"Auld Lang Syne" by Jamie Cheshire
– In the cold twilight above the town, he sang it to himself.
The aftermath story that emerged from the rumors and boasting was that there was a girl at the center of it.
Fascinated with every big and little thing, Jamie Cheshire has long been an avid student of design and structure. Having worked together with giants, he has had the extreme good fortune to practice his craft for most of the last four decades and has seen his work appear nationally and in several countries on three continents. He lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with his beloved feral, hippie-chick wife, their three dogs and two cats. Deeply committed to the ordinary, he is constantly searching for a way to describe it.
Author’s Talk
Jamie Cheshire
The cartoonist Kliban once drew a cartoon of an old man captioned, “‘It was hell,’ recalls former child.” Mine would have to be captioned, “It wasn't what I expected.”
I’m older than most people and younger than all the rest and it’s when these two points on the continuum converge that something boils out like sap in a fire and demands its hissing and singing be heard. It becomes my assignment to find out why. Some little ordinary thing happened. Some little slant of light mixed with a fragrance. Some scrap of a conversation jumped down from one of my shelves and into the grate, knowing I’d reach in to try to save it.
Sometimes I recognize it right away. And sometimes it’s something new to me. When I follow it, it’s often not what it looked like it was going to be at first.
That’s what has happened here. Three times on three separate occasions. First came a fight long forgotten. Eben Flood came some years later, as a poem given by a teacher. He, too, lived a long time in the recesses. The third, the recording by The Choral Scholars of University College Dublin, is the new thing that awakened and tied the others to each other and to me.
John Steinbeck wrote as if he were telling me his stories privately over a beer, maybe on the tailgate of a pickup with a chainsaw and a splitter nearby. He seems quite familiar with my mind.
The province of description is his, but the craft is not guarded and the gates to it are never shut. Attempting to describe an insistent moment, a thing, or the way the thing changes another thing, or an impression that remained after young eyes grew older is, to me, as important as knowing our compass directions or who our people are. Our giants are our giants because they inhabit our stories.
In Cannery Row, Steinbeck said, “Perhaps that might be the way to write this book -- to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves.”
I’m ok with that because it’s most often the story that has something to say. It’s rarely me.
It’s an unregulated process and often fun. You can see plenty of evidence of that by following my Substack posts at https://substack.com/@jamiecheshire
