Creative Writing Student Portfolio 2019-2020

ON CAMERON KNOWLER ELI WINTER (AB’20)

The last time Cameron Knowler and I saw each other, we got together to play guitar a few days after New Year’s. A year before, we had gone on tour; now we had hopes to record some of the music we’d played on the road. At some point, Cameron let slip his lone serious New Year’s resolution, which was “to stop talking.” He’s the only guy I know who could keep it.

I’ve known Cameron for a little over two years. I don’t remember how we met. We play music together, but we come from different backgrounds. My music has a nebulous position within experimental circles; Cameron, meanwhile, describes himself as a “recovering bluegrass musician.” He’s tan, limber and tall, with thin lips, a sharp nose and acne scars dotting his cheeks. He often dwarfs his instruments—arms angled, neck bent, tapping his toe when he plays. His voice is a narrow tenor, quiet yet incisive. Bantering in between songs, he can be difficult to hear, yet one senses that he’s saying something important. He talks carefully, deliberately, with focused restraint. And he speaks in paragraphs—pausing, digressing, backing up, turning to face a thought.

Nearing home after a summer tour, I tell him he feels like a kindred spirit. He feels the same.

On tour, I saw his attention to detail firsthand. Each morning, whether he’s slept in a bed or on the floor, he rolls the cuff of his jeans up an inch or two past his ankles when he gets dressed. He wears his hair long, swooping diagonally over his forehead down to his brow. There’s usually a trucker hat; sometimes, themed socks.

You get the sense that he’s self-sufficient, and that, in many things, he’s taught himself much of what he knows.

Cameron plays guitar in a number of styles: bluegrass, oldtime, rock, jazz. He started when he was three.

His dad, who was fascinated by the guitar, gave him a Guns N’ Roses cassette tape. Cameron remembers his reaction: “I became obsessed… Holy shit.” Soon, he was playing every day. His hand, he says, formed in the shape of the guitar’s neck.

Don’t get me wrong: the guitar has a steep learning curve. To strum, you turn your right forearm in towards the guitar, clipping a pick between your thumb and forefinger, like one might hold a pen. Your picking has to be precise to play notes in quick succession, moving between and across the strings. Meanwhile, your left hand curls around the guitar’s neck, fingers bending into stiff, complex chord shapes, fingertips pressing the strings hard against the fretboard and in towards your palm, forming calluses or even drawing blood. The motions are unfamiliar, challenging, often painful. You could hardly blame a first-time guitarist for quitting once this mess of coordination challenges confronts them.

This might explain why, when Cameron started seriously learning to flatpick a few years ago, he spent a considerable amount of each practice session holding his guitar in his lap and looking at it. When you hold a guitar in your lap, its curves fit the shape of your thigh. Play it long enough and it feels like it’s part of you; the Indian slide guitarist Debashish Bhattarcharya says the fretboard of his lap guitar feels like part of his spine. But there’s a scientific basis for it, too. A few minutes is all you need to use a tool, such as a guitar pick, and think of it as part of your body. Cameron’s pick isn’t separate from him, but an extension of him. The guitar, too, feels connected, part of a musical symbiosis. And so, when you hear Cameron’s music, you feel like you’ve shaken his hand.

Cameron’s main inspiration is Norman Blake, the iconoclast bluegrass guitarist. When I ask him where 17