New Food, New Music

Two of the most distinguished magazines on the South — The Oxford American and Southern Cultures — are offering up special issues devoted respectively to music and food. While these are generally must-have magazines (and great subscriptions for holiday giving, I should add!), these particular issues are also don’t-miss, which I guess you can consider a step up from must-have the way I’m working all this here.

The Oxford American’s annual music issue has always been a special treat for me — and over the years the music has lent a lot of “texture” to my iPod. This year, the magazine augments its continuing exploration of Southern music in all its many forms and genres with a focus on a particular state’s musical offerings, in this case Arkansas, where the publication is currently based. As a result, the issues features two free CDs, one offering that annual eclectic mix of music and a second focussing on music produced in Arkansas or by Arkansans. Among the artists featured this year are Barbara Lynn, Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson, Paul Burch, Billy Lee Riley, and Sister Ernestine Washington. A sampling of features from the issue is available here, and don’t miss this fun q&a with the contributors here as well.

Among the highlights of the new issue of Southern Cultures are John Egerton (perhaps my favorite food writer) on custard pie; the Lee Brothers (they’re everywhere!) on buttermilk; and N.C. favorites Jean Anderson (on sweet potato pie), Bill Smith (on halved-crap soup), and Mama Dip (on “Fooling Her Papa with a Dessert.” If you have a question about what makes Southern food Southern… well, there’s an article on that too. The issue also includes a free DVD, Put It On The Skillet, which claims to feature “the best short food films collected anywhere.” Among them: an overview of the Southern Foodways Alliance’s documentary film initiative, “Capital Q” about the Skylight Inn in Ayden, N.C., and “A Red Hot Dog Digest: A Travelogue along the Lee Highway” about those dyed-red hot dog and a series of restaurants in Southwestern Virginia. (I get hungry just thinking about that last one.)

Kathryn Stripling Byer at “How A Poem Happens”

The wonderful website “How A Poem Happens” talks with N.C. Poet Laureate Kathryn Stripling Byer this week about her poem “Precious Little.” The poem is prefaced by a quote from Eudora Welty’s Losing Battles, and the interview opens with Byer discussing Welty’s influence on her own writing:

This poem began after a writers conference in Asheville, NC to which I took a small group of women students. Eudora Welty had just died, and we spent a portion of the morning session talking about her work, so her influence was much on my mind as the rest of the day unfolded. Welty’s lyrical short stories helped to shape my sense of how language can create a world that pulses at the center of the lyric moment. “The Wide Net,” in particular, really woke me up to the kind of writing I wanted to attempt; by then, I knew I wanted to write poetry, not fiction, but I also knew I wanted my poetry to sound as much like Welty’s wide net as possible.

The rest of the interview is equally insightful. Check it out here.

Short Takes: “New Stories From The South”

One of my favorite books each year is the newest edition of the New Stories From the South series from Algonquin Books. Though I got the 2009 volume a while back, I have only recently had a chance to look at it, but there was plenty to enjoy and appreciate, including stories by favorites including Jill McCorkle, Elizabeth Spencer, George Singleton, and Wendell Berry. But it was a couple of other things that stood out to me at first encounter. First, this year’s guest editor is Madison Smartt Bell, who’s not just a fine writer (obviously) but also a fine reader and editor. (I’ve used his book Narrative Design in my fiction workshop the last few times I’ve taught it, and it’s simply brilliant.) In his introduction here, Bell draws on his visits to New Orleans — both pre- and post-Katrina — to consider what’s happening to (what’s already happened to) the South and to Southern literature. He writes that

Rootedness used to be the core quality of Southern culture, holding fast to the plantation (big house or quarters), to the scratch farm or small town. That isn’t altogether gone, but it has drifted into polarity with the nomadic quality of so many Southerners’ lives. We educate most of our writers now, scattering them into craft schools all over the nation. They marry outlanders and settle in compromise locations….

Later, continuing on the theme of familiarity and uprootedness, he concludes that

The hurricane tore New Orleans to shreds and left it to put itself back together in a whole new way… but maybe something like that has happened all over the South, with no need for a material hurricane. Against the great longing for home we all share is the fact that so many of us are unhoused and uprooted by our own choice (maybe unreflecting choice) — that we have cast ourselves against the wind…. That tension, then, becomes a germ of the stories we now have to tell.

A brief introduction, but plenty to ponder there — an implicit encouragement for you to read the whole essay.

The second thing that caught my attention was how many of these stories — three of the twenty-one included — use second-person narrative, and this circumstance stood out particularly dramatically to me because those three stories were the first ones I read, choosing primarily at random as I flipped through the book. (It was only as I started the third that the coincidence unnerved me.) The stories by Tayari Jones, Michael Knight, and Stephanie Soileau each speak directly to the you here — just like in those great old Choose Your Own Adventure stories. In Jones’ story, “Some Thing Blue,” your mother has bought you a secondhand wedding dress: “So now you stand in the makeshift dressing room of the warehouse-store laced into this gown which was abandoned by a woman whose obligations were far less urgent than your own.” In Knight’s story, “Grand Old Party,” you’ve gone to the house of the man who’s having an affair with your wife, and you’ve got trouble in mind: “The .12 gauge in your hands couldn’t feel more out of place. No sign of your wife’s car, but maybe she parked in the garage. Use the barrel to ring the doorbell. This is what a man does when he’s been made a fool.” Finally, in Soileau’s “The Camera Obscura,” the you isn’t the jilted one but the one contemplating an affair, a new high school teacher struggling with her marriage and infatuated with an artsy photographer:

He lingers at the lunchroom table with no food or drink in front of him, and you realize of course that you’ve communicated your interest a little too clearly and he’s lingering just for you, and after he’s finally given up and left, your fellow teachers at the table say with revulsion (and with some affection, too) that he seems to “out of phase.” What do you do when this ticklish absurdity masquerades as persistent, budding joy? What do you do?

What do you do? Second-person narration is, of course, a matter of some preference. It can seem a little forced or mannered (or even overused, says my wife Tara, who’s encountered too many of these herself lately). But when it works, it does indeed force you into some interesting perspectives and some troubling predicaments, and each of the stories here succeed on those terms.

The 2009 New Stories From The South isn’t overall a collection of great stylistic experimentation, of course. There are eighteen other stories more traditional in their approach. But throughout all the tales I’ve sampled, I’ve found writing that pleases and provokes. As with the entire series year after year, this new volume has proven itself a must-have book for anyone interested in either Southern literature or short fiction.

NYT Praises UNC-W Grad’s Second Thriller

Marilyn Stasio’s latest crime column gives high marks to The Long Division, the second novel from UNC-Wilmington graduate Derek Nikitas. ”Nikitas bumps up the style requirements for writing crime fiction another notch,” says Stasio, who also notes the novel’s “dazzling plot maneuvers.” Nice praise, to say the least. The full review is at the end of the article here. Nikitas already stopped by Pomegranate Books in Wilmington right after the book’s publication in October, so no N.C. events on the schedule right now. I’ll keep my N.C. readers updated if more events develop.

N.C. Events: David Wroblewski, Larry Tise & Fred Chappell

This weekend’s big visitor to Triangle area bookstores is David Wroblewski, author of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, which earned so many raves reviews last June (the Washington Post called it the “book of the year” when the year was only half over) and is earning a new batch of readers now that it’s out in paperback. Wroblewski will appear Friday evening, November 13, at Raleigh’s Quail Ridge Books and then again on Saturday at McIntyre’s Books in Fearrington Village.

But while that visiting star may be burning the brightest, don’t let it eclipse two other local lights.

Larry Tise, the Wilbur and Orville Wright Distinguished Professor of History at East Carolina University, visits Manteo Booksellers on Saturday to discuss his new book, Conquering the Sky: The Secret Flights of the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk. Released just last month, the book explores a series of test flight from 1908 (five years after that First Flight) which prepared the flying machine for the military market — and truly began earning the invention worldwide fame.

Then early next week, Fred Chappell offers up his second new collection of the year. Following on the success of Shadow Box: Poems — an intricate and enjoyable collection —  Chappell will read from Ancestors and Others: New and Selected Stories at four locations over four days, a whirlwind mini-tour: Tuesday, November 17, at the Bull’s Head Bookshop in Chapel Hill; Wednesday, November 18, at Durham’s Regulator Bookshop; Thursday, November 19, at Quail Ridge Books; and Friday, November 20. Basically, no excuse to miss this short story master looking back over a long and distinguished career.

For links to each of the bookstores and a more comprehensive listing of upcoming events, check out the full MetroBooks Calendar here.