Caralee was the best writer in the MFA program. She wrote of her hard scrabble childhood in Appalachia. It was simple, but direct storytelling that the professors praised and the fellow students envied. Caralee read her work with a sweet southern drawl. Her words evoked images of sugar pine forests, burbling creeks and whisky stills. Railroad tracks and cotton fields. Red clay, and hot sticky summer days that brought afternoon thunderstorms. She wrote of the great gothic themes of the south: a mother's suicide, a sharecropping father who abused her as a child, a teenage pregnancy. It was so real, so raw and honest. She'd had a hard life, yet she spoke of simple beauty. She spoke of the carefree summer days. I return again and again to an image of her one summer afternoon, and am reminded of everything that makes the joy transcend the bad.
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