From creative slump to Southern folk horror: the writing assignment that revived me

When we find ourselves in creative slumps, it can be hard to imagine ever finding our way back to the page. But sometimes, all it takes is the right class, the right teacher, or the right community to reignite our passion for writing. For me, that community was mystery writer Tom Kies’ creative writing class at Carteret Community College, where I found a group of supportive writers and a renewed sense of purpose.

After our very first class, I wrote a scene that would later become the seed for my current WIP, a Southern folk horror novel I lovingly call Queen Hag. While the scene has evolved beyond recognition, it remains a testament to the power of community, inspiration, and the creative spark that can come from unexpected places. To celebrate Carteret Writers’ forty-year anniversary and our upcoming conference (where Tom will be presiding as MC), I present to you the scene that revived my creative spirit.

Great-aunt Hazel couldn’t have picked a better time to die. The tugboat Savannah had been squatting on for the past year had sprung a leak several weeks back. Every day, the brackish brown water skulked closer to the gunwale. A long, mud-covered alligator had taken up residence in the jungle-dense inlet alongside the boat. It grinned in toothy anticipation.

All her hustles had dried up. Savannah couldn’t find a shill to sell fortunes to in the French Quarter anymore. Even her dealer had split town without a faretheewell, leaving her with a single joint that she promised to make last.

It did not.

After a while, two raggedy buzzards joined the alligator. One took to perching on the boat’s mainmast, where she often eyeballed Savannah with unabated lust. The other crouched on the weedy bank and courteously avoided eye contact.

At some point, you’ve got to admit you’re beat.

Savannah was beat. She’d begun to consider doing a swan dive straight into the alligator’s gullet.

But then came the voice mail from great-aunt Hazel’s estate executor Stanley Janus, Esquire.

Under normal circumstances, that fateful message might have been buried by still more unanswered calls and unchecked messages. But these were desperate times. Savannah crossed her fingers and beseeched all known deities that one of the dozen or so dispatches might be the voice of destiny offering her some way off this sinking ship.

To her amazement, her prayer had been heard and noted, and, what’s more, it had been answered.

“Missus Greenleaf, this is Stanley Janus, Esquire of Janus Wealth Management in Yonder, North Carolina. I’m executor of Hazel Greenleaf’s estate. Your great-aunt has named you beneficiary. Please return my call at your earliest convenience to discuss the matter.”

Savannah didn’t know she had a great-aunt Hazel, but then she only knew she had parents based on logic and biology. Whoever Hazel was and whatever branch of Savannah’s kudzu-smothered family tree the old bird had been been perched on, she’d fallen off it, and she’d left her nest egg to Savannah. It was almost too good to be true. Just in the nick of time. Janus Wealth Management even foot the bill for the bus ticket from Louisiana.

Savannah nearly had the whole upper deck to herself for the daylong trip to the east coast, so she stretched out across a whole row and plumped her rucksack like a pillow. With neither alligator nor buzzards waiting on the other side of her eyelids, she slept more soundly than she had in months. When the bus driver finally dropped her off in the parking lot of the Yonder train depot, she bid him adieu with more goodwill than she’d felt in decades.

It was early yet. Though the indigo of the eastern horizon was fading to periwinkle, Yonder was still dark and deserted. A few rowdy adolescent seagulls and grackles were mixing it up in the parking lot, but otherwise the town felt empty, abandoned. Savannah took a deep breath, sucking in the sulfurous, salty breeze coming off the sound a few blocks away. She threw her backpack over her shoulder and glanced one more time at the map she’d pulled up on her phone. Hazel’s house was only a twenty or thirty minute walk from the bus stop on the Strait side of Yonder, and Savannah was happy for the chance to stretch her legs after the long trip.

She set out through the deserted strip of downtown, passed cottages with pyramid-style roofs and a few  Queen Anne mansions that had seen better days. She crossed over railroad tracks just as the rising sun painted them with a rose-gold glow. The closer she came to the destination marked by a dropped pin on her phone, the more derelict the blocks became. Ravenous Virginia creeper consumed gap-tooth fences and collapsing arbors whole. Cedars bent under the weight of thick wisteria. Impenetrable thickets of Chinese sumac invaded any lot left untended more than a day. Gradually, a seedy hinterland of deserted lean-tos and broken-backed cottages merged into honest to god wilderness, the very edge of Yonder, where Savannah found a shady path crackling with white oyster shells.

It led due north through a dense alley of old growth live oaks. Occasionally, a sunbeam would steal through the canopy of bent, twisted limbs and evergreen leaves. Each time, the probing light found color – the iridescent sapphire of bluebird wings or glimmering crimson yaupon berries. When the passage opened again, the sun had made itself known. The sky was ablaze, and the blaze glinted like molten glass out on the Narrow Strait. Savannah put her arm up to shade her eyes until they adjusted to the dazzle of the sunlight on water.

In this bright spot, the chalky path diverged, running east and west to thread a pale seam binding forest and marsh. In the crook created by the forked road, a sycamore tree some forty-five feet high and fifteen around crouched over a small cabin. Its platter-sized leaves cast the fragile shack in deep green shadow.

To call her ancestral home a shack was generous, Savannah thought. Weathered cypress shiplap hung at odd angles. The wood columns of the porch were freckled with white paint in its final stages of molting. Tramp’s trouble and some other vine with small white flowers crawled along the railings. Savannah noticed a fracture in one of the upper story windowpanes; on the other side of the glass, a gust of wind rustled faded curtains.

All around the house, feral cats lazed in thick beds of mint and marshpenny. A raccoon squatted in the crotch of the sycamore tree, and a fat, black sow covered in coarse hair slept half-concealed in the shade of a pecan tree on the shack’s easternmost perimeter. One muscular tom lifted his muddy head to eye her briefly, then returned to sunbathing. Savannah’s presence didn’t seem to unsettle the residents.

“My inheritance is a hillbilly petting zoo,” she said aloud to no one and without much bitterness.

Though it was rattletrap, the house didn’t appear to be sinking like her last home. No slick predators ogled her from the cord grass. The local buzzard population seemed to have secreted itself in the forest rather than loitering on the lawn.

However, between sycamore shadows, climbing vines, and the natural gloom of the deep overhanging roof, the porch was as inviting as an open grave. Vague shapes competed with the murky palette. It was difficult to make out what waited for Savannah there, and she felt hesitant suddenly. She didn’t know anything about this place or this great-aunt Hazel.

She paced back and forth on the oyster shell path, listening to the shells crunch under her feet. She’d come this far; it was just a few more paces. She couldn’t though. She felt eyes on her. She felt as if someone was waiting for her on the porch, but then why not speak up. Savannah stooped and squinted, attempting to discern details of the dark porch, but it was impenetrable.

Savannah turned her attention to her boots, which toed the clean boundary between the thick, wild carpet of weeds and the chalky white path. Here, around the perimeter of the cabin, the line was further demarcated by bleached whelk shells. She took a fortifying breath and stepped over the boundary, squatting to press her hands flat into the cool, tender growth. She looked once more into the gloom of the porch from this angle and detected the faintest finger of pale gray mist seeping out of the shadows.

She followed the mist to its source: a gnarled, knotted crone smoking a pipe stealthily among the shadows. Savannah’s brain blinkered for a second, unsure of how to process the image. A cloud passed over the morning sun and cast a chilly shadow. Savannah shivered and began to wonder if she was still dreaming on the bus. She tested the theory, slowly closing her eyes until the old woman’s countenance disappeared entirely into the oblivion of Savannah’s shuttered skull. When she opened her eyes again, the old woman was still there, exhaling thick clouds of smoke. The skin of her face was tawny and wrinkled, and white hair escaped her loose braid like rapids overrunning a riverbed. Like Savannah, the old woman wore loose-fitting overalls, though her knobby old feet were bare.

“Who’re you?” Savannah called out, feeling the muscles around her neck tense. She was afraid to step forward. She was afraid the old woman was there. She was afraid the old woman was not there.

The old woman snorted. “Who’re you?”

“Savannah Greenleaf. I’m supposed to be here,” she said with less confidence than she intended to convey.

“Savvy?” The crone tilted her head and studied Savannah intently. “Girl, yer not near as cute as you was last time I seen you. Done went and got old.”

No one had called her Savvy in years. Decades.

“I don’t know you,” Savannah said. “I’ve never seen you before.”

“You seen me now, ain’t you?”

The goodwill evacuated Savannah’s body so quickly she felt the vacuum it left.

“Hazel?” she said, inwardly damning Janus Wealth Management for getting her hopes up. “I thought you were dead.”

The old woman nodded. “That’s right. I been trying to tell the mailman for weeks, but he won’t believe me. Keeps leaving them damn circulars anyway. What’s a haint gonna do with half-priced bananas, I ask you?”