For just about one year, immediately post-college, I lived and worked in Greenwood, Mississippi. The truth? I hated it. I couldn't leave fast enough. I was a newspaper reporter, a job that paid sub-poverty level wages in a town where that was enough to get by. The man who hired me was what I like to call "handsy" when I'm being kind, and flat out lecherous when I'm being honest. It was a year in which I drank too much, slept too little, worked as hard as I knew how to work, hung out with some really smart and wonderful people, acted at the Greenwood Little Theatre, was involved in a hot air balloon crash, bungee jumped off a crane, covered a capital murder trial, muddled through a flood, ate a ton of good food, listened to excellent music, and learned a lot about cotton and catfish and community. I read a lot. So did everyone else. It was a community of readers and writers. In fact, my favorite librarian hails from Greenwood. Must be something in the water.
In retrospect, it was mostly great.
I bring this up because a native of Greenwood just won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Donna Tartt, who earned that prestigious award for her wonderful novel The Goldfinch, was born in Greenwood and raised (according to her bio) in nearby Grenada. I know nothing of Ms. Tartt save what she gives us in her novels. She rarely does interviews. She doesn't attend writing conferences. I've never seen her give a reading or sit on a panel. She publishes a book once every dozen years or so and I read whatever she gives us and I'm grateful for it. And yet, because I know Greenwood, I can't help but feel I know her just a little.
For that reason and many others (I love her work), I was thrilled when the Pulitzer news was announced. I had that peculiar flutter of excitement that you get when someone close to you does something great, like when your father shoots a snake from clear across the road. It's pride based in nothing more than geography and I don't deserve to feel it, but there it is.
I won't go on and on about it, except to say that I hope you read The Goldfinch if you haven't already done so. And I hope you like it as much as I did. And if you're ever passing through the Mississippi Delta, make time to visit Greenwood. Maybe you can stop and read a long novel over a basket of soft dinner rolls and a plate of frog legs at the Crystal Grill.
You won't be sorry.
