Joe Bar on Birmingham’s Southside during the Five Points Fest, 1984: Glynn Wilson

Sunday Reader –
By Glynn Wilson –

You must know by now that I read a lot. Always have.

When I was a kid I went through the school library and left little unread. In the summer months, back when there was a such thing as a book mobile, very little escaped my attention. I racked up a bunch of ribbons for reading the most books back in the 1960s, when growing up in the suburbs of Birmingham felt a lot like what people remember as the 1950s.

If you follow me on Facebook, you probably see that I share lots of news stories, essays and opinion columns on a variety of topics, mostly on politics and public affairs, also science and the natural environment.

I also watch a lot, and not just other people, birds and other creatures in nature. I watch a lot of movies.

What I read and watch influences what I write.

And in this web forum, there are no constraints on what I can say, other than what constraints I impose on myself.

For those who don’t know much about me, you should know that I am considered to be brutally honest.

“Tell it like it is” is not just a mantra I came up with to get clicks online.

Well, Friday night I had a hard time falling fast asleep after watching a provocative drama on Netflix. It wasn’t the plot of the English professor getting in trouble for inappropriately touching the attractive student that got my attention. That’s such a cliché it just made me yawn. It was what he said to the students about what to write about. The assignment was to write something autobiographical about an incident that changed your life in some way.

That got me to thinking.

Then when I switched over to the Facebook app on my iPhone to check the feed before going down for the night, I noticed a post from a former college professor, Dennis Covington. He used to teach creative writing at the University of Alabama in Birmingham — and hang out drinking imported beers at Joe bar on Southside.

He posted a link to a short little article he once wrote for a journal published by the Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society. There’s not much to it, really, but my comment was: “You are too nice, and brief. I’ve left Alabama for the final time. I vow never to cross that state line again, not even my ashes.”

I’m not sure what made me react that way, but I would like to discuss it.

“… as the miles roll past, I realize that, in one way or another, I have always been leaving Alabama.”

Leaving Alabama: The joy and agony of crossing state lines

If you were to take the time to read my memoir, there are some stories in there from the 1980s and my time spent hanging out on the Southside of Birmingham.

Jump On The Bus: Make Democracy Work Again

But since the book is mostly concerned with what I learned about making democracy work as a news writer, there are many stories left out.

In the interest of exploring some of these autobiographical moments that changed my life, Five Points South is an important place, and the 1980s was an important time.

The only reason I ended up taking Covington’s creative writing class at UAB in the first place is because I had been on the road for many months with a rock and roll band, and I left the tour too late to get back into the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa for my senior year in the fall term in August. UAB was on the quarter system, so the term started later in September.

Plus, I was engaged at the time to a Star Spangled dancer from Homewood High School, whose family owned and operated several businesses on Southside. The engagement didn’t work out, for reasons that will not be explained here, and there’s no reason to name the innocent in this tale.

But I do believe spending that fall quarter in Birmingham did change my life, and maybe even in profound ways I’ve never considered before.

For Covington’s class, we had to write three short stories of fiction. I had never really tried that before, since my college training in journalism up to that point was strictly in writing non-fiction. In those days, much writing took place on type writers, although we did have computers to work on at the Crimson White student newspaper in Tuscaloosa.

But I did not own a computer yet, so I wrote those three short stories on an electric typewriter I purchased at a shop east of Birmingham right off of First Avenue by the Roebuck Shopping Center. Now these stories may have been fiction, but I drew from own experiences to create them.

One of the stories was a fishing story based on my time spent as a kid with my Uncle Virgil, who was a paraplegic due to sever arthritis. But he could swing his legs from the peer into a bass boat and find the striped bass trolling around Logan Martin Lake. We probably should not have been eating those fish, since it was later discovered that Alabama Power had been dumping old transformers into the lake contaminated with PCBs. But we did eat them, lots of them, along with vegetables from my Aunt Ester’s garden.

I later entered that story in the Earnest Hemingway short story competition, but heard from a judge that it was disqualified that year because the committee was looking for non-linear gay fiction. All fishing stories were tossed out, even though Hemingway was famous for writing about fishing himself, most notably The Old Man and the Sea.

In a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway once wrote, “To me a heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in.”

I don’t remember what my third story was about, and no longer have a copy, since I had to get rid of all my paper files eight years ago when clearing out and selling the house in Birmingham. But I do remember that the second story seemed to get the most reaction from the other members of creative writing class when we had to make copies and let other people read and discuss them. It included a scene from my experience playing rock clubs in Underground Atlanta and featured dancing transvestites.

Everybody seemed to like that and I recall a discussion about the true meaning of happiness.

Whatever. I passed the class with an A or a B. I can’t remember which. But I remember running into Covington hanging out drunk at Joe bar with my good friend Rowland Scherman, who owned the bar. I think Covington later went on the wagon and got himself sober, then chased religion from here to there, even to Sand Mountain, where they liked to worship with live, venomous rattle snakes.

Religion has never been my thing, so I didn’t pay much attention to that. But I do remember that Covington also somehow made a trip to Central America in the 1980s, and wrote about the war in Nicaragua for the Birmingham Post-Herald. I thought that was interesting literary journalism. Maybe he should have done more of that.

Later on in the 1980s, when I was back on Southside and owned the NewsBreak newsstand, book store and coffee bar, a business I opened when I was only 29, I tried to get on a trip to Nicaragua myself with another good friend, the photographer Spider Martin. We actually met with a group of Communists in another Southside bar and discussed going on a planned trip with them. But Spider scared them off with his smart-ass sense of humor, so we never got to make that trip.

Many years later, we did get to make a trip to Cuba, however. I wrote about it for The Southerner magazine.

Forbidden Sister City

For the purposes of this self analysis, however, as I sit here eating the fresh local July produce in this beautiful mountain campground contemplating the future of humanity and the universe while looking at pictures from the amazing Webb telescope, I do think I learned valuable lessons that changed my life in that time hanging out on Southside.

Related: NASA’s Webb Telescope Reveals Star Formation in the Cartwheel Galaxy

Creative writing would become an important element in later years when I was assigned to write creative non-fiction in the form of news features for newspapers and magazines.

If Malcolm Gladwell was right in his book Outliers: The Story of Success, it probably did take me 10,000 hours to master the art of writing news features. But I did master it, and even got a Master’s degree and got out of Alabama, and ended up on the front page of several well-respected newspapers back in the final years of the 20th century and the end of the era of the mass circulation daily newspaper.

Everything has changed since then.

In looking back on it now, the biggest mistake I ever made in my life and career was moving back to Alabama in 2005. It had to be done to fulfill a familial duty. But it apparently ruined my chances for a continuing career in mainstream publishing.

Yes, it did afford me the time to explore web publishing in the early days of blogging. And I still love the freedom of it all.

I do not feel compelled to reiterate all the things that happened over the next decade, or to relive them again here. Everybody reading this knows all about the Alabamification of America. I’ve already written about that ad nauseam.

I still have good friends in Alabama, and my time there is not without fond memories. Let’s just say for the sake of argument here that all the tiny little insults from a people with a giant chip on their shoulder cut deep to my bones like a thousand paper cuts, and I will not suffer those sling and arrows ever again, not even on Facebook. Trolls be damned.

The final insult came when I worked my ass off to help the people of my home state elect a United States Senator who actually showed up and did the job and tried to help them. That would be Doug Jones in 2017. But in 2020, with Trump on the ballot and Mitch McConnell money plastering the airwaves with anti-liberal ads, the people voted for a football coach named Tommy Tubberville.

My friends in Alabama are already sharing news of the Alabama Crimson Tide football team and the upcoming season on Facebook. But I’m finding it hard to pay attention. There is just too much misery in the world right now to think about the distraction of football. If that is all they can learn to excel in back in my home state, dog forgive them. It’s really hard being last in everything else.

When I crossed the state line going north in the first Covid spring and made it to the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina, and then back to the D.C. metro area finally when the vaccine became available, I knew I would never see Alabama again.

If I had it all to do over again, I would never have moved back to Alabama. I won’t make that mistake again. At this point in time, I would not even want my ashes taken back there after I’m gone. I’ll find another place for that before my journey on this blue planet is done.

Meanwhile, there’s some interesting reading in the online papers.

The author Silas House writes about why people stay in places threatened by climate change.

Climate change makes Appalachian life even harder. So why do we stay?

William MacAskill, a professor of philosophy at Oxford University and the author of the forthcoming book “What We Owe the Future,” writes about this.

The Case for Longtermism

And perhaps most interesting of all, Allyson Chiu writes about a new study on how humans have long benefited from a connection to nature.

“… beyond being an essential source of food, water and raw materials, the natural world can contribute to people’s overall well-being through a host of intangible effects — and, according to new research, there are many more critical connections between humans and nature than one might think.”

Nature can affect human well-being in many more ways than you think

I will be spending more of my time contemplating these things as the summer days turn to fall over the next few weeks, and the election comes up in November.

Speaking of fishing stories, I’m working on a news feature on wild, native brook trout and why they still exist in a few cold water streams in Maryland. I’ve got an appointment on Monday with a certified trout fly fishing guide. Wish me luck. There will be photos and a video.

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