The Young and the Restless

A Southern lit professor at the University of Georgia assigned it to me. It was the first Faulkner I’d ever read. At first, it flummoxed me. That first sentence: 122 words long with nary a comma.  For about 150 pages, I struggled to make sense of his words. Then I finally realized Faulkner’s writing wasn’t writing. It was talking. It was the voices in Quentin Compson’s head, transcribed verbatim. It finally clicked. Then, on page 174, I discovered the famous passage that would stay with me forever, when Quentin’s Harvard roommate, Shreve, says this:

“Tell about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.”

Four years later, I moved off to New York City, and constantly heard variations on exactly those words.

Ellen Corry moved from Watkinsville, Georgia, to Manhattan to attend New York University a year ago. She’s been hearing them, too. Like me, she tried to run from this place, but finds that the pull of the South is to strong to escape completely.

At age 19, Ellen becomes the youngest writer ever to contribute to Salvation South, and we’re glad to present her work. For the last decade, as I’ve edited countless stories about the South, one of my greatest pleasures has been helping young writers find ways to express their conflicting feelings about our region. I’m happy as a pup to add Ellen to the list.

I’m also happy to present the words of two poets who are contributing to Salvation South for the first time: Sarah Vance and John Dorroh.

If you haven’t joined the Salvation South Family yet to give your financial support to our work, we’d welcome your contributions. Our readers ensure that we can keep this refuge for Southern storytellers afloat.