Welcome, Chattahoochee Writers Conference!

I very much enjoyed hosting participants in the Chattahoochee Writers Conference on Saturday night. In fact, I enjoyed myself so much that I forgot to take photos!  Not to worry, though, because one of the participants took a photo or two and wrote about the event:
http://wynne-huddleston.blogspot.com/2010/09/2010-chattahoochee-valley-writers.html

News from McCullersland

Variety magazine announces news of McCullers biopic:

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118024507.html?categoryId=2431&cs=1

Conference registration page up!

We realize that February seems like a long time away, but it'll be here before you know it. And you know you don't want to miss the Carson McCullers conference. Check it out at
http://conted.colstate.edu//CarsonMcCullersConference_.php

Welcome, Jessica Garratt!

The Carson McCullers Center extends the warmest of welcomes to Jessica Garratt, our 2010 Marguerite and Lamar Smith Writing Fellow. Having arrived yesterday, Jessica will spend the next three months in residence at the McCullers House.  Jessica's first book, Fire Pond, won the 2008 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry, selected by poet Medbh McGuckian, and was published by the University of Utah Press in April 2009. Currently Jessica is a doctoral candidate at the University of Missouri where she holds a creative writing fellowship. She also received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas in Austin, where she earned her MFA.

Welcome, Mrs. Bush.

The Carson McCullers Center was honored to have as our guest today former First Lady Laura Bush, who is in town to deliver a presentation at a leadership conference.

"... the last Friday of August ..."

The first page of The Member of the Wedding:

It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid. In June the trees were bright dizzy green, but later the leaves darkened, and the town turned black and shrunken under the glare of the sun. At first Frankie walked around doing one thing and another. The sidewalks of the town were gray in the early morning and at night, but the noon sun put a glaze on them, so that the cement burned and glittered like glass. The sidewalks finally became too hot for Frankie’s feet, and also she got herself in trouble. She was in so much secret trouble that she thought it was better to stay at home – and at home there was only Berenice Sadie Brown and John Henry West. The three of them sat at the kitchen table, saying the same things over and over, so that by August the words began to rhyme with each other and sound strange. The world seemed to die each afternoon and nothing moved any longer. At last the summer was like a green sick dream, or like a silent crazy jungle under glass. And then, on the last Friday of August, all this was changed: it was so sudden that Frankie puzzled the whole blank afternoon, and still she did not understand.

Southern Literary Trailfest 2011

The Southern Literary Trail has announced that it will begin its Trailfest 2011 on February 17 with guess what event? Yes! You guessed it -- The Carson McCullers Center's very own McCullers conference: "Carson McCullers: An Interdisciplinary Conference and 94th Birthday Celebration." For more on the Southern Literary Trail, including LOTS of other events scheduled for Trailfest, go to www.southernliterarytrail.org

The Carson McCullers Center is proud to be a part of the Southern Literary Trail, and we are especially happy to sponsor the inaugural event of Trailfest 2011.