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The Conecuh Series
It’s Good Weather For Fudge
Conversing with Carson McCullers
Revised Edition
Sue Brannan Walker
Foreword by Virginia Spencer Carr
Introduction by Carlos Dews
NEWSOUTH BOOKS
Montgomery
Also by Sue Brannan Walker
Traveling My Shadow
The Appearance of Green
Shorings
Sue Walker: Greatest Hits, 1982–2002
Blood Must Bear Your Name
In the Realm of Rivers
Faulkner Suite
She Said
Reuben’s Mobile
How Stubborned Words Mule, How They Balk and Take Their Measure
Table Five
The Ecological Poetics of James Dickey
The Conecuh Series
Celebrating Diversity in the South
Like the springs that unite to form the headwaters of the Conecuh River near Union Springs, Alabama, this series seeks to bring together the South’s many traditions and cultures, celebrating at once our differences and our commonality.
Wade Hall, Series Editor
NewSouth Books
105 S. Court Street
Montgomery, AL 36104
Copyright © 2017 by Sue Brannan Walker. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.
ISBN: 978-1-58838-333-4
eBook ISBN: 978-1-60306-444-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016919733
Visit www.newsouthbooks.com
To
Dale Edmonds,
professor, dissertation director, mentor, friend, whose illuminations have influenced my work throughout my career, my deepest respect, appreciation and gratitude.
Thanks to
Virginia Carr,
for her encouragement and support,
to
Wade Hall,
who listened, responded, and understood,
and to
Carlos Dews,
with ballads of heart and spirit.
Contents
Lorraine Allen Illustration of Carson McCullers
Foreword by Virginia Spencer Carr
It’s Good Weather for Fudge: Conversing with Carson McCullers by Sue Brannan Walker
Carson’s Columbus in Postcards
Carson McCullers illustration by Lorraine Allen
Carson McCullers was born in 1917 in Columbus, Georgia. As a girl and young woman, she studied the piano in preparation for a career in music, which failed to materialize but which provided the leitmotif for much of her fiction. Before she was thirty, McCullers had published The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Member of the Wedding (novel and play), and The Ballad of the Sad Café. She would later publish Clock Without Hands, but by her forties she had become severely disabled by the strokes and heart attacks that eventually claimed her life. She died and was buried in 1967 in Nyack, New York.
Preface (2007)
Wade Hall (1934–2015)
Editor, the Conecuh Series
When a talented poet from Mobile writes an extended poem in which she imagines a visit and conversation with one of the South’s most gifted writers, it is cause for a literary celebration. Such was the event that occurred in October of 2002, when I attended a conference at the Columbus (Georgia) Museum and heard Sue Walker read her new poem celebrating the life and fiction of Columbus native Carson McCullers.
It is especially appropriate that this poem be part of the Conecuh Series, which is dedicated to celebrating diversity in the South. No writer has written more honestly and compassionately about outsiders and misfits in American life than Carson McCullers, one of the South’s most original and daring authors. During her short lifetime she celebrated diversity in her characters, plots, and themes. From Frankie Addams to John Singer, the lonely outcasts of her fiction search frantically for “the we of me”—as do we all.
The meeting of McCullers readers and scholars in Columbus included Virginia Spencer Carr, the noted biographer whose Lonely Hunter is not only the definitive biography of Carson McCullers but is also a model of the genre. We are honored to have her introduction and endorsement. McCullers-Walker-Carr are an awesome and eloquent trio.
Sue Walker’s poem is an inspired interweaving