Fairhope author Judith Richards has built a decades-long writing career largely rooted in the Gulf Coast, drawing on family stories, her own varied work history and a long creative partnership with her husband, fellow novelist C. Terry Cline Jr. In a town that has long punched above its weight in Southern letters—Fairhope’s bookstores, writing groups and Single Tax Colony intellectual heritage have attracted writers for more than a century—Richards and Cline have spent four decades turning out fiction from their home on the Eastern Shore.
Richards grew up moving frequently as her father worked in the timber industry, and after high school she joined a traveling theatrical show as an actress before marrying a fellow performer. The itinerant childhood and early stage career gave her a store of settings and characters that would surface in her fiction, along with the performance instincts that later made her a natural storyteller on the page. Following a divorce, she relocated to Montgomery in 1968, where she worked as a teacher, performer and real estate manager before meeting Cline while both worked for Colonial Educational Exhibits and the Land Alive Foundation.
That job had the two of them touring schools across Alabama, Florida, Georgia and Mississippi with a program that used live animals, including an African lion cub, to teach students about animal anatomy and behavior. The lecture circuit—part science class, part traveling show—put Richards in front of auditoriums of restless students across the South and gave her first-hand experience translating complicated material for young audiences, a skill that would serve her well in the books to come. Richards says she learned much of her craft as Cline’s unofficial writing apprentice during that period, watching a working novelist draft, revise and sell books from the inside. The couple married in 1979 and settled in Fairhope, where they still live.
Novels rooted in her husband’s Florida childhood
Richards’ debut novel, “The Sounds of Silence,” was published in 1977 and drew on her own experiences with the Land Alive Foundation. Breaking into print with a first novel at a time when the publishing world was concentrated in New York established the pattern of her career: fiction built from lived experience, told with an ear for the rhythms of Southern speech. Several of her subsequent books, including “Summer Lightning” and “After the Storm,” are set in Belle Glade, Florida, in the 1940s and follow a character based on her husband’s own boyhood: a quick-witted, mischievous truant named Terry Calder who spends his days dodging school and chasing adventure in the Everglades.
The Belle Glade books sit in the muck-country farming region south of Lake Okeechobee, where cane fields, canals and the vast marshes of the Everglades shaped a hard-scrabble childhood in the years before the region’s modern development. Richards says the stories came from years of listening to Cline’s family recount his exploits around the dinner table in Thomasville, Georgia, where the tales of a boy who could talk his way out of anything grew taller with each retelling. Both “Summer Lightning” and “Too Blue to Fly” went on to win the Alabama Library Association’s fiction award, a recognition from the state’s librarians that helped cement her readership among young and adult audiences alike.
A new novel set in post-Katrina New Orleans
Richards’ most recent project, tentatively titled “Ninth Ward Down” and under consideration for the title “Thelonious Rising,” follows a nine-year-old boy in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward before and after Hurricane Katrina. She says the idea took shape after the 2005 storm, when a suspense novel her husband had been developing was set aside in favor of a story meant to honor a city she describes as having been “beaten down.” The Lower Ninth Ward, which suffered some of the deadliest flooding in the disaster, became the natural setting for a story about survival and loss.
In the novel, the boy, Thelonious Monk DeCay, earns tips dancing for tourists in the French Quarter while saving money to search for the jazz-musician father he has never known. After Katrina floods his grandmother’s home and she drowns in the rising water, he turns to a reclusive family friend to survive, navigating a flooded city by rooftop and alley. The child’s-eye view of the flood draws on the images that stunned the world in the days after the levees failed: houses pushed off their foundations, people stranded on roofs, a great American city submerged.
For a writer whose career has been tied to the Gulf Coast, the pull of post-Katrina New Orleans was personal as much as literary. Mobile and New Orleans share a bay-and-delta culture—Mardi Gras was celebrated on Dauphin Street before it ever rolled down Canal Street—and Gulf Coast residents watched the 2005 catastrophe with the recognition that the same storm could just as easily have turned east. That proximity, Richards suggested, is part of why the story demanded to be written from the ground level of the flooded neighborhoods rather than from the vantage of official post-mortems.
Advice for aspiring writers
Richards encourages young South Alabama writers to build a portfolio by pitching local newspapers and magazines, entering writing contests and starting a blog, while also forming a critique group with fellow writers for honest feedback. The path she describes mirrors her own: write constantly, publish wherever an editor will take the work, and find readers who will tell the truth about a draft.
She points to The Pensters as one existing local group open to writers of varying ages and experience. The Eastern Shore writing community Richards describes is one of the quiet assets of the Fairhope area: a circle of published novelists, journalists and beginners who critique one another’s manuscripts, and a town whose independent bookstore and arts institutions give working writers an audience within walking distance of home.
Decades into a career that began with a traveling animal-education show and a first novel in 1977, Richards remains a fixture of the Fairhope literary scene—a novelist whose books carry the Everglades, the timber camps of her childhood and the flooded streets of New Orleans into print, all written from a quiet street a few blocks from Mobile Bay.
The Alabama Library Association awards gave the Belle Glade books a second life in school libraries across the state, where librarians became some of Richards’ most reliable champions. For a novelist writing about a boy who hates school, the irony has not been lost on her: generations of Alabama students have met Terry Calder in a classroom, assigned by the very institution he spends his fictional days escaping. The Calder books belong to a tradition of Southern boyhood adventures—canoes, cypress swamps, small kindnesses and small crimes—that runs through much of the region’s literature of the mid-century years.
Richards and Cline’s marriage also became a professional partnership unusual in its endurance. Both maintained independent writing careers while sharing a household and, in effect, an editorial ear; her apprenticeship under him matured into a dialogue between two working novelists whose shelves eventually held dozens of published titles between them. Writers’ conferences and book events along the Gulf Coast frequently featured the two of them together, trading anecdotes about the publishing business and the strange apprenticeships by which writers learn the trade.
Fairhope itself deserves part of the credit for the couple’s long productivity. Founded in 1894 as a utopian Single Tax colony, the town developed an identity as a haven for free-thinkers, artists and writers that persists today—a place with a walkable downtown, a storied independent bookstore, and a bay-front park where reading on a bench is practically a civic requirement. For a writer who spent her youth in timber towns and her young adulthood on the road, Fairhope offered the stable, beautiful, quietly literate base from which decades of books could be launched.
The new Katrina novel also represents a departure in subject matter if not in sensibility. Where the Calder books found adventure in sunlit swamps, “Ninth Ward Down” finds its young protagonist improvising survival in a drowned city—a story with higher stakes and a harder edge. Yet the craft at the center is the same Richards has practiced all along: a child character with pluck and a mission, an adult world of danger and generosity around him, and the Gulf Coast’s weather and water supplying the forces that test them both.
Her counsel to beginning writers also carries the practical wisdom of someone who entered the business mid-life, without an MFA or New York connections, and made it anyway. Portfolios built one clip at a time, contest entries that force a writer to finish and polish a piece, and critique partners willing to say a draft isn’t working—these are the small, repeatable habits that turn an interest in writing into a career. In a region full of stories, she suggests, the raw material is already at hand: it is the discipline of the writer, not the subject, that is in shortest supply.