Matthew Cullifer's Blog - Posts Tagged "dixieland"
"What he wanted to be when he grew up..."
Dixieland
Growing up, my heroes were teachers, writers, and professional wrestlers. I wanted to become one of the three.
I've dabbled with writing since I was fourteen--horror crap mostly that I'd stolen from Stephen King. Later in high school, I discovered the classics--Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck-- and like any angry, young man with a fascination with words, I dreamed of writing the fabled "Great American Novel." I wrote of things in which I had no experience: foreign wars, heartache, and death. It was rubbish.
Eventually, teenage heartache did come, and I handled it badly. I wallowed in it. Bret Easton Ellis' works entered my life, and he became the new messiah. Drug-addled, self-indulgent characters began to litter what I was attempting to write; they were lost, desperate. That went on for ten years and the words slowly to a trickle.
In the meantime, I became a teacher, a husband, a father, an assistant principal, and later a principal at an elementary school. The only words were academic.
In the spring of 2017, though, the words returned in a flash: "Friday night at the Gavin-Campbell Farm Center is hot as hell." I wasn't sure what it was or where it was going, but over the next three months, the words where there whenever I touched the keyboard. That sentence became "Dixieland," my first completed and coherent novel.
It's not for everyone. It's a niche novel detailing a failing professional wrestling business in south Georgia in the 1980s, but it's more than that. It's the story of fathers and sons, surviving and living. It's a love letter to days gone by, and a conversation that I never got to have with my Dad.
Follow me on Twitter @MatthewCullifer
Growing up, my heroes were teachers, writers, and professional wrestlers. I wanted to become one of the three.
I've dabbled with writing since I was fourteen--horror crap mostly that I'd stolen from Stephen King. Later in high school, I discovered the classics--Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck-- and like any angry, young man with a fascination with words, I dreamed of writing the fabled "Great American Novel." I wrote of things in which I had no experience: foreign wars, heartache, and death. It was rubbish.
Eventually, teenage heartache did come, and I handled it badly. I wallowed in it. Bret Easton Ellis' works entered my life, and he became the new messiah. Drug-addled, self-indulgent characters began to litter what I was attempting to write; they were lost, desperate. That went on for ten years and the words slowly to a trickle.
In the meantime, I became a teacher, a husband, a father, an assistant principal, and later a principal at an elementary school. The only words were academic.
In the spring of 2017, though, the words returned in a flash: "Friday night at the Gavin-Campbell Farm Center is hot as hell." I wasn't sure what it was or where it was going, but over the next three months, the words where there whenever I touched the keyboard. That sentence became "Dixieland," my first completed and coherent novel.
It's not for everyone. It's a niche novel detailing a failing professional wrestling business in south Georgia in the 1980s, but it's more than that. It's the story of fathers and sons, surviving and living. It's a love letter to days gone by, and a conversation that I never got to have with my Dad.
Follow me on Twitter @MatthewCullifer
