The project I’m working on while I’m on a writing residency at Hambidge in the Blue Ridge Mountains is a new novel (still a gleam in my eye) based on a lynching incident in my hometown of Greenville, S.C. in 1947. A twenty-four year old black man, Willie Earle, was arrested for the robbery and stabbing death of a white taxi cab driver, Thomas Watson Brown, taken from the Pickens County jail near Greenville by a mob of thirty or more white taxi cab drivers, driven to the woods nearby, and beaten, stabbed and shot twice with a shot gun. … Read More

Ohmygod! (And I don’t have to almost step on a snake to say that). What a profoundly beautiful novel The Member of a Wedding by Carson McCullers is!

I first read it in my early twenties after I had been to Breadloaf, where people still spoke of McCullers being there, and where I first saw her photograph: that elfin face and dark, sad eyes. I would have liked to be the next Carson McCullers, but that was not to be (by a long shot), but I have kept Member all these years, when so many other books have come and … Read More

Hambidge is an artists’ and writers’ residency program located in the Blue Ridge Mountains of NE Georgia, a stone’s throw from both the N.C. and S.C. borders, and I am lucky enough to be here.  My home for these two weeks is the Son House, an old, weathered farmhouse/cabin nestled into a hill; we were meant to be together.  Inside it’s warm, rustic, comfortable and spacious.  Three large windows face the east, and I can write long hand at an artist’s drafting table or at a desk with my laptop, looking out at the view.