R.L. Burkhead

The Apparition of Shelby Foote

R.L. Burkhead, MFA

From The Record at MTSU

Summers on MTSU’s campus appear lazy. Huge blocks of students vanished into the countryside for the break. A lingering sun on the horizon until 8:00 p.m. And soul-smashing temperatures that suck the action verbs from the air and reduce compound-complex sentences to short, struggling, declarative grunts.

But the perceived laziness is a deception.

University staffers and faculty remain and push through the humidity, hurrying along the zigzag sidewalks between offices in efforts to deconstruct the previous semester and brace for the onslaught of the Fall rush. I join them in my daily pinball maneuvers from MTSU’s Belle Aire location to and throughout campus, behavior that has tagged me as the reading guy, or so I have been informed.

My daily walk—the rounds, as I call it—allows for a great many things…as long as I keep moving. And I cannot deny the reader charge (not that I wish to), especially since I fell deep into a large hole by the side of the road two weeks ago while reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.

In addition to reading, the rounds allow me to think through problems, to remember things I have forgotten, and to observe the summer’s fury of to-dos.

Often, I think about these to-dos at my favorite summer spot on campus: an empty, gray bicycle rack bolted just under a large shade tree missing a mammoth lower branch. Trees remind me of writers and writing. From a distance, as many writers may prefer to be observed, trees appear motionless and photographed. Spend any length of time with a tree, and the frenzy will reveal itself.

On this afternoon’s pause at the sacred tree, I thought about the frenzy of literary activity humming at this moment, during this summer.

I look across campus and see The Writer’s Loft’s own Suzanne Craig Robertson participating in the program’s first summer writing sabbatical. She’s here all week in a dorm, enjoying our concrete walls and indoor/outdoor carpeting while working on her fiction. Two buildings in the opposite direction, there’s the start of the Young Writer’s Loft, a five-day writing workshop for rising seventh, eighth, and ninth graders. And in the current issue of The Tennessee Writer (the official Tennessee Writers Alliance newsletter), I see a book review by Loft Alumni J. Terry Price.

Beyond campus, many are doing great things to support the craft of writing. New magazines and journals have appeared, one paper (Illiterati: Nashville’s New Creative Publication) and one not (asouthernjournal.com), and fresh literary programs and events are bringing more and more writers together. It is in this spirit that we have opened a portion of the program’s literary journal (The Trunk) to the public. The Summer 2005 issue will be on campus in a few days and it will include something new: columns and how-to pieces from writers in and out of the program, each sharing the joys and frustrations of this profession.

Newspaper stands linger at the boundaries of campus—some four hundred plus acres—as well as loiter within, and thanks to this summer’s continual one hundred and ten degree heat index, these boxes appear like lava lamps when viewed from a distance. The rounds remove me from the sacred tree and plunge me toward the buildings, bringing these boxes into focus. While July succumbs to August, the date of the paper has not changed in over a month: Wednesday, June 29, 2005.

And there he is, on the front page above the fold: the recently departed Southern storyteller Shelby Foote. Blue shirt and brown blazer, head tilted to his right and a hand extended up as if pointing toward the camera and out as progress cuts down the trees and pours concrete. The historian and novelist passed away two nights before this issue arrived on campus, and he has spent all summer here on the sidewalks, at the entrance of the student center, behind Cope, and at other select locales.

But the summer has not yet ended and much remains to do before classes begin. I look away from Mr. Foote and continue across campus: reading, dodging holes, and feeding the to-dos.