Chattanooga Pulse

With great aplomb, the Chattanooga Market opened its first day of the season this month, showcasing the work and talents of numerous visual artists and artisans from the Chattanooga area. Painters, photographers, sculptors, jewelry designers, furniture makers and musicians all came together to the buying public’s delight under the First Tennessee Pavilion and the warmth of a bright spring day.

Chattanooga has become well known for its support and respect for local artists and craftsmen. Everybody who was anybody was at the 4 Bridges Art Festival, and the Bluff View Art District has become a shrine to the visual arts. But those who create while sitting alone under a desk lamp with pen and paper in hand (or staring at a computer screen) have been sadly overlooked, despite the fact that the talent of some of Chattanooga’s unknown literary artists is astounding.

This is not to say that Chattanooga has completely ignored the literary arts. In 1981, two UTC professors joined with the Chattanooga Arts and Education Council to found the Conference on Southern Literature, which has now become one of the leading cultural events in the Southeast, and is based here in Chattanooga. Past participants have included such major writers as Eudora Welty, James Dickey, Allan Gurganus, Bobbie Ann Mason and William Styron, to name only a few. These names carry an immense weight in the literary world, and as long as people are studying America’s Southern literature these writers will never be forgotten. Chattanooga’s Southern heritage, and its respect for its Southern heritage, was one of the reasons our city was chosen to host this conference.

With the conference was born the Fellowship of Southern Writers. A group of writers meeting at the 1987 conference decided to form the fellowship, its mission being: “to recognize and encourage literature in the South through commemorating outstanding literary achievement, encouraging young writers through awards, prizes and fellowships, recognizing distinction in writing by election to membership, and through other appropriate activities.” It is an exclusive fellowship that has no more than 50 members at any time. The members are very much involved in Chattanooga’s Conference on Southern Literature. It is here that they meet and, according to their web site, “participate in the biennial Arts & Education Council Conference on Southern Literature, where they elect new Fellows, bestow awards on established and emerging writers and deliver readings and lectures.”

Chattanooga’s individual literary history, though, is a bit more obscure. Despite the highly publicized conference and the meeting of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, there remains a rich and mostly unappreciated aspect to the city’s literary life. This city is full of writers of the first order who, except among themselves, go mostly unrecognized.
Many people know that the namesake of Chattanooga’s St. Elmo Historic District is a 19th-century book by Augusta J. Evans, St. Elmo. Ms. Evans became enamored with the town after spending several summers on Lookout Mountain and decided that the view from atop the mountain rivaled that of St. Elmo Castle in Naples, Italy. The book was, as was most of Augusta Evans’ literary work, very much in support of the Confederate cause and served her “noble cause” of helping to raise the spirits of people and armies facing defeat. The book sold more than a million copies in its first four months and was one of the top three best-selling novels of the 19th century. St. Elmo was and remains proud to carry on the book’s name.

But who has heard of a small farming community just this side of Dayton called Owl Roost? There is a book about that place, too, called The Fields of Owl Roost, which won an Indie Excellence Award in 2005. Bruce Majors, the author of the book, describes it as “a collection of poetry based on my experiences growing up and living in the hills and hollows of that ancient community near Dayton called Owl Roost. “Only three or four families live there now, but the place is rich with history and tales of the folk who lived there a hundred or two hundred years ago,” says Majors. “I have a cabin on the original Owl Roost Road and that’s where I do a lot of writing. I’ve lived in this region most of my life and my poems are tied to the countryside around Dayton and Chattanooga.”

That cabin on the old Owl Roost Road is typical of the sequestered discipline it takes for most writers to perform their craft. Writing is necessarily a lonely endeavor. Nowhere besides the writer’s mind do the words flow out of a pen like the fireworks fly from a glassblower’s pipe. Nobody cares when a writer says, “Watch this!” and types on a keyboard or scribbles on paper the way some do when an artist splashes paint across a stretched canvas. The act of creating written works of art can be terrible and lonely, as is often the author’s admiration of a finished work once the exhilaration of having had the discipline to complete it has subsided. You can’t hang a book on a wall for people in the coffee shops to walk by and admire. The writer doesn’t need people to look at what they’ve done—they need someone to listen to what they have said. Literature requires a patient dedication from a reader and local literary artists require support and dedication from the local community that Chattanooga has yet to offer.

For this reason, then-graduate students Rebecca Cook and Jennifer Hoff brought the Chattanooga writing community together in 2001 to found the Chattanooga Writer’s Guild (CWG), a not-for-profit organization whose stated mission is “to promote, encourage and support the craft of quality writing and to create a supportive environment for writers in the greater Chattanooga Community.” The group was proud of the 20 members it was initially able to acquire—but not everyone thought it was such a great idea. Ms. Hoff once said of the group’s beginning efforts, “We were advised against organizing, not because it wasn’t a good idea, but because there was fear that there was not enough interest in the Chattanooga area.” Today the CWG boasts more than 150 local writers and is still growing, proving that the interest was and remains there.

Pris Shartle is the current president of the Chattanooga Writer‘s Guild. Under her guidance, the Guild is revamping its web site and expanding the already existing Independent Writers Groups. The new web site will offer all members the opportunity to post personal profiles detailing each individual’s skills and writing experience. An online discussion forum and information about upcoming readings, member publications and other events will also be available.

The Independent Writers Groups have become one of the most vital aspects of the Chattanooga Writer’s Guild. These groups provide opportunities for Guild members to meet in critique groups and offer educated feedback on current works-in-progress. Each group is unique and decides its own time and place to meet. Non-member guests are welcome to attend one of these group meetings, though to attend regularly and to share work it is necessary to become an active member. There are currently seven critique groups and four independent, open to the public groups organized and available through the Guild.

In addition to the somewhat private critique groups, the Chattanooga Writers Guild organizes public readings for its members to showcase their work. The most recent of these readings was Read Around Tennessee, an event hosted by David Smotherman of Winder Binder Gallery of Folk Art on Frazier Avenue. Among the local writers who read at the event were Penny Dyer (a Pushcart Prize nominee), Rebecca Cook (founding member of the CWG), Bruce Majors, and Jenny Sadre-Orafai.

One of the first to have the nerve to stand behind the event’s microphone was CWG founding member Rebecca Cook. She admitted immediately to being only the slightest bit inebriated, for which those interested in full disclosure should give her the greatest respect, then with her contradictory laughing eyes began reading work that immediately raised the bar to a formidable height. The following is an excerpt:

“Once she saw a bull mounting a cow. She was afraid but her father barked, ‘He’s breeding her’ and that was that. She thought someone might die and then there was a burning bush and a prophet. She washed the dirt from his feet and he held her in the air, up and up until she touched the ceiling of the sky. They say your first god is your father bouncing you on his knee. They say salvation is just a holding on for dear life. There was something she meant to say but she didn’t want to fall off. There was something she tried to reach but she couldn’t hold on. When it stops, it stops forever. But really there was only an afghan, red with black stripes and she pulled it up to her chin. She went to sleep and didn’t dream. She was too dangerous for dreams. When she dreams, the stars fall down. When she dreams, it starts all over.”

Jenny Sadre-Orafai read soon thereafter. Jenny is a Chattanooga native who began writing when she was a child, and eventually studied under poet and UTC professor Earl Braggs while attending college. It was under his tutelage, she says, that she really began to understand her craft and began giving public readings of her work. She has since been published in numerous literary journals such as Plainsongs, Poetry Midwest and Boxcar Poetry Review and has had a book chosen for publication by Finishing Line Press. She currently serves as poetry editor of New South, Georgia State University’s Journal of Art and Literature.

Jenny read a poem entitled “Where Wedding Bands Go”, which was originally published in Dash Literary Journal and is reprinted here. The problem with Jenny is that she is as captivating in body as the words she reads, leaving the listener wondering what they’re really paying attention to. By the time she’s done, you realize that, despite her initial disclaimer that the words and the writer cannot be held accountable for one another, the girl and the poetry really are one and the same. She read:

I tried to sell it, tried to swallow it.
I tried to bury it in a field behind
a house that didn’t belong to me.
I tried to throw it over some blue bridge
where I had once thrown a horseshoe charm.
I tried staring at it until it vanished.
I tried sliding it on my dog’s tail,
hoping it would glide off her stumpy
thing and fall into hands that could
give it what it needs—a good polishing,
and a finger that wants it

The mention of the “blue bridge” rings a bell in all of our minds. When asked about the poem, Jenny says, “The blue bridge, of course, is the Walnut Street Bridge. I’ve read that poem all over the country and outside the country but never actually in Chattanooga before the reading Saturday. It was hard to read it without smiling…”

Honorable mention must go to poet Mike Bodine, the self-proclaimed “Poet Laureate of East Ridge”. His reading combined good humor, unashamed honesty and a certain poignancy that elevated him a step or two above some of the others. The Shaking Ray Levi Society would do well to look into recording him. He is a writer who is a lot better than he thinks he is.

The most influential writer in the Chattanooga area seems to be Sadre-Orafai’s former teacher, Earl Braggs. Though he did not read at Read Around Tennessee, Braggs has carved out his own prominent place in the city’s literary history by publishing such works as Crossing Tecumseh Street and, perhaps his most well known book, Walking Back From Woodstock. In 1995, he won the Jack Kerouac International Literary Prize. When asked about how the region he lives in influences his work, Braggs says, “The South is a writer’s place, and Chattanooga is a writer’s town. There is something in the air that I can’t quite articulate with words. An inviting richness hovers over downtown and along the river. Something here beckons the creative to create, to sing, dance, improvise.”

Braggs is right. Chattanooga has journeyed from being a polluted steel and river town to one of the most vibrant small cities in the Southeast. This bright vibrancy is shadowed by a sometimes-dark, haunted past, which makes Chattanooga representative of the South as a whole, of the human condition as a whole, and a deep wellspring of inspiration for the artist.

Chattanooga beckons visual artists from all over the country and welcomes them upon their arrival, offering countless opportunities, from city-organized art shows to wealthy patrons willing to help these artists achieve that one elusive goal: to sell their work. Our writers these days are picking themselves up by their bootstraps with the help of the Chattanooga Writer’s Guild and people like Earl Braggs who have decided to make Chattanooga their home.

In the end, despite not having the support, recognition or community endorsement the visual artists are afforded, our city’s writers remain as passionate about their art as any of our other more celebrated artists are. It is a way of life that tortures as much as it sustains, a sort of addiction that the writer secretly endures, nurses and hides away. As Bruce Majors explains it, “I write because I need to write. Old memories and old sins haunt the paper all the time. I really think most poems are made in the subconscious mind and come out like having a baby. You can’t help it.”

We’ll end here with a poem of his that, luckily for all of us, he couldn’t help writing.

Passing By Pleasant Hill Baptist Church At Dusk

A sinner in a Ford truck sucking on Pabst Blue Ribbon
half drunk, not half in love with anything, I wonder
what the Lord must think?

Tires rip and crack on the graveled road,
offering jolted prayers on my behalf to a God
who does not entirely believe in me.
I don’t even know what prayer really is

cicada’s choiring through pines?
an owl’s hoot over a shadowed lake
or me stranded on uncertain knees to beg
forgiveness of sins I don’t even remember?

My old truck brakes at the ramp.
I stand upright in my spirit, wholly lighted,
baptized in moonlight,
and slide a john boat into the dark waters of absolution
The only salvation I may ever know.

Support For Writers In The Area

Here is a list of the current Critique and Independent writing groups organized by the Chattanooga Writer’s Guild. Anyone is welcome to visit these groups and see if they might be a fit. Membership in the Chattanooga Writers Guild is required for regular participants. To join, ($25 annually, $15 for students) go to www.chattanoogawritersguild.com.

CWG Critique Groups:

Fiction: Wally’s Restaurant-East Ridge, 3rd Wednesday, 7 p.m. (423) 893-5539.

Fiction: Ryan’s Steakhouse in Hixson, 1st Tuesday, 5:30-6:30 p.m. psculley@scullysnet.com

Poetry: Hixson, 3rd Thursday, 7 p.m. Call Helga Kidder, (423) 875-0378.

Nonfiction (evening): New Hope Presbyterian Church, Shallowford Road, 4th Tuesday, 7 p.m. (423) 892-9408.

Nonfiction (mid-day): Panera Bread-Battlefield Pkwy, 2nd & 4th Thursdays, 12:30 p.m. eat, critiques 1-3 p.m. (706) 866-1387.
Christian Writing: First Presbyterian Church, McCallie at Douglas St., Rm. 405 of the Tower, 3rd Tuesday, 6-8 p.m. (423) 842-6477.

Memoir: First Presbyterian Church, McCallie at Douglas St., Rm. 405 of the Tower, 1st Tuesday, 6-8 p.m. kphillipso@aol.com.

Independent Groups:

Owl Towne Writers: Resurrection Lutheran Church, 4309 Ooltewah-Ringgold Rd., every other Tuesday, 7 p.m. Free, open to any writing style, Contact Ken Crane at owltowne@catt.com

Rhyme N Chatt: Every Monday, 7 pm, at Mudpie Restaurant. $25 annual dues. Ages 17 and older, free for ages 16 and younger, open to all area poets. (423) 544-1597.

Open Mic Night: Barnes and Noble on the final Friday of each month. Contact KB Ballentine at drinaalbert@bellsouth.net

New Voices Poetry Reading: Pasha Coffee House, 3914 St. Elmo Avenue, on the third Saturday of each month. Contact Ray Zimmerman at znaturalist@yahoo.com.

Other Writing Groups:

New to the area is the Center for Contemplative Writing. Contact Anne at (423) 605-0525.

Author Photos from Lesha Patterson