“Living in the lowcountry has given me a renewed purpose in life, and the festival grew out of that sense of direction…. I’m blessed to be able to offer a platform to help many more writers get to know readers and one another. It’s also a chance for us to give back locally to the Literacy Center and nationally to the publishing industry via the Book Industry Charitable Foundation.”

Rockelle Henderson is the president of Rock Inked, Inc., an […]

“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 […]

 

“My impulse as a writer is to have readers enter a novel the same way you enter a dream.”–Wiley Cash

Porch Talk went to the 29th annual Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, TN, for a lively conversation with novelist Wiley Cash (The Last Ballad) and musical guest, singer, songwriter, and author Radney Foster (For You to See the Stars), hosted by Pat Conroy Literary Center executive director Jonathan Haupt. This Porch Talk Live session […]

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 […]