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 […]

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 […]

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, […]