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Monthly Archives: April 2022

Indie Bookstore Day and the Creation of the Greater Charlotte Book Crawl

April 25, 2022 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

One of my favorite moments in the film The Miracle on 34th Street is when the employees at Macy’s department store in New York City begin sending shoppers to Gimbels department store when Macy’s doesn’t have in stock what their customers are trying to find.  I was reminded of this special moment when I heard that eleven Charlotte-area independent bookstores are working together during the month of April on a project they call the Greater Charlotte Book Crawl.  Their collaborative book crawl will culminate on April 30, 2022, which is Indie Bookstore Day.  These participating bookstores are encouraging area readers to visit each other’s businesses and get to know what makes each bookstore unique.  For more information about the book crawl, please click on the following link:  https://greatercharlottebookcrawl.com/

As part of the Greater Charlotte Book Crawl, the participating bookstores are collecting donations for Promising Pages, a Charlotte nonprofit organization that provides area children with their own books.  For more information about Promising Pages, please click on the following link:  https://promising-pages.org/

One of the people involved with organizing the Greater Charlotte Book Crawl is Halli Gomez, the Events Coordinator at Park Road Books.  I recently contacted Halli and asked her about the creation of the book crawl.  Here is what she sent to me:

Owners and events coordinators at the eleven independent bookstores in the greater Charlotte area had an idea to make Independent Bookstore Day (the last Saturday in April) an event larger than that one day. We first began discussing ideas during Zoom calls last summer, 2021, and I believe the idea for a book crawl, or a similar event, came quickly. although we originally planned for it to be a three-day event. We did like the idea of an event that would incorporate all stores. We tossed out ideas like pins and stamps and other items as rewards for visiting, but because of time, most stores settled on providing stamps.

We went through the behind-the-scenes tasks such as creating a name, website, and the passport (thank you Jennifer from Editions for the wonderful creation!) and made fun “passing the book” videos for the Instagram channel.

As owners and employees of these bookstores, we love what smaller local shops offer and how they are a part of the community. Readers who frequent independent bookstores are not only in love with books and reading, but also the personal attention and knowledge they receive when visiting. We love to share that with all readers and visitors. Supporting independent bookstores allows the reader and bookseller to form a relationship based on the shared love of books and knowledge. In addition, shopping locally helps to create a thriving community for residents and visitors.

We’ve been thrilled to see so many people visiting the stores, telling their friends and family, and posting their crawl on social media!

I urge everyone to participate in this year’s Greater Charlotte Book Crawl by visiting the participating bookstores. Here is the full list of these stores:

The Book Rack – Charlotte

Editions Coffee and Bookstore – Kannapolis

Goldberry Books – Concord

I’ve Read It In Books – Charlotte

Main Street Books – Davidson

Park Road Books – Charlotte

Second Look Books – Harrisburg

Shelves Bookstore – Charlotte

That’s Novel Books – Charlotte

The Urban Reader – Charlotte

Walls of Books – Cornelius

The Charlotte area is fortunate to have so many indie bookstores.  Each one of them helps make Storied Charlotte a special place for readers and writers. 

Tags: book crawlIndie book stores Charlotte

How A.J. Hartley’s Burning Shakespeare Came to Be

April 14, 2022 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

I have followed Andrew Hartley’s career since he joined the faculty at UNC Charlotte in 2005, so I know for a fact that he really is only one person.  Still, I cannot help but think of him as two people.  On the one hand, there is Dr. Andrew James Hartley, the Russell Robinson Distinguished Professor of Shakespeare and author of such scholarly works as Shakespeare and Political Theatre in Practice and The Shakespearean Dramaturg:  A Theoretical and Practical Guide for the Scholar in the Theatre.  On the other hand, there is A.J. Hartley, the New York Times bestselling author of numerous fantasy and thriller novels, such as The Woman in Our House, Steeplejack, On the Fifth Day, and The Mask of Atreus.  Often these two sides of Andrew go their separate ways, but they have converged in his newest novel, Burning Shakespeare.

Burning Shakespeare is a time-travel novel in which an American businessman and Shakespeare hater travels back in time to Renaissance London on a mission to eradicate Shakespeare from history.  He is countered by three recently deceased people from our time who are given a chance to come back to life if they go back in time and stop the businessman from carrying out his mission. 

I recently contacted Andrew and asked him how he came to write Burning Shakespeare.  Here is what he sent to me:

I generally write pretty quickly, producing a first draft in a few months. In periods of frantic energy, I’ve written as many as three books in a year. Not so with Burning Shakespeare.

I began this book in the mid-1990s and put it through a series of radical rewrites over the next quarter century. Every time I came back to it, I’d find that my enthusiasm for the premise and the wryly playful narrative voice stalled mid-way through as the story got bogged down in logistics, the rules of the world I had created and, most insidiously, an impulse to Educate. This is an occupational hazard, of course, and is not of itself a bad thing, but in this case it was killing the story deader than Shakespeare himself.

I’ve written fiction involving Shakespeare—the focus of my life as an academic—before, once in a thriller about a lost play (Love’s Labour’s Won) called What Time Devours, and in two adaptations I wrote with British mystery author David Hewson for audio (Macbeth, a Novel, and Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, a Novel). In each case I had to fight the impulse to slide into lecture mode, but it had been easier to stay on track because in the first case the Shakespeare component was a comparatively minor one (the story involved a complex backstory involving champagne production and the billeting of troops during the first world war, if you can believe that), while the adaptations were kept on track by my (nonacademic) co-author in ways ensuring the story stayed uppermost.

But Burning Shakespeare was a novel about Shakespeare, what he means, what he’s worth, how those things came to be and what outmoded or dangerous baggage have been dragged along with him. He could not be sidelined. The plays took center stage in the novel and it was difficult not to collapse into the role of fan or instructor, writing with one eye on my scholarly colleagues in the dim hope of impressing, as if I was writing yet another academic article.

The story, predictably, suffered, and I realized that I had written not so much a novel as a kind of extravagant footnote. So, I tore it up and started again. And again. And again. I tried rethinking the story as a young adult novel but it quickly started shadow boxing with my sense (real or imagined) of how my teenaged characters were encountering Shakespeare in high school, which made things worse. So, I embraced my own position and centered the story on an aging Shakespeare professor, though without significantly improved results. I tried a narrative involving story elements in the lives of the characters which clearly paralleled plot points from the plays, but this felt clunky and unoriginal. Each time I would labor for a few months, loose interest and put it aside.

In 2019 I came back to it, rereading the latest draft and finding the now familiar emotional journey: initial amused excitement gradually paling as the story failed to live up to its premise. Worse, I realized that the story had become boring. But there was a silver lining to the cloud. This time I could see that the real problem was that I had lived with so much of the story for so long that I had come to view as essential what was merely familiar. Things which had felt fundamental to the narrative, things which had survived every rewrite and editorial tinkering, were just things I had grown comfortable with. They weren’t that good, but they also weren’t the core of the project which I had got used to. That produced the next realization: the story could be saved, but only by breaking it into pieces, discarding much of what I had done, and starting over. I needed new protagonists, I needed new second act elements, and I needed to take more seriously the idea that the present might be better off without Shakespeare in it.

This last point grew out of another nagging realization: the book had grown steadily more and more out of touch with Shakespeare as an academic subject. While my career as a professor had evolved over the last twenty-five years, keeping pace with the shifts and trends of scholarship whose function is to find the concerns of the present in the literature of the past, the book hadn’t. It felt fusty, old fashioned, holding on to ideas about Shakespeare which I might have been taught in the eighties and were now moldering truisms long since picked apart by more recent criticism.

So, one last time, I started over. I took a bulldozer to the plot and a wrecking ball to the dramatic personae, and I made something new, something I found fun and engaging, argumentatively provocative, and more clearly of the present. Of my present. Is it better? I think so. Whether other people will, remains to be seen, but I’m happy with it which, at this point in my life, I call a win.

UNC Charlotte’s Atkins Library new Popular Reading Series will feature A.J. Hartley.  He will discuss Burning Shakespeare, his previous books, and his writing process.

This hybrid author talk and Q&A will be held on Thursday, April 21st, 4-5:30, with a book signing. The event will be hybrid (Halton Reading Room & Zoom). 

Registration

It might sound odd to say, but I am pleased that Dr. Hartley and A.J. Hartley have joined forces in the writing of Burning Shakespeare.  Storied Charlotte is the beneficiary of this fortunate convergence. 

Celebrating Children’s Poetry with The Peeve and the Grudge

April 11, 2022 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

April is National Poetry Month, so I am very pleased that my first picture book, The Peeve and the Grudge and Other Preposterous Poems, made its debut this month. The timing could not be better.  In writing this collection of poems for children, I set out to celebrate the ways in which children respond to words and idiomatic phrases that they do not fully understand.  I love how children play with the meanings of such words and phrases, and I use this type of wordplay as the basis for the poems in the book.  I wrote these poems from a child’s point of view, and I tried to appeal to a child’s sense of humor.  The illustrations by Ana Zurita perfectly capture the humorous nature of the poems.  My hope is that this book will not only amuse children but will also encourage them to take an interest in poetry.

Most of these poems relate to actual conversations I have had with children over the years.  For example, the poem titled “The Peeve and the Grudge” can be traced back to a conversation I had with a four-year-old girl back when I worked as a preschool teacher.  One day this girl asked me what a peeve was.  She told me that her mother had said something about having a “new pet peeve,” and the girl wondered if a peeve was something like a goldfish. I asked her why she thought a peeve was a fish.  She informed me that her mother had just purchased a new fish for their aquarium, so she figured that this fish must be her mother’s new pet peeve.  She seemed disappointed when I told her that a peeve wasn’t a fish, and she said that she was going to name the fish Peeve anyway. This conversation stuck with me, and years later it served as the inspiration for my poem.

In some cases, the poems are based on comments that I overheard children say while I was out doing errands.  A year or so ago, I went shopping for a new lawnmower.  As I was looking at lawnmowers, I overheard a conversation between a father and his young son.  The father was telling the store employee that he needed a new mower since his old mower was out of whack.  At this point, the boy tugged at his father’s sleeve and suggested that they buy some whack. The father didn’t understand what the boy meant, so the boy explained that since their mower was out of whack, they should just get some more whack for it.  This overheard conversation provided the inspiration for my “Gizmos Gone Bad” poem.

I think that children’s poetry works best when read aloud, and I hope that parents and teachers consider reading these poems aloud to the children in their lives.  I have long enjoyed reading poetry aloud, so I decided to record a reading/performance of “The Peeve and the Grudge” on my Storied Charlotte YouTube site.  To see this reading, please click on the following link:  https://youtu.be/jvSZF5mUwPw

As we celebrate National Poetry Month here in Storied Charlotte, I urge everyone to take a poetry break and read a poem or two, and if you regularly interact with children, I urge you to include poetry when you read aloud to them. 

Tags: children's poetry

Landis Wade’s Deadly Declarations

April 04, 2022 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

Landis Wade, the founder and host of the Charlotte Readers Podcast, is also the author of a new book titled Deadly Declarations: An Indie Retirement Mystery.  The official launch date for the book is April 5, 2022, but I had the privilege and pleasure of being able to read an advance review copy. 

Deadly Declarations is set in a fictional retirement community located in Charlotte.  Three residents of the “Independence Retirement Community” join forces to solve a mystery related to the famous and controversial Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence.  In this fast-paced mystery novel, Landis completely demolishes the stereotypes associated with retirement communities.  The protagonists in this novel are anything but retiring.  They are feisty, independent, and fully engaged in the world around them.  They take on a powerful law firm, a corrupt politician, and a secret society, and they prove that they are more than equal to the challenge.  For readers of Deadly Declarations, the phrase “respect your elders” takes on a whole new meaning.

I recently contacted Landis and asked how he came to be so interested in the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence and why he decided to incorporate it in his mystery novel.  Here is what he sent to me:

For many Charlotte residents, the story of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence is a tale of unknown Charlotte history hiding in plain sight. Although I grew up in Charlotte, I don’t recall the Meck Dec story being taught in public schools, and if someone told me when I was a boy that Charlotte was first to declare independence from Great Britain, it didn’t stick. As I got older, it never occurred to me to ask why the date May 20, 1775 appears on the North Carolina state flag or why some North Carolina license plates use the phrase: “First in Freedom.”

As a result of Charlotte Readers Podcast, the Meck Dec story came to life when I interviewed local author Scott Syfert about his book The First American Declaration of Independence? The Disputed History of the Mecklenburg Declaration of May 20, 1775. I learned that the Meck Dec story is full of drama and fraught with controversy. There are faithful believers and ardent non-believers who date back to the time of the founding fathers. John Adams was a true believer in what he called “one of the greatest curiosities and one of the deepest mysteries that ever occurred to me,” and Thomas Jefferson was insistent the Meck Dec was “spurious,” saying he “must remain an unbeliever in the apocryphal gospel.” Adams suggested that Jefferson lifted phrases from the Meck Dec for his July 4, 1776 Declaration of Independence, setting the stage for North Carolinians and Virginians to debate the veracity of the Meck Dec story to this day.  

I became intrigued with the idea of solving the Meck Dec mystery through fiction, and it occurred to me that a plotline where the characters put the Meck Dec on trial in a Charlotte courtroom might be a fun and interesting way to get there. One of my goals was to write a contemporary mystery that got people talking about the Meck Dec, so I was thrilled when BookLife Review said of the novel: “it’s hard to tell where history ends and fiction begins.”

In the process of reading Deadly Declarations, I learned a lot about the history of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, but Landis incorporates this historical information so smoothly in his story that it never disrupts the entertaining plot.  For readers who are familiar with the Charlotte area, another pleasure associated with reading this novel is recognizing the local landmarks that Landis includes in his novel.  Among the Charlotte places that he mentions are Park Road Books, Green’s Lunch, and the Mecklenburg County Courthouse.

For readers who want to know more about Landis and his new novel, please click on the following link:  https://landiswade.com/  For readers who would like to meet Landis and hear him talk about his new novel, he and Scott Syfert will talk about Deadly Declarations and the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence at Park Road Books on Thursday, April 7, 2022, at 7:00 p.m.  Copies of his book will be available for purchase at this in-store event.

When Landis retired from his career as a trial lawyer in 2018, he redefined his life. He launched his Charlotte Readers Podcast, took numerous classes and workshops on writing fiction, wrote a series of three holiday-themed novellas, and set his sights on becoming a full-fledged mystery writer.  With the publication of Deadly Declarations, Landis has more than achieved his goal.  I hereby declare that there is a new mystery writer in Storied Charlotte, and his name is Landis Wade. 

Tags: mystery novel
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