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Churchtown: The Tale of Suzy Delou and Faye Fiddle

Churchtown is a novella that was published as one of the six winners of the Roast Books ‘Great Little Reads Competition’. It is based on research into the tradition of the folk tale as it exists in the American South, studied while Caleshu was a Teaching-Writing Fellow at University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa in the mid 1990s. The novella concerns a feud between two women, and draws on the feud as a literary trope with a long history, from the folktale of ‘Brer Rabbit’ to the numerous ‘feuds’ that appear in the Old and New Testament (of specific interest is Solomon’s settling of the feud between two mothers who both lay claim to a child). Set on an island off the coast of Georgia, Chruchtown’s feud stems from the contradictory nature of one character (Suzy Delou) and her promotion of a Gomorrah -like deviance and her nemesis, Faye Fiddle, whose staunch Christianity is mired by her psychological breakdown. The novella exploits the conventions of the tale with its investment in exposing how a new world order comes to be, that is, how the character of Dobby Valentine’s God-like resurrection brings the island’s contradictory forces (of a ‘good’ life and a ‘doomed’ death) into harmony. As well as traditional folktales and Biblical parables referred to above, research into Southern fiction and the southern-gothic genre as written by Faulkner, Flannery O’ Connor, and Barry Hannah, inform this novella’s tale-like fantasy which aims to explore the place of religion within the Earthly world. Research imperatives also include the mode by which the novella’s tale is told: via a poetic language, the rhetoric steeped in Southern flourishes and excesses.