orleans, you become aware of certain things very early on.

First, there’s food. The basic New Orleans food groups are red beans and rice (on Mondays), crawfish, shrimp, beignets, and drive-thru daiquiris to go. A fifth food group might be the muffuletta. When I’d stay with relatives in Shreveport in north Louisiana, one aunt would make sure she fixed rice, because she worried I might be homesick.

Second, there’s weather. You’ve never met humidity like what saturates New Orleans. When you live in a place bounded by a lake, a river, and a gulf not too far away, and it’s built on swamp and bayous, then you will know what real humidity is like.

Third, there’s the accent. It’s not exactly unique; there are echoes of the New Orleans accent in Brooklyn and even south St. Louis. It’s a multicultural gumbo of influences, including French, Spanish, Cajun, Black American, Jewish, Italian, and German, embedded within American English. New Orleanians would be completely at home ordering in a crowded deli in Brooklyn.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Beignets by Julian Rosser via Unsplash. Used with permission.

An Evening with Elizabeth George

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“As long as the stories are there to be told, I’ll be writing.” – Elizabeth George.

Last Friday, my wife and attended an author’s talk with mystery writer Elizabeth George at the St. Louis County Library. The library’s foundation maintains a robust author program, bringing in some 150 a year. 

It’s been some time (like more than a decade) since we last attended one of these, an evening with poet Billy Collins. That one had been packed with some 800 people; the program was free. I remember having to park across a busy highway at a shopping mall.

George is the author of the Inspector Lynley mysteries. We had been fans of the PBS series (2001-2007) with Nathaniel Parker as Thomas Lynley and Sharon Small as Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers. Just recently, a new version has started on Britbox, with Leo Suter as Lynley, Sofia Barclay as Havers, and Daniel May’s as a perfect malevolent detective chief inspector and Lynley’s boss. We’re enjoyed the four episodes of the first season, including Daniel Mays as the character you love to hate. In fact, we finished episode four the night before we saw Elizabeth George.

Lynley 2025: Daniel May, Leo Suter, and Sofia Barclay

I’ve read about half of the books by George, now numbering 21. She’s on tour promoting the book, A Slowly Dying Cause, set in Cornwall. 

The program was interview-style, with George asked questions by St. Louis writer, filmmaker, and director Katherine Bratkowski. About 250 people attended; the program had an entrance fee included an expanded fee if you also bought the book. The people who attended, and it was largely a female audience, were Lynley fans.

“I really wanted to take my characters around England,” she said, “because I like England.” In the series, Lynley’s aristocratic family lives in Cornwall, so he has a good excuse to be in the area. He has to deal with problems with the family estate (a Grade II listed building, meaning repairs can only be made with materials from the time it was built). He takes DS Havers with him, “because she’s in trouble; Havers is always in trouble,” George said.

She explained that she originally created the two characters to be complete opposites. Lynley was created first – upper class, Oxford-educated – while Havers is from the working class, comprehensive-school educated, and always seems to be eating. In the original TV series, George said, “Sharon Small really got the Havers character.” For all of the characters in the stories, she writes an assessment that’s physical, emotional, and mental before she ever works them into the story.

With A Slowly Dying Cause, she says she wrote five beginnings, rewriting until it worked like she wanted it. She writes everything first draft and then goes back and edits and pares down heavily. For several of the stories, she didn’t know how the crime would be solved, “a really scary situation.” 

George says she’s been an Anglophile since the 1960s; she majored in and taught English literature for several years before turning to writing. She writes every day, emphasizing that, for any writer, discipline is the key. She said it takes about 18 to 24 months to write a novel now. 

One of the first questions from the audience was “why did you kill Helen?” Helen was Lynley’s great love, and she’s murdered in one of the books (it made a big impression on me, to the point where I can still remember who the murderer was). George’s answer: to keep the story open. Had Helen continued in the series, the overall story line would have closed down in family and children.

Yes, I got my copy of the book autographed.

She starts stories with the place or setting, then the victim, and then how the victim was killed.

George said she likes the new Lynley series on Britbox, but the episodes are very different from the books they’re based upon. “You can see the series and then read the books because they’re so different.”

It was a fun, informative evening; George loves to talk about her books and writing, and she was graciously patient in signing copies for the long line of people (including me). And she posed for photos for anyone who asked. I’ve now started reading A Slowly Dying Cause, and it’s already a great story. 

Wendell Berry and the “Mad Farmer Poems” 

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Wheat fields

It was a conversation that went much like you might expect.

“I don’t understand it,” the executive said. “They hate us. They hate what we do. They don’t even really understand what it is that we do. They don’t understand how important our products are for farmers and for the world’s food supply.”

I was sitting in the executive’s office, working with him on a speech he was to give. What he was talking about wasn’t the subject of the speech, but it was clearly on his mind. I listened to what was essentially a rant, and then I asked a question.

“Have you read Wendell Berry?”

He stared at me. “Who’s that?”

And there it was. The animosity about the company’s products, the position of the company in the marketplace, the company’s close identification with “Big Agriculture,” and the executive’s being perplexed with the activists and animosity on social media could all be summed up that that question – “who’s that?”

Wendell Berry

I answered his question. “Berry,” I said, “is the man who has articulated a very different understanding of agriculture, the idea of community, and the understanding of the land. He’s widely read and admired. You have to read his essays to understand what’s behind all the animosity and controversy. His fiction and poetry will help, too.”

The response? “I don’t have time to read that stuff.”

Now 91, Berry was born in Henry County, Kentucky, where his family had farmed for five generations. He worked as a writer for agricultural publications like Rodale Press, but he eventually returned to Henry County and worked his own farm, Lane’s Landing. 

But he continued to write. He wrote essays, poems, general interest articles, short stories and novels. He fictionalized his region of Kentucky, renaming the nearby town of Port Royal as  “Port William.” Slowly and then rapidly, his ideas of land, community, and agriculture permeated American culture, influencing people like Joel Salatin and Michael Pollan, who in turn have had a huge influence.

I generally prefer Berry’s fiction and poetry to his essays. A good place to start is with The Mad Farmer Poems, where Berry articulates his major problems with agriculture as practiced in the United States. It’s a relatively short collection, about the size of a chapbook, and it includes such poems as “The Mad Farmer Revolution,” “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” (which is not as radical as it sounds) and “Prayers and Sayings of the Mad Farmer.”

The poems introduce you to a man who is, yes, angry about the state of modern agriculture, but who maintains a reverence for the land, the people who farm it, and the community the people create together. This is what Berry sees as broken and lost in America of the 21st century, and it’s difficult not see the sense he makes.

In 2007, Jason Peters, a professor at Hillsdale College, assembled and edited a collection of essays about Berry under the title Wendell Berry: Life and Work.  It’s a good introduction to Berry and his writings from people who admire his work and his beliefs and have generally been strongly influenced by him. 

The contributors include non-fiction author Sven Birkerts, novelists Barbara Kingsolver and Gene Logsdon, poets Donald Hall and John Leax, Patrick Deneen of Georgetown University, ecology writer Bill McKibben, and numerous others. They speak to Berry’s fiction, his poems, his faith, his philosophy, his deep beliefs in land and community, and related topics. And the key here is the word “related.” Berry doesn’t compartmentalize different parts of his life. It is all part of an integrated whole.

Berry received B.S. and M.A. degrees from the University of Kentucky. He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and studied in Italy and France under a Guggenheim Fellowship. He taught at New York University and the University of Kentucky and served as a writer for Rodale Press. Since 1965, he and his wife have lived at Lane’s Landing. And he has a new Port William novel publishing in October – Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story.

When the executive and I had that conversation, more than a decade ago, I had read much of Berry’s poetry, two of his novels, and several of his essays – a mere drop in the bucket of what the man has published. I’ve read much more since then. And I think my answer to “Who’s that?” is even more on point now then it was back then. If you want to understand the culture – and cultural battle – of American agriculture, you have to read Wendell Berry.

Related:

My review of Berry’s That Distant Land.

Wendell Berry and the Land.

My review of Berry’s Jayber Crow.

Wendell Berry and This Day: Poems at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Wendell Berry and Terrapin: Poems at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Wendell Berry’s Our Only World.

The Art of the Commonplace by Wendell Berry.

Nathan Coulter by Wendell Berry.

Andy Catlett: Early Travels by Wendell Berry.

A World Lost by Wendell Berry.

A Place on Earth by Wendell Berry.

The Memory of Old Jack by Wendell Berry.

Poets and Poems: Wendell Berry and Another Day.

Top photograph by Megan Andrews via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“A Month in the Country” by J.L. Carr

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In 1980, British writer J.L. Carr (1912-1994) published a short novel. It was one of eight he would publish during his life. And it turned out to be the one that became something of a classic. Even today, it’s considered a “perfect novel.”

The novel is A Month in the Country. It has the kind of plot that wouldn’t lead you to believe it would become as famous as it has. A veteran of World War I, who specialized in art restoration before the war, has been hired to uncover a mural in a small chapel in Yorkshire, one dating to early Anglo-Saxon times. At some point in the past, perhaps during the dissolution of the monasteries and raiding of the churches by Henry VIII, the mural has been covered over. 

Now the church authorities want it restored, if possible. Thomas Birkin, the veteran is still suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (called something else back then), largely manifested by a nervous tic in his face that he can’t control. His wife has deserted him, although she had deserted him many times before. It’s a perfect job for Birkin – away from people, away from stress, and it might just give him the time he needs to heal. 

J.L. Carr

Working near the adjacent cemetery is another veteran, Charles Moon, who’s been hired to find the bones of an ancestor of a former parishioner, who believed the burial was somewhere near the cemetery. Moon and Birkin become friends. And it will turn out that Moon is also healing from a different kind of wartime experience. 

Inevitably, Birkin finds himself being drawn into the life of the nearby village of Oxgodby. The townspeople, including the vicar’s wife, will also help Birkin heal. Rather surprisingly, nothing will quite turn out the way the reader expects, and that’s part of what gives the novel its charm. 

The book was made into a movie of the same name in 1987, starring Colin Firth as Birkin, Kenneth Branagh as Moon, Natasha Richardson as the vicar’s wife, and Patrick Malahide as the priggish vicar. 

Carr drew on his own background of growing up in Yorkshire for all his novels, including A Month in the Country. The themes of art, vanished village life, community, and healing are worked through his books. 

It’s a gem of a story, the uncovering of the mural (and the artist) a significant part of it. Life never quite works out the way you think it will, and sometimes that’s a very good thing.

“Foster” by Claire Keegan

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Irish writer Claire Keegan writes stories like Johannes Vermeer painted paintings: interior scenes, perfectly drawn, with far more going on than what first meets the eye. Whether you’re reading a Keegan novel or standing before “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” when you finish and walk away you simply say, “Yes.”

I discovered this when I read Keegan’s Small Things Like These, the story of a coal hauler doing his regular delivery at a convent when he discovers a young girl shivering outside and discovers he has walked into something else entirely. Keegan moves comfortably into her characters’ skins, and the reader becomes almost one with the story.

In Keegan’s short novel Foster, a young girl doesn’t entirely understand what is happening when her father brings her to the home of an older couple, Mr. and Mrs. Kinsella. The girl’s mother is in the final months of pregnancy, the house is already full of children, and the family has the opportunity to park her with a childless couple. The girl discovers a life very different from her own, a life of regular baths, daily changes of clothes, trips to get ice cream, and a couple who love her from the moment she walks in their door. She also discovers something of a mystery, like why she’s initially given the clothes of a boy. And there’s something about the well from which water is drawn.

Claire Keegan

In the day-to-day life of this couple and the girl, the story unfolds. Gradually she discovers how to live a different life, and she will soon come to understand what happened in the family. The story unfolds perfectly; Keegan is one gifted storyteller.

Keegan is best known for her short stories, which have appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, Granta, Best American Short Stories, and The Paris Review, among others. Her writing has won numerous awards and recognitions, including the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the William Trevor Prize, and several short story awards. She studied English and political science at Loyola University in New Orleans, received a M.S. degree in creative writing at the University of Wales, and a M.Phil degree from Trinity College Dublin. She lives in rural Ireland.

I didn’t know if I could like a Keegan story better than I liked Small These Like These, but Foster dispelled any doubts I had. From beginning to end, it’s a story of compassion, understanding, and what makes us human. 

Related:

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan.

Stephen Foster: How Song Opened a Door on History

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You can’t research and write a novel about the Civil War, or anything else set in the mid-19th century, without quickly running into the songs people sang. As I researched what would eventually become my novel Brookhaven, I came across war songs, anthems, sung by the Irish who came to America and enlisted, hymns, songs by the home folk, and more. 

I went looking for a book about music in the Civil War, and I found ta small volume published by the Library of America in 2010, Stephen Foster & Co.: Lyrics of America’s First Great Popular Songs. It’s a small, eye-opening gem. I discovered that songs I learned in elementary school had been around for more than a century.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.