Blog #4- Kristi DeMeester

As an As an aspiring Southern author who wants very much to write Southern fiction in the styles of Faulkner, O’Connor, Lee Smith, and Mr. Conroy himself, I found myself filled with longing at every page turn of The Prince of Tides. Conroy’s fiction carries me back to my Georgian childhood; he speaks to the young girl in me who still runs outside into the rich humidity after a bath to catch the summer fireflies while the frogs sing around me, and my Momma is in the house threatening a butt whoopin if I don’t get inside this instant. He writes, “The moon then rose quickly, rose like a bird from the water, from the trees, from the islands, and climbed straight up— gold, then yellow, then pale yellow, pale silver, silver-bright, then something miraculous, immaculate, and beyond silver, a color native only to southern nights” (6). Of course I want to steal from Conroy. I want to take his dark magic and make it my own, but I’m forced to pick from among his snapping dialogue, his characters who become achingly real because of the horror of their sins and the sweetness of their redemption, and his beautifully crafted settings. If I must choose, I’m going with the style because the style gets me every time.
Every time I read Conroy I seem to forget the overwhelmingly lyrical quality of his writing. His sentences rise and fall in cadences of lengthy description and short, cutting dialogue. His descriptions of Colleton waver on the poetic. When I was reading, I literally moaned aloud and the sheer beauty of his descriptions and the quick witticisms of his dialogue. One of my favorite bits begins,
"All of us touched, bound in a ring of flesh and blood and water. Luke would give a signal and all of us would inhale and sink to the bottom of the river, our hands still tightly joined. We would remain on the bottom until one of us squeezed the hands of the others and we would rise together and break the surface in an explosion of sunlight and breath. But on the bottom I would open my eyes to the salt and shadow and see the dim figures of my brother and sister floating like embryos beside me. I could feel the dazzling connection between us, a triangle of wordless, uplifted love as we rose, our pulses touching, toward the light and terror of our lives. Diving down, we knew the safety and silence of that motherless, fatherless world; only when our lungs betrayed us did we rise up toward the wreckage. The safe places could only be visited; they could only grant a momentary intuition of sanctuary. The moment always came when we had to return to our real life to face the wounds and grief indigenous to our home by the river"(454).

Sigh. Beautiful. His sentences flow seamlessly one into the next and create a natural rhythm in their variety. This style, this variety is something I long to emulate. I want my sentences and my style to flow as easily as his, and oh, I’m willing to toil mindlessly over a hot laptop to get my sentences to do what his do.