Glass Cabin

I’m excited to say that Pulley Press, whose mission is to highlight rural writers, has contracted Tina and me to write a book of poems about living in our glass cabin. The book is in its final stages and will be released on March 26. You can now pre-order Glass Cabin.

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In the meantime, building the cabin continues. Slowly. Everything we do is by hand. If you’re interested in knowing more about our life as writers, beekeepers, first-time builders and homesteaders, tadpole raisers, meadow makers, hawk watchers, and native plant propagators, you can go to my blog, Glass Cabin Diary, or you can go to our Instagram @glasscabindiary.

What Things Cost

What Things Cost

“Necessary Weight, Necessary Time” is the essay Tina and I wrote for What Things Cost: an anthology for the people: (University of Kentucky Press, release date March 7). Our essay is about the power and ache of work in our lives. We are very proud to be part of this wonderful book that is a fundraiser for the Poor People’s Campaign.

The Salt Love Tour

After the pandemic, Tina and I visited places and read from our books, This Ditch-Walking Love and Known by Salt. We’re grateful to the people who had us out and the audiences that attended. Below is the record of places. The Salt Love Tour is now over. But soon, the Glass Cabin Tour will begin.

Friday, February 23, 2024 at Triana for Smithsonian’s Crossroads: Change in Rural America

Thursday, November 9, 2023 at Jasper County High School

Tuesday, March 7, 2023 at The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Thursday, October 27, 2022 at Southern Connecticut State University

Wednesday, October 26, 2022 at Gateway City Arts in Holyoke

Monday, October 24, 2022 at Belding Memorial Library in Ashfield

Tuesday, October 18, 2022 at The Lava Center in Greenfield

Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at Kennesaw State University

Wednesday, March 2, 2022 at Wednesday Night Poetry in Hot Springs

Tuesday, March 1, 2022 at Harding University

Monday, February 28, 2022 at Hendrix College

Thursday, February 24, 2022 at Ferus Brewing

This Ditch-Walking Love

This Ditch-Walking Love won the Tartt First Fiction Award and is now in print. I want to thank Joe Taylor and everyone at Livingston Press at the University of West Alabama for choosing my collection of stories. I’m honored to receive the Tartt.

Ditch-Walking is set in the Murphrees Valley section of the Cumberland Plateau where ridges lift above what creeks and small rivers have made. No matter where you dig, shovels and rockbars hit chert, causing the ground to spark. That difficulty of breaking the land is heard in the way people speak here. It is rural and hilly here. Ravines spill into creeks that feed into the Locust Fork River. A chicken plant is the biggest employer. People work there or on farms, in the local schools, stores, churches, and the church of Walmart. 

Because the characters in This Ditch-Walking Love don’t have enough money to carry them, they rely on a network of plateau fields, creeks, woods, and clay roads. It might be enough, a field row in August for walking and gathering tomatoes and okra up, or a bluff for jumping off of into the Fork, or a drive out to Jick’s Chevrolet just to see his hellfire cars. These are the places everyone goes to, looking for what they can’t make full on their own. 

The stories in Ditch-Walking are first person accounts—two brothers searching for the dead body of a friend, a passerby happening upon a lynching, a daughter plotting against her grieving mother, and a nephew who finds a Ferris wheel instead of arrowheads buried on Brown’s land.

I’ve always written for the people I worked with in the watermelon and cantaloupe fields of South Georgia where I grew up, people defined by sweat and work and lots of laughter because laughter was the only counter you had for dealing with what was hard in your life. Their voices have given me my voice as a writer. My hope has been to give them stories in return, stories they could take part in. The people I’ve gotten to know on the Cumberland Plateau are not so distant. These stories are for them and for you.

You can read a review of Ditch-Walking here.

About

I grew up in South Georgia on a small farm. We had cattle, peanut and melon crops, and pines for cutting. Days were for working, nights for walking the dirt road that split the land, and in winter, the sky. My writing comes from the humid air, the sand-grit of that place.

In 2024, Pulley Press will publish Glass Cabin, a book of poems Tina and I wrote about building our home in rural Alabama. We have been building for thirteen years now. The work goes slow because everything we do is by hand. By hand because of the costs, because we have other jobs, because we need to write. You can read more about us and our life on Instagram @glasscabindiary and at my blog, Glass Cabin Diary.

My collection of stories, This Ditch-Walking Love, winner of the Tartt Fiction Award, is set in the Murphrees Valley section of the Cumberland Plateau where I now live, where ridges lift above what creeks and small rivers have made. Because the characters in these stories don’t have enough money to carry them, they rely on a network of plateau fields, creeks, woods, and clay roads. It might be enough, a field row in August for walking and gathering tomatoes and okra up, or a bluff for jumping off of into the Locust Fork River, or a drive out to Jick’s Chevrolet just to see his hellfire cars. These are the places everyone goes to, looking for what they can’t make full on their own. This Ditch-Walking Love was published in 2021 by Livingston Press. I’m recording an audiobook of Ditch-Walking.

My novels Birmingham, 35 Miles and Snakeskin Road are about environmental disasters in a future South. Birmingham, 35 Miles follows a group of clay miners left behind to live in a dust bowl in Alabama. Snakeskin Road follows one woman leaving this dust bowl for what she hopes is something better. Both novels were inspired by summers of drought when I worked the melon fields, inspired by the people I worked with. My chapbook of poems, Weathervane, meditates on the connection between family and nature.

I’ve also received fellowships from Hot Springs National Park, Alabama State Council on the Arts, and Georgia Council for the Arts.

Thank you for visiting. You can reach me here, southverveATjamesbrazielDOTcom.

Birmingham, 35 Miles

Birmingham, 35 Miles

From the publisher Bantam—

In this haunting and poignant debut novel, James Braziel tells an unforgettable story of love, family, and survival across a world that has already begun to die.…

When the ozone layer opened and the sun relentlessly scorched the land, there was nothing left but to hope. Mathew Harrison had always heard of a better life as close as Birmingham, only thirty-five miles away—zones of blue sky, wet grass, and clean breathable air. But to him it’s a myth, a place guarded by soldiers, off limits to all but the lucky few. Meanwhile Mat works alongside his father, mining only the red clay that the once fertile Alabama soil can offer.

Now, with the killing deserts on the move again and the woman he loves on a Greyhound heading north, Mat has a travel visa and every reason to leave. But his roots in this lifeless soil inexplicably hold him firmly to the past. Torn between hope and resignation, with time running out, Mat must make a fateful choice between a new life and the one that isn’t ready to let him go.

Snakeskin Road

The Georgia Center for the Book named Snakeskin Road one of the books all Georgians should read for 2010.  Snakeskin Road was also shortlisted for the Townsend Prize that same year and longlisted for the British Fantasy Awards. It was also one of Locus Magazine’s Best of 2009.  

From Bantam—

In this powerful and moving new novel by James Braziel, author of Birmingham, 35 Miles, a woman begins a harrowing journey of survival along a passage of terror—and hope.… They call it Snakeskin Road. An ever-changing network of highways, rivers, and forgotten trails, it’s used by profiteers of a grim new traffic in human cargo. The catastrophic climatic changes that transformed the Southeast into a vast, inhospitable desert have left its desperate inhabitants with no choice but indentured servitude. Jennifer Harrison is among those destined for the farms, mines, casinos, and brothels of the Midwestern “Free Zones.” Carrying the unborn child of her deceased husband, Mathew, Jennifer hopes that in three years’ time she’ll be free to reach Chicago—and a world better than the one she is leaving.

Along with a thirteen-year-old refugee entrusted to her care, Jennifer begins a hazardous pilgrimage across a countryside of barricaded city-states, lawless camp towns, marauding gangs, and what’s left of a corrupt government. But nothing she faces is more dangerous than a man named Rosser—a ruthlessly opportunistic bounty hunter determined to bring her back to Birmingham. In a world where hope is always a mile ahead, Jennifer has one last chance before the road disappears forever.

Weathervane

Weathervane

Finishing Line Press published Weathervane in 2003. The chapbook was the first collection of my work and is out-of-print.

“James Braziel writes of rural life, that of his youth in particular and American in general,” says Richard Messer, author of Murder in the Family.  “The experience rendered in such marvelous lyric detail in Weathervane is of life lived in close and constant relationship to the elements.  The power of the weather and the primal forces of nature, of growth and decay, dominate the inner and outer landscapes of the poems.  The success of  Weathervane derives from its sympathy for the land and those who live close to it; from its tenderness, its vividly original imagery, and the fact that, while it speaks personally of the poet’s own youth, it also portrays the pathos of our collective loss as we become more and more alienated from the land.”

Tony Grooms, author of Bombingham and Trouble No More writes, “Wake up and welcome James Braziel’s fresh voice and vision to the realm of American letters.  Born of the farmland, his poems are songs of the elements—of drought and rain, of field and woods, of fire, sky and stone.  His language is lyrical and as luscious in the mouth as cool, ripe black berries.  Reminiscent of the deep imagery of James Wright, these observations of the South and the Mid-west are visions of American life that are deeply felt, and deeply hoped for.  The weathervane of the title poem is a television antennae ‘spun like a tree in the switching wind.’  Like that weathervane these poems sway and spin, but they are well-grounded as they home in on the language and imagery of a beautiful, suffering landscape and the people who farm it or journey through it.  James Braziel is an impressively talented young poet and writer who stands at the beginning of what promises to be an engaging and thoughtful literary journey.”

Stories, Poems, and Essays

The following stories, poems, and essays can be found online — 

“September Prayer”

        — High Horse

“What the Wind Carried Away”

        — New York Times

“Asleep in the River”*

        — Newfound

“Jick’s Chevrolet”*

        — Map Literary

“Vittate”*

        — Map Literary

“Watersmeet”*

        — Appalachian Heritage

“Where the Stars Fall Together”*

        — 100 word story

The Ballad of JD

        — Southern Humanities Review

▫ also appears in Glass Cabin

* also appears in This Ditch-Walking Love