By Staff
If by some chance you don't already know the highway-cleaning witches, the Sign of the Goo-Goo Cluster, or General Beauregard Lee the Georgia groundhog, then you should get to know Nan Graham through her latest book, In a Magnolia Minute.
For the past decade, listeners of the NPR affiliate in Wilmington, North Carolina, have heard Graham's stories of the South and Southerners. Best-selling author Pat Conroy – known for navigating the cultural byways of the South – said Graham "is so relentlessly Southern she makes me feel that I was born in Minnesota."
In a Magnolia Minute, Graham's second collection of humorous essays, is now available.
Not all of the essays offer laughs. Graham writes about watching news broadcasts of soldiers returning home from overseas and remembers when her husband was fighting in Vietnam. She commemorates the death of musicologist Alan Lomax and describes his work with Ruby Pickens Tartt in Alabama's Sumter County, where Graham spent her summers as a child.
From the deepest Delta to Dreamland Barbeque, from the Florida Panhandle to the Research Triangle, In a Magnolia Minute offers a tour of the South unlike any you will find in a travel guide.
Graham is a lifelong Southerner who has lived in almost every corner of the South. She has been writer-in-residence at the University of West Alabama in Livingston and teaches at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. She lives in Wilmington with her husband.
Copies are $14.95 for trade paperback, can be ordered at www.blairpub.com, or by calling 800-222-9796, or by sending a check to John F. Blair, Publisher, 1406 Plaza Drive, Winston-Salem, NC 27103.