by Shannon Ravenel
Each of the stories in this book first appeared in an American magazine, review, journal, or quarterly. And all of them appeared there within the year preceding selection for this book. So truly, they are all “new.”
None of these short stories is, as far as I can know, part of a larger piece. None is an excerpt.
Each was written to stand alone. And so they are all truly “stories.”
But are they all truly “from the South”?
Twenty years ago, John Corrington White and Miller Williams edited a collection of stories they called Southern Writing in the Sixties (LSU Press, 1966). They gave their criteria for selection as follows: “The fiction included here has been selected from the works of . . . writers who were raised in the South . . .” So far so good, clear and simple. They went on to finish the sentence, “. . .or, having reached the age of responsibility, came to the South and became Southerners.” That’s not as simple.
It’s getting harder all the time to draw the borders to the South. People move—both geographically and spiritually—a lot more than they used to. Do we still believe in the Mason-Dixon Line? Does being a Southern place still require one-time membership in the Confederacy? Does being a Southern writer still mean being particularly and peculiarly shaped by history, the past more than the present, nostalgia, defeat, poverty, color, guilt?
I call myself a Southerner. I was born and raised in South Carolina. So were my parents, and their parents, and theirs. I have an accent that doesn’t fade completely even though I have lived far away from the Low Country for more than 25 years. In thinking about whether and how to judge what is and what isn’t Southern writing, I find that my notion of it hasn’t so much to do with geography or a personal relationship with history. What it does have to do with is belonging, something related to my having hung on to my accent. Corrington and Williams said it well: “The Southerner is not the only person who knows where his home is. But he is one of the few to whom it matters very much.”