Southern Stories From The Porch Swing

Time is the one thing I've never had enough of. Ever since I was a small child, I've been conscious of how quickly time passes and have wanted to slow it down somehow. Of course I never found out how to do it, but it's worried me nonetheless. About the only way I have found to hold on to time is to write down my thoughts. So I began keeping a journal when I was fourteen. Of course I didn't call it a journal back then. It was Dear Diary. My mother subscribed to Ladies' Home Journal and that January, the magazine gave away a free mini-datebook for the New Year. Mama said I could have it, so I began sporadically recording my thoughts and activities. Some of the entries I now find laughable or embarrassing. I was a middle school kid after all. But that diary set me on a path of recording the events of my life that I have followed for many decades since then. The paragraphs in this book grew out of that idea.

An appreciation of the significance of the porch in everyday life in the US South. It reveals that the porch is a stage for many social dramas, and it uses literature, folklore, oral histories and photographs to show how southerners have used the porch to negotiate public and private boundaries.

Long before the written word men told stories. Stories about home and family, stories that taught life lessons, stories that revealed the values and principles that were important in life. Stories that have secrets, mysterious secrets, secrets that are only passed down from generation to generation when the time is right, stories that change lives, this was to be Grandpa Martin's legacy to me. Grandpa's Porch Swing Stories is a collection of storyteller; Dennis “Dink” Martin's most requested tall tales. The Story Man has combined his Grandpa Martin's stories along with true life experiences of growing up in the country to weave together an adventure of folklore, history, and humor. Martin's stories and adoptions have their setting in Blount County, Alabama. Some, like Grandpa's stories, have a lesson to be learned. The Story Man carries you back in time, back to the days of his youth, back to the days of listening to Grandpa's stories, and back to the days of going to his Grandma Massey's house for Sunday dinner. His unique style carries you back to a time that no longer exists, to a time when family values and principles were taught by example, back to a time you wish your grandchildren could experience. These stories will warm your heart and bring a smile to your face as author Dennis “Dink” Martin takes everyday events and turns them into stories which provoke tears, chills, and shudders – enjoy the adventure!

Southern Homes and Plan Books showcases the architectural legacy and design philosophy of Leila Ross Wilburn (1885–1967), a legacy that includes hundreds of houses in a variety of popular house styles, from bungalows to ranch houses, built using Wilburn’s plan books during the first six decades of the twentieth century. Wilburn opened her own firm in Atlanta in 1908 and practiced until her death in 1967. She published nine plan books that offered mail order house designs to contractors, builders, and prospective homeowners and allowed them the ease of choosing a preconceived design and construction plan. Sarah J. Boykin and Susan M. Hunter provide a survey of the southern homes built from Wilburn’s plan books, examining Wilburn’s architectural legacy and her achievements as a plan book architect. The book provides beautiful photographs of houses built from her plans, along with illustrations from the plan books themselves and other related documents from the time. Readers can thus see how her designs were realized as individual houses and also how they influenced the development of some of the Atlanta area’s beloved historical neighborhoods, most notably Druid Hills, Morningside, Virginia-Highland, and Candler Park, as well as the McDonough–Adams–Kings Highway (MAK) Historic District in Decatur. Today, Wilburn’s houses are enjoyed as appealing, historic homes and represent some of the richest examples of southern vernacular architecture to emerge from the plan book tradition.

Contributions by Julie Cantrell, Katherine Clark, Susan Cushman, Jim Dees, Clyde Edgerton, W. Ralph Eubanks, John M. Floyd, Joe Formichella, Patti Callahan Henry, Jennifer Horne, Ravi Howard, Suzanne Hudson, River Jordan, Harrison Scott Key, Cassandra King, Alan Lightman, Sonja Livingston, Corey Mesler, Niles Reddick, Wendy Reed, Nicole Seitz, Lee Smith, Michael Farris Smith, Sally Palmer Thomason, Jacqueline Allen Trimble, M. O. Walsh, and Claude Wilkinson The South is often misunderstood on the national stage, characterized by its struggles with poverty, education, and racism, yet the region has yielded an abundance of undeniably great literature. In Southern Writers on Writing, Susan Cushman collects twenty-six writers from across the South whose work celebrates southern culture and shapes the landscape of contemporary southern literature. Contributors hail from Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida. Contributors such as Lee Smith, Michael Farris Smith, W. Ralph Eubanks, and Harrison Scott Key, among others, explore issues like race, politics, and family and the apex of those issues colliding. It discusses landscapes, voices in the South, and how writers write. The anthology is divided into six sections, including "Becoming a Writer"; "Becoming a Southern Writer"; "Place, Politics, People"; "Writing about Race"; "The Craft of Writing"; and "A Little Help from My Friends."

Four seasons. Four stories. Each one set in the enchanting world of the South. These are the kinds of stories your grandmother told you from a front porch swing.Ice Melts in Spring by Linda W. YezakWhen Kerry Graham's boss forces her to return to the Gulf of Mexico where her husband drowned years ago, she feels only spring's chill and not the warmth of the Texas sun. Can the joy of a reclusive author and the compassion of a shrimp-boat preacher thaw Kerry's frigid heart?Lillie Beth in Summer by Eva Marie EversonWith the untimely death of his wife, Dr. James Gillespie believes God has abandoned him. He also believes he's never met anyone like the young widow Lillie Beth, whose beloved Granny lies dying at home, and who sees a God who sweeps hope through a farmhouse window. Can a young woman whose husband died in Vietnam restore a faith that is all but dead.Through an Autumn Window by Claire FullertonBecause her larger than life mother Daphne Goodwyn is dead, forty-year-old Cate returns to Memphis with one thought in mind: something always goes wrong at a Southern funeral. But surrounded by the well-mannered society that raised her, the nostalgic rites of a three-day, autumn mourning bring the unexpected gift of the end of sibling rivalry.A Magnolia Blooms in Winter by Ane MulliganWith Broadway stardom within her reach, Morgan James returns home in winter to help an old friend. Maybe it s just nostalgia, but when she sees him again, an old flame rekindles. When she s called back to NYC to take the lead in a new musical, will fame be worth losing the man she loves?.

People and simple events have always fascinated me. Trying to capture them on paper has made me an incurable writer. Though none of these stories are absolutely true, they may contain an essence of some of the unforgettable personalities and times that I've encountered over the course of my "Southern and white" life (which, incidentally, I had nothing to do with.) By accepting Jesus Christ as my Savior, I have learned to appreciate my past and have hope for the future. Thereby, I have become contented.

Four chilling tales from the New York Times–bestselling author of Swan Song and the “true master of the Gothic novel” (Booklist). From rural Alabama to the Louisiana bayou to the North Carolina mountains, World Fantasy and Bram Stoker Award–winning author Robert R. McCammon has made the American South his own Gothic playground in these four unforgettable novels. A Boy’s Life: “Strongly echoing the childhood-elegies of King and Bradbury, and every bit their equal,” McCammon’s World Fantasy and Bram Stoker Award–winning novel takes place in 1964 Alabama, where a twelve-year-old boy’s idyllic life takes an abrupt turn into a dark world of mystery when he and his father witness a car roll into a lake—only to discover a corpse handcuffed to the steering wheel (Kirkus Reviews). “It’s McCammon’s The Prince of Tides. . . . Incredibly moving.” —Peter Straub Mystery Walk: Two boys with mysterious powers—a psychic who speaks with the dead and a faith healer—share a common bond and hold mankind’s fate in their hands in an epic showdown of good versus evil. “As finely a turned tale of horror as the best of them.” —Houston Chronicle Gone South: A veteran’s moment of rage leads to a grisly murder and a heated chase deep into the bayou, where he encounters a pair of bizarre bounty hunters—and a strange new friend, who might help him find redemption. “A gothic picaresque that mixes gritty plot and black comedy.” —The Wall Street Journal Usher’s Passing: Edgar Allan Poe’s classic tale, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” is no fiction in this Gothic novel of ancestral madness in the mountains of modern-day North Carolina, as the heir to the Usher legacy—a horror novelist—confronts his terrifying inheritance. “A frightening pleasure.” —St. Louis Dispatch