I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.
~Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
A
On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how they spend the day.
xA
March 1, 2025: Ellen Birkett Morris
X
Ellen Birkett Morris’s first novel, Beware the Tall Grass, was chosen by Lan Samantha Chang as the winner of the 2023 Donald L. Jordan Award for Literary Excellence, which carries a $10,000 prize and an offer of publication by Columbus State University Press, located just a few miles from where I live in Columbus, Georgia.
Beware the Tall Grass is told in two points of view. Eve starts us off in the first chapter. It’s the year 2000, and her son Charlie has just been born. Eve thinks Charlie, who arrived with a birthmark and a gaze full of depth, looks like he’s “already seen things worth talking about.” When her husband Dan waves the baby back and forth through the air, it soothes him. Eve and Dan joke that maybe he was a pilot or a bird in his past life.
In the second chapter, it’s 1955, and we hear from Thomas who’s just been given a horse for his eighth birthday. Thomas, who lives in Montana, names his new horse Beau “not knowing where the name came from, only that it felt right.” He grows to a high school senior, and while out riding in the tall grass, an eastern racer slides in front of them, causing Beau to rear, Thomas to be thrown, and Beau to fall and break his foreleg. “Beware the tall grass, nothing good ever happens there.”
Although these two narratives appear to have no link between them, it’s a novel. We know they’ll connect in some way, and curiosity propels the reader forward. The slow pace of the narration, with the chapters continuing to alternate between Eve and Thomas, also heightens the tension.
Eve is a ceramicist and makes little clay animals–this metaphor filters into her thoughts on parenting.
Before Charlie, I had come to expect that my work and my life could be made perfect with practice. I had a fantasy that I could give him an ideal childhood, one that would make up for my own crazy upbringing, as if I could somehow fix the past. As if he were made of clay and ready for molding instead of a mysterious mix of blood, bones and psyche.
Thomas’s response to Beau’s death is to enlist in the army, and only after he enlists does his longtime friendship with Carrie turn into something more. Take a look at this beautiful passage that shows, as the writer Bobbie Ann Mason described it, Ellen’s “gentle and graceful writing.”
I knew from losing Beau that sadness and joy can occupy the same space in a person. That they could stand side by side together, yet distinct. That was what I felt, appreciation for what I had now and grief at the thought of losing it.
Those three sentences also show the dichotomy present throughout the novel, alluded to by Judge Lan Samantha Chang. “In this beautiful novel, two stories separated by half a century intertwine to create an indelible narrative of peace and war.”
Ellen is the author of Lost Girls: Short Stories, winner of the Pencraft Award and finalist for the Clara Johnson, IAN, and Best Book awards. She is a recipient of an Al Smith Fellowship for her fiction from the Kentucky Arts Council. Ellen is also a poet and the author of two poetry chapbooks, Abide and Surrender. She won top prize in the 2008 Binnacle Ultra-Short Edition and was a finalist for the 2019 and 2020 Rita Dove Poetry Prize. Her poem “Abide” was featured on NPR’s “A Way with Words.” Her essays have appeared in Newsweek, AARP’s The Ethel, Oh Reader magazine, and on National Public Radio, which is where she heard a story that gave her the idea for Beware the Tall Grass. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky.
.A
Come back on MARCH 1st to read how ELLEN BIRKETT MORRIS spends her days.
