It's Good Weather for Fudge: Conversing With Carson McCullers

The Conecuh Series

It’s Good Weather For Fudge

Conversing with Carson McCullers

Revised Edition

Sue Brannan Walker

Foreword by Virginia Spencer Carr

Introduction by Carlos Dews

NEWSOUTH BOOKS

Montgomery

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The Conecuh Series

Celebrating Diversity in the South

Like the springs that unite to form the headwaters of the Conecuh River near Union Springs, Alabama, this series seeks to bring together the South’s many traditions and cultures, celebrating at once our differences and our commonality.

Wade Hall, Series Editor

NewSouth Books

105 S. Court Street

Montgomery, AL 36104

Copyright © 2017 by Sue Brannan Walker. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.

ISBN: 978-1-58838-333-4

eBook ISBN: 978-1-60306-444-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016919733

Visit www.newsouthbooks.com

To

Dale Edmonds,

professor, dissertation director, mentor, friend, whose illuminations have influenced my work throughout my career, my deepest respect, appreciation and gratitude.

Thanks to

Virginia Carr,

for her encouragement and support,

to

Wade Hall,

who listened, responded, and understood,

and to

Carlos Dews,

with ballads of heart and spirit.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Also by Sue Brannan Walker

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

Lorraine Allen Illustration of Carson McCullers

About Carson McCullers

Preface by Wade Hall

Foreword by Virginia Spencer Carr

Introduction by Carlos Dews

It’s Good Weather for Fudge: Conversing with Carson McCullers by Sue Brannan Walker

Afterword

Carson’s Columbus in Postcards

About the Author

Also in the Conecuh Series

Carson McCullers illustration by Lorraine Allen

Carson McCullers was born in 1917 in Columbus, Georgia. As a girl and young woman, she studied the piano in preparation for a career in music, which failed to materialize but which provided the leitmotif for much of her fiction. Before she was thirty, McCullers had published The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Member of the Wedding (novel and play), and The Ballad of the Sad Café. She would later publish Clock Without Hands, but by her forties she had become severely disabled by the strokes and heart attacks that eventually claimed her life. She died and was buried in 1967 in Nyack, New York.  

Preface (2007)

Wade Hall (1934–2015)

Editor, the Conecuh Series

When a talented poet from Mobile writes an extended poem in which she imagines a visit and conversation with one of the South’s most gifted writers, it is cause for a literary celebration. Such was the event that occurred in October of 2002, when I attended a conference at the Columbus (Georgia) Museum and heard Sue Walker read her new poem celebrating the life and fiction of Columbus native Carson McCullers.

It is especially appropriate that this poem be part of the Conecuh Series, which is dedicated to celebrating diversity in the South. No writer has written more honestly and compassionately about outsiders and misfits in American life than Carson McCullers, one of the South’s most original and daring authors. During her short lifetime she celebrated diversity in her characters, plots, and themes. From Frankie Addams to John Singer, the lonely outcasts of her fiction search frantically for the we of me—as do we all.

The meeting of McCullers readers and scholars in Columbus included Virginia Spencer Carr,