Writing Southern Fiction Is More Than Just Saying ‘Y'all', by Karen White:

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When people ask me what I write, I tell them that I write ‘southern women's fiction'.  To clarify, I usually follow that with the (hopefully) more clear ‘grit lit.'  Although that frequently elicits a grin or two, it rarely seems to explain what it is that I try to create on the pages of my novels.

I stick with the adage of ‘write what I know' and I know the south.  Although I've only lived in the south for less than half of my years, I come from a long line of southerners.  My father's family has lived in the south since before the American Revolution and both of my parents were born and raised in Mississippi-my father on the gulf coast and my mother in the Delta.  I have relatives still living there who most people from other parts of the country would need a translator to understand.  But when I hear them speak, I simply feel as if I have found home.

I don't speak with a southern accent, but I do occasionally use the word ‘y'all', would never consider wearing white shoes before Easter or after Labor Day, and have been known to say ‘bless her heart' when what I was really thinking was something a lot less generous.  It's the southern way, after all, learned beneath my grandmother's kitchen table where I sat and listened to my mother and her four sisters chat and gossip while drinking coffee into the wee hours of the night.  It is those soft voices, thick like the mud of the Delta, that I hear when creating the strong southern women in my novels.

My April, 2009 release, The Lost Hours, is set in the quintessential southern city of Savannah, Georgia.  I've never lived in Savannah, but have visited it often and knew it to be the perfect setting for a story about a woman bruised by life who returns to her grandparents' home to recover, and instead opens a Pandora's box into her family's darkest secrets.

The story moves between the lives of three best friends growing up in the segregated Savannah of the nineteen thirties, and a present day horse farm on the Savannah River on the grounds of an old rice plantation. The juxtaposition of the two decades seventy years apart gives a glimpse of the remnants of a fading way of life as it paves the way for the new south of skyscrapers and civil rights.

The south is, in many ways, its history and all of my novels touch upon some part of Dixie's collective past.  But writing southern women's fiction is so much more than history or even the accent.  It's primarily a sense of place, stocked with those inherently wacky yet familiarly beloved southern characters (remember Aunt Pittypat?)-most of whom I've met or find myself related to in real life.  It's the heat and the humidity, too, and the strong sense of family and belonging, good homestyle cooking, and warm hospitality. 

That's the southern part, anyway.  To make it women's fiction, I make the protagonist a strong but flawed woman at a crossroads in her life.  I toss her and the setting together and, voila!  Southern women's fiction results.

When I sit down to write, I close my eyes and picture myself at my grandmother's Indianola, Mississippi home, smelling something wonderful cooking in the kitchen while slapping at mosquitoes.  I hear the voices of my mother and aunts against the background of the katydids singing from the old oak trees, and try to recreate those senses on the pages in front of me.   My hope is for my readers to close my books with a contented sigh, and with a craving for some really good fried chicken.

Karen White, The Lost Hours, scrapbooks, Penguin Books