Writing

Forgetting All the Illustrations I Studied for a Non-Illustrated Book

November 5, 2025 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

My historical novel Brookhaven has no illustrations. I spent an estimated third of my research time hunting for them.

The novel is set in two different time periods – the Civil War and immediately after, and then 50 years later, in 1915. From the beginning of the first draft, I quickly learned that I had to see both periods. I had to see what people wore, what they ate, how they traveled, what their homes were like, what their streets and communities were like, and more.

From early on, I had to spend far more time looking than reading, and vastly more time looking than writing. Thos 50 years were some of the momentous in American history – rapid industrialization during the war and after, wagons and carriages giving way to automobiles, the advent of flight, the rapid spread of newspapers supported by wire services like Associated Press, rapid changes in the position of women in society, and mechanized agriculture becoming the rule rather than the exception.

To continue reading, please see my post today at the ACFW Blog.

Illustration: Men’s golfing fashions in 1915.

The New Edition of Cultivating Oaks Press: Fidelity

October 21, 2025 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

The autumn edition of Cultivating Oaks Press is online, and its full of stories, articles, poetry, and beautiful photography. The theme is fidelity, defined by my Merriam-Webster Dictionary as “the quality or state of being faithful” and “accuracy in details.” Synonyms are faithfulness, trustworthiness, and loyalty.

This issue includes stories and articles by Tom Darin Liskey, Annie Nardone, Sam Keyes, Rob Jones, Amelia Friedline, Andrew Roycroft, and Lara d’Entremont, among several others. I have a poem, entitled “52,” and an article entitled “A Lock of Hair.”

It’s a wonderful issue.

“Brookhaven” and the Pearl River Lumber Company

October 15, 2025 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

A reader of Brookhaven sent n email, asking if I modeled the McClure Lumber Company in the novel on the Pearl River Lumber Company. A great-grandfather had worked there, the reader said, and she wondered.

That I had to research the Pearl River Lumber Company to respond to her should answer the question. Or, more briefly, no.

The company was founded in 1899, building a large mill on the outskirts of Brookhaven, Mississippi. A community grew up around it and was called Pearlhaven. A rail line was built, appropriately named the Brookhaven & Pearl River Railway, and extended from Brookhaven to Monticello in the next county to the east. Coincidentally, int he novel this is roughly the road or direction that the young Sam McClure travels to reach home some months after the Civil War has ended. I even mention Monticello by name in the book.

The lumber company was eventually acquired by the Goodyear Syndicate, and the rail line was sold to the Illinois Central in 1910. The mill was closed that same year. The rail line operated for another 18 years, finally shut down in 1928.

In Brookhaven, from the 1850s Sam McClure’s family has been operating a grain mill, a lumber mill, and the general store across from the railroad depot in downtown Brookhaven. The grain mill, facing consolidation in the industry because of the growth of the big milling conglomerates like General Mills, was eventually closed and the property converted to racing racehorses. The lumber mill continued to operate, and the war in Europe increases demand for lumber and wood. I included a short scene about British and French representatives signing a contract with Sam, a contract which would lead to a major expansion of lumber operations.

*The Illinois Central deport in Brookhaven about 1903*.

But I didn’t know anything about the Pearl River Lumber Company or the associated railroad operations. The genesis of including a lumber yard in the story came from the fact that Brookhaven is part of the Great Piney Woods of Mississippi, and natural resources like wood and lumber would come to characterize the “New South” after the Civil War and Reconstruction. The South had enormous natural resources, and while agriculture would remain the major industry, it was industries like lumber that helped pulled the South out of post-war economic devastation.

While the novel had been published, the reader’s question took me back into research. I was rather tickled to discover what little I knew actually aligned very closely with the real story.

Top photo: Operations at the Pearl River Lumber Company.

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

October 9, 2025 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

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

October 8, 2025 By Glynn Young 3 Comments

“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”

September 10, 2025 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

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?”

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 21^st 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.

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.