Janis Owens

At home in Florida

Welcome to the official web site of author Janis Owens, author of three novels set in West Florida: My Brother Michael, Myra Sims, and The Schooling of Claybird Catts. On February 10, 2009 she will publish her cookbook memoir with Scribner: The Cracker Kitchen: A Cookbook in Celebration of Cornbread-fed, Down-home Family Stories and Cuisine.  

Browse, enjoy, send me your startling insight on the side, where it says comments. Don’t be shy. This is an expanding proposition and we’ll be adding and subtracting as we go. Some of my comments get snagged by my spam filter and I never see them, so don’t get your feelings hurt if you write and I don’t respond. Your message is trapped in a spam filter with sixty-thousand ads for illegal drugs and penis-enlargers. I do apologize. Do it on the link to the right and I’ll usually get it. 

I’m a native of North Florida, born a few miles south of the Alabama/Georgia border in Marianna, in 1960; the last child and only daughter of an Assembly of God preacher and his wife, Roy and Martha Johnson.  Daddy actually had a church in a little settlement south of Marianna called Page Pond, where I was conceived, but they moved into town before I was born, because Mama was homesick for the West End of Marianna, where her extended family: mother, uncles, cousins and kin, all lived. Shortly after they moved to town, Daddy took a day-job as an insurance salesman for The Independent Life Insurance Company, with a debit that spanned the Apalachiacola National Forest. Daddy was also an insurance salesman, or policy man, as he was known in the south. When I was three, we moved to New Orleans, then Hattiesburg, Mississippi, then to finally back to North Florida, where we eventually ended up in Ocala in Marion County, which is close to ground zero of Cracker Florida (which is to say: Scrambletown, which is about ten miles east, on the border of the Ocala National Forest, and part of Daddy’s Ocala debit.)

My brothers Jay and Jeff and I grew up on sermons and story-telling in the finest Cracker tradition. The best stories were those of our maternal grandmother, Eula Roberts Rice, a native of Cuba, Alabama. She was widowed the month before I was born, and for part of my childhood, I was fortunate to share a bed and bedroom with her. I was a fearful, shy little bird of a kid, and every night before we went to sleep, Grannie would tell me a story to settle me down; Bible stories as a rule, though she also told Aesop’s fables and southern folk tales and family stories. Through her eyes and memory, I was introduced to life at the turn of the century in the rural South, and came to know her own grandfather - a Civil War vet who was too old to be soldier, even by 1860’s standard, but went to town to buy farm supplies in 1862, and was so moved by a brass band’s rendition of Dixie that he joined the Confederate Army on the spot.

Fortunately for him, he was captured scouting Sherman’s camp before the Battle of Atlanta and didn’t die in the bloody days to come, but sent to Rock Island, Illinois, where the greatest insult he endured was having to walk home to Alabama when the war was over. Grannie was his oldest grandchild and pet, and he used to buy her candy with his pension, and tell her campfire stories of how nervous they were before battle; how awful the war had been. Grannie’s marriage to my grandfather, James Isaac Rice, was a happy one, and my childhood was haunted by his memory.

Grannie in the kitchen, 1957

Grannie took care that I knew him posthumously, and introduced him to me through hilarious stories of his wild and wily North Georgia kin - the Rudds and Rices of Floyd County, Georgia - a family famous for its humor and high temper. She also told me stories of her own childhood in Alabama, as the poor relation of a much larger, wealthier family, and heart-breaking stories from the Depression, when my grandfather lost everything he had in Georgia, and moved his family to West Florida so he could work at the heading mill, building wooden barrel heads for the Etowah Cooperage Company. That’s how my mother’s family came to live on the West End of Marianna, in close proximity to the Heading Mill where Granddaddy and all my uncles worked, the same neighborhood where I was born in 1960. My mother had grown up there, across Lafayette Street in a section of town known as Magnolia Hill that Granddaddy used to call “Pore Row” because of the narrow row houses that lined the street. After the War (that is: World War II), with the money my Uncle Kelly sent home from the Pacific, my grandparents were able to buy a small farm on the south side of the tracks, just off Yost Street, where I was born in 1960. 

Marianna, 1962

Now, my Grannie’s ability to evoke image was only equaled by her daughters, my late and beloved Aunt Doris (Doris Rice Hill), and my dear old Mama, who is colorful by nature and certifiably in love with the sound of her own voice. A southern lady of the Amanda-Wingfield tradition, Mama spun slightly more mythic family stories than Grannie, though what she lacked in hard fact she made up with a kind of bruised humanity, of the Truman-Capote, Katherine-Anne-Porter school of southern thought: lyrical and true to human nature, if not so careful with dates and names and exact historic reckoning. She painted many a lovely picture of life in the thirties and forties and fifties, living there on the West End with her brother and sister and uncles and cousins and close-knit church - stories that are the basis for the Catts family and all their varied histories in my first three novels.

But getting back to my official bio: shortly after my graduation from high school, I met and married a good ole Arkansas boy by the name of Wendel Owens who for reasons best known to himself, told me I was an artist, a writer, and belonged at the University of Florida. He pressured me to take  writing classes and by some miracle of God, I ended up in Smith Kirkpatrick and Harry Crews‘old Creative Writing Workshop. After I submitted my first story, Crews called me to his office and told me that I was indeed a writer, and being only about twenty at the time, I didn’t have any better sense than to believe him.  

Harry Crews

 In 1983, after the birth of my first daughter, I finished UF and set about to write my first novel, which I set in Marianna and finished in due time, and sent around to NY, where it was received well enough, considering it was a first novel and I was a twenty-four year old half-wit at the time. I was still toying with it (and a sequel) a few years later, when Grannie’s only sister, my equally loved Aunt Izzy died in her house in the Westend, and I went up to the funeral. There, Mama related one of her old Magnolia Hill stories, of a neighborhood child - red haired and pretty - who died next door to them on the Hill, the victim of incest and a self-induced abortion. Somehow the story planted itself in my head and when I returned home, I wrote the first draft of My Brother Michael.

In the process of writing MBM, I realized that Myra had at least as compelling a story and decided to tell the woman’s side of the story and give the little red-headed child a voice of her own, hence, Myra Sims. The Schooling of Claybird Catts is her son Clayton’s version of the events, which brings the story back to full circle and carries it into the next generation.

In the past ten years, when traveling and speaking about my books, I would occasionally self describe as a Southerner of the Cracker persuasion, to the great amusement of my audience, especially if I said it outside the South. They found the word depreciating and naïve and inevitably, someone would ask why I’d so proudly associate myself with a word that had such a loaded historic connotation. To them, it was clear that Cracker equaled: ignorant, racist, toothless and base. To me, it meant a whole different thing, and in time, re-educating my audience over the roots and true heritage of the word became an interesting side line.

So hot was interest in this re-emerging persona that I was asked to speak at a Cracker symposium in Fernandina, with two state experts: Ron Haase (father of neo-Cracker architecture, and author of the wonderful Classic Cracker) and Dana Ste. Claire, another Marion County boy, who is the state expert on all things Cracker; author of Cracker Culture in Florida History. It made for a merry meeting, and at the end of the program, Dana told me I had to record some of my family stories and write a cookbook, because as the state expert, there were three things Crackers were deadly serious about: food and laughter and food.

I took his expert advice to heart and without breaking a sweat, wrote out dozens of family recipes, along with historic oddities (that is: baked road kill) and a generous helping of history. With every recipe there seemed to be a story, and soon my cookbook was a memoir cookbook: THE CRACKER KITCHEN. 

Marianna Breakfast 1952