Writing a Home: Love and Labor on Hydrangea Ridge
Alabama poet Tina Mozelle Braziel and novelist James Braziel talk about love, endurance, and creativity in their handmade glass cabin—a project that became a home, an acclaimed book, and an inspiration.
Glass Cabin poetry collection; James and Tina Mozelle Braziel interview; glass cabin in Alabama
Every spring for the past twenty-four years, a tiny, zero-stoplight town called Waverly, Alabama, has hosted a music festival called the Old 280 Boogie. That’s where an award-winning fiction writer, James Braziel, fell in love with an award-winning poet, Tina Mozelle Braziel.
“We boogied so long my calves were sore for a week,” James reports.
They have been dancing to their own tune ever since. Tired of watching far too much of his paycheck go to rent, James, who had grown up on a farm in South Georgia and had watched his own father build a house by hand, decided there must be a better way to live. He soon found “Bob’s Wild Land,” a piece of property nobody wanted on a ridge above Sally Branch, Alabama. There was no running water because the town below could not afford to pipe the water up the hill. But James figured he could catch water from the sky, so after a month of negotiations he bought his ten acres of oak, pine, and huckleberry bush.
Glass Cabin poetry collection; James and Tina Mozelle Braziel interview; glass cabin in Alabama
He renamed it Hydrangea Ridge.
The original idea, in the early teens, was that James, a University of Alabama at Birmingham Creative Writing associate professor, was supposed to complete the house before Tina's return in 2013 from her MFA studies in poetry at the University of Oregon. He warned her building a house on Hydrangea Ridge would not be easy, nor would living there. She was unfazed, having worked as a counselor helping “delinquent boys...build temporary homes in the woods,” so, during breaks in her studies, she helped every chance she got. Two years later, they were married, and Tina had her degree.
Was the cabin finished? Not nearly. But they had laid the foundation, so they moved out of their apartment and into an adventure.
Glass Cabin is their luminous book of poetry and lyrical prose that chronicles their more than decade-long endeavor to build a creative space, a home, and a life on Hydrangea Ridge. As Rebecca Gayle Howell asserts in her introductory essay to the work, “with [t]en acres, $6,000, and a desire to no longer define their time as money,” the Braziels built “a house of glass on an unwanted ridge in Alabama.”
Building their home and writing the book named after it has been an undertaking of faith, rooted in trust—in themselves and their appreciation of the natural world.
They traded convenience for solitude, peace, and the natural world. They surrendered society’s expectations to gain a sanctuary for themselves, the wrens, the coyotes, and all the beauty they can see through their salvaged, gothic church windows.
Glass Cabin is a book about reimagining what is possible. Or, as Tina writes in her poem from the book, “Stutter-Step,” when folks asks when they will finish...
I answer we’re somewhere
between halfway and never
Maybe they think I mean soon
But I don’t. And I don’t prize
journey over destination.
Building their home and writing the book named after it has been an undertaking of faith, rooted in trust—in themselves and their appreciation of the natural world. All along they have savored the beauty that surrounds them daily and the importance of taking time when one has time to take.
Glass Cabin poetry collection; James and Tina Mozelle Braziel interview; glass cabin in Alabama
Jacqueline Trimble: In the introduction to the book, Rebecca Gayle Howell writes, “To build a house of glass, a person enters a contract with reality.” That idea strikes me as particularly apropos of this extraordinary book, which is about a journey, an actual journey, but also an existential journey. So, tell me, how is building a glass cabin a contract with reality?
Tina Mozelle-Braziel: It reminds me that reality is the natural world. So many times, we’re saying the “real world,” and we’re talking about being in our cars or on our computers or going to the store. So much of what we see as the man-made world is what we call reality or the real world. [We live] in a space where we see the trees and we see the birds. Lately, we’ve become really fascinated with the Carolina wrens that are just all over the place.
James: Climbing the windows...
Tina: ...eating the spiders. And we are constantly reminded what really is our home. That’s the best benefit of a contract with reality. I think there’s also what you have to pay. The first thing that comes to mind is something that it’s hard for me not to play off of when I write: this idea that those who live in glass cabins or glass houses can’t throw stones. This sense that you’re very visible to that outside world. Even writing this book, it kind of hit me more and more how visible we are. We were talking with a photographer or designer from UAB magazine, and she was like, I feel like y’all are my best friends. I know y’all so well. And I was like, oh, yeah, I guess people would after reading this.
JAT: This is a very personal book. We get a glimpse inside, not just of the house and the process, but into your relationship, into your marriage. You’re both writers. Tina, primarily poetry, and James, primarily fiction. But you’ve come together, just like you’ve come together to build this house, to create this book. I’m trying to figure out how to ask this. Marriage can be a very tenuous proposition in the best of circumstances. Add to that this major building project and then writing about it. How was that? Was it just a joy? Was it a mixed bag? Contentious? What was that like? It’s not as if you can get away. What can you say?—“I’m going to the kitchen. Don’t come in here!”
“There’s something about when you have a life where, at the center of your life is creating things, and in our case, creating together, whether it’s the house or the writing that we’re doing now. ... I just feel lucky.”
TMB: So when people ask me the question, I usually go back to what my mom said: “You really like to test your marriage, don’t you?” And it’s funny because I feel like we keep passing the test. For me, building the house and writing the book really helped me work through a lot of my trust issues. When we first were here, we couldn’t wash our hands without the other person because of the way the spigot worked. I’m a very independent person. I like to be able just to do things myself. And I have learned to trust and depend on Jim. I don’t know if I would have come to that as readily or as easily without being forced to. It’s funny how much the writing of the book mimicked the building of the cabin.
JB: It strengthened the bond between the two of us. That was the main thing for me. Someone told Tina once, if that was me, I would be taking the credit card and going to the hotel until the place was finished, you know? But that’s not at all what Tina did. I knew there was a point there where Tina was just all in. There’s something about when you have a life where, at the center of your life is creating things, and in our case, creating together, whether it’s the house or the writing that we’re doing now. There are tough moments. There are tenuous things. But the bond is just so much stronger. I just feel lucky. I feel lucky.
JAT: So what made you decide to write a book about this process? And particularly a book of poetry?
JB: Well, that’s complicated. When we were building the house, I was keeping journal entries, and Tina was also doing some writing. We actually were writing a creative nonfiction book, but it was more of a separate thing, where I would write a chapter and Tina would write a chapter. In 2022, we had just finished that book and we were getting ready to send it out. We got this email from Frances McCue at Pulley Press looking for rural poets. [Writer and UAB faculty member} Lauren Slaughter had told Frances, “You got to get in touch with these two.” Frances asked if we had thought about writing a book of poetry about the glass cabin. We really had not, but we put together a proposal. Pulley Press accepted it and gave us a contract. We had a year. That’s when we started writing the book. I really can’t say enough of how great it was to have Francis McCue. She came and saw the house and she talked to us. She was just really good about trying to find the narrative arc in the book. It was just really good to have that third person out there.
JAT: How did you shift from the nonfiction chronicle of the building to poetry?
JB: Once we got the contract, we were like, we’re going to do this. And we shifted to it. The other book is there, and that is something we are planning on trying to find a home for.
JAT: So let’s pivot a little. You bought the land, and that was kind of a serendipitous thing. I’m curious, because when you bought the land, you guys were not married.
JB: That’s right.
JAT: So basically, Tina married into this project. Right?
JB: Yes. She married into the life of poverty out here.
TMB: No, to a life of natural riches. The bank offered this land cheap because it was not the most usable land around. But you saw something in it, clearly. I’m trying to understand your thought processes. “Oh, hey, the bank’s got this land for sale, and I’m going to buy it.” You knew that it was going to be difficult to build on, difficult to get water because you would have to haul it. How did you tell your bride about this?
Glass Cabin poetry collection; James and Tina Mozelle Braziel interview; glass cabin in Alabama
JB: I grew up on a farm. And I’ve always done physical labor. A lot of it is just really tough stuff. My father built the house I grew up in, and he did some of it by hand. Sometimes he had to hire people to help him, but he was also this person who was always doing things. In the book I talk about plugging and unplugging the circular saw for him. That was as much as I did, but I learned. I had seen someone [build a house]. I knew it was possible. That was the really important part. The second piece was just the desire to have a writing life and realizing that the biggest expense was the rent. Half my paycheck was going that way.
I grew up in the country. I wanted to get back to rural space. And I was like, how can I do this? And just so you know, this is how it works with Tina: One of the first things we ever did together was go see the Rural Studio down in Hale County. We saw how they put things together and used recycled materials. And that was really the moment where I was like, yeah, I think I can do it. I can do it cheaply. I wanted to do it. I had a little bit of money from my job at the University of Cincinnati. [James left that institution to join UAB in 2010.] So I guess what I’m saying is she was aware of what was going on. So, my thinking was, I’m going to drive out from Birmingham and look for land and just see if I can find a few acres. That was my process. I feel like pretty much anything is possible. It’s real funny. I think I trust my body more than my mind. I felt like physically I could do pretty much anything. I knew it was going to be difficult, but I was like, okay, bring it on, let’s go.
TMB: And I do like that he likes a challenge.
JB: I like the challenge. And with Tina, it was just that. So, she knew through the whole process how things were going. And she didn’t say nope. I knew it was going to be all right, you know?
JAT: I love that. If I remember the story correctly, this house is supposed to be finished at a specific time, but it wasn’t finished by then. Can you talk about that story a little bit?
TMB: So Jim was like, I’m going to have it done by the time you finish your MFA. And I was like, okay, that sounds great. And then it was, well, I’ll have the walls in and you can help me doing the finishing work, you know, and that’ll be fun. I was like, okay. And then, it was like, well, I hope I’ll have the roof on by the time you get back. And I was like, oh, no. And, then at some point I was like, well, if, um, if, you know, you don’t have it ready or the roof on or whatever, I was like, we’ll just stay in the apartment until we get it done. And Jim’s like, um, no, the lease is up. We can’t. Yeah. I can’t afford to. It’s like, come September, we’re moving out there. Whether we have, you know, even if we’re having to live in a tent.
“We would write poems during the week, and then on Sundays, we would make waffles and mimosas and read each other’s poems and give each other feedback.”
JAT: I was like, “Camping, baby!”
TMB: Yeah. That’s when things got really real. I got back in June and started building quickly. Yeah.
JAT: Construction does not always follow a timeline.
JB: It’s just twice as long as you think it is.
JAT: You talked about writing Glass Cabin in about a year. So that timeline went a little more predictably than the house-building timeline. How did you write the poems? I know you worked with your editor. Did you say to each other, “Okay, I’m going to write about this and you’re going to write about that?” Or did you just let the manuscript find its way organically? Did you often write about the same things?
TMB: We would write poems during the week, and then on Sundays, we would make waffles and mimosas and read each other’s poems and give each other feedback. We did that every Sunday. At first, we were like, we’ve got a contract. We can write whatever we want. Everything was great from around January to April. And then Frances came to visit, and it became very apparent she wanted us to write about building the house. We had not been writing that part of it.
JAT: What had you been writing about mainly?
TMB: We were writing primarily about living here and being in the house.
JB: Also, the nature outside the house.
TMB: We began spending a little more time discussing what we needed to write. I spent a lot of time telling Jim, “You’ve got to write about building the house.”
JB: Part of it was we had written the other book about building the house. So we were happy to write about our life out here. And going back to make the other poems (about building the house) was a little more difficult. She also wanted prose pieces. Tina was at the Ada Long Workshop doing her thing there. I would take all the poems, and I would put them together thinking, here’s the arc of the book. Tina would come home and I’d be like, what do you think? I’d wait till she got in, you know, got settled, and I would kind of push it over there to her, and then she would be, “No.” And I would be like, oh, man. I’d be down for a day or two, and then I’d put it together again and say, “What do you think?”
TMB: I’d be like, no, no. That part of me like saying no to the order, it’s very similar to building projects.
JB: Yes.
TMB: So Jim would be like, oh, great idea, but I’m going to do it this way. And I’m like, but if you do it that way, then this issue and this issue. My role as the naysayer has kind of continued, and he loves me anyway.
JB: I appreciate Tina can see things I can’t see. I’m grateful for that.
JAT: Being a poet, it’s really funny to me that the poet is the grounded one. What were your favorite poems in the book?
TMB: Well, one of my favorite poems that Jim wrote, and I’m not sure if I’m going to get the name right, so you might have to help me. It’s the poem where you’re writing about the ladders.
JB: Oh, yeah. “It Will Happen.”
TMB: “It Will Happen.” There’s that moment where he talks about how he thinks I hadn’t gotten over the idea that my dad survived a fall, and just the fact that Jim sees that really hit me. I don’t think I ever said that to him.
Glass Cabin poetry collection; James and Tina Mozelle Braziel interview; glass cabin in Alabama
JAT: That’s beautiful. I love that.
JB: “Showering at the Gym.” Every time Tina reads that one, you’ll just see me just shaking my head, like “Wow.” The other one is “Least I’m Not as Picky as a Carolina Wren.” When I read them or I hear Tina read them, I just feel very loved.
JAT: Although this book purports to be about building a glass cabin, it’s really a love story. I have three questions. One, what did you learn about each other that you didn’t know in this process of writing or building?
JB:I played basketball in high school and worked in the fields. And there was this way [in both] where everything was complimentary. Sometimes you’re leading; sometimes the other person’s leading and you’re helping them. And that’s what I found with Tina. There are times we’re doing stuff—Tina’s in one corner, and I’m doing something and we’re working around each other—but we’re working together. We’re helping each other. There doesn’t even have to be words. Things are just complementary in that way. I just didn’t know if that would be the case. And that has been the case, and that’s been really great.
TMB: And about Jim. . .he has this will that’s huge and dynamic and it makes things happen. It’s very impressive. But it’s not so willful that he doesn’t listen to my naysaying, you know? He’s just like, “Okay...,” and [finds] another way to work around it.
JAT: Okay. Two, what did you learn from each other about writing?
JB: In terms of building, what I learned from Tina is...she’ll call it “the girl way,” which is a different way of approaching how you might do things.
TMB: Just replace the word girl with smart. I’ve helped girlfriends of mine move, and we do things a certain way. Move everything out of the way, get the vehicle as close as possible, save your body and your back, right? But men do not do it this way. They’re just like, “I gotta take this over there,” and they don’t even look to see if the path is clear or anything.
JAT: So you learned the smart way, or the “girl way”?
JB: To pause a second before I go into things and think of the best way to do something. That was helpful. And then on poetry, on the writing front, I learned from Tina how to use fewer words. I will never forget this: She was working on one of her poems, and I was looking over her shoulder. In ten seconds, less than ten seconds, words were gone. She had gone through and revised like that. And I was just like, “How did you do that?” It was good to have her help on how to make the images less wordy.
TMB: I tend to be a lot more cautious. I want to know how things are going to turn out and that they’re going to be okay, or that it’s going to be accomplished. And Jim’s so exuberant. He’s like, “Yeah! We can do this.” With both building [the cabin] and writing this book, there were times I [would say], “Maybe we need to take longer with the house. Is this going to work out? [I had] trepidations and worries. He has helped me to just think, “Keep trying and you will figure it out.” And, if you make a mistake, you can rip out the boards or the lines or the pole or whatever, and try again.
JAT: And three, how has what you learned changed you as a writer or as a spouse?
TMB: I feel like we’re a “we” and not just a “he” and a “she.” We really are. It’s hard for me to think of myself without Jim.
“How can you be married without having a sense of humor? It’s such an odd proposition to join yourself with somebody else. Humor— when you can laugh at yourself—definitely helps you get through the hard times.”
JB: Writing a book together created this third language. It’s the language between the two of us. It’s difficult to talk about what that is. It’s not something that I saw coming. But when we read together, I can feel it.
JAT: This book has really fine attention to the natural world. There is also humor. How important was having a sense of humor?
TMB: How can you be married without having a sense of humor? It’s such an odd proposition to join yourself with somebody else. Humor— when you can laugh at yourself—definitely helps you get through the hard times. I remember when we were first here, and it was so cold. We didn’t have a couch, and we had one chair. I said, “Go get the bench seat out of my van and bring it in here so we have someplace comfortable to sit.”
JAT: I love that, And you interject that humor into the writing, so that we take that journey with you. There are lots of moments where we laugh. It’s a serious book with so many scenes of real emotional intensity, but it feels lighthearted. Not light, but lighthearted. Maybe a better term would be joyful. It feels joyful. Was the experience of building this house, this glass cabin, and the experience of writing this book a joyful one?
TMB: I define joy as where you find happiness and contentment, even if there’s hardship. Building the house was tough at times—and even writing the book, because we were writing it so quickly. That was tough. But we do find ways to make it more fun or to laugh at ourselves. We knew we had this goal in mind of having this creative life—to go back to that contract with reality or having the connection with nature, that was very joyful to me. Jim will say he’s never seen me happier, except when I’m tending my tadpoles.
JB: It’s true.
TMB: I didn’t have tadpoles, but I was seeing the anoles and skinks running across the boards, or there was this hungry baby fawn when we were first building. And all of that brings a lot of joy. It’s very calming—and exciting.
JB: It’s not that doing hard work always leads to joy, but there’s something about when you’re doing something that’s hard and things work out, then it is really joyful. And for me, it just makes the joy more joyful. I also think there’s something just about the act of creating, just being able to stretch your mind in so many different ways. Even if it is difficult, at the end of that process, I just always feel good. Whether it’s the house or the writing.
Glass Cabin poetry collection; James and Tina Mozelle Braziel interview; glass cabin in Alabama
TMB: Jim’s always happiest if he has on his tool belt and he’s doing.
JB: We talk about it pretty much every day—the way the light’s coming in, and the way the seasons change, the wrens everywhere. It’s just a really joyful place to be.
JAT: Going back to something you said at the beginning, James, about, wanting to make a place where you could create without the burden of high rent and this stressful life of work that almost squeezes the creativity out of you. You guys have literally created a space in which to be creative. How has that affected or expanded your creative practice? It just struck me when you mentioned that wish because I think every writer I know has that desire to get from under unwanted work in order to find a creative space.
JB: I just love being in nature, so it’s a total immersion in this space and in creativity. Lately, I’ve been reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the Annie Dillard book, and [her message is] just, pay attention. And then she breaks everything down. She could say about a million things about sunlight. That is how it feels. That’s how my life runs. I’ll have students who will be like, “I just can’t. I feel like I’ve run out of ideas.” But for me the well is deep. It’s so deep. And being in this space has just it even deeper. I don’t think there’s an end to it. I think I could probably write about sunlight forever. No one may want to read that, but I could do that. And being here has oriented my life in that way.
TMB: I think, too, it’s caused us to question conventional ways of living. We’re living in a house without running water. We’ve done this for over a decade now. We built this house by hand. Our society and our culture pressures us to think we need to have this and to have that and put on these type of clothes for this occasion. So, I feel like a lot of the creativity is in thinking, what if I do it this way instead of that way? How do I create a life that serves the interest of what it is that I want to do in this world, you know? Instead of trying to conform to what? To particular expectations? Living in Alabama without running water? That pretty much falls into a stereotype: It’s not like you’re going to go much further down from there.
JAT: Oh, that’s funny, that’s funny. I don’t know if you guys have this experience as teachers, but all of my students are suffering from anxiety. They are so stressed about everything, and many of them have to work in order to go to school, to keep school from putting them into a life of crushing debt. And I just think there has got to be a better way to do this. Some of these kids are incredibly creative, but they’re not going to have an opportunity because they’re going to—what did Thoreau say?—have to spend their life pushing their hundred acres ahead of them. So I love what you said about rethinking. It’s not just a matter of building, but it’s a matter of rethinking. Life can look great like this and not like this.
“When you have the person who’s saying—you can’t be this or you can’t be that, because how are you going to pay your bills?—then use your creativity. You can come up with a way.”
JB: Yeah. That’s it.
JAT: You have been taking your show on the road. I had the profound pleasure of seeing you guys at NewSouth Bookstore in Montgomery, Alabama, and you were absolutely great together. Funny and smart and beautiful and loving and all of that. What has been most surprising to you about people’s reactions to the book?
TMB: What’s most surprising is that people say, “I feel like I know you. You’re my new best friend.”
JAT: So, is there a craziest question you’ve had from people?
TMB: This is a project that brings out such curiosity because the question that immediately comes up is how in the world did you do this? How did you decide to do this?
JB: [There is] one question that always stays with me, that has put things in perspective for me. We were reading somewhere and someone said, “Well, why don’t you just build a well? ”And I was like, because we don’t have the money to, and there are times like that where I realize that we are living this really kind of different life.
JAT: What do you most want people most to get from this book?
TMB: I go into high schools to talk about the Ada workshop sometimes, and I’ll tell the kids, you don’t have to go build your own house. But when you have the person who’s saying—you can’t be this or you can’t be that, because how are you going to pay your bills?—then use your creativity. You can come up with a way. When they’re still saying, oh, you can’t do that, say, well, I’m not as crazy as those two writers without running water. Use our story to convince people that you can do what you want to do.
JAT: What’s the next project?
TMB: We’re writing another book together. A developer has bought [a hundred acres of land that borders ours], and they’re going to put maybe 300 to 400 houses back there. And there’s a waterway called Sally Branch that runs through that we are completely enamored with. We want to write a book bearing witness to what may happen [to that waterway because of the construction], while also looking at ways that we can mitigate their plans and save what we can of Sally.
JAT: That’s important work.
TMB: And I’m putting together another collection of poems, tentatively called I Am a Terrible God. Because people always said that my tadpoles must think I’m a god. And I’m like, no, I’m really terrible at being a god. The book looks at human interactions with the natural world, using God as a metaphor for that.
JAT: I love both. Both ideas deal with the way we have encroached on the natural world—natural colonialism or something.
JB: And for me, basketball is a sacred space. I’ve just I’ve never written about it, and I want to. As I get older, there are these books that I must write, and that’s one of them.
Dr. Jacqueline Allen Trimble is a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, a Cave Canem Fellow, and a two-time Alabama State Council on the Arts Fellow. Her first collection, American Happiness, won the Balcones Poetry Prize, and her latest collection, How to Survive the Apocalypse, was named one of the ten best poetry books of 2022 by the New York Public Library. Her work has appeared inPoetry, The Offing, The Rumpus, Poet Lore,and other journals and has been featured by the Poetry Foundation and Poetry Daily.Trimble is a professor of English and chairs the Department of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University in Montgomery.
