In 2018, What Makes Someone A ‘Southern Writer’?

“Far more urban, far more ethnically and culturally and politically diverse, the South is no longer a place defined by sweet tea and slamming screen doors, and its literature is changing, too. ‘It is damn hard to put a pipe-smoking granny or a pet possum into a novel these days and get away with it,’ the novelist Lee Smith once said.” Even so, Margaret Renkl has a answer to the question – one that’s paradoxical and somewhat painful.