Billy Coffey

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The best things in us

April 6, 2020 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

image courtesy of photobucket.com

A quick look at my website tells me that it’s been almost two years since I added a single word to this blog.

Aside from the (very) occasional update to social media, I’ve largely been absent from the internet. There are reasons for this, good ones and many, which will likely come up from time to time in the weeks and months ahead.

For those who have kindly reached out privately to make sure I am still alive, thank you. I very much am. And for those who have wondered if I’m still writing — yes, I also very much am.

But again, we’ll get to that.

Suffice it to say for now that there was some question if Billy Coffey should remain Billy Coffey or perform a bit of literary magic and become someone else, and that at some point in the last two years, the internet became little more to me than just a place where people shouted at each other. Both of those things made me realize that maybe the wisest decision was to take a nice long break and head back out into the real world.

It’s ironic that heading back out into the real world is what ended up bringing me back to my own little corner of the virtual one.

Because it’s crazy out there right now, isn’t it?

One month ago we were all under the impression that our lives were as solid as the world we walked upon. Now we’re coming to understand that was just a story we told ourselves to keep the monsters away. The truth is that life is a fragile thing, much like our happiness, our peace, and our plans for the future. Any one of them can be threatened at any time by any number of things. We’re nowhere near as big and strong as we think. A lot of us are figuring that out right now, myself included.

Like most of you, I’ve spent the last few weeks at home. My wife the elementary school teacher is still teaching, though only to those students blessed with internet access and only from our sofa. Our children are here. I am fortunate enough to continue my day job here here in my upstairs office. We take the dog on long walks and play basketball in the driveway, spend our evenings on the front porch listening to the wind and the birds and our nights watching movies. We’ve fared better than most. The sickness has stayed away from our little town. Though its shadow creeps in everywhere, I’m even more glad than usual to call this sleepy valley my home.

Social distancing, that’s the key.

Keep others safe by keeping yourself safe. Don’t go out unless you have to. That’s life for all of us right now, and it looks like it’s going to stay that way for a while. One day at a time, wash your hands, sneeze into your elbow, wear a mask, call and text the ones you love.

Get by. I keep hearing that from people — we all just need to hang in there right now and get by.

I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that, and for many of us that has to be enough. Let’s face it, hanging in there and getting by is exhausting. Most days feel like we’re all having to swim against a constant current. Victory doesn’t mean progress, it just means holding in place.

That was my thinking up until about two days ago. I figured the best way through this was to keep apart and keep busy, so that’s what I’d been doing. Lots of work. Lots of walks. Lots of writing and reading. Getting by. I thought I was doing everything right.

Then I had to go to the Food Lion in town.

It can be a harrowing experience to go to the store now, and next time I’ll tell you how that trip to get some groceries made me feel a lot better about things. But right now I’ll leave you with what the little old Amish lady in line told the cashier. I couldn’t hear the beginning of their conversation (the rest of us in line were standing six feet apart and looking at each other like we were all infected), but I did catch the end, that warm smile and a gentle voice that said:

“The worst things in the world can never touch the best things in us.

We just have to try and get our eyes off the one and put them on the other.”

Not the first time an Amish lady told me exactly what I needed to hear.

The truth is that I’ve been practicing as much distraction these last few weeks as distance, keeping myself busy so I wouldn’t have to stop for a minute and really think about what all of this is and what it means. I’m not going to beat myself up over that. Sometimes the things that come into our lives feel too big to handle. Too scary to look at. For a lot of us, this time is one of those things. There’s nothing ever wrong in getting by.

But that little Amish lady at the Food Lion stirred something in me that had gone asleep.

I’m tired and stressed and worried and can’t stop washing my hands. But for as much as I just want all of this to be over, I also don’t want it leave me the same as I was a month ago. If we believe that nothing in life is random and everything means something — and I do — then there must be a purpose to all things, even the bad ones. For me, that means wondering what my purpose is in this, and what purpose this has in my own life.

Somewhere along the line, I lost myself. I bet I’m not the only one who can say that.

If that’s you, then maybe we can find ourselves together. Because in the end, that’s how we’ll all get through this.

 Together.

Filed Under: change, control, COVID19, encouragement, endurance, fear, home, hope, living, perspective, purpose, quarantine, small town life, social media, trials, writing

Pub Day: Steal Away Home

January 2, 2018 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

Steal Away Home

The first gift I remember getting was a baseball bat,

one of those giant hollow ones made out of bright blue plastic from down at the Family Dollar. The kind of bat you can’t help but swing and hit something, anything. Dad bought it for me. A single plastic ball, bright white and roughly the size of a coconut, came taped to the handle like an afterthought. Summertime, that’s when it was. Hot sun and a warm breeze. Me with a Spiderman T-shirt and Dad wearing a pair of cut-off shorts, a wad of tobacco in his jaw. Sometime in the mid-70s. Had to have been, because I can still see Dad’s old truck parked in the driveway beside Mom’s yellow Camaro.

And I can see the two of us out on the sidewalk in front of the house, Dad’s hand on my shoulder as he points to a splotch of gray paint on the sidewalk. Him telling me to put my foot right there, hold that bat up behind my shoulder. Get ready. Watch the ball. That pitch coming in slow and easy—“I’m rainbowin’ it,” Dad says—and me shutting my eyes to swing.

I can see all of it, every detail even these many years later.

The memory stands as fresh and clear as the one of me sitting down to my computer just a few minutes ago. Isn’t that strange? We’ve all lived so many moments, each of them recorded on some bit of gray matter in some fold of our brains, yet we’ve forgotten much more of our lives than we can recall. I can’t tell you what I did last Thursday, but I can relive that moment of taking my first swings of a baseball bat forty years ago with such clarity that I may just as well be five years old again.

I’m not sure why some memories are like that, so precise when so many others are subject to fading. But I do have a theory. Those first meetings with people and things which will come to help define our lives are ones we never forget. Those memories shine no matter the distance between when we are and when they happened because we continually return to them, keeping them strong, keeping them shiny.

That’s baseball to me. Always has been.

And I get it if baseball isn’t your thing. Really, I do. The days of every person in the country huddling around the radios in their living rooms to hear a nightly game are gone. It’s all too slow for our fast-paced lives. So much standing around and spitting, so little action. Weird rules. Steroids.

Sure.

But for me baseball was always more. Not merely a game, but my first lessons in everything from poetry to physics, history to religion.

For instance:

The only specifications for a baseball field is the distance between the bases and from the pitcher’s mound to home plate. Meaning the size of a field is limited only to one’s imagination. Meaning, I guess, that a baseball field could technically stretch on into infinity.

And there is no clock to a baseball game, no threat of time expiring. It takes as long as it takes. There must be a winner and a loser. A game perfectly played would last for eternity.

But here’s my favorite: scientifically speaking, hitting a major league fastball is impossible. The time it takes for a 95 mph pitch to reach home plate is shorter than the time it takes for the human eye to register it, much less for the human eye to then coordinate the rest of the body to swing a rounded bat in the correct plane and degree to meet a rounded ball. Meaning that game you might believe is boring really isn’t at all, it is a succession of small miracles unfolding before your very eyes.

Infinity. Eternity. Miracles. Sounds like my kind of thing.

I played baseball all through high school and had designs on playing much longer before life got in the way. That’s a story for later, though. But I still love the game and will upon occasion still wake myself in the night from swinging a bat in my dreams. It seemed inevitable, then, that the day would come when I would write a baseball book. That day is today.

Steal Away Home is my ninth novel (NINE. No wonder I’m so tired) and is out today.

You can learn more about it here.

If you’re a baseball fan, rejoice. You’ll find plenty there to nourish your love of the game. But don’t despair if you don’t know a fielder’s choice from a fungo, because it isn’t about baseball at all deep down, it’s about the things we love and come to depend upon to give our lives meaning, and how all of those things will eventually lead us to ruin unless our love is placed first in the one person who will never let us down.

Go grab you a copy. I promise you’ll love it.

Filed Under: baseball, dreams, publishing, Steal Away Home, writing

Release Day: Some Small Magic

March 14, 2017 by Billy Coffey 3 Comments

some small magic coverLet me tell you about a kid I know, a boy named Abel.

In many ways he’s not unlike a lot of children around here, meaning Abel’s family is poor and he has only one parent at home. That would be Lisa, Abel’s momma. Lisa spends most of her time waiting tables down at the diner. The tips aren’t much but they provide. There’s groceries enough, along with the rent money for their little rundown house along a dead-end dirt road outside town. Abel stays home most times. He came into the world with a mild form of brittle bone disease. Any awkward step can leave Abel casted and laid up for weeks. He’s got to be careful in what he does. Lisa worries about her boy. There are times, many times, when Abel knows himself a burden his momma cannot bear.

But I don’t want you thinking everything in Abel’s life is bad.

Far from it. He doesn’t have much but believes that okay; very often the ones truly cursed in life are those who have more than they know what to do with. It’s hard for Abel to get around with those soft bones, but there isn’t much exercise involved in reading. That’s what he does mostly, Abel reads, which has turned him into maybe the smartest kid I’ve ever known. And you can say all you want about the way his classmates pick on him, Abel’s got someone who will do just about anything in the world for him. Dumb Willie Farmer might only be the janitor at the elementary school (and might only be Dumb, as the name implies), but you will find no better friend. Ask Abel, he’ll tell you.

And about that house: sure it’s nothing more than a rented little shack, but it’s set along the edge of a field where the trains pass three times a day. Abel loves his trains. He’ll limp out there every day to count the cars and wave at the conductor. His daddy’s gone, prayed into the sky before Abel was born, but some days Abel will wave at that train going by and imagine a daddy he never knew waving back.

I’m not sure how life would have turned out for Abel had he not gotten into trouble with his momma and cleaned their house as an apology. Have you ever noticed how quick things can change off one small decision? It happened to Abel that way. He even cleans up the spare bedroom in back of the house where Lisa says he should never go, and that’s where he finds his daddy’s letters—shoved into an old popcorn tin and addressed to Abel Shifflett of Mattingly, Virginia. Some of these letters are dated from years back, but the one on top? Sent three weeks ago. Abel can only sit and ponder it all. His daddy’s not dead. And more than that, one of those letters reveal where his not-dead daddy is: a place called Fairhope, North Carolina.

It’s one of those times when all of life’s murky darkness gets shot through with a beam of light.

Abel knows what he’s supposed to do. He’s going to find his daddy and bring him home. Because that will fix everything, you see? His momma won’t have to work so hard anymore. The two of them won’t have to struggle. If Abel can get his daddy home, they’ll all be a family. It’s all Abel has ever wanted.

The problem is how a ten-year-old boy with soft bones is supposed to make it all the way down to someplace in Carolina without getting found. It’s too long of a way, and there will surely be danger. But then Abel realizes he has a secret weapon in his friend Dumb Willie, and the two of them hatch a scheme to run away from home. They’ll hop one of the trains coming by Abel’s house and ride it as far as they need. It isn’t a terrible idea so far as ideas go, but one which doesn’t take long to go awry. Hopping a moving train at night is an act fraught with peril, especially with a broken little boy and his not-so-smart friend. Abel’s journey seems to end before it begins when he is crushed under the rails.

But this isn’t a tragic story—oh no. This is a tale of magic big and small, and Abel and Dumb Willie aren’t the only ones at the train that night. Death itself has come in the form of a young woman to take Abel on. One look at this broken boy is enough to convince her this is a thing she cannot do. Even Death carries a burden too great, having witnessed so many children having their lives ended in so many needless ways. And while both Death and Dumb Willie (who is not so Dumb after all) understand what has happened to Abel, Abel himself does not. He convinces the strange but pretty girl who saved them to join in their journey, after which he promises to let her take them home.

So it is that Death itself accompanies two boys along the rails through the wilds of West Virginia and eastern Tennessee, clear to the Carolina mountains. Looking for a father long thought dead. Looking for a little magic.

That is the story in short for my eighth novel, Some Small Magic, which is out today.

There’s more to Abel’s journey (trust me, a lot more), but the rest is for you to discover. Believe me when I say you won’t be disappointed.

It’s my favorite book so far, and you can pick it up by heading here.

In the meantime, should you find yourself at a railroad stop in central Appalachia, do yourself a favor. Scan those boxcars as they fly past. They might not be all empty. And if you see three faces peering out at the blue sky, send a little prayer their way.

Because those three are bound west, toward home.

Filed Under: Adventure, challenge, choice, death, faith, family, home, magic, publishing, Some Small Magic, Thomas Nelson, trials, writing

Washing away the mess we make

July 1, 2016 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

OuterBanks16 1

I stand upon a sliver of land off the North Carolina coast that I call home for one week a year, looking at what has been written in the spot of sand at my feet.

For seven years now, this spot has been my special place. All the information I need to navigate my day can be found right here without use of a screen or wifi, without any device at all.

Here, the tanagers and mockingbirds are my alarm clock. Deer move silent along narrow trails cut among the sea oats, calling the weather by the way their noses tilt to the air. Dolphins dance for their breakfast, twirling and slapping their tails in the calmness beyond the breakers, telling me when it is time to cast a line among the waves.

Yet while solitude here is plentiful, I am reminded that I have not wholly left all things behind.

There are others here as well, a family far down along the beach, a man patrolling the dunes, who have come to this place in search of the very comfort I crave.

I tend to study these others with the same sort of fascination I give to the constellations that shine over these deep waters at night, or the cockles and welks I pick up from sandbars that rise up and then fade in the changing tides. A trip through our tiny parking lot reveals that many who have answered the ocean’s siren call have traveled quite far—Ohio, Michigan, even Idaho. We are all travelers here. As such, friendliness presents itself as a thing ably given, but only with the unspoken expectation that all parties will be allowed to return to their own families, their own lives, in short order.

Umbrellas pop up along the beach in the early morning as though the sand has broken out in a multi-hued pox, each widely spaced so as to neither intrude nor interfere: islands on an island. This partition extends even into the ocean, where one is expected not to stray from the invisible line stretched outward from one corner of your square of beach to the next. If one does, should the waves you jump over or ride atop carry you in front of where your neighbors sit reading Dean Koontz and sipping glasses of wine bought at the island’s only Food Lion, your fun must be paused until you stand and fight your way back across the current to where you belong.

I’m unsure whether this need for boundaries is expressed unconsciously or with intent—if it speaks toward a desire to allow others their own attempt at peace and renewal, or if it rather tells of a deep-seated wariness toward short-term neighbors.

Hillary4prisonBut a little bit ago I took a long walk along the shore, and now I think I have that answer. Here among the piles of scallop shells and oysters and augurs, HILLARY FOR PRISON 2016 has been written into the sand. Not far down comes BERNING FOR NC. Then, TRUMP’S FIRED ’16. Each carved by a different finger or big toe, each thus far saved from the encroaching tide but not by the vandalisms of others.

I thought of two things as I stood by each of those pronouncements, and how those pronouncements had been scrawled at with such rage. One is that we can leave our problems and cares at home for a short while but not our divisions. The other is that increasingly, our divisions are becoming worse and angrier.

This in itself is nothing new; our country has always been an angry one. But our collective mood has changed these last years in such a way that it now feels more a souring that hangs between us all. Our rage and distrust has gone from a thing—the government, the economy—to a person—the hated Other who dares not believe as we believe.

It is a depressing thing, really. And to be honest, it is also the very thing I wanted to get away from for a few days. But here I am yet again, a neutral witness to a raging culture war, and it saddens me as much as I’m sure it does you. It saddens me a lot.

I’m only glad I’m out here alone with only the pipers and gulls. Should the Hillary supporter, Bernie person, and Trumpster meet, there may be violence. That’s where things have arrived at now, or at least where things are headed. And I’m willing to say that’s why even here this year, everyone mostly keeps to themselves. Because we’re all tired of it, all the fighting. Because we all just want a break from the notion that we’ve come to associate the opinions and stances of others with their entirety as people, and from the ugly truth that we have somehow gone from mere disagreement with those who think other than us, to wariness, to distrust, to blame, and now, finally, to hate.

I am a writer. That term is a broad one, though I’ve found its job description narrow enough to fit inside a single sentence: Every time you sit to work, try to tell the story of us all.

Thankfully, that story has been fairly easy to come by for most of my life. Lately, though, it’s gotten a bit harder. Diversity is the magic word now, just as the celebration of all that makes us different has in certain circles become our national religion. And while that might be right and good, I’ve found that celebrating of differences often casts aside all those things that makes us the same.

Like you, I don’t know where we’re going as a country. Like you, I’m worried about it. If the recent tragedy in Orlando speaks of a single thing, it isn’t that there are those who would focus upon the weapon a terrorist used rather than the ideology behind why he used it, or that it is far too easy for a sick man to purchase an instrument of war. To me, Orlando says that we have reached a point now where we can no longer even come together to mourn.

But I’ll leave you with this. That family I saw far down the beach made their way past me a little bit ago. Dad, mom, and two little kids. They did not avoid me as they passed, did not take the easier path toward the dunes to walk around me. The father did not look at me as though I were some potential threat, nor did his children glare at me with Stranger Danger eyes. Instead, the mother smiled and offered me a sand dollar they’d found just up the beach. The kids wanted to see my tattoo. And the dad, grinning, merely said, “How ya doin’, buddy?”

And you know what? I’m doing fine. I am.

OuterBanks16 2Because I nodded and said as much to that beautiful family and then left all that scribble in the sand for the tide to wash away. I walked on as they walked on, all of us looking out toward the ocean with the breeze in our faces and the smell of salt filling our lungs, thinking much the same: in spite of the mess we are prone to make of things, ours is still a beautiful world.

Filed Under: conflict, emotions, encouragement, messes, perspective, Politics, vacation, writing

Release Day: There Will Be Stars

May 3, 2016 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

Twitter_There_Will_Be_Stars

Today is release day for my newest novel, There Will be Stars.

If you’ve hung with me for the last seven books (sheesh, seven books!), chances are you’ll know the name Bobby Barnes. He popped up the first time way back in Snow Day, then again in The Devil Walks in Mattingly, then one more time in In The Heart of the Dark Wood. Kind of strange that one of the most recurring characters in all of Mattingly should be the town drunk, but then that’s me. I’ve always been drawn to characters who are broken in some way, probably because I’m a little broken, too.

Probably because we’re all a little broken.

You guys know that, right? We’re all broken people living in a broken world, and the trick is to seek out the beauty in all the cracks. That’s what life is all about. It’s certainly what it’s all about for Bobby when you get to the end of this story.

People often ask me if the shine wears off after seven books. I tell them no, it doesn’t. Between you and me, though, that’s kind of a lie. The truth is that every release day marks an event I spent a really long time trying to convince myself would happen.

Twenty years passed between the day I sat down and said I wanted to write a novel and the day my first novel was released.

And between the two . . . well, let’s just say a few of those years were dark ones that I don’t care to ever live again. So each year that a new novel comes out is a cause for celebration—it means I’ve made it this far. But while I’ll likely walk around for most of today with a goofy smile on my face, I know I haven’t quite made it where I want to be just yet. That’s why I’ll also spend much of today getting ready for what’s next.

In the meantime, please do head over to Thomas Nelson’s site for places to order a copy of There Will be Stars. Or even better, head on down to your local bookstore grab it there. And don’t you worry about Bobby Barnes. Sure, he’s not the sort of guy you’d want around. But the great thing about starting out with a ruined character is that it leaves the door open for redemption by the end. And is there a better thing in this life than that?

I don’t think so.

Filed Under: Thomas Nelson, writing

Chasing our collective ghosts

March 8, 2016 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

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When you’re raised in the South and announce your intention to become a writer, people look at you funny.

They’ll shake their heads maybe and grin definitely, squeeze your shoulder or the soft spot inside your elbow and bless you with a “Bud” or “Sugar” on the end. There, too, will be a hesitation, a loaded pause at after that “Lord help you, Dear” meant as a warning to be wary of the title Southern. Be a writer, they mean, and only that. Any adjective you have a mind to apply will only invite others to do the same.

Writer can become Southern writer can become only a Southern writer.

Yet even this will not explain the uncertain stares that follow an author here. To most, there is no negative connotation to being only a writer concerned with dusty roads and fading churches, the hollers and hills and those either blessed or cursed to live from Virginia west through Tennessee and down to the Gulf shores. Indeed, an argument could well be made that this region has yielded more and greater contributions to American letters than any other, likely due to a uniquely story-driven culture. We grow up with stories here, many of which have never been committed to paper but passed from one generation to the next on creaky porches and wobbling kitchen tables, along with the lessons those stories tell. Faulkner was only a Southern writer, as was O’Connor and Percy, Wolfe and Welty. To our relations north and west, such company would be sought after.

Here, there is an understanding of what it means to be known as a Southern writer. It is to contend with the ghosts.

By this I do not mean the ghosts that walk our woods and mountains, caught in some nether region between life and death. There are plenty of those, though from the tales I’ve heard they warrant more pity than fear. I mean those ghosts which truly haunt us, notions of tradition and justice and the memories of poverty and inequality and slavery, that mire the South in a history we can neither set aside nor escape. I can think of a no more reviled and revered part of our country than this, which I believe goes toward the idea that it is the South that holds many of our history’s sins and much of its graces. The past rules here. It is a place where the ground you tread was made holy by blood and tears, where people will ask of your name, your relations, and the state of your eternal soul in a single sentence, and where you are frowned upon if you dare settle far from the bones of your kin.

This is the setting for the writer of the Southern fiction.

We cast our eyes and our pens upon this landscape with truth in mind. We stare down the ghosts not with the hopes of seeing them vanish, but seeing them as they are. It is by doing so that we stand as intermediary in the breech between Here and Elsewhere, past and present. We are the literary equivalent of the person who will shout down a family member but fight a stranger who tries to do likewise.

We are known as rednecks. Bible-thumpers and NASCAR lovers, animal killers and Tea Partiers. You will find much of that in our stories. You will also find a people whose kindness will strip you of words and whose dignity in the midst of heart-wrenching poverty will convict you of your own deeds. And you will find us as well, these keepers of a present drenched in the past, shining a light into the dark places of the human heart in order to see both its narrowness and its depth.

Our stories are not only of the South. More than anything else, that is what I want you to know. A peer-reviewed study published last April in the journal PLOS ONE used Google trends to analyze the most racist region of America. Their findings suggested not Mississippi or Georgia or Virginia, but an area stretching from Kentucky to the northeast. A recent survey conducted by the Oklahoma Symposium of Racial Studies concluded that the most racist city in the United States isn’t Montgomery or Atlanta, but Portland, Oregon. Slavery and inequality doesn’t just belong south of the Mason-Dixon. Those things built New York city, too. They built Washington, D.C.

Those ghosts are everywhere.

They wander and creep and haunt. And it is the Southern writer who goes chasing after them, because every ghost should be dragged to the light.

Filed Under: gothic, South, truth, writing

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