Love in Tennessee

This collection of essays attempts to come to an understanding of the convergence of factors that brought about the result of the 2016 US presidential election, looking to literary voices from Melville to Orwell to try to constructively structure the prevalent bewilderment.

Love in Tennessee is a fictional memoir of the author’s growing up in a small town set in the mountains of East Tennessee in the 30’s, 40’s, and early 50’s. Although the period is before cell phones and jet travel, it is a universal tale that could have happened anywhere, nearly anytime. Some essentials never change. It could have happened today in Des Moines or the Catskills. It could have happened in 19th Century England in the provincial town of Middlemarch, as George Elliot so elegantly presented it. From the earliest the author dreams of the larger world outside, especially the glowing, beckoning lights of New York, but the lessons he learned, essentially in the varieties of love – its sorrow, dramas, and ennoblements – he learned in his long lost hometown from observing fellow dwellers and on his own. He felt the first stirrings of sexuality that often precedes love while crawling as a baby among silken legs of women. He found the intoxicating pleasure of exchanging views of hidden parts of the anatomy with a young neighborhood girl before either were six in his dilapidated backyard barn. In fact, the first chapter of the book, Secrets of the Barn, introduces much of the erotic that follows in the book.  Subsequent chapters show others in town coping with love and desire – the solid citizen...

Love in Tennessee is a fictional memoir of the author’s growing up in a small town set in the mountains of East Tennessee in the 30’s, 40’s, and early 50’s. Although the period is before cell phones and jet travel, it is a universal tale that could have happened anywhere, nearly anytime. Some essentials never change. It could have happened today in Des Moines or the Catskills. It could have happened in 19th Century England in the provincial town of Middlemarch, as George Elliot so elegantly presented it. From the earliest the author dreams of the larger world outside, especially the glowing, beckoning lights of New York, but the lessons he learned, essentially in the varieties of love – its sorrow, dramas, and ennoblements – he learned in his long lost hometown from observing fellow dwellers and on his own. He felt the first stirrings of sexuality that often precedes love while crawling as a baby among silken legs of women. He found the intoxicating pleasure of exchanging views of hidden parts of the anatomy with a young neighborhood girl before either were six in his dilapidated backyard barn. In fact, the first chapter of the book, Secrets of the Barn, introduces much of the erotic that follows in the book.  Subsequent chapters show others in town coping with love and desire – the solid citizen...