Tom Poland, A Southern Writer

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

A personal note to my readers:

In June 2009 my sister, Debra, bumped into my hometown paper’s news editor and photographer, Jacquelyn Johnson. Two years earlier the Lincoln Journal had published a feature of mine about a remarkable family reunion. Jacquelyn, fond of that feature, asked my sister a question. “Do you think your brother would write a weekly column for us … for free?”

My sister relayed Jacquelyn’s question to me. I thought about writing columns for the folks back home as a way of moving back to all things familiar. Another thing played on my mind. I’ve always advised my students to write on a regular basis. I took my own advice. “Why not,” I told my sister.

I sat down one day and began to write about the world 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 kept hearing 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 had their sense of place buried beneath the hustle and bustle of life. Do you have a sense of place, a southern sense of place?

We all need one. 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