It’s September 1st.  Some people may be starting to think about scarves and pumpkin spice lattes, but when the days begin to shorten (and it’s still in the 90s in Sacramento), here at Postcards from Purgatory our thoughts turn to our favorite Southern writer, Pat Conroy. As anyone who reads this blog knows, Bethany and I have a soft spot where Mr. Conroy is concerned. Please just search the blog archive if you’re interested, because I don’t want to bore our legions of long-time readers (all ten of you) with a rehash of how we both first became acquainted with Pat Conroy’s oeuvre.

But now it’s the fourth annual PAT CONROY MONTH!!!! It seems like this milestone should be commemorated somehow, but I have no idea how one celebrates blog milestones besides writing about it on the blog. Probably if we were super popular we’d arrange some sort of Pat Conroy block party in one of our neighborhoods, complete with all the recipes from his cookbook that Bethany reviewed a couple of years ago. All of the recipes contained mayonnaise, from what I remember. We don’t like mayonnaise very much, so the menu for our block party probably won’t contain many of these recipes…. If anyone has any menu recommendations for our hypothetical block party that don’t contain mayonnaise, please comment on this post.

My plan for PAT CONROY MONTH!!!! this year is to reread The Water is Wide, Conroy’s first successful published work, which is a memoir of the year he spent teaching on an island off the coast of South Carolina. Bethany reviewed it during our first PAT CONROY MONTH! in 2012. This is the last of what I consider Conroy’s “early works” (i.e. the books that he had published before I started reading him like some sort of zealot in the early nineties) that I need to reread for the blog, and it’s also the first book of his that I read. I was assigned it for my sophomore honors English class in high school, and I remember loving it, but I haven’t touched my copy of it in years, except to move it around from place to place with me. I’m very excited to see if it’s stood the test of time.

I guess that’s it! This is our favorite month on the blog, and I am looking forward to spending it with Pat Conroy once again.