Introduction

Jay Lamar is coeditor with Jeanie Thompson of The Remembered Gate: Memoirs by Alabama Writers (2003). Her essay “Secrets” was included in a special edition of Southern Humanities Review, and she is a contributor to Albert Murray and the Aesthetic Imagination of a Nation (2010), one of several titles in the Pebble Hill Imprint series she established while serving as director of Auburn University’s Center for the Arts and Humanities. Lamar has written and edited for scholarly, professional, and public-interest publications for almost thirty years. She was founding director of the Alabama Book Festival and first director of the Alabama Center for the Book. She served as executive director of the Alabama Bicentennial Commission, 2014–2020.

On the Art of Dying

Carmen Agra Deedy is the author of seventeen books for children, including The Library Dragon, The Cheshire Cheese Cat, Martina the Beautiful Cockroach, the New York Times bestseller 14 Cows for America, The Rooster Who Would Not Be Quiet!, and Rita and Ralph’s Rotten Day. Her personal stories first appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered. Funny, insightful, and frequently irreverent, Deedy’s narratives are culled from her childhood as a Cuban refugee in Decatur, Georgia. She serves on the board of the Smithsonian Institute’s Library and Archives (SLA). An award-winning author and storyteller, Deedy is also an accomplished lecturer, having been a guest speaker for both TED and TEDx conferences, the library of Congress, Columbia University, the National Book Festival, and the Kennedy Center, among other distinguished venues. A lifelong supporter of the institution, she opened the 2016 Art of the Book lecture series fo the Smithsonian Libraries. Learn more at her website:https://carmenagradeedy.com/.

The Mystery of Creativity and the Unmasking of Beauty

Patricia Ellisor Gaines was born in Selma, Alabama, in 1939. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Birmingham-Southern College in 1962 and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Georgia in 1966. The degree was granted “with distinction” by the revered artist Lamar Dodd, who asked that she remain and join the faculty. Instead, Patricia married the writer Charles Gaines and moved to Ireland. There she painted and devoted herself to raising a young son, Latham Gaines IV. Later the family moved to Iowa, then Wisconsin, where both Patricia and Charles worked as teachers on Operation Arts, a Title III program to bring the arts to culturally deprived areas of the state. Greta was born in Iowa and Shelby in Wisconsin. Finally settling in New Hampshire, Patricia Gaines taught at Proctor Academy and New England College and created two books, The Fabric Decoration Book and Soft. Her paintings have been exhibited in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and Auckland, New Zealand. Her latest exhibition was at the Alabama School of Fine Arts.

What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?

Patti Callahan Henry is a New York Times, ECPA, Globe and Mail, and USA Today bestselling author of 16 novels, including her newest, The Secret Book of Flora Lea. She’s also a podcast host of original content for her novels Surviving Savannah and Becoming Mrs. Lewis. She is the recipient of the Christy Award Book of the Year, the Harper Lee Distinguished Writer of the Year, and the Alabama Library Association Book of the Year for Becoming Mrs. Lewis. She is the cohost and co-creator of the popular weekly online Friends and Fiction live web show and podcast. She was also a contributor to the monthly life lesson essay column for Parade Magazine. She’s published in numerous anthologies, articles, and short story collections, including an Audible Original about Florence Nightingale, titled Wild Swan, narrated by the Tony Award winner Cynthia Erivo. A full-time author, mother of three, and grandmother of two, Patti lives in Mountain Brook, Alabama, with her husband, Pat Henry. Her newest novel, The Secret Book of Flora Lea, is set outside Oxford, England, in the hamlet of Binsey. Her website is https://www.patticallahanhenry.com/

Finding the Words: Writing Past the Age of Fifty

Angela Jackson-Brown is an award-winning writer, poet, and playwright who is an associate professor in the creative writing program at Indiana University in Bloomington. She also teaches in the graduate program at the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. She is a graduate of Troy University, Auburn University, and the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University. She She has published her short fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry in journals like the Louisville Journal and the Appalachian Review. She is the author of Drinking from a Bitter Cup, House Repairs, When Stars Rain Down, The Light Always Breaks, and Homeward. Her novels have received starred reviews from Library Journal and glowing reviews from Alabama Public Library, Buzzfeed, Parade Magazine, and Women’s Weekly, just to name a few. When Stars Rain Down was named a finalist for the 2021 David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Historical Fiction, longlisted for the Granum Foundation Award, and shortlisted for the 2022 Indiana Authors Award. Her website is https://www.angelajacksonbrown.com/

Here’s Looking at You: Fragments from an Older Southern Latinx Woman

Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés was born in New Jersey to Cuban parents and educated in Miami and New York. Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry appear in numerous journals and anthologies, including South Writ Large, Acentos Review, Azahares, the Antonym, Kweli Journal, Guernica, Letras Femeninas, Southern Humanities Review, and The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature. Her short story collections Oye What I’m Gonna Tell You and Marielitos, Balseros, and Other Exiles were #4 and #5 on the Guardian’s list of ten of the best books to help understand Cuba. Everyday Chica, winner of the 2010 Longleaf Press Poetry Prize, was followed by Everyday Chica, Music and More, a poetry CD set to Caribbean folk music released in 2011. Her most recent publication is “Dancing Danny”—a video essay found at https://constell8cr.com/articles/dancing-danny/. She is professor of English at the University of Central Florida, where she teaches literature by women of color and creative writing. She lives in Orlando with her family including three re-homed dogs and is abuela (Yeya) to three grandbabies.

A Movement of Time

Sara Garden Armstrong is a visual artist whose decades-long practice embraces a wide range of scales and techniques, from large site-specific sculpture to handheld artist’s books, all of which examine organic processes of transformation. Her atrium commissions have focused on scientific phenomena and their interactions with the human condition, such as the installation for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society at the University of Alabama Birmingham Medical Center. A recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation call (Creating a Living Legacy) grant through Space One Eleven, Armstrong has exhibited nationally and internationally for over forty years. Museum collections include Museum of Modern Art, New York; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Alabama. The monograph Sara Garden Armstrong: Threads and Layers was published in 2020 and coincided with a traveling exhibition of the same name, which toured through January 2023, incorporating site-specific art for each location. The Gadsden Museum of Art published a catalogue documenting each iteration of the exhibition, featuring an essay by critic and artist Mary Jones. Armstrong received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Alabama and a Master of Art Education from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). After living in New York for thirty-six years, she returned in 2017 to Birmingham, where she currently lives and works. For four decades, her 21st Street Studio building has been home to more than a hundred artists’ studios and many galleries. Currently it hosts the Alabama Center for Architecture, Ground Floor Contemporary gallery and collective, and twelve artists’ studios. Her website is www.saragardenarmstrong.net.

The Generous Becoming

Jeanie Thompson, a native of Decatur, Alabama, is founding director of the Alabama Writers’ Forum (Montgomery), a statewide literary arts service organization (www.writersforum.org). She is also a poetry faculty member with the low-res MFA Writing Program at Spalding University in Louisville and a literary arts education advocate. Thompson began writing poetry in high school and attended the University of Alabama, where she received her MFA in creative writing and was founding editor of the Black Warrior Review literary journal. She has published five collections of poems and three chapbooks and has edited a collection of memoirs by Alabama authors, The Remembered Gate, with Jay Lamar. Her latest work, The Myth of Water: Poems from the Life of Helen Keller, was a finalist for the 2016 Foreword Indie Poetry Book Awards. Her literary arts awards include two literature fellowships from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, one from the Louisiana Arts Council, and the Alumni Artist of the Year Award (2003) from the University of Alabama’s College of Arts and Sciences. Her current project is a collection of essays about collaborating with visual artists in Alabama. Thompson’s work with the staff of the Alabama Writers’ Forum to develop Writing Our Stories, a creative writing program for at-risk youth, has been recognized by the Auburn University at Montgomery Center for Government as a public/private partnership and by the Alabama Arts Alliance for curriculum innovation in arts education. In 2022 Thompson and her staff published The Language of Objects: A Creative Writing Handbook, based on twenty-five years of Writing Our Stories classes. Find more about her work at at www.jeaniethompson.net

Sheltering in Place

Carolyn Sherer is an American photographer interested in issues of identity. She works in series, making individual images to create a composite portrait of often-marginalized communities. Her past work has featured people with disabilities, people living with HIV, and multiple projects related to the LGBTIQ community. The current series for Old Enough: Southern Women Artists and Writers on Creativity and Aging puts a face on an underrepresented community of women in the New South who navigate ageism and sexism to express mature creativity. They are confident in their perspective—a strength forged from a lifetime of wins and losses. A visual storyteller, Sherer honors individuality by creating environmental portraits in personal space, yet seeks the bond of common humanity in a direct gaze. Select images from Old Enough have been included in the 19th annual Julia Margaret Cameron Award for Women Photographers exhibition at FotoNostrum Mediterranean House of Photography in Barcelona, having won an honorable mention. A book of Sherer’s images, Just as I Am: Americans with Disabilities, won a first-place IPPY (Independent Publisher Book Award) and the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book award from Boston University. Sherer’s work has been included in exhibitions at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, Ackland Museum of Art, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, African Art Museum of South Texas, Tacoma Art Museum, African American Museum of Dallas, Birmingham Museum of Art, Wiregrass Museum of Art, Mobile Museum of Art, Montgomery Museum of Art, Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts, and the Huntsville Museum of Art. The images are included in numerous museum, corporate, and private collections. Her work can be seen on her website:

https://www.carolynsherer.com/

I Have Seen the Promised Land and It Is Me

Jacqueline Allen Trimble lives and writes in Montgomery, Alabama, where she is a professor of English and chair of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University. She holds three degrees in English: a BA from Huntingdon College and an MA and PhD from the University of Alabama. She serves on the board of the Alabama Writers’ Forum. Trimble has won several teaching and writing awards, including the Exemplary Teacher Award (for junior faculty), the Todd Award for Outstanding Teaching (for senior faculty), the Julia Lightfoot Sellers Award (given by the Huntingdon College junior and senior class to the faculty member who has most inspired them to learning), and the University of Alabama’s Outstanding Dissertation of the Year Award, for “Race, Gender, Culture in Adrienne Kennedy in One Act,” an analysis of the playwright Adrienne Kennedy’s absurdist dramas through the lens of feminist/womanist theory. Trimble’s research interests include twentieth-century Black women writers, feminist theory, and representations of race and gender in popular culture. She is also a poet. Her work has appeared in The Offing, Blue Lake Review, the Louisville Review, and The Griot. American Happiness, her first collection, was published in 2016, and How to Survive the Apocalypse followed in 2022. A 2021 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry recipient, Trimble has also been awarded a Key West Literary Seminar scholarship, is a Cave Canem fellow, and was the recipient of a 2017 literary arts fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts. American Happiness won the 2016 Balcones Poetry Prize and was named best book of 2016 by the new Seven Sisters Book Awards. Her website is https://www.jacquelineallentrimble.com/

For the Birds

Wendy Reed is an Emmy-winning writer and producer whose work includes documentaries and the long-running Alabama Public TV series Bookmark and Discovering Alabama. The author of An Accidental Memoir: How I Killed Someone and Other Stories and coeditor of All Out of Faith and Circling Faith, Reed has taught in the Honors Colleges at UAB and the University of Alabama, where she completed her PhD. She is passionate about compelling science-writing, critical thinking, combatting disinformation, and books. An Alabama State Council on the Arts fiction fellow, she has been recognized by Oregon State University, the Lillian E. Smith Center, the Seaside Institute, and Lincoln University for her work. During the pandemic she was a census enumerator and mass vaccine site registrar, which convinced her to complete a master’s in public health. Currently she works in the Alabama Brain Lab. She and her husband have a combined family of six children, two grandchildren, and one chihuahua named Pablo. Her website is https://www.wendyreed.org/

I Want To Do My Thinking Myself

Yvonne Wells is an internationally renowned quilter who lives in her hometown of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. In 1985 she made her first appearance at the Kentuck Festival of the Arts in Northport, Alabama, where she won her first of six Best in Show awards. Wells’s work has been exhibited in Japan, France, and Italy, as well as displayed in the prestigious Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., and the American Museum of Folk Art in New York City. Six of her quilts are held in the permanent collection of the International Quilt Study Center and Museum in Nebraska, and she has garnered numerous awards, including the Alabama Arts Award from the University of Alabama Society for the Fine Arts, the Druid Arts Award for Visual Craftsmanship from the Arts and Humanities Council of Tuscaloosa, and a Governor’s Arts Award from the Alabama State Council on the Arts. The University of Alabama Press Faculty Editorial Board awarded Wells and Professor Stacy Morgan the 2021 Anne B. and James B. McMillan Prize, given for a work “Most Deserving in Alabama or Southern History or Culture,” for their forthcoming book The Story Quilts of Yvonne Wells.

Onslaught

Patricia Foster is the author of All the Lost Girls (PEN/Jerard Award), Just beneath My Skin (essays), Girl from Soldier Creek (SFA Novel Award), and the 2023 collection Written in the Sky: Lessons of a Southern Daughter, and the editor of four anthologies, including Minding the Body: Women Writers on Body and Soul. She has received a Pushcart Prize, a Clarence Cason Award, a Theodore Hoepfner Award, a Dean’s Scholar Award, a Florida Arts Council Award, a Yaddo Fellowship, and a Carl Klaus Teaching Award. She was a juror for the Windham-Campbell Literature about Prize in Nonfiction (Yale University) and a fellow at the Inaugural Writing Residency at Sun Yat-sen University. She was a professor in the MFA Program in Nonfiction at the University of Iowa from 1994 to 2018 and has taught writing in France, Australia, Italy, the Czech Republic, and Spain. Her website is https://patriciafosterwriter.com/https://patriciafosterwriter.com/.

Creativity and Illness

Anne Strand, artist, has traveled a rich and complex journey. This teacher, Episcopal chaplain, published author, wife, mother, and retired licensed psychotherapist of thirty-one years has signed her work with a stamp meaning “Grand-Mother-Wise-Woman” given to her by her son at the birth of her first grandchild. Mentored in Paris by the painter Elaine de Kooning, whose work hangs in the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Strand studied art with the New York Studio School and earned academic degrees in art, theology, and psychology. Her work forms an amalgam of these three disciplines. Both as writer and as artist, she interprets her subject matter through a mystical lens—grounded in spiritual literature, contemporary quantum theory, and current scientific thought. Strand is a veteran of numerous museum and gallery one-woman and group exhibitions, and her work is to be found in homes, businesses, and institutions throughout the eastern United States. Her work can be seen on her website: https://www.annestrandart.com/

A Question I Wrestle With

Janisse Ray is an award-winning author, environmental activist, and entrepreneur. Much of her writing explores the borderland between nature and culture: she believes in the power of stories to bring about transformation—in an individual, a community, or a nation. Ray has gained a following of earth-conscious folks who appreciate her heart-centered approach to life, her courage, and her well-crafted stories. Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Ray’s bestselling first book, was a New York Times Notable. This environmental memoir about growing up in the disappearing longleaf pinelands brought attention to a critically endangered ecosystem and set fire to a movement to restore this iconic landscape. Eleven other books followed, including a novel, The Woods of Fannin County, and two volumes of eco-poetry. Ray has won an American Book Award, Pushcart Prize, Southern Booksellers Award, Southern Environmental Law Center Writing Award, Nautilus Award, and Eisenberg Award, among many others. Her essay collection Wild Spectacle received the Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence, which carries a $10,000 prize. Her books have been translated into Turkish, French, and Italian. Ray earned an MFA from the University of Montana and accepted two honorary doctorates. She serves on the editorial board of terrain.org, is an honorary member of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, and has been writer-in-residence on many university campuses. She leads writing workshops on magical craft, where she teaches not only writing technique but how to access the duende, or spirits, that make writing sizzle. She is the creator of The Wild Spectacle Podcast. Ray lives on an organic farm inland from Savannah, Georgia. She loves dark chocolate, the blues, and anything in flower. Find out more at her website, https://janisseray.com/, or via her Substack newsletter, Trackless Wild.

Enough

Mary Gauthier is a professional songwriter and author whose most recent book, Saved by a Song, is an exploration of the creative process in service to recovery and healing. Rolling Stone said, “Mary Gauthier’s book is a must-read music book. The Grammy-nominated songwriter dissects her brutally honest songs and preaches the ‘magnificence of empathy’ in a memoir that is just right for these times.” Gauthier was named by the Associated Press as one of the best songwriters of her generation. Her most recent musical release, Dark Enough to See the Stars, was preceded by 2018’s Rifles & Rosary Beads, a collection of songs co-written with wounded veterans. It was nominated for a Grammy award for Best Folk Album, and Record of the Year by the Americana Music Association. The UK Americana Association named Gauthier their 2019 International Artist of the Year, and Folk Alliance International named Rifles & Rosary Beads the 2019 Record of the Year. Mary Gauthier’s songs have been recorded by dozens of artists, including Jimmy Buffett, Dolly Parton, Boy George, Blake Shelton, Tim McGraw, Bettye Lavette, Mike Farris, Kathy Mattea, Bobby Bare, and Amy Helm. They have also appeared extensively in film and television, most recently on HBO tv’s Yellowstone. Find out more about her work at her website: https://www.marygauthier.com/.

Wet Leaves: A Winter’s Reflection

Lila Quintero Weaver is the writer and illustrator of a graphic memoir, Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White, and later served as co-translator of its Spanish edition. As a graphic novelist and documentarian of the immigrant experience in the American South, Weaver has lectured at college campuses across the United States. Original artwork from Darkroom has been exhibited in numerous galleries, including Whitman College, the Rosa Parks Museum, the Levine Museum of the New South, the Jule Collins Smith Museum, and CentroCentro, in Madrid, Spain. Weaver received the 2013 Druid Arts Award from the Arts Council of Tuscaloosa, and that same year Darkroolilaqweaver.com m was named one of the Notable Books for a Global Society by the International Reading Association. In 2018 Weaver published a children’s novel, My Year in the Middle. As a children’s writer, she has twice co-taught at Highlights Foundation Workshops & Retreats, in Pennsylvania. She is also a contributor to Tales from La Vida: A Latinx Comics Anthology. Her website is lilaqweaver.com

Moving Beyond Purpose

Nevin Mercede’s artistic life has been a peripatetic one involving both coasts and several places between. After years of wandering the galleries of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Saturday classes at the Philadelphia College of Art, and Sundays drifting around the Barnes Collection, Nevin moved west, where she earned a BFA in printmaking from the California College of Arts and Crafts and an MFA in painting and printmaking at the University of Montana. She has exhibited works of varied media nationally since the 1980s while also teaching college-level studio art and art history, ultimately earning tenure at Antioch College. In 2014 Mercede moved permanently to Florida in order to oversee the design and construction of the Beach House Studio along with a gentle expansion of her Beachside Periwinkle. Every year the native plant gardens that inspire her paintings become increasingly dense, and she looks toward living within a functioning xeriscape that enables more studio time.

Past It

Jennifer Horne served as the twelfth Poet Laureate of Alabama (2017– 2021). Raised in Arkansas and a longtime resident of Alabama, Horne is a writer and editor of prose, poetry, and fiction who has taught creative writing in workshops across the Southeast and in school, university, and prison classrooms. The author of three collections of poems, Bottle Tree, Little Wanderer, and Borrowed Light, she also has written a collection of short stories, Tell the World You’re a Wildflower. She has edited or coedited four volumes of poetry, essays, and stories, and in 2020 she coedited, with her sister, a collection of their mother’s poetry, Root & Plant & Bloom: Poems by Dodie Walton Horne. Her latest work is a biography of the writer Sara Mayfield, Odyssey of a Wandering Mind: The Strange Tale of Sara Mayfield, Author. Horne has been the recipient of fellowships from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and the Seaside Institute in Florida, and in 2015 she gave the Rhoda Ellison Lecture at Huntingdon University in Montgomery, Alabama, and was awarded the Druid City Literary Arts Award, given by the Tuscaloosa Arts Council. For the spring semester of 2018 she was the Visiting Writer-in-Residence at Lenoir-Rhyne College in Hickory, North Carolina. Learn more at her website: https://www.jenhorne.com/

Arrows for Our Quivers: The Power of Sources

Katie Lamar Jackson is a freelance writer and photographer with four decades of experience working as a journalist, author, editor, communications director, and educator. Her work has been published in myriad newspapers, magazines, books, and essay collections and covers a diverse array of topics—gardening, wildlife, the environment, arts and culture, history, biography, and travel among them. She has authored or coauthored ten nonfiction books, including the award-winning Oracle of the Ages: Reflections on the Curious Life of Fortune Teller Mayhayley Lancaster, A Movement of the People: The Roots of Environmental Education and Advocacy in Alabama, and A Tiger among Us: A Story of Valor in Vietnam’s A Shau Valley. Jackson holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Auburn University, where she worked for more than twenty-five years before retiring in 2012 as communications director for Auburn’s agricultural and natural resource programs. She currently lives in Opelika, Alabama, where she is working on a variety of creative nonfiction projects on topics ranging from wild horses to eclipse chasing to the landscape of her birthplace, Tuskegee, Alabama. She was accepted into the MFA program at University of Western Colorado last month (February 2024).

I Want to Do My Thinking Myself

Gail Andrews graduated from the College of William & Mary and received her master’s degree from the Cooperstown Graduate Program. After an NEH internship at Colonial Williamsburg, Andrews joined the Birmingham Museum of Art in 1976 as assistant curator of decorative arts, subsequently serving as assistant director and ultimately as director of the museum for twenty years. An acknowledged authority on folk art and textiles, she has written numerous articles and catalogues including Black Belt to Hill Country: Alabama Made Quilts, Southern Quilts: A New View, quilt and needlework chapters for Made in Alabama: A State Legacy, and the introduction to the book Revelations: Alabama’s Visionary Folk Artists and edited and contributed essays to Pictured in My Mind: Contemporary American Self-Taught Art. Andrews is actively involved in a variety of arts and educational organizations locally, regionally, and nationally. She served as president of the Association of Art Museum Directors, and in 2017 she received the Jonnie Dee Riley Little Lifetime Achievement Award from the Alabama State Arts Council.