FIONA FARRELL'S NOVELS.

I've just started a personal reading project - or rereading project. I plan to read all of Fiona's novels in chronological sequence. Just finished The Skinny Louie Book. My reason for doing this is that I love and admire Fiona's writing. I:ve always felt that we're akin in many ways. We share the same interest in family, in society, in history, in the magical in the middle of the workaday, in class and gender and region and generation. We're both southern novelists. We're realists but not realists - in Fiona's case she's more magic realist, in my case I'm more surrealist. We're both satirists. We both hear words. We both see story. We both borrow a lot of our phrases - and then play around with them - from the banal language of the day, especially the languages of folk, religious, commercial, mass cultures. Ordinary speech. Pop songs. The jingles of quotidian ads. And the quality of our work to date is about equal. Or at least I think? - I reckon! And because we're so similar, while naturally having our crucial differences in how we see the universe, what meanings we might think we can infer, not to mention mechanical things like technique, structure etc etc, I know I can learn a lot from reading her novels over again. This time a lot more closely. I'm rereading Fiona because I know that while I'll be learning a lot by being at the feet of a beloved peer I'll be enjoying her words world immensely!

Stevan Eldred-Grigg
Charleston