Brenda Sutton Rose's Blog, page 6

Dirt Roads with Ahab

I’m going out with one my dog’s today. Ahab. He’s the big one. A mixture of this and that: Lab and Pit and perhaps something else. He came from the homeless shelter for dogs. That’s what I call it. The homeless shelter. The official name to the place that cared for Ahab for so long […]

Dogwood, with Gratitude

A few months after the release of Dogwood Blues, a book club connected to a Friends of the Library group from a county a few hours from my hometown asked me to speak at their July meeting. The president of the group had started reading my book and was thrilled. Even though he hadn’t finished reading […]

Phantom Dreams

  When my two children were young, my husband would often leave for 3-month deployments aboard a nuclear submarine. During his absence, my children and I enjoyed the live theater, symphonies, and ballet. We read poetry, books, and attended museums. We planted flowers and had sleep-overs. When their father and I separated, my children and […]

Addition and Subtraction

It is a Tuesday. The month is July. In two days my mother will be dead. As a writer I know to build the suspense one scene at a time. Stretch the tension. The rules of style are tattooed inside me. But this is my story and I will tell it the way I want. […]

The Blood of a Guitar

Filed under: literary fiction Tagged: blues, guitar, guitar quotes, music, music quotes, southern fiction, southern writers, writing

The Intruder

The Intruder, a short-short story laced with magical realism,was first published in the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. I hadn’t thought about the story for some time, yet when I walked through the house this morning, my knees aching, a memory of the old woman and her rusty joints kicked in. If you don’t […]

Cotton Mill Village: A Photo Essay

Plundering through the history of our southern way of life, I can always grab hold of something interesting, dust it off, and examine it. Today, I give you a photo essay of the families whose homes were at Tifton’s cotton mill village before it closed. These photos were shared with me many years ago when I was helping dig up information for an exhibit at GMA. I was intrigued. Thrilled. Riding the school bus in my youth, I had seen the village many times but never up close. The photos and conv...

About Farmers

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Filed under: nature writing Tagged: dirt, Farmers, farming

A Mountain Thanksgiving

November. Blood Mountain. Cool. Heavenly views, steep, curving, rushing with leaves in ten thousand colors. Thanksgiving. Turkey and dressing. Sweet potato casserole. A small cabin tucked away down a winding road. Peach mimosas. Broccoli casserole. I pull on my boots and wrap in a shawl, then traipse down to visit Eleanor Exley, but she isn’t at her cabin. The creek sings to me as I walk by. A drive to downtown Blue Ridge. Arts. Paintings. Boro Irish Pub. Porter beer. My daughter and I...

Gossip in DOGWOOD BLUES

During interviews and book club visits, I’ve discussed themes, motifs, and symbolism in Dogwood Blues. Readers surprise me with their insight, with the layers of the story they uncover. After one interviewer led me to talk about the theme of miracles that filled the story, the discussion moved to the way I used gossip to tell the story and create character depth.

InDogwood Blues, Nell is the town gossip, a woman who takes one sentence of truth—noun, verb, and predicate—surrounds the sentence...