Adventures in Pen Land

Adventures in Pen Land: One Writer's Journey from Inklings to Ink is North Carolina writer Marianne Gingher's fifth book and tells of her uphill slog toward writing success. Written in first person, this is a smooth, easy read with humorous anecdotes from Gingher's life, starting at age 6, and illustrations by Daniel Wallace. There's an interesting chapter called "The Southern Writer Thing" where she describes a trip to New York City to meet her literary agent and reflects on what it means to write, sound, and look "Southern."

Here's the blurb from the back of the book, which describes it much better than I can!

She invites us along on a raucous tour of soul-sucking jobs, marriage, and a teaching career, with accompanying disquisitions on blasphemous reading preferences, ’60s pop culture, writing workshops, and other amusing detours and distractions on the way to publication. She also shares her keen insights into the role of a Southern writer in American literary culture, the experience of writing as a mother, and the process of novel-writing as compared to a lengthy family car trip.