{"id":2182,"date":"2020-03-24T14:08:37","date_gmt":"2020-03-24T18:08:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/?p=2182"},"modified":"2020-03-24T14:08:37","modified_gmt":"2020-03-24T18:08:37","slug":"mister-gavin-edwards-neighborhood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/blog\/2020\/03\/24\/mister-gavin-edwards-neighborhood\/","title":{"rendered":"Mister Gavin Edwards’ Neighborhood"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I didn\u2019t know that Gavin Edwards lives in Charlotte when I\nspotted his book Kindness and Wonder: \nWhy Mister Rogers Matters Now More Than Ever <\/em>while shopping at Park Road Books the other day.  The store has a special display of their\nbestselling nonfiction books, and that\u2019s where I saw Edwards\u2019 book.  The cover features a photograph of Mister\nRogers wearing his iconic red, cardigan sweater, and the photograph called out\nto me.  Being a longtime fan of Mister\nRogers, I took the book off the shelf and read Edwards\u2019 bio statement\nprinted on the dust jacket.   It concludes with the line: \u201cGavin lives in\nCharlotte, North Carolina, with his wife, museum curator Jen Sudul Edwards, and\ntheir two sons.\u201d  I turned to Sherri\nSmith, one of the store\u2019s employees, and asked her if Edwards really lives in\nCharlotte.  She assured me that he does,\nand she added that they consider him a friend of the store.  Well, it was then clear what I needed to\ndo.  I bought the book and read it the\nnext day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Edwards divides the book into two sections.\u00a0 The first section focuses on Mister Rogers\u2019 life and his long career in children\u2019s television.\u00a0 In the second section, Edwards distills Mister Rogers\u2019 approach to life down to \u201cten ways to live more like Mister Rogers right now.\u201d\u00a0 I enjoyed all of the book, but the second half grabbed my attention.\u00a0 Kindness and Wonder<\/em> came out in the fall of 2019, so it predates the coronavirus outbreak.\u00a0 However, I felt that Edwards\u2019 discussion of the ten ways to live like Mister Rogers is especially relevant for our current public health crisis.\u00a0 As soon as I finished Edwards\u2019 book, I wrote a column titled \u201cWhat Mister Rogers Would Say about the Coroavirus\u201d for The Charlotte Observer<\/em>.\u00a0 To read the column, please click on this link:\u00a0 https:\/\/www.charlotteobserver.com\/opinion\/opn-columns-blogs\/article241363251.html<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

After I finished my column, I set out to learn more about Edwards.\u00a0 I found out that he is a Yale-educated journalist who has published numerous articles in Rolling Stone<\/em>, including twelve cover stories.\u00a0 He has also published articles in The New York Times, Wired, Billboard, GQ, <\/em>and many other periodicals.\u00a0 Like most authors these days, he has a website.\u00a0 After visiting his website, I learned that he has twelve books.\u00a0 In addition to Kindness and Wonder, <\/em>he has published such titles as The World According to Tom Hanks:\u00a0 The Life, the Obsessions, the Good Deeds of America\u2019s Most Decent Guy <\/em>(2018), The Tao of Bill Murray:\u00a0 Real-Life Stories of Joy, Enlightenment, and Party Crashing <\/em>(2016), and Last Night at the Viper Room:\u00a0 River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind <\/em>(2013).\u00a0 For more information about Edwards and his writings, please click on the following link:\u00a0 https:\/\/rulefortytwo.com<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On his website, Edwards makes several references to Park\nRoad Books, but he doesn\u2019t go into much detail about his life in\nCharlotte.  I wanted to know more, so I\ncontacted him and asked him how he came to make Charlotte his home.  Here\nis his response:  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before I moved to\nCharlotte five years ago, I had visited the city exactly once, on assignment\nfor a magazine article where I entered a racecar driving school. So my initial impression\nof the city was that it involved mandatory jumpsuits and driving at 154 mph,\nmaking lots of left turns. That has turned out not to be the case.  We came to Charlotte (from Los Angeles)\nbecause my wife is a museum curator (she’s now the chief curator at the Mint\nMuseum). I’ve moved around enough to know that the life of a writer can be\nisolating, if I’m not careful, so when we got here, I made sure to make friends\nand meet my neighbors and find places to volunteer. My actual neighborhood has “Driveway\nFridays,” weekly potluck get-togethers all summer long, plus huge\ngatherings for Halloween and the Fourth of July. And I’ve found people in\nCharlotte to have lunch with, to play board games with, to discuss experimental\nnovels with, so my appreciation of Charlotte is not based solely on the fact\nthat the rest of my family is thriving here. One good friend can make all the\ndifference in a new town; happily, I’ve got more than that here.  A lot of the writing I do really isn’t\nspecific to Charlotte: my books on Bill Murray and Tom Hanks and Fred Rogers\ncould have been written anywhere in the country. So I regularly try to take on\nsome writing assignments that let me get to know North Carolina and its\nresidents better, whether that means interviewing photographer Burk Uzzle for <\/em>The\nNew York Times (https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/08\/08\/arts\/music\/woodstock-famous-couple.html<\/a>)\nor reporting on the last days of a\nlocal music store for <\/em>The Charlotte Observer(http:\/\/www.charlotteobserver.com\/entertainment\/arts-culture\/article212804554.html<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In reflecting on Edwards\u2019 connections to Charlotte, I am\nreminded of the inscription that he wrote in my autographed copy of Kindness and Wonder<\/em>.  It reads simply, \u201cHi neighbor!\u201d  I like to think of Edwards as being part of\nmy neighborhood.  Of course, some would\nsay that Charlotte is too big to be called a neighborhood.  As I see it, however, the term neighborhood works\nperfectly for the community of writers and readers that make up Storied\nCharlotte.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I didn\u2019t know that Gavin Edwards lives in Charlotte when I spotted his book Kindness and Wonder:  Why Mister Rogers Matters Now More Than Ever while shopping at Park Road Books the other day.  The store has a special display of their bestselling nonfiction books, and that\u2019s where I saw Edwards\u2019 book.  The cover features […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":202,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[32,33,31],"class_list":["post-2182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-storied-charlotte","tag-mister-rogers","tag-neighbor","tag-nonfiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/202"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2182"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2182\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2194,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2182\/revisions\/2194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}