MARLBORO — I live on a dirt road in a green wood where most of my neighbors are called MacArthur - a robust clan steeped in music, books, and extended family. They do the work of woodcraft and gardens, weather and song.
Over the past 20 years, I've watched a handful of the younger ones, babes in arms, become grinning “half-pints” rollicking the hay wagon. They grew up in the way their parents did: school across the field, supper from the yard, songs from the past. Now I watch their little ones learn to wobble across the same land while clutching the finger of a sun-brushed grandmother who is my friend.
Where I grew up, our mothers sent kids outdoors to fend for themselves. We'd skid our bikes on macadam driveways, home by 6 p.m. for grocery store food and TV. My mother did the work of cleaning, cooking, and clothing. My father grew mushrooms from before breakfast to after supper in damp, windowless buildings. We lived separate lives.
I'm not complaining. I had my imagination. It led me to the cottages and quilt-like landscapes in books, like the real ones on MacArthur Road, places where folks sit before open fireplaces, tell stories, and sing songs that also tell stories.
Even without the books and instruments, like the ones that line cottage walls, I knew I wanted the stories, and I learned how to find them. I've lived both inside and outside of cities. I've found stories everywhere I looked and listened.
Eventually, I moved north to these maple-lined winding dirt roads of Vermont. I landed in the place where the stories in me began to muster a voice of their own. Like the narrators of folk songs, I wanted to mine in my fiction what it means to scrape for an honest life against the landscape of Vermont's ragged beauty. I wanted to explore with my characters the underbelly of human nature in this rural setting.
* * *
Lately I've been thinking about the connection between stories and song and what writers can learn from the old mountain tunes. The impetus: the new CD released by Robin MacArthur and her husband Tyler Gibbons, who also grew up among hills and music.
Together they are Red Heart the Ticker, and their album is Your Name in Secret I Would Write.
When I asked Robin if I could take a listen, I didn't expect to be caught up in a collection of riveting shorts in the same way I spend my reading and writing hours: heart humming, skin all a-prickle, a fullness gathering in my throat. Within minutes, my writer mind began checking for connections and threads, character and plot.
Why wouldn't I expect story? I knew the album was a collaboration between the musical couple (both are writers) and Robin's grandmother's ghost, Margaret MacArthur, who traversed the dirt roads of southern Vermont for the purpose of preserving tales - a woman who was all about the story.
After my third time listening through the CD, I looked up the word ballad: “a poem or song narrating a story in short stanzas. Traditional ballads are typically of unknown authorship, having been passed on orally from one generation to the next as part of the folk culture.”
What stood out: “song narrating a story.”
The fourth time, I listened more closely for the craft lesson. Everything I do these days seems to come down to craft.
When a song begins with the lines Mother's in the graveyard/ I'm on the ground/Look for me, there's a story: setting, character, tension, desire.
As a writer, I can gather a whole workshop of wisdom on compression, just from hearing these few lines. Where a writer would choose specific words to create the graveyard mood, Red Heart crafts the music - using somber tones, slowing the rhythm, punctuating the sentiments with the strike of a bell.
In these southern Vermont tales set to song, plain language depicting frank sentiments reflects the interior and exterior landscapes of character and captures the essence of rural predicament. That's how I want to write.
As in good stories, the words in this collection can be both harsh and humorous.
“Stratton Mountain Tragedy” tells the true story of a death wrought by winter's hand: The frost of death was in her eye / Her cheek was hard and cold and pale.
“Single Again” jokes of the ills of marriage,
When young men they first fall in love / It's oh my little honey and my little turtle dove / But when they get married it's no such thing / It's get up and get the breakfast, you cross ugly thing.
The lyrics throughout the CD represent the diversity of narrative from a distinct time and place. A slew of motley instruments - often antique or salvaged - complement and amplify the words with non-verbal dialogue, raising subtext to the surface and giving rise to an enhanced emotional response in the listener.
In Red Heart's renditions, rhythms and tones heighten meaning, which would otherwise be left obscure in spare Yankee storytelling. The clomping of a boot or the shaking of dried peas in a jar are the percussions that punctuate the plots.
In the ballad “The Lake of Champlain,” the lone strum of a bass guitar underscores pending danger with each repetition of the line There's deep and false water in the lake of Champlain.
Writers can establish mood and affect reader response on a subconscious level using similar tools on the page - deft image patterning or smart keyword repetition, for example.
As I listen to these mountain tales from the past, I think about how far I am from where I grew up. But mostly I think about how I live inside these spiraling stories - the real ones, the songs, and my own fictions - and how, in my writing, I want to capture the rhythm and timbre of the meaning I hear between the words.
* * *
Within the disc jacket of Red Heart the Ticker's CD, there's a story, too. It's about the relationship between grandmother and granddaughter, their relationship to place, and how a skip in generation - like white space on a page - enables the reverberation.
As my youngest daughter, Luci, now a teen, sings along with Red Heart on our kitchen player, I recall how Robin and her mother showed up at my house a few days after my baby girl's birth. They brought her a tiny purple cap to keep her head warm on cool summer nights.
I wonder if Robin remembers that, and how she held that baby - she would have been around 19 - and when I next see her along the road, I mean to ask.
That's how the stories keep going. One person telling another what happened, again and again. Telling them while the young ones are listening.