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Monthly Archives: December 2020

Rebecca McClanahan Goes to New York City

December 21, 2020 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

My father grew up in New York City.  He spent most of his boyhood living in a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, and that experience shaped his taste in movies.  He loved movies set in New York, and he especially loved the New York movies written by Neil Simon.  He felt a special bond with Simon in part because they shared a birthday.  My father was born on July 4, 1928, and Simon was born on July 4, 1927.  I remember going with my father to see Simon’s The Out-of-Towners as soon as it came out in 1970, and I have loved the movie ever since.  The movie stars Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis, and it deals with a middle-aged couple (Gwen and George Kellerman) who leave their home in Ohio and go to New York so that George can interview for a new job.  What follows is a series of hilarious mishaps that tests the couple and changes their perspective. 

I thought about The Out-of-Towners when I discovered In the Key of New York City:  A Memoir in Essays by Charlotte writer Rebecca McClanahan.  Published by Red Hen Press in September 2020, this book is Rebecca’s eleventh book and her second memoir. Like Gwen and George Kellerman, Rebecca and her husband, Donald Devet, left the security of their comfortable home and headed off to New York City to explore new possibilities. Rebecca and Donald were about the same age as the Kellermans when they went to New York in 1998, but unlike the Kellermans, they ended up staying in the Big Apple for eleven years. Rebecca and Donald, like the Kellermans, approached New York from the perspective of outsiders, and this perspective helped them notice details that native New Yorkers often ignore as they bustle about their business.  Rather than provide a chronological record of her years in New York, Rebecca writes focused essays in which she delves into particular moments and events.  I recently contacted Rebecca and asked her for more information about In the Key of New York City.  Here is what she sent to me:

When my husband and I moved from Charlotte to New York in 1998, it was a midlife leap into the unknown. We’d talked for decades about living in the city someday and had visited New York whenever we could. Then one day, while we were walking on 8th Avenue celebrating Donald’s 50th birthday, I surprised myself by saying, “If we’re going to make the move, we better make it now.” That was in May, and by August we had put our house on the market, stored the possessions we had not given away, found a furnished sublet, left our jobs, and said goodbye to family and friends—and even to our cat! Neither of us is impulsive by nature, but I guess the urge was strong. We figured that with the sale of the house and our savings, we could make it for two years if we didn’t find jobs there. We ended up staying for eleven.

In the Key of New York Cityis a memoir-in-essays about the first several years of our time there. We were newcomers, outsiders, and, as is the case with most outsiders, our senses were heightened as we struggled to navigate an alien landscape. Despite my training as a military brat who moved often during childhood, I was extremely lonely at the beginning, or maybe homesick is a better word for it. We’d been comfortable in our North Carolina lives and I missed that easy comfort. I missed my home and garden, my friends and family, my students and colleagues in the writing community.

Making a community in New York was a tough learning experience, but little by little we made connections—through our new jobs, mostly, and by reconnecting with New York area friends we’d lost track of over the years. But much of the growing feeling of connection came from the constant interaction with strangers. This was due in part to street activity—with walking rather than driving, encountering diverse faces close-up and personal, hearing the broth of languages on our walks, sharing subway seats or park benches, and learning how to give each person we met their own valuable space. It may sound strange, but I discovered a new form of intimacy in those encounters. I felt part of a world much larger than myself, my neighborhood, or my circle of friends. I hadn’t expected the intensity of this feeling and it surprised and comforted me. So, sprinkled among the longer essays in the book are brief moments that suggest these connections: an encounter on the subway involving two sleeping children, the drunken young man on 8th avenue holding a dying pigeon out to me as if I might save it, the post 9/11 park scene where I see a Muslim woman in a headscarf running toward a child who is in danger. All of these encounters, and more, forced me to imagine what New York—or, indeed, our nation—might look like if we all, horror of horrors, went “back where we came from.”

The book opens and closes with scenes of Central Park. The park bench was such an important part of my experience of New York—not only as my own physical (if temporary) stake on the landscape and a place from which to view the scene, but also as an opportunity for conversations with strangers who were always eager to share their stories and their odd but intriguing wisdom. A park bench is where public and private meet, which echoes my experience of the city. The book moves between the public and the private, the joyous and the sorrowful (9/11, my cancer surgery and recovery, moments of loneliness and regret) and the present and the past.

The title (“In the Key…”) is of course related to music, and music weaves its way throughout the book: in sounds heard through apartment walls, the cacophony of the streets and subways, the music I hear during the 9/11 prayer service, and even in the hospital essay when I hear the dying man’s wife echoing his cries—an opera of shared pain. Music touches the deepest parts of our experience; it transcends language. Which is why music is such an important part of the book.

In another way, though, the “key” to New York could also be seen as an object, something that opens the door into a new experience. That is what I hope the book might do for readers, not only those readers with connections to New York. I hope that the book’s reach extends to anyone who has ever been uprooted or who has felt like a newcomer or outsider, who has longed for connection, and who has been lucky enough to experience a place that changed them in remarkable ways. Maybe that’s reaching too high, but that was my aim in writing the book. I am grateful to each and every reader. Readers make books possible. Thank you, Mark, for the opportunity to talk about my book.

Rebecca and Donald, like the Kellmans, have returned home.  Rebecca is maintaining her connections in Charlotte, including teaching in The Queens MFA program, and Donald is working as a video producer here in Charlotte.  Rebecca is having great success in her writing career, the details of which can be found on her website: http://www.rebeccamcclanahanwriter.com

Rebecca still sees herself as a Charlotte writer, but her experinces living in New York have rippled through her writing career in a variety of ways.  Her embrace of both Charlotte and New York is reflected in the fact that she is the recipent of fellowships from both the North Carolina Arts Council and the New York Foundation for the Arts.   As I see it, Rebecca’s new book adds an appealing New-York-City vibe to Storied Charlotte.

Tags: essaysmemoir

Allison Hutchcraft, Henry David Thoreau, and the Art of Nature Writing

December 14, 2020 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

I first read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; or Life in the Woods during my high school years in Colorado.  There’s a pond on mountainside where I grew up, and I decided to emulate Thoreau and write about the pond, just like Thoreau wrote about Walden Pond.  I perched on the bank for about an hour, watching the occasional dragonfly zip through the cluster of cattails near where I sat,  and then I got restless.  As much as I admired Thoreau’s writing, I realized that I lacked the discipline and powers of perception to be a nature writer.  Still, I appreciate writers who are attuned to the rhythms of nature and who can help us understand our place in the natural world. One such writer is Charlotte poet Allison Hutchcraft.  For more information about Allison and her poetry, please click on the following link:  https://www.allisonhutchcraft.com

I met Allison about six years ago.  At the time, she had just had a poem published in the Kenyon Review about a dodo bird.  I remember reading the poem and then talking with her about her ability to make readers care about an extinct bird.  I have followed her career ever since and have taken pleasure in seeing her poetry gain national attention.  I am pleased to report the recent publication of Swale, Allison’s first poetry collection.  I contacted Allison and asked her for more information about her collection.  Here is what she sent to me:

I’m thrilled to share that my first poetry collection, Swale, was released this November by the good folks at New Issues Poetry & Prose. The book looks outward to the natural world, and also inward to the landscape of the mind. In Swale, water and land meet and mix, and at times become confused. Sailors hallucinate the ocean as a field. Ancient coastal forests, having fallen into the sea from shifting tectonic plates, reappear on a beach, unburied by erosion. 

In my work, I often find animals appearing, from bears, horses, and lambs to whales and manatees. In Swale, there are extinct species, too, particularly the dodo and Steller’s sea cow, which went extinct roughly in the 1680s and 1760s, respectively. Human intervention set in motion those extinctions, and I’m interested in thinking about those losses, and the kinds of worldviews that made them possible.

In 2018, I was lucky to be a resident at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology on the Oregon coast. Sitka is a dream of a residency, and quite remote: perched where the Salmon River estuary spills into the sea, and steps from a national scenic research area. I saw more elk than people. Being in that particular place—walking the woods and coastlines, climbing over boulders, touching rockweed, lichen, and driftwood—was incredibly generative, and brought forth poems that grew incrementally from daily observations. Such writing in the field is crucial to me. At the same time, I love research. Reading about the fur trade in the Pacific Northwest, for instance, led me to the naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller’s study of the sea cow, which in turn led to a poem.

I am particularly interested in the ways in which art and science meet and what questions and conversations such crossings might foster. I often think of Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, in which he advocates for finding ways to bring the disasters of the Anthropocene into our shared consciousness. Nixon writes:

“In an age when the media venerate the spectacular, when public policy is shaped primarily around perceived immediate need, a central question is strategic and representational: how can we convert into image and narrative the disasters that are slow moving and long in the making, disasters that are anonymous and star nobody, disasters that are attritional and of indifferent interest to the sensation-driven technologies of our image-world?”

This, to me, is an urgent call: how can we begin to make visible the precariousness of our world? Poetry, I think, offers one way to do so.

Even though Allison’s Swale is a work of poetry while Thoreau’s Walden is a work of prose, both writers have much in common.  For both of them, nature writing is an immersive act.  Both are keen observers of the dynamics of the natural world, and both reflect in profound ways on how humans interact with nature.  Both have an appreciation of place, and they communicate their appreciation of place through the power of their writing.  In many ways, Allison Hutchcraft is Storied Charlotte’s own 21st-century Thoreau. 

Tags: Nature writerpoetry

Charlotte Art Books

December 07, 2020 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

I like coffee, and I like books, and I don’t have anything against tables.  However, I don’t especially like the term coffee table book.  When I come across this term, it causes me to associate a book with a glorified coaster or a saucer for a coffee cup.  I prefer to use the term art book when I am referring to a book that features photographs and reproductions of visual images. 

I enjoy perusing art books.  I like the way the images and the text work together.  I also like the way the images in an art book relate to the other images in the book.  I often have sense that the images are speaking to each other in a synergistic way, and I know that this experience is no accident.  Like the curator of an art exhibit, the creator of an art book puts a great deal of thought into the arrangement and presentation of the images in the book.  I am pleased to report the recent publication of several art books that have associations with Charlotte.  For the purposes of this blog post, I will focus on three such books.

Anne Neilson’s Angels came out last month, and it features 40 full-color reproductions of Neilson’s well-known angel paintings.  Often described as “ethereal,” these oil paintings reflect Neilson’s skill in playing with light, color and texture.  The wings on her angels are usually created by the thick application of oil paints, and this technique gives these angel wings a three-dimensional quality.  The book also includes “inspirational devotions” in keeping with Neilson’s Christian religious beliefs.  Neilson is a Charlotte-based artist and owner of Anne Neilson Fine Art, an art gallery located in Charlotte.

Charlotte:  The Signs of the Times reflects photographer Christopher Lawing’s passion for Charlotte’s iconic signs.  He first took an interest in photographing these signs while still a student at Myers Park High School, and for the next seven years he continued to photograph and research the history of Charlotte’s historic signs.  In this lavishly illustrated book, Lawing brings together photographs of over 100 distinctive Charlotte signs, many of which are associated with important Charlotte landmarks, including Ratcliffe’s Flowers, the World Famous Open Kitchen, and Mr. K’s Soft Ice Cream.  For each of the photographed signs, Lawing provides information about the sign’s location, the history of the business associated with the sign, and a note about the sign’s current status.  Sadly, some of the physical signs no longer exists, but they live on in Lawing’s book. 

Classic Black:  The Basalt Sculpture of Wedgwood and His Contemporaries is by Brian D. Gallagher, the Curator of Decorative Arts at the Mint Museum.  This book functions as a catalog for the Mint Museum’s current “Classic Black” exhibit, which can be seen at the museum’s Randolph Road location.  However, the book also functions as a stand-alone celebration of black basalt sculptures and ornamental wares.  Classic Black includes 254 color illustrations of busts, statues, vases, cameos, and other works created out of black basalt.  In the words of a reviewer from the Wall Street Journal, this is “a handsomely illustrated catalog written by Mr. Gallagher, with contributions by several eminent colleagues in the field.”

For readers who are interested in checking out other art books that are tied to Charlotte, I suggest that they visit the gift shops at the area art museums.  In some cases, Charlotte’s art museums still have the catalogs for temporary exhibits, such as the Mint Museum’s 2011 ground-breaking exhibit titled “Romare Bearden:  Southern Recollections.”  These museum catalogs, along with the various art books created by Charlotte painters and photographers, add a rich visual dimension to the ever-expanding library of books that make up Storied Charlotte. 

Tags: art bookscoffee table books
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