The following article is a combination of my notes/questions and Joe’s answers.

Introducing

Author of Beautiful Heresy (his publication on Substack), My Angel Wears a Helmet, Such Pleasant Smells and at least a handful of other books and publications.

Substackers might know him from the Lives he participated in over the course of last summer and fall with Richard, starting an I AM movement. Those lives have definitely given a lot of insight into his life, views and personality, but he is not only a funny and engaging chat partner on the screen, he is also an excellent writer.

I came across his writing last spring on this very platform. What I found about it, even as a first impression is that
it’s very down to earth, relatable, expressive. He uses an extensive range of words, so on occasion it can be challenging for me - which challenge I like rising up to, broadening my vocabulary, as learning is always a positive thing - but mostly that his writing is strikingly honest, to the point that it’s inescapable, no matter the subject, nor the mode of writing or genres of literature. It accomplishes having a reaction from the reader every single time, be it laughter, anger, agreement or jerking tears. It is captivating.

What to discuss during the live

A short story collection book, titled My Angel Wears a Helmet and Such Pleasant Smells

Both talking about shame, in my opinion, but each from a different angle.

The Review/The Questions

Of Men, Mischief and Misadventure or My Angel Wears a Helmet (click on the titles to get the books from Amazon) is a collection of short stories or rather anecdotes, and the main character of them is the writer, Joe, surrounded by his family in a variety of ages (varying from being a young boy to his 30s) and a variety of situations.
It’s a first person portrayal of humorous stories, ones that maybe we’d try to hide - not him - but what results in the reader thinking of their own mishaps and funny stories as well and that after all we are all human and nobody is without faults.

This book is dedicated to his parents. The picture he paints of them is full of warmth, love and respect. I very much love the Dedication section, right before the Prologue.

Questions:

• Please talk a little bit about your upbringing and the place that formed you. Also the place books have filled in your childhood and in your life in general. Your favorites and if you think that it had an effect on your style or unique voice as a writer.

  • I grew up in rural Georgia. Born in a place called Jesup, but raised in Covington (home of Dukes of Hazzard and Walking Dead to name a couple), in a place where people still fixed things when they broke, where barns were still barns, trucks lasted longer than they should have, and everybody knew enough about everybody else to keep you honest. It wasn’t an extraordinary place by any objective measure, but it was rich in the things that matter to a writer: characters, stories, humor, and contradictions.

    My father was a law enforcement officer and one of the defining figures of my life. He was intelligent, funny, stubborn, and possessed a dry wit that could cut through any situation. Looking back, a great deal of my writing comes from sitting around listening to people like him. In the South, storytelling is often a form of currency. People don’t simply tell you what happened. They tell you how it happened, who was involved, what went wrong, and why it’s still funny twenty years later. Long before I ever considered writing seriously, I was surrounded by people who understood rhythm, timing, and the value of a punchline.

    Books were just as important. I was one of those kids who read constantly. Adventure stories, history, science fiction, classic literature, cereal boxes, etc. If it was on a shelf, there was a good chance I’d eventually get to it. Books were a way to leave rural Georgia without actually leaving it. Through them I wandered through ancient civilizations, sailed with explorers, fought pirates, traveled into space, and spent time in places I couldn’t have dreamed of otherwise.

    I think reading had a profound effect on my writing, though perhaps not in the most obvious way. The writers I loved most were often writers who sounded like themselves. Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, Hemingway, James Fenimore Cooper, and many others all had distinct voices. You could read a paragraph and know who wrote it. That taught me that style isn’t something you bolt onto a story afterward. Style is personality.

    My own voice is probably the result of several influences colliding at once. Southern storytelling, military culture, a lifetime of reading, and an appreciation for humor even in difficult circumstances. I’ve always been drawn to stories that can make you laugh and reflect at the same time. Life tends to work that way. The funniest memories are often tied to the people we miss most.

    Ultimately, the place that formed me wasn’t just a location. It was a collection of people, books, experiences, and conversations. The geography matters, but the voices matter more. I think every writer spends part of their career trying to figure out where their voice comes from. Mine came from front porches, family stories, old books, traveling, and the kind of people who could turn a simple mistake into a story worth telling for the rest of your life.

• When did you start writing and how?

  • Oh, I don’t know. Ten? My first blog was in my late twenties. It was as chaotic as I remain to this day. I never ‘niched’, because I am like a dog chasing squirrels. I don’t know what to do when I do land one so it’s on to the next squirrel.

• What was your first published piece or book titled and what made you publish it?

  • Men, Mischief and Mayhem, which is now My Angel Wears a Helmet, was the first I will claim.

    I didn’t set out to write a book so much as I set out to spend time with my father again. After he passed, I found myself thinking about all the stories we’d told over the years, the disasters, the jokes, the lessons that never felt like lessons until much later. Grief has a way of making people either look away from memories or hold onto them tighter. Writing was my way of holding on.

    I also knew that if I wrote a traditional book about loss, I would probably make both myself and everyone reading it miserable. That wasn’t what my father would have wanted, and it certainly wasn’t how I remembered him. He was funny. He found humor in nearly everything, including his own mistakes. So I chose to tell the stories that made me laugh, even when they carried a little sadness underneath.

    What began as a way to process grief became something much larger. I realized that many of the funniest stories were also the most meaningful. They were about fathers and sons, family, growing up, making mistakes, and eventually becoming the people who once seemed larger than life to us. If the book has a message, it’s probably that those moments we think are ordinary at the time often become the memories we treasure most.

    In the end, publishing it felt less like releasing a book and more like preserving a conversation I wasn’t quite ready to end.

• Why “My Angel Wears a Helmet” (the answer is in the foreword of the book, still, ask this question, though it’s an indication)

  • The title comes from a line in the foreword where I wrote, “That I have lived this long and survived to write about them suggests that there is a higher power looking out for us. My angel wears a helmet and pays higher insurance rates for our association.”

    The book is a collection of stories about mistakes, near disasters, questionable decisions, fatherhood, military life, and the general chaos that seems to follow me around. By the time I finished writing it, there was a recurring theme that I had somehow survived an awful lot of situations that should have ended much worse than they did.

    The title is obviously humorous, but it also captures the spirit of the book. I have been fortunate throughout my life. I’ve had good parents, good friends, good mentors, and more second chances than I probably deserved. Looking back over those stories, it sometimes feels as though somebody was working overtime to keep me intact long enough to tell them.

    So My Angel Wears a Helmet became the perfect title. It acknowledges the comedy, the close calls, the gratitude, and the suspicion that whatever guardian angel was assigned to me has had a much harder job than most.

Reading the dedication perhaps?

• Favorite chapter of this book and why.

  • If I had to pick a favorite chapter, it would probably be “A Dish Served Cold.”

    Part of that is because it’s funny. The entire chapter is built around a years-long desire to get even with my father after the humiliation of the oil plug incident, and every son understands that feeling. You spend years waiting for the old man to make a mistake so you can finally return the favor. The problem is that good fathers have an irritating habit of being competent.

    But the real reason it’s my favorite is that it captures who my father was better than almost any other chapter in the book. On the surface it’s a story about tools, a barn, a lawnmower, and a long-awaited opportunity for revenge. Underneath, it’s really about the relationship between a father and son, the way we learn from each other, tease each other, and eventually become more alike than we’d care to admit.

    When I started writing the book, I thought I was recording funny stories. What I eventually realized was that I was preserving pieces of him. That chapter was one of the moments where that became clear to me. The laughs are there, but so is the affection.

    A close second would be “Sasquatch.” Not because of Bigfoot, firecrackers, racing go-karts, or my father’s deeply questionable parenting methods, but because it shows the playful side of him that many people never got to see. Most people knew him as serious. We knew better.

    If I had to choose only one, though, A Dish Served Cold wins because it makes me laugh every time I read it, and it reminds me of my dad every time I do.

• What is the conclusion of this book?

  • The conclusion of the book is that our lives are not really made up of achievements. They’re made up of stories. Some are triumphs, some are disasters, and most are a mixture of both. When I started writing, I thought I was documenting funny memories. What I eventually realized was that I was preserving the people who lived them with me, especially my father.

    The book ends with laughter, but it begins at gratitude. I was forgiven more times than I deserved, given more chances than I earned, and taught lessons that took decades to fully understand. Looking back, the mistakes became stories, the stories became memories, and the memories became a way of keeping the people I loved close at hand. That’s really what My Angel Wears a Helmet is about.

He says it with his own words:
“or your family is not like mine and enjoys recounting them to shame you amid family or public gatherings. Of course, I am joking. Shame was not an aspect of my being raised.”

“My parents did such an excellent job that it took me writing this to realize that the punishments I received sometimes were so cleverly meted out and so effectively conducted that I was not aware of their effectiveness until their recounting here.” - says Joe. A revelation and at the same time a proof of admiration that shines through the whole of this book in my opinion.

Comparison with Such Pleasant Smells

As opposed to the My Angel Wears a Helmet, Such Pleasant Smells (Joe’s newest book) shows a different take on Shame.

It’s less straightforward in the sense that there is an underlying story here, while the stories are front and center in the other book. The main character here is the Gardener, a man with a past, with an upbringing, a family and a garden, where the garden symbolizes a life(style), routine, learned behaviors.
He has come to a conclusion where he says he is walking, he is leaving. Leaving the garden, the house, the occupants.
To me as a reader this walking or leaving means implementing changes in his life.

It’s a personal story, as is the short story collection, but more serious in tone, where the garden is being used as a living metaphor.

• What made you write this book? Was it any different than writing My Angel Wears a Helmet?

  • My Angel Wears a Helmet began with memory. Such Pleasant Smells began with a question.

    The first book was my attempt to spend time with my father again. I was grieving, and writing let me revisit the people and stories that shaped me. The humor wasn’t accidental. It was the only way I knew to tell those stories honestly. My father would have found it suspicious if I suddenly became solemn and profound. The laughter was part of the truth.

    Such Pleasant Smells came from a very different place.

    At some point I became interested in the difference between who we are and who we perform ourselves to be. In the deeper sense. The roles we inhabit. The stories we tell about ourselves. The ways we learn to survive by becoming useful, admirable, successful, dependable, moral, strong, or whatever else the world asks of us. Eventually I started wondering what happens when the performance succeeds so completely that even the performer forgets where it began.

    That question became the book.

    Where My Angel Wears a Helmet is filled with people, Such Pleasant Smells is filled with mirrors. One book looks outward toward memory and family. The other looks inward toward identity, shame, desire, self-deception, and the stories we build to make ourselves bearable to ourselves.

    Writing them felt completely different.

    The first book was often joyful to write. Even when I was writing about loss, I was spending time with people I loved. I laughed while writing large portions of it. Sometimes I laughed hard enough that I had to stop.

    This book was slower. More difficult. Less forgiving. There were chapters I rewrote repeatedly because I wasn’t trying to tell a story. I was trying to discover whether something I believed was actually true. That’s a very different process. In the first book, I usually knew the ending before I started writing. In this one, I often didn’t know what I thought until the chapter was finished. I am not lying when I say that in many cases I learned as much as the reader did. Some chapters floored me when I had finished.

    I sometimes describe My Angel Wears a Helmet as a conversation with my father.

    Such Pleasant Smells feels more like a conversation with the parts of myself I’d been putting off.

There is a part of this book where it says: “I have not been happy.” “I can feign happiness” “Prune and dress it up.”
This reminds me of how much value we put on what others think of us. We adjust everything: our appearance and behavior to meet their requirements. I know that I am a ‘different person’ when I am at home than when I am here. Or appear as.

Different parts of the personality gets highlighted and/or triggered by different environments. So it’s not necessarily a whole of a life(style), but the small things as well. The oppressed parts of us. (Not because specific people pressed us to do so, but society as a whole might have, or we decided it ourselves, not knowing better yet.)
It’s unknown how long can we go on like that, oppress the true self that’s been under the cover. The book uses the garden metaphor, I tend to describe it as a volcano, as the pressure rises and eventually there is an eruption, hopefully followed by peace and happiness.

• Did you have a catharsis? Or an Aha moment? You wrote in the other book that “it took me writing this to realize…” Was the process cathartic or did it provide some healing by the knowledge of, ‘coming to terms with’ what you unearthed?

  • People might imagine a book like this comes from a single catharsis or an “aha” moment, but that wasn’t really my experience. What surprised me was that the insights wasn’t there before the writing. That came through the process of writing.

    In my earlier work, I wrote that “it took me writing this to realize...” and that’s still true. Writing has always been less about expressing what I already know and more about discovering what I actually believe. I often start with a feeling, an image, or a question, and only after living with it on the page for months do I understand what it’s really about.

    So yes, there was healing in the process, but not in the sense of uncovering something and then feeling resolved. The healing came from being unable to hide from certain truths once I’d written them. The page is remarkably difficult to negotiate with. It remembers what you said five chapters ago. It notices contradictions. Eventually it forces you to deal with things you’ve spent years explaining away.

    What emerged while writing Such Pleasant Smells was the realization that shame isn’t primarily an individual experience. It’s relational. It’s inherited. It moves through families, through silence, through the things that never get really said. I don’t think I fully understood that when I started.

    
    The most cathartic moment wasn’t discovering some hidden secret. It was recognizing how much of my life had been built around hiding things and then finding the right words for it. Once you can state something accurately, you may not be free of it, but you’re no longer entirely trapped by it.

    So I’d say the book didn’t provide closure. It provided clarity. And clarity turned out to be far more valuable of the two.

This is obviously a very personal story, a very relatable one. Overall a heavier and more serious story than the short story collection.

I am hopeful that with smaller changes anyone who find themselves in a situation, with a revelation or realization, can smooth out their issues so they don’t have to oppress their true selves anymore and still be accepted by their environment.

This book ends with a cliffhanger, with an open end. To me it is indicating that it is to be continued. I am very much looking forward to that. And as I am partial to happy endings, I want to believe that there is a way for the Gardener to be happy again.

Thank you for taking the time and reading this article today. Thank you for your continuous support and participation in highlighting these fantastic writers and their work, by taking part in the Short Stories and Tales publication’s monthly Short Story competition’s nomination and voting processes.
Please continue reading, liking, commenting on and sharing our fellow Substack writers’ work!
Read more stories! Read more books! :)

Hope to see you again soon!

Get My Angel Wears a Helmet. Maybe for Father’s day! It really is a good book!

I enjoyed learning about MJ’s writing background, style, favorite book, writing process and a little bit about how Hank’s The Ugly Duckling, our featured book came about. He even read the blurb in addition to the review that’s available here on this publication.

During this live we mentioned other writers here on Substack, whose work might be nominated to the Short Stories and Tales Short Story Contest, and those whose published books are featured as reward options for our winner.
Please check out the nomination post here.

I read a chapter from MJ’s book earlier in March. The recording of that live can be viewed in the podcast. The book can be found on MJ’s page, on the Southern Copywriters Blog and on Amazon as well.

Other books mentioned during this live were:

Our featured books:
Hank Cotton’s The Ugly Duckling
’s Loretto, reviewed here
’s Myths & Monsters, reviewed here (last week’s live)
’s short story book My Angel Wears a Helmet and his latest, Such Pleasant Smells, reviewed here, also
, ’s book, featured on the Southern Writers’ Guild last month: First Light.

Thank you , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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Thank you to everyone who tuned into our video today!

To buy Emma’s book from Amazon please click here.

Join me for my next live video in the app.

See you again soon,
Harriet

Get more from Harriet Corvine in the Substack app

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My dad didn’t like gardening either. He did some of it, but didn’t put all his heart into it. And it showed. I picked up the pieces. Then I planted my own garden and I tended to its every need. I am still there, but many of my plants died in the last few years, many I gave away. In my parents’ garden my dad’s trees still stand, but what I used to have are long gone.

Now I enjoy the beauty of wildflowers. They grow freely, effortlessly in the fields that are home to bunnies and bees and butterflies. I used to wander around the field with my friend and collect bouquets there while my mother preferred gerberas and carnations.

A garden is more than the plants and flowers in it. It’s sweat and dirt and skin cut by the thorns of beautiful roses.

I walked into a garden a few days ago. It is magical. It is beautiful with a variety of plants. I could smell the roses and the jasmins, lean on the walls and take it all in. I am not familiar with all the plants in this one but I am with the concept.
We are born and we learn. We learn from our elders what was passed down to them. The expectations, the patterns.

This story is not about flowers. It’s not about words that are on the surface. It’s not about beauty. It’s about the meaning, that layer underneath. It’s about opening the gate and going for what we want. Many will live their lives and won’t think much of it. Live it like everybody else, accept the way, bowing to it, kneeling. And then there are those who remember, who are curious. Those who stand in the garden one day and stare into nothing because it dawns on them or at the sink in the kitchen, the water still running. Then walk and that doesn’t seem to make any sense to others. It makes perfect sense.

The book is well thought out, beautifully illustrated, structured, the pictures are otherworldly, the botanical descriptions and the opening observations are spot on and profound. It’s easy to digest, but deep. It’s worth taking in slowly and thinking about each part before moving onto the next. It’s a living-breathing metaphor in our hands and it’s the Gardener who breathes life into it.

’s new book is available for purchase on ko-fi and Amazon.

If you are looking for something entertaining with some suspense, double story lines that meet in a church in New Mexico, look no further, read ’s Loretto.

Available to purchase on Amazon.

He demonstrates not only bravery, empathy, but wit, humor, love and loyalty, too. His words to the girl not long before arriving at their destination are the wisdom and truth for all of us to remember.

I highly recommend reading this story by Hank Cotton. It will make you feel good and will restore your faith in humanity.

This book is available for purchase though The Southern Copywriter’s Blog and Amazon.