Tell Me a Story of Deep Delight
Two new collections reveal the South at its storytelling best
The Alumni Grill
Edited by William Gay and Suzanne Kingsbury (MacAdam/Cage, 225 pp., $12.50)
Stories From the Blue Moon CafE III
Edited by Sonny Brewer (MacAdam/Cage, 386 pp., $26.50)
Anyone who doubts that Southern literature is alive and well should take the time to read two fine new anthologies of the region's best up-and-coming writers, Stories From the Blue Moon Café III and The Alumni Grill. And the books should really be read as a set. Their stories come from the same circle of writers. They are both largely the product of Sonny Brewer, the Fairhope, Ala., literary impresario; between running a bookstore and an annual writers' festival, Brewer also edited Stories and was the driving force behind The Alumni Grill (edited by William Gay and Suzanne Kingsbury). And they present a species of Southern literature that is much different from the bodies-under-the-front-porch Gothic that has become a stereotype of the genre. These stories are at once fiercely regional and yet universal, cognizant of their place but, more important, of their place's place in the world. And the best stories—of which there are too many to list—understand at a fundamental level the fissures that emerge when trying to navigate between here and there.
Perhaps the single best story in either collection is "Birdland," by Michael Knight, a creative writing teacher at the University of Tennessee's Knoxville campus. ("Birdland" appears in Stories, though Knight also has an entry in The Alumni Grill.) The story tells of Elbow, an eccentric hamlet south of Tuscaloosa that, every year, becomes the winter home for a flock of feral Rhode Island parakeets. One year the parakeets are followed by a fetching Icelandic ornithologist—Ludmilla Haggardsdottir, though for pronunciation's sake the locals call her "the Blond"—who soon falls for the story's narrator, a quiet, classics-loving bachelor named Raymond. The town has but a few other residents: there is a well-intentioned mayor/general-store owner given to shouting racial slurs during Alabama games; his sole employee, a black former college football star; a set of foul-mouthed twins; and a broken-down farmer. It's quirky, but not precious, as Knight has a knack for the perfect humorous turn: though always unopposed, whenever the mayor runs for reelection, he visits each of his dozen constituents, "brib[ing] us with hard cider and the promise of a brighter future here in Elbow."
But there is method to Knight's madness. Elbow's eccentricities combine to make it a perfect microcosm for today's rural South—Eden-like in its beauty, football-obsessed, racially mixed but still fumbling toward racial equality. And the story's central tension—between the Blond, who is disgusted by the mayor's backwardness and wants to leave, but who is also fascinated by the town's subtly complex beauty, and Raymond, who is content with his surroundings but enamored with the wider world the Blond represents—is a powerful metaphor for the tension between today's South and the rest of the country.
Not every story is as intensely allegorical as "Birdland." In fact, the strength of both collections lies in their remarkable breadth. The first story in Alumni Grill, Tom Franklin's "Christians," is a rather conventional (but still moving) story of backwoods revenge, set around the turn of the 19th century. But just a few stories later is John T. Edge's "Fleet's Eats: Tales of the Culinary Underground," a nonfiction chronicle of a day in the life of an unlicensed restaurant owner, who gets up at 3:30 every morning to prepare lunch for dozens of patrons who will, in a matter of hours, occupy his dining room, family room and back porch. There are charming—and hilarious, and bleak—character portraits of football backbenchers, rural EMTs, lawyers, archaeologists and phone solicitors. There is Rick Bragg's profile of the SEC's first black head coach, and there is Grayson Capp's brief but entertaining account of the bumps encountered along the road to the waiting room of music stardom. (Capps is a gifted singer who, if there's justice in the world, will move past that waiting room someday; he also performs on a CD accompanying Stories.)
Some stories, like Michelle Richmond's "Down the Shore Everything's Alright" and Steve Yarbrough's "Warsaw Voice," aren't even set in the South (New Jersey and Poland, respectively), and other than the writers' own regional provenances it's not completely clear what makes these "Southern" literature. One could argue that they still have that indefatigable sense of place that marks all Southern stories, although merely having a sense of place isn't unique to Southern writing. Rather, their inclusion reminds us that every genre bleeds and blurs at its edge, and that maybe Southern literature—and the South, by extension—isn't always all that different from anything and everywhere else.
But ultimately, Alumni Grill and Stories succeed for more basic reasons than which stance they take on what Southern literature is or where it's going. The big test for anthologies isn't how good their best stories are, but whether their mix of voices, locations, emotions and characters can sustain a reader across a couple of hundred pages. Middling (and most) anthologies will mix a few gems in with a lot of chum, hoping that readers are willing to suffer through to find something they really like. Not so with these books. Brewer, Gay and Kingsbury have done a remarkable job of bringing together a consistently strong, yet consistently diverse, collection of writers from across the South. In doing so, they have managed to say something new about their region and its literature. n
