An impressive, wide-ranging collection of a region’s creative voices.
This 10th-anniversary edition of a literary journal features award-winning work in multiple genres by members of the South Carolina Writers’ Association.
The SCWA’s founder and board member, Carrie Allen McCray, contributed to a flush of literary activity in South Carolina before her death in 2008 at age 94. Her own interest in Southern subjects fits with the first award-winning entry here, Skip Shockley’s “Samuels’ Gold,” the lead chapter of a novel that focuses on a post–Civil War heist. Although the period details of the 1865-set narrative bring readers believably to the coast of Florida, setting them down in the midst of a murder plot, the pacing requires some patience. (Perhaps life and fiction move more quickly now.) The more contemporary stories, however, conjure vivid scenes and lessons. In Kasie Whitener’s “Cover Up,” a middle-aged woman gets her old tattoo touched up and feels a desire for the tattoo artist but ultimately finds a relationship with her wilder, vulnerable 19-year-old self. In Jayne Bowers’ “Come On, Sweet Boy,” a grandmother tells about her daughter’s experience with a difficult birth in a tale that squeezes the heart without recourse to sentiment or exaggeration. A clear bit of memoir, Bob Strother’s “Friends in the Wind,” concludes that it would be nice to hear the voice of an old friend, who would understand “that our wilting body is a joke of recent vintage, and not everything we have ever been.” However, the present day doesn’t escape scrutiny. The poem “Chatter through the Ether” by Michael Crowley, for example, worries about the cellphone generation with their “plastic talismans”; missing out on the beauty of the world, they appear crazed: “Our captains of the ether sail on / certain that constant chatter equals living. / In earlier generations only / the deranged walked helter-skelter down streets // shouting into the ether.” Many of the other entries also portray persuasive narrators and engaging revelations. Adrienne Mathues’ “The Waltz,” for example, a charming nonfiction piece on the struggle of learning the tango, dances toward a quiet but powerful exhilaration.
An impressive, wide-ranging collection of a region’s creative voices.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5394-8987-0
Page Count: 158
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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