Deep Water, Dark Horizons and Other Stories, plus, a sampler of Suzanne Hudson’s literary career, is in honor of her receiving the 2025 Truman Capote Prize. The collection of specially-chosen morsels, published by Joe Taylor (Livingston Press of University of West Alabama) introduced by Sonny Brewer, and dedicated to Joe Formichella, notable pillars of her support, gives the reader a taste of the whole meal. It is a feast.
It is impossible to read these stories and novel excerpts and not wonder about the personality behind them, though the distinctive voice and fearless vision are clear enough. Those still curious may want to start with the essays “Writing the Mud Life” and “Hiding Out With Holden Caulfield” to discover the self-avowed optimist, deeply connected to family and a wide, supportive community, that Hudson is. It’s the old question asked of Flannery O’Connor, or David Lynch, or many other artists: How could such a congenial and loving soul make art about such “dark” things—dysfunctional, fractured families (lots of step-relatives in these stories), bottom-feeder abusers, incest, child abuse, suicide, one set of rednecks thinking they’re better than another set of rednecks, a landscape drenched in the musk of sex where women and children are inherently vulnerable?
The most obvious answer is: because that’s where the stories are. But a more subtle answer can be found in Hudson’s epigraph to “Mud Life”: Flannery O’Connor’s observation, delivered via Joyce Carol Oates, that “the very act of writing is an act of hope.” Or in David Lynch’s “dark” ideas, gifts from the lower floors of the psyche, that he “falls in love with.” For the artist, it’s not about the ideas themselves so much as the beauty found in pursuing them to whatever weird landscape they lead to. You don’t fall in love, artistically, with normal, happy people. Not that there are any.
There’s no need for hope, after all, unless something’s fucked up. O’Connor’s stories take place in “territory largely held by the devil,” and their end is Christian grace coming in from your blind side, not possible or even needed without a dark night of the soul. Grace flows into the hollow reamed out by pain—which is what I think Emily Dickinson meant by “after great pain a formal feeling comes”—though to O’Connor, great pain means “the Cross.” Salvation exists on the other side of earthly experience, in territory not held by the devil. But that such a place is something you have to “believe in” is a pretty good indication that it ain’t around here. You write stories about the territory you know. In pointing the way to the proper denizens of 20th century fiction, Sherwood Anderson used the term “grotesque”—outsiders in the lonely moral vacuum of the modern world. Personally, I’ve always read Anderson’s “grotesque” as “available for story.” Those figures are tragic in his stories; in O’Connor’s they just need somebody there to shoot them every minute of their lives; in Hudson’s they just need to fall into the pool below Ruby Falls and shut up.
I don’t think there’s a neat label for Hudson’s stories. Yes, as the blurbs point out, she reminds you of O’Connor, she’s worthy of Faulkner, she reminds you of William Gay, who reminds you that she reminds you of O’Connor (minus God). She reminds you of a lot of Southern writers—but what writers remind you of is the business of bureaucrats, and not the point. The point is that these stories pass the only test that really matters: you want to keep turning the page. She knows her people and landscape thoroughly: white/black, old/young, rich/poor/in between—how they think, how they talk, their mannerisms, their perversions and unspeakable secrets, the gulf between what they are and what they’re pretending to be—in Faulkner’s phrase, “the human heart in conflict with itself”—and her heroes are the few who challenge the devil and aren’t living a lie. She’s an original and artful writer.
Her work is diverse but there are some themes that suggest a pattern: people marooned in backwaters of the South without healthy socialization or functional family, usually with a clueless or abusive or genetically-doomed antagonist, and a protagonist who is not merely a victim but delivers an act of rebellion or defiance or the gratification of some long-repressed revenge, always in one way or another violent—that lands just after The End. As I was reading “Bonita Street Bridge Club,” I got interrupted just a paragraph or two before the ending I was eagerly anticipating. Still, I put the book down to tend to business, thinking of Dunbar, the cretin goon of a husband in the story, and feeling pretty confident about where things were headed.
But that pattern hardly fits all her stories, and three of my favorites, impressive by the skill with which they are told, have patterns of their own. Since I can’t deal with all the variety in this space, I’ll offer a few remarks about those.
“Opposable Thumbs,” the title story from Hudson’s 2001 collection, is a beautifully-wrought coming of age story that follows a small group of kids, white and black, in a small south Georgia town, set against the early days of the Civil Rights movement making its unwelcome way into the segregated South (early 60s). We are in the fragile dawn before the loss of innocence—if the guilt of the old Jim Crow South can be called innocence in the same way childhood can.
The story starts with the accidental hacking off of five year old Cooter Tolbert’s thumb, and follows the protagonist, Kansas Lacey, her friends and their families, through the unstable terrain of those times. Toward the end, Kansas has just learned from her friend LittleBit how she, Kansas, was conceived, and what happened to the black man, LittleBit’s husband, who made the mistake of stumbling upon the scene. Kansas’s abused and abandoned mother took her own life when Kansas was five.
Like much of Hudson’s writing—like life—the story pivots around sex—gross in the adults, practical in the eyes of Pinky, the black surrogate mother figure to Kansas (“you don’t get no baby every time . . . Folks do it ‘cause they like it”), and a mystery to the children, for whom this is more a tale of sexual wondering than sexual awakening. The boys just want to do it “one day.” Only in Kansas are there gleams of a rich and complex sexuality brewing.
Nothing much happens in the story, but everything changes—including, on the roof of the jail, Cooter’s thumb that, like childhood, slowly dries up and disappears.
Another severed thumb figures in the story, and when the topic of the two lost digits, along with an account of the black folks “all tore up” over in Albany, egged on by the “federal government,” finds its way into the Lacey dining room, Grandemona, matriarch of the Laceys, speaks for her age and class: “That’s enough about body parts and race relations. I want a civilized conversation at my dinner table.”
If it weren’t for the title, you might dive into “The Seamstress” thinking it’s about Mrs. Wilson, standing on a platform having her Mardi Gras gown altered, and her flattering, gossip-delivering, sycophant “friend,” Mrs. Dixon, sharing the delicious sensation of lacerating their social inferiors. The pettiness and pretension and snobbery of these hens is established with such a sharp scalpel in the early going, the reader can hardly be blamed for siding with one target of their condescension, a woman who left what surely was her sock puppet of a husband of thirty-two years, and her antebellum mansion, for a drywall hanger.
Everybody, except for the small circle of true blue bloods in Mobile society beyond their grubby reach—all the “trash” and pretenders and climbers (takes one to know one) and bad party-givers, are lustfully flayed by these spiteful, decorated piranha, and the reader has the best time in confederacy with the author soaking up the show.
But the story is not about Mrs. Wilson, who has lost “what little potential for a soul had ever rested in her heart in the first place,” and Mrs. Dixon. It’s a fly on the wall story—a fact the reader gradually realizes as the story progresses, until he/she is fully allied with the silent, unassuming seamstress who knows her place all too well—and knows everything about her clients, who know nothing about her.
Celeste, widowed, making good money camouflaging her “betters,” suffering their condescension as she raises and educates her children, is the true subject of the story: the fly on the wall, who sees, hears, suffers it all, and keeps her peace. She is a very good seamstress, in her forties, planning for an early retirement, and we learn some interesting things about what she left behind, unlike these bitches, to marry for love.
Another way of looking at this story is as a sort of fairy tale. Like Cinderella, it ends with a ball where the long-suffering fly on the wall turns out to be a spider, the one creature in this shitshow living an authentic life.
The story is a master class in escorting the reader through a toxic maze to a point of clear vision, and the deft delivery of exposition. As always, Hudson knows her people well, and takes us deep inside their world—a world that I finished the story with a prayer of thanks that I’m not in.
And, finally, “Looking for John David Vines,” another skillfully constructed story that delivers the goods in pieces from many directions. It is a moving story about an “almost-thirty” bar queen, Christy, of some repute in her prime, when she enjoyed an early romance with the “edgy” baron of the back seat, JD Vines, then a later affair with the married version of him, but now he’s become scarce and her clock is ticking. She has a son from a brief, bad marriage and a boob job, and is maybe still a few degrees to the good of slut. Who knew the simple, repeated question “Have you seen JD?” could carry such pathos?
The story takes place on a single night of bar-cruising as Christy and her friend Malia make the rounds in Columbus, Mississippi—but Christy, feeling her encroaching limits with a sense of quiet desperation revealed by her tic of pecking labels off beer bottles, is really hoping to run into JD, with whom she imagines more of a bond than is really there. They had their fun, but now it seems JD, four years older than her, is back with his family and avoiding her. We only see him, like Christy, once and from a distance in the story, at a restaurant laughing with his wife and kids. We understand that Christy still has the hots for him, but even more for what he represents: the part of herself she’s afraid to lose. “She knew, deep in the back of her head, that she was just before turning into a bar skank.” It’s pretty simple: a case of white-hot sexual jealousy with a side dish of confronting a hard truth about yourself. “Get me the hell away from here,” she tells Malia, “before I kill his ass.” And closing hour is approaching. Ah, Christy! Ah, humanity!
Hudson always gives you the story, but also a wide angle view of the world from which the story is derived. Her stories are more slice of life than plot—their goal less resolution than recognition. If they don’t solve anything—and who said they had to?—they come from a writer with a sly eye, and slyer sense of the decadent (important to keep that clear in this or any age), who has paid attention.
Suzanne Hudson
About Suzanne Hudson: A native of Columbus, Georgia, with roots in Southwest Georgia, Suzanne Hudson (rps.hudson@gmail.com) grew up in Brewton, Alabama, and has been a resident of Fairhope, Alabama, for nearly forty years. A retired public school teacher and guidance counselor, she is also the internationally prize-winning author of three novels, a “fictional” memoir, and her short stories and essays have been widely anthologized. Hudson lives near Fairhope, Alabama, at Waterhole Branch Productions, with her husband, author Joe Formichella (joe_formichella@yahoo.com) and the other denizens of the Branch. She is the 2025 Truman Capote Prize winner.
John Williams
About John Williams: Dr. John Williams is currently a mentor in the Reinhardt University MFA Creative Writing program. His novel, End Times (Sartoris Literary Group, 2023) was named a finalist for the 2025 Townsend Prize for Fiction and Williams was the Georgia Author of the Year for First Novel in 2002 for Lake Moon (Mercer UP). He has written and co-written numerous plays, with several local productions, and published a variety of stories, essays, and reviews through the years. He and co-author Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s play Hiram: Becoming Hank, about the formative years of singer Hank Williams, enjoyed several productions, most recently at the Monroe County, Alabama courthouse in April 2021. His most recent books are Village People: Sketches of Auburn (Solomon and George 2016), and Atlanta Pop in the 50s, 60s, and 70s: The Magic of Bill Lowery, co-authored with Andy Lee White (The History Press, 2019), and Monroeville and the Stage Production of “To Kill a Mockingbird” (The History Press, 2023). Other publications can be found on his website at johnmwilliams.net, which hosts his blog, johnmwilliams.net/blog. He live in LaGrange, Georgia.
To purchase Deep Water, Dark Horizons: livingstonpress.uwa.edu/Deep Water.htm
To purchase End Times: Amazon.com: End Times: 9798987120514: Williams, John M: Books
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