Margaret Eby is a journalist and critic who writes about books, movies, music, television, and various cultural ephemera. She currently works as the features and essays editor at HelloGiggles, an incubator for young women journalists. Her new book is South Toward Home: Travels In Southern Literature.From Eby's Q & A with Deborah Kalb:
Q: You write, “Southern writing at its loftiest is a literature of opposition.” Can you say more about why you feel that to be the case?--Marshal Zeringue
A: It’s a literature of opposition in many ways. Confronting stereotypes of what it’s like to live in the South with the specific lived experience of these authors, and the opposition of perceived ideas of what it’s like to live in these places.
Most of these writers were not overtly political, with some exceptions, but all had stakes in the South, and they all cared deeply about the political situation in the South, in the civil rights movement, and expressed it in different ways.
Richard Wright expressed it openly. Eudora Welty wrote a beautiful short story, "Where Is the Voice Coming From?", after Medgar Evers’s assassination. They were writing to oppose the complacency of the clichés of the place they grew up in.
Q: You note that your choice of authors to include was “a personal one.” What about these authors especially appealed to you?
A: The original list I had going in of my favorite authors was...[read on]