As she takes a break in a Nashville photo studio, her handlers buzz around her, finalizing plans for seven upcoming shows in Dublin, Glasgow, and London. At 44, she is slim and small, with big eyes, high cheekbones, and a worried face. NANCI GRIFFITH IS LIKE A CHARACTER IN ONE OF HER SONGS: strong, melodramatic, folksy. Only one addressee, Michael Corcoran of the Statesman, had written anything negative. Most of their publications, in fact, had been generally favorable to her work. Several had never penned a word about her. She sent the identical letter last August to writers and editors at the Dallas Morning News, the Houston Chronicle, the Austin Chronicle, the Austin American-Statesman, and Texas Monthly. Texas is, after all, the only place on earth that actually eats its young.” That mirror must be incredibly difficult to accept.” She ended with: “I carry with me always the pride and the knowledge that great things have come from my native soil-very few ever return there. ![]() She gave a nod of thanks to Thomas Wolfe, who wrote deeply autobiographical novels that so angered the folks in Asheville, North Carolina, that he could never go home again, and compared herself to writer Katherine Anne Porter, who was born in Texas but left at age 28, never to live there again: “She too had the wisdom to get the hell out of there and you hated her because she wrote of you as you are, not as you so self-indulgently perceive yourselves. Then the letter began: “There has always been a certain amount of pathos within artists who leave their sacred bountiful homes of birth for the benefit of preserving their own belief in their art-especially in cases such as my own where my native soil that I have so championed around this globe has done its best to choke whatever dignity I carried within me.” “IN RESPONSE TO the Years of Brutal Abusive Reviews in your Publication,” she wrote in salutation.
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