“When The Hometown You Wrote About is Changed Forever By Disaster” by Scott Gould (fiction, ’06)

An essay by Scott Gould (fiction, ’06) appears in Lit Hub:

 

Not long after I finished a book of stories set in Kingstree, S.C., my hometown drowned. The stories in the collection Strangers to Temptation take place in that town and on the river that runs through it, during the 1970s—back when I was a kid. In the fall of 2015, Kingstree sank under the Black River’s muddy floodwaters. Turns out, the town is still struggling to return to the surface. I just didn’t realize how much until I went back for a visit.

You’ll find Kingstree just west-of-center in Williamsburg County. By most measures, Williamsburg County is the poorest county in the state. The county got a little poorer and a lot wetter when the hard rains came. During a five-day period in 2015, beginning late on October 1, Kingstree was sledgehammered with a deluge of biblical proportions. A low-pressure area lumbered in from the west. [. . . continue reading here.]