Vocabulary R Us: Thoughts on Language with Alice Burns
I think most of us wanna-be writers are - or were - readers. It’s possible those of us who haven’t had as much publishing success as we would have liked have tried too hard to emulate “real” writers. This tendency can leave your writing bereft of the value of the unique sights and sounds of the places where you were raised. I want to remedy that effect in future offerings.
Had I given more thought to this thesis earlier on, I would have more greatly appreciated the fact that Faulkner, Capote, Wolfe, and other wonderful writers were, like me, southerners. The rural South was my stomping ground before I could stomp, and, although I got citified at the age of four or so, the rhythms of the South have stayed with me throughout the years, years in which I moved from backwoods Alabama to Baltimore, Maryland; Battle Creek, Michigan; and Atlanta, Georgia, all the while traveling farther afield to many other places, for both work and pleasure.
Add to the fact of various and sundry locales I have frequented that my mother had a Scottish brogue and a storehouse of lore and expressions that were not common even on the farms and in the mining camps where I grew up. And, to top it all off, six years after the death of my first husband, I married a New England Yankee who could “pahk his cah” with the best of ‘em.
At the time of my marriage to the Yankee, we were both 65 years old and I was writing “legally defensible decisions” for U.S. Administrative Law Judges, but my writing experience had begun while I was in high school. I wrote book reviews for J. R. Rothermel, then the book review editor for The Birmingham News, having been introduced to him by one of my English teachers. The News also accepted a feature or two from me, one concerning the wind that blew down a section of the brick wall that comprised Legion Field Stadium.
Since my legal writing days, I have made a stab or two at creative writing, but have found myself somewhat stymied by the long experience of having to make only statements that could establish or qualify as findings of fact. Now that’ll throw a cog in your works right off. My idea of a solution to my problem is prospective because it has yet to succeed, but what I think Ima gonna do is write like I heard folks talk ‘way back when.
I have to start by lickin’ my calf - in other words, going back over past efforts at writing publishable material - I mean written thangs - and making those thangs say what they said to me when I thought about writing about them. If my mother saw some of my submissions following my retirement as a paralegal writer, she would say I had done s..t and fell back in it. And if I dared disagree with her, she would order me to “quile in,” which I think means “coil in,” like a threatening snake, you see. My Yankee taught me things like “bubbler,” rather than water fountain and “common” rather than park. Besides he was a big union man as a mechanic and I was eventually in what we liked to call management in the government. Thus did sparks and colorful vocabulary fly in many of our conversations.
I promise I’m not going to spew forth an enormous bunch of stuff written in dialect, but I am going to do some practice pieces that I think will have the effect of lightening me up, so to speak. Goodbye, legally defensible, hello, entertaining stuff (I hope).
Alice Burns’ Bio:
I was born just after the Great Depression in Oneonta, AL, 9th child of a tenant farmer/mine foreman. Our family moved to Birmingham when I was four so that the older children could get jobs in the booming steel mills. I had wonderful teachers at Ensley High School who told me I had talent and encouraged me in many ways. A 41-year career with the Federal Government eventually took me to a job writing decisions for U. S. Administrative Law Judges. Because I was writing alongside attorneys, I thought I should at least get a college degree, which I did at the age of 49. I then was promoted to a position in management, from which I retired in 1997.