Porch Talk

Pat Conroy taught me that there’s something even more transformative than education, and it’s the power of grace.

This Porch Talk originally appeared in The Lowcountry Weekly. 

The second annual Pat Conroy Literary Festival is almost upon us, and this year’s theme is The Transformative Power of Education. In honor of that rich subject, I asked a random handful of festival presenters to ruminate on “one thing” they learned from Pat Conroy, through his writing or his […]

“That’s what it is to be a storyteller. It’s a calling to tell the tales that help us to know who we are.”

Novelist J.C. (Jana) Sasser lives amid the woods and marshes of South Carolina’s Edisto Island, halfway between Beaufort and Charleston and seemingly halfway between the present and the past. Once home to novelist Bren McClain, Sasser’s house is a converted barn that dates at least to the 1930s and is made in part from wood […]

“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 […]

“Reflecting on Pat stories brings a smile and fills me with a mirth too often missing from life during these turbulent times…. His words were a healing balm I had needed my whole life long.”

Novelist Karen Spears Zacharias is a Georgia-raised Gold Star daughter. Her work as a journalist has been featured in the New York Times and on CNN, National Public Radio, and Good Morning America. Zacharias is the author of eight books, including Mother […]

“We cannot read a book without importing ourselves as characters. This is one of the marvels of fiction. We get to rehearse things on the written page. We get to examine our own motives and lives through books.”

A Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, native, writer and artist Nicole Seitz is the author of six novels, including The Spirit of Sweetgrass, The Inheritance of Beauty, and Beyond Molasses Creek. Nicole’s fiction has been honored by Library Journal, Romantic Times, […]

“After reading Pat Conroy the first time I began to understand there was a larger world I could read my way into, and it was like discovering water at the same moment you realize you are dying of thirst.”

Following this Porch Talk interview, read an exclusive excerpt from Mark Powell’s essay on Pat Conroy, “The Extended Hand.”

Mark Powell is one of my favorite mysteries. I discovered Mark through his novel The Sheltering, published by Pat Conroy’s Story […]

“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 […]

“Sometimes when I write a novel, I find that I have injected parts of my ‘lost life’ into the story. I have never lived in a small town, and yet I find myself writing about them. It’s as if the lives I never lived travel alongside me and, every once in a while, show up in stories.”

Patti Callahan Henry is a New York Times bestselling author of twelve novels, including the The Bookshop at Water’s End, […]

“My primary interest in writing my novels is to examine the power of familial love and family dynamics, and how those dynamics change under hardship. Love, struggle, commitment, sacrifice, pain, joy, parenthood and childhood are universal concepts.”

Novelist Michel Stone is a graduate of Clemson University and a native South Carolinian who has published more than a dozen short stories and essays in various journals and magazines. She was the recipient of the 2011 South Carolina […]

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 […]