Reflections from Modern Memoirs Client Tucker H. Byrd

Tucker H. Byrd published his book entitled “No Excuses” Love, Dad with Modern Memoirs in 2023. This collection of daily notes to his young son took just two months from the day we started the project to the day books arrived on his doorstep. We asked Byrd to reflect on what the publication process was like for him, and what it has meant to share his book with others.

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1. Your book is a compilation of the 170 inspirational notes—colorfully handwritten on index cards—that you slipped into the backpack of your son every day during his fourth-grade year (2019–2020). What was your intention in giving these notes to your son, and why did you choose that year of his life to do so? How does the phrase you chose for the title, “No Excuses / Love, Dad” serve as a touchstone for the whole collection?

Tucker Byrd: I wish I could say I started with a grandiose plan to write a year’s worth of inspirational notes as a defining statement of love for my son and bind them in a glitzy book from a high-quality publisher. The truth is, I wrote one note to give him affirmation and encouragement as he began fourth grade, a time of personal and physical growth that is often a transitional year into “big” school learning. I wrote one note, then another, then another, and soon I had established a certain love language with my son, which continued for months. Toward the end, it had become such a ritual, that I had to press on, even as COVID descended upon all of us, requiring my son to be homeschooled for the last 6 weeks of the school year. The title, “No Excuses” Love, Dad was born from all this. “No Excuses,” which I wrote on all the notecards, is the West Point motto, and it speaks to taking responsibility, regardless of the commitment required, obstacles faced, or outcome. The phrase “Love, Dad” came from the heart. Together these phrases express the challenges all parents face in shaping a child and teaching them to be accountable, while loving them regardless of their struggles, or even failures.

2. What was your goal in assembling the cards into a book instead of simply filing the loose notes away in a shoebox, or otherwise preserving them? Whom did you intend the readers to be, in addition to your son?

Tucker Byrd: The notes sat in a box for years, and I would pull them out periodically. Each card was written during a particular phase of my son’s life, and to be honest, bringing those memories back years later when I reread the cards would often make me tear up! Finally, I thought it would be nice to pull them all together in a book, which led me to Modern Memoirs. What you created for me far exceeded what I could have imagined. I had not intended to share it with many others, but the responses I got from people who heard about the project touched me. They seemed to derive some special meaning on their own about parenting, growing up, and encouraging one another.

3. What can you say about the design of the book and how it helped you achieve your goals in publishing it?

Tucker Byrd: The design and formatting were A+. Modern Memoirs made this book an art piece that now sits on my law-office table. People are fascinated by the book, which is more than a bit humbling because it started as such a private expression to my son.

4. You first contacted us more than two and a half years before deciding to launch the project. What motivated you to finally publish it when you did, and what compelled you to keep the project moving along so quickly to complete it in just two months?

“I never expected it to touch others, particularly those who are not family members. I wrote what I felt to let my son know that he is not walking his life path alone.”

Tucker Byrd: I did get off to a slow start, but to be honest, it was the reception I got from Modern Memoirs that finally pushed me to act. The staff could have said, “This is ‘cheesy,’” like watching someone else’s home videos; but their words of encouragement, especially from Director of Publishing Ali de Groot, did it for me. Once we began, I knew we were late in the year to get things done in time for the holidays, but Modern Memoirs put the wheels in motion to make this a special holiday gift for my son and family.

5. Can you share a little bit about others’ responses to the book, and especially how your son received it? What do you hope he will get from the book as the years go by and he reaches adulthood?

Tucker Byrd: Many read it and cried, which made me cry. I never expected it to touch others, particularly those who are not family members. I wrote what I felt to let my son know that he is not walking his life path alone. Now 13 and very much a teenager, I don’t think my son can be reasonably expected to think that what his dad said or wrote is cool. He likely will only fully embrace the book years from now, perhaps when he has his own child. Maybe then he will write a sequel about being a parent himself, calling it Becoming a New Parent: What Do You Know? My Dad May Have Been Right All Along!

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Liz Sonnenberg is genealogist for Modern Memoirs.

“Bro, Put Your Skis On”: Writing Lessons from Woolf (and My Brother) on the Slopes

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From far away, I imagine I resembled an inkblot on a sheet of notebook paper, my dejected form silhouetted against the relentless glare of the snowy mountain slope. Paralyzed on the left margin of the “page,” I watched helplessly as other figures slid from top edge to bottom, gliding like droplets of ink that somehow resisted being absorbed into the “paper.” I had all the equipment I needed to continue down the mountain, my skis and poles lying flat on the snow beside me, and I had taken several skiing lessons in the days prior. I could see in my mind’s eye the swooping curves I needed to make in order to descend in a slow and controlled manner, and I visualized those turns again and again, planning, refining, and wishing my thoughts alone would propel me into action. But rather than pushing me to my feet, any courage or willpower I possessed lay slumped within me like a fussy toddler in the arms of a frustrated caregiver, all boneless, passive resistance to my wishes.

“I recognized this feeling—the feeling of knowing exactly what I needed to do and how to do it, while confronting an obstacle, a steel wall, that denied my abilities and desires.”

I recognized this feeling—the feeling of knowing exactly what I needed to do and how to do it, while confronting an obstacle, a steel wall, that denied my abilities and desires. It was a feeling that had crept up in my creative life when I was about to edit my own piece, or when I was beginning to write down a personal experience. In those cases, I often resorted to distracting myself and pushing off my work to another day—anything to avoid looking at the obstacle directly. There on the mountain, though, with the bleak options of either getting over my anxiety or spending the night in the snow, I had to somehow break through the obstacle I faced.

From my position at the top of the mountain, I saw my siblings looking up at me and assumed they were wondering why I hadn’t followed their trail. Instead, I’d been sitting in the snow for probably ten minutes, a chill beginning to creep through my ski-pants bib and jacket. I pulled my phone out to numbly scroll my apps, as if that would help the situation, only to immediately receive a call from my brother.

“Bro, put your skis on,” he said the second I picked up.

I was defeated but didn’t want to admit that to a person who had started flinging himself down intermediate runs on only our second day of skiing. “Just go on,” I said. “I’ll make my way down eventually.”

“Are you stuck?” he asked, and without waiting for my reply he said, “I’m coming to get you,” hanging up before I could object.

Fifteen minutes later, my brother rescued me, calmly encouraging my slow progress down the mountain and never leaving my side. Once we made it to the bottom, he pointed out that I had indeed been able to ski down the slope on my own two feet. Rather than feeling successful, however, I was frustrated that I hadn’t been able to do it without him, and I passed on his offer to go up the mountain again.

Instead, I returned alone to my aunt and uncle’s lodge, where I decided to throw myself onto the couch to read To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, which one of my professors had recommended to me before I left on a break from college to go skiing with my family. It was a good recommendation. Almost immediately, I fell in love with Woolf’s idiosyncratic style, her focus on the internal world, and the winding alleyways of thought and language down which she sends her readers. Suddenly a passage stopped me with a jolt of recognition:

“She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment’s flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child.”

These words, of course, reminded me of my creative work, where I sometimes felt a sense of paralysis during “that moment’s flight” from idea to execution. But I also pictured myself on the mountain, mentally tracing turns down the snowy slopes and totally unable to make myself carry them out. Seeing myself sitting in front of a blank screen and then connecting that vision to my defeat on the ski slopes suddenly illuminated the obstacle I hadn’t been willing to examine: my fear of the loss of control.

“I thought of it as like a dance—making choices, and letting go; control, and no-control.”

I wanted to ski because when I had slipped out from under my own anxiety during my lessons, and even when I dejectedly made my way down the slope with my brother next to me, I was exhilarated by the novelty and freedom of gliding down the slope. I loved the view of the looming mountains, the wind on my face, and the alternating feelings of control and loss of control when I pointed my skis downhill and allowed gravity to take me. I thought of it as like a dance—making choices, and letting go; control, and no-control. My first day of ski lessons had taught me that I needed to trust the slip downhill in order to make good, stabilizing turns. During what felt like a freefall into gravity’s force, I shakily counted aloud, “One, two, three—” three seconds for the mountain—and then I threw my weight onto my downhill foot and turned, counting again, “One, two, three—” three seconds directed by me.

Facing a lack of control can be paralyzing, no matter what we are doing. At some point, a writer must give in to the knowledge that their work might not come out exactly as planned or pictured. There is a risk there, as real to some of us as that of a broken bone to a skier. Perhaps this is the foundation of the steel wall of writer’s block that can feel so defeating to many of us. Language is an imperfect means of conveying thoughts and feelings, ideas and memories, but it’s one of the best tools we have, like the skis and boots and poles we use to hurl ourselves down mountains. The product of language leading us where it will, and a writer’s brave effort to carve their own path within it, is writing.

Later on the same afternoon when I read the passage by Woolf, I put my gear back on and trudged out to ride the ski lift. The recognition of a private sentiment, expressed in the beautiful voice of a beloved author, had dislodged some sticky thing in my psyche, letting me face the mountain again. This time, I didn’t fail; I flew.

I haven’t skied since, and I might not ever ski again, but I know I will always be a writer. This necessarily means that I will find myself confronting obstacles again and again, steel walls blocking my writer’s path, or chasms between idea and execution waiting to swallow my intentions whole. I can’t control what my path looks like. My only option is to let my brother’s words, “Bro, put your skis on,” echo in my heart, and trust the fall.

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Emma Solis is publishing associate for Modern Memoirs.

Reflections from Modern Memoirs Client David B. Dearinger

David B. Dearinger published his book entitled A Southern Madam and Her Man with Modern Memoirs in 2023. After a decade of family-history research, this dual biography of two of Dearinger’s ancestors took one year and two months from the day he first contacted us to the day books arrived on his doorstep and became available for sale. We asked Dearinger to reflect on what the research and publication process was like for him, and what it has meant to share his book.

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1. Your book describes the lives of your great-grandparents Susie Tillett and Arthur Jack. She ran brothels in Lexington, Kentucky, and Chattanooga, Tennessee. He, among many occupations, was a saloonist, gambler, and horse-trader. In the preface, you say that before you began your research, neither you nor anyone in your immediate family knew many stories of these ancestors. What was the first discovery you made that alerted you to their unconventional lives?

David Dearinger: I had long known some of the details of my great-grandfather’s life—his origins in Atlanta, his multiple careers of running saloons, managing a vaudeville theater, and running horses on the Grand Circuit. But I knew little of my great-grandmother’s life, other than that she had been a devoted spouse and mother, a superb cook and seamstress (she made many of her own clothes), and the owner of a “boarding house” in Chattanooga.

The earliest hint that there was more to the story and, indeed, that she had led a life that was at least as fascinating as that of her husband, came from a few dozen studio photographs and several large, framed portraits made of her in the 1880s and 1890s, which my grandmother cherished and shared with me. (Some of these images are reproduced in my book.) In them, Susie wears long, beautifully made gowns, stylish hats, feathers, full-length furs and even jewels, clothes and accessories that suggest a history both richer and more complicated than I knew. I pondered the mystery of how my great-grandmother could possibly have afforded such clothes for decades until, starting around 2010, I finally began to crack the case.

David B. Dearinger’s great-grandparents in their youth. At left, Susie Tillett, age eighteen, 1877. Photograph by Louis Granert, Chattanooga, Tennessee, copy of an earlier, now lost image made probably in Lexington, Kentucky. At right, William Arthur Jack, age twenty, about 1881. Photograph by Theophilus H. Ivie, High Art Production Co., Atlanta.

2. The findings in your book are extensively researched and documented. What primary sources proved most helpful? Were there certain discoveries that were particularly rewarding?

David Dearinger: The most revelatory documents were contemporary newspapers, city directories, censuses, and insurance maps. I was especially impressed and surprised, perhaps naïvely so, by the frankness with which some of these documents recorded the precise location of brothels and the identities of their residents—one of whom turned out to be my great-grandmother. Granted, this level of documentary accuracy was pretty much confined to the years between 1890 and 1917; but that happened to be the exact period in which my great-grandparents were at their most professionally active. During those years, censuses often identified houses of ill-fame as such, city directories gave madams their proper honorific (abbreviated as “Mad”), and insurance maps labeled brothels with the unique designation of “FB” (“female boarding house,” a cartographic euphemism for brothel). For my purposes, these sources proved to be gold mines of information.

“…my purpose was to uncover and tell the truth, to back it up with proper documentation, and to keep an open mind[…]my primary emotion as the narrative unfolded was unmitigated excitement, what I can call, without hyperbole, the joy of discovery.”

3. In the endnotes, you state that it was not your purpose to assign blame or to glamorize sex work through your research and writing about your ancestors. What purposes did you have in mind as you worked on this book? And can you describe the emotional journey your research took you on as you learned about your ancestors’ colorful lives?

David Dearinger: From the start, my purpose was to uncover and tell the truth, to back it up with proper documentation, and to keep an open mind. As a professional historian (and an amateur genealogist), my primary emotion as the narrative unfolded was unmitigated excitement, what I can call, without hyperbole, the joy of discovery. The fact that these discoveries were deeply personal only heightened my excitement. I came out on the other end more impressed with my great-grandparents than I had been at the start and filled with admiration for their courage, tenacity, and inventiveness.

4. You are a curator and art historian by profession. How do you think studying family history enriches our understanding of history in general? What can it teach us about ourselves?

David Dearinger: I began working on my family history when I was fifteen years old. Like most people at that age—and despite the efforts of some superb teachers—I was naïve about American history and felt little personal connection to the political events and famous people we learned about in elementary and high school. But once I began to discover the facts of my ancestors’ lives, I was inspired to learn more, for better or worse, about the bigger picture. Suddenly the history of the United States—the (re)settlement of the country by Europeans, the genocide of its Native peoples, the shameful history of slavery, the wars, the social and economic upheavals, and the sometimes-desperate attempt to establish something like a democracy—became real, personal, and much more interesting.

5. How did you decide to self-publish your book instead of publishing it with an academic or trade publisher? When did you realize that you wanted to sell it, making it available to a larger readership than family and friends?

David Dearinger: As Susie herself might have said, I always wanted to sell it! My initial plan had been to publish with an academic press. But I soon realized that by going in that direction, I would lose a certain amount of control over important elements of the book—the number of allowable illustrations and the inclusion of what I considered important appendixes, for example—and that the publication date might be pushed back as much as three years. For such a personal project, I found these otherwise reasonable terms unacceptable. Therefore, I decided to investigate the option that I eventually took. I was inspired to consider Modern Memoirs by my friend and former colleague, Joyce M. Bowden, whose intelligent and beautifully produced family history, Four Connor Generations in South Carolina 1790–1920, was published by the company in 2014. And so here we are.

6. Do you think your great-grandparents would have objected to your telling their story in this book?

David Dearinger: I have asked myself that and similar questions a number of times over the past few years. And of course, there is no way for me to know the answers. I can say that, if 100 years from now, some poor benighted historian investigated the nooks and crannies of my own life and wrote a book about it, I would, if it were possible, cheer them on. To be remembered at all would be something; but to think that some hopefully open-minded, intelligent person could make more sense of my life than I can, would be delightful.

As it happens, I did ask Susie and Arthur for their permission. The last time I was in Kentucky before the book was published, I visited their graves in the beautiful and historic Lexington Cemetery. As I stood there looking down at their tombstones, a hickory nut fell from one of the ancient trees that grow nearby and hit me on the head. Was this a bad sign or a good sign? I decided to take it for the latter. Cut. Print.

David Dearinger holding his book in front of a portrait of his great-grandmother

Want to read more? Purchase A Southern Madam and Her Man at Memory Lane Books & Gifts, the Modern Memoirs online shop.

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Liz Sonnenberg is genealogist for Modern Memoirs.