Monthly Archives: February 2023

The Charlotte Mecklenburg Library is once again sponsoring its Community Read program.  The purpose of this month-long program is to encourage the members of the larger Charlotte community to read and discuss common texts that all deal with a central theme. For this year, the theme is friendship.  For more information about the Community Read program, please click on the following link: https://www.cmlibrary.org/community-read

This year’s Community Read program kicks off on March 1, 2023.  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:

Don’t miss the opportunity to participate in the biggest book club in Charlotte. Charlotte Mecklenburg Library’s Community Read runs throughout the month of March. The program focuses on creating community dialogue around the theme of friendship.

This year’s signature title is The People We Keep by Allison Larkin. In this story, the main character, April Sawicki, leaves her troubled past behind her determined to live life on her own terms. Making a life for herself, she encounters people and places she never dreamed of. Join April as she chronicles her journey in the beautiful music she creates and discovers home is with The People We Keep.

Read the book and meet the author, Allison Larkin. Allison Larkin will host an online presentation on Tuesday, March 21 at 6:30 p.m. Register for the event and you can win a chance to have Allison Larkin stream into your book club!

The Community Read is for everyone. There are titles for teens, preteens, and young children. These titles also focus on friendships. The Edge of Anything by Nora Shalaway Carpenter is the teen title. The story focuses on the unlikely friendship of two girls facing their inner demons. Uncover Mia Tang’s secrets in the preteen book Front Desk. Mia works in a hotel, hides immigrants, and has big dreams. Follow Mia and see if she finds the courage and kindness to help everyone as she follows her dreams.

The book for young children is The Big Umbrella.  Amy June Bates and her daughter got the idea to write The Big Umbrella after walking to school. Imagine it is raining, and you have a big umbrella. Everyone can fit under the umbrella! It doesn’t matter if you are tall, plaid, or hairy. You don’t have to worry, there will always be enough room for everyone!

There are many ways you can get involved in the Community Read program. Meet the authors. Nora Shalaway Carpenter will be at South County Regional Library on Tuesday, March 7, 2023, at 5:30 p.m. Kelly Yang will host an online presentation on Thursday, March 16, 2023, at 11:30 am. Take the Community Read Challenge. Log your reading and activity time and track your progress. Participate in a program. There are programs for all ages and reading abilities. You can participate in a library-led program or a program led by our community partners. Read the books, meet your neighbors, and come together as a community.

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.     

I first got to know Landis Wade in his role as the founder and host (now co-host) of the Charlotte Readers Podcast. In this role, he has interviewed hundreds of writers.  Landis, however, is also an author in his own right.  He has published several books, including Deadly Declarations: An Indie Retirement Mystery, which came out last year. Landis is himself a retired trial lawyer.  He never studied fiction writing during his years as a history major at Davidson College or while earning his J.D. degree at Wake Forest School of Law, but since founding his podcast in 2018, he has learned a lot about the art of writing by interviewing authors.  When writing Deadly Declarations, he drew heavily on the insights he gained through conducting these interviews.  For Landis, hosting the Charlotte Readers Podcast has functioned as his own private M.F.A. program in creative writing.

Landis has now decided to share with the general public some of the insights and pointers that he has learned through hosting Charlotte Readers Podcast.  He has just released The Writing Life, a collection of “inspirational and practical reflections” that he has compiled from some of the interviews that he has conducted with authors.  Intrigued, I contacted Landis and asked him for more information about this project.  Here is what he sent to me:

I did not launch Charlotte Readers Podcast to publish a series of books about writing, but a funny thing happened on the way to and from the studio. The writers who appeared on the podcast inspired me with their tales of how they do what they do and it helped my own writing journey so much that I wanted to give back by sharing what I’d learned. And what better way to do that than to let the authors speak for themselves?

In Book 1 of the series, authors share their honest reflections on The Writing Life. We find inspirational and practical reflections of hard-working, award-winning, and New York Times bestselling authors in more than 33 U.S. states and five countries.

What I found from the quotes in book 1 is that writers grab for their pens and fire up their computers for the love of writing. They have a common urge to create, to use letters, words, and sentences to tell stories, either about themselves, or others, or about characters they create in their writing chambers. They write for therapy or to understand themselves and the world around them. They write for the sake of writing. They write for publication. They write to be remembered. They write to be heard and understood. And as more than one author says, they write because they can’t not write.

Through a painstaking seven-month process of listening to and transcribing excerpts from 500+ audio and video interviews, I realized I had the makings of more than one book. My co-hosts Sarah Archer and Hannah Larrew jumped in and helped me organize the content into eight separate books, and they also wrote forewords for the books. I wrote reflections for each book about what I learned from the quotes in each book.

Authors quoted in book 1 include David Baldacci, Therese Anne Fowler, Steve Berry, Lisa Jewell, John Hart, Sophie Cousens, Ron Rash, C.J. Box, Craig Johnson, Wylie Cash, Kristy Harvey, Brad Taylor, Charlie Lovett, Judy Goldman, Chris Fabry, Amber Smith, Tracy Clark, John Gilstrap, Kimmery Martin, A.J. Hartley, Clyde Edgerton, Jill McCorkle, Jason Mott, Mark de Castrique, Cathy Pickens, Mark West, David Joy, and many more local, regional, and nationally recognized authors.

Eight print books will release monthly, beginning March 1^st, and ebooks 2 through 8 in the series will release monthly, beginning April 1^st. We decided to make the first ebook our gift to the writing universe. It can be downloaded for FREE at this universal link: HERE. 

Charlotte Readers Podcast began with the tagline: “where authors give voice to their written words.” With this series, we’ve flipped the tagline to: “where authors give text to their spoken words.”

Readers who are interested in learning more about Landis’s latest project are in luck. On March 1^st, from 6:00 to 7:00 pm on Zoom, there will be a community conversation celebrating the release of Book 1, where the founders of Charlotte Lit and the three podcast co-hosts engage in a wide-ranging discussion with participants about The Writing Life, prompted by some of the best and most useful quotes in the book. Anyone can sign up for FREE for this conversation HERE.

I congratulate Landis on the publication of The Writing Life, and I look forward to the release of the other volumes in this series.  The contributions that Landis has made to Storied Charlotte are many and varied, and they now include a unique and insightful series of books about writing.

Valentine’s Day is not just about candy, flowers, and jewelry.  It’s also about stories. For readers who enjoy relationship stories, I have two book recommendations that have Charlotte connections.  One is The Plus One by Sarah Archer, and the other is Love and Valentines at Caynham Castle, a collection of five Valentine’s Day-themed novellas.  Both books are perfect for Valentine’s Day.

I first got to know Sarah Archer in her role as a co-host of the Charlotte Readers Podcast.  I heard her talk about The Plus One on the podcast, and I was intrigued when she described the novel as a romance story involving a woman and a robot.  I contacted Sarah and asked her for more information about the book and how she came to write it.  Here is what she sent to me: 

I’ve always loved an off-kilter romance, so when I had the idea of a robotics engineer who builds the perfect boyfriend, I immediately began playing out scenarios in my head. At first, I envisioned the story as a female-led version of the 1980s comedy Weird Science, but I knew from the start that my engineer would spend more than one wacky day and night with her robot—I wanted to see where this pairing could go if given the time to truly develop as a relationship. And while my background up to that point was primarily in screenwriting, I had wanted to write a novel since childhood, and this seemed like a fun entry point, so I decided to give it a go.

This premise offered a playing field on which to explore issues around AI and robotics technology (the new ChatGPT bot is scarily similar to some of the mechanisms behind my robotic romantic interest, Ethan), but also allowed me really to explore my human characters: what they look for in relationships, how they define love. The protagonist, Kelly, balks at the traditional expectations for love and relationships that society—and especially her mother, who runs a bridal boutique—have placed upon her. When we meet her at the beginning of the novel, she would doubtless prefer to spend this Valentine’s time of year at home by herself in a Slanket, watching a favorite movie, “baking” a cake for one in the microwave. The heart of the book is really about Kelly finding not just who she wants to be with, but who she wants to be, and I hope we can all embrace that theme around Valentine’s Day.

I was fortunate to get traditionally published, and the process of writing and promoting this book has taught me so much about the fiction world, and created opportunities for me to meet many wonderful writers and readers who are now my critique partners, social media buddies, and friends. In particular, it’s been an excellent bridge into the local Charlotte writing community. When the book was released, I had only moved to the area a month before. But I made an effort to dive in and start connecting with organizations like the Charlotte Writers Club as soon as I got here, and when I gave a reading at Park Road Books right after the novel’s launch, I was so pleased to see the seats filled by some of my new literary friends. I knew already I had stepped into an engaged and supportive writerly scene.

Since publishing The Plus One, I’ve been working on other novels, as well as several screenwriting and poetry projects, and have more recently fallen in love with the short story form. While some of my newer works are more literary in bent, I continue to enjoy any writing that straddles some kind of boundary, whether it’s the intersection of rom-com and sci-fi in The Plus One, or the line between drama and comedy, or reality and the otherworldly. I’m excited to be part of an expansive writing community here in Charlotte that embraces writers of every stripe and genre.

For readers who want to know more about Sarah and her writing, please click on the following link:  https://saraharcherwrites.com/

Even though Love and Valentines at Caynham Castle is set in England, the collection has significant associations with Charlotte since three of the five contributors are current or past residents of Charlotte.  One of these writers is Nancy Northcott (who happens to be my wife). I asked her for more information about this collection, and here’s what she sent to me:

Love and Valentines at Caynham Castle is the fourth in a series of holiday-themed romance anthologies set around an ancient English castle that’s now a hotel. The authors in this collection of novellas include Charlotte’s Morgan Brice (pen name of Gail Z. Martin) and Nancy Northcott and former Charlotte resident Caren Crane. The anthology offers various types of romances. In addition to the stories referenced below, there’s a paranormal featuring Greek gods and an ancient pub and a romantic suspense tale centered on a racing stable and a set of cursed racing silks. 

The One Who Got Away (by Nancy Northcott) is a second-chance-at-love story. Hastings Whitney grew up driven not only to succeed but to be seen to succeed. His focus on success cost him two marriages and any number of relationships. Now he has a second chance with the woman he never forgot, jewelry designer Corinne Lanier. Has he changed enough to balance work with a relationship? Or will a business crisis bring old habits back to the fore? And is there a sinister side to his problem?

Fae-ted Mates (by Morgan Brice) is part of the Kings of the Mountain MM romance fantasy series featuring Dawson and Grady King.  Dawson and Grady King are honeymooning at Caynham Castle, hoping to take a break from monster hunting. They have one piece of family business to handle, involving a generations-long agreement with the Welsh Fae. However, things go wrong, and Dawson and Grady are in danger of being trapped in the Faerie realm forever.

Romance Sells Records (by Caren Crane) features a heroine who is not interested in relationships.  After watching her mother’s hope for a grand romance get dashed time after time, Hannah Evans grew into someone with no tolerance for romance. Callum Hughes’ parents had an enviable relationship, and he wanted the same for himself: if only he could he convince Hannah to trust what they could build together.

The relationship stories included in these two books vary in significant ways, which is fitting since they feature characters who are quite different from each other.   However, these tales all have Storied Charlotte connections, and they all are great stories to read on Valentine’s Day.