Monthly Archives: May 2022

The Return of Robin Hemley

May 30, 2022 by Mark West

In the lobby of UNC Charlotte’s English Department stands a handsome display case full of books written by members of the department. Most of the books on display are by current faculty, but the display case also includes a selection of books by former faculty members, including Robin Hemley’s first novel, The Last Studebaker, which came out in 1992. Robin served as a creative writing professor at UNC Charlotte from 1987 to 1994. In the years since he left Charlotte, Robin has taught at universities all over the world, including a six-year stint as the director of the Writing Program at Yale-NUS in Singapore. He is now the director of the George Polk School of Communications at Long Island University (LIU) as well as the co-director of LIU’s MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing. For more information about Robin’s career, please click on the following link: https://robinhemley.com/

I am pleased to report that Robin is returning to Charlotte this week to talk about his latest book. Robin will join Judy Goldman in an in-person event at Park Road Books (4139 Park Road) on Sunday, June 5, from 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm. During this event, Robin will discuss his novel Oblivion: An After Autobiography, and Judy will talk about her new memoir titled Child (which I wrote about in my Storied Charlotte blog a few weeks ago).

Oblivion is Robin’s first paranormal novel. It’s a ghost story of sorts, but at its core, it is a story about the interior life of a writer. In discussing the book, Junot Diaz (a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction) writes, “A mesmerizing meditation on immortality, both the literary and fleshly kinds, and its ultimate unattainability… like language, like summer, like love, Oblivion is irresistible.” I contacted Robin and asked him for more information about Oblivion, and here is what he sent to me:

Where do writers go when they die? The forgotten ones, at least, go to The Cafe of Minor Authors where they drink endless cups of cappuccino, self-obsess, and nurse their shattered dreams. Some authors, it’s rumored, can escape Oblivion if they try hard enough to write something the universe can’t ignore, even after death. This is the story of one ambitious writer stuck in oblivion who not only risks upturning his own fate but also the fate of his literary hero, and that of his great grandmother, Hanna, an aspiring actor in the Yiddish theater in the Prague of 1911. This book is for anyone who has ever wanted to be an author, anyone who knows an author, anyone who is an author, recognized or not, and anyone who loves books enough to want to spend their afterlife reading forgotten classics in the great library of Oblivion.

Oblivion is a story that sprang from a combination of my family history, the ups and downs of being a writer, and my love for the writer Franz Kafka, who had his own struggles with family and writing. I consider it perhaps my best book, and my writer friends seem to agree. I also was able to give full play to my sense of humor as well as my more philosophical side about “immortality” and the common drive to make our marks.

I have remained in touch with Robin since he left Charlotte, and I know that he has fond memories of his Charlotte years. I asked him for his thoughts about returning to Charlotte for the event at Park Road Books, and he sent me the following reflection:

Charlotte is near and dear to my heart. I taught at UNC Charlotte for seven years from the late 1980s to the mid-90s, my first full-time academic job. One thing I have long loved about Charlotte and North Carolina as a whole is that it’s one of the few places in the country where writers are really respected. Literature is such an integral part of Charlotte, and that’s something that can’t be said universally. I believe I was an integral part of the literary scene there and made many friends in the literary community in Charlotte and across North Carolina. Some of my friends still reside in Charlotte and I’m excited to see them – Mark West and Judy Goldman (who is joining me for our joint book event) among the people I’m so looking forward to see again. But there are many others, too many to mention, here, whom I hope will show up. I might not recognize them at first and vice-versa. But it would be great to reconnect.

I plan to attend Robin and Judy’s joint book event on June 5, and I am looking forward to reconnecting with Robin and hearing about his latest book. Robin truly is a world traveler, but he will always have a place in Storied Charlotte, and he will always be my friend wherever he goes.

Book Buyers Begins Anew

May 23, 2022 by Mark West

When people enter my book-lined office for the first time, they often comment on how many old children’s books I have, and it’s true. I have hundreds and hundreds of old children’s books, the oldest of which dates back to 1830. I am occasionally asked, “Where did you find all of these books?” I answer by explaining that most of them came from used bookstores. I have been haunting used bookstores since I was in my 20s, and that was a long time ago.

I found a number of the books in my collection at Book Buyers, one of Charlotte’s best-known used bookstores. For years, Book Buyers was a fixture in the Plaza Midwood neighborhood. I often took the drive to Plaza Midwood, where I roamed the shelves at Book Buyers and said hello to Deena, the store cat. Lee Rathers and her father, Richard Rathers, did not want to leave their original location in the Midwood Corners shopping center, but when their rent doubled, they were forced to find a new location. In December 2021, they held a moving sale and began the laborious process of relocating their store to the Eastway Crossing shopping center.

Last week I received an email from Lee Rathers informing me of “Book Buyers Grand Reopening.” She mentioned that they had a “soft opening” earlier in the spring, but she said that they were now ready to celebrate their big move with a big event. I quickly responded to her email and asked her for more information about their move and their grand reopening. Here is what she sent to me:

Book Buyers has relocated from its original location in Plaza Midwood to Eastway Crossing, a shopping center on the corner of Eastway Drive and Central Avenue. The move came about because we were priced out of our Plaza Midwood location along with numerous other businesses. Book Buyers originally opened in 1999 and is one of Charlotte’s longest-running independent used bookstores. Our new location is an exciting new phase for our business in a quickly growing area of Charlotte’s East Side.

Our new Eastway Crossing space is 4,200 sq-ft and holds our complete inventory of approximately 30,000 titles. Customers will recognize the layout of the space and the same, original pine bookcases built by owner Richard Rathers. Our resident bookstore cat, Deena, has recently moved back in and is making herself at home and greeting customers.

Book Buyers is grateful to be among many other independently owned businesses in Eastway Crossing, many of whom are Plaza Midwood transplants. Bart’s Mart, immediately next door to us, is a beer and wine seller with a great selection and fun atmosphere. On the other side of our space, Gear Goat Xchg sells new and used outdoor equipment and brings a great energy to the area. Armada Skate Shop, Tommy’s Pub, VisArt Video, Eastside Local Eatery, The Dog Salon, Open Door Studios, and other neighbors make Eastway Crossing a great destination and hub for local businesses.

Here’s some information about our Grand Reopening:

When: June 6th to June 12th (all week)

What: Grand Reopening featuring:

25% off all used books
Children’s storytime
Writing workshop led by Charlotte Center for Literary Arts (Charlotte Lit)
2 nights of poetry and fiction reading by local writers followed by an open mic
Sunday Brunch

Where: 3040 Eastway Drive, Suite B

Who: All customers, new and old, are welcome

Why: We want to celebrate our new location and the start of our next 20 years in business as East Charlotte’s used bookstore. We’re grateful for our loyal customers and are excited to offer events and activities to bring our community together. This reopening marks the beginning of future readings and other Book Buyers offerings to the public.

I wish Lee and Richard (and Deena) all the best as they celebrate the grand reopening of Book Buyers. I look forward to visiting their new location in my never-ending quest to acquire new additions to my collection of old children’s books. Needless to say, I am pleased that Book Buyers is still in business right here in Storied Charlotte.

Tags: grand reopening independent used bookstore used books

Perusing President Theodore Roosevelt’s Personal Library

May 13, 2022 by Mark West

I have a sense that I know President Theodore Roosevelt even though he died a little more than a century ago. The reason I feel so connected to Roosevelt is that I have carefully perused his personal library while I was researching and writing Theodore Roosevelt and His Library at Sagamore Hill, which Rowman & Littlefield published a few weeks ago.

Throughout his adult life, Roosevelt read between 300 and 500 books each year. Wherever he went, he brought books with him. Whether he was rounding up cattle on a ranch in North Dakota, giving campaign speeches from the back of a train, governing the nation from the White House, or exploring an uncharted tributary of the Amazon River, he always made time to read books. Most of these books came to rest in Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt’s home located near Oyster Bay in Long Island, New York. In most cases, these books are on the same bookshelves where Roosevelt put them so many years ago.

The books in Roosevelt’s personal library reflect his love of classic works of literature, his interest in history, and his fascination with the natural sciences. His reading shaped his values, his point of view, and his thinking on the many topics that interested him. For Roosevelt, reading was not a passive pastime. He regularly applied what he learned from his reading to his daily life and to his work in politics. When he finished reading a book, he often contacted the author to discuss the implications of the author’s main points. In a sense, Roosevelt’s books provide a window into the workings of his mind.

The time I spent perusing Roosevelt’s personal library was one of the highlights of my career. I felt as if I were in his presence, as if I had a glimpse of the inner person behind his public persona as the Rough Rider.

My fascination with Roosevelt’s reading relates to my larger preoccupation with personal libraries. I always take an interest in the books that people read. When I am visiting friends and family members, I am drawn to their bookcases like some insects are drawn to lamps. When I am watching a person being interviewed on television and that person is seated in front of a bookshelf, I often ignore what the person is saying and try to read the titles of the books on the bookshelf instead.

Perhaps because I am a book collector myself, I feel a sense of kinship with other book collectors. In many ways, my Storied Charlotte blog is an extension of my book collection. I actually own many of the books that I write about in my Storied Charlotte blog posts, and many of them are shelved together—I am sure that Roosevelt would approve.

Judy Goldman and Her Memoirs

May 09, 2022 by Mark West

Charlotte author Judy Goldman has published two books of poetry and two novels, but she is best known for her memoirs. Her first memoir, Losing My Sister, came out in 2012, and her second memoir, Together: A Memoir of a Marriage and a Medical Mishap, came out in 2019. These two earlier memoirs are now joined by Child: A Memoir, which the University of South Carolina Press released on May 5, 2022. For more information about Judy and her books, please click on the following link: http://judygoldman.com/

In all three of her memoirs, Judy delves into the complexities of her relationships with important people in her life, such as her sister and her husband. In Child, Judy writes about her relationship with Mattie Culp, the Black woman who cared for Judy as a white Jewish girl growing up in Rock Hill, South Carolina, during the 1940s and ‘50s.

When writing her memoirs, Judy does not shy away from difficult or controversial topics. One of the reasons her memoirs are so memorable is that they are not simple retellings of the surface details of her life. In the case of Child, Judy writes about how the racism of the Jim Crow South affected her relationship with Mattie. Judy brings up this topic in the very beginning of her book. In her prologue, she writes, “Like thousands of white southerners in my generation, I was raised by a Black woman who had to leave her own child behind to work for a white family. … Our love was unwavering. But it was, by definition, uneven.”

Child, as the title suggests, focuses on Judy’s childhood and the role that Mattie Culp played in it during this period in Judy’s life. However, Judy does not limit the book to her own childhood. She also writes about Mattie’s life. In preparation for writing this memoir, Judy researched Mattie’s childhood, her education at a Rosenwald School built for Black children, Mattie’s relationship with Judy’s mother, and Mattie’s life after Judy grew up. In Child, Judy covers many of the details of Mattie’s life, but she avoids speaking for Mattie. As Judy told Dannie Romine Powell in a recent interview published in The Charlotte Observer, “In my memoir, I tried to be careful never to presume to know what Mattie might be thinking and only convey what she actually said to me. Any reflection I included was my own.”

Judy’s three memoirs are all deeply personal stories. While they are certainly autobiographical, I don’t think of them as autobiographies per se. I see them more as candid meditations about some of the relationships that have shaped Judy’s life. Within the context of her life, these relationships transcend the particularities of dates. Thus, even though Judy is now eighty years old, she infuses Child with a sense of immediacy. Her descriptions of the small moments that she and Mattie shared in the late 1940s are written as if they happened yesterday. In a sense, Judy’s readers feel as if they are participants in these moments, too. Judy invites the readers of Child and her other memoirs to form their own relationships with the people who figure in her narratives. Judy has a gift for writing memoirs that are unique to her life, but at the same time, speak to readers whose lives are far different from her own. In my opinion, with the publication of Child, Judy has established herself as Storied Charlotte’s leading writer of memoirs.

Tags: memoirs

Larry Mellichamp’s Legacy of Growing Plants and Telling Their Stories

May 02, 2022 by Mark West

A few weeks ago, I went shopping for plants at the spring plant sale sponsored by UNC Charlotte’s Botanical Gardens. I had the good fortune of running into Dr. Jeff Gillman, the Director of the gardens, and he helped me find plants that would grow in my garden’s shady section.

As is usually the case when I see Jeff, we ended up talking about our friend Dr. Larry Mellichamp, the previous Director of UNC Charlotte’s Botanical Gardens. Larry retired in 2014, but Larry and Jeff often visit each other and collaborate on garden projects. Our conversation turned to Larry’s delightful and insightful books, and we agreed that Larry has a special talent for telling stories about plants. I asked Jeff if he would write about Larry’s books for my Storied Charlotte blog, and he readily agreed. Here is what he sent to me:

Academics, especially those in the sciences, tend to write for other academics. Their writing is usually dry, full of scientific jargon, and just not very pleasant to read on a beautiful Saturday morning. This is a real shame because, let’s face it, academics tend to know more about the subject which they study than almost anyone else. Every once in a while, however, one of these dry as bones scientific authors will decide that regular people are actually worthy of their time and attention and they will create something amazing. Such is the case with Dr. Larry Mellichamp, Professor and Director Emeritus of the UNC Charlotte Botanical Gardens.

As the Director of the UNC Charlotte Botanical Gardens for over thirty-nine years, Larry has hands-on experience and knowledge of an incredible array of plants. At various times in his career, he could claim elite expertise in orchids, carnivorous plants, ferns, and others, but he is perhaps best known for his work with native plants.

Over the years Larry wrote six books, all of which targeted the average person on the street and helped to make plants more interesting and accessible. His book Bizarre Botanicals, written with Paula Gross, is a great example of Larry collecting information on a plethora of fascinating plants and, instead of keeping it to himself, letting people know about all of the cool specimens that are out there. The book even includes information about the difficulty of growing these odd and intriguing plants, letting us know whether a beginner should give them a shot or if it’s only for the advanced gardener.

Larry’s best-known book is, without a doubt, Native Plants of the Southeast. It’s an incredible journey through the plethora of plants native to the Southeast with wonderful notes and specifications. Perhaps most interesting to the lay reader is the star system that it utilizes, rating various native plants according to how well they fit into a home landscape. It’s a wonderful tool that gets the reader thinking about how well a native landscape might fit into and around their home. After writing Native Plants of the Southeast, Larry followed up with the Native Plant Primer (written with Paula Gross), an easy-to-use book for the beginner in the world of native plants. Along with his previous books including The Winter Garden, Practical Botany (with P. B. Kaufman, J. Glimn-Lacy, & D. LaCroix), and Wildflowers of the Western Great Lakes Region (with James Wells and Fred Case) Larry has done a great service for both the casual and advanced Gardeners of the Southeast with his writing.

On April 23, Larry received the Flora Caroliniana award from the North Carolina Botanical Gardens for his work in the field of botany and especially for introducing people, through his writing, to the fascinating world of plants. It is a fitting award for a uniquely talented educator and writer.

Larry’s interest in sharing his passion for plants is not limited to the adult readers of his books. Some years ago, I ran a week-long Harry Potter summer camp at UNC Charlotte, and I devoted a day to herbology. I contacted Larry and asked him if he would talk to my campers about unusual plants. Larry is a world-famous expert on the Venus flytrap and other carnivorous plants, and I knew that the campers would be interested in these odd plants. Larry not only agreed to talk with the campers, but he threw himself into the spirit of the Harry Potter camp, playing the role of our camp’s very own Professor of Herbology. We met at the university’s McMillan Greenhouse where Larry introduced the campers to many bizarre plants. Then Larry gave the kids a tour of the greenhouse, paying particular attention to the carnivorous plants that grow there. Larry’s zeal for these plants and his willingness to engage with the kids in a playful way won over the campers. That afternoon, they all enthusiastically drew pictures and wrote stories based on the plants they had observed in the greenhouse.

Many gardeners have green thumbs, but Larry has more than special thumbs. He has the magical power to spark a curiosity about plants in the minds of all who come into contact with him. Jeff and I agree that Storied Charlotte and indeed the wider world is a greener place because of Dr. Larry Mellichamp.

Tags: botanical gardens herbology

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