[music: “Brittle Rille” fades in, soft chimes, low tones]
Hello, and welcome to Daddybuck’s Notebook. I’m Lindsay, and my grandfather, Daddybuck, was a creative genius. In this podcast, I go through the things he’s made and share them with the world, and with you. I’ll also share my own works inspired by his, paying forward the inspiration he gave me. So let’s get started.
[music: “Brittle Rille” fades out]
I have found another notebook. This one is less like a notebook I guess – it’s a big brown accordion folder, one of those old kinds, with tabs that have letters printed in Times New Roman on the edge of each section. It also has this cream-colored rope wrapped around it and tied in a sort of half-bow knot, I guess to keep the thing closed when it was moved from room to attic to storage to work shed or wherever it lived. It’s pretty heavy! I put it on my lap and when I’m rummaging through it, it takes a bit of muscle to move each of the tabs to the side, just because of the material it’s made of. It’s substantial. I’m very excited about this one.
Best part: On the back are two white sticker labels. One says “Secular Poems # 8, John Townsend” written in sharpie. The other sticker label, sketched with a different pen, reads “Folder Delta”.
I cannot wait to find out if there are Secular Poems #1 – 7 somewhere, or Folders Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie somewhere! I really hope they exist. I don’t know if I have them (*laughs*), it just seems like I found a clue in a huge mystery.
Anyway! This was an exciting find for me. As much as I appreciate Daddybuck’s religious poetry, it also hurts my heart a little to see the same message of penance over and over. Especially since – well, I’m his granddaughter. I think he was way harder on himself than he should have been. And honestly, I think God would agree with me.
Besides, I’ve seen so much creativity out of his other stuff, I couldn’t wait to go digging in here!
I did find religious poems, both sad and hopeful and often ending with rejoicing, to be fair. I saw a couple silly ones, too. Then I found these Writers Conference poems. There are two of them, typed up and printed on separate pages of paper. One is labeled Writers Conference 1 and the second is Writers Conference 2, both dated from the same day in 2001. I guess he got to go to one of those conferences back then. I don’t remember hearing about it, but I’m really glad he got to if that’s the case.
[music: “Suite in G, Minuet 1” on cello fades in slowly]
And something about the experience inspired him to write about it like this. Here we go…
[music: “Suite in G, Minuet 1” fades up to background, light and steady-metered cello solo]
Writers Conference 1
I cling to the windowsill beholding
Through chicken eyes
Swans and eagles
With glittering minds and golden pencils.
My chicken brain stunned,
I drop to the ground,
Fluttering flightless wings
To search the weeds for corn.
Writers Conference 2
I soar grand and golden over speckled chickens
My eagle’s eyes disdain the view
As they scramble over corn bits.
I rise to clouds where even the sun
Envies my Olympian splendor.
[music: “Suite in G, Minuet 1” resolves, music ends]
My Daddybuck was a writer in every way, including thinking of himself as really bad at it and yet doing it anyway
It’s a weird sort of self-aware, self-deprecating hubris. I don’t know. I’ve seen this thing before in writers I follow on social media and in person, and I’ve done it too! There’s a kind of safety in saying you’re not good at something, especially if it’s something you love to do… and part of you must think you’re decent at it, because you keep doing it and showing it to people. But if you say you’re good, you might attract the attention of the kinds of people who want to tear down someone else’s confidence to make themselves feel better. At the very least you might be asked to share the thing that you’re proud of. If you do share it, they might not like it. And then you have to wonder… was I wrong? Am I fooling myself? Am I really actually BAD at this?
That’s an existential crisis. It FEELS like you can sidestep it a bit if you just claim to be bad at the thing you love to do. Then, if someone likes it, they may try to convince you that it’s good, which feels really great and gives you reason to believe it. And if they don’t like it, you can say yeah, I know, and it feels like maybe it doesn’t hurt as much…
That’s kind of probably how I thought about it. But (*laughs*) I’m 30 now and I don’t think this works like I thought it did. If you tell yourself you’re bad at something, while it may FEEL safe, you start to believe it… and then, what are you protecting? The love you have for creating? The creation itself? Either way, the damage you were trying to prevent from the outside… that’s damage that you already just caused yourself.
[music: “Brittle Rille” fades in softly]
As I read through his stuff, I can see that Daddybuck was excruciatingly self aware. He knew of his own depression, his own self-deprecating thoughts. He could even turn it all around in his head and imagine that his own self-criticisms were a form of pride. It’s a type of very cyclical negativity that I’m familiar with. I think a lot of people are.
At the same time, he kept writing. He put down these intense thoughts, feelings, wisdom. He enjoyed his own words. He printed them out and saved them. He shared them with friends and his nerdy little granddaughter! I know. I remember him sitting back and smiling, even as he made fun of himself. Because, in some way, he really did like what he had written.
[music: “Brittle Rille” fades out]
These two poems are called Writers Conference 1 and 2. My guess is he went to a writer’s conference and had to stop and confront these two sides of himself when he looked around the room and saw all these different people doing the same kinds of things. But maybe he didn’t see it that way. Maybe he just saw some writers being self-deprecating and some being self-congratulatory, and maybe he judged one more than the other, and maybe he didn’t. I don’t know exactly why he put this down to paper… but to me, whether he knew it or not, it feels a lot like his doubt and his pride watching each other, one from above and one from below, constantly at odds, constantly distant, at least so long as they know the other one exists.
[music: “Hide Your Lies Above The Clouds” fades in, upbeat tempo, light synth and piano with soft high hat, stepping up and down the melody of a chord]
Like my grandfather, I spend way too much time looking at myself from some hypothetical outside perspective. But with writing, and creating in general… you can’t really do that. When you do what you love, you can’t do it from the outside. You have to be in your own head, in your own body, your own soul. That’s where it comes from. Creating things gives people like us a freaking break from that constant vigilance! God knows we need it.
So, for both our sakes, I decided to write an answer to this dichotomy he wrote. This is my poem.
It’s called Sparrowhawk.
[music: “Hide Your Lies Above the Clouds” transitions to bridge, long synth notes, soft buzz under the words with tempo kept light and calmer]
I dive between the wind-soaked clouds
My bright eyes ignore the self-conscious birds
Above and below me.
I race the wind to catch my prey
In arrowshot somersault madness
The only way to fly.
[music: “Hide Your Lies Above the Clouds” transitions out of bridge to previous upbeat piano steps above light rhythmic synth]
The music in today’s episode was “Brittle Rille” by Kevin McLeod at incompetech.com, Suite in G, Minuet 1, composed by Johann Sebastian Bach and performed by cellist Mark Holt at cellokeys.wordpress.com, and “Hide Your Lies Above The Clouds” by the incredible Breakmaster Cylinder, whose music you can find on Soundcloud and at breakmastercylinder.bandcamp.com.
The pieces today were “Writer’s Conference 1” and “Writers Conference 2” written by John S Townsend, and “Sparrowhawk”, written by me. This podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. All rights reserved.
The transcript for this episode will be on my website at lindsaywrittendown.wordpress.com.
Stay well, and stay creative.
[“Hide Your Lies Above the Clouds” concludes, music ends]
Lindsay, Written Down 