Pridemore Visits the Southland

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a plot for pridemore, author, fiction, georgia literary festival, missouri, south, southern festival of books, Stephen Roth

I have always considered A Plot for Pridemore to be a Southern novel, even though the fictional town of Pridemore is set in Missouri. A lot of Southerners do not recognize Missouri as a part of the American South, and I can understand their feelings about that. A couple of years ago, when the University of Missouri’s athletic program joined the Southeastern Conference, a lot of SEC diehards took offense. I think some of them still do.

Missouri is one of those states that has a bit of an identity problem. It’s not quite the South, and it’s not completely Midwestern. St. Louis has the style and feel of an East Coast town, while Kansas City looks more toward the West. Springfield, Mo., is like an extension of Arkansas. Branson is its own island of patriotism, homespun values and camp, a sort of Las Vegas for Baptists. In terms of the state’s most famous residents, Mark Twain seems like a Southerner to me, while Harry Truman is staunchly Midwestern. Tennessee Williams was from St. Louis and a frat boy at Mizzou, but I feel like he should have been from Louisiana. Brad Pitt is from Missouri and so is Sheryl Crow, but they both live somewhere else now.

The state can’t even decide if it’s Democrat or Republican. Missouri’s perpetual swing-state status garners a lot of attention come election time, when it gets more visits from presidential candidates than most states not named Ohio or Florida.

Despite Missouri’s vague geography, I see the characters of Pridemore as very Southern in their values, quirks and stubborn sentimentality. Maybe it’s because I’m from Georgia, and I wanted to write the book with a Southern point of view. I don’t know.

This is all a roundabout way of saying that I am thrilled and very honored to be invited to a couple of great book conferences in the South this fall. The first one is the Southern Festival of Books on Oct. 10-12 in Nashville, which features readings and panel sessions with about 200 authors. The next stop is the Georgia Literary Festival on Nov. 7-9 in Augusta, which will feature Georgia authors like Terry Kay, Raymond Atkins and Philip Lee Williams. I do not know what I am scheduled to do at these conferences yet. I will share more details about them soon.

In the meantime, I am also doing a reading from Pridemore at 7 p.m. Friday, August 15 in Kansas City. I will be sharing the stage at The Writers Place with another Kansas City author, Catherine Anderson, and poet Alarie Tennille. It should be a wonderful evening event!

That’s all the news I have about my book at the moment. If you’re interested in learning more, you can find information here, here and here.

Review: A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage

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a death at the white camellia orphanage, book review, fiction, great depression, hobos, marly youmans, mercer university press, novel, south, southern fiction, Stephen Roth

It’s a rare achievement when a work of fiction contains enough detail and nuance about a particular place in history that you, the reader, feel like you understand and inhabit that world. That’s how I felt reading Marly Youmans’ A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, which is part murder mystery, part road story, but also a poetic rendering of life in the rural South of the 1930s and early 40s.

White Camellia tells the lonely story of Pip, a Depression-era orphan who loses his half-brother to a horrific, unsolved murder at the Georgia orphanage where he lives. Soon after, Pip decides to leave his squalid existence of picking cotton and sleeping in close quarters, “breathing in the scent of near-naked boys and the stink of the chamber pots.” It is the golden age of the hobos, so Pip chooses a life crossing the country and hopping the rails. Like another fictional orphan named Pip, his coming-of-age journey comes at a brutal cost, but he also experiences kindness from a series of eccentric strangers who are drawn to the equally eccentric and fiercely independent Pip.

Throughout the tale, Youmans captures the surroundings, mood and language of the era so convincingly you almost expect to find red clay caked around your shoes when you set the book down. Her description of a giant locomotive arriving at a small town depot is just one example of how aptly she sets the scene:

The monster took no notice but plunged, vaulted, and dived over the slight rolls of the land, shaking the earth as easily as a hound shakes a kitten, spewing cinders and smoke, drive wheels pounding and somersaulting over Emanuel County, so swift and thunderous that it seemed nothing in the world could cry halt! to such an extravagance of force. High as a house, the engine swooped down on Pip, hissing and hooting in his face, in his very being, turning him inside out, ringing him like a bell.

If you enjoy beautifully crafted descriptive prose and a coming-of-age story that is in turns heartbreaking and uplifting, check out A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage. You can find it on Amazon.com, or at www.mupress.org.

Fiction in a Southern Context

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a plot for pridemore, camp redemption, fiction, georgia, mercer university press, missouri, raymond atkins, south, southern fiction, Stephen Roth

If you enjoy reading Southern fiction, check out Camp Redemption by Raymond L. Atkins. It’s about a brother and sister who own a cash-strapped children’s church camp in north Georgia, and one day receive an unexpected visitor. Like a lot of fine Southern writing, this novel has charmingly eccentric characters, a strong appreciation of history, and asks some rather pointed questions about God’s involvement in everyday life. It’s also beautifully written and funny as heck.

Camp Redemption was published by Mercer University Press after the book won the 2011 Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction. My first novel, titled A Plot for Pridemore, won the 2012 Ferrol Sams Award, and will be published by Mercer in Spring 2014. According to the press, the award is given to the “best book that speaks to the human condition in a Southern context.” Even though my book takes place in Missouri (which may or may not be part of the South, depending on whom you talk to), it has a distinctly Southern point of view, and draws heavily from my time growing up in Georgia.

Upon receiving Atkins’ novel in the mail, examining the beautiful cover art, and reading the author’s wonderful, flowing prose about the hills and valleys of lower Appalachia, I am even more excited and humbled (and perhaps a little intimidated) to be joining Mercer’s roster of fiction writers. At this point, I am still in the early stages of editing my manuscript with the press, but I’ll have updates in the approaching months about how the book is coming along. Becoming a published author has long been a dream of mine, and I hope to share parts of my adventure with all of you.

Image pulled from http://www.mupress.org.