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.



 

If you like good reads that last awhile: Barry Yeoman's 2014 picks

Barry Yeoman of Durham http://barryyeoman.com is a journalist extraordinaire and a writing teacher with no equal. Here's his list of his favorite long-form journalism from 2014. Thank you, Facebook.


The Contestant
Daniel Alarcón, The California Sunday Magazine
https://stories.californiasunday.com/2014-10-05/the-contestant
After appearing on a Peruvian reality TV show, a young woman disappears.

The Shame of Borough Park
Rachel Aviv, The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/10/outcast-3
Sexual molestation, rabbinical debates, illegal wiretaps, drug addiction, sketchy prosecutions, political alliance-building, internecine feuding, and extortion allegations in Brooklyn's Chasidic community.

Prescription for Death
Vince Beiser, Playboy
http://www.playboy.com/articles/prescription-for-death
“The worst drug dealers are the pharmaceutical companies. We basically deal with their victims.” A dispatch from a West Virginia county with an overdose rate 16 times the national average.

A Question of Mercy
Pam Colloff, Texas Monthly
http://www.texasmonthly.com/story/montague-county-tim-cole-questions-randy-wood-conviction
The story of a Texas prosecutor who feels “the certitude of [his] moral code” unraveling 15 years after winning a guilty verdict.

North Carolina’s Civil War
Michael Graff, Politico
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/02/north-carolinas-civil-war-103962.html
“That’s life now, down here in North Carolina, the prettiest, ugliest, most forward-thinking, most backward-minded, most divided state in the South.”

A Toast Story
John Gravois, Pacific Standard
http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/toast-story-latest-artisanal-food-craze-72676/
A story about toast but not about toast. Starts twee. Ends real.

The Quinoa Quarrel
Lisa M. Hamilton, Harper’s / Food & Environment Reporting Network
http://thefern.org/2014/10/quinoa-quarrel/
This story about the conflict between Bolivian indigenous rights and international food security poses a moral conundrum with no facile solution, no easy sense of “right” and “wrong,” which is what good journalism should sometimes do.

The Trials of White Boy Rick
Evan Hughes, The Atavist
https://atavist.com/stories/the-trials-of-white-boy-rick/
The gripping (and true) story about a baby-faced drug trafficker in Detroit.

Who is Charlie Crist? The answer is complicated
Adam C. Smith and Michael Kruse, Tampa Bay Times
http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/stateroundup/knowing-charlie-crist-the-complicated-story-of-a-lifelong-politician/2191892
“A ‘vessel,’ Crist called himself last month. It's unwittingly introspective, an apt description, more true than he even intends. A vessel is empty until it's not. Who do you want him to be? What do you want him to do? He’s a devoted listener. Fill him up.”

Whipping Boy
Allen Kurzweil, The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/17/whipping-boy
A grown man seeks out his childhood bully. The ensuing drama involves fake royalty, President Eisenhower, silk neckwear, and a California prison.

The Madness of Modern-Day Poaching
Paul Kvinta, Outside
http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/nature/hornswoggled.html
Kvinta’s article about rhino poaching is populated by prostitutes, a compromised whistleblower, an investigative reporter, and a Lone Ranger-style private eye. It is hard to read in some places, but it is also a wild and fascinating ride.

When Hope Needs Hope
Joan Garrett McClane, Chattanooga Times Free Press
http://projects.timesfreepress.com/2014/07/deanna_final/index.html
What happens when a hospice physician learns she has Stage 4 cancer?

How to Build a Perfect Refugee Camp
Mac McClelland, The New York Times Magazine
hhttp://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/magazine/how-to-build-a-perfect-refugee-camp.html
At this model refugee camp in Turkey, everyone is appreciative but no one is happy.

Can Whole Foods Change the Way Poor People Eat?
Tracie MacMillan, Slate / Food & Environment Reporting Network
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2014/11/whole_foods_detroit_can_a_grocery_store_really_fight_elitism_racism_and.html
When Whole Foods opened a store in Midtown Detroit, co-CEO Walter Robb promised the company would tackle “elitism” and “racism” in Detroit. Tracie McMillan went to see how those plans were working out.

The Lost Bones
Ben Montgomery, Tampa Bay Times
http://www.tampabay.com/topics/specials/2014/dozier.page
A two-part series about the hard-fought effort to exhume and analyze the remains of the boys buried at a horrific Florida reform school.

Caviar’s Last Stand
Michelle Nijhuis, Medium / Food & Environment Reporting Network
https://medium.com/full-belly-reports/every-spring-game-warden-rob-farr-patrols-the-reservoirs-of-the-osage-river-in-central-missouri-becaf5b489c8
Your expensive “Russian caviar” might be an illegal knockoff from the Ozarks.

Follow the Blood Money
Adam Penenberg, Pando Daily
http://pando.com/2014/02/23/called-to-account-a-suicide-bombing-a-lawsuit-a-bank-accused-of-financing-terrorism/
“What struck Osen was how organized the whole process was: the banal evil of the international cash-for-martyrdom industry.”

A Raised Voice
Claudia Roth Pierpont, The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/11/raised-voice
A tremendous profile of Nina Simone: “It took her an hour to write ‘Mississippi Goddam.’... It’s a song about a movement nearly out of patience by a woman who never had very much to begin with, and who had little hope for the American future.”

An Accident Waiting to Happen
Elizabeth Royte, OnEarth
http://archive.onearth.org/articles/2014/02/oil-trains-keep-exploding-so-why-are-we-send-more-through-national-parks
“Picture this: a unit train jumps the track just west of the Continental Divide. Cars tumble off the rail bed, bouncing and ricocheting off each other. Tankers puncture, oil spills and flows, and a spark detonates a massive explosion.” Then the phone rings in Kalispell.

In a Liberian slum swarming with Ebola, a race against time to save two little girls
Kevin Sieff, The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/in-a-liberian-slum-swarming-with-ebola-a-race-against-time-to-save-two-little-girls/2014/10/27/7f14e5ac-1b77-4d48-adef-de19e07e7651_story.html
“You can’t quarantine people here,” says a pastor. “We’re all intertwined.”

Portrait of a Serial Winner
Wright Thompson, ESPN The Magazine
http://espn.go.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/10984370/portrait-serial-winner-luis-suarez-soccer-most-beautiful-player
“When a defender presses close, Suarez doesn't respond as if the man is trying to take the ball. He reacts as if the defender is trying to send him back to the streets of Montevideo, alone.”

Sixty-Nine Days
Héctor Tobar, The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/07/07/sixty-nine-days
“Down here, there is no day, only darkness and explosions,” Victor Segovia wrote in his diary. “All our spirits are on the ground. We are bordering on insanity.”

You Can’t Quit Cold Turkey
Tommy Tomlinson, ESPN The Magazine
http://espn.go.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/11382220/ex-nfl-qb-jared-lorenzen-lifelong-battle-weight
A sports story and a confessional: “Jared Lorenzen and I are in love with the same woman. Her name is Little Debbie, and she makes delicious snack cakes.”

A Time Bomb
John H. Tucker, Indyweek
http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/an-apex-teen-dies-of-an-overdose-of-synthetic-lsd/Content?oid=3837336
The wrenching story of a teen who overdoses on synthetic LSD.

Home For the Holidays
Michael Vitez, Philadelphia Inquirer
http://www.philly.com/philly/health/Going_home_for_the_holidays.html
The Thanksgiving homecoming of a 19-year-old “peacemaker” who was brutally pummeled by a college football player.

Double Jeopardy
Paige Williams, The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/17/double-jeopardy-3
Alabama allows judges to override reluctant juries and impose the death penalty. These “judicial overrides” spike in election years. “Frankly, nothing says ‘tough on crime’ like the death penalty,” says one critic.

A Plea for Peace
Alexandra Zavis, Los Angeles Times
http://graphics.latimes.com/clerics/
A dispatch from the Central African Republic: “If they wanted to kill the child, he declared, they would have to shoot him first. One of them swung around and pointed his gun at the priest.”

'Byrd' wins Crook's Corner Book Prize: $1,000 and 365 free glasses of wine

Kim Church of Raleigh, author the poignant debut novel, "Byrd," has won $1,000 and a free glass of wine every day for a year at Crook's Corner restaurant in Chapel Hill. She's the winner of the second annual Crook's Corner Book Prize, announced Monday evening at the restaurant.
Novelist, short story writer and biographer Randall Kenan, who teaches English and comparative literature at UNC Chapel Hill, chose "Byrd" from a short list of four novels.
"All the books were beautifully written, interesting to read, and often fun," Kenan emailed today. "Byrd stood out as the most successful artistic expression and the novel with the purest, most daring and moving language.  Plus the story is so very powerful.  I think people will be reading this book for quite some time to come."
The 2014 inaugural winner was Wiley Cash of Wilmington for his novel "A Land More Kind Than Home." The judge was short story writer and novelist Jill McCorkle.
Next year's judge will be novelist Lee Smith.
The contest is open to first-time novelists whose work is set in the American South, though the authors can live outside the South.
Entries are now being accepted for the third annual Crook's Corner Book Prize. For more information: Info@crookscornerbookprize.com.

The Crook's Corner Book Prize Long List

Queen Sugar, by Natalie Baszile / A Pamela Dorman book/Viking
Byrd, by Kim Church / Dzanc Books
The Resurrectionist, by Matthew Guinn / W.W. Norton
Flying Shoes, by Lisa Howorth / Bloomsbury USA
Remember Me Like This, by Bret Anthony Johnston / Random House
I Shall Be Near To You, by Erin Lindsay McCabe / Crown
Heart of Palm, by Laura Lee Smith / Grove Press
In the Garden of Stone, by Susan Tekulve / Hub City Press
Saint Monkey, by Jacinda Townsend / W.W. Norton
The Ways of the Dead, by Neely Tucker / Viking
Mother of Rain, by Karen Spears Zacharias / Mercer University

The eleven books that made the Crook’s Corner Book Prize Long List were published between January 1, 2013, and June 30, 2014, and were selected from entries submitted by major publishers, independent publishers and self-publishers. The goal of the Crook’s Corner Book Prize is to encourage new writers.

Amy Butcher: 'A Memoir of Friendship and Murder' due in April

Amy Butcher by Carmen Machado

You have a treat (of sorts) in store for spring. A treat, that is, if you like a tautly-written memoir about something almost unthinkable. Amy Butcher, the author and a graduate of the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Program, and Kevin were friends as undergraduates at Gettysburg College. Nothing romantic. But best buds. Then, a few weeks before graduation, Kevin walks Amy home and an hour later, murders his ex-girlfriend. He is arrested, sentenced to prison. That's when Amy becomes obsessed with him. Her memoir, "Visiting Hours: A Memoir of Friendship and Murder," will be out from Penguin in April. I am reading an advance review copy. I am mesmerized. Here's an excerpt.  
 

Kevin followed me first from that Pennsylvania town to a larger town in Iowa. Then New York; New Hampshire; Ohio. He lived at first inside my heart and then my mind and then my closet. I wrote to Kevin as if he were merely away at camp, or boarding school, or a semester at sea, and while my intention, early on, was pure, somehow, over time, our letters became a testament to my life. They were an official record of my vitality, proof that I was still thinking and breathing and existing, moving from one town to the next, one lifestyle to another, living the life not taken from me. What began as a loving communication—Do you remember playing video games on projectors? Do you remember drinking sake with that famous poet?—had become an act of retribution.

Poet and professor Miller Williams: 'When I Am Dead, My Dearest'

The wry poet Miller Williams, who founded the University of Arkansas Press and was father of  singer Lucinda Williams, died Thursday in Fayetteville, Ark., of complicatons of Alzheimer's, reports the New York Times. He was 84.
Mr. Williams was the editor of my first book of poetry, and he called me one day at work to go over my manuscript. He named a few of the poems included and said, "These poems don't interest me at all. Let's get rid of them."
He spoke with such cool authority that those poems suddenly no longer interested me either.
"Yes," I agreed. "By all means, let's take them out."
I wish I could remember some of the nice things he said about the manuscript. But, of course, I can't.
Mr. Williams taught for three decades at the University of Arkansas, and he published 37 books. He delivered a poem at the Capitol for President Bill Clinton's second inauguration.

The New York Times story: 

When I Am Dead, My Dearest

Sing what you want to sing. Theologize.

Let anyone who wants to lie tell lies.

What will I care, back in the past tense

with no ambition and not a gram of sense,

back where I was before a fear and a wish

joined to form a sort of finless fish

that learned to walk and have lips and smile?

I will go there to wait an endless while,

and neither think that wrong nor wish it right,

more than a rock in darkness hopes for light.

You will say my name, but less with years,

the children less than you and more than theirs.

It's mostly our names, as they fray and thin,

blown on the breaths of aging friends and kin,

that in some tugging moments we may seem

to sleep on a little past the dream.

-- from "Adjusting to the Light," University of Missouri Press, 1992.

'Bone Clock's' David Mitchell on link between stammering and writing

The acclaimed English novelist David Mitchell, whose sixth and most recent novel, "The Bone Clocks," was one of Oprah's picks for 2014, is a stammerer. His semi-autobiographical novel "Black Swan Green" deals with that subject. He and his wife, who live in Ireland, have an autistic son, and they translated into English a book by a young autistic Japanese writer Naoki Higashida called "The Reason I Jump: One Boy's Voice from the Silence of Autism."

In this Paris Review interview with Mitchell, he's been asked if he thinks his own stammer had much to do with his desire to write:

On one hand, yes: it makes sense that a kid who can’t express himself verbally would be driven to express himself on the page instead. On the other hand, no: most writers aren’t stammerers and most stammerers aren’t writers. Perhaps the best answer is that the writer that I am has been shaped by the stammering kid that I was, and that although my stammer didn’t make me write, it did, in part, inform and influence the writer I became. It’s true that stammerers can become more adept at sentence construction. Synonyms aren’t always neatly interchangeable. Sometimes choosing word B over word A requires you to construct a different sentence to house it—and quickly, too, before your listener smells the stammering rat.

Fiona Ritchie and Doug Orr on N.C. Bookwatch on Sunday

You don't want to miss this upcoming 2015 kickoff episode of D.G. Martin's North Carolina Bookwatch with guests Fiona Ritchie of Scotland and Doug Orr of Black Mountain. They'll be talking about their gorgeous and fascinating UNC Press book, "Wayfaring Strangers: The Musical Voyage from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia,"  with an introduction by Dolly Parton.

The show will air on UNC-TV this Sunday at noon and on Thursday at 5 p.m.