Southern Writers on Writing: Sneak Previews

In just over two months, Southern Writers on Writing will be released by University Press of Mississippi. This is my fourth book to be published, and my second anthology to edit. You can read more about the book and see a complete list of contributors here. I hope you’ll purchase the book from your local independent bookseller, but if you don’t have one nearby, you can always get it here. (ready for pre-order) In the coming weeks I’ll publish a list of events where you can come for a reading/signing and meet some of the contributors, so please stay tuned!

Between now and then, I thought I’d give my readers some sneak previews, both here and on Facebook. Here in my blog I’m going to share several quotes from the essays contributed by the twenty-six southern authors each week during these ten weeks leading up to its release. Then on Facebook, during the month of April, I’m going to publish one quote each day.

I’ll open with a blurb from my friend and fellow author Neil White:

This is no stodgy how-to book. Southern Writers on Writing is over-flowing with good, strong voices—funny, caustic, compelling, and—yes—absurd. The writers Susan Cushman has assembled here understand this craft. They have endured the suffering that leads to great prose appearing so damn effortless. This collection is essential reading for emerging writers–as well as any fan of modern southern fiction.—Neil White, author of In the Sanctuary of Outcasts

Next I’ll share quotes from the Foreword, the Introduction, and the first two essays. To find out the titles of the books these southern authors have written, just click on their names. Enjoy!

The chapters in this book span a huge range of topics in writing, from Clyde Edgerton’s tips for students of fiction writing to Lee Smith’s moving and vivid personal account of her life as a writer. What all of these southern writers share is a deep immersion in the literary imagination, the desire to live many lives. It would be hard to prove that southern writers experience literature any differently than do northern or western writers, and equally hard to prove that there is anything uniquely southern about the craft of southern writers…. That said, anyone who has travelled the country knows that the South has a unique characters and culture. That culture is absorbed in every square inch of skin of the writers who ever lived in the South, shapes their being, and can be seen in the particular stories they write.—Alan Lightman from the Foreword

In Southern Writers on Writing, twenty-six southern authors spill their guts on the art of their craft. Why is it important that they are southern? Do I feel that we have something to prove, or just something to offer? Maybe a little of both…. But this book isn’t just an attempt to show up the ignorance of those who would belittle the South. It’s a joyous celebration of our culture and the writers who bring it to life on the page as they create a contemporary canon of southern literature.—Susan Cushman, from the Introduction

One starts writing for fun and stays for the passion. It is only in a writer’s later years that this vocation takes on a third dimension, as a lifeline to eternity; a way to remain on earth long after one has left it; an intruder back to the dust. Like those hairy gents in their loincloths, scratching away in their caves, writing might be viewed as a final, puny claim on immortality.—Jim Dees, from “Off the Deep End”

I see it in a lot of writers, from the interviews of the famous to the manuscripts of the less so, from Flannery O’Connor trying to convince us that there’s hope at the core of her writing to a first-time novelist who buried the lead that would garner him a six-figure advance on a two-book New York publishing contract eight pages in, that irreconcilable impulse to somehow explain your existence, defend your choices, or excuse your work, offering a reason why you write, with or without a challenge, if only for yourself. –Joe Formichella, from “Consider Kudzu”