Storied Charlotte

Lisa Williams Kline’s New Novel about a Writers’ Group, Book Banning, and the Experience of Living in a Retirement Community

June 20, 2026 by Mark West

Now that I am in my 70s, I am drawn to stories featuring characters who wrestle with the challenges of getting older, for I am dealing with such challenges myself. Scarcely a week goes by without somebody asking me if I am planning to retire, which I am not, but I have many friends who have retired and who have made the decision to move into retirement communities. I am curious about their experiences, so when I heard that Lisa Williams Kline has recently published a novel set in a retirement community, I decided to investigate.

The novel is titled The Bristlecone Writers’ Group. It focuses on a small group of writers who live in or are affiliated with the Bristlecone Retirement Community, and they all are members of the same writing group. One day one of the members dies, and her death sets into motion a series of revelations and events involving the writing process, book banning, and a mystery surrounding the woman who died. Wanting to know more, I contacted Lisa and asked her about her new novel and how she came to write it. Here is what she sent to me:

Thank you so much for the invitation to write about the inspirations for my new book, The Bristlecone Writers’ Group. I’ve lived in the Charlotte area since 1997, and in Davidson since 2014. I was president of the Charlotte Writers’ Club many years ago, when we still met at the Great Aunt Stella Center. Mary Kratt, who had been president before me, kindly took me under her wing and showed me the ropes. Later, I had the pleasure of working at Novello with Frye Gaillard, Amy Rogers, and Betsy Thorpe. After Novello closed, Eleanor Brawley hired me as an administrative assistant on her narrative photographic program for the Levine Museum, Families of Abraham. When I was moving from writing children’s books to adult fiction, I attended Queens to earn my MFA. Now, I get into Charlotte several times a month, as one of our daughters lives in Plaza Midwood, one of my writers’ groups (Betsy Thorpe and Emily Pearce) meets at Amelie’s on Park Road, and I still belong to CWC and Charlotte Lit. I am in a group called Lake Norman Writers, a spin-off from Charlotte Writers’ Club North, with Ann Campanella, Gilda Morina Syverson, Tootsie O’Hara, Sandra Phillips, Connie Fisher, Caroline Kenna, Tara Marshall, Dede Mitchell, and Tammy Wilson. I consider myself lucky beyond measure to have been welcomed by and become part of the writing community here.

I realized a few years ago that writing had been a huge and important part of my life – I still hardly feel that something has truly happened to me until I have processed it by writing about it – but I had never in a novel addressed the idea of how writing can affect a person’s life, or how dreams of writing can be deferred and then at last fulfilled. So that’s where the idea for the novel began.

The Bristlecone Writers’ Group is a story about what happens after one member of a writers’ group in a retirement community dies and the others discover a list of banned books in her otherwise empty briefcase. Time and the revelation of secrets change what they thought about their lost friend, and her work. Solving the mystery together brings deeper and more meaningful connections, and the characters experience second chances at lifelong dreams and even love.

The book takes place in a fictional town named Eden Forest, which is a blend of Winston-Salem, where I grew up, and Davidson, where I live now. The retirement community in the book is a blend of several different communities such as Salemtowne, where I spent time with my mother, the community in Delaware, where my husband’s mother stayed, and the Pines, in Davidson, where several members of my old writing group now live. The bookstore is based primarily on Main Street Books in Davidson, with vibes from Park Road Books, Trope Bookshop, Fred and June’s, and other beloved independent bookstores in the Charlotte area.

I also wanted to write about older people, whose lives are so much more complicated than many people think. When I was young, I thought that our most important decisions were made in our youth. But by the time we are older, our lives can be exceedingly more complex than before, with ex-spouses, children and stepchildren, and our decisions markedly more difficult. Also, I’ve found there’s more freedom and fun in being older than I realized. Though the characters are all fictional in The Bristlecone Writers’ Group, many of the stories are true, told to me by family and friends. Such as the story of the woman with two husbands in the same retirement community. Or a couple who divorce over whether to move to a retirement community or not. Or a wife selecting the next wife for her husband should she pass away.

And I wanted to write about the importance of books and reading. I learned about Banned Books from the Big Chair when I attended the American Library Association Conference in San Diego in 2024. A huge chair was set up in the lobby, and anyone could sit there, looking swallowed by it, like Edith Ann on Laugh-In (boy am I dating myself) and read a passage from one of their favorite banned books. This simple expression about the freedom to read moved me so deeply that I decided to include it in my book. I’m also a member of Authors Against Book Bans and appreciate the tools this organization offers to fight this dangerous practice.

I had written about animals in my books for children, such as the Sisters in All Seasons series, in which each book focused on an adventure with a wild animal. But I’d never focused on animals in my adult books, and I wanted to explore how pets become such important furry family members, especially as we get older. Our dog Joni played Bruiser Woods in the Davidson Community Players’ production of Legally Blonde: The Musical, and it was an absolute delight to include that as part of my story.

Other writing challenges I wanted to take on with this book were interweaving multiple voices and making some of the voices unlike myself. A teacher at Wildacres, Louise Hawes, once challenged me to create diverse casts for my books, and I have been trying to do a better job of that ever since.

At Park Road Books on July 30 at 6:30, dear friends and gifted writers in my writers’ group, Betsy Thorpe and Emily Smith Pearce, will interview me about The Bristlecone Writers’ Group. Special guest Joni, aka Bruiser Woods, will also be there, in her Harvard t-shirt, ready to greet everyone.

For readers who want to know more about Lisa and her writings, please click on the following link: www.lisawilliamskline.com

I thank Lisa for providing me with information about her new novel and for providing everyone in Storied Charlotte with a behind-the-scenes look at life in a retirement community.

Tags: Lisa Williams Kline

Introducing the Carolina New Works Play Festival

June 14, 2026 by Mark West

Most of my friends and colleagues at UNC Charlotte know that I am currently serving as the Interim Chair of the University’s Department of Theatre. For me, one of the pleasures of serving in this position is getting to know the faculty members in the department and learning about their various projects and activities. One such faculty member is David Janowiak. David’s latest project is launching the Carolina New Works Play Festival. Working together with Three Bone Theatre, David organized this festival to showcase new plays by playwrights from North and South Carolina. In response to my request for more information about this festival, he provided me with the following press release written by Meg Whalen:

Inaugural Carolina New Works Play Festival presents winning works in July. The festival is a collaboration between the Department of Theatre and Three Bone Theatre.

Three highschoolers on the last day of senior year. A gay man returning to his small Southern hometown and aging parents. Ambitious Los Angeles creatives tempted by ChatGPT.

These characters will breathe their first when the Carolina New Works Play Festival presents its inaugural cohort of plays in two sets of public staged readings July 24-26 and July 31-Aug. 2.

Founded by the UNC Charlotte Department of Theatre and Three Bone Theatre, the Carolina New Works Play Festival showcases plays from North and South Carolina playwrights, selected through a rigorous juried process. This year’s winning plays are “TRE,” by T.J. Lewis; “How I Got Forgotten,” by Glenn Rawls; and “You Can’t Smoke in Burbank,” by Skylar Schock.

In “TRE,” Tay, Rey and Bree find themselves on the last day of senior year, fumbling through life and contemplating what comes next. What are they doing with their lives? Where should they go to college? Who do they want to be as grown-ups? And why do they keep kissing each other?

In “How I Got Forgotten,” a newly single gay man returns to his small Southern hometown after his mother’s heart attack. As he sees his mother slip toward dementia, he realizes she has been covering for his father, a retired history professor who is in the grips of Alzheimer’s.

“You Can’t Smoke in Burbank” takes on the art versus AI dilemma, as three Los Angeles-based creatives use ChatGPT to finish an assignment. That decision thrusts them into unexpected circumstances that challenge their ideas about success, entertainment and making something matter.

Following two weeks of rehearsals with local directors, actors and dramaturgs, each play will receive two professional staged readings: July 24-26 at Rowe Recital Hall on the campus of UNC Charlotte and July 31-Aug. 2 at The Arts Factory on West Trade Street.

After each reading playwrights and artists will host post-show discussions with the audience. Audiences will witness the creative process, and their feedback will become part of the plays’ development.

For more information about the 2026 festival performances, including showtimes, and the guidelines for future play submissions, visit the CNWPF webpage.

I am pleased to report that the following UNC Charlotte students are participating in this year’s festival:

Lydia Elder: Stage Manager for How I Got Forgotten by Glen Rawls
Ashlin Heise: Stage Manager for Tre by TJL
Micah Jordan: Actor–Reynardo in Tre by TJL
Jordan Goddard: Actor–Skylar in You Can’t Smoke in Burbank (YCSIB) by Skylar Schock
Anna Bailey: Actor–Student/Waiter in YCSIB by Skylar Schock
Katherine Macguire: Actor–Taylor Bell/Instructor in YCSIB by Skylar Schock

I congratulate David and the good folks associated with Three Bone Theatre on the launching of the inaugural season of the Carolina New Works Play Festival. I am proud that Storied Charlotte is home to this new festival.

Tags: Carolina New Works Play Festival

Mark Peres’s New Memoir about His Father

June 06, 2026 by Mark West

With Father’s Day just around the corner, now is a perfect time to showcase Mark Peres’s new memoir about his father. Titled The Man Who Lived a Hundred Lives, this memoir not only tells the story of the remarkable life of Mark’s father, but it also touches on Mark’s relationship with his father. I recently contacted Mark and asked him for more information on The Man Who Lived a Hundred Lives and how he came to write it. Here is what he sent to me:

Father’s Day arrives differently at different stages of life.

As a child, Father’s Day is about gratitude. As a young adult, it can become an occasion for distance, independence, or even rebellion. But as the years pass, something changes. We begin to see our fathers not merely as parents but as people: complex, imperfect, contradictory people who lived entire lives before we arrived and who carried burdens, dreams, losses, and aspirations that we only partially understood. My memoir, The Man Who Lived a Hundred Lives, emerged from that realization.

The book began with a conversation. In 1992, when my father was in his seventies and I was standing at a crossroads in my own life, I sat down with him in Miami and began asking questions. I thought I knew his story. After all, he was my father. I knew where he had lived, what jobs he had held, and some of the colorful anecdotes that surfaced at family gatherings. But as the interviews unfolded, I discovered how little I knew.

My father, Ambrosio Benchimol Peres, had lived one improbable life after another. He grew up in a Jewish community deep in the Amazon rainforest of Brazil. He was an early voice on the radio, a revolutionary, a law student, an AWOL soldier in the Brazilian Army. He sold lingerie in Havana before the Cuban Revolution. He migrated to the United States and took on odd jobs. He traveled the world, created wealth, and lost it all. He moved our family repeatedly, always chasing opportunity and imagining a better future just over the horizon. Over the course of his life, he seemed to become several different people, each adapted to a different place and time.

I still remember the yellow legal pads on the table and the tape recorder between us. Occasionally my father would pause, stare into the distance, and retrieve a memory that had lain dormant for decades. In those moments, I felt less like a son and more like a passenger carried to places and times I had never known.

The title of the memoir came naturally. My father did not simply live a long life. He lived many lives. Yet the deeper I listened, the more I realized that the story was not only about adventure or resilience. It was about identity. It was about what we inherit from our parents and what remains hidden from us. It was about the mysteries that exist even within the families we believe we know best.

The interviews sat in boxes and folders for decades. Like many people, I was busy building a career, raising a family, and pursuing other ambitions. The recordings and transcripts became part of the background of my life: important, cherished, but unfinished.

Years later, after my father’s death, I returned to them. By then, the urgency felt different. I was no longer simply collecting family history. I was trying to preserve a voice before it disappeared. I was trying to understand the arc of a life that stretched across continents and generations. I was trying to answer a question that many sons eventually confront: Who was my father when he wasn’t my father? The answer turned out to be richer and far more surprising than I could have imagined.

Charlotte played an important role in bringing that story into the world. For more than two decades, Charlotte has been my adopted hometown. It is where I have taught, raised a family, built friendships, and helped create organizations devoted to conversation, ideas, and civic life. The memoir found its final form through the encouragement of Charlotte’s literary community.

One of the most important influences was the Charlotte Lit Author’s Lab. Writing is often described as a solitary act, but books rarely emerge from solitude alone. They require readers, teachers, editors, and fellow travelers who help us see what is working and what is not. The Author’s Lab provided exactly that kind of community. Over many months, I shared pages, received feedback, wrestled with structure, and learned how to transform recorded interviews and memories into a narrative that readers could experience as a page-turning story.

The process taught me something unexpected. Memory preserves facts, but storytelling reveals meaning. Perhaps that is why Father’s Day feels so connected to this book. For many of us, the day on the calendar is not merely a celebration of a parent. It is an invitation to remember. To ask questions. To listen more carefully. To recognize that the people who raised us contain entire worlds that we may never fully know.

Writing the book allowed me to spend one more season in conversation with my father. It allowed me to see him not simply as the man who raised me but as a fellow traveler navigating uncertainty, reinvention, love, disappointment, hope, and time.

In the end, that may be what every family story is about. We begin by trying to understand our parents. Along the way, we discover that we are also trying to understand ourselves.

For readers who want to know more about Mark and his writings, please click on the following link: https://www.markperes.com/

I congratulate Mark on his new memoir, and I thank him for sharing the story behind the writing of this memoir. I also thank him for his many contributions to our community from founding the online magazine Charlotte Viewpoint (which ran from 2003 to 2016),to leading the Charlotte Center for the Humanities & Civic Imagination, to writing the speculative fiction novel The Accord. With the publication of The Man Who Lived a Hundred Lives, Mark is now also part of Storied Charlotte’s ever-widening circle of memoirists.

Tags: Mark Peres memoir

Classic Children’s and YA Books Set in the Summer

June 01, 2026 by Mark West

The summer solstice will take place on June 21, 2026, which technically marks the beginning of summer. However, I am sure that most of the students in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) think that the real beginning of summer will arrive on the afternoon of June 10, 2026, which is the last day of the 2025-2026 school year. The sense of liberation that students feel on the last day of school is captured in Alice Cooper’s famous hit, “School’s Out,” or as it is sometimes called, “School’s Out for Summer.” In this song, Alice Copper sings about “no more books,” and I am sure that is how many students feel, but for some students, summer is a time to read books for pleasure. I was such a student when I was growing up. Today’s Storied Charlotte blog post is for readers of all ages who read for pleasure and who are interested in classic children’s and YA that take place during the summer.

One such classic is Maureen Daly’s coming-of-age novel Seventeenth Summer. Published in 1942, this novel is often cited as one of the key books that shaped the nature of contemporary YA literature. It’s written in first person, and it captures the emotions of a teenage girl who falls in love for the first time. Daly wrote the book while she was still in college, so she could still easily relate to the way teenagers often think about relationships. Angie Morrow, the central character, is a bright but very naïve teenager who has lived a sheltered life. I recently taught this book in my course on classic American children’s literature. My students liked Angie and were pleased with her determination to go to college, but they were surprised at how clueless Angie often is when interacting with Jack, her first boyfriend. In some ways, Seventeenth Summer seems a bit tame by today’s standards, but in the opinion of my students, Angie’s emotional responses still ring true.

Another classic book set during the summer is Virginia Hamilton’s debut novel, Zeely, which came out in 1967. Following the publication of this middle-grade novel, Hamilton went on to become a famous African American children’s author. In Zeely, a girl named Elizabeth and her brother John spend the summer on their uncle’s farm. There they meet Zeely Tayber, a tall Black woman living on a neighboring farm. Elizabeth has a very active imagination, and she imagines that Zeely is Watutsi queen living in exile. For Elizabeth, her fantasies about her neighbor are put in a new light when she gets to know Zeely as a real person. The novel focuses on the characters’ interactions, and it wonderfully captures the workings a child’s imagination.

My last recommendation is Bette Greene’s 1973 historical novel titled Summer of My German Soldier. Set in a small town in Arkansas during World War II, this novel focuses on a 12-year-old Jewish-American girl named Anne Bergen. She befriends Fredrick “Anton” Reiker, a young German POW who escapes from a nearby prison camp. Anton was drafted to serve in the German military even though he opposes Hitler and the Nazi Party. Their friendship ends up shattering her relationship with her family and puts her at odds with the town. I taught this course in a graduate seminar on Southern children’s literature, and my students were very impressed with how Greene deftly deals with the complexities of prejudice and wartime fervor. Summer of My German Soldier is far from an entertaining summer escape novel, but it is a memorable story.

I could recommend many other children’s and YA books that take place during the summer, but these three books stand out for me because they show how much story can be packed into three fleeting months. With summer vacation just around the corner, I hope that everyone in Storied Charlotte, whether they are school-aged or grownups, can spend part of their summer reading just for the pleasure of engaging with a well-told story.

Tags: Seventeenth Summer Summer of My German Soldier Zeely

Andrew James Hartley, William Shakespeare, and Julius Caesar

May 24, 2026 by Mark West

My friend Andrew James Hartley uses his full name when writing or editing scholarly books about William Shakespeare, but he usually writes as AJ Hartley when he is writing works of fiction. From 2005 until 2023, Andrew served as the Robinson Professor of Shakespeare Studies at UNC Charlotte, and during that time he brought out numerous scholarly works related to Shakespeare’s plays. Upon his retirement in 2023, he told me that he planned to focus on writing fiction, so I assumed that he would not be bringing out any more scholarly books under his full name. I was wrong.

Andrew James Hartley’s Arden edition of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar came out on May 14, 2026. Part of the Arden Shakespeare Fourth Series, this edition is rooted in the first known performance of the play in London in 1599. It includes a critical introduction to the play’s textual, cultural and performance history. It also provides detailed on-the-page notes explaining language, character and performance. For more information about this edition, please click on the following link: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/julius-caesar-9781350110878/

I contacted Andrew and asked him for more information about this project: Here is what he sent to me:

My Arden edition of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was almost nine years in the making. It began when I was invited by the editorial board to contribute a proposal for the play, since I had published two previous books on it (a performance history and an essay collection) along with a couple of student guides. It was daunting to say the least. I had only ever edited Shakespeare for specific stage productions so editing an actual edition—an Arden, no less—was extremely intimidating.

I began by identifying what the edition was to be. The new Ardens are committed to producing specific iterations of the plays rather than an ‘ideal’ composite text which combines or otherwise selects pieces from the earliest printed texts according to editorial preference. I aimed to recreate a clean version of the performance text of the first productions from 1599. That meant taking the earliest existing text (the Folio text of 1623), addressing its errors and ambiguities and restoring elements which—based on external evidence—seem to have been changed between the play’s first appearance on stage and the Folio’s printing. The Folio contains, for example, a number of significant mistakes about who is and is not present in key scenes. Some lines contain so-called textual cruxes where the precise meaning is unclear. Such discrepancies needed to be rectified. Other issues were less immediately apparent. Shakespeare’s friend and fellow playwright Ben Jonson made fun (twice!) of a line delivered by Caesar, but the line does not appear in the Folio text. I decided to restore it. (It’s a perfectly good line in terms of character, but contains a logical paradox which Jonson thought absurd).

After the proposal was approved by the board I had to deliver a sample scene. I chose act 3 scene 1, the assassination scene, because it contained several knotty problems particularly related to staging and casting. The sample scene is where you—hopefully– demonstrate your judgment in more than just textual editing; you have to show you can format the text correctly and according to the incredibly baroque Arden style sheet (currently at 34 closely typed pages). More importantly, you have to show how you will approach the things for which the Arden editions are best known, their full textual notes (in which you signal every significant alteration made by every editor in every previous edition produced over the last 400 years) and their extensive commentary notes. These are where the editor glosses or otherwise unpacks the content of difficult or suggestive words and phrases, shows how key performances have handled the choices presented by the given moment, and offers what you might call teachable insights. They are the meat of the edition, and sometimes fill more of the page than the Shakespearean text itself.

After the sample scene had been approved (late 2018), I went back to the first scene of the play and started over, working with a facsimile of the Folio text in front of me and every previous edition (physical or digital) to hand for cross checking. Most days I managed to get through about five lines of text, handling the textual notes and commentary as I went, though sometimes a single phrase would send me down the rabbit hole of research for days. As I completed each act, I would run it by the general editor assigned to me (Tiffany Stern) and respond to any questions she raised or errors of formatting etc. It was a long, slow business, and became my primary academic activity through the pandemic and beyond.

When it was done I turned to the introduction which, like everything else in the Arden edition is thorough and extensive, in this case, over a hundred pages of critical and performance history asserting the play’s inherently political dimension from its earliest days. Julius Caesar is shot through with specifically Elizabethan issues of political overreach and the threat of rebellion which has resonated for many subsequent periods (think of Orson Welles’ expressly Fascist Caesar in his 1937 production, or the Public Theatre’s collision with the first Trump administration in 2017). The edition also contains lengthy extracts from Shakespeare’s primary source, Plutarch’s Lives, and the usual academic apparatus of references and works cited. I expect it will be the go-to scholarly edition for many years to come. It is certainly the pinnacle of my academic career.

I’ll be talking about these things at Park Road Books on June 3^rd at 7pm where editions will be available for purchase.

I congratulate Andrew on the publication of his Arden edition of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. As the publication of this edition demonstrates, Storied Charlotte is gaining a reputation as a center for Shakespeare Studies.

Tags: Andrew James Hartley Arden Shakespeare Series

ConCarolinas 2026 Is Nearly Here

May 16, 2026 by Mark West

Many Charlotte-area fans of fantasy and science fiction stories are eagerly anticipating the upcoming ConCarolinas convention. Scheduled to take place from May 29 through May 31 at the Hilton Charlotte University Place, ConCarolinas is expected to attract a wide range of fans, authors, performers, gamers, game designers, and cosplayers. For more information about this year’s convention, please click on the following link: https://concarolinas.org/

ConCarolinas is billed as the “Carolinas’ Longest Running Sci-Fi & Fantasy Con.” Established in 2001, ConCarolinas is celebrating its 25^th anniversary this year. In keeping with the convention’s long history of celebrating fandom in all its flavors, programming covers a wide range of topics. Here is the official description:

Our programming is designed to be fun and educational with an emphasis on literary arts, visual arts, and performing arts. We tie that all together with our love of science fiction, fantasy, superheroes, and gaming.

It’s a weekend full of entertainment, gaming, costumes, authors, films, music, discussion panels, and workshops with professionals in the entertainment and creative community. Come celebrate geekdom and meet some of the region’s most creative minds.

I am pleased to report that these “creative minds” include many writers of fantasy and science fiction from the Charlotte area. Among them are AJ Hartley, John G. Hartness, Darin Kennedy, Nicole Givens Kurtz, Gail Z. Martin, Larry N. Martin, James Nettles, and Nancy Northcott.

Although reading is usually a solitary activity, participating in fandom is not. There seems to be some sort of paranormal gravitational pull that brings fans of fantasy and science fiction together to celebrate their love of shared stories. In a sense, ConCarolinas is a big communal celebration. I always say that my blog is all about celebrating Charlotte’s community of readers and writers, so as I see it, Storied Charlotte and ConCarolinas are made for each other.

Tags: ConCarolinas

Reading Recommendations for Mother’s Day

May 09, 2026 by Mark West

I remember that my mother liked to spend Mother’s Day reading in bed. My brother, sister and I would bring her our handmade Mother’s Day cards in the morning, and then we would leave her alone with her book for most of the day. My mother passed away years ago, but I still associate Mother’s Day with reading. With this memory in mind, I decided to focus this week’s Storied Charlotte blog post on reading recommendations for Mother’s Day. I contacted Kathie Collins, the Co-Founder and Creative Director of Charlotte Lit, and Mary Alice Dixon, the author of the recently published poetry collection Snakeberry Mamas: Words from the Wild, and I invited them to recommend an excellent book that would be especially appropriate to read on Mother’s Day. I was pleased that they both accepted my invitation.

One of the reasons I reached out to Kathe Collins is that she recently taught a class at Charlotte Lit called “The Mother-Daughter Dyad in Myths, Fairy Tales, and Contemporary Culture.” I asked her if she could recommend a book that deals with the relationships between mothers and daughters. Here is what Kathie sent to me:

Mark, thanks for inviting me to contribute a short piece about mothers and daughters for Mother’s Day. I’m the mom of three thoughtful, loving, and successful adult daughters (as well as two incredible sons). Of course, I am a daughter, too, and lucky that my eighty-year-old mom is still thriving, mothering me with advice and worry as often as she can. Although I’ve not followed my mother’s footsteps completely, I’m sometimes awed by the number of ways in which my life has parallelled hers—even when, maybe especially when, I’m trying to go another way, to be a separate and distinct woman. No doubt my mother feels this pushing away and pushing against, as I feel it with my daughters, as a loss. For me, this daughter loss, however expected, always comes as a surprise, and brings with it fresh grief.

Love, loss, and grief are parts of the complex and intense relationship that is the mother-daughter bond—a relationship I would argue no author has captured better than Amy Tan in her acclaimed novel The Joy Luck Club, in which she explores these complexities, particularly as they occur within patriarchal culture, through the lens of four mother-daughter dyads. The following quote is from a scene in which the character An-mei Hsu explains how mothers try to prepare their daughters for the world, try to give them a life in which they can escape their mothers’ failures and insecurities, but nevertheless pass on both love and pain—trauma and resiliency seamlessly woven—from generation to generation: “And even though I taught my daughter the opposite, still she came out the same way! Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was born a girl. And I was born to my mother and I was born a girl. All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way.“

Tan’s novel, a National Book Award finalist, was published in 1989, just a few months before I became a mother for the first time; that is, before I knew what motherhood would make of me. Before I knew what it was to love a daughter. I reconnected with the work this spring as I prepared to teach a Charlotte Lit class on the mother-daughter dyad in classic and contemporary culture and found its themes not only more personally poignant than ever, but also just as socially relevant. So often, I hear people label the mother-daughter relationship as inherently difficult, as though women are simply wired to find fault in each other. What this book reminds us is that mothers, especially those in male-dominated cultures like our own, are forced to make difficult choices, whether conscious or not, about how to love their daughters while preparing them for a society that will rarely be looking out for their best interests. That is, they must love them while making them tough. Daughters are often wounded by that preparation. And still, love is as much a part of the story.

I reached out to Mary Alice Dixon in part because many of the poems in her collection Snakeberry Mamas relate to maternal behavior. After all, the word “mama” is in the title of the book. In Mary Alice’s poems, maternal behavior and the rhythms of nature are often interconnected. This theme is reflected in Mary Alice’s book recommendation. Here is what Mary Alice sent to me:

A book to read on Mother’s Day? Of course, there’s Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter. Unconventional, and perhaps unattractive mothers, but real. Which is what I ask of fiction. Books that capture the complexity of their eras. Surely the most searing portrait of motherhood in a novel has to be Toni Morrison’s The Beloved, in which Sethe, an escaped slave, kills her eldest daughter rather than allowing the girl to be returned to slavery. Morrison show us how the most brutal of circumstances shape a sacrificial maternal love.

But the book I most recommend to celebrate Mother’s Day is not fiction, not essay, not memoir, not psychology. It’s ecology: Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest (Alfred A. Knopf, 2021). This is not a book,” Simard writes, “about how we can save the trees. This is a book about how the trees might save us.”

Simard’s pioneering study shows how old growth “Mother Trees” stand at the center of a social network, sustaining, feeding, and communicating with their saplings through underground networks of carbon energy transfer. With the voice of a poet, Simard describes this “flow of energy from the Mother Tree as powerful as the ocean tide, as strong as the sun’s rays, as irrepressible as the wind in the mountains, as unstoppable as a mother protecting her child.” In fact, a dying Mother Tree will pass “her life force straight to her offspring…. Dying enabled the living; the aged fueled their young.”

In this age of ecological and other crises, the Mother Trees rise, the “Beloveds” of the forest. They show us that if humans are to survive as a species, we must remember we spring from communal roots as interconnected, as sacred, as strong, as magnolia and oak. Read this book then hug a tree. Hug a child. Hug a mother. Plant a seed.

I thank Kathie and Mary Alice for their thoughtful book recommendations for Mother’s Day. I wish all the mothers in Storied Charlotte and beyond a happy Mother’s Day.

Tags: Finding the Mother Tree Mother's Day The Joy Luck Club

Alicia D. Williams and Her New Picture Book

May 03, 2026 by Mark West

Charlotte author Alicia D. Williams burst on the children’s literature scene in 2019 with the publication of her debut novel, Genesis Begins Again. She received both a Newbery Honor and the Coretta Scott King-John Steptoe Author Award for New Talent for this novel. Following the success of her first book, she stepped away from her teaching position here in Charlotte and focused her attention on her burgeoning writing career. In the years since the publication of Genesis Begins Again, Alicia has brought out a new children’s book on nearly a yearly basis. For more information about Alicia and her books, please click of the following link: https://www.aliciadwilliams.com/

Her latest book is Nani and the Lion, a picture book that was released by Atheneum in February. Illustrated by Anna Cunha, this book is set in an African village and features a young girl named Nani who loves to drum. While the villagers and most of the animals enjoy dancing to the beat of her drum, the local curmudgeonly Lion, who calls himself the “lord of the land,” does not like noisemaking of any kind. Soon Nani and the Lion come into conflict, but Nani does not cower when facing this powerful adversary. Nani and the Lion is an original story, but it has the feel of a folktale.

I recently contact Alicia and asked her about the story behind Nani and the Lion. She provided me with the following comments that she made during a recent interview that she did with Jena Benton:

In my experience as a teacher, folktales were almost always the perfect introduction for young learners. They connected with these wonderful read alouds in a different way. It is the same connection that I felt when I read Zora Neale Hurston’s work and Virginia Hamilton’s too. And the same connection my daughter had when I shared folktales with her. As I taught those lessons I thought, I wonder if I could write my own. It was then, the idea for Nani and the Lion was born.

As I wrote the tale, my mind was on arts-integrated lessons that would use puppetry, storybox theatre, chants, movement, and music too. I pictured children creating their own story endings, writing and sharing their own folktales too.

Folktales and oral storytelling have been a part of our lives for eons. We have wonderfully expanded children’s literature genres, but folktales are sometimes lost in the cracks. And with classroom teachers working hard to get students to read and engage reluctant readers, I would offer the idea of dipping back to folktales. There are many benefits to this type of storytelling. It enhances language development and listening skills, cultivates creativity and imagination, offers empathy and emotional connection, and allows children to explore their own cultural roots and those of others. Plus, there are incredibly fun to read out loud to any age group.

I simply tell stories that speak to me. I tell the story that nudges me and whispers, I’m ready. And I honor the voice in which it wants to be told even if that means being open to a genre that I’m unfamiliar with. I’m more of an intuitive writer, so I don’t plot stories or create outlines. I usually have an idea of where the story will go and that’s all. I tend to listen to the characters and trust that the tale will come even if it feels like a puzzle that I have to solve.

I congratulate Alicia on the publication of Nani and the Lion, and I am looking forward to her future contributions to the literature and lore of Storied Charlotte.

Tags: Alicia D. Williams Nani and the Lion

Patricia Joslin’s New Poetry Collection

April 26, 2026 by Mark West

Before I write a Storied Charlotte blog post, I often exchange numerous email messages with the person whose work I am featuring in that particular blog post, and that is certainly the case with this blog post about Patricia Joslin and her new poetry collection titled No Packing Necessary: Poems for the Solo Journey. Patricia emailed me about a month ago and informed me that her forthcoming poetry collection would soon be published by Main Street Rag. I responded by saying that I would write blog post about her new poetry collection closer to the book’s official release. Since I knew that she planned to launch the book in early May, I emailed her last week and asked her if she could send me a write up about her new poetry collection that I could include in this week’s blog post. Her response surprised me. She wrote, “I am in Morocco at the tail end of a vacation, but I will be home on Sunday.” She said that she would send me something as soon as she returned to Charlotte. I told her that I do not get many emails from Morocco. I agreed to wait until I heard from her before writing this week’s post. Sure enough, on Sunday night she sent me a write up about how her new collection came to be. Here is what she sent to me:

I grew up in southern Wisconsin and raised my family in Minnesota. My husband and I, both weary of the endless cold and gray skies, dreamt of a change for our retirement years. Our daughter attended Davidson College for her undergraduate program. We visited often, and decided the weather here was more appealing than what we lived with in the Midwest.

In the fall of 2002, as our son started his freshman year at the University of Michigan, we took the leap and settled in Charlotte, embarking on a new chapter. I often joke that I spent my first fifty years up North and plan to spend my last fifty basking in the Southern warmth.

But life, as it often does, shifted unexpectedly. In 2018, after forty-one years of marriage, my husband died of pancreatic cancer. Managing loss is an intensely personal experience. Writing has always been my refuge, and in the aftermath of loss, I sought creative ways to process my grief. At the time, the Levine Cancer Institute offered writing workshops for cancer patients and their caregivers. Meeting weekly with others familiar with cancer who wanted to write about their experiences (with the guidance of a therapist) was a great start for me.

In early 2019 I discovered Charlotte Center for the Literary Arts (Charlotte Lit). I began attending weekly open-studio Pen to Paper classes. There, I explored writing personal essays, flirted with the idea of a memoir, and finally—unexpectedly—fell in love with poetry. A class with Dannye Romine Powell opened the door to a whole new way of expressing myself. Dannye’s teaching was transformative, and in 2021, I joined a cohort of eleven poets as part of the inaugural Chapbook Lab, a year-long workshop program at Charlotte Lit. The experience was intense, challenging, and deeply rewarding. Each poet was paired with a mentor; I was fortunate to work with the acclaimed Lola Haskins. Our shared goal was to create a book of poetry by the end of the year—a task that required both vulnerability and discipline.

In 2023, my first book, I’ll Buy Flowers Again Tomorrow: Poems of Loss and Healing, was published by Charlotte Lit Press. The poems echo the grief of the cancer journey so many face today. Yet they offer the promise of hope and healing to those who remain behind. I’ve received heartfelt messages from recent widows who found in my poetry a way to understand their own grief.

My second book was just published by Main Street Rag. No Packing Necessary: Poems for the Solo Journey is a collection of narrative poetry meant for those recovering from loss. The title, drawn from a line in one of the poems, speaks to the timelessness of what we carry in our hearts—memories, love, longing. These poems explore widowhood, aging, and the quiet magic of life in later years, inviting readers to find their own path forward. It has now been eight years since my husband’s death, yet grief remains a companion, sometimes surfacing unexpectedly. Not long ago, I watched Casablanca and found myself sobbing for lost love. The final poem in my book, “Sunday Morning in the City of Love” references the famous line…” We’ll always have Paris.” Of course I cried.

In 2024 I moved to The Village on Morehead, a retirement community close to Uptown.

The Village is a phenomenal place to live, filled with vibrant people and a motto that encourages us to “Live Life Boldly.” Please join us on May 5th from 4 to 5:30 pm as we celebrate Cinco de Mayo and the launch of my new book at The Village. To learn more about the event, order your copy, or read some of my poetry, visit my website: patriciajoslin.com.

I congratulate Patricia on the publication of this new poetry collection. To give readers a sense of this book, I offer this blurb by David E. Poston. “‘The divine exists even in the darkest places,’ writes Joslin, but these poems are far from dark. Though many deal with aging, mortality, and grief, they exhibit grace, vulnerability, and empathy. She renders the world in vivid sensory detail—a flash of cardinal’s wing, rock wrens rising in song, the scent of her father’s pipe tobacco—and moves us to see the ‘bliss in the mystery of it.’” I am pleased that Patricia has been able to find a bit of the divine right here in Storied Charlotte.

Tags: Patricia Joslin poetry collection

Rebecca McClanahan’s New Memoir

April 18, 2026 by Mark West

On December 21, 2020, I wrote a Storied Charlotte blog post about Rebecca McClanahan’s then recently published memoir titled In the Key of New York City: A Memoir in Essays. As I noted in my blog post at the time, In the Key of New York City was Rebecca’s eleventh book, and it was about the eleven years that she and her husband lived in New York City. After returning to Charlotte, Rebecca found herself focusing much of her time and energy on taking care of her elderly parents. Now that her parents have died, Rebecca has drawn on her experiences of caring for her parents in a new memoir titled Light Falls on Everything: A Daughter’s Memoir of Caregiving, Grief, and Possibility, which the University of North Carolina Press released on March 31, 2026. Here is the link to the publisher’s listing of the book: https://uncpress.org/9781469693217/light-falls-on-everything/

I contacted Rebecca and asked her for more information about her new memoir and her experiences as a Charlotte writer. Here is what she sent to me:

Light Falls on Everything: A Daughter’s Memoir of Caregiving, Grief, and Possibility, my twelfth published book, focuses on the years of caring for my elderly parents after we moved them from Indiana to Charlotte and my husband and I became the “first responders,” with support from the extended family. My parents’ deepest wish had always been to stay together “until the end,” and that is what we attempted to help them do, no matter what it took. It took a lot. As is so often the case with long-term caregiving, many days were shadowed by exhaustion, confusion, heartbreak, and anticipatory grief. Still, light flickered in even the darkest corners, revealing moments of tenderness, laughter, absurdity, surprise, and unrelenting love.

From the very beginning of the caregiving journey—which lasted nearly a decade—I felt compelled to write, if only a few notes on a hospital napkin, on the back of a pharmacy receipt, in the margins of my parents’ desk calendar. At the time, I had no idea that these scribbled notes, and later the segments and chapters that developed from them, might one day comprise a book. I was just trying to get from one day to the next, one night to the next. I now understand that this process was a way to hold myself still for a moment, just long enough to take a few steps out of the scene so I could see my parents—and myself—as characters in an ongoing, universal drama. Mother has been gone five years now; Dad, nearly a decade. And it has taken me yet another decade, since his death, to revise and shape the final book. As if any memoir is ever final. A memoir happens between two covers; it has a clear beginning and end. Life happens outside these covers, continuing its forward movement beyond the boundaries of any memoir.

For me, much of my life happens within the context of Charlotte’s writing community. My history with our “storied” city goes back nearly 50 years. In 1978, when I completed graduate studies at University of South Carolina, I moved to Charlotte to join my husband, Donald Devet, who was an instructional television producer for CMS and also a professional puppeteer, having recently co-founded Grey Seal Puppets. Before that, as a former Marine brat, I’d never lived anywhere for more than a few years at a time and I never imagined I could plant deep roots in any city.

As it turned out, I was wrong, as I so often am! Within a year, I began teaching high school English (first at Olympic and then West Charlotte) and later served as director of the Poetry-in-the-Schools program, where, for fifteen years, I taught poetry to thousands of K-12 students in 110 schools, with assistance from visiting writers including Chuck Sullivan, Ruth Moose, Charleen Swansea, Ellen Johnston-Hale, and Suzanne Newton. Happy sidebar: Two of my former high school poetry students, Julie Funderburk and Michael Sadoff, are now published writers based in Charlotte!

Meanwhile, on the home front, three of my five siblings had moved their families from California and Indiana to Charlotte, thus expanding my role of semi-professional aunt. I was also knee-deep not only in poetry but also in teacher education as part of the UNC Charlotte Writing Project, and in music, performing with the Oratorio Singers and in musicals at The Little Theatre (now called Theatre Charlotte) while also composing music for Grey Seal Puppets’ productions.

But the literary community is what formed my deepest connection to Charlotte. Nearly every writer whom Joseph Bathanti mentioned in a recent Storied Charlotte post also welcomed me, along with many others too numerous to include here. But here’s a short list of folks in poetry critique groups I was part of: First, Cathy Smith Bowers, Judy Goldman, Mary Kratt, and, in later years, Gail Peck, P.B. Newman, Irene Honeycutt, Diana Pinckney, Tony Abbott, Dede Wilson, Barbara Conrad, and Barbara Presnell. I was also connecting with other local writers including Julie Suk, Susan Ludvigson, Dannye Romine Powell, Rick Chess, Chris Davis, Robin Hemley, and Fred Leebron, and with other Carolina writers who provided support and companionship, especially once I began publishing fiction, essays, memoir, and writing craft books—among them Frye Galliard, Ron Rash, Philip Gerard, Doris Betts, and Fred Chappell.

In 1998, Donald and I took a huge personal and professional (some called it “crazy”!) leap in pursuit of a lifelong dream to live in New York City, which turned into a decade-long experience I describe in my 2020 memoir, In the Key of New York City. During that time, I also started teaching in the newly formed Queens University’s MFA program, which brought me to Charlotte for twice-yearly residencies and helped maintain my relationships here. In 2009, we moved back to Charlotte to be closer to family and to set the stage for caring for my parents, eventually moving them from Indiana to Charlotte. Thus began the eight-year caregiving experience that is at the center of my newest memoir.

I began my literary life in our “storied” city and am grateful to be continuing it with support from friends, family, students, readers, and fellow writers. Charlotte Lit will host a book launch for Light Falls on Everything: A Memoir of Caregiving, Grief, and Possibility, on Wednesday, April 22, at 6:00 p.m. at the Charlotte Lit studio (601 E. 5th Street, Suite 160). To save a seat, register here! I look forward to seeing readers of Storied Charlotte in the audience! Thanks again, Mark, for the chance to contribute to this ongoing conversation.

I congratulate Rebecca on the publication of Light Falls on Everything, and I thank her for her many contributions to Storied Charlotte’s community of readers and writers.

Tags: memoir Rebecca McClanahan