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
