The Cracker Kitchen

Pat Conroy

It was my great friend Doug Marlette who first brought me news of the amazing Florida novelist Janis Owens. He had met her at a book festival when he was publishing his first novel, The Bridge, and called to tell me he had found a new best friend for both of us. He was reading her first novel, My Brother Michael, and he didn't understand why Janis Owens wasn't famous.When I asked what was so great about her, Doug mentioned her pure authenticity, her comfortableness in her own skin, and her amazing gifts at storytelling. As Doug knew, I have a primordial attraction to the storytellers of the world. I ordered her three novels that night, and by the time I met Janis, I had read My Brother Michael, Myra Sims, and The Schooling of Claybird Catts. The three novels were an astonishment and a dilemma for me. She wrote about the hookwormed, xenophobic redneck South that has received such incessant ridicule in the literature of the South (including my ... read full excerpt from: Cracker Kitchen: A Cookbook in Celebration of Cornbread-Fed, Down Home Family Stories and Cuisine ebook