Tell the World You're a Wildflower: Stories

by Jennifer Horne

Tell the World You’re a Wildflower is a collection of loosely interwoven stories in the voices of southern women and girls of different ages and backgrounds. Beginning with the youngest characters and ending with the oldest, the stories encompass plastic surgery and white supremacists, family secrets and family trees, the United Daughters of the Confederacy and a young writer who describes her work in progress as “the bastard love-child of William Faulkner and Alice Walker.”
In Tell the World You’re a Wildflower, each character must decide what to tell, whether to tell it, and to whom to tell it. Each struggles with questions of identity and truth, trying to understand who she is and what holds true for her. Some tell their stories plainly, directly, others more obliquely, nesting one within another. Anchored in the tradition of southern storytelling, these women contend with loss, change, and growth while going to church, school, and prison, navigating love and sex, and worrying too much about what people might think.
 
Yet these women generally refuse to behave, and they wander in and out of each other’s stories just like people do in small towns across the South. Small town lives are always your third-grade teacher is your new neighbor’s aunt and the boy you dated your senior year falls from political grace after being caught in a hot tub with your second cousin. Though they may have had little say in where they were planted, Horne’s protagonists nevertheless do their best to bloom.
 
Rich, multifaceted, and unforgettable, Tell the World You’re a Wildflower is the work of a veteran explorer of the twentieth and twenty-first century South. Horne’s quest to understand her culture through decades of reading and observing has now yielded these narratives that imaginatively and insightfully enter the hearts and minds of southern women.

Genres: Short Stories

176 pages, Hardcover

First published July 14, 2014

About the author

Jennifer Horne is a writer, editor, and teacher who grew up in Arkansas and has lived for many years in Alabama. Her book Working the Dirt: An Anthology of Southern Poets (2003) brought together over 100 poems about farming and gardening in the South. Her two co-edited books (with Wendy Reed), All Out of Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality (2006) and Circling Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality (2012), have received acclaim for the high quality of the essays and their contribution to discussions about religion and spirituality in the American South. Her most recent book, Tell the World You’re a Wildflower (2014) is a collection of loosely interwoven stories in the voices of southern women and girls of different ages and backgrounds. Bottle Tree (2010) is a book of poems focusing on Horne’s experiences as a southern woman; her second collection of poems, Little Wanderer, a collection of road and travel poems, will be published this summer by the Irish publisher Salmon Poetry. She is currently working on a poetry chapbook, a new collection of short stories, and a memoir-influenced book about Scott and Zelda biographer Sara Mayfield.

Reviews

[Carolyn Breckinridge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Slice-of-life stories are often associated with Chekhov. But Jennifer Horne's 'Tell the World You're a Wildflower' exemplifies the best of modern day slice-of-life writing. Each story in this diverse collection presents a unique and powerful window into the world of the Southern woman's experience. Ms. Horne's voice is powerful and graceful, and this collection is quilted together by her ability to move in and quickly out of the life experiences of astonishing different characters and walks of life. This book has a permanent place on my bookshelf except when I am sharing it with my friends.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed these stories. Some were haunting, some were playful, some were both. All the stories were about women. I'm fairly certain it doesn't pass the Reverse Bechdel Test, which is really saying something! I loved the way life in the American South was portrayed, without being cartoonish--all of the women seemed real to me.

My only complaint is that I would like to hear more from several of the characters. I would like some of these stories to be novels.

[Ginger Henderson · Rating 2 out of 5]

One of the few books I just couldn't finish. I stopped about 3/4 of the way in because every story is just so depressing. I had no idea I was buying a book of sad, depressing heaviness. I guess the cover got me - it looks light and inviting. Definitely not the book for me.