The Girl From Silver Creek

Before Doris Willis Gracia assembled her first book, she simply started writing down the stories of her past exploits growing up in Silver Creek, Miss. When she finished them, she’d fax them to me — for no other purpose than she thought I’d enjoy reading them.

I did, and I told her. So she faxed more, going out of her way to find a machine near her home in Moody to send them over.

Each one of her tales, always handwritten and never more than a few hundred words in length, is dynamic and often triumphant, a mix of Southern Gothic, rural allure and moral tightroping. Every line is another moment in the stream of consciousness of a charming woman of 83 years. Sometimes she skips a dozen miles from where she started, but she never fails to wrangle it in to a meaningful conclusion.

Take for example the most recent story she sent on Dec. 4 titled “Baby Girl and our Access to Excess.” You won’t find it in her book, but within the confines of a single page Gracia manages to connect the opening of Publix in Moody to both a small shop in her hometown and her German Shepherd that used to people watch outside the Food Giant. It’s cluttered and sporadic, and almost doesn’t make sense that it could all be cohesively relevant. But like everything she’s sent me in the past eight months, it carries you along until you join the author on the path she’s set out.

Each time she sent me a piece, she would call me to ask if I received it. We’d chat briefly about her progress, as I learned only a couple months ago that her plan was to assemble these stories into a book. I learned even later that the whole process of writing and printing “The Girl from Silver Creek Book One” — all 188 pages — took less than a year to complete, and I had been around for all of it. I honestly thought she had been jotting these stories down all her life.

“When I was 82, God gave me the gift of remembrance,” she told me only this week. “So I wrote it down for the first time.”

Now, I haven’t read Gracia’s book, so this isn’t a review. It’s only been out for a couple weeks. But you could say I’ve been following her career as an author. So, while I can’t give you a formal conclusion on its quality, I can offer a suggestion.

Readers in St. Clair County, Alabama might not know anything about where Gracia grew up in Mississippi, but there is sure to be some overlap between her childhood and ours. Someone surely knows the anxiety and humor of being lost in the woods with their father after the car breaks down, watching him search desperately for a way to light his cigarette. Following the family dog for hours as it leads you in a giant circle.

It never happened to me, but something about reading that story made it feel awfully familiar. If you read it, too, you might feel the same — all while learning a little about the life of a woman who lives nearby.

“The Girl from Silver Creek Book One” is available to order online at lulu.com. Garcia said she’s already working on Book Two and plans to release it as soon as it’s complete.