This month's program features University of Georgia English professor James Everett Kibler, who joins St.John Flynn in the studio to talk and take listener calls about his latest novel Memory's Keep (Pelican Publishing, 2006), the second in his Clay Bank County trilogy.

Set in the mid-1970s in rural South Carolina, Memory's Keep is the story of Mister Pink Suber, a 94-year-old black man who still tends the farm his family has worked on as servants since the 1800s. His children moved away after his wife died, but he goes on farming his land and passing along to his young neighbor, 27-year-old Trig Tinsley, the ways of farming and of life.

From the Book Jacket

Written in the loose style of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales or Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Memory's Keep is a nostalgic and bittersweet flashback, revealing the formative experiences of Trig Tinsley, the unforgettable curmudgeon at the center of Walking Toward Home, Kibler's first novel in his Clay Bank County trilogy. The novel exceeds Trig's individual life, taking us back over a century and a half ago to a time when daily life was more tangibly tied to the land.

Kibler is known for his lyrical and poignant tales of Southern agrarianism and his critical examinations of the modern world. Memory's Keep explores these themes in the story of Mister Pink Suber, whose five children have moved away after the death of his wife. Alone, he goes on tending his land and livestock while mentoring his young neighbor and friend Trig Tinsley in the ways of farming and life.

It is his deep love for the land and the sensibilities of Celtic imagination that inform us in Kibler's writing, gently and accurately revealing the Agrarian vision.

About the Author

Born and raised in upcountry South Carolina, James Everett Kibler spends much of his spare time tending to the renovation of an 1804 plantation home and the reforestation of the surrounding acreage. This home served as the subject of his first book, Our Fathers' Fields: A Southern Story (University of South Carolina Press, 1998), for which he was awarded the prestigious Fellowship of Southern Writers Award for Nonfiction in 1999.

After receiving his B.A. from the University of South Carolina, he went on to earn his Ph.D. He currently serves as a professor of English at the University of Georgia in Athens, where he teaches a popular course on Southern literature.

Kibler's poetry has been honored by the Poetry Society of South Carolina and has appeared in publications throughout the country. In addition to being awarded the Fellowship Award in 1999, Our Fathers' Fields was honored with the Southern Heritage Society's Award for Literary Achievement. In October 2004, the League of the South bestowed on him the Jefferson Davis Lifetime Achievement Award.

Child to the Waters, a collection of touching and poignant Southern fables set near the Tyger River, highlights the values of familial unity, continuity, and rootedness, as well as the Celtic background of Southerners. Through this book, the author aims to reveal the musical beauty of Southern speech and dispel common assumptions about the language of his culture.

Kibler's novel Walking Toward Home is by turns humorous, satiric, and poignant and peopled by true individuals who have grown wise from experience. Though they have all been knocked low, they have continued to walk on.

Kibler divides his time between Whitmire, South Carolina, and Athens, Georgia. He continues to pursue his true passion: the study of Southern history and culture.

Praise for James Everett Kibler and Memory's Keep

• "James Kibler makes no bones about it. Memory's Keep is an all-out, full-hearted, sentimental paean to the golden days that were, or might have been, or surely should have been. Anyone who likes the smell of newly turned April dirt, of green fields simmering in summer heat, of freshly planed walnut, will love every page of this fondly authored book."-Fred Chappell, author of I Am One of You Forever
  
  
• "Kibler has developed a theme that has long defined both Southern history and literature: the deep, metaphysical connection between the Southern character and temperament and the natural world."-Walter Sullivan, author of Nothing Gold Can Stay: A Memoir
  
  
• "In James Everett Kibler we find a member of a quickly diminishing breed: the man of letters."-Randall K. Ivey in Southern Partisan
  
  
• "In Memory's Keep, James Kibler has created a world, and remembered a world, so vivid, so real, it becomes part of the reader's world as well."-Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek