Natchez Trace near Rocky Springs

Elmwood Cemetery Memphis TN

Specificity

Went to sleep last night with a few writing problems. Not new ones. Old ones. Trying to figure out how to tie all my work together. That's always been a sticking point for me. After all, I tend to write about location and setting. My work grows around place. I might get inside the head of "The Other" but my plain people are Southern. These days I work for specificity in all ways when putting words to paper. Plot. Story. Character. Description. Mood. Metaphor. One links to the other. 

Specificity is always a challenge. 

I must have been stressed. I've got deadlines and deadlines. I have drawn lines in the dirt that I cannot cross. So all night long, I worked on this problem in my head and dreams. Fortunately I woke up with the problem resolved. But I am so tired. I kept waking up, writing things down. Sleep was more like naps. I thought of my mother often. My aunts. My people.

I've been to this house. In daylight and in dreams. Memory is a strange thing. But without it, we are nothing.

Haint Blue Porch Ceiling

Let's catch some haints

Faulkner's headstone this time of year.

Cemetery in St. Francisville Louisiana

Once Upon a Time, I ate my lunch among these stones. I can still close my eyes and see those moments. One stone in this churchyard reads, "Every time the wind blows, it tells a tale of thee."

Poe in Allegory (Juvenilia) aka It's October 2013

(Something I wrote as a teenager, a very young teenager, around thirteen or fourteen years old.)


Poe In Allegory

Amid the cool dark of endless space
A single crimsom flame does race.
Behind it across an ocean of blue
A haunting shape does pursue.
This shape gains speed with the light of day.
In the cool of night it loses its way.
While it moves across the sky,
The shape falters and asks itself why
It pursues a thing it will never possess,
And why it does not pause forever to rest;
Yet, always in the light of day
The shadow moves faster along its way!

Alas! Night is a time for stars and dreams.
Life is not what it is or what it seems.
There is no shadow, only the glow of the moon,
And the warmth that it brings never too soon.

                                     Copyright © 2012  Madly Jane