Lowcountry literary lights hope to brighten the futures of our youth

Thursday night's Charleston premiere of "The Secret Life of Bees" should cast at least a flicker of hope across the pluff mud of home.

It reflects our powerful colony of writers, and what it can do to help end the more common take on Lowcountry literacy -- poor test scores.

Sue Monk Kidd wrote the novel while living by the marsh near Charleston. It instantly became sweet honey to a world that has now smacked its lips through more than 5 million copies.

As the movie version hits the big screen nationwide Friday, we are reminded that a region whose schools are labeled a "corridor of shame" shares the muck and the marsh with literary giants.

And the giants are giving back to a home they find so inspirational.

The sold-out Lowcountry premiere at The Terrace Theater on James Island, and a reception following with the author at the Harbour Club, will help Lowcountry children become better readers and writers.

Proceeds will help Charleston's Lowcountry Initiative for the Literary Arts reach its $30,000 goal to support a "Poets in the Schools" program.

Kidd, who spoke with students at Charleston's downtown Burke High School about her book last week, is on the advisory board of the initiative. Look at the other Lowcountry writers on that board:

William Baldwin, Pat Conroy, Dorothea Benton Frank, Harlan Greene, John Huey, Josephine Humphreys, Sarah June Goldstein, Cassandra King, Bret Lott, William Louis-Dreyfus, Mary Alice Monroe, Ellen Rachlin, Gordon Rhea, Anne Rivers Siddons, Theodore Rosengarten, Kwame S.N. Dawes, Alex Sanders, Zoe Sanders and Gary Smith. The initiative was started by poets Carol Ann Davis and Marjory Wentworth, our state poet laureate.

Get the picture? The Lowcountry is abuzz with writers of national stature.

Maybe it's appropriate that Beaufort County's own Pat Conroy got his start with "The Water is Wide," in which he blew the whistle on the unequal treatment black students were getting in Lowcountry public schools. He saw value in Daufuskie Island children when others did not.

Today, Conroy and the other writers in the initiative are helping the Lowcountry -- from published authors to "failed" children in "failed" schools -- see the value of creative writing.

It's sort of like the movie. Millions can now see Kidd's fictional 14-year-old girl from rural South Carolina grasp her secret strengths within.

But in the pluff mud of home, the story of the author and her dizzying success has a more familiar moral: All of us must leave the Lowcountry better than we found it.