Alec Clayton It’s a good question: Why in the world would a white boy from Mississippi presume to write about race. I’ve been pondering it a lot. Especially after the Academy Awards and the many comments swirling around comparisons between Spike Lee’s Black Klansman and Best Picture winner Green Book, which reminded everyone of when Lee’s Do … Read more
This is old but worth sharing. Artist Brian Roche, who painted the cover illustration for Return to Freedom, book two of the Freedom Trilogy, posted this photo on Facebook shortly after the book came out. It is the couple who modeled for the cover holding a copy of the book. Click title to see photo.
We all have self-doubt, creative people probably more so than anyone. I’ve considered myself an artist of one sort or another since before I was old enough to go to school and my mother set up an easel for me next to hers and I made my first oil painting. I majored in art in … Read more
In my new novel, This Is Me, Debbi, David, I try to walk the line—hopefully with some success—between formulaic writing and being original and honest. It is formulaic in that it is a quest story and a road story, original in the uniqueness of the characters, and honest in that all the characters are flawed … Read more
A few years ago I told a story at Story Oly, Olympia’s monthly story slam, about my adventures and misadventures while hitchhiking to New York from Mississippi in 1973. Folks laughed a lot at the story, so I wrote it as a short story for Creative Colloquy and read it at a couple of their … Read more
To use a comma or an exclamation point or no punctuation at all, that is the question. Less punctuation is a trend that is popular with modern writers. Quotation marks are becoming obsolete. Editors slice superfluous words, including words they think are superfluous but might not be (Microsoft Word’s grammar check is notorious for this). … Read more
In a letter to me sometime around 1980 the poet Harry Calhoun raved about Flannery O’Connor’s short stories so much that I ran out to the local bookstore and bought Flannery O’Conner the Complete Stories. As well as I can remember, the only thing I had read of hers at the time was “A Good … Read more
My reading and book talk at Panorama, a retirement community in Lacey, Washington, went well. Much of the discussion centered on race, as it often does when talking about Tupelo. I said that although race was an underlying theme in the book, it’s really about much more than that. It’s about Kevin Lumpkin and his … Read more
“Hell can’t be no hotter than a Mississippi July. The heat don’t bother a kid, though. Not the heat nor the scratches nor the bugs. She don’t know how it is killing her. It takes all of the flexibility out, it scrapes you like scraping a plate to the dogs.” – Jack Butler, “Country Girl” … Read more
I have no formal education in writing other than a single class, which I vaguely remember as being called Creative Writing 101. Students wrote short stories; teacher critiqued them. I recall writing one story that wasn’t too bad and one that was terrible. My first attempt at novel writing came between undergrad and grad school. … Read more