If Southern literature is rooted in family storytelling, Sonny Brewer is the patriarch, and Southern Writers Reading is the big reunion.

By Shari Smith
Photos by Leslie Goldberg

Whether it is his unerring eye for talent or his penchant for pitching a fit, Sonny Brewer gets people to make art of the written word. Some have never written, some have
sworn off writing at the recommendation of their therapist, and some didn’t know they could write in the first place. Their published works sit on the shelves of bookstores and the nightstands of avid readers because Sonny dragged them to their keyboard with gentle prodding or threats of physical violence. Whatever his method—support system or irritant—there is a long string of writers below the Mason-Dixon line who know they owe their careers to Sonny Brewer.

He is as soft as wood smoke, hard as roofing nails, and smart as hell. While Southern writers and Southern readers have placed him square and plumb on a literary pedestal, his feet are made of Lamar County clay, not the sand of the tony Bay area where he now makes his home. It is part and parcel of the two sides of Sonny, the charm and the potential for fury, all of it, every fist thrown and tear shed, giving to Sonny the enigmatic gift for knowing good writing from bad. David Poindexter of MacAdam Cage Publishing in San Francisco says, “Sonny is a Book Man. He can spot an author’s brilliance well before the pundits in New York even get out of bed.”

Frank Turner Hollon and William Gay

Southern Writers Reading began as a good Southern tale with gifted authors as characters and acts bordering on criminal woven through the plot. In 1997, Sonny published The Pains of April, the first book by Baldwin County attorney Frank Turner Hollon. Together with his publishing partner Kyle Jennings, Sonny and Hollon hauled books in the back of a green Ford Explorer to the convention of the Southern Independent Booksellers Association (SIBA). With nothing resembling anything close to a marketing plan, Hollon reasoned that book sales had a direct connection to exposure and slipped copies of his book into the arms of the teddy bears on display in their hotel’s gift shop window while Sonny and Kyle distracted the guy at the checkout counter.

At the SIBA convention, author Tom Franklin introduced Sonny to Tennessee sheetrock hanger William Gay. On the drive back to Alabama, Sonny read aloud from Gay’s story, The Paperhanger, realizing midway that Jennings had slowed from his usual speed of 85 to not much above 30.

“When I finished reading, not a word was spoken for a half a minute. Somebody, maybe me, said, ‘Damn,’” Sonny remembers.

Building a literary event around a man with the shy ways of William Gay would require a fair amount of shoring him up. Frank Turner Hollon and Tom Franklin signed on to help. Jim Gilbert, now an editor at River City Publishing in Montgomery, coined the name and with that Southern Writers Reading had breath in its lungs. Some say they forgot about the Iron Bowl, and some say they didn’t give a damn, but either way, the group scheduled their first event for the weekend before Thanksgiving. Eventually, the Alabama-Auburn game was moved to another weekend. Sonny swears it was by the direct hand of the literary gods.

Suzanne Hudson

In time Southern Writers Reading established the reputation of being the launching pad for new writers, new Southern voices, none more eloquent than that of Suzanne Hudson.

Hudson, a Brewton girl, described Sonny Brewer as a “pain in the ass” in 1976 when they were neighbors in Hillside Heights, the married student housing tract of the University of South Alabama.

“The sign had been vandalized,”recalls Hudson, “to read LSD Heights.” They took the same creative writing course in which Hudson remembers Sonny as “spot-on in the critical analysis and editing process.” More than 20 years later, he would edit her first published novel, In a Temple of Trees, which she believed had a mangled plot and lacked the raw brutality it demanded. “Sonny gave me permission to have my main character slice the throat of a man who clearly deserved it,” says Hudson, “pushing me further into the kind of territory he well knows I have always tended to visit, though usually hugging the border.”

Getting Suzanne Hudson to that first published book wasn’t for the weak. In college, she had entered a contest along with the rest of the class at Sonny’s insistence. One Southern state away, William Gay was entering the same competition, a Penthouse contest made respectable by a co-sponsorship with the National Endowment for the Arts and paying $6,500 to the winner. Hudson wanted the money. She did not want the attention.

“Suzanne was the prettiest girl in the class, kind of a hippie chick with her cutoff blue jeans and loose white t-shirts,” Sonny remembers. “Turned out, she was the best writer, too. I got my entry back within a month. They hung on to Suzanne’s. She won, and the notoriety about did her in. Rather than flaunt her talent, she buried it.”

For more than 20 years, Sonny tried in any way available to him to get Suzanne Hudson to write. “It involved a lot of red-faced yelling and creative cussing,” recalls Hudson. “Expansive hyperbole and stomping and slamming and swearing off our friendship forevermore into eternity. Only the swearing off didn’t take.”

“No way, I was going to be a partner in that crime,” explains Sonny. “Not when time and fate brought me to an editor’s chair at a couple of magazines and an anthology or two. There was nothing noble about it. When I tugged on Suzanne’s jean pocket and walked away with an essay or poem or short story, I was earning my paycheck.”

William Gay wrote that Suzanne Hudson “writes like a fallen angel. Her characters have one foot in heaven and the other in hell.” Her follow-up novel, In the Dark of the Moon, is an epic tale set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement, a book that led Silas House to call her “the female Larry Brown” and First Draft magazine to compare her to William Faulkner. Sonny Brewer simply said, “I told you so.”

Doug Crandell

When an editor at MacAdam Cage recommended that Doug Crandell, a writer from Georgia, contact Sonny, Crandell remembers Sonny’s response as “quick and encouraging,” although all the spots were taken for the third volume of Blue Moon Café, an anthology of Southern Writers Reading alumni. Crandell went to hear Sonny read from the collection at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, making a point to meet him. “It was like he was family,” remembers Crandell, “Within months, he emailed me asking if I had anything for Blue Moon Café Four.”
With support, advice, and encouragement from Sonny, Doug Crandell published his first book, Pig Boy’s Wicked Bird in 2004. Thrilled (and perhaps not quite right in his mind) upon becoming a published author, Crandell had the ISBN tattooed on his right bicep. Crandell, 2008’s Georgia Author of the Year and now with four published works to his credit, says, “I’ll never be able to repay him. What consoles me is that there are so many others who won’t be able to either.”

The Festival

Southern Writers Reading 2008 in Fairhope holds the same promise, the same literary redemption, as the nine that have come before. This year’s roster for Saturday, November 22nd, includes Tasha Alexander, Ravi Howard, Carolyn Jourdan, Tom Kimmel, Marcus Sakey, and Tito Perdue, whom the New York Press called “one of the most important Southern writers we have.”

Friday night November 21st will find the alumni—the family cobbled together by Sonny Brewer—reading and laughing and exchanging their books on the grounds of the Fairhope Public Library the way most reunion-goers exchange pictures of babies. They will gather, this year and in the years to come, to be counted among the members of that family of Southern Writers Reading, the legacy of published stories and the whispered secrets of the ones they don’t want told.

They will come to see Sonny Brewer. And, if their mommas raised them right, to say ‘thank you.’