One of the many benefits to me of this blog is the opportunity it provides me to  celebrate  the successes of fellow southern women writers.  I am delighted to  showcase  Sally Whitney’s  latest book, Surface and Shadow, just released today.
A few weeks ago, I asked  Sally to share some of her thoughts about being a southern writer and in particular, what inspired her latest book.
What gave you the idea for this novel?
 I can’t say that anything gave me the idea for this novel. The idea just seemed to grow. Strong women have always been my favorite characters in novels, so I knew my novel would have a woman as the protagonist. I think women have a hard time being strong because for many years, expectations and requirements have been set against them. Too often, women have to show strength in defying cultural norms before they can be strong anywhere else. I wanted to show this personal battle within my protagonist. I’m also interested in North Carolina cotton-mill towns, partly because very few of them still exist. I put the woman in the cotton-mill town and asked “What if?†And the story grew from there.
 Why did you choose to write about the South?
 The South chose me. Place is very important to my fiction. Often with short stories I get a sense of place before anything else. I see a backyard vegetable garden baking in the mid-summer sun. Or a front porch sagging under the weight of family generations who have traipsed across it. With Surface and Shadow, I saw the narrow main street of a small town with its decades-old store fronts and a mysterious aging farmhouse partly obscured by trees and flowers.
Always the places I see are in the South, usually in North Carolina. And it’s not just the physical places that draw my thoughts in that direction. It’s a sense of mystery and wonder, history and hope, darkness mixed with light. When I was in graduate school in New Jersey, I tried to write about a woman living in New Jersey, but my professor told me to “get that woman back down south where she belongs.†He knew where my imagination lives.
 What do you think are the greatest pitfalls to writing about southern women?
 Number one is falling prey to stereotypes. We all know them. Southern women have been caricatured in books and movies and jokes since such means of communication began. But avoiding stereotypes and still conveying some of southern women’s significant characteristics can be tricky. Stereotypes, like caricatures, have some basis in truth. While southern women are not as hung up on social niceties and proper etiquette as they’re often portrayed, we do expect people to be kind to each other. Good manners are nothing more than being considerate of other people. We are not simpering, obedient belles trying to please the men in our lives. We do not go to college just to find a husband. We are independent women, but we often find ways of exerting that independence that are more persuasive than combative. We like men, and generally love a few of them, but they aren’t required to help us lead fully developed lives.
 What do you think defines a “southern writer?â€
 Although southern writers are often defined by where they live, I think they’re more accurately defined by the books they write. My favorite contemporary southern authors, including Lee Smith, Joshilyn Jackson, Tom Franklin, and Fannie Flagg, tell stories of passionate people caught in difficult circumstances, not necessarily unique to the South, but certainly influenced by southern culture, climate, and geography. In Jackson’s gods in Alabama, for example, the great respect many Alabamans hold for football plays an important role. In Franklin’s The Tilted World, which he wrote with his wife, Beth Ann Fennelly, the roaring force of the southern Mississippi River is a major character. Heat is often one of my favorite characters in stories by southern writers. Although other parts of the United States can be hot, there’s no heat like southern heat. And heat can make people do crazy things. Southern writers understand the South and its people with all their beauty and their flaws. They know the strong ties between the people and the land and the climate. Their stories could not take place anywhere else.
For more about Sally Whitney and her work, see this blog, May 1, 2015. Â
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night, taking the “red-eye” cross country, wearing sequined jeans, images-3getting a tattoo, signing up to run a 10K or any other kind of “K”, or tottering around in shoes with spiky 4″ heels. And I’m OK with all of that.
intake of breath at my reflection under the harsh lights of the beautyimages-1 shop, or (please, God, no), when someone called me “cute?” No matter. It’s true. Things have changed, they have really changed. And while I haven’t experienced substantial losses, yet, praise God, a thousand “little sailings” unnoticeable at the time, have manifested in sea changes in my life over the years. Life was never, after all, endless journeys to far horizons, but a voyage through tributaries, narrowing to one. I am at that tributary.
In a wheelchair beside the nurses’ station, a tiny old woman sits, eyes closed, lips parted, hands folded in her lap. Her head droops to one side. Ragged wisps of white hair stray across her forehead. Her nightgown is rumpled, one slipper has dropped to the floor exposing a pale bare foot.  She could be asleep, perhaps even comatose.  Visitors pass, a nurse rushes by and jostles her wheelchair but offers no apology.  No one notices.  It’s  as if she’s invisible.
lead, resisting  his owner’s attempts to move forward.  The visitor tugs at the lead, averting her eyes from the woman in the wheelchair.  But the little dog is determined.  He sits  down by the woman’s wheelchair as if he has reached his destination.   After a few seconds, the woman opens her eyes and raises her head.  A smile spreads slowly across her weathered face at the sight of the little dog.  Her watery eyes twinkle. A soft voice breaks the silence.  It has a characteristic honeyed lilt, a pattern of speech once cultivated in finishing schools for proper southern ladies.
peacefully naps  at my feet.  As I sip my morning coffee, I watch his rhythmic breathing  punctuated now and then by a twitch of his ears, a muffled yip or a brief pummeling of his legs. Maybe he dreams of chasing  a squirrel or a cat.  Maybe he doesn’t dream at all. I wish I knew. I wish he could tell me.
body impossibly balanced on  one long thin leg. A school of ducks fat from the bread we feed them  paddle languidly by and assorted songbirds compete for air space. An occasional bird of prey soars overhead in search of food. Today there are only buzzards and hawks but on rare occasions, we see golden eagles. I wonder why we revere hawks and eagles, and find their buzzard relatives disgusting. I wonder if buzzards know this.  I wonder if Eagles do.
 gracefully folding and unfolding, embracing the morning air as he glides away.
has picked up now, and the lake is choppy.  The rain slices at the side of the house and the wind drives it into the porch. I watch the rain pounding on the lake and wonder about the young men and their ill-fated fishing trip.
$20 bill. She will also be the first woman to appear on U.S. currency.  Ironically, $20 is the exact amount of her Civil War monthly pension.  To add to the irony, the slaveholding president, Andrew Jackson remains on the bill.  We might have chosen a more friendly partner, but at least he has been demoted from its face to the rear.
Around 1844, Harriett married John Tubman, a free man, a rare occurrence at the time. Â Five years later, fearing she was about to be sold, she and two brothers escaped. By this time she had changed her name to Harriett. Her brothers turned back, but she continued alone and finally escaped to freedom. Her husband decided not to join her and instead married another woman with whom he had four children. Harriett was heartbroken, but refused to sacrifice her 
freedom and instead committed to bringing other slaves to freedom. From 1850 to 1860, by her own account Tubman returned to Maryland 13 times and rescued 70 family and friends. Harriet was a no-nonsense leader who carried a rifle on these trips to discourage slaves she was trying to help from trying to turn back. If necessary, she bribed people.
Harriett Tubman was one of the most prolific Underground Railroad conductors of all time. During the Civil War, she served as nurse, scout, cook and spy in the Union Army and became the first American woman to lead an armed raid into enemy territory. Harriet returned to Auburn, New York after the war and began another career as a community activist, humanitarian, and suffragist. The capstone of her humanitarian work was the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged, located near her home in Auburn. Harriett continued to be active in the suffrage movement and appeared at suffrage conventions until the early 1900s. She died at her home in Auburn, NY in 1912, at the age of ninety. Harriet Tubman attributed her ability to risk everything for the cause of freedom to her deep spiritual faith.