Bob Strother's story, "The Interloper," is currently appearing on-line in Mobius Magazine – The Journal of Social Change. "Established in 1989, Mobius strives to publish challenging fiction and poetry that deals with social change as a primary and secondary theme." Bob's story will also be published in the print version of Mobius Magazine when it comes out in June. Congratulations, Bob!

Editor's note: Apologies to Bob for not including this item in last month's Printed Matters.

Bob Strother has had another short story published. "Trade Secret" will appear in the printed version of Down In The Dirt Magazine in June, and it will soon be in the on-line version.

Down In The Dirt Magazine is published by Scars Publications, "the mother of all publishing ventures for new writers." Scars.tv bills itself as "the music, news, philosophy & literary haven with everything you want about everything cool."

See www.scars.tv and click on the "Down In The Dirt" on the sidebar.

Susan Boyer's story, "Search and Rescue," has been awarded the Editor's Choice Award in Fiction for Issue 2 of Relief: A Quarterly Christian Expression. Her work will be featured at the beginning of the issue, her name will be featured on the cover, and her work will be included in a future Editor's Choice anthology. In addition, she will receive $100.

"Relief seeks to bridge the gap between mainstream fiction and cotton-candy Christianity... The primary measuring stick for good Christian writing cannot continue to be safety. It must be skill - the ability to expose what is real, express it eloquently, punch the reader."

See Susan's photo and bio at www.reliefjournal.com, and congratulate her for a job well done!

moonShine review, the journal that has published both Kevin's and Bob's work, is looking for submissions for its summer issue. The deadline is March 1.

moonShine review publishes short fiction, flash fiction, and creative non-fiction. They publish work from anywhere, but preference is given to artists from Charlotte, NC, and the Southeast. Their goal is to bring about understanding through art and writing by providing a venue for unique voices. They are interested in work that conveys an honest and individual perspective.

For submission guidelines, see the Thrift Poetic Arts website.

Just a reminder that the South Carolina Book Festival will be held this weekend, February 24-25, at the Convention Center in Columbia. SCWW will have a table in the exhibitor's hall manned by members from around the state.

Bob Strother and John Migacz will also be there, selling their novels, Love Among the Greeks, and The Dieya Chronicles: Incident on Ravar, at their Renegade Books exhibit. Please drop by and say hello.

The Festival will feature free seminars and book signings all weekend long - a great value for the price of a parking space. For information on Book Festival events and participating authors check out www.scbookfestival.org.

After debuting his epic Sci/Fi novel, The Dieya Chronicles: Incident on Ravar at the Columbia Book Festival, John Migacz will be offering the book at the First Thursday meeting.

John says: "They make great gifts, door stops, and tasty treats - everyone should own at least ten!"

This first in the Dieya Chronicles series will sell for $14.99. Find out more at www.johnmigacz.com.

Aimee Caruso's article, "Mountains of Inspiration" was published in the March 2007 issue of Running Times, "the runner's best resource."

As Kevin Coyle mentioned in November, the first issue of The Literary Bone --containing his story, "Looking for Elves, " -- is now available for purchase or download on www.lulu.com.

In Tigerville, SC, the Blue Ridge Middle School's charity event, the 2007 Relay-For-Life Story Contest, is now accepting entries.

This story contest, as with all events for Relay-For-Life, is coordinated by volunteers. All contest fees in 2007 are donated to the fight against cancer and other diseases. Prizes have been offered.

For information and submission guidelines, please contact Mack Clarke at mackclarke@yahoo.com.

Our chapter webmaster recently made the decision to sacrifice a little bit of dazzle for a whole lot of speed. Leland Beaudrot has rebuilt the Greenville Chapter website so that it loads much more quickly than before. It still looks great, and you can easily access past issues of Printed Matters right from the page.

Elvisblog is now two years old and people have visited it over 80,000 times in that period. There was a daily record of 292 set on Elvis' birthday, January 8, 2007, and the best month was August, 2006 (the month of Elvis' death) with 5200 hits.

Dreams of conquests and adventures soared Through the mind of a young boy in sleep. The day would come when those dreams did fade As he grew, climbing mountains more steep. Gone are the rocking horse, gold sword, and shield. His helmet was still battered and scratched. Those were the toys of yesterday's glory Like many before they became attached. The young man gazed at the stars and wondered, As he chased the impossible dream. He realized later that one's life changes All those things he thought were supreme. Reality set in when his studies began, Took up a profession, and gained wealth. Education was required for the road to reward, Not to mention his prosperity and health. He reaped what he sowed to experience this path That he chose to entertain and share. 'Through sickness and health', those words he spoke When he stood with his chosen so fair. His vocation and family were his life and love, Took pride in his children's successes he'd see. The lady of his castle was most treasured over all Of his heirs, his fortune, and nobility. At times he'd look back on his golden years. First he was father, then grandpa by name. The rocking horse, shield, and gold sword long forgotten Had returned with remembrance from whence he came.

If you give a SCWW non-fiction writer 2000 words in The Pettrigru Review, they'll want 4000 words like the fiction writers.

When you give the non-fiction writers 4000 words, the fiction writers will want to double their word count like the non-fiction writers. They will want 8000 words.

The poets will want to double their total like the other writers. That means that poets will get 160 lines of poetry.

When you double everyone's word count, they'll ask for a new deadline since they need more time to write that many words. They will ask for a May or June deadline.

When they have time to write more words, all the works will be longer, and the font size will have to be reduced.

When the font size is reduced, the non-fiction writers will want bigger type because they will get fewer pages.

Then the fiction writers will want color illustrations for their work. When the fiction writers turn in color illustrations, printing costs will increase.

When the printing costs increase, the editor will ask for a fee to enter The Pettigru Review.

When they are asked for a fee, all the writers will be ticked off. This will cause the editor to tear his hair in frustration and say, "I can't do this. I quit!"

If the book isn't published, the SCWW members will ask for their dues back.

If the members ask for their dues back, the board of directors will say, "Maybe we shouldn't be so hard on the editor. If we tell him to use the original guidelines, maybe he'll come back."

If the membership gives in and agrees with the old rules, maybe the non-fiction writers won't complain this year.

But NEXT year, I am sure they will ask for the same number as the fiction writers. When will it ever end?

* With apologies to IF YOU GIVE A MOOSE A MUFFIN, by Laura Joffee Numeroff.

Heoo All:
Here are some good lines I found during my summer reading.

1. Every writer sooner or later becomes his own least intelligent disciple.
(Jean Louis Borges)

2. I have trained myself in satire, which causes diseases of the skin, including leprosy.
(Jean Louis Borges)

3. Tangiers obsesses you like an unrequited love. The city had not had a governor for six months and nobody noticed. Barbara Hutton's house had been sold. I caught a glimpse of Jean Genet at the Cafe de Paris. Elizabeth Taylor celebrated her birthday in Malcolm Forbes' palace in the Casbah. Tennessee Williams fell asleep on the doorstep of the Rue Siaghine.
And me?
What about me? Well, I'm still teaching.
(Tahar Ben Jelloun)

4. It was one of the most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from Amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.
(Edith Wharton)

5. You do not disorganize a society, however primitive it may be, with such an agenda if you are not determined from the very start to smash every obstacle encountered.
(Frantz Fannon)

6. I even knew a dog that died of indigestion from swallowing the pages of The Brothers Karamazov one afternoon.
(Carlos Dominguez)

Enjoy, Mack Clarke

Elysabeth Eldering found a site that she wanted to share with the group: www.simegen.com/romance/nuts&bolts.html . It's called the "Nuts and Bolts of Writing" and includes some pointers on creating strong, sympathetic characters, getting your characters to talk normally, naming your characters, and writing synopses and query letters.

I sped down the winding two-lane road searching desperately for the Antioch Baptist Church supposedly just outside Pauline, South Carolina. The wedding was twenty minutes hence and the best man was lost.

Boarded-up gas stations, rusted farm equipment and rotted-out barn skeletons blew by like silent reminders of a time long since gone. Buzzards scattered from their roadside repasts, screeching irritably at my intrusion.

"There's got to be someplace I can ask directions," I said, scanning the countryside.

I'd bounced over railroad tracks and careened through a curve when I spied a weathered structure with a sputtering neon sign on top and two cars in the parking lot.

As I burst through the door, an elderly lady gasped from behind the counter and asked timidly, "C-Can I help you, sir?"

"Yes, ma'am," I said. "Where in the hell am I?"

She pointed to the faded sign above her head and said with trembling lips, "Dairy Queen?"

Bob Strother kicked things off with the second half of his story "Bobby and Me and Five-Cent Cigars." In 1955 Chattanooga, Tennesee, white, ten-year-old Bobby inadvertently insults his black friend Bobby G. by using a racist term in describing a janitor at his school. After an awkward hour of silence while they both work in Bobby's grandmother's store, Bobby takes a couple of Tampa Jewel cigars out of the tobacco case and invites Bobby G. to go up on the roof to smoke. After wondering how to apologize, Bobby realizes that Bobby G. never calls him by name - "He called my grandmother "Miss Louise" - Lon "Mister Lon"- But he'd never called me anything. Maybe he didn't know what to call me. I was probably the only white boy he'd ever spent any time with." Bobby tells Bobby G. that he'd like it if he'd call him Bobby. Then he apologizes for what he said earlier, and says, "I just forgot, I guess - about you being colored, I mean." Bobby G. replies, "Well, that's not such a bad thing, I recon, that you forgot I was colored." The two boys end up by agreeing that "this is a pretty good five-cent cigar."

In an essay titled "Teutonic Memories," Russ Haddad presented a collage of images culled from the three years he spent in the Army stationed in West Germany between 1965 and 1968. There were stories about the diminutive size of Italian ice cream cones, and the horror of a young female clerk who gave Russ change containing an old WWI Nazi coin that was supposed to have been melted down and restamped. There were also stories of an Oktoberfest joke and teaching "Home on the Range" to a crowd of guests at a Bavarian inn. Russ had even more tales stuffed into his five-page essay - too many to relate here!

Jim McFarlane's Penelope spent the day in church. While holding herself rigidly still to avoid being disciplined by her future mother-in-law Mother Prince, Penelope considers the church and its congregation. "Penelope thought about the five women on her row - Old Mrs. Prince, Miss Prince, young Mrs. Prince, future Mrs. Prince, Miss Prince. Was this English naming habit designed to lump all the women together, to deny them their individuality?" "She didn't recall St. Paul forbidding a pew with a back for the three-hour service." "For a congregation that was suppoosed to enjoy the love of Jesus, they seemed overmuch concerned with undeserved suffering than with the joy of living." "The beliefs of this congregation seemed to be shrinking to a smaller and smaller ideology. All thought alike because they disciplined each other for thinking differently. A rut of conformity." In the end, Penelope concludes that "she and Matthew must find a place where they could live freely without fear of corruption. Or the accusation of corruption."

In John Kingsbury's novel, Jesus' Lap, Paige speaks with a therapist named Martha King. It's their third meeting, but the first time Paige has been inclined to discuss the accident. She describes how her car hit another and how the passenger, named Gloria, wasn't wearing a seat belt and ended up laying on Paige's windshield. "Paige looked into Martha King's eyes and saw depth. A depth of understanding that surprised her. An understanding that was a comfort." "It seemed like it would be so hard to tell and yet it was so easy. It was just so hard to live with."

John Migacz read a flash fiction story called "The Locked Door." It's about the last man on earth. It would take more words to describe the story than the 96 words in the piece, so I'll leave it to your imagination.

Newcomer David Burnsworth read part of the first chapter of his mystery novel, Palmetto Heat. The story takes place in 1987 in Charleston. Two security guards working third shift in a security hut for Charleston Port are keeping each other awake by discussing their experiences at a fancy restaurant in town. A van pulls up, one guard goes out to investigate and is shot with a tranquilizer. The second guard is tranquilized in the hut. Later it is learned that the occupants of the van don't steal any of the large amount of expensive merchandise at the port - they only take documents from a safe.

Barbara Dougan read for the first time at SCWW. Her story, "Reunion" takes place at the 35th reunion of the high school Class of '71 in the Liberty Hotel ballroom up north. Pam and her husband are separated, and she gets through her days by fantasizing about a brainy, chess-playing friend from high school named Joe. As hoped, Joe appears at the reunion. Studying him from across the room, Pam thinks that "Joe would be untethered. He would also have had a rather humdrum life and be looking for adventure, something Pam was looking for too. As for how he looked, she didn't care whether he was gray or bald, fit or overweight, as long as his eyes still flashed when he grinned." She gets herself a gin and tonic, and heads over to greet Joe and his friends. When she says hi, "there was the roguish grin."

Kevin Coyle finished up with more from his novel, The Saga of Snorri the Priest. The four children who did not go back to camp follow Ospak to the place where he claims to have seen a dragon. It turns out to be a strange bird. They chase it until they enter a grove overgrown with vines and discover "a dark shape almost twenty-five feet across and more than that high, with eight legs each taller than a man." They scream, "Dragon!" and go running back down the hill. The next morning, a scouting party finds that the "dragon" is actually a man-made round tower constructed from unworked granite fieldstones and mortar. None of the men can determine who built the tower. They see that there's a fireplace on the upper level, and decide that it may have been used as a beacon for approaching ships. They name the place Stopullborg, or "Tower Hill" and Snorri says that they should use the tower as a lookout. Someone asks, "Do you really think that's necessary?" Snorri replies, "Until we make peace with the Skraelings, we can't be too careful."

The next meetings of the Greenville Chapter of SCWW are as follows:

• Thursday, March 1 - First Thursday Meeting, 6:00 p.m. at The Open Book
• Tuesday, March 20 - Third Tuesday Meeting, 6:00 p.m. at The Open Book

All genres welcome at both meetings. Suggested limit for reading selections is five double-spaced, typed pages, although longer selections may be possible if time permits.

The Open Book, 110 S Pleasantburg Drive, Greenville, SC

The "Solid South" is a myth. Dissenting viewpoints thrive like kudzu in Southern clay. This is no less true in South Carolina, described by James Louis Petigru as "too small to be a republic and too large to be an insane asylum." To celebrate the Palmetto State's history of intellectual diversity, the SCWW's new-and-improved literary journal, The Petigru Review, is named in honor of our state's most vocal member of the "loyal opposition."

Born into a marginal Upstate farming family in 1798, Petigru rose to prominence among the social elite of Charleston. Along the way, he established himself as an educator, teaching at the Columbia Academy and Beaufort College before gaining admittance to the South Carolina bar. He served on the board of trustees of the College of Charleston and his alma mater: South Carolina College, now the University of South Carolina. He supported Charleston's Literary and Philosophical Society and the Southern Review, and helped found the South Carolina Society for the Advancement of Learning and the South Carolina Historical Society. His law office was known as a home for aspiring lawyers—about one tenth of all attorneys admitted to practice in this state between 1825 and 1860 had "read the law" as his apprentices. To Petigru, education was "the most important subject for society; not for the individual only, but to the community." He championed public schools as a means of cultivating intellectual independence, necessary for democracy's survival. As he so eloquently stated: "[W]hat hope is there for the human race when there is no minority?"

Putting his democratic principles into practice, Petigru served as South Carolina's attorney general, a Charleston city councilor, and a member of the state legislature. An ardent Unionist, Petigru's loyalty to the U.S. Constitution never wavered during the Nullification Crisis despite the opinions of his family, friends, and constituents about the hated federal tariff. He condemned South Carolina's Nullification Ordinance, writing that it was "monstrous to contend that the framers of the Constitution did not invest the General Government with full power to execute [its] own laws, or that without such a power Union can exist."

With the demise of his political career in 1838, Petigru continued to advance unpopular positions in his legal practice. He represented the British consul in Charleston in his efforts to free his nation's black sailors imprisoned under South Carolina's Negro Seamen's Acts. Petigru argued that the Negro Seamen's Acts violated the Constitution's Supremacy Clause because such laws undermined treaties with Great Britain guaranteeing the rights of its citizens. He also represented a Massachusetts Abolitionist who had been flogged under the lynch law as punishment for alleged theft. Petigru filed suit against his client's accusers, arguing that these five Lowcountry gentlemen—motivated by loathing for a "low Yankee"—had violated his client's due-process rights. In 1854, the jury awarded Petigru's client $2,500, a remarkable sum at the time.

After South Carolina seceded from the Union on December 20, 1860, Petigru lamented that he had seen "the last happy day of [his] life." An isolated Unionist living in the "hotbed of secession," he might have expected ostracism or worse. But a lifetime of earning the respect of his political opponents would not fade so quickly. Mary Chestnut, the famed Civil War diarist, admired Petigru's "astounding pluck," which "raised him in the estimation of the people he flouts and contradicts in their tenderest points." When Petigru defied Confederate confiscation laws by refusing—on grounds of attorney-client privilege—to inform against those of his Northern clients who owned property in the state, many of his legal colleagues joined in his protest. Upon his death on March 9, 1863, both North and South eulogized him, and almost the entire Confederate officer corps stationed in Charleston attended his funeral.

This is not to say that the man was a saint. Petigru had a violent temper, was an inattentive husband, and—like many wealthy Southern men of his time—he owned slaves. But these moral failings have not diminished his value to South Carolinians as a symbol of dissent. In 1970, liberal USC law students formed the Petigru Society. The society's goals included inviting to campus guest speakers with diverse perspectives and recruiting African-American and female law-school applicants in the hope of changing the mostly white-male composition of the state bar. The society's members "were perceived as radicals" for advocating such "wild and crazy things," said Robert N. Rosen, a Petigru Society founder. According to Rosen, a Charleston native and author of several history books including The Jewish Confederates, Petigru is "not only South Carolina's greatest lawyer, but a man of principle who opposed secession, defended slaves and poor blacks, and was a shining example of what a lawyer should be."

No doubt Petigru's "shining example" inspired his rebellious daughter, Susan Petigru King. She made a literary career out of poking fun at prominent Charlestonians in her novels and short stories, much to the chagrin of polite society. In 1994, she was inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors. We hope that SCWW members will be similarly inspired by Petigru's "radical" legacy to create written works that challenge the mainstream and educate readers about the underrepresented points of view that our state has to offer.

Kevin Coyle
Co-Editor, The Petigru Review

Printed Matters is the newsletter of the Greenville Chapter of South Carolina Writers Workshop.

Please forward critiques, comments, ideas, and submissions to Printed Matters Editor Marcia Migacz at marciamigacz@prtcnet.com.

Thanks to our contributing writers and news reporters:
Phil Arnold, Aimee Caruso, Russ Haddad, Pat Stewart, Mack Clarke,
Elysabeth Eldering, Bob Strother (twice!), and Kevin Coyle

Copyright 2007 by Marcia Migacz, Editor. Contributing writers retain all rights to their work.

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