Parting the Curtains
Interviews with Southern Writers

Dannye Romine Powell and Jill Krementz

 
978-0-89587-116-9
0-89587-116-5
$12.95 hardcover
8 1/2" x 9 1/2" 
353 pages black-and-white photographs, index

When Maya Angelou writes, she rents a room in a hotel where none of the staff will admit knowing who she is.

James Dickey stations typewriters around his house and circulates among them, his various works cross-pollinating one another.

Whenever Pat Conroy needs jump-starting, he phones his friend Doug Marlette, hoping to catch him on a mean day: "When Doug is vicious, it's poetry."

At times when the words wouldn't come, Alex Haley used to mix cake batter, pop it in the oven, and pull up a chair to watch "that absolutely miraculous process of something being created from raw material."

The twenty-three Southern writers perceptively interviewed here by Dannye Romine Powell are as varied in their approaches to writing, their habits, and their opinions as they are in the kinds of art they produce. But though they are as distant in years as Kaye Gibbons and Eudora Welty, and as different in background as Dori Sanders and Walker Percy, each "braves his or her way onto the blank page day after day, trusting the subconscious, believing in the power of language to lift us out of ourselves," as Powell says.

Whether their triumphs involve getting inside the skin of a Confederate widow, like Allan Gurganus, or completing some of their best work after suffering personal tragedy, like Reynolds Price, all these writers share the goal stated by William Styron: "To finish a work of literature that fulfills every shred of my talent."

Writers featured in Parting the Curtains include:

about the author and photographer
Southern writers were Dannye Romine Powell's beat during her seventeen years as a book editor at the Charlotte Observer, where she is now an award-winning news columnist. An accomplished poet, she has published work in such journals as the Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, and the Georgia Review. Her collection of poetry, At Every Wedding  Someone Stays Home, won the 1993 First Book Award from the University of Arkansas Press. Among her honors is a 1993 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry.

Jill Krementz is the nation's most accomplished photographer of literary figures. From her early work with Harper's Bazaar, Glamour, and Time to her award-winning "Very Young" and "How It Feels" books, she has established herself at the top of her profession.