Fire to Tend To

I started writing because I wanted to cut out the pain that had been festering in my chest and put it on the table where all could see it clearly. I had just moved off to college and had left home for the first time in my life. My mother was struggling with opioid addiction, my father had been an alcoholic all of his life, and my younger sister was stuck in the middle with two years of high school left to finish while I got to go sit in writing workshops and rip gravity bongs with my burnt-out buddies.

I was writing, but I didn’t consider myself a storyteller until halfway through undergrad. I wrote a story about an old drunk who was also a bootlegger. My goal had been to create an unreliable narrator. The day we workshopped it my teacher approached me during one of our breaks and asked, “Ricky, have you ever been published before?” I had to stifle my laughter. I was simply writing about the stories I knew, the world I had witnessed with fascination growing up in Eastern Kentucky. It was as though I had an eye for some beauty in what was so obviously broken. I once wrote an essay about an old Buick I found in the woods while rabbit hunting. Those are the images that imprinted themselves inside my mind. I can still see that piece of junk tucked against the fence line so clearly in my head. That wasn’t the type of stuff I figured got published. But that was the day I knew I had some fire to tend to and I’ve been feeding it ever since.

I read Larry Brown’s Facing the Music and it felt like every broken person in those pages was someone back home. I knew every soul and I just had to put it down somewhere. At first I strictly wrote short stories and flash fiction, I had anonymous characters with names like, “the Father” and “the Girl.” But eventually, they grew together and became a novel. And those faces suddenly had names. Sweetie Goodins. Lucy Perley. Case Estes. As any writer would tell you they lived inside my mind every day and I’ve come to know them intimately over the last decade. A third of my life. Poured into a book. For better or for worse. Hopefully something positive. Even though it felt like they lived right down the road from my childhood home it took me years to trace the lines and see where their lives intersected, how they had touched each other, and why their bonds were so tightly sealed together.

I remember wanting to tell these stories as a warning to anyone tempted to open the Pandora’s box of opioid addiction, but I also wanted to show how hard the people in these stories love and how hard their families love them. I wanted to show how human they were despite their weaknesses. I needed to show how deeply rooted hope was in their hearts.

It still feels to weird to call myself a writer to others. It’s awkward, it feels like it requires some defense, it feels like I’m still just faking my way through even after all of these words I’ve written down. There have been moments of inspiration, heartbreak, and triumph. My hand has cramped from jotting lines down, my eyes have watered from staring at a screen late at night, and there were times when I genuinely couldn’t see where it was all going. A close friend of mine once said to me: “Buddy, I hope one day you can put Turkeyfoot behind you.” I’ve thought about that sentence quite a lot over the last few years. I don’t think I’ll ever quite put it behind me. But at the very least I took from within and put it out into creation. I hope to encourage others to do the same.

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