(C) Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural This story was originally published by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Review: Building a Writing Life [1] ['Christiana Wayne', 'The Daily Yonder', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar', 'Where Img', 'Height Auto Max-Width', 'Vertical-Align Bottom .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar'] Date: 2024-06-28 Glass Cabin By Tina Mozelle Braziel and James Braziel Pulley Press (2024) Wendell Berry’s instructions to rural writers to move back home for renewed artistic inspiration and fulfillment has been followed nearly to the point of cliché. The Kentucky poet, who is the urban literati’s image of perfect rural contentment, writes of his own move from Manhattan to his birthplace, “There was the assumption that the life of the metropolis is the experience, the modern experience, and that the life of the rural towns, the farms, the wilderness places is not only irrelevant to our time, but archaic as well because unknown or unconsidered by the people who really matter—that is, the urban intellectual.” So he got out of town, and tells all thoughtful writers to do the same. James and Tina Braziel, husband and wife authors of Glass Cabin, a collection of prose and poetry about building a new home in rural Remlap, Alabama, are aware of the trope. “Maybe Thoreau is to blame,” James wondered, “for getting people started on this kind of living when he built his cabin on Walden Pond.” But for the Braziels, the decision to move was not entirely an artistic one. Rent was high in Birmingham, Alabama, where James teaches literature of the University of Alabama – Birmingham. Half of his income was going to the apartment. In these conditions, they said, “a writing life seemed impossible.” In the early days, before they were married, Tina was finishing her Masters degree in Oregon. They promised each other, not an easy life in Remlap, but a full one. In most of accounts of an artist’s move to the country, the ideal writing life requires a working wife. Wendell Berry himself is clear about how much administrative and household labor he leaves for his wife. Poet laureate Carl Sandburg sat in the attic of his Flat Rock, North Carolina, farmhouse with a towel hung over his head while his wife tended to the goats outside. Thoreau’s mother did his laundry. The Braziels, though, both write, and they both work. Much of Glass Cabin narrates the work they have done with their own hands. They got the windows for the home (and the name for the book) from discarded church stained glass. Tina’s poem “Making Church Glass Ours” details the difficult labor of transporting and installing their new, metaphorically resonant walls. The Braziels write about hacksaws, the fear of falling off a ladder, sawdust all over their unfinished floor, and showering at the gym after a day of labor. Of course, the work of construction is creatively fertile, but it is also real work. Each passage in the book is labeled by its author, either Jim or Tina. Jim realized afterward that all of his writing is addressed to Tina or his son, Dylan. But what about the audience beyond each other? Tina said she writes to assert the dignity of her community. A teacher once told her that she writes with a “trailer park chip on her shoulder”—she did grow up on one in central Alabama. The teacher meant it as a slight, but Tina put the phrase in her own poem. She thinks it’s true. Jim says he writes for the melon field workers in the south Georgia fields where he was raised. “Sometimes the people I knew in the rows appear with hands rubbed smooth by field dirt to lift and carry me through the heat,” he wrote in Glass Cabin. “Sometimes I carry them.” Here are two different (competing?) interests in rural folks: the urge to write to and the urge to write on behalf of, the duty to pay tribute and the duty to explain. Which way should we face when we talk about the places we love? The Braziels don’t have a single answer. (They explain that their partnership in writing—as in life—creates an implicit dialectic.) Glass Cabin is built on relationships— between husband and wife, but also between city and country, parents and children, the body and the mind, and, most strikingly, work and love. “If I keep saying I love you,” James wrote, “will it be enough when I give you a hammer and drill and ask you to brace these boards?” Jim first dreamed of the move to country more than a decade ago because it would make a writing life possible. But Tina insists it’s not merely that; it’s a creative life. “Everything we do here,” she told her husband, “is a creative act. Don’t you see that?” Tina Mozelle Braziel, also appeared on an episode of Rural Food Traditions podcast, where she shared her secrets to cornbread, what life is like in the glass cabin she built with her husband, and some of her poetry. Related Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license. 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