U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Wright reading at Davidson College Thursday

Charles Wright by Dan Addison

"It's not just a bunch of words," says U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Wright. "Language has purpose," The 1957 Davidson graduate will be the star of "An Evening with Charles Wright" at 8 p.m. on Thursday in Duke Family Performance Hall on the Davidson College campus.
Wright chose Davidson as an  undergraduate because his parents wanted him to have a proper education. He majored in history, but his greatest desire was to write fiction. One thing he learned at Davidson was that he was not a storyteller -- a shock for the Tennessee-born student.

He gave up on the idea of writing fiction, but later, in Italy, Wright happened on the poems of Ezra Pound, and, as he told the Paris Review, "I discovered a form that seemed suited to my mental and emotional inclinations -- the lyric poem, a form that seemed suited to my mental and emotional inclinations -- the lyric poem, a form, or subgenre, I guess, that didn't depend on a narrative structure, but on an imagistic one, an associational one."

The author of 20 books, Wright has won every prize awarded to poets, including the Pulitzer Prize. He is retired from the University of Virginia where he taught English literature and creative writing.

The reading is free and open to the public. However, tickets are required. They are available from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., at the Alvarez College Union ticket office. They are also available for $3 by calling the ticket office (704-894-2135) or by reserving online.

Read Tmore here: http://readinglifeobs.blogspot.com/search?q=Charles+Wright#storylink=cpy

The Body Tourist author at Park Road Books this Saturday

Dana Shavin

Reviewers have been calling Dana Shavin's memoir, The Body Tourist, riveting, brilliant, witty, insightful, courageous and ...excruciating.

The Body Tourist is the Atlanta native's personal journey into and out of anorexia. One reviewer calls it "the biography of an illness as stubborn as the woman determined to kill it.."

Another reviewer says Shavin can "write with both hands."

You can hear the author read and talk about her book at 11 a.m. on Saturday at Park Road Books.

A former therapist, Shavin now makes her living as certified life coach and as an artist and a writer. Since 2002, she has been a monthly columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, and she is editor of the Chattanooga Jewish Federation newspaper, the Shofar.

WHAT: Dana Shavin will read and sign copies of The Body Tourist. 

WHEN: 11 a.m., Saturday

WHERE: Park Road Books, Park Road Shopping Center, 4139 Park Rd., Charlotte, 28209.

COST:  Free and open to the public.

---

Dan Fesperman to talk on drones at Park Road Books Friday

Fesperman

Drones. The very word sounds invasive.

On Friday, at 5:30 p.m., at Park Road Books, Dan Fesperman, a Charlotte native and a 1972 graduate of Olympic High School, will talk about his new thriller -- his ninth -- called "Unmanned" (Knopf, $26.95).

A former reporter for the Baltimore Sun, Fesperman draws his plots from his own  international assignments to Pakistan, Germany, Bosnia, Afghanistan and the Middle East.

Reviewing the novel for the Wall Street Journal, Howard Gordon says:

Dan Fesperman's excellent and timely ninth thriller, Unmanned, "...explores the ethical conundrums of the most potent new weapon in the American arsenal: the unmanned aerial drone. Watching our enemy from the sky is one thing, but what if those same eyes are looking down at us? And who is watching the watchers? Unmanned is a smart and thoughtful exploration of the unintended consequences of waging war by remote control."

WHAT: Dan Fesperman reads and answers questions about his new novel.

WHEN: 5:30 p.m. Friday

WHERE: Park Road Books, 4139 Park Road, Park Road Shopping Center, Charlotte, 28209

COST: Free and open to the public.

Poet Philip Levine dead at 87: Home and far from home

Philip Levine

I didn't know the poet Philip Levine. I never met him, and I never heard him read, except on the Bill Moyers show in 2013 on TV.
But I loved him from afar.
Called the working man's poet, Levine died Saturday of pancreatic and liver cancer in Fresno, Calif. He was 87.
Born in 1928 in Detroit to Russian-Jewish immigrants, Levine grew up in the midst of the Great Depression. His heroes were the ordinary folks who worked at hopeless jobs simply to stave off poverty. Noted for his interest in the grim reality of the blue-collar worker, Levine resolved "to find a voice for the voiceless" while working from age 13 in the auto plants of Detroit. A former U.S. Poet Laureate, Levine won the Pulitzer Prize, twice the National Book Award, and in 2014, the $100,000 Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award for lifetime achievement.

Here's one of my favorite of his poems.

SWEETNESS

Sixteen years ago, in the high meadows
on the French side of the mountains, a clear
April morning, a warm wind slowing
through the young grains and grasses, the sun
touching everything with yellow light, I called
to my son Teddy, then fifteen, to come see,
and he left the car to stand beside me. He spoke
first, in a voice the wind half-swallowed, to say
something about the sweetness and the air
at this height. I had been asking a farmer
if he knew was the pass to Adorra open. Yes,
of course, on a day like this, and he laughed
his great laugh, a thickly built man
sweating in the open wool shirt high above
me on the tractor seat. I felt my wife's hand
in mine, squeezing, and turned in time to see
her holding back the tears for a moment before
they overflowed. Just the three of us, home and far
from home, a tiny family on so vast a plain,
with forty miles to go, yet were there.

Anne Tyler on inspiration, routine and the power of the unconcious

Pulitzer-winning novelist Anne Tyler, whose 20th novel, "A Spool of Blue Thread," was published last week by Knopf, was interviewed in the summer of 1992 by the Virginia Quarterly Review. She talks about not relying on inspiration, on what makes a routine and how sleep often solves her writing problems.

Tyler doesn’t wait for an inspiration before she begins writing. She makes writing a routine, reviewing a bit of her previous day’s work and then starting again, following the characters through the plots. “It’s like playing dolls,” she believes. “Writing is a sort of way of disobeying two major rules I heard as a child: stop daydreaming and stop staring into space.” To Tyler, tapping her imagination “is really an extension of day dreaming. I just sit around thinking “What if?” about things.” The process of writing for Tyler is one of continual discovery.

 Tyler has been writing thoughts and observations on white, unlined index cards since high school. The cards are eventually filed in a small metal box; divided by chapter number, the box also has “extra,” “general,” “look up,” and “revise” sections.

 When starting a novel, Tyler reads through her file of cards and selects ones that bring to mind interesting associations, looking for a story that will tie them together. As characters emerge and develop in her imagination, she explores their personalities. Before she begins writing, she insists on knowing her characters intimately so that she will understand each person’s reaction to the events that occur. Only after this preparatory period is over will she be able to outline the novel, using a single sheet of paper and one or two sentences per chapter.

 While she sleeps, she told an interviewer, “some sort of automatic pilot works then to solve problems in my plots; I go to bed trustful that they’ll be taken care of by morning. And toward dawn I often wake up and notice, as if from a distance, that my mind is still churning out stories without any help from me at all.”

 Tyler frequently suffers from insomnia from two to four in the morning, a malady she believes she inherited from her family. She says that half of her family “fights” this condition; the other half gets something done. Tyler uses those wakeful hours to write on index cards.

Gail Peck Reads from 'Within Two Rooms' Sunday at Park Road Books

Gail Peck

Before Charlotte poet Gail Peck could give her first reading for her new chapbook, "Within Two Rooms" (Finishing Line Press), she learned that a full-length poetry manuscript, "The Braided Light," had won the Lena Shull Book Contest, sponsored by the North Carolina Poetry Society.

Her prize is $250 and a reading in March at Catawba College in Salisbury. Former poet laureate Fred Chappell calls "The Braided Light," about Vincent Van Gogh and Claude Monet, "a poignant envisioning of visions, a look into the heart of light." Main Street Rag will publish this book in March.


Meanwhile, back at the chapbook ranch, Peck will read from "Within Two Rooms" at 2 p.m. Sunday at Park Road Books. Charlotte poet and essayist Rebecca McClanahan calls these  poems "a bittersweet litany of praise for the world the mother teaches us to notice, and to love."

WHAT: A poetry reading by Charlotte's Gail Peck
WHEN: 2 p.m., Sunday, Feb. 15.
WHERE: Park Road Books, 4139 Park Road, Charlotte 28209
COST: Free and open to the public

                                                                       

 

Margaret Walker once sued Alex Haley for copyright infringement

Margaret Walker

Carolyn Brown's "Song of My Life: A Biography of Margaret Walker" (University Press of Mississippi, $20), is a new look at the prize-winning poet and author of "Jubilee," a semi-fictional historical novel based on the author's bi-racial grandmother. In the biography, I learned many things I had not known.

• That Walker and husband "Alex" Alexander began their married life in 1943 in High Point, N.C.
• That Walker began her teaching career at Livingstone College in Salisbury, N.C. in 1940.
• That Walker was the first African-American woman selected to attend Yaddo, an artist's retreat in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Also in residence with Walker were Carson McCullers, Langston Hughes and Jean Stafford.
• That Walker sued Alex Haley, author of the Pulitzer-winning book, "Roots," for copyright infringement for "significant parallels between her "Jubilee" and Haley's "Roots"...enough to lead her to believe that he had stolen her work." Walker did not win the case, but she considered it "time well spent" for what she learned about copyright infringement. 

John David Smith on 'Lincoln and the U.S. Colored Troops'

John David Smith, author of  "Lincoln and the U.S. Colored Troops," will give a free public lecture at 6:30 p.m., Tuesday at UNC Charlotte Center City, 320 E. Ninth Street, in Uptown Charlotte.

The book tells two stories: Lincoln's decision to use African Americans to keep the Union in tact and the yeoman service of the more than 180,000 black soldiers who wore the Union blue. 

Smith is the Charles H. Stone Distinguished Professor of History at UNCC, and he is also the author of "We Ask Only for Even-Handed Justice: Black Voices from Reconstruction, 1865-1877," and "Soldiering for Freedom; How the Union Army Recruited, Trained and Deployed the U.S. Colored Troops" (with Bob Luke.)

The event is sponsored by  UNCC's College of Liberal Arts & Sciences and the J. Murrey Atkins Library at UNCC.

Jason Mott on D.G. Martin's 'North Carolina Book Watch' Sunday

Jason Mott

 Jason Mott, author of the recent novel, "The Wonder of all Things," is a writer's writer. I was lucky enough to moderate a panel last fall on which he served. He was extremely articulate about the writing life and his no-nonsense approach to tackling a novel, and he gave the audience valuable tips on what to do when you're stuck: keep writing.

Mott will be on D.G. Martin's "North Carolina Book Watch" this Sunday at noon and again on Thursday at 5 p.m. (UNC-TV).

I'm hoping Martin will ask him what inspired his first novel, "The Returned," on which the ABC television series, "Resurrection," is based.

His latest, "The Wonder of All Things," concerns a 13-year-old girl who has amazing healing powers. But each time she uses her powers, there's a cost to her.

You don't want to miss this inspiring writer from Bolton, N.C.

 

Betty Adcock's 'Widow Poems' -- 'conversations shredding in the wind'

Almost four years ago, Raleigh poet Betty Adcock lost her long-time husband, Don, a jazz musician. His death has changed her life, of course, and over the ensuing months, the poems began to come. Poems, she says, that were "hard to write, hard to live through," and the book, she says, "has changed her, too. I care much less for some things and much more for other things than I used to."
 
Now her chapbook "Widow Poems" (Jacar Press), $12.95) from which the following is taken.

The Widow's House

seems to be coming apart -- pieces
of wall, snatches of a rug, chair-rungs,
shingles, plumbing, lamps and doorknobs.
Glass shatters from rows of still-framed 
faces. The mirrors are dusking over,
no longer disclosing.

                              Everything floats
as if gravity has left the place. It's not
violent; it is a loosening, a soundless
disengagement. Even her body has become 
otherwise, flesh that can no longer
recognize itself.

Perhaps it is she who has gone to ash,
gone to ground and the dark.
She has asked so hard for him,
crying out in the night, weeping into
pots on the stove, roses in the yard.

Perhaps she is the ghost 
in the house they built dissolving,
turning now as if in the grip of a slowed
tornado, air full of what could be
confetti in some kind of decelerating
celebration: music, books, conversations
shredding in the wind that memory
always becomes -- unfastened, recasting,
disheveling as the end of lovemaking.
She sits on a splintered floor
surrounded by the done-for.

Betty Adcock is the author of six collections of poetry from LSU Press. She has taught for many years at Meredith College in Raleigh and most recently at the low-residency Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers in Swannanoa, N.C. To order the book: Jacarpress.com

Hubbard's 'And We Stay' named Printz Honor Award book by ALA

 

Some people won't answer the phone if they don't recognize the number. I'm not one of those people. It could be a free trip to Paris or to the Grand Canyon or maybe someone's offering great gobs of cash. Who knows what awaits?

On the other hand, Jennifer Hubbard, a young adult novelist who once taught at Charlotte Country Day School and now lives in Salisbury, doesn't answer strange numbers.

You might say what happened recently will change that.

The call came on the eve of Super Bowl Sunday. Jennifer was at home, working the New York Times cross-word puzzle. Ring. Ring. The phone showed a Tennessee area code.

She let it ring.

Jennifer and her husband went out to dinner, and the calls continued. Once. Twice. She ignored  each one.

As she was stepping into Salsibury's Keppel Auditorium for a performance of the North Carolina Symphony: ring, ring. This time, a New York number. Jennifer listened to the voice mail, which chastised her for not answering the previous calls.

So Jennifer returns the Tennessee call and learns that...

Her 2014 young adult novel, And We Stay, had been named a Printz Honor Book!

Now, what does this mean exactly?

The Michael L. Printz Award, given annually by the American Library Association, honors the best book written for teens based on its literary merit. In addition, the Printz Committee names up to four honor books, which also represent the best writing in young adult literature.

So Jennifer's book now keeps company with past winners of the Printz Honor, including The Book Thief, by Marcus Zusak, and Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson.

This means that And We Stay will be in print for a long time to come. It also means that every library in the country will want to have a copy on its shelves. It means a lot of things, really, but most of all, Jennifer's hoping it means that her work will be taught in high schools, and that she'll be invited to talk with students about it. 

Oh, and Sofia Coppola, if you are reading this, Jennifer would also very much like for you to be the one to adapt the novel into a screenplay and direct the film version.

 

Shelby Foote on aging, Joan Crawford dancing and Thomas Wolfe

The Paris Review interviewed Shelby Foote at his house in Memphis, Tenn., in 1999, and Foote  talked about various subjects, including his use of real ink and blotters, which were getting almost impossible to find. Foote, of course, is the author of the monumental trilogy: The Civil War: A Narrative, but he continued to think of himself as a novelist. In 1999, he was still working on his yet-to-be finished novel, Two Gates to the City. 
When he mentions Thomas Wolfe below, he is obviously referring to their time at UNC-Chapel Hill. Foote did not graduate, but holed himself up n the library and plotted his own course of study.
At the time of the interview, Foote wa 83 and, unbidden, began to talk about aging.

 

Getting old has way more virtues that it has faults, if you leave out the pain you might suffer if you have some serious injury. But I take great pleasure in being able to look back on things. I remember certain little scenes that are almost meaningless, like Thomas Wolfe coming up the library steps while I was coming down, being with William Faulkner and talking to him about his work, all kinds of things. I remember a sky without a jet trail. I remember Joan Crawford dancing. I remember Roosevelt’s fireside chats and people sitting in front of the radio, like warming their hands in front of a stove. Everyone on the face of the earth has such remembrances if he lives long enough. I’m eighty years old now, which is almost inconceivable to me. I don’t believe it for an instant. 

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/931/the-art-of-fiction-no-158-shelby-foote

All I want is to hunker under the covers and read 'The Girl on the Train'

Never mind washing the dog, if we had a dog.
Never mind feeding the cat, if we had a cat.
Never mind stuffing the pillows with water fowl feathers, if we had water fowl feathers.

Never mind the blackberry pie I promised I'd bake.

Never mind. Never mind.

All I really want is to hunker under the covers today and read Paula Hawkins' smash hit, "The Woman on the Train."

Even Stephen King tweeted that it kept him up all night. "The alcoholic narrator is dead perfect," he wrote.

Critics are calling the bestseller by the UK author "compulsively readable," a "Hitchccokian thriller" and comparing it to "Gone Girl" and "The Silent Wife."

The hardcover is in its 10th printing and DreamWorks has optioned it for a movie, according to USA Today .

What's it about? Rachel, the woman on a train, is alcoholic and obsessed with a couple she sees from the window on her commute to London. They seem the perfect couple to her until the morning she sees something that draws her into a possible murder investigation.

Who's Paula Hawkins? A Londoner who admits to a darker side of her personality. She worked as a journalist for 15 years before publishing three novels under a pseudonym -- "chick-lit," she calls them. And, without being told, we know -- and celebrate -- that she's now remarkably wealthy.
    

Sunday at Quail Ridge in Raleigh: A tribute to Reynolds Price

Reynolds Price

 If I could be anywhere this Sunday afternoon, it would be at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh. The afternoon forum will be a tribute to the late Reynolds Price, long-time Duke professor and the author of such classic novels as "A Long and Happy Life" and "Kate Vaiden."

I fell in love with Price in 1963, soon after "A Long and Happy Life" was published. I checked it out from Duke's East Campus Library, where my then-husband was a graduate student.

Back home, I began reading aloud to my mother, who was helping me care for my new-born son. After that first long, glorious sentence in "A Long and Happy Life," we held our sides laughing -- not because what we read was particularly funny. But because it was exhilarating to happen upon such clear, pleasurable genius in the first sentence.

It would be another decade-plus before I actually met Price. As editor of the Observer's book page, I had started a series called "Piedmont Authors," which gave me an excuse in 1979 to drive to Durham to interview him. We met outside his classroom on West Campus, walked to our cars -- he drove a yellow Mercedes -- and I followed in my car (a white Mercedes, I admit, thanks to my brand-new husband who had been an indulgent bachelor before we married) to his little house deep in the country between Durham and Chapel Hill.

Two things I'll never forget: How he raved over his former student Anne Tyler, whom he taught as a 16-year-old Duke freshman and his surprise that every student after her was not as talented.

The other was his telling me that he ran four miles a day.
That fact would stick in my mind years later, when I returned to interview Price, this time in his wheelchair because of paralysis from radiation to reduce a spinal tumor -- a condition he bore with regal patience and an enviable grace.

WHAT: A tribute to Reynolds Price with Nancy Olson; Price's niece Memsy Price, Edmond Miller, Alex Harris (who will show photos), Frank Hielema and Jim Clark. Moderator: Clay Stainaker

WHERE: Quail Ridge Books, 3522 Wade Ave., Raleigh, N.C., 27607

WHEN: Sunday, Feb. 1 at 3 p.m.

COST: Free and open to the public  

What Miranda July and Charlotte's Kathryn Schwille have in common

Miranda July

Question: What does award-winning Charlotte fiction writer Kathryn Schwille have in common with filmmaker and actor Miranda July, whose debut novel, "The First Bad Man," is being hailed as "so totally weird and wonderful" that it's like "watching an insane person dance"?

Schwille and July have been friends since high school?

No.

They were roommates at the Bread Loaf writers' colony?

No.

They both write about kinky sex?

Well, sort of.

The truth is, Miranda July graces the cover of a recent edition of Printer's Row Journal, in which Schwille's short story, "White Birch," appears. Printer's row is an experimental insert of The Chicago Tribune which goes only to premiere subscribers and which includes book reviews, long short stories and essays. Printer's Row, named for the area of Chicago where printers once had their shops, replaces the Tribune's former book pages.
In December, Schwille learned she was a finalist for this year's Pushcart Prizes, awarded to "important works published by small presses last year." The award was for her short-short story, "FM 104," which originally appeared in the literary journal Memorius. Other fiction has appeared in West Branch, River Styx, Sycamore Review and Crazyhorse. She was also a 2013 recipient of an artist's fellowship from the North Carolina Arts Council.

Leave it to Charlotte's Lee Ann Brown: A poem about poke sallet

Lee Ann Brown grew up in Charlotte. She is the founder of the award-winning, independent poetry press Tender Buttons and the author of several collections of poetry, including her most recent, "In the Laurels, Caught" (Fence Books, $15.95). She divides her time between New York City, where she teaches at St. John's University, and Marshall, N.C.

The following is from "In the Laurels, Caught."

POKE SALLET

is cooked not raw

              stay ahead
              of the red

Eat in spring
       cook when 6 inches or less

lymph cleanser

   2 boils

Do Not drink the potlikker

Eat the berry

1 on the 1st day
2 on the 2nd day
3 on the 3rd day

How far do you
spit out the poisonous seeds?

become a dynamic accumulator
bringing up minerals from below

Children in a school near here used poke ink
It was that with which they wrote

any daughter paints her arms

             the way to play the plants

   on paper the unfixed juice goes from bright magen-
ta to a dried blood color

the man who built our house
     first dreamed of a pokeberry sky

 but after a hot day of crushing berries
and smearing the boards, gave into Benjamin Moore

it's "hard to fix"

 that color more bright than cochineal

Junot Diaz's ' Wondrous Life' tops list of 20 best novels in 21st century

One of my favorite writers, the Dominican-born Junot Diaz, topped the list of more than 150 novels of the 21st century named in a poll of leading critics by BBC Culture, the entertainment arm of the BBC's international website, which included choices from experts at the New York Times and Time magazine.
Diaz won for his Pulitzer-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007).


The winners:

1. Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007)
2. Edward P Jones, The Known World (2003)
3. Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (2009)
4. Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004)
5. Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (2001)
6. Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000)
7. Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010)
8. Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2012)
9. Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001)
10. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006)
11. Zadie Smith, White Teeth (2000)
12. Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)
13. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (2013)
14. WG Sebald, Austerlitz (2001)
15. Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend (2012)
16. Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty (2008)
17. Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2010)
18. Zadie Smith, NW (2012)
19. Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (2009)
20. Shirley Hazzard, The Great Fire (2004)

I'm in love with a man I never met: Amorak Huey and his liner notes

True confession: I am in love with a man I never met. His name is Amorak Huey and I'm not even sure how to pronounce it, though I know the emphasis is not on the first syllable. I found his poetry on line, and I fell hard. He grew up in Alabama, and he's a former newspaper man. He teaches now at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. I think he must write poetry in his sleep because he seems to be in every literary journal I pick up.

I found this essay by him as I was twittering around. I think he's a genius. He has a forthcoming book of poetry called Ha Ha Ha Thump from Sundress Publications. "Liner Notes" previously appeared in the Winter 2015 issue of Brevity.

Liner Notes for the Debut Album From the Band We Never Formed

by AMORAK HUEY • January 7, 2015

 
For M, J, C, and S.

Track 1

There was that time we almost died, which is to say every day because that’s how life works, but in particular this is about the night we took the back way and then the dark shortcut around the back way, and the road went downhill and farther downhill and turned and turned and kept turning long past the point where turning made sense. How grateful we were to be so scared.

Track 2

The boys we were. The boys we would become. The boys who never existed. Someone is always going to be tallest, fastest, strongest, most handsome. Sometimes one person gets all the gifts. The day will be shaped by how the rest of us deal with such a discrepancy. Loyalty means holding hands even if you’re homophobic.

Track 3

There was that girl we each gave the keys to our mouth. Waited for her to choose. Back then we didn’t know the difference between want and other kinds of want.

Track 4

Our bodies crack open early. Our skin splits and lets in the lightning. One of us laid down a motorcycle to avoid killing a dog. Left a meaningful amount of flesh and blood on the asphalt, a beautiful and gory smear. A donation. The price of a forever scar.

Track 5

There was naturally the problem of music itself. Of choosing instruments and keeping time, and the way trees in the South take tentative root in the crumbling red clay. When you grow up in Alabama, you understand you are never alone. You understand the earth leaves a stain.

Track 6

There was that girl again. Every time she used one of our names was a kind of prayer, a kind of answer. I don’t mean to make desire sound more sacred than it is.

Track 7

All writing is done from memory. How much is lost between a thought and the recording of that thought? Between an experience and any pretense at understanding that experience. Between her lips and the lyrics that mention them. We were the kind of boys who drowned such questions in sweet tea and staying up all night.

Track 8

When a storm came from the south, it brought the gulf, the brack and bitter of saltwater, the scent of mystery. When it came from the west, it brought more wind than we could handle, all uproot and damage.

Track 9

There was a map of the city where we lived, its efficient New Deal homes and straight roads, all those mowed lawns and the churches that contained us. The highway a mile north. The rivers that carried us away. I thought I took the map when we parted, but I cannot find it.

Track 10

Imagine the disagreements. Some of us speak to speak, some to be heard. All of us know music is a substitute for sex but no one says so aloud. Is it still performance if there is no song and no audience? Is it possible to be keenly aware of the possibility of suffering if none of us has truly suffered?

Track 11

In any group of five or more, one of you is certain to believe wholly in the mind while another is all gut. The rest, rather than choosing sides, arrange themselves in reasonably orderly fashion along this spectrum. The most obvious error is thinking our patterns of behavior will evolve past this origin.

Track 12

Our problem was never a lack of self-awareness. It was awareness only of self. And each other. We were aware of each other. If you don’t realize how close to the edge we all are, all the time, every moment, close your eyes and see how long you can hold your breath.

Sunday celebration for Carolyn Noell's 'The Medicine Man's Daughter'

The Charlotte Writers Club will celebrate the publication of Carolyn Noell's memoir, "The Medicine Man's Daughter," with a reading at the Warehouse Performing Arts Center in Cornelius on Sunday.
This is a coming-of-age story of Dayou Tucker, a Liberian refugee who came to Charlotte to escape civil war.

Jan Blodgett, archivist for the Davidson College Library, says this about the memoir:

"This is a poignant and captivating story that reveals not just one woman's courage, but that of a whole community of friends and strangers whose lives are changed forever by knowing one another."

Noell is a retired teacher and counselor with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School system.  She and her husband Tom are involved with the Stephen's Ministries at Davidson College Presbyterian Church. Noell has also written a book of poetry, "Weathered Pine."

When: Sunday, Jan. 25, 2-4 p.m.
Where: The Warehouse Performing Arts Center, 9216-A Westmoreland Road, Cornelius.
Cost: Free and open to the public.

 

Enter the 2015 Doris Betts Fiction Prize contest and win $250

Doris Betts

I would consider it a supreme honor to win any contest with Doris Betts's name attached. Betts, a Statesville native, wrote novels and short stories that carved channels in the heart. She taught for years in the creative writing department at UNC Chapel Hill, and she inspired hundreds of students to become writers. If they didn't go on to write, they enjoyed a deeper appreciation for literature because of Betts, who died in 2012.

I urge you to find a copy of "The Ugliest Pilgrim," her stunningly wrenching 1973 short story about a young woman with a disfigured face who rides the bus from Spruce Pine to Tulsa in hopes a preacher will heal her. You'll find it in the collection, "Beasts of the Southern Wild," a 1974 finalist for the National Book Award.

The 2015 Doris Betts Fiction Prize is now open for submissions. First place winner will receive $250.

GUIDELINES FOR THE 2015 DORIS BETTS FIiCTION PRIZE. Deadline: February 15:

• The competition is open to any writer who is a legal resident of North Carolina or a member of the North Carolina Writers’ Network. North Carolina Literary Review subscribers with North Carolina connections (lives or has lived in NC) are also eligible.

• The competition is for previously unpublished short stories up to 6,000 words. One entry per writer. No novel excerpts. Stories do NOT have to relate to NCLR’s annual special feature topic.

• Submit previously unpublished stories online at https://nclr.submittable.com/submit. Submittable will collect your entry fee via credit card ($10 NCWN members or NCLR subscribers / $20 for non-members/non-subscribers).

• To pay submission fees by check or money order, make payable to the North Carolina Writers Network and mail to: Ed Southern, PO Box 21591, Winston-Salem, NC 27120- 1591

• Documents must be Microsoft Word or .rtf files. Author's name should not appear on manuscripts. Instead, include a separate cover sheet with name, address, phone number, e-mail address, word count, and manuscript title. (If submitting online, do not include a cover sheet with your document; Submittable will collect and record your name and contact information.) If you have any problems submitting electronically, email NCLR's Submission Manager.

The winner and finalists will be announced in April. The winning story and select finalists will be published in the next year’s issue of the North Carolina Literary Review.
Direct questions to Margaret Bauer, Editor of the North Carolina Literary Review, at BauerM@ecu.edu.
 

Dementia sets in as 82-year-old Etta walks 2,000 miles to the ocean

Emma Hooper

One of the most charming debut novels of 2015 will surely be Emma Hooper's "Etta and Otto and Russell and James," out this week from Simon & Schuster. You've probably heard the story line by now.

Eighty-two-year-old Etta has never seen the ocean. So early one morning she takes a rifle, some chocolate, and her best boots, and begins walking the 3,232 kilometers (about 2,000 miles) from her farm in rural Canada eastward to Halifax in Nova Scotia. She leaves husband Otto a note on the kitchen table: I will try to remember to come back. Otto understands. But with Etta gone, the memories come crowding in, and he struggles to keep them at bay.

Russell is the couple's friend and a one-time rival for Etta's love. In fact, he's spent his whole life loving Etta from afar, and he insists on finding her, wherever she’s gone.

As Etta walks farther toward the ocean, accompanied by a coyote named James, the lines among memory, illusion, and reality blur as dementia sets in. Rocking back and forth with the pull of the waves, Etta and Otto and Russell and James move from the present of a quiet Canadian farm to a dusty burnt past of hunger, war, passion, and hope; from trying to remember to trying to forget.

In interviews, Hooper, a musician in her mid-30s who lives in England, says the characters Etta and Otto are loosely based on the maternal grandparents she visited as a child on their small farm in Sasketchewan. Her grandmother, like Etta, taught in a tiny school, and her grandfather did come from a farm family of 15 children.

With starred reviews in both Kirkus and Library Journal and named as People Magazine's Book of the Week, critics are lauding this novel about leaving and being left, about the need to remember and the need to forget and about following your dreams, no matter your age.

Emma Hooper: Well, the characters of Etta and Otto are loosely based on my maternal grandparents. My grandma did actually teach in a one-room schoolhouse in Saskatchewan, and my grandpa did grow up in a farm family of 15 kids (and his hair did all go white when he was overseas for the war). So, I suppose, a mixture of that and letting my slightly absurdist imagination take over from time to time. I like to play little “what if” games with myself. “What if fish skulls spoke? What language would it be in? What would they say? Why?” Or, “What if, instead of taking the fastest, easiest way to get somewhere, you took the slowest? Why?” I put that kind of thinking together with the characters who help direct it, and, ta-da, a sort of story appears.
- See more at: http://www.bookweb.org/news/indies-introduce-debut-author-qa-emma-hooper#sthash.QkgI5BMg.dpuf

What inspired Etta and Otto and Russell and James?
Emma Hooper: Well, the characters of Etta and Otto are loosely based on my maternal grandparents. My grandma did actually teach in a one-room schoolhouse in Saskatchewan, and my grandpa did grow up in a farm family of 15 kids (and his hair did all go white when he was overseas for the war). So, I suppose, a mixture of that and letting my slightly absurdist imagination take over from time to time. I like to play little “what if” games with myself. “What if fish skulls spoke? What language would it be in? What would they say? Why?” Or, “What if, instead of taking the fastest, easiest way to get somewhere, you took the slowest? Why?” I put that kind of thinking together with the characters who help direct it, and, ta-da, a sort of story appears.
- See more at: http://www.bookweb.org/news/indies-introduce-debut-author-qa-emma-hooper#sthash.QkgI5BMg.dpuf

What inspired Etta and Otto and Russell and James?
Emma Hooper: Well, the characters of Etta and Otto are loosely based on my maternal grandparents. My grandma did actually teach in a one-room schoolhouse in Saskatchewan, and my grandpa did grow up in a farm family of 15 kids (and his hair did all go white when he was overseas for the war). So, I suppose, a mixture of that and letting my slightly absurdist imagination take over from time to time. I like to play little “what if” games with myself. “What if fish skulls spoke? What language would it be in? What would they say? Why?” Or, “What if, instead of taking the fastest, easiest way to get somewhere, you took the slowest? Why?” I put that kind of thinking together with the characters who help direct it, and, ta-da, a sort of story appears.
- See more at: http://www.bookweb.org/news/indies-introduce-debut-author-qa-emma-hooper#sthash.QkgI5BMg.dpuf

What inspired Etta and Otto and Russell and James?
Emma Hooper: Well, the characters of Etta and Otto are loosely based on my maternal grandparents. My grandma did actually teach in a one-room schoolhouse in Saskatchewan, and my grandpa did grow up in a farm family of 15 kids (and his hair did all go white when he was overseas for the war). So, I suppose, a mixture of that and letting my slightly absurdist imagination take over from time to time. I like to play little “what if” games with myself. “What if fish skulls spoke? What language would it be in? What would they say? Why?” Or, “What if, instead of taking the fastest, easiest way to get somewhere, you took the slowest? Why?” I put that kind of thinking together with the characters who help direct it, and, ta-da, a sort of story appears.
- See more at: http://www.bookweb.org/news/indies-introduce-debut-author-qa-emma-hooper#sthash.QkgI5BMg.dpuf

What inspired Etta and Otto and Russell and James?
Emma Hooper: Well, the characters of Etta and Otto are loosely based on my maternal grandparents. My grandma did actually teach in a one-room schoolhouse in Saskatchewan, and my grandpa did grow up in a farm family of 15 kids (and his hair did all go white when he was overseas for the war). So, I suppose, a mixture of that and letting my slightly absurdist imagination take over from time to time. I like to play little “what if” games with myself. “What if fish skulls spoke? What language would it be in? What would they say? Why?” Or, “What if, instead of taking the fastest, easiest way to get somewhere, you took the slowest? Why?” I put that kind of thinking together with the characters who help direct it, and, ta-da, a sort of story appears.
- See more at: http://www.bookweb.org/news/indies-introduce-debut-author-qa-emma-hooper#sthash.QkgI5BMg.dpuf

What inspired Etta and Otto and Russell and James?
Emma Hooper: Well, the characters of Etta and Otto are loosely based on my maternal grandparents. My grandma did actually teach in a one-room schoolhouse in Saskatchewan, and my grandpa did grow up in a farm family of 15 kids (and his hair did all go white when he was overseas for the war). So, I suppose, a mixture of that and letting my slightly absurdist imagination take over from time to time. I like to play little “what if” games with myself. “What if fish skulls spoke? What language would it be in? What would they say? Why?” Or, “What if, instead of taking the fastest, easiest way to get somewhere, you took the slowest? Why?” I put that kind of thinking together with the characters who help direct it, and, ta-da, a sort of story appears.
- See more at: http://www.bookweb.org/news/indies-introduce-debut-author-qa-emma-hooper#sthash.QkgI5BMg.dpuf

What inspired Etta and Otto and Russell and James?
Emma Hooper: Well, the characters of Etta and Otto are loosely based on my maternal grandparents. My grandma did actually teach in a one-room schoolhouse in Saskatchewan, and my grandpa did grow up in a farm family of 15 kids (and his hair did all go white when he was overseas for the war). So, I suppose, a mixture of that and letting my slightly absurdist imagination take over from time to time. I like to play little “what if” games with myself. “What if fish skulls spoke? What language would it be in? What would they say? Why?” Or, “What if, instead of taking the fastest, easiest way to get somewhere, you took the slowest? Why?” I put that kind of thinking together with the characters who help direct it, and, ta-da, a sort of story appears.
- See more at: http://www.bookweb.org/news/indies-introduce-debut-author-qa-emma-hooper#sthash.QkgI5BMg.dpuf

What inspired Etta and Otto and Russell and James?
Emma Hooper: Well, the characters of Etta and Otto are loosely based on my maternal grandparents. My grandma did actually teach in a one-room schoolhouse in Saskatchewan, and my grandpa did grow up in a farm family of 15 kids (and his hair did all go white when he was overseas for the war). So, I suppose, a mixture of that and letting my slightly absurdist imagination take over from time to time. I like to play little “what if” games with myself. “What if fish skulls spoke? What language would it be in? What would they say? Why?” Or, “What if, instead of taking the fastest, easiest way to get somewhere, you took the slowest? Why?” I put that kind of thinking together with the characters who help direct it, and, ta-da, a sort of story appears.
- See more at: http://www.bookweb.org/news/indies-introduce-debut-author-qa-emma-hooper#sthash.QkgI5BMg.dpuf

What inspired Etta and Otto and Russell and James?
Emma Hooper: Well, the characters of Etta and Otto are loosely based on my maternal grandparents. My grandma did actually teach in a one-room schoolhouse in Saskatchewan, and my grandpa did grow up in a farm family of 15 kids (and his hair did all go white when he was overseas for the war). So, I suppose, a mixture of that and letting my slightly absurdist imagination take over from time to time. I like to play little “what if” games with myself. “What if fish skulls spoke? What language would it be in? What would they say? Why?” Or, “What if, instead of taking the fastest, easiest way to get somewhere, you took the slowest? Why?” I put that kind of thinking together with the characters who help direct it, and, ta-da, a sort of story appears.
- See more at: http://www.bookweb.org/news/indies-introduce-debut-author-qa-emma-hooper#sthash.QkgI5BMg.dpuf

'Stella by Starlight' set in 1932 in segregated town of Bumblebee, N.C.

E

At first glance, "Stella by Starlight" is a whimsical-looking middle-grade novel with silhouettes of two black children near a frozen pond under starlight.

Wait! That's not a cozy bonfire across that pond where the children can roast marshmallows. There's a cross in the middle of that blaze.

Author Sharon M. Draper lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, and sets the  book in the fictional town of Bumblebee, N.C., modeled on the town where Draper's dad grew up.

It's "a place in the segregated South," where Stella, a fifth-grader, can go into some stores and not others. Where some folks are pleasant and others are not.
"To Stella, it sort of evens out, and heck, the Klan hasn't bothered them for years."                                                                                                                            

Draper is a New York Times bestselling author ("Out of My Mind") and she says on her web page that she used to visit her grandmother in this little town, "tucked in the rocky bottom of the Blue Ridge Mountains," near Spindale.

"Roosters crowed at dawn," Draper writes. "Our breakfast milk came warm from the cow, our eggs fresh from the chicken’s nests. I remember hot apple pie, cold watermelon slices, and sugar sweet tea. And the stories. After the sun faded into darkness, and fireflies blinked in the yard, everyone would gather on Grandma Estelle’s porch and listen to the old folks tell tales—funny memories, harsh realities, family treasures, and sometimes big fat whoppers."

Underline the words "harsh realities."

Bumblebee in 1932 is not only segregated, but the Klan still terrorizes black families.

Listen:

"Every Negro family in Bumblebee knew the unwritten rules -- they had to take care of their own problems and take care of one another. Help from the white community was neither expected nor considered. It was as it always had been."

The night the Klan shows up, Stella recognizes the white physician's horse as the one leading the pack.

Draper's grandmother, Estelle Twitty Mills Davis, died in 1983 and left Draper her only journal and became for her granddaughter both muse and spirit guide. "She is my Stella by Starlight," Draper says.

Kirkus Review says; "A tale of Jim Crow South that's  not sugar coated but effective, with a trustworthy narrator who opens her heart and reader's eyes."

Draper has received the Coretta Scott King Award for both "Copper Sun" and "Forged by Fire," and "Out of My Mind" has been a New York Times bestseller for more than a year.

SHARON DRAPER TO READ AT QUAIL RIDGE BOOKS

When: Wed., Jan. 21
Time: 7 p.m.
Where: Quail Ridge Books, 3522 Wade Avenue, Raleigh, N.C., 27607
Cost: Free and open to the public

UNC at Pittsboro? Historians reveal what might've been and more

 

Imagine that our great University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, would, but for the tight-fistedness of an 18th century landowner, have been our great University of North Carolina at Pittsboro.

On Pokeberry Creek, no less.

It's true, and the details of this near-miss of the 700-acre Chatham County Jones Grove plantation as a site for the University in 1792 -- as well as the secrets literally dug from unmarked slave graves -- are revealed in a tantalizing new book, "Miss Mary's Money: Fortune and Misfortune in a North Carolina Plantation Family, 1760-1924" (McFarland Publishers, Jefferson, N.C., $29.95 softcover.) by H.G. Jones with David Southern.

Trust Jones, who's taught history in several universities, served as state archivist and director of the North Carolina Department of Archives and History and as curator of the North Carolina Collection at UNC, to nail the most elusive facts and make history come jigging to life.


David Southern is a managing editor at Duke University Press of "The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle" and a genius of a sleuth.

Let's put aside the complicated Smith genealogy that begins with a 1760 land grant to one Richard Parker, and just say that Mary Ruffin Smith became the sole heir of several sizable parcels, including Jones Grove, which over the years expanded to more than 1,000 acres, and which, at her death in 1885, she willed to the University. Proceeds from the sale of the property were parlayed into scholarships.

Mary Smith never married. But her unsavory bachelor brothers, Francis Smith and Sidney Smith, one a quasi-doctor and one a binge-drinking lawyer, sired four daughters with a slave woman named Harriet, often as the result of rape.

And that's only the beginning of this fascinating story, which anyone interested in dysfunctional families, horrific treatment of slave women by their white owners, great wealth, family devotion and heart-swelling generosity, will definitely want to read.








 

Anyone out there who has not finished Donna Tartt's 'The Goldfinch'?

Checking out at the Fresh Market recently, my friend Mark asked if I'd read Donna Tartt's bestselling novel, "The Goldfinch." I admitted I had not, and he told me he was enjoying it but having trouble finishing it. Today, reading The Notebook in The Guardian, I find Mark is not alone: 

The question most people ask when they find out you read books for a job is, do you finish them? It’s a good question, to which the short answer is yes, I do, because someone’s paying me to finish them. It would just be rude to take the money and review a book based on its first three chapters, or judge it for a prize and not make it past the opening pages. And some books – not many, but some – don’t begin well but end spectacularly.

But when I am reading for myself, I don’t have any such compunction. Reading a book shouldn’t be a chore, the carrots that must be eaten before pudding is allowed. Reading is – or should be – a pleasure in its own right. There is no novel so perfect that you have to finish it, or you’ve somehow failed as a reader. And I guarantee that no author is sitting at their desk wondering how to make their book more endurable. Not even Donna Tartt.

Kobo – the e-bookseller – has released two sets of figures: for books bought this year, and for books finished. The Goldfinch was its 37th best-selling book, but only 44% of those who started it managed to complete it. Perhaps that’s no surprise: Tartt’s magnum opus is almost 800 pages long and plenty of us find very long books off-putting. But presumably most of those who bought The Goldfinch knew it was a long read and fancied it anyway. But partway through, they just lost momentum because the story didn’t engage them sufficiently.

Most-unfinished book of the year isn’t a title anyone would hope to win. But her core fans probably read the book to the end, as did a whole raft of new readers, which propelled her up the bestseller charts. And those readers who didn’t finish it still paid for it, so Donna Tartt can mop up those tears with crisp tenners, which will surely ease the pain.

'Invisible Racism': Claudia Rankine to read at Queens University Jan. 16

When Alexandra Schwartz interviewed poet Claudia Rankine last summer for the New Yorker, she asked her how her award-winning poetry collection, "Citizen: An American Lyric," came about.

Here's what Rankine answered:

I started working on “Citizen” as a way of talking about invisible racism—moments that you experience and that happen really fast. They go by at lightning speed, and you begin to distrust that they even happened, and yet you know that you feel bad somehow. My husband is a great fan, or used to be a great fan, of Tiger Woods, and so I started by watching a lot of golf tournaments. I am a great fan of the Williams sisters, and I would watch tennis. You began to see a lot of little moments, and they would happen, and they would happen, and they would happen, at the U.S. Open and at various other Grand Slams, and I thought, “I’m going to start documenting these.”

And as I began documenting them in Serena Williams’s playing life, I started doing it in my own life. Then I started interviewing people and asking them for stories in their lives. I specifically said, to people I met and to friends, “Tell me a moment when you suddenly found yourself feeling invisible or internally unsettled by something that came down to a moment that you then read as racism, but I want it to happen between you and a friend.” I didn’t really care too much about what people were doing in Ferguson, at this level. I meant in their day-to-day working lives. And then, as people began to tell me stories, I began to see it in my own life, everywhere, happening, and I just started writing them down.

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, poet Claudia Rankine earned a BA at Williams College and an MFA at Columbia University. She is a former Queens University instructor in its MFA program.

Rankine has published several collections of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), a finalist for the National Book Award; Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004); and Nothing in Nature is Private (1994), which won the Cleveland State Poetry Prize.

Claudia Rankine Reads:

When: 8:30-9:30 p.m., Friday, Jan. 16
Where: Ketner Auditorium, Queens University
Cost: Free and open to the public.

At Park Road Books Thursday: 'How Women Lead Better Together'

Maggie Ellis Chotas

As a journalist, I've not experienced a business partnership with other women, though I have worked with and for many women over the years.

I am, however, a member of a small group of women who have met together on Wednesday mornings for almost 30 years. I am constantly amazed at how adept women are at paying attention to each others' problems. They are empathetic and patient listeners, they respond to each other thoroughly and completely, and they don't stop until they have worked together to find creative solutions to life's many vexations and perplexities.

That group is one reason I was interested in Betsy Polk and Maggie Ellis Chotas's new book, "Power Through Partnership: How Women Lead Better Together" (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., $16.95).

Polk of Chapel Hill is facilitator, mediator and board-certified coach, and Chotas, who grew up in Charlotte and lives in Durham, is a also facilitator and leadership coach. Together, they founded Mulberry Partners, a business that advises business partners.
 
In her foreword, Anne-Marie Slaughter ("Why Women Still Can't Have It All") says that Polk and Chotas "offer real, practical solutions to the dilemmas that face even the most ambitious and committed women among us."


During their 12-year partnership, Polk and Chotas interviewed 125 female co-leaders who had plenty to say about the power of their partnerships. These women became their mentors as they wrote this "guidebook we never had" for women who are "ready for a better way to lead, to work, to live."

The authors will talk about their experiences and the power of female partnerships at 7 p.m., on Thursday, Jan. 15, at Park Road Books, 4139 Park Road, Charlotte, N.C., 28210.