Matthew M Cornett

Tag: fiction

  • “Year of the Cat”

    I’m going to start out this week by making a confession and I don’t care if you laugh. I one hundred percent have a “soft spot” (pun intended) for 1970’s Soft Rock and I know exactly who to both thank and blame. Give me a sappy 70’s love song soaked in pop sentiment and polyester, and I’m right back there in that front room on Northside Drive, sitting in my mother’s lap in that ugly exorcist green chair, listening to her favorite 8 track cassette tapes on a rainy Fall day in 1976. Those kinds of moments probably made me the sappy 53 year old I am now but I’m good with that.

    I’m the youngest of four kids. I was born in 1972 and my sister is two years older than me which means that she started kindergarten in the Fall of 1975. From that moment until I started Kindergarten in the Fall of 1977, it was me and my mom during the day. Those days were spent playing, reading, listening to music, watching The Electric Company, and napping which I hated. Making me sit still was the worst punishment and I think my mom invented “time out.” Thinking back, I couldn’t have had a better childhood. I define my life by the beautiful memories I have and those are the earliest and most self-defining. What a gift my mother gave me. 

    The music that stands out to me from those days comes from artists like The Carpenters and Barry Manilow (again, I already said to go ahead and laugh). Hearing them and basically any mid 70’s Soft Rock song immediately transports me back to those days. To me, those songs feel like a warm cozy blanket on a lazy rainy day. If you don’t get that from some kind of music no matter how corny, I feel sorry for you. I do have a couple of playlists you can check out though so let me know!

    In chapter 6 of my book If We Never Meet Again, I tell the story of Hannah. She had terminal cancer and was only a few years older than me. As I stated early in her story “Hannah was the one patient who changed everything for me. The others before her were powerful experiences that taught me about hospice but Hannah changed me. She imprinted herself on my soul” (41). When I go to patient homes, I always end up looking at the pictures they have around and the older, the better. I’m fascinated with older pictures of times gone by. When I went to Hannah’s house for the first time, I noticed this picture of “Hannah and her sister dancing outdoors at some celebration, each with a gorgeous smile on their faces laughing right at the moment the photo was taken. Hannah was dressed in silk like material that glistened in the camera flash” (42). The photo was a beautiful moment and I don’t think I will ever forget that smile on her face. 

    As fate would have it, somehow I ended up at her house one night so her brother could get some rest out on the couch. I didn’t know it then but she was actively dying and I was there holding her hand:

    “As I tried to settle back in the chair to keep her company while her brother rested, Hannah stared straight up at the ceiling. A tear started out of the corner of her right eye and then she looked over at me. I could see that she was terrified. She opened and turned her right hand toward me. I placed mine in hers and patted her lovingly with my other hand doing my best to give her my most comforting and sympathetic smile. Our eyes were locked onto each other, hers filled with fear, and mine attempting to be strong. “It’s going to be alright Hannah. I’m here with you and I’m not going anywhere. Close your eyes and try to rest.” She never did. We sat there for at least three hours locked in that embrace with her eyes going from mine, to the ceiling, around the room, then back to mine again. Everytime our eyes met I smiled at her trying my best to comfort this woman I did not know (45).”

    When it came time to choose a song from my playlist to represent Hannah, it was an easy choice because of that photo of her. I have always loved Al Stewart’s “Year of the Cat” from 1976. Al Stewart is a fascinating Scottish born musician. If you get a chance, watch some interviews he has done. He is a genuinely down to earth guy that you could hang out with at a local pub. According to the video “Al Stewart talks Year of the Cat” you can find on Youtube, he grew up wanting to be in rock and roll like Duanne Eddy who inspired him to pick up the guitar but felt his early rock and roll work was awful until Bob Dylan came along and “saved his life.” He says “He (Dylan) couldn’t play and he couldn’t sing either but he could do things with lyrics that were magical.” He set off to be a folk singer and found success in the late 60’s and early 70’s. He was later influenced by Paul Simon as well. He eventually found himself on tour in America supporting Linda Ronstadt. He began work on what would become “Year of the Cat.” He based it off a warm up riff his piano player kept playing. The record company didn’t like his first version about a british comedian who had committed suicide and they asked him to rewrite the lyrics. His girlfriend at the time had a book on Vietnamese Astrology and the page was open to a chapter called “The Year of the Cat.” He thought to himself, “that to me looks like a song title.” Casablanca was on the television and he “started playing with it.” The rest is history. He felt the song wasn’t that great so he made it the last track on the album but the song was a hit and resonated with listeners. 

    I have always loved the song. Its opening piano riff that takes its time to build up to the moment is a masterclass in pop musical set up. Modern music with its short attention span desperately trying to catch the listener’s attention within the first 15 seconds could learn from him. When it finally kicks in to the drums, bass, and electric guitar it has a perfect feel and flow. And I have always loved its sound: crisp, clean, and pure. It sounds like a less perfectly engineered Steely Dan recording, which is not a putdown in any way. By the time he sings “On a morning from a Bogart movie” you realize that this is truly something special. But what really gets me is when he says what I think is one of the best lines from any pop song to ever describe a woman:

    She comes out of the sun

    In a silk dress running

    Like a watercolor in the rain

    Don’t bother asking for explanations

    She’ll just tell you that she came

    In the year of the cat 

    That line is mesmerizing. “Out of the sun in a silk dress running like a watercolor in the rain.” The alliteration sun and silk…the rhyme of sun and run…the image of a watercolor in the rain. Dang. It’s Shakesperian. It’s as perfect a line as I’ve ever heard in pop music. In my text I wrote “I don’t have any idea who Al Stewart was describing in those lines but it should have been Hannah in that photo” (42). 

    The ladies group at my mom’s church back in Lexington, Ky, read my book for their book club and I had the privilege to go back home there in March for their meeting. One of the women asked me which death was the hardest on me. Without a hesitation I said “Hannah…it was like watching my own sister die.” At the end of the chapter, I wrote:

    People come in and out of our lives for all kinds of reasons. I think Hannah came into mine to truly personalize it for me. When Mr. Miller died, it was simply a culmination of a life well lived and there was comfort in knowing that he was at rest. Hannah wasn’t much older than me; she could have been my sister. Her death felt more tragic. In the world of hospice, you start to see death so much that it just becomes part of the job but even after all this time, I’m still not over her. I hope I never will be. 

    I can honestly say that sitting here writing this, I’m still not over her. Her sister-in-law was right. I would have loved to have known her before the brief time that I did. But I can honestly say that her death was one that influenced me to begin writing these stories. It’s not much, but it is her legacy and that makes me happy. 

  • Writing Style

    Bob Dylan was a master of messing with the press. Throughout his early career he was constantly hounded by them wherever he went. He was playful, sarcastic, and often bewildered by the constant attention. While on tour in Australia back in 1966, someone asked him why he wore such “outlandish clothes.” In a typical sardonic Dylan reply he said “I look very normal where I live.” Style is a fascinating subject, especially when you start thinking about it in relation to writing. When I taught writing to my high school seniors, inevitably, the topic would always come up. To me, writing styles are like flavors-some will naturally appeal to you, some can become an acquired taste if you stick with them long enough, and others will never connect with you no matter what you do. Trying to argue with someone about liking or disliking a style is like telling someone they are wrong for preferring one flavor over another. 

    I always told my students that style needs to suit the purpose. If you are writing something formal, then it makes sense to stay within that confine, but if not, then the style is up to you. I often joked with my students that there were English teachers who would correct the great writers of the past. If Hemingway sat in a modern writing class, most teachers would say “Ernie, could you maybe connect some of these short, terse sentence structures so things could flow a little better?” Hemingway would probably punch them in the mouth and go win a Pulitzer Prize. The same would have gone for Faulkner. “Hey Willie, do you think you could stop with the long, overdrawn sentence structures? I have to read some of your paragraphs twice for them to make sense.” He would ignore their suggestion like a southern gentleman, and go win a Pulitzer Prize of his own. 

    As an English major, I was exposed to all sorts of styles and I truly enjoyed discussing and analyzing them but when it comes to thinking about your own style? That’s a whole different experience. Remember, my belief is that style suits the purpose. I could have elevated the style and written a totally different book but that wasn’t my purpose. I wanted to convey my true experience so to be honest, this one is completely me. One thing that I have heard people say (especially those who have known me personally and professionally) is that when they are reading my book, they can hear me saying the things that I have written. That is certainly because in writing this book, I didn’t just use a conversational writing style (which is how I would describe it); it really is me “naked as a tree” as David Gray calls it in his 2015 song “Back in the World.”  

    I think that’s why it freaked me out a little early on. When they finally released it in mid January, it was only available for pre-order. A lot of friends and family told me that they had ordered theirs and I was very excited but no one had the book yet. It really didn’t hit me until my Aunt Leslie texted me the Sunday after its release. She said she had bought it on Kindle and was reading it at that very moment. Hilariously, I wasn’t ready for that. I got nervous, my hands started sweating, and I started pacing around the house. My wife asked me what was wrong and I said “Leslie’s reading it right now! She’s actually reading my book!” To calm me down, my wife lovingly asked “Isn’t that what you wanted?” Of course, it was what I wanted but for some reason the knowledge that someone was actually reading what I had worked on for the past year and a half terrified me momentarily. Thankfully, she loved it and she really went out of her way to encourage me which really helped ease my mind. I never thought I would be so neurotic about it but it was touch and go there for a moment. 

    When you write a book about your own experiences, you can’t escape the fact that there will always be a self-serving aspect to it. The sheer act of putting it out there is a supposition that people will be interested in your experiences. You run the risk of being pretentious and maybe you can never truly escape that. But I wanted my focus to be on the stories of the people I encountered who changed me and I hope that’s what has come across. And I wanted to share these stories to help others who have been or will be going through similar experiences.

    But where did this conversational style come from? In college, I took two “Modern” literature classes at the University of Kentucky. The “Modern British Novel” and the “Modern American Novel” both of which got me into literature from the early to the mid twentieth century. Of all of those writers, Hemingway probably influenced me the most. I love his simple, yet profound sentences that contain worlds. One of my favorites is “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.” Simple, direct, and everything you need to know, yet it leaves you with a world yet to be discovered. 

    I’m not arrogant enough to compare myself to Hemingway or any other great writer. I’m just honest enough to admit that what appeals to us is probably inescapable in its influence, consciously or not.