Wednesday, Buxton Books, Charleston’s premier bookstore, hosted the launch of my new book Long Ago Last Summer.

What follows is an abridged version of the festivities.  Thanks to my wife Caroline Tigner Moore for providing these videos.

Julian Buxton got the show rolling with by reading a passage from the book on James Dickey.

Next, Alex Werrell delivered his introduction.

The first bit wasn’t recorded. Here it is

Bearing in mind my grandmother’s suggestion for any speech — all great orators should study Shakespeare, she said, and learn his most important lesson: “All’s Well That Ends” — I won’t catalogue all that Wesley Moore has written, taught, and done.

You’d need a TI-84 to add up the lives he molded, shaped, and changed — and if he were to receive royalties for every lesson plan of his that I’ve copied, this book launch would be in Mallorca. It is a gargantuan and daunting task to try to introduce this Renaissance raconteur, writer, poet, teacher, and philosopher king, so I’ll outsource the job responsibly and sustainably to Cecil Franklin, who was once asked by a reporter to describe his little sister: “Call Aretha a great blues singer and you’re telling the truth. Call her a great gospel singer and no one will argue. Call her a great jazz singer and the greatest jazz artists will agree. Bottom line—she’s all three at once. And in the language of the jazzman, that’s what’s called a motherfucker.”

Wesley Moore is all that and more.

The video picks up from there:

I followed with a reading of my short story “Their Own Little Worlds.”

Unfortunately, “The Bluegrass Blues,” the poem I read was cut short in the video, so here’s the text:

The Bluegrass Blues

For Kathy McDaniel

Banjos make me blue.  There’s

pain in that frenetic pickin’

fueled by moonshine and misfortune,

pain that goes all the way back to Ireland,

black potatoes and fickle lasses,

the death of lovers or worse.

Fiddling can get downright dolorous, too,

that high lonesome keening,

the breakneck pace

the manic flipside of poverty.

Saturday night

shouting on the hills of glory

but returning to the shack

to find the chickens dead

and Pretty Polly’s tearstained letter.

***

Picture Shelly^[1] plucking a banjo,

Shelly in one of those silk

two-toned cowboy shirts

singing through his nose

about how the saddest songs

end up being the sweetest,

a fiddle taking up the strain,

a quick, pained grin to the audience

as he nods his head to the music.

The last piece was a short essay “The Art of Not Thinking” that I wrote a couple of weeks after Judy’s cancer returned.

After a Q and A session, it was book signing time.

I really appreciate all who came out on such an unbearably hot day, and it was especially gratifying to see my fellow authors Eugene Platt, Layle Chambers, Bill Thompson, and Josephine Humphreys.

Cheers!

---

^[1] The English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792-1822