Just a reminder: I do leave Georgia occasionally. The Grand Tetons are behind me, but today I am safely back home in Tate, Georgia

In yesterdy’s mail arrived a letter from Kevin Grogan, Director of the Morris Museum of Art. He and his staff manage perhaps the greatest collection of southern art in the counttry. However, that was not the reason for the letter. Kevin and his staff also administer the Porter Fleming Literary Competition which solicits entries in the categories of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and one-act plays every year.

For the past three years I have submitted poetry written about the world of my parents’ youth, growing up in “Vashti” (an imaginary stand-in for all the little towns in east central section of Georgia). Their’s was a world of declining small towns. sunset places where cotton had once been king, a land of blue highways (on the maps) and crumbling roadside architecture. This year I decided to turn my hand to telling some of these stories (some true, some only inspired by truth) for the competition. Even if I failed to win, it would be a good reason to attend this year’s awards ceremony in a beautiful setting. Those are being delayed for now.

Kevin’s letter informed me that I had, in fact won first prize for my story “Going Home on the Nancy Hanks (1961),” The Nancy Hanks was the passengerline special between Atlanta and Savannah. It also ran through the heart of east central Georgia, the land on which my family has lived since the 1790’s. I was headed home at Thanksgiving to Gough where my parents, brother and sister were living after the collapse of the construction industry in the Eisenhower Recession of the late-1950’s and early 1960’s. They had returned to their roots. My parents and I were all born in this tiniest of places.

It was a lonely journey through forelorn landscape filled with bare trees and stubbled cotton fields. I departed from the great Atlanta Terminal Station and arrived in the middle of nowhere. One of only wo passengers in the single passenger car, I stepped down into a deserted town and was retrieved by my family driving a broken down car. Perhaps the trip would be better forgotten, but the atmosphere, the place, the plight of my family made it painfully memorable-so I wrote about it.

Kevin’s letter, went on to say that I had also won second place for another work entitled “The Dove,” a short story inspired by a poem I had written earlier. The broader and less demanding format of short story offered room to expand this tale of a young child who is killed in a tragic accident at a cotton gin. The gin of course marks the arrival of modern industry in an agricultural world and the child’s tragedy suggests the danger and destruction of the work that had to be done in a perilous place. It was also a a place in time, prisoner to an inevitable reliance on a cash crop that had survived even when its slave force had been freed. Now the cotton crop seemed to enslave and endanger all who were dependent upon it.

Increasingly, I am drawn into the world of the south in the early twentieth century, as you have surely noticed. The decline of Gough, the loss of the Longleaf pine forests, the Tom Loyless story and the hope symbolized by Warm Springs, all these things seem parts of a whole to me. It’s the story of how we got here, how the dream of an antebellum south died slowly, suffocated by depression and despair, haunted by tragedy and mean livelihood. Oh, I will return to humor, to stories of dogs, to long-ago friendships, so hang in there with me as I find my way to writing something worthwhile, something we can all find meaningful.

We will remember this as “2020: Year of the Coronavirus.” I pray you and yours are safe. Most of us will survive this and those who do not will live on in the stories and and in the souls of those of us who remain.