Afternoons With Tom
With scrapbook-style visuals, video, and her own narration, Lis-Anna Langston describes how she faced a life-threatening diagnosis through repeated visits to the grave of Thomas Wolfe, the Asheville-born novelist renowned across America for his sweeping, autobiographical fiction.
This is the story of one girl who goes to the cemetery to make peace with death, but instead finds a reason to live.
Editor’s note: To read the essay as you watch, click CC for closed captions.
Salvation South has never published a visual essay such as this one. If you are a storyteller inclined to create a visual essay of your own, please go to our Submissions page and choose the “Visual Essays” category.
Hailed as “an author with a genuine flair for originality” by Midwest Book Review and “a loveable, engaging, original voice…” by Publishers Weekly, Lis Anna-Langston is the author of five novels. Raised along the winding current of the Mississippi River, she studied literature and creative writing and graduated magna cum laude in 2023. Winner of the NYC Big Book Award, Independent Press Awards, and dozens of other book awards, she is a three-time Pushcart award nominee, with work appearing in many literary journals.
You can find her in the wilds of South Carolina plucking stories out of thin air.
Thank you for this work – a beautiful tapestry of words and images that made me cry and laugh. May you continue to pluck stories from the air!
Blessings,
Deb Bowen