Southern Women Writers Conference

I’m headed to the Southern Women Writers Conference at Berry College.  Lots of great speakers: Isabel Wilkerson (author of Warmth of Other Suns, my favorite history ever), rocker and writer Marshall Chapman, poet Stacey Lynn Brown (love Cradle Song), A Dry Grass in August’s Anna Jean Mayhew and so many more...

Excited to attend a creative nonfiction workshop with Melissa Delbridge (just finished Family Bible last night). Dorothy Allison knocked my socks off twice earlier this summer at the Tin House Writer’s Workshop---can't wait to hear her keynote address.

On Friday morning, poet Caroline Young, a fellow Athenian, creative nonfiction writer Joy Wilson-Young and I will be reading in a symposium called Recovering from Endings and Troubled Histories.  I’ll be reading from Delta Drive, a story set in Greenwood, MS, my hometown.  

Tin House, Hambidge, Missing Vic Chesnutt

At Tin House Writer's Workshop...attending creative nonfiction workshop with Stephen Elliott...Big fan of his work as well as his instruction style.

Have seen great readings:  Wells Tower, a mind-blowing performance on said topic by Dorothy Allison, Elliott, etc...


Feels like I have found my tribe...


Two weeks ago, I attended a residency at Hambidge. Finished the final ten percent of UnReformed.  Next up... revise, revise, revise.

Finishing fulfills the last promise I made Vic Chesnutt. I wish he were here every single day.


Three years ago, he wrote me a recommendation.  Whenever I feel lost, he guides me back.

"She's working on an ambitious psychological memoir project about her teenage years as a rebellious daughter of a Mississippi doctor sent off to a brutal Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic. Now a schoolteacher with her own son in grade school and with the political tenor of the times, her story has a fresh relevance informing a shadowy current surging through fundamentalist Christianity in the American south."