Dynamic Duo: Stockett and White Kick Off Spring Writers Series

Kathryn Stockett has one of the biggest novels on the planet  (The Help has been on the New York Times hardback best sellers list for 102 weeks — and counting). Susan Rebecca White (Bound South and A Soft Place to Land) is swiftly making a name for herself in contemporary women’s fiction.

Both Atlanta authors will appear together Wednesday night to kick off the spring 2011 Ivy Hall Writers Series. The venue: the main Atlanta campus of (SCAD), 1600 Peachtree Street. The event is free to all.

That Stockett and White recently became fast friends was probably fated. Their respective first novels The Help and Bound South were published on the same date: Feb. 10, 2009. When each author was sent on a promotional tour, they crossed paths and started “hanging out.” They served on a couple of panels together at Southern literary festivals and “really hit it off,” White said in an interview earlier this week via phone from New York City. She has spent the past month in Manhattan researching and working on her third novel (working title: A Place at the Table), which is due to her publisher on Oct. 1.

“Kathryn and I are really excited about doing this event together,” White said of SCAD’s Wednesday program. “It's always more fun to have someone else up on stage with you, especially when that person is a friend, and someone whose work you deeply admire.”

The admiration, it would seem, is mutual. Stockett calls White “a wonderful writer” and was among the first to praise White’s 2010 release, A Soft Place to Land. She called this novel about two sisters separated after their parents die in a plane crash “a beautiful story of the complicated love between two sisters. It's smart, funny, moving and wise. I simply did not want to put it down. If you have a sister, you're going to miss her, and if you don't have one, you'll wish that you did. Book clubs: This is your next pick.”

Stockett’s The Help has received buckets of praise. Set in Mississippi in the 1960s,  the novel unfolds from three points of view to reveal a deeply felt tale of black maids and the white women who employ them — and treat them disgracefully. Readers have mentioned both laughing and crying throughout the course of the novel’s 464 pages. (A feature film, starring Emma Stone, Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer, is slated to hit theaters next August).

A review of  The Help in the Washington Post said Stockett strikes “every note with authenticity. In a page-turner that brings new resonance to the moral issues involved, [Stockett] spins a story of social awakening as seen from both sides of the American racial divide.”

 “We are thrilled to present two young Atlanta authors who write about the Southern experience through new, intriguing voices,” said Georgia Lee, director of Ivy Hall,  SCAD-Atlanta’s venue for its writing program. (The renovated building years ago was the Mansion restaurant on Piedmont Avenue between North and Ponce de Leon avenues).  Both Stockett and White “resonate with local and national readers alike. As popular, acclaimed authors who are also hometown favorites, they are a perfect pair for the Ivy Hall Writers Series.”

According to a recent spotlight in Vanity Fair (February 2011 issue), Stockett and White are among “a new wave of Southern female writers who might look like belles but who write fearlessly.”

While Stockett is originally from Jackson, Miss., White was raised in Buckhead. She says growing up in and around intown Atlanta definitely informs her work as a novelist.

“I wouldn’t be the writer that I am if I hadn’t grown up in such a strange and wondrous subculture,” White said.

An example?

“In my first book, Bound South, there’s this moment where an elderly grandmother mistakenly puts a porcelain raspberry in her mouth,” White said. “In order to save face, she swallows it rather than spits it out. And that really happened, that’s the world I grew up in and it is great for fiction. You can’t just make that up.”

Lee very much likes the idea of the Ivy Hall Writers Series having a “New Southern Writers” component; the program with Stockett and White, she said “could very well be the start.” Beyond that, Lee strives for balance in programming, “from serious to lighthearted,” and cultural diversity.

The free author series continues this spring with three more significant talents: April 5: Sarah Vowell (Unfamiliar Fishes); April 21: Elizabeth Kostova (The Swan Thieves); May 9: Gary Shteyngart (Super Sad True Love Story).

When appropriate and feasible, visiting writers are invited to work with SCAD writing students and welcome to stay in an efficiency apartment in Ivy Hall. Kostova, whose previous “big” book was The Historian, is to spend two weeks there next month as a guest instructor.

Kathryn Stockett and Susan Rebecca White will each speak, then sign books 6:30 to 8 p.m. Wednesday at SCAD’s main Atlanta campus, 1600 Peachtree St. The event is free and open to the public. For more information, visit the Ivy Hall website.