Savannah Stylus

As Sadie's mom, one of the things I like best about Savannah is the opportunity to participate in a variety of cultural events. There's the Savannah Music Festival, the Savannah Film Festival, and one of my favorites, the Jewish Food Festival (kugel, anyone?). This weekend is the Third Annual Savannah Book Festival, and while I was worried the weather might keep me away, I pulled on my polka-dotted Wellie boots, braved the gray skies and drizzly rain and headed down to Telfair Square.

More than 30 authors gave (free!) talks today in categories such as contemporary issues, history and biography, fiction, poetry and lifestyle. It's a good opportunity to meet and interact with well-known authors and learn about writers you've never heard of before. Following their talks, the writers sign books in the book sales tent outside. Here was the scene earlier today over on West President Street (the sun even decided to make a cameo):


Now I don't know about you, but there is something refreshing to me about seeing people buy books. Real, honest-to-god books with paper. Not this Kindle crap or iPad idiocy. There will never be a digital substitute for the feeling you get when you crack open a book for the first time, smooth down the pages and breathe in that smell of ink on paper.

The book festival also serves as a source of inspiration to me as a wannabe writer in that you get to hear how other writers hone their craft. All of the writers I heard today - Lauretta Hannon, Rick Bragg and Robert Leleux - said they write by listening. Hannon, the author of The Cracker Queen: A Memoir of a Jagged, Joyful Life, said she regards language as music, paying close attention to the rhythm of the words she selects. Rick Bragg, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All Over But the Shoutin' (aka the Southern version of Angela's Ashes), discussed his writing simply as something he had to do. And Robert Leleux, a first-time author of The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy, hilariously confessed that he was a writer because, as an only child worshiped by his mother, he came to believe it was his destiny because she inordinately trumpeted a poem he had written as a six-year-old.

All of these writers revel (some may say "wallow") in their Southernness. Rick Bragg talked about giving a voice to the roofers and whiskey-makers and barfighters of his northeast Alabama upbringing. Lauretta Hannon sang the praises of "Co-Cola" and such Southernisms as "stove up" while recounting stories about her mama, chain gangs and cigarettes. And Robert Leleux accurately noted that Jane Eyre would never have been written in the South because we don't stash our madwomen away in the attic; they freely roam the streets (and sometimes climb our family trees).