TOA & Alabama

This week, The Offending Adam pauses our usual publication schedule for a specific and important purpose. We are presenting a week of writing on Tuscaloosa. You will see from this collection of writing from people connected to Tuscaloosa that Tuscaloosa is boozy, ghostly, quiet, funny, sad; it is the seasons, a mythic place, the trunk of a car, red clay, a hammer, a bird, bratty sometimes, a train spike, a blurry view, bridges, an escape, a purgatory; that it is graceful, and it is lordly. That it is not gone. I know that Tuscaloosa may be broken and that Tuscaloosa may be bruised but that Tuscaloosa will recover. And that it will recover with our help.

When we think of communities that support writers, we typically think of New York City and San Francisco, possibly Chicago and Boston and Los Angeles. Places that are big and obvious centers of creativity. What is easy to forget is that much of the nurturing of young, cutting-edge writers and artists happens in more surreal, odd places: Tuscaloosa, Iowa City, Las Vegas, Fayetteville, Syracuse, Gainesville, Missoula, Tucson, Greensboro, Nashville, and Baton Rouge, just to name a few off the top of my head. These are the communities that have set up programs and opportunities for us to set up shop and spend a few years working on our craft and our dream. These are not just off-beat or backwoods cities and towns; they are where a generation of writers are growing and developing, and the place that we call home, even if only temporarily. These are places that have inspired our writing and, oftentimes, come to inhabit our writing. Almost without my noticing it, Las Vegas as a place has crept into my poems and made itself at home. And in these writings from Alabama, you can see how important and vital Tuscaloosa has become for the group of writers who are down there. So, please, help support the greater community of Alabama and Tuscaloosa as well as the specific community of writers who have found a welcome home in the community.

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