Living Jackson Magazine

How Far She Went

A review by Susan Harper

This is a warning: To open Mary Hood’s award-winning collection of short stories entitled How Far She Went is to fall into it—to fall under its author’s spell and succumb to her vision. Descriptively rich and precise, and beautiful in the writing, it is imbued with Hood’s unique ability to experience life through every pore and then convey the occurrence. This is a book that can refresh your senses and perhaps even change the way you view the world.

I first came to it through the title story, which I found in an anthology and fell into without warning. By the time I reached the end, the world seemed suffused with white light and I was breathing through my teeth. When I read the same story today, for perhaps the ninth time, I cried. It never loses its power, but the nature of its impact is different each time.

Mary Hood came to writing through advanced chemistry and physics classes at Georgia Tech, and perhaps that’s a clue to the dynamism of her prose. In an interview at Agnes Scott College, where she was writer-in-residence, she described her response to an exam question at Tech about whether a man approaching his car through the rain will get wetter if he runs or walks. The other students were whipping out their slide rules, she said, intent on finding the answer, while she sat there thinking, “They don’t even know what color the car is. They don’t know why he’s walking or running, or if it’s raining like mad, why would he walk? Ah, why would a man walk slowly through the rain?” She abandoned her pursuit of a master’s degree in chemistry that day, went home, and began to write.

In the years since, she has given us two extraordinary short story collections—How Far She Went and And Venus Is Blue—and the novel Familiar Heat. She has won a long list of honors, including the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Townsend Prize for Fiction, the Lillian Smith Book Award and the Whiting Award. She has been writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi, Berry College and Reinhardt College, as well as at Agnes Scott. Kennesaw State University named her Writer of the Decade. Her fellow writers take the praise one step further. Pat Conroy said, “Mary Hood is not a good writer. She is a great writer.”

Undeterred by all of this praise and recognition, Hood lives quietly among us here in Jackson County, working, as time allows, on a third collection of short stories and a second novel, publishing the stories one at a time, and somehow retaining that vitality of vision that is hers alone. To get to know her as a writer, start with How Far She Went and read the stories in order, beginning (as the book does) with “Lonesome Blues,” which limns an unlikely friendship between a subdued widow and a country music star in an ambience where the flashbulbs flicker “like heat lightning” and the applause sounds “like chicken frying.” Spend some time with “A Man Among Men,” in which death finally and suddenly brings a man to life. Listen to the crows in “How Far She Went” calling “strong and bold MOM! MOM!” A trick of the ear to hear it like that. She knew it was the crows, but still she looked around. No one called her that now. She was done with that.” Or was she?

Mary Hood is called things too. She’s called a Southern writer, but she’ll tell you quickly that her father was from New York City, and that everything she writes has to pass “the sternest censorship from that Northern conscience in me.” She’s compared with Flannery O’Connor, but Hood says that while they both write from within a Christian framework, O’Connor was more judgmental: “the church militant” as opposed to “the church triumphant.”

Hood is also sometimes called Georgia’s greatest living writer. I think she manages not to hear that. Perhaps it would block the sound of the “Southern talkers” and other characters whose voices fill the stories in How Far She Went. Trust me, you don’t want to miss hearing them either.

Contributing writer Susan Harper, a Jackson County resident, is the library manager at Commerce Public Library.

How Far She Went, published by University of Georgia Press, is a Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Author Mary Hood lives in Commerce.