friday reading tip:
Check out the new anthology, Alumni Grill, featuring stories by a number of Southern writers, including yours truly. Other authors in the mix are Brad Watson (author of the excellent story collection Last Days of the Dog Men and the novel Heaven of Mercury), Silas House, Rick Bragg, Suzanne Hudson, and Tom Franklin, to name a few. Alumni Grill and Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe III are the latest in a series of Southern fiction anthologies published by MacAdam/Cage.
A couple of weeks ago, MacAdam/Cage joined Lemuria Books to throw a huge party in Mississippi to celebrate the publication.Contributors to both anthologies were on hand to sign books, give readings, and drink lots and lots of beer. I was there last year but missed it this year, on account of being, in Biblical terms, "great with child."
As you may know by now, I live in San Francisco. But I grew up in Alabama, on the Gulf Coast, which is where my story collection, The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress, is set. Despite the fact that I haven't lived in Alabama in eleven years, I find myself coming back to the South in my writing again and again.As writers, we are so often shaped by place, by the climates and voices of our childhood, by the earliest language we pick up from parents and family and community. We may relocate, lose our accents, change our religious and political affiliations--in essence, grow up--but something of the place of our childhoods always remains with us.
the exercise:
fiction: Write a story set in the city/neighborhood/region of your childhood. In the story, setting should be more than a mere backdrop. It should be vivid and alive, integral to the plot and movement of the story.
memoir: Write about a place that has shaped you.
11:27:02 AM 
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