Fanning the Spark
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A01=Mary Ward Brown
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Alabama writer
Author_Mary Ward Brown
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Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=BGLA
Category=DNBL1
COP=United States
Creative perseverance
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eq_biography-true-stories
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Female authorship
Format=BC
Format_Paperback
Hemingway Award
Language_English
Late-life success
Literary friendships
Literary life
Mary Ward Brown
Memoir of motherhood
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Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
Rural Southern life
softlaunch
Southern memoir
Southern storytelling
Vietnam War letters
Widowhood and writing
Women in literature
Writing through grief
Product details
- ISBN 9780817358662
- Format: Paperback
- Weight: 235g
- Dimensions: 137 x 215mm
- Publication Date: 15 May 2016
- Publisher: The University of Alabama Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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In 1986, after years of publishing stories in literary magazines and periodicals, Mary Ward Brown published her first book, the story collection Tongues of Flame. It soon received regional and national attention, and the following year won the PEN/Hemingway Award for fiction. Mary Ward Brown was sixty-nine years old. Though she would go on to write and publish many more stories and a well-received second collection, It Wasn’t All Dancing, Mary Ward Brown’s late acclaim hardly hints at the rich and varied life that prepared the way for her success.
Fanning the Spark is the story of her life as a writer—her upbringing in rural Alabama; the joys of college, marriage, and motherhood; the sorrows of becoming a widow; and a lifelong devotion to writing, writers, and literature, and the company of those who shared those loves, nurturing and feeding her interior life in the face of many challenges, losses, and obstacles, both emotional and material.
Here, in prose every bit as eloquent, evocative, and incisive as her stories, are her remembrances of loved ones; her letters fraught with worry to her son in Vietnam; periods of emotional isolation and unbidden silence; her invaluable friendships with renowned writers, editors, and agents; her love of community and place; and immeasurable delight with every award, speech, and public reading, the many recognitions she has garnered late in life. Above all, it is the story of the competing demands of art and of life, the constant struggle between her need to write and the practicalities of family, duty, and day to day living.
Fanning the Spark is the story of her life as a writer—her upbringing in rural Alabama; the joys of college, marriage, and motherhood; the sorrows of becoming a widow; and a lifelong devotion to writing, writers, and literature, and the company of those who shared those loves, nurturing and feeding her interior life in the face of many challenges, losses, and obstacles, both emotional and material.
Here, in prose every bit as eloquent, evocative, and incisive as her stories, are her remembrances of loved ones; her letters fraught with worry to her son in Vietnam; periods of emotional isolation and unbidden silence; her invaluable friendships with renowned writers, editors, and agents; her love of community and place; and immeasurable delight with every award, speech, and public reading, the many recognitions she has garnered late in life. Above all, it is the story of the competing demands of art and of life, the constant struggle between her need to write and the practicalities of family, duty, and day to day living.
In addition to publishing two acclaimed collections of short fiction, Mary Ward Brown has received the PEN/Hemingway Award for Fiction, the Hillsdale Prize for Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and the Lillian Smith Book Award. She lives in the village of Hamburg, between Marion and Marion Junction, Alabama, in the same house in which she was born and raised.
