By Richard Anderson
Mary Ward Brown of Perry County died on May 14, 2013. She was our most acute literary observer of life in Alabama. In her two volumes of exquisitely-crafted short stories, she captured a panorama of a specific place during a particular time: the Alabama Black Belt in the second half of the twentieth century. By so doing, she offers us a moving and sympathetic depiction of a region and a people under strain and in flux. Read More…
By Suzanne Hudson and Joe Formichella
He was a permanent fixture in Fairhope’s funky world of artists, a gentle literary giant, authoring nine novels and a children’s play before communing with Edgar Cayce, who guided his final turn at the craft. The result of that collaboration was The Return of Edgar Cayce. C. Terry Cline Jr., though, would not take credit. “I didn’t write it,” he laughed, “Edgar Cayce did.”
Born in Birmingham “on a train going out” he always said of his short stay there, Terry would have been 78 on July 14. A memorial is being planned for June 30 at Henry George Park in Fairhope at 10:30 a.m. He would insist that he hasn’t really left us, but the physical body did early Tuesday morning, May 21. A few days before, we left him a note and are comforted to know that he heard our bon voyage. What we don’t know for sure is whether he wrote his final book in the buff, as he claimed he always did, but it makes us giggle to think so. Read More…
By Trudeir Harris
Words sing to me. And I am responsive to the tunes they want me to create. Sometimes they evoke the blues, sometimes they call forth a rousing gospel, and sometimes they’re just sheer harmonies of celebration. I hear patterns or rhythms for sentences in my head, and those rhythms find their way onto my computer screen, or, when I am traveling, onto my note pad. Words sing to me, and I am a devotee of their songs. It is the singing power of words that enabled me to articulate what it means for me to move from being a black person living in the South to being a Black Southerner. The words sang a song of family history, one rooted in Deep South Alabama, and they dared me to claim that history in spite of Alabama’s uncomplimentary history in race relations. Words sing to me in my study, elsewhere in my home, or when I’m a long way from home. They always let me know that I have Alabama in my bones. Read More…