southern writers Archives - Late Last Night Books

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Little Town, Big Exposure: A Visit to the 9th Annual Gaithersburg Book Festival

Bad Weather Doesn’t Stop Book Lovers

In the opening hours of the Ninth Annual Gaithersburg Book Festival, the skies were an ugly steel gray and the precipitation shifted across mist, sprinkle, drizzle, and steady rain — and still the book lovers came out in force. Sporting umbrellas and rain ponchos, they were ready to hear their favorite authors read from and discuss books at the different literary tents, browse the new and used bookstores and independent booksellers, get their books signed while chatting with those favorite authors, grab something tasty from the food vendors, and go back again for more.

Of the many book festivals that the Baltimore-Washington area now enjoys, Gaithersburg is my personal favorite. Though it often draws over twenty thousand attendees and attracts many nationally known authors, it still has a very intimate feeling.

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AN INTERVIEW WITH M.O. WALSH, AUTHOR OF MY SUNSHINE AWAY

When M.O. Walsh released his debut novel My Sunshine Away, reviewers named him the newest member of the Southern gothic literary tradition. The novel, which I reviewed on Late Last Night Books here, offers the rich atmosphere and haunting darkness associated with the Southern gothic school, but it also offers many-faceted characters caught in some of life’s profound dilemmas. In recognition of its excellence, My Sunshine Away won the Pat Conroy Southern Book Award for General Fiction. I was delighted when Walsh agreed to answer questions about his inspirations, writing techniques, and more.

S.W. What is appealing about the U.S. South in general as a setting? Would you ever consider writing a novel set somewhere other than the South?

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MY SUNSHINE AWAY—WHAT HAPPENED WHEN I WASN’T LOOKING

Most novels that include an assault in the plot feature that assault as the main event. One of the beauties of M.O. Walsh’s debut novel My Sunshine Away is that the rape described on page one is not the main event, no matter how much the young narrator wants to think it is.

At age 14, the narrator, who remains nameless throughout the story, is infatuated with his 15-year-old neighbor Lindy. So, when she is attacked coming home from track practice one summer night in 1989, he thinks the world as he knows it is destroyed. Through his remaining adolescence, he sees life through the prism of the rape and how it affects Lindy’s relationship with him, while all around him so much else is happening that belies the idyllic quality of his southern neighborhood and that will shape him into the adult he becomes.

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TRAVELING WITH MISS JULIA

Summer is the time for road trips, and one of the best traveling companions is a phone or iPad full of audiobooks. If I’m driving alone, I get antsy if I have to go very far without one of these lively passengers. They’re also great for sharing if you have one that everybody in the car likes. I find the best books for travel are lighter fare because it’s hard to keep up with complex plots when traffic takes your attention.

One of my favorite series of books for listening in the car is the Miss Julia series by Ann B. Ross. Miss Julia is a clever, opinionated, and lovable woman of a certain age who has a knack for getting involved in thorny circumstances, sometimes by her own actions, but usually not.

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THE INVENTION OF WINGS—EXPLORING THE SOUL OF A WOMAN WHO LEARNED TO FLY

Ever since The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd was released in 2014, I’ve heard it described as the story of the relationship between a white girl and the enslaved black girl who is given to her as her personal maid on her eleventh birthday. The novel is that story, but its deeper story is the evolution of the white girl, Sarah Grimké, into not only a leader of the abolitionist movement but also one of the first proponents of women’s rights.

Sarah Grimké was a real person who was born into Charleston aristocracy and grew up there in the years before the U.S. Civil War. Kidd used diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, and Sarah’s own writing as well as biographical material to learn the facts of Sarah’s life and many of her desires, struggles, and motivations.

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6/10/2015. INTERVIEW WITH TOM FRANKLIN, CO-AUTHOR OF THE TILTED WORLD

6/10/2015. INTERVIEW WITH TOM FRANKLIN, CO-AUTHOR OF THE TILTED WORLD

Tom Franklin’s fiction overflows with detailed characters, rich emotion, and the smoldering energy of the Deep South. I first encountered his novels with Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, a marvelous story of murder and tested loyalty that was nominated for nine awards and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the prestigious Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger Award.

The Tilted World, which Franklin wrote with his wife, Beth Ann Fennelly, is even better. In The Tilted World, Franklin and Fennelly explore the devastating consequences of the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 on property and people. As I said in my review of The Tilted World last month, the authors give life to the fear, grit, and courage of the people who were there.

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5/10/2015—BOOK REVIEW: THE TILTED WORLD BY TOM FRANKLIN AND BETH ANN FENNELLY (ONE OF THE BEST HISTORICAL NOVELS I’VE EVER READ)

5/10/2015—BOOK REVIEW: THE TILTED WORLD BY TOM FRANKLIN AND BETH ANN FENNELLY (ONE OF THE BEST HISTORICAL NOVELS I’VE EVER READ)

In March 1927, after months of nearly nonstop rainfall, a levee on the Mississippi River near Greenville, Mississippi, collapsed with more than double the water volume of Niagara Falls. The deluge, combined with flooding from additional breaks in the levee system, covered 27,000 square miles in 10 states up to a depth of 30 feet. Authorities have called it the most destructive river flood in the history of the United States. And yet many people have never heard of it. In their gripping new novel The Tilted World, Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly have righted that omission and brought the horrors and heroism of the flood to life.

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INTERVIEW WITH CLIFFORD GARSTANG, AUTHOR OF IN AN UNCHARTED COUNTRY AND WHAT THE ZHANG BOYS KNOW

1/10/2015—INTERVIEW WITH CLIFFORD GARSTANG, AUTHOR OF IN AN UNCHARTED COUNTRY AND WHAT THE ZHANG BOYS KNOW

I discovered Clifford Garstang through his excellent blog “Perpetual Folly.” I was looking for information for a SheWrites.com blog post I was writing about literary magazines, and Garstang had the information right there when I needed it. So I started reading his blog and realized that his writing is both engaging and provocative. His collection of short stories, In an Uncharted Country, won the Maria Thomas Fiction Award and the IPPY Gold Medal for Best Regional Fiction–Mid-Atlantic 2010. His novel in stories, What the Zhang Boys Know, won the 2013 Library of Virginia Award for Fiction. Most recently, Garstang served as curator and editor of Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet, published in 2014.

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BOOK REVIEW: GODS IN ALABAMA BY JOSHILYN JACKSON

11/10/2014 – BOOK REVIEW: GODS IN ALABAMA BY JOSHILYN JACKSON

Gods in Alabama by Joshilyn Jackson starts with a shock and ends with an even bigger shock. Set in the tiny town of Possett, Alabama, the story is a classic example of Southern Gothic literature, which includes works by Flannery O’Connor (the queen of Southern Gothic), William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Carson McCullers. You can tell a story is Southern Gothic by its preponderance of violence, weird characters, loners, ghosts, and other grotesque occurrences in any and all combinations. Jackson’s protagonist, Arlene Fleet, fulfills most of these requirements all by herself.

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LEE SMITH—DISTINCTIVE VOICE OF SOUTHERN DIGNITY

9/10/2014 LEE SMITH—DISTINCTIVE VOICE OF SOUTHERN DIGNITY

Last month, in my review of Lee Smith’s novel Guests on Earth, I talked about the dignity and respect that Smith gives to her characters, not just in her latest novel, but in all her novels. This month I want to tell you more about that particular writing skill and about another of Smith’s strengths, a detailed attention to setting. I also promised to tell you about Smith’s personal connection to Guests on Earth, which is tied to her deep sense of place.

Over the years, Smith has published 13 novels and four collections of short stories. She’s won numerous writing awards, including the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the North Carolina Award for Literature, and a Southern Book Critics Circle Award.

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BOOK REVIEW: GUESTS ON EARTH BY LEE SMITH

8/10/2014 BOOK REVIEW: GUESTS ON EARTH BY LEE SMITH

Sanity and insanity are more closely linked than most people realize, particularly in the lives of artists. Why is creativity often accompanied by some degree of madness? And why are women, particularly in the past two centuries, more likely to be judged insane than men? With a captivating mixture of fictional characters and people who actually lived, Lee Smith explores these questions and others in her latest novel, Guests on Earth.

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4/1/2014. GUEST BLOGGER PEGGY PAYNE ON NOVELS OF THE SUPERNATURAL AND EXTREMELY NATURAL

4/1/2014. GUEST BLOGGER PEGGY PAYNE ON NOVELS OF THE SUPERNATURAL AND EXTREMELY NATURAL

The question most writers are asked second (after the universal “What do you do?”) is “What do you write?”

Not such an easy question to answer for novelists whose books deal with both spirituality and the raw details of physical and emotional life.

More important, what if you’re a reader and want to read such a book: where do you look? Again, not so easy.

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AUTHOR PEGGY PAYNE IS GUEST BLOGGER ON APRIL 1

3/29/14. AUTHOR PEGGY PAYNE IS GUEST BLOGGER ON APRIL 1

Author Peggy Payne has chosen to craft her novels around the intersection of spirituality and physical/emotional life. Or, as she explained in an interview here earlier this month, the subject chose her. The results include Revelation, Cobalt Blue, and Sister India, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Despite her novels’ success, Peggy says she has difficulty explaining their nature and an even bigger challenge categorizing them so readers know where to find them. She’s come up with possible, somewhat whimsical, solutions to the labeling dilemma, which she shares along with actual sources for books of “expanded realism” on a guest blog post here April 1.

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INTERVIEW WITH PEGGY PAYNE, AUTHOR OF COBALT BLUE

3/10/14 INTERVIEW WITH PEGGY PAYNE, AUTHOR OF COBALT BLUE

Throughout her career as a novelist, Peggy Payne has explored aspects of spiritual and supernatural phenomena. Her first novel, Revelation, deals with a Christian minister who hears God speak to him out loud. Her second, Sister India, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, follows an American woman as she seeks sanctuary in Varanasi (Benares), India, destination of the holiest Hindu pilgrimage. Payne’s latest novel, Cobalt Blue, as I said in my review last month, describes the turbulent experience of kundalini rising. Cobalt Blue earned the rare distinction of having been the book of the month on a Playboy Radio Network program and in the top 100 spiritual books for Kindle.

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BOOK REVIEW: COBALT BLUE BY PEGGY PAYNE

2/10/14 BOOK REVIEW: COBALT BLUE BY PEGGY PAYNE

Cobalt Blue is a novel about sex, and then it’s not. If you’re looking for steamy sex scenes, you’ll find them here, but you’ll also find much more in the struggles of Andie Branson, a 38-year-old artist who is suddenly caught up in a puzzling chaos of inspiration and desire. Frustrated that her career is floundering (her most recent job includes the lowly work of napkin design), Andie’s interest in creating art is waning, so she’s surprised when an unexpected surge of pleasure grows into an urgent passion to paint. And so the journey begins.

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Interview with Nancy Hartney, Author of Washed in the Water

9/17/13 — INTERVIEW WITH NANCY HARTNEY, AUTHOR OF WASHED IN THE WATER

In my review of Washed in the Water earlier this month, I suggested this debut collection of short stories made Nancy Hartney an important new voice of the South. That was very much on my mind when I got a chance to talk to Hartney about her roots, how her upbringing influenced her writing, and how she feels about the region she grew up in. Here is our interview, slightly edited and condensed:

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Interview: Amy Franklin-Willis, The Lost Saints of Tennessee

9/10/13 – INTERVIEW WITH AMY FRANKLIN-WILLIS, AUTHOR OF THE LOST SAINTS OF TENNESSEE

When Amy Franklin-Willis’s debut novel, The Lost Saints of Tennessee, was released, The New York Times Book Review noted “the main characters are agreeably imperfect, their stories sensitively told.” The Christian Science Monitor said, “…she excels at making readers care about her characters, especially the ones who have made the biggest mistakes.”

I couldn’t agree more that characters are the soul of The Lost Saints of Tennessee, although the sense of place is powerful, too.

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