I’m writing this on the 5^th, as I sit on my porch with my dog next to me and the birds chirping (mostly Carolina Wrens, Cardinals, Mockinbirds, although yesterday an Indigo Bunting came to visit) and the chimes chiming in the breeze. We spent yesterday evening together with a bunch of friends, our yearly hang our friend Paul Schatzkin puts together for a Nashville Sounds game (our AAA baseball team). The Sounds fireworks are always amazing and last night, they overlapped with Nashville’s incredible display which was happening just a few blocks away, over the tall condos that weren’t there a few years ago. It was pretty spectacular.

One of my favorite July 4^th memories was the summer my sister and I were camp counselors at Camp Wind-In-The-Pines in Plymouth, MA and we all had the night off and went to the harbor in Plymouth (near THE rock) and watched the fireworks while a symphony played. I was 20, she was 19. We were young, in college, far away from our home, new friends, the ocean, silly camp counselor names (I was Gooch, she was Dizzy).

I remember years of finding the right rooftop in NYC or Hoboken to watch the West Side fireworks with friends. I remember sitting on the edge of the river in Nashville my first year here, watching them light up the Cumberland. I remember the one when I was single and sad and was invited with sober friends to go downtown to watch them and my friend Jamey wanted me to drive to his parents’ house a few hours away for their family celebration along the Tennessee River and I kept telling him I was too sad and he wouldn’t want me there. He almost convinced me, offered to drive 2 hours back to Nashville to get me (I still didn’t think he was interested in me… I was dumb).

4^th of July can be weird if you’re grieving. You can’t hide from the celebrations. They keep your dog running under the bed. No matter where we live, most of us hear them somewhere. You can’t run from explosive joy (literally). As we say in the rooms of recovery, it’s just another day.

It is the 5^th of July that means a lot to me. I had my students this week write a song about the day after a holiday (or the day before), because I think there are really interesting stories to tell about the lead up or the clean-up. What was left behind. What was found.

This morning, our church did a kind of Lessons and Carols service (an Episcopal thing). Instead of the usual, there were four readings, and none were from the Bible. One, a poem by Maya Angleou. The second, a speech by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the third, a portion of Frederick Douglas’ speech “What To the Slave is The Fourth of July”, and the final was an excerpt from Amanda Gorman’s poem “The Hill We Climb.” In between the incredible musicians sang “This Land is Your Land,” John Prine’s “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven,” “America the Beautiful.” After hearing those readings, the patriotic songs rang differently to me.

Honestly, I’d kind of ignored whatever crazy was going on in DC for the 250^th celebration of the United States. But late last night, I did see (and was not surprised) that white supremacists marched. As they do. So this morning, it was great to be in a community that acknowledges the celebration of “freedom” that we have on every 4^th is really a false freedom, as there was a huge population of people, human beings, not a part of that independence. And, if we’re being completely honest, still are not. As a woman, to know that 250 years later there is still not an equal rights amendment is shocking. We are not free until we all are free.

But fireworks are cool and so are AAA baseball games.

9 years ago, on the Fifth of July, Jamey and I drove to Chattanooga to our fertility clinic. We’d been doing IVF with an egg donor. It was pouring down rain, thunder and lightening everywhere. We’d already had one failed implant of a 5-day old blastocyte. I could have sworn I was pregnant. I felt pregnant. When my doctor called 2 weeks later to tell me that I was not pregnant, I fell to the ground in despair. I felt that all my past sins were coming back to punish me. I got really really dark. Jamey made me go on a walk with him. He said to me, “We will try again. That one was not meant to be. We have to try again.”

And so, on July 5, 2017, we made the stormy drive back to Chattanooga to try again. When we got to the clinic, they informed us that the first blastocyte they thawed had fallen apart and that we would have to wait another 30 minutes to thaw the ‘3^rd best.’ While we waited, the power went out because of the storm. No matter, they assured us, we will work under generator power. Great, I thought, completely convinced all of this was a sign and not a good one.

Suffice it to say, the 3^rd best blastocyte became our beloved Huckleberry and I think of July 5^th as a holy day in our family. When he became my blood and my body. Since he was not my egg, it is my claim of conception. This year, July 5^th is a Sunday and we will all be in church together and for that, I am grateful. I will hold his 8-year-old, almost ‘too cool for school’ hand and feel the blessing that he is and say a prayer to my God(dess) of thanksgiving and grace.

Ramparts and bombs bursting. Family barbecues and baseball. Taylor Swift’s wedding and Aaron Parnas’ grieving family. White supremacists and people of color still experiencing violence and economic and voting inequity. My poetry friends in our text chain sent photos of our dogs in red, white and blue things (I did not, as my dog, Dusty Springfield, is way too cool to be dressed in patriotic colors and she is cynical about all celebrations). One sent this.

From Walt Whitman.

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,

All, all alike endeard, grown, ungrown, young

   or old,

Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich, 
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law

   and Love,

A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,

Chaird in the adamant of Time.

May our country’s ideals of equality and our striving to heal generational wounds of inequality and brutality be part of our Pledge of America. May we recognize that we are not many generations from slavery, and that our “equality” is a work in progress and progress needs to go a bit quicker, please. May we all together, all genders and gender-identifying, all colors and shades and shapes and races and identities hold the flag up someday and say we lived up to a greater ideal than the original forefathers, one our mothers and ancestors demand out of their bruised and worn feet and bodies. May America be a living, breathing example of true freedom.

And may all of you know the joy of lighting firecrackers with an 8 year old and their Star Wars figures in a driveway in Tennessee

Amy Speace is an award-winning Americana folk singer and songwriter discovered by Judy Collins. Her songs have been recorded by Ms. Collins and many others and she has won International Song of the Year from the Americana Music Association (UK). Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Working Mother, and Salon.com. She received her MFA from Spalding University and teaches English at Cumberland University. She resides in Nashville, Tennessee, with her son, Huckleberry, and her dog, Dusty Springfield.

The Cardinals, coming Sept 1st with Red Hen Press , is her debut poetry collection.

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Today is Laura’s birthday. She is 58. Yesterday was Katie’s. She is 59. They are my best friends from high school.

We’ve been texting in a flood of conversation. Today, we are texting about a girl we all knew back in those days. A mean girl. A rich girl. The head of the 7^th grade clique I somehow ended up in as the new girl from Minnesota who happened to live down the block. I’m pretty sure her mother forced her to befriend me when our family moved down the street that summer before 7^th grade. We would walk to junior high together each morning. She had drawers and drawers of beautiful angora faire isle sweaters. All the rage in the early 80’s. She was obviously the queen of junior high. I was a 12 year old from Minnesota who had long straight hair I wore in two braids. I didn’t wear a bra yet. I was afraid to, so I hid my body in an oversized orange sweatshirt with the Wheaties logo on it. I was into drawing and playing piano and reading Nancy Drew mysteries. Jane (I’m giving her a pseudonym) and her gang swore like sailors, went to NYC from time to time to Macy’s to buy LeSportsSac bags, had a serious collection of Bonnie Bell Lip Smackers, and wore bras. I was a tomboy. They were boy crazy. Jane’s older sister was the cool girl a few years ahead of us and was friends with the cheerleader group (her sister was too cool to even be a cheerleader). They made out with the football players and drank out of flasks behind the bleachers at the football games.

I was out of my league from the get.

One of Jane’s friends, T, was very busty and who was most definitely not from the rich side of town, but had that kind of spacy, disaffected bitchy cool that made her important to Jane. Jane’s all need a middle class sidekick, I’ve learned. The Beta to her Alpha. T was mean to me. I was the tagalong with the out of touch hair, baggy clothes, not an inch of cool. T one day told me, “What you need is a best friend,” with a subtext of “find another group.”

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Standing next to me was Laura. She was in my class but was from a different elementary school than Jane and T. Most of her classmates went to a different junior high and I think she was a bit lost. She was taller than me, formidable, with a huge head of red curly hair and a big smile. A real tough girl attitude that wasn’t put on like a costume. Street smarts earned. Hearing T, Laura said to me, ‘I’ll be your best friend.’ And that was that. And here we are, now both 58.

Laura is funny. World class funny. No bullshit. Didn’t give a shit what anyone thought of her funny. She was smart and everyone liked her (or they were afraid of her). Either way, she was my great protector. One day Vivian Sigh–a very tall, very large girl in our class who was from the projects and hated the ‘rich girls’–threatened to beat me up (Vivian Sigh was always beating someone up) in the locker room one afternoon and I, stupidly, goaded her on. Then Vivian Sigh threw a punch at me, it was Laura who pushed me away and took the punch.

Laura moved away during high school. Before she did, we befriended Katie, who was a year ahead of us. We met her in marching band. Laura played flute. I played tenor saxophone. Katie was a flag bearer. We were all super band geeks. You have to know that in our high school, marching band was a cult. It was huge, over 200 of us, we spent a week at band camp drilling the routines that cost over $25K to create, and we practiced all the time for competitions. We were Atlantic Coast champions for 4 years in a row. We marched in the Macy’s Parade. It was a big deal and it took over our lives and I loved every minute of it. The three of us were a gang. Katie was a bit of a tomboy too. Quiet, but not reticent. Driest sense of humor I’ve ever known. Also, not a lick of bullshit. When Laura left, KT was my ride or die.

My parents joined the Grampian Hills tennis pool club when we arrived in Williamsport. There was a country club but it was mostly golf and my father was a huge tennis player. Turns out the Grampian club had originally been mostly Jewish because they quietly didn’t allow Jewish people at The Country Club. Of course, Jane’s family were Country Club people. Objectively speaking, we were privileged, like Jane, just on a lower run of the wealth scale. Jane came from generational wealth in a small, small town. My father had clawed his way out of poverty to a solid upper middle class living by that point. I did not want for anything growing up, but I did not grow up experiencing myself at all as ‘rich.’ My father didn’t walk through the world as a wealthy man. He walked through the world as a man who worked very hard and was still working very hard. Nobody handed anything to my Dad. He grew up on a small farm without electricity for a long time. He put himself through college, having to take time off to work to make enough to go back for a semester. While Jane and her country club friends were bound for private expensive prep schools, I knew I was a public school kid.

That’s why I loved The Grampian club. The kids I met there, for the most part, were like me. Unassuming. I met Terry there. He became one of my best friends and his parents were my parents’ best friends. Terry, Laura and Katie and I were a gang in the summer and then we were a gang during the school year, even though Terry went to the Catholic school in town. Bill joined us, and, even though Bill’s family was THE old money family in town, Bill and his sister were really down to earth. Bill went away to prep school but joined us on holidays and summers. Somehow Greg from the south side of town (a different high school too) joined us and filled out the gang. In the end, none of them were in my graduating class. But those were my friends on college breaks, in the summer, through life.

We’ve all lost parents. We are all in our late 50’s. My parents moved away from Williamsport many years ago, so I have no reason to go there anymore. Bill still lives in town, going back after many years in business to restart his life as a teacher. He lives in the house he grew up in, the house with the pool that we’d all sneak into late at night to drink wine coolers and splash around. The four of us haven’t been in the same place since I don’t know when. Maybe college?

Once, during college, I was at a party, probably at Bill’s house, around the pool. Jane’s father made a lewd comment to me, something like, “you’re hot.” Typical. I understand a bit more about her family in hindsight and I’m pretty sure the girl was just hanging on for dear life throughout her childhood.

I’ve been thinking about friendships and how hard it is to make new friends in our 50’s. Usually, people’s friends come from their kids’ parents. But I am an older parent, and any mother of an 8 year old is mostly young enough to be my own kid. I don’t have a regular schedule. I’m a writer and a touring musician and a full time/part time mom. It’s like dating. I can’t date. I have Wednesdays free. And I’m too old and tired to do the dating dance of flirting and coffees. I just want someone who likes to watch British procedural dramas on Netflix and cook healthy food and eat brownies. On Wednesdays. But not stay over. I like my mornings alone.

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It’s rare when I meet another woman who runs at my speed. And when I do, it’s like a gift from the universe. I’ve recently met a few and the relief of meeting a new friend at this age is incredible. It’s a better rush than falling into deep like with a dude. At least for me. Because I can text the new friend about poetry and shoe shopping and they get me. And I don’t have to worry if my arms are a bit flappy.

Back then, in the junior high school days, I felt so awkward, like everyone else had the playbook for social cues and I missed it. I was in the cool group but I was bullied by the cool group. Maybe just because I showed weakness and insecurity. Because I felt like I needed to fit in and couldn’t afford LeSportsSac handbags from Macy’s and didn’t want to drink because I knew I’d get punished.

Or, maybe I did know myself. I knew I liked to sit in the attic where I’d set up my easel and draw for hours, even if it was hot and stinky and full of cobwebs. It felt like the ideal artist’s garret. I knew I loved to light candles around the piano and hover my hands over the keys hoping my Catholic God would gift me the songwriter gene (he didn’t until I was in my mid-20s). I wasn’t friends with T or Jane in high school. In my own class, I hung out with the honors class kids. But they had their own cool set and I didn’t quite fit into that one either. There was a choir group. I didn’t feel like I fit into them either.

I was ambitious and, once I discovered I could sing and act, I was very serious about music. I trained with a private voice teacher and went to a summer arts program that was very competitive. I got the solos and the leads. I was very single minded. I was smart and got good grades. But I also skipped 40% of my senior year and still graduated in the top 20 of over 600. And I was resented for that (one girl actually said something to me about it and I acted like I gave no shits about what people thought about me, although I very much did). Looking back, I was depressed. Probably had clinical depression since I was a kid. But it was the 80s and nobody talked about that stuff.

Maybe I’ve always chosen to go my own way, which can be a lonely ride. A misunderstood one, too. I am single-minded. I knew from an early age I wanted to live in Greenwich Village and be “an artist.” I didn’t actually know what that meant, it could be a poet a singer an actor, but it meant something more colorful than where I lived. And so in college, I gathered interesting people around me. Some, I can see in hindsight, were fabulous liars and created personas around them to probably hide from deeply traumatic childhoods. No matter, they were interesting. In acting school in NYC in the early 90’s, I was surrounded by them. It’s like we all moved to Manhattan from our small towns to find each other and to me it was the dream.

And now, in my late 50’s, as a mother, without any other mothers around me that are my age, I love to find other mother/artists who are singular and iconoclastic. A bit edgy. Maybe like me, with few close friends. I am finding mentors, women a bit older than me who have done something amazing with their lives, women I can learn from. I am finding women younger than me who look to me for advice and guidance and I give freely (sometimes I charge money).

But most importantly, I keep Katie and Laura very close at hand. To remind me not to believe my press. To remind me that I wore an oversized Wheaties sweatshirt for too long to hide from having to wear a bra until the last minute. I have a friend, Danny Schmidt, who wrote a beautiful song called “Company of Friends.”

When I die, let them judge me by my company of friends
Let them know me as the footprints that I left upon the sand
Let them laugh for all the laughter
Let them cry for laughter’s end
But when I die, let them judge me by my company of friends.

Or, as Henry V states, “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”

I keep a small band. But I keep them close. And I’m fiercely loyal once you’re in my orbit. Ride or Die, as my one of my new friends says. You’d better be working on not giving a shit what others think of you (a lifelong journey). You’d better be honest and vulnerable. You’d better be very funny. And you’d better have a good shoe game.

Mostly, if Vivian Sigh should come back to beat you up and Bunky Johnson isn’t there to protect us (as he always was), this time, I promise I’ll take the punch.

Amy Speace is an award-winning Americana folk singer and songwriter discovered by Judy Collins. Her songs have been recorded by Ms. Collins and many others and she has won International Song of the Year from the Americana Music Association (UK). Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Working Mother, and Salon.com. She received her MFA from Spalding University and teaches English at Cumberland University. She resides in Nashville, Tennessee, with her son, Huckleberry, and her dog, Dusty Springfield.

The Cardinals, coming Sept 1st with Red Hen Press , is her debut poetry collection.

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I write these blogs on Sundays in order to publish them on Mondays and I’m usually sitting in the sun on my porch with my dog Dusty at my feet and the fan on the ceiling blowing a warm breeze. I’ve been on the road a lot this month, put a lot of miles on my car. Drove to Texas and back with Huck to play and wander the Hill Country. Drove to West Virginia to play Mountain Stage for the 7^th time. Then drove up north to Maryland with Huck to visit my mother for a week. Drove back 9 hours yesterday and I’m worn out. Mom packed us a lunch, so I stopped at a Rest Area along I-81 heading south in Virginia, a beautiful drive usually full of traffic and trucks, that was empty and easy yesterday in the blue sky.

I grew up on road trips. We always had a Buick station wagon – remember that back row of seats that faced the road? We called it the “back in the back” and my sister Lee and I always shared it, waving at the cars behind us, fighting over space on the bench seats, as I usually spread my Barbies all over the place, touching the invisible line, encroaching on Lee’s side. Matt and Danny, the twins, were in the middle seat. Mom and Dad up front, sometimes with whatever cat with had at the time sitting on Dad’s shoulder, Dad making up voices for her as if the cat was giving Dad directions. I do that now with Huck. “Do the Dusty voice,” he says to me.

For a while, we had a pop-up camper and for a few summers that we lived in Minneapolis, we would do 2 week trips out West to see the national parks. The Dakotas to see The Badlands and Mount Rushmore. Glacier National Park in Montana. Rocky Mountain National Park. We did a lot of Rest Stop picnics. I’ll never forget the smell of that pop-up camper – a kind of welcome mustiness blended with bug spray and suntan lotion. I’ve been dreaming of buying a small camper for me and Huck. Setting up a tent takes so much time and I hate camping in the rain. It’s a dream…

But the rest stop yesterday with Huck was beautiful if you looked away from the road. Rolling hills of green and clover, tall trees for shade over the concrete picnic tables, each with a grill (we would definitely grill hot dogs on those in the 1970s). Huck ran up the hill to the rocks and beckoned me. I kicked off my shoes and ran up barefoot. We lay on the grass and looked at the clouds and named the things we saw. And I was back in 1972, 73, 74, 75, 76 with my family, in that wood-paneled station wagon, fighting in the back seat with Lee. A bell jar half full of urine (the pee jar) was rolling around in the foot well. Homemade GORP snacks (“good ole raisins and peanuts”).

Today is Father’s Day and I was in church with Jamey and Huck and all those memories came back to me and I very acutely missed my father. When he was alive, it was a complicated relationship, but now that he’s passed, it’s very simple. My father was a pretty black and white man. A hard worker. His whole life’s mission was to work hard to make a better life for all of us than what he had growing up (basically, a widowed mother, very poor, 5 kids, no time for emotion). He did that. He was a champion tennis player. He loved old country music and Fox News. He was not intellectual nor really interested in seeing issues from all points of view, but he read all the time, mostly books to reinforce his views. He wrote us all a book about his life, his family, his beliefs, his memories. I proof-read it for him while he was working on it. It has helped me understand why I felt emotionally abandoned by him. He didn’t mean to. He was busy working so that I would grow up with all the possibilities and be able to go to a great college. Mom was my emotional support. As much as I’ve written about my father and had to grapple with some things about him, anger and disappointment and grief I felt after he died, I am able now to write about what a beautiful experience it was to be his daughter and what I learned from him. And, in death, we have this amazing relationship. We all see him in cardinals. I see him in trees. My book of poetry coming out is full of my father. My record There Used To Be Horses is partly about my father and his dying.

Tonight, as the sun goes down and the birds are still singing and the leaves of the hackberries rustle, I feel so much love and gratitude for my father. All those trips were such an extension of my father’s Boy Scout days, his days as a forester. His own dad died when he was 8. He gave us what he didn’t have. And so I will try to do the same for Huck, making peanut butter & jelly sandwiches and stopping at a rest stop to take my shoes off and roll down hills with him until he’s too old to want to go on road trips with his mom.

Happy Father’s Day Dad. You did the best you knew how to do. And it was extraordinary in so many ways.

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Father’s Day – Amy Speace

(Song is from There Used To Be Horses Here released in 2021)

Amy Speace is an award-winning Americana folk singer and songwriter discovered by Judy Collins. Her songs have been recorded by Ms. Collins and many others and she has won International Song of the Year from the Americana Music Association (UK). Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Working Mother, and Salon.com. She received her MFA from Spalding University and teaches English at Cumberland University. She resides in Nashville, Tennessee, with her son, Huckleberry, and her dog, Dusty Springfield. The Cardinals, coming Sept 1st with Red Hen Press , is her debut poetry collection.

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When I was working on my MFA, we had the opportunity to work with the undergraduate art students in an ekphrastic project. An ekphrastic work is basically one kind of artistic work responding to another kind of artistic work. The visual art students chose poems the grad students had written and created work inspired by our poems. I’d never heard of that term before, but that term I’d taken an old poem of mine that was in free verse and I revised it into a pantoum. My first stab at that form (a very strict form of repeating lines). It worked perfectly for my poem “Mothership” which was, without me realizing, an ekphrastic poem as I’d written it in response to a Turner painting I sat in front of for a long time at The Tate Britain Museum in London when I was pregnant years ago. Since then, I realize much of my work has ekphrastic elements.

Last year, I was home in Nashville when news of the flooding in and around Kerrville, Texas came across my social media feed. In 2006, I was a New Folk Finalist at The Kerrville Folk Festival. That contest is a legendary one in the songwriting community. It is a home to me. And to many of my friends. I wrote about Kerrville in last week’s blog.

So, when the news of the flood came, and I read the stories and followed the pictures of the devastation, it was unfathomable. I called my friends who lived there to check in. That water so brown and angry and so so so high… impossible. For many years, I’d floated on my back in that beautiful green stillness with the cypress trees that hung over.

I came across Aaron Parsley’s extraordinary piece in Texas Monthly, his account of his survival and loss written just days after the flood. If you haven’t read it, stop reading me and go read it. He was just awarded the Pulitzer Prize for it. I’ve never read anything like it.

A few weeks later, I was scheduled to spend a week in Wimberley, TX at a songwriter’s retreat at Blue Rock Studio. It was an incredible opportunity to have food and lodging and access to the beautiful space to do nothing all day but write songs. I was invited there by Billy and Dodee Crockett, incredible humans and supporters of the arts (Billy is also a wonderful songwriter and producer himself), and it was me, Billy, and two other songwriters there for the week they’ve dubbed “Occupy Blue Rock.” The other two just coincidentally happened to be my close friends, Jonathan Byrd and Katie Boeck, both extraordinary songwriters and top notch hangs. I had been looking forward to this from the time I got the invite months before.

But I arrived stuck and shocked. Wimberley is in Hill Country, not too far from Kerrville. And Parsley’s article and story was all I could think of. I had that kind of deep grief that mourned a place, a land, a river, but also mourned a loss that wasn’t my own. So, I felt very conflicted about my grief. Or, rather, my right to grieving.

I spoke about it to my friends and colleagues there that first night. I said I thought I had to write about the flood before I could write about anything else and that I had a story that inspired me. I didn’t say much about it as I was only really talking about a feeling I couldn’t quite name yet. “Sympathetic grief” isn’t really a thing and felt shallow. That first full day of writing, I re-read the article for a way in but couldn’t find words. I felt colors. Blue and grey shades. I saw the rain. Really, I heard it. I saw the dark. I wanted to sob, but it wasn’t my loss. I kept trying to find my way into the song, but I couldn’t. I kept firing my own authorship, my right to authorship. As if I didn’t have the right to write anything about this. Does that make sense?

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I remember how it felt in the days after 9/11. I lived in Hoboken, NJ at the time at 11^th and Hudson Streets, one block from Elysian Park that overlooked the Hudson River. I could see the City from my window (I had been living in Manhattan, then Brooklyn, then Hoboken since 1991). That morning, I’d lied and called in sick to my temp job (which was downtown). There was a Monday Night Football game that had gone into double overtime and we had watched it. Ok, that’s an excuse. I was in a place in my life in between – not happy in anything, I was acting and it was a slog, I had just started playing music out at clubs, I was temping, and I wasn’t unsettled in my marriage. I tended to blow things off and call in sick to the only job that was making me any money for rent. That Tuesday morning, I woke (I’m pretty sure my husband and I got into a fight about me bailing on work again) and walked my two dogs to the park when someone came running up to me to ask where my Kal was and where did he work (they knew he worked in finance) and told me that a plane had hit one of the towers. I ran home, turned the TV on, watched the 2^nd plane hit, grabbed a camera (I don’t even know why I thought of that) and ran to the river, just a block away. And spent the next few hours sitting on the banks of the Hudson watching everything. The smoke. The fire. Then the crumbling, so sudden. The sirens, the smoke, the smoke, the smoke.

The grief I felt after 9/11 was similar to this one I couldn’t name after the 2025 Texas Flood. Of course, in 2001, was sitting right there on the Hudson River, I knew those Towers, had worked on those floors. Knew the guy who I bought a bagel and a coffee from in the subway hallways underneath. A week before, my friends and I had ridden the elevators to the Windows on the World restaurant and pressed our faces against the windows so high up there. I had friends who escaped the towers, my sister-in-law still won’t talk about that day, and I know she dodged the falling. I know people who died in the towers, my college classmate Fred Rimmele was in one of the planes. So, although I didn’t lose anyone close or that I really knew well, I didn’t just read about the Towers falling. I saw it happen. And but for a sudden urge to play hooky, I would have been there. Still, my deep grief felt, well, borrowed. I didn’t feel like I should be allowed to feel loss, when there were so many who really lost people. [I wrote a poem about this that was published in Euonia Review]

It was the same with Texas. I was gut punched and felt guilty that I was taking on grief that wasn’t my own. That first day, I wrote a mostly instrumental foggy piano piece with very vague lyrics and presented it to Jonathan, Katie and Billy that night when we were sharing what we’d worked on that day. They all know me and know my work, and someone asked me what my ‘in’ was to the song. I talked about Aaron Parsley’s piece and how I could not get past the image of a mother, his sister, holding onto a tree with one child in one arm and the other in the other arm. And that moment the baby slipped out of her arms into the darkness, into water. Even writing that sentence right now, I had to take a breath before writing this one.

Billy, Jonathan and Katie agreed I was holding the story at arm’s length, holding myself at arm’s length. The song wasn’t making any sense because I’d distanced myself too much. I talked to them about feeling like I had no right to write anything about this story. And as I talked, I started crying, and I wasn’t a writer anymore, I was a mother not imagining the moment, but almost like method acting (which I’d studied), I was living that moment in my skin, in my body, wherever my writer-self resides. And it was horrible and impossible and unimaginable, and my dear friends told me I had to write that song with that narrative. They gave me permission.

I stayed up very late that night and did what I usually do when I know I am trying to tackle something too large to put into words. I just write what I see. I went back in my mind to my bedroom that night after the flood, when I scrolled the photos of the flood. The night I found Aaron Parsley’s piece, when Huck, my son, was curled up next to me in bed. And I wrote what I saw. And that song became “The Mother.”

It is on my latest record, that was recorded that week at Blue Rock. I rarely play it in my shows. It’s too much for me. But a few weeks ago, I played The Kerrville Folk Festival, and it was appropriate for that set, for those that experienced the flood. I changed the last line of the chorus which used to be (and is on the recording) “Is there a God who decides who survives?” to “What kind of God decides who survives.” It is angrier. Less writer. More honest.

If my song made any money (and we all know folk songs aren’t cash cows), I’d send all that money to Aaron Parsley’s sister in honor of her lost son. She can have every fraction of a penny Spotify will pay me. I’m sure I’ll never meet her, which is why I wanted to write it, to let her know every mother who read Aaron’s piece was with her.

I played the song last night at a house concert in Fort Worth, Texas. A local politician running for congress, Heli Rodriguez Prilman, a young fiery badass of a woman who is trying to take the seat out from under some old Republican man, came to the show to introduce herself and let the crowd know what she’s about and ask people to vote and get involved. I love this. She took time to come to a concert in someone’s living room to meet her community where they gathered. She stayed for the whole concert, and we talked a lot at the end. I watched her during the show as I sang “The Mother.” She was holding herself back from sobbing. Many were. Which is why I don’t play the song. But we connected as mothers and as fans of Aaron Parsely’s writing (and podcast now).

Ekphrasis is a powerful tool of connection and communication across eras, across mediums. It opened me up to write the song from the perspective of a mother experiencing the flood through Aaron’s story about his experience. Maybe it’s my little way of connecting to his sister. A prayer. This is the only way I can write “topic” songs. I did this with “Ginger Ale and Lorna Doones,” a song about an abortion (Mary Gauthier, when I asked her how to tackle this subject, said, ‘well what did you see?’ and I wrote that). It is how I wrote “The Reckoning,” my song responding to the Renee Good killing (that will release in August).

I don’t expect that Aaron Parsley will ever hear my song. But should anyone out there meet him or know him, please let him know that a folk singer in Nashville who loves the earth in Texas and loves the rivers in Hill Country is grateful for the bravery and heart he brought to writing his piece. And thought about Clay, his nephew, in every moment writing this song. We say ‘thoughts and prayers’ after all tragedies and we all know how that falls. Flat and inept. Maybe St. Augustine was right, albeit misquoted most likely. “To sing is to pray twice.”

Amy Speace is an award-winning Americana folk singer and songwriter discovered by Judy Collins. Her songs have been recorded by Ms. Collins and many others and she has won International Song of the Year from the Americana Music Association (UK). Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Working Mother, and Salon.com. She received her MFA from Spalding University and teaches English at Cumberland University. She resides in Nashville, Tennessee, with her son, Huckleberry, and her dog, Dusty Springfield. The Cardinals, coming Sept 1st with Red Hen Press , is her debut poetry collection.

I don’t remember the first poem I wrote as well as I remember the first song. “Boundaries and Borderlines” was my first song. It was all 20 -something angst, brought on by listening to a lot of Tori Amos’ “Little Earthquakes.” You are here. I am there. There’s a – wait for it --- borderline in between us and that is symbolic, of course. I was in a long-distance relationship with a songwriter who had taught me three chords and I used all of them. I think I rhymed “magazine” with “kerosene,” which, come to think of it, is some A-level country writing. It wasn’t good. But I remember writing it and that feeling of finishing it and that I had written a song! Euphoria! Let’s do it again! And again and again and again….

Poetry started for me much younger. My grandmother gave me a copy of Robert Frost’s Collected Works when I was in middle school. I’m pretty sure I chose Amherst College because of Robert Frost (I didn’t discover Emily Dickinson until later). I loved those poems. To this day, “Birches” is still one of my all-time favorite poems. One could do worse than be a swinger of birches. I still cry reading it out loud.

I do remember the first published poem of mine, or I remember the title, the idea, and the student drawing that went with it on the pages of my high school literary magazine “The Cherry and White.” The poem was called “The Wall” and it was, yes, about a metaphoric wall. The dislocation of a 16 year old upper middle class white privileged kid who felt completely out of place in the middle of Pennsylvania, who didn’t understand girl group social cues, who was most definitely an artist searching for her field, who wasn’t pretty. She was conformist enough to want to be popular but was too well liked and not eccentric enough to be in the arty gang. So, I wrote bad high school poetry about it and starred in the high school musicals and got good grades so I could get my ass to a New England preppy Ivy-adjacent college where I would find myself and my people.

Looking back, there were two people I went to high school with who were my people. Both were smarter than their years, a bit eccentric, great readers and writers and very, very fun. Steve Landale and David Giglio. I watched “Stop Making Sense” and “Quadrophenia” at Steve’s house while we got stoned and would go hiking to the top of a hill up near where he lived where there was one of those large white crosses and we’d sit there and sneak cans of beer and talk about high philosophical matters. David Giglio, a year older, saw my poems and gently guided me to reading poetry. He was too kind to say “um, these are bad…so read some great ones and learn form.” He was brilliant. I haven’t seen either since high school.

I stopped writing poetry in college. I’m not sure why. I didn’t even take a poetry class, which I regret. I studied playwriting and James Joyce and Shakespeare Critical Theory and Derrida and Foucault (great party talk at post-college parties). I could pepper my post-feminist post-college cocktail conversation with the word “trope” and everyone would nod, knowingly, even though I wasn’t really saying anything but regurgitating some trope from Andrea Dworkin, with whom later I’d come to realize I entirely disagreed. I also pretended to like experimental dance theater, but that’s another story for another time.

I followed my heart to the theater and moved to NYC to be an actress and while in a 2 year training program at The National Shakespeare Conservatory, I picked up the guitar and that song about missing my boyfriend spilled out along with 10 others and Kenny Gorka at The Bitter End gave me a gig and a few years later Judy Collins heard me and here I am 20 some years later.

Not surprisingly, my lyrics have a poetic slant. Lyrics are not poetry (ask me and I’ll bend your ear about it), but they can borrow poetic devices and songwriting and poetry are cousins. I did write a few poems over the years. I never shared them. It was a hidden desire to ‘be a poet.’ But really, who wants to BE a poet? That sounded really arrogant and foolish. It’s not really a job (then again, is Folk Singer? I mean, really?).

My debut book of poetry, The Cardinals is coming out in September. You can pre-order it now. And I have copies of The Galleys and I can’t believe I can write that – ‘the galleys – here.

The first time I ever heard one of my songs on the radio, I was driving through Michigan on tour and had the local NPR station on. I remember thinking “man this song sounds familiar – who is this?” and started singing along before I realized it was me. I started crying. I’ve heard myself many times since and it always does that to me. That’s how I felt when I held my book in my hand.

Someone else liked my work enough to invest money in publishing it and now it’s for sale and people can buy it. MY POETRY. It all started with that journal my Godmother bought me for my First Communion when I was 7. Red padded cover (man, I’m gonna guess there’s a bird on there and that may have been a cardinal and holy shit I just realized this and again God shows up in these really amazing ways…). Gold-flecked edges. The pages were lined and dated by days of the year. I remember writing about Hannah my 1^st grade friend who was Jewish and celebrated Hannukah and I wrote that exact sentence and I also wrote about her lighting a menorah and playing “draydal.” I wrote every day. I have every single journal I ever kept. Except my 7^th grade journal that later, in high school I re-read and hated that 7^th grade girl and burnt the journal so that nobody could ever read it. I could slap that high schooler. I would do anything to have that journal back.

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t a writer.

I was just describing my music career to someone this morning. That I’m like a starter on the Farm Team. And I’m really grateful for that. I never (or haven’t yet) got to the Big Show. However, the Farm Team is a really amazing place to play ball. I think I wanted to be a rock star when I started. I think. I’m not sure. Maybe I just wanted the ride. Maybe I just wanted to see where it went if I walked through that door that was open. I know I didn’t really have a life plan. I just kept walking through open doors. I’ve gotten Big Show Adjancent. I played The Ryman. I have sung at The Opry. I’m in a hotel right now in Charleston, WV writing this because I’ll be playing “Mountain Stage” tonight for the 7^th time. I’ve played Glastonbury and Kerrville Folk Festival. I’ve had a song recorded by Judy Collins. I mean, I’m blessed. Even if I’m not a ‘rock star’ or famous. I’m a starter on the AAA team. I love my life. I wish the pay was a little better and it’s disappointing that for some games, folks don’t come out, but some games are packed.

That’s going to be the same for me as a poet. Trying to get people to come out to a bookstore reading. But I’m used to it. I’m a late bloomer in the publishing world. But then again, all my favorite writers hit their peak in their greying years. As a songwriter, I’m just hitting my A game. I’m a new poet. I’m still learning. But I love this book I wrote. “The Wall” isn’t there (you’re welcome). But “To The Wishing” is and I wrote that for my niece Alexine when she was 5 and she’s in her mid 20’s now.

I hope you pre-order the book. I’d like to be a New York Times Bestseller. I mean, why not just say it, right? What’s the harm in wishing it out loud? If you’re reading this, take a minute and order the book through the links here.

PRE-ORDER

And then look for my tour and come to a show and I’ll sign it for you. The world is a crazy place right now full of disconnect. Right now some angsty 16-year-old feels like God abandoned them and feels like nobody really gets them maybe they’re listening to some song that makes them feel seen and understood and they’re writing shitty poetry. It’s really important for art to be here to be the net that holds us together and keeps us feeling like we’re not alone when the world is on fire. That we see each other’s pain and lonely. That we feel it too. That we all nod “yeah, I’ve been there.” That’s what poetry and song (and film and dance and sculpture and maybe even AAA baseball) do. Yeah. Maybe even experimental Dance Theater and post-feminist theory, too.

And I promise if I find a recording of “Borderlines” and the old scribbling of “The Wall” I’ll share it. I’m 58. I’m really out of F’s to give. Uncool is where it’s at for me. Angst was a necessary luxury for that kid to find herself. I don’t have time for it anymore. I’d rather walk through the world like I always have, looking for open doors. I stopped banging my head on the ones that are closed a long time ago. It’s just exhausting and my shoulder aches anyway from tendonitis or menopause or holding a baby when I was 50.

I finish this blog from Taylor Books in Charleston, WV that has a great café and a great selection of books and I’m glad I found it. Go to your local indie. Buy books from them even though it’s cheaper and easier on Amazon. Borderlines are a made up thing. We can kick them down with words and songs, right?

Amy Speace is an award-winning Americana folk singer and songwriter discovered by Judy Collins. Her songs have been recorded by Ms. Collins and many others and she has won International Song of the Year from the Americana Music Association (UK). Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Working Mother, and Salon.com. She received her MFA from Spalding University and teaches English at Cumberland University. She resides in Nashville, Tennessee, with her son, Huckleberry, and her dog, Dusty Springfield. The Cardinals, coming Sept 1st with Red Hen Press , is her debut poetry collection.

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In 2006, I was a finalist in a very famous songwriter’s contest at The Kerrville Folk Festival. If you know anything about folk music or legendary Texas songwriters like Guy Clark, Lyle Lovett, Nanci Griffith, you know about this festival. It’s been going on for a bazillion years. And Guy and Lyle famously won that contest (they pick 6 winners out of 32 finalists). I hear Nancy and Steve Earle famously lost. Townes Van Zandt won. Mindy Smith lost. Shawn Colvin lost. Many have never even got to the finals.

I was in it that year. It was the same year I got signed to Judy Collins’ record label, so it was a big year for me and to many, I was a shoe in. I lost. But by the time they announced the winners, I didn’t really care. I made lifelong friends in my class of finalists and discovered the magic of the Kerrville Folk Festival. My year was a good year. Diana Jones, Antje Duvekot, Gorde Quist (Band of Heathens) won. My new friend Jud Caswell won. Jud and I would go on to write “Weight of the World” (together with Jon Vezner), a song that Judy Collins recorded. KC Clifford was a finalist and she’s a lifelong friend. The winners, as I recall, had amazing songs. I had pretty good songs.

It was there in the late night campfires of Kerrville that I learned to write a song, sitting up till 3am (or later) with incredible songwriters, some famous, some complete unknowns, all masters of the craft. Tom Prasada-Rao, Buddy Mondlock, Michael McNevin, Michael Lille, Jonathan Byrd, Anais Mitchell. I judged the contest a few years later and met Robby Hecht and BettySoo by (ugh) judging them. There were great artists in the contest that year (and the other years I judged) who wouldn’t make the final 6 who have amazing careers. Some came back another time to win (Ordinary Elephant), some just went on to have great careers of their own without the win.

Winning would have been nice. It’s nice to be thought of in the company of Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark. But just getting to Kerrville was the win. There’s a spiritual thing happening here for 3 weeks every summer, where people leave their ‘ordinary/extraordinary’ lives and gather under the Texas stars, and sometimes storms, and share songs and wine and food and stories. I used to camp at Camp Nashville until that one folded into others. Then Camp Coho was my home. We had a lovely spot in ‘the meadow’ where we’d watch the hummingbirds while Gary would bring out his accordion and play some old Scottish ballad with a thousand verses. Or Alan Gann would recite one of his poems (he’s still one of my favorite poets), or Jack Hardy would play one of his amazing folk songs. Gina Forsyth would bring her fiddle out, Karen Mal her mandolin. Or we’d all go to the Medina River at Richard’s place, where Eric Schwartz would entertain us with Motown and we’d all sing along in the tall soft grassy lawn with the hammocks and the impossibly clear green still water. Those years were beautiful and I grew up there in so many ways.

I was also deep into my addiction and ego and insecurity. I drank too much (so many of us do there so I didn’t know I had a problem) and I know, as I say with Huck, I made ‘bad choices.’ I also had so much fun. RJ Cowdrey and I stayed up all night on Chapel Hill (the highest point at the camp where many have been married) with a throng of hippies passing a whiskey bottle dancing and singing and stumbled down the ridge a little too loudly making up bawdy folk songs. I did that a few years prior with Jonathan Byrd, sliding into Camp Coho at 6am announcing to nobody that we had just written a song and they had to wake up to listen. It was “It’s Too Late To Call It A Night,” and Alan Gann was up and remembers it. So many sunrises on Chapel Hill, beautiful moments of connection, deep alcoholism and infidelity and shame. And beauty. It does sometimes happen together and so my darkest days were also beautiful days.

They say pain is the doorway to spiritual awakening. If that’s the case, then Kerrville holds my spiritual doorway.

Here, I learned to write songs. Here, I learned to be humble and listen. Here, I learned maybe I wasn’t the NYC shit that I thought I was. Here I was humbled into getting good. Here, I fell in love and fell out of love, and got drunk, and ate pot cookies and took a magical tour of the camps I didn’t know about with Brian C and Robby Hecht. Here I watched my friends get married. Here we celebrated the life of Vic Heyman and Reba Heyman, who were huge supporters of mine and the festival. Here I stood next to the marker of my dear friend Tom who invited me into the circle at Camp Nashville and gave me cred. Here I stood under the stars in magical circles and heard the most glorious songs. Here I lost God and found God all at once.

This year, I’m playing the festival. I’ve played it many times, but it’s been 7 years since I’ve been here and I wanted to bring Huck this time. He came with me as a one-year old last time I played. Now he’s 8. We took a road trip and decided to stay a few days so I could show him the magic. My guitar player, Dave Coleman, who’s also a great songwriter flew in on Saturday. There is a worship service on Chapel Hill on Sundays that I never knew of and had never attended in all the years I’ve come. I’m 12 years sober, so I have been here sober, but I still stayed up late to swap songs in circles.

But since Covid, so much has been broken and put back together in my life, soul, heart and I’m different this year. I knew about the service and I wanted to go. Dave wanted to go. Huck of course. So we went up to Chapel Hill and a small group was gathered under the beautiful blue sky. The priest is a young singer-songwriter and an Episcopal priest so the service would be Episcopal, which is my church. It was beautiful service. We had communion and sang and I did a lot of my own silent conversation with God. Thanking her for me just getting here. And I don’t mean just the hike up that hill.

As I sang my set last night, they sky was bright and the sun shone on the stage. Chris Jacobs was out there on sound, as he always is, as he has been since I met him 20 years ago. Sparkle Joe (Joe, a lawyer in real life, wears sequined capes and dances and has a bucket of them for other dancers and kids capes too… Huck loves him) was dancing and interpreting the songs. My friends Sarah Beth and Nathan and Buddy and Polly were there smiling. Robby was waiting backstage to sing with me on our song “Sea and the Shore.” A song that would not have been written without us meeting here. Rebecca Loebe was the MC, a beautiful soul who has a lovely career despite the fact that she was in the contest the year I judged (and didn’t win…although she came back to crush it another year and has played mainstage many times). James McMurtry would be playing later with my friend BettySoo. Huck sat backstage watching, just waiting for his ice cream. Dave’s guitar swirled in reverb, a bed of harmonics that I could play with and sing to and I felt like we created our own little world sonically together, in a kind of musical communion that may have been blessed that morning with our own communion on the hill.

My personal “God” is a starlit sky at the crossroads here in Kerrville with Tom singing our song “Have Faith In Me.” She’s in the Medina River. She’s in Dalis Allen’s flowing kimonos. She’s in a song Steve Fischer sings up on the rocks. She’s in the poetry of Allan Gann. She’s in Brian Cutean’s eyes.

They say here “Welcome Home,” and when I first heard it I was a cynical NYC chick, cooler than cool and I thought it was hippie bullshit. But it is in the best way. It’s true. There’ s a ‘coming home’ that happens here to everyone. A non-denominational spirit in songs and community.

I guess if you’re gonna face your demons anywhere, a folk festival in the Texas hill country is a good enough place to do it. And it’s a beautiful place to come back and give honor to that broken girl, who was just searching for something outside of herself that was always inside, waiting for her to come home.

Amy Speace is an award-winning Americana folk singer and songwriter discovered by Judy Collins. Her songs have been recorded by Ms. Collins and many others and she has won International Song of the Year from the Americana Music Association (UK). Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Working Mother, and Salon.com. She received her MFA from Spalding University and teaches English at Cumberland University. She resides in Nashville, Tennessee, with her son, Huckleberry, and her dog, Dusty Springfield. The Cardinals, coming Sept 1st with Red Hen Press , is her debut poetry collection.

Well, I’ll be damned
Here comes your ghost again
But that’s not unusual
It’s just that the moon is full
And you happened to call
And here I sit
Hand on the telephone
Hearing a voice I’d known
A couple of light years ago
Heading straight for a fall

“Diamonds and Rust” by Joan Baez

I sit on my front porch in Nashville most mornings and meditate. I’ve studied a few types of meditation since 2011 and landed in 2019 on Transcendental Meditation but had been short-changing my sits from 20 minutes to 10 minutes. Last week, I decided to get back to 20 minutes. The difference was astonishing. Somewhere after the 10-minute mark, I stopped making lists and putting stage outfits together and going over the newest song I’d written, and I dropped into light and sound. Maybe it has been a conversation with The Divine (or The Source, or Universe, or Spirit or God or whatever the F it is that connects us all).

I also had deep and long conversations (or wordless connections) with people who had died that were profound. I could be the old cynic that I am and explain it with biology and science and that I made up the ‘magic’ of the other voice coming in, it was me wanting that to happen and I made it up. OR, I could go with my gut and call it what I called it: Spirit. Flow.

This is what I was planning on writing about today. Flow. When I first got sober, my old dog, June, died of cancer and I had to put her down. I’d lost a marriage, then lost a very complicated relationship I had bet everything on, I was in a new town and alone and in my 40’s and childless and almost broke and I had to put my dog down. I sat with her as she passed, talking her to the next place. After, I drove straight to an AA meeting.

I was in my first few months, and I was shaky. I was working on the 2nd step – “Came to believe that a Power great than ourselves can restore us to sanity.” My old Catholic judgmental God had to be fired and I’d decided blithely (just to get onto the next step) to call my Higher Power “Flow.” Flow like the river. Like creativity. An ease I longed for, that I only knew in that strange trance of creating. A few months later, totally randomly, I was asked to adopt a Redbone Coonhound with trauma issues whose name was…wait for it…Flo. Yeah. You can’t make this shit up.

I’ve been experiencing a lot of Flow lately. Guiding voices. My dead father, in my meditation, actually apologized to me, an acknowledgement I never got that I wrote about in my song “Grief is a Lonely Land.” My creative projects are flowing. I’m writing every day, whether a poem or songs. I’m allowing. One door closes and another opens and, like I always have done, I walk through.

*. *. *

10 years ago, I had a co-writing session booked with Rod Picott, a great songwriter. I told him just the exoskeleton of a story about someone I knew in high school. I think what I said was I remembered her as the most popular pretty girl, that we’d been friends in junior high but didn’t really hang out in high school. And she was a kind of town celebrity because she’d gone off to LA and had become a model and married a rock star drummer and there were a divorce and stories in the music magazines and VH1 and rumors, and that she landed back in our hometown. All of this was true. I ‘heard’ she ran with a fast crowd in high school. I didn’t know if it was true. It was gossip. She did move to LA and marry a famous drummer. And she did move back home. And from what I could see on Facebook, in her 40’s at that point, she was naturally beautiful with a radiance about her. I told him she was the Prom Queen (I was wrong, she was the Homecoming Queen). He said, “Everybody wants to dance with the Prom Queen. Everybody wants their chance.”

We didn’t finish the song and we both forgot about it for 10 years. Then one day, I found the old work tape and the chorus and started writing again. I decided Homecoming would give me more high school imagery (football, cheerleaders). I put the Queen (inspired by Heidi but now a character, a stereotype) on a Mustang as being driven around the field – that was culled from memory. I called Rod and said, let’s get back to it.

I didn’t know that much about Heidi’s life story, and to be honest, I didn’t really know her very well in high school. I’d call her maybe a good acquaintance at that point. I knew of her as smart and very kind to everyone. But I’d only sketched out a few details to Rod. He didn’t know her at all. So, we created a universal type. “I heard one night up on Tower Hill/ she rounded third base with a college kid.” It was a cool line. There was a place in my town Skyline Drive, but it didn’t rhyme, so we named it “Tower Hill.” We had the character run off to LA to “make it” and end up with a drummer in a heavy metal band (culled from what I knew of the real person). And in the end, she ‘licks her wounds and comes back home.’ It was just a good line we wrote, creating more of a fiction, that this character didn’t get what she went out there, or got something else, and came back to their town. A storyline that many songs and movies are built upon: a dreamer’s journey that goes south. The chorus changed to “Everybody wants to dance with the Queen / Everybody wants their chance to be seen,” which to both of us, spoke to that universal thing we ALL went through at that age. We mythologize the Prom Queens, the captain of the Football Team, and we all want to be seen by someone. As we age, we all learn the quiet kid in the back who never talks sometimes comes back as the most successful. The popular girl may have a very sad story to tell. The Class President was deeply insecure. And in our own insecurity, we craft narratives around these archetypes, and those narratives keep us, at 16, stuck in our own insecurities. The dream is as false as an LA tan.

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That was the song to me and Rod. The false myth.

The trouble is that the false myth cut close to the human behind the song and she was recognizable and it hurt her. Her name was Heidi Benson. Now she’s Kai Shanti. She heard the song and was hurt by it. I’ve never had this happen. She has a blog and posted a public “Letter to a Friend,” and messaged me about it, reaching out. I read it immediately.

It was honest and generous and extraordinarily vulnerable. It was also a kind of apology, as if she’d hurt me back then. It was an olive branch. She wrote of her truth, her journey and, though we have led very different lives, there were so many similarities that I was stunned by her humanity and grace. I immediately sat down and wrote her a private letter. My own apology, and amend, my olive branch, an opening to a connection.

* * *

There is always the perceived popular girl, prettiest girl, popular boy, rebel, class talent, class clown, rich girl, poor kid, pothead, deadhead, hackey-sacker, smoker’s gang, band geeks, goody two shoes, best this, best that… That’s what high school is.

I don’t know about you, but I hated high school. I was ambitious and creative and felt very out of place and stuck in a town I wanted out of. I loved my family and I was safe and secure and my parents did a wonderful job creating home for us with all the tools they had. I grew up with amazing siblings I am very close to and we have worked through most of our demons together. I was not an easy kid to parent. I was headstrong and thought I knew everything and had rage I wouldn’t understand until my 50’s. I had mood swings. My parents called it “artistic.” I know it now as depression. I was bullied in junior high school by the popular rich girl who was mean (and, looking back, probably as scared as I was, unhappy, definitely troubled, and so many reasons for her own trauma) and went into high school vowing to never be bullied again, so I kept a distance from people and went to work on my Big Dreams.

I found my friends eventually and we are still bonded, but we didn’t all go to school together. Terry, Bill, Laura, Katie, Greg. We survived the 1980’s together. It was like a John Hughes movie. Seriously - my prom dress was ugly, so ugly, because I was inspired by Molly Ringwald and one made for me. I didn’t have a boyfriend so I took some guy I met from Regional Choir who I didn’t really like. I was never on any Prom or Homecoming court. I ran for Class President with a bunch of other girls as a team – oh the thought of it is so humiliating. My father, ever the idea guy, and his own Class President and always popular and handsome, thought, because my name is Amy, I should run with the whole line-up and call it The A Team and he made business cards for us to hand out. I mean, talk about super uncool.

The line up won. Except me. I lost to…..wait for it… Heidi Benson.

*. * *

Bob Dylan broke Joan Baez’ heart and you can see it happening on film in Pennebaker’s “No Direction Home.” Previous to Baez, he broke Suze Rotolo’s heart by openly cheating on her with Baez. Rotolo went onto become an artist of her own. I don’t know of anywhere she wrote anything about Dylan, but I’ll bet she pulled from her own history and memory and subjective truth to create art.

Baez wrote the song “Diamonds and Rust.” It is clearly about Dylan. He knew it. He wrote a lot of songs that were inspired by people. How about “It Ain’t Me Babe.” He didn’t write anyone’s name in the lyric, but I’m sure whomever it is about knew it and had her own feelings. Baez wrote the song about Dylan. I don’t know… was she angry? Was she hurt? Did she just use the story to create art? How did Dylan feel? I’ve never cared to look. It’s a wonderful song and I’m not listening to it thinking about Bob Dylan. It’s my own “ghost” that comes around again. For decades, writers have debated who “You’re So Vain” is about, and I think Cary Simon finally copped to the truth, but it doesn’t matter to me, as the listener, because I’ve got my own guy I’d like to say those words to.

And that’s what art does. I teach writing. I teach that the more specific a writer is with the detail, the more universal the song is. If you tell me the exact color of the couch you lost your virginity on, even if I didn’t lose my virginity on a green plaid couch with cigarettes stuck in the cushions, I’ll see my own deflowering. If it’s a good song, there’s a catharsis, a turn. Where we can all feel it together about our own lives.

The first time I heard the Miranda Lambert hit “The House That Built Me” (written by Tom Douglas and Alan Shamblin) I had to pull over to the side of the road and cry. I think I played it again and again and again. That song changed me. None of those details are mine. There’s a front porch and a dog and an old house. I didn’t grow up with a front porch and that tree and that dog. But the chorus, the emotion and longing behind the words was mine.

I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
This brokenness inside me might start healing
Out here, it’s like I’m someone else
I thought that maybe I could find myself…

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I know that feeling and we all did and we made that song ours and that’s why it’s a hit song. It’s songs like these that taught me how to write. That made me want to be a great songwriter. To just write ONE thing that is part truth and history but becomes mythological and true.

Kelsea Ballerina has a song she co-wrote called “Homecoming Queen.”

Look damn good in the dress
Zipping up the mess
Dancing with your best foot forward
Does it get hard
To have to play the part?
Nobody’s feeling sorry for ya

The singer, the protagonist, the “I” in that song has a point of view. Is it anger? Or just exhaustion with the make-believe. “What if I told you the world wouldn’t end / If you started showing what’s under your skin? / What if you let ‘em all in on the lie? / Even the homecoming queen cries.”

That’s what I was trying to do with my “Homecoming Queen.”

“Everybody wants to dance with the queen / Everybody wants their chance to be seen.” There are details in that song that were made up, some are from other friendships, there is no “Tower Hill,” I read Judy Blume books on Teresa Savidge’s pink canopy bed.

“Homecoming Queen” (song by Amy Speace, Rod Picott) from The American Dream

However….it hit Heidi (now Kai) hard and I completely see why and I am so terribly sorry for that. There is a human behind the character. Maybe there was a real Mary in “Thunder Road,” and even though Springsteen wrote songs of redemption, maybe the real Mary wants a say. Maybe the girl who loses her virginity in some Springsteen song seems a little bit like a girl he knew in high school and her truth is she was raped and hearing that song brings up old trauma.

* * *

Are we artists responsible to the Muses of our work? That’s a really heady question. And I’m sure has been debated by people much smarter than I am. Maybe. Maybe not. Ethically? Maybe not. Artists are selfish thieves, we steal snippets overheard out of context and use them in our work. I watched my father take his last breath, holding his hand, telling him I loved him and staring at his face. I wanted to be a witness to the moment that Life, that mystical spirit, actually left his body. I desperately wanted to understand the instant of division between living and dying. Because I loved my father fiercely and didn’t want him to go. And because I am a writer, I wanted to see something, I wanted to write about it. I wrote a poem later about that moment – “I am scoring my father’s dying.” I wonder if my sister, who was also there, having her own experience, would think this awful and selfish. Goulish, perhaps. But I felt closer to my father watching his soul pass from one world to the next. And I’m grateful I was there. And I’m grateful that the words came later to make a poem out of it.

Are we responsible for the harm done? I may have thought differently before Friday and Kai’s letter. But now, I believe so. Maybe one could argue that art is art and leave it. But I am first a human. Second, an artist. And if, in my human fallibility, trying to create art, I hurt someone else, well then, yes I’m responsible. Or, if not responsible, then I must be respectful. Maybe Dylan wouldn’t apologize. Taylor Swift certainly doesn’t. I did not write a song from a wounded place. I have no ‘shit to work out.’ But in crafting a character, I stole from truth and that creation hurt someone. So yes, I am respectful of that and sorry for the fact that it hurt someone I never meant to hurt.

* * *

My first ex-husband, hearing a new song of mine after we separated that was thinly veiled about the person I was secretly with, said to me sadly, “you never wrote a song like that for me.” I have so many songs that are about him. I have albums about our divorce, and other huge heartbreaks. “How To Sleep In A Stormy Boat” is a song cycle inspired by Shakespeare. And it’s a breakup album. The person who I wrote those songs about knows it. He sees himself in them. We’ve never had that conversation about whether it hurt him or not. Maybe I should have. “American Dream” has a few songs directly inspired by my recent divorce. And one, ”Glad I’m Gone,” that is purely fiction written with Gary Nicholson. None of those lyrics are autobiographical. It’s actually the opposite of what I was feeling. But it was nice to step into that character and try it on and I love the song. I don’t know if my partner thought it was about him. He never said anything and I never asked him if he listened to the record.

I am not a purely confessional writer. But I take from my life. It’s all I know. I write about joy and about love and about heartbreak. I write about the rain. I write about towns. I make shit up completely and write songs that people assume are autobiographical. After years of therapy and work around it, I wrote a poem about being date raped. I didn’t know what form it should sit in to make it palatable until I found the ballad form. And I call it “The Ballad of the Forgotten Night.” It healed something in me to write it. We take from our lives and from the people we know and the places we have lived.

Maybe all artists are narcissists. And somewhat callous in our thievery. For the sake of something we craft. That does not make us saints. Or devils. But when I hurt someone, I want to know and I want to know what I can do to make an amend. First: Do. No. Harm.

*. *. *

Flow. Let’s get back to Flow. Because that’s what I was going to write about. And that’s what this may really be about. Divine flow. Kai and I share a strong faith in the Divine. We both have survived some seriously hard shit, hard public breakups, falls from graces, and then rebuilding and rebirth. We are 58 now. Mothers. Creators. I haven’t seen her in person since our 10^th reunion. And our 40^th is this summer and I’m very regretful that I cannot go. But maybe, my own God or Goddess or River or Higher Power brought me this moment of grace and connection and I have hope that we will find a deep connection out of this. Some more Flow. I think we all need that right now.

Kai. Heidi. My dear lovely friend who I met in Curtin Middle School in 7^th grade. With the long white blonde hair. The alabaster face. Tall and thin. A gymnast. Best friends with Nancy Petts with her dark curly hair and freckles. You were soft spoken and kind and made me feel included when I was the new girl in town. You and I both studied piano with Mrs. R and we did piano recitals together. You were really good. In high school, we were in choir together and you made State Choir which was a big deal. People liked you. You seemed kind to everyone. I never heard anyone say a bad word about you. I’m sorry I didn’t see you then. I’m sorry I didn’t see you as I wrote a song stealing your story. I’m sorry for all of our classmates who heard my song and needed to defend you. I’m sorry if I wasn’t kind. I’m sorry that anything that I did hurt you. Namaste, my new friend.

Pretty sure I know the next song I’ll be writing.

Extra Reading

Kai Shanti’s Blog: Letter to a Friend

Amy Speace is an award-winning Americana folk singer and songwriter discovered by Judy Collins. Her songs have been recorded by Ms. Collins and many others and she has won International Song of the Year from the Americana Music Association (UK). Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Working Mother, and Salon.com. She received her MFA from Spalding University and teaches English at Cumberland University. She resides in Nashville, Tennessee, with her son, Huckleberry, and her dog, Dusty Springfield. The Cardinals, coming Sept 1st with Red Hen Press , is her debut poetry collection.

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It was a perfect Sunday here in Nashville. Hot like summer but not too hot. Blue sky. We went to church all three of us together. It was our priest Scott’s last sermon. Scott is the priest that, many years ago, when I was having a crisis of faith (like, the thousandth) and was somewhere in the divorce process but clearly far away from the acceptance process, I asked him one day if there was a group at our church for people who were divorced. He thought that was a great idea but said no there wasn’t. I told him I kind of needed a spiritual advisor and he invited me to coffee. I was dipping my toe back into church, back to this one where Jamey first brought me, where we went for years, where Huck was baptized, and now, single and broken-hearted, I went back to find something I wasn’t finding from 12 Steps or therapy. After telling him my story, I said to Scott, over coffee, “fuck God.” And he smiled kindly and said, “Yes. Fuck God. And that’s when God shows up.”

Scott invited me and made it possible for me to go on a weekend retreat he was leading with a woman who did sound baths, over a New Moon on New Year’s Eve at Rivendell Retreat Center. It was better than sitting in my house alone counting down a holiday alone for the first time. We meditated, did sound baths, journaled. I was deep in the throes of my Long Covid battle with major fatigue, so I slept a lot. But I did write a poem about the moon and I did feel healed by community and since then, I’ve rarely missed church at St. A’s.

Scott talked about sound and light and love. He uses Tibetan bowls and gongs and invites silence. I used to think I saw the Divine in metaphor but there are people who talk about God in language I understand, like colors, like shadows, like chimes, like rivers, like wind. Like light.

Later today, Huck and I went on a long bike ride, on a path through the nature park trails that line The Cumberland River. Tall trees, and deer peeking out, cardinals everywhere. A heron or an egret circled above us, then did a nosedive into the pond and caught a fish and we watched it. There are parts of the path that are canopied by the trees. Huck, pedaling fast from behind, as we passed into one of these stretches, yells, “Mommy, we’re in the shadowlands.” I didn’t think I heard him right, so I called back, “What did you call it?” And he called, “The Shadowlands.”

I immediately thought of C.S. Lewis’s work and how grief is considered a kind of shadowland. But to Huck, it was a relief, this cooling off part of a mostly sunny, hot trail. I remembered how, when he was much younger, he would try to jump on my shadow, or put his shadow on mine, fascinated by the possibility of a ghost self he couldn’t leave behind. And I thought of my own journey, the shadowlands of uncertainty. The ones from which I have emerged. And that without that darkness, I may not be able to be as connected and joyful as I feel now. My friend Kathy told me a few years ago, deep in the middle of the breaking apart, “you will know a life beyond your wildest dreams,” and I thought she was full of 12 Step Jargon Shit. But today, I thought, oh, she was so right and it looks nothing like what I thought would make me happy.

Tonight, I sat on my porch with my friend Katie, singing songs together, while our boys, both 8, saw the season’s first firefly in the darkness, in the clovers of my un-mowed lawn. Last night was the New Moon of the month. Darkness.

The night is warm and I sit here, my friends gone now, listening to crickets and see if I can piece together something from my morning writings, tap into the sound of night for metaphor. But I am no longer a night writer, like I was when I was younger. I work better in the birdsong of morning, writing of things I remember from the shadowlands.

Amy Speace is an award-winning Americana folk singer and songwriter discovered by Judy Collins. Her songs have been recorded by Ms. Collins and many others and she has won International Song of the Year from the Americana Music Association (UK). Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Working Mother, and Salon.com. She received her MFA from Spalding University and teaches English at Cumberland University. She resides in Nashville, Tennessee, with her son, Huckleberry, and her dog, Dusty Springfield. The Cardinals, coming Sept 1st with Red Hen Press , is her debut poetry collection.

I’m writing this on a flight back home to Nashville from a weekend on tour in upstate New York. I like to write when I’m in motion – ideas come to me when there’s a current of rhythm under my feet, or in this case, my whole body. I write when I run or walk along the Cumberland River. I get ideas and I repeat them in a rhythm to my stride so that I don’t forget the words. I write while driving, while listening to music I may start writing a song on top of whatever is playing on the radio. I write in slivers of time available to me. And I don’t worry if anything comes or not. I just write. I just show up with the movement of movement cradling me.

It is Mother’s Day and I am a mother and I’ve been reflecting on how my creative journey and my career has changed and been challenged by being a mother. I make a living touring as a songwriter and when I was pregnant, I knew all of that would change. I thought I may have to quit and do something else. What if the Muse left? What if I couldn’t figure out how to be away from home? Would I make enough money touring less? But in the sleepless darkness of pregnancy insomnia, I started to write my blog “Menopausal Mommy” – I couldn’t find any blogs of women my age (49) who had babies and could give me some advice, so I wrote one. I’ve been writing it ever since (if you want to read the blog from 2017 to now it’s at www.menopausalmommy.blog – I’m just moving it over here to Substack).

What I found astounded me. I felt more creative. Maybe it was that my filter had come off. I was turning 50 and about to give birth for the first time. I’d been at it for 20 years, trying to climb a ladder of my own imagination. In truth, I’d gotten pretty high up that ladder but still felt like there was so much more, a place I had to get to in order to feel…what? Successful? Worthy? But I got pregnant and all that changed.

Suddenly, I really didn’t give a fuck. And the songs spilled out, and the poetry started and the blogging started. I wrote in the early hours of the morning when I couldn’t sleep. When Huck was born, I wrote while he was nursing. I wrote instead of napping. I did get off the road for a year, but then Id put Huck in a baby carrier from the front and my guitar on my back and I’d travel with him (and the help of someone else). Then Covid hit, so I was grounded for more than a year, but I started teaching online, and when the world opened up, And I decided to go back to school. I got divorced and while navigating that grief and terror of being a part time single mother (how would I pay the bills alone? How would I tour?)), I got an MFA in Creative Writing and started mainlining poetry and mommy memoirs.

My Muse got really sharp after motherhood and I learned to not question the idea, but to write it quickly. I don’t have hours to sit around and wait for inspiration. I have minimal time, but I build my life around mothering my son and mothering my creative self. I can’t do one without the other. I adore my son and find that if I just watch him watch the world, poetry shows up everywhere. He’s taught me to find wonder in the little things – a dandelion, a pinecone. My son listens to me do my vocal warmups in the car and I hear him mimicking me from his room sometimes.

I used to be a late-night writer. I used to be a late-night human. I’m a morning writer now. I take him to school and come home and meditate, then read a bit of poetry and then I start writing. I’m in bed soon after he is. I’m always tired. I tour every other weekend. Jamey and I built our custody schedules for this, so I’m able to be a very present mother but also have time to tour and continue to sing shows (and make a living). But if all that went away, if I could never tour and play shows, I’d still be writing.

It’s a fallacy to tell writers that they have to write every day or else they’re not ‘real’ writers. That’s a load of bullshit. I don’t write every day. I write when I can. There is no handbook for mothers who are creatives, working artist mothers. I know so many men who are touring songwriters and are able to tour for weeks, months at a time. I don’t know any mothers who do this (unless they are big enough to afford a tour bus and a full-time nanny).

But I’ll be honest, there is absolutely no way I could continue to tour and make a living as a songwriter if I were a full-time single mom, or if I had more than one child. You really can’t have it all unless you’re wealthy. There’s really no such thing as “having it all” – I mean having WHAT exactly? I have enough. And I’ve learned to be grateful for the enoughness of it all.

So Happy Mother’s Day to anyone who mothers, whatever you mother, whether it’s a human or a plant or, most importantly, yourself.

Amy Speace is an award-winning Americana folk singer and songwriter discovered by Judy Collins. Her songs have been recorded by Ms. Collins and many others and she has won International Song of the Year from the Americana Music Association (UK). Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Working Mother, and Salon.com. She received her MFA from Spalding University and teaches English at Cumberland University. She resides in Nashville, Tennessee, with her son, Huckleberry, and her dog, Dusty Springfield. The Cardinals, coming Sept 1st with Red Hen Press , is her debut poetry collection.

I started writing “Menopausal Mommy” in 2017 when I was pregnant and 49 and felt very isolated. Out of that blog, came a conversation that expanded from my own experience with being a first-time mother at 50, to my own life as an artist and my own faith journey as an ex-Catholic recovering alcoholic singer/songwriter/poet and now divorced woman in my late 50s. I write in the space where it all intersects – art, performance, motherhood, feminism, ex-New Yorker now Nashvillian, 13 years sober ex party girl who used to care too much about the fame game and now just loves to chase down a great song or poem all while navigating being single at 58, alone but not lonely, in love with the brokenness of the world.

My son Huck is taking piano lessons and I’m not even sure he likes it. We decided that we wanted him to learn to play an instrument and to play a sport. He chose piano and baseball. A few years ago, at 5, he did piano lessons for a few months, but he wasn’t really into it and I could tell we were just wasting money. But in January this year, we tried again. His teacher is pretty cool. Doesn’t talk to him like a kid. Sometimes I feel like he’s talking over Huck’s head, when he starts talking about time signatures or relative minors, but I just go with it and listen from the other side of the room. We’re working from a book, but he’s also got him playing the boogie woogie scale and making up melodies.

The other day, I was sitting at the piano with Huck going over his lesson (it takes about 10 minutes) and I could tell he was restless, wanting to go faster but kept making mistakes and getting really frustrated. I said, “do you want to just play something you make up?” and he said, “yeah.”

I have no idea what prompted me, but I filmed it. You see him counting the beat and then he starts and I start in with him, making shapes (not even chords) with my left hand, following him and at first it’s a muddy mess, but he keeps going and I’m watching his face from the phone video and realize he’s really listening, and then I see him making choices. At one point, I think he’s ended the ‘piece,’ but he’s just sustaining a single note, and very legato, he continues a melody. I take my hands off the piano and listen and watch. It was beautiful. Really magical. Had shades of Faure and Debussey, he was painting a picture with these random notes he chose. It could have all been just the luck of spontaneity, but I watched his face and there was something working there, and I held my breath. I was watching the gears of creativity open up in my son. The melody landed, not on a solid tonic chord, but on the ‘4,’ the ‘subdominant,’ which is a tone that bends and leans to wanting something more, needing to land on the 1 or the 5, and he left it there, gasping for air, longing for landing, and I was stunned. He looked up and was done.

We talked about it, was that fun? I asked. He said, ‘can we do it again?’ He said, “I like my song.” I said, “then you should name it.” He named it “Nightmares and Dreams” and asked to see the video a few more times, pointing out where the ‘weird’ notes were – “that’s where it’s a nightmare” – and then when the melody gest high and lyrical, he said, “that’s the dream.”

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I was probably around 14 or 15, a lonely middle school girl, a kind of misfit in my school. The only place I felt comfortable in my skin was playing the piano. I started playing by ear at 3, but started lessons when I was 5. I was a terrible practicer, but a good sight reader and kept it up through high school, always a mediocre player with the promise of a better one in my fingers. But I loved the piano. I would sometimes lay my hands over the keys in the dark at night and do just what Huck did – sound things out – explore. Create. I never showed anyone these little tunes, not even full songs, just melodies, or harmonic phrases. I only wrote in the dark. I never put melodies or words to these things. I never wrote them down. I would be 25 before I got a guitar and started writing songs in my NYC studio apartment after a devastating break up with a guy in a band. I would be in my 40’s in Nashville, single, before I went back to the piano and gave myself permission to play by ear again and write on piano.

In Church this morning, the sermon was about coming home to oneself. I love my church. It’s a progressive Episcopalian church in Nashville where the musicians are the real deal and play John Prine and Nanci Griffith along with “Rock of Ages” and Emmylou Harris showed up last week to sing. It’s a church where two of the priests use the ‘she’ pronoun for God. It’s a church devoted to social justice and sustainable farming and it’s a place where I found a spiritual ‘home.’ Not surprisingly, many of my friends from AA go there, too. I found my spiritual home in AA first, then this church. I’d always found God in music. Home in music. God and home, being, to me, the same thing. That feeling of belonging in love. Deep love. My church doesn’t even hide it’s rage at the injustices going on in our country. Preaches Love Heals. And walks the walk. People know me there. They know my son. I sing there once in a while. I stay to get coffee and cinnamon after, to meet more people, to be in community. I take Huck to my AA meetings and put headphones on him and we stay to help clean up and everyone knows Huck and high fives him. A few weeks ago, Huck and I were watching TV and someone must have said something on the show, because Huck said, “Mommy. He said that guy was a drunk. That’s what you are right?” At first, I was really shocked. But I’m committed to telling the truth, so I said, “You know what, you’re right. That’s what I was. I am not that anymore.” And I explained to him the meaning of the word and of course, he overheard it in someone’s share at an AA meeting when I didn’t think he could hear anything under the headphones. But to him, it was just a word. And he is right. I was. And I am not now. I am home in my sobriety.

For so long, I ran in circles trying to belong to someone else, or to someplace else, or something else. I tried to figure out who I was, all the time, I was just being. That’s what that moment of sitting at the piano, just putting a finger on a note, maybe two, then another, then following the sound to something pleasing, or even landing on something awkward and ugly. And repeating it. To make it a choice, not an accident. And then resolving it into something beautiful and whole. The discovery of creating a sound that has never existed before just for the sheer pleasure of the moment. I did that when I was a kid, sad and alone, feeling completely misunderstood and not knowing who to turn to. It was, in those shadowy teenage years, my way of communicating with God, making music. I watched Huck do that the other day. I saw something wake up within him. I know what he was doing. When I did that, there was nobody around, and there would have been nobody to go to. But Huck is born of two writers. I know simply to hold the space, for he is on his own homecoming journey, and he knows where the piano is now, and if he wants to find himself there, picking out melodies on his own, he can. And if he wants me to sit next to him, I will. And if he doesn’t, that’s ok, too. But I feel like I just watched something being born and caught it on video by accident. And that is the kind of hallelujah I believe in.

Amy Speace is an award-winning Americana folk singer and songwriter discovered by Judy Collins. Her songs have been recorded by Ms. Collins and many others and she has won International Song of the Year from the Americana Music Association (UK). Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Working Mother, and Salon.com. She received her MFA from Spalding University and teaches English at Cumberland University. She resides in Nashville, Tennessee, with her son, Huckleberry, and her dog, Dusty Springfield. The Cardinals, coming Sept 1st with , is her debut poetry collection.

I moved away from the NYC area in the fall of 2009. Came to Nashville, a stranger, a Yankee. I’d gotten a divorce, I was struggling to make ends meet living in a studio apartment with a backyard (rare) in Jersey City, making my living touring as a musician. I’d gotten signed to a record label and management in Nashville and realized for the cost of what I was spending each month for a closet apartment, I could rent a full house with a backyard and front yard in a cool neighborhood, pay my car payments, my health insurance, and basically live like a regular old lower middle class human being who can buy the good groceries and not eat Ramen like a post-college grad student anymore. Since then, I’ve gone back to NYC to play shows, but I never stay long. I drive in for the gig and out that night.

Last weekend, I had the rare opportunity to stay in the city in a hotel in Columbus Circle for two nights with free days to wander. I lived in NY from 1991 through 2009. I lived on W. 99th between West End and Riverside in a maid’s closet room (toilet in the actual closet) in a pre-war 3 bedroom for $450 for two years. I lived on Morton Street in the West Village for 2 years. At 432 E. 11th between A and 1st for three years in a studio for $575 a month. I also lived for a forgettable summer in Cobble Hill Brooklyn and for years in Jersey City Heights, then Hoboken, then Jersey City (near Grove Street PATH train). So I took the subway to 7th Avenue Sheridan Square and started walking. I walked down Christoper Street to Hudson, then down Hudson to Morton to see my old building. There was a rumor that Robert Pinskey lived across the street from me and would walk every day. I have, at times, lied and said that I saw him, but I doubt I did. So many things are gone from that time. But so many still exist. Henrietta Hudson’s, the lesbian bar, is still there. Anglers & Writers, my writing cafe on the corner of Hudson and Morton is gone. I spent hours there writing bad poetry and song lyrics. I walked across Bleecker to Broadway, then across to the East Side and up 2nd Avenue. There was Veselka, the Ukrainian restaurant I’d eat hot borscht at 2am after drunken nights at the KGB bar. It’s there but it’s changed. Kiev is gone. My old building is there and still looks dingy. The mosque on the corner of 1st and 11th is there, but instead of a line of cabs, their drivers inside praying, it’s a jumble of bicycles, delivery men inside praying. The city still smells of that warm fog of beer and piss and garbage that steams up out of the subway grates. But it’s cleaner than when I lived there.

I sat in Veselka’s thinking about that woman I used to be. Ambitious and broke, an Ivy League (adjacent) drunk spinning in circles in my personal life, but spinning out songs and stories to stave off the hangovers. Late nights closing down Motor City bar with the theater company Expanded Arts after we’d done “Shakespeare in the Park(ing) Lot” in the summer time. Tequila shots and dancing on the bar and falling in and out of love with other drunk actor/poets. Days at law firms typing away legal briefs and memos, taking too-long lunches to shop for things I didn’t need at Saks, or to linger with a hot dog at the Central Park Zoo in front of the sea lions. Dreaming of when “I made it” and it would all be easier. Dreaming of when the right One would come and make it all easier. Rescue me. I was always looking for a rescue. I was not a good friend. I was a terrible wife, girlfriend. I wonder whatever happened to Sandra who I spent almost every day with at the cafes on St. Mark’s Place, Cafe 9, where Dechen Thurman (Uma’s brother) worked and he and I became fast friends for a small time. I can’t find her online. I wonder whatever happened to Kennedy, one of the best actors from my 2 year program at The National Shakespeare Conservatory. Or Lainie Kazan, the larger than life actress/singer. I was her personal assistant for a few years and saw enough of the acting business to realize I wasn’t cut out for it.

I wandered those streets in the cold last weekend, grey sky threatening to rain or snow. I must have walked miles. You don’t walk as much in Nashville. I miss that. I thought of the lawyers I worked for, Paige, Barry, who became friends for that time. I thought of Ken Gorka from The Bitter End who gave me my first solo show. I thought of hauling groceries up 4 flights of stairs. I thought of the day I watched the towers fall while I sat on the Hudson River in Hoboken in silence because I was supposed to have been temping there that day and I had many friends who worked there. I thought of those 2 decades of definition. I’m not really from anywhere. I was born in Baltimore, but we left when I was 7. We left Minneapolis when I was 12. I left Williamsport, Pennsylvania (the middle of nowhere) when I was 18 to go to college. So I have no real long-term ties to anywhere. But NYC. NYC shaped me.

The ice lay on the power lines and branches for days and the nighttime soundtrack was pops and cracks and thuds and branches hitting the ground (all ice) or the roofs. It was brutal cold, sharp like the ice, and I listened to the looming tree lose her fight and split in my yard, barely missing the trampoline. She took the grill. Another took the gutters. Another took a bit of the fence. I got lucky.

I was in New Orleans at the Folk Alliance International Conference two weekends ago when the storm hit Nashville and I couldn't get home. I knew what was coming so I’d dripped the faucets. But nobody could predict what actually happened. An unprecedented ice storm disaster. Over 230,000 people without power. Some in my zip code STILL don’t have power. My power had gone off while I was away, but I came home on Monday to power. For two days. Then it went off again for three. I decamped to Jamey’s (Huck’s dad…my ex) and for those days we played games and watched movies and I felt grateful for the relationship that we have worked hard to create as a family, on our own terms. I had a place to go with warmth and love. Many, so many didn’t. Even back in my own house with power, alone for a few days while Huck stayed with Daddy, I felt this shivering uncomfortable THING in my chest… Abandonment? Alone? Fear?

I got sick early in January and it lingered, a flu-like virus that turned into bronchitis that never went away and I’d lost my voice at the music conference and felt exhausted and very much didn’t want to be there. Got home to the devastation but got on antibiotics. There was that.

Renee Good and Alex Pretti were murdered and the story was being twisted and there’s no amount of shouting that will make anyone in power hold those responsible for what happened. It was an overwhelming feeling of universal despair and rage. I wrote a song after Renee Good’s death. I’ll be recording and releasing that. It’s all I can do. And it’s not a protest song telling us what to do or how to feel. It’s saying, “How can I even respond to this…how do I sell this world to my child with THIS going on.” It’s what I do. Turn my lack of power into music. But my reach is small. It won’t change anything. I did it for myself. But then Alex Pretti was murdered… And I was at a conference of musicians who write protest songs and we all felt numb and many gathered in the lobby of the hotel to sing a song together and I stood to the side (I didn’t know the song) and felt useless. Or just didn’t feel like singing. Here we were in a 5 star hotel in the French Quarter of New Orleans, spending thousands of dollars to do business and make connections in a genre of music that really is fiscally unsustainable for 99.9% of the artists there. Singing a song. My friend Tom Paxton would kick my ass for leaning against a wall not joining in. I wasn’t feeling very Joan Baez at that moment.

Then I come home to the ice storm. Ice. ICE. It doesn’t feel like a coincidence. Talk about being nose to nose with one’s powerlessness. It’s been a month of that: powerlessness. So I sat with it yesterday and meditated for the first time in awhile. From my meditation, I picked up my pen and my journal and I wrote what was there. It was fractured. Metaphors. Language that fit into poetry without form. I allowed it to not make any sense. And rather than spend any more time on it, I let it be and thought I’d get back to it.

I wrote a song yesterday with my dear friend John Dennis, a GREAT folk songwriter in the poetic wordsmith tradition. I’m so grateful to have met him. He’s not known. Those who know him revere his writing. He’s humble and quiet and kind and then throws down these songs that slay. He’s a true artist. I almost cancelled our hang. I was tired. I wanted to stay in bed. I was depressed but couldn’t cry. I couldn’t unravel the exact THING I was messed up about. So we just talked. I just needed to talk and to say that I didn’t know a lot. A lot. A lot. And he didn’t know and said it a lot a lot a lot. And it was good to just connect. And we were fine to leave it there. But I asked him, ‘Do you have anything?” (because John always brings a part of something). And he had a verse and a chorus and it was stark and beautiful. And so we leaned into it.

Turns out, my disjointed metaphors of unknowingness fit with his. My phrases I thought I’d save for a poem about the ice storm fit his music that landed with “I know you’re cold, and damnit I am too" that he had written that was the chorus. And they fit perfectly. So we wrote this song and did a little I Phone video of it.

This is what I do. This is what we do. And sometimes, I’m just too disconnected to join in the group protest song in a hotel room where a music conference is happening, no matter the good intentions of the group and the sad beauty of that moment. And sometimes all this disturbance brings me back to the scared and lonely little girl that feels abandoned and hurt in a corner sucking her thumb and scratching her blanket. My son is 7 and every day a few times he’ll just want to snuggle. We lay there quiet, he- curled up into the c curve of my body, and we connect. I love that he knows he needs this. I need this. And I needed to snuggle with my despair. And I needed my friend John to give voice to his. And we needed to write this song.

This, to me, is why art. If you’re asking.

Seven Days in January
John Dennis/Amy Speace

There’s shadowy scrapers where power lines stood
And the neighborhood’s covered with ice
Abandon your papers cause I’ve got some wood
It’s the only way we can survive

Sheltering faces worn down to the mean
endlessly retraumatized
This shivering nation is weighed to a lean
Something still keeps it alive

I know that you’re cold
and damnit I am too
It’s hard to be bold
But somebody has to

With God as your witness, you glassy eyed boy
Come out of that masochist mind
You’re caught in the distance tween nature and noise
In a world it’d kill to be kind

I know that you’re cold
and damnit I am too
It’s hard to be bold
But somebody has to

We all end up alone
Though nobody plans to
It’s hard to be bold
But somebody has to

A fat bellied robin on half-fallen limb
Red feathers against a slate sky
Little head bobbing through cracks in the skin
Picking for traces of life
We’ve still got a chance in the night

I know that you’re cold
and damnit I am too
It’s hard to be bold
But somebody has to

Here’s what I learned. Dating apps aren’t for me. I went on a few dates. Many were like, “I am retired! My kids are grown! I want to travel the world!” and I’m like, “I travel the world for a living and my kid is 7 and I can see you on Wednesdays and some Thursdays!” One was funny. On the second coffee hang he asked, “How many dates until I can kiss you,” and I said “Nine.” He laughed, a bit uncomfortably. But I knew what that meant to me. I didn’t want to kiss. And with that, I realized, I don’t need a third date. And then I realized, the truth is, I don’t really want to date. I’m enjoying being single right now. I’m happy, truly happy. I got more involved in my church and my recovery meetings. I have a great family - we may not be married, but we are wonderfully a family. I also learned my boundaries. It takes being single for awhile to learn that. I’m enjoying this ride.

Here’s what else I’ve learned. I need to start to care more about my physical health. I need to get back to yoga and start working with weights. My hips aren’t what they were and I want to be a 75 year old who is still doing yoga and maybe even still running. So I hate resolutions, but I’ve made some plans for 2026 in terms of exercise and food.

For 2026? What’s next? More of the same and more. Kenny Foster and I are working on songs for a new duo record we’ll put out. We’re called Salt + The Wound and I’ll let you know how it’s going but I’m very excited about this project. My debut book of poetry will come out in September 2026, so I’ll be on a book/music tour to promote that. I’m crossing my fingers that my agent gets a publishing deal for my memoir, Menopausal Mommy. I really believe in that manuscript. I’m going to continue writing this novel, which may or may not suck, but it’s fun to try something new. I’m writing poetry for the follow-up to The Cardinals. My mother is still healthy and active and I try to see her as much as I can. Huck is thriving and is fun and funny. He loves Cub Scouts and baseball and starts piano lessons in January. I’m starting to work with a new vocal coach in January too. I’m even thinking of getting into some piano lessons myself.

Financially, not gonna lie it’s not easy. I’m not going to be teaching at the University in the Winter/Spring Term, so things will be tight. I RELY on my Patreon monthly income, so if you really want to help support my music and creativity, the best way to do that (besides coming to shows and buying my merch) is by joining Patreon, where I post all of my new work to share in community. Even just $2-3 a month is helping. It still amazes me that I have eeked by all these years in this independent career. Somehow, even when things are scary, a gig shows up and I can make it. I’m hoping that I can work toward a more permanent job at Cumberland University teaching, so I have a solid part-time or full-time (w/ flexibility so that I can tour on weekends) gig there. It would be nice to not be month-to-month.

But I’m grateful. I’m healthy. We solved the Long Covid fatigue problem with meds that work. I’m happy and active and creative again. Huck is a joy. Although he told me he knows the ‘f’ word and whispered it in my ear and said, “I know, Mommy. That’s an adult word.” So we’re there… I have close friends and Huck has a best friend at both Mommy and Daddy’s house.

The best book I’ve read in 2025 is my Amherst classmate Helen Whybrow’s memoir called The Salt Stones. It’s about her being an organic shepherd in Vermont, but it’s about motherhood, marriage, life, spiritual connections to our landscape. It’s an incredible book and I haven’t read anything that’s stuck with me like this for a while. For poetry, The Hurting Kind by Ada Limon. She takes my breath away.

Best movie I saw this year I saw twice and want to see again. Hands down. Hamnet.

Best concert. A tie between Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit at The Ryman and Gillian Welch & Dave Rawlings at The Ryman. Both were seeing these artists at the top of their game. Second runner up was Lucinda Williams at The Basement East this month. Rock and Roll in her 70’s. Blew my mind.

Best new artist to me: Ken Pomeroy. Extraordinary writer and singer. I love her. Best album of the year for me was I’m With Her’s “Wild Clear and Blue". I’m a sucker for amazing harmonies. These women are firing on all cylinders. Great music. Great singers. Great songs.

I hope you all have an extraordinary holiday weekend of moving into the next year. It’s just a day. Just another day. But we get to shed 2025 and start again. Isn’t that a beautiful thing. Start from where you are.

Maybe it’s that after two years of suffering from Chronic Fatigue brought on by Long Covid, I finally have almost a full year of health under me, thanks to the Vanderbilt Neurology Sleep Disorder Center and them proscribing a med that works. Maybe I’m finally on the other side of “wishing things were different” post-divorce. Maybe I’m finally on the other side of all the trauma work I’ve done in the past 5 years. People say I look younger, that there’s a glow about me, a difference in my eyes and they’re right. There’s something different. It’s like my inner self woke up, looked around, and said, ‘enough sleeping and being sad, f that s. Life is good the way it is.’ And so it is. Maybe it’s getting to 57 years old. Whatever it is, I’ll take it. This is truly my first fully joyful, fully awake, fully not-grieving holiday in a long time. And I’m making the most of it. I hit the 50% off sales this week, garlanded the shite out of my house with twinkling lights, wrapped my new porch with garlands and big OG lights.

Yesterday I made batches of Christmas cookies from faded, stained recipe cards my mother gave me years ago. I have one kid and I live alone 1/2 time with him. I don’t need those cookies. But I do. I made my first ex husband’s mother’s (my 1st Ex Mother In Law) marinara sauce she taught me 25 years ago. Her family was from Parma, Italy and I’ve never tasted red sauce like hers anywhere in the world. That and the dog are the only things I took from the marriage. Besides a cherished long, deep friendship with my ex and his wife. I make that sauce in batches for presents and to freeze. It’s my choice for Last Meal. Kal’s mother’s sauce with sweet Italian sausages with bread from Antique Bakery on Willow Avenue (gone now) in Hoboken over linguini. The secret is the San Marzano tomatoes. We don’t skimp in my house.

I’m done teaching at Cumberland University this term and won’t return until Fall 2026. Taking next term off to concentrate on writing and recording with my new project, Salt + The Wound, a duo with Kenny Foster. We’re both very excited about this work. Great songs. Great friend. Can’t wait for you to hear what we’re cooking up. Also, I’ll be doing shows every other weekend through 2026. Pretty much booked up through the beginning of the summer. Then the poetry book comes out in September 2026 and I’ll be doing a book tour in the Fall 2026. It’s the first time I’ve really had the year mapped out so cleanly. It gives me a peace and a sense of ease. I know what I’m doing. I’m writing. I’m right now working the next record and will be throughout 2026. 2027 will be the duo record. And writing the follow up book to The Cardinals. And watching Huck turn over another year. I’m usually not good at the long term vision. I do much better with what’s right in front of me. But it’s nice to know there’s a map, so I can just take in each day right now.

Back to the sauce. It needs stirring. I won’t give the recipe away. But I’ll give you a jar of the sauce.

xo
A

I had this morning free as the drive to Derry today isn’t that long. The promoter has put me up in this amazing place, The Harrison Hotel. An old victorian building, Melanie has turned it into a lovely hub for artists and thinkers. Last night I came back after my show and the pub was full for a late night art crawl. She hosts music and readings and all sorts of cultural events. This morning I had the best breakfast I’ve had all tour and sat with Melanie and met an incredible man, a drummer/flautist/musician with many awards, and he has this light around him. I could tell he was a rare soul in the world and we connected straightaway about music and mission. Kaidi Tatham. Then, a few minutes later I met Ed Finn, the host of “Ed Finn Travels,” a tv show about journeying and he’d just gotten back from Nashville, so we babbled about the foodie scene there and BBQ. He said he was blown away by how truly friendly people are in Nashville. I like to think so as well. Then, I wandered to St. George’s Market. My cab driver and I talked a bit. He said he likes a little bit of what Trump is doing and I asked what and he said, “a man is a man and a woman is a woman.” I smiled and told him I just didn’t think it was the President’s job to interfere into this question and that I had enough trans friends in my life to get an understanding of what it must be like to grow up in the wrongly assigned gender. He said he knew trans people and loved them. That issue is so strange that you can love a trans person and still be against the gender assignments. Ugh. In a way, I think that guy and I could have found common ground, but I was at St. George’s Market and had some walking to do.

Wandered for a bit. The cabbie told me to get a Belfast Bap, but it looked HUGE. Meat and egg and cheese in a sandwich like a footlong sub. I bought my mother a Christmas present and rifled through the old vinyl as they played Dolly Parton. Wish I could take home all the cheese and bread. Listened to a children’s choir singing Christmas music for a bit. Then walked to City Hall’s green domes to stumble upon a Christmas Market. Stalls and stalls of hot chocolate and candy and hand-made ornaments and wool scarves and sweaters. Then it began to rain so I found a cab to come back to now sit in the window of the B&B and drink a pot of coffee before my Irish tour promoter comes to take me to Derry for the last show of the tour.

I’ve been coming to the UK off and on through the last 15 years. First with Ian Hunter as his support. Then Alejandro Escovedo. A few small tours alone with my first agent, Mick. Then with John Fullbright 11 years ago, where I played Belfast the first time. Then my own tour after I won the International Song of the Year award from the Americana UK with my current agency. That felt like a peak moment, like things could stick. People were coming out and excited to see me. It was the right rooms for me. The right audience. But then, it was 2020 and the world stopped. I didn’t come over again until last year and we had decent audiences, but not great and I was worried coming to the UK would be a loss. But this tour has been incredible. Mostly sold out or full shows. People say they’ve driven hours to see me, that they’ve waited for years, they bring all my CDs with them to sign. They know the lyrics. They request songs. I’m in Belfast, playing my first headlining show and the room is totally full and Radio Ulster plays me and there are two show reviewers in the audience and I’m just onstage so grateful that I stuck it out.

I’ve been at this for 2 decades now and I can play in some places in the States and know I’ll pull an audience. And there are some nights where I’m still not drawing a crowd. And it’s baffling and frustrating, but we keep trying. And then I come over here and people are coming out. After years of working. Mary Gauthier recently posted about playing a sold out tour and it was her first after all these years. It takes a long time. Just coming back. Putting out records. Working and working. It takes loving the road. Really loving it. Loving talking to people, meeting them at the merch table and finding out who they are. Remembering names. Staying in gratitude all the time. All the damn time.

You see, I connect on stage sometimes with my 14 year old Amy, who sat at the piano at night with the candles lit, her fingers hovering over the keys, wanting so badly to be a songwriter and having no idea how to start. It would be 10 more years before I wrote my first song. But that girl knew and the first time I got on stage at 15 in middle school to sing a solo in the choir musical review, some switch went on in my soul. I lit up. I changed. I knew from that moment that I wanted THIS, whatever the ‘this’ was. It would take a lot of winding roads to get the first song out at 24 and the first record out at 30 and the rest of it, but it was there.

And here I am in Belfast playing to a small theater and my inner 14 year old is kind of freaking out that my little desire is now taking me around the world. In my small way. My small folkie way. Just a guitar and a piano and a tour manager. Nothing fancy.

I don’t take it for granted.

But, that agent had caught me and marked me. So, on Thanksgiving morning, THIS agent stopped me. I had to think quickly. I kind-of lied. “Well, I didn’t KNOW there was a show. I got here for meetings and for a holiday and was told I’d be playing for my distributors, not a show, but they had set up a show without me knowing.” I was told to hang out in a small area filled with, to be honest, brown-skinned people. For a few hours. Then, they took me back into what I like to refer to as immigration jail. I passed a group of Turkish men who told me they were a band. They said, “What’s a blonde American like you doing back here?” I couldn’t tell them. But they were being kicked out at a severe loss of income. I was put into a kind of holding cell. A desk and a chair. It looked like a police interrogation room. They took my phone and my things. I wasn’t allowed to go to the bathroom. I hadn’t had anything to drink or eat for hours. I was in a panic. Someone had to call Andy at the 12 Bar to tell him I wasn’t going to make the gig. I had to call my manager to say “WTF????????” A woman and a man came into the room to question me. I answered carefully, sticking to my story. They left. Two others came in, questioned me. I gave the same answer. Asked if I could get a drink or something. They left. I was freaking out. A gentleman walked in, looked around as if to make sure the interrogators weren’t there, said, “I’ll get you something. Would a cappuccino and an egg salad sandwich be ok?” I started crying. He was so kind.

Finally, the first team came back in, asked the same questions, I cried and told them the same story, and said, “This is my Thanksgiving….can’t you give me a break?” Well, they were going to send me right back to NYC, but I told them I was meeting my band in Vienna the next day and since it was a holiday there would be no way for me to get another flight and I was a broke folk singer and …. well, the wailing pitiful act worked. They said they’d put me on a flight to Vienna straightaway.

Two uniformed agents walked me through Heathrow to the gate, handed me my phone as we were walking and I left very very angry phone calls to my manager (who, turned out, wasn’t really as honest throughout MANY of my issues at that time…sweet but there were a lot of unbelievable foul ups that she let fly, and it was her job to take care of these things…) basically telling her what happened, that she fucked me by posting the damn gig, that she’d better get me a hotel room in Vienna and not a piece of shit Motel 6 kind of place, and that I was charging a good Thanksgiving meal to the label and it was up to her to make sure it was paid. They walked me through the gate, in front of the line of passengers, who had deemed me some kind of criminal as I was being escorted, gave my passport to the flight attendant (who wasn’t to give it to me until my feet were on Austrian soil) and sat me down. The passengers boarding all gave me the side eye. When the bar cart came around, I asked for a beer and the woman sitting next to me harrumphed. I heard it. I just kept my mouth shut.

So I landed on Viennese soil, got my passport and my bags and a message from the manager with the information for the hotel. It was near the town center which was gorgeously decorated for the holidays with the holiday markets. After a shower, I started walking, in a Polar Express kind of winter wonderland. It was gorgeous. Vienna was gorgeous. I was just wandering, looking at menus until I heard English being spoken behind me. I turned and said, “You speak English?” He was a man who worked with NATO who was in town from Canada on holiday. I said to him, “What is the best authentically Austrian restaurant around here, doesn’t matter what it costs?” And he walked me over to it and introduced me to the maitre’d. I thanked him. Settled down. And asked the waiter for whatever he’d serve to someone who had never been who had the worst day and cost wasn’t a problem. AND the best bottle of red wine.

I proceeded to have the best meal of my life. Reindeer with elderberry sauce. I think. The Canadian came back with his wife about an hour later to check in and joined me for wine and dessert. We shared another bottle. In the end, I have no idea what that meal cost. The label paid for it. And for years, I had trouble getting into the UK without being held and questioned until someone about two years ago finally took the red flag off my file.

The 12 Bar Club is gone. Andy died awhile back. I switched managers to David Macias and Thirty Tigers in Nashville and had some apologies to make to that manager for being a handful but not that time and I have no idea what she’s doing now but I hope she’s not managing artists. And god bless Judy Collins for paying for that meal. Things are very different now. I always have a visa. I have a tour manager. And I don’t drink wine. But I do remember that first bottle (not the second).

I think it was all worth it for that Thanksgiving meal.

So I’m down a Bruce tunnel. Like I was a Dylan tunnel last year. I’m listening to Born To Run on audiobook because Springsteen narrates and you have to experience it in his voice. And honestly, I feel seen. I’ll never be famous. I started way too late to even be a major label hit-maker. I started at the wrong time in the business when everything was falling apart. I had no pretensions of that kind of success. But when I started, I was single-minded. In the folk world, you go to conferences and do ‘showcases’ in hotel bedrooms late at night. I’d have stage outfits picked out to play for 5 people at 1am. I scripted my shows. I over-rehearsed my band. I told them what to wear. I knew I wasn’t a great songwriter when I started out, so I studied songwriting, the craft, the greats. I went in search of my own unique voice. What makes me ME? And when I found it, I knew it wasn’t major label hit-making world, but it was mine and I stuck with it. Jonathan Byrd, my dear old friend from the beginning, used to call me the hardest working woman in folk business and I was worried that was my reputation - hard working. Not an artist. I got the record deal because I worked hard, not because I earned it. Now, looking back, I know differently. It took being good AND hard working. And I hear that in Bruce’s voice. I gave up everything for this. It was all I wanted: a career writing and singing my songs to an audience who connected and to continue to grow that audience. That’s all. I didn’t want a family. I ran roughshod through my first marriage - basically being on the road ALL the time. I LOVED the road. I loved my band. Then I moved to Nashville and fell in love with songwriting and the process of collaborating.

Why am I telling you this? Because reading/listening to this book and watching that movie and reading all the books my heros have written about the process of writing and performing is just validation that I’m doing the right thing, despite the lack of a 401K plan. I am obsessed with music, with songs, with performing.

So I have to remember ALL of this when I’m two weeks in front of a new record release for a record that feels raw. I can hear the missed notes. These songs, are they any good I ask myself? It was a moment. Three hours in a studio and I sang the ones that I’d just written and a few old ones. I didn’t plan it. I didn’t ‘work hard’ at it. I just laid it down. Listened back and thought, that’s it. That’s the vibe I want. And I’m nervous - does it stand up? will the songs hold? will I remember all of those lyrics?

And, while I’m dealign with anxiety about that, I’m thinking about my childhood homes. There are three of them. Three states. Three towns. Moving. Never landing. I’m a student right now of songwriting, again, listening to Springsteen songs, like I listened to Dylan songs last year. What corner of the darkness have I not crept into for imagery? What haven’t I said? Or been afraid to say?

I’m in no hurry. But I’m banging my head against my past, digging for gold again. I think it’s not that I worked harder than anyone, I just felt like I wasn’t as good as everyone else. Fear of failure is a huge motivator for me. I also never had a back up plan and, being a fast typist, I always was able to pick up a temp secretary gig for a few weeks off the road in NYC and by the time I got to Nashville, the road was paying my bills. I also got lucky. Very lucky. I wonder, at 57, is there any more luck around the corner? Even if this is the landing point, I’m still a student, still working hard, still learning to dig in and let go.

I learned this from my Dad who grew up poor and worked his way through college and his way from salesman to a part owner. He bought his first bike when he was in his 40s. I asked him if I could have it as a kind of ‘vintage bike’ and he said no. That was his prized possession that reminded him of where he came from. From nothing. Nothing is handed to you. I didn’t have a cushion. My parents didn’t support me once I graduated college. So I learned to work. Like my dad did

.

I had tickets to The Ryman to see Ricki Lee Jones and Patty Griffin play tonight and I almost bailed, having just flown home this morning from that weekend in Colorado that was filled with dark and light moments, wonderful friends and (I think) good shows, but I wasn’t at my best physically and I spooled around in a lot of personal uncertainty. I ended up going ‘off script’ in my shows, playing the songs and telling stories, some unrehearsed, and sneezed on microphone and my nose dripped, and I messed up lyrics and I just kept on unfazed with the feeling of, ‘well, this is me right now and take it or leave it.’ And I felt ‘not good enough.’ And then I’d be in the middle of the show feeling like, well, maybe I am. Or maybe ‘good enough’ is bullshit. On my last show a woman, Julie, who calls herself my biggest fan (and she just may be) requested about 5 songs that are obscure, on old EPs, or songs I haven’t played in a decade. I told her I’d have some of them for her next time I came to town. She didn’t care. She was having a great time and I realized it didn’t matter if I was ‘good enough,’ just that she wanted to hear me sing. So I did and it may not have been my best run of shows, but I showed up, insecurity ringing in my ears and all. It’s a job.

But tonight, I forced myself to go. I was tired, but I invited a friend who’d never seen Patty Griffin and I’d never seen Ricki Lee Jones and I was in need of inspiration. I even thought maybe seeing two other iconic women do their thing, I’d get ideas for changing it up, or maybe I’d just see them be human and not feel so badly about myself.

It was extraordinary and not in ways I would have expected. I’ll start with Patty. I’ve seen her many times and she’s one of my favorite writers and singers and I know many of her albums by heart. Her show was….different. Dark. Moody. Theatrical, even. Quiet. Non-melodic. Many songs felt like chants. There was a reverence in her performance. She talked about her mother’s death, about Palestine, about having broken her hand. She almost snorted on mic. She was imperfect. Didn’t play any of the songs I could sing along to. In fact, I knew only one song she sang. I watched it like I was watching the dawn rise, though, quiet and prayerful. Had I come to hear all of my favorites, I would have been disappointed, but I came for Ricki mostly. The Patty I got was human and frail and strong and unsure and didn’t care if I wanted to hear her hits. She hit a mood and stayed in it. And it was a revelation to me. She created something different than ‘a show of her songs.’ There were no long ovations. It was a place she brought us to in the first song that seemed to just stay on one chord for 7 minutes of non melodic lyrics and she moved around in that poetry for an hour and then left. It felt like leaving a play that turns your brain around, rather than listening to a musical heroine. I was in awe. And learned something about putting a set together for these times.

Back now to Ricki. She’s 70. She wore what looked like paisley pants and an oversized black t shirt. Nothing fancy. She had a small ensemble - piano/accordian, marimba/percussion, violin/background singer. She sang so behind the beat that there didn’t seem to be a song in there, just a kind of beat poet meditation to a groove. I know those songs. I don’t know the lyrics (I could never figure them out, I just slur a kind of coolness like she does when I sang along) but I know the swoop of the melodies and she has always sung jazz like Holiday, back, way back of the beat. But tonight, you couldn’t even find the down and it was, to me, amazing to hear this 70 year old woman reinvent a hit song like “Chuck E’s In Love” so I could barely hear the hook. It felt like a conversation, not a playlist. And it was fun. And she was fun. And very funny. And self-deprecating.

Both women talked about getting older. Patty is 61. I’m 57 and I’ve been thinking a lot about what to do when the chase is out, when you just want to write and sing and play music. When the business could care less what you’re doing but you’re not only not done but you’re just getting started in your prime. That’s how I feel. Like in the past few years, I’ve just landed on something, the ‘it’ that makes me me. Totally ineffable and completely wordless. It’s just something I know. And I watched two women tonight sit in their knowingness and play. Ricki was jazz, improv and scat and shady characters making bets in the desert and LA.

And listening to her, I was 22 again, back in Western MA in my first apartment, which was an old renovated train station, so that the Montrealer went by at 2am and the building shook. I worked at a bakery that year. I was in love for the first time and, as far as I thought, for the only time and I wanted to be near my love. I lived his dream for that year because mine weren’t clear. I bought my first stereo and my first CDs and listened non-stop to Ricki Lee Jones’ first record and “Pirates” dancing around my apartment barefoot, learning every swoop of the melody. I spent my mornings serving coffee and pastries and my afternoons getting high with my love who’d named the parts of my body he loved and I thought something this certain would last forever. I learned to play guitar from him but I hadn’t written a song yet. I was years from that. All I knew was that I wanted to be with him, so I lingered in a college town for a year listening to Ricki Lee and Joni and REM’s “Nightswimming” while we jumped the reservoir and skinny dipped under the full moon.

I was there tonight, tears running down my face, because what I realized in those songs, especially “Last Chance Texaco” and “Satellites” was that something was bubbling in me back in that year of doing nothing but falling in love. I knew I had to leave that town and get to NYC and I didn’t know why and I didn’t really know what I wanted to do but I had to get away. I chased theater, acting, playwrighting, directing until that love broke apart and I wrote 10 bad songs in a week and the bubbling became a hum of certainty and I wrote my way out of grief. I haven’t thought of that year in a long time, until tonight, at The Ryman, with my friend, who was reliving her own 22-ness, first hearing Patty Griffin.

I’m not sure I would have had such a profound night had I not had the weekend of questioning myself. It’s almost like I fell back into the memory of how I even started to write songs, how it happened, why it happened, even that it happened. And even in those first terrible songs I knew I’d found myself. Maybe I had to go through a weekend of uncertainty to get back to a kind of certainty.

If you’ve gotten this far in this long epic post, and you have not yet listened to early Ricki Lee Jones, please do yourself a favor and go listen right away. I don’t smoke weed anymore, but she goes good with a bit of a buzz.

Tomorrow, I am going to go back to my list of all the songs I’ve written and tear apart my current set and build it back up. Learn the new record. Learn some of the songs Julie loves. Learn a cover or two.

And start again

…

There were more than 15. Not many more, but it’s a small venue, and it was respectable. Also, Carbondale is in the middle of nowhere. My nose didn’t drip, I didn’t sneeze, I dropped the keys and my voice actually was good tonight. The sound was great. There was a keyboard. All was smooth. But I was in my head a bit, fighting the Dragons. The ones that tell me I’m not good enough, that my songs are pretty good, but what am I doing at 57 still doing this, that tell me I’m irrelevant, that I had my big shot when Judy Collins discovered me and that the moment passed. That I’ll never have more than 30 people show up at a gig. That I’m eeking by. That I should maybe pack it in.

Of course, what I’m not remembering is that I’ve gotten off my antidepressants because I’m not, well, I wasn’t, depressed and I wanted to see if I needed them. What I wasn’t taking into account was that the altitude was making me sick. That I’ve been low-grade depressed the past few days and I don’t know why because there’s nothing I can point to that’s making me sad.

I teach songwriting and performance. For a living. And I can get on stage and just be bored with my songs. And I can still do a good show. My whole life I’ve struggled with low-grade depression (and then, for a few years, very bad depression). I’ve also struggled with wondering if I’m good enough. Is that depression? Or is that just being a human? Is there a single songwriter out there who doesn’t feel this way? I’ve watched friends go from playing the same stage as me to worldwide crazy fame. I’ve also seen some of the most incredible songwriters just get no traction. I’ve had some very lucky moments - some amazing mentors - and still I play to 15 people some nights.

But a thing happened tonight. I told the story of writing “Me and the Ghost of Charlemagne,” a song that won International Song of the Year from the UK Americana Music Association in 2020. I’d written it as a kind of ode to this life, creating little songs, hoping they last, wanting more, always wanting more and realizing that really, in the end, we’re just bones and relics, lucky if anyone remembers our names. I thought I might quit the road, quit writing songs. And that was the song I wrote. Which won something. And that was supposed to change everything, but that was February 2020 and the world shut down and the record didn’t sell and …. timing was bad. I told that story on stage. And this couple came up to me, and the man said, “Please don’t ever quit. We drove 5 hours to see you and we’re so grateful that you do this.” FIVE HOURS????? I wouldn’t drive 5 hours to see Bob Dylan. Someone actually drove 5 hours to a small little folk club to see me, to hear 90 minutes of my music.

And you know, I’m sitting here writing this and feeling such utter gratitude for that couple. For telling me that. Because I was in a place of feeling like ‘what’s the point?’ And it’s like the universe answered and it’s not fame, it’s not money, it’s not whatever I thought this whole thing would look like. And I’m not selling out venues right now. And maybe I never will. And I teach on the side to make my bills. And I worry that I don’t really have much of a savings account and there’s no retirement plan and I’d really love to have the money to turn my garage into a bedroom/bathroom to have more room for Huck. And I’d like to think that love isn’t through with me yet (yep, that’s a Darrell Scott quote) and I’d like to write a song somebody of note records. But in the end, maybe it’s enough.

And maybe I shouldn’t wean off the meds just yet.

I was driving in Lebanon, TN yesterday in between classes on a lovely winding rural (ish) road. “Ish” because Lebanon is one of the fastest growing towns in the country. They’re getting an In-N-Out Burger before Nashville. Lebanon still very rural TN. Bible belt. Conservative. At least, that’s been my experience. This term, I’m teaching a college writing class to advanced high school kids in two schools, twice a week. My classes are 95% white kids. I have one girl who’s Muslim, two Indian Americans, a girl from Africa, and a few Hispanic Americans. And two from California, self-declared Barbies. Many of their first essays were about faith and conversion moments. Revivals. The moment God ‘touched’ them. I mean, the white kids, that is. Not the Californians. The girl from Africa was adopted out of a Kenyan orphanage to a couple from Oregon and grew up along the coast and then moved here. Her story is fascinating. One of my favorite students wrote about finding out that he had Tourrettes. One is obsessed with Drum Corps, which, as a former marching band geek, happens to be one of my hidden obsessions as well (you should have seen his face light up when I brought up the movie “Drumline,” as if he’d never had a teacher even come close to understanding his passion). My best writer is the Ally Sheedy character in “The Breakfast Club,” bushy long brunette unbrushed hair hanging over her pimply face, long, awkward limbs, mismatched clothes, clearly socially awkward. But she’s an incredible writer and I kind of love her.

Not that the typical Bible-belt white Christians aren’t interesting. They are. But there’s a kind of simplicity to their writing, for the most part, those whom write about God. I want them to write about whatever they are passionate about, and if it’s Jesus, I’m all in. And maybe I’ve got a major unconscious bias. Jamey always said I had an issue with “Jesus.” I don’t, honestly. Growing up Catholic as a skeptical questioner who doesn’t believe much that I can’t see or prove myself, well, I can be an intellectually arrogant disbeliever. I actually belong to a faith now. I go to an Episcopal church. But I feel like I can still be skeptical and I question everything. But I do understand in believing in things you (or I) can’t prove.

In terms of these kids and their writing, I’ve learned to read these ‘faith’ journeys with an open mind and heart. Of course, I want to push them a bit, as a writer. The first paper was to write about something that happened that changed you, how you were before and how you were after. Some of the papers about faith were simplistic. God came down and voila! They were changed. I want more. I want critical creative writing even in moments where it’s hard to find words to describe. Like art and faith. I WANT them to reach for words. It’s hard, because, well, I have to be careful of my words these days. My department head at the University was fired for a social media post. I have to be careful. I want this job. I want to reach these kids. I’ve had my own spiritual experiences that go beyond explanation, but, well, I’m a writer, so I reach for words.

Back to yesterday, I passed a small Baptist church that had a sign outside that said, “Drive Through Prayer.” I laughed a bit to myself as I drove on by. Silly, I thought. Then I turned around. Wait, I’m an experience junkie. I’d never seen anything like it. It would be like passing the kid’s stand with a glass jar of lemonade for $1. So I pulled in. There was a GMC truck with huge mudflaps (for Jesus, of course) in front of me. There was a line at the Drive-Through. Ha ha. I had to check in with my cynic. Just go with it. And I thought of my friend Kim who just died last week of early Alzheimer’s. Kim was my age. For a few years, she was my closest friend in Nashville and had been in a home for the past year or so and I let life get in the way and didn’t get there in time. I thought of her brother, Shawn, and her family and I thought, hell, they might could use some prayers from a country Baptist preacher, why not.

The short, portly man approached my car, waddling like a penguin on his bowed legs. He wore a white Stetson, a buttoned up vertical striped shirt and a large belt buckle. White hair and kind eyes. “What can I do you for?” he asked. I said, “Well, I’d never seen anything like this and I thought I’d see what this is about.” He handed me his card, Pastor Ryan, and asked me if there was anything I’d like him to pray for, for me or for anyone else. He had a piece of paper on his Bible and a pencil in his hand and took notes. I told him about Kim (he wrote Ken). He asked my name and wrote down “Ann.” Then, leaning on my driver’s side window, he closed his eyes and started improvising a very stuttered, stilted prayer of comfort to Kim’s family (Ken’s) and to me for my suffering. He’d asked me if I lived in Lebanon and I told him I lived in East Nashville but taught school up here. He prayed, “Now Lord, Ann is your humble servant, teaching these kids, she is a warrior for you, spreading your Good News,” (I didn’t have the heart to tell him I don’t really do that…once a Catholic…) and he went on for about 5 minutes. My father was raised Evangelical Christian and was the king of a good improvised Lord Jesus prayer. We Catholics stick to the script and it still feels somewhat uncomfortable to hear the off-the-cuff praying many protestants here do. Episcopals don’t do this, thank you Jesus.

I had closed my eyes and thought of Kim and her family. I wanted to take this seriously. I wasn’t trying to mock anything. It wasn’t comfortable for me, but maybe I wasn’t coming to this Pastor Ryan with 100% belief in my heart. So I was going to try. And Kim’s smile came to me and her voice and she was waving her finger at me laughing her ass off, saying, “Speace, I can’t believe you are doing this for me, you bitch,” knowing it was part joke, part real. She was really there, ribbing me and as much as Pastory Ryan was talking to his personal Jesus, my friend Kim was telling me she knew what I was doing and thought it was hysterical. I got to tell her, silently, that I missed her and was sorry I didn’t get to see her. And she laughed again, and told me I was a flake.

Pastor Ryan asked me if I wanted the church to call me and I said no. He asked if I went to church and I said I was an Episcopal, thanked him for his time and when he said, as all people around here seem to say, “have a blessed day,” I said, “you as well,” and pulled out.

I drove home yesterday after teaching under a roiling sky of thunderclouds. The sun was peeking out pink. It had rained off and on most of the day. I thought of my student’s writings and thought of how where I grew up, you didn’t talk much about Jesus or God in school, or to each other. I think of my high school friends and it’s funny, all of my best friends from high school are Catholic. Irish Catholic, in fact. We didn’t talk about God. Church was to be endured. You just went because that’s what you did. And I thought, maybe some of these kids will rebel like I did, walk away, question what they’ve been taught in one book. Maybe, like me, they’ll come back.

I just know a few things. A. That In-N-Out Burger is coming to Lebanon and I’m jealous it won’t be in East Nashville and B., that I’ll never pass up a Drive Through Prayer chance again.