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Made in the Shade
Many fine Southern authors thrive in the shadow of Grisham and Conroy
By Christopher Scanlan
Page 4 of 4
On an April morning, House, 32, lean and friendly in jeans, takes a break from proofing galleys to take me on a tour of the eastern Kentucky landscape that he's claimed as his fictional territory. Outside the town of Lily, where House lives with his wife and two young daughters, he noses his pickup down a road where he plans to set his fifth novel.
Scrub pines offer cheap cover for the scars left by strip mining. Coppery water glistens in a sulfuric silt pond. During the Depression, his grandmother raised nine children alone on this land after her husband died in prison. "This is called Happy Hollow," he says. "She once told me whoever named that place sure never lived there. I love that."
Twenty minutes later, we're in a hollow in another part of the county, this time 100 yards up a steep hill, standing in his mother's family graveyard, a timeless spot shaded by pine and hemlock trees that looks over a whiskey-colored creek. He points out several generations of his Scotch-Irish ancestors whose lives and deaths provide the models for his characters. "Here's my uncle that was murdered," he says. "This is my grandmother. She died of an enlarged heart, which I think is just great symbolism for a character. Her heart was too large to live."
The best writers, whatever their region, are literary alchemists who transform family history into literature, preserving a vanishing past by finding the universal in the particular corner of the world where they were raised, from a Kentucky hollow and a Louisiana bayou to a North Georgia orchard. "All the best novels are regional: To Kill a Mockingbird, Madame Bovary, War and Peace," says House.
While Kay, House and many other Southern writers draw on the region's rural heritage, others find their inspiration in a different kind of soil, the concrete landscape of city and suburban sprawl, and attract readers more interested in today's issues than yesterday's tales.
"To the fiction writer in the South, place is everything," Dede Yow, an English professor at Kennesaw State University, has observed. "It is the literal ground, the red clay, and the dogwood trees; it is the metaphor for identity and love; and it is where one's family and community are."
For Terry Kay, that place is Vanna, the small town where he grew up. During my visit last December, he and his wife, Tommie, took me 40 miles from Athens to sample ribs and Brunswick stew at Vanna Country BBQ, a Spartan eatery where farm tools decorate the walls. The light was fading as Kay pointed out landmarks from his life and his novels -- the vacant general store, the Methodist church, the railroad tracks, a road sign marked "White Dog Lane," and the six acres of the family farm he owns, including an old cemetery where he expects to be buried someday.
Under a star-shot sky, we headed back to Athens. Before I left the next morning, Kay reminded me of the primal hold that Southern ground has on a writer's imagination and the bounty it continues to produce all over the region. Hearing him describe long boyhood days behind a mule-driven plow -- "There isn't a better place on earth. There's nothing else to do but dream" -- I was struck by the poverty of my suburban upbringing. At that moment, I began to understand why a literary road trip through the South is such an enriching journey. Kay says, "Everything that I am, if you gather it all up and put what I think I want to be, if not what I am, is in that land." In his softly accented words, I heard Faulkner, O'Connor, Welty, Earley, House, Crews, Gautreaux, Ansa, all the legions of Southern writers, past, present and future.
Christopher Scanlan teaches writing at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla. His short stories, essays and nonfiction have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. He and his wife, Katharine Fair, are the authors of a serial newspaper novel, The Holly Wreath Man.
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