The small mission-style cottage was saved from demolition in 2001 when author Sonny Brewer and other concerned Fairhopians saw its potential and proposed to the City Council that it be turned into a residence for working writers. The Council generously approved the proposal, and the FCWA agreed to renovate the cottage and provide it as a temporary home for writers who needed a quiet retreat. The FCWA raised money to repair and furnish the cottage, and named it in honor of Betty Joe Wolff, founder of Fairhope’s Page & Palette bookstore, who Sonny called “an author’s best friend and advocate.” I
In the spring of 2004, the Center welcomed its first writer-in-residence, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and novelist Rick Bragg. Following Bragg, the cottage has been the temporary home and writing retreat for numerous novelists, journalists, memoirists, screenwriters, and poets, including Karen Zacharias (After the Flag Has Been Folded, A Silence of Mockingbirds); Janice Harayda (Manhattan on the Rocks, The Accidental Bride); Sena Jeter Naslund (Ahab’s Wife, Four Spirits, The Fountain of St. James Court); singer/songwriter Andrew Duhon (TheMoorings); Philip Deaver (winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant); Tennant McWilliams (The Chaplain’s Conflict: Good and Evil in a War Hospital, 1943–1945); playwright and actor Joel Vig (Hairspray, A Christmas Memory); Judith Paterson (Sweet Mystery, Be Somebody); Edgar Award-winner Charlie Price (The Interrogation of Gabriel James, Dead Connection, Desert Angel, Dead Girl Moon, Lizard People); and Tami Sharpe (on sabbatical from the United Nations, serving as a Human Rights Fellow at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.
In the spring of 2004, the Center welcomed its first writer-in-residence, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and novelist Rick Bragg. Following Bragg, the cottage has been the temporary home and writing retreat for numerous novelists, journalists, memoirists, screenwriters, and poets, including Karen Zacharias (After the Flag Has Been Folded, A Silence of Mockingbirds); Janice Harayda (Manhattan on the Rocks, The Accidental Bride); Sena Jeter Naslund (Ahab’s Wife, Four Spirits, The Fountain of St. James Court); singer/songwriter Andrew Duhon (TheMoorings); Philip Deaver (winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant); Tennant McWilliams (The Chaplain’s Conflict: Good and Evil in a War Hospital, 1943–1945); playwright and actor Joel Vig (Hairspray, A Christmas Memory); Judith Paterson (Sweet Mystery, Be Somebody); Edgar Award-winner Charlie Price (The Interrogation of Gabriel James, Dead Connection, Desert Angel, Dead Girl Moon, Lizard People); and Tami Sharpe (on sabbatical from the United Nations, serving as a Human Rights Fellow at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.