I grew up in the South with a Baptist Church on every corner and confederate flags draped in the back windows of passing pickup trucks. Although I’ve read my fair share of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty and Reynolds Price, as well as others, Southern fiction and Southern writers were just not something that excited me. Perhaps it was because I grew up with “characters” around me that I wanted to forget.
Needless to say, with this attitude, when I became a writer I swore that I would never, ever write a “Southern” novel. I wanted to divorce myself from the South and from its sometimes backward ways. I wanted to write literary fiction, which in mind did not include anything Southern. And yet, like many of us, what I set out to avoid, is exactly what I found myself doing.
This happened in the middle of the night one summer many years ago, when a character by the name of “Wildflower” McAllister started talking to me. I heard her voice as clearly as my own. Since I am a writer, and also a Southerner, I figure I get to be a little crazy, so I started writing down what she told me. Many months later I had a complete manuscript that my literary agent is currently marketing to major publishers. It is considered “southern gothic,” although any true Southerner would call it normal, everyday life.
So the old cliché of “never say never” stands. Life, as I’ve said before, seems to have its own ideas about what might be best for us and has a much bigger imagination than we do.
Go here to read chapter one and check out my other novels.
