Lovedrunk with that New-New

James R. Lower

When it first came to me, from out of a scurrying mess of thoughts, I saw it as small and clear and simple. An image from another time: on a rural stretch of farmland, a son and father lug a handmade, heirloom table up a rise to throw it on a bonfire of everything they’ve ever owned. Just this flicker and nothing else. And that’s the narcotic, isn’t it: that new-new, a bit of imagining that feels fresh and strange and squirmy and sacred almost. Don’t spook it. Don’t ever let it go.

For months and months I’d been raindancing for long-form schtuff, that book vibe, throwing pieces like this down on paper, each a spark to shield and blow into and feed until they flared. From there, most of these would choke, every one of them, snuffing out into smoke and nothing much. Boring. Recycled. Uninspired, awkward scraps. But this moment caught me, slowly and for whatever reason, and I kept coming back to summon it again and again. There was something beyond these two people in that place that I needed. There still is, all these months later now.

When pushed, the single moment grew, a story short skittering out, a trail of scenes to nowhere in particular, more exploratory than anything else, a blind feeling-out of whatever else could even be there. A family scouring a life out of the frontier as the Civil War breaks back East. A father off to fight, a mother succumbed to brokenness, and three siblings left to survive somehow. The characters come along, shades at first, some features clear, some in shadow. I set them upon each other, colliding them together as they wrangle and maneuver for purpose and effect.

But what of it? Not every snowflake needs pages upon pages of exploration. We look for vivid, powerful tellings that move, scenes with substance, characters with guts, but what makes the pages run? For this and for me, it was the time: historical, a nascent country, fracturing and turning in on itself as it grew outward, hard and simple worlds scattering into and brutalizing one another, so many things uncharted, incompatible, unknown. And it was the place: a family plot in natural isolation, sought out and sweated through and settled, on the crest of wildness, where Native Americans, freedmen, slaves, invading whites, folklore, voodoo, mythology, superstition, all these and others swirled together, and within that, story.

And I go where story goes, or try to. Growing up in the Dirrrrrrty as I did (The South is a whole other story), I played in the red clay beside signposts about the battles that had gone down all around me, slavery and murder and blood and fire; my hometown, Atlanta, was laid to waste by my ancestor Willie T. Sherman; my great-to-the-5th-power grandpappy, Cyrus, a coal-mining Union soldier, won the Medal of Honor at the Battle of the Wilderness. I can hold his journals in my hands, read his scrawled-ink hand that’s faded but so very actual. I can pick through the tiny, leatherbound copy of The Iliad that a Rebel soldier dropped on the battlefield for him to find. With this setting pooling up around my sliver, I’ve found it all too easy to tumble into the idea, to be consumed by it. It’s accessible to me in a way that feels new. And away we go.

It’s rarely an easy thing, although those stretches come, but mostly it’s a bushwhack, a tending, and with patience the dimensions of it open, desires grown and vanquished, worlds born and set to motion to spin on, hopefully, in all those who might ever read some.

I’ve been writing this one through some life horror, too, and still it leads, becoming more and more infused with meaning and power for me, and I’m thankful just to have it around. I get the feeling that completing novels tends to require all of you in this way. When I read a good one, it feels like that, like it is not a light and airy thing, but rather wrought from someone’s life.

So for now, it’s a world all my own, an old and growing one, completely distinct from that first glimmer but descended from it. I’m sweating out arcs and outlines, which scenes build to what and when, where’s the drive in each moment, the momentum, and how do I pull people inside here with me? But it feels good to be a fiend again, stumbling after this one, lovedrunk, telling it until I can’t any longer.

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Header Image by Kelcey Parker Ervick.

Spot illustrations for Fall/Winter 2023 issue by Dana Emiko Coons

Other spot illustrations courtesy Kelcey Parker Ervick, Sarah Salcedo, & Waringa Hunja

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