I'm in love with a man I never met: Amorak Huey and his liner notes

True confession: I am in love with a man I never met. His name is Amorak Huey and I'm not even sure how to pronounce it, though I know the emphasis is not on the first syllable. I found his poetry on line, and I fell hard. He grew up in Alabama, and he's a former newspaper man. He teaches now at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. I think he must write poetry in his sleep because he seems to be in every literary journal I pick up.

I found this essay by him as I was twittering around. I think he's a genius. He has a forthcoming book of poetry called Ha Ha Ha Thump from Sundress Publications. "Liner Notes" previously appeared in the Winter 2015 issue of Brevity.

Liner Notes for the Debut Album From the Band We Never Formed

by AMORAK HUEY • January 7, 2015

 
For M, J, C, and S.

Track 1

There was that time we almost died, which is to say every day because that’s how life works, but in particular this is about the night we took the back way and then the dark shortcut around the back way, and the road went downhill and farther downhill and turned and turned and kept turning long past the point where turning made sense. How grateful we were to be so scared.

Track 2

The boys we were. The boys we would become. The boys who never existed. Someone is always going to be tallest, fastest, strongest, most handsome. Sometimes one person gets all the gifts. The day will be shaped by how the rest of us deal with such a discrepancy. Loyalty means holding hands even if you’re homophobic.

Track 3

There was that girl we each gave the keys to our mouth. Waited for her to choose. Back then we didn’t know the difference between want and other kinds of want.

Track 4

Our bodies crack open early. Our skin splits and lets in the lightning. One of us laid down a motorcycle to avoid killing a dog. Left a meaningful amount of flesh and blood on the asphalt, a beautiful and gory smear. A donation. The price of a forever scar.

Track 5

There was naturally the problem of music itself. Of choosing instruments and keeping time, and the way trees in the South take tentative root in the crumbling red clay. When you grow up in Alabama, you understand you are never alone. You understand the earth leaves a stain.

Track 6

There was that girl again. Every time she used one of our names was a kind of prayer, a kind of answer. I don’t mean to make desire sound more sacred than it is.

Track 7

All writing is done from memory. How much is lost between a thought and the recording of that thought? Between an experience and any pretense at understanding that experience. Between her lips and the lyrics that mention them. We were the kind of boys who drowned such questions in sweet tea and staying up all night.

Track 8

When a storm came from the south, it brought the gulf, the brack and bitter of saltwater, the scent of mystery. When it came from the west, it brought more wind than we could handle, all uproot and damage.

Track 9

There was a map of the city where we lived, its efficient New Deal homes and straight roads, all those mowed lawns and the churches that contained us. The highway a mile north. The rivers that carried us away. I thought I took the map when we parted, but I cannot find it.

Track 10

Imagine the disagreements. Some of us speak to speak, some to be heard. All of us know music is a substitute for sex but no one says so aloud. Is it still performance if there is no song and no audience? Is it possible to be keenly aware of the possibility of suffering if none of us has truly suffered?

Track 11

In any group of five or more, one of you is certain to believe wholly in the mind while another is all gut. The rest, rather than choosing sides, arrange themselves in reasonably orderly fashion along this spectrum. The most obvious error is thinking our patterns of behavior will evolve past this origin.

Track 12

Our problem was never a lack of self-awareness. It was awareness only of self. And each other. We were aware of each other. If you don’t realize how close to the edge we all are, all the time, every moment, close your eyes and see how long you can hold your breath.

'I Love You More' author Jennifer Murphy says 'dreams do come true'

Former Charlottean Jennifer Murphy has concocted a doozy of a plot in her debut novel, "I Love You More" (Doubleday, $24.95). Lawyer Oliver Lane is shot to death in his Outer Banks rental cottage, and the prime suspects are his three wives, who are each unaware of the other but all sport the same haircut.
The star of the book is 12-year-old Picasso, Oliver's precocious and dictionary-reading daughter, who tries to make sense of what she knows and doesn't know.

Murphy

Kirkus Review calls this "a thoughtfully written, original and entertaining exploration of events ignited by love and lies."
Murphy, who now lives in Seattle, emailed me that her biggest dream was always to write and publish a novel. But as a former single working mom, a writing schedule was a luxury. She got serious after she went to the Wild Acres Writers Conference in Little Switzerland, N.C., and studied with novelist Ann Hood, who encouraged her.
At Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Vermont, she met an agent, who offered to represent her. In 2011, Hood invited her to a conference in Tuscany, Italy. Murphy took 50 pages of her novel-in-progress, "I Love You More." Hood liked it so much, she advised her to dump the novel she'd been working on and stick with this one.
Nine months later, she completed "I Love You," and in a few more months, her agent sold it to Doubleday.
"It took awhile," she writes, "and there were a lot of rejections along the way. But ultimately I believe it was the stick-with-it-ness that made it happen."

Murphy, who served as executive director of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public Art Commission, will read from  "I Love You More" at 2 p.m., Sunday, Sept. 7, at Park Road Books in Charlotte.

How Louise Shivers got her own 'baby' out of jail

Louise Shivers - NY Times photo

The death of  novelist Louise Shivers is old news now, but for me, it's still the saddest news of the summer. The Stantonsburg (N.C.) native died on Saturday, July 26, in Evans, Ga., of congestive heart failure. She was 84. Margalit Fox in her obituary on July 28 in the New York Times called her a "conjurer of (the) rural South."
Yes, she was that. And more.
I was serving as book editor in 1983 when Shivers' first novel, "Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail," appeared among the hundreds of books that spilled in each week for review. I noted the blurb from Eudora Welty on the back cover ("With this absorbing first novel we meet an author richly endowed and sure of her way.") Welty only blurbed two or three novels during my 17-year-stint on the book page. The other was Kaye Gibbons' "Ellen Foster," and before my time, Walker Percy's "The Movie Goer."
So I packed up the 136-page novel for a closer look.
Shivers was so in command of her story that as I read, my real world collapsed, and I was transported to 1937 and the tobacco fields of Eastern North Carolina. It was a riveting story of love and lust, of betrayal and tragedy. But what lifted the novel was Shivers' wisdom in giving us also a story of insight and transformation.
She knew well of what she wrote.
I interviewed Shivers over the years, and always she talked about the trap that women keep themselves in, often a trap of their own making. Shivers herself was in that trap, she told me. "I was raised to be quiet and submissive. The husband brings home everything, and you do what you're told."
The publication of that first novel at age 54 -- and the awards and accolades that followed -- helped to change all that. Shivers told me that her relationship with her husband had grown stronger.
"What a terrible thing to do to a man," she said, "to throw all that responsibility on him and set him up as a god and as a father."
Part of her trap, Shivers said, was spending two decades denying her urge to write. She had married after one year at Meredith College, and by age 24, she'd had three babies. But by 1967, when the "babies" were teenagers, she said that yearning to write "had just been suppressed as long as it was going to be suppressed."
By 1979, she had a manuscript to submit to a writers' conference, and it won first place. Novelist Mary Gordon happened to be the judge, and she recognized a true writer. Shivers quit her job in the library in Augusta, Ga., and put herself on a schedule to finish the novel.
Sad enough that Shivers is no longer among us. But so much sadder had she not followed her dream and thereby sprung that genius of a talent right out of that dark, cramped jail.