Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and

Host: The porch of the old farmhouse creaked under the weight of evening. Cicadas hummed in the humid air, their voices blending with the slow rustle of wind through pine. Beyond the porch, the fields stretched toward a violet horizon — wide, heavy with memory, the kind that makes silence feel inherited.

The light from inside the house spilled through the screen door — warm, gold, filled with the faint scent of coffee and old paper. On the small table between two wooden chairs lay a book of poems, its pages marked by sweat and curiosity.

Jack sat in one of those chairs, his boots dusty, his sleeves rolled up, his grey eyes half-lost in the landscape. He looked like a man born to work the land but trapped in the questions it raised.

Jeeny sat across from him, barefoot, her hair loose, a notebook open on her lap. Her eyes glowed with the kind of thought that comes not from intellect alone, but from wonder — that Southern kind of wonder that smells of magnolia and ghosts.

Somewhere in the background, an old radio played faintly — an academic voice reciting lines from a recent lecture:
"Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques." — Robert Morgan

The voice faded, replaced by static, but the words hung in the thick summer air like heat.

Jeeny: “That’s the South in a nutshell, isn’t it? The stories bleed into everything — even the poems.”

Jack: “You think it’s a good thing? That poetry borrows the weight of fiction?”

Jeeny: “Not borrows. Honors. You can’t live here and not feel haunted by language. Every word drips with history — pain, pride, contradictions. The poets just breathe it differently.”

Jack: “So you’re saying every poem down here has ghosts in it.”

Jeeny: “Of course. Faulkner gave us ghosts that walked with the living. Welty gave us the warmth in small tragedies. O’Connor gave us the grotesque grace. And all of it — all of it — still echoes in every Southern poem worth reading.”

Host: The porch light buzzed softly. Moths circled the bulb, drunk on its glow. The smell of wet earth rose from the field where the rain had fallen earlier.

Jack: “You know, I used to think poetry was about escape — a way out of all this weight. But now I see it’s the opposite. It’s a way of carrying it.”

Jeeny: “Exactly. Down here, words don’t escape the dirt — they grow out of it.”

Jack: “That’s the problem. Everything beautiful here still smells of decay.”

Jeeny: “That’s what makes it beautiful. The South doesn’t pretend to be clean. It knows rot is part of the truth.”

Host: Her words lingered, the way summer air holds onto warmth long after sunset. Jack tilted his head back, looking at the stars just beginning to tremble into being.

Jack: “You think that’s what Morgan meant — ‘values and techniques’? The way the South tells its stories? Layered, circular, guilty, gorgeous?”

Jeeny: “Yes. We don’t write straight lines here. We spiral — like kudzu climbing around its own stem. Our stories return to themselves. They always do.”

Jack: “Because they can’t leave.”

Jeeny: “Because they shouldn’t.”

Host: The screen door creaked as the wind moved through. A page of Jeeny’s notebook flipped over, exposing a poem scrawled in ink — unfinished, restless.

Jack: “Read it.”

Jeeny: “It’s not done.”

Jack: “Neither’s the South.”

Host: She smiled — small, knowing — then read, her voice soft but firm, like a hymn learned by heart.

Jeeny:
“Here, grief wears cotton,
and faith smells like soil.
We plant what we love,
and bury it twice —
once in the ground,
once in memory.”

Jack: (after a pause) “That sounds like Welty.”

Jeeny: “Or like anyone who’s ever loved this place and tried to forgive it.”

Jack: “You think poetry forgives?”

Jeeny: “No. It remembers kindly.”

Host: The crickets grew louder, their song steady and ancient. The porch light flickered once, as if even the electricity respected the quiet weight of her words.

Jack: “You know, it’s strange. Faulkner wrote of men chasing ghosts. O’Connor wrote of souls trying to escape them. Welty wrote of women who learned to live with them. And now we — we write from what they left us.”

Jeeny: “Inheritance and guilt.”

Jack: “And grace.”

Jeeny: “Always grace.”

Host: The air shifted. The night deepened. Fireflies flickered along the field like punctuation marks in an unfinished sentence.

Jack: “You think those values — the ones Morgan talked about — still matter? In a world that moves too fast to listen?”

Jeeny: “Maybe more than ever. Because those values weren’t just Southern. They were human. Deep attention. Moral struggle. The tension between beauty and brutality. We’ve traded those for irony and speed.”

Jack: “So poetry becomes a kind of resistance.”

Jeeny: “Exactly. A slower truth in a loud world.”

Jack: “You sound like my grandmother. She used to say the land remembers more than we do.”

Jeeny: “It does. That’s why the poetry here breathes like the land — patient, stubborn, unashamed of its wounds.”

Host: The thunder rolled faintly in the distance — not a storm, but a reminder. The earth clearing its throat.

Jeeny: “You know what I love about Southern writers? They never separate the sacred from the ordinary. A broken chair and a baptism can live in the same paragraph.”

Jack: “Because down here, salvation needs mud.”

Jeeny: “And poetry gives it form.”

Host: Jack picked up the worn poetry book between them, flipping through its pages — the edges soft from years of touch. He paused at a dog-eared section, reading aloud without looking up.

Jack: “‘We tell stories because the world forgets too easily. We write poems because we forget too slowly.’”

Jeeny: “That’s not Faulkner.”

Jack: “No. That one’s yours. You wrote it in the margin.”

Jeeny: (smiling faintly) “Then I guess I’ve learned from the right ghosts.”

Host: The moon climbed higher, silvering the fields, the chairs, their faces. For a moment, the porch felt like a chapel — the land itself their scripture, the cicadas their choir.

Jack: “So maybe Morgan was right. The poets here don’t just reflect the greats — they continue them. They speak in the same language, but softer.”

Jeeny: “And maybe one day someone will say the same of us.”

Jack: “Writers?”

Jeeny: “Witnesses.”

Host: The night settled completely now — heavy, humid, holy in its stillness. The book lay open between them, its pages glowing faintly in the light.

And as the wind moved through the pines, it carried with it the whisper of a lineage — not of blood, but of spirit.

Because Robert Morgan had understood something eternal:
that literature, like land, roots itself in memory,
that every poem grows from soil turned over by others,
and that every generation of writers
inherits both the wounds and the wonder
of those who came before.

Host: On that porch — in that quiet hour — Jack and Jeeny sat as the latest echoes of that long tradition,
their silence not empty, but full —
the hush before the next line is written.