The ladder was tall.
The cowboy, short.
Winter chill in the air. Another month and we would be under snow here in the high desert of Central Oregon. I was already cold under my woefully insufficient leather jacket but I was here on a mission. Warmth would have to wait.
I stepped into the weather-beaten horse arena. “Hello?” My voice echoed a bit.
“Up here!" There, way up in the rafters, competing with barn swallows, was the man I was looking for. “What can I do for you,” he threw over his shoulder, fixing something and not paying me much mind.
I was expected. I had called in advance but, heck no, as I would soon learn, ranch chores didn’t wait for guests to arrive, especially those of the unsolicited nature, which I was. Yes. I was on the hunt, doing research on “the cowboy culture.” What was the cowboy code? Did the real deal cowboy exist anymore? Or was that Old West culture dead, except what is remembered in Will James drawings?
“Might I ask you a few questions,” I said, standing underneath the ladder precariously balanced on wooden stairs. Looking at the wiry figure above, I sensed that I had hit paydirt here. Spurs. Boots. Black hat. Wranglers. Carhartt jacket dirty from the years. Worn-out work gloves taped around the thumbs, a repair that spoke of knowing what poverty and tough times were all about.
“About what,” he asked directly.
“Cowboys,” I answered directly.
You could hear his chuckle all the way down the ladder. This was a Perry Mason moment with me on the witness stand but that was nothing new in my line of work. As a writer and filmmaker, I was used to being queried and kept at arm’s length. Put in the kind of decades I have under my belt writing about the lives of mostly ordinary folks and you get used to the natural response of “Thank you kindly. But I’d rather not.”
I got it. Trust. You had to earn it. As writers like me should.
A minute more, job done, he came down, tools in hand. “Charley Snell,“ he offered his hand with a smile that had life to it. “You look cold. Come on. We can turn the heat on in the office.”
You had to be a blind fool not to see. In that moment I knew. Charley Snell was the real deal. 🙂
ORDINARY MASTERPIECES
“I thought you would like these,” her note said.
The surprise was a sheet of uncirculated stamps commemorating the life of Andrew Wyeth, one of America’s most well-known and beloved artists. Standing in the post office, holding the images in my hand, Wind from the Sea, Christina’s World, North Light, I had to laugh a little at life.
You see, as a child, I had no clue how famous they were. They were just "the Wyeths” who lived in the old farmhouse along Brandywine River, down that winding, one-lane road past the Sonoco gas station and my Dad’s favorite-cup-of-coffee and hamburger restaurant, Hank’s Place. The crossroads town of Chadds Ford, PA was simply their home and mine.
Yet, the world Andrew Wyeth painted was the one in which I lived. Flour Mill. Chester County Farm. Blue Dump. Those bare-bone colors of winter and fall. The simplicity of Quaker living. The bleak loneliness of fields harvested, now waiting for spring. Evening at Kuerners could have been my sledding hill.
I realize it now, many years later. We are a bit alike, this Andrew Wyeth and me. He saw beauty, wonder and love in what others deride as “commonplace," “rural” and “American.” The meaning Andrew beheld, he sought to share through art.
And so do I. As a writer, filmmaker and American storyteller, I most often tell the stories of ordinary people, mostly rural folks, who are rooted in this land that I love. As an artisan, I tend to see in ways that others don’t and find meaning often in the bleak, lonely and waiting places of life. Out of life, imagination, relationship and spirit, I create ordinary masterpieces. This is who I am. It is what I do.
LeT ME HELP YOU...
/ Evaluate your idea,
manuscript
or Screenplay
Whatever state your idea is in currently, let me offer you a
fresh pair of eyes and a thorough
assessment based upon my
decades of professional experience.
/ PRovide direction / Strategies
From concept to completion,
we will craft the best plan
for getting the writing done along with impletmenting a successful marketing strategy based upon
your material and your
target audience.
/by doing the Writing itself or coach you in the process
Large or small, let me take the burden of writing off your shoulders or teach you how to do it yourself.
Saltpeter, Charcoal and Sulfur
But on paper? Oh boy. Did we have work to do or what? Those teenage years of neglecting basic grammar were exacting their dues. Disjoint, run-on sentences with fifty concepts each. Some in my shoes would have run for the hills. But, naw, helping him was exactly why I had come alongside this fledging writer as a coach and copy editor.
You could tell. This man had the gunpowder in his spirit. He was not going to be daunted in the least by the process. He understood that this was his part of the reason for being here on earth. It mattered and he was not going to let life’s stuff put it on hold. All he needed were some matches and, you bet, I had a bucket load of them.
So we began, most times, sentence-by-sentence, right down to the roots of what he was struggling to communicate. When I work with a client, whether I do the writing or coach them through their book, screenplay, blog, marketing or whatever, our goal is to access the power inherent in the process of birthing a concept from the ethereal dimension of imagination into the concrete world of language.
Together, we partner to create their finest work.
It didn’t take long for this client of mine. Soon, I worked myself out of a job. And gladly so. He needed me no longer. The saltpeter, charcoal and sulfur had exploded.