Confessions of a Southern Writer

I love Delta blues, grits and fried green tomatoes, and sitting on my front porch swing sipping a big glass of iced sweet tea while mocking birds fight in my magnolia tree. I have a deep Southern drawl and love excess. I have a gazillion first cousins and hear every one of their secrets at funerals – the second best social event in the deep South after football. I am Scarlett O’Hara about my farm and would subsist on radishes before I’d sell an inch of it.  I call perfect strangers hon, my neighbors by their first name and my enemies that heifer. And when summer comes and the fragrance of gardenia, jasmine and sweet olive fills my gardens, I am so overcome by joy I dance half-naked under the full moon. But only where that heifer can’t see me and gossip.

What does any of that have to do with being a Southern writer? Everything! Blues and sweet tea and jasmine are in my blood. Magnolias and funeral foods and secrets are in my bones. The land is my soul.  When I write I’m doing more than telling a story: I’m slicing myself open and coloring every page with my blood, bones and soul.  And I’m doing it without conscious effort.

When I wrote The Sweetest Hallelujah I tapped deep into my roots to come up with the characters. My quirky, wonderful, terrible, awful, amazing relatives sang through my mind as I created Billie and Miss Queen, Cassie and Betty Jewel, Sudie and Merry Lynn, Saint Hughes and Tiny Jim.

The same was true of setting. Guided by Eudora Welty’s example of writing with a strong sense of place, I filled the novel with places in the Deep South that are familiar to me – my farm (you guessed that, right?), the little Southern church where both the music and the sermon echo with cadences of the blues, Carver Park where the swings are rusty and a little girl looking to get into trouble can find it, Tiny Jim’s juke joint where anybody with a harmonica in his pocket and a case of soul-punched blues can find himself in the limelight.

I’d love to say that the rest of the book came to me in a flash of inspiration and them appeared on the page as if by magic.  But that’s not true. The Sweetest Hallelujah went through a gazillion versions over ten or so years of sweat and tears, prayer and euphoria, blues and chocolate. And that’s before I ever sent it to my agent!  Not to mention that I wrote it in the shadow of such Southern literary giants as William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Harper Lee and Pat Conroy.

Believe me, being a Southern writer is not easy.

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