Writer's Block

“This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.”   ~ Neil Gaiman 


Here’s a secret about me; when I get those annoying security questions that are intended to protect my digital footprint, I always answer the favorite teacher with the same name. Chapman.

In the early 1980s, I was a nondescript and thoroughly uninteresting teenager. Lacking any vision or, in my defense, any encouragement, I bounced from class to class equally happy and unhappy with mediocrity. Yes, I was on the college path – but I found that path to be as dry as I was.  In the absence of a better plan, it at least provided a path. Our high school was large by Southwest Virginia standards. As I would find out later, it paled in comparison to the classes and resources of our northern Virginian cousins. 

Mongrels - Fear Not

Ps 56:4  In God I will praise his word, in God I have put my trust; I will not fear what flesh can do unto me.

Sometimes it’s important to remember who you are.  In our part of the country, we are mongrels. It’s important to remember that.  We Appalachians are a soupy mix of predominantly Scots-Irish-Germans that were kicked out of Europe, kicked out of Ireland and kicked out of the Northeast of America.  Our forefathers slunk down the spine of the mountains and settled on lands that – truth be told – no one else was much interested in.

Our standard-bearers no doubt came from all sorts of dubious circumstances.  Otherwise why would they risk life and limb travelling across the ocean with only the clothes on their backs?  They scraped out a living in these mountains and built a life that improved each generation.  Yes – we’re a hard-scrabble people and we have our faults.  But we have a history of being magnanimous and generous to the weak and oppressed – irrespective of race or creed.  (For more on this, I recommend Sen. Jim Webb’s excellent ‘Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America’).   We are not an arrogant people.  Or at least we didn’t used to be.