Alan Michael Parker's Winning Poem "Superlatively Unsettling"

Alan Michael Parker

Alan Michael Parker, a Davidson College English prof and the author of eight collections of poetry and three novels, takes first place -- for the second year running -- in the prestigious Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition. His winning poem: "Lights Out in the Chinese Restaurant."
The speaker in the poem is enjoying his meal. The lights go out. Poof. He's dead.
"I love this poem," said final judge Jillian Weise of Clemson University in Greenville, S.C. "It begins in a realist mode... makes a quantum leap. ...Part nightmare, ... the poem is superlatively unsettling."
Parker's quantum leaps are legendary. So I asked him: How did this particular leap occur?
"What we see when the lights go out becomes," he says, "naturally, a riff upon the afterlife's possibilities, as well as upon the mundane. I'm often interested in these kinds of inquiries, in finding metaphysical news in physical experience."

Parker, winner of numerous awards for his writing, has taught at Davidson College since 1998. He also teaches in the low-residency MFA program at the University of Tampa.
Marlene Sherbondy of Raleigh was named first runner up in the competition for her poem, "After the Funeral." Melissa Hassard of Greensboro and Kathryn Kirkpatrick of Boone won honorable mentions for their poems "At the End" and "Visitation."
The Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition honors the legacy of the poet and critic Randall Jarrell, who taught for 18 years at what is now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. The contest is open to residents of North Carolina as well as to members of the North Carolina Writers' Network.










  

Jack Gilbert: "Poems of Savage Compassion"

Before we let National Poetry Month slip down the rabbit hole, here's a favorite poem of mine by the late Jack Gilbert, born in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1925. The poet James Dickey said of Gilbert's work: "He takes himself away to a place more inward than is safe to go. From that awful silence and tightening, he returns to us poems of savage compassion."
 
Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina

There was no water at my grandfather’s
when I was a kid and would go for it
with two zinc buckets. Down the path,
past the cow by the foundation where
the fine people’s house was before
they arranged to have it burned down.
To the neighbor’s cool well. Would
come back with pails too heavy,
so my mouth pulled out of shape.
I see myself, but from the outside.
I keep trying to feel who I was,
and cannot. Hear clearly the sound
the bucket made hitting the sides
of the stone well going down,
but never the sound of me.

-- from the New Yorker magazine, Nov. 10, 2008

UNCC's Mellichamp: Native Plants of the Southeast

 

  

Repeat after me: Asarum canadense. Oenothera fruticosa. Ipomoea pandurata.

Never mind. You can enjoy this gorgeously photographed and intelligently-written book without having to utter one sound. "Native Plants of the Southeast: A Comprehensive Guide to the Best 460 Species for the Garden" (Timber Press, $39.95) is by Larry Mellichamp, professsor of botany at UNCC and director of the university's 5,000 square foot botanical garden of exotic plants from around the world. The 542 stunning color photographs are by veteran photographer and certified native plant specialist Will Stuart.

Mellichamp is a bit of a philosopher, one who occasionally waxes lyrical.

Listen to his introduction to the section on wildflowers:

"What is it about flowers that makes us want to pick them (simple beauty), to give them as gestures of love (for an anniversary), of bereavement (at funerals), of hope (at weddings), of accomplishments (flowers on stage)? I don't think our analytical minds want to examine the architectural structure of a rose bud upon first encounter, nor are we initially fascinated by the mathematics of the spiral patterns of the florets in a sunflower head, nor do we care that the flower must be pollinated  to produce fruit and seeds. No, there must be some fundamental trait in the human psyche that draws us to flowers."

A pleasure to read, and a useful guide to the infinite possibilities for plantings in our very own gardens.

 

Novel Set in Charlotte is PW's Pick of the Week

I'm not the least bit surprised that the latest novel by Charlotte's Kim Wright (aka Kim Wiley), "The Unexpected Waltz" (Gallery Books, $24), got a starred review in the most recent issue of Publisher's Weekly. Not only that. The magazine selected "Waltz" as its Pick of the Week.

Kim Wright

The book's not out until early June, but I plunged into the advance review copy while my 5-year-old grandson was at choir practice. Now I'm thoroughly engrossed. The novel has everything I look for in a good read: intrigue, interesting characters at a crossroads and a comfortable authority that allows me to surrender to whatever happens next. What's more, the novel is set in Charlotte.

Wright, who grew up in Indian Trail, is also the author of a 2010 novel, "Love in Mid Air," which People magazine called an "astute and engrossing" debut.

PW describes this latest a "dance drama," starring the new widow Kelly, with more money and time on her hands than she knows what to do with. And, the magazine continues, Wright "guides us expertly through a moving, layered, and lyrical exploration of transformation."  

Head's up: Her book launch on June 8, 2-4 p.m., will be at the Piper Glen Ballroom, 6420 Rea Rd, beside Trader Joe's. You're invited for "signature drinks, readings, a free waltz lesson, and a few surprises."

Coffee with Cassandra King: 'Failed Southern Belle'

You're going to love this. Cassandra King, known to many as Sandra Conroy, wife of novelist Pat Conroy, will be at Park Road Books at 12:30 p.m. Friday for a "Coffee with Cassandra," that is, of course, free and open to the public.

Cassandra King

She'll be talking about her latest book, "The Same Sweet Girls' Guide to Life: Advice from a Failed Southern Belle" (Maiden Lane Press, $15), which grew out of a commencement speech she gave last year at her alma mater, the University of Montevallo in Montevallo, Ala.

I've met Cassandra, and I can certify that she's not a failed anything. But neither is she prissy or insincere or sweety-sweet as are some of our very finest belles. (Now that was truly insincere.)
The advice she gives here will make you smile -- especially if you went to college in the South in the fifties or sixties -- but it's advice you'll want to pass onto your daughters and granddaughters.

The title of the book is tongue-in-cheek, and if you're at Park Road Books on Friday, you must ask Cassandra its origin.

Six pieces of advice are all she gives. One of the wisest is No. Three: "Life Is Going to Break Your Heart."

"If you cannot accept that," she writes, "life will not only break your heart, it will break you as well."
This is the perfect graduation gift.

P.S. You can leave your white gloves at the door.

Chapel Hill's Elizabeth Spencer Wins $30,000 Rea Award

The late great Eudora Welty referred to Elizabeth Spencer's short stories as having a "certain prankish gaiety" about them. Now Spencer, that long-legged, Mississippi-born beauty who lives in Chapel Hill and is 92, has won the coveted $30,000 Rea Award for the Short Story.

Elizabeth Spencer

Cynthia Ozick, the first winner of the Rea Award in 1986, calls the prize, "Our little Nobel."
Jurors for the award are Mississippi-born Richard Ford ("The Sportswriter," "Independence Day"), Alabama-born Tom Franklin ("Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter") and Hillsborough's Lee Smith ("Fair and Tender Ladies," "Guests on Earth").
In their citation, the jurors said Spencer's stories "...revel in their delicious verbal (and moral) distinctions, take liberties and never fail to pay off."
"It is not at all that Ms. Spencer has lasted as a writer," they wrote, "but rather that she has thrived at the height of her powers to a degree that is unparalleled in modern letters."
Spencer is the author of eight short story collections and nine novels. "Starting Over" is her most recent collection. She is also the author of the 1960 novel, "The Light in the Piazza," made into a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer  movie in 1962 starring Olivia de Havilland, Yvette Mimieux and George Hamilton.
Previous winners of the Rea Award include John Updike, James Salter, Joyce Carol Oates, Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, as well as Ford and Welty.

Here is Spencer being interviewed in January on D.G. Martin's "Book Watch."

Here is the Paris Review interview with Spencer from 1989.

The Longing that Feeds Kim Church's "Byrd"

“Desire is not simple,” writes the poet Anne Carson.
Neither is longing, that dark river that runs through the heart of Kim Church’s first novel, “Byrd.”

Kim Church

We’ve already reviewed “Byrd,” but I couldn’t stop thinking about all the longing that fed that novel. “Byrd” is about 32-year-old Addie, who owns a bookstore in Raleigh, and, after a failed abortion, decides to surrender her baby for adoption. A baby she writes letters to for years, letters she’ll never send. Letters that will tear at your very fiber.
“Dear – What to call you? Almost-child? One who has taken root in me and won’t let go? One who might have been mine? Could still be, if I were brave enough?
“But I’m not. I can’t be the mother you deserve. I know this in the way other women know they’re meant to be mothers. I know from everything I have ever been or dreamed or wanted.”
The novel began as notes in 1998 and is not based on Church’s own experience
So I decided to ask Church, who grew up in Lexington, and lives in Raleigh where she works part-time as a lawyer: Where does all this longing spring from?
“Addie’s story is one of learning to accept and live with her own hard choices,” Church writes me. “For her, this is a slow, often painful process – much like the process of writing a novel, which involves learning to commit to choices and let go of fear, doubt, perfectionism, all those things that get in the way. It took me a long time to figure out and accept who I am as a writer.”
Church writes that she identified with Addie in other ways, too, which she says may get closer to the heart of my question.
“I’ve never been in Addie’s situation,” she says, “or had to confront her choices, but I do know how it feels to struggle with the decision over motherhood. Addie’s doubts and fears and what-ifs have personal resonance for me.”
Church told the News & Observer’s Andrea Weigl that the idea came from a dinner conversation years ago. One of the dinner guests, writes Weigl, was a man who casually mentioned that he had fathered a child who had been given up for adoption.
Weigl says Church recalled: “My thought was, ‘What about the mother?’ I felt sure this experience was not casual dinner conversation for her.’”

Church will read and sign copies of “Byrd” at 2 p.m., May 3, at Park Road Books, 4139 Park Road.

Queens Prof Named Pulitzer Finalist

"Stunned and delighted." That was Morri Creech's reaction late Monday afternoon when his daughter called him while he was teaching to congratulate him on being named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry collection, "The Sleep of Reason" (Waywise Press, 2013).

Morri Creech

"My phone just blew up with calls," Creech says by email, "but I had no idea what the whole thing was about. It seemed unreal, especially since I publish with such a small press and didn't have any warning that this might happen."

Creech is writer-in-residence at Queens University of Charlotte, where he teaches in both the undergraduate creative writing program and in the low-residency MFA program. Susan Ludvigson, prize-winning poet and Winthrop University professor emeritus, got to know Creech when he took her classes and workshops at Winthrop.

"He came to my classes as a freshman," says Ludvigson, "already knowing his calling, and having read most of the important poets in the English language, as well as the French and German poets. If he hadn't taken classes, I'm sure he would have arrived at his success on his own, because he's both brilliant and fiercely dedicated." At the same time, says Ludvigson, he was "quiet and humble in the workshops, offering helpful criticism to other poets, while believing that he still had much to learn."

Charlotte poet Beth Swann met Creech when she enrolled in the Queens MFA program in 2009. "Knowledgeable, affable, accessible and professional at all times, Morri remains to this day my trusted mentor," she says. "He's not only an asset to Queens, Morri is a man who impacts and empowers students and makes valuable contributions to our community."

Swann calls Creech's poetry "breathtaking," blending, she says, "a keen observation of life today with the music of the masters to create timeless beauty."

Creech, 43, was born in Moncks Corner, S.C., and studied at both Winthrop and McNeese State University in Louisiana. He's been awarded a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and he's received grants in poetry from the NEA and the North Carolina and Louisiana Arts councils. He lives in Charlotte with his wife and two children.

The winner of the 2014 Pulitzer in poetry is Vijay Seshdri for "3 Sections" (Graywolf). The other finalist is Adrian Matejka for "The Big Smoke" (Penguin).

Jan Karon: New Mitford Novel Due in September

Jan Karon has big news -- she'll have a new Mitford novel, "Somewhere Safe with Somebody Good,"  out in September -- but our telephone conversation is all over the map. That divine coat she was wearing when I interviewed her in 1996 in Blowing Rock, for instance. Unforgettable. Long, sleek lines. Black. Fit her like a swim suit. She bought it at Binn's in Williamsburg, she told me back then. And she says she's still wearing it.

Jan Karon

Or the cabbage rose wallpaper in her Blowing Rock kitchen, and those  antique girls' dresses -- pristine and white -- that hung on her bedroom wall. I could've moved right into that charming cottage.
But our real subject now is Mitford, and the bestselling Karon's return after a near-decade to the scene of her popular novels, starring, among others, Father Tim Kavanaugh.
"Father Tim has been retired five years, and is at loose ends," she tells me. "I needed to relieve him of this angst that seems to come when men retire. Stop!" I said. "Find something to do."
So the good father "just fell into" a new pulpit.  "But it has nothing to do with the church," she says. "He walks out his faith on Main Street."
And no more Main Street Grill. The new eatery is Wanda's Feel Good Cafe. "Wanda's all about burgers and fries," says Karon. "That's where the guys meet."
You probably know that Karon, who's 77, was born in Lenoir and grew up in Charlotte, and that her grandmother lived for decades at the corner of Park Avenue and Worthington.
Did you also know that Karon, who now lives in Central Virginia, has a secret recipe for weight loss? It's all about cabbage. Let me know if you want the recipe. I'll run it in this space.

Salon Sundays in April at C.A.S.T.

Don your hats and gloves, your topcoats and spats. In celebration of National Poetry Month, John Amen of Pedestal Magazine is sponsoring Sunday Salons on April 13, 20 and 27, at C.A.S.T., 2424 N. Davidson St., 28205. Salon Sundays -- don't you love the sound? -- 2-4 p.m., will include poetry, music, the spoken word and theatrical stagings by Amen and Daniel Harris.
Headliners for April 13: Award-winning poets Anthony Abbott of Davidson and Sarah Lindsay of Greensboro; poetry slam champion Ed Mabrey and Iodine editor Jonathan Rice, recipient of the 2012 Irene Honeycutt Legacy Award.
For April 20: National Book Critics Circle award finalist Dorianne Laux, who teaches in the MFA  program at N.C. State, Guggenheim and NEA fellowship winner Joseph Millar and award-winning poet L. Lamar Wilson of Chapel Hill. The program will also include therapeutic harpist Beth Brown.
For April 27: Poet Morri Creech of the Queens University of Charlotte MFA faculty as well as award-winning poet Jacki Shelton Green and Walt Whitman Birthplace writer-in-residence George Wallace. Providing music: Tanja Bechtler, founder and director of the Bechtler Ensemble Music Series.

Dorianne Laux

Tickets: $15 adults; $12 seniors (60+); $10 students. For advance tickets: https://secure.ticketsage.net/websales.aspx?u=cast&evtid=11353 or call 704-455-8542.

Prize Money: Calling Carolinas Poets

Have a stash of unpublished poems? If you live in the Carolinas, or if you're a native of North or South Carolina, here's your chance to see one of your poems in print.
Kakalak, an anthology edited by Charlotte's Beth Ann Cagle, Lisa Zerkle and Richard Allen Taylor and published by the Charlotte-based Main Street Rag, is calling for submissions of one to three poems of no more than 60 lines each ($10 entry fee). Deadline: April 30. The 2014 edition of Kakalak will present about 100 pages of poetry and 20 pages of art. First prize: $300. For complete rules, including instructions for submitting works of art:  http://mainstreetrag.com/Kakalak%202014.html  
.

Joseph Bathanti: "I Write to Be Forgiven"

Joseph Bathanti

"Why do you write?" I asked North Carolina Poet Laureate Joseph Bathanti, a question I've asked many other writers. Bathanti's answer is unlike anyone else's, and I love it.

"At this point in my life," he says, "after years of writing, I write because it is for me, to quote Flannery O'Connor, 'the habit of being' -- quite simply my life's practice, a daily office, though there are days when I am able to write only in my head. But, of course, psychic writing is invaluable, too.

"I also write because it affords me a chance to be a better person, to see and speak the truth that is perhaps invisible during the actual experience I'm writing about, a truth I cannot afford to tell in my minute to minute existence.

"I write to be forgiven."

Bathanti's latest book of poems, "Concertina" (Mercer University Press) is set in the Charlotte of 1976, when Bathanti was working in local prisons as a VISTA volunteer and dating Joan, the woman who became his wife.

Bathanti, professor of creative writing at Appalachian State University, will talk and read from his poetry at 7 p.m. Tuesday in Tate Hall as part of Central Piedmont's Sensoria festival.
You don't want to miss this. Free and open to the public.  

New books from Carolinas Writers

Carolinas writers are busy cranking out books.
Vanderbilt professor and Rutherfordton native Tony Earley has a new story collection,  "Mr. Tall,"

Alan Michael Parker

out in August. It's been 20 years since Earley's last collection, "Here We Are in Paradise." So what's he been doing? I'll save that news.

Former N.C. Poet Laureate Fred Chappell has a collection of poems, "Familiars," due in August from LSU Press. If you haven't guessed, it's about cats.
Davidson's Alan Michael Parker has a novel due in June from Dzanc Publishers. Says Parker: "The Committee on Town Happiness" is set in a fictional small town, not a college town. Kirkus Review: "Parker's not trying to be Dostoevsky here but rather wishes to create light and good-natured entertainment -- and he succeeds."
 UNC Charlotte's Aimee Parkinson's eerily intriguing novel, "The Petals of Your Eyes," is out in May from Starcherone Books. About her collection of stories, "The Innocent Party," Cris Mazza ("How to Leave a Country") wrote: "These stories are like running a finger around a seemingly smooth edge of glass -- you don't know you've been cut until you bleed."
Charlotte's Kim Wright, whose novel "Love in Mid Air," was praised by Publisher's Weekly for "its fresh perspective and sympathetic characters few writers can match," has a novel, "The Unexpected Waltz," due in May from Gallery Books.

Lee Smith

Scott Ely was a popular fiction writing professor at Winthrop University in Rock Hill. Ely died in October, and his last novel, "Plumb's Bluff," is due in June from Livingston Press. If you know Ely's work, it won't surprise you to find a hero gunning to win a national rapids race, as well as a murder to solve and a Romanian sculptress who swims nude in the river's baptismal pool. Unadulterated Ely.

Hendersonville native Robert Morgan ("The Road from Gap Creek") says he's finishing a novel set in 1850 -- "The Year of the Fugitive Slave Law" -- about two slaves who escape from the Carolinas and make their way to Ithaca, N.Y.
Down in Sullivans Island, S.C., Josephine Humphreys ("Nowhere Else on Earth") is working on a novel with a contemporary setting and is also absorbed in "something -- I'm not sure what -- about Colonial Haiti. I'll be back with more on that.
Hillsborough's Lee Smith ("Guests on Earth") has finished a memoir called "Dimestore." Smith's dad owned the Ben Franklin dimestore in the small, coal-mining town of Grundy, Va. The project, she says, "got a kick start recently when the entire town was demolished as part of the flood-control project." The house she was born in was also bulldozed. Someone salvaged the Smiths' brass door knocker, which now hangs in her study.
 
 

'I'd Rather My Granddaughter be a Whore...'

If you were to write a play about Richard Blanco's life, his paternal grandmother would likely get the lead role. In a poem, Blanco says she once told him: "I'd rather my granddaughter be a whore / than my grandson a faggot like you."

Richard Blanco

In a recent interview, he confessed he didn't feel completely free to be who he was -- a gay man -- until his grandmother died.
Blanco, as you likely know, is the man our President tapped to write and deliver his inaugural poem in 2013. Now 46, he's the youngest poet, the only Latino, and the only openly gay man ever to do the honors.

Conceived in Cuba, born in Spain, raised and educated in Miami, it's little wonder that for years Blanco didn't know who he was, where he was from or where he belonged.

After years of longing for his parents' homeland -- the mangos are better there, they told him, the lemons, the beaches -- he temporarily rejected the very culture he longed for.

His most recent collection, "Looking for the Gulf Motel," explores his life as a gay man in the very conservative Cuban culture.

Because Blanco's parents wanted a better life for their son, they offered three career choices: doctor, lawyer, engineer. Good at math, he chose engineering, earning his degree from Florida International University in 1991. In 1999, at Florida International, he completed his MFA under poet Campbell McGrath, and his thesis won the prestigious Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for a first collection.

Hear Blanco read his poetry and talk about his life at Sensoria: 10:30 a.m., April 9, in Halton Theater and again at 7 p.m., in Halton Theater on the Central Piedmont campus. Details: Alice.jenkins@cpcc.edu
704-330-6122 (O)

Writers' Conference on UNC-Greensboro campus

Peggy Payne

Searching for information about writing a novel, poetry, a children's book -- or how to publish and market what you've written? Here's an upcoming conference that won't strain your purse or your nerves.

The North Carolina Writers' Network one-day spring conference on April 12 on the UNC Greensboro campus includes a stellar faculty:  acclaimed novelists, editors, poets, memoirists and publishers. Among them: Kim Church ("Byrd"), Steve Mitchell ("The Naming of Ghosts"), Peggy Payne ("Co-Balt Blue"), Nancy Peacock ("Life without Water"), Mark Smith-Soto ("Any Second Now") and Robin Muira (co-director of Carolina Wren Press).
Cost: $99 for NCWN members; $150 for non-members. There's a hefty discount if you register now. Details:  Ed Southern, ed@ncwriters.org. Or www.ncwriters.org.