Hullo, check my blog for recent thoughts, news, twaddle and the like...

http://www.pibbtown.blogspot.com/

Cheers,

Caroline

Dear Potential Reader,

White Girl Roar was originally a short story intended for entry into a local Atlanta weekly's contest for a brief piece of writing with Southern flavor. Instead, I spent four more years writing what Maya Angelou might have meant when she said, "If there's a story you want to read that hasn't been written, write it yourself."

I was born in Atlanta, Georgia, to a pair of Savannah-bred parents in 1976, after the civil rights movement had affected necessary change upon the Southern landscape. I grew up colorblind in the South's capital city, having no slurs in my vocabulary and treating others as I would want to be treated. It wasn't until I went to college in the border territory of Washington, DC, that I became aware of the baggage of my birthright. My Northern brethren always assumed the worst--that I was a Klan daughter living on a plantation where word of Lincoln's Emancipation had not yet reached, that the old way of thinking was alive and well within me.

Could I blame them? Hollywood paints us as illiterate, backwards, and racist at the worst, or quaint folk who talk funny and hold tight to a magnolia-encrusted plantation yesterday of sweet, polite prejudice at best. Stories with a Southern setting always focus on race, every classic addressing the separatism and soullessness of the Old South. Where is the story that shuns the stereotypes, that praises the fact that change occurred and revels in the beauty of a new way of being, of thinking, of living with one another?  Maybe it already exists--it is unlikely I have read every book in the world.  Regardless, I wrote my own.

White Girl Roar focuses on the life of Peaches, a daughter of the New South and the evolution of the southern belle. It is a story that confronts the past's hidden secrets, while recognizing what used to be and highlighting what no longer is. The title of this tome is confrontational--my editor begged me to change it to something benign more than once. But why does the concept of a white girl making a loud noise have the power to make some people so uncomfortable? If someone penned Black Girl Roar, would it seem as potent? Why not?

As a final thought, let me mention that I am not saying that the South is the picture of a perfect situation--there are still those who embrace the old way of thinking. However, I do think that this is not a situation unique to the South. Discrimination and inequality are national phenomenon, if not universal. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Project, there are nearly 800 race-based active hate groups in the United States. Southern states top the list with an alarming frequency, yet there are states outside the borders of the Mason-Dixon line that equal our numbers--California, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Michigan, and Illinois. I very badly want to believe that my Southern brethren who are part of these groups are a minority, that taken as a whole we are no longer what we once were--that it matters that God blessed us with a prophet and a nonviolent, peaceful protest that brought change. Regardless, as long as my South plays the scapegoat for race relations in this country, no other region of the United States has any need to examine itself.

I appreciate your interest in my book, White Girl Roar.  It matters.  Cheers,

Caroline