Tom Poland, A Southern Writer

Photo, Botany Bay Road, Edisto Island—Robert C. Clark

A personal note to my readers:

 

Having a sense of place is what my work is about. We live in a time when all places are starting to look alike. I could blindfold you and drop you in any southern city and you’d see a Home Depot, Lowes, Outback, Carrabbas, Barnes & Nobel, Chili’s, Applebees, and more, and you wouldn’t know if you were in Savannah, Augusta, Atlanta, Charlotte, Birmingham, Raleigh, or Columbia.

I decided to so something about that. I sat down one day and began to write about the South I once knew. Thus began a journey down memory lane, a trip back to my roots, and an examination of many things southern and how they are changing. My old homeland leapt from my heart to page after page.

As I wrote columns about a South long gone I began to hear from people. One reader wrote me saying, “Today’s kids know how to text and tweet and Facebook and chat on the cell phone for untold hours every day, but they don’t know a sweetgum from a hickory. …” That comment grabbed me by the collar. The feeling that I wasn’t alone began to take over me and that connection stoked my writing. Many people I discovered have their sense of place buried beneath the hustle and bustle of life. Do you have a sense of place, a southern sense of place?

I was interviewing a man for a magazine feature when I asked him, “Where are you from?”

“Nowhere,” he replied, “I’m an Army brat.”

I have a wonderful friend whose dad was a Marine fighter pilot and an ace at that. He fought at Guadalcanal. She said she moved so much as a child she didn’t try to make friends. “There was no point,” she said. “We moved all the time, and if we didn’t move, my friends did. Growing up, I always envied people who lived in one place,” she said. I find that immensely sad.

We all need a sense of place. Since I couldn’t find that old familiar place of my youth I used writing to recreate the land I came from. It’s my hope that my website, which serves up columns and features I write for journals and magazines in Georgia and South Carolina will give you a sense of place.

Welcome to Georgialina, my homeland. I know it well. I grew up on the Georgia-South Carolina border. I’ve spent my  life traveling and writing about Georgia and South Carolina and it’s been my privilege to rediscover the authentic Southland.

May this website bring you a sense of place.

Tom Poland’s work has appeared in magazines throughout the South. He’s published five books and more than 600 magazine features. His column, “Across The Savannah,” appears weekly in the Lincoln Journal. In 1996, Reckon magazine published his literary feature, “Deliver Me from Leviathan,” on James Dickey. Excerpts were published in The World As A Lie–James Dickey, the Dickey biography by Henry Hart. The University of South Carolina Press has published three of his books, most recently, Reflections of South Carolina, now in its third printing. For six years, Tom worked as a scriptwriter and cinematographer, working primarily along the South Carolina Lowcountry and its barrier islands. While filming on a primitive barrier island one evening, fog rolled in trapping him overnight. That experience led to his novel, Forbidden Island, and the mythical Georgialina. Currently, he’s awaiting publication of a book about the blues and how the music evolved to create the shag and beach music phenomenon in the Carolinas. A Lincolnton, Georgia, native and University of Georgia graduate, he lives in Columbia, South Carolina. His niece and two daughters followed him into Journalism. He’s a big fan of Macintosh computers & is a season ticket holder/supporter of the Georgia Bulldogs. 

Favorite Quotes On Writing and Creativity

Live Free, Live Wild, Live Different

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused. —Ernest Hemingway

Writing is a kind of smoke, seized and put on paper. —James Salter

All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time. —  Ernest Hemingway

Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut. —Ernest Hemingway

I never wanted to be well rounded, and I do not admire well-rounded people nor their work. So far as I can see, nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design. —Harry Crews