I returned from my bike ride the other night and saw a small package leaned against the door. Opening it, I found Sitting Up with the Dead, Pamela Petro’s exquisitely written and immensely entertaining book about the South and its storytellers.
Pam – a dear and longtime friend – had told me that the book was being reissued, and I was delighted. She is one of the finest travel writers working today, and Sitting Up with the Dead is one of the best travel books of the last few decades. It intersperses colorful accounts of Pam’s travels through the South with the stories of the storytellers she listened to and talked with. It’s really two books, each one evocative of a place that is more a place, as Pam points out, than perhaps any other region of our country. How the two are connected is subtly explained in the prologue:
“Chaucer knew that stories are the surest guides on any journey. They are, in fact, journeys themselves, leading out of the graspable, sweaty present into the vanished or imaginary worlds that support it.”
