Glass Cabin

By Tina Mozelle Braziel and James Braziel

GLASS CABIN CHRONICLES the thirteen years Tina Mozelle Braziel and James Braziel spent building their home out of secondhand tin, tornado-snapped power poles, and church glass on a waterless ridge in rural Alabama. Their alternating voices support one another like parts of their cabin-every board needs its nail, every window needs its frame. The

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pulley Press
• Release date: Apr 23, 2024
• ISBN: 9798987407684

Tina Mozelle Braziel

Tina Mozelle Braziel is the author of Known by Salt (Anhinga Press), winner of the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry and the 2022 Alabama Library Association Author Award for poetry, and Rooted by Thirst (Porkbelly Press). Her work has also appeared in POETRY, The Cincinnati Review, Southern Humanities Review, and other journals. She has been awarded a fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and an artist residency at Hot Springs National Park. As the Magic City Poetry Festival's inaugural Eco Poet, she collaborated with the Cahaba River Society to develop eco-poetry curriculum and videos. She holds an M.F.A in Poetry from the University of Oregon, an M.A. in Poetry at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and a B.A. in Intercultural Studies at the University of Montevallo. She directs the Ada Long Creative Writing Workshop at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She and her husband, novelist James Braziel, live and write in a glass cabin that they are building by hand in rural Alabama.

Book preview

Cover pictureTitle page: Pulley Press, Glass Cabin, Tina Mozelle Braziel, James Braziel,

©2024 Tina Mozelle Braziel and James Braziel 

ISBN 979-8-9874076-8-4

Published by Pulley Press, an imprint of

Clyde Hill Publishing

Book design and illustrations by Dan D Shafer

Cover art by Dylan Braziel

Photos courtesy Tina Mozelle Braziel and James Braziel

This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

On the Art of Seeing In and Seeing Out

Preface

The Ache Won't Quit

Dandelion

Down at the Trespass

A Simple Box

Making Church Glass Ours

How To Make a Clearing

Texts

Sun-Drenched

Alchemies

Everlast

Hive Step

What I Mean When I Say Help Like Hep

Woodhenge

Hummingbird

The Subfloor Blues

Rivering

Meander

Strike It

Say Uncle

I Married Him Before He Got the Roof On

Sawzall Rhythm

Texts

Honeymoon at Tor House

It Will Happen

Texts

Become Kindling

Push

Right Now

After Work in the Last Week of July

Bending Tin

Out Here

Hinge

Constellation

Showering at the Gym

September Prayer

Hatches

Stair Calculator

Turkey Vultures

Visqueen

First Winter, the Cabin

Stutter-Step

Stutter-Step

Weathermyth

Rounds

Built by Hand Ourselves

Shelf Weather

Pliers

Without Varnish

Tongue and Groove

Spontaneous Combustion

List of Things

Least I'm Not as Picky as a Carolina Wren

Always and Absolutely

Drill or Haul

Neighbor on the Dirt Road

May

Things Just Wear Out

The Flowering Pear

February Prayer

Mud Baby

Waterworks

Solar Power

Alaska

Down from the Cabin

Fourteen Rivers

Coosa

Visiting Walden Pond

Ephemeral Pool

Going Feral

The Thing About Composting Toilets

An Accounting of Birds

Easement

Victory Lap

Indicator Species

The End of Plastic Netting

Cliché

Shadows Now

Lay at My Feet

A Pair of Hawks

The Apocalypse

May the Apocalypse Come in Early Spring

Coping Mechanisms

Tight Gradient

Sixteen Fibs I Like Telling Myself

Hold Still

Drought Song

In Place

Table of Our Routine

Refuge

Not Gone Away

Ease

Nothing Else

Sunday, Now Our Day

Odds Are

Where We Live Is Who We Are

Chigger Braille

Gain the Ocean

If You, Then Me

An Early Snow

Glossary

Acknowledgments

Introduction

On the Art of Seeing In and Seeing Out: 

Tina Mozelle Braziel and

James Braziel’s Glass Cabin

I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being.

—URSULA K. LE GUIN

To build a house of glass, a person enters a contract with reality. No matter where the inhabitants stand, they see out—out to the coyote and the dandelion, the cedar weed and the garden clearing. They see that the tree needs the bird and the bird needs the worm and the worm needs the human. The fact of a window teaches us that, although the human enjoys the illusion of shelter, of being guarded and apart, we are not.

Tina Mozelle Braziel and James Braziel built a house of glass on an unwanted ridge in Alabama. Ten acres, $6000, and a desire to no longer define their time as money. In Glass Cabin, they have given us a record book, an almanac of building their house, their love, their marriage. As a guide, this book ostensibly teaches us how to survive by our own strong hands. And what more important guide could there be, in this time of climate change and structural upheaval?

I’ll tell you. It is this book’s remarkable revelations about interdependence that makes it a work of art, both beautiful and needed. Much like their house, this book is built—at every joint and beam—in a structure of collaboration. Here is a guide for how to surrender to a love for all living beings, a love that radically transforms our understanding of the word self, the word profit, of the word wealth.

The minutes, hours, and days of our lives were not always counted by a factory clock. Remembering that in this present moment, in which most of us wake up winding a kind of factory clock inside our own anxious and austerity-terrorized minds, requires a courageous imagination. Ursula K. Le Guin mapped this truth when she accepted her Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters: We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings. …Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.

Dear reader, in your hands you hold a work of such courage, written by two love birds who just couldn’t help themselves but fall for what is greater than the self. I hope you will keep it by your bedside and read a new page every tired morning. I hope you will leave it open in your cubicle and read a poem when your eyes hurt too much to look again at that addicting screen. And I hope you will go home at night and walk outside and see that the stars, the light that died to make you, are your stars, and you are theirs, and that this belonging is your only job. Le Guin continued on to say, The name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom. Dear reader, in your hand you hold the hard-won good news that freedom is not just your reward, it is your birthright. Glass Cabin is a true work of art; it is a work of the truest art I know.

— rebecca gayle howell

for Hydrangea Ridge

Preface

Jim

Weekends in spring 2011, I drove out, divining like old timers witching for water. Only I was witching for a place to build a home. An acre or two, that’s all I needed, and more importantly, what I could afford.

I jotted down numbers handwritten on sale signs. I stopped at convenience stores and BBQ joints, asked cashiers and the people waiting in line if they knew where I could get land. The Great Recession had ended but it didn’t feel like it. As the owner of Benedikt’s Restaurant put it when we spoke, Everyone needs money now.

I had moved to Birmingham, Alabama, back in the fall to teach. Nobody gets rich teaching, but the job does come with a steady paycheck. Important because I brought Dylan, my youngest, with me. Wouldn’t be easy—a new high school his senior year—but I’d been a stay-at-home dad and always taken care of him and his sisters, and his mother and I were heading for a divorce.

The fresh start had me dreaming about what I wanted, which was a writing life, which meant living somewhere that inspired and just having day after day to put down words.

Problem was the apartment rent. Took almost half my paycheck, and that one expense alone made it hard to keep up with the other bills. A writing life seemed impossible. If I could get some land, build a simple box, something permanent—not mortgaged or rented—maybe then, I told myself, I could have it.

Where I went was rural, where people not so well-off lived, places and people that reminded me of the South Georgia community I grew up in. By the end of summer, the Alabama plateaus and bluffs and creeks and mountain pines had become part of my blood, for I’d made the full compass, spoke by county road spoke. B town—my affectionate name for Birmingham because Atlanta has always been the A side of this Southern record—was my hub.

But none of my divining got me a place until Bob Harvey gave me a call. Bob’s a real estate agent who pointed on a map in his office in April to what he called Wild Land. Nobody wants that land now, he said then. But you, it’s what you want.

A developer had gone belly-up in the 2008 housing crash. His dream—turn the woods around Sally Branch, a stream running into the Blackburn Fork of the Little Warrior River, into a suburbia heaven. Problem was water. The small town below didn’t have the money to pipe water uphill to heaven. And the developer didn’t either. Digging a well for a single homestead meant churning 300, 400, as much as 700 feet through chert, which took a lot of patience, pipe, and money. I figured I could get around that by catching water free from the sky.

After I talked with Bob, a bad night of tornadoes swept in from Mississippi. Once in a generation is what the weather authority said about the loss of property and people. I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times about a devastated neighborhood, Pratt City. This is some of what I witnessed—

Whole buildings gone. One entire neighborhood off Avenue W gone. Around us are piles of wood and so much wire—thick cables draped over dented cars, wrapped into lassos on street corners. We see tar paper trapped