Growing up fifty miles from Monroeville, Alabama means I have crossed paths with the reclusive Harper Lee many times. I never met her, mind you. I know her from her famous book, a biography she refused to cooperate with and from her home town, We have traveled the same roads for years. Harper Lee and [...]
Sail Cat Road, the sequel to No Good End, continues below. It is being posted tweet-by-tweet daily on Twitter (http://twitter.com/ttaylordude). I will post each chapter here on Ning (in chronological order). For the prequel, please go to: www.nogoodend.com. Each chapter is posted at: http://sailcatroad.posterous.com and at http://terrytaylor.posterous.com
Mikal Ritko traveled alone. Things had gotten out of hand. Bren [...]
I hate to admit this, but I have eaten an animal we hit during a rainstorm as we were driving down the road. Truth is, I have eaten more than one. It’s been a long time, and it was in Alabama, but I still remember the deer staring us down before leaping to its death [...]
I heard part of this story and witnessed the other part of it. The year was 1974.
Down on Highway 29 headed south out of Andalusia, Alabama towards Florala and the Florida line, a single, tall evergreen tree leaned achingly toward the road. It had been bent over a little to the east by the winds [...]
I know full well that college football is damned near pro football – perched right on the edge, sniffing the rim like a dog in the bathroom. I know that major teams are raking in millions while players scramble to keep from getting a season-ending/scholarship-ending injury. I have no defendable reason to love the game, [...]
Three weeks ago, I wrote a scenario into “No Good End,” a fiction novel that I have been posting on Twitter 140 characters at a time. It involved an 18-wheeler and a hit man. The 18-wheeler ends up nose-diving into a clump of trees in eastern Alabama beside I-85 and pluming into a fireball that [...]
On June 19th, I started doing something crazy: writing a novel on Twitter. Not about Twitter, on it, line by line, chunk by chunk.
Watching people in Iran tweeting news out of their country when the press was shut out inspired me. So I just started writing a Southern crime story, not that those two are [...]
When my grandfather died, we inherited his rusty, 1949 Chevrolet truck. It was ancient and I thought everyone who saw me riding in it would start humming the tune to The Beverly Hillbillies. To make matters worse, my father painted it dark green using Sears exterior paint applied with a brush. It gave the truck [...]
July: The kitchen in my grandmother’s house smelled like collard’s boiling, creamed corn, fecund humidity and fresh ink on the latest issue of The Progressive Farmer; John Deere green on one page, Massey Ferguson red on another. A picture of Ford’s new Maverick sat glumly next to a farmhouse looking relieved it was not the [...]
With Richmond motorcycle repairman (University of Chicago Ph.D.) Matthew Crawford’s new book, Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry Into The Value of Work, I am rethinking my shop class experiences from high school.
I’ve spent my life in a no-collar world where my friends are blue-collar or white-collar. In Mr. Crawford’s book, blue-collar people keep [...]
The metal push-plow churned up ants and wigglers and little snakes. I pulled back on the bent wooden handle and shoved the blade harder into the earth again and again, pushing and pulling, working an angle to break the new ground with the next lunge. There is no motor on a push-plow, hence the name. I [...]
My cousin has recently begun to read the stories I write on this blog. He is a few years younger than me. Craig, you will like this one.
The rain came under a ledge of gray clouds. The mountains could not stop it. The Blue Ridge turned a foggy face to the deluge and earned their name in somber hues above us. We sat on the front porch of a restaurant in Abington, Virginia, right off Interstate 81. The establishment had once been [...]
I just filled our clothes dryer with yet another load of damp laundry. It reminded me of a time when we had no dryer and our formerly nasty clothes hung in the backyard on a clothesline for everyone to ogle. My dad had a pair of argyle socks that were so badly stretched and so [...]
I went to a Southern university where proper ladies and gentlemen of culture wore suits, ties and sundresses to football games on Saturday. Since I was neither proper nor cultured and wouldn’t recognize a lady or a gentleman if they bit me in the ass (a suggestion I offered to more than a few of [...]