3/14/02

AUTHORS OF BOOK ON ALABAMA WRITERS TO BE HONORED AT AU

AUBURN -- There will be a reception on Tuesday (March 19) to recognize an Auburn University employee and her co-author for a book they edited about Alabama writers.

Jay Lamar, associate director of AU's Center for the Arts & Humanities, and Jeanie Thompson edited The Remembered Gate: Memoirs by Alabama Writers, which was published by the University of Alabama Press.

The two will be honored with a reception at 5 p.m., at Pebble Hill, home of the Center for the Arts & Humanities.

The collection of reflective essays explores themes of artistic self-discovery and regional awareness, and showcases 19 nationally known writers who have roots in Alabama.

Fiction writers, essayists and poets, including Frye Gaillard, Wayne Greenhaw, Nanci Kincaid, Sena Jeter Naslund and Hellen Norris, recall how their formative years in Alabama shaped them as people and as writers.

The essays range from pained and sorrowful to the wistful and playful, from the privileged to the poverty stricken, from the rural to the urban and in time and from the first years of the 20th century to the height of the Civil Rights era and beyond.

Paul Ruffin, editor of the Texas Review and author of The Man Who Would Be God: Stories, called the book "an eclectic collection that . . . draws religion, race, family life, and geography into a rich composite."

Through the essays, readers will learn how the individual artists came to understand something central about themselves and their art from a changing Alabama landscape.

"Whether from the perspective of C. Eric Lincoln, beaten for his presumption as a young black man asking for pay for his labors, or of Judith Hillman Paterson, floundering in her unresolved relationship with her troubled family, these personal renderings are intensely realized visions of a writer's sense of being a writer and a human being," Lamar said.

"Robert Inman tells of exploring his grandmother's attic, and how the artifacts he found there fired his literary imagination," she said. "William Cobb profiles the lasting influence of the town bully, the diabolical Cletus Hickey.

And in Growing Up in Alabama: A Meal in Four Courses, Beginning with Dessert, Charles Gaines chronicles his upbringing through the metaphor of southern cooking."

Lamar is also coeditor of the anthology Reading Our Lives. Thompson, executive director of the Alabama Writers' Forum, a partnership of the Alabama State Council on the Arts in Montgomery, is the author of four collections of poetry.

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CONTACT: Lamar, 334/844-4946; Priscilla J. McWilliams, University of Alabama Press, 205/348-9534.