Redneck Writer’s Group
By Jeffrey Stueber
In the town of
Sam, farmer, often comes to the meetings wearing blue jeans with manure-stained remnants permanently etched into his clothing. We often play the game of “guess what pattern the stains on his clothes make” as he ambles into our meeting room. The other game we play is “who gets to sit next to Sam.” His favorite topic - only topic, actually – is farming and he adorns his writings with references to the animals in his farm. Every animal has a name: Bessie the cow, Donald the Duck, Tripod the three-legged cat whose fourth leg was tragically lost in a battle with a push lawn mower. I surmised that his reality knows of nothing else than farming and his writing reflected that.
Bill and Phil joined our group when we still met at Morrys, the local pub. When they joined they thought they were just partying with a bunch of drunken fools, which we actually were at that particular meeting. They stayed because their alcoholic demeanor needed some creative juices to flow to help deaden their barley-malt personality. Their writings are generally uninteresting and inarticulate and populated with titles like “Poo on your shirt” and “My Balding Ford Truck Tires.” They harmonize their readings like a bad episode of American Idol, each taking turns and forgetting when to switch so that their renditions meld together like a bad radio station that could not hold its frequency as other stations attempted to intrude on it.
Rita is a cat lover with an allergy that is made worse by her insistence on spending every moment with them. Cat hair adorns her jacket as does a pocket full of nasal spray she would inhale at periodic intervals during each meeting. Her writings were about – what else? – her cats and nearly every meeting Sam attempts to pawn off his three-legged cat on Rita. The situation is often made worse by Phil’s barely intelligible “kill the damn thing” comment that enrages both. This is usually the time we take a break until the atmosphere resumes a calmer demeanor.
There are other beautiful specimens in the group. Stan collects pornographic magazines and frequently refers to the writing in them as if it was Shakespearean. The pages he brings to group meetings usually contain traces of female body parts (which we try to ignore) and if he could consume his mind with something other than nakedness – politics, for instance – he could produce well-written material. Beth is not a writer by nature although she loves to listen to poetry. The writer’s group is merely an avenue by which to exchange cookie recipes. When she does write, her offerings resemble a jagged collection of meandering thoughts that resemble brain scribbles. Kris is a young adult whose poetry – if you could call it that – reflects her animosity toward her former boyfriend. Nothing of hers is given without the shedding of at least one tear as it reveals an uncultured scorched beauty saddened by remorse. Max, a high school dropout and intellectually transient adult, excelled at writing until his near-death experience being almost trampled to death by pigs on his parents’ home changed his life. He is now “religious” to some degree although his type of religion baffles me. His writings oscillate from tales of alien abductions and Jesus cults to Wiccan incantation festivals and Buddhist herbal tea remedies.
This is my writer’s group and in Mooseport it is as much entertainment you could have in one sitting without a television. The people in the group aren’t model citizens drawn from the pages of a home and garden magazine, but I try to look on this group as my own little slice of heaven with angels whose halos are bruised and battered by the tumults of redneck Mooseport reality.