Thank You, H.L. Mencken - Aiken

Nothing unites southerners more than a cause, and if it involves someone not of the south, so much the better. Mencken had no way of knowing southern character when he wrote that the South was "almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert." Futhermore, according to the uncpress.unc.edu, Mencken believed that most "southern poetry and prose was drivel."

One must surely chuckle over such accusations that came on the eve of the Southern Renaissance which involved such notables as Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren, and, oh, yeah . . . that Nobel prize winning fellow . . . William Faulkner. Much like the listener that Faulkner's Quentin Compson spoke to in Absalom, Absalom, Mencken, and many others, may never be able to comprehend what it means to be southern or why "place" and heritage is alive and vitally important to southerners, nor why we don't give up our "village idiots" without knowing just where they've gone. "Do you remember . . ." and "What ever happened to . . ." are often the beginning of conversations that lead to territories more tangled and convoluted than Huck Finn ever explored. But the answers to those questions are important, for the South and its people are bound together by the past. That's really what Faulkner was trying to say in all those stories and books. We never really let go of the past because it still has a bearing on our present, even in the 21st century, even when we are close to losing our identity, close to becoming homogenized by cable television, asphalt, and Wal-Mart.

Who we are and the stories, poems and essays we write still speak of what "being southern" means. We are influenced by Steinbeck, Whitman, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Cormac McCarthy, Proust, Nabaknov, and Poe, who was himself a southerner. We write of imaginary worlds, fantasy, school buses, justice gone awry, alternative histories, and losing conflicts with computers. But don't think for one moment that our allegiance to the South is forgotten; it permeates our attitude in all that we write. We create microcosms and people them easily, because we have known characters all our lives. We learned our sense of place by osmosis, along with our concept of honor, and we infuse that into the writing we produce.

William Faulkner said: "I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."

We are not the giants of southern literature who rose in the mid-twentieth century. We are only a group of Small Town Southern Writers, whose voices rise to maintain our identity and our humanity, and we welcome you to our blog, to "our place."