Episode 5: A visit to the Monteagle Sunday School Assembly

In 1882, an offshoot of the Chautauqua Movement found a home in Monteagle, Tennessee, a town just up the road from Sewanee University atop the Cumberland Plateau. This past week I had the pleasure and honor of visiting for a talk and film screening. My hosts were Mark and Anne Byrn Floyd, two fixtures here “on the mountain,” as the residents say—Anne Byrn’s family has been here for seven generations, going back to a lawyer who drafted the Assembly’s original charter. I couldn’t have asked for better hosts—not only because of their Southern hospitality, but because of their intimate inherited understanding of the place and its spirit.

Though I was born and raised and currently live in Western New York, I’ve never been to Lake Chautauqua. From what I’ve heard, though, Monteagle is a bit different.

To pass through the wooden boom gate, which a teenager in a guard both operates by hand, is to pass back in time—into an old-growth forest punctuated by Victorian cottages, log cabins, and the most impressive porches I’ve ever seen. Like “The Mothership” up north, the Assembly is organized around a summer-long program of creative and intellectual inquiry: my program for I Am Here You Are Not I Love You followed a lecture on planetology and preceded a briefing on the latest news from Pompeii and Herculaneum. But I competed for attention with tennis and pickleball tournaments, a farmer’s market and craft fair, and a four-day wilderness immersion for the teenagers. Cats, dogs, and kids rollick down the gravel roads and deep glens of the Assembly grounds; frequently I came across what seemed like hundreds of abandoned bicycles in the middle of a clearing or at the edge of one of the Assembly’s 140 year-old bridges, indicating the latest location of their traveling woodland carnival.

The children I did meet were uncommonly self-possessed: they introduce themselves, shake your hand, say goodbye to everyone present before they leave an Assembly porch for their next adventure. The parents and grandparents displayed the same politeness, and as I got to know more of them I learned to ask more probing questions, realizing the variety of the paths that had brought them here. There were plenty of investors and lawyers, sure—but I also met a couple who had started their own one-room schoolhouse; the chief author of the AP Latin exam; an author of hunting and fishing tales; an acoustic designer for music venues; and the founder of an alt-weekly magazine. They welcomed me immediately: I spent the night after my lecture celebrating a resident’s 49th birthday with a back porch game of giant jenga, Tennessee liquor flowing, deep cuts from run DMC filling the otherwise silent night. I could see why a family might keep coming here for seven generations.

I spoke on Thursday morning in the Assembly’s Warren Chapel. I’ve done my best to tailor each of these readings and talks to the audience, so for the Assembly, I focused on artistic and intellectual community and companionship. I read a few sections of the book for the first time—including one capturing and amusing exchange between the artists Bob Gulley and Jean-Michel Basquiat and another from the very end of the book, where I explain why I attempted the project and what “artistic community” means to me now. Mark then took me for a tour of Sewanee University, where the annual writers conference was just wrapping up. It was cool to see my book stocked with titles from the other visiting writers—good company.

After a nap (the atmosphere demanded it) I rallied for a cocktail party at the Floyd cottage followed by a screening of the documentary in the Assembly auditorium. The space was huge, with the sounds of the night coming in from moveable wooden baffles on the sides of the building and bats occasionally flying across the screen.

Reminder: if you haven’t seen the film, you can rent or buy it on Amazon.