Monthly Archives: March 2022

Susan Amond Todd and the Convergence of Women’s History and Family History

March 28, 2022 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

March is Women’s History Month.  Over the years, I have often seen references to women’s history as “herstory,” and I like the sound of this term.  One way to celebrate Women’s History Month is to celebrate authors who write “herstories.” One such author is Susan Amond Todd, a Charlotte writer whose third novel, Life’s Fortune, came out about a month ago.  In this novel, Susan tells the story of a woman whose struggle to establish an independent identity causes her to confront long buried family secrets. As she delves into her family history, she gradually learns more about her own place in her family’s history, and this knowledge helps her chart a new path for her future.  For more information about Life’s Fortune and Susan’s other books, please click on the following link:  https://susanamondtodd.com/

I recently contacted Susan and asked her about how she came to write novels about women’s lives.  In her response, she comments on her own family history.  Here is what she sent to me:

When I was about ten, I overheard my parents talking about how my grandmother had written a book. I thought at that moment, I wanted to write a book one day, too. I never told anyone and kept it to myself because I was afraid someone would tell me it was a crazy idea.

I was a daydreamer and storyteller as a kid which got me in trouble many times but has come in very handy when I write. One time at a parent-teacher conference, the teacher told my mom I had too vivid an imagination. My mom came home and told me the teacher said I needed to stop it. I didn’t stop but was just more careful from then on.

I had thought about starting to write a book many times over the years but life always seemed to get in the way and I didn’t really know where to begin. I had a degree in Marketing and have worked in banking my whole career. Then in my mid-50s I lost 80 pounds and knew if I could do that, I could write a book. I had an idea and joined a little local writing group I found online. It was just what I needed to get me going. Before I knew it, I was writing my first book White Lake and after that, the sequel to it Return Home. My third book, Life’s Fortune, was released on January 11th of this year. It’s the first in a four-book series. I have many other ideas for books in my head that should last my lifetime.

Being an avid reader, I have been inspired by authors who wrote about the trials and tribulations of life. That’s what I wanted to write about. My commitment is to write for women in a way that they see how the ordinary woman is amazing in what she considers to be her ordinary and sometimes boring world. These women always rise to the occasion and through the struggle and contrast in their lives come out better in the end. Through my job I have had the privilege to meet and work with many women from all over the world and have concluded we all want the same thing. To love and be loved. In my books, I focus on family, friendship, perseverance, love, and surviving. Basically, I write about what I like to read.

When I have the chance to interact with women after they’ve read my books, they tell me how relatable they are to their life. That is the highest compliment I can receive.

When I sign books I always write “Follow your dream” before I sign my name because that’s what I did and what I want the person receiving the book to do.

I also have in my possession Down in the Hollow the original manual typed manuscript of the grandmother who inspired me. My plan is one day to edit and add a modern twist to it before publishing the book as coauthors with her. She was born in 1898.

As Susan’s novels demonstrate, women’s history is not limited to the remote past.  In telling stories about women’s lives, Susan shows how family history and childhood experiences influence the decisions that women make in their adult lives.  In her writing, Susan draws on her own family history, and Storied Charlotte is richer because of it.

Tags: family historynovel

The Debut of the Charlotte Readers Book Club

March 21, 2022 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

On December 13, 2021, I received an email from Landis Wade, the founder and host of the Charlotte Readers Podcast.  The re message read “Pitching an idea.”  Intrigued, I opened Landis’s email.  “I have a proposition for you to consider,” he wrote.  He went on to say that he and Sam Poler, the Director of Member Experience at Advent Coworking, were thinking about starting a book club that would meet quarterly at the Advent Coworking facility on Louise Ave.  He wanted to know if I would be interested in partnering with them.  Of course, I said yes. 

A few days later, Landis, Sam, and I met, and we officially founded the Charlotte Readers Book Club as a bookish collaboration involving Advent Coworking, Charlotte Readers Podcast, and Storied Charlotte. We agreed that our book club would feature recent books by talented local authors.  We also agreed that our events would be open to the public and that attendees would not be required to read the featured books in advance.  We decided to feature two authors at each event, and Landis and I agreed to co-host the conversations with these featured authors.  

I am pleased to announce that the Charlotte Readers Book Club’s debut event will take place on Wednesday, March 30, at 5:30 pm at Advent Coworking (933 Louise Ave., Suite 101).  This month we’re discussing Code Name: Serendipity by Amber Smith, and Dear Miss Cushman by Paula Martinac.  The central characters in both of these books are young, and the authors will comment on writing about young characters. This event is free and open to the public, but we are asking that attendees request tickets in advance:  https://adventcoworking.com/en/events/tickets/1415004192/charlotte-readers-book-club

Here is some more information about our featured authors:

Amber Smith is the New York Times bestselling author of young adult and middle-grade novels, including The Way I Used to Be, The Last to Let Go, Something Like Gravity, and most recently, her middle-grade debut, Code Name: Serendipity. An advocate for increased awareness of mental health, gendered violence, and LGBTQIA+ equality, she writes in the hope that her books can help to foster change and spark dialogue. She grew up in Buffalo, New York, and now lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her wife and their ever-growing family of rescued dogs and cats.

Paula Martinac is the author of a book of short stories and seven novels. Her debut novel, Out of Time, won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction (Seal Press, 1990; e-book Bywater, 2012). Her novel-in-stories, The Ada Decades (Bywater, 2017), was short-listed for the 2017 Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction, the Foreword Indie Award for LGBTQ Fiction, and the Goldie Award for Historical Fiction; and her novel Clio Rising (Bywater, 2019) received the Gold Medal for Best Regional Fiction from the 2020 Independent Book Publishers Awards. She has also published three nonfiction books on LGBTQ themes. She is a lecturer in the creative writing program at UNC Charlotte. I am looking forward to co-hosting our first Charlotte Readers Book Club event.  Here’s the event link for you to share: Charlotte Readers Book Club  For me, co-hosting this event relates directly to the main reason I started my Storied Charlotte blog. Both are all about celebrating Charlotte’s community of readers and writers. 

Tags: Book ClubCharlotte

Of Rocks and Rifles and the Geology of War

March 14, 2022 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

When Scott Hippensteel agreed to give a presentation on his book Rocks and Rifles:  The Influence of Geology on Combat and Tactics during the American Civil War as part of UNC Charlotte’s Personally Speaking Series, he had no idea that the war in Ukraine would coincide with his talk.  Scott’s presentation will focus on the role that geology played during the Civil War, but the current situation in Ukraine adds another dimension to his presentation.  After all, with Russian tanks sinking in mud, it is clear that geology is also playing a role in the war in Ukraine. 

Scott’s presentation will take place on Tuesday, March 29 at 7 p.m. at The Dubois Center at UNC Charlotte Center City.  The event is open to the public at no charge, but attendees are asked to register to attend the event.  For more information about Scott’s presentation, please click on the following link: https://clas.charlotte.edu/rocks-and-rifles-influence-geology-combat-and-tactics-during-american-civil-war

Rocks and Rifles is about the Civil War, but Scott is not a history professor.  He is an associate professor in UNC Charlotte’s Department of Geography and Earth Sciences.  He earned his PhD in geology from the University of Delaware.  I wondered how a geologist took such an interest in the Civil War, so I contacted him and asked him how he came to write Rocks and Rifles.  Here is what he sent to me:

I grew up in central Pennsylvania, not too far from the most famous battleground from the Civil War, Gettysburg.  As a younger man, I spent countless hours walking the boulder-strewn battlefield, studying the tactics and strategies used by the soldiers and considering how the huge rocks influenced the fighting.  These experiences fostered a love of history—both American and natural—and eventually, after taking as many undergraduate classes in history and science as I could, I decided to pursue graduate degrees in geology.

When I joined UNC Charlotte in 2000, I was fortunate enough to join a research project that has been ongoing for the last twenty years and remains the most fascinating investigation I’ve ever been a (small) part of:  the geoarchaeology of the Civil War submarine H.L. Hunley.  On this project, I used my training as a sedimentologist and micropaleontologist to help determine how the submarine filled with clay and sand and why the bodies of the crew were so incredibly well preserved.  I had found a direct link between geology and Civil War history.

Jump ahead to 2017 when I compelled my poor wife and daughter to visit yet another Civil War battlefield while on a “family” vacation.  This time we ended up at Stones River, where the rock outcrops formed natural trenches that proved so ideal a defensive position for federal soldiers during the fierce fighting in the winter of 1862.  These outcrops were dubbed the “slaughter pen” by the soldiers because of the results of the intense and sustained fight, and they reminded me of another “slaughter pen”, located between Little Round Top and Devil’s Den at Gettysburg.  Here, as well, the geology had a great impact on the combat.  I soon discovered many other ways that rocks influenced the fighting:  soldiers piled cobbles and boulders for cover, soldiers threw rocks when ammunition ran low, soldiers even used rocks to explode the percussion caps on their otherwise defective and useless rifles.  It occurred to me that even though there were dozens of books on the terrain (and geology) of the Gettysburg battlefield and hundreds on the actual battle, there were no books relating the two subjects; I decided to write one.

Rocks and Rifles:  The Influence of Geology on Combat and Tactics during the American Civil War was the result.  Each chapter of the book starts with a discussion of the strategic situation prior to a particular campaign and then explores the geology of the battleground, followed by the history of the battle. The final portion of each chapter is the most important—an analysis of how the rocks influenced the strategy, tactics, and combat.  I targeted the book for people with an interest in geology or history or both.  I had so much fun creating this book that I decided to write two more.  The second of these will be published by the University of Georgia Press next year:  Sand, Science, and the Civil War:  Sedimentary Geology and Combat.  This book concentrates on the fighting along the shorelines and Mississippi River.

During my Personally Speaking presentation, I plan on discussing my most recently published (and fun!) book:  Myths of the Civil War: The Fact, Fiction, and Science behind the Civil War’s Most-Told Stories.  Each chapter of this book tackles one “myth” or trope from the Civil War that has been repeated over and over in our history books.  One chapter is called “The Myth of the Civil War Sniper,” in which I use physics to demonstrate that the history books are wrong – sharpshooters simply never killed individually selected officers from more than a half-mile away.  There were no fields during the Civil War where, after the fighting ceased, “bodies covered the ground so densely that a person could walk from one side of the field to the other without ever touching the ground.”  It never happened.  Bullets never fell with the intensity of hail.  Rifle muskets did not “revolutionize” the way battles were fought.  And so on.  This book has been met with outstanding reviews, especially from Civil War historians, so it delights me, as a natural scientist, to have contributed to a field outside my own.

Through his work as a scientist with an interest in military history, Scott adds to our understanding of how geology factors into the fighting of wars.  He also shows that the much-ballyhooed division between the sciences and the humanities is counterproductive.  There are lots of ways in which the science disciplines and the humanities speak to each other.  The interdisciplinary nature of Rifles and Rocks is what makes the book so insightful.  By writing books that combine science and history, Scott is making innovative and original contributions to Storied Charlotte’s library of scholarly works. 

Tags: Civil War

Little Women through History

March 06, 2022 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

Little Women at 150, a new collection of scholarly essays about Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel, has an official publication date of March 8, 2022.  It is fitting that the University Press of Mississippi is releasing this collection during Women’s History Month, for Little Women has had a tremendous impact on the history of women ever since the first part of the novel came out in October 1868.  For more information about Little Women at 150, please click on the following link:  https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/L/Little-Women-at-150

Daniel Shealy, the editor of Little Women at 150, is my friend and long-time colleague in the English Department at UNC Charlotte.  Over the years, he has edited numerous books related to Alcott, including The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott, The Journals of Louisa May Alcott, Alcott in Her Own Time, and Little Women: An Annotated Edition.  During his long career, he has become well known among the other leading Alcott scholars. In editing Little Women at 150, he has drawn on his many connections in the field, and the result is a collection of eight original essays by top Alcott scholars. As the reviewer for Publishers Weekly states, “the contributors do a great job of considering the classic novel in original, surprising lights.” 

The contributors to Little Women at 150 provide insights into why Little Women has had such a lasting impact on the history of American literature.  These scholars look at Alcott’s novel from different perspectives, but they all discuss the relationship between Alcott’s novel and the larger world.  A number of the contributors point out that Little Women reflects 19th-century values and attitudes.  However, as is discussed in several of the essays, Alcott’s novel also raises questions about societal values and attitudes, especially as they relate to gender roles.  In the words of Roberta Seelinger Trites, one of the contributors to the collection, Alcott “creates a philosophical space in which her female characters can articulate ideas about language, nature, and self—and without fear of censure.”

In thinking about Little Women at 150 as it relates to Women’s History Month, I am in agreement with the contributors that Alcott’s Little Women should be viewed as one of the canonical texts in the history of American literature and that Alcott should be included among the pantheon of major American authors from the 19th century.  However, the impact of Little Women on women’s history is not limited to the 19th century. I assigned Little Women as required reading in my graduate children’s literature seminar this semester, and it sparked a lively debate about the book’s portrayal of gender roles during our class discussion.  It’s clear to me that Little Women still speaks to contemporary readers.  In his introduction to Little Women at 150, Daniel writes that the collection “looks backward and forward in time, not only to the influence of the novel upon readers and writers but also to the future.” 

I commend Daniel for editing this thoughtful collection of essays and for helping us better appreciate Alcott’s place in history.  I am fortunate that one of the world’s leading Alcott scholars is just down the hall from my office, and Storied Charlotte is fortunate that Daniel has pursued his career as a scholar and teacher at UNC Charlotte. 

Charlotte Mecklenburg Library’s Community Read Program

March 01, 2022 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

In 2014, the Charlotte Mecklenburg Community launched its first Community Read program.  The original tagline for the program was “One Book, One Week, One Community.”  The featured book that year was Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.  During the span of a week, various people (including me) led discussions of the book at the different branches of the library.  The Community Read program has evolved over the years.  It is now a month-long program involving numerous community partners and featuring several books that all speak to a common theme.  For this year, the theme is gentrification and its impact on established neighborhoods. 

This year’s Community Read program kicks off on March 1, 2022.  One of the people who is coordinating this program is Meryle Leonard, the Assistant Director of Outreach at the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library.  I contacted Meryle and asked her for more information about this year’s Community Read program.  Here is what she sent to me:

The Community Read program has been a part of Charlotte Mecklenburg Library’s programming footprint since 2014. I am excited, grateful, and humbled that I’ve had the opportunity to not only be a part of this program but manage and implement the program for many years. This is such a rewarding experience because it has allowed me to meet wonderful people and work with many community agencies and organizations, building long-term relationships and partnerships. This outcome didn’t happen by chance, it developed as the program evolved.

The Community Read program has intentionally changed, grown, and evolved from a library-led program to a community-led program supported by library staff and resources. When the program began, the library selected and offered one book for the community to read and planned programs for one week to support the book.  Now with over 30 partners, the program has books and events throughout the month of March, for all ages and reading levels. This year, our signature title is Tomorrow’s Bread by Anna Jean Mayhew. Our companion titles are children’s books Windows by Julia Denos and The Blue House by Phoebe Wahl. We have two middle-grade books, Take Back the Block by Chrystal D. Giles and The Epic Fail of Arturo Zamora by Pablo Cartaya. For teens and those who enjoy the young adult genre, we included the book Pride by Ibi Aanu Zoboi. All the books have the common theme of gentrification and urban renewal. Readers, book clubs, and students can get together virtually or safely in person to discuss the additional themes found in all the books. Speaking of finding the books, most books are available for check out in several formats, but also available for free at all our locations, while supplies last. This is a far cry from our one book-one-week program.

The goal is to engage 10,000 people, 10% of our county in the program. With this ambitious goal, we have an interactive component,  Beanstack Reading Challenge.  Participants can log reading and activities. We invite everyone to register online for our virtual authors’ events featuring Anna Jean Mayhew, Chrystal D. Giles, and Ibi Zoboi.

Let’s get on the same page. Consider this an official invitation to join the March 2022 Community Read program. Information about the Community Read can be found on our website.

I have had the pleasure of reading Anna Jean Mayhew’s Tomorrow’s Bread, the signature title for this year’s Community Read program.  Tomorrow’s Bread is a historical novel set in Charlotte in 1961.  It shows how Charlotte’s urban renewal program affected the lives of the people whose homes and neighborhoods were destroyed to make room for new real estate projects.  Published in 2019, this novel provides a vivid portrait of daily life in the African American neighborhood of Brooklyn just before it was bulldozed.  In my opinion, Tomorrow’s Bread is a perfect choice for this year’s Community Read program, for its Charlotte setting resonates with Charlotte readers.  The book’s historical insights provide today’s readers with a better understanding of how the gentrification process has shaped the history of our city and the development of our neighborhoods. 

I urge everyone to participate in this year’s Community Read program.  By reading books in common and discussing them together, we can make Storied Charlotte a true community.     

Tags: reading challenge