When I learned about the recent publication of Jack Claiborne’s Charlotte, the Slugger and Me:  A Coming-of-Age Story of a Southern City and Two Tenacious Brothers, I immediately flashed back to my introduction to Claiborne’s writings about Charlotte.  As soon as I moved to Charlotte in the summer of 1984, I subscribed to The Charlotte Observer, and that’s when started reading his weekly column. Titled “This Time and Place,” this column ran in the paper from 1970 to 1990.   In this column, Claiborne wrote about the people and history of Charlotte, and his column helped me better understand the city that has since become my permanent home. 

In his new memoir, Claiborne tells the story of how he and his brother Jimmy (who came to be known as Slug) moved to Charlotte in 1936 following the death of their father. At the time he was just five and his brother was four.  They grew up together in a city that was not yet known as a New South city, but it was already a city that was rapidly changing.  Claiborne devotes much of his memoir to discussing how he and his brother were influenced by the development of the city.  As he recalls, both brothers found opportunities in this fast-changing Charlotte. Claiborne built a career as a journalist with The Charlotte Observer while his brother became one of Charlotte’s leading restaurateurs. 

Dannye Romine Powell recently interviewed Claiborne about his new memoir.  This interview appeared in The Charlotte Observer on March 24, 2024.  Toward the end of the interview, she asked the following question: “You describe Charlotte of the 1930s and 1940s as a ‘welcoming place where you didn’t need a fortune or a pedigree to make friends or find favor.” Does today’s Charlotte retain some of those features?” Here is his response:

Oh, yes.  Charlotte is still an open and inviting city.  Its leaders are still people who came here from elsewhere.  There is no ruling class of “Old Charlotte” sachems managing things behind the scenes.  District representation ensures that all parts of the city are heard from on vital issues.

For readers who are interested in hearing Claiborne talk about his memoir, the Myers Park Library is sponsoring an event called “An Evening with Jack Claiborne, Retired Charlotte Observer Associate Editor.”  This event will take place on Tuesday, April 30, 2024, from 6:00 pm to 7:30 pm.  Registration is required.  For more information about this event, please click on the following link:  https://cmlibrary.bibliocommons.com/events/65f30279ad1be248855a33eb

Charlotte, the Slugger and Me is not Claiborne’s only book about Charlotte.  He also wrote The Charlotte Observer: Its Time and Place, 1869-1986 (2012), Crown of the Queen City:  The Charlotte Chamber from 1870 to 1999 (1999), and Jack Claiborne’s Charlotte (1974).  Anyone who wants to know more about the history of Storied Charlotte should acquaint themselves with the writings of Jack Claiborne.

Given that April is National Poetry Month, I think it is fitting to focus this week’s Storied Charlotte blog post on the upcoming visits to Charlotte by two nationally known poets—Nathan McClain and Jericho Brown.

Nathan McClain will give a poetry reading on Thursday, April 4, from 4:00 – 5:15 p.m. in Atkins Library’s Halton Reading Room on the main UNC Charlotte campus. McClain will read from his work, followed by an audience Q&A and book signing.  One of the organizers of this event is Allison Hutchcraft, who is a creative writing professor at UNC Charlotte.  I contacted Allison and asked her for more information about this event. Here is what she sent to me:

Acclaimed poet Nathan McClain will visit UNC Charlotte on Thursday, April 4, visiting Allison Hutchcraft’s Intermediate Poetry Writing class (who recently finished reading McClain’s latest book of poems) and give a campus reading of his work in Atkins Library’s Halton Reading Room from 4:00 – 5:15 p.m.

Nathan McClain (he/him) is the author of two collections of poetry: Previously Owned (Four Way Books, 2022), longlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award, and Scale (Four Way Books, 2017). He is a recipient of fellowships from The Frost Place, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and is a Cave Canem fellow. He earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College. His poems and prose have appeared in Plume Poetry 10, The Common, Guesthouse, Poetry Northwest, and Zócalo Public Square, among others. He teaches at Hampshire College and serves as poetry editor of the Massachusetts Review.

Of Previously Owned, poet Diane Seuss has said, “The opening poem of Nathan McClain’s Previously Owned operates like the legend of a map, a key to the book’s existential topography. The poem’s presenting subject is a Roman sculpture of a boy pulling a thorn from his foot, or ‘not pulling / rather, about to pull.’ McClain addresses the self via the second person, and draws in the reader, too, as observer: ‘and here you / are, looking,’ witness to the boy’s ‘insistent grief.’ ‘And what // have you learned from / standing here so long examining pain?’ Previously Owned exists in this incremental space—the about to pull, the almost, the grief, the tenderness, the examination, and the distance. It’s a masterstroke in a masterful collection, in which a speaker of a nuanced intelligence and lush interiority reflects upon the American landscape, its pastoral and judicial and historical duplicity entwined with racial alienation and violence. McClain has written a collection of sculptural artfulness—through which the thorn of grief thrums still.”

The poet Tommye Blount has said, “In Previously Owned, America’s dark history is not quaintly rooted in the past, but dangerously ever-present. ‘And what / have you learned from / standing here so long / examining pain?’ Nathan McClain questions in the opening poem ‘Boy Pulling a Thorn from His Foot’—not just the reader—himself as witness. If Scale, his first collection, can be said to be anchored in domestic space, then Previously Owned expands the architecture of that domestic space to include Country and the country. The ways in which McClain troubles the pastoral and peripatetic traditions thrills me: ‘I’ve never actually seen a moose, / only signs warning of moose, / and NO PASSING ZONE signs’ (‘Where the View Was Clearer’); and of the fireflies in ‘Now that I live in this part of the country,’ ‘look, they / flash the way hazard / lights sometimes flash… / and I might have said, no, / don’t they seem to pulse / with the glow of old / grievances?’ This book is a triumph and will be talked about for years. Nathan McClain is one of the most daring poets I know.”

Jericho Brown will perform and discuss his poetry as part of Charlotte Lit’s annual Lit Up! celebration on Wednesday, May 1 from 6:00-8:30 at Not Just Coffee, 1026 Jay Street, in Charlotte.  This is a ticketed event, and reservations are required.  The following information about this event is from Charlotte’s Lit’s website:

Join Charlotte Lit and Pulitzer Prize winner Jericho Brown on May 1 for Lit Up! 2024, as we celebrate eight years serving the literary arts community. Jericho performs his work, then joins Charlotte Lit Press author AE Hines and audience members in a thought-provoking conversation. Enjoy live music, a wide selection of beverages, and hors d’oeuvres by Something Classic. 6:00-8:30 pm, Not Just Coffee, Jay Street.

Ticket Options:

• General admission tickets include light bites and libations | $100 Members & their Guests, $150 Non-members [Purchase Here]
• Limited VIP tickets include light bites and libations, priority reserved seating, a signed copy of one of Jericho’s books, and a VIP lounge with our featured guests | $250 Members Only [Purchase Here]

Jericho Brown is author of the The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), which won the Pulitzer Prize, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. 

He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues, 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. 

His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.

I am excited that Nathan McClain and Jericho Brown are coming to Charlotte, and I am sure that the many readers and writers of poetry who live in Storied Charlotte are just as excited as I am. 

For the third year in a row, many of the independent bookstores located in the Charlotte area are working together during the month of April on a project that they call the Greater Charlotte Book Crawl.  Their collaborative book crawl is timed to coincide with the Independent Bookstore Day, which will take place on April 27, 2024.  These participating bookstores are encouraging area readers to visit each other’s businesses and get to know what makes each bookstore unique.  For more information about the book crawl, please click on the following link:  https://greatercharlottebookcrawl.com/

Beginning April 1, bookstore lovers can pick up Greater Charlotte Book Crawl (GCBC) passports at any of the nineteen participating bookstores. Each visit to one of the bookstores during the month of April earns the crawler a new stamp.  The goal is for participants to visit all nineteen stores. Each “finisher” will earn a special edition 2024 GCBC tote bag. The finishers simply need to show a completed passport at any participating bookstore. Finishers can also submit a photo of their completed passport to be entered in a drawing for the Grand Prize: a collection of gift cards from each of the bookstores.

The Greater Charlotte Book Crawl is all about the joy of touring bookstores.  As I see it, there is something magical about visiting bookstores.  I love going to bookstores and perusing the shelves.  Another way that I enjoy touring bookstores is by reading books about bookstores.  For readers who share this interest of mine, here is a short list of great books that are either set in bookstores or are about bookstores. 

One of my favorite novels that takes place in a bookstore is The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin.  A. J. Fikry, the central character in this novel, is a lonely widower who owns a quirky bookstore called Island Books.  A. J. is a cantankerous man, but his love of Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry and his deep knowledge of classic literature provide him with ways to connect with other booklovers.

One of my favorite nonfiction books about bookstores is Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books by Paul Collins.  This memoir recounts the author’s humorous experiences when he and his family move from San Francisco to Hay-on-Wye, a Welsh town that is famous for its many used bookstores.  He gets a job working in one of these bookstores where he tries to organize an American literature section.  This book is full of eccentric bibliomaniacs and all sorts of odd and amusing information about book history. 

One of my favorite ghost stories that is set in a bookstore is The Sentence by Louise Erdrich. The novel takes place in Birchbark Books, which is a real bookstore that Erdrich owns in Minneapolis.  The main characters in the novel are Tookie, a Native American woman who works in the store, and Flora, the ghost of a white woman who used to patronize the store.  Erdrich herself also shows up as a minor character in the novel. 

One of my favorite fantasy books that takes place in a bookstore is The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods.  Often described as a work of magic realism, this novel deals with a magical bookshop in Dublin that functions as a sort of time-travel portal.  Part of the novel is set in the 1920s, and part of the story is set in the present day.  However, the timelines converge in intriguing ways.

One of my favorite children’s books about a bookstore is The Book Itch:  Freedom, Truth, and Harlem’s Greatest Bookstore by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson and illustrated by R. Gregory Christie.  This book is a work of fiction, but it is based on the real history of the National Memorial African Bookstore, which Lewis H. Michaux opened in Harlem in 1932.  The store remained in business until 1974.

While I enjoy reading books about bookstores, I enjoy visiting real bookstores even more.   I urge all my fellow bookstore lovers to participate in the Greater Charlotte Book Crawl.  It has just been around for three years, but it has already established itself as a Storied Charlotte tradition.