front cover of Fanning the Spark
Fanning the Spark
A Memoir
Mary Ward Brown
University of Alabama Press, 2009
In 1986, after years of publishing stories in literary magazines and periodicals, Mary Ward Brown published her first book, the story collection Tongues of Flame. It soon received regional and national attention, and the following year won the PEN/Hemingway Award for fiction. Mary Ward Brown was sixty-nine years old. Though she would go on to write and publish many more stories and a well-received second collection, It Wasn’t All Dancing, Mary Ward Brown’s late acclaim hardly hints at the rich and varied life that prepared the way for her success.
 
Fanning the Spark is the story of her life as a writer—her upbringing in rural Alabama; the joys of college, marriage, and motherhood; the sorrows of becoming a widow; and a lifelong devotion to writing, writers, and literature, and the company of those who shared those loves, nurturing and feeding her interior life in the face of many challenges, losses, and obstacles, both emotional and material.
 
Here, in prose every bit as eloquent, evocative, and incisive as her stories, are her remembrances of loved ones; her letters fraught with worry to her son in Vietnam; periods of emotional isolation and unbidden silence; her invaluable friendships with renowned writers, editors, and agents; her love of community and place; and immeasurable delight with every award, speech, and public reading, the many recognitions she has garnered late in life. Above all, it is the story of the competing demands of art and of life, the constant struggle between her need to write and the practicalities of family, duty, and day to day living.

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front cover of It Wasn't All Dancing and Other Stories
It Wasn't All Dancing and Other Stories
Mary Ward Brown
University of Alabama Press, 2001
This eagerly anticipated second volume of short stories is offered by nationally acclaimed writer Mary Ward Brown, often referred to as the “first lady” of Alabama letters
 
With the 11 stories in this long-awaited collectiong, Mary Ward Brown once again offers her devoted fans a palette of new literary pleasures. The hallmarks of her style, so finely wrought in the award-winning Tongues of Flame (1986)—the fully realized characters, her deep sensitivity, a defining sense of place and time—are back in all their richness to involve and enchant the reader.
 
All but one of the stories are set in Alabama. They deal with dramatic turning points in the lives of characters who happen to be southerners, many jaxtaposed between Old South sensibility and manners and New South modernity and expectations. Among these is a new widow who is not consoled by well-meaning, proselytizing Christians; a middle-aged waitress in love with the town “catch”; a bedridden belle dependent upon her black nurse; a “special” young man in a newspaper shop; a young faculty wife who attempts generosity with a lower-class neighbor; and a lawyer caught in the dilemma of race issues. Through their diverse voices, Brown proves herself a graceful and gifted storyteller who writes with an authoritative pen, inventing and inhabiting the worlds of her set of characters with insight, compassion, and wit.
 
Most of the stories in It Wasn't All Dancing have appeared previously in prominent national magazines and literary journals, including the Atlantic Monthly, Grand Street, and Threepenny Review. This fine collection should appeal to a wide audience among writers, literature scholars, and general readers alike.
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front cover of The Remembered Gate
The Remembered Gate
Memoirs by Alabama Writers
Jay Lamar
University of Alabama Press, 2002
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.
 
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front cover of Tongues of Flame
Tongues of Flame
Mary Ward Brown
University of Alabama Press, 1993

These beautifully crafted stories depict the changing relationships between black and white southerners, the impact of the civil rights movement, and the emergence of the New South.

Mary Ward Brown is a storyteller in the tradition of such powerful 20th-century writers as William Faulkner, Harper Lee, Flannery O'Connor, and Eudora Welty-writers who have explored and dramatized the tension between the inherited social structure of the South and its contemporary dissolution. With Tongues of Flame, her first collection of short stories, Brown bares the awkward, sometimes hopeful, and often tragic suffering of people caught in changing times within a timeless setting.

Here we meet such memorable characters as a dying black woman who seeks the advice of a now-alcoholic white doctor whom she knew in better years; a young woman, jilted at the altar, driven crazy by an illuminated cross erected by the church opposite her house; and a 95-year-old woman buying a tombstone for her long-deceased husband only to discover that he had been adulterous throughout their marriage. Brown constructs her characters in a disarmingly plain style while breathing life into them with compassion and honesty as they confront the large moments of their lives.

First published by E. P. Dutton in 1986 to immediate critical acclaim, Tongues of Flame won the 1987 PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award. The judges commended Brown for "seeing life whole, without prejudice, without sentimentality, without histrionics. Her voice may be quiet-sometimes she speaks in a whisper-but her words are, nevertheless, always forceful, clear, and ultimately lasting." With this new publication of Tongues of Flame and its inclusion in the University of Alabama Press's Deep South Books series, a whole new generation of readers may once more discover Mary Ward Brown's profound stories of pain, loss, and hope.

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