I’ve been known to slow dance with words over graves of buried prayers, drink words undiluted under the shadow of my grandfather’s whiskey bottles, lift words from where they’ve spilled around my father’s brogans. I write from the seeding syllables of my gardens, from the crumbling graves of my ancestors, from sorrow sleeping in my grandmother’s tattered Bible. I dig for stories in the soil of the southern landscape, under longleaf pines, ancient oaks dripping with Spanish moss, and in the fields of callused farmers. When the mood hits me, I extract poetry from the juice of freshly picked blackberries and haul memories from the soles of my bare feet. With the barbed-wire nouns and plural verbs of my mistakes, with the cast iron consonants and sweet, silent vowels of my mother’s kitchen, I write. But in the end, the most important thing is that I give these stories life.

Brenda Sutton Rose

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I’ll be speaking at Dooly County Library at 4:30 PM on Monday, March 27. The event is hosted by GFWC Vienna Womans Club. As a past president of Tifton’s Womans Club, I know these women well. The Vienna group is one of the best. This event is open to the public. Come hear me speak about the stories behind the stories.

In this photo I’m speaking at the Camellia House about the stories behind my short stories, giving readers a look into the writing process and the bits of truth I pulled into “Samuel’s Wife.”

Brenda speaking at Camellia House

Book cookies by Kay Ireland

Author of Dogwood Blues

https://www.amazon.com/Wiregrass-Childhood-Brenda-Sutton-Rose/dp/B0FFG3GLJC

You will find me at The Roasting Room in Bluffton, SC from 10:30 – 11:30 a.m., Monday, July 21, 2025. I’ll be speaking about Dogwood Blues and my recent novella A Wiregrass Childhood.

 

You’ll find a gallery of my oil paintings at Sutton Rose Studio.

A Wiregrass Childhood

During the early years of America, in the wiregrass country of Irwin County, Georgia, two brothers and a strange boy meet by chance in the local river that runs deep with memory and myth, history and vitality. Micah is a quiet, sensitive boy with a rare ear for music. His older brother, Isaac, watches the world with the steady eye of someone wiser than his years. And Oak, a Creek boy from a nearby village, carries the weight of his people’s stories and the silent worry of what’s to come. They didn’t mean to find each other, yet somehow it seems fated to be. Friendship grows in the hush of pine forests and the music drifting from Micah’s violin–friendship that defies the hard lines drawn between settlers and native people as they navigate a tumultuous time of tension between the Creek natives and white settles. Blending history and fiction, A Wiregrass Childhood is a tender, haunting story of connection, land, and the quiet courage of boyhood.

Brenda’s poetry, essays, and short stories have appeared in Flycatcher Magazine, Mobius: Journal of Social Change, Montucky Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Ginosko Literary Magazine, and numerous other online and print journals. She is the author of Dogwood Blues, a novel that earned her a reputation as a writer of southern fiction with a focus on the changing South and small town life. Brenda was nominated for a Georgia Author of the Year Award in 2015, a Pushcart Prize in Fiction in 2018, and a Pushcart Prize in Fiction in 2023. Her novella A Wiregrass Childhood was published by Horseman Press in April 2025. She is currently working on her second novel.

Brenda leads writing workshops and speaks at book clubs and related events. Her email is brenda@brendasuttonrose.com.

To purchase A Wiregrass Childhood, click here.

To purchase Dogwood Blues in Kindle click here.

To purchase Dogwood Blues in paperback click here.

To view her oil paintings go to Sutton Rose Studio by clicking here.

Thank you for reading! Numerous book clubs in the South invited me to their homes to speak about Dogwood Blues. I was touched by their kindness, interest in my book, insight into the themes and motifs, and the process of my writing.

To purchase Dogwood Blues on Kindle click here.

To purchase Dogwood Blues in paperback click here.

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