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Monthly Archives: April 2020

Mark de Castrique, Man of Mysteries

April 27, 2020 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

Mark de Castrique, one of Charlotte’s most prolific writers of mysteries, recently brought out his 19th novel.  Titled Murder in Rat Alley, this novel is the 7th in his Sam Blackman Series.  For more information about Murder in Rat Alley and Mark’s other books, please click on the following link:  http://www.markdecastrique.com

In most of Mark’s mysteries, there is no clear line demarcating the past and the present.  Events that happened long ago often have a bearing on the mystery at hand, and the dead often have a say in the unfolding of the story.   Such is the case with Murder in Rat Alley.  Although the story is set in present-day Asheville, much of the story deals with the disappearance of a NASA engineer in 1971.  In this novel, the underside of the Space Race and the current climate change crisis converge in a dark alley in Asheville.  Rat Alley is a real place.   

Since the publication of his first mystery, Dangerous Undertaking, in 2003 to the publication of Murder in Rat Alley in December 2019, Mark has published on average about one book per year.  I recently contacted Mark and asked him how he sustains this high level of productivity.  In his response, he interrelates the past and the present, just as he does in his mysteries.  He also addresses the importance of being part of Charlotte’s community of writers:

Writers often are portrayed as solitary figures, alone in a room with a pen, blank sheet of paper, and their imagination.  That image isn’t necessarily false.  But there comes that time when pen must go to paper or keyboard connect to computer screen, and I’ve found those secluded moments more productive because of the community that has contributed to my writing endeavors.

            I came to creative writing through a side door.  My career has been in film and video production.  In Charlotte, I’ve worked on documentaries and bio-pics that offered the opportunity for collaborative script writing, editing, and wide public distribution.  In short, storytelling.  My only creative writing education had been several screenplay courses as an undergraduate.  I was not familiar with Charlotte’s writing community.

            I was introduced to that community through the good fortune of being in a city with outstanding higher educational institutions.  It’s my belief, that from community college to major universities, writing cells come into existence when nurtured by the shared desire to learn the craft.  With that goal in mind, I nervously signed up to take a continuing-education short story writing class at Queens University (Queens College at the time).  I found myself in a room with twenty students and an instructor.  What I soon discovered was writing isn’t a competitive sport.  Someone else’s success doesn’t diminish your own.  Someone’s authentic voice doesn’t silence your own.  And writers who want to support other writers have the ability to become honest and constructive listeners.  That first class and its collaborative spirit taught me it’s not the writing, it’s the rewriting that leads to success.

            Out of that class grew a smaller writing group that encouraged and critiqued each other’s work.  That gave me the confidence to plunge into grad school in the English Department of UNC Charlotte, which introduced me to a whole faculty of writers of one kind or another.  They became my community as I concentrated on narrative theory and how a story is constructed.  Thanks to faculty support, my creative graduate thesis became a published novel.

            That was nearly twenty years and twenty novels ago.  One thing I’ve learned is that there is always more to learn.  The Charlotte Writers Club has a wonderful history of offering programs.  I was privileged to speak recently at their monthly meeting.  New technologies create new support methods such as Landis Wade’s Charlotte Readers Podcast that not only connects readers to writers but writers to writers.

Yet, there is no escaping that moment of staring at the blank page.  I try to remember it represents a world of possibilities.  I don’t face it alone.  I have a community of writers behind me.

Mark’s remarkable success as a mystery writer is not the only reason I think of him as a man of mysteries.  There is also a bit of a mystery behind his name.  In most cases, names that include “de” are French in origin.  Since “de” is French for “of,” a name that includes “de” technically means that a person with that name is “of” a particular place in France.  However, there is no Castrique in France.  In an effort to solve this mystery, I sent Mark an email and asked him about the origins of his name.  In his response, Mark wrote, “The last name of my great grandfather Charles was Castrique. This was in England. His father had several altercations with the law so when Charles immigrated to the U.S. he added the de.”  Well, now that I know that Mark isn’t tied to some village in France named Castrique, I think it might be more appropriate to call him Mark de Charlotte, as in Storied Charlotte. 

Tags: Castriquemystery writers

For the Love of Libraries

April 20, 2020 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

For the Love of Libraries— Since National Library Week runs from April 19 through April 25, now is a fitting time to celebrate the many ways in which the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library contributes to Charlotte’s community of readers and writers.  Even though all of the library branches are closed because of the coronavirus outbreak, our public library is still providing online support to area readers and writers, and the library is still participating in National Library Week.  For more information about the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library’s celebration of National Library Week, please click on the following link:  https://cmlibrary.org/blog/national-library-week-2020

Whenever I talk with Charlotte writers about the public library, they all have stories to tell.  However, for the purposes of this blog post, I am focusing on three writers whose connections with the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library have especially deep roots.  One of these writers is Jeffrey Leak, whose books include Racial Myths and Masculinity in African American Literature and Visible Man: The Life of Henry Dumas. Another is my wife, Nancy Northcott.  Her fiction includes The Herald of Day, the first novel in a historical fantasy trilogy,and a novella in Welcome to Outcast Station, the first volume in a science fiction series. Both Jeffrey and Nancy grew up in the Charlotte area, and their library connections go all the way back to their childhoods.  The third writer is community historian Thomas Hanchett, whose books include Sorting Out the New South City:  Race, Class and Urban Development in Charlotte, 1875-1975 and Charlotte and the Carolina Piedmont.  I asked each of these three authors to send me a paragraph about their experiences with the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library.

Here is what Jeffrey sent to me:

I have a long-standing appreciation for the public library. I grew up near what is now Northwest School of the Arts, riding my bike in the summer to the library, then located on LaSalle Street, now located on Beatties Ford Road. My journeys there were the result of an ultimatum from my mama: “if you come in my house one more time, you’ll be in till this evening.” Tired of me running in and out, Hattie Leak told me to make up my mind. Inside or outside. Heat or AC. More times than not, I chose the former. The librarians understood my dilemma, sometimes even including me on their lunch-run to Hoyles or Mr. C’s, less than a block away. but the main thing they gave me was access to books and the encouragement to read them. African American history and culture came alive in that welcoming space. From reading there, I always wanted to travel to the northeast where figures like Benjamin E. Mays and Zora Neale Hurston had gone. These black librarians took my curiosity and interests and, like the story of Jesus and the feeding of the fish to the multitudes, multiplied them. I don’t have any data to support this claim, but I think my reading skills actually improved in those pre-teen summers. What I do know is that my education has taken me to points in the northeast, including Maine and New York City (the respective places associated with Mays and Hurston), Africa, Europe and the Caribbean. Oh the places I have been! But I’ll always know that much of what I have been blessed to experience started at the library on LaSalle.

Here is what Nancy sent to me:

As a geek child, I didn’t fit in with my more athletic, outdoorsy neighbors. I found a haven in the Davidson Public Library. I loved to ride my bike down to Main Street, check out as many books as the bike’s basket would hold, and pedal home to start reading. Mrs. Wally, the librarian, often had recommendations ready when I walked in the door. She knew I loved science fiction, history, historical fiction, mysteries, and YA romance, and her suggestions ran the gamut. I reveled in the imaginary journeys those books provided. The library was also special to me because my father and I often went there together. Those trips were the one activity only the two of us shared. Every couple of weeks, after supper, he would ask if I wanted to go. I always jumped at the chance. You can bring home so many more books when you have a car! During those visits, I regularly read the comic strips in the back of Boys’ Life magazine. I wanted a subscription, but my mom nixed that on grounds of my not being a boy. When my dad and I went to the library, I always took the latest Boys’ Life off the shelf and read the comics in the back. He knew but never commented, so that also was just between us. I check out much less fiction than I once did, but I love having the library available for research materials.  It’s probably fair to say I wouldn’t have become a writer if the library hadn’t stimulated my imagination all those years ago.

Here is Tom sent to me:

When I’m researching the history of a community, the local public library is always my first stop. I’ve used history collections in dozens of cities nationwide and I can tell you for sure that the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room is among the best in the U.S. Arriving in Charlotte back in 1981 to research older neighborhoods for the Historic Landmarks Commission, I went directly to the original Carolina Room. It was then a single room staffed by a single person, Mary Louise Phillips. I wasn’t sure what she would make of a this 26-year-old non-native, barely able to find Charlotte on a map, asking so many questions about Myers Park, Biddleville, cotton mills, land development. But she welcomed me in. The Carolina Room has been a home-base ever since.  Today I’m delighted to be finishing my term as the Carolina Room’s first Historian-in-Residence, thanks to the vision of Library CEO Lee Keesler. In partnership with fellow community historian J. Michael Moore, we’ve just debuted a how-to website of tools, tips and weblinks for researching your house or neighborhood in Charlotte  CharlotteHistoryToolkit.com.  More work I’ve done over the years, drawing on the Carolina Room, can be found at my website www.HistorySouth.org. And while you’re on the internet, check out the Carolina Room’s own rich website, www.CMstory.org.

As the responses I received from Jeffrey, Nancy and Tom reveal, the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library has played a significant role in these writers’ lives.  In a sense, the public library can be seen as a reoccurring character that plays a variety of roles in the individual stories of Charlotte’s readers and writers, but it is also a central character in the overarching narrative of Storied Charlotte.

Tags: Carolina Roomcharlotte historylibraries

Two Peas in a Pod, One in a Podcast

April 13, 2020 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

When I used to teach writing courses many years ago, I advised my students to avoid clichés.  Back then I saw clichés as being hackneyed and unoriginal.  However, as the years have gone by, I have become more accepting of clichés.  I find that when I stop and think about a cliché, it often evokes a memory or a compelling image.  Such is the case with the cliché “two peas in a pod.”   My parents always grew peas in their large vegetable garden, and one of my jobs as a boy was to shell the peas.  I remember pulling the pods apart, revealing the emerald green peas maturing within.  For me, this cliché is not just about the similar nature of the peas, but it’s also about the protective nature of the pod. 

In many ways, Landis Wade’s Charlotte Readers Podcast and my Storied Charlotte blog are two peas in a pod, and Charlotte’s community of readers and writers is our common pod.  Both Wade and I share an interest in connecting readers and writers.  Both Wade and I draw attention to Charlotte’s talented writers.  Both Wade and I collaborate with the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library.  As Wade expressed in a recent email to me, “It looks like our interests are similar, yours with a blog, mine with a podcast.”  

In a little less than two years, Wade’s podcast has become a fixture in Charlotte’s cultural scene.  Wade recorded the first Charlotte Readers Podcast episode in 2018, and he will release his 100th episode at the end of April.  I recently contacted Wade and asked how he came to create Charlotte Readers Podcast.  Here is his response:

At my 40th College Reunion last summer at Davidson College, someone paid me a back-handed compliment. It went something like this. “You were the last guy in our class who I thought would write a book and do something creative like start a podcast.” It’s true. I didn’t fit the mold. I was a college football player, who majored in history and then turned that into a law degree, where I then worked as a trial lawyer for 35 years in Charlotte.  Then what? Did you hear the one about the lawyer who walked into a podcast studio? True, it sounds like a bad Dad joke, but I wasn’t kidding when I announced I was doing just that in the fall of 2018 when I retired in December. My dad asked, “how do you make money at that.” I said “I don’t, Dad, I just want to do something creative in my Act 3.” He was mystified.

While still working as a lawyer, I wrote my first book, The Christmas Heist as a Christmas gift for my family, which one reviewer called a cross between My Cousin Vinny and Miracle on 34th Street. When the next Christmas rolled around, the characters returned to save Christmas once again in The Legally Binding Christmas. The trilogy was completed with The Christmas Redemption, which won the 2018 Holiday category of the 12th Annual National Indie Excellence Awards and was the 2018 Holiday category Honorable Mention in the 10th Annual Readers’ Favorite Awards. My foray into writing and my experience as a trial lawyer made me wonder whether I could create an interview-based podcast to help authors give voice to their written words. I had a sense that this medium – this podcast thing – could be a great way to connect authors to listeners who enjoy good stories and poems. And thus, Charlotte Readers Podcast was born, the intersection between readers and writers where “Authors Give Voice to Their Written Words.”

When I started podcasting in the fall of 2018, I didn’t know the difference between a mixing board and a mixing bowl, why I needed an audio host, or how to get voices to travel into a microphone and end up in Apple Podcast land, but I loved to read and write, so I figured I might be able to learn the rest. Since then I have interviewed over 125 authors, done a number of live podcasts and on April 28th, I will release our 100th episode. With support from sponsors Park Road Books and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Library and some help from member supporters and Advent Coworking where I record when I can do so in person, I’m getting closer to breaking even (not there yet), but I podcast because I enjoy engaging with interesting people who also happen to tell good stories and I like connecting readers with writers. 

Book lovers and writers who are interested in learning what’s coming on the podcast through our bi-weekly newsletter or engaging with, supporting or reviewing the show, can find those links here: https://linktr.ee/CharlotteReadersPodcast   They can find our website here: www.charlottereaderspodcast.com

Although we might feel alone in this the time of self-isolation, we should remember that there are other peas in our pod.  We still have our communities, and we still have stories to share.  I congratulate Landis Wade on his 100th episode of Charlotte Readers Podcast, and I thank him for his many contributions to Storied Charlotte.        

Tags: Charlotte Readers Podcastpeas in a podpodcast

In the Words of Two Charlotte Poets

April 02, 2020 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

Charlotte’s community of readers and writers is reeling as a result of the coronavirus outbreak.  We have seen the recent cancelations or postponements of Sensoria, the Center City Literary Festival, many library events, and a number of book signings and readings by local writers.  However, the coronavirus cannot stop the National Poetry Month, which takes place each April (https://poets.org/national-poetry-month).  It is fitting, therefore, that Christopher Davis and Grace Ocasio, two of Charlotte’s most prominent poets, are launching new poetry collections this month.  Davis’s Oath is being published by Main Street Rag (https://mainstreetragbookstore.com/product/oath-christopher-davis/), and Ocasio’s Family Reunion is being published by Broadstone Books (http://broadstonebooks.com/Grace_C_Ocasio.html).  I contacted Davis and Ocasio and asked each of them to send me a brief statement about their connections to Charlotte.  I also asked each of them if they would provide a sample from their new collections, and they both agreed.

Here is what Christopher Davis sent me:

I moved to Charlotte in August of 1989, newly hired by the English Department at UNC Charlotte to teach creative writing workshops.  My first collection of poetry, The Tyrant of the Past and the Slave of the Future, had won the 1988 Agnes Lynch Starrett award from Associated Writing Programs, an organization bringing together creative writing programs, and writers, within academia.  The book was about to be published by Texas Tech University Press.  I had grown up in Los Angeles, received a BA in English Literature from Syracuse University, and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.  I had taught creative writing for two years at Murray State University in western Kentucky.  I was 29 years old, and my life up to that point had seemed already full of adventure, trauma and insecurity: eleven years earlier, my younger brother had been murdered; my parents, both academics themselves, had subsequently gone through a difficult separation and divorce; as a young(ish) gay man, I felt the presence of the AIDS crisis, as did everyone who was experiencing it personally at that time, in complex, hard-to-compartmentalize ways.  I self-identified as a poet, and as an “arts” person in general, very strongly.  My first impressions of Charlotte, when I came to UNC Charlotte for an on-campus interview in February of 1989, were that it seemed like a lush, sunny, sensual, almost tropical kind of place.  It reminded me of the Wallace Stevens poems I loved, such as “In the Carolinas” and “Bantams in Pine-woods.”  Western Kentucky had been exciting too, to my suburban southern Californian eyes, but it was a landscape of wildernesses, whereas Charlotte contained cultivated gardens filled with day lilies and hosta, and crepe myrtle trees planted by the city along the Plaza, where I rented a small house throughout the 1990’s.  Hurricane Hugo hit, and my first days of teaching at UNC Charlotte were marked by, well, what I was used to:  adventure, trauma and insecurity.  Later in 1989, when the gorgeous flora in my front yard lost its flowers and receded into the ground for winter, I was so upset, assuming I had done something wrong, maybe not watered the plants enough, not fertilized anything.  My first spring here, in March of 1990, was a fabulous revelation.  I watched the day lilies burst out, the pear trees pop alive; I listened to Aaron Copeland’s “Appalachian Spring” in my Walkman; I excitedly worked on poems that would eventually appear in journals, then in my second book, The Patriot, published by University of Georgia Press in 1998.  “One swollen evening / warm rain flooded the gutters. / Dogwood blossoms had come out / over a wash of green leaves. / The world seemed quietly willing.”  I was home.

Much time has passed since then, but, because I have remained in one place for half of my life, always responding to seasonal and historical events, always bringing my sensory experience, my body, my place, into my poems, it somehow seems as if no time has passed, like a “grace dissolved in place,” as T.S. Eliot names that feeling in his poem “Marina.”  Of course Charlotte has gifted me, and my poetry, with much imagery, language and experience.  But I think this poem, which will appear in my forthcoming collection, Oath, published by Main Street Rag Press, is most representative of my creative life, as lived in this part of our country, for so long.  In 2007 I received a grant from UNC Charlotte to support scholarship; I spent one week, in late January, at a hotel at the far end of Wrightsville Beach, in the Wilmington area; I wrote pages and pages of notes, and over several years shaped this poem.  If “that’s all she wrote,” I’m happy!

SHELL ISLAND

It’s weathered subject matter, this boutique hotel,

a revamped Holiday Inn at the end of a sand bar      

pulled this way and that, eroded by wind, rain,

currents, tides flooding the inland waterway.  

To restore expensive real estate, bulldozers

added three thousand more feet of beach

a little to the north, destroying habitats

for plovers, black flyers, sanderlings.

White water fowl wings

skim breaking waves.

*

An Adirondack chair the burgundy of dried blood

hunches against the rusty railing of the balcony. 

My muscles are already beginning to atrophy. 

Really do resent having to sit here, solitary,

slaving over rough drafts, shifting, shrinking,

when the sound of the surf pounds outside.

My heart, you know, feelings, needs to be

touched, doesn’t yours?  My neck hurts, 

my sharp nose and tight-lipped mouth

floating between my shoulder blades.

*

This human mike, this hollow, fragile body,  

a community perceptual center, embraces

it, this inside voice, radio free me, carries

it through books, buffet lines, museums;                                                        

in a pornography outlet beside Autumn Inn,

a care facility for seniors, it makes it moan.

Sun-bleached driftwood looks bone gray.

Well, I guess I am here on an arts grant,

i.e., to mix work, dying, and play. 

Pray, let’s wave at, never away, 

*

that obese sex tourist, trudging, in flip-

flops, along the boardwalk, two gay

Thai guys, twins, performing an act

behind his back, bowing, grinning,  

their four middle fingers lifted, tips,

bending in, slightly, wiggling, like

hooks catching trapped laughs,

flipping, “quote, unquote,”

the bird, supernatural,

rhetorical, rhapsodic. 

Here is what Grace Ocasio sent me:

As far as I was concerned, Charlotte was a foreign land, and I was a hardcore New Yorker when I moved to Charlotte in 1993, newly wed from the burbs of Westchester County.  The only thing I knew about Charlotte was that my mother had passed through it one time, years before she migrated to New York with my father and that my uncle, Dr. Arthur Grant, had received a B.A. in English from Johnson C. Smith University.  I truly became, upon learning from my then fiancé, Edwin Ocasio, that his company, Hearst Corporation, would be relocating to Charlotte the summer of 1992, like Eva Gabor’s Lisa of Green Acres fame.  “The stores” I implored as I conversed with Eddie long distance ten months before our wedding.  For sure, the asphalt jungle had rooted itself deep in my DNA, and no amount of persuasion on Eddie’s part was going to sell me on Charlotte.  Hence, I went kicking and screaming down south. 

Little by little, Charlotte grew on me.  Teeming with nature galore, the birds and trees of various kinds won me over.   All the writers I met wrote about flowers.  What is this? I wondered.  True, the amazing contemporary poet Thomas Lux taught me in a Sarah Lawrence College graduate seminar that one could use flowers symbolically, creating great potency of language.  One need not imbue one’s language with the literal meaning of flowers, I learned.  Still, I imbibed what the writers around me wrote, admired and appreciated their verse.  I, however, referenced nature in order to reflect/mirror my emotions.  The death of my mother in 2008 prompted me to write about her passing aided by the image of a dogwood.  Other poems emerged, some relating to nature in one way or another. A few of these poems made their way into my new collection, Family Reunion.  Nowadays, I sit or stand in my bones, content to wait for small moments to burgeon into poems.

FALL FESTIVAL

We, my Edward and I, take Zoe to a pumpkin patch

where she dives into a horde of pumpkins

as though they will draw her close

as cousins she’s never met.

She commands the hayride––

first child to scramble up

into the tractor-drawn wagon,

first child to throw a bucket of hay over her head.

We walk through a meadow, snatch wildflowers,

cram our pockets with them,

lean against white oaks and watch the sun

slide down the sky like a child racing down a water coaster.

We flash our headlights from Mooresville to Charlotte,

letting people know harvest is the time to gloat

over chill in the air, the snap of grass under feet,

the scent of pumpkin buttercream,

the yellow, red, and orange leaves of tupelos

that entice us to sleep even when we’ve been up all night,

tossing stray sandman thoughts out the window

or in the trash can in our backyard.  

I thank Christopher Davis and Grace Ocasio for sharing their thoughts and poetry and for their many contributions to Storied Charlotte.        

Tags: Charlottepoetpoetrypoets
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