Flannery, Shelby and Me

It’s been 22 years since I left the South for the Midwest.  I remember thinking that it was 116° and I was leaving ‘home’, with a new husband and a new life.  I was scared.  I’ll admit that now.  Things have changed in those 22 years, including the things I will admit.  Now I’ll admit I’m a writer.

The new home became another.  The new husband became an old husband, then an ex.  Soon I will have spent more of my life in the Midwest than the South.  It doesn’t matter.  I always have been and always will be Southern.  Maybe it’s genetic.  It’s definitely in the heart.  It will always be ‘home’.

I started writing when I was nine years old. My friends wanted to be ballerinas, teachers and nurses. I wanted to be a writer.  For years, writing sat on a shelf in my heart.  They were years of living, learning, and gathering the experiences of life that filled my writing when I took it off the shelf and put it back into the day-to-day. 

I wrote scenes, shorts, sketches, novels, and was shocked to discover that I was a Southern writer.  I am a Southern writer.  Almost everything is set in some Southern location, real or imagined.  Even stories set elsewhere are filled with characters gloriously Southern.  Dialogue is rich with Southern phrases and feelings. 

Yesterday, I found myself writing these words: “I can’t seem to get away from the fact that I’m a Southern writer”.  My next sentence was this:  “And why would I want to?”

The society of Southern writers is populated by some of the most remarkable and celebrated people who put pen to paper or finger to keyboard.  Like all writers, we are a mix of people and personalities.  We have our share of those who lived fast and died young.  We have the usual numbers of never, singularly, multiply, and unhappily married, and every conceivable compliment of significant others.  We include writers who never left the South and those who left and never returned. 

.  We tend toward long sentences and richly textured names.  We describe locales in ways that give immediate recognition.  We are adept at disguising no-account relations in stories that make you laugh and cry, sometimes both all at once.  And we can say, “Why, no ma’am, Aunt Mamie.  I wasn’t thinkin’ of Cousin George when I wrote that at all!” with a perfectly straight face.

This fraternity of writers includes names that conjure up every genre, style and voice in literature.  Names like Flannery, Eudora, Faulkner, Dickey, Styron and Conroy.  Names like Horton, Shelby and Maya.

Now, who wouldn’t want to be part of such an alliance? 

I’m proud to be a Southern writer.  There will be no more apologizing for it.  Not now.  Not ever.  I just wish they’d teach me the secret handshake.

© 2002 Catch Ideas