Living and Breathing the Writing Life
Saturday morning, six carloads of Writing Your Life class members left the Orlando area in route to Cross Creek, Florida, home of famed writer, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. We’re enjoying J.T. Glisson’s book, The Creek, this spring session and hearing his stories firsthand when he visited our class on April 12th. Now we wanted to see everything with our own eyes.
Our first stop was The Yearling Restaurant, named for Rawlings’ Pulitzer Prize winning book, where the more adventuresome members of the group sampled frog legs, alligator tail and sour orange pie. J.T. Glisson joined us for lunch and entertained everyone with one story after another about growing up in Cross Creek and being friends with Marjorie Rawlings.
Then it was on to the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park to tour the Cracker house and grounds where she lived and wrote and listened as our guide Melissa filled us in on all the details of Florida’s most famous writer. The house is filled with Rawlings’ possessions and set up in such a way that, at any minute, you expect to see the author walk out of the living room to the veranda to sit at her typewriter and write her next classic.
Late that afternoon, we all headed home inspired with new stories just waiting to be written. Getting back took a little longer because we had to stop at several roadside fruit and vegetable stands to bring home fresh-picked Florida blueberries, peaches and watermelon, or so they told us.
To see photos of this fun-filled day, click here. (www.writingyourlife.org?show=pictures)
