As a 60s San Francisco vintage, culturally diverse woman with roots in the Tatra Mountains and the Smokey Mountains I write into a very sparsely populated room. Don’t get me wrong, others visit there, but my writing may be as inspired by what has not been seen as writing, in spite of my dangerous reading addiction. How do I quote the clap songs, the hopscotch rhymes, the small prayers that informed my early work and inform my writing to this moment? Dunno. If I’m very honest I’m probably as marked by Twisted Sister and Paul Williams lyrics as I am by any other thing. Now I’m picturing Baba Yaga singing The Rainbow Connection with Grace Slick. Let us say that my writing is informed by street magic, radio conjurings, and yes, some literature. All of that aside, my Cherokee family is liberally dusted with writers and bank robbers. Henry Starr was both, this is from his book Thrilling Events,
“One time a party said: “How brave you are!’ but I quickly checked him up by saying that an outlaw could not get that high in the scale of courage. The word ‘brave’ should only be applied to those who risk their lives in an honest calling, such as fighting for their country. Give a man moral courage and he’s got the other fellow whipped; that is, if he believes sincerely in his own cause and holds a clear conscience. A lot of cynical people will smile at the thought of an outlaw having a conscience, but that very thing has given me a brand of courage that has made me entirely free from fear of anything, here or hereafter. You may have heard people say, ‘He has a brave heart.” To my thinking there is no such thing. The proper expression would be: ‘He has a brave head’- the heart has nothing to do with it, because you first see the object to be feared, and the eye telegraphs the impression to the brain. The brain flashes it to the nervous system, and if the brain gives a false or exaggerated report, cowardice results.”