Still Sturgill

Wrote this spur of the moment Twitter flurry late last night after a long, good day:

This book. It just keeps quietly finding its way. I hoped it would go some way toward conveying what farmers are up against. What we’re all up against, in a sense. And that’s been happening. But I also wrote it to relive the love of why I loved writing in the first place. Go for poetry, go past the easy meat to the bone, set the jokes aside for a bit, risk overdoing it. Tell ya what helped…right when I thought I better not, folks might not go for it, I might lose a reader or two (and I have), I listened to Sturgill Simpson’s “Sound and Fury” over and over late one night. That was the tipping point. I was never cut out to be a so-called “badass” writer. I like doing what I call “cow jokes.” It’s fun to share laughter. I like writing 500 word bits that provide light relief. Toilet reading, if you like. But in the pandemic I was driven back to the late-night hammer sessions this all sprang from. Those days decades ago when I just wrote because I had to, not because it paid. Not because it sold. Out of that came this book. And how glad I am that I ignored the wishy-washy in me, that I just went ahead and hit repeat on Sturgill and got to typing. It’s late. G’nite. [EDITOR’S NOTE: It’s not late, it’s the next day, but y’know…] (photo by Lee Butterworth Photography)