SC Writers Share Stories of Beloved Places

South Carolina authors are sharing stories in a new book of some of the places in the state that they love and remember fondly.

State of the Heart: South Carolina Writers on the Places They Love is an anthology of 35 essays from various South Carolina writers.

“They wrote about one place in the state that means a lot to them,” said Aïda Rogers, the book's editor. She is the co-author of Stop Where The Parking Lot's Full, a guide to SC restaurants.

The essays cover both locations that are still vibrant and those that are long-gone.

“One writer wrote about growing up deep in Spartanburg County, where BMW is now,” Rogers said. “She remembers riding her bicycle and picking blackberries and going to this old country store. It's not like that now.”

Places touched upon in the book include the Savannah River Site, the Carolina Coliseum, the Dock Street Theater and Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge.

“When I sent out a letter to different writers to write about a place, I didn't think I'd get something as personal and deep and meaningful.” Rogers said. “I learned a lot. Most of these writers are older than I am so, it was very educational to me.”

Pickens' Dot Jackson's essay “Remembering Keowee: The View Through the Bridge” is about the Keowee River Valley before it was flooded. Her essay touches on the hole in the floor of Chapman's Covered Bridge – and the terror it inspired in children.

She also writes about exploring an old church cemetery as a child and finding a child's grave there.

“Do you know that feeling, being a kid and you see this little small grave and knowing there's a child there and that could have been you?” Rogers asked. “To me, that's the great thing about writers – they notice these things and they say it. The rest of us don't think to say it or to put it down, but she did.”

Thought the casket itself was secure underground, Jackson remembers peeking in at “the ruined end of the vault” as a child and writes of how children today do the same thing.

Columbia playwright Ceille Baird Welch writes growing up in Moncks Corner and her mother taking her to the Dock Street Theater in Charleston when she was 13.

“That's where she fell in love with theater and she became a playwright,” Rogers said. “She writes about how her mother twirls into the room like Loretta Young, the movie star.”

Clemson University naturalist Drew Lanham writes about farms.

“He wrote about the fact that farms don't exist like they used to do,” Rogers said. “Barns are crumbling and what that's like to grow up on a farm, and even your dad can't save the farm.”

Horace Mungin's “My Quarter-Acre of Paradise” is about how much he missed having a garden when he lived in New York – and how his South Carolina garden is thriving.

Rogers says Mungin's essay contains “my favorite sentence in the whole book.”

The book's contributors are: William P. Baldwin, Kendall Bell, Cynthia Boiter, Shane Bradley, Lee Gordon Brockington, Ken Burger, Amanda Capps, John Cely, Pat Conroy, Robin Asbury Cutler, Billy Deal, Clair DeLune, Nathalie Dupree, Mary Eaddy, Starkey Flythe, Daniel Elton Harmon, Stephen G. Hoffius, Cecile S. Holmes, Dot Jackson, Dianne Johnson, Sandra Johnson, John Lane, J. Drew Lanham, Nick Lindsay, Vennie Deas Moore, John Hammond Moore, Sam Morton, Horace Mungin, Kirk H. Neely, Liz Newall, Tom Poland, Aïda Rogers, Dori Sanders, W. Thomas Smith Jr., Deno Trakas, Ceille Baird Welch and Marjory Wentworth.

The book is published by the University of South Carolina Press. For more information about the book, see here.

http://www.sc.edu/uscpress/books/2013/7251.html