St. Simons Memoir

Eugenia Price

Description

Her joyous remembrance of her first decade on an enchanted island

And of those cherished friends who inspired her best-selling trilogy, Lighthouse, New Moon Rising, and Beloved Invader. After only a few golden hours on Georgia’s St. Simons Island, Eugenia Price longed to make it her home. Even though she loved her old town house in Chicago, and her busy writing and lecturing schedule, the shadow-streaked, light-filled place had cast its spell and would not let her go. The reader, too, will feel the Island’s magic as Genie describes her odyssey with her friend Joyce Blackburn from the urban North to Southern small-town community life and peace.

With deep affection and humor she shares her many friendships—with “the first six,” the elderly folk who gave her their love, their stories, and their memories so that she could write her novels of St. Simons; with her beloved editor, Tay Hohoff, who encouraged and goaded her; and with all the other people who helped with her writing and with the building of her Island home in the midst of the “dear dark woods.”

Although she had been uncertain at first of her welcome to St. Simons, she later experienced the rare privilege of having the Island name a day in her honor.

These intimate pages are also filled with Genie’s quiet faith in God and her eternal gratitude for His grace in sending her to St. Simons. She calls her book a memoir, but it is more than that. It is a thanksgiving celebration of life and of its surprising goodness even in the midst of sorrow and loss. So that she can exclaim to Joyce, “How could life be better than it is right now?”

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Personal Memoirs
• Christian Living
• Philosophie et théologie
• Eugenia Price
• St. Simons, Georgia
• Île de Saint-Simon
• Georgia

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 27 avril 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781684427147
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

St. Simons Memoir
Books by EUGENIA PRICE
FICTION
Maria
Don Juan McQueen
The Beloved Invader
New Moon Rising
Lighthouse
NONFICTION
St. Simons Memoir
No Pat Answers
Learning to Live from the Acts
Learning to Live from the Gospels
The Unique World of Women
Just As I Am
Make Love Your Aim
The Wider Place
God Speaks to Women Today
What Is God Like?
Find Out for Yourself
A Woman s Choice
Beloved World
Woman to Woman
Share My Pleasant Stones
Early Will I Seek Thee
Never a Dull Moment
The Burden Is Light!
Discoveries
St. Simons Memoir
The Personal Story of Finding the Island and Writing the St. Simons Trilogy of Novels
EUGENIA PRICE
Turner Publishing Company
Nashville, Tennessee
www.turnerpublishing.com
Copyright 1978, 2020 Eugenia Price
St. Simons Memoir
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, [phone], fax [phone]. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to Turner Publishing Company, 4507 Charlotte Avenue, Suite 100, Nashville, Tennessee, [phone], fax [phone], E-mail: [e-mail] .
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and the author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
Cover design: Bruce Gore
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Upon Request
9781684427123 paperback
9781684427130 hardback
9781684427147 ebook
For the Goulds of St. Simons, with love and gratitude
Contents
Part One
THE FIRST SIX
Part Two
INTERIM
Part Three
THE BELOVED INVADER
Part Four
THE DODGE
Part Five
NEW MOON RISING
Part Six
LIGHTHOUSE
Photograph sections follow pages 64 and 160 .
PART ONE

The First Six

G ENIE is only half here, I heard Joyce Blackburn tell someone in the crowd around the table where I was autographing in a Tampa, Florida, bookstore on December 1, 1961. Don t get me wrong. She s enjoying all this, but her mind is back on an island we ve just found off the coast of Georgia. She believes she may have found the idea for a novel to be laid there.
I heard a man ask which island.
St. Simons, Joyce said, her voice showing her own excitement. It s the most beautiful and romantic spot either of us has ever seen!
Without turning around, I smiled to myself as I went on signing my new 1961 title and talking to those in the line before my table. St. Simons Island was probably not really the most beautiful, romantic spot either of us had ever seen, but something had happened there to us both.
At that point, some old friends greeted me and I lost the remainder of Joyce s conversation with the unseen gentleman, except to hear her exclaim, She ll be beside herself when I give her the names you ve written down. We do thank you!
Joyce Blackburn, also a writer, is my best friend and housemate. My then current title, Beloved World: The Story of God and People , was just out, and my publisher had retained Joyce to travel with me during a promotion tour that had stretched from Friday, November 3, where it began in a store near our home in Chicago, on to Iowa, Ohio, and West Virginia, and south into Florida.
For the first time in the seven years during which I d done autographing parties, I began wishing that this one would end or that I could escape long enough to steal a few words with Joyce. Having overheard that scrap of talk about St. Simons Island, my heart raced. The crowd didn t diminish for at least another hour, and when the afternoon finally ended, the nice people who ran the store escorted us to our car and stood talking for a while about the obvious success of the new book and the party, so that we were en route back to our motel before I had a chance to question her. What, what, what! What did that man say about St. Simons Island? Who is he? What does he know about it? What names did he give you?
Joyce is normally a controlled person-a good thing, since I tend to soar at the slightest provocation. His name, she said, is Mr. Mort Funkhouser, and he grew up on St. Simons or spent vacations there as a child-I was so surprised when he told me, I m not sure which. But he loves it too and he told me about two ladies he said could really help us with research for your novel-Mrs. N. C. Young and another lady whose name he couldn t remember, but she s the postmistress.
It was the sixties-their beginning. Tension was mounting in the United States between North and South. For a moment, I felt a touch of panic. Georgia is different from Florida, isn t it? Do they hate Yankees in Georgia?
I was born into a state, West Virginia, formed out of the violence of the Civil War-formed to fight proudly, as my history teachers had drummed into me-with the Northern cause. For more than thirty years, I d lived and worked in Chicago, with a time in New York during World War II, and yet suddenly my heart was on St. Simons Island, a part of a state I d never seen before that trip. A state I d never thought about, really; at that point, I hadn t even read Gone with the Wind! Anyway, according to our press in Chicago, cars with northern license plates were suspect in some southern states. If the people of St. Simons turned us away, I felt as though my heart would break! Joyce had lived as a teenager in Virginia, and her parents lived there long after she began to work in Chicago radio. She gave me a knowing smile and said nothing. What did she know about Southerners that I didn t know? Did she honestly believe these two ladies would receive us and help with our otherwise blind research for a novel already tormenting my imagination? I had felt completely accepted by the shadowy woods of St. Simons, by the little white church under its sheltering oaks at the north end of the Island. I had felt-strangely at home. But what about those two ladies who might hold the key to my story? What if they resented questions? What if they thought of us as invaders?
In the few days since finding St. Simons, we had done a party at Effie Sutton s bookstore in Jacksonville, Florida, and another with our friends the Constables in Ft. Lauderdale. Now the Tampa party, too, was behind us, and we looked forward to several days of rest before we were due in Charlotte, North Carolina, then Statesville the following week. No matter how we would be received, we were free to head my white 1959 Pontiac Bonneville back across Florida to the simple, shadow-streaked, light-filled Island I already loved.
Don t worry about how we ll be received, Joyce said when we reached our Tampa motel. Southern hospitality is no myth. That I know. Get a good sleep now, so that we can start early.
She was right, of course. No point in worrying. We were going back for four or five days-time enough to learn how the Island people took to us and whether or not they would cooperate in research for the novel I wanted so much to write. The novel about an island which was about to change both our lives.

But I, who normally fall asleep within a minute or two after I ve closed whatever book I m reading, lay awake a long time that night trying to evaluate what might be happening to us. The nearest description I could find for the inner excitement I was experiencing in what I considered a rather orderly life was that it was very like falling in love. Not just my writer s brain but my emotions, too, were transported. Wasn t that a somewhat foolish way to feel about a mere place? And why this particular place? I had crisscrossed the entire country numerous times, I had loved many other spots I d seen, but the spell of St. Simons Island did not let me go.
Since finding the Island, I d done three busy autographing parties, along with their accompanying TV, radio, and press interviews. I felt I had expressed myself adequately about my new title, Beloved World . My passion for St. Simons Island had in no way dimmed my enthusiasm for the new book, in which I d written all the way through the Bible-had told the story of God and people-somewhat in the style of a novel. Without a doubt, it had been the most challenging work I d undertaken to date. I had seemed compelled to do it. The Bible is a collection of books, but the strong cord of God s love for people binds them together into the most engrossing narrative of all time. Had that piece of writing turned my mind once more to novels? Was that at least part of the reason for this inner excitement? Writing these lines as I am in 1977, I know that it was. Plainly, an old dream was stirring.
In my teens, I had longed to become a novelist. During the years between, that dream had faded. It was once more vivid as I lay awake in the Tampa motel. No two ways about it, I meant to find out if I could become a novelist. There is a wide world of difference between writing nonfiction, as I had done in all my books to date, and actually constructing a novel-even with historical records to follow. I was then contracted