It's Good Weather for Fudge. Sue Brannan Walker

      

      The Conecuh Series

      It’s Good Weather For Fudge

      Conversing with Carson McCullers

      Revised Edition

      Sue Brannan Walker

      Foreword by Virginia Spencer Carr

      Introduction by Carlos Dews

      NEWSOUTH BOOKS

      Montgomery

      Also by Sue Brannan Walker

      Traveling My Shadow

      The Appearance of Green

      Shorings

      Sue Walker: Greatest Hits, 1982–2002

      Blood Must Bear Your Name

      In the Realm of Rivers

      Faulkner Suite

      She Said

      Reuben’s Mobile

      How Stubborned Words Mule, How They Balk and Take Their Measure

      Table Five

      The Ecological Poetics of James Dickey

      The Conecuh Series

      Celebrating Diversity in the South

      Like the springs that unite to form the headwaters of the Conecuh River near Union Springs, Alabama, this series seeks to bring together the South’s many traditions and cultures, celebrating at once our differences and our commonality.

      Wade Hall, Series Editor

      NewSouth Books

      105 S. Court Street

      Montgomery, AL 36104

      Copyright © 2017 by Sue Brannan Walker. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.

      ISBN: 978-1-58838-333-4

      eBook ISBN: 978-1-60306-444-6

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2016919733

      Visit www.newsouthbooks.com

      To

      Dale Edmonds,

      professor, dissertation director, mentor, friend, whose illuminations have influenced my work throughout my career, my deepest respect, appreciation and gratitude.

      Thanks to

      Virginia Carr,

      for her encouragement and support,

      to

      Wade Hall,

      who listened, responded, and understood,

      and to

      Carlos Dews,

      with ballads of heart and spirit.

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Also by Sue Brannan Walker

       Copyright

       Dedication

       Contents

       Lorraine Allen Illustration of Carson McCullers

       About Carson McCullers

       Preface by Wade Hall

       Foreword by Virginia Spencer Carr

       Introduction by Carlos Dews

       It’s Good Weather for Fudge: Conversing with Carson McCullers by Sue Brannan Walker

       Afterword

       Carson’s Columbus in Postcards

       About the Author

       Also in the Conecuh Series

      Carson McCullers illustration by Lorraine Allen

      Carson McCullers was born in 1917 in Columbus, Georgia. As a girl and young woman, she studied the piano in preparation for a career in music, which failed to materialize but which provided the leitmotif for much of her fiction. Before she was thirty, McCullers had published The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Member of the Wedding (novel and play), and The Ballad of the Sad Café. She would later publish Clock Without Hands, but by her forties she had become severely disabled by the strokes and heart attacks that eventually claimed her life. She died and was buried in 1967 in Nyack, New York.

      Preface (2007)

      Wade Hall (1934–2015)

      Editor, the Conecuh Series

      When a talented poet from Mobile writes an extended poem in which she imagines a visit and conversation with one of the South’s most gifted writers, it is cause for a literary celebration. Such was the event that occurred in October of 2002, when I attended a conference at the Columbus (Georgia) Museum and heard Sue Walker read her new poem celebrating the life and fiction of Columbus native Carson McCullers.

      It is especially appropriate that this poem be part of the Conecuh Series, which is dedicated to celebrating diversity in the South. No writer has written more honestly and compassionately about outsiders and misfits in American life than Carson McCullers, one of the South’s most original and daring authors. During her short lifetime she celebrated diversity in her characters, plots, and themes. From Frankie Addams to John Singer, the lonely outcasts of her fiction search frantically for “the we of me”—as do we all.

      The meeting of McCullers readers and scholars in Columbus included Virginia Spencer Carr, the noted biographer whose Lonely Hunter is not only the definitive biography of Carson McCullers but is also a model of the genre. We are honored to have her introduction and endorsement. McCullers-Walker-Carr are an awesome and eloquent trio.

      Sue Walker’s poem is an inspired interweaving