DAPHNE, Ala. — “Two Southern Authors on One Summer Evening”  — set for 6:30 p.m. on Friday at the Daphne Public Library — might be an inviting weekend event for the pleasure-reader.

Sonny Brewer of Fairhope and Philip Shirley of Dauphin Island will discuss their works, answer questions and sign books, according to Deborah Norris, reference librarian.

Shirley writes fiction, poetry, criticism, feature  and business articles and speeches.

He’s been published in literary magazines such as “Thicket,” “Southern Gothic” and “StorySouth” and in the Southern writers’ anthology “Stories from the Blue Moon Café.”

He will read from “Oh, Don’t You Cry for Me,” his new book that is a collection of short fiction pieces with nine unrelated stories.

One story follows the life of a north Alabama woman who is pregnant with an illegitimate child and does not know which of two men is the father, according to Shirley.

Another deals with the anger between two brothers who are in love with the same woman; one brother married her while the other was at war, he said.

“Almost all of my work deals with people whose character is flawed in some way, yet they find their own path toward the future without leaning on others too much,” he said. “I am drawn to people who care nothing for our pity or even our help.

 “They want to be self-sufficient in the face of difficult odds.

“I also like to write about the South and Southerners, for an uncomplicated reason: that’s what I know, and the places in this book are all special to me.”

The places aren’t the only special thing about writing, to Shirley.

“Writing allows me to explore how people feel and react to the world,” he said. “As for finished writing — mine or someone else’s — it means that we have a unique opportunity to  relate to other people by understanding more thoroughly what motivates them, how they feel about things important to us all, and what is behind their actions.”

His next project is on the Louisville Slugger baseball bat’s journey to icon status, he said. Then he will complete a novel about Elvis.

Brewer is the founder of Over the Transom Bookstore in Fairhope and of the Fairhope Center for Writing Arts; he was editor-in-chief of Mobile Bay Monthly, editor and publisher of The Eastern Shore Quarterly and editor of Red Bluff Review.

He will talk about his new book, “The Widow and the Tree,” a fictionalization of the late Inspiration Oak in Mobile, a giant tree that was intentionally killed.

He will also discuss his  other books: “The Poet of Tolstoy Park,” “A Sound Like Thunder” and “Cormac: The Tale of a Dog Gone Missing.”

 Brewer gravitates toward Southern themes and culture, he said, adding that he usually sets his stories  in Fairhope or on the Eastern Shore.

He, like Shirley, enjoys the imaginative possibilities writing creates.

“It’s a way to live in a world of imagination, to constantly toy with the idea ‘what if,’ he said. “Did the footprints in Henry’s house  (from ‘The Poet of Tolstoy Park’) really belong to a little girl? — I don’t know, nor do I really care.

“I get to live in my imagination.”

After months spent inside his head, he likes to find reality, he said.

“I get grounded with a hammer,” he said. “I love to do carpenter work.

 “The first thing I do when I finish a book, (is to) go do some hard labor — build a dock, put  a roof on boat house.”

Though he’s allowed to live  outside reality, writing “is the consistent thread in a rather loopy working life that included construction work and other miscellaneous jobs,” he said. “But through it all I always wanted to write.

“I wrote P.R. (public relations) in the Navy, I edited story manuscripts for Mobile Bay Monthly … I always had a typewriter or a word processor near me.”

The library is located at U.S. Highway 98 and Whispering Pines Road. For more, call 621-2818.