Storied Charlotte

Shaun “Shef” Williams Is Cooking at the Library

January 20, 2024 by Mark West

When I first learned about the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library’s Around the World in 21 Branches Festival Tour, it reminded me a fun culinary event called a progressive dinner party. In case you are not familiar with this type of dinner party, it refers to a multi-course dinner during which the successive courses are prepared and served at the different homes of the various people hosting the party. The library’s Around the World in 21 Branches Festival Tour is organized in a similar way, but instead of taking place in different homes, this multi-stop event takes place at the various branches of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library. The Sugar Creek Library is the next stop on the tour. The Sugar Creek Library’s event will take place on Saturday, January 27, 2024, from 11:00 am to 2:00 pm. Given that I already associate the event with a dinner party, I am especially pleased to report that the Sugar Creek Library event really will involve the cooking of delicious food.

The featured author at the Sugar Creek Library event is Shaun “Shef” Williams. Shaun will talk about his new cookbook titled Soul in the Citi: Homestyle Cooking in the City. As part of his presentation, he will be doing live cooking demonstrations during which he will prepare recipes from his cookbook. His presentation is scheduled to begin at 12:00 noon. For more information about the event and to register, please click on the following link: https://cmlibrary.bibliocommons.com/events/659ef7dfeb28943d007ffb15

Shaun currently lives in Mint Hill where he operates a catering and event production business called Shef Shaun’s Kitchen: https://www.shefshaunskitchen.com/ In writing Soul in the Citi, Shaun drew on his catering experiences, but he also drew on his experiences working as a chef in New York City and Charlotte. However, it was his childhood experiences cooking with his grandmothers in Cleveland that served as his chief inspiration when writing this cookbook.

He recalls that his grandmothers “made everything from scratch and often with no written recipes. The secret ingredient to making everything taste so good was definitely love.” His goal in writing Soul in the Citi is to help his readers “cook up dishes that remind you of Grandma’s kitchen!”

In addition to running his business and sharing his love of soul food, Shawn is writing his second cookbook. I am sure that his many fans in Storied Charlotte are ready for a second helping.

Tags: cookbooks

Charlotte’s Three Musketeers

January 13, 2024 by Mark West

I read The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas during my college days. Although I do not remember all of the details of the plot, I do remember the camaraderie of the three central characters. I also remember their famous motto: “All for one, one for all.” I thought about The Three Musketeers and their motto when I heard that three Charlotte fantasy authors—John G. Hartness, Patrick Dugan, and Darin Kennedy—have decided to band together in order to promote their new books. I contacted them and asked for more information about their project. Here is what they sent to me:

John G. Hartness, Patrick Dugan, and Darin Kennedy are three Charlotte-based fantasy authors who have embarked upon a new venture for 2024. All have a new book/series that they are eager to get into the hands of readers, and they have joined forces to launch a Kickstarter to introduce their latest stories to the world.

John is a fixture in the southeastern science-fiction/fantasy convention circuit and was previously the president of Charlotte Writers Club, the oldest writer organization in the Charlotte area. His works include various series such as Bubba the Monster Hunter, The Black Knight Chronicles, and Quincy Harker – Demon Hunter, the latter two of which are actually set here in Charlotte. His latest book is The Seven: Unforgiven, a high-fantasy take on the Akira Kurosawa film The Seven Samurai of which John is a huge fan.

Patrick is a local programmer in the Charlotte area who writes everything from steampunk to high fantasy to cyberpunk fairies and is a frequent guest at multiple events along the southeast as well. He works with fellow author Jim Nettles/James McDonald on a project called Books & Beer where Charlotte-area and regional authors come together monthly to do readings and sell books to the public at venues where alcohol and literature are paired liberally. His latest book is Stone Cold Witch, a tale of an inexperienced elemental witch in Asheville, NC, who must learn her trade quickly as a member of her coven has been murdered, a demon is loose, and the fate of the world is at stake.

Darin is a family physician with Atrium Health where he both sees patients and teaches new physicians right here in Charlotte and writes fantasy stories in his free time. Doctor by day, novelist by night, Darin has published numerous books, including two trilogies, Fugue & Fable (set in Charlotte) and The Pawn Stratagem as well as a modern-day, young adult take on A Christmas Carol. His new series is Songs of the Ascendant, an ‘80s pop music fueled, contemporary fantasy that takes elements of multiple shows, movies, and books from Darin’s formative years and blends them together. He has nearly finished writing the third of the first three books in this series – Shadows of the Night, All Fired Up, and You Better Run – and he can’t wait to get these books out there to the public.

The new Kickstarter for these three Charlotte-based authors runs 2 Jan – 1 Feb 2024. Feel free to check out their latest offerings. The link to check out the Kickstarter and back their project is:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/falstaffbooks/new-year-new-books

I wish John, Patrick, and Darin all the best on their three-pronged promotional project. Like the three original musketeers, these three fantasy authors have embraced the motto of “One for all, all for one.” Also like the original musketeers, our three comrades have connections to a real place. The original musketeers were based in the storied city of Paris, but our modern-day trio can be found right here in Storied Charlotte.

Tags: fantasy stories

Chris Arvidson’s Ekphrastic Adventures

January 08, 2024 by Mark West

A month or two ago, one of my students stopped by my office and asked me about the meaning of a literary term that she had come across in her reading for a class that she was taking on literary theory. After I answered her question, she said, “I wish I could be like you and know the meaning of all of these fancy words and terms.” I assured her that in reality I do not know the meaning of all the literary terms that are bandied about these days. I think that she might have been a little disappointed in me.

I am in my late 60s, but I am still adding new words and terms to my vocabulary on a regular basis. Recently, for example, I looked up the meaning of the term ekphrastic poetry. My friend Chris Arvidson, a Charlotte poet and artist, had mentioned to me that she had taken an interest in writing ekphrastic poetry, but I wasn’t sure what she meant by this term. Although I associated the term with art, I didn’t know exactly how art figures in ekphrastic poetry. Well, I turned to the Poetry Foundation’s “Glossary of Poetic Terms,” and I found out that an “ekphrastic poem is a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art.” Intrigued, I asked Chris for more information about her interest in ekphrastic writing. Here is what she sent to me:

I’ve always considered myself a writer first, then an artist, but the two have really begun to meld together, so the ekphrastic form lends itself tremendously to my general artistic adventure as a result. I think about ekphrastic writing in the most general of applications. I have run into those (usually academics) who take a very strict view of what the ekphrastic form precisely must be, and I resist this notion with fervor. In this strictest sense, the form is seen only as the production of a description of a piece of art. I see many more possibilities. To me ekphrastic writing is about where a piece of art takes the writer. And, in this way, the combination of the work of art and the writing done in response to it, become a whole of its own—the sum becomes another kind of whole. And it needn’t only be poetry.

This idea of creating ekphrastic work led to an exhibit at Charlotte Art League last Spring, a show of works by artists from around the country, paired with writers who shared their art-inspired work. It was a tremendous success by any measure and has inspired the Art League to mount another such effort for May of 2024. To pull the show off this year, I teamed up with Jay Ward, Charlotte’s Poet Laureate, and Caroline Kane Kenna, the immediate past President of the Charlotte Writers Club. We herded the cats, as it were, pouring through the entries and created “pairings” of writers and artists. Jay and Caroline are on board again for the 2024 show 1 + 1 = 3. And we’ve decided to up the stakes a bit and make it a juried exhibition. Opening night, we’ll bring the writers to the stage to read their art-inspired work.

In preparation for the submission process, I’m doing several workshops – in hopes of inspiring writers to participate. First off, I’ll be doing a workshop for Charlotte Writers Club on Saturday, January 13, 10-12:00 p.m., at Providence United Methodist. Then on Saturday, January 20, I’m teaming up with Charlotte Lit and the Charlotte Art League from 10-12:00 p.m. at the Art League, to do a very specific ekphrastic adventure. Finally, on February 17, I’ll be leading one of Jay Ward’s Poet Laureate Workshops at the University City Library from 1-3:00 p.m. The deadline for entries for the May show is February 26. (To see how we plan to put this all together, go to the Charlotte Art League’s website and the Call to Artists 1 + 1 = 3 page for more details https://charlotteartleague.org/call-to-artists1- or just drop me a line for more information: chris@chrisarvidson.com.)

And, in January at the Art League, I’ve got an ekphrastic piece in the show called “It’s Never Just Black and White” which includes two collages and a poem.

I thank Chris for sharing this information about her ekphrastic adventures and for her willingness to share her interest in ekphrastic writing with the rest of Storied Charlotte.

Tags: poetry

Bridging Religious Differences through Story Sharing

December 21, 2023 by Mark West

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: holiday stories

Charlotte Lit Press Plans to Publish Poetry Collection by AE Hines

December 18, 2023 by Mark West

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Nonfiction by Charlotte Writers

December 11, 2023 by Mark West

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: nonfiction

Delving into the History of Disney

December 02, 2023 by Mark West

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: Forgotten Disney

The Poems of Jay Jacoby

November 27, 2023 by Mark West

Shortly after I joined UNC Charlotte’s English Department in 1984, I met Jay Jacoby. He had joined the department six years earlier, so I naturally looked to him for guidance as I set out to build my career as an English professor. I remember talking with Jay about publishing, and I was surprised to learn that he regularly published poetry in addition to his scholarly articles on the teaching of writing and on Jewish literature. He shared with me a few of his poems at the time, and I liked the way he drew on his teaching experiences in his poetry.

Jay retired some years ago and moved to Asheville, where he hosts a monthly book group at Malaprop’s Bookstore, leads a weekly study group associated with his local synagogue, participates in three different writing groups, teaches literature and creative writing classes at UNC Asheville’s College for Seniors, and plays competitive Scrabble as a member of the Asheville Scrabble Club. However, he remains in touch with his former colleagues at UNC Charlotte, and he continues to write and publish poetry. Earlier this year, ArsPoetica brought out a collection of Jay’s poetry titled Lessons Learned & Unlearned. For more information about Jay’s collection, please click here.

I recently contacted Jay and asked him for more information about this collection. Here is what he sent to me:

Most of the poems in this collection, written over a period of nearly sixty years, reflect many things I have been taught and that I have gone on to test, either through experience or imagination. They represent not only lessons I have learned over the years, but also those I have not. Several of the poems were written during my 27-year tenure at UNC Charlotte, including elegies for former colleagues and reflections on my writing conferences with students.

In many of the poems, I have followed the advice of Sir Philip Sidney: “Look into your heart and write.” In many more, I was just messing around with language, engaging in wordplay but, as Frost once noted, “play for mortal stakes.” There are a number of “found poems” and centos in this collection, occasioned by my “stealing” and juggling words of other writers. There’s an acrostic, a few anagrams, dictionary poems, shaped poems, and ekphrastic poems inspired by works of art. And there are poems constrained by fixed forms: haiku, tankas, sonnets, villanelles, even a golden shovel.

Jay also shared with me one of the poems in his collection. Titled “Untethered in Dixie,” this poem was written on the occasion of his leaving Pittsburgh for his tenure-track position at UNC Charlotte:

UNTETHERED IN DIXIE

Ten years of marriage finally gone South

and so, to my greater surprise, will I.

Despite early vows otherwise, I will

now traverse that Mason-Dixon line

though still haunted by Life’s images

from childhood: Emmett Till, Little Rock,

Pickrick’s Drumsticks, and bodies managed

so easily with firehoses and vicious dogs.

My pride and prejudice now also managed,

worn down by the promise of a paycheck.

***

An itinerant Pennsylvania Yankee will soon

descend to serve in Queen Charlotte’s court.

***

Farewell Steel City, a.k.a. “City of Bridges,”

all four hundred and forty-six of them

spilling us into ninety-one enclaves.

Gert Stein, your native daughter, was right:

“A Holubky is a Gołąbki is a Golubtsy.”

A cabbage roll by any other name

would smell as sweet. In Blitzburgh,

they’d tell me, “These lines need fixed.”

***

So I roll down from your sooted hills

And into the khaki piedmont flatland.

***

Hello Queen City, a.k.a “City of Churches.”

There’s one or more at every intersection,

all ready to serve me country ham biscuits,

seven-layer salad, Cheerwine or sweet tea.

I am now a stranger in a strange land, like

Geronimo stranded among the white-eyes

Indeed, everyone is blond; here we cannot

sing of ochi chyornye or schwartze oygen.

***

I explain that I am a recent transplant,

happy to exchange my “yinz” for “y’all.”

***

I am amazed by all this southern charm.

I wasn’t expecting Deliverance, but this?

other than my asking “What’s Cheerwine?”

At every 7-Eleven, they all invite me to

“Come back and see us.” And I always do.

I asked myself why I stayed north so long?

In a year or so I would have my answer.

I thank Jay for the information about Lessons Learned & Unlearned and for sharing “Untethered in Dixie.” Although Jay is now a resident of Asheville, as far as I am concerned, he is still tethered to Storied Charlotte.

Tags: poetry

Giving Thanks

November 20, 2023 by Mark West

I recently received an email message from a former student who used to live in Charlotte but has since moved to a mid-sized, midwestern city. In her email, she commented on how much she missed Charlotte’s literary community. She said that she missed her old writing group from Charlotte, and she mentioned how hard it has been for her to find a comparable writing group that she could join since she made her move. She said she missed going to the book signings at Park Road Books and taking her kids to the EpicFest literary festival at ImaginOn. After reading her email message, I realized how fortunate I am to live in Charlotte. Since Thanksgiving is around the corner, I decided to list ten reasons why I feel thankful that I am a member of Charlotte’s community of readers and writers.

I am thankful for the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library. Our public library is one of the best in the country. It provides books and other resources to the residents of every neighborhood in our city, and its free public programming enriches the lives of thousands of people in our community. It is also a steadfast defender of the freedom to read.

I am thankful for Charlotte’s excellent writing groups and organizations, such as Charlotte Lit and the Charlotte Writers Club. These groups provide area writers with guidance, support, and a sense of belonging to a community writers.

I am thankful for Charlotte’s independent bookstores. The bookstore I visit most often is Park Road Books, but there are more than a dozen independent bookstores in the Charlotte area. Every April these businesses work together to celebrate Indie Bookstore Day and collaborate on the Greater Charlotte Book Crawl.

I am thankful for Charlotte’s literacy groups, such as Promising Pages, Read Charlotte, and Smart Start of Mecklenburg County. These groups work hard to improve children’s literacy skills. In the process, they help instill in children a love of reading.

I am thankful for the Charlotte-area book publishers, such as Falstaff Books, Main Street Rag Publishing Company, and Warren Publishing. Although these publishers work with writers from around the country, they have an impressive record of publishing books by Charlotte-area authors.

I am thankful for the Charlotte Readers Podcast. Founded by Landis Wade in 2018, the Charlotte Readers Podcast is now co-hosted by Landis, Sarah Archer, and Hannah Larrew. Over the years, many Charlotte-area authors have been featured on this entertaining and informative podcast.

I am thankful for the Arts & Science Council for providing area writers with grants to support their creative work and for their support of cultural programs in the Charlotte area.

I am thankful for North Carolina Humanities and their NC Center for the Book. Although North Carolina Humanities is a state-wide organization, it is headquartered in Charlotte. Through their award-winning North Carolina Reads program and their other projects, North Carolina Humanities makes many contributions to Charlotte’s literary community.

I am thankful for Charlotte’s literary journals, including Litmosphere: Journal of Charlotte Lit, The Main Street Rag, Nova Literary-Arts Magazine, and Qu: A Contemporary Literary Magazine from Queens University. These journals often publish stories and poems by Charlotte writers.

Finally, I am thankful for all of the wonderful literary works created by Charlotte’s many writers. Without their contributions to Charlotte’s literary scene, there would be no Storied Charlotte blog.

Tags: Thanksgiving

Stories for Veterans Day

November 11, 2023 by Mark West

I am writing this Storied Charlotte blog post on Saturday, November 11, 2023. I waited until 11:00 in the morning to start writing this post in honor of Armistice Day, which is now known as Veterans Day. It commemorates the end of World War I. On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, all of the countries involved in World War I agreed to an armistice resulting in the cessation of military operations. The next year saw the observance of the first Armistice Day, which took place on November 11, 1919. In 1954, Armistice Day was renamed Veterans Day, but it is still observed on the eleventh day of November.

Veterans Day provides us with an opportunity to recognize and honor those who have served in the military. As I see it, one way to honor military service is to read and reflect on the stories about people in service during wartime. Several Charlotte authors have published such stories in recent years. Three examples are Gary Edgington’s Outside the Wire, Meredith Ritchie’s Poster Girls, and Nancy Northcott’s The King’s Champion.

https://pages.charlotte.edu/mark-west/wp-content/uploads/sites/322/2022/09/Outside-the-Wire-Final-Cover-scaled-1.jpeg

Gary Edgington’s Outside the Wire deals with America’s involvement in the Iraq War. The novel opens in Baghdad in 2008, and it immediately immerses the reader in the chaos and complexities of the war. The novel is marketed as a military thriller, but it also a story about a burgeoning relationship between a counterterrorism expert named Rick Sutherland and a military physician named Nancy Weaver. For more information about Gary and his debut novel, please click on the following link: https://garyedgingtonauthor.com/

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Meredith Ritchie’s Poster Girls is a historical novel set in Charlotte during World War II. The novel focuses on the women who worked at Charlotte’s Shell Plant where they manufactured ammunition for the war effort. Meredith tells the story from the perspectives of two military wives—one black and the other white—who both find employment at the Shell Plant. The novel delves into the nature of life on the home front, but it is also story about an unlikely friendship. For readers who want to know more about Meredith and Poster Girls, please click on the following link: https://www.meredithritchie.com/

Nancy Northcott’s The King’s Champion concludes her Boar King’s Honor historical fantasy trilogy. Although this novel’s main characters are wizards, the book centers on the real history of World War II from the Dunkirk evacuation through the Battle of Britain. Kate Shaw, one of the central characters, is an American photojournalist posted to her agency’s London office. With British Army officer Sebastian Mainwaring, she and others with magical Gifts work to stop the intended German invasion of Britain, Operation Sealion. For more information about The King’s Champion and Nancy’s other work, please visit her website, www.NancyNorthcott.com.

As all three of these novels make clear, war stories involve much more than a series of battle scenes. They are also stories about complex human relationships. As we observe Veterans Day here in Storied Charlotte, it is important that we remember that wartime service affects veterans and their families and to be grateful for what they have done.

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