Monthly Archives: May 2020

War Stories

May 25, 2020 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

With Memorial Day upon us, now is a fitting time not only to honor those who lost their lives while serving in the military but also to reflect on the power and significance of well-told war stories.  The type of war stories that I find most moving are those that focus on how individuals respond to the high-stakes situations associated with wars.  Two such books are Wynne’s War (2014) by Aaron Gwyn and Two Souls Indivisible:  The Friendship That Saved Two POWs in Vietnam (2004) by James S. Hirsch.  Wynne’s War is a novel set in the mountains of Afghanistan while Two Souls Indivisible is a work of nonfiction about two American pilots held captive in a POW camp during the Vietnam War.  Both books provide insights into how people deal with the realities war, and both books have connections to the Charlotte area.

Aaron Gwyn, the author of Wynne’s War and several other books of fiction, is a creative writing professor in the English Department at UNC Charlotte.  He was raised on a cattle ranch in Oklahoma where he rode horses throughout his growing up years, and his familiarity with horses is reflected in Wynne’s War.  This novel focuses on two characters—a young Army Ranger named Elijah Russell, who is known for his excellent horsemanship, and Captain Carson Wynne, who commands a group of Green Berets.  Wynne assigns Russell with the task of training his group of Green Berets how to ride horses so that they can carry out a secret mission in the mountainous region of eastern Afghanistan where horses are well suited for the treacherous terrain.  Over the course of the novel, the relationship between Russell and Wynne becomes increasingly complex, especially for Russell.  As they travel deeper and deeper into enemy territory, Russell finds himself torn between his obligation to follow Wynne’s orders and his growing concern about Wynne’s obsessive and almost fanatical behavior.  Wynne’s War is very much an action-packed war story, but it is also a thoughtful character study.

James S. Hirsch’s Two Souls Indivisible focuses on the evolving relationship between Fred V. Cherry, who grew up in Suffolk, Virginia, and Porter A. Halyburton, who grew up a little north of Charlotte in Davidson, North Carolina.  As Hirsch recounts in his book, both men served as pilots during the Vietnam War, and both were captured by the North Vietnamese and held as prisoners of war for more than seven years.  Their captors imprisoned them in the same cell, thinking that Cherry (an African American) and Halyburton (a white southerner) would have an intense animosity toward each other.  However, the two men developed a deep friendship and supported each other throughout their years in captivity.  Hirsch’s book does not gloss over the horrible experiences these men faced as POWS, but he emphasizes their friendship and resilience.  The friendship that Cherry and Halyburton forged during their years in a POW camp persisted long after they gained their freedom.  The two men stayed in frequent contact until Cherry’s death in 2016.

General William Sherman once said, “War is hell.”  Wynne’s War and Two Souls Indivisible certainly provide support for Sherman’s assertion.  However, these books transcend the hellish horror of war.  They provide readers with insights into the hearts and minds of the participants in our wars.  Although these books are set in far-away places, they are still part of Storied Charlotte.    

Tags: prisoners of warwar horseswar stories

Of Anchors, Books, and Juggling Women

May 17, 2020 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

My guess is that in other cities television news anchors and radio broadcasters don’t generally write books, but in Charlotte it’s another story.   This month Molly Grantham, a WBTV news anchor, published her second book, The Juggle Is Real:  The Off-Camera Life of an On-Camera Mom.  Grantham is not the only Charlotte-area anchor or broadcaster to have published multiple books.  Sheri Lynch of the Bob and Sheri radio show has also published two books, and the former news anchor Robert Inman has published numerous books.   

Grantham’s The Juggle Is Real is a follow-up volume to her first book, Small Victories, which came out in 2017.  In fact, both books share the same subtitle:  The Off-Camera Life of an On-Camera Mom.  Grantham wrote her first book while on maternity leave.  It started as a series of Facebook posts that she wrote on a weekly basis shortly after the birth of her second child.  Small Victories has a candid and humorous feel to it.  The Juggle Is Real is just as candid has her first book, but it is more serious in tone.  The book opens with Grantham recounting her visit with her dying mother.  From there she writes about experiences of juggling her job and her responsibilities as a parent while working from home because of the coronavirus pandemic.  Grantham includes lots of humorous observations in this memoir, but it is all set against the sobering backdrop of our current public health crisis.  For more information about Grantham’s books, please click on the following link:  https://www.mollygrantham.com/

Grantham’s two memoirs are perfect shelf mates to Sheri Lynch’s two books about motherhood:  Hello, My Name Is Mommy:  The Dysfunctional Girl’s Guide to Having, Loving (and Hopefully Not Screwing Up) a Baby, published in 2004; and Be Happy or I’ll Scream!:  My Deranged Quest for the Perfect Husband, Family, and Life, published in 2007.  Both Grantham and Lynch have a knack for writing self-deprecating humor, but Lynch’s humor is a bit edgier than Grantham’s.  Like Grantham, Lynch writes about the difficulties of juggling her family life and her career, but Lynch’s juggling act often doubles as a comedy act.  For more information about Lynch’s career, please click on the following link:  https://bobandsheri.com/bio/

Of the Charlotte-area news anchors who have also published books, no one can match the record of Robert Inman.  From 1979 to 1996, Inman worked as a news anchor for WBTV, but he took an interest in writing novels in the mid-1980s.  He published his first novel, Home Fires Burning, in 1987.  In 1996, he decided to step down as a news anchor and become a full-time writer of novels, plays, screenplays, and essays.  For more information about Inman’s books, please click on the following link:  http://robert-inman.com/about-the-author

Inman’s most recent novel, The Governor’s Lady, came out in 2013.  Like Grantham’s and Lynch’s memoirs, this novel deals with the experiences of a woman attempting to juggle multiple roles and expectations.  In the case of The Governor’s Lady, the central character is Cooper Lanier, the wife of an ambitious southern governor who decides to run for President of the United States. Her husband concocts a plan for her to succeed him as governor so that he can devote more time to his presidential campaign.  However, when she is elected governor, she finds herself torn between being a stand-in for her husband and following her own ideas and plans.  The result is a story that combines family dynamics and political intrigue.

For Molly Grantham, Sheri Lynch, and Robert Inman, the demands associated with their broadcasting careers have not prevented them from launching new careers as authors.  All three of them have written memorable books about the realities of contemporary women’s lives, and Storied Charlotte is richer for it.

Tags: family lifehumorjuggling lifemotherhoodnews anchorsnovelsradio broadcasters

The Forging of Andrew Hartley’s Impervious

May 11, 2020 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

In our roles as UNC Charlotte professors, Andrew Hartley and I were both on campus on April 30th of last year, the day that two UNC Charlotte students lost their lives in a shooting that took place in a campus classroom.  I had left campus about fifteen minutes before the shooting occurred.  Andrew, however, was in the middle of an end-of-year theatre departmental celebration when the shots rang out, so he and his students experienced first-hand the terror of huddling in a dressing room while the police investigated the shooting.  Shortly after this experience, Andrew began writing a young adult fantasy novel in which he responded in a creative way to the shooting.  The result is Impervious, which Falstaff Books released in April.  For more information about this release, please click on the following link:  http://falstaffbooks.com/impervious-book-release/

In his new novel, Andrew combines the grim reality of gun violence, the gritty world of today’s schools, and the liberating power of fantasy.  Although real-world issues and problems often figure in Andrew’s fantasy novels, in Impervious the very real problem of school violence is at the center of the story.  I recently contacted Andrew and asked him about how he combines fantasy and reality in the pages of Impervious.  Here is his response:

Though I loved Tolkien growing up, I quickly gravitated to novels whose paranormal or fantastic elements were more clearly rooted in conventional reality and whose brand of evil was less abstract and more specifically human. That may have begun for me with Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy, but it expanded across genres and drove many of the stories I came to love, whether it was detective fiction or in the ordinary horrors of Stephen King. I developed a fascination with the way that the imagined, the spooky, or the otherworldly might be tied to the everyday. Likewise in television and film, I came to love the way that the most unlikely narratives might be the shadows cast by commonplace events, people or attitudes.

I didn’t start writing for younger readers till my son was old enough to read it. Until then I had written mostly adult mystery and thriller, but I came back to fantasy, my first literary love, moving from middle grade fiction to young adult as he aged. But I never lost that sense that the best fantasy did not point away from reality so much as it reflected back on it, albeit through a fun-house mirror which distorts and makes the familiar strange. 

The idea for Impervious came to me several years ago: a fantasy novel in which the elements which marked it as fantasy gradually broke down, revealing an all too real and horrible event at the center, something the protagonist had not been able to bear looking at directly. I didn’t know how to write it, however, and it sat as a half developed outline, no more than a few pages long. 

Then came April 30th 2019. I was trapped on campus at UNCC with a handful of students, hidden in a dressing room in the theatre building where I work, waiting for the police to determine it was safe to go out. A gunman had killed two students and injured four more. We waited for two hours in silence, trying to track events on our phones, see what had happened, what was happening, what might happen.

It was a few days before the extent of the trauma became clear to me. I was jumpy, emotional, prone to flashes of panic. It was odd because I had not actually been in real danger, though I hadn’t known that at the time. The shooter was subdued quickly, partly through the self sacrifice of a student, Riley Howell.

I don’t remember if it was my idea to write the book or if my wife suggested it. I’ve written through trauma before and it made sense to do it again. So I took the outline I had written for the fantasy novel built around a traumatic event, restructured it and spent two weeks at my computer, pausing, pretty much, only to sleep and eat. It just poured out. It was painful to write because I felt like I was reliving everything, but it was cathartic, and when it was done, I felt better. 

I don’t know what other people will make of it, and a part of me doesn’t care, because writing it was, for me, both necessary and inevitable. If it brings other people closer to a sense of such things without having to live through them, if it helps them to reflect on violence, on heroism, all the better. I want it to. But I didn’t write it with that end in mind. I wrote it because if I was ever going to get out of that dressing room, I had to. Sometimes, that’s how writing is.

Andrew (or A.J. Hartley as he is known to his readers) has published many novels since moving to Charlotte in 2005, but Impervious is the one that has the deepest connections to his experiences in our city.  Impervious was not just written in Charlotte; it was forged in the heat of one of Charlotte’s most hellish days.  As such, Impervious is very much part of Storied Charlotte. 

Tags: April 30gun violenceImperviousschool violenceyoung adult fantasy novel

Dannye Romine Powell and Her 45 Years as a Player in Charlotte's Literary Scene

May 04, 2020 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte
Photo credit:
Laurie Smithwick

Shortly after I moved to Charlotte in the summer of 1984, I subscribed to The Charlotte Observer.  At the time, Dannye Romine Powell served as the book editor for the paper.  Back in those days, the paper published a two-page book section every Sunday.  It included original book reviews, interviews with authors, and news about local literary events.  As a regular reader of the paper’s book section, I got to know Dannye through her writing and through seeing her at book signings and other literary events in the community.  I soon came to see Dannye as a key player in Charlotte’s literary scene. 

Dannye made her debut on the Charlotte literary scene in 1975 when she became the book editor for The Charlotte Observer.  She remained the paper’s book editor until 1992.  In this role, she often interviewed Southern authors.  She decided to collect these interviews in a book titled Parting the Curtains:  Interviews with Southern Writers, which came out in 1995.  In addition to her interview book, Dannye has published five poetry collections, two of which have won the the North Carolina Poetry Society’s Brockman-Campbell Award for best book by a North Carolina poet.  Her most recent collection, In the Sunroom with Raymond Carver, just came out from Press 53.  For more information about this collection, please click on the following link:   https://www.press53.com/dannye-romine-powell

I recently contacted Dannye and asked for her reflections on her long career as a Charlotte journalist, columnist, and poet.   Here is her response:

In the beginning – at least in the beginning of my tenure as book editor of the Charlotte Observer in 1975 – there was Charleen. Nobody said, “Charleen who?” Everybody knew. The ebullient, charismatic Charleen Whisnant was all the literati this town needed. She published a series of hardback literary reviews – The Red Clay Reader – unparalleled in their energy and excellence. Before long, Charleen reclaimed her maiden name – Swansea. She divorced her high school sweetheart, married a young entrepreneur, and moved on to South Carolina and other pursuits.

Charlotte was rich in poets in those years. But in 1970s and ‘80s, with one or two fleeting exceptions, to unearth a novelist, Charlotte had to dig back to Carson McCullers’ brief stay here in 1937. Chapel Hill had the goods –Reynolds Price, Doris Betts, Daphne Athas and Max Steele. And Greensboro with novelist and poet Fred Chappell. And Columbia, S.C., with James Dickey – predominantly a poet – and Jackson, Miss., with Eudora Welty, whose genius was the short story.

Before long, a new crop of novelists sprang up – again in the Chapel Hill area — Lee Smith, Alan Gurganus, Marianne Gingher, Angela Davis-Gardner, (Charlotte native) Lawrence Naumoff and others.

A decade before my arrival at the Observer, my predecessor Harriet Doar had discovered Louisiana’s Walker Percy and his first novel, “The Moviegoer.” By discovered, I mean she had snatched his book from the dozens that poured in each week to the newsroom and wrote about it as if Percy belonged to us. As Harriet once explained, “Sometimes you just know a good book by its feel.”

My own find was the young Kaye Gibbons of Raleigh in 1987. Thanks to Harriet, I too had learned to feel my way to a promising read. One day, I plucked a small volume from the pile and noticed blurbs from both Eudora Welty and Walker Percy. I wept as I read the first page of Gibbons’ magical “Ellen Foster” — a sure sign my sensibilities had encountered genius.

Charlotte came so close to having our very own novelist with the late Dot Jackson, a former Observer columnist, who spent the 1970s and part of the ‘80s writing the splendid “Refuge,” after working all day at the paper. But by the time it came out in 2006, she had moved on to Six Mile, S.C.

We finally snared one in 1991 when Algonquin Books published Simmons Jones’s first and only novel, “Show Me the Way to Go Home.” Jones, a Charlotte native, was 70 when the book came out.

Today, Charlotte teems with novelists. There’s Judy Goldman, poet-turned-novelist- turned memoirist. And the internationally bestselling Kathy Reichs. Among others, there’s Mark de Castrique, Kimmery Martin, Kim Wright, Jeff Jackson, Sarah Creech, Nancy Stancill, Kathryn Schwille, Phillip Lewis, Webb Hubbell, Jon Buchan, Megan Miranda, Amber Smith, Erika Marks, Alan Michael Parker, Andrew Hart, Marybeth Whalen, Alicia D. Williams, Renee Ahdieh, Gail Z. Martin, Paula Martinac, Aaron Gwyn, Carrie Ryan, Joy Callaway and Bryn Chancellor.

And, yes, poets still thrive here. Julie Suk, now 96, has a new collection due in May from Jacar Press.

Funny, isn’t it. When the literary pickings were slim here, The Observer’s book page flourished. Now the writers are flourishing. And where oh where is the book page?

Nowadays Charlotte’s literary scene has many players, but few can match Dannye’s long record.  For her 45 years of contributing to Storied Charlotte, I thank her.   

Tags: book editorcolumnistjournalistliterary sceneNorth Carolina poet