Jeff Mann grew up in Covington, Virginia, and Hinton, West Virginia, receiving degrees in English and forestry from West Virginia University. His poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in many publications, including The Spoon River Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Laurel Review, The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, Crab Orchard Review, Bloom, Appalachian Heritage, Best Gay Poetry 2008, and Best Gay Stories 2008.
He has published three award-winning poetry chapbooks, Bliss, Mountain Fireflies, and Flint Shards from Sussex; two full-length books of poetry, Bones Washed with Wine and On the Tongue; a collection of personal essays, Edge: Travels of an Appalachian Leather Bear; a novella, Devoured, included in Masters of Midnight: Erotic Tales of the Vampire; a book of poetry and memoir, Loving Mountains, Loving Men; and a volume of short fiction, A History of Barbed Wire, which won a Lambda Literary Award. He teaches creative writing at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.
SURVIVING WINTER’S WOODS:
A TALK GIVEN IN VIRGINIA TECH’S “FINDING MY PATH” SERIES
(for Irene McKinney)
Being asked by Multicultural Affairs and Programs here at Virginia Tech to speak on “finding my path” is flattering. The underlying assumption in asking me to speak about how I have “discovered meaning and purpose in life,” to quote from the e-mail invitation I received a few months ago, is that an audience can somehow benefit from hearing that story. To talk about “the journey to finding [my] career path” and “important life lessons” I’ve learned is to presume that, from knowing a little bit about my experience, listeners can glean some truths of use to them.
On this score, I am a little “juberous” (that’s Appalachian for “dubious”), a little hopeful, a lot humbled. Much of the time I find it hard to believe that anyone’s read anything I’ve published or could garner any kind of wisdom from anything I have to say. Self-confidence has always been elusive.
But, since I’ve agreed to be here (a poet rarely misses an opportunity to enjoy the attentions of an audience), first let me complain. This invitation comes at a bad time, since these days I am full of grave doubts about my “meaning and purpose in life.” As an author whose work was originally inspired by a group of American writers called “the Confessional Poets,” I write and publish material, both poetry and prose, that is very often bluntly (one critic has said “recklessly”) autobiographical. So I hesitate only briefly before confessing to this room of some friends but mostly strangers that I am burning up with, riding full tilt into, wallowing piggishly amidst, the mythical, apparently inevitable Male Midlife Crisis.
What admission could be more banal? Really, what could be less interesting, more mundane, than a man in his late forties with a beard full of silver who’s whining about his unsatisfied dreams, futile and unreciprocated lusts, nagging despair, undone deeds, and sense of professional failure, who whinges (that wonderful British verb) about how his elbow joints interfere with his weight-lifting, how his commuting derails his half-hearted attempts to stick to a regular biking schedule, how his committee work robs him of time to focus on his own writing? You didn’t come here to hear about my Slough of Despond, to use the phrase from Pilgrim’s Progress. Well, be patient for a few more minutes, and we’ll all get to a more comfortable, positive point.
The phrase “Finding My Path” suggests that said path has led to an edifying, comfortable, satisfying place, a place where deep yearnings have been fulfilled, hard questions answered, important accomplishments attained, and some peace achieved. When I was twenty-one, I expected (I think—who can remember exactly what one expected twenty-some years ago?) that middle age would indeed be such a time of serene accomplishment, of battles won and gloated over. It should be the well-deserved era not just of sitting but downright sprawling on one’s laurels.
For some, this might be the case. For me, and many others of my approximate age, this is not so. We have our accomplishments, yes, and for most of us, we can say, with Mary Chapin Carpenter, “everything we got, we got the hard way.” We can also say, with Steve Earle, Faust, and the rest of the perverse and restless species, “I ain’t ever satisfied.” Let me be perhaps uncomfortably honest, and, at the same time, step into the self-protective first person plural. Despite any material comfort we might luckily have amassed, we host depression, doubt, the slow and annoying erosions of aging, the comforting but tedious rounds of routine and domesticity, the abrasions of financial necessity, an aching and pointless nostalgia for lost youth, angers without easy outlet, the dulling of hope, and the receding of mystery and passion. The world is too much with us, to quote William Wordsworth. We have, by this point in our lives, been forcibly parted with many loved ones. Each of us could recite with ease longish litanies of loss. We are haunted by questions without answer, questions that have driven artists and philosophers for centuries. The wearisome Latin phrase is Cui bono: What good? What good is the mortal world when nothing strong and beautiful lasts? What use is desire, especially that which can never be fulfilled? What good is ambition when it is so often thwarted? What, if anything, can be learned from, salvaged from, fear or loneliness, or from the world’s blatant and daily tragedies and injustices? We, to echo Dante, in the middle of our lives find ourselves in a dark wood. We are often not whole, not balanced, not calm, pleasant, or rational. Often we feel too much; we are too intense for our own good.
As you can surely tell by now, my father’s ancestors, the Ferrells from central Ireland, the Manns from Germany’s Palatinate, have bequeathed to me a tendency towards melancholy, a Northern European gloom. In addition, my native region has given me a wide streak of Appalachian fatalism. Rereading Beowulf lately in the Seamus Heaney translation, I can only shrug with affirmation when Beowulf says, “Fate goes ever as fate must.” This is an attitude that, on bright days, leads to freedom; on grim days, to a pervasive sense of hopelessness. Here I think of Lee Smith’s wonderful protagonist Ivy Rowe in Fair and Tender Ladies. Writing to her sister, Ivy says,
Silvaney, I have been caught up for so long in a great soft darkness, a blackness so deep and soft that you can fall in there and get comfortable and never know you are falling in at all, and never land, just keep on falling…You know I used to have so much spunk. Well, I have lost my spunk some way. It is like I was a girl for such a long time, years and years, and then all of a sudden I have got to be an old woman, with no inbetween. Maybe that has always been the problem with me, a lack of inbetween. (193)
And as, to borrow from “The Sire of Sorrow,” Joni Mitchell’s musical take on the Book of Job, I find myself “all complaint,” I cast up, despite myself, several life lessons I hardly knew I knew, as the whale ignominiously cast Jonah upon the sands. One: don’t expect the struggle ever to stop. It merely takes new forms. Two: constant struggle will wear you down and wear you out, but intermittent struggle keeps you awake, productive, and alive. Three: suffering can lead us to empathy and compassion, to a deeper connection with the human race. As the narrator of James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” says after the death of his daughter, contemplating his estranged brother, “My trouble made his real.” Four: art, whether it be literary, musical, or visual, can help us make sense of our lives and lend us a context in which to understand our struggles. Case in point, that compulsive list of allusions I just produced: Mary Chapin Carpenter, William Wordsworth, Dante, Beowulf, Lee Smith, Joni Mitchell, Job, and James Baldwin.
So, these small wisdoms aside, my path has led to a dark wood? Well, yes, this particularly bleak winter day at my desk, composing this talk, questioning my purpose, the worth of what I’ve lived and learned. But, well, no, not entirely. One of the great gifts of aging is this knowledge: that internal darkness, however deep and apparently endless, is not endless.
I survived long enough to learn that, and that knowledge has helped me survive a lot longer. I’d like to tell you now about someone who did not survive, a man I never met, and what I learned from his story. Then I’d like to tell you about the people and places that have given me light and hope even though—I am old enough to know myself, strong enough to be honest—my brain’s chemical constitution tends towards light and hope’s polar opposites.
A few years ago, my partner John and I visited the poet laureate of West Virginia, Irene McKinney, in her home near Belington, in Barbour County. A survivor herself, having recently endured a series of treatments for bone cancer, Irene was as full of vivacious intellectual energy as ever. Talk about a role model when it comes to dealing with adversity. It was January, so we stayed inside a lot, cooking, drinking wine, and talking, watching snow flurries whiten up the pastures. I was working on a new book then, Loving Mountains, Loving Men, a collection of memoir and poetry about being gay in Appalachia, and Irene, who’d kindly agreed to write a blurb for the book’s back cover, had read earlier versions of it. Reading about my life reminded Irene of a friend of hers, and she told me about him. I have no idea whether his family would appreciate his presence in this talk, so I’ll use a pseudonym and call him Jamie.
Jamie grew up in Barbour County. He used to play drums with Irene’s guitarist son; together they built Irene’s A-frame guest cabin on the edge of her property. He was a lot like me. He loved to make music, he loved to walk the woods. He was a great enthusiast of Native American culture, and he was devoted to his mountain roots. He was gay, and so his country-Catholic father rejected him. He suffered from great loneliness, for, as you might imagine, there’s not a lot of opportunity for gay romance in rural West Virginia, a loneliness I myself had known for long years before I was fortunate enough to meet John. Thanks to this isolation, these burdens, he was seriously conflicted, as many of us are, straight or gay. Something went wrong, in his heart or in his head. Jamie became seriously depressed. When he was thirty-three, during a visit to Wilmington, North Carolina, he disappeared. He was found drowned in the Atlantic Ocean, an apparent suicide. To use the language of this speakers’ series, he had lost his path.
That night, as John and I strode across rainy fields to Irene’s guest cabin, I saw Jamie standing and waving at the edge of the woods, where fallen leaves collected against the wire fence that separated bare trees from January’s austere pasture. No ghost, of course, just a poet’s fancy. I’d seen no photograph, and to this day I have no idea what he looked like. But, erotic idealist that I am, I imagined a lean, good-looking young man in standard country-boy garb—flannel shirt, Levi jacket, faded jeans, and work-boots—with an auburn beard and a big smile. I saw a younger version of myself, really. As I lay in bed, in the dark beside John, watching the gas flames of the heater flicker, listening to rain on the pitched roof Jamie had helped build, I thought about him, how similar we were: both mountaineers, both men who loved men. I know better than most what a difficult combination that can be. I know how hard it can be to continue when preachers and politicians condemn you and complete strangers revile you, how exhausting it is to live in a constant state of siege. I wished we’d met, split a few beers, gone four-wheeling together, made some music with his drums and my guitar, cursed the conservatives, shot the shit about the pains and pressures of being an Appalachian gay man. I grieved a brother I never knew, and wondered why, faced with similar pressures, he ended his life and I have endured to this gray-bearded age.
What saved me? Figuring that out might serve as a spring tonic of sorts to ameliorate the woods’ winter darkness, and it would lighten the mood of this talk considerably.
My family saved me.
My mother taught me Southern manners, hospitality, and how to care for people unselfishly (the unselfish part is still difficult), all of which has made for fairly harmonious relationships with other human beings. I am a good friend, good colleague, good neighbor, good host, and at least a tolerable spouse because of these lessons. I am not entirely self-absorbed; I am honestly concerned about the welfare of other human beings, especially those who have been kind to me. (Those who are not kind to me receive the assiduous and patient attention of my considerable dark side.)
My father was much less interested in other humans than he was in the outdoors. He took me walking in the woods and fields of Summers County, West Virginia, where I grew up. He pointed out the trees, then pointed out the trash along the side of the road. From those walks came an abiding love for the natural world and a savage disgust at the way civilization is trashing the planet. Later, this early influence led me to a degree in Nature Interpretation from the Forestry Department at West Virginia University and a dedication to Wicca, a neopagan religion predicated entirely on a sense of the sacred in Nature and in the rhythms of the seasons. More recently, my father’s teachings have led me to a violent detestation of mountaintop removal mining and the wealthy politicians who allow that blasphemous practice to continue.
My father also brought me up to read—I was eagerly tackling The Iliad and The Odyssey by the seventh grade. From his great favorites the American Transcendentalists, in particular from Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” and from Thoreau’s Walden, I learned to reject as best I could the restrictive dictates of society, to live with a sort of honest and defiant individualism. Daddy (yes, I’m a southern man, so, at age 47, I still call my father “Daddy”) also encouraged me to share his vast contempt for the more intolerant brands of orthodox religion. When, at age sixteen, I realized I was gay, these lessons were to prove golden. It was easier to follow my heart’s and my hormones’ dictates with confidence and without guilt. What polite society and the church had to say about my erotic leanings was never much of a concern. “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist,” claimed Emerson. And “What I must do, is all that concerns me, not what the people think.” And “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.” And when my parents finally discovered my sexual orientation, they did not reject me, as Jamie’s father did him. They did not turn cold and throw me out—all of which happens, be sure of that; I have heard enough painful tales from other gay people to know. After taking some time to adjust to this unwelcome fact, they accepted me wholeheartedly. My father, in fact, has published several op-eds and letters to the editor in West Virginia newspapers defending me, and the Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender community in general, from pious homophobic attacks.
My grandmother and aunt saved me. They taught me the stories of my family, and this has helped me realize that I am not some emotional mutant, some inexplicable oddity, but one of a line of complex, passionate, conflicted people who will have his embattled time in the sun before joining his ancestors in the cemetery on that little hilltop near Forest Hill, West Virginia.
My sister saved me. From childhood we have been close, with similar values. Her good cooking has gotten me through many a heartbreak: it’s amazing how much good biscuits, potato salad, and soup beans can mean when you’re lonely and upset.
My tenth-grade biology teacher Jo Davison saved me. She and the circle of other young nonconformists to whom she introduced me provided me with a critical support group, letting me know that my love of poetry and music, my enthusiasm for black-bearded country boys like myself, were all fine by them. She came out to me as a lesbian, and then she lent me Patricia Nell Warren’s The Front Runner, a novel about an Olympic athlete and his love affair with his coach, the book that made me realize I was gay. Gently she introduced me to the gay world, sparing me years of confusion and self-doubt. The openness I demand of myself now—an attempt to give young LGBT folks some sort of honest role model—I owe to her.
My friends saved me. For many years, as I moved from one unreciprocated passion to another (I had an amazing knack for falling in love with the wrong men), friends reminded me of what pleasures can be had in the absence of romantic or erotic success. Cin and I played guitar, Allen and I compared notes on men and danced at the local gay bar, Laura and I drove cross-country to San Francisco, exploring the Rocky Mountains, Mesa Verde, the Grand Canyon. These days, settled as I am with John (June 2007 will be our ten-year anniversary), spending time with friends is one of our great delights. Tiffany and Andrew whip up a complex Chinese feast, Dan and Phil join us at a gay-friendly guesthouse in West Virginia, Laree and Cindy show us around D.C., Joe and Charlene stay over for a winter weekend abrim with good wine and ethnic cooking.
In particular, my friend Cindy has saved me. I have known her since Autumn 1979. Our lives have run along odd parallels: in love with difficult, hurtful people at the same time—Susan and Thomas—and then in love with supportive mates—Laree and John—and now comparing notes on the ups and downs of marriage. We have been lonely together, reveling in what small pleasures we could: eggplant parmesan, walks about the herb garden of the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. We have hated together: George W. Bush, car stereos, obnoxious children bred with incompetent laxity, and, most especially, religious fundamentalists. We have pointlessly hankered together: I for country-music star Tim McGraw, she for actress Jessica Lange, a woman whose beauty makes even me, six on the Kinsey scale (i.e., completely queer), perfectly comprehend heterosexuality. Thanks to our long history, Cindy understands, without hesitation, who I am, as crazily contradictory and ambivalent as that often is. When I’m with her, I often think of French philosopher Simone Weil’s saying, “The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, ‘What are you going through?’"
Literature saved me. I see myself, my passions and sufferings in Wordsworth, Keats, Yeats, Eliot, Whitman, and so many others. In particular, Sylvia Plath gave me a black-glass mirror in which to study my own dangerous intensities. When I encountered her work my senior year in college at West Virginia University, her late poems fascinated me. They showed me how art could be made from desolation and rage. Her work inspired me to attend graduate school and become a poet. Expressing my internal storms in writing has been one way to make sense of them and so to weather them. Though she and other fine poets I admire—Anne Sexton and John Berryman—ended as suicides, their poetry and my own artistic attempts have helped keep me from a similar conclusion. Reading and teaching Appalachian literature and Gay and Lesbian literature have also helped me understand my convoluted self by encountering in books the “hillbilly” and “queer” aspects of my identity.
Music saved me. The music my father raised me on—Beethoven, Brahms, Puccini—as well as the popular music I listen to these days delights, invigorates, and redeems me. Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, Melissa Etheridge, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Tim McGraw, Kathy Mattea, Keith Urban: their voices have lent me fire and transcendence on the most ashen and miserable of days, and the lyrics of their songs show me refracted versions of my own troubles. Playing guitar, piano, or mountain dulcimer soothes and centers me. Singing along to favorite CD’s, I, to quote Joni Mitchell’s “Hejira,” “see something of myself in everyone / Just at this moment of the world / As snow gathers like bolts of lace / Waltzing on a ballroom girl.”
My native landscape saved me. Often, due to my difficult brain chemistry, my psyche’s boundaries feel perilously thin. I am unusually sensitive to noise, to bustle. Cities abrade me. As much as I love to visit them—for the most part to ravish their bookstores and ethnic restaurants, to a lesser extent to visit their gay bars and luxuriate in the presence of My Kind—I cannot tolerate urban areas for long. I soon feel overstimulated, invaded, endangered. The rush, the traffic, the crowds turn me surly, paranoid, and impatient fast. But the countryside—Thomas Hardy’s “far from the madding crowd”—is another matter. Living in small towns among the mountains, as I have for most of my life, has kept me sane. The natural world is never far. The hills rise protectively about me. I can see the stars. Commuting back and forth between Pulaski and Blacksburg, I can study the seasonal changes in meadow, woodland, hillside and creek. I can bike through the countryside down the New River Trail, take in the view from the top of Draper Mountain, drive the tortuous emerald bends up to Mountain Lake and look out over the crests of the Alleghenies.
Universities saved me. I hope to emulate my father, who is reading and writing nonstop at age eighty-five, by spending my life in a constant state of learning and creating. I teach because I want to keep learning. I choose fresh materials for my classes with some regularity so as to read new stories, new poems. I have been connected with universities in some capacity, either as undergraduate student, graduate student, instructor, or professor, since I entered West Virginia University in August 1977, and that connection has kept my mind active, hungry, and enthusiastic. The liberal atmosphere of university towns has made living in Appalachia as an openly gay man a lot easier than it could have been. Mine is an unusual combination of diversities—“the Mountaineer Queer”—that might not be understood or appreciated off-campus but which is apparently valued by the university community. Thus my presence here today.
Romantic and erotic failure saved me. This seems counterintuitive, to say the least, since they also made me want to drive my pickup truck into the side of a mountain. But, past the initial and very lengthy suffering, with serious contemplation (great gift of the introvert) I learned a great, great deal. I learned how much turmoil can fuel poetry. All of my first poetry collection Bones Washed with Wine and much of my second collection On the Tongue were inspired by a particularly agonized affair I had in the early 1990’s. I learned that yes, one can love with the deep and half-insane passion one sees in novels like Wuthering Heights, and it is a blessing to have the capacity to feel that dangerously and deeply, no matter what the price (and the price will be as deep and devastating and sometimes far lengthier than the love). I learned that, for some of us, our hearts lead us to those who are incapable of or thoroughly uninterested in reciprocation. In other words, I learned that my heart can betray me. I learned that some of those who feel themselves beloved will take just as much as you are willing to give, but that casual acceptance of gifts does not evoke in them any sense of obligation or even gratitude. I learned that, for many of us, such passions, as is claimed so often in sentimental song lyrics, truly do come along only a few times in a lifetime, and that is good, for otherwise we might all die young. I learned that those loved so passionately and then lost will haunt you inescapably for the rest of your life, but being haunted is not a bad way to live. It is certainly an artistically productive way. I learned that, once you survive the loss of such a muse, that any other pain you encounter will be, if not small, then smaller, in contrast. You can look up at the gray tsunami of suffering foaming and cresting, about to break over your head, and say with confidence, “Well, I survived that, so long ago. I am certainly strong enough to survive this.”
My partner John saved me. He has created a safe space, a home, in which my overly sensitive soul might escape the world’s hostilities. He lends me support, humor, pleasure, and comfort. He somehow tolerates my mood swings, roving eye, and regular rants. We enjoy fine meals, quiet time by the fireplace, trips to San Francisco, Hawaii, Prague, Scotland, Scandinavia. Despite the hateful amendment passed last fall in Virginia, outlawing any form of same-sex marriage, we are married in every important sense of the word. Stupidity and prejudice have robbed us, and those like us, of legal recognition or benefits, but that only gives me reason to remain ornery, defiant, and outspoken in my protest.
So, to everyone’s relief, perhaps most especially mine, though this talk began as lament, it ends as a procession of blessings, a paean of thanks. As natural as it is for me to focus on what is lacking, what has been stolen, it is certainly salutary to remind myself of what is present still, what has been rescued, what makes continuing worth it. I write this, speak this, in order to give gratitude some enduring shape, so that, when the bleakness returns, I have my own words as evidence, as reminder, as driftwood for the drowning.
I want to finish with my lost and unmet brother Jamie. His body was returned to his native Barbour County for burial. Irene told me about his funeral. It was a mixture of folks who might not come together in any other context: gay people, mountain people, Native Americans, Catholics, and musicians. There, personified, were all the wildly disparate elements of his psyche, paying their respects, sitting down together in sadness, sharing a groaning board of funeral food. Those many identities must have seemed to him hopelessly fragmented and irreconcilable, as he stood there on that North Carolina beach staring at the welcoming waves. My guess is that, had he had all that I have been blessed with, he might have been able to give himself more time. Had he encountered as much kindness as I, he might have been kinder to himself. Had he lived longer, that slew of apparently incompatible shards could have been fused. Amalgamated, they could have provided an incredible, if always difficult, depth and richness. Unfused, they caused a fragmentation that destroyed him.
I understand fragmentation, the centrifugal forces that invite us to fly apart. As a child, I found a praying mantis egg case on a japonica bush in the back yard and kept it inside a vented jar. I remember the hatching, all those tiny insects crawling from what appeared to be a chunk of brown Styrofoam. I cannot forget that seething, how, trapped together inside the glass, they turned on one another, how rapidly cannibalism began. Even at that age, I sensed a metaphor for the deep and potentially destructive divisions of the human brain. Standing here in the winter wood, I can feel those opposed selves grappling for dominance in the dark inside my skull. Nevertheless, living the examined life that Socrates suggests, I know what has saved me and continues to save me, and now you know it too. Loved ones, literature, learning, music, and mountains: they have given me the strength to give myself time, and that time has given me a self strong enough to survive myself, survive the world, and to speak what I know. I speak to those like me, the dark and divided ones, those waiting in winter light, light the cold silver-gray of magnolia buds, those sad ones mesmerized by the swirl of snow, those hesitating, desolate, at the edge of the forest, the edge of the ocean. What I say is Stay.