Rosemary Daniell on love, loss, literature, and the legacy of Zona Rosa

ONE of the most important writers Savannah – or the South – has ever produced will be the subject of a remarkable celebration at Tybee Post Theatre this weekend.

Rosemary Daniell was in the vanguard of second wave feminism in the 1970s-80s. You could even say she wrote the book on it, exemplified by groundbreaking works such as A Sexual Tour of the Deep South, Sleeping With Soldiers and Fatal Flowers: On Sin, Sex, and Suicide in the Deep South.

In a time when women's liberation was still largely a fringe movement in the South, she successfully navigated both the patriarchy and the publishing business long before it was commonplace for women writers to do so.

But nothing has been easy for Daniell. Now 88, she has outlived all three of her children. Her first three marriages failed, but she found her true soulmate 40 years ago in fourth husband Tim – that rare, very secure man who wasn't at all threatened by Daniell's past or by her sometimes larger-than-life personality.

Originally from a working-class Atlanta background, Daniell moved to Savannah in the 1970s and never looked back. In that time, she has become an indispensable part of the local and regional literary scene, not only through her searingly honest, hilariously funny memoirs and essays, but through mentoring aspiring writers in her Zona Rosa writers' group, now in its fourth decade.

The celebration at the Tybee Post Theatre is a once-in-a-generation chance to soak in the history and liveliness of Daniell and a cohort of some of her most dedicated alumnae from her acclaimed and long-running Zona Rosa groups.

I've known Rosemary for decades myself, and it's always a pleasure and an adventure to talk to her. By turns bawdy and introspective, she combines the charms of a Southern belle, the sharp descriptive powers of a journalist, and the sensitive soul of the poet that she certainly is.

I spoke to Rosemary at her Gordonston home last week.

This will be a celebration of Zona Rosa. What an amazing legacy for you, to influence so many other writers for so long.

Zona Rosa has been going on almost 42 years now. Every time I wrote one of these books about it, I thought I should stop doing it because it’s interfering with my other writing. (laughs) That didn’t happen, because I just get more and more involved. Now we have this retreat once a year out on Tybee. This will be our 23^rd one.

We’ve had a lot of people in Zona Rosa publish books. All the people who are going to speak at the event have been in Zona Rosa, and some of them have been in it 20 years or more.

Bruce Feiler will be a big part of this celebration. How long have you known each other?

He’s going to introduce me! We’re old friends. Bruce has had 7 New York Times best sellers, but I met him before he ever published a book.

I was friends with his dad, Ed Feiler. After Sleeping with Soldiers came out, Ed would always give me pep talks. Computers had just come out then, and he said you’ve got to get a computer. I didn’t know what he was talking about. (laughs)

Bruce had just gotten out of Yale at the time, and was teaching in Japan. He would later go on to write the book Learning to Bow, about his time there. One day his dad brought me over some essays Bruce had written.

I didn’t think much about it at first. But then Caitlin McRae, my assistant, came to me one day with his essays in her hand. Caitlin has been my assistant for decades, and she is still in Zona Rosa. She was 17 when she first started with me – and now she’s 50.

Caitlin just said, “You’ve got to read these – these are wonderful.”

Your own route to best-seller status was pretty much the opposite!

I was a high school dropout. I had never heard of Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, all those great poets. I started writing when I was living in Atlanta and had three small children. I went to Emory University and took a continuing ed class. I had this professor, H.E. Francis, there.

It was an evangelical experience for me. I just fell in love with modern poetry. I read all these poets and kept all these notebooks. I wrote nothing but poetry for the first 12 years.

It was definitely Atlanta hippie time. (laughs) And I was definitely a hippie mom. No makeup, long hair parted in the middle, all that stuff.

Finding yourself at that time and in those circumstances must have been difficult enough without career pressure.

I got married when I was 16 and had my first child at 18. My first husband was a very violent man. We divorced when I was 20. And then I married an architect.

By then I was getting poems published. I got a fellowship to the University of Colorado. But I had not yet had a book published.

Then I met this guy who was from Boston, he was from a totally different culture, he had gone to Yale. He had lots of friends from Yale in New York. We’d sometimes stay at the Chelsea Hotel.

It was a difficult marriage, though. There was a very popular book at the time called Open Marriage. It sold like 50 million copies. So we decided to have an open marriage… that did not work very well! (laughs)

We met in 1969 and divorced in 1976. And that’s about when I moved here full-time.

Tell us more about how that happened, and more importantly what made you stay in Savannah for good?

I happened to come here initially when I worked in something called Poetry in the Schools. I was program director for that in 1970 and 1971. I worked at what was then Wilder Junior High School.

A friend told me about two gay women who lived on Huntingdon Street. They said I could live there while I was working.

I had never gone to bars or discos very much. Then I got to Savannah met all these interesting people, a lot of gay people especially. In Savannah there was always some kind of craziness going on.

I remember one woman wore a full nun’s outfit, the whole nine yards, to go to Pinkie Masters so people would buy her free drinks. We would all go to Dr. Feelgood’s. Then there was the Who’s Who, where you’d sometimes run into Jim Williams.

And I remember the "Spider Woman." That was at a bar across the street from the hotel on Oglethorpe that SCAD later turned into dorms. The Spider Woman would do these crazy dances.

You and a female friend famously got a job on an oil rig off the coast – the only two women surrounded by 75 very horny, very masculine men.

Yes. Fatal Flowers had not come out yet. We got the job and found out the men on the rig had been told not to bother us. After we got off the helicopter that landed on the rig, they parted for us like the Red Sea. (laughs)

Naturally I got involved with a guy there. That was when I first came to know “macho men!”

You write about that in Confessions of a (Female) Chauvinist. That might be my favorite work of yours, because it’s a great distillation of your journalistic skills.

It’s a book of essays, with some being about Savannah. Johnny Rousakis – who was Mayor of Savannah for five terms – he wrote a letter saying he was outraged by one of my articles. (laughs)

You must have been doing something right, then.

I know, right? This was all second wave feminism we’re talking about. My piece in the book that first ran in Atlanta magazine in 1970 was the first article about feminism in the Southeast that I know of.  

Fatal Flowers was your first published work actually written in Savannah?

Yes, Fatal Flowers is my memoir about growing up in the South. It came out in 1980, and I wrote that in my apartment on the corner of Huntingdon and Price.

I remember that place was $195 furnished. There was no phone or TV. To call anybody I had to walk around the corner to the payphone at Johnny Ganem’s. I can’t believe I lived that way! (laughs) But that’s just how it was.

Then I moved around the corner to Habersham. I remember that one was $150 a month! (laughs)

That was about when Fatal Flowers was getting big. I got to go on book tours, did major TV shows. I’d always wear a pink cowboy hat doing those interviews.

Tim is your fourth husband, and y’all have been married now nearly 40 years. Tell us about how you first met!

I met Tim at the second-floor bar of the old John Wesley Hotel downtown. [Now the Planters Inn.]

I’d been going out with all kind of guys. I was single, and went out constantly with different ones. I was actually starting to get tired of it! (laughs)

Tim was standing behind the bar – not working, but talking to the bartender. I remember he had on a T-shirt and shorts, and had a tattoo.

Our eyes met.... and I thought, he’s going to make a great one-night stand! That’s the way I thought back then. (laughs)

The gay man I had come to the bar with said, “Would you like to meet my friend?” talking about Tim. So Tim came to table, and I soon thought he was really interesting. He was a paratrooper, he was going through a divorce, he was in therapy. I thought all that was very interesting.

Tim said, “Can we go to my apartment? I’ll change into something better and take you somewhere nicer.”

I found out later that a woman we passed on the staircase on our way down was who he had a date with that night! Of course I ended up spending the night at his place.

I remember Fatal Flowers had just come out and was getting a lot of attention. Tim called me a week later and said, “I read it and I really liked it. I want to have some type of relationship with you.”

That really impressed me, because of all the guys I’d gone out with and married, none of them showed any interest in me being a writer. Most of them thought it was weird. Sometimes I would say I was a schoolteacher because I just didn’t want to have to explain it to them.

How did Zona Rosa come about?

The City of Savannah asked me to give a writing class. After a while I noticed the same people were coming back. At one point I asked about four of the women if they wanted to start coming over to my apartment to talk about their writing some more, in a more in-depth way.

Well, I thought that would last about six weeks, or six months at the most. Later we had a waiting list and had to start a second group. Then we started a Zona Rosa group in Atlanta, and I started driving back and forth from Atlanta for that. It really started taking over my life.

Now that we’re doing it on Zoom, I have women from all over the country. Doing it on Zoom has been a big deal. One thing that makes it more work in a way is because I’ve committed myself to sending written critiques to everyone. They send me pages in an attachment, and I print them out and go over them with care. Back when I’d do critiques in person, we just sat here and talked about them.

I write in my journal every day. I’ve journaled every day for 55 years. I write down my ideas, my dreams, everything. I always end it with a gratitude list. And on that list is always my friends in Zona Rosa.

What’s next for you? Any new writing projects on the horizon?

I won the gold medal at the Faulkner Society in New Orleans for best nonfiction book. I haven’t had time to get it published. It’s a book about my three children. The title I have for it now is My Beautiful Tigers.  

Laura became a psychiatrist and neuropharmacologist. A brilliant, brilliant person. Her two siblings, David and Darcy, struggled with addiction.

David had early onset schizophrenia and did a lot of drugs. He was in and out of mental hospitals. Darcy was an opioid addict. I ended up bringing both of them down here from Atlanta to take care of them.

David died of lung cancer in 2009. Lauren contracted a devastating type of cancer, esophageal cancer. She died in 2022. My two daughters died within a year of each other.

Laura was a damn good writer, really an amazing writer. When she died she was working on a book. One of my projects is to try and write the rest of her book – to turn it into another book, really, to honor that memory.

Of course, I’ve got stacks and stacks of unfinished manuscripts I need to write. (laughs) I’ve got to get back to my writing! I’m at a certain age, as they say. I’m 88 years old, I'm not going to live forever.

I think people might lump you in with novelists, but you’ve only written one work of fiction, Hurricane Season.

Tim thinks that’s my best book. The woman in it has similar experiences to me, but grew up on a farm in Alabama. She marries a man who takes her to New Orleans.

I drew on my own experiences a lot. For example, in the book her children are mentally ill. That’s in the book... but the book has a happy ending.

I remember I would feel very anxious writing it, especially when I was walking around Forsyth Park gathering my thoughts. It really made me anxious to write the book, but I knew that meant I needed to write it!

That’s been one of our credos in Zona Rosa from the beginning: If something makes you anxious to write about – that’s the thing you need to write about!

“Wine, Women, and Words” a celebration of Rosemary Daniell, happens August 11, at 3 p.m. at the Tybee Post Theatre.

Daniell will be introduced by Bruce Feiler, author of 15 books and seven New York Times bestsellers. She will also be joined onstage by several of her “Stars in the Zona Rosa,” who will discuss the impact Daniell and her writing program had on them and read from their published works. Special appearances include:

• Ujjvala Bagal-Rahn, author of Red Silk Sari;
• Helen P. Bradley, author of Breach of Trust;
• Vickilynn Brunskill, author of The Killing Closet;
• Kathleen McGuire, author of Trials of a Dead Lawyer’s Wife: A True Story; and
• Christine Poythress, author of Dharma’s Dance.

Your $35 ticket includes access to the event, a complimentary drink, a fun goodie bag, and sweets. All ticket sales will go toward Tybee Post Theater’s fundraising efforts. To purchase tickets, visit tybeeposttheater.org or call 912-472-4790.