MarshSong Cottage, sitting creekside on a tidal marsh, is host to the spring and fall Pat Conroy Literary Center Writer’s Residencies. Mary Ellen Thompson welcomes writers to her guest cottage, located on Saint Helena Island in South Carolina, mid-way between downtown Beaufort and Hunting Island State Park.

MarshSong, so named for the melody the marsh mud plays at low tide, is situated on an historic property, once the first school in the nation for freed Black slaves. But the history goes deeper than that with ancient shell middens hinting at stories of other cultures.

The Cottage is a perfect writer’s sanctuary with views of water and woods; wildlife creatures and birds abound.

The residency calls will be posted on the Pat Conroy Literary Center’s facebook page. The next call will be posted in the summer for the Spring 2024 Residency.

Our resident for Spring 2024 is Jeffrey Dale Lofton.

We look forward to welcoming Jeffrey to our beloved Beaufort for his week at the MarshSong cottage, overlapping with our annual March Forth program. 

Jeffrey Dale Lofton hails from Warm Springs, Georgia, best known as the home of Roosevelt’s Little White House.  He calls the nation’s capital home now and has for over three decades.  During those early years he spent many a night trodding the boards of DC’s theaters and performing arts centers, including the Kennedy Center, Signature Theatre, Woolly Mammoth, and Studio Theatre.  He even scored a few television screen appearances, including a residuals-rich Super Bowl halftime commercial, which his accountant quipped “is the finest work of your career.”  

Ultimately, he stepped away from acting, keen to use his stage- and screen-performer’s deep understanding of the art of storytelling in a different way. To that end, he provided communications counsel to some of the nation's leading landscape architects, after which he worked closely with war veterans, helping them tell their stories, which add richness and nuance to historical accounts of major conflicts. At the same time, he focused on pursuing post-graduate work, ultimately being awarded Master’s degrees in both Public Administration and Library and Information Science. Today, he is a senior advisor at the Library of Congress, surrounded by books and people who love books—in short, paradise. 

Red Clay Suzie is his first work of fiction, written through his personal lens growing up a gay, physically-misshapen outsider in a conservative family and community in the Deep South. It is the recipient of the Seven Hills Literary Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Red Clay Suzie will be released in paperback on March 5, 2024.