by Adam Petty

Staff Writer

It's tempting to think that American writers no longer have a sense of place. After reading countless novels about failed relationships in urban settings, one might conclude that all of the authors in the country are watching the same shows, visiting the same sites, and drinking the same brand of coffee. Diversity seems like an unusual trait for the country to lack, since its literature was built on what was once called ``local color,'' but sometimes it seems that all that has disappeared.

However, this is not really the case. ``Regional'' authors might not command the immediate interest that they did in the nineteenth century, when New England audiences were interested in any place west of Ohio. But such authors are still out there; they just have a different function. They no longer serve the purpose of reporting back from the great frontier, but of detailing the lives of people and places that might otherwise be overlooked.

The South has long possessed one of the country's greatest regional literatures. From Mark Twain on, some of the most vital writers have lived and worked south of the Mason-Dixon line. One of the most recent heirs to this tradition is Kaye Gibbons from Raleigh, North Carolina.

She was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina in 1960, and had what would be politely called a difficult childhood. Raised in a farmhouse, her mother committed suicide when she was still young, and her drunken, abusive father was left to raise her. Soon she was passed off by her father to what she calls ``various bizarre, kleptomaniac, hypochondriac pathological-liar, sociopath relatives'' until she wound up in a foster home.

This sounds like a horrendous way to grow up, and to be sure, it was. But to a writer, and especially a Southern writer, it also sounds like the beginning of a story and a soucre of inspiration for a few more.

Gibbons thought as such. After being encouraged by a college professor, she began putting down her rough biography in fictionalized form. It wound up becoming the novel ``Ellen Foster,'' to date still her most famous book. She was quickly recognized as an important new talent, and her novel won several awards.

Like many other books from the same region, Gibbons' novel is greatly concerned with capturing the sounds and rhythms of Southern speech on paper. Even the speech of rural blacks is treated correctly and accurately portrayed without condescension. Gibbons' knows how these people talk, as she often spent time in black households when growing up.

Gibbons has found such accuracy in diction to be important, and even poetic. While doing research for her novel ``A Cure for Dreams,'' about four generations of Southern women, she ran across some transcripts from the Federal Writers' Project, an archive of works the Great Depression.

When she found these manuscripts, she said that she ``discovered the voice of ordinary men and women as art,'' and that she knew that these voices would be guides for all of her books. Indeed, all throughout her books there is an affinity for the downtrodden and eccentric members of society, who are difficult to find and tough to question, but well worth the effort.

An awareness of history is also important to her, and not just that of her native region. She pays attention to problems that the South has faced as in her Civil War novel, ``On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon.'' But even in this book, the effects of the war are related through the involvement of a family, and the relationships within that family is where her real interest lies. Gibbons once explained her emphasis on home and family by saying that ``[i]t seems to me that everything that's important in life happens around the house and in the yard.''

This concern for family relations has long been one of the hallmarks of Southern writing. But Gibbons' own concerns are perhaps more personal than some of her peers.

Several of her books are autobiographical in nature, as in ``Ellen Foster,'' and also in ``Sights Unseen,'' a novel that deals more explicitly with the details of her mother's life. Since these relationships close to her, there could be some reluctance on Gibbons' part to make her conclusions too dire.

Thus, the endings of her books are usually happy, or at least mutually positive. Whereas William Faulkner or Flannery O'Connor might write about drifters and outcasts whose moral values are ambiguous at best, Gibbons is more involved in her characters. She knows the lives of her characters first-hand, and perhaps wants to offer them the promise of a brighter future, like the one she now has.

But she doesn't fall into sentimentality when offering such promises. This is perhaps the most challenging feat that she sets for herself: trying to truthfully represent the lives of honest, hopeful people without sounding like a Hallmark card. She does it well, and well enough to make one wish for others to follow her example.

Kaye Gibbons will be one of the keynote speakers at the Festival of Faith and Writing in April.