Southern Writers on Writing

Susan Cushman

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781496815019
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

Contributions by Julie Cantrell, Katherine Clark, Susan Cushman, Jim Dees, Clyde Edgerton, W. Ralph Eubanks, John M. Floyd, Joe Formichella, Patti Callahan Henry, Jennifer Horne, Ravi Howard, Suzanne Hudson, River Jordan, Harrison Scott Key, Cassandra King, Alan Lightman, Sonja Livingston, Corey Mesler, Niles Reddick, Wendy Reed, Nicole Seitz, Lee Smith, Michael Farris Smith, Sally Palmer Thomason, Jacqueline Allen Trimble, M. O. Walsh, and Claude Wilkinson The South is often misunderstood on the national stage, characterized by its struggles with poverty, education, and racism, yet the region has yielded an abundance of undeniably great literature. In Southern Writers on Writing, Susan Cushman collects twenty-six writers from across the South whose work celebrates southern culture and shapes the landscape of contemporary southern literature. Contributors hail from Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida. Contributors such as Lee Smith, Michael Farris Smith, W. Ralph Eubanks, and Harrison Scott Key, among others, explore issues like race, politics, and family and the apex of those issues colliding. It discusses landscapes, voices in the South, and how writers write. The anthology is divided into six sections, including "Becoming a Writer;" "Becoming a Southern Writer;" "Place, Politics, People;" "Writing about Race;" "The Craft of Writing;" and "A Little Help from My Friends."

III

Place, Politics, People

Southern writers have a great sense of place. That makes you write the truth. When you do that, people read it and say, “You wrote my life.”

—MAGGIE BRITTON VAUGHN (POET LAUREATE OF TENNESSEE SINCE 1995)

Southern Fiction: A Tool to Stretch the Soul and Soften the Heart

Julie Cantrell

My story begins in Louisiana, a land that gave me life—and, oh what a feral life it was! I begin my essay in the Bayou State because, for me, every story can be traced back to those densely tangled roots.

Many hear the word Louisiana and imagine a hot, humid mess of a place. They’d be correct. The humidity is fierce, the heat can be unbearable, and the air sometimes carries the odor of mud and fish, diesel engines and petroleum plants. On the surface it can appear a bit unpleasant if not downright threatening, especially in areas where litter is commonplace and poverty is extreme, where entire families reside in a shanty shack or an off-the-grid river camp or a rusty, gutted school bus surrounded by weeds.

But there is a reason native Louisianans rarely leave, and it’s not because we’re crazy—although most of us are and, truth be told, normal does not impress us much.

While Louisiana is indeed a hot mess of a state, lurking at the bottom of the map as a breeding ground for mosquitoes, alligators, nutria, and snakes, it is so much more than that. My homeland is an enchanted realm where sinners and saints meet beneath chapel spires, where voodoo lurks between tombstones, and where a casket can float right up out of the ground. It’s a place where murky backwaters draw a darkness so deep, the only light comes from swamp gas or heat flash or early morning sea vessels.

We are a blended people in a land with blurred lines, a place thick with fog and back-alley jazz, where waters shift and levees break and the bayou itself can be heard breathing. It’s a place where we stick together, even when we fall. A place where we come back swinging—or singing—no matter how many times life drags us under.

Louisiana is the only place in the world where someone can find a backyard crawfish boil, a Second Line parade, and a Sunday revival, all in the midst of fiddles, accordions, tubas, and trombones. It’s a place of shotguns, airboats, and filé gumbo, not to mention a bag of beignets and a King Cake. Or two.

This Creole state is at once a fais do-do, a Mardi Gras, a baptism, and a cochon de lait. It’s an early morning bateau aimed for trot lines or duck blinds. It’s an old glass jug of cherry bounce or a whispered spell to keep the haunts at bay. It’s a childhood spent in catechism or Sunday school, a calendar built around hunting seasons and offshore shifts. It’s corrupt politicians, snake oil salesmen, mobsters, conmen, nuns, and priests, all gathered together for an SEC sunset on a Death Valley Saturday night.

Despite its rough edges and soiled soul, Louisiana is my heart’s home, and I quite like it that way.

So what does Louisiana have to do with writing? Well, nothing. And everything.

At its beginning, the people who navigated these bayous were of two extremes. Either they were hired explorers out to stake a claim for some faraway king, or they were exiles kicked out of the more habitable lands until they reached the place where river meets sea. Once a home to native tribes, this boot-shaped state eventually became a land of misfits. A dwelling space for slaves, Gypsies, prisoners, refugees, and those on the run for reasons never told.

It sounds as if no one in their right mind would want to live here, but that’s a far cry from truth.

Those of us who do share space with such ragged spirits would have it no other way. We are a people who take pride in doing life on our own terms, in placing our faith in something greater than ourselves, and being self-sufficient survivors. If there’s anything I have learned from Louisiana, a shape-shifting state if ever there was one, it’s that life will bring wave after wave of trauma and transition. Our job is to always, always, always find a way to adapt.

While Louisiana has long been a celebrated mix of cultures, ethnicities, religions, and class, undercurrents of bigotry do surface at times. I spent my childhood in a rural community, and in those days the few minorities who did reside in our town lived in one small section near the railroad tracks. It was called The Quarters, and I don’t have to explain that name. Domestic violence was commonplace in our parish, and women—survivors in their own right—were often kept “in their place” by immature and/or insecure partners. Substance abuse played a big part in these abusive cycles, countered only by the evangelical teachings of absolute abstinence and the eternal wrath of God.

True to its roots, Louisiana remains a world of two extremes today. It is an all-or-nothing kind of world, reflected perfectly in the practice of Mardi Gras, a no-holds-barred carnival season followed immediately by the restrictive tradition of Lent. It’s no wonder so few are able to maintain a steady balance in the midst of such chaotic swings.

As a child in Louisiana, I had to learn quickly how to navigate this wondrous place. It was all things wild and beautiful, at once pure and perilous. It was the kind of land where you keep your eyes wide open—for snakes, for spiders, for predators of all sorts.

Louisiana is about resilience, and any true Louisianian has learned that the hard way. One way I learned to survive such surroundings was by putting ink to page. As a young girl with bare feet and braids, I would climb into my backyard cedar tree and write in my journal. At first, I wrote about the world as I saw it. I wrote about the boys I wanted to marry, the love I had for my family, and the landscape that shaped my soul. But in time I began to write in greater detail about the people I loved, the people who formed my neighborhood, my community—and me.

I wrote about the man who gave his wife a black eye and then turned around to give us tomatoes from his garden. Another man who fed two stray puppies to the alligators before tossing the ball with us in the front yard. A woman who was drunk every afternoon by the time her kids got off the school bus, but who cooked her family three meals a day and packed her children’s lunches every morning. A man who kept five pit bulls chained in the backyard for fighting, but who collapsed in tears when his young daughter was diagnosed with cancer. A woman who isolated herself after learning of her husband’s affair, and the husband who continued to carry on as if nothing at all had happened, as if the whole wide world belonged to him.

As a child, I learned to pay attention, and I learned to process the crazy world around me by capturing it all on paper. I tackled adolescent angst by penning songs and melodramatic poetry. This led to gushy love letters, and a fair amount of thoughts about kissing. But I had no idea how therapeutic writing would become for me until I entered a high school literature class.

Our teacher assigned To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, and she required us to journal as if we were one of the characters from the story. Naturally, I chose Scout. I began writing as if I was this spunky, high-spirited little girl moving through a time and space I had never known. With that one assignment, writing became more than a way to document life around me. It became my favorite escape.

My journaling shifted in response. I no longer wrote about the people I observed. Instead, I began writing from the lens of each neighbor, relative, stranger, or friend. As I became the abusive husband, the alcoholic mother, the liar, the cheat, or the con, I began to unravel the complex dynamics that could lead any one of us into a particular place in life. It became clear that we were all just a few mistakes, mishaps, or choices away from one another, and I began to build a deep sense of empathy for every person whose path crossed mine—the good, the bad, and the ugly.

As that fourteen-year-old girl, I learned that fiction has the power to break down barriers. But it took me years to understand why. Now I believe fiction offers wide-open access to our emotional core, inviting us to draw from the well of truths that most of us have learned to avoid. When reading a nonfiction account of another person’s experiences, we tend to enter that story with our defenses high. We may think to ourselves, “Oh, I’d never do that.” Or “Wow, she’s really selfish.” Or “What an idiot!” It’s easy for us to separate the real person’s life from our own, and therefore we convince ourselves we could never end up in the trouble they’re in because of x, y, or z.

This is an instinctive way to protect ourselves from the fear and anxiety that might arise if we dared consider someone else’s messed-up life could very easily become ours. But it also prevents us from taking deep, honest glances at our own vulnerabilities and limits our opportunities for personal growth.

While nonfiction keeps us one step removed from the feelings, thoughts, and beliefs of another character, fiction tears down those walls. When we read fiction, we enter the story with an understanding that it is no threat to us because this situation is not real. In fact, it’s never been real. And it never will be real. Not for the characters in the story, and certainly not for us.

Knowing these imaginary situations aren’t likely to enter our actual lives, we can lower our defenses and fully walk in the skin of these characters without fear. This allows us to experience life through their lens and to identify with those who are “not like” us.

This is where the magic happens. By embracing a character’s personal journey, we can begin to understand people who think differently, behave differently, and believe differently than we do.

Fiction builds empathy. Fiction is the truth teller. Fiction is the peacemaker.

And what does this have to do with the South? Louisiana is one small piece of the South, but it is a vital piece, and while many people may assume such a unique place can’t possibly reflect their own communities, they’d be wrong. Louisiana reveals the human journey at its best and worst. On a larger scale, the South does the same.

In literature, the South works as a lure by tapping all the senses. When we set a story here, we not only deliver a cast of colorful characters, we share their sinful secrets while serving a mouth-watering meal. We draw readers in with soul-stirring music and landscapes that would make anyone want to disappear beneath the mossy oaks. The South offers a fantasy, a place where time slows and anxieties melt like the ice in a glass of sugar cane rum.

Readers of southern literature are invited to explore a place that exists on a level either above or below their own reality, even if they spend their actual lives right here with us in the South. Whether we draw a reader to the backwater bayous, the dusty Texas oil fields, or the misty Smoky Mountains, we pull them a world away from the nine-to-five grind, inviting them to climb aboard a Gulf Coast shrimp boat or take a stroll on a quiet Charleston boulevard. We drape them in feathers before parading them through the raucous crowds of Bourbon Street. We settle them into a shallow bateau or sway with them on a squeaking streetcar. We bring them out of their own worries and woes, and we allow them to become a different self. Then, with their defenses lowered, we are able to give them that invaluable new view, enabling them to end the book with a greater understanding of one another. And of themselves.

The South is the ideal setting for such soul exploration because it is not only alluring, it is complex. With complicated tensions, it would be easy to get caught in the trap of bigotry here. We all know hatred has destroyed many a soul in these parts. And beyond. But fiction allows us to avoid that undertow, to swim beyond the weight of such destructive beliefs. By stepping into a story, we learn to see the world from all sides, and we begin to realize we are all Louisianians. We are all just scrappy little souls doing the best we can to survive.

Many in life say the earth is our mother. If that’s the case, then the South is the lap into which we all crawl to hear her story. It is the place where we learn a language of folklore and fairytales, happy-ever-afters and made-up myths. Here, swaddled in kudzu beneath the bower of magnolias, we nurse from the bosom of the universe’s bard. We nestle snug in her arms, sipping on fables. We cut our teeth on plotlines, believing that we are the hero of her tales.

The South is nothing less than a sanctuary for story. It is the porch swing, the rocking chair, the barstool, the back pew. It is everything that made me and shaped me and saved me. As a southern writer, I aim only to invite my readers to enter this sacred space.

So to all I say, Welcome, welcome home. Life is hard and your soul is weary. Come in, kick off your shoes. You are safe here. Let me tell you a story.

The Burden of Southern Literature

Katherine Clark

A hundred years ago, anyone who contemplated writing serious literature about the South had to deal with what C. Vann Woodward famously called “the burden of southern history.” By “burden,” he meant that the history of the South after the Civil War stood in exact contrast to the history of America. Whereas the country at large was characterized by success of all kinds, the South was considered a defeated failure. America was a land of prosperity; the South was a region of poverty. As industrialization and urbanization swept the country, the South remained regressively rural and agricultural. The American self-image was one of moral superiority and idealism, while the South had harbored the original sin of slavery. In his essay, “The Search for Southern Identity,” Woodward presents a series of these stark contrasts between the collective experience of America as opposed to that of the South.

The burden for a would-be writer in the South 100 years ago was the fear that no one either inside or outside the region would want to read about a place marred by failure, poverty, slavery, backwardness, and a horde of social, political, and economic side effects. If the South was a national embarrassment and a pocket of shame, what reader would be drawn to this subject matter? And if the South was so different from the rest of the country, why would most Americans want to read about something that did not connect or relate to them? So at the beginning of the twentieth century, there was no such thing as a “southern writer.” There were writers in the South searching for subjects that would strike a chord with a national audience.

William Faulkner was one of these authors. At the beginning of his career, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I. Becoming a Writer
• II. Becoming a Southern Writer
• III. Place, Politics, People
• IV. Writing about Race
• V. On the Craft of Writing
• VI. A Little Help from My Friends
• Contributors
• Index