The unquiet Muse
Prolific songwriter Jim Carpenter publishes two books of fiction
Local Americana musician Jim Carpenter can’t actually count the number of songs he’s written in his 63 years. Hundreds, certainly. Popular with his bands the Hoolios and the CarLeans as well as in a solo guise, Carpenter has over the course of 10 albums consistently delivered evocative melodies and lyrics that spin entire worlds of people and relationships and emotions in four-minute offerings. If his sonic narratives resonate in the context of such tunesmiths as Guy Clark, Robert Earl Keen and Townes Van Zandt — that’s not hyperbole — the songs are also typified by a haunting literary quality that echoes the tone and tradition of Harry Crews or Eudora Welty.
What complicates the latter comparison, and what most Carpenter fans don’t know but are about to discover, is that, under the name James Waine Carpenter, he’s also an incredibly prolific author of wonderful short stories.
After years of secretly compiling boxes full of these fictional works — and because, he says, he doesn’t know what else to do with them — Carpenter on Wednesday released “Jubilee” and “Box of Sin,” the first two in a series of six short story/novella collections he plans to issue over the next few years from his own Loco Dare Press. For the present, “Box of Sin” and “Jubilee” are available at his writing website, jameswainecarpenter.com, at Bank Square Books, and through Amazon. Carpenter says he also hopes to have some virtual book events after the first of the year.
Like his songs, Carpenter’s fiction explores characters who are wounded, melancholy, introspective and often very funny in that Deep South literary tradition — and solidly reflects a short but indelible part of Carpenter’s own childhood in Chincoteague Island, Virginia.
Carpenter writes with wistful beauty of small town Southern folks whose lives are shaped by struggle, family, religion, and hard work — and how those elements guide or crush dreams. The stories and characters are finely and lovingly drawn, but not at the expense of honest depictions of very human flaws. At their heart, the stories inspire a sense of the author’s longing to discover something as yet unknown about his own life.
Here’s a typical passage, from the story “Pretty Momma” in “Jubilee,” where a young man makes the painful choice to pursue his destiny rather than stay home with the delusional mother he nonetheless loves very much:
“It was not necessarily because I had left her so soon, or even that my leaving so closely resembled my father’s. It was simply that I left. And there weren’t enough green stamps on the Delmarva Peninsula to fill the empty spaces in my big, hollow momma; not enough black dirt in Pocowaddox to bury her despair deep enough
that it would not rise to the surface on a rainy night like an old tire in a spring field; no tether strong enough to keep the only person who may have ever truly loved her, bound and tied to her forever.”
Catching up with the past
“I lived in Virginia a very short time as a boy, and spent some of the weeks of some summers there,” says Carpenter, seated in socially distanced fashion on the patio of a Niantic eatery earlier in the fall. “And while not all the stories say it, in a way they're all set in my version of that town.”
Carpenter has also lived in Norfolk, Cape May, Key West, Miami and Nashville, but for three decades has lived in Niantic with his wife Robin, a hair stylist. Their 28-year-old son Jake is a musician and teacher in Vermont. But in that powerful ancestral fashion, Carpenter still regards Chincoteague Island as home. Though his parents no longer have their oyster business on the island, they still maintain a home there.
“I'm still writing about that town and its people,” Carpenter says. “Sometimes a friend might say, ‘Hey, how come you haven't written a song about me?' I'll say, ‘I haven't caught up with you yet. I'm still writing about the people who impacted and meant something to me when I was growing up. It's not that I don't love you, but I'll probably never get to everyone because I guess I'm catching up with my past.'”
This comment seems even more important when Carpenter talks about his process. “I never have a scene or an outline, and I certainly don't do what John Irving does, which is to write the last line first,” Carpenter says. “I just write the first line, and it'll just trigger something that might be a little thing that happened when I was barely old enough to talk. And I just take it from there.”
He adds he has no idea where any given story might lead or why, but he's learned that just the act of putting the words to paper will trigger other inspiring associations — and it's proven to be a self- perpetuating creative goldmine. But, while the stories are autobiographical in terms of inspiration, Carpenter says real persons who might jump start an idea are never depicted in terms of replication; his fictional characters are collages of people he might have known who, during the act of writing, morph into distinct characters themselves.
What to do?
“When I started writing the stories years and years ago, I thought, ‘What am I going to do with all of this?' And all I could think of in my experience was, ‘Well, l could send some to Reader's Digest.' I thought my stories had a small-town element and some uplifting qualities that would fit well with Reader's Digest.” He laughs. “Then some friends who read (some of his stories) clued me in that there's a lot of darkness in what I write. They were pretty obviously NOT a match for Reader's Digest.”
There's a curious, even charming naivete to Carpenter's approach to marketing his fiction. Some might call it bewildering or even self-defeating, but it's more complicated than that.
“It's my fault,” he says. “It's not a ‘ humble' thing. It's functional. I've shopped a few stories to periodicals, but I've never tried to get an agent. I wouldn't know how to do that. That's a fault in me. I like creating things, but I have a real problem putting them out in the world.”
He adds that the situation mirrors his musical career. “I'll work hard on songs and make a record and play shows in support ...” he pauses and tries again. “I've moved to Nashville twice to try to make it a songwriter. But I don't know if it's fear of success or maybe even a fear of money (that keeps him from seeking professional representation that could get his work before the public).”
He talks about growing up in a very religious household: “I think in the way I was brought up, it was conveyed to me that money was the root of all evil. My mother told me stories that stayed with me about my grandfather, who was a preacher. He started his own church. They taught that money was the root of all evil, but they had no problem making it.” He pauses and smiles. “I don't know how true this is, but I was told they would go each year and buy the best new Cadillac — then they'd go home and paint the bumpers so it wasn't all shiny and new looking. They didn't want to ‘get above their raising,' as the saying goes. And the more I think about that, the more I wonder if that was instilled in me in some fashion.”
There you go. In five minutes, surrounded by folks sipping coffee and eating pastries on a sunny day on Main Street in Niantic, Carpenter, in his soft, shy voice, essentially created what could be a fine story or song.
Music or fiction?
As an artist, Carpenter doesn't have any big issue in terms of whether a burst of creativity should be developed as a song or a story. It's simply a matter of an odd reality.
“It's pretty simple,” he laughs. “I can't write songs in my house. I have to be somewhere else — a hotel room or at a club. And I can only write fiction at home. So that's pretty easy. Wherever it happens, it happens.”
Maybe it has to do with the circumstances of when Jake was born.
“Robin and I switched off a lot staying home with him, and I fell into a routine of sitting and watching Jake play at my feet,” Carpenter says. “And I'd write stories all day. That lasted for about a decade, and if I could have continued that forever ...” He smiles and shakes his head wistfully. “In any case, I ended up with a lot of stories. I'm still writing them.”