Malone Ridge (Little Star Books 2023) is a well-conceived, well-told tale of spirit triumphing over circumstances. And for Eve Malone, the protagonist, the circumstances are, if not dire, close enough. Born in Nitro, a small West Virginia community in Appalachia, she is living in poverty in a trashy, once-abandoned hunter’s trailer with an outhouse in […]
Mary Ellen Thompson
July 17, 2023 by Leave a Comment
Mary Ellen Thompson’s interview with the legendary Pat Conroy was published in A Lowcountry Heart. A lead features writer for Beaufort Lifestyle Magazine for eight years, and columnist for Lowcountry Weekly for ten years, she has also written for Pooler Magazine, Effingham Magazine, Carolina Arts Magazine, St. Mary’s Magazine and Eat, Sleep, Play Beaufort. Mary […]
July Read of the Month: “Deeper than African Soil” by Faith Eidse
July 5, 2023 by Leave a Comment
Deeper than African Soil (Masthof Press, 2023) by Faith Eidse is a most unusual and exceptionally fine memoir. No wonder Florida State University recognized it with the Kingsbury Award, given annually to a graduate student who demonstrates lasting intellectual value in writing, and with the English Department’s Ann Durham Outstanding Master’s Thesis Award. Several chapters […]
Memory and the Music of Time: “Evenings at Five” by Gail Godwin
July 4, 2023 by Leave a Comment
ESSAY BY KERSTIN W. SHANDS If love and work, as Freud proposed, are the key components of human happiness, the novelist-composer couple in Gail Godwin’s Evenings at Five have been supremely blessed. For close to three decades, Rudy and Christina have been living and working together in superb synchronicity and creative resonance. When their passionate […]
James Wade
June 30, 2023 by Leave a Comment
James Wade lives and writes in the Texas Hill Country with his wife and daughter. He is a two-time winner of the Spur Award from the Western Writers of America, and a recipient of the prestigious Reading the West Award for Debut Fiction. His most recent novel is Beasts of the Earth. Other titles include All Things Left […]
“Cormac McCarthy: The Great Optimist of American Literature” by James Wade
June 30, 2023 by Leave a Comment
Associate Editor Dawn Major has not had the pleasure of meeting author, James Wade, who wrote the following piece, “Cormac McCarthy: The Great Optimist of American Literature.” She met him through another fellow Southern author. If anything, the Southern writing world is a small one. Everyone knows everyone in the end, well…maybe not Cormac McCarthy […]