From the Office and Backyard to the Road, Boat, or Plane–Backstories and
Side Stories While on Assignment. Updates on Personal Projects, Too.

Archive for January, 2009

Murrells Inlet, Russell’s signs

Back in September I posted a preview of my food-travel feature about Murrells Inlet… it’s now in print, in the February issue of Charleston Magazine, earned a mention on the cover.  To read a version online, click here.

 – Sandy Lang, January 2009

The January issue of Charleston Magazine includes my travel piece on Mississippi. It’s the magazine’s first-ever Literary Arts Issue, and my story opens with a visit to William Faulkner’s longtime home.

Walking up the allée of cedars on a chilly morning in Oxford, Mississippi, there’s the feeling that you’ve arrived at one of those heavy places, thick-aired with the stories and life that you imagine and know must have existed there… at least that’s the way it feels to a writer (to me, at that moment) who wonders about the effect of place on writing, or conversely, the effect that a writer can have on a specific place.

I’d come to Rowan Oak, the homestead and William Faulkner’s white-columned house where the Nobel and Pulitzer-winning author lived for 32 years, writing stories of the South in flux… complicated, powerful tales. There looked to be no one else about, and I pushed open the front door, Faulkner’s front door.  To the right was a small desk, and then a parlor to left that looked caught in a certain kind of mid-century South, with a piano and velvet chaises. I heard a man say.  “Are you the writer giving the reading tonight at Square Books?” I looked around. No, I wasn’t giving a reading, but it became clear that the man was speaking to me.  Obviously, I’d come to a place where the first assumption is that someone is a writer. (Pretty cool.)...

You can read the entire piece on the magazine’s re-vamped website. (The issue also includes winning entries from a fiction contest… plenty of fine writing in the magazine this month.)

– Sandy Lang, January 2009

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In print/published, Literary, Travel

bookplates2

I am captivated by this time of year… the marsh grass is golden in clear evening light, bare branches of pecan trees stretch into the sky, flocks of red-winged blackbirds swirl over farm fields. There are indelible scenes everywhere. It’s a stark, beautiful season.

For a few years now, photographer Peter Frank Edwards and I have regularly explored the South in cooler months on assignments, and along the way have developed a personal project, “Winter South.”  Using some of the images from this project, last month we had a series of bookplates printed to share with friends and colleagues. (They are adhesive-backed, pretty nice quality.)  If you’d like a bookplate or two, just let me know.

– Sandy Lang, January 2009

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