Authors 'Round the South

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Dearest Readers,

Earlier this month her ladyship, the editor, happened to be driving along Route 76 in North and South Carolina—a rural highway that she is most fond of because it crosses quite an exceptional number of rivers, cotton farms, and soybean fields. She has driven this route many times, so that now the ladies who serve homemade fried chicken in the convenience store in Nichols, SC (pop. 408) are quite well known to her, as she is to them, even though in truth she lives in quite another state altogether. Just prior to the site of the best fried chicken on Route 76 there is a house. A large, shambling, dilapidated house built in the plantation style, but looking circa just post War-Between-the-States. It is not so much painted as it is weathered. The yard is not kept, and is only passable because the very large oaks and magnolias do not allow much to grow beneath them. Its upper veranda is festooned in Spanish moss and many of its window visible from the road are broken or cracked. In short, it looks completely abandoned, were it not for this one thing—there are always, in every season, children’s toys strewn about, and they all look quite new. Bicycles and Big Wheels and bright toy cars, badminton and Frisbees. So, abandoned, but not abandoned. Perhaps it is only the ghosts of children who live there?

Her ladyship was put in mind of this house when she read the welcome news that the building which houses The Wren’s Nest no longer enjoys the doubtful distinction of a spot on the Georgia Trust’s list of Places in Peril. Her ladyship doubts very much that Nichols, SC has a list of places in peril, but if they did this mysterious house would surely be on it.

In her own town of Wilmington, NC, there is a young man named Brian Blackmon who has been intrepidly searching out abandoned spaces, and has written quite movingly about them:

"Creeping through this area, ducking whenever a car goes past, we ignore warning signs that read “homeless members only” and the destroyed toilets and fire extinguishers until we arrive at possibly the most unnerving part of this adventure: a new add-on to the Almont Shipping Terminals, which is completely black and stuffed with beds, clothes, and grocery bags. Confronted with the reality that my curiosity of abandoned spaces is another person’s haven from the cold rain, I felt uneasy and a little ashamed."

Abandoned Spaces: Surrey Street & Almont

On this last road trip, her ladyship was en route to a conference devoted to the busy and bright and brash world of social networking. Slowing down as she passed the mysterious house, she considered “tweeting” about it, but decided to leave that task to the mockingbirds that still graced the overhanging branches of the trees.

Her ladyship, the editor

Authors 'Round the South

Authors Round the South is the home of one of the most extensive listings of literary events in the South, including author readings & appearances, book club meetings, book & literary festivals, open mics, poetry slams and writing groups. No matter what part of the South you live in, you can find a bookstore and author appearance near you!

Ten years of great southern lit for $9.95!

How well do you know your Southern lit? We dare you to use a pen on these crossword puzzles, each inspired by one of the winning titles of the SIBA Book Award, honoring ten years of the very best in Southern literature as chosen by the people who would know...Southern Independent Booksellers! A great gift for your book club, for puzzle-lovers, and anyone who loves Southern literature.

$9.95 paperback. Available at Southern Indie Bookstores.

Play a sample puzzle online!

Reader, meet writer: STARS authors on the road

The following authors are traveling this month and open to meeting with book clubs, talking to schools and participating in library programs. Visit the STARS directory at Authors Round the South for more information.

Literary Gossip & News

Dog Ear Books is moving and Sherlock’s Book Emporium is opening in Nashville TN. And let’s face it, doesn’t every indie bookstore need a Remote Control Car “Death Row” Obstacle Course?

There are several new literary e-zines worth visiting:
Jelly Bucket (the term refers to the lunch pails that used to be carried by miners).
Still (featuring Silas House as fiction editor, and yes, you may take either meaning of the word “Still” as appropriate)

Don your aprons and grab your forks, the March issue of Oxford American will focus on Food and Southern Culture. We expect this issue to weigh in at about the size of a hog worth barbecuing. And speaking of pig…there is an excellent video of William Meacham, founder of Meacham’s Country Hams, on the Southern Foodways Blog.

The poor Yankees writing for the Boston Globe have discovered southern cooking, Ted & Matt Lee style

SIBA Book Award finalist and Georgia poet laureate Susan Meyer is a finalist for the Cider Press Review Book Award.

Frank Reiss from A Cappella Books reviews A Separate Country by Robert Hicks on GPB’s Cover to Cover

It is determined that Mr. John Grisham can write short stories.

This month A Good Blog is Hard to Find asks “What is the future of publishing?” Every day a different writer provides a different answer to this, let us be frank, unanswerable question.

Meanwhile, Karen Spears Zacharias wonders if God really wants us to win the lottery.

Previews are now running for the upcoming Walker Percy Documentary. And many thanks to the Southern Writers Network for pointing her ladyship to The Walker Percy Project, which, among other things, finally answers the question "Who was Walker Percy?”:

"novelist of ideas
philosophical novelist
comedic satirist
cautionary moralist
diagnostician
prophetic essayist
post-modern thinker
'existentialist' Southern gentleman
ex-suicide wayfarer-pilgrim
Martian castaway [...]
None of the above/all of the above"

http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/

Author 2 Author: Elise Blackwell

Q: Where did the idea for An Unfinished Score come from?

A: Like most novels, An Unfinished Score didn’t spring from a single incident or idea but from several small moments and thoughts. The early image that remains strongest for me, and that fueled the initial writing, came from a symphony I attended in Philadelphia. One of the viola players seemed at once engrossed in her work and fundamentally sad. I wondered how she could play so beautifully if she was indeed deeply sad. It’s the fiction writer’s job to wonder why people are how they are, and I wondered why she was sad, whether she was grieving something. I felt an odd personal connection, too, because I had briefly played viola (only as a child) and retained a love for its sound, and perhaps a slight envy for those who had a talent for it (which I did not). I’d been interested in writing about music since I touched on Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony in my first novel, and so I started to think more about it, including composition. Among the ideas I considered was what it would be like to have a talent and love for an art form with a such a small audience. Would your life feel special or wasted?

Q: The musical knowledge in this book is impressive.  A person without a musical background might be hard-pressed to understand some of the references such as the comment that "Perhaps it's a nod to Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra..." or "no one plays Harold as beautifully as you do." Did you intend this book for a niche audience or did you have some other intention in making your main characters musicians?

A: I did a lot of research for the book, but I don’t have a specialized background. So if I could write the book’s musical content, I think anyone can understand it, at least in broad strokes. My hope is that even if something isn’t fully known by the reader, the context will make it clear enough. For instance, the reader doesn’t need to know that Bartok piece to understand the passage, and the Harold reference is explained. (It’s Berlioz’s Harold in Italy.)  The reader need not have even heard of the piece, much less know it well, to understand what it means to the character. Yet I hope it won’t seem too naïve to a musician reading the book. Some nights I wake in the middle of the night terrified that a musician will read the book and laugh at my ignorance. I have a friend who is a composer, and I’m wondering how I can hide the book from him….

Q: Do you play an instrument or have you performed in an orchestra yourself? If not, how difficult was it to write about?

A: I had brief, early encounters with the viola and the oboe—both instruments that are the butt of a lot of jokes. Alas, I have no real talent for music, though I love to listen to it. I didn’t know all that much when I started, but one of the fun things about being a writer is that you have an excuse to learn about anything that interests you. It’s okay to be a dilettante. Research aside, though, my way into the material was more personal: I know what it’s like to commit my life to an art form and to risk financial and sometimes other forms of stability to do so.

Q: Your previous work has been based on historical events -- a flood, a famine. Your research for this book led you to study with the St. Lawrence String Quartet and with the Conductor's Institute of South Carolina. How did this research differ from that of your previous work? Was it more of a challenge? Or, perhaps, a lot more entertaining? 

A: I should say quickly that I didn’t study with the quartet or the conductor’s institute. I merely observed, uninvited. What was great about the research for An Unfinished Score is that I had to imagine the world of musicians, but not the whole period. The book is set now, more or less. In some ways that was more of a challenge (deciding how much contemporary culture and technology to include in the book) but in many ways much easier (no worrying about anachronisms). And—you nailed it—it was more entertaining to do live research. I had an excuse to go to concerts and buy cds, and I didn’t walk around feeling like I was living in the past half the time, as I did with my first two books.

Q:  The music aside, the novel is about betrayal. Suzanne, a concert violist, has been cheating on her husband, an obsessed composer. When her lover, Alex, dies in a plane crash, his wife, Olivia, blackmails Suzanne into completing an unfinished score that Alex was composing for Suzanne.  Suzanne agrees to do this because she doesn't want her husband, Ben, to know that she's been unfaithful to him, and she keeps her secret from her best friend, Petra.  What are your observations about women and their friendships and the rules we break when it comes to relationships?

A: Suzanne agrees to work on the unfinished score for complicated reasons. Of course she wants to avoid having her secret revealed not just to her husband but to everyone in her life, but she also works on the music to be closer to Alex. She hopes that if she can finish his score she can understand their relationship and find some closure to move on. She’s both afraid of and fascinated by Olivia, both as Alex’s wife and as a forceful woman. At moments she thinks Olivia could almost be her friend, and perhaps she’s drawn to the older woman because she herself lost her mother too young. The other important woman in Suzanne’s life is Petra. Both relationships offer the possibility for support and friendship, and yet, as too often happens, women hurt each other—sometimes due to romantic competition. And yet there is so much shared experience there, and what holds Suzanne and Petra together when tensions arise in their friendship, and despite the deceit between them, is that shared ground, together with their love for Petra’s daughter, Adele.

Q: In addressing the issue of infidelity -- no small matter to Carolinians lately -- you create a character with a lot of similarities to Jenny Sanford. Suzanne is composed, always keeping her emotions in check. She doesn't even break down when she learns of her lover's death, nor when she meets her lover's wife. Was your work informed at all by what was happening at the Governor's mansion in South Carolina at the time?

A: My novel was fully drafted before Mark Sanford took his mystery trip to Argentina, so that news item didn’t influence the book. Yet it’s true that public infidelity surrounds us. (I was at a dinner party recently at which the parlor question was, “If you were Elin Nordegren, would you leave Tiger Woods? Not everyone answered “no.”) If you reach a certain age these days, infidelity is likely to have come up as issue in the marriages of friends and colleagues, as well as of politicians and athletes. Your reading of Suzanne is a good one: she’s not a character who doesn’t experience emotions deeply. I think she does shatter when Alex dies, albeit quietly and internally. But she is skilled at hiding her emotions and sometimes is partially shut down by them. Her work as a performer helps her in this, if “help” is the right word. She’s accustomed to channeling composer’s emotions through her viola—and also to putting on a public face. Her somewhat unhappy childhood, her often cool marriage, and her long affair have also given her extended practice in hiding what she feels. I think, though, that her ability not to break visibly comes at a steep cost, part of which is her separation from those she loves and could make her happy, and ultimately she can’t sustain it even at the physical level. I don’t think this is uncommon, either. So many women—and I suspect plenty of men—have a valve on their emotions they learn to turn off to get by or because it seems easier in the short run.

A: No matter how vivid our memories are, or how clearly our mind’s eye or our heart holds the loved one, we miss their physicality. There’s a wonderful, heartbreaking moment in Colm Toibin’s The Heather Blazing, in which the main character is devastated by the idea of his deceased wife physically in the ground, beginning to decompose. We want to hold on to people however we can, and it’s often through objects and pictures. I chose smell in my novel because it’s the aspect of a person’s physicality that’s hardest to describe and retain. We can take someone’s photograph to keep, record their voice, save their written letters, but we inevitably loose their unique smell. When my husband is out of town, it comforts me to smell his pillow. How awful it would be to lose that, and that’s the notion that occurs to Suzanne when she is confronted by the space in which Alex lived.

Q: You manage to weave in some other important issues, such as the debate over cochlear implants. This is a big debate among the deaf community, isn't it?

A: While cochlear implants are nearly a miracle for an adult who loses hearing, there’s a real disagreement over whether they are good for children who were born deaf. Many in the deaf community feel that the implanted child doesn’t gain real hearing but nevertheless loses deaf culture and the beautiful form of communication that is American Sign Language. Other people, particularly outside of the deaf community, consider this view selfish or misguided. I did a lot of reading, but I didn’t learn enough first-hand to have a solid opinion. Luckily for me, the novel is (as Milan Kundera and other have argued) the art form most capable of holding ambiguity, so I don’t have to take a side. To me it was fascinating to explore a related set of questions: What does it mean to hear? What is the world like for those who cannot? What does it mean to be responsible for a child’s future? What does it mean to make a huge decision for someone else? What would it be like to belong to two worlds?

Q:  What's your advice to your university students who say they plan to write full-time for a living? What's your writing routine? How do you manage to carve out time to write? 

A: This is advice I’ve given before, and it’s not particularly original, but it’s honest and it hasn’t changed much. Don’t write because you want  to be “a writer” (whatever that is), but because you take pleasure (most of the time) in the writing itself. If you enjoy talking about writing more than you enjoy sitting alone in a room doing it, the effort may not be worth it for you. Second, read a lot and write a lot, and keep your eyes and mind open while you read and write. Third, think carefully and creatively about what kind of day job and life situation will best accommodate your writing over time. Find a way to support yourself, keep reading and writing, and then be patient. Gymnasts may be past their prime at twenty, but you become a better writer across an entire life. I also encourage students to write something that matters to them—emotionally or intellectually or aesthetically. Otherwise there’s no point in it, with the exception of those few purely mercenary writers in it only for money—in which case there are easier ways to make a better living. As for my own routine, it changes across the year according to my teaching and travel schedules. I use to require large blocks of uninterrupted time and a sparkling clean house to write, but life taught me to write when I can and even when the dishes need to be washed. You have to put the writing first, but if you can’t write in the morning you learn to do it at night. I’ve also trained myself to think about a book I’m working on when I’m running or driving or shopping or cleaning so that I’m ready to work when I get to sit down.

Q: What are you working on next?

A: I’ve begun work on my fifth novel, tentatively titled Water Damage. It is set in post-Katrina New Orleans, and one of the main characters is an art conservator who specializes in the restoration of water-damaged paintings. Another is an artist, another works for the Art Loss Registry, and another is a troubled young man from a prominent family. My idea is that each of these four major characters is damaged in some unseen way that makes them dangerous to each other, even when they are well meaning. The plot centers around a stolen painting from the past and a murder that was overlooked in the chaos of the Katrina evacuation. One idea I want to explore is how some people’s lives are dramatically altered by external forces (such as a natural disaster but also emigration, incarceration, crime, and other life-changing events that may be out of their control), while other people act on their own destiny’s in ways they aren’t fully conscious of, often because of pasts that haunt them. There’s a mystery to the plot of An Unfinished Score, but Water Damage will come even closer to reading like a literary mystery.

From the Blogs

The Authors

A Good Blog is Hard to Find:Can I help it if I want my characters to drink sweet tea instead of blood? Can I help it if I prefer inky, earthy smells and the flutter of smooth pages to one more cold, hard, soulless techno-toy? And can I help it if I like the idea of having my prose and poetry pruned and my punctuation properly proofed instead of leaving it up to SpellCheck and moi? Read more.

Janis Owens: And here is the thing with grits: they stay with you. A bowl will hold you till supper. They really are a fortifying grain. And, of course, nothing says love like cheese grits. Pork chops come close, but for my money, grits are the ultimate love feast. They’re not just for breakfast anymore. Read more.

The Booksellers

A Reading Life: There is a line at the beginning of Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Old Man and the Sea that goes “. . . after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky . . .” Most of the friends who sit in the humid Havana evenings playing dominos with him think Usnavy Martín Leyva is salao. He is poor. His wife is not exactly simpatico. His teenage daughter is, well, a teenage girl. His apartment is crumbling under the weight of years of neglect and some illegal, ill-advised construction by the people who live above him. Really, it’s just a matter of time until the building is in ruins. His life is teetering on the brink of ruin itself. To be salao

Bound to be read:Susan Gregg Gilmore speaks about how she came to write her novel Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen Read more.

Consuming Books: As an audience, it seems we cannot get enough of Jane Eyre or the author, Charlotte Bronte.  In this beautifully imagined tale of the Bronte sisters and the writing of Jane Eyre, author Sheila Kohler takes us to the gloomy Yorkshire moors of northern England.  The family seems cursed: the mother and two of the children are dead; the father is sick; another son destroyed by alcohol and opiates.  Is life imitating art or art imitating life?  In Becoming Jane Eyre, the story centers around Charlotte and the overlapping narratives of author and heroine.   Both women, real and imagined, are angry at their circumstances and indignant at the injustices they suffer.  Kohler ably portrays Charlotte’s unrequited love for a married man and the agony she undergoes because of it.  The language of the book is the same as that in the time of Jane Eyre.  Kohler’s novel Cracks has been made into a movie directed by Jordan Scott (Ridley’s daughter). Read more.

Hooray for Books:Based on the well-known hymn, Ashley Bryan’s latest book is an explosion of life and color.  Each page celebrates the diversity of life, whether it be human, plant or animal, with exuberantly colored paper cutouts.  Bryan uses his mother’s embroidery scissors to bring this poem to life in his own unique way — on the final page, God’s hands are made of a myriad of colors ranging from tan to pink to deep brown.  There’s a short biography of Cecil Frances Alexander, Irish hymn writer and poetess, at the end of the book, as well as the words and music to the hymn. All Things Bright and Beautiful, by Ashley Bryan, Atheneum Books For Young Readers, $16.99 Read more.

Page 854: Over the past week we have been appalled, saddened and occasionally inspired by the news coming out of Haiti. We have heard frequently of the poverty and despair said to be endemic in that country, and have listened to pundits and crackpots offer reasons for those circumstances. In Sunday's New York Times, however, Madison Smartt Bell testified to the remarkable riches flowing from that Caribbean island and its extraordinary people. Art, music, literature and -- yes, Pat Robertson -- even Vodou have been a source of pride, courage and resilience in this country born from the determination of slaves throwing off their yoke of tyranny. How does one endure beyond all expectation of endurance? Perhaps part of the answer lies with these riches. Madison Smartt Bell's article is here.

Read This!
recommended reading from your neighborhood southern booksellers

Shadow Tag: A Novel by Louise Erdrich
(Harper, $25.99, 9780061536090)
"Knowing her unstable husband has been reading her diary, a desperate woman uses it to manipulate him, creating a false tale, obscuring her true motives, and pushing him closer to the edge. Shadow Tag is Erdrich's most compelling novel in years, a gripping portrait of an marriage stumbling towards its inevitable, yet shocking dissolution." --Rich Rennicks, Malaprop's Bookstore/Cafe, Asheville, NC

The Kingdom of Ohio: A Novel by Matthew Flaming
(Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, $24.95, 9780399155604)
"Peter Force is in New York City in the early 1900s working underground to dig subway tunnels. When he meets a beautiful woman with a fantastic story -- and through her meets J.P. Morgan, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla -- he begins a quest to discover if travel to another world is possible. Get ready to be transported through time yourself as you read this book." --Beth Carpenter, The Country Bookshop, Southern Pines, NC

Liar by Justine Larbalestier
(Bloomsbury USA Children's Books, $16.99, 9781599903057)
"Ever since Micah began high school, she has layered falsehood upon falsehood. And even though the entire school knows she isn't trustworthy, Micah somehow continues to dupe them. But when her boyfriend is brutally murdered, Micah must come to terms with the truth in all its horror. In this intriguing novel, readers must decide if Micah is what she says, or if she is simply spinning herself deeper into a web of lies." --Megan Graves, Hooray for Books!, Alexandria, VA

January's Sparrow by Patricia Polacco
(Philomel, $22.99, 9780399250774)
"January's Sparrow is an intimate and engrossing true story of the horrors and occasional happiness of slave families just before emancipation. While this is a children's book, it is not for the fainthearted." --Judy Mathys, Family Book Shop, Deland, FL

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, John Lawrence (illus.)
(Candlewick, $24.99, 9780763644451)
"John Lawrence's hand-colored, vinyl-cut, and wood-textured illustrations richly evoke the atmosphere and drama of one of the best adventure stories ever written. An unusually beautiful piece of bookmaking, and a special gift for any time of the year." -- Carol Moyer, Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh, NC

[via IndieBound.org]

Lady Banks’ Commonplace Book

A slap of wind made me shiver.  I ventured onto the familiar cement porch and down a step into deep darkness. As my eyes adjusted I could make out the silhouettes of shagbark hickories and loblolly pines. I had been coming here for many years; I knew the open spaces of the yard as thoroughly as I knew the passages within the house, worn walkways between couch and kitchen, bathroom and bed. Yet this night I moved without any confidence. Mom’s impending death was causing my world to tilt in ways I had never thought possible; even the brick-hard clay of Mississippi seemed like chancy footing. I took a few tentative steps out from the house, looked up, and gasped.

The comet stretched halfway across the sky.

-Jan DeBlieu, Year of the Comets: A Journey from Sadness to the Stars (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005)

 

Lady Banks’ Bookshelf

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