Calling Me Home: Pamela

For more than a year, we have been awaiting a special day that is almost here: the publication of Julie Kibler’s first novel, Calling Me Home, available for pre-order now and in bookstores February 12. If you are in DFW, please join us that evening for Julie's book launch and signing at 7:00 p.m. at Barnes & Noble, The Parks Mall, Arlington. Click here for more information and to RSVP (which is helpful to Julie and the store in planning for the event, but not required).

Calling Me Home is our group's first published novel, and it marks a major milestone for both Julie and the blog itself. We started this blog more than four years ago as an outlet for some of our thoughts on writing, but also as a platform to help introduce us to you, our readers, as writers looking forward to publication. That time is beginning. In celebration, each of us is sharing our thoughts on home, how it calls us, and what it means to every "me" in our group. We hope you enjoy these posts, and we hope to see some of you February 12!


By Pamela 

You might not realize it when you meet me, but I'm a true Southerner. Sure, I rarely say "y'all" or "yonder" or bless someone's heart and admit to cringing just a little when someone says "fixin' to." In fact, I don't have much of a drawl at all. Probably because I spent the first 23 years of my life as a Midwesterner. 

I grew up in Indiana, finished college in my hometown and worked my first big girl job in Indianapolis. A series of truly unfortunate events landed me in Alabama at the age of 25. There I would spend the next ten years--my formative years, I like to call them--realizing I was home.

Our old house in Alabama (taken this year by a friend).

In a lovely small town, where ancient canopying trees linked arms across streets named for Civil War generals like Jackson and Grant and Sherman, I would get divorced and fired from a job. I'd find a better job, a better man and marry him before he could discover how truly flawed I was. I'd give birth to two incredibly brilliant boys, start a business, buy and sell two houses, learn to cook chicken-fried steak and gravy, discover composting and gardening and the meaning of southern hospitality.

There in Alabama, with the beach a half-day drive away and the family I left in Indiana the same distance the opposite direction, I grew up. When we moved to Texas for my husband's job I had mixed emotions. So much had happened to me in such a short span of time, it was impossible for me to leave without leaving a big part of myself behind. We were only in Texas a year before we uprooted again for a town outside of St. Louis in Illinois. Back to the Midwest I went. And while that move should have felt as though I'd been called home, from the moment we unpacked our boxes, I waited for the chance to return to my southern roots.

Seven years later, we'd move again (this time with two boys, a girl and a different dog) to north Texas, and I couldn't wait to be a Southerner again. But after a few weeks, my heart dropped a notch or two. Dallas might claim to be southern, but it's not to me. Sure you can order sweet tea at nearly every restaurant and occasionally I'll hear someone say "y'all" but it's usually me, hollering at my young 'en and the neighbor boys to pipe down so I can hear myself think.

So the South continues to beckon and I wistfully talk to my husband about where our next move might take us. Should we ever get lucky enough to choose our home state, you can bet it will be somewhere close to a beach in house with a wide front porch, where neighbors say "hey, y'all" as they come calling. Calling me home.