By JAMIE QUATRO
If you walk into the building that houses the tiny studio space in which I write – the old Southern Saddlery Factory in Chattanooga – the first thing you’ll see is a wall of framed invoices dating from the late 1800s:
Sold to Mr. Phipps, Bristol Country Club, Bristol, Tennessee: 2 leather utility bags, Brown Elk, $5.00.
This summer, for the first time in my life of weather, I walked through a rainstorm: entered, endured, exited. All within one hundred yards of a smooth country road.
Other firsts: bearing out tornado warnings in the basement of Frost Library (twice); a moment of queasy lilting I assumed was in my head but turned out to be a Virginia-originated earthquake; battening hatches (drawing water, securing heavy items in the backyard) against a hurricane. To be truthful, I have experienced earthquakes and hurricanes before, but the former was in Guatemala, where such things are expected; the latter was in the foreign country of childhood in which parents are responsible for taping the windows, and I was allowed to dance in the driveway in my bathing suit in the warm wet eye of the storm.
From our friends at Tottenville Review, on its place of origin:
It feels strange to look at an old photo, one taken long before you or your parents were born, and recognize something. It’s a disconcerting feeling that uproots you from your present life. Suddenly you find yourself in a faraway place that feels antiquated and remote—but it’s also eerily familiar. You realize that you once knew it very well.
By LAUREN GROFF
Once upon a time, I believed that writing was the same thing as being a writer. This was before I understood that scribbling a messy sentence in a notebook was not actual writing, a time when I bought gamely into the self-sparked romance of becoming a writer: a life of moonlit walks beside rivers, bare apartments dancing with light, foreign languages drifting through a window full of geraniums. Being a writer meant being somewhere else, anywhere that promised architecture and meaningful encounters with sophisticated natives and a chilly, ascetic version of me pinned like an anchorite to my pages. I knew I could never be a writer in the place where I was born, small, cold Cooperstown with its mysterious lake. Laughable idea, that!
In Germany, to be drunk is “to be full of stars and hail.”
French teachers urge their students to “seize the moon by the teeth.”
In Russia, the concept “never” calls crustaceans to mind: “when the crayfish sings on the mountain.”
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