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.

Episode 4: On Alice Notley, unsent letters, pizza kitchens, making a home in Western New York, leaving it, what we can learn from Griselda, and how to keep making art

A book tour is the best excuse to see old friends. This past weekend I reunited with two: Western Massachusetts and Gabriel Bump, author of the novels Everywhere You Don’t Belong and The New Naturals.

I met Gabe in Buffalo in 2019. Our convenient location on the I-90 and rents that matched his first advance made Buffalo an attractive home, in between his roots in Chicago and Western Massachusetts, where he had recently completed his MFA. We went to the same poetry and art parties and traded thoughts on fiction and hip-hop, before he went south for a job teaching at the University of North Carolina and I went east to his old stomping grounds in the Valley. When I was putting together the tour for this book and learned that Gabe was headed back to UMass, I knew we had to meet up somewhere. I’m so grateful that he joined me for a reading and conversation at Unnameable Books in Turners Falls.

I opened the reading with a poem by Alice Notley, “One of the Longest Times,” which I felt marked an intersection between my project and some of Notley’s lifelong interests—communion with the dead, the making and remaking of personhood, the persistence of identities, experiences, and relationships across geological time. Then I read two sections from I Am Here You Are Not I Love You that I hadn’t spoken aloud since my final round of edits—never before an audience.

Gabe and I then had a wide-ranging conversation. I’m still still blown away by his sensitive reading and exciting questions—which I think you can hear in my voice on the recording. We talked about our relationship with Buffalo and ideas of “home,” success and celebrity, and how to persist as an artist, touching on the obvious examples of Andy and Cindy, our mutual friend Mickey Harmon, the extended Griselda universe, and our own experiences as writers. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
A tour is also a great excuse to make new friends. Rachelle and I recently met the photographer Nafis Azad at a wedding in Maine (thanks Meagan and Nigel), and he generously invited us to his studio in Whately near Turners Falls to see his studio and massive vintage Polaroid, a demo model that never went into commercial production.

Sending my thanks out to Gabe, Nafis, Adam Tobin at Unnameable, and everyone who came to the reading.

Unnameable Books in Brooklyn hosted the second stop of the I Am Here You Are Not I Love You tour. Although the book’s official release date was Friday May 16, I billed the 17th as a second launch, because I think this is a New York City book almost as much as it’s a Buffalo book. (In the recent Brooklyn Rail review, Melissa Holbrook Pierson observed that Buffalo is a prominent character in the book, and I think you could say the same for SoHo and Williamsburg.) I was deeply grateful for the company of the artist and Hallwalls founder Charles Clough, who was a major source for my book, and the Renaissance man Howard Fishman, who wrote the impassioned and inspiring biography To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse.

We spoke about our various projects, I read a little from the book, and we discussed our experiences, observations, and gripes as working writers and artists. The loose conversation took some interesting turns—we covered the who’s who of various named movements of the last century; public funding in the arts; the interplay of talent, charisma, and changeability; and Buffalo’s Vincent Gallo.