Southern Writers Reading,
as idiosyncratic a literary event as has ever existed, happens
every year on the weekend before Thanksgiving in Fairhope,
Alabama. Founder Sonny Brewer calls SWR
a ‘literary slugfest’ and ‘literature as spectator sport,’
and although these descriptions ring true to me, the event
itself is really very simple. Various southern writers read
from their work. Sometimes they are new to the game, sometimes
they are not. A roomful of fellow writers and people who
like to read listen to them. Afterwards, they all talk about
writing. What it’s like, how you do it, why you do it, how
you keep on doing it. This is the basic formula; it is repeated
several times. Rick Bragg, new Fairhope resident, Alabama
native, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, and author of
Ava’s Man and All
Over But The Shoutin’, is anchoring the hoedown
this year.
At SWR, you will not
find breakout sessions on Writing The Perfect Query Letter
or on What You Should Know About Publishing Contracts. Typical
writing conference fodder and useful information, sure –
but not relevant here, because these topics have nothing
to do with the discipline, frustration, and serious joy
of writing well. SWR is not about the business of writing.
It isn’t an academic event, either. You will not run into
anyone reading fascinating papers on Marxist Poetics & False
Consciousness or Queer (Wo)Men in the South. Some might
consider this a shame, I suppose. SWR does
not try to be all things to all people. It is about southern
storytelling. As local historian, critic, and writer John
Sledge puts it, SWR is rooted in Faulkner,
in a gritty, blue-collar literary tradition of “hard stuff,
beautifully written.”
Southern Writers Reading
began in 1999 on the day that Frank Turner Hollon,
a lawyer with a practice in Robertsdale, stopped by
Over The Transom, Sonny Brewer’s Fairhope bookstore
and small press, with a manuscript he’d had under his bed
for more than a decade. I’ve heard this story from four
different people, and it’s a little different every time,
so I’m just going to give you the version I like best, in
which Sonny, pre-wearied by the importunations of many wanna-be
authors, said Frank would have to pay him a hundred damn
dollars to read his book. Frank anted up and left the bookstore.
Sonny scanned one page and chased him out into the street.
“If you can keep this up, I think you’ve really got something
here,” he said. Sonny kept the hundred dollars (“I’m never
giving it back!” he says now) and his OTT
press published Hollon’s first novel, The Pains
Of April. Did they make a lot of money? Well,
no. But it’s a great book.
Hollon and Brewer traveled
the Southeast hawking The Pains of April
at book fairs and conferences. Eventually, they decided
to hold their own book event and invited the writers Tommy
Franklin and William Gay to come read alongside Hollon.
Local writer Tommy Franklin had won an Edgar for Poachers
(his stellar collection of short stories) and William Gay
had published his first novel The Long Home.
(I believe that Gay’s short story “I hate to
see that evening sun go down” will be included
in the Norton Anthology within a couple of decades.) Anyway,
that was the first SWR, in 1999. Well, probably in 1999.
No one seems to be absolutely sure of the date, but Hollon
counted backwards using his books’ pub dates and that’s
what he came up with.
Anyway, when the next
November rolled around, the San-Francisco-based publisher
McAdam/Cage was interested in Hollon’s
second book, The God File, and
so publisher David Poindexter was in the
audience at SWR when Sonny Brewer introduced
all the writers and said, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could
publish a book of short stories by these people?” Poindexter
said he’d make it happen, and that’s how Stories
From The Blue Moon Café began. The anthology,
now in its fifth incarnation, differs every time but has
been a mix of established, regional, and fledgling writers,
including Hollon, Franklin,
Gay, Brewer, Rick
Bragg, Ellen Douglas, Charles
Simic, Suzanne Hudson, Joe
Formichella, Dayne Sherman, the
poet Beth Ann Fennelly, and many more.
So much started from
that single seed, says Hollon, from his first impetuous
visit to Over The Transom. His sixth novel,
Blood and Circumstance, comes out in January.
Sonny Brewer has now published two well-received novels
of his own, The Poet of Tolstoy Park,
which is on its way to becoming a movie, and A
Sound Like Thunder, which came out this August.
In fact, Sonny’s escalating
writing career has forced him to reduce his involvement
with SWR. Ever so gingerly, the event is
being handed over to the non-profit Fairhope Center For
The Writing Arts. Fairhope-based writer Joe Formichella
is executive director and is organizing this year’s SWR.
Skip Jones, who is an avid reader rather than avid writer,
serves on the board. “I’ve been a participant at every SWR,”
says Jones. “I’ve gotten to know a lot of these writers.
Sonny’s gifted at finding really good emerging southern
writers, and there’s hardly anything more fun than interacting
with somebody who’s smart and willing to share. I’m kind
of addicted to it."
Writers also respond
to the organic, informal atmosphere at SWR.
Joe Formichella says that SWR and Sonny
Brewer coaxed him out of ‘creative writing exile’ back in
2002. At SWR he saw writers he’d studied
with, drunk with, shared rejections slips with back in the
80s and 90s; now they were up on the stage, reading from
their work. “That was more valuable than having them tell
me how they worded their query letters,” said Formichella.
What mattered was realizing that “you keep working, against
these overwhelming odds. You have to will it to happen.
I saw how writers arrange their lives around the work when
there is no promise at the end of the road.” The reinforcement
held; Joe’s first book, The Wreck of the Twilight
Limited, was published in 2004; his second,
Here’s To You, Jackie Robinson: The
Legend of the Prichard Mohawks, in 2005.
Sonny Brewer has made
so much happen for so many writers. Why? What motivates
him? When I ask him this, we are sitting in his little office
in Fairhope, a few feet away from the small round concrete
hut that is the real place the real poet of Tolstoy Park,
Henry Stuart, built and lived in early
in the last century. Sonny has a hard time answering my
question. He gets up, sits down, arranges books, flaps papers,
looks up something on his computer. His conversation stubbornly
loops outward, away from himself, to other writers’ lives,
to the many authors he loves and constantly quotes, finally
to a manuscript by a gifted young unpublished writer that
is piled on his desk. He puts his hands on the pages. “It’s
about this,” he says. “The story just turns me inside out.
She wants to share it. That’s what it’s all about.” He is
moved by this young writer’s struggles, by her fears, but
most of all by her writing. Finally, to explain why he does
what he does, he reads to me.
by Janet Nodar, reporting
for Southern Breeze
|