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.

I’m deeply grateful for the invitation from John Deming to read at the KGB Bar Monday Night Poetry Series. For nearly three decades, this series has presented exceptional poetry in the best Soviet-themed pro-Ukrainian bar in the East Village. As the date of my reading approached—with real poets Kristina Andersson Bicher and Tom Sleigh—I grew increasingly nervous. I hadn’t written a poem since 2019. I had spent the past five or more years immersed in nonfiction. While I was excited to read from my forthcoming book, I Am Here You Are Not I Love You, I realized that this was an opportunity to force my mind back into the mode of poetry. I began working on two new poems on the recent flight from JFK to Madrid (I did not purchase wifi), and Rachelle helped me edit them in the weeks since.

Because of her help, I was able to open my KGB reading with three poems: my long poem that appears in Best New Poets 2019 and two new poems. All three, as it turns out, are about Rachelle. I did not beat the wife guy allegations.

After the poems, though, I read the prologue of I Am Here You Are Not I Love You, just two and a half pages.

As I listen to the first few seconds of my voice on this recording, I’m struck by the strength of the Buffalo accent. The irrepressible “āẽyhh.” I don’t have anything profound to say about this—just, wow. It’s stronger than I realized.Thanks to Ata for setting this up, to John for the generous introduction, to Grace and Selena for all their work to keep this series going.

Episode 1.

Panel discussion recorded live at the New Orleans Poetry Festival and Small Press Book Fair, Sunday, April 13, 2025.

From the NOPF website:

This roundtable will explore the life and legacy of the poet Frank Stanford (1948-1978). Drawing on the unique expertise of each panelist, it will do so through several perspectives. James McWilliams, author of the first Frank Stanford biography (due out in the summer of 2025 with the University of Arkansas Press), will survey Stanford's early upbringing in Greenville, Mississippi; Memphis, Tennessee; Snow Lake, Arkansas; Mountain Home, Arkansas; and Subiaco, Arkansas. A. P. Walton, whose edited collection of Stanford's letters is also forthcoming from the University of Arkansas Press, will examine not only the intricate and deeply personal nature of Stanford's copious correspondence, but also how Stanford crafted those letters into a form of art that complemented his poems as he moved across various geographies in northwest Arkansas (Fayetteville, Rogers, Eureka Springs, Busch) and relationships. Poet Canese Jarboe will explore Stanford's poetics, giving special consideration to the rural and backcountry registers in Stanford's work, as well as the ongoing interplay between death and sexuality that animates so much of his poetry. Aidan Ryan, whose Foundlings Press has long promoted Stanford, will discuss the challenges involved in introducing a long neglected/overlooked poet to a larger audience of readers. As a filmmaker, Ryan can also comment on the cinematic nature of Stanford's writing. Finally, as poets who knew Stanford personally, Bill Willett and Ralph Adamo are in a unique position to discern the mythical Stanford from the actual Stanford, noting how Stanford negotiated his identity to craft a life that was dramatic, heroic, prolific, brilliant, and tragic.

• A. P. Walton

• Canese Jarboe

• James McWilliams

• Ralph Adamo

• Aidan Ryan

If you prefer, watch the video here.