Blog Archive

Editor’s Note: Ralph F. Voss delivered these remarks at the Montevallo Literary Festival on April 13, 2012, and elsewhere.

Long ago, on Saturday night, November 14, 1959, I was a sixteen-year-old high schooler on a date in Plainville, Kansas, with my girlfriend Alice, also sixteen, who had to be home at midnight. The movie ended around ten, so we didn’t have much time to drive around, honking at friends and listening to music. I took Alice home by midnight, neither of us aware that 200 miles southwest of us, at the farm home of Herb and Bonnie Clutter near the tiny town of Holcomb, another sixteen-year-old, Herb and Bonnie’s daughter Nancy, was about to be murdered, along with her parents and her fifteen-year-old brother Kenyon. In some significant ways, my life changed that night because of the Clutter murder case. Read More…

Editor’s note: Jennifer Horne gave these remarks as part of a presentation at the AAUW Adelante Book Club, held at Eclipse Coffee & Books in Montevallo, Alabama, on April 11, 2012.

I want to start by saying that both our books, All Out of Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality and Circling Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality, focus on spirituality in the sense of personal experience more than belief systems—not as a substitute or contradiction but as a parallel line of discovery.

When the first book was published, my coeditor, Wendy Reed, and I did expect more controversy, just because the South tends to be more religious than the rest of the country and more conservative. We had included, among other things, a woman who calls herself a Baptist-Buddhist! Is there such a thing as a Southern fatwa? Read More…

I have had a passion for creative writing ever since I was a little girl. I have always loved words in general, and throughout my life their power has never ceased to amaze me. From the American Girl books to the Harry Potter series to The Help by Kathryn Stockett and A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen, literature has given me characters to sympathize with and look up to, new ways to view the world, and concepts to stand up for and believe in. The world of books has always been an incredibly important part of my life, and one of my goals in life is to contribute to that world as a writer. Read More…

As the images of storms past hover and sink deeply into our minds, many of us tend to rearrange our memories and allow them to fade.

This is unacceptable behavior.

The only plea a teller of true tales can make that is worth making is: Please don’t let this happen. Write down/record each detail of your experience, whether you were in the eye or whether you escaped physically untouched. Fact is, we were all touched, deeply and irrevocably. Read More…

Editor’s note: Tomas Tranströmer received the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature on October 6.

I first met Monica and Tomas Tranströmer in 1983, in Houston. I had left my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, to attend a graduate writing program and nominated myself to pick them up at the airport. We immediately had a connection, since I had met Robert Bly in the 1970s and published a special feature on his poetry in Aura Literary Arts Review, a magazine I edited for the English Department of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. They were delighted as their close relationship with Bly dated back to the 1960s. Read More…

I’m not a doctor, but I am constantly surprised at the number of people who suffer from metrophobia. I’m talking about educated, literate professionals in many writing related fields of endeavor, who–if asked–involuntarily gasp and stammer, “Oh no, I can’t…. I don’t…. I could never do that!” Read More…

Editor’s Note: Dr. Elaine Hughes, Professor Emerita of English at the University of Montevallo, received the Alabama Humanities Award on September 26, 2011. Following is a transcript of her acceptance speech.

My life-long love of literature and libraries began when I was ten years old. That was the summer I had resolved to read a book a day. The public library in my home town in west Jefferson County consisted of a small oak book case in the living room of Miss Mamie West, second grade teacher, who encouraged students to frequent her home library when school was not in session. Each morning I would get on my bicycle and pedal up Highway 78 West to Miss Mamie’s house, select my book, and scurry home to begin reading. This particular morning, Miss Mamie discovered I had read all the selections in the youth materials, and the bookmobile had not been by to replenish her shelves. So she dutifully went through the titles and selected one she thought appropriate for me to read, The Bishop’s Mantle. When I read the first sentence in the novel—“The priest was surprised when he opened the door to find an infant on the front steps of the rectory.”—a new world was opened for me. Read More…

Perhaps the most frequently given advice beginning writers receive is “write what you know.” On the face of it, that seems to be exactly the right philosophy to espouse, but I realized some time ago that it fell short of being as complete and piquant as one might think.

For example, one might ask, what exactly does a beginning writer, especially a very young beginning writer, know? Read More…

I was a child editor. Or that’s how I’d like to think of it. Almost 22, I entered the MFA program at The University of Alabama in January 1974 and ended up as editor-in-chief of a magazine in the making: The Black Warrior Review. (Years later, another set of editors would drop that “The.”) My team of rag-tag creative writing peers and I managed to launch a magazine that led off with poems by Norman Dubie and included work by Rodney Jones and Gary Soto. We published two short stories, one from the prize-winning Alabama fiction writer H.E. Francis. We learned on the job how to be editors, to work with printers, and to market our product. There were no courses in this, and we probably wouldn’t have taken one if there had been. Read More…

I’m not from Montgomery, and meeting someone who knew Martin Luther King Jr. is still a thrill. I work one block away from where Rosa Parks caught that famous bus. Walking by the former Greyhound Bus Station, where the Freedom Riders were beaten for trying to integrate interstate transportation, still chills and astounds me. A century before the Civil Rights Movement, the same area welcomed Jefferson Davis and saw the birth of the Civil War. Read More…

I’m a bit persnickety about details as a result of a poetry workshop I offer as a Road Scholar with Alabama Humanities Foundation. Based on Nabokov’s idea of caressing "the divine detail,” this workshop underscores how paralyzing with power the simple detail can be. Read More…

This question has plagued me for a long time, and I saw it recently on a writing Web site, so I am not the only one who has asked it. For a long time, I was unpublished and wrote in the “closet.” I was afraid if I admitted to doing it (writing, folks) I would have to face that dreaded question: “Oh, what have you published?” To which, I’d have to say, “Well, nothing… but my mother loves my stuff.” And then go crawl under a rock. Read More...

June 4, 2011

For the past few days, I pondered what brought Wayne Greenhaw and me (and Bill Baxley for that matter) together today. Different people from different places with different careers. After considerable speculation, I settled on one unifying movement containing many separate parts. Born only a year apart, the three of us left the culture into which we were born during our teenage years and entered through the gates of history into the most powerful freedom movement of the twentieth century. If the Depression and the Second World War defined our parents’ generation, the Civil Rights Movement defined ours. Read More…

In her essay “Connie May Is Going to Win the Lottery This Week” in Sonny Brewer’s new collection, Don’t Quit Your Day Job, Connie May Fowler, while talking about the awful jobs she held before being able to write full time, throws in, nearly offhandedly, “Writing is a rough vocation made all the more difficult by changing delivery systems, archaic business models, and imploding economies. You write your heart out and some clown you don’t know takes a sucker punch at you in the media, and manners and tradition dictate that you remain silent.”

To the best of my knowledge, I have never reviewed a book by Fowler, so I am not, literally, the clown she is referring to, but I have reviewed several hundred other books, so I am surely that “clown” to some writers. Read More…

Like most students I entered college to earn a degree because Degree = Career. And like most students in this day and age, particularly those like myself whose field of choice happened to be in the liberal arts, I realized that this equation is more appropriately written as such:

Degree = Go back and get a Masters Degree in something useful and talk to us in three years. Read More…

Of all the elements of craft, the one I seem to know least about is plot. However, that’s what I feel I need to know most about. I’ve been struggling with a sprawling novel for over a decade. I heard Madison Smart Bell read at Bread Loaf, then devoured his section on plot in his creative writing text. It was so well-written that I read about the narrative arc as if it were fiction, but I couldn’t put his advice into practice. The same with Janet Burroway. Advice just didn’t translate. Read More…

Carolyn Nyman, my mother’s best friend growing up, was my high school English teacher. I was named after her. Aside from the family connection (and the fact that she didn’t rat me out when she caught me reading novels in class) Carolyn gave me my first Eudora Welty book. She changed my life. Read More…