Preface to What We Hold In Our Hands: a Slow Road Reader

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The 4 a.m. excursion that has brought home ninety-plus personal essays (and other such writings) is an habitual armchair scavenger hunt, an archeological dig or American cultural anthropology field trip powered by curiosity.

It may seem an odd passion to set out daily and so early, even on weekends. But it is my writer’s way of sampling the currents of the times, mine and ours.

Sorting these pieces, finding a pattern in the apparent randomness and chaos of everyday living has become a centering exercise that moves me a little closer to an understanding of what it is that you and I together hold in our hands.

These stories and essays range as widely as do daily experience and the winds of my whimsy, worry and wonder. The collection is richly hyper-local, with accounts of living the rural life in the near habitat of home, a small dot on the map that is a microcosm of the Blue Ridge and the southern Appalachian realms.

There are personal stories here, even some from and about our children, and this time around, including more than a few on the action verb, aging, that I am coming to know better in the three years since the first book.

Here too, I share concerns as naturalist for the survival challenges faced by the smallest of our fellow companions that are important harbingers of our planet’s health.

We hold in our hands our unique stories past and present, our values and beliefs, our hopes from common culture and experience and out of the same soil, water and air. We hold the fate of our children’s world and future.

This book of personal essays is a single grain of sand from a low, green mountain of human experience. It is a peculiar narrative of particular moments and dramas in one life, one family and one pleasantly-rural county and home place.

Throughout this eclectic assortment resonates a joy for living. These pages hold the subliminal hope that all of us will revisit with gratitude the shared blessings in our grasp--our here, our now, our known riches of the senses, of memory, of duty and relationship together in a common human family and story.

About the Writing and the Writer

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This collection has been growing for a couple of years in my archives, one blog post, one slow-walk AHA moment (you’ll hear more about this), one news column or radio essay at a time, cell by organ by limb, migrating finally to a comfortable place in the whole of it all.

You’ll find some family resemblance between this book and the first, Slow Road Home. Both are compilations of “folk writing” as a blog reader long ago described my style and subject matter. The topic material of both is wide-ranging, even more so in this volume.

Slow Road Reader is a sampler of very different flavors and textures, but the sum of them is also united by a sense of life-long curiosity and humor or sometimes concern, often about very local matters but with wider and more global truths embedded.

You can open this book anywhere, read a passage at random, and have a story without feeling an urgent need to read further to get to the conclusion or resolution. At the same time, you’ll find some continuity and theme throughout and between the books. The siblings have the same father, and so share a common ancestry, traits and voice because he has these particular field markings as follows.

Father and grandfather: Find here not a few stories that feature our granddaughter Abby. There’s a Father’s Day poem from our son, Nate, and one I wrote to his big sister Holli just before she brought Abby into our lives. And of course there are more than a few that bring in the spousal unit, the hero of Bonny and Clyde and the Killing Fields of Goose Creek. But I’m still paying for Solomon’s Sheets in Slow Road Home, so I’ve tried to be good this time.

Naturalist and teacher: This book, like the first, has nature as its most common theme across all eight categories (read on for that explanation)--a given considering my forty-year history as a biology-watcher and classroom teacher. One way or another, you the reader will be challenged to become an active participant in your particular landscape and to act on the living planet’s behalf. There are facts and factoids embedded here and there throughout, and you just might discover some useful (or useless) truth that you didn’t know about a common plant or animal in your own back yard.

Believer: ... in the power of humor and personal vision and voice to tell a story best. If you squint your eyes just a little, you’ll find me peeking out of every one of these pieces. If you were a fly on the wall watching as I wrote them, you’d see the energy and joy of a story well told (at least as well as I am able to do it) and perhaps become infected with a sense of the thrill of discovery that permeates my morning writing. You may also detect a certain Gary Larsenesque quirkiness to the way I understand the natural world, taking enormous delight in the small beauties and ironies of the ordinary. As an older writer this time around, the topic of aging and the passing of time finds its way here, especially in those passages that deal with the physical demands of rural living.

Citizen/participant: ... of a household, neighborhood, county, region, nation and globe. Almost all of this book is hyper-local in that its parts were written in my slippers for immediate consumption of local readers and listeners. I do make references often to the town or county of Floyd in southwest Virginia and I’ve not stripped dates from all these pieces, so they are set in time, but the subjects will not become soon dated. Taken as a whole, when you finish digesting all 90-plus morsels herein, you’ll have discovered ways that my story is your story. My hopes and concerns belong in some way to all of us for all our short durations here.

Photographer: I know a lot of folks were expecting more pictures in the first book. I’d love to have color in this one, but couldn’t figure out how to do that economically. But I just had to have more pictures this time around since so often, especially on the blog, I write from an image. I trust these small black and whites add something to your experience of the story, and if you’re interested in larger-with-color versions, hop over to the Slow Road Reader gallery at SmugMug. (More images added soon!)

Finally, regarding organization: Yes, there is some. I tagged these disparate pieces into eight categories for the purpose of my own sorting-out. You can find my category “tags” below the name of each piece, and read my descriptions of them in the Appendix of the book. The ten parts of the book pass through selections from all or most of these topic categories so that there is some roughly common structure within the diversity of them each part.