Publishing doesn’t make you a writer, writing does. The difference between who I was before I sold the book and who I was after was one phone call and that’s it.

Porch Talk is pleased to welcome Kerry Kletter, author of the debut YA novel The First Time She Drowned, an American Library Association’s Booklist magazine’s Top 10 for Youth selection. A former film and TV actress, Kerry lives and writes in Santa Monica, California. Kerry joins us […]

Welcome our friend and Lowcountry neighbor to the Porch: poet, teacher, and novelist Ellen Malphrus.  The last I saw Ellen was at the sad occasion of Pat’s last days, where she and her husband Andy not only provided emotional support and loving presence, but an unending supply of succulent Peruvian chicken from Andy’s forthcoming restaurant (Andes Rotisserie) in Bluffton. As any southerner will tell you, the woman who brings the best food to a crisis is a Woman […]

I was in Beaufort last week, for the first time since Pat’s death just on the edge of Spring a year ago, on March 4^th.

There is something so particularly cruel about losing someone on the edge of Spring in the lowcountry, when the winter gray of the marsh and Spanish moss is just on the verge of the photo flash of color and glorious life that comes with the bloom of all the old southern scene-stealers: dogwood, […]