Jan Harayda has sent us another dispatch from Fairhope, Alabama, where she's a writer-in-residence at the town's Center for the Writing Arts, as debut novelist Kathryn Stockett dropped by Page & Palette Books to read from The Help (already a NY Times bestseller). As Harayda reports, Stockett sounded a bit awestruck by her visit:

"They're planting flowers outside, and it's the middle of a recession," Stockett told a standing-room-only crowd, after noticing that a town grounds crew had been digging up the daffodils that lined the streets and replacing them with tulips. But it was the crowd's turn to be awed when Stockett spoke about the publishing history of her first novel, the story of a white Ole Miss graduate who returns to her Mississippi hometown in the early 1960s and finds herself startled by how her friends treat their black maids. Stockett was born and raised in Jackson and said that while her portrayal of race relations in her state may upset some, her closest relatives were "truly relieved" when agent Susan Ramer signed the novel and sold it to Amy Einhorn Books. "I got 45 rejections from agents," she revealed, "which means that my mother had to listen to me moan and feel sorry for myself 45 times."

(photo: Emily Bell)