John T. Edge explores ‘quest for home’ in new book

There was a time when John T. Edge could walk through an airport without someone recognizing him. Or go incognito to a restaurant with his wife.

But when you’re the author of 10 books, write a restaurant column for Garden & Gun magazine and host the Emmy Award-winning “True South” on the SEC Network, ESPN, Disney and Hulu, you have earned yourself a measure of fame. 

“If I’m walking through an airport, I’ll stop and talk to three people,’’ Edge said. “They want to talk to me about our show. In a way,  it’s not really celebrity. There is a familiarity.’’

Edge lives in Oxford, Mississippi, but his taproot runs deep in Middle Georgia. He grew up in Clinton, in Jones County, and attended school at Stratford Academy and Tattnall Square in Macon.

“True South’’ is now in its eighth season. This season’s first episode, which aired on Sept. 2, took him on a pilgrimage to the house where he grew up in historic Clinton. 

It also features a trip to Nu-Way Weiners on Hillcrest Boulevard in Macon and to Fresh Air Bar-B-Que south of Jackson.

In the episode, Edge, 62, discusses his new memoir, “House of Smoke: A Southerner Goes Searching for Home’’ and his quest for meaning in a region that has “both held him close and pushed him away.’’

The book’s release date is Sept. 16 in Oxford. His book tour also begins that day, running through the end of October and including 24 cities and 27 different venues.

“It’s a tour of the Deep South, the SEC footprint,’’ Edge said. “It’s a way to be in conversation with the people who watch ‘True South.’ Hopefully, we can talk about their families, as well as mine … and their South, as well as mine.’’

Edge will be in Birmingham on Sept. 17, Chattanooga on Sept. 18 and Atlanta on Sept. 22.

The author will give a lecture and have a book signing at the Hay House in Macon on Sept. 23.  He will be joined by Josephine Bennett, senior director of news and partnerships at Georgia Public Broadcasting. 

The ticketed event is $30 for the lecture and a copy of the book or $10 for the lecture only. Bear’s Books on Forsyth Street is hosting the book event. The doors open at 5:30 p.m. with the lecture starting 30 minutes later.

The Melody recently interviewed Edge about his book.

Was this a book you were always going to write and needed to be written?

I recognized that this story I’ve told — and should be told — was powerful enough and relatable enough to be worthy of a book. It was around 2020, so it was five years in the making. But I lived a life before I figured out my life was perhaps worth examining so that others might find some inspiration in their own searches. It took me a long time to figure that out.

Do you believe it has been writing itself all along, and you reached the point that this was the time to do it? 

It was really important to me. I’m 62 years old and, as you know from reading the book, there are many ways in which the South’s peculiar history haunted me. The “Lost Cause” shadow cast a pall over my own story and the particular history of my family. In writing about my own story, I could offer readers a path to reckon with their own stories. Writing a memoir, if you try to do it right, is not an act of selfishness but an act of generosity. And that’s the spirit in which I  tried to write this. 

Did it take the sum of your life experiences to be able to tell the story from the perspective that you did?

I don’t know if it’s the sum of them. I’ve been teaching the MFA (Master of Fine Arts) program at the University of Georgia since 2015. Valerie Boyd founded it. And at the beginning of the book (the dedication), it says: For VBH and VJB. VBH is my wife, Vivian Blair Hobbs, and VJB is Valerie June Boyd.

Valerie invited me to teach in that program at the University of Georgia — the university I had flunked out of, and to be a mentor (in narrative nonfiction). She gave me a fancy title. When she did that, she gave me a way to come back home, to return to Athens and make good on the education I squandered the first time around.

That was just so powerful for me to step into a classroom in Athens and teach people who were my peers. It’s a low-residency program, so these are people my age and the same level of accomplishments. I was stepping back in as a teacher as somebody who had flunked out of that college. That mattered to me so much, and then Valerie’s belief in the power of stories and narratives inspired me in many ways to see the power that lurked in my own story.

So I don’t know if it was the sum of my life experience. It was the nurturing and example that Valerie offered that set me on this path. There were a number of different things that set me on this path. There was an Oxford American piece I wrote called “My Mother’s Catfish Stew.’’ People reacted to that story and said things to me like, “My mother’s drug was barbiturates, and I grew up in Texas, but reading your story about your mother helped me find a way to reconcile with my own.” That was another signal.

But I still pushed my story aside. It took making “True South” when we did an episode in Season 3 that was set in my mother’s hometown of Bowman, South Carolina. I was in conversation there with my colleague, Wright Thompson, who is our executive producer and Tim Horgan, our director. As we were writing that episode and talking about what are the messages conveyed, I realized that for much of my life when I told myself I was running toward the next discovery, the next place, the next person I might write about, I was in so many ways running away from my past — the story of my family and the story of the South.

When we made that episode in 2020, and I began writing this book and taking advantage of the lessons that Valerie taught me, I quit running and recognized I needed to return to the place that made me and claim the place I live now.

Did writing it help you make peace with the heavy parts of your story?

I don’t think of writing as therapeutic. The therapeutic effect is an ancillary product of the writing. Writing is writing. It’s stacking scenes one after another, trying to stay in the scene and tell a story. The exercise of stacking those scenes up to tell a story, of establishing cause and effect in your own life, helps you figure out the through line and helps you see the decisions you made, the repercussions of those decisions and there’s a lot to learn in that. You see patterns. You see ridiculous repetitions of the same mistake.  And you understand moments of growth and how they often come from crises.

I’ve known you for a long time, and I learned some things about you that I did not know. Will it be that way for others who grew up with you or knew you at different times in your life?

I think with the likely exception of my wife and our son and a few really close friends, much of this story will be new to readers. I’ve spent a career, for the most part, focused on telling other people’s stories, looking outside myself to honor the lives and work of others. And that was purposeful. That’s what I thought the good work to be done was. But I also came to realize in my late 50s that my story may also be of service to others.

Going back to what you mentioned earlier, I’m going to ask you to dial it back about 40 years to that wild, UGA frat boy with a 1.8 GPA. Could that version of John T. Edge have ever imagined he would one day be an author and have his own television show? 

No. I think this is one of those things people can identify with. For many of us, we get lost in college. Sometimes there’s a good result from that. You get lost in college, then you find your path, you find your tribe and you emerge with a better sense of your own identity, dreams and beliefs. I stayed lost a little bit longer in those. I think it’s important to say this. There are successful people across every industry and educational institution you can imagine who have stories that are comparable to mine. If our fellow humans give us grace, we are afforded second and third chances, and I believe life boils down to what you do with those second and third chances. 

With a book, you don’t always know what the author looks like unless you see the book jacket. Do people now recognize you now because of the TV show? Do they know your name? 

Yeah, it’s kind of beautiful. If I’m walking through an airport, I’ll stop and talk to three people. They want to talk to me about our show. In a way,  it’s not really celebrity. There is a familiarity. I show up on their television screens and tell them a story about a place they know or are curious about and want to know. In the first episode of this season, I focus on Clinton, Macon, and Jackson, Georgia. I reveal some things about myself. In that, there’s a bond created.

I got this beautiful email from a woman just this week who lost her son to a gunshot, and she told me that watching our show was kind of a balm for her, that it helped get her through tough times. I’ve heard from people who watched the show we made on Lake Village, Arkansas, a city struggling to find a new economic path forward, with beautiful people doing that work. They tell me that it reminds them of their town in Kentucky or Florida. Wherever it may be, people respond to our show in an emotional and intimate way. So when I run into people who watch the show and want to talk about it, they want to talk about that.

That has to be gratifying. 

It is. As Southerners, we have this sense of connectivity, this belief that if we drill down just a bit, we can find a friend in common, an experience in common, a favorite restaurant in common. The show is like an exposition of that. I think that’s part of what people respond to, the intimacy of this region. And I think they respond to our attempt to show the South for what it is instead of depending upon stereotypes and myths and moonlight and magnolias.

If you were on death row, what would be your last meal? 

I get to time travel, right? It would be a barbecue sandwich,  drenched in that red vinegar sauce, Brunswick stew and a cold Mountain Dew from Old Clinton Barbecue, circa 1970s.