Southern Fictions by Kathryn Stripling Byer
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"For years I tried to write about the racial conflict in my Southwest Georgia county as I experienced it growing up in the 1950's and 60's, but I didn't trust my own voice to speak honestly about living in the midst of that turbulent time. Who was I then? Even more important, who was I now? Ten years ago, an accident in the Smoky Mountains left me laid up with a broken ankle for weeks. I had plenty of time to read and think. So I opened my notebook and began writing a sonnet about growing up in the deep South. One sonnet led to another and into the material I'd tried to write about for so long. As another native Georgian, the fiction writer Flannery O'Connor, once said, "Our limitations are our gateways to reality." The precise iambic pentameter and rhyme scheme of the sonnet had opened the gate to this particular reality and enabled me to render it into poetry." |
This book was designed, hand-printed, and hand-bound by Dave Wofford of Horse & Buggy Press in Durham, North Carolina and completed at the beginning of Spring in 2011. The covers were handmade by Ann Marie Kennedy in Raleigh, North Carolina. These hand-pulled sheets were created from a mix of flax and cotton fibers, including a few Confederate battle flags that were repurposed and worked into pulp for a portion of the covers (alternate covers were kept flag-free for a quieter earth-toned color). Half of the edition was printed on a tan interior paper (Bugra) and half on white sheet (Schiller).
A portion of the proceeds from the sales of this book will be used to fund youth writing workshops exploring issues of identity.
100 copies of this editon were printed.
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