{"id":14520,"date":"2025-12-17T15:08:28","date_gmt":"2025-12-17T20:08:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/regalhousepublishing.com\/?page_id=14520"},"modified":"2025-12-17T15:20:16","modified_gmt":"2025-12-17T20:20:16","slug":"david-wesley-williams","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/regalhousepublishing.com\/david-wesley-williams\/","title":{"rendered":"David Wesley Williams"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I live and write in the South, and the South is my subject. The sense of place is powerful down here. Place is a character. Take Memphis, where I live. Eudora Welty called it \u201cthe old Delta synonym for pleasure, trouble, and shame.\u201d What she was saying, I think, is that Memphis calls to us, compels us, tempts us. Bit of a scamp, is Memphis. Born storyteller. Stories for days. No better company than that for a writer. My Memphis isn\u2019t in Tennessee, like the the map says, but is, as it\u2019s colloquially known, \u201cthe capital of north Mississippi.\u201d That\u2019s a swath of Magnolia State stretching from the Hill Country \u2014 sweeping up William Faulkner\u2019s Yoknapatawpha County \u2014 over to the Delta, a land thrumming with devilment, portent, and the dominant sevenths of the blues. Ah, the Delta, \u201cperfectly flat and level but it shimmered like the wing of a lighted dragonfly,\u201d as Welty, patron saint of the sentence, wrote. \u201cIt seemed strummed, as though it were an instrument and something had touched it.\u201d Something had \u2014 Robert Johnson\u2019s fingers. Or the devil\u2019s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

See now? I\u2019ve gotten carried away. The South does that. Well, it does to me, and so many other writers to whom I\u2019m in thrall. Good Southern writing isn\u2019t just set in the region, but steeped in it. My latest novel, The Coldwater Girl, is the story of folk artist named Ivy Coldwater, who leaves her Delta home on a search for meaning, but mostly finds fellow lost souls. The ghost of a soldier at Shiloh battlefield. Two sisters, both small-town psychics, who set up shop next door to each other and wage a price war. A stumblefoot boy in the country chasing a butterfly with a BB gun \u2014 they start them early, you know, in the armed-to-the-teeth South. Meanwhile, a mysterious voice comes on the radio and muses on life and life after, religious fervor and train songs. Ivy, on the run from family all through the book, really is on a collision course toward it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I call it a Comic Southern Gothic, if such a sub-genre exists. It\u2019s also a dead-serious attempt, between all of Ivy\u2019s deep-fried follies, to write about what Faulkner said is the only thing worth writing about: \u201cthe human heart in conflict with itself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s a universal subject, sure. But in the South it rises to the level of religion. Because the South is different from the rest of America, a land apart. A scarred land. In many ways a stuck and stunted land, too many people here still fighting the Civil War \u2014 and thinking, these days, maybe, they\u2019ve finally won the thing. Faulkner\u2019s famous words about the past abide, as ever. A few statues coming down didn\u2019t change what\u2019s still in some hearts; just hardened them, is all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, no, it\u2019s not all just a rhapsody in blues down here. On the same Delta roadtrip where you can visit Robert Johnson\u2019s grave and search for \u201cOde to Billie Joe\u201d breadcrumbs, you can also stand before the ruins of Bryant\u2019s Grocery, where 14-year-old Emmett Till supposedly whistled at that white woman, and ponder the first page of one of the South\u2019s darkest chapters. And if you visit Memphis, along with Graceland you\u2019ll want to see the site of Martin Luther King\u2019s assassination \u2014 it\u2019s the National Civil Rights Museum now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a complicated place, the South, a confounding place. But also a place of cultural riches, from Johnson\u2019s blues to Welty\u2019s words \u2014 artists who didn\u2019t just revel in life down here, but reckoned with it. Actual artists, too, like Ivy Coldwater\u2019s hero, Carroll Cloar, the Memphis surrealist whose works include \u201cChildren Pursued by Hostile Butterflies,\u201d inspired by his youth in the Arkansas Delta where, he said, \u201csomething was always going to get you \u2026 I didn\u2019t even trust butterflies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The South is a land of myth and mystery, fable and figment. No wonder I\u2019ve set all my novels here, including Come Again No More<\/em> (2025), Everybody Knows<\/em> (2023), and Long Gone Daddies<\/em> (2013.) Trying to pin it down on the page is one of writing\u2019s great challenges, and worth a lifetime of false starts and dead ends. Is the truth up the road a piece? Around the next river bend? Beneath all that kudzu? Maybe, maybe not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But a search for meaning is not always about the answers you find along the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ivy Coldwater taught me that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you The Coldwater Girl<\/em> in the summer of 2027.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I live and write in the South, and the South is my subject. The sense of place is powerful down here. Place is a character. Take Memphis, where I live. Eudora Welty called it \u201cthe old Delta synonym for pleasure, trouble, and shame.\u201d What she was saying, I think, is that Memphis calls to us, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":{"0":"post-14520","1":"page","2":"type-page","3":"status-publish","5":"entry"},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P9DpGh-3Mc","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":12827,"url":"https:\/\/regalhousepublishing.com\/chris-mcclain-johnson\/","url_meta":{"origin":14520,"position":0},"title":"Chris McClain Johnson","author":"Jaynie","date":"July 26, 2023","format":false,"excerpt":"Winner of the 2023 Fugere Book Prize Chris McClain Johnson finds stories everywhere. 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