A Note from the Table

an invitation for Tending Table readers to follow a new poetry project on memory, inheritance, & the South

For anyone who knows me, it will not surprise you that I often tend to have several creative projects going at the same time. And if you are a regular reader here, you may have noticed that since Easter, the frequency of posting on Tending Table has not stopped, but it has slowed a bit.

I owe you an explanation.

Over the last few months, I have been working on a poetry collection tentatively titled Southern Songs. It is a project about memory, family, inheritance, faith, place, and the complicated music of growing up in the South. Much of my writing here has been connected to my life as a priest: Scripture, prayer, the church year, spiritual formation, the slow work of tending a life with God.

This new project is taking a different path toward many of the same questions.

Instead of beginning with the lectionary or the church calendar, these poems begin with memory. With red clay and cast iron. With church fans and battlefields. With sayings I learned before I knew what they carried. With family stories, old silences, inherited songs, and the beauty and brutality of the place that made me.

I am trying to write about the South truthfully. Which means I am trying to love it without lying about it.

That work has been taking up a good bit of my creative energy lately. And rather than fold all of that writing into Tending Table, I decided to create a separate space for it. A kind of field notebook for the larger work.

It is called, drum roll please, Southern Songs.

I hope to complete the poetry and begin the process of submitting for formal editing and publication of the poetry collection toward the end of this year or early next year.

In the meantime, the Southern Songs Substack will be a place where I share some of the poems, essays, fragments, histories, conversations, and reflections that are emerging around the collection. Some pieces may eventually find their way into the book. Some probably will not. But all of them belong, in one way or another, to the larger work of listening and truth-telling.

Tonight around 6:00 p.m. EST, the first post will go live over at Southern Songs. It begins with the story of a trip Shelby and I took to Charleston, South Carolina, and a ghost tour that unexpectedly became the doorway into this project.

It is a reflection on handprints left in old Charleston bricks, on the stories we inherit, and on what it might mean to love the South truthfully. I’d be grateful for you to read along.

Tending Table is not going away. I still hope to keep writing here about prayer, Scripture, poetry, formation, and the life of faith. But I wanted to invite those of you who might be interested in this other stream of work to follow along there as well.

You can subscribe to Southern Songs here:

As always, thank you for reading. Truly. It means more than I know how to say.

And thank you for making room for the different ways this work keeps asking to be written.