Today we’d like to introduce you to Pamela Terry.
Hi Pamela, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
After 15 years as an interior designer, I picked up a lifelong passion for writing and started a blog called From the House of Edward. Before I knew it, the blog had an international following and was picked by London’s Telegraph as one of the Top Ten Home Blogs. After a few years of essay writing on the blog, I wanted to try my hand at a novel, something I’d dreamed of doing since childhood. No one was more delighted than I was when this novel, entitled The Sweet Taste of Muscadines was published by Random House/Ballantine in 2021.
My second book, When the Moon Turns Blue came out in February of this year, and I am currently at work on my third. Life is a fascinating journey.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I was fortunate to have a writer friend, Patti Callahan Henry, who believed in my work and offered to introduce me to some respected agents when I finished my first novel. This resulted in my signing with my brilliant New York agent, who submitted the book to Random House. They purchased The Sweet Taste of Muscadines within two weeks of submission. This is unusual and sounds incredibly easy. While I’m grateful to have been spared the arduous road of rejections writers often travel, I can say that the difficult part of writing is always finding the bravery to try something that sounds, and often is, such a long shot. I think the key is to not care if you’re published but to keep as your goal the desire to create something true, something only you can write. If you manage to do that and keep your own voice in the process, that is the real success. Publishing is the just the icing on the cake.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I have been called a “Southern Writer”, something to be expected, I suppose, when the title of your first book contains the word “Muscadines”. It is difficult to take offense at that label when I look at the long line of writers before me who also proudly wore it. Even if I’m hanging onto the bottom rung of a ladder that includes O’Connor and Welty, Faulkner, Hurston, and Lee… well, I’m more than happy to be included.
Southern Writers have their own category in American literature and I’ve thought a lot about the reason for that. We are known for our sense of place, our unique way with the language, and our tendency to lay bare that part of our history that continues to cause such perplexity and pain. The South’s homegrown writers have to reckon and wrestle with the essential paradox of America in a way that the rest of the country does not.
What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
The tumult of the past half-decade has resulted, I think, in much more diversity in publishing, and I’m so happy to see it. Literature is one of the most effective pathways to empathy, and hearing from a wider variety of voices can only make us better people, both individually and collectively.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://www.pamelaterry.net
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pamelaandedward/
Image Credits
The ones of me are by Pat Terry
