“My reputation is the kind you can’t ruin.”—Marshall Chapman

Marshall Chapman grew up in Spartanburg, South Carolina. As a debutante and the daughter of a textile mill owner she started life “firmly part of proper society” but was determined to make a very different life doing something else – somewhere else.

At the tender age of 7, Chapman saw Elvis perform and knew immediately what that something else was. Her memoir Goodbye, Little Rock & Roller details much […]

“It’s like you find this true light, which for me was writing, and then you lose that light, and then you have to go find that true light again. And in many ways, that was what happened to me.”

Ann Kidd Taylor grew up watching her mother, best-selling author Sue Monk Kidd, write from a room in their home–an experience she describes as “the most normal thing in the world” when you’re a child.

And yet for Taylor, it […]

“It was definitely fun when Pat Conroy came into your bookstore.”

Longtime Beaufort, South Carolina, residents, David and Lorrie Anderson didn’t start their work lives in the bookselling business, but that’s exactly where they ended up after David’s habit of collecting books “got out of hand.”

The couple first opened NeverMore Books, a local bookstore specializing in unique, hard-to-find books and signed first editions, in September of 2015 on Carteret Street. But a little over a […]

“A lot of people, I think, set out to write a novel that will accomplish something. And I guess I’m much more interested in writing a novel that will explore something–that will in some way enlarge my thinking….”

Beaufort native, Valerie Sayers, is the author of six novels including Who Do You Love and Brain Fever, which were named New York Times “Notable Books of the Year.” The film Due East was based on her novels Due East […]

“I think the Center is on a path to pull together all these disparate literary forces that have been going on for years and years here. Not just writers, but readers and people in the book industry on every level….”

To Pat Conroy, he was that Will Balk. When not answering questions from visitors at the Pat Conroy Literary Center, William “Will” Balk Jr., who serves on the center’s advisory council, also writes a garden column for Lowcountry […]

Bren McClain is a writer who never gave up, a former journalist turned award-winning fiction writer. Her first novel, One Good Mama Bone, was recently published by Story River Books, Pat Conroy’s original southern fiction imprint with USC Press. McClain sat down with me to talk about farm life, writing, and a secret that would stay with her for many years before becoming the seed for her first novel.

This interview has been edited for length.

Mindy Lucas: Welcome to Porch […]