Storied Charlotte

David Boyd’s Translations of Japanese Picture Books

October 05, 2020 by Mark West

I remember when Piedmont Airlines debuted its nonstop service between Charlotte and London in 1987. Even before the first flight to London took off, the city installed new signs for the airport with the word “international” proudly added to the name of the airport. Our international airport is just one of many examples of Charlotte’s international connections. Another example is UNC Charlotte’s Department of Languages and Culture Studies. This department offers a diverse smorgasbord of language courses and programs, including one of the nation’s top-ranked programs in Japanese Studies.

David Boyd is one of the professors in UNC Charlotte’s Japanese Studies Program. He specializes in teaching courses on Japanese-English translation. He also works as a professional translator, and he is winning high praise for his English translations of Japanese picture books. His translation of Hiroshi Osada’s Every Color of Light: A Book about the Sky recently came out with Enchanted Lion Books, and already it is receiving excellent reviews. Publishers Weekly praised his translation in a starred review. Publishers Weekly also featured him in an article titled “Building Bridges: The Art of Children’s Book Translation.” I recently contacted David and asked him about his work as a translator of Japanese picture books. Here is what he sent to me:

I came to UNC Charlotte in 2018, where I’m fortunate enough to teach what I love: Japanese-English translation. Most of my courses have been workshops, in which the students and I have had detailed discussions about a wide variety of texts and translation strategies. Ultimately, my goal is to help them become more sensitive to the structures and nuances of both Japanese and English.

In 2017, I published my first translation of a children’s book: What What What, illustrated by Ryoji Arai and written by Arata Tendo. This was also my first time working with Enchanted Lion Books, a Brooklyn-based publisher with a discerning eye for great stories and art from around the world. What What What tells the story of a young boy who can’t keep himself from asking questions. As the book begins, the boy’s constant questions irritate and exasperate everyone around him. But, in the end, the boy’s inquisitive nature saves the day. Sometimes you really do need to keep on asking. What What What is both haunting and touching as it affirms the power of a child’s boundless curiosity.

This month, Enchanted Lion is publishing my translation of another book illustrated by Arai, with text by the late poet Hiroshi Osada. What What What is a very human tale, but Every Color of Light: A Book About the Sky is focused on the natural world. In the book’s opening pages, it starts to rain, and over time what begins as a light rain builds into a full-fledged storm. With every turn of the page, the weather grows more and more fierce—until the storm finally subsides and the sky returns to blue. In this stunning work, Osada’s words evoke nature’s moving lullaby while Arai’s art brings those words to life.

Through his work as a translator, David is helping American children make connections with Japanese children’s literature, but he is also contributing to Charlotte’s connections with the wider world. His English translations of What What What and Every Color of Light add an international dimension to the ever-expanding library of books that make up Storied Charlotte.

Tags: Charlotte international connections English translations of Japanese picture books

Charlotte’s Creators of Comic Strips

September 28, 2020 by Mark West

My love of comic strips goes back to my early childhood. When I was a boy, my father read aloud to my siblings and me. In addition to reading books aloud, he regularly read the Sunday comics to us. We always called them the “funnies.” Every Sunday morning, before our mother got up, one of us would hand Dad the comics sections from our local newspaper, and he would start reading. One Sunday, when I was around seven or eight, I decided to play a trick on him. I dug through the stack of old newspapers next to the fireplace, found the comics from the previous Sunday, and slipped them inside the current week’s comics. Then, after Dad woke up, I handed him a double dose of comics to read aloud. He began by reading Dennis the Menace, and then he turned the page and found another Dennis the Menace. To my glee, he also read the second one. He went on to read both weeks’ worth of every comic strip, never letting on that something was not quite right. Needless to say, I reveled in my own Dennis-the-Menace moment.

I still regularly read Dennis the Menace although nowadays I tend to identify more with the character of Mr. Wilson. Given my long history with Dennis the Menace, I was pleased to learn that one of the current creators of this comic strip is from the Charlotte area. His name is Marcus Hamilton, and he has been creating the daily Dennis the Menace comic strip since 1995. Hamilton, however, is not the only creator of comic strips with Charlotte connections. Charlotte can also claim Jim Scancarelli, the current writer and illustrator of Gasoline Alley, and the late Doug Marlette, the writer and illustrator of Kudzu.

Marcus Hamilton did not create the character of Dennis the Menace. That honor goes to Hank Ketcham, who started the Dennis the Menace comic strip in 1951 and continued to write and illustrate it until the mid-1990s. When Ketcham began making plans to retire in 1993, he set out to find someone who could keep his comic strip going. Hamilton, a Charlotte-based illustrator, heard that Ketcham was looking for a successor, and the opportunity appealed to him. He contacted Ketcham, who was living in California at the time, and applied for the position. Ketcham liked Hamilton’s style of illustration, so he flew Hamilton to California, and they spent three days working together on the comic strip. Hamilton later said, “I learned more in those three days than I did in four years at college.” Hamilton has been illustrating the daily panels of Dennis the Menace ever since.

Jim Scancarelli, like Hamilton, worked as a freelance illustrator in Charlotte for years before entering the world of comic strips. In fact, both of them worked as artists for WBTV (Charlotte’s CBS-affiliated television station) in the 1960s. Also like Hamilton, Scancarelli ended up taking over an existing comic strip. Gasoline Alley, the comic strip that Scancarelli now writes and illustrates, debuted in 1918, making it the longest-running current comic strip in the United States. Frank King originated the strip and continued to produce it until the mid-1950s. King created a large cast of colorful characters who live in the fictional town of Gasoline Alley. In 1956, Dick Moores stepped in as the writer/illustrator of the strip, and in 1979 Moores hired Scancarelli as his assistant. When Moores died in 1986, Scancarelli took over Gasoline Alley. In commenting on this transition, Scancarelli recently said, “When I came along, I put my own personality into it. The art is a little different. Dick had a certain way of doing the expressions, and I’ve kept the characters in character but put my own swing to them. Now it’s more fun because I don’t have to sit there and emulate him as much as I did in the beginning.”

For Doug Marlette, the creation of his comic strip Kudzu was tied to his career as an editorial cartoonist. Marlette worked as the cartoonist for The Charlotte Observer from 1972 to 1987, and he launched Kudzu during this time in his career. Kudzu ran from 1981 until 2007 when Marlette died in a car accident. At its peak in popularity, the strip was syndicated in 300 newspapers nationwide. Kudzu is set in the fictional town of Bypass, North Carolina, and much of the humor relates to the tensions between the traditional South and the New South. Although Kudzu is no longer published in newspapers, there are several collections of the strips that are still available, including Gone with the Kudzu.

Marcus Hamilton, Jim Scancarelli, and Doug Marlette are all major players in the world of comic strips. It takes a special talent to be able to tell a story in just a few panels, and these three cartoonists excel at telling stories in this compressed format. Their artistry, wit, and insights into human nature are reflected in their comic strips. As I see it, their comic strips are delightful contributions to Storied Charlotte.

Tags: comic strips Sunday comics

UNC Charlotte Graduates Find Success Writing for Children and Young Adults

September 21, 2020 by Mark West

In the fall of 1984, I joined UNC Charlotte’s English Department with the understanding that I would focus my teaching and scholarship on children’s literature. During the early years of my career as an English professor, I took a lot of pride and satisfaction in my successes in publishing articles and books. I remember, for example, when I sold a piece to the New York Times Book Review, I used the honorarium to throw a party for the entire English Department. I started the invitation by saying, “This party is being brought to you by the New York Times.” Nowadays, however, much of my sense of satisfaction comes from the successes of our students and former students.

Given my interest in children’s literature, I am particularly pleased that two recent graduates of our M.A. program—Lora Beth Johnson and Susan Diamond Riley—have found success writing books for children and young adults. This summer, Razorbill, a Penguin imprint, published Lora Beth’s Goddess in the Machine, a YA fantasy novel. Also taking place this summer, Koehler Books published Susan’s The Sea Turtle’s Curse, the second book in her Delta & Jax Mystery Series for middle-school readers. Both Lora Beth and Susan honed their writing skills while pursuing their M.A. degrees. I contacted these authors and asked them to provide me with information about their books and to comment on how their experiences as graduate students in UNC Charlotte’s English Department contributed to their successes as published authors.

Here is what Lora Beth sent to me:

Goddess in the Machine is my debut novel and the first in a duology from Razorbill, an imprint of Penguin Random House. In it, a girl wakes from cryonic sleep on a planet she doesn’t recognize and must team up with the mysterious soldier who woke her to navigate a future world where technology is considered magic and its practitioners revered as Deities. Goddess received a starred review from the School Library Journal and was selected for the American Bookseller Association’s Indies Introduce list. The Nerd Daily calls it “exhilarating and gripping,” and that it “reinvents one of the most beloved genres of fiction and leaves you wanting more.” I describe it as The 100 meets Jupiter Ascending, with a little bit of a linguistic twist.

When people ask me where I got the idea for Goddess, I always start by telling them about my experience at UNC Charlotte. I wrote the first draft of the manuscript that would become Goddess in Dr. Beth Gargano’s YA Fantasy course. It was a very different book then, with a different title, characters, and plot. But I had the opportunity to explore the themes and worldbuilding elements that I wanted to weave into the narrative. I did the next few revisions during the following semester, learning to work on deadlines and turning in multiple drafts to Dr. Gargano, who was my creative thesis committee chair. At the end of that semester, I put a 400-page, unbound manuscript into the boxes of Dr. Gargano, Dr. Balaka Basu, and Dr. Paula Connolly. They passed me anyway.

Since the first few drafts of Goddess were written while I was at UNCC, it was inevitably shaped by the courses I took, most notably by a linguistics course I had with Dr. Pilar Blitvich. Goddess is told from the perspective of two different characters who speak in different dialects. Depending on which character’s point of view you’re reading from, you’ll either be reading a science-fiction story or a fantasy. What one character calls technology, the other calls magic, and that difference in language is all it takes to put these two characters sharing a narrative into alternate realties. This is an idea that germinated from our studies in Dr. Blitvich’s course and grew into the entire crux of the novel.

Graduating wasn’t the end of my journey with Goddess—there were still revisions to be done, and queries to be sent, and editors to submit to—but my time at UNC Charlotte inspired and directed what would become my debut novel and continues to shape my writing. I’m currently revising the second and final book in the Goddess duology and plotting my next series. You’ll be able to find information about future work on my website: https://www.lorabethjohnson.com/.

Here is what Susan sent to me:

My novels The Sea Island’s Secret (University of South Carolina Press, 2019) and The Sea Turtle’s Curse (Koehler Books, 2020) are the first two books in the Delta & Jax Mystery series, with a third book currently in the works. While set in the present day, each book takes place in the Carolina Lowcountry and has the sibling duo solving a mystery from a particular era in our country’s past. In The Sea Island’s Secret, for instance, Delta and Jax find a skeleton and a mysterious message in a bottle in the salt marsh, sending them on a quest for a forgotten Civil War treasure. In their second adventure, the kids discover an ancient carving of a sea turtle on the beach, but soon find that the relic has magical powers that send them back nearly 500 years to the time of Spanish explorers and Native Americans. And did I mention that the turtle carving has apparently put their sea island home under a curse, with a hurricane hurtling their way? You can find more information about my novels on my website: https://www.susandiamondriley.com/

I am not exaggerating when I say that neither of these books would have existed if I hadn’t decided—at age 50—to enroll in UNC Charlotte for my M.A. degree in English. Up to that point, I had spent my professional career primarily writing nonfiction pieces for newspapers and marketing departments, as well as editing other writers’ works. If I was ever to achieve my dream of writing a fictional novel for children, though, I needed the structure and accountability that I believed a graduate program would provide. What I received was so much more. I found mentors in the field of Children’s Literature, instructors and published authors who graciously shared their insights and experiences in both the writing process and the world of publishing itself. My M.A. thesis consisted of an early draft of my first novel, and I admit that I would have been satisfied with that manuscript alone. After all, my bucket list item had been to write a novel, and I had done that. But my mentors would not let me leave it at that. Even after I graduated and moved out of state, the members of my thesis committee continued to check on me regularly to ensure that I was pursuing publication of my book. Without their encouragement, I don’t know that I would have ever seen my books on the shelves of bookstores and libraries, let alone in the hands of eager young readers asking, “When will the next Delta and Jax book be out?”

My life has completely changed since my days at UNC Charlotte. I now live on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, and have become part of a dynamic network of authors and artists who include me as one of their own. I regularly attend book launches (sometimes my own!), lead writing workshops for adults and children, and speak to groups of all ages—all via Zoom these days, of course. You might say I’ve started a whole new chapter of my life, and I can’t wait to see what happens next!

The successes that Lora Beth Johnson and Susan Diamond Riley have achieved as published authors are of their own doing. Their novels are the products of their fertile imaginations and their hard work. Still, I like to think that the time they spent as graduate students in UNC Charlotte’s English Department helped in the launching of their writing careers. As graduates of our M.A program, Lora Beth and Susan are alumni of UNC Charlotte and are part of the community of readers and writers that make up Storied Charlotte.

Tags: mystery series YA fantasy novel

Charlotte’s True Crime Writers

September 13, 2020 by Mark West

My introduction to the genre of true crime took place while I was still in high school. I decided to read Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood after I saw the 1967 film adaptation of Capote’s book. Since I had already seen the film. I had a pretty good sense of what to expect from the book, but it still disturbed me. It wasn’t just Capote’s account of the murders of the four members of the Clutter family that got to me; what troubled me the most was Capote’s ability to bring his readers inside the minds of the two killers. Capote helped me understand these men’s thinking process, and I found it unsettling to see the world through their eyes. Works of true crime can do that. As a genre, true crime is about more than the crimes depicted. Works of true crime can shed light into the dark corners of human nature and reveal sides of our society that we generally like to keep out of view.

Charlotte is home to several excellent true crime writers, including Karen Cox, Pam Kelley, and Cathy Pickens. These three writers have recently published works of true crime that provide readers with insights into the seamier side of life in the American South. Karen Cox, a history professor at UNC Charlotte, published Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South in 2017. UNC Press brought out a paperback version of this book last month. Pam Kelley, a former reporter for The Charlotte Observer, wrote Money Rock: A Family’s Story of Cocaine, Race, and Ambition in the New South, which the New Press published in 2018. Cathy Pickens, the author of the Southern Fried Mystery Series, wrote Charlotte True Crime Stories: Notorious Cases from Fraud to Serial Killing, which came out with the History Press in 2019. I contacted all three of these authors and asked them to provide me with information about their books and their interest in the genre of true crime.

Here is what Karen sent to me:

I wasn’t searching for a true crime story to tell, the true crime story found me. I was in the Mississippi state archives wrapping up research for a different book, when a story caught my eye. In 1932, an elderly white couple from Natchez, known for their eccentricities and who lived with their goats in a crumbling down antebellum mansion, were charged with murdering their neighbor in Depression-era Mississippi. It was southern gothic come to life. I mean, who could resist such a story? I couldn’t. That is where things began, but it is not where they ended.

Certainly, the notoriety that the case received in the national media at the time made this a fascinating story. Known locally as the “Goat Castle murder,” the focus had remained on the white protagonists for decades. But as I learned, at the heart of the story was a tale of racial injustice. It’s more likely that a journalist or nonfiction writer might have written about this story, but I saw in it an opportunity for me, a historian, to write creatively about various topics that are central to understanding southern history–race relations, Jim Crow segregation, the double-standard of southern justice, the decline of the southern aristocracy, the southern gothic, and mass incarceration. These are tough issues for readers to grasp, but woven into a story of true crime they become easier to digest and understand.

At some point, my interest in writing about this case became an obsession to set the story right, to give some historical justice to the poor black domestic–Emily Burns–who was convicted of the crime and sent to one of the South’s most notorious prisons, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, better known as Parchman. She was innocent, but white southern society demanded that someone, especially a black someone, pay the price for taking a white life–even if the eccentric white neighbors were complicit in the crime. I think that writing Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South freed me as a historian to write for broader audiences. Academia can beat the creativity out of a person, but through true crime, I found my way back.

Here is what Pam sent to me:

My book focuses on true crime – cocaine dealing – but when I decided to write Money Rock, I also wanted to explore Charlotte’s legacy of racism. In a way, this book was a do-over. I’d first written about Belton Lamont Platt, a flashy coke dealer nicknamed Money Rock, when I covered his trial for the Charlotte Observer in 1986. When I reconnected with him in 2011, he’d spent more than 20 years in federal prison and become an evangelical minister. That’s when I started asking deeper questions that I hadn’t considered the first time.

I find the genre of true crime a double-edged sword. Done badly, it can be exploitive, reinforcing stereotypes about criminals without exploring why they commit crimes. I’d put my original 1986 story about Money Rock in this category. I focused on the man’s jewelry and money and cars but didn’t dig deeper. On the other hand, the best true-crime reporting can spotlight and even correct injustice. One terrific example – not a book, but a podcast – is In the Dark’s series on Curtis Flowers, a man who was tried six times in Mississippi for the same murder. Its meticulous reporting uncovers a botched investigation and stunning prosecutorial misconduct. The podcast drew national attention to the case, and last week, Mississippi’s attorney general finally dropped it. Flowers is free after 23 years in prison.

When I first began researching my book, I was trying to understand what drove Belton in his Money Rock days. I wanted to hear what it was like to be a major cocaine dealer, why he bought so much jewelry. Eventually, I began to look at larger issues, such as the role structural racism – segregation, urban renewal, mass incarceration – played in his family over several generations. It’s been gratifying to hear readers say the book opened their eyes to Charlotte’s racial history. What I love about the true crime genre is that it can illuminate so many things besides crime.

Here is what Cathy sent to me:

When I decided to become a mystery writer, I journeyed through courtrooms, high-profile trials, morgues and autopsy suites, jails, all the places where we wrestle with often insurmountable questions of good and evil. I was first intrigued with the crime solvers and the crime scientists, rather than the crimes and criminals. Then I stumbled on the crime reporters, those who made reportage its own art form: William Roughead, Edmund Pearson, F. Tennyson Jesse, Rebecca West, Zora Neale Hurston, Edna Buchanan.

Along the way, I’ve learned only the edges are black and white. The stories behind the headlines are the most fascinating, but we seldom get to peek back there.

In trying to understand my fascination with true crime, I’ve pored over academic studies and random apologist essays. None offer satisfying answers. I started reading true crime because I needed to understand. How could I write good crime fiction if I didn’t understand why crimes were committed, how they were solved, what it felt like to be a victim? The real fascination? I love a good story. Nowhere have I found better storytellers than lawyers, police officers … and crooks.

Our fascination with crime stories isn’t new, we just have more ways of engaging with the stories than ever before, the latest being podcasts, cable TV networks, and do-it-yourself social media sleuths. The demographic for the true crime “consumer” skews female. Is the puzzle-solving attraction a simple hearkening to Nancy Drew or Miss Marple? As for readers of mystery fiction, readers of true crime are often attracted by the puzzle, by wanting to mentally (and safely) engage in unraveling the mystery of who-dunnit or why. The stories are complex—and subtle. And endlessly fascinating.

Crime is a mirror that reflects its society, the people, the place, the time when it occurs. To understand any city, it helps to know its extremes, and crime is certainly an extreme, one that alters the lives of those who commit crimes, those who suffer, those who solve, and those who try to understand. In its broad outline, Charlotte crime varies little from that in other cities. But like any city, Charlotte lends its own unique flavor to the ways people can go wrong. Though regularly reported, “annual statistics” or “average” stories seldom grab headlines—and imaginations—for long. So what makes a story become part of the warp and weft, woven into the essence of a city and the people who call it home? With over one million residents, the Charlotte area is full of stories. In Charlotte True Crime Stories: Notorious Cases from Fraud to Serial Killing are stories that started in dark places but that show the heart of a city still southern and, in good ways, a bit small-townish.

Like Truman’s Capote’s In Cold Blood, the true crime books written by Karen Cox, Pam Kelley, and Cathy Pickens can leave readers feeling a bit unsettled, but they can also help readers better understand why some of our fellow humans turn to lives of crime. Karen, Pam, and Cathy have all written books that belong on the shelves of the ever-expanding library that is Storied Charlotte.

Tags: Charlotte true crime writers southern gothic true crime genre

Allegra Westbrooks, Charlotte’s Pioneering African American Librarian

September 07, 2020 by Mark West

courtesy of the Robinson-Spangler
Carolina Room

I never met Allegra Westbrooks. She retired from the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library (then called the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County) in 1984, the same year that I arrived in Charlotte. She did, however, have an impact on my early years in Charlotte. Soon after my arrival, I met Pat Siegfried, the library’s Director of Youth Services. When she found out that I once made my living as a professional puppeteer, she obtained funding for me to do puppet shows at every branch of the public library. I remember being impressed with the library’s extensive network of branches. These branches had their own community outreach which they used to promote my puppet shows. I was especially impressed with how these outreach programs connected with Charlotte’s African American communities. I shared with Siegfried my positive experiences performing at the various branches, and she mentioned that the strengths of the branch system had a lot to do with the woman who had long served as the Supervisor of Branches. That woman was Allegra Westbrooks.

When Westbrooks moved to Charlotte in 1947 to manage the Brevard Street Library branch of the public library, the library system was still segregated. The Brevard Street Library was one of only two branches that served African Americans at the time. After the library system desegregated in 1956, Westbrooks moved to the Main Library where she ran the acquisitions operation before being promoted to Supervisor of Branches in 1957, making her the first African American to hold the position of supervisor in the Charlotte public library. Over the years, her title changed, but she continued to serve as a leader of the branch system throughout the rest of her career.

During her thirty-six years with the public library, Westbrooks played a major role in developing library outreach programs and expanding the library’s branch system. Early in her career, she collaborated with community groups and organizations to make books available to children who did not live near branches, and then she started a bookmobile program to bring books to residents throughout Mecklenburg County. Later in her career, she helped expand the number of library branches operating in the county, and she encouraged the branches to sponsor book-related events that would draw local residents to the branches.

Toward the end of her career with the library, Westbrooks worked closely with Judith Sutton, who became the Deputy Director of Libraries in 1977. As Sutton recently recalled, Westbrooks “did everything in her power to orient me to the system I joined, the community we served and to the nature, history and resources of the variety of branches of the library. Allegra was a calm, quiet-spoken but strong advocate for the best in public library services.”

Westbrooks talked about the highlights of her career during an oral history interview conducted in 2007. To listen to this interview, please click on the following link: https://repository.uncc.edu/islandora/object/uncc%3A2152

Westbrooks retired in 1984, but she remained involved in the Charlotte community until her death in 2017. In recognition of Westbrooks’ many contributions to the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library Board of Trustees recently decided to rename the Beatties Ford Regional Library in her honor. In April 2020, this library branch officially became known as the Allegra Westbrooks Regional Library. It’s a testament to Westbrooks’ lasting legacy that her contributions to Charlotte Mecklenburg Library are still remembered and honored some thirty-six years after she officially retired. As a librarian, Allegra Westbrooks devoted her career to making books and stories available to the residents of Charlotte. In the process, however, she made a place for herself in the pages of Storied Charlotte.

Tags: bookmobile

Labor Novels Set in the Charlotte Region

August 31, 2020 by Mark West

Given that Labor Day is nearly upon us, I have decided to focus this Storied Charlotte blog post on labor novels that take place in the Charlotte region. Not that many decades ago, the Charlotte area was known not for its banks but rather for its textile mills. I am reminded of this fact on a daily basis, for the house where I live started off as housing for the textile workers employed by Atherton Cotton Mills in what is now known as South End. Working conditions in our region’s textile mills were often far from ideal, and some of the workers in these textile mills responded to these conditions by participating in labor unions. These unions organized a number of strikes, the most famous of which was Gastonia’s Loray Mill Strike of 1929.

Over the years, numerous authors have written novels about the impact of the labor movement on the lives of textile workers in our region. For the purposes of today’s Storied Charlotte blog post, I will focus on three of these novels: Olive Tilford Dargan’s Call Home the Heart (1932), Doug Marlette’s The Bridge (2001), and Wiley Cash’s The Last Ballad (2017).

Olive Tilford Dargan’s Call Home the Heart originally came out under her pen name of Fielding Burke. The novel is largely set in Gastonia, and it deals with the Loray Mill Strike. The central character in the novel is a working-class woman named Ishma Waycaster. She moves from the Great Smokey Mountains to Gastonia in order to find work in a textile mill. Partially inspired by the strike leader Ella May Wiggins, this character becomes involved in the efforts to improve working conditions at the Loray Mill. The strike figures prominently in the conclusion of the novel, but most of the story focuses on the central character’s personal conflicts and her growing sense of desperation. Sometimes compared to Harriette Arnow’s The Dollmaker, Dargan’s Call Home the Heart is now recognized as one of best novels to come out of the labor movement. A writer for the Saturday Review described the book as “perhaps the best novel yet written of the industrial conflict in contemporary America.” The Feminist Press republished Call Home the Heart in 1983.

Doug Marlette is best remembered as The Charlotte Observer’s Pulitzer-Prize winning editorial cartoonist and creator of the Kudzu comic strip, but he also wrote two novels before his untimely death in a car accident in 2007. His first novel, The Bridge, takes place in a small North Carolina town where the central character, a newspaper cartoonist named Pick Cantrell, grew up. Pick returns to this town after his career takes a nose dive, and he reconnects with his grandmother, who is known as Mama Lucy. As the story progresses, Pick learns that his grandmother played a key role in the General Textile Strike of 1934. In many ways, The Bridge spans generations. The grandmother’s story and Pick’s story interconnect in unexpected ways. The Bridge was named best book of 2002 by the Southeastern Bookseller’s Association.

A native of Gastonia, Wiley Cash delves into the history of his boyhood hometown in The Last Ballad. I heard Cash talk about the origins of The Last Ballad when he spoke at the Charlotte Library’s Verse & Vino event in 2017. He mentioned that his parents and grandparents worked in the textile mills in the region, so he grew up having a general familiarity with the history of the textile industry. However, he went on to say that it wasn’t until he was in graduate school that he learned much about the Loray Mill Strike. He became fascinated with Ella May Wiggins, one of the leaders of the strike, and he decided to base The Last Ballad on her short but eventful life. In addition to being a labor organizer, she was a talented singer, and Cash became particularly interested in this aspect of her life. Cash tells the story of Ella May Wiggins through the voice of Ella May’s daughter Lilly, who shares the story of her mother’s life with her nephew some seventy-five years after the 1929 strike. The Last Ballad received the Southern Book Prize and the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction.

All three of these novels emphasize the roles that women played in the history of the labor movement in our region. These novels bring to life the struggles of North Carolina’s textile workers and shed light of their efforts to improve their working conditions and provide a better future for their children. As we celebrate Labor Day, I think we should take a moment to reflect on the stories of the textile workers who played such an important role in the history of Charlotte and the surrounding communities. The stories of their lives and struggles are part of Storied Charlotte.

Tags: industrial conflict labor novels labor unions Loray Mill Strike textile industry textile mills textile strike

Gail Z. Martin and the Launching of ConTinual

August 24, 2020 by Mark West

As one of Charlotte’s most prominent writers of fantasy novels, Gail Z. Martin is a frequent guest/speaker at fantasy conventions. This time of the year, Gail is usually making plans to attend Dragon Con, the giant fantasy convention that normally takes place in downtown Atlanta during the Labor Day weekend. For Gail, participating in Dragon Con provides her with an opportunity to promote her latest fantasy novels, and she has several new novels to promote this year, including Sellsword’s Oath, the second volume of her new and critically acclaimed Assassins of Landria epic fantasy series. This year, however, Dragon Con has been turned into a virtual event because of the coronavirus pandemic. In fact, all of the fantasy conventions in the region have been cancelled or converted into online events. For Gail and all of the other fantasy writers and fans who normally flock to these conventions, the shuttering of these events has been a tremendous disappointment.

Anyone who knows Gail would not be surprised to learn that she quickly resolved not to let a measly global pandemic stop her from interacting with her fans and collaborating with her fellow authors. As soon as she realized that Dragon Con and the other area fantasy conventions would have to cancel their in-person gatherings this year, Gail decided to launch ConTinual, an innovative, ongoing, online experience for fantasy writers and fans. ConTinual has its roots in Charlotte,but it has already attracted attention in fandom circles from around the country. I recently contacted Gail and asked her to provide me with an account of ConTinual’s origin story. Here is what she sent to me:

Creating an online, ongoing event bridging a variety of fandoms isn’t a one-person task—it takes a village. Having the idea is the easy part—bringing all the pieces together requires the dedicated commitment of many people.

That’s important to keep front and center, because while I had the idea for ConTinual (the online, ongoing, multi-genre convention that never ends), and I’m its biggest cheerleader and its official ‘face’, I couldn’t do it without a fantastic operating committee of volunteers as well as all of the many, many authors, performers, musicians, vendors, readers, fans, and attendees who make it all happen.

I write epic fantasy, urban fantasy and more as Gail Z. Martin; and as Morgan Brice, I write urban fantasy MM paranormal romance. I’m based in Charlotte, where I live with my husband and frequent co-author Larry N. Martin and our two dogs. I’ve been very involved in NC-based fandom for more than a decade, and in normal years, I’m a guest author/panelist at sci-fi/fantasy and romance conventions up and down the East Coast (and sometimes even farther afield).

One thing I had noticed last year was that Romance authors had a more active and accessible online network of bloggers/reviewers than the science fiction/fantasy community. I’ve seen how valuable that active online network can be to readers and authors, and I had been musing about how we might create something like that to bring multiple fandoms/genres together online, since people read a variety of kinds of books and like a lot of the same movies/shows. (I’m also a huge fan of the TV show Supernatural).

Then I was at Disney World the week everything shut down. Book and fandom conventions both big and small were cancelled. And it hit me that there weren’t going to be conventions for a long while. I’d been talking with Charlotte-based authors John Hartness, Jim McArthur, Theresa Glover, and Nancy Northcott as well as VA/MD-based authors Jeanne Adams and Jean Marie Ward about how fantasy/SF needed to build the kind of online infrastructure that Romance had, and broaden it to include a larger range of fans.

It seemed like the Great Pause would be a perfect time to build an online community, because authors/creators needed an outlet and were at loose end and thus available to do Zoom panels, online readings, performances and more. We also had a ready audience that was bored and looking for diversion. I didn’t just want to do something temporary. I wanted to build an ongoing platform/event/community to last long after the pandemic.

So before breakfast one day while I was still on vacation, I set up the ConTinual Facebook group, and asked one of my cover artists, Natania Barron, to create a logo. And then I messaged my friends and said, “Hey guys, I just did a thing….”

They came in as the original operating committee. We started to plan discussion topics and reach out to our fairly extensive personal networks of authors, musicians, performers, and more to record panels, add programming, and think about how we could make ConTinual a great experience for everyone and keep it going long after the ‘current unpleasantness’ fades. We’re currently building out a website, as well as content on YouTube, Discord and Twitch. Right now, we’re focusing hard on holiday programming, to add some geeky good will to the upcoming season. We hope to be constantly evolving and growing, so that there’s always something new. Anyone who wants to learn more about ConTinual should click on the following link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ConTinual/?tn-str=*F

Launching ConTinual has been a challenging project for Gail, but it has not diverted her from her many writing projects. One of Charlotte’s more prolific authors, Gail is especially well known for her fantasy adventure novels. She has published more than 30 novels and short story collections, not counting the ten or so novels that she has co-written with her husband, Larry Martin. For more information about Gail’s many books, please click on the following link: https://ascendantkingdoms.com/ As Gail sees it, launching ConTinual and writing her fantasy novels are not really separate activities—they are more like different sides of her role as a player in the larger drama that is Storied Charlotte.

Tags: book and fandom conventions epic fantasy fandom fantasy adventure novels Romance authors science fiction/fantasy community urban fantasy

Sandy Hill’s Charlotte Mysteries

August 17, 2020 by Mark West

Since launching my Storied Charlotte blog in February of this year, I have become increasingly aware of the many Charlotte authors who once worked as reporters or editors for The Charlotte Observer. I have featured a number of these former Observer employees on my blog, including Tommy Tomlinson, Dannye Romine Powell, Patricia Cornwell, Jodie Jaffe, and Kathleen Purvis. With this week’s blog post, I am adding Sandy Hill to this list.

Hill moved to Charlotte in the 1960s, and she worked as an editor for the Observer for many years.She also, however, has written historical novels and cozy mysteries, including the just-released Shadow Dance. Like two of her other mysteries, Shadow Dance is set in Charlotte. I recently contacted Hill and asked her about how living in Charlotte has influenced her career as a novelist. Here is what she sent to me:

All but one of my novels are set in North Carolina. Tangled Threads is set in a mythical Tar Heel cotton mill village in the late 1890s. A visit to the exhibit “From Cotton Fields to Skyscrapers” at the Levine Museum of the New South piqued my interest, and I ended up writing the story of two girls who grew up in a mill village, one leaving and the other staying and how their lives intertwined. That called for a sequel, Kate & Delia, also set in a North Carolina mill village, about what happened later.

The Blue Car is a coming-of-age story set in the North Carolina foothills and deals with difficult choices and the courage to stand up for what is right. I wrote the opening sentence 20 years ago at a writing workshop in South Carolina.: “They came for her in a blue car.” That line stayed in my mind for years. Finally, I sat down with the opening line and let the novel unfold from there.

Three of my cozy mysteries are set in Charlotte: Deadline for Death, An Ice Day to Die, and Shadow Dance. All of them feature journalists. Deadline for Death, with my sleuth, Erin Markham, deals with murder at a fictional Charlotte newspaper. It gives a behind-the-scenes look at a big-city newsroom. An Ice Day to Die takes my intrepid newspaper editor Erin to an ice-skating competition in Charlotte. I’ve competed in skating competitions as an older adult and had one appearance in the chorus line of Ice Capades when it came to Charlotte some years ago. I drew on that background, plus more research for Ice Day to Die. Shadow Dance is set in Charlotte but has a visiting journalist, not Erin. It draws on my brief foray into ballroom dancing and includes rock climbing at Crowders Mountain.

One of the things I’ve enjoyed most about writing is talking to Charlotte book clubs about my novels and the process of writing. It’s interesting as a writer to see what readers think of your darlings. Readers who want to know more about me can visit my author page: amazon.com/author/sandyhillnovels.

By setting several of her mystery novels in Charlotte, Sandy Hill is not just writing about what she knows; she is also providing Charlotte readers with the added pleasure that comes from recognizing the places that figure in Hill’s Storied Charlotte.

Tags: books set in Charlotte cozy mysteries historical novels

Charlotte’s Food Writers

August 10, 2020 by Mark West

Earlier this month, Charlotte lost one of its leading food writers. Helen Moore, The Charlotte Observer’s food writer from 1966 to 2007, died on August 3, 2020. During her long career as a food journalist, Moore did much more than share recipes and cooking tips. She wrote about food traditions in the South, interviewed prominent North Carolinians about the role that food played in their lives, and commented on the changing food scene in Charlotte. Moore earned an honored place in the pantheon of Charlotte food writers.

Like Moore, most of the prominent food writers from Charlotte have written about the food of the South, and this focus is reflected in the titles of some of their books. Betty Feezor, the host of a popular cooking show that ran on WBTV from 1953 to 1977, published her most famous book, Betty Feezor’s Carolina Recipes, in 1964. Eudora Garrison, the first food editor for The Charlotte Observer, published a cookbook titled Eudora Garrison’s Favorite Carolina Recipes from Carolina Kitchens in 1967. Amy Rogers, a food commentator on Charlotte’s NPR station WFAE, published Red Pepper Fudge and Blue-Ribbon Biscuits: Favorite Recipes & Stories from North Carolina State Fair Winners in 1995 and Hungry for Home: Stories of Food from Across the Carolinas in 2004. More recently, Charlotte writers Kathleen Purvis and Ashli Quesinberry Stokes have published noteworthy books about food in the South.

Kathleen Purvis is currently Charlotte’s best-known food writer. From 1989 to 2019, she served as the food editor for The Charlotte Observer. In this capacity, she wrote articles and regular columns about the food scene in Charlotte as well as articles about regional and national topics related to food. She has also published numerous articles about food and drink in popular magazines, such as Southern Living, Garden & Gun, and Our State: Celebrating North Carolina. In addition to her countless articles and columns, Purvis has written three books, all of which have been published at UNC Press. Her venture into book writing came about as a result of meeting Elaine Maisner, an editor at UNC Press, at a food-related event. Maisner was about to launch a series of cookbooks under the heading of Savor the South. Her idea was that each book in the series would feature one quintessential Southern ingredient. Purvis liked the idea, and she ended up writing two books in the series: Pecans: A Savor the South Cookbook (2012) and Bourbon: A Savor the South Cookbook (2013). She then went on to write her third book, Distilling the South: A Guide to Southern Craft Liquors, which UNC Press published in 2018. For more information about Purvis and her publications, please click on the following link: https://kathleenpurvis.com/about/

Ashli Quesinberry Stokes is a Professor of Communication Studies and former Director of the Center for the Study of the New South at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Stokes is a specialist in the field of food studies, writing about Southern food in academic journal articles and for popular outlets such as Zocalo Public Square, Academic Minute, Charleston Post & Courier, and The Counter. She regularly teaches a course on Southern Foodways, is working with the UNCC Botanical Garden to create an interpretive garden based on North Carolina food, and will be engaging in a Fulbright comparing Scottish and Appalachian food traditions in Spring 2021 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her interest in Southern foodways is reflected in her book Consuming Identity: The Role of Food in Redefining the South, which she co-authored with Wendy Atkins-Sayre. The University Press of Mississippi published this book in 2016 as part of their Race, Rhetoric, and Media Series. I recently contacted Stokes and asked her how her experiences in Charlotte have influenced her research in the area of Southern foodways. Here is what she sent me:

Shortly after moving to Charlotte in 2006, I began working on a journal article about how food organizations use a variety of communication strategies to attract new members in order to help cultivate change in local food systems. I had no idea then that what started with researching the Charlotte chapter of Slow Food International would begin my own enthusiastic involvement in the city’s vibrant food culture and serve as a research “lab” for writing Consuming Identity.

Although our book is an exploration of the persuasive messages that Southern food sends and how they help shape people’s identities in the region overall, Charlotte’s restaurants, markets, food-based events, and food and drink related businesses sure have a lot to say. The city balances on the edge of newer and older forms of Southern food culture, and it is fascinating. For example, we went to the Mallard Creek Presbyterian Church Barbecue in north Charlotte, held since 1929. We watched in fascination as police kept the interstate exit traffic moving as thousands of people sought a plate and a handshake with a political candidate in the drive through line. We also went to the Poplar Tent Presbyterian Church Barbecue in Concord to learn about its own long-standing tradition; however, we ended up talking to the church matriarchs about their special desserts, people behind us waiting patiently to get a slice of Mrs. Margaret Ann’s chocolate pie or JoAnna Goff’s five flavor pound cake. Later, we sampled pad Thai made with zucchini and sweet potato noodles at a vegan cafe in South End, wandering happily through South End Market afterward to chat with local farmers selling everything from impressive mushrooms, goat cheese, hydroponic microgreens, and edible flowers. After sampling Price’s famous fried chicken, seated in the grass outside watching the Light Rail glide by, we headed Uptown to watch mixologists use rum and rye from Charlotte distilleries to craft the latest “it” cocktail.

Although the food and drink were delicious, people’s stories were better. We talked with women like Tori and Mia, the Cake Makin’ Sisters, trying to start a minority-owned business and land a spot on a food television program. We learned about a Chinese immigrant who stir-fried okra in his restaurant rather than deep frying it in the way some residents were used to. We met suburban moms who made amazing Southern cakes and used Instagram to sell them while their kids napped. Manolo Betancur told us about his bakery’s weekly deliveries up to the North Carolina state line, bringing a taste of churros and Latin American breads to the migrant workers.

We analyzed many food messages while writing the book, but one was clear: Charlotteans, like their foods, are many things. The changing South can be experienced (and appreciated) simply by taking a delicious bite. I plan on continuing my communication research in Charlotte’s food culture once the pandemic eases: attending a Soul Food Sessions dinner, designed to showcase the city’s African American chefs, going to a TasteMakers Meet Up, a food hobbyist club, and supporting the small restaurants that need our business. There’s so much to learn about the city’s people through its food, and I can’t wait to get out again.

Over the years, the food writers of Charlotte have helped define the nature of Southern foodways. These writers have shown how Southern food and storytelling go together like shrimp and grits. Here’s to Helen Moore, Betty Feezor, Eudora Garrison, Amy Rogers, Kathleen Purvis, Ashli Quesinberry Stokes, and all of the other food writers from Charlotte. My appreciation goes to all of them for their contributions to Storied Charlotte.

Tags: cookbooks food journalist food traditions food writers foodways southern cookbooks southern food southern living

Theresa Payton: Charlotte’s Cybersecurity Expert and Author of Manipulated

August 04, 2020 by Angie Williams

Theresa Payton, an expert in the field of cybersecurity and long-time resident of Charlotte, recently published Manipulated: Inside the Cyberwar to Hijack Elections and Distort the Truth (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020). Payton is uniquely well qualified to write this book. She served as the White House Chief Information Officer for President George W. Bush, after which she founded Fortalice Solutions, a leading cybersecurity consulting firm. In Manipulated, she draws on her experience and expertise to explain how Russia and other foreign and domestic powers are using artificial intelligence and cyberattacks to influence American elections. She goes into detail about what she calls “the manipulator’s playbook,” and she provides readers with practical advice on how to avoid being manipulated in this way.

Payton’s book has been out for only a few months, but it is already drawing widespread attention and praise. The reviewer for Booklist, for example, wrote “Payton, an expert in cybersecurity, sounds a clarion call that our political process is at risk and explains why and how it is being assailed by foreign and domestic enemies of democracy. Many conservatives may want to dismiss Payton’s arguments, since she places much of the blame for the situation at the feet of current Republican leadership. But Payton can’t be dismissed as a liberal Democratic cynic, since her credentials are firmly rooted in the work she did for the George W. Bush administration. Payton clearly knows her stuff, [and] she paints a timely, frightening picture.”

Payton is a well-known player in Charlotte’s cybersecurity circles. Since the mid-1990s, she has helped Charlotte’s banking community improve the security of their banking technology and IT systems. She has also shared her expertise with Charlotte’s general public by giving televised presentations on WBTV on “Protecting Your Cyberturf,” and by participating in UNC Charlotte’s Cybersecurity Symposium. I recently reached out to Payton and asked her about her Charlotte connections. Here is what she sent to me:

I had a unique opportunity due to the financial services industry to move to Charlotte, NC. I moved here in 1995 and in my mind, I thought it would be a great place to “stay for a couple of years.” It’s now 2020 and I never really left! Funny enough, when my husband first left the US Navy, we had said our goal was to move to Washington, DC; however, our jobs brought us to Charlotte. When offered a position to work for President George W. Bush at the White House, we debated on whether or not to make a move to Washington, DC. We decided the best place to live and raise our family would be Charlotte, so I made the commute each week for almost 2.5 years.

Living in Charlotte means I have easy access to incredibly smart and talented colleagues, a variety of parks and gardens and to direct flights to almost any place in the world. I do most of my idea generation with smart people all around Charlotte. I think through my book ideas while I am on my runs around our beautiful city. For my recent book, Manipulated, guess where my writing desk was? American Airlines planes going to and from Charlotte. I’ve logged over 1.5 million air miles! That’s a lot of time to dedicate to writing. I am proud to call Charlotte home and have been delighted to have the support of Charlotte citizens who have purchased and promoted my books, and from Park Road Books. It’s one of the best indie bookstores in the nation, and it’s right here!

When I was talking with Sherri Smith from Park Road Books about Payton’s Manipulated, she referred to Payton as one of Charlotte’s most prominent writers of nonfiction. Sherri’s comment caused me to reflect a bit about Charlotte’s community of readers and writers. Charlotte, of course, is home to many gifted fiction writers. It is important to remember, however, that Storied Charlotte includes some very influential writers of nonfiction, including Theresa Payton.

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