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Monthly Archives: December 2023

Bridging Religious Differences through Story Sharing

December 21, 2023 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

The word holiday comes from the Old English word hāligdæg, which means holy day.  Given the origins of the word, it is not especially surprising that religious tensions often surface during the holiday season. After all, most religions have holy days, and many of these holy days fall around the December solstice.  During this year’s holiday season, however, we are experiencing a troubling uptick in religious tensions in part because of global events and in part because of an overall increase in divisive discourse in our society.  Against this backdrop, I am reminded of how religious differences influenced my family’s celebrations of the holiday season during my childhood days. In the case of my family, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol served as a bridge that enabled our family to come together for the holidays.

My mother came from a long line of Swedish Lutherans who always celebrated Christmas.  When my mother was just a little girl, she helped her mother prepare for the family Christmas activities.  Her mother died when Mom was still a child, but Mom had already accumulated a treasure trove of Christmas memories, many of them involving her mother.   My father came from an equally long line of Polish Jews who never celebrated Christmas.  For the most part, the differences in my parents’ religious backgrounds were manageable largely because both of them had turned away from organized religion during their teenage years, but these differences occasionally flared up. 

Not long after my parents moved into their first apartment in the early 1950s, the differences in their religious backgrounds surfaced when Christmas season arrived.  My mother assumed that they would put up a Christmas tree, but my father felt reluctant to buy one.  He had always associated Christmas trees with Christians, and he wasn’t a Christian.  My mother no longer thought of herself as a Lutheran, but she still loved Christmas and she very much wanted a Christmas tree.

Just before Christmas, my father had a change of heart.  He secretly bought a tree and some inexpensive decorations and began setting it up while my mother was away from their Greenwich Village apartment.  That same afternoon, my mother purchased another tree and talked a neighbor into helping her carry it to their apartment.  She walked in and was startled to see my father decorating a Christmas tree.  That marked the beginning of my parents’ efforts to create their own holiday traditions.

For my mother, Christmas presented an opportunity to celebrate her Swedish heritage. My brother, sister, and I wholeheartedly joined in the Swedish merriment.  We baked Swedish Christmas cookies, listened to Swedish Christmas music, and put Swedish decorations on our two Christmas trees, one of which was about fourteen feet high.  In fact, we called the smaller one our Swedish tree, and that tree always featured the handmade, heart-shaped paper baskets that my mother had kept from her childhood.  We ate Swedish pancakes, and on Christmas Eve we ate a Swedish fish dish called lutfisk.  Actually, my brother and I usually ate steak since we did not care for the lutfisk, but my mother prepared lutfisk anyway.

My father half heartedly went along with our Swedish Christmas doings, but he must have felt a bit like the odd man out.  Looking back on my childhood, I now understand that my father’s Jewish background made it difficult for him to relate to my mother’s exuberant Christmas spirit. Eventually, however, he found a way to make his own contribution to our family’s holiday traditions. 

Throughout my childhood, my father read aloud to my brother, sister and me nearly every night after we finished our homework.  We had no television, so listening to Dad read aloud was our main form of evening entertainment.  One of my father’s favorite authors was Charles Dickens, and he read to us a number of Dickens’s novels.  One Christmas Eve, he took Dickens’s A Christmas Carol off the shelf and read the entire story to us.  Usually, Mom didn’t listen to Dad read, but that night she joined us in the living room.

The reading of A Christmas Carol became an annual ritual.  I still cherish the memory of our entire family sitting in the living room gazing at our giant Christmas tree and listening to Dad once again relate the story of Scrooge’s reformation.

A Christmas Carol will always have a special place in my heart, for I know that it was the shared love of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol that helped my family bridge the differences between my parents’ religious backgrounds.  Such is the power of stories. I wish everyone in Storied Charlotte a holiday season full of shared stories

Tags: holiday stories

Charlotte Lit Press Plans to Publish Poetry Collection by AE Hines

December 18, 2023 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

I have been following with interest the recent rise of Charlotte Lit Press, which is the new publishing operation associated with Charlotte Lit.  Kathie Collins and Paul Reali, the co-founders of Charlotte Lit, are also the people behind the creation of Charlotte Lit Press.  Kathie is the Editor-in-Chief, and Paul is the Managing Editor.  Kathie and Paul contacted me this past week and let me know that they are about to publish a new poetry collection by AE Hines.  Intrigued, I asked them for more information about this forthcoming release.  Here is what they sent to me:

We’re very excited to tell you about the latest news from Charlotte Lit Press – our publishing imprint. Charlotte poet AE Hines, author of the acclaimed debut Any Dumb Animal, will release his second collection, Adam in the Garden, with Charlotte Lit Press, March 2024.

Here’s what the great Dorianne Laux said about the collection:

With Adam in the Garden, AE Hines dares to imagine a new Eden, as his speaker finds himself “middle-aged and queer,” in poems that weave sound and image into tightly crafted narratives. Whether confronting betrayal and loss, sex and desire, or even environmental collapse, threads of hope and gratitude run throughout these verses, as does the speaker’s anxiety about the fragility of what binds.

“Perhaps you too have done this,” he asks, “Found yourself awake on the edge // of so much happiness you fear fate / might intervene?” In plain-spoken language, Hines transforms simple, everyday acts into tender and moving lyrics, offering surprising journeys and closing lines that continue to inspire. We find a poet willing to risk sentimentality without collapsing into sentiment. A seeker willing to risk blasphemy in his personal search for truth.

We’re grateful for the trust Hines is putting in Charlotte Lit Press. The cover reveal is today, and we’re happy to give Storied Charlotte readers the first look! Pre-sales direct from Charlotte Lit Press (open now at charlottelit.org/press) will be signed by the author. And: thanks to a group of the author’s friends, all pre-sales will result in a dollar-for-dollar donation match to Charlotte’s Time Out Youth.

A good question is: how did we get here, into publishing full-length poetry collections? Here’s a brief history. We launched the imprint “Charlotte Lit Press” in 2022 to publish Litmosphere: Journal of Charlotte Lit, which includes the top entries from our Lit/South Awards. (We’ll publish our third issue next May.) Early this year, the Press expanded into poetry chapbooks; we have now released six, with more in the works.

The turning point was when the amazing poet and Lit faculty member Lola Haskins brought us her 14th collection, Homelight. We jumped at the chance to publish an established, nationally known and lauded poet. Being able to work with Hines is a natural progression. We’re not accepting open submissions yet—we’re going to focus on the launch of Adam in the Garden—but we’re thinking hard about what’s next for Charlotte Lit Press.

I thank Kathie and Paul for sharing this information about Charlotte Lit Press and their planned launch of Adam in the Garden.  I am also pleased to play a role in the reveal of the book’s stunning cover.  As I see it, we are all fortunate that Charlotte Lit Press has set up shop right here in Storied Charlotte.

New Nonfiction by Charlotte Writers

December 11, 2023 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

Charlotte is home to many talented nonfiction writers, including Gavin Edwards, Scott Fowler, and Lara Vetter.  All three of these writers have new books out in time for the holidays, and all three books are intended for general readers.

Edwards, together with Joanna Robinson and Dave Gonzales, just released MCU:  The Reign of Marvel Studios. The book tells the story behind the rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which is often referred to as the MCU.  The authors trace the history of Marvel Studios from the release of Iron Man in 2008 to the company’s evolution into one of Hollywood’s dominant players. The book in based on more than a hundred interviews with actors, writers, producers and others involved in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Edwards is a regular writer for Rolling Stone and the author of more than a dozen books, such as Kindness and Wonder:  Why Mister Rogers Matters Now More Than Ever; The World According to Tom Hanks:  The Life, the Obsessions, the Good Deeds of America’s Most Decent Guy; and The Tao of Bill Murray:  Real-Life Stories of Joy, Enlightenment, and Party-Crashing.

Sports Legends of the Carolinas: Exclusive Photographs and In-Depth Conversations with the Sports Icons of our Times

Scott Fowler and photographer Jeff Siner published a hardcover coffee-table book titled Sports Legends of the Carolinas.  Many of the people profiled in the book are tied to Charlotte, including Muggsy Bogues, Jake Delhomme, Bob McKillop, and Judy Rose.  Fowler wrote the text, and Siner, a photographer for The Charlotte Observer, provided photographs for all of the people profiled in the book.

Scott Fowler is a sports columnist for The Charlotte Observer, where he has worked as a writer since 1994.  He recently started a podcast featuring interviews with sports icons from North and South Carolina, and he drew on these interviews in writing Sports Legends of the Carolinas. 

Lara Vetter’s new release is a biography, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), which is part of Reaktion Books’ Critical Lives series. It provides a lively account of modernist poet H.D.’s life and remarkable literary career including discussions of H.D.’s interactions with such notable figures as Sigmund Freud, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound.  Since H.D. spent most of her adult life in London and Switzerland, this biography also sheds life on the American expatriates who moved to Europe during the first half of the 20th century.

Vetter, a professor of English at UNC Charlotte, is an internationally recognized expert on H.D.

The diverse nature of these three books shows reflects the wide range of authors who call Storied Charlotte home. 

Tags: nonfiction

Delving into the History of Disney

December 02, 2023 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

In October 1923, Walt and Roy Disney officially founded the Disney Brothers Studio—now known as The Walt Disney Company. Disney has been celebrating its 100th anniversary throughout 2023 by commemorating the company’s greatest hits and marking the major milestones in the company’s remarkable 100-year history.   However, not all of Disney’s productions have achieved iconic status or have even met with success.  In order to understand the history of Disney, one needs to examine Disney’s lesser-known productions as well as its celebrated successes.  With this idea in mind, Kathy Merlock Jackson, Carl H. Sederholm, and I edited a collection of essays titled Forgotten Disney, which came out this year in order to coincide with the celebration of Disney’s 100th anniversary. The contributors to Forgotten Disney come from around the world, but Charlotte writers are well represented.

Paula T. Connolly, a professor of English at UNC Charlotte, contributes an essay titled “Mickey & Co. Enlist:  Disney’s World War II Animated Shorts.” In this essay, she analyzes the cartoons that Disney produced to support the war effort.  Among the cartoons that she examines are 7 Wise Dwarfs (1941), The Thrifty Pig 1941), The New Spirit (1942), Out of the Frying Pan into the Firing Line (1942), and Der Fuehrer’s Face (1943).  She discusses the role these cartoons played in encouraging viewers to purchase war bonds, conserve materials needed for the war effort, and support the soldiers fighting overseas.  As she points out, these animated shorts were products of their time, but they still have something to say to contemporary viewers.  She writes, “examining their techniques of persuasion can tell us much about how narratives—particularly political ones—are used to garner audience support.”

Dina Schiff Massachi, a lecturer in the American Studies Program at UNC Charlotte and an expert on L. Frank Baum and his Oz stories, contributes an essay titled “Disney’s Abandoned Rainbow Road to Oz.”  She traces the history of Disney’s plan to produce a feature-length film titled the Rainbow Road to Oz. As she recounts, initial work on the film began in 1957, but the film was never completed.  In addition to examining the various reasons why Disney ultimately shelved this film, she discusses the connections between Rainbow Road to Oz and two other Disney Oz projects that came out after Walt Disney’s death: Return to Oz (1985)and Oz the Great and Powerful (2013). As she points out in the conclusion of her essay, “While Disney revolutionized how Americans look at classic European fairy tales, … neither Walt Disney nor the company he built have ever truly been able to capture L. Frank Baum’s Oz with any real success.”

For readers who want to know more about Forgotten Disney, please click on the following link:  https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/forgotten-disney/

Paula’s and Dina’s contributions to Forgotten Disney underscore for me the important scholarship that is coming out of Storied Charlotte in the field of popular culture studies.  

Tags: Forgotten Disney
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