Writer’s Talks at Rawlings House Series Returns to Cross Creek

The Writer’s Talks at Rawlings House Series returns to Cross Creek; under a magnolia tree almost in the shadow of the Pulitzer Prize winner’s home.

Ann McCutchan brings us her critically acclaimed, often revealing, sometimes deeply moving biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings herself—The Life She Wished to Live.

“Come to this biography for the outsized personality,” Dwight Garner writes in the New York Times. “Stay for a portrait of a woman whose writing meant everything to her.”

Light refreshments and music begin at 1:30 p.m.; Writer’s Talk at 2:00 p.m. Free with standard park admission. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park at Cross Creek, Florida. Call 352-466-3672 for more details.

Made possible by the Friends of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Farm, the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Society, and Florida State Parks Department.

What emerges after seven years is the most complete portrait of a very complex life: the long sojourn in Florida’s backcountry and her instinctive affinity for the place and its people; astonishing encounters, and endearing friendships with the literary galaxy including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Robert Frost, Margaret Mitchell, and her “magnificent editor,” Maxwell Perkins; the relationships which helped shape her— from her hugely ambitious mother Ida to her insecure but surprisingly courageous husband Charles Rawlings, and finally Zora Neale Hurston, who would bring her to a new understanding of African Americans. Above all, there is the furiously driven writer. “Rawlings cleared through life as though armed with a machete,” Jonathan Miles writes in Garden and Gun. “McCutchan gracefully records every chop.”

Ann McCutchan is the author of five previous books, most recently Where’s the Moon? A Memoir of the Space Coast and the Florida Dream. She is also a professional musician, lyricist, and librettist. Ms. McCutchan lives in Laramie, Wyoming.