Write Stuff

Shout Outs

Some of the South’s best writers remind me of the best beat reporters. In travels to their literary haunts, I’ve been deeply struck by how William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Willie Morris and Flannery O’Connor brought to life the character, and characters, of their native South. These authors so saturated themselves in their surroundings, it pours out in their writing. It’s a good lesson to remember. The more reporters immerse themselves in their neighborhood, the more they can evoke a sense of place in their writing.

O’Connor spent much of her adult life – she died at 39 – in and around her farm home near Milledgeville, Ga. Consider the detail and imagery she packs into this description in her story, “You Can’t Be Any Poorer than Dead”:

The old man had started an acre of cotton to the left beyond the fence line and had run it almost up to the house on the one side. The two strands of barbed wire ran through the middle of the patch. A line of fog, hump-shaped, was creeping toward it, ready like a white hound dog to crouch under and crawl across the yard.

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Mississippi is about the last place most New Yorkers would turn to for inspiration. Shadowed by its sordid civil rights history, dismal support of public education and rural poverty, Mississippi often brings up the bottom in any list of states ranked for quality of life. The latest report in the news here is that Mississippi does lead in one thing – obesity.

Yet, in a trip crisscrossing the state from Natchez to Yazoo City to Oxford to Jackson, your itinerant Write Stuff correspondent found inspiration in the words and places of native Mississippians like Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, Willie Morris and William Faulkner. Perhaps because of their region’s past — “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,’’ Faulkner once famously wrote – the state’s legendary storytellers have much to teach those of us interested in writing and how to improve it.

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