I’ve started my fourth novel, a story that I have been carrying with me for over a decade. Growing up in Chattanooga, I was surrounded by Civil War battlefields. It is a big part of Chattanooga’s story. It is, undeniably, a deep part of my own family’s story. My great-grandfather was a Union soldier injured on Snodgrass Hill in the battle of Chickamauga. After the war, he decided to stay in Chattanooga and build our family home in Chattanooga Valley, just miles from the battlefield where he was injured. I have decided to name my novel Flintstone. For me, the title fits. It seems to encapsulate so much of how I feel about the complexity of the South.
The Tennessee River is also, undoubtedly, a big part of my story. Even now, I live along the French Broad, a river which flows directly into the Tennessee. In fact, I see the process of writing a novel the same way I see a watershed. With this new novel, I have already determined time, place, and person. Now the trick is for me to absorb all of the other elements that flow into that story, from near and far away. That process unfolds slowly. It takes a whole lot of time, research, and silence. In the South, all streams and rivers flow towards the great Mississippi. In the South, our modern story flows directly from the injustice and horror of slavery and the devastation of the Civil War. It happened that way, as epic as any Iliad or Odyssey, and it still defines us. Flintstone begins there.