Southern Women Writers

There are a number of southern women writers who are favorites of mine.

There is something special about the writers that come out of the South of this country. Some of the women seem to be caretakers of a lifestyle that is slowly slipping away. Others are celebrants of a new lifestyle that is emerging.

There is a common thread of nostalgia, not only for the life they have lived, but for lives lived long ago. The South gets in your blood.

The smell of wood smoke in the fall, salty breezes off the Gulf, the dizzying scent of magnolia blooms, asphalt baking in the sun, kudzu draping a roadside forest – all these draw the writer.

Southerners seem introspective, to be looking back to how it was, even if ‘was’ is before they were born.

The pine forests are filled with gray coated riders; empty wooden shacks are filled with ghosts from times gone by. Lost in pine wood forests, worn tombstones thrust upward by saplings grown to trees testify to lives spent and no longer sought after.

Crumbling stone chimneys are solitary markers to young love, new beginnings, hope for the future, lives passing on.

My desire to write has always been with me, since I was a teenager, inspired by extraordinary teachers who told me I had talent. That has yet to be determined and passing years have made my skills rusty. In the past two years I have finally begun to write, at the end of my life. I am encouraged by the fact that several of the women I admire only began to write fiction at the same time in their lives.

So, who is your favorite Southern woman writer – and why?

For me, all of them grasp the inner woman of the characters in their stories, the inner monologue that never escapes our soul.