55 books like A Lowcountry Heart

Every time I start a new project, I run through all the reasons not to begin. Perfectionism is such an enemy to creativity.

Anne Lamott offers practical, hard-won advice on the creative process, getting over our self-imposed hurdles bird by bird (one by one). I resonated with her encouragement to compose a lousy first draft that we can then start to edit and refine. I’m so glad she challenged us to turn off the radio buzzing in our own heads.

We may not be able to see where our creative endeavors will lead, but Anne brings humor and humanity to the frightening process of plunging ahead. 

Yes, the same Stephen King: Carrie, The Shining, Misery, and dozens more. Fiction? Yes–his memoir is among the best books for writing nonfiction, not the best of nonfiction books.

Writers of every genre suffer the same troubles, like doubt, rejections, not enough days when the work “flows”, procrastination, alcohol, and drug abuse, having to bow and beg (until your success reverses the tables), and so on. In On Writing, Mr. King gives us his story: "the good, the bad, and the ugly", of writing. 

Start with chapter 25 of “CV”, right to the meat of King’s memoir. Be sure you read his “Tool Box” for writing. From the “fundamentals” (e.g., read and write a lot, vocabulary, sentences, paragraphs) to the “craft” (e.g., subject, story-telling; clarity {again !}; people, personalities, and characters).  

Enjoy!

While some writing books offer nuts and bolts–the so-called rules of writing–this book from Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Dillard teases the writer with essays that make you think.

We are invited into the world of writing with metaphor and we learn by comparison. Like the story of the inchworm stuck in the long grasses, frozen to the tall blades. Perhaps you should just jump, Dillard quips, and put yourself “out of your misery.”

True, writing can be miserable at times, but also, it can be wonderful. I like this book because it is a way to experience what it feels like to be a writer through the craft of prose. 

I was drawn to this book by the title but also the subtitle: The intermingling of fishing and writing in a novelist’s life.

As a fly fisherman and writer myself, I have often thought about the connection between fishing and writing, and more particularly, the similar experiences that come from both, so when I learned about this book, I had to read it. Craig Nova does not disappoint.

Fishing is about good stories, and Nova tells them in this book, but he also reveals how fishing and writing have common needs, such as the need to be in the moment.

He also is honest about the challenges of being a writer and he uses the stream to remind us that when, as he says, “the literary weather is going to take a turn for the worst, what is needed, more than anything else, is the ability to calm down.” 

This book is part of a series, but this particular one captured my heart. Cara’s niece, Linnea, is like Jess in so many ways. Having just graduated college, she joins the turtle team that works with the turtle hospital, learns to surf, and of course, falls in love. She also sets out to find her own calling and when she does, it requires sacrifices she did not know she would have to make. It is the pain we all feel when we discover our path does not align with those we love. Mary Alice Monroe has such a strong connection to nature and it comes through in all her books, particularly here when she describes life at the beach and those turtles, oh, those turtles...  

Set in the emerald cove of Florida’s Panhandle, Three Shots to the Wind by Sherry Harris is the third book in the cozy Chloe Jackson, Sea Glass Saloon Mystery series.

The characters in this series are realistic and likable and embody that sense of community that cozy mystery readers long for. A fun premise with an ex-fiancé winding up dead and her current love interest a prime suspect.

A precise, thoughtful, and unromantic blues scholar, Barry Lee Pearson was also a friend of, and occasional booking agent for, DC-area acoustic blues legends like John Jackson and Cephas & Wiggins.

Jook Right On, which I was delighted to blurb and use in my own teaching, offers a series of compact autobiographical testimonies—“blues stories”—on a wide range of topics from a wide range of blues people. 

“Wordsmiths by trade,” Pearson writes in his brilliantly incisive introduction, “these storytellers bring to their tales qualities also found in blues musical performance and philosophical perspectives characteristic of the blues tradition such as improvisation, ironic humor, ambivalence, and a life-affirming sense of hope in the face of adversity.”

Constitutionally immune to cliches, Pearson brings you closer to the blues musician’s perspective than any writer I know.  

I’ve been assigning The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing in Southern Studies classes at Ole Miss for the past twenty years; the incarcerated students in my blues lit class at Parchman said this was their favorite book. 

Honeyboy, born in 1915, grew up in the bad old Mississippi Delta, back when cottonfield sharecropping, lynching, and prison farms were the givens. The blues were his way out. He learned his trade, rambled widely, took his pleasures where he found them.

“I had three ways of making it,” he writes. “Women, my guitar, and the dice.” He knew all the great bluesmen, and gigged with most of them: Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Little Walter. An unforgettable Delta blues autobiography.

Stetson Kennedy, an environmental activist who extolled the beauty of Florida's reputation preceded him in this important book.

An influence on other writers of natural history, including Bill Belleville and Kennedy’s fourth wife Sandra Parks, the naturalist icon writes with humor and affection about his native state. Also, I love that he worked with Zora Neale Hurston on the Florida Writer’s project.

This quintessential historical fiction book on Old Florida was both a nominee of the Pulitzer, and the Nobel Prize in Literature. Rich in history and unforgettable characters, the story follows the MacIveys, as they scrap out a living as dirt farmers, beginning in the mid-1800s, through the 1960s. Not hurricanes, the Civil War, freezes, or near-starvation can staunch the family’s resilience, ultimately allowing them to build a great fortune. This novel truly touches my heart as my family came from Georgia, with little in their pockets, in the early 20th century, seeking to fulfill their own dreams. This is writing at its best, steeped in rich and authentic detail, making this a novel that will live on through the ages.