Literally Blogging

Natalie Goldberg, in one of her many fabulous essays on creative writing, praised the mysterious “Southern writing gene” possessed by writers born in the South, and elusive to anyone else who seeks to imitate the distinctive writing style.

I inherited this gene, and it is the most valuable thing I inherited from the land of heat and humidity, a land I’d wanted to leave for a long, long time. I recently did so, moving across the country, as far as you could get from my childhood home.

But that gene is pervasive. No matter how far I move or how high into the snow-capped mountains I go, sticky summer nights bespeckled with fireflies and the musky-sweet scent of night-blooming jasmine will always be part of my soul.

When you think of Southern writers, some common names come to mind: Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, Dorothy Allison, Carson McCullers. They are famous for their characters, perhaps most for their child characters.

O’Connor and Allison, especially, have drawn both praise and criticism for their realistic portrayal of children in a beaten-down, dusty life, twisted and stunted under the burdens they bear.

There are all sorts of theories about these Southern children. Some writers believe it is the legacy of racism in the South which is still strong today, that has so infected these children with its ugliness that they have no hope of growing normally. Other look to the South itself, a portion of the world born of conflict and war, always at odds with itself and the world in general. Maybe it’s the heat, or growing up with old stories, but many people, and places, in this land seem frozen in time, baked into a tableau that never moves, full of faded plantation homes and long-gone heroes.

In a wonderfully revealing essay, Flannery O’Connor talks about how she got a letter from an old woman telling her that she was not ‘lifted’ by O’Connor’s works, and that all people read in order to get this lift. Which, by association, would mean O’Connor’s work was useless.

O’Connor mulls that no matter what she wrote, there would be thousands of people unhappy, and her job is to relate the truth of the human condition…a loyalty to the story rather than the reader.

I think this is what makes Southern writers so distinctive and so brave: the willingness to provide an unhappy ending. It’s especially shocking because when you encounter a child, in a movie or book or life, you expect to find happiness there. No matter what the world has shown us to the contrary, we still cling to this belief.

The broken and misshapen Southern child, though, represents all that is real and ugly, embodying the characteristics we are wont to turn away from in real life.

I’ve encountered this in my own writing: people generally highly praise it, but always voice one thing they wish I’d change: the ending.

But when you’re Southern, you’re Southern.

What do you think, of this struggle between loyalty to the story and loyalty to the reader? Which must you please first?

Child of truth.

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