The 10,000-Hour Rule

If you apply the 10,000-hour rule introduced by psychologist, K. Anders Ericsson and popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers, that one could become an expert in various fields by allotting thousands of hours of time and energy to perfect their skills, then in the field of writing, I might qualify as an expert. In my case, I use the term “expert” loosely, and allotting thousands of hours to perfect a skill in an area of interest does not guarantee success. I know today’s camera technology performs at the speed of light, but it took 10,000 hours to make
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Impossible Dream

I received such an outpouring of responses when I published this story on my newsletter a month ago that I thought I would share it on my Facebook pages. I was lucky man to be born into the Bud and Bernie Arnold family. Here is a little “coming of age” moment when Dad and I did our first show together. Up until this experience I had been looking for a hero in all the wrong places. I spent some years tossing about in the world. “He’s finding himself,” was the euphemism offered when explaining why I was expelled from or
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Barry Scott Made Me A Better Man

My dear friend passed into eternity a year ago. We spent so much time together on and off stage telling stories, sharing burdens, dreaming of heaven. In this one-year anniversary of Barry shuffling off his mortal coil, I want to share the final story Barry shared with me just a few days before he left us. The last time we spoke just days before his passing he said, “I got a story for you.” He was energized. His voice was a mere rasp of its former power, but the joy he was feeling at the moment gave him strength. “You
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Whole Lotta K-LOVE

How many times have you said it or heard other people say they don’t like surprises? This phrase is as common as the head cold. Merriam-Webster defines surprise as “an unexpected or astonishing event.” I’ve had my share of those events, and not all of them pleasant.   I love author Alice Walker’s quote, “Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.” So when the occasional surprise finds me, and it also happens to be an enjoyable one, I try to “live” on it sparingly and appreciate the joy that comes with it. I received some news that was totally unexpected and
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A Family Tradition

A family tradition began 44 years ago on Whitland Ave in Nashville, Tennessee. My father and mother were a part of a small group of people who wanted to celebrate each July 4th in a special way. Over the years the program varied, which included my sister Nan Gurley singing patriotic songs. But there was always one constant: my father would read from the Declaration of Independence while members of the Nashville Symphony would play Aaron Copeland’s “Ode to the Common Man.” When Dad departed this life, the mantle was passed to me. I still wear the shirt he wore,
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My Fiery Gizzard Epiphany

It was a Dad/Daughter time to celebrate Father’s Day. Our hike had been planned for weeks, and I had dreamed of taking this trek forever. A few years ago one spring, I did a solo hike from the Fiery Gizzard trail-head, beyond Sycamore Falls, up to Dog Hole trail following the ridge to Raven’s Point, and then down into the gorge circling back along the river. This section of the trail is beautiful but rugged. The ranger warned I’d be climbing over rocks and boulders beside the river, and that the trail was not well marked. He spoke truth. A
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The Interview

In the early days of 2021, I had the privilege to doing a podcast interview with Alison Treat. Ms. Treat has a wonderful podcast devoted to historical fiction, and she invited me to talk about the publication of my novel, “A Voice Within the Flame,” on her show. It was a free-wheel conversation about a writer’s life, and the long and winding road of bringing this novel and the book series “The Song of Prophets and Kings” into the world. So if you’ve got a few minutes to listen and are curious about the process of how this novel made
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I Married a Queen

I married a queen, not one of royal pedigree, but of the hometown variety. She was Homecoming Queen not once but twice at her local high school. I began courting the queen about eight years after she wore her crowns, and within six months of courtship, I started plotting and scheming my marriage proposal. I’m a romantic by nature so it was important to set the right atmosphere for the occasion. I got out of rehearsal early that day and went by Kay’s office to get the key to her apartment. She had a fireplace, and I wanted to take
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Cultural Exchange

Most of you know I love being outdoors and hiking on trails both foreign and domestic. Beside the joy of walking through the beauty of nature, I look forward to encounters with fellow hikers. I remember teasing my father once when we were headed out for a day of hiking that I thought he looked “too dapper” for the trail. His reply, “You never know who you might meet on the trail, Son.” Words to live by. We are all smiles in this picture, but I met five of these ladies under a difficult circumstance. On this particular day, I
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Conversations at the Crossroads

There is a well-worn path in the back field behind our house. When Covid shut down the world, including our local gym, I took to doing laps around the perimeter of our acreage. The gym has since reopened, but I have enjoyed cutting large repetitive circles on terra firma and not jogging on machines with conveyor belts or on Nordic tracks so much that I have yet to re-up at the gym. May not for a while…may not at all. I have traded in the sounds of heavy-metal cranked up to motivate faster fat-burning, or multiple screens of cable commentators
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Ancient Voices; Part Trois: Walk With Me

I have written often in the past of my hiking adventures. Taking journeys on my own two legs is a preferred choice of travel. Themes from “Song of the Open Road” by Walt Whitman has always fueled the wanderlust in my bloodstream. I love the company of other trekkers, but also enjoy the solitary walk. There are those trails that are favorites that I go back to time and again just to be among the familiar: the landscape, the water falls, the rock formations, the twists and turns of the path through thick forests, but mainly I return to remember.
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Ancient Voices – Part Deux

When we returned home to Nashville from our one-year sojourn to Washington State in search of holograms and lazar-lights for our biblical epic, I heard about the British actor, Alec McCown, doing a one-man production of “St. Mark’s Gospel.” He had memorized all of Mark’s gospel, KJV no less, and given performances in London and New York to packed houses. I knew no one was going to hire me for such a venture (my name had no marquee value, nor did I have a British theatrical resume), but I began to test the waters of the church world to see
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Ancient Voices

What do all these factors have in common: engagement, marriage, unemployment for one spouse, pregnancy, eviction, multiple living quarters including an unfinished attic, the kickoff of a writing career, the arrival of a first child, unemployment for the other spouse, all followed by a cross-country move with their four-month old daughter leaving behind kith and kin in search of fame and fortune? You guess it…Kay and Chip. Oh yeah, and cram all these events into just over a year’s time. I can think back on some of the decisions and choices I’ve made in life and wonder, “What was I
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Two Old Men Telling Stories

Barry Scott and I loved telling stories to each other about our childhoods, our families, our work, our faith. Between us we had well over one hundred years of stories. I recently walked the grounds of St. John’s AME Church where, two years before, we had done a performance of Jim Reyland’s play “Stand” and saw the ghosts rising from the concrete pad and grassy plot. It was all that was left of the church property after the tornado went through North Nashville in March of 2020. Before the show, Barry and I sat in the Sunday school turned make-shift
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The Art of Conversation

I met Joshua back in the Fall of 2019 at one of the exits off Interstate 40 that cuts through the middle of downtown Nashville. Joshua is a newspaper vendor who sells The Contributor, a street newspaper focusing primarily on social justice issues involving poverty and homelessness. At peak morning hours (pre-Covid-19), there can be a steady stream of cars driving onto the exit ramp. These vehicles approach a traffic light where Joshua operates his business on this prime real estate. Then drivers must choose one of three different directions to take, and so become absorbed into the vast web
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Love in the Time of Covid-19

Never thought I’d be standing at a baker’s bench. Never thought I’d be up to my wrists kneading dough. Never thought I’d be driving a delivery van to multiple locations giving out bread. But here we are in this not-quite dystopian world of pandemic and sequestration. Nothing like a plague to get the attention of the world. And yes, I ripped off the title of my piece from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s great novel, “Love in the Time of Cholera;” an excellent addition to one’s literary life experience. Kay and I were in New Zealand in mid-January when we became aware
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Who Fired That Shot

I don’t know who fired the first shot, but I do know when and where the war began. It was in 1991, at Fontana Resort in North Carolina at the ninth Pryor Family Reunion. The war continued for decades; family “water warriors” from five states gathering once every two years for great battles with intermittent skirmishes among members of the clan in several other locations between reunions. Back in the day, humans roamed the landscape on foot. We were nomadic individual families that turned into clans that turned into tribes that, with a steady birth rate and population increases, eventually
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Rocko Ride of Shame

I have embarrassed myself so often in life that one could accuse me of being an accomplished Performance Artist in the trade. For humiliation to work there must be witnesses. Doing something humiliating in the privacy of one’s personal space doesn’t count. The whole “dance like nobody’s watching” thing is a bit self-inflated. Unless, of course, you are Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Elaine Benes. But the trouble with the Ms. Benes’ character was that she was quite pleased with her “moves,” never seeing the disgrace. The humiliation only works when both the audience and the humiliated see the humiliation in action
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Don’t Try This At Home

It was not until my mid-twenties that I began in earnest to read western classic literature. Growing up with undiagnosed dyslexia kept me from reading much of anything except comic books, Mad magazine, and newspapers—I was a paperboy for four years. For academic assignments I relied on the student’s best friend, CliffsNotes. It wasn’t until my early twenties that I discovered that I was not “slow of mind,” but that my brain/eye connections were malfunctioning when it came to reading. I just had a problem decoding language, so I decided to slow down and read for pleasure. While in my
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The Christmas Tree Fairies

Our Christmas tradition was born out of a refusal to have a fake tree in the house: the same one pulled from storage each year, a trunk of hard synthetic with drilled holes for the perfectly tapered limbs to fit, and reeking with a musty smell of aged plastic. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that” (thank you Jerry Seinfeld). We had to have a live tree, which meant finding a cedar tree on the wooded acreage behind our house, cutting it down, and lugging the felled beast home. The adventure always happened the day after Thanksgiving. We rose early
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You Can Go Home Again

I never thought I would see this day. I did not even dream about it or hope that it might happen. It just happened. I did not try to make it happen; no strings were pulled; no favors called in; no money exchanged. It just happened. This is not some random act of stars aligning. Dare I say it, but this might be something ordained, and it took fifty years to get here. When I walked out onto the stage of Collins Auditorium to perform in Beki Baker’s (Chair of the theatre department at Lipscomb University) production of “Bright Star”
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Bodies of Broken Bones

I love the stark realism the words of this title bring to mind. It comes from a phrase in “Seeds of Contemplation” by Thomas Merton: “As long as we are on earth, the love that unites us will bring us suffering by our very contact with one another, because this love is a resetting of a body of broken bones. Even saints cannot live with saints on this earth without some anguish, without some pain at the differences that come between them.” This spiritual image affords us a super power. We have a potential to have x-ray vision. We can look at
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Don’t Be The Bunny

I have delayed my monthly story because I’ve been a little preoccupied ruling the world and “snuffing out popular resistance as if it were a naughty baby bunny.” It really is exhausting. There are just so many decisions to make—when your decisions are the only ones that matter, and there are so many people to keep in line—these people insist on having opinions contrary to my own. So yes, I have been busy playing a character that has created his own evil empire in a production of “Urinetown.” I have played bad guys before, but to give me an idea
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Reservations in Heaven

I was raised in an era when our particular church persuasion believed that we were the only ones going to heaven, and only then if you behaved according to the rules and had done enough “good works” to get in, and if not, well too bad. My own heart knew that I would never be good enough or do enough to qualify. It took me awhile to ask the question that if our church affiliation was so unsure about its future hopes of heaven how then could they be so sure that anyone from another denomination had no chance of
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You Gotta Love This Woman

We received a call recently from concerned parents worried about my wife’s influence on their children. The concerned parents were our daughter Lauren and son-in-law, Erik, and the children in question were our grand children. This was not an easy thing to accept. The complaint had to do with Kay’s lullaby catalog sung to the grand kids when she puts them to bed at night. I had long since been banned from lullaby duty. When I would pinch-hit for Kay in her absence all I came up with was “Purple Haze,” “Stairway to Heaven,” “Whipping Post,” and “Born to be
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