Listening for stories

In One Writer’s Beginnings, Eudora Welty wrote: "Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole."

One time over a matter of a week, a couple of mice got into my house. For months and even years after, my cat, Luke, would sit by the place where the hole was stuffed, waiting for another one to come in. He never gave up.

As a kid, I was the cat watching for a mouse, the kid listening for a story. I remember sitting on my great aunt's lawn in McHenry, Kentucky. My younger siblings were playing elsewhere. But I was in one of those colorful metal chairs that's back looked like a tulip, my legs dangling. I was with the adults, waiting, listening. And those adults delivered with stories and reactions and a side helping of humor. The only thing that slowed them from telling stories was the whistle of a passing freight train, which they'd have to wait to pass in order to hear. Maybe that's why today I turn down the volume of the television when I hear a train in the distance. I've always thought it was about a restlessness, a desire to travel and be elsewhere. It might be in part. But perhaps I also connect the train's whistle to storytelling. Next time I hear a train, I'll pay better attention to what comes next. A story might jump off one of the cars.

2nd and Church--It's a Literary Location

Attention Writing Friends, Nashville and Tennessee Friends, Spalding Friends, WKU Friends, Reading Friends! The inaugural issue of a new literary journal was launched this week. Meet 2nd and Church. Publisher Roy Burkhead is a Spalding M...FA grad, a WKU grad, and a fabulous writer. Obviously a lot of work and sweat goes into a new literary journal--and perhaps some pain. From Roy's blog: "It was around the end of May of this year when I was near the intersection of 2nd Avenue and Church Street, and I was remembering my desire to create a literary journal that would focus on Nashville and Middle Tennessee. It was also on this day in May when I was hit by a car in the crosswalk." Click the link below to learn more about 2nd and Church.

http://2ndandchurch.com/