I live and write in the South, and the South is my subject. The sense of place is powerful down here. Place is a character. Take Memphis, where I live. Eudora Welty called it “the old Delta synonym for pleasure, trouble, and shame.” What she was saying, I think, is that Memphis calls to us, compels us, tempts us. Bit of a scamp, is Memphis. Born storyteller. Stories for days. No better company than that for a writer. My Memphis isn’t in Tennessee, like the the map says, but is, as it’s colloquially known, “the capital of north Mississippi.” That’s a swath of Magnolia State stretching from the Hill Country — sweeping up William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County — over to the Delta, a land thrumming with devilment, portent, and the dominant sevenths of the blues. Ah, the Delta, “perfectly flat and level but it shimmered like the wing of a lighted dragonfly,” as Welty, patron saint of the sentence, wrote. “It seemed strummed, as though it were an instrument and something had touched it.” Something had — Robert Johnson’s fingers. Or the devil’s.
See now? I’ve gotten carried away. The South does that. Well, it does to me, and so many other writers to whom I’m in thrall. Good Southern writing isn’t just set in the region, but steeped in it. My latest novel, The Coldwater Girl, is the story of folk artist named Ivy Coldwater, who leaves her Delta home on a search for meaning, but mostly finds fellow lost souls. The ghost of a soldier at Shiloh battlefield. Two sisters, both small-town psychics, who set up shop next door to each other and wage a price war. A stumblefoot boy in the country chasing a butterfly with a BB gun — they start them early, you know, in the armed-to-the-teeth South. Meanwhile, a mysterious voice comes on the radio and muses on life and life after, religious fervor and train songs. Ivy, on the run from family all through the book, really is on a collision course toward it.
I call it a Comic Southern Gothic, if such a sub-genre exists. It’s also a dead-serious attempt, between all of Ivy’s deep-fried follies, to write about what Faulkner said is the only thing worth writing about: “the human heart in conflict with itself.”
That’s a universal subject, sure. But in the South it rises to the level of religion. Because the South is different from the rest of America, a land apart. A scarred land. In many ways a stuck and stunted land, too many people here still fighting the Civil War — and thinking, these days, maybe, they’ve finally won the thing. Faulkner’s famous words about the past abide, as ever. A few statues coming down didn’t change what’s still in some hearts; just hardened them, is all.
So, no, it’s not all just a rhapsody in blues down here. On the same Delta roadtrip where you can visit Robert Johnson’s grave and search for “Ode to Billie Joe” breadcrumbs, you can also stand before the ruins of Bryant’s Grocery, where 14-year-old Emmett Till supposedly whistled at that white woman, and ponder the first page of one of the South’s darkest chapters. And if you visit Memphis, along with Graceland you’ll want to see the site of Martin Luther King’s assassination — it’s the National Civil Rights Museum now.
It’s a complicated place, the South, a confounding place. But also a place of cultural riches, from Johnson’s blues to Welty’s words — artists who didn’t just revel in life down here, but reckoned with it. Actual artists, too, like Ivy Coldwater’s hero, Carroll Cloar, the Memphis surrealist whose works include “Children Pursued by Hostile Butterflies,” inspired by his youth in the Arkansas Delta where, he said, “something was always going to get you … I didn’t even trust butterflies.”
The South is a land of myth and mystery, fable and figment. No wonder I’ve set all my novels here, including Come Again No More (2025), Everybody Knows (2023), and Long Gone Daddies (2013.) Trying to pin it down on the page is one of writing’s great challenges, and worth a lifetime of false starts and dead ends. Is the truth up the road a piece? Around the next river bend? Beneath all that kudzu? Maybe, maybe not.
But a search for meaning is not always about the answers you find along the way.
Ivy Coldwater taught me that.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you The Coldwater Girl in the summer of 2027.
