Books like A Lowcountry Heart

I love that Bird by Bird doesn’t read like a reference book.

Lamott’s words feel personal. The book is personal to me because my daughter gave me her college copy of Bird by Bird when I began my writing journey. Lamott’s plain, honest, and affirming words, like first drafts are “shitty” and “writing a first draft is very much like watching a Polaroid develop,” resonate with me. Bravo to Lamott for this great metaphor!

Writing can be solitary, but Lamott reminds us we’re not alone. So, I heeded her words. I joined the party and became an active literary citizen. It’s there that we writers find our people, supporters, and dear friends.

King’s practical advice and inspiration guided me in writing my debut historical novel.

As a new swimmer in the waters of creative writing, I appreciated King’s opinion that writers learn best by reading and writing, and that the most valuable lessons are the ones we teach ourselves.

I’ve always considered myself an experiential learner. Writing Of White Ashes was a masterclass in asking, “Wait, how do you do that?” And quirky quotes from King, like “the road to hell is paved with adverbs,” helped me choose strong words, construct them into vibrant sentences, and piece together a story I was uniquely suited to tell. 

This is such a book!

Ferocious, sparse, wise, and dedicated to the lifelong love affair between an author and her work. This book is full of paradoxes: it grounds the process…and elevates it.

It is about writing…and also it is about flying planes, fishing, chopping wood, and a thousand other beautiful metaphors that Dillard describes in perfect detail without ever over-explaining. A perfect book for writers.

I was drawn to this book by the title but also the subtitle: The intermingling of fishing and writing in a novelist’s life.

As a fly fisherman and writer myself, I have often thought about the connection between fishing and writing, and more particularly, the similar experiences that come from both, so when I learned about this book, I had to read it. Craig Nova does not disappoint.

Fishing is about good stories, and Nova tells them in this book, but he also reveals how fishing and writing have common needs, such as the need to be in the moment.

He also is honest about the challenges of being a writer and he uses the stream to remind us that when, as he says, “the literary weather is going to take a turn for the worst, what is needed, more than anything else, is the ability to calm down.” 

This book is part of a series, but this particular one captured my heart. Cara’s niece, Linnea, is like Jess in so many ways. Having just graduated college, she joins the turtle team that works with the turtle hospital, learns to surf, and of course, falls in love. She also sets out to find her own calling and when she does, it requires sacrifices she did not know she would have to make. It is the pain we all feel when we discover our path does not align with those we love. Mary Alice Monroe has such a strong connection to nature and it comes through in all her books, particularly here when she describes life at the beach and those turtles, oh, those turtles...  

Set in the emerald cove of Florida’s Panhandle, Three Shots to the Wind by Sherry Harris is the third book in the cozy Chloe Jackson, Sea Glass Saloon Mystery series.

The characters in this series are realistic and likable and embody that sense of community that cozy mystery readers long for. A fun premise with an ex-fiancé winding up dead and her current love interest a prime suspect.

A precise, thoughtful, and unromantic blues scholar, Barry Lee Pearson was also a friend of, and occasional booking agent for, DC-area acoustic blues legends like John Jackson and Cephas & Wiggins.

Jook Right On, which I was delighted to blurb and use in my own teaching, offers a series of compact autobiographical testimonies—“blues stories”—on a wide range of topics from a wide range of blues people. 

“Wordsmiths by trade,” Pearson writes in his brilliantly incisive introduction, “these storytellers bring to their tales qualities also found in blues musical performance and philosophical perspectives characteristic of the blues tradition such as improvisation, ironic humor, ambivalence, and a life-affirming sense of hope in the face of adversity.”

Constitutionally immune to cliches, Pearson brings you closer to the blues musician’s perspective than any writer I know.  

I’ve been assigning The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing in Southern Studies classes at Ole Miss for the past twenty years; the incarcerated students in my blues lit class at Parchman said this was their favorite book. 

Honeyboy, born in 1915, grew up in the bad old Mississippi Delta, back when cottonfield sharecropping, lynching, and prison farms were the givens. The blues were his way out. He learned his trade, rambled widely, took his pleasures where he found them.

“I had three ways of making it,” he writes. “Women, my guitar, and the dice.” He knew all the great bluesmen, and gigged with most of them: Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Little Walter. An unforgettable Delta blues autobiography.

This book was a staple reference for me.

Its descriptions of places, people, and events are rich with specifics and vivid with detail, perfect Floridian fodder. There is a sincere love for the locations in this book that I relished. It feels uniquely local, yet the themes of belonging are universal.

I like to think of my memoir and this collection as long-lost siblings, this book the older one that paved the way.

I re-read this early McGuane as I was researching my book, looking for details of South Florida life during the 1972 football season.

The protagonist, Thomas Skelton, comes home to Key West from Gainesville and sets out to become a fishing guide. It was written during, and takes place during, the fall of 1972, and Skelton’s dad even watches football in one scene.

But this Key West native isn’t interested in the perfect Dolphins—he’s a Packers fan! (This anomaly is explained, though not excused, by the fact that the author hailed from northern Michigan.)

I was enthralled, though, by some of McGuane’s best writing, and got this gem about the lure of South Florida: “…American bad actors who, when the chips are down, go to Florida with all the gothics and grotesqueries of chrome and poured-to-form concrete that that implies.”