I used to write with a British accent. The voice in my head as I wrestled with ideas, looking for connections, hoping for conclusions, reaching for just the right word was an invention. I had never been to England, you see. I grew up in a small town in northwestern Pennsylvania – Youngsville, if you are interested – and, but for Canada, which to us never really counted, had never been out of the country. But here I was in college, surrounded by individuals from all over – big cities, many of them – and I felt I had to step up my game. In truth, I believed that my northwestern Pennsylvania accent was not smart enough. Even my diction was suspect. I said pop when everyone else said soda, crick, not creek, kife, not borrow without asking.
I am now amused by the thought of this behavior, but only because I experienced a small epiphany soon after my sophomore year. I was reading a classic work of American literature and discovered that I knew the meaning of every word on the page. I did not need to defer to a dictionary. The language was not foreign or overly erudite. I got it. It was then that I concluded that I no longer needed to pretend to be someone I wasn’t. My writing voice changed. I was a student from northwestern Pennsylvania, and that was fine. I could be smart, too.
The heart of the epiphany, really, was that I was also capable of creating great works of literature or, if you will, great art. I studied a host of authors in earnest, mostly American. Many came from humble beginnings just like me. They were just serious about their craft. They wrote on what paper they could find. They held down real jobs. Blue collar work. But they kept at it, honed their skillset, leaned in to their passion for wordsmithing. I began keeping a journal. I collected phrases – the curious ways some folks worded an idea. Dialects. Diction. I noticed how much of it was defined by region. I was fascinated. I remain so. But I also noticed something quite telling as I continued my studies both undergraduate and then graduate. Getting to tell your story to a mass audience is quite the luxury. Few make it past the gatekeepers – those agents and publishers who have dollar signs for eyes and little regard for literature and art for its own sake. It must be trending for it to pass. The story might be genius, but if it is not somehow participating in the current discourse – something, by the way, that turns on a dime – then it will not pass muster. Thank you for submitting. I am not the right agent or publisher for it.
All of this is to wonder about the curriculum that was presented to me and my peers. We read what was approved. We studied what managed to get by the burly bouncer in major publishing houses. The voices were not exhaustive; they were select.
Was I, therefore, exposed to the widest array of human experiences? Of course not, and I don’t pretend that I or anybody else could possibly absorb that array. However, my formally educated self wondered about the stories of the truly disenfranchised. People like my Uncle Butch, a man with barely an education who loved “go-buggies” (cars) and John Wayne. To my knowledge, he never read the Romantics or the Transcendentalists or any of the other formalized literary groups I was exposed to in college, yet many of the things that came out of his mouth were sheer poetry. Clever and colorful. Original. A verbal celebration of his life, a life out of the spotlight yet a vastly important life nonetheless.
Uncle Butch was no stranger to want. As a boy during Christmas, his parents neglected to put up a tree, so he, in his words, “throwed a pine branch in a bucket, put it in a corner, and called it done.” Even the toys he and his siblings got that year from the Salvation Army were already broken. His was a hardscrabble youth of selling dead turtles and sporting duck ass hairstyles to a hardscrabble adulthood, working where he could to make ends meet -- garages, shops, and lumberyards -- because there were seasons when, as he phrased it, “I don’t need much, buddy. I just need to get to where I’m going. I just hop right in to my truck and VROOM! …. I’m bookin’ down the road, smoking the tires!”
What he did not get in material, he made up for with imagination. Nobody could tell a story quite like Butch. Animated might be the closest adjective to describe his intonations, points of emphasis, and, of course, word choice. Butch did not drive around town, doing errands. He “boogied all over hell and back.” Nor was he prone to hurrying anywhere to retrieve something someone had set on the curb. Not Butch. He would rather “run just as hard as he could, picking ‘em up and putting ‘em down ‘cause that thing had ‘free’ written all over it” or he might even “rip down the road, just haulin’ freight.” If he felt good, he “felt as fine as the fuzz on an old woman’s toes,” and if things were not going so well, he might be tempted to grab his “shootin’ irons.”
This was his way of speaking. Not studied. Simply natural. And yet no one even knew about it except those within his orbit.
In the end, he was a man who lived and died. Just like us all. An individual. Uniquely created by God. A man with a voice and a story to live and a story to tell. Perhaps the invitation is there to see that in ourselves and, I hasten to say, others whose names may not be on curriculums and syllabi but who are just as important and loved by God nevertheless. Shakespeare said “we must hasten;” Uncle Butch said, “It’s time to agitate the gravel.” It means the same thing, for ours is a shared humanity.
