The Alabama Writing Workshop is looking for two volunteers to help with their annual event, which is scheduled for Friday, March 10 from 8:30 am to 5 pm. The typical duties are simple and include helping at the registration desk, getting people checked in and running the pitch room. 

Volunteers get the opportunity to mingle with all the agents and speakers at lunch, which will be provided for free for volunteers.

Also, each volunteer will get one 10-minute pitch with an agent of his/her choice free of charge. AWC volunteers can speak to the entire audience for up to 5 minutes, promoting the AWC if they like. 

While the Alabama Writing Workshop only needs two volunteers, other members who want to attend get a discounted rate of $50 off registration.

For more information about volunteering, please reach out to Brian at 513-675-6538. And if you are interested in learning more about the 2023 Alabama Writing Workshop, please visit the website.

I think most of us wanna-be writers are - or were - readers.  It’s possible those of us who haven’t had as much publishing success as we would have liked have tried too hard to emulate “real” writers.  This tendency can leave your writing bereft of the value of the unique sights and sounds of the places where you were raised.  I want to remedy that effect in future offerings. 

Had I given more thought to this thesis earlier on, I would have more greatly appreciated the fact that Faulkner, Capote, Wolfe, and other wonderful writers were, like me, southerners.  The rural South was my stomping ground before I could stomp, and, although I got citified at the age of four or so, the rhythms of the South have stayed with me throughout the years, years in which I moved from backwoods Alabama to Baltimore, Maryland; Battle Creek, Michigan; and Atlanta, Georgia, all the while traveling farther afield to many other places, for both work and pleasure.

Add to the fact of various and sundry locales I have frequented that my mother had a Scottish brogue and a storehouse of lore and expressions that were not common even on the farms and in the mining camps where I grew up. And, to top it all off, six years after the death of my first husband, I married a New England Yankee who could “pahk his cah” with the best of ‘em.

At the time of my marriage to the Yankee, we were both 65 years old and I was writing “legally defensible decisions” for U.S. Administrative Law Judges, but my writing experience had begun while I was in high school. I wrote book reviews for J. R. Rothermel, then the book review editor for The Birmingham News, having been introduced to him by one of my English teachers. The News also accepted a feature or two from me, one concerning the wind that blew down a section of the brick wall that comprised Legion Field Stadium.  

Since my legal writing days, I have made a stab or two at creative writing, but have found myself somewhat stymied by the long experience of having to make only statements that could establish or qualify as findings of fact. Now that’ll throw a cog in your works right off. My idea of a solution to my problem is prospective because it has yet to succeed, but what I think Ima gonna do is write like I heard folks talk ‘way back when.

I have to start by lickin’ my calf - in other words, going back over past efforts at writing publishable material - I mean written thangs - and making those thangs say what they said to me when I thought about writing about them. If my mother saw some of my submissions following my retirement as a paralegal writer, she would say I had done s..t and fell back in it.  And if I dared disagree with her, she would order me to “quile in,” which I think means “coil in,” like a threatening snake, you see. My Yankee taught me things like “bubbler,” rather than water fountain and “common” rather than park. Besides he was a big union man as a mechanic and I was eventually in what we liked to call management in the government. Thus did sparks and colorful vocabulary fly in many of our conversations.

I promise I’m not going to spew forth an enormous bunch of stuff written in dialect, but I am going to do some practice pieces that I think will have the effect of lightening me up, so to speak.  Goodbye, legally defensible, hello, entertaining stuff (I hope).

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Alice Burns’ Bio:

I was born just after the Great Depression in Oneonta, AL, 9th child of a tenant farmer/mine foreman.  Our family moved to Birmingham when I was four so that the older children could get jobs in the booming steel mills.  I had wonderful teachers at Ensley High School who told me I had talent and encouraged me in many ways.  A 41-year career with the Federal Government eventually took me to a job writing decisions for U. S. Administrative Law Judges.  Because I was writing alongside attorneys, I thought I should at least get a college degree, which I did at the age of 49.  I then was promoted to a position in management, from which I retired in 1997.  

When I began writing in 2019, I read books and websites to learn how to get published. Some avenues to publication are easier than others. Genre publishers, for instance, have a voracious appetite for content (remain calm, genre authors—I said some avenues are easier, not easy). I write literary fiction and humorous essays. The competition for those forms is very stiff. I figured it would take years to get my work into print. I joined a local writers’ group and began working hard.

While I enjoyed the work, I craved immediate gratification. I wanted Ink. So I did what many citizens and also crackpots do: I started sending letters to my local newspaper. I had quick and repeated success. As good as that felt, I knew that this was a small paper with just a few subscribers, and that rising to the top of their slush pile was not going to win me a Pulitzer. Most letters don’t make you think, “Now there’s a writer!” Very few letter-writers are scratching a creative itch. For most, promoting their idea or agenda comes first and their letter is just how they plop it out there. Still, when you have zero publishing credits to your name, seeing a few letters in print is very encouraging.

After about a year of working locally, I went from writing letters to one local paper, then to the statewide paper, and I was eventually published in papers in all 50 states and most of the US territories. I set out simply to get published, but along the way I received a practical education in studying different markets, studying individual publications and their editors, being creative and resourceful, following guidelines, and doing what works as opposed to what you think should work. You can get all of that from how-to books, but I absorbed those lessons in a much more meaningful way by actually engaging with many papers, getting a pile of silent rejections (they don’t tell you they’re not going to run your letter—they just don’t run it), and eventually building up a pile of clippings. I got the Ink, and so much more.

You can do all of this by writing for contests and literary journals and magazines, but newspaper letters are a nice, short form (flash fiction alert: many papers have a 200-word limit), the feedback is quicker, and given the number of papers in the country the need for content is vast. You can turn all of local print media into your own writer’s sandbox in which you can practice many elements of writing craft, with a low bar between you and publication.

If you would like to try writing letters to newspapers, or you want to see how I did it and the resulting published letters, read my blog posts about my journey.

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Christopher Jay Jones is a retired computer programmer who lives and writes in Anniston, Alabama. He has been published in two Alabama Writers' Cooperative collections as well as the Bridge Bulletin magazine, and has a story coming out soon in The Birmingham Arts Journal. He also blogs a bit to indulge his tendency to overthink things, in an attempt to keep his short stories under 10,000 words. Look for "Christopher Jay Jones" and "Column Inches by Chris" and "Bridge, Out Ahead" on Substack.

The deadline for writers who would like to apply for a Literary Arts Fellowship from The Alabama State Council on the Arts is quickly approaching. These competitive Fellowships are $5,000. Writers of poetry and prose are both encouraged to apply. Click on the link above for additional information, including rules and guidelines.

HOW DO YOU KNOW IF YOU ARE  A "REAL" WRITER?  This question has plagued me for a long time, and I saw it recently on a writing web site, so I am not the only one who has asked it. For a long time, I was unpublished and wrote in the “closet.” I was afraid if I admitted to doing it (writing, folks) I would have to face that dreaded question:

“Oh, what have you published?”

To which, I’d have to say, “Well, nothing… but my mother loves my stuff.”

And then go crawl under a rock.

I’m sure there are people out there for whom this would not be a problem, people who have lots of self-confidence and don’t care what anyone thinks of them. I tip my hat to you. For the rest of us, what to do? Should we go to the writer’s conference and expose ourselves as wanna-bes or should we just stay home?

Now that I have several novels and nonfiction books published, I have the perspective to return to this perplexing question. How do you know when you are a “real” writer? What is one? Does anyone who picks up a pen or taps on the computer qualify? Do you have to be published? How many times? Does self-publishing count? Does payment in art journal copies qualify or do you have to be paid for it? If you win an award or get an honorable mention, does that jump you to the “writer status?” According to the IRS, a professional is anyone who is paid for their work. My first publication to a magazine netted me $8.48. It was a great feeling to finally reach that milestone, but somehow it didn’t make the question go away.

Is the aspired distinction merely to be found in the eye of the beholder? If I like what you write, does that make you a “writer” in my eyes, but if I don’t care for it, you aren’t? Saying someone is a “good writer” or a “bad writer,” at least slaps the tag on them, but is he/she a “real” writer? If you keep a journal under the bed and scribe in it daily, are you one or not?

Okay, I’ve asked the question, now I’ll share my epiphany.

By college, I was quietly writing fiction, but I took a class in poetry because it was the only way to get my roommate to go to biology lab. It turned out to be the best move I could have made. Everyone brought their hearts and souls to class with their poems. And it was brutal. I learned that there was only one rule—Does it work?

Not: Does it express what you really want to say? does it use alliteration and rhyme correctly? Only: Does it work? You can break rules; you can follow rules; you can cry big crocodile tears onto your paper, but the only question is that one.

So, it doesn’t matter if you are published or not, have won awards or not. It doesn’t matter what you write or how often you write. It doesn’t matter. A writer wants it to work! If it doesn’t work, a writer is willing to produce it for critique, to listen to criticism, to cut, to add, to change, to ask questions, to learn, to rewrite, to stand his/her ground, to start over, to rewrite again—whatever it takes to make it work.

Of course, you can write without being “a writer.” And there is nothing wrong with writing for your own pleasure or self-discovery . . . or for your mother. Kudos to you and keep writing!

But if you have a passion to tell a story, to paint in words, to reach people, to move people, then you understand the question—Am I a “real writer?”

And if you have that passion and are willing to work to make your writing “work,” then in my book, you most definitely are one!

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T.K. Thorne is a retired police captain and award-winning writer of books and blogs that go wherever her curiosity and imagination take her. Visit her at TKThorne.com.

THINKING ABOUT POETRY: A CLOSE EXAMINATION OF ELEMENTS OF CRAFT

By: SUE WALKER

Take a look at poem you have written or that someone else has written with an ear and eye directed toward revision.

1.     MEANING:  Can you – as a reader – write a brief paraphrase of the poem? What is the poem saying? If you were to write a letter to the poet about her / his poem, what would you say is the general gist of the poem?

I want to mention a book that seem relevant to the above. The first is an older book published in 1959 entitled HOW DOES A POEM MEAN buy John Ciardi.  How who is John Anthony Ciardi (June 24, 1916 – March 30, 1986) was an American poet, translator known for his translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. He wrote several volumes of children’s poetry and was a columnist for the Saturday Review. He was a poetry editor and directed the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont. This is, I believe, an essential book for learning how the elements of a poem work.  Here is a quote from Chapter 1:  “The human-insight of the poem, and the technicalities of the poetic devices are inseparable. Each feeds the other. This interplay is the poem’s meaning, a matter not of WHAT IT MEANS (nobody can say entirely what a good poem means) but HOW IT MEANS.

An aside here:  Negative Capability Press in 1886 published a festschrift on Richard Eberhart. One of the contributors was John Ciardi who introduced Dick Eberhard at a reading he gave at Rutgers.  “I think I offended him,” Ciardi said. “Eberhart has never written a so-so poem. He’s either breath-takingly magnificent or he is lousy. Let me beg him as my dear friend and as an old admiration to fix or ‘breath-takingly magnificent.” 

2.     TITLE:  Ah yes – the title. Does it make you want to read on? Does the title intrigue you? Does the title indicate something of importance?  Does the title itself do any work?  I like what Ken Craft (born 1967), cartoonist-story teller said about the importance of a poem’s title: “When unlocking a poem’s meaning, titles are one of the first ‘must considers’ of your process.”  I like my title to be the last thing I attend to. I look back through possible lines that occurred in the poem and write several possible titles before choosing the one that ultimately heads the article, poem, or story.  

3.     HISTORY:  Is there any indication of something that has happened before the poem begins? Is there some history, some antecedent scenario?  Does the reader need to know this?  What does the writer reveal of what happened prior to the matter of the poem?  Emily Dickinson wrote a poem entitled: “Yesterday is History” in which she says:

            Yesterday is History,

            ‘Tis so far away—

            Yesterday is Poetry—

            ‘Tis Philosophy—

And Carol Ann Duffy’s poem “History” presents a past that if rife with the matter of men. She tells History from the woman’s perspective—the woman as witness.  One of my favorite quotes is that of T.S. Eliot (1888-1965): “Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future. And time future contained in time past.”  I am thinking of how the writer handles the yesterday, thinking of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. (Swann’s Way—the first book)   Ah, that madeleine moment when the scent of something brings back a moment. And how does the writer shape memory. A useful book is Sven Birkerts, The Art Of Time In Memoir: Then Again.  There might well be a reading list for each of these sections on KIND / GENRE:  What kind of poem are you reading / responding to? Sonnet (What kind? Shakespearean, Petrarchan? Spenserian? Miltonic?) Sestina? Villanelle? Ode? Free Verse? Prose poem? Hybrid?  My writing class at the Mobile Botanical Gardens in Mobile, Alabama have recently gone, alphabetically, through Forms from A-Z.

4.     MAKE-UP:  What is the poems design / make-up? Does it have stanzas, or does it exist as a whole? How many parts does the poem have? Where do the breaks come? Does one stanza link with another stanza or exist an entity in and of itself?  What change or changes exist because the poem is divided into specific parts? Look for single words that stand out. What about single words on a single line? Why is a single word emphasized? Are words set apart on a line? What about spaces? What use does space serve? As of January 12, 2023, the U.S. Poet Laureate is Ada Limón.  Take a look at her poem, “Power Lines” in the summer issue of the Paris Review:  https://theparisreview.org/poetry/7787/power-lines-ada-limon. The poem is written in couplets with an alternating single line: The poem begins thus:
             Three guys in fluorescent vests are taking down
             a tree along my neighbor’s fence line, which is of course,

             my fence line, with my two round-eyed snakes and my wandering  (and another couple follows with racoon. (period.)
Note the spacing, the enjambment, and the period after “racoon” at the beginning of stanza 3. (In addition to being U.S. Poet Laureate, Limón is the author of five books of poetry and the recipient of National Book Critics Circle Award for The Carrying.

5.     SHAPE: Is the shape of the poem relevant? Look at the line length. Is the poem written in long lines that extend almost the length of the page?  Is the poem composed of short lines? Does it matter that this is so?  I want to mention Concrete Poetry – poems that present a particular shape such as an Apple. Google, if you will, Lewis Carroll’s The Mouse’s Tale” in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and “Easter Wings” by George Herbert. 

6.     DICTION: What would you say about diction? Is the poem written with dialect?  Are certain parts of speech emphasized? What about tense – first, second, third tense? XYV – Examine your verbs. How many “to be” verbs exist in the poem? Could any of them be more dynamic / dramatic? What if the line read: “The child is going across the street.” Could “is” be replaced by a more telling verb such as: The child ambles / races / dashes / stumbles/ limps / etc.  I believe there are seven editions of On Writing Well by William Zinsser (Oct 7, 1922-May 12. 2015. The New York Times said this book belongs on any shelf of serious reference works for writers.” 

7.     PUNCTUATION: Take a look at your em dashes, at your semicolons, your capitalization, etc.  We are not Emily Dickinson, nor are we E.E. Cummings.

8.      AT THE END:  And now, look at your end words. The eye pauses there though briefly. Do you really want “a” at the end of the line? What about a conjunction there?  I recommend James Longenbach’s The Art Of the Poetic Line.  He examines metered lines, syllabic lines, and free verse lines.

9.      TONE: What emotion is revealed in the poem? Is there a change in the narrator’s voice? Who will tell what?

10.  SOUND:  The sound units of a poem are its syllables. The word “melodramatic” has five sounds.  Readers become aware of sounds when two end-words rhyme, but poets could also pay attention to the rhythm and sounds in their lines just as they are of the words that end the lines of a poem.  Please check out Robert Pinsky’s The Sounds Of Poetry: A Brief Guide.

11.  SYNTAX:  The arrangement of words and phrases.  What difference does it make if we say: “the mad woman in the attic” or the woman mad in the attic? And what about a series of prepositional phrases? Is it too much to say that in a poem every word matters – and the placement of that word matters – especially if it exists on a line by itself?   Ellen Bryant Voight has a book entitled The Art Of Syntax. Sound and syntax hold hands.

12.   AGENCY AND SPEECH ACTS:  Who is the main agent in the poem?  Does the main agent change as the poem progresses> Can you imagine the poem written in a different person?  What about the use of first person, “I”? What about the use of “you?” What about s/he and it? Just because the poem is written in first person, we should not assume that the “I” is the poet.

13.  WHAT IS MISSING?  Can you imagine the poem without a certain stanza or line? Could the parts of the poem be rearranged? Why do you think the poet would want certain lines and stanzas in the position in which they appear?  What if the last line of the poem were the first line of the poem? What if the last stanza were the first? 

14.  WHAT STANDS OUT?  With the poem no longer before you, what do you remember that stands out for you about the poem?  What stands out about how it is written?  What is striking? What is memorable – in content, in genre, in analogies, in rhythm, the speaker?

15.  WORD ROOTS:  Certain words from words in earlier / other languages – Greek, Anglo-Saxon, Latin.  Are there particular root words that occur in the poem? Are other languages featured in a striking way?

16.  CONNECTIONS  / RELATIONSHIPS:  Every word in a poem enters into a relationship with the words around it and with other words in the poem.  Is something going on that comes to mind because of the constellations of certain words. 

            Thematic relationship: For example – stars and sky may appear in a certain relationship.

            Gender relationship: Think about this:

                        I asked my uncle if it was okay to be melodramatic

                        And he said, “yes.”

            Phonemic relationship: What words are connected by their initial s’s or st’s – i.e. – stage and stars and stand, etc.  What is the use of anaphora?

            Syntactic relationship – as “When I consider”. And “When I perceive” may introduce dependent clauses.

17.   SENTENCES:   This is reflecting on some things have already been said.  Subjects and predicates as well tenses have their sway. Who is saying what to whom?

18.  IMPLICATIONS: Because a poem suggest, not expatiates, it requires the writer to supply the concrete instances for each of its suggestions.  Thus, a poet may peak abstractly, but reader is called upon to think concretely. Implications may be present in rhythm as well as in word

19.  SPEAKER:  For the writer, this is often an important choice. Examine the facts of identity in the poem and how these may offer varying views of the world of the poem.

20.  ATTITUDES, JUDGEMENTS, VALUES:  What values are suggested in the poem. Is a judgement being made?  Can you separate the personal from the author> Just because the poem affirms a person’s right to die doesn’t necessarily believe that this point of view is held by the poet.

21.  IMAGES: A word isn’t necessarily a picture.  Words refer. Images represent.

22.  THE SENSES:  What in your poem is related to Sight, to Scent (smell), Taste, Touch, and Sound (hearing).  When I was working on a book about the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, I would try to name the sounds I heard when walking along the E.O. Wilson Boardwalk.  I would google Swallow Tailed Kite – or Blackbird, etc.  and determine if I could write their particular sound.  I could google the bird – and my dog would come running; “Where is it?” she would look around. “It must be somewhere, I heard it!”  The late Pat Schneider would bring a collection of things to describe – a cotton ball, a pinecone, sandpaper, a piece of modeling clay, smooth stones.  And yes, I know, this goes under Sound. 

23.  PAT SCHNEIDER:  My favorite book on writing and teaching writing and on the Workshops is Writing Along and With Others.

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Sue Brannan Walker is Professor Emerita at the University of South Alabama and a former Poet Laureate of Alabama.  She is the Publisher and Editor of Negative Capability Press and has published 12 books as well as hundreds of poems and critical articles. Sue currently teaches a Poetry Workshop at the Mobile Botanical Gardens every Wednesday a well an online workshop via Zoom. She is on the Board of the Alabama Writers Cooperative, the Alabama Writers Forum and Blakeley State park. She is a recipient of the Eugene Garcia Award for Literary Scholarship. Her book on James Dickey was awarded the Adèle Mellen Prize for its distinguished contribution to scholarship. She is involved with various writing groups in Mobile and judges contests for the National Federation of State Poetry Societies and various state groups.

We are pleased to announced the publication of 2022 Awarded Writers’ Collection, which features award-winning work from the AWC’s 2022 Writing Contests. These pages feature a wide variety of work, across genres, and it’s a wonderful anthology to get lost inside.

This book would not have been possible without the help of T. K. Thorne and Jessica Temple. Both assisted in getting the book put together and in making the Contests possible.

Click here to purchase your paperback copy.

For all of the many poets in the AWC, the Alabama State Poetry Society’s Fall 2022 Workshop will be on October 14th and 15th in Columbiana, Alabama, at the 4-H Center. There are many activities planned for the weekend, including workshops with Dr. Jacqueline Trimble and our new Poet Laureate, Ashley M. Jones. The event is free for members, and lunch will be provided.

To register, please click here. And if you aren’t a member yet (but are interested in becoming one), here is more information.

It sounds like it’ll be a great weekend!

Randy Crew is the author of the new cozy murder mysteries series, The Four Seasons. It was a pleasure to be able to talk to him about, among other things, his inspiration, his writing life, and his relationship with his characters.

Bradley Sides: First of all, Randy, thank you for taking the time to answer a few questions for us over at the AWC. Before we discuss your The Four Seasons series, do you mind sharing your story of how you became a writer?  

Randy Crew:  Glad to, Bradley. Writing and history were the subjects I consistently did well in during my school years, and throughout my life, I usually kept diaries. In my experience teaching creative writing at a junior college in my later years and participating in many different writer groups over those later years, people who keep diaries are natural writers. Then at Auburn, besides the required physical education courses, I only got an A in a class called “Business and Professional Writing.”  Even that class was a challenge because, to this day, I am a terrible speller. So, it wasn’t until I was in my 50s and spell check was invented that I felt it was time to scratch that writing itch. And the itch was to write my first novel, A Killing Shadow. It was only during the four years it took me to write A Killing Shadow, and I was in my 50s then, that I felt like I had become a writer.

BS: You are the author of two previous military action-adventure novels. Your new series shifts into a different territory. What inspired you to turn your focus to this series?

RC:   With both A Killing Shadow and One-way Mission, I wanted to leave a written document behind that would belie the myths and untruths told by Hollywood and the media about those of us who were in Vietnam. In those two novels. I told the truth as I knew it—the good, bad, and the ugly—but I did it in a way that would be an engaging, fast-moving action-adventure story with a mystery line, a lot of humor, and drama. Once I got that out of my system, years went by, a granddaughter was born, the itch returned, and I decided it was the time to have fun and write something light and playful—such as cozy murder mysteries—something my son could enjoy now and, in time, my granddaughter could enjoy. She’s already an advanced reader like her daddy was, so it won’t be long.

BS: For you, how does your writing process differ from writing a standalone novel to shaping a series?

RC: Everything I’d read about being a creative writer of novels said a series was more attractive to agents and publishers than a standalone, so those first two novels were intended to be a series. A Killing Shadow is actually two books in one, and One-way Mission is the sequel, the third book in the series. So, I’ve always written with a series in mind.

BS: I’ve mentioned your new series, The Four Seasons. Do you mind sharing with our readers what it’s about—and what they can expect to uncover as they begin it?

RC:   Oh, sure, glad to. They are cozy murder mysteries, each one set in a different season of the year, from Halloween 1955 to the summer of 1956. Starting with book 1, the Trick-or-Treat Corpse, retired homicide detective Nathan B. Hawke, from Dallas, Texas, tells the story of his junior high school adventures with the occasional corpse. The reader will discover life in the small town of Southern Pines, North Carolina, a golfing Mecca today, along with Pinehurst, but a sleepy little town in 1955. They’ll also discover a much more civil and respectful time in our country’s history when good manners were important, and children respected their parents and elders. This was also a time when children were allowed to wander, have outdoor adventures without wearing helmets and kneepads, and exercise their imaginations. They could even make mistakes, fall down, get hurt, get back up and press on. I have a counseling background, so I also couldn’t avoid slipping in some life advice, usually administered by Nate’s grandfather, the WWI vet with the mustard-gas-damaged lungs. His advice is usually related to Nate’s relationship with his older sister, the teenager who thinks she’s ready for love, or the village bully who is on Nate’s path to school every morning.

BS: Let’s talk about “Nate,” your protagonist. What inspired him?

RC:   As “Nate” explains in the prologue, he had an unfortunate reputation in his junior high days that inhibited his crime-scene credibility, so when he and his dog Superman stumble into their first corpse in “Boris” Barrow’s woods—that’s the elderly recluse in the spooky Victorian mansion who looks like Boris Karloff—nobody believes him. Nate decides to clear his name and prove to the local police and others that he has matured since his days as a liar and prankster, so he sets out with a couple of school friends and his spunky mom to find the murderer. And keeping his promise to his mom, a Korean war widow, to never lie to her again is a constant challenge for him. But it doesn’t keep him from lying to others. For Nate, the truth is so boring when a clever lie here and there can get you out of a lot of trouble.

Also, Nate isn’t the only protagonist. These four books are called the Four Seasons series, but each is also referred to as “A Nate and Superman cozy murder mystery.”  Superman, Nate’s mutt with the bloodhound nose, is a key player. He’s the key player, according to him. He’s a detective dog with attitude.

BS: Is it emotionally different for you to be with a character for so long? With a story of a standalone novel, we get to know characters and then let them go. With your current work, though, you’ll be with Nate for multiple books. I imagine there’s a deep connection there, right?

RC:   Oh, yeah. I went to junior high school in Southern Pines, North Carolina. I lived and roamed the woods and town where Nate lives, so while I am not telling my story—I never found a corpse—I am showing life as a junior high school student in 1955 and 1956. Those were good years for me; lots of good memories of neighbors, community, baseball, boy scouts, and camping. And I had a troublesome sibling like Nate. I also remember a bully, a difficult paper route customer, and a few other unsavory characters, so while writing these books, at every page of the manuscript, I ask myself, Yeah, that’s what you remember, Randy, but what if…

BS: For many writers, place functions like a character. In establishing your setting, did you view it with this kind of depth?

RC:   I’d like to think so. Southern Pines was a unique place. There was the rich, country-club set, mostly people from the north who had a second home there so they could play golf. They generally lived on “the hill,” and then there were the textile mill workers who lived around the town. In the rural areas, you had the salt-of-the-earth farmers, but you also had the bootleggers and car-strippers. I had children from all walks of life in my class; several of them are key players in my books.

In these stories, Nate is in a single-parent family because his father was killed in Korea in 1952. Fortunately, my father returned from two tours of duty in Korea, so again Nate is not me, but a friend of mine in my Southern Pines class lost his father in Korea, so with Nate being in a single-parent family, in a way, I’m telling my friend’s story. Plus, with my father gone a lot, my mother was the head of our family several times in my life, so I’m familiar with the single-parent environment.

BS: Are you working on other writing projects as you finish your series? Or is your focus solely on Nate and the crew for the foreseeable future?

RC:   I’m locked in on Nate’s story right now. I’ve finished books one and two, The Trick-or-Treat Corpse and the Christmas Tree Corpse, and I’ve started book three, the Centerfield Corpse, but after book four, the Campfire Corpse, I have considered a new series that will be set in Hawaii.

After we lived in Southern Pines for two years, we moved to Oahu, Hawaii. One of my junior high friends there was John Chestly. We called him John “Moochly” because he was always mooching food off the rest of us on camping trips. One day, while we swam in a beautiful Hawaiian stream that ran through some grazing land, Moochly bumped into a dead horse. That was the kind of stuff that happened to him, so I’ve been wondering…what if Moochly had bumped into a dead man or woman?

BS: Before I let you go, what advice do you have for writers out there who might just be getting started on their own paths to publication?

RC:   Join a local writer’s group. Stay active in AWC, go to conferences, and study creative writing. Oh, and use active verbs in your writing. When I first decided to write my first novel—and my reasons for doing so go a lot deeper than what we’ve had time to cover here—the first thing I did was take a class in creative writing at the local junior college. After that first class, I knew I belonged in the writing community. Next, I went to the local library and checked out every book they had on creative writing. I was on fire; I’d found my calling, so to speak.

BS: Thank you again, Randy, for your time, and congratulations on your The Four Seasons series!

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Randolph Crew is a former Marine pilot with two published military action-adventure novels based on his 793 combat missions. He holds an MA degree in counseling from Webster University and a BS degree in Business from Auburn University. Now retired and mellowed (his words), he’s having fun writing cozy murder mysteries for ages 10-110. His mysteries take place in Southern Pines, NC, where he lived when he was a junior high student with a reputation. For recreation, he enjoys hiking the great outdoors in his home state of Alabama. You can find him there or connect with him on our contact page. He’d like to hear from you.

Please join us in congratulating the winners of the AWC’s 2022 Writing Contests! Winners will receive certificates and cash rewards, and they will also be published in our upcoming anthology. Congratulations again, writers! It was a pleasure to read your words.

Short Story

First Place: "When Worlds Collide" by Octavia Kuransky, Center Point, AL

Second Place: "Grimm’s School for the Morally and MeToo Challenged" by Tay Berryhill, Birmingham, AL

Flash Fiction

First Place: "Grandpa Versus the Giant Gorilla" by Vic Kerry, Oakman, AL

Second Place: "Lucky" by Kate Duthu, Mobile, AL

First Chapter of Novel

First Place: "Inescapable" by WB Henley, Indian Springs, AL

Second Place: "Blame it on the Moon" by Kathleen Thompson, Birmingham, AL

Memoir

First Place: "Saint Chris, Protect Me" by Doug Gray, Fayetteville, TN

Second Place: "The Reliquary" by Christopher Jay Jones, Anniston, AL

Formal Poetry

First Place: "Writer at Mill Creek" by Emma Fox, Birmingham, AL

Second Place: "Afternoon in the Old Harshaw Cemetery, Haiku One" by Anne P. Wheeler, Birmingham, AL

Free Verse Poetry

First Place: "A choreography of almost" by Miriam Calleja, Birmingham, AL

Second Place: "Salt on a Bird's Wing" by Catherine Hall Kiser, Fairhope, AL

Prose Poetry

First Place: "Forsythia" by Karen McAferty Morris, Pensacola, FL