The Bethannigan Turns One!

My freakishly large head and a thing I wear on top of it and the things that are rattling around inside of it that I will now offload into your head, you're welcome.

Hey, friends. Happy Birthday to The Bethannigan! It's been just over a year since I started my Substack, an experiment to test ways to divest from the Metaverse but not divest myself from some of the good stuff that comes from social media (like connecting with YOU). I Substack only every 6-8 weeks—but I’m learning ways Substack can be a good medium, one that allows more long-form commentary than social media. And I’ve enjoyed being exposed to some other people’s Substacks through the network, including both old friends like Ann Hood and writers I know a smidge, like Rebecca Makkai’s SubMakk.

So I’ll keep rolling along, and I plan to keep my Substack free. I believe 100% that writers should be paid--and I'll gladly pay to subscribe to others’ newsletters—but for me, eek, if I felt my newsletter had to be good enough for someone to plunk down money I would never ever write it--too much pressure. As the marvelous mystery writer Laura Lippman says about her marvelous Substack, Shaved Meats, Piled High, “It’s free, and it’s worth every penny. “

The Story of Jack’s Hat

I want to tell you about this hat.

My pal Jack Sonni was maybe my only straight male friend who gave a shit about fashion.  He loved to dress well, whether playing “Money for Nothing” with the Dire Straits during Live Aid in 1988 ( Jack was the dude in the long red leather jacket, “the other guitarist,” as he liked to say) or playing these past years in The Dire Straits Legacy Band in Brazil or Helsinki or Italy, as in this recentish photo:

He was always the best dressed guy strolling around Oxford, MS, where he classed up our neighborhood bar, City Grocery, during Thursday happy hours, his tailored jacket standing out among the flannel-clad backs on the other bar stools.

Jack dressed well, and Jack appreciated a well-dressed woman, which is something well-dressed women appreciate.  My husband believes I look awesome in everything, I wouldn’t change that.  But he’s also the only writer I know who had his author photo rejected from his fancy New York publisher because he was wearing a Bud Light T-shirt.  There’s no challenge in impressing my husband.  Jack Sonni though?  Hoo boy.  He noticed the right stuff.  A complement from Jack left you feeling not only seen but vindicated.  Like, I knew I was right to spend my kids’ college tuition on this embroidered jacket. 

Jack had a special fondness for hats, and I remember him telling me that on a trip to California, he was going to get a custom hat made from Enrico Busto of Busto and Sun. When Jack returned, he walked a little taller.  I admired the hat for the work of art it is, a beautiful rich burgundy with dove gray trim, a Jack of Spades playing card tucked behind the ribbon.  Even the lining, which no one would see, was a lovely silk floral.  Branded on the leather band: Made Exclusively 4 Jack.  The hat, like my dear friend, was an original. 

And then my dear friend died.  No warning: a stroke.  I won’t write here of the shock, the pain Jack’s death caused those who loved him.  But I will jump ahead to write this: when his daughter, Caiti, and sister, Joni, came to Oxford to clean out his apartment, they gave me Jack’s hat.  I keep it on display so I can see it every day.  But I also wanted to wear it.  Problem is, I have a ginormous head.  How large?  I dunno, maybe freakishly large?  I’d never thought so before but I couldn’t pull Jack’s hat down over my head. It perched high atop my skull like a layer cake.

Enrico Busto to the rescue. I’d heard him speak on Jack’s podcast, called The Leisure Class, and on the March 21, 2022 episode, Enrico was a guest.  Enrico described his wayward path to haberdashery beginning as a younger man collecting vintage hats--but Enrico had a big head, he said, and needed to know how to make these hats bigger without damaging them.  A big head, I thought now--Enrico knows my pain.  So I sat down at my desk in Mississippi and wrote to him in California and confessed my big-headedness and Enrico invited me to ship the hat off to his studio where he worked his magic and sent it back. 

Now if Jack’s hat isn’t on display, it’s sitting comfortably on my head--a piece of functional art, an heirloom, a legacy. Made Exclusively 4 Jack pressing against my temple, Jack looming large in my very large head. 

Here’s Jack’s plaque at his barstool in City Grocery, which names his favorite cocktail. Come visit and we’ll toast him there.

Something Someone Smarter Than Me Said

In this section of The Bethannigan, I usually quote from intellectual bigwigs. In this edition, you get Barbie.

With the passing of Jack, it’s no surprise that I’ve been doing my fair share of that kind of thinking lately. And taking deep inhales of Mary Oliver’s THE FOURTH SIGN OF THE ZODIAC (PART 3):

Do you need a prod?

Do you need a little darkness to get you going?

Let me be as urgent as a knife, then,

and remind you of Keats,

so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,

he had a lifetime.

“Tomorrow never knows,” Jack would say. How should we live, given that truth? What does maximal aliveness look like?

I love this passage from one of Walt Whitman’s letters, originally sent to me by my pal/chef/cookbook writer Paula Disbrowe. In the letter, written to a German friend Whitman’s sixty-third birthday, reflects on the disabling stroke he’d suffered a decade earlier. He could have spent his days focused only on his pain. Whitman writes:

From to-day I enter upon my 64th year. The paralysis that first affected me nearly ten years ago, has since remain’d, with varying course — seems to have settled quietly down, and will probably continue. I easily tire, am very clumsy, cannot walk far; but my spirits are first-rate. I go around in public almost every day — now and then take long trips, by railroad or boat, hundreds of miles — live largely in the open air — am sunburnt and stout, (weigh 190) — keep up my activity and interest in life, people, progress, and the questions of the day. About two-thirds of the time I am quite comfortable. What mentality I ever had remains entirely unaffected; though physically I am a half-paralytic, and likely to be so, long as I live. But the principal object of my life seems to have been accomplish’d — I have the most devoted and ardent of friends, and affectionate relatives — and of enemies I really make no account.

Lovely, huh? Speaking of living largely in the open air—Tommy and I just got back from teaching at the Ossabaw Island Writers Retreat, and that place is almost spectral in its beauty. I’m writing a piece for Garden & Gun about it.

Cool Opportunities for Writers

• Don’t you love postcards? I do. If you read my last substack, you might recall my favorite piece of mail after publishing my New York Times Op-Ed. Delightfully crochety M.P. Treakle from Texas felt I’d used a preposition incorrectly (and cites the 1937 Websters to prove it, and sent me a 1950s postcard on which he uses a highlighter—all so awesome. Well, And I learned there’s a literary journal called Postcard that published ten pieces (poems and prose poems) on yes, you guessed it, 10 postcards. Submissions are open now!

• Poet Major Jackson’s podcast, The Slowdown, features a poem he’s chosen and his commentary about it. Now he is inviting nominations for The Slowdown. I nominated this poem by Kelli Russell Agodon that I love from her book Rising Tides. Use this link to submit a poem you love!

• Most exciting of all—the writer's residency I’m an advisor for is no longer just a dream—we’re on-target to open in later 2025. Greenfield Farm, being built on Faulken’s old mule farm, will be a “new front porch for the South,” revolutionary in that it will PAY writers to make art. So I put a happy little post about this on Facebook. . . .But remember how I said that I’d like to divest from Metaverse? It seems that Metaverse would like to divest from ME. Because everyone started liking/sharing the post—and FB thought I was paying people and took it down!

Sigh. But at least YOU dear Substackians know about it.

I’m 91% Sure I’ve Learned How to Insert a Survey So Help My Title My Piece

I have a dilemma reagarding a title of one of my micro-memoirs. I’ve called it “The Irish Goodbye.” But my friend says “Irish Exit” is more common. Yet another friend doesn’t know either term. So please weigh in:

Where You Can See my Freakishly Large Head in Person

If y’all are in the Atlanta area, please join me—I’ll be at Agnes Scott College the first week in April for their 53 writers festival! My reading on Thursday April 4 is open to the public, as are other events.

Where You Don’t Have to See My Freakishly Large Head But Can Listen and Imagine It

If you can’t come to Atlanta, you can still listen to me flap my gums—this time on the podcast “Our New South,” alongside writers Jesmyn Ward and Nikky Finney. Don’t be scared by this short promo video starring my head:

What I’m Tickled Pink By

1. Only in Mississippi: my student showed me her doctor’s excuse for missing class. “Broken nose. Patient dropped cheerleader baton.”

2. My 13-y-o son has been typecast in his middle school play. His role? “Boy Who Doesn’t Listen.”

3. Beat my arch enemy in pickleball. Aren’t arch enemies adorable?

4. My office! Y’all, I renovated my tiny little “room of one’s own.” It the bookshelf was too small and caving and the whole 25 year old set was as tired as its owner. See the before, photographed at its very messiest, grading midterms:

   

   So (with the help of California Closets) it got renovated, and because it’s MINE and I don’t have to take into consideration any of the Y chromosomes in my house, I painted it Benjamin Moore’s ”tickled pink. “

   Isn’t it pretty?

   

   I am just now filling the bookshelves with my most beloved books—what joy!

In Closing

May we all be, like Whitman, “Living largely in the open air, sunburnt and stout.”

Until next time, folks! And remember—The Bethannigan doesn’t want your money. But it does want your love! Praise me, pet me, share me, feed me. Take me home and tell your friends.