WRITING
There are few things as satisfying to me as a good sentence. The best ones express a poetic defiance, exacting from our inexplicable existence something eloquent and true, spitting in the eye of inevitable death one time-resistant word at a time.
All the literary work I have done so far has been an effort to capture, with some degree of stylistic courage, the wonder and corruption of my country, and to turn that same critical prism constantly upon myself, my musician’s ear tuned to the nuance of harmony and dissonance, to the tension within contradiction, to the historical noise that emanates from a nation’s landscapes and cityscapes.
SHADOW MY LIKENESS (novel-in-progress): Equal parts road novel and family saga, Shadow My Likeness is a Künstlerroman about generational trauma and a lineage of people who were chewed up by a culture they bought into, believed in, and fought to defend—people who would be forgotten if not for one man’s effort to remember, interpret and preserve. Told in first-person and third-person point of view, the novel is narrated/directed by James Peak III, a musician who finds himself sidelined by the breakup of his band and the sudden death of his father, events that engender a process of both personal and generational reflection and investigation. Recognizing that the only path out of his alcoholic despair is through a feat of creativity, James seeks to sift from the complicated crosscurrents of history a reassessment of his values.
Originally published online by No Depression Magazine, this essay recounts a portion of a tour River Whyless did with The Low Anthem in June, 2016.