Month: July 2017

The Sombrero Syndrome

Is there room in the suitcase for this?

 

By Susan Kelly

Tis the season for traveling, touring, visiting, and succumbing to the Sombrero Syndrome.

Definition: som·bre·ro (\sm-brer-()) syn·drome (\sin-drm): an affliction which compels one to buy an item endemic to a specific locale; a purchase that will eventually prove to be useless, such as a sombrero while in Mexico.

I was first infected with Sombrero Syndrome on Nantucket, the college summer I worked in a cutesy “shoppe” schlepping scrimshaw and quahog jewelry. Never mind that I was too poor to eat anything but fluffernutter sandwiches and hitchhiked everywhere; I scrimped and saved until I could buy a $100 (including employee discount) piece of (probably fake) whale tooth  etched with a sailing ship. You want it? It’s right here, along with several strings of worry beads I bought at a kiosk below the Parthenon.

Somewhere in a kitchen drawer is the damask tablecloth I had to have while I was in Provence that looked so romantically al fresco enchanting . . . in Provence.  It’s probably stuffed next to the scarf I bought from a Florentine street vendor, which matches nothing in my closet, but at least it was only $5. Should’ve bought gelato.

The Syndrome virus lurks in every milieu. At Fearrington Village, all the plants look so perfect that I just had to bring home some shrub that was supposed to burst forth with red berries every December. I envisioned instant, perennial mantel decorations for Christmas. Either I got the girl plant or the boy plant or it’s asexual, but there’s never been a single berry.

The Sombrero Syndrome is a different infection from buyer’s remorse. The latter concerns any old thing you buy at the mall which you then proceed to loathe. This includes the Punishment Dress, so named because you have to wear it to punish yourself for buying it. Sombrero Syndrome is the kilt I bought in Scotland (worn once, and then to a costume party) and the angora yarn I sold my soul for in Ireland when I was a knitter. Or flufferknitter.

And while I’ve never been to Mexico, I bought the equivalent of a sombrero in some Napa Valley winery tasting room: a sun hat so wide-brimmed that I had to hold it in my lap all the way across the country so it wouldn’t get smushed. Clearly, I should have opted for a case of rosé (see gelato, above).

Forget Zika, Ebola and malaria. Beware the Sombrero instead.  OH

Susan Kelly is a blithe spirit, author of several novels, and proud new grandmother.

Between Here and There

A homesick Southern girl dives deep into Flannery O’Connor

 

By Jane Borden

Uh-oh,î I said from the sofa in my Los Angeles apartment. As if the collected works of Flannery O’Connor might respond. Books don’t talk. Authors do, I suppose, but even if O’Connor’s ghost had decided to travel from her grave in Milledgeville, Georgia, just to watch me read her stories, she couldn’t have heard my “uh-oh” utterance over the hip hop music blaring from my neighbor’s car. And suddenly I was then wondering what she would think of Drake and his meteoric rise up the charts — an omen, for sure,
but of what, only she could say.

To read O’Connor’s work is to fall under a spell. It is also a form of travel. And that was the point. I found myself a little closer to home that afternoon. Los Angeles is as far away from Greensboro as New Foundland is. As far away as Colombia. I miss home. I wrote an entire book about figuring out how to move back to the South. Then the cocktail of marriage and career pulled me even farther away. So I prescribed myself some O’Connor. When I was a teenager, her country Georgia folk stayed with me long after class. The Misfit was around every corner. The healer in the river was just beyond every tree line. That afternoon in Los Angeles, I enjoyed feelings of familiarity. But then they became uncomfortably intense.

I said “Uh-oh” because I connected a little too much with the characters in her stories. This is not good. Things don’t end well for O’Connor’s creations. They find themselves shot in the heart; drowned in rivers; or abandoned at truck stops, deaf and mute. I mean, if Flannery is writing my life, the best-possible ending for which I can hope is to have a Bible salesman steal my wooden leg.

Allow me to clarify: I’m not claiming a similarity to her. She was the queen of Southern Gothic, whose beautifully succinct short stories reveal our shortcomings and unquenchable desires. I am also Southern, but if my writing reveals anything, it’s an inability to turn down muffins. O’Connor was invited to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the prestigious Yaddo colony in upstate New York; I was once invited to speak at a book club of five people on the Upper East Side. And also to a karaoke birthday party next weekend.

But I am searching, as her characters do, for the same answers regarding origins and endings. Like young Nelson who travels to Atlanta in O’Connor’s story (the one with the title that can’t be reprinted), I inherently long to be where I can shout, “I was born here!” In my book, I described the sickening feeling of asking myself where I was going and realizing I didn’t know. When Mrs. Shortley’s daughter asks her that question in “The Displaced Person,” Mrs. Shortley dies of a stroke, right there at the farm’s gate.

Like I said: Uh-oh. More than anything, I’ve searched for the answer to the question of where home is. But I certainly don’t want to have an aneurism at RDU. So instead of learning from her characters, I’ll take a lesson from O’Connor herself, who suggests that truths can’t be catalogued, that they only exist in the in-betweens and no-wheres, when you’re standing “half in the sunlight and half out,” or when “there was not a cloud in the sky nor any sun.” Perhaps I should simply say, as that Bible salesman does, that “I’m not even from a place, just from near a place.” Better not to nail down home, but drown in its moving current; wherever I am, I’m in it. What O’Connor so beautifully described are the currents themselves. If life can’t be known, it can at least be understood. One of her editors wrote that when they met, he couldn’t decipher a word through her thick accent. But with her pen she was crystal clear. Too bad we never got to hear her karaoke.  OH

You can find Greensboro native Jane Borden, author of I Totally Meant To Do That, in L.A. — or at JaneBorden.com.

Chasing the Elusive

A conversation with artist Richard Fennell 

By Maria Johnson

Hanging around Greensboro’s GreenHill art gallery just before an opening,

Richard Fennell looks like a collector who’s arrived early.

Well-groomed and white-haired, he’s the model of business casual. You could be forgiven for wondering: Is he a retired corporate lion waiting to pounce on the cash bar? Perhaps a senior partner who helped his law firm build an impressive collection? Or maybe he’s a local politico?

That would be sort of true. Fennell’s serving his sixth term as the mayor of wee Whitsett (population 600ish) on the eastern edge of Guilford County.

But you’d be closer to bingo if you noticed that this mustachioed gentleman favors a couple of portraits on the wall: self-portraits of the artist.

Yup. Same guy. Which means that beneath the municipal exterior beats the heart of an artist — an artist’s artist — whose work is the stuff of GreenHill’s ongoing show: The Edge of Perception: Richard Fennell Retrospective.

The exhibit — more than 100 works plucked from a 50-year career — shows Fennell’s evolution from his undergraduate days of etching and printmaking at East Carolina University, through the formative years he spent getting a Master of Fine Arts degree at UNCG.

As a student of the so-called Greensboro School at UNCG, he was introduced to the painterly use of color, which he married to a lesson from sculpture — the importance of studying the space next to an object, or “looking off the edge,” as he likes to say.

Fennell, now 70, got noticed while he was at UNCG. He landed a piece in the North Carolina Museum of Art. Since then, he’s become one of the state’s most successful painters, with hundreds of pieces hanging in homes, museums and corporate offices around the Southeast.

Known for his color-rich still lifes and rural landscapes — rendered mostly in oil and sometimes in pastels — Fennell’s a crowd-pleaser in the vein of his favorite painter, French Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne.

He has painted all over North Carolina, including coastal marshes, Piedmont meadows and farmhouses, and mountain vistas near the home he built by hand in the Ashe County community of Grassy Creek.

Like any lifelong artist, Fennell has tussled with his craft, tinkered, solved, relaxed, understood and repeated the process over and over in his quest to capture “it.”

In an interview just before his show opened, he explained what “it” is and why he’s still nipping at its heels.

He’ll give art fans a further peek into his thinking when he conducts a painting demonstration on August 16, 6–7 p.m., at GreenHill. The exhibit runs through August 20.

MJ: Has your work always been so colorful?

Fennell: No. I started off in black and white. I was always interested in drawing. When I was an undergraduate, I started in printmaking and painting. Later on, I was really able to understand color.

MJ: What brought you to that understanding of color?

RF: It started with sculpture and watercolor. I studied with Peter Agostini, who was a sculptor, and he got me started on that idea of trying to develop the form within the space it existed. I was working three dimensionally with clay. Also, I did drawings and watercolors. I learned early on, watercolor is direct. You have water and you have color. The water will stretch the color. You can have it very intense and bring it down. There are many subtleties, and I began to really understand color at that point. When I went over to oil, it was a totally different medium and didn’t act anything like watercolor, so I just started using pure color. When I wanted a red, I’d use a red, when I wanted a pink, I’d use a pink.

MJ: You were applying patches of pure color?

RF: Right. Then another thing I was doing — and I learned from sculpture — is when you’re building a form, you’re applying the clay, but you’re also tearing down. With oil, I started doing the same thing: I’d apply it and look at it. I’d also tear it down. If it wasn’t right, I’d scrape it off and work back into it. Then you start getting layers of color.

MJ: Most people don’t think of oil paint as being dimensional.

RF: Right, but working on a flat, two-dimensional space, it’s totally different from working in the round with clay. With your working on a flat space it’s really difficult to get that feeling of solidity and form. So a lot of times it takes this [he gets out of his chair and ducks and weaves as if he’s looking at canvas from different angles].

MJ: How would you describe the Greensboro School? What were some of
the hallmarks?

RF: To me, it had some truth to it. When I studied in undergraduate school, it was all Abstract or Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art. This was in the late ’60s, early ’70s. That didn’t really appeal to me, so I started looking for something else. When I was looking into grad schools, I saw UNCG was totally different. I saw these beautiful figures that people were drawing and painting. And I was like, “Wow, I’d like to understand what they’re doing.”

MJ: So that would be a unifying theme for the Greensboro School, an emphasis on figure?

RF: Right, and working from life. That’s how you learn about color, that’s how you learn about just about everything. It’s not a photographic type of understanding of reality. It’s not like I’m copying “it,” but I’m trying to understand “it” and I’m trying to reconstruct “it.” “It” is that elusive thing that’s out there, and that probably comes down to truth — and a life force.

MJ: Is there anything else that would pop out as a common thread for the Greensboro school?

RF: Color was probably one, too. Andrew Martin, I learned a lot from him about color.

MJ: Once you came into your style, and you recognized that people liked it, did you ever feel hemmed in by knowing that there was commercial value in painting that way? Were you ever scared to go off in a new direction or try something different?

RF: Yeah, I was. A lot of times, you get that from galleries. One time I was doing some work, and they said, “People like your old work better,” and I was like, “What the hell? I don’t care about that.” That makes you mad. That’s when you go and do something really off the wall. But sometimes, you do feel like you’re falling into that trap, especially when galleries are telling you, “People like this.”

MJ: So how have you pushed yourself?

RF: A lot of it has to do with where you are. That kind of dictates what the outcome is going to be. I’ve never been one of these artists who had to travel, say out West, because I feel like I have so much information where I am.

That’s the nice thing about working from life, is that you see things that you could never imagine. I saw something the other day I’d never seen before. I was looking at a landscape and I saw a space far in back, then I saw the light hitting fairly close, then I saw something in-between that I’d never seen before. It was the way the light was falling. It was hitting bits and pieces of things, maybe the tips of vegetation, and it created almost this movement sandwiched between the two spaces I was looking at. That was really exciting. I was like, “Wow, I gotta work on trying to get that.”

MJ: How did you come to live in Whitsett?

RF: I was getting married that summer, after M.F.A., so I wanted to be close to UNCG. We looked all over Greensboro. One day the Realtor said, “I found a place out in Whitsett.” It was an old two-story house, and I said, “Wow, this is great. It gives me all the room in the world, studio room all over the place.” Whitsett, at the turn of the century, was an institute, a prep-type school. It was called Whitsett Institute. A lot of these old houses were used as dorms and residences for the faculty and the students.

MJ: Tell me about being mayor. A lot of artists make political statements, but you don’t see a lot of artists as politicians.

RF: What started happening while I was in graduate school was you, started getting this movement in, from Greensboro, Burlington and Gibsonville. They didn’t care one iota about Whitsett’s history. They just wanted a jumping off point to the Interstate. That just infuriated me and my wife. We thought, “What can we do to safeguard this?” There was a county commissioner named Jackie Manzi. We were at a meeting, and she said, “What you guys ought to do is incorporate.” So I said, “Hmm.” We got a bunch of people together and started talking about incorporation to protect us from all of these other people trying to take a bite out of us. That’s the reason I got involved, was to protect the area and the landscapes that I really loved . . . We incorporated back in the early ’90s. They wanted me to be mayor to begin with. I said no, I’m not going to be a mayor, but I’ll be a council member. I’m an artist. I’m not a politician. So that was good for a while, but about 12 years ago, I became mayor because I felt like there was a need at the time.

MJ: Does it ever feel weird being an artist and a mayor? Do you have to campaign?

RF: No, I don’t. It’s two different hats. It’s totally different. You take one hat off and put the other one on

MJ: You’ve been creating art for a long time. Is there ever a temptation to think there’s nothing new in art, nothing new in your art?

RF: This is what you have to understand — in art, you try to keep growing all through your life. I’m not going to switch over to something totally different. I feel like I still have a lot to learn. I’m still making discoveries. It still seems fresh to me. Whether it feels fresh to somebody else doesn’t matter. I don’t want to get off on some tangent that makes no sense whatsoever. I’m still trying to understand what the hell I’m doing! [He laughs.] Really, it’s true. It’s so elusive. I just got through doing three portraits. They were really nice. Each one of them had a totally different feel because each one was a totally different human being, with different things you’re trying to get. That’s exciting.

MJ: What can people learn from this exhibit, about you, that they didn’t know before?

RF: I guess you can start at the beginning and see where I’m struggling, trying to get an understanding of something, and as I progress, maybe you can see what that is. All of this was preparing me to understand how to see, how to paint.  OH

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry. 

Writing MyWay Home

Finding one’s place in a wide literary landscape

 

By Wiley Cash

It’s not easy to know what is true for you or me

 at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I’m what

 I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you.

Langston Hughes wrote these lines and the poem “Theme for English B,” from which they’re taken, in 1951, when he was nearing 50 years old. I first read the poem as a 20-year-old college sophomore. I’ll turn 40 in a few months, and I can honestly say I’ve thought about this poem almost every day since I read it.

In the poem, the speaker’s college composition teacher has asked the students to go home tonight and compose a page about themselves, and whatever results from this assignment will speak to something about who the students are, where they’re from, and what they’re made of. The idea is that what comes from you speaks to what there is of you.

As I mentioned, I was a college sophomore when I encountered “Theme for English B.” I had enrolled at the University of North Carolina-Asheville because the English major featured a track in creative writing, and a writer was what I had decided to be. I was a little unclear as to how this would be accomplished, but I was there to learn, and learn I did. But looking back, the best thing I learned about writing was that I wasn’t the kind of writer I wanted to be, meaning I wasn’t someone who wrote like Raymond Carver, Anton Chekhov or Toni Morrison, nor did I write about the things these authors wrote about. I had never visited Carver’s Great Northwest. I couldn’t imagine the lives of Chekhov’s peasants. I couldn’t speak to the African-American experience in Morrison’s Ohio. These people lived interesting lives of conflict and history and culture, and they hailed from interesting places.

I was from Gastonia, North Carolina, raised Southern Baptist, loved basketball with all my heart, and spent my summers lifeguarding and my free time reading the masterworks of authors whose lives were more curious than mine, and whose literary voices were more distinct and powerful as a result. But I kept writing. In my little campus dorm room I locked my eyes on the monitor while my fingers pecked away at the keyboard of an enormous, ancient computer. Not once did I lift my gaze to look at the world around me, not once did I dare look back at the world from which I’d come. As a result, the stories that spun from my fingers were regionless, devoid of place, meaning they were almost wholly devoid of life. I refused to acknowledge that any place I was from could be interesting enough to warrant representation, and I also refused to acknowledge the fact that I couldn’t write well enough to make up for the “placelessness” of my fiction.

In the fall of 2003, I left North Carolina at the age of 25 and lived outside the state for the first time in my life. I had enrolled in a Ph.D. program in English and creative writing at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, which is in the heart of Acadiana, more commonly known as Cajun country. Soon, I found that I missed fresh water. I missed the gentle swell of the Piedmont hills as they rose toward the Blue Ridge Mountains. I missed cold winters and mild summers. I missed the good, clean smell of mud that wafts up from a trickling stream as you draw closer to the water. I missed ferns. I missed the music, accents and cuisine I’d always known as comforts without ever realizing the emotional tether they had on my heart. In short, I missed home.

I had chosen this particular graduate program in this particular state because a particular author served as the university’s writer-in-residence. Ernest J. Gaines had long been my literary hero, and I still believe he’s one of the finest writers our nation has ever produced. He’d grown up on a plantation just west of Baton Rouge, the same plantation on which his ancestors had been slaves and later sharecroppers, but he hadn’t begun to write about the place he knew until he joined his mother and stepfather in California when he was 15 years old. He wrote about southwest Louisiana because it was inside him largely because it was no longer outside him, and he longed for it. He began writing about Louisiana while he lived in California, and it led to some of the most important literature in American history: The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, A Gathering of Old Men and A Lesson Before Dying.

Ernest J. Gaines and Thomas Wolfe are perhaps the greatest influences on my writing life, and I took a page from each. From Gaines I learned to write about what I know and where I’ve been, and from Thomas Wolfe, especially Wolfe’s autobiographical hero Eugene Gant in Look Homeward, Angel, I decided to turn my eyes “to the distant, soaring ranges.” My first novel is set in the mountains of western North Carolina, where I’d made the decision to become a writer. My second is set in my hometown of Gastonia, as is my third novel, The Last Ballad, which will be released this fall.

A few months ago I returned to Louisiana to spend a few days with Gaines and his wife, Dianne, where they purchased land and built a home on part of the plantation where Gaines was born and raised. One evening around dusk, I was standing on the banks of the False River across the street from the Gaineses’ home when I recalled a line from Hughes’ poem: I guess I’m what I feel and see and hear. I could feel the old dock beneath my boots, every creak as the water lapped against it. I could see the sun fading in the trees across the river, could see the lights winking on at homes on the other side of the water. I could hear the trucks and cars pass on the road behind me, the occasional motor of a boat that passed along the darkening water, the flip of a fish as it broke the surface and then fell beneath it. At that moment, I had no doubt that what I was feeling and seeing and hearing had turned me toward the writer I’ve become, but the things that surrounded me at that moment were not the things that made me the writer I am. Those things rested farther north in the hills and mountains of the Old North State, hidden along creek beds and gurgling streams. Shaded beneath towering maples and sweet gums. Pressed into the rich earth beneath a blanket of ferns.

I often wonder about the things that will make up my daughters’ lives, as they will not be the things that have made up my own. They were both born only a few miles from the ocean, and they will both be raised in a landscape that is flat and in air that is humid and tinged with salt. Will they know the magic of the place from which they’ve come? Or, like me, will they have to leave home to find it?  OH

Wiley Cash lives in Wilmington with his wife and their two daughters. His forthcoming novel The Last Ballad is available for pre-order wherever books are sold.

Inside or Out?

Let August’s crop of new books help you decide

By Brian Lampkin

August in North Carolina is a confusing time. One wants the outdoors, the promise of a summer lived in the splendor of sun and breeze. But one step into the draining weight of swampy humidity drives us back into the confines of artificial comfort. This month’s highlighting of new releases tries to offer books that understand this split, longing for inside and out.

August 1: A Woman’s Place Is at the Top: A Biography of Annie Smith Peck, Queen of the Climbers, by Hannah Kimberley (St. Martin’s, $26.99). Annie Smith Peck is one of the most accomplished women of the 20th century that you have never heard of. Peck was a scholar, educator, writer, lecturer, mountain climber, suffragist and political activist. She was a feminist and an independent thinker who refused to let gender stereotypes stand in her way. Peck gained fame in 1895 when she first climbed the Matterhorn at the age of 45 — not for her daring alpine feat, but because she climbed wearing pants.

August 1: Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults, by Laurie Penny (Bloomsbury, $18.99). Smart and provocative, witty and uncompromising, this collection of Laurie Penny’s celebrated essays establishes her as one of the most important and vibrant political voices of our time. Bitch Doctrine takes an unflinching look at the definitive issues of our age, from the shock of Donald Trump’s election and the victories of the far right to online harassment and the transgender rights movement.

August 8: The Great Quake: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet, by Henry Fountain (Crown, $28). At 5:36 p.m. on March 27, 1964, a magnitude 9.2 earthquake — the second most powerful in world history — struck the young state of Alaska. The violent shaking, followed by massive tsunamis, devastated the southern half of the state and killed more than 130 people. A day later, George Plafker, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, arrived to investigate. His fascinating scientific detective work in the months that followed helped confirm the then-controversial theory of plate tectonics.

August 8: The Locals, by Jonathan Dee (Random House, $28). Here are the dramas of 21st-century America — rising inequality, working class decline, a new authoritarianism — played out in the classic setting of some of our greatest novels: the small town. The Locals is that rare work of fiction capable of capturing a fraught American moment in real time.

August 15: Bravetart: Iconic American Desserts, by Stella Parks (Norton, $35). From an award-winning pastry chef and a James Beard Award–nominated writer for Serious Eats, foolproof recipes and a fresh take on the history of American desserts, from chocolate chip cookies to toaster pastries.

August 22: Young Jane Young, by Gabrielle Zevin (Algonquin Books, $26.95). Chapel Hill’s Algonquin Books brings us Zevin’s much-anticipated follow-up to The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry. Young Jane Young is a smart, funny and moving novel about what it means to be a woman of any age, and captures not just the mood of our recent highly charged political season, but also the double standards alive and well in every aspect of life for women.

August 29: All the Dirty Parts, by Daniel Handler (Bloomsbury, $22). The author of the Lemony Snicket series brings us an unblinking take on teenage desire in a culture of unrelenting explicitness and shunted communication, where sex feels like love, but no one knows what love feels like. With short chapters in the style of Jenny Offill or Mary Robison, Daniel Handler gives us a tender, brutal, funny, intoxicating portrait of an age when the lens of sex tilts the world.

August 29: The Hidden Light of Northern Fires, by Daren Wang (Thomas Dunne, $26.99). Charles Frazier calls this debut novel “a distinctive clear-eyed perspective on a fresh corner of the Civil War. The characters are fully alive, wonderfully varied and the narrative voice is particularly lucid, in sharp contrast with the raving bloody madness of that dark moment in American history.”  OH

Brian Lampkin is one of the proprietors of Scuppernong Books.

Change of Place

How the king of the legal thriller became an adopted son of Carolina

 

By D.G. Martin

When John Grishamís latest novel, Camino Island, hit bookstore shelves in June, it immediately rose to number one on The New York Times best-seller list and stayed there for weeks.

No surprise there. That is what John Grisham’s books do.

But Camino Island is different from most of Grisham’s previous 30 novels. It is not his usual legal thriller in which crimes and mystery intersect with the lives of lawyers and judges.  Lawyers make only cameo appearances in the new book.

Instead, the action is set in the literary world — the world of writing, publishing and selling books. There is also a literary underworld of criminals who steal and sell valuable manuscripts. Grisham still gives us a crime story. But this time writers, readers and booksellers, as well as thieves, take center stage.

One of the book’s central characters gives it a strong North Carolina connection. Mercer Mann, a writing instructor at UNC-Chapel Hill, is losing her job. She suffers writer’s block as she tries to complete her second novel to follow up her first mildly successful one. Carrying a burden of tens of thousands of dollars in student debt, she is at loose ends. Her desperate situation and some other personal connections make her a prime target to be recruited for an undercover assignment to help recover a stash of valuable stolen papers.

Earlier, a group of clever thieves has broken into the Princeton University library and walked away with the original manuscripts of The Great Gatsby and four other novels written by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The papers were insured for $25 million. The insurance company suspects that Bruce Cable, a rare book dealer and bookstore owner, has possession of the Fitzgerald papers. He is the center of a group of writers, fans and book collectors on Camino Island, a small resort community near Jacksonville, Florida.

Somehow investigators for the insurance company learn that Mercer’s grandparents had lived on Camino Island, that their house is still in the family, and that Mercer has been a frequent visitor. The company sends the case’s lead investigator, Elaine Shelby, to Chapel Hill to recruit Mercer. She wants Mercer to go to Camino Island, where she can infiltrate Bruce’s group, make friends with him, and try to learn whether he has the Fitzgerald papers.

In Chapel Hill, Elaine wines and dines Mercer at Spanky’s and the Lantern restaurants, two of the town’s favorites, and, incidentally, not far from the house where Grisham and his wife, Renee, live when they visit their daughter and her family, who live in Raleigh.

Mercer is a reluctant recruit, but Elaine is persistent and persuasive. Elaine’s promise to pay Mercer’s student debt is a clincher. She tells Elaine, “I have sixty-one thousand dollars in student debt that I can’t get rid of. It’s a burden that consumes every waking hour and it’s making me crazy.”

Elaine promises, “We’ll take care of the student loans.” Plus, she offers another $100,000.

Later, when Mercer has doubts, Elaine continues to persuade, “You’re a writer living at the beach for a few months in the family cottage. You’re hard at work on a novel. It’s the perfect story, Mercer, because it’s true. And you have the perfect personality because you’re genuine. If we needed a con artist we wouldn’t be talking right now.”

Sure enough, Mercer becomes part of the group of writers who gather around Bruce and his bookstore. Some of them, Mercer discovers, “are seasoned raconteurs with an endless supply of stories and quips and one-liners. Others are reclusive and introverted souls who labor in their solitary worlds and struggle to mix and mingle.”

As she mingles and mixes, she learns that the popular authors whose books have sold well “longed for critical acclaim, while the literary ones . . . longed for greater royalties.”

Getting to know the writers leads to Mercer getting to know Bruce, the smart and charming owner of Bay Books. He owns a dozen seersucker suits and wears a different color each day. He has persuaded 100 customers to collect signed first editions and to put in a standing order to buy signed copies of the latest book by every visiting author. Bay Books makes big money on the sales, and those sales attract book tour visits by America’s most popular authors.

Bruce does well as an independent bookseller. He does even better collecting and selling rare books and signed first editions.

Is he also making even more money dealing in the dark world of stolen books and papers?

Mercer’s assignment is to get to know Bruce well enough to learn whether he has possession of Princeton’s Fitzgerald papers. By courting and charming him, she ultimately finds the answer.

Meanwhile, he is courting and charming her, too. While she is finding out about his dark world, he prepares defenses to turn the tables on her and the investigators’ plot to prove that Bruce has his hands on the Fitzgerald papers.

So, as the story moves toward an expected ending, Grisham does his usual. He twists the expected into a set of cascading surprises that will fool, entertain and delight his readers, just as he does in his legal thrillers.

Is there more than an entertaining story here? Does Grisham, for instance, want to highlight our country’s growing problem with the student debt that is affecting so many young Americans? He says not. The student debt burden on Mercer, he says, is just a small plot point in the Camino Island story. But, according to Grisham, his next legal thriller, coming out in October, will have overwhelming student debt as a central feature of the new novel’s plot.

North Carolinians love their authors. They love for North Carolina authors to have the kind of success Grisham enjoys. Some North Carolina Grisham fans argue that his growing connections to our state give us grounds to say that he is one of us.

Grisham himself says his farm near Charlottesville, Virginia, is his home and that he is very happy there.

However, his North Carolina contacts are substantial. In addition to his house in Chapel Hill, his daughter’s family in Raleigh, and the Chapel Hill scenes in the latest book, he is a Carolina basketball fan. Grisham and popular television host Charlie Rose have an ongoing $100 bet on every Carolina-Duke basketball game.  Rose supports his alma mater, Duke. Grisham bets on Carolina.

On his recent book tour to promote Camino Island, he made only 11 stops. Four were in North Carolina, twice as many as in any other state. Along the way he invited other North Carolina literary giants — Randall Kenan, Jill McCorkle, John Hart, Ron Rash, Wiley Cash and Clyde Edgerton — to discuss their work.

Even if Grisham and his wife are still proud Virginians, we can declare them honorary North Carolinians.

Grisham dedicated Camino Island to Renee. He gives her credit for helping develop the new book’s plot as they were driving to Florida for vacation. They collect rare books and signed first editions. When they heard a radio report about a stolen rare book, they were off and running and had the outline of the book developed before they got out of the car.

I bet they were driving through North Carolina when the idea hit. OH

D.G. Martin hosts North Carolina Bookwatch, which airs Sundays at noon and Thursdays at 5 p.m. on UNC-TV.

Extra, Extra Read All About It

Cinema with a twist

 

By Maria Johnson

The text came shortly after 11 on a Friday night.

“Would you be up for being a yoga student extra in our film?” asked director Olivia Mungal.

FYI, I’m usually not summoned at midnight for movie work the next morning but Olivia and her Greensboro-based colleagues at Layla Films Productions had graciously agreed to include me in their entry for this year’s 48 Hour Film Project, an annual event that starts with summertime competitions in cities around the world.

Greensboro, Asheville and Charlotte host contests, which makes the Old North State look good because New York and California are the only other states with more than one 48HFP site.

The potential rewards for artists are huge: Local champs take their short works – which run from four to seven minutes — to Filmapalooza, a festival that awards the winner a $5,000 prize and a screening at the Cannes Film Festival in France.

No matter where 48HFP filmmakers live, the race to create a film in two days begins on a Friday night, when teams draw their genres and discover the three elements that every film must share: a character, line and prop.

Earlier that Friday night, 32 teams had drawn a genre in Greensboro. Olivia’s team, know for its dark humor, had the choice of making a silent movie or a thriller/suspense film. They picked thriller/suspense. The required character was Sunny or Sonny Bowles, a yoga instructor. The necessary prop: a ribbon. The mandatory line: “How many times do I have to tell you?”

A couple of hours after her initial text, as Olivia and the other writers pounded out a script for their flick, Swelter, she sent me the details: “Call time will be 8 a.m. at the Guilford Campus lake. One of our actors is a certified yoga instructor, so we’ll be having you do some real poses.”

“Got it,” went my thumbs.

“Eeeeeeek!” went my mind.

A real yoga instructor meant real yoga, which meant my Achilles tendon might go SPROING! like the last time I was in a yoga class. It’s a little-talked-about dark side of middle-age womanhood: yoga injuries sustained in the quest for inner peace.

I briefly considered hopping out of bed and stretching for a while, but decided I’d be better served by dreaming of greater flexibility.

The next morning, I spent way too much time considering my yoga outfit and whether to tie my hair back or leave it down. Ordinarily, it would not be a question. I would tie it back. But this was pictures, baby.

I left my hair down and sped toward Guilford College. It is hard for me to describe how my heart sank when I arrived to a lakeside that was completely devoid of humans.

I called Olivia in a panic.

“We’ll be there in a few minutes,” she said calmly.

First lesson in moviemaking: Hurry up and wait.

The actors and crew trickled in. They were a loose-knit group of friends, most in their 20s and 30s, who’d met through school or each other.

At the hub of the wheel were Olivia, a UNCG grad who makes a living in digital marketing; UNCG alum Ellen Ross, who works at a bookstore; Guilford College alum Kristin Wampler, a yoga instructor and photographer; Cameron Wilkin, who graduated from Guilford and programs computers at UNCG; and James Lyons, a Guilford grad who works in tech support at his alma mater.

Guilford allows James, the main cinematographer, to use the campus for shoots, which is how we ended up at the lake that Saturday morning. The script called for a peaceful outdoor yoga class.

Someone should have told the campus ducks, who have failed to absorb the Quaker school’s pacifist ways. They harassed us until Olivia chased them away with flapping arms. Score one for method acting.

Soon, the boom microphone was hovering over us, and two cameras — long-lensed digital numbers like the ones your photo-geek friends own — were recording in video mode. Over. And over. And over again. There were multiple takes for every shot. Pick a reason: a shadow, muffled sound, a forgotten line, a detail that was inconsistent with the shot taken before.

Two hours later, we were dripping with sweat, and the first scene
was done.

Time for a wardrobe change. Then we reconvened in a theater basement for another “class,” this one led by a substitute yoga teacher who had murderous intentions with hot yoga.

Fortunately for us, the thermostat in the cool basement stayed put. We spritzed ourselves with water to resemble sweat and starting doing the eagle pose, which requires you to intertwine your arms, then do the same with your legs, then squat on one foot. I’ve always suspected it was invented by a yogi who forgot to pee before class.

Naturally, our eagles fell short of our teacher’s expectations, and she became more draconian. Muscle fatigue, the real kind, set in as the afternoon wore on, and another reality of amateur filmmaking emerged. People have stuff to do on Saturday. For me, a painting project loomed at home.

A quick script change enabled me and another extra to storm out of
class, digusted.

“This is messed up,” I ad-libbed on my way out of the scene. “Whatever happened to namaste?”

Pretty good, huh?

My son told me that, come Oscar time, I’m a shoe-in for Best Extra.

“Thanks, kid,” I told him. “I’ll remember you in my speech.”

Then he asked if I know the other meaning of “extra.”

“Yessssss,” I said. “Everyone knows . . . that.”

Just so you’ll know, too, the folks at Urban Dictionary define extra as “doing too much, being pretentious, putting on a show.”

Like they know anything about being in pictures.

At press time, the winner of Greensboro’s 48HFP had not been announced, but you can find out by going to 48hourfilm.com/greensboro-nc.  OH

Maria Johnson is contributing editor of O.Henry. You can reach her at ohenrymaria@gmail.com.

Notes From a Firefly Summer

A message from tiny lights shining in the darkness

 

By Jim Dodson

Early one morning back in late June — the eve of the summer solstice, as it happened — while I was making coffee in the kitchen before sunrise, I heard a small sound of an animal in distress. I stepped out to our carport and found a baby rabbit lying on his back, his feet lightly kicking, as he looked up at me.

I gently scooped up the little fella, wondering how he’d gotten into such a fix. But then it came to me.

He’d been brought home by one Boo Radley, our young tiger cat who was at present missing his collar and bell. This explained everything. Wearing his bell, Boo Radley is a fairly harmless dude on the prowl. Without it, a feline serial killer and menace to small creatures everywhere. He’d been roaming free for a full week without his collar and bell, which also explained the dead yellow finch I’d found on the stone path beneath the feeder out back and buried in the primroses.

Fortunately the tiny rabbit’s injuries appeared slight. As I carried him across the street to a wild area in my neighbor’s yard where lots of rabbits congregate in the evening, I thought about a couple of books about rabbits that helped to shape my view of life.

The first was Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit, which I still own a copy of, given to me by my mother at a very early age, along with Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. These were the first two chapter books I’d read during the solitary summer days in the small Southern town where my father worked for the newspaper.   

Before I set him down in the tall grass, I gently massaged the baby rabbit between the ears and gave him the only line from Peter Rabbit that I could recall: “Maybe your mother will put you to bed with some chamomile tea.”

Our neighborhood, which is old and heavily forested, teems with rabbits. We see them in groups on our early morning and evening walks with the dogs. I joke that we actually live in Bunnyland, a vast empire of tunnels and warrens where these small brown herbivores who are either considered a nuisance by gardeners or a sign of ecological harmony by tree huggers — and I am both things, by the way — reside in a world of their own, coming out at the corners of the day to munch on clover and grass and any fool’s unfenced veggie patch. Most are so tame you can walk within a few feet of them. 

I freely admit having a soft spot for rabbits, probably because of Peter Rabbit but also because the first living creature I intentionally killed was a rabbit, which I shot one cold afternoon while hunting with my father on Henry Tucker’s farm in the hills west of town. I was 12 or 13. It was late on New Year’s Day. The rabbit stood up as we approached across the stubble of a harvested cornfield, erect as a Presbyterian elder. It was my first hunt. Several young rabbits scampered away in terror but the old rabbit stood his ground on his haunches watching us approach. I leveled my 20-gauge and pulled the trigger without a second thought.

My dad made me take the rabbit home to skin and cook, pointing out his belief that it would be a crime not to honor the rabbit’s life by wasting his flesh. I ate as much of it as I could bear, thinking how, just hours before, this handsome elder of the rabbit race had been out for his last New Year’s walk. Off and on, I dreamed about that rabbit for years.

And I never hunted again.

But I soon learned much more about guns and the brevity of life. When I was 21, my girlfriend was murdered by a 15-year-old kid with a handgun during a botched robbery of a country club in the mountains. Within a few years I was a staffer for the biggest news magazine in the South, covering Atlanta’s record crime wave, interviewing grieving families and coaching a mixed-race baseball team in a city where someone was killing young black kids and tossing their bodies into the Chattahoochee River. The kids on my team and their parents were terrified that they might be next, which is why I drove them home to the federal housing project after practices and games.

During this dark passage of life, I also covered victims of a shooting war on the Texas border with Mexico for a national church magazine, went undercover at a notorious Tennessee game preserve, interviewed convicted murderers, rode with homicide cops, traveled with armed Klansmen and watched a dozen autopsies. One hot August night while walking my dog down our leafy and quiet street in Midtown, I even saw my neighbor shot dead on his porch during a late-night robbery. He was an Emory med student whose promising life went out like a porch light. He died as his hysterical girlfriend and I waited for the emergency medical technicians to arrive. 

Somewhere about that time, I read Richard Adams’s leporine masterpiece Watership Down and decided I’d had enough killing. Days after I turned 30, I pulled up stakes and moved to the banks of a green river in southern Vermont where I rented a small cabin heated by firewood that I split by hand. There, I taught myself to fly fish, procured a pup from the local Humane Society, resumed playing golf and read every book I’d ever meant to read including Watership Down for a second — maybe even a third — time. It became my favorite book.

On summer evenings in the wildflower meadow just outside my cabin door, I’d sit until well after dark watching fireflies dance and rabbits feed. Sometimes the rabbits came right up to my doorstep. Amos the dog was fascinated by them but trained not to give chase. Some grew so unafraid of us they hopped right up to him. I think they thought he might be one very big rabbit.

Years later, when I kept a large flower garden on a hilltop in Maine, I made a silent deal with the rabbits and white-tailed deer that inhabited our forest keep. I planted them a summer garden near a vernal spring at the back of our property, where they fed contentedly through the summer and into the fall. In winter, I trudged out under an Arctic moon to dump 50-pound bags of sorghum on the summer feeding spot. I even made up a fanciful tale about a couple of bumbling black bears called Pete and Charlie who dined in our “Animal Garden,” a tale both my now-grown children vividly recall. Pete and Charlie were part of all our lives, and probably will be for a long time.

Magically — or by random luck — the deer and rabbits never ate my Volkswagen-sized hostas or other tender bedding plants. Ours really was a Peaceable Kingdom.

So what do you suppose is a firefly’s true purpose in this world?

My grandmother, Beatrice Taylor, used to say “lightning bugs” were simply God’s way of reminding us of how brief one’s light shines in this world. She refused to let my brother and me collect them in a jar, citing their fragile dance with mortality.

My own belief is that fireflies are in this world simply to delight and make us pause in a darkening landscape, and remember what childhood felt like, inspiring a true sense of awe over a bug that serenely lights up as it goes its way through the uncertain night. What a living metaphor for how to live your own life.

Whatever else can be said of this firefly summer, regardless of a world beyond the neighborhood and childhood imagination that forever appears to be in danger of coming apart at the seams, it’s been a bountiful season of bunnies and fireflies in our neck of the woods — and kids playing in the dark, too.

The other evening we passed a group of a dozen youngsters of various sizes — toddlers to young teens —  joyfully playing a game my wife and I both loved to play in the long summer dusks of our childhoods. My Southern neighborhood gang called it “Red light, Green Light,” my wife’s Yankee crowd, “Statue.” The name changes but not the basic idea. These kids called their updated version “Night at the Museum.”   

As a central figure shuts eyes and counts out loud, the players attempt to advance “home” without being seen moving when the count is up and the leader’s eyes  suddenly open. Players must freeze like rabbits or statues on the lawn.  As we watched, a tiny barefoot girl was the first to reach “home”, gleefully slapping hands with the older kids.

Just then we heard a mother’s voice calling to her children, another welcome echo of American childhood. Somewhere in the darkness, young Boo Radley was on the prowl again, a world made safer by his new collar and bell. OH

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.