The Remembered Gate
288 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
19 B&W illustrations
Paperback
Release Date:09 Sep 2003
ISBN:9780817350543
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The Remembered Gate

Memoirs by Alabama Writers

Edited by Richard Evans and Jeanie Thompson; Afterword by Mark Kennedy
University of Alabama Press
Showcases nineteen nationally known writers who have roots in Alabama

In The Remembered Gate, nationally prominent fiction writers, essayists, and poets recall how their formative years in Alabama shaped them as people and as writers. The essays range in tone from the pained and sorrowful to the wistful and playful, in class from the privileged to the poverty-stricken, in geography from the rural to the urban, and in time from the first years of the 20th century to the height of the Civil Rights era and beyond.

In all the essays we see how the individual artists came to understand something central about themselves and their art from a changing Alabama landscape. Whether from the perspective of C. Eric Lincoln, beaten for his presumption as a young black man asking for pay for his labors, or of Judith Hillman Paterson, floundering in her unresolved relationship with her troubled family, these personal renderings are intensely realized visions of a writer's sense of being a writer and a human being. Robert Inman tells of exploring his grandmother's attic, and how the artifacts he found there fired his literary imagination. William Cobb profiles the lasting influence of the town bully, the diabolical Cletus Hickey. And in “Growing up in Alabama: A Meal in Four Courses, Beginning with Dessert,” Charles Gaines chronicles his upbringing through the metaphor of southern cooking.

What emerges overall is a complex, richly textured portrait of men and women struggling with, and within, Alabama’s economic and cultural evolution to become major voices of our time.
 
The Remembered Gate should be required reading for all Alabamians.’
Library Journal
 
This book serves up so much more than the standard southern blue plate menu, the usual fare. What struck me about the collection was its truth and its abiding sense of home, with all the rough spots and cow piles and Bible-belt sternness.’
Huntsville Times
 
An eclectic collection that . . . draws religion, race, family life, and geography into a rich composite.’
—Paul Ruffin, editor of the Texas Review and The Man Who Would Be God
 

Jay Lamar is Associate Director of the Center for the Arts and Humanities at Auburn University and coeditor of the anthology Reading Our Lives. Jeanie Thompson is Executive Director of the Alabama Writers' Forum, a partnership of the Alabama State Council on the Arts in Montgomery, and author of four collections of poetry, including White for Harvest: New and Selected Poems.

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