Preface

To compose a preface to a work of this particular constitution is to engage in a fundamentally unstable endeavor—akin to drafting a cartographic guide to a landscape still in the process of geological upheaval. What follows in these pages resists facile classification. It is neither conventional memoir nor recognizable fiction, neither sustained theological argument nor reliably confessional text. Rather, it operates as a hybrid form: part testimonial document, part aesthetic experiment, part erratic homily, part philosophical inquiry into the self under duress.

The author was once my student—exasperating and possessed of the kind of intellect that resists instruction while demanding it. She interrupted lectures with questions that turned literary theory into confessional theology and once rewrote a formal essay in blank verse because, as she informed me, “Milton would have.” I never knew what version of her would appear in class, only that it would be unapologetically herself.

Her sense of humor—dry, defiant, and strangely devotional—was suffused in equal parts Holiness Church theatrics and South Georgia sulfur. She herself remained steady, like one of those novelty Drinking Birds: head bobbing rhythmically, compulsively, toward the same shallow pool of effort and depletion.

Flannery O’Connor once wrote, “The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.” I believe Odell found it. Or at least wandered into it, barefoot and half-prepared, as was her way. What she wrote down there—this manuscript you now hold—may be an attempt to map that meeting place. Or it may be something else entirely. A confession. A casserole. A weather report. I’m still not certain.

The reader should be forewarned: structural coherence is not this text’s governing principle. Narrative chronology is repeatedly abandoned, subverted, or merely ignored. Stylistic consistency gives way to tonal dissonance. The voice oscillates—intentionally, one assumes—between the intimate and the performative, the scholarly and the hallucinatory. Whether this produces illumination or obfuscation may depend largely upon the reader’s tolerance for textual ambiguity and emotional volatility.

To say the work is derivative is, paradoxically, both accurate and insufficient. Of course, it is derivative. All literature is. As Ecclesiastes reminds us with disquieting finality, “There is nothing new under the sun.” What matters, then, is not originality in the vulgar sense but the manner in which existing forms are reassembled—how familiar tropes are fractured, repurposed, and imbued with particularity. What distinguishes this work is its relentless specificity. The narrative voice does not universalize. It documents. It remembers. It reframes the mundane and the metaphysical in ways that are often unsettling, occasionally transcendent, and always disinterested in readerly comfort.

It is not, to borrow the familiar metaphor, akin to a thousand monkeys eventually producing Shakespeare through infinite keystrokes. It is closer to a solitary figure—highly literate, acutely unstable—who has read all of Shakespeare, suffered a psychic rupture, and once annotated King Lear in a psychiatric unit with a stolen pen and a surplus of imagined insight. The result is often arresting. Sometimes frustrating. Never insipid.

The book is unmistakably Southern in its cultural geography, though it bears no resemblance to the sanitized or sentimental South frequently peddled in mass-market memoir. This is a South of institutional betrayals, charismatic dysfunction, and religious excess. The churches in these pages hum with eschatological tension. The communities depicted are as capable of violence as they are of mercy. Familial affection coexists with deep ancestral disrepair.

The prose is saturated with theological allusion, yet it is not doctrinal. Scripture is evoked, not quoted, engaged, not explained. Grace, when it appears, is not didactic but episodic, often absurd, and occasionally indistinguishable from coincidence. The text is far more comfortable interrogating belief than affirming it.

Some passages feel meticulously composed and others that appear transcribed from the margins of an unmedicated consciousness. This is not necessarily a flaw. It may well be the aesthetic thesis: that the self is inherently disintegrated and that coherence—spiritual, psychological, or narrative—is a polite fiction we maintain out of habit, not truth.

In short, this is not a book that seeks to resolve itself. It prefers to reside in contradiction. Whether that is a failure of form or its most honest gesture is, perhaps, the central question.

I am not prepared to offer a verdict on the work’s literary merit. I am, however, prepared to admit that I could not look away.

—Dr. Sandra Estelle Beaumont

Written with marginal annotations and considerable circumspection

Atlanta, GA

March, in a season distinguished by excessive rainfall and minimal clarity.

P.S. Dear Reader, I offer a generous—if largely symbolic—reward to anyone capable of elucidating this manuscript’s preoccupation with tambourines. I have cataloged every instance. My confusion persists.