After spending the past year writing essays on Medium and newsletters on Substack, I’ve accepted that I’m more of a non-fiction writer/essayist/blogger/ex-journalist than an author of fiction.
I’ve tried writing fiction. I think anyone who enjoys writing for the sake of writing — or storytelling for the sake of storytelling — has made up a character or two. Or they’ve built a secret world, or drawn up a fake map, or imagined a new place.
And I’m not just talking about fantasy writers — I’m talking about folks who write romance, contemporary fiction, literary fiction, and dozens of other genres and sub-genres. Inventing fake people, fake colleges, fake bands, fake music festivals, fake contests, fake romances, and fake countries is pretty fun — and it’s common across the genres.
Having said that, I have such a tough time writing fiction, because I often fall back on my real life for inspiration. I can write about stuff I don’t know about. (I love doing research — and I’ve always worked in research-heavy fields, so I know where to find good sources.) But I like to write about real people and real memories and real places.
Lately, I’ve spent time working on a … short story? A novella? I don’t even know what I want it to be — I don’t want to overwrite it, so I imagine it will be fairly short.
Even though I don’t know how much I’m going to write, or how I want to end it, I know that what I’m writing is a love letter to three separate, imperfect parts of the South: the Cumberland Plateau of Tennessee, the river-lined wedge of western Kentucky, and the wide-open Llano Estacado, in western Texas.
I’ve written before about another part of the country my family hailed from — the Chesapeake and Outer Banks areas. I wrote a bit about these parts of the world in Alameda and Sabrita, two short stories I wrote back in my early twenties. That was a while ago, when I was first getting my footing as a writer. (I’m still getting my footing, all things being equal.)
But this new story — Old Granddad — has the flavors of the other places my family has called home.
Speaking broadly, I come from a part of the country that’s been a land of growth and a land of cutting-down. Black and Indigenous people, poor people, working-class folks, and women and children have faced adversity — and triumphed against it — in this place: the South.
My own family eked out a living by doing just about every typical working-class job. From the earliest colonial years, my ancestors were sharecroppers — and at least one of my ancestors was an enslaved person of Congolese descent. These early ancestors of mine certainly didn’t have an easy time here in the South. But our family remained here for generations, making a living one way or another.
My great-grandmother was a sharecropper, a clothing factory seamstress, and a caregiver for her murdered brother’s children. Her daughter, my maternal grandmother, was a maid and a hairdresser. My maternal grandfather was a veteran, a cattle farmer, and a machinist. My paternal grandfather was a coal miner, a crane operator, and a logger.
His father — my great-grandfather — was a bit more carefree. He spent all day doing nothing, and then spent all night drinking and playing cards. He once sold a box of turnips weighted down with rocks, and the grocer bought it, so I can’t say he didn’t make at least one attempt to feed the family. But my paternal great-grandfather was the direct opposite of my maternal great-grandmother, who nearly broke her back working as hard as — if not harder than — any man in her family.
At the end of the day, my maternal great-grandmother and my grandfathers were probably the three hardest working people in our family. Their toiling was brutal — and they were underpaid, under-thanked, and under-rewarded. Their effort was all worth it, and they knew love and respect and support, but they never could be thanked fully and properly for all the sacrifices they made.
These two sides, paternal and maternal, met in me. I’m three parts hard-working, one part ready to take a break. (That’s thanks to my great-grandfather, who made recreation his life’s work.) I feel like I owe them all something that I can’t quite give them.
In some small way — to record bits and pieces of their stories, and to incorporate these stories in whatever I’m writing — I hope I can preserve their memory. FI may not be able to do a lot, but I want to try to do that.
I want them to live in, in stories, in recollections, in warm memories. They live on, in the writing and the reading, in the pictures, in the words.
Jamais Mayville 