Linda Vigen Phillips: Growing up with a bi-polar mom

Phillips

If you're waking at 4 each morning compelled to put words on paper, you've likely got a story worth telling. That happened to Linda Vigen Phillips of Charlotte several  years ago. The story is fictional, but it's based on growing up with a mother with a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

Phillips' words rushed out in the form of poetry -- very accessible poetry -- and she wrote for months. She thought maybe she'd publish what she had as a small book of poetry. But a good friend encouraged her to keep writing. "This is a novel," Carol Baldwin kept insisting.

Those 4 a.m. writing jags have turned into a just-released Junior Library Guild Selection called "Crazy" (Eerdmans Books, $9.995).

I'd say it's an indispensable novel for anyone, young or old, who lives with a mentally ill relative.

Phillips' life growing up was unpredictable, but she says she wasn't always miserable. She had  her art, as did her mother, and she had a great gang of friends. But she never talked about what went on at home, and because it was the 60s, she never saw a therapist or even told a teacher about her home life.

It also turns out that Phillips' mother wasn't schizophrenic. While she was writing "Crazy," Phillips wrote  to her hometown in Oregon for her mother's medical records. She took those records to a psychiatrist in Charlotte, who said her mother was much more likely bi-polar or manic-depressive.

Phillips will be reading from "Crazy" at 2 p.m. on Saturday at Park Road Books. I think you'll be surprised how the verse reads as naturally as prose.
_

Nancy Stancill to read from 'Texas' at Morrison Regional Library

Investigative-reporter-turned-novelist Nancy Stancill of Charlotte will sign copies and read from her debut suspense novel, "Saving Texas," at 6:30 p.m., Wednesday, Sept. 10, at Morrison Regional Library, 7015 Morrison Blvd., Charlotte.

Stancill is a former award-winning Charlotte Observer reporter who's earning her MFA in the University of Tampa low-residency program. She'll talk about the skills a long-time non-fiction writer must learn to produce a good novel.
D.G. Martin of the UNC-TV show "Book Watch," calls Stancill's novel "mesmerizing."

Last November, Stancill pledged royalties from the first thousand copies sold of “Saving Texas” to an Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) endowment to support the Godfrey Wells Stancill Fellowship in memory of her father, the former Suffolk News-Herald editor who died in 1995.

Alan Michael Parker's third novel, 'Committee,' a home run

Alan Michael Parker by Felicia Van Bork

What joy to find a novel that's exactly right. You're skimming through. First, the pages turn to
silver in your hands, then to gold. You know it's the real thing. Delight breaks out on your body, and you must put the book down for a few seconds and simply breathe.
Such is "The Committee on Town Happiness" (Dzanc Books, $14.95), a third novel by the poet Alan Michael Parker of Davidson College.
"The Committee" is 99 linked episodes (voice steady as hummingbird wings) laying bare the absurdity of committee-think and the elusiveness of happiness. A spoof, of course. An existential satire with ribbons of magical realism. It reminds me of one of my all-time favorite novels, "Mrs. Caldwell Speaks to Her Son," by the Nobel-winning Camilo Jose Cela, in which Mrs. Caldwell writes letters to her dead son Eliacim proclaiming her great smothering love for him. The tragedy in "Mrs. Caldwell," is, of course, that Eliciam will never read the letters, and mother and son will never be reunited. The tragedy in Parker's novel, if I must spell it out, is that "town happiness" is impossible to achieve.

The Committee on Major Financing convened, decreed its lack of jurisdiction. The Committee on Animal Safety made recommendations in light of the incessant barking. The Officer of Public Generosity deployed new azaleas. Two committees folded for lack of a quorum. We set a watch, deputized three teens. We made private overtures. We unsewed our shrouds.

As though day were night we went to sleep and rose to the falling darkness, to eat and work and play. We moved throughout our darkened town.We would see the fuss. We would learn what we were missing.

 We want to say that we have succeeded. Soon we will do away with walking around and not knowing.

Sarah Dessen and Lee Smith to appear on segments of N..C. Bookwatch

Sarah Dessen

Bookwatch has become such a favorite in our house that we now record it. No matter the guest, the host, former Charlottean D.G. Martin, is himself a treat. No one is more animated, and no one works as charmingly to draw out the essence of the writer and his or her work. If you're new to the state, it's a wonderful introduction to the personalities and minds of our literary riches.

Lee Smith

This Sunday, Aug. 24, young adult writer Sarah Dessen will appear on the show.

 

Her most recent title, "The Moon and More," set on Emerald Isle, recently won the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Award in the young adult category. Lead character, Emaline, loses both her long-time local boyfriend and her newfound summer love. There's heartbreak, of course. But new beginnings await.


Bookwatch airs at noon on Sundays and at 5 p.m. on Thursdays on UNC-TV.

On Aug. 31, award-winning Hillsborough novelist Lee Smith will appear on Bookwatch. Her most recent novel, "Guests on Earth," includes a character based on Zelda Fitzgerald and her stay at the elegant and now-defunct Highland Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Asheville.
 
 

Champagne Reception for Webb Hubbell and 'When Men Betray'

Webb Hubbell

You're invited, Thursday, 5-7 p.m., to a champagne reception at Elder Art Gallery, 1520 S. Tryon, to celebrate Webb Hubbell and his new novel, "When Men Betray."

Observer reporter Jim Morrill wrote about Hubbell last week. Here's what he said:
"Two decades ago the headlines weren’t kind to Webb Hubbell.
'Clintons’ pal Hubbell is indicted.'
'Hubbell Begins Prison Sentence.'
It was in the ’90s that Hubbell found himself swept up in the scandals and endless investigations known as Whitewater. It was a hard fall for the one-time Arkansas whiz kid, top Justice Department official and longtime friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Notoriety took its toll. But the headlines faded.
For nearly four years now, Hubbell and his wife, Suzy, have lived on a quiet street in Dilworth, planting roots and rebuilding their lives outside the glare of public attention.
Last week Hubbell, 65, re-emerged with the publication of his first novel, a legal thriller about friendships and loyalties set in Little Rock, with cameos by Davidson College and Charlotte’s Mimosa Grill.
The author and his book already have drawn national attention. The Washington Post ran a story. C-SPAN televised his weekend appearance at a North Little Rock library.
It’s the latest chapter in a life which itself has unfolded as a kind of thriller.
Like Jack Patterson, his protagonist in 'When Men Betray,' Hubbell’s is a story of friendship and power with plot twists, legal turns and even a brush with death."
So come hear Hubbell read and have him autograph a copy of the novel.

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2014/05/25/4932566/remember-web-hubbell-he-now-lives.html#storylink=cpy