Remarks on a local park, pawpaw trees, and how to put a price on the creative spirit
My speech from the spoken-word stage at the 2023 Kentuck Art Festival
This weekend, I had the insanely awesome honor of speaking on the Kathryn Tucker Windham Spoken Word Stage at the 52nd Kentuck Art Festival. My adopted hometown of Northport, Alabama, happens to be home to one of the biggest and most well-known folk art festivals in the country, and I was invited to join the performer lineup.
It was no secret what my main topic would be: the ongoing fight to save the oldest park in town from being paved into a literal parking lot. Friends who couldn’t make it in person this weekend have been asking me what I said, so I thought it might be helpful for me to post a general run-down of my set, along with some links to additional information about what’s happening to our local parks.
My town, which I’ve somewhat infamously nicknamed “Nightmare Mayberry,” should be a cautionary tale for creatives and eco-advocates elsewhere. The main point of my remarks at Kentuck is that we arty folk have to start getting more involved in our local communities—we have to fight back against encroaching, concrete-covered greed everywhere if we want to both economically revitalize small towns and cities across America and redesign these places to prioritize sustainability and livability for everyone.
So, okay, here’s what I said:
First of all, a big thank you to Mark Cobb for organizing and running the spoken-word tent again this year. This is a really big moment for me to be up here, and I’m just incredibly grateful that all of you are here with me this afternoon.
My reading is probably going to be the most different from anything else you’ll hear in the writer’s tent this weekend. Why? Well, because I’m going to spend most of my time up here dishing some local dirt. Specifically, I want to talk about the giant mountain of red dirt back there that’s looming over this year’s festival.
I might get in trouble for talking about this, to be honest, but I’m going to do it anyway because we artists need to talk about it. This is especially the case for those of us who are local to central Alabama, but honestly, the story behind that dirt mountain is the same story of misplaced priorities that’s playing out in lots of small towns and cities across America right now. This story is an important one, so I’m going to tell it.
First, though, before we get to that pile of dirt, I want to talk about a different patch of dirt here in town that will help to put the red mountain into context. I’m going to start today with a fairly straightforward op-ed essay I wrote this summer for our local Patch affiliate. It’s about the fight going on here right now to save the oldest park in town from getting paved into a literal parking lot.
First Reading: Let's Keep Asking What The Community Center Debate Is About
As the quest to save the Northport Park drags on, I’ve started wrestling with another question this fall. Why do I care so much about this? What’s keeping me involved, even as things just get uglier and uglier? I’m a writer, an academic kind of person. I’m a gardener, for goodness sake. What am I doing here, exactly? What happened to me?
Thankfully, I have a really amazing space to try and work out the answer to that question, in the form a semi-regular column I write for Reckon Review. If you don’t already know it, Reckon Review pitches itself as “a dirt road drivin’, jelly jar sippin’, Dollar General shoppin’ journal of prose.” The editors there, Meagan Lucas and Charlotte Hamrick, are two really thoughtful and supportive taste-makers of the right-now Southern grit-lit scene.
Meagan and Char let me hang around and write a column about creativity and gardening that we call Buried Nitrogen. And my most recent column, just published a couple of days ago in fact, is about the Northport Park again, yes, but it’s also about pawpaw trees—and a lot of other stuff.
Second Reading: On Pawpaws and a Local Park
Thank you again for still being here, still listening.
I don’t know yet if “this park thing” will eventually become a book project or a podcast or something else entirely. But I do know that the generative creative process is starting for me, and frankly, being here today and seeing what all of you are responding to right now is really helpful. So thanks for letting me workshop this out a bit.
I also want to make sure that while I’m up here today, I give a very heartfelt shoutout to the small press that’s publishing my debut novel in 2025. That would be Belle Point Press, based in Fort Smith, Arkansas. The editor there, Casie Dodd, has made a real commitment to putting out raw, complicated work by Southern people, including some you've already heard of (such as Alabama’s poet laureate Ashley Jones, who will be up here tomorrow), and a lot of others that you will definitely hear more from over time.
Belle Point occupies this strange liminal space between the Deep South and the Midwest. They’re forging a whole new voice and identity for the mid-central South, and I’m really excited and honored to be part of their upcoming fiction lineup. My book will be called The Diamondbacks, and it’s about a girl who grows up in a speculative Southern town that’s turned a local sport into a literal religion. Things get weird, and for various reasons, the book includes a whole lot of stuff about turtles. Eventually, you’ll be able to get it at Ernest and Hadley.
I thought about reading an excerpt from The Diamondbacks today, but then I thought maybe for this crowd of fellow writers and creatives and makers that it would be more interesting for you to hear a piece I wrote, also for Reckon Review, about the emotional experience of getting this book both written and then under contract.
My road to this has been really long and winding, and I hope that for some of you out there, hearing me admit to that up here, is helpful to you. If your work is also taking a little longer to land than you expected, I see you, I’ve been there. And now here are some thoughts about how it feels when all the twists and turns finally start to come together.
Third Reading: The Venus Vignettes
Okay, now finally, as promised, we’re coming to the end of my occupation of this tent, so let’s talk about the dirt.
Specifically, that dirt, the big red mountain of fill dirt from a road construction project in Tuscaloosa that Northport bought for a discount and brought over here in a long line of dump trucks, which lasted for days. And there could be more to come, after we artists clear out of here after this weekend.
If you live here in Northport or Tuscaloosa, you may already know that there have been plans in the works for awhile now to expand Kentuck Park to become a premiere youth sports complex adjacent to our festival grounds. The city of Northport recently bought 40 acres of land down here for the expansion, and up until fairly recently, this grand plan was known publicly as the Kentuck Sports and Festival Complex at the Bridge District.
It’s a mouthful, but that’s what it was called. However, at the most recent city council meeting on October 2, the mayor of Northport gave a lengthy state-of-the-city speech (start the video at 10:00) that used, for what I believe is the first time, the name Warrior Sports Complex to refer to this project. He spoke for roughly 21 minutes, and not once did he say the word “Kentuck” while talking about the council’s plans for the city’s future. Don’t believe me? You can double check his transcript. I did. No mention of Kentuck.
So, why the seeming erasure of the Kentuck name from this big new recreational development happening here … at Kentuck Park? Well, this is where I’m likely to get in trouble. But everything I tell you next is from local news articles and videos of council meetings. Nothing else. No fiction now, just public records. This is information that’s available to all of us.
Here’s the scoop: in recent months, the city council told Kentuck administrators that in order to receive their annual funding request from the city, they would have to sign a five-year contract committing them to this space, the same space where they’ve been holding the festival almost continuously for more than 50 years. Sounds easy, right? Well, look at that dirt mountain. It’s only been here for a few weeks, and it’s not going anywhere, anytime soon. And again, it may get even bigger in the coming weeks and months.
In light of the dirt mountain and the uncertainty about how exactly it would affect the experience of this year’s festival, Kentuck delayed the decision on whether to sign the five-year binding contract with the city. In response, last month the council removed Kentuck’s request for annual funding from their budget for external organizations (start the video at 16:24 to hear the removal). And two weeks later, the mayor referred to this area publicly for the first time as the Warrior Sports Complex, instead of calling it the Kentuck Festival and Sports Complex.
Here are my opinions now. Just mine, no one else’s. Just me, talking to you, trying to figure this out, because we writers are especially attuned to subtle shifts in language and narrative. So I can’t help but notice that along with the name change, the broader story about what exactly this space is going to become also seems to be shifting around a bit, just like that semi-stable pile of dirt back there.
Right now, the story is that all that dirt will become 15 baseball fields, along with tennis and pickle-ball courts. Perhaps surprisingly, there will also be a hotel somewhere over here, along with an indoor recreation facility and maybe some restaurants and retail thrown in for good measure (see pages 111-112). It all depends on what the developers suggest in the coming months.
It strikes me, though, that nowhere in the current story about the future of this space does a quirky character named Art seem to play a starring role. And this sort of downplaying or, dare I say, discounting of the importance of the very robust community of artists who have been meeting here for half a century is definitely showing if not telling.
But look, that red dirt back there isn’t the only Kentuck dirt worth talking about right now. I also want to talk about this dirt, this ground, right here, in this tent, this festival. For 52 years, this patch of dirt in the woods has been built up into a rich, organic bed of ideas and inspiration and energy and connection. We’re standing right now on soil, not dust, and soil is not inert. It is an electric, networked field. We are here, together, as artist and audience, and we are feeding off one another, like two plants trapped together in a garden bed.
You know, plants communicate with each other through chemical signals in their roots. The proximity of particular plants to one another can help both of them bloom, or cause one to wilt, or both to die, in certain cases. Healthy plants don’t tend to grow in total isolation. All of us benefit from this ground—and from similar grounds, whenever artists gather and work and share and live.
We artists are not plants, obviously. We are very strong human people. We are capable, we are important, and we are valuable, in every sense of that word. Yet too often, in cities like Northport, a lot of people seem to prefer us to stay quiet, to keep our heads down and keep our eyes on the ground in front of us. And a lot of the time, we do exactly that, because it’s easier or because we have to, just to get through each day. To survive.
It can be tough, really tough, to be ourselves in places like this—places that spend millions of dollars on kid baseball fields that might someday generate revenue, while at the same time give nothing to a well-established art festival that already brings millions of dollars into the community—which is, of course, the crudest and most baseline measurement of value there is.
My point here is this: the creative spirit and energy of people like us is what small cities like Northport actually need in order to grow in a good, healthy, sustainable, and beautiful way. We can bring light and life and joy to this place—or we can carry all of that to other, more appreciative elsewheres. We are what’s real, what’s homegrown and original and authentic. Creative people deserve to be treated with respect, in every city, including Northport. We, too, should be recruited, celebrated, supported—we should be developed.
It can be tempting to agree to keep our heads down in places like Northport, to stay hidden in order to self protect. I know because for a very long time, that was me, too. But we can’t keep doing that in places like here. Because if we do, we’ll be choked out, pushed aside, or smothered entirely by concrete—or by a mountain of red dirt.
We don’t have to accept mistreatment quietly. We can fight back. We can grow stronger. So lift your gaze and stare straight on at the people who try to say that you don’t belong here for whatever reason, or that your perspective about this place and its future doesn’t matter.
Do not let the tyranny of the closed-minded shut you down. You are taller than any mountain of dirty greed.
It really is up to us, as creatives, to support and amplify the things and the people and the places—and the trees—that matter to us. Be a crusader. Join whatever fight needs you most. Maybe it’s Northport’s escalating War on Parks, or maybe it’s a different battle, in a different city. Whatever it is, engage with it. Be your creative self and make something of the fight.
With that, thank you so much for being here with me today. Again, I am overwhelmed with gratitude.
If you’d like to join the fight to save a very old park in central Alabama, please consider supporting the legal fund.