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(October 9, 1946–)

Jo Carson is a native of Johnson City, Tennessee, where she makes her home. A poet, a playwright, a short story author, and an actress, Carson graduated from East Tennessee State University in 1973 with a degree in speech and theater. In addition to writing and acting, Carson has been an occasional commentator for National Public Radio's
All Things Considered.

Carson first began writing poems around the age of ten, which got her in trouble, she says, because she ignored her schoolwork. “I was a terrible student, and I hated school…. I took a long time getting through college because I did other things. I was still writing in college instead of doing other homework.”

Many of Carson's plays have received national recognition, including
Daytrips
, which won the Kesselring Award;
Preacher with a Horse to Ride
, which won the Roger L. Stevens Award from the Fund for New American Plays; and for
The Bear Facts
, Carson received a National Endowment for the Art's Playwright's Fellowship.

Her collection of poems,
Stories I Ain't Told Nobody Yet
, was selected for the American Library Association's recommended list for 1990, as well as
Booklist's
Editor's Choice. The poems in
Stories I Ain't Told Nobody Yet
form the basis of
People Pieces
, a one-woman stage production Carson has taken to theaters and colleges throughout the United States and abroad. “The pieces all come from people,” Carson explains. “I never sat at my desk and made them up. I heard the heart of each of them somewhere.” Carson describes the poems as “distillations” which remain “true to the thoughts and rhythms” of the original speaker. Carson says, “Everything I write is to be spoken aloud.”

In her review of
Stories
, George Ella Lyon noted, “What we hear…is not the poet's voice but what she listens to. We are made listeners by our reading, hauled within earshot of voices…. Fundamental to
Stories I Ain't Told Nobody Yet
is the belief that all lives speak truths worth listening to.”

In the opening scene from her short story “Maybe,” from her collection
The Last of the ‘Waltz Across Texas' and Other Stories
, Carson's three narrators—Dessa, Brenda, and Harry—take turns sharing their thoughts on love and marriage.

In the excerpt from her play
Daytrips
, Carson examines the impact of Alzheimer's disease on a mother, Ree, who has the disease, and her daughter, Pat, who has to deal with the consequences.

Selected Drama:
Whispering to Horses
(1996–97),
The Bear Faas
(1993),
Daytrips
(1991),
Preacher with a Horse to Ride
(1990).
Books for children:
The Great Shaking: An Account of the Earthquakes of 1811 and 1812
(1994),
You Hold Me and I'll Hold You
(1992),
Pulling My Leg
(1990).
Poetry:
Stories I Ain't Told Nobody Yet
(1989).
Short stories:
The Last of the ‘Waltz Across Texas' and Other Stories
(1993).
Interview:
with Jo Harris,
Appalachian Journal
20:1 (fall 1992), 56–67.
Autobiographical essay:
“Good Questions,” in
Bloodroot
(1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 72–79.

Kathie deNobrogia and Valetta Anderson, eds.,
Alternate Roots: Plays from the Southern Theater
(1994), 338–39. Joyce Dyer, “Jo Carson,”
Bloodroot
, 71. “Jo Carson Issue,”
Iron Mountain Review
14 (summer 1998). Jennifer Mooney, ‘“Room Is Made for Whoever': Jo Carson and the Creation of Dialogical Community,” in
Her Words
(2002), ed. Felicia Mitchell, 50–65. George Ella Lyon, review of
Stories I Ain't Told Nobody Yet, Appalachian Journal
17:2 (winter 1990), 204–5. James S. Torrens, “Trying Them Out Off Broadway [review of
Daytrips],” America
(8 December 1990), 453.

from
Stories I Ain't Told Nobody Yet: Selections from the People Pieces
(1989)

The day I married, my mother
had one piece of wedding advice:
“Don't make good potato salad,”
she told me, “it's too hard to make
and you'll have to take something
every time you get invited somewhere.
Just cook up beans; people eat them too.”

My mother was good at potato salad
and part of the memories of my childhood
have to do with endless batches made
for family get-togethers, church picnics,
Civitan suppers, Democratic party fund raisers,
whatever event called for potato salad.
I'd peel the hard-boiled eggs.
My mother would pack
her big red plastic picnic bowl
high with yellow potato salad
(she used mustard),
and it would sit proud on endless tables
  and come home empty.

What my mother might and could have said is:
Choose carefully what you get good at
'cause you'll spend the rest of your life doing it.
But I didn't hear that.
I was young and anxious to please
and I knew her potato salad secrets.
And the thousand other duties
given to daughters by mothers,
and sometimes I envy those women
who get by with pots of beans.

from
Stories I Ain't Told Nobody Yet: Selections from the People Pieces
(1989)

I am asking you to come back home
before you lose the chance of seein' me alive.
You already missed your daddy.
You missed your uncle Howard.
You missed Luciel.
I kept them and I buried them.
You showed up for the funerals.
Funerals are the easy part.

You even missed that dog you left.
I dug him a hole and put him in it.
It was a Sunday morning, but dead animals
don't wait no better than dead people.

My mama used to say she could feel herself
runnin' short of the breath of life. So can I.
And I am blessed tired of buryin' things I love.
Somebody else can do that job to me.
You'll be back here then; you come for funerals.

I'd rather you come back now and got my stories.
I've got whole lives of stories that belong to you.
I could fill you up with stories,
stories I ain't told nobody yet,
stories with your name, your blood in them.
Ain't nobody gonna hear them if you don't
and you ain't gonna hear them unless you get back home.

When I am dead, it will not matter
how hard you press your ear to the ground.

from Maybe

[Dessa:] I am not telling this for sympathy. I don't like sympathy and I don't want any of it. Harry'll say I made my own bed and I now have the honor of lying down in it. Well, maybe I did. If I did, what I'm doing right now is tucking in the corners like they ought to be tucked in. No call for sympathy here. A body feels sorry for somebody, they feel like they're better than that somebody, that's the truth. Now, I might feel different if Harry had died, but Harry didn't die. Harry got mad at me, went to Nashville, stayed two weeks and come home married to somebody else. What I get is “Oh, poor Dessa, I feel so sorry for you…” Well, don't. Feel sorry for Brenda if you want to feel sorry for somebody. She married Harry.

[Brenda:] There probably isn't much I can say to keep from looking pretty crazy. Meeting a man in a bar and drinking and talking and after two weeks tying the knot is not what anybody I know thinks Dear Abby might call a good idea, me included, so I knew it was a tomfool thing to do and it was. But I'm not sorry I did it and if I was still just hanging out in Nashville, giving up whatever hopes I had—I am 37—I'd do it again in a minute. Don't get me wrong, marrying was not what I was hoping for, I don't know if I can say what I was hoping for, hope's such a mess spreading all over everything, but I was lonely and sick of trash jobs like waiting tables and getting up the next day and doing the same thing and then there was Harry and marrying Harry was the gift horse that stood grinning at me. I think I was sort of a gift horse for Harry too, and a couple of gift horses that are given to one another know better than to look each other in the mouth.

[Harry:] Now, I am not real proud of myself. What I did was half-cocked and I knew Dessa wasn't going to like it. Even standing there in Nashville at the justice of the peace, I was thinking Dessa ain't gonna like this much. And then driving back up the interstate, Brenda's stuff in the back of the truck, I was doing strict 55. I never drove 55 since the law went in, but I did it coming north on I-81 'cause it takes longer. I was driving with Brenda sitting next to me, and I was saying things a man says to a woman that just married him and he's taking her home, things about the house and who she's gonna like in the neighborhood, things like if she wants to go to church, I reckon we could do that for awhile. But I'm thinking about what I really ought to be telling Brenda and 55 ain't slow enough to get it out. How do you say you have a common law wife you haven't talked about yet and you're getting a common law divorce right as you sit here saying it, only the common law wife doesn't know it yet? And then I'm thinking about how Dessa probably ain't gonna like Brenda even a little bit and she probably ain't gonna be very happy about my getting married. Dessa don't take up with people easy like I do. I stopped at one of those rest stops and I called her. I was going to say it but I couldn't think of how to start. She said “hello” and I couldn't push out a word. I just hung up.

[Dessa:] Marriage is not what it's cracked up to be. I knew that right from the beginning. I knew what I was supposed to think it was and I knew what me and my friends wanted it to be. We wanted romance. Well, my mother made sure a youngun didn't get out of her house without hearing something different. She had this list of names for daddy that began with hard-headed and ended with son-of-a-bitch and got pretty hot in between. But you didn't have to hear the names. You could look at my mother and see her life wasn't much to brag about and daddy was part of the problem and the name calling didn't help. So I knew about that marriage. I just figured I'd be different.

My mother knew when Harry first started talking about getting married. She could tell, I swear she could smell it and she started in on what she called woman-to-woman talks. They were not about the facts of life, she never did get to that. I could have told her stuff. These were talking-tos, they were what I got when I was in trouble right before I got the real punishment. They started the minute Harry knocked on the door to pick me up for a date. They included Harry sometimes, not that he was a volunteer, but then, I wasn't either. They began with “Now Dessa, you are not old enough…” To be seeing one boy regular. To be going out as much as I was. I was old enough and we both knew it. I was eighteen. It was like she was talking to take up time. The more she did of it, the worse I wanted out. So I told her I'd find out if Harry was as bad as she thought before I did anything to make it permanent—she didn't like it but she thought I meant sleeping with Harry when I said that about making it permanent and anything was better to her than running away and getting married so she didn't disown me or anything. And I told Harry maybe I'd marry him but I didn't see no reason to rush into things and why didn't we just move in with each other for awhile and see how it worked.

[Harry:] You fall in love like I did, you decide you want to live with a person and you ask that person to marry you and she either does or she don't, right? That's how I see it now. There ought not be no halfway about it and Dessa and I were halfway. All Dessa would go was halfway. Dessa'd stop halfway to the gates of heaven, turn around and tell the angel Gabriel maybe she'd go on but maybe she's just gonna sit here for awhile. She said maybe to me and she never got around to saying yes. It ain't no way to live together, it makes a man uncomfortable, like he ain't welcome to pull his shoes off. It did me. I pulled my shoes off when I wanted to, I don't mean I didn't ever do that, but I never felt halfway about Dessa and Dessa was halfway about me. She had to be. Why else would she stop halfway? Ask yourself that. I asked myself. Over and over and over again, driving somewhere in the truck, even with Dessa sitting there. I couldn't help it. And I asked Dessa. She'd say “Harry, I'm not with you because I'm tied to you so it must be because I want to be here. You should be pleased by that.”

[Dessa:] Moving in together was fine with Harry then. He told everybody he knew that he'd hooked up with a swinging woman. “Knows her own mind” he said. I didn't think I was so swinging or so smart either. At first I was worried and I didn't want it to be awful or expensive if it turned out like my mother was so sure it was going to. But it turned out to be almost easy and I thought we did all right.

[Harry:] For a while, I was satisfied. Took the “being with you” bait hook, line and sinker. But people say more than that to one another. Dessa said you can't say more than that, but I know you can. People get married to each other and marrying is deciding I do or I don't, I am or I ain't, it's drawing some lines. Marrying is not having to sit with your back to the wall anymore. I would have married Dessa right up to the minute I married Brenda and been happy as a bug in a rug, but Dessa wouldn't do it and I could not stand all the maybes any more.

[Dessa:] I thought Harry proved my mother wrong. Turns out he proved her right. What I did was different from my mother but it didn't work and what's funny is that after fourteen years, it's not gonna cost much money to get out. It's hard to say what it is costing. I think what mother was trying to tell me is that loving somebody costs, costs in ways you never know it's gonna cost, costs in ways you never think to think about. Loving daddy cost my mother years of her life. I don't know how many but I'd bet it's true. I don't think loving Harry cost me years—Harry wasn't as hard to love as my daddy—but loving Harry cost me more than loving me cost Harry. I'm the one that got the surprise. “Surprise! I married somebody else!” I wouldn't have ever, ever done that to Harry. I wouldn't have even thought of it.