Speak So I Shall Know Thee
Interviews with Southern Writers

William J. Walsh

978-1-878086-21-1
1-878086-21-9
$14.95 paperback 
316 pages 
 index 
 6" x 9"

Down Home Press

A sampling of Southern writers on Southern writing...

The upheaval that was caused in the South by slavery, the Civil War, and the Reconstruction, that is a very great tragic theme, and we had a writer who rose to the occasion of dealing with material that large: Faulkner. As seriously flawed as he is in some ways, he intuitively sensed, I think, though he didn't strike me as being a man of much real intelligence, that these changes could be recorded by him in his own way. That's really all the material he had and he worked it to death. But out of it came the really only big epic literature the South has produced. --James Dickey

If somebody wants to call me a Southern writer it doesn't offend me, but I don't think any novelist wants an adjective placed in front of the word novelist. I don't think you have to be a Southerner to read my fiction. I hope not. That would mean I failed utterly. Is Tom Wolfe or Walker Percy a Southern writer? Is Faulkner a Southern writer? One of the things you have to resign yourself to as a writer is this business of people labeling you. That's just the way of the world and that's alright. You don't have to like it, you just have to live with it. --Harry Crews

I guess you'd have to call us Southern writers because we write out of the South. I hope what we have to say would transcend the region, but certainly we speak out of the Southern experience because a writer must write about what he is born into and knows. There's no doubt all my books are very concerned for Southern people--I would think, now, more of the new South than the old South. I'm getting a little tired of the old South. I think we can pack that baby up. --Anne Rivers Siddons

Authors featured in Speak So I Shall Know Thee include:

about the author
William J. Walsh is a writer and teacher of English. He lives in Atlanta.