Tim Carmichael
Bio
I’m a firm believer life is messy, beautiful, and too short, which is why I write poems full of heart and humor. I am an Appalachian poet and cookbook author. My book Beautiful and Brutal Things is on Amazon, Link 👇
Achievements (20)
Stories (263)
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Elegy for a Country Once at Peace
There was a morning, once, when we rose unafraid, when dawn came like a friend who knocks at the door, certain of its welcome. We opened our eyes to a country still whole, to the people who had learned, by long and faithful labor, how to live beside each other in the ordinary grace of the uneventful day. Oh, what were we then, who did not know how rare a thing it is to dread so little? The newspaper passed beneath the elm in autumn, and its news was only news, only the slow procession of the known and mild. We received it calmly, the way a still pond receives the rain and settles back to calm.
By Tim Carmichaela day ago in Poets
Easter in the Mountains
When I was growing up in the mountains of western North Carolina, Easter came along with a promise that things were about to feel a little brighter, if only for a while. We didn’t have much in those days, and everybody knew it, but somehow Easter had a way of making you forget all that. For one Sunday out of the year, we felt like the richest people in all of Appalachia.
By Tim Carmichael5 days ago in Families
The Deleted Paragraph
I sit at my desk, staring at the paragraph like it has personally insulted me. I have been circling this thing all morning, moving sentences, swapping words, cutting lines, adding lines, sighing, muttering, “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” more times than I care to admit. I’ve patted it, pleaded with it, threatened it with deletion, and yet it remains, refusing to cooperate. I realize now that it’s not that the paragraph is bad. It’s that it is too full of itself. Flapping its sentences around like wings, trying to explain what I already said, trying to justify its own existence.
By Tim Carmichael7 days ago in Motivation
The Eastern Junction
The village of Strale sat between two hills and a railway line that had carried goods east for forty years. The men who worked the line lived in a row of identical houses along Cutter Road, and Raymond Hesk had lived in the third of these houses for seventeen years, since the day he married Dorla and carried her suitcase up to the second-floor room that faced the tracks.
By Tim Carmichael8 days ago in Fiction
