Sorry- I sort of kited off on a tangent there.
As someone who grew up on a farm several miles from the nearest small town (albeit rather uneventfully), I’d appreciate it if you told this idjit to take her poverty, decay, blighted dreams, and blasted hopes, and shove them right up her ass.
Failing that, if you send her up here I could arrange for her to be chased around a pasture by not-very-domesticated bison whilst confined inside a high voltage fence. All in the interests of exposing her to the reality of rural life, of course.
I actually like her- she’s a good person, I just never realized how divergent our senses of humor evidently are. She’s also a huge promoter of fantasy and Sci-Fi as literature (especially Tolkien and Heinlein).
I keep thinking of books this professor must have found boring: *To Kill a Mockingbird, Cold Sassy Tree, All Creatures Great And Small, A Prayer for Owen Meany…
Hi, Willie. Your comment is puzzling. I can’t answer for Sampiro, but my father also had cattle. I grew up a little to the northwest of Sampiro. I’m reasonably certain that there are cattle farms still further to the east in Georgia and the Carolinas. Why would you think not? These areas are still quite rural.
Here you go, Willie:
North Carolina Cattlemen’s Association
South Carolina Cattlemen’s Association
I just looked it up. I’m not surprised: it’s members of the Turcotte family, slightly fictionalized in the book as the Finch family, who raised him.
It makes you wonder why they didn’t file suit earlier. (My father was not a doctor and he did not have an adopted son, but) if somebody claimed my father raped a patient, allowed his adopted son to repeatedly rape an adolescent male (a major factor in Scissors, accepted a pay-off to let the grown man in the example above sexually and physically abuse his 13 year old daughter, and embezzled money from patients, I sure as hell wouldn’t have waited until the book was a bestseller with multiple printings, had a movie with pretty big names in production, and had been the subject of dozens of interviews before deciding “Hey, you can call my daddy a morally bankrupt sexual predator for one, maybe two, maybe even three years, but in that fourth year it starts to get old”. (The family concedes that Turcotte/Finch lost his license, but this is only to “be expected for someone who is an ‘outside the box’ thinker and an ‘outside the system’ doer”.
It’ll be an interesting lawsuit. Luckily I dont’ have anything anywhere near that juicy on anybody (at least not of the ones that are still alive), and when dealing with non-family members I make sure to change as many details as I can to avoid a positive ID while still keeping the essence of their role in the story true.
Sampiro another country kid checking in to say this woman needs to lighten up. I grew up in a two roomed house with no indoor plumbing, a pot bellied wood stove for heat and animals for company. Quiet and desperate are two things my life never was. Hell I didn’t even know we were poor til I started school and the other kids told me.
I also have no trouble believing any of your stories. In fact I shared them with one of my older brothers and sister. They not only made us all laugh until we couldn’t breath but led to walks down memory lane when someone would ask “Remember when we fed mom’s chickens to that cougar?”. If you ever get your stories printed I will buy a copy for every sibling, and their children. So all my citified nieces and nephews can understand why their parents are the way they are.
By the way we’re northern but our great grandmother was southern (she turned her husband in as a northern sympathizer during the civil war, and he had to light out for the Idaho territory to keep from being hanged) so I guess we come by our insanity honestly.
Sampiro, just jumping in to add my haypenny.
Don’t listen to this woman. She has some kind of bug up her ass, and it’s completely interfered with her ability to critique your writing. I’m sure, as she’s someone you originally trusted enough to ask for advice she has her good qualities.
But they don’t relate to your memoires.
(I just want to add: I suspect you’re right about her view of ‘small towns’ being from Faulkner.)
Sampiro, I’ve been loving your stories because they are so true. Your friend is in a big hurry trying to decide whether each story is intended to be funny, cute or romantic so that she can be judgmental and insist that it failed. I read each of your stories and let it be what it is. One or two others have found hilarious that I have not found funny to the same high degree; however, I have loved them because the were sharply drawn and unlike anything I’d ever heard. (Many did leave me laughing right out of my chair, though.) She does seem to have some preconceived notion of what your life and rural Alabama life should be like and so is intolerant of your stories showing it to be different. That’s her problem.
As others have said, you can’t please everyone. I, on the other hand, hope to be one of the first owners of your book and to buy several copies for friends.
Sampiro- I have absolutely no concept of what life in rural Alabama is like, should be like etc and I LOVED your stories.
They’re funny.
Sometimes in a sad, poignant way, sometimes in a very sick and twisted black way, but oh my goodness are they FUNNY. Well-written and hilarious. To be honest, I don’t care whether they’re the God’s honest truth or slightly embroidered, they made me laugh.
Don’t let the bitch grind you down, because I’d pay money for more stories, and I’m not the only one.
(I was recently re-reading some Gerald Durrell, and although your family is much more odd and harrowing than his, My Family and Other Animals made me think of you.)
Without having read all the subsequent posts to your OP, I have a couple comments. One, being a professor doesn’t make a person smart and doesn’t make them intuitive as to what people like to read. Don’t pay her opinion much mind.
Two, your subject matter, and the fact you find a lot of your childhood funny (in a black humor kind of way) reminds me of just about every childhood I know of. Fact is, there is at least a grain of humor in nearly everything. Your style reminds me of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius which was both heartbreaking and hilarious. You’re on to something here. While you can (and should) take criticism regarding certain technical aspects of good writing, don’t let this professor woman take a dump on the essence of what you’re trying to communicate. Write the truth – your story is interesting and lyrical. If she doesn’t get it, well…then I guess she won’t be your target audience. Good luck!
Except for furt, of course. 
I’m sorry for the unclear, run-on sentence. I’m not saying that cattle are not raised that far east, just that in the areas suitable for raising cattle, there are going to be small towns every 6-7 miles. Has something to do with the way the land was parcelled up originally, though I don’t know the details.
A “township” is a measurement of land.
One thing to bear in mind when looking at maps of very rural areas is that many of the placenames on the map are of dead towns but they have a post office. While it may technically have a population of 300, there aren’t that many people there because it’s counting people who get mail through the post office there as residents. We were technically residents of Titus (a “town” with a post office, gas station and a couple of small churches) even though we lived 7 miles away.
Which couldn’t be further from your style of writing. I’m glad you’re not letting her criticism affect you. Are there any profs you’re friendly with that more closely share your sensibility?
Many English professors are frustrated authors in disguise. Let your audience and history be the judge of the merit of your works. Ask the professors for insight as to technical competence, not content, and leave it at that.
My dear Sampiro, by way of establishing my credentials, I mention (though it’s apparently it’s no longer on the newspaper’s web site) that in 2001 I reviewed Elizabeth Spencer’s short story collection A Southern Woman.
I am not an English professor (only an English major-turned-writer), but I’ve written numerous book reviews and am a voracioius reader. And I say she don’t know what she’s talkin’ about! Your work, as others have noted, strikes the right balance between humor and poignancy. I’m still reading my way through what you sent yesterday, and I do have what I hope will be helpful criticism (not critical remarks! Literary criticism!!).
You won’t appeal to everyone. There are wildly popular authors I don’t like. There are well-respected authors I don’t like! (PLEASE don’t ever make me read The Sound and the Fury again! Uck! [or “ish!”]).
Fondly,
–Ellen (affected by Sampiro’s parenthesis- and bracket-itis) 
I gotta agree on Tolkien, but Heinlein? I love his books, but he’s a great storyteller, not the Great American Novelist. I also have to say that, even though I’m even more northern than any Yankee, and have never lived in the country, I find your stories very funny and think that you are a born “slice of life” storyteller.
I would much rather read (or hear) a great story than a Great Literary Work by someone who doesn’t know the first rule of fiction - it’s got to tell a story.
To continue the “parts of Alabama really can be extremely rural” hijack–
I live in Montgomery. You can go from “State Capital” to “still looks like the 1930’s” in about 10 minutes.
US 80 between the Montgomery Airport and the Selma bypass (heh) is about 50 miles of rolling farmland with no towns to be seen. When I worked at Tuskegee University, I lived in rural Macon county. I was 10 minutes from my office at a reasonably-sized University and it looked like I lived in the middle of nowhere. My neighbors (nice folks) lived across the road in a tar paper shack and heated their home in the winter with a wood stove. There wasn’t really any law enforcement, and if your home caught fire, it was gone.
It was an interesting experience for some one who grew up in Atlanta and considered Athens, GA to be a small town.
–jack
(link to editorial after someone realized the Alabama State Patrol doesn’t, after midnight)
http://www.alabamastatetrooper.com/state_highways_lonely_at_night.htm
I’d love to read anything you have to say about it, and I promise I won’t pit you (unless you like insult my Mama or something).