 
When I first moved to Fairhope, I wanted to hop in the car almost every evening and take a leisurely drive through the town’s oldest neighborhoods to admire the cottages nestled harmoniously beneath giant trees, some with breathtaking views of the bay. Time and time again I saw the same sign posted in front of nearly all of my favorite new or renovated homes — Walcott Adams Verneuille Architects. I later discovered that Mac Walcott, a founding member of the firm, is also a fiction writer, columnist, film producer, map collector, beekeeper, farmer, father to three children, and husband to Gina (also an architect and founding member of their firm). Through this unique perspective, he’s helping to preserve not only the appearance but also the personality of a town founded as a single-tax colony for true-hearted free-thinkers. Watt Key Watt Key, 36, grew up in rural Point Clear, often envying his Mobile friends who seemed to have many childhood playmates. “Though there are definitely some advantages to growing up in a place where you typically have to use imagination to entertain yourself,” Key says, “I know it helped me as a writer.” Key didn’t set out to write his debut novel, Alabama Moon, as a children’s book, but that’s how it’s classified. A book read and loved by both children and their parents, it seems to straddle the same place in literature as To Kill a Mockingbird. “I’m probably right where I need to be,” says Key. “I’ve realized that most of the books that stay in my head are young-adult and children’s books. Perhaps I was unknowingly imitating that genre all along. J. Wes Yoder J. Wes Yoder, 27, is Fairhope’s newest writer-in-residence at the Wolff Cottage, a cozy place to write funded by the Fairhope Center for the Writing Arts. The previous writer-in-residence was Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Bragg, who says of Yoder, “They say some people are born to write. I think this boy was.” Yoder grew up in Franklin, Tennessee, just outside of Nashville, studied journalism at Auburn University, and worked at several newspapers before moving to New York, where he wrote his debut novel, Carry My Bones. To support his fiction writing, he worked at a Ralph Lauren store in Manhattan. “Everything I have is Ralph Lauren,” he says, which accounts for his stylishness. Sonny Brewer Sonny Brewer is known in these parts as the guru of Southern literature. As the editor of the successful anthology series Stories from the Blue Moon Café, he has helped launch the writing careers of too many writers to name (I’m one of them). Once a folk singer, sailor, traveling used-tire salesman, carpenter, real estate agent, magazine editor, and bookstore owner, Brewer is now focused on his own writing career. Here he sits photographed in the curious round house that his acclaimed novel, The Poet of Tolstoy Park, helped make famous for the second time. The first time came early in the twentieth century when area poet/philosopher Henry Stuart, despite poor health, threw away his shoes (so he could always feel the earth), built the concrete house by hand, and then lived twenty years longer than doctors predicted. A film based on the book is currently in pre-production. Ravi Howard Ravi Howard, 32, has only recently moved to Mobile, but there has always been a strong connection due to childhood visits to family living in the area. “Mobile and Daphne were escapes,” Howard says. “When I was here, it was the weekend, summer vacation, or a holiday, so that, I think, shapes a place for a child.” He writes lovingly and lyrically about the area in his debut novel, Like Trees, Walking, but his writing is also methodical and mournful. The book is based on a horrific event in Mobile history — the 1981 lynching of a black teen, Michael Donald. One of the last recorded lynchings in American history, Donald was found hanging from a tree on a residential street called Herndon Avenue, now renamed Michael Donald Avenue. Howard hopes his novel will help keep the true story from becoming forgotten. Michelle Richmond Mobile is a constant presence in Michelle Richmond’s writing. Here’s a description of her hometown from her award-winning story collection, The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress: “Back home in Mobile the plush lawns blaze with pink azalea bushes, wisteria drips from the fence-posts, and it is almost too much to take in — all that color and heat.” Richmond, 36, lives now (like the narrator of her mesmerizing new novel, The Year of Fog) in another bay city, San Francisco, where she finds the fog beautiful and dramatic. But Mobile still competes for her affections. She misses Mardi Gras, thunderstorms, summer dresses, crawfish boils, and oyster bars where you can eat on a balcony over the water and toss your shells on the floor. “While San Francisco has a lot of interesting and beautiful vegetation,” she says, “Mobile is uniquely lush—down there, everything grows.” |
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