Washington residents will have a chance to see Southern culture played out in print when Crickett Rumley, author of “Never Sit Down in a Hoopskirt and Other Things I Learned in Southern Belle Hell,” visits the city Friday.

Rumley will be at I Can’t Believe It’s a Book Store in downtown Washington from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. to read from and sign copies of the book.

Rumley’s book follows Jane Fountaine Ventouras as she returns to her Southern roots in Bienville, Ala., after being expelled from 13 boarding schools in five years. A synopsis of the book describes Bienville as a place where “ladies always wear pearls, nothing says hospitality like sweet tea and pimento cheese sandwiches, and competing in the annual Magnolia Maid Pageant is every girl’s dream.”

Rumley gave insight into her background as a professional writer in an interview with the Washington Daily News. Rumley, whose family is originally from Washington, graduated from Rhodes College in Memphis, Tenn., with a degree in Latin American studies. She completed her master-of-fine-arts-in-film degree at Columbia University in New York. After working for writer-director John Sayles and actress Julia Roberts, Rumley began teaching screenwriting at the New York Film Academy.

Rumley explained how she crafted the book.

“I think I started it in 2007. A friend of mine had recommended that I apply to this wonderful women’s writers’ colony in Washington state. You had to describe the project you would work on while staying at the retreat, so I took a chance and wrote a one-page synopsis for a novel,” she said. “But believe me, I was taking a leap of faith with it. I hadn’t written prose since I went to film school in the early ’90s. I write screenplays, drama. There was a very steep learning curve.”

Rumley also said she has a personal connection to Alabama.

“I was particularly inspired by Mobile, which is where I went to junior high and high school. My father, Stewart Rumley (a former Washington mayor), was stationed there as a pilot with the Coast Guard in the 1980s. Mobile was Southern, like us North Carolinians, but from the minute we moved there, it was clear Mobile was special,” she said. “Like New Orleans, they celebrated Mardi Gras. They had lavish parades and costumed revelers who threw moon pies from floats and bands dancing in the streets on a Tuesday that should have been a school day but not in Mobile because Mardi Gras was a centuries-old holiday here, the leftover of French and Spanish colonization. And the city was beautiful and sultry and full of history. Azaleas and Spanish moss-covered oaks lined the streets in the old sections of town. Unbelievable humidity descended upon the land in the summertime, sending everyone scurrying inside in the middle of day.”

Rumley said there’s quite a difference when it comes to writing for film and writing books.

“I think the best way to describe it is to conjure up the term ‘motion picture.’ When you are telling a story for film or television, you have to design ‘motion’ or actions for the characters in order to create the ‘picture’ the audience is looking at,” she said. “When writing prose, an author does not necessarily have to do that — huge sections of novels can explore a character’s internal monologue or abstract thoughts or concepts without much reference to the visual at all.”

The creative process is not always done alone. Writers have to look to experiences and the work of others for ideas, she said.

Rumley discussed some of her favorite writers and how they influenced her current work.

“I was heavily inspired by a couple of things uniquely Tarheel.  I love Michael Malone’s “Handling Sin” — I suspect that more than a few of your readers are fans of that book. His work makes me laugh and laugh. He creates such vivid characters and surreal situations — I could just eat his writing up with a spoon. I definitely felt his spirit hovering about as I plotted some of the wackier circumstances my Magnolia Maids get themselves into.

“In terms of dialogue, Ron Shelton’s baseball movie “Bull Durham” is downright delicious. Those Carolina accents, the construction of arguments and the back-and-forth dialogue tickle me to death. I think I have memorized every line of the scene in which the coach finds Tim Robbins in the locker room with a girl when he should be out on the field warming up for his professional debut. It is so funny, so revelatory, so Carolina. I feel like I go home every time I play that scene, and I do play it often.”

Rumley offers advice to those who want to follow a similar path to her path.

“A writer has to be driven, absolutely driven, to tell stories, to withstand the rigors of learning the craft, develop a personal voice and try to make a career,” she said.