Introduction to Focus: The New South?

Page 3 November–December 2008 the new south? introduction to Focus: tom Williams, Focus editor “Geography” is a word that shows up often in the fiction of the great—but not nearly famous enough—Mississippi writer Lewis Nordan. In one story, “Sugar, The Eunuchs and Big G.B.,” the first-person narrator realizes his Mississippi Delta town Arrow Catcher is “a terrible circus geography where freaks grow like magic from the buckshot and gumbo.” In this and other uses of the word, Nordan conveys much more than the physical landscape of a place, but the cultural and spiritual, as well. In 2001, when I took over as the fiction editor of Arkansas Review, a literary magazine with a southern orientation , I was looking for something akin to Nordan’s geographies, worlds of the authors’own making that seemed strange and familiar, often in the same detail. However, I spent much of my first year reading fiction that couldn’t find its own geography, in a number of ways. Instead, what I saw was a lot of familiar rehashing of common themes—race relations, crazy families, the agrarian ideal, the War Between the States; styles that unconsciously parodied William Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor; characters so stereotypical as to belong on Hee Haw. Of course, I wouldn’t have been surprised had the latest imitation of “A Worn Path” arrived with a Tacoma postmark, but more often than not, it arrived from Shreveport or Jackson or Little Rock. Of course, this is not to say I wasn’t inundated with outsider attempts. (It appears everyone with the least literary urge believes he can write a New Orleans story after spending a week in the French Quarter—preand post-Katrina.) But those efforts could be easily dismissed as tourist fiction. What of the fiction that came from the South yet seemed comfortable with saying all that had been said before in nearly the same mode and fashion of Ernest Gaines, Elizabeth Spencer, Ellen Douglas, or Barry Hannah? Were the writers so obedient to the tradition of Southern fiction that they couldn’t see the world around them? Where was, I wondered, the fiction of the New South? Though it’s the title of this particular Focus, The New South is quite the curious phrase. It’s been around so long—since the end of the “War of Northern Agression”—it might have outlived its usefulness. It’s a term like “postmodernism,” one that designates so very many things: art, commerce, politics, even, well, geography.Too, like postmodernism , it gives rise to such questions as “What comes after?” The New New South? The Newer South? The Post-New South? I even engaged in some of this wordplay myself, claiming once at a conference that Arkansas Review was looking for the “new fiction of the New South.” What that meant, I cannot say for certain, though I suspect when I asked for the “new fiction of the New South,” I was much like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart with his definition of obscenity: “I know it when I see it.” Fortunately, since that first year of reading the slush pile, I’ve begun to see it, the new “geography,” if you will. It started to come in through the mail in the form of the submissions, often by students from some of the well-known or up-and-coming Southern creative writing programs—the University ofArkansas, Ole Miss, Florida State, and University of Memphis come to mind. Daring, vital, diverse, this was fiction cognizant of tradition but not strangled by it, written by women and men willing to experiment with form. The stories took place in Southern cities, not just on plantations or lonely crossroads. It brought other ethnicities into the drama of white versus black. It was also often comic, not steeped in the brooding violence associated with Cormac McCarthy (once considered a Southern writer) or Harry Crews. Most of all, it sounded different, composed with region of the US we call the South (excluding Florida and Texas) contains a number of distinct regions within: The Piedmont, the Black Belt, Appalachia, the Ozarks, Acadiana, and the Mississippi Delta. And within those regions lie...