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Monthly Archives: March 2020

Mister Gavin Edwards' Neighborhood

March 24, 2020 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

I didn’t know that Gavin Edwards lives in Charlotte when I spotted his book Kindness and Wonder:  Why Mister Rogers Matters Now More Than Ever while shopping at Park Road Books the other day.  The store has a special display of their bestselling nonfiction books, and that’s where I saw Edwards’ book.  The cover features a photograph of Mister Rogers wearing his iconic red, cardigan sweater, and the photograph called out to me.  Being a longtime fan of Mister Rogers, I took the book off the shelf and read Edwards’ bio statement printed on the dust jacket.   It concludes with the line: “Gavin lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with his wife, museum curator Jen Sudul Edwards, and their two sons.”  I turned to Sherri Smith, one of the store’s employees, and asked her if Edwards really lives in Charlotte.  She assured me that he does, and she added that they consider him a friend of the store.  Well, it was then clear what I needed to do.  I bought the book and read it the next day.

Edwards divides the book into two sections.  The first section focuses on Mister Rogers’ life and his long career in children’s television.  In the second section, Edwards distills Mister Rogers’ approach to life down to “ten ways to live more like Mister Rogers right now.”  I enjoyed all of the book, but the second half grabbed my attention.  Kindness and Wonder came out in the fall of 2019, so it predates the coronavirus outbreak.  However, I felt that Edwards’ discussion of the ten ways to live like Mister Rogers is especially relevant for our current public health crisis.  As soon as I finished Edwards’ book, I wrote a column titled “What Mister Rogers Would Say about the Coroavirus” for The Charlotte Observer.  To read the column, please click on this link:  https://www.charlotteobserver.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/article241363251.html

After I finished my column, I set out to learn more about Edwards.  I found out that he is a Yale-educated journalist who has published numerous articles in Rolling Stone, including twelve cover stories.  He has also published articles in The New York Times, Wired, Billboard, GQ, and many other periodicals.  Like most authors these days, he has a website.  After visiting his website, I learned that he has twelve books.  In addition to Kindness and Wonder, he has published such titles as The World According to Tom Hanks:  The Life, the Obsessions, the Good Deeds of America’s Most Decent Guy (2018), The Tao of Bill Murray:  Real-Life Stories of Joy, Enlightenment, and Party Crashing (2016), and Last Night at the Viper Room:  River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind (2013).  For more information about Edwards and his writings, please click on the following link:  https://rulefortytwo.com

On his website, Edwards makes several references to Park Road Books, but he doesn’t go into much detail about his life in Charlotte.  I wanted to know more, so I contacted him and asked him how he came to make Charlotte his home.  Here is his response: 

Before I moved to Charlotte five years ago, I had visited the city exactly once, on assignment for a magazine article where I entered a racecar driving school. So my initial impression of the city was that it involved mandatory jumpsuits and driving at 154 mph, making lots of left turns. That has turned out not to be the case.  We came to Charlotte (from Los Angeles) because my wife is a museum curator (she’s now the chief curator at the Mint Museum). I’ve moved around enough to know that the life of a writer can be isolating, if I’m not careful, so when we got here, I made sure to make friends and meet my neighbors and find places to volunteer. My actual neighborhood has “Driveway Fridays,” weekly potluck get-togethers all summer long, plus huge gatherings for Halloween and the Fourth of July. And I’ve found people in Charlotte to have lunch with, to play board games with, to discuss experimental novels with, so my appreciation of Charlotte is not based solely on the fact that the rest of my family is thriving here. One good friend can make all the difference in a new town; happily, I’ve got more than that here.  A lot of the writing I do really isn’t specific to Charlotte: my books on Bill Murray and Tom Hanks and Fred Rogers could have been written anywhere in the country. So I regularly try to take on some writing assignments that let me get to know North Carolina and its residents better, whether that means interviewing photographer Burk Uzzle for The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/08/arts/music/woodstock-famous-couple.html) or reporting on the last days of a local music store for The Charlotte Observer(http://www.charlotteobserver.com/entertainment/arts-culture/article212804554.html).

In reflecting on Edwards’ connections to Charlotte, I am reminded of the inscription that he wrote in my autographed copy of Kindness and Wonder.  It reads simply, “Hi neighbor!”  I like to think of Edwards as being part of my neighborhood.  Of course, some would say that Charlotte is too big to be called a neighborhood.  As I see it, however, the term neighborhood works perfectly for the community of writers and readers that make up Storied Charlotte. 

Tags: Mister Rogersneighbornonfiction

Patrice Gopo, Tommy Tomlinson, and Sensoria

March 10, 2020 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

One of the great strengths of Charlotte’s community of writers is that it usually makes room for newcomers.  Even in the 1950s, Harry Golden, a Jewish activist from New York City, found Charlotte to be a conducive place to pursue his writing career.   Nowadays, writers from many different places have set their roots in Charlotte, and Charlotte’s cultural scene is richer as a result of this infusion of talent.  Two notable examples are Patrice Gopo and Tommy Tomlinson.  Both of these gifted writers will be showcased during the upcoming Sensoria Festival, Central Piedmont Community College’s week-long cultural celebration that will take place from March 27 through April 5, 2020.

Patrice Gopo took a long and winding road on her journey to Charlotte.  The child of Jamaican immigrants, Gopo grew up in Anchorage, Alaska.  During her early adult years, she spent time in South Africa, where she met her husband, before eventually moving to Charlotte about ten years ago.  Gopo draws on her unique background in her rich and highly personal essays.  She addresses such topics as race, immigration and religion in her essays, but she relates these topics to events and people from her life.  Her essays have appeared in numerous national publications, including The New York Times and The Washington Post.   A collection of her essays recently came out under the title All the Colors We Will See:  Reflections on Barriers, Brokenness, and Finding Our Way.  For more information about Gopo and her writings, please click on the following link:  https://www.patricegopo.com/home

I recently contacted Gopo and asked her about her connections to Charlotte.  Here is her response:

Almost a decade ago, I arrived in Charlotte. At the time, I couldn’t begin to imagine what this city and the state of North Carolina would mean to my writing life. Those were my beginning writing days, and I discovered a warm, welcoming, and vibrant writing community. It is here that I found classes and conferences and connections. It is here, in Charlotte, that I found people and organizations who believed in the value and importance of my work and wanted to support me in my endeavors. People like Maureen Ryan Griffin with Wordplay and Greg Collard at WFAE. And organizations like CharlotteLit, ASC, and the NCArts Council. The Charlotte community has been a beautiful encouragement to my writing life, and I’m thrilled to always include in my bio, “Patrice lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.”

Tommy Tomlinson’s journey to Charlotte started in Brunswick, Georgia. He grew up in a farmhouse on the outskirts of Brunswick.  He decided to pursue a career in journalism during his junior year at the University of Georgia.  He started his career as a reporter in 1986 when he joined The Augusta Chronicle.  In 1989, The Charlotte Observer hired him as a reporter, and four years later he became a feature writer specializing in popular music.  From 1997 to 2012, he wrote a prize-winning column that appeared in The Charlotte Observer three time a week.  Since then he has worked as a free-lance writer for such publications as Esquire, Sports Illustrated and Forbes.  In 2019, Simon and Schuster published his memoir titled The Elephant in the Room:  One Fat Man’s Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America.  For more information about Tomlinson and his writings, please click on the following link:  http://tommytomlinson.com/bio/

Although Tomlinson’s career as a free-lance writer has taken him all over the country, he and his wife continue to live in Charlotte.  I recently contacted him about his connections to Charlotte.  Here is his response:

I’ve been in Charlotte for 30 years, which I never would have expected. Journalists often bounce around from one place to another, chasing better jobs. But I landed here in 1989 to work for the Charlotte Observer, and for the next 23 years that was the best home I could’ve asked for. The paper let me stretch, try new things, build connections with readers. Now I’m lucky enough to work at WFAE, where they have been generous enough to let me do a podcast even though I don’t exactly have an NPR voice. I’ve had to travel a lot for work over the years, and besides having a great airport, Charlotte provides what I need — a stable, lovely, warm place to call home. My wife and I don’t plan to live anywhere else.

Both Gopo and Tomlinson are participating in Sensoria this year.  On March 30, 2020, Gopo will discuss All the Colors We Will See at CPCC’s Central Campus in Tate Hall at 10:30 a.m. and at CPCC’s Cato Campus at 1:30 p.m.  Tomlinson will also speak on March 30, 2020.  His talk, which is titled “On Journalism and Writing:  A Conversation with Tommy Tomlinson,” will take place at CPCC’s Central Campus in Tate Hall at 12:30 p.m.  For a full schedule of events associated with Sensoria, please click on the following link:  https://sensoria.cpcc.edu/events/

In recent years, Sensoria has established itself as one of Charlotte’s premier cultural events.  CPCC’s Sensoria is a free weeklong festival at CPCC’s campuses, open both to students and to the public. It’s really quite extraordinary how much the festival offers each year, including not just literature but art and design, history and culture, leadership and service, and science and technology. For literary events, the festival includes local and regional authors, such as Gopo and Tomlinson, and always a major national writer brought as an Irene Blair Honeycutt Distinguished Lecturer—this year it’s US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo. Other renowned poets and writers have included Tracy K. Smith, George Saunders, Amy Bloom, Natasha Trethewey, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Mary Oliver. The festival also honors local and regional writers with the Irene Blair Honeycutt Award for lifetime literary achievement and service to the literary community.  Sensoria provides a wonderful opportunity for students and the community to engage with literature and the arts.  There can be no doubt that Sensoria makes an important contribution to storied Charlotte. 

Tags: art and designCharlotte writersfestivalhistory and cultureliterary eventsregional authorsSensoriaWriters

Charlotte's Publishers

March 02, 2020 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

As an English professor, I am one of the unfortunate people who is expected to keep up the Modern Language Association’s ever-changing rules about citing sources.  I usually adjust to these changes without much complaint, but there is one change that made its appearance in the latest edition of the MLA Handbook that bothers me.  This change relates to how we are supposed to deal with the publisher of a book that is included on our works cited list.  Under the new rule, the location of a publisher is no longer mentioned.  I don’t like this change at all.  Publishers do not function in a vacuum.  In most cases, they are inextricably tied to the communities in which they do business.  The location of a publisher tells one something about the publisher, but it also says something about its home community.  MLA might not care, but I think it’s worth noting that Charlotte is now home to several successful independent publishers.

Falstaff Books, one of Charlotte’s fastest growing publishers, made its debut in January 2016 under the leadership of John Hartness, and it is already publishing about 40 titles per year.  Known initially for writing popular works of urban fantasy, Hartness has a strong interest in genre fiction, and this interest is reflected in the titles that Falstaff Books releases.  On its official website, Falstaff Books is described as being “dedicated to bringing to life the best in fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, romance, and dramatic literature.”   Hartness often works with authors from the Charlotte region, including my friend and colleague at UNC Charlotte A. J. Hartley.  In April, Falstaff Books will release A. J. Hartley’s Impervious, a fantasy novel that deals with the topic of school violence.  For more information about Falstaff Books, please click on the following link:  http://falstaffbooks.com

I have a particular fondness for Falstaff Books since it is the publisher of The Herald of Day, a fantasy novel by my wife, Nancy Northcott.  Because of my wife’s associations with the company, I have learned about their many connections with Charlotte’s community of genre authors.  A prime example of Falstaff Books’ involvement with this community is its Saga Conference, a two-day, professional development conference for genre writers that’s held in Charlotte every year.  This year’s Saga Conference will take place on March 6-8 at the University Hilton.  For more information about the Saga Conference, please click on the following link:  http://sagaconference.com

Main Street Rag Publishing Company, another one of Charlotte’s successful publishers, got its start as the publisher of The Main Street Rag, a quarterly literary magazine that began in 1996 under the editorship of M. Scott Douglass.  Since then, Main Street Rag has developed into a well-regarded independent press known especially for poetry.  Unlike most small presses, Main Street Rag owns its own printing and binding equipment, which it uses in the production of its releases.  It has published a number of regional and national authors, including Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Irene Blair Honeycutt, Randall Horton, Maureen Ryan Griffin, Diana Pickney, Tony Abbott, and Michael F. Smith.  I am pleased that Christopher Davis, one of the creative writing professors from UNC Charlotte’s English Department, is about to join the list of authors published by Main Street Rag.  Oath, his most recent collection of poems, is scheduled for release this spring.  For more information about Main Street Rag, please click on the following link:  http://www.mainstreetrag.com/about-main-street-rag/

One of Charlotte’s quirkier independent publishers is Dark Lantern Tales, the brainchild of Mark Williams.  Ever since he was a boy, Williams has loved to read dime novels and other forms of sensational fiction from the late nineteenth century.  Over the decades, he has built an impressive collection of these publications. However, they were originally printed on cheap paper and are now so fragile that they are nearly unreadable.  In an effort to bring these crime thrillers back into circulation, he started Dark Lantern Tales.  As he states on his informative website, he has now published trade paperback and electronic book versions of numerous “rediscovered crime and detective stories from the 1800s.”  Among the books he has published are the Joe Phenix Detective Series by Albert W. Aiken.  Although Williams obviously does not publish Charlotte-area authors, he does work with Charlotte’s Park Road Books to make the trade paperback versions of his publications available to Charlotte’s reading public.  For more information about Dark Lantern Tales, please click of the following link:  https://darklanterntales.wordpress.com

The aforementioned publishers are by no means Charlotte’s only publishers, but they serve as excellent examples of this aspect of Charlotte’s literary community.  These and Charlotte’s other publishers all make important contributions to storied Charlotte. 

Tags: Dark LanternFalstaff BooksMain Street Ragpublishers
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