[Landline special] Love’s ambassador

“In a time of great need — starvation, privation, aggravation, a broken heart and a broken head — I found succor at Dollywood.”

- from “Silly Beasts in Sacred Places” by Karin Bolender

One of the reasons I wanted to do Arthur magazine in the first place was to publish this piece by Karin Bolender as a cover story, something we finally achieved with issue No. 8 (Jan. 2004).

Audacious and deeply personal, Karin’s “Silly Beasts in Sacred Places” is a suspenseful, 6,000-word solo-roadtrip-to-Dollywood-during-a-period-of-intense-psychic-distress piece that contains multiple intertwined revelations — about the author, of course, but also about the special dreamland that is Dollywood, and inevitably, the nature-essence-spirit of Dolly herself:

When you push through that shiny silver turnstile into the theme park, it’s clear to one and all that you are passing into a dreamworld. That is brightly obvious. But the secret of Dollywood, well, that is something you have to search for, beneath the shimmering surface. But seek and ye shall find. Among the old, old rocks, in the mud and waters and crevices and tiny caves of lizards and bugs, and in your very mitochondria, it is there. And Dolly knows it, too.

Karin’s piece gave me the goosebumps when I first read it in some obscure corner of the internet somewhere/somewhen around the turn of the century1. This is the kind of thing I want to read in a magazine, I thought; this is the kind of thing I want to share as widely as I can.

After we published this issue of Arthur, when we heard from many readers for whom Karin’s piece had had a similar salutary effect — “that story got me laid!” one young woman memorably told me — I knew the non-inconsiderable collective labor of love involved in producing Arthur had been worth it. Thank you, Karin.

For the magazine, we paired Karin’s piece with a wonderful, up-to-date listener’s guide to Dolly’s career of recorded work by Paige La Grone Babcock (no relation), which I either commissioned or she had in hand, or both. Paige delivered — seriously, I consulted her “Dollyography” just this morning as I struggled to choose which Dolly album to throw on to try and soothe the spiritual gut-punch of her loss and to rejoice in the artistic gifts she shared with us all. Thank you, Paige.

Both pieces are available at the Arthur magazine archival website, as well as a downloadable PDF of the entire issue where they were published. Links for all are below.

Perhaps, in this moment, these pieces will land for you as they have for many others over the last 20-plus years.

“Find out who you are, and do it on purpose” - Dolly Parton

In gratitude,

Jay

Links:

Text of “Silly Beasts in Sacred Places” by Karin Bolender

Text of “Dollyography: A Listener’s Guide to Dolly Parton“ by Paige La Grone Babcock

PDF of Arthur No. 8 (Jan. 2004)

Karin Bolender, today: ruralalchemy.com