We Don't Care How They Do It in New York! by Susan Cushman

I love Sunday mornings! As an Orthodox Christian, the Divine Liturgy is the spiritual highlight of my week. Every Sunday is like a mini-celebration of Pascha (Easter)... Christ is Risen! Indeed, He is Risen!

On a much less etheral note .... I also look forward to the two brightly-colored plastic bags that arrive in my front yard (or if I’m lucky, in my driveway) on Sunday mornings. The red one contains The Commercial Appeal. The blue one is fatter—it holds the Sunday edition of The New York Times.

I’m Mississippi born and raised, and shortly after moving to Memphis in 1988, I published a trade magazine for residential builders, architects and interior designers for three years. It was during that time that I received a gift from someone (sorry, I can’t remember who!) that I wore proudly while I worked on this little regional publication in my home office. It was a Mary Engelbreit tee-shirt with a picture of a girl in overalls and a straw hat with her bare feet propped up on her desk. The caption read, “We Don’t Care How They Do It in New York.” (The next great Southern novel is obviously in the typewriter on her desk!)

That was then. This is now. Meaning that yeah, we actually do care….

There are umpteen gifted Southern writers slaving away at their craft down here, our imaginations fueled by a culture populated by generations of colorful, larger-than-life characters. And what do we do with these stories that we write about this candid wonderland of humanity when we’re finished with them? Why, we send ‘em up north to agents and editors and publishers… in New York City.

Some of us even move to New York City to write about these folks we know and love back home. Take Harper Lee, for example. Her childhood in Monroeville, Alabama (and maybe even her college years at the University of Alabama and a brief stint in law school) prepared her to write To Kill a Mockingbird, a tribute to her lawyer-father and a portrait of life in a small town in rural Alabama. But she moved to a cold-water flat in New York City in 1949, at age 23, to find a job and write. (Her father was willing to pay for law school, but not for her to chase her dreams of writing. Read more of her fascinating story in Mockingbird by Charles Shields.) Eleven years later, in 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird was published by Harper and Row, in New York City… and became one of the most widely read books of all time, even winning the Pulitzer Prize.

Most of us stay here, in spite of the kudzu and the chiggers, but we care enough about how they do it in New York City to subscribe to the New York Times Book Review. I was very interested when the September 16 edition ran a review of Dennis McFarland's latest novel, Letter From Point Clear. The reviewer, New York art critic, Richard B. Woodward, was pretty hard on the book, while speaking favorably of McFarland’s previous novels. I was especially interested in his criticism that McFarland, “too often opts for mood over action,” and that “novels about the tensions of family relationships tend to unfold at a slow tempo, but when this is compounded by a beach setting during a Southern summer the effect can be stifling.”

Although McFarland (left) lives in Massachusetts, (he left Alabama in the ‘60s) he did grow up in Mobile, so I think he understands that Southern summers unfold slowly and that mood is important.

So I ordered the book. Then one afternoon last week I took it down to the banks of the Mississippi River (yes, I took that picture!) and read for about two hours while watching the sun set… imagining myself at Gulf Shores, Alabama, as much as possible. (This wasn't difficult, since I spent summer vacations at Daphne, Alabama, every summer from 1959-1967 or so. My best friend's family had a house on the Mobile Bay, where I learned to water ski and crab and lots of other good stuff!) Anyway, as I read Letter From Point Clear, I found myself empathizing with the Owen clan and their family struggles, identifying with first one character and then another. It took me a while to get used to his point of view shifts, and I think it might have worked better if he’d stuck with Morris’ voice, but I certainly don’t think, as Mr. Woodward says, that “the Southern heat seems to have wilted the muscle tone of his prose and his characters,” but then again… I don’t live in New York City.

We care how they do it in New York City, but that doesn’t mean they always do it better. I loved Evelyn Somers’ post on September 15 in The Missouri Review Blog: “Bigger and Better than the New York Times.” She wrote about an essay in the September 9 NYT Book Review by David Oshinsky, a Pulitzer-Prize winning historian from the University of Texas-Austin. It was about well-known works of numerous literary giants that were rejected by Alfred A. Knkopf. The thing was, The Missouri Review scooped the Times by publishing Knopf readers’ reports… seven years earlier, in their Winter 2000 issue!

Kudos! to The Missouri Review. Maybe I should send Evelyn a Mary Engelbreit tee-shirt…. or maybe we should have some printed up that say, “A Good Blog is Hard to Find.” I’d buy one, wouldn’t you? (But then again, I bought a tee shirt at a Wreckers concert at Joe’s Bar in Chicago in May!)

Bio: Susan Cushman is a writer and artist living in Memphis, Tennessee. She has an essay, “myPod,” coming out in the October issue of skirt! … which premieres its Memphis edition in 8 days! (skirt! is also published in Atlanta, Augusta, Boston, Charleston, Charlotte, Columbia, Houston, Jacksonville, Knoxville, Richmond, and Savannah/Hilton Head.) Susan published a trade magazine for residential builders, architects and interior designers in the early ‘90s, for which she did most of the writing (and sold all of the ads, ugh!) She paints Byzantine-style icons in egg tempera and teaches classes in iconography. Her first novel, The Sweet Carolines, is currently undergoing major reconstruction, so it’s not quite ready for prime time (agents)... in New York City, that is!