N.C. Events: Dessen, Holmstedt & Carter

Just a quick look at what’s on tap over the next few days on the N.C. lit scene. 

First up, one of my favorite writers, Sarah Dessen, reads from her latest book, Along for the Ride, at McIntyre’s Books in Fearrington Village on Saturday, July 25, at 11 a.m. I was just talking two days ago about Dessen’s novels with a friend who’s now reading one of her earlier books, and we both agreed in our appreciation of her skill at crafting characters and pulling us into a story. While I’ve been waylaid in my own reading of the new book, Along for the Ride was recently named one of Good Morning America’s Picks for Teen Summer Reading. Check it out.

Also on Saturday, Kirsten Holmstedt reads discusses her new book, The Girls Come Marching Home: The Saga of Women Returning From the War  in Iraq, a follow-up to her Band of Sisters, at the Fayetteville Barnes & Noble; that event begins at 2 p.m. The New York Post recently featured the new book in its Required Reading column, and closer to home, the Wilmington Star-News published a nice profile of both the book and the author earlier this month. 

Finally, Durham’s Regulator Bookshop welcome Stephen L. Carter on Tuesday evening, July 28, to discuss his new book, Jericho’s Fall. Check out the Washington Post review here, which called the book an “odd but readable mixture of spy thriller, literary novel and haunted-house mystery” and ultimately complained that the climax was “too exciting.” Despite the review’s fine points, however, “too exciting” might very possibly be just what some readers are looking for in an action thriller this time of year.

Alexandra Sokoloff Talks About “The Unseen”

Alexandra Sokoloff’s new novel, The Unseen, takes as its starting point a set of real-life experiments done by Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine at Duke University from the late 1920s until the mid-1960s. As explained in the novel, Rhine and his colleagues — including William McDougall, Karl Zener, and Rhine’s wife Louisa — investigated widely into ESP and psychokinesis, and Rhine’s own seminal publications, including Extra-Sensory Perception (1934) and New Frontiers of the Mind (1937), not only helped to popularize the term parapsychology but also brought many of these possibilities to the wider American public for the first time. Seven hundred boxes of original files from the lab were stored at Duke when it closed in 1965 and have only recently been made available to the public.

In Sokoloff’s novel, Laurel MacDonald flees a disastrous engagement in California for a tenure-track position in Duke’s psychology department. When she happens upon those newly released research papers, she thinks she may also have stumbled into a project that will help turn tenure-track into full tenure — and soon discovers a companion in that quest, a handsome professor who’s also been sifting through the files. But surprises await, of course: The charming young professor may well be a devil in disguise; Laurel’s own uncle may have been involved in one of the more disturbing of the Rhine’s experiments; and family skeletons aren’t the only dark secrets that might be discovered in those research papers, potentially a Pandora’s box of trouble for everyone involved.

The News and Observer called The Unseen “a classic haunted house story with a decidedly local flavor” and wrote that “Sokoloff has found a groove” with this third novel, after successes with The Harrowing and The Price. In addition, Sokoloff recently enjoyed a top honor for her short fiction, earning the Best Short Story award at this year’s Thrillerfest for “The Edge of Seventeen.”

Sokoloff’s tour continues this week with a reading at Durham’s Regulator Bookshop on Wednesday, July 22, at 7 p.m., and she’ll also be joining the Mystery Book Club at the Cary Barnes & Noble on Monday, July 27, at 7 p.m. Further out, look for her at the Barnes & Noble at New Hope Commons in Durham on Saturday afternoon, August 29, and on North Carolina Bookwatch later this year. (For complete information, check out Sokoloff’s own website here.) In the meantime, Sokoloff fit in a quick interview below.

Art Taylor: One of your inspirations for The Unseen was the real-life parapsychology lab at Duke University. What are the advantages — and on the other hand, the challenges — of writing a novel that has some basis in documented historical events, rather than working solely from imagination or being inspired by more personal events?

Alexandra Sokoloff: I love working from real life because with everything I write I want the reader to believe that the story could really happen. All of my novels walk a very fine line between reality and the supernatural; part of the whole mystery and spookiness is that question: “Is this really happening, or is it a hoax or a criminal conspiracy, or is it even just all in the main character’s mind?” I like to keep readers guessing! So working from real-life paranormal case studies — how ESP and poltergeist experiences are reported by real people — helps me keep the story believable.

The particular challenge of The Unseen was to use the real-life history of the Rhine experiments and the Duke parapsychology lab in a thriller, without doing anything to dishonor the work that Dr. J.B. Rhine and Dr. Louisa Rhine did, which was not only groundbreaking but I think noble, dedicated to the advancement of human knowledge and potential. But in a thriller, there has to be a dark side, and jeopardy, so I was creating a mystery that never happened, and not-so-pure characters who never existed, but basing it all completely in a factual history. I wrote the Afterword in the book to make sure readers understand what is fact and what is fiction.

While much of the plot concentrates on the supernatural, The Unseen also focuses on family and on the secrets of the past — persistent themes in Southern literature — and throughout the book, Laurel is often offering perspectives on her new home in North Carolina: regional attitudes, customs, manners, fashion, food, etc. She even comments about feeling like she’s trapped in an episode of The Andy Griffith Show. What brought you to the South? How has your own time in the region influenced your writing? And beyond the setting itself, would you consider this book a “Southern novel”?

One of you charming Southern men brought me to the South.

Don’t kid yourself, we have family secrets in California, too! I would never dare to call The Unseen a “Southern novel.” I’m not sure I could write a truly Southern novel even if I’d lived here 25 years. My time here has been so short, and the region and the people are so complex. I knew the only chance I had of pulling The Unseen off in any kind of truthful way was to tell it from the point of view of a total transplant like myself, a California fish-out-of-water. So through Laurel MacDonald I was able to tap into my own sense of wonder and alienation about North Carolina and North Carolinians, and draw the Southern characters from the perspective of that outsider character. And that’s a good point of view for a thriller, especially a supernatural thriller, because the character is already disoriented and isolated and off-balance. And of course, it provides some humor.

And as to how living in the region has influenced my writing… I’m not sure I can answer that one yet, although fireflies have something to do with it, but I do know that it’s a very rich environment, while L.A. tends to be a vacuum, albeit a glamorous one. It saps creative energy and you have to go elsewhere to renew, whereas here the lifestyle is more rejuvenating.

Speaking of disoriented: In one scene, Laurel struggles with trying to answer questions for the Paranormal Belief Scale that she and her colleague are going to administer to the students — a scale for determining a subject’s “preestablished paranormal beliefs.” You’ve written about enjoying ghost stories as a child; you’ve written about experimenting with the paranormal as a teenager. How has writing your three books so far impacted any of your own beliefs about psychic phenomena or paranormal goings-on?

The interesting thing about writing ghost stories is that people you meet tell you their own paranormal stories (and oh, do Southerners have ghost stories!). So it’s very much reinforced my belief that psi experiences — like precognitive dreams, and crisis apparitions (having a loved one appear to you at a moment of extreme trauma or death), and telepathy, and the sense of a past experience or personality imprinted on a place — really do happen to people. As the Rhines discovered, there’s too much consistency about the stories not to believe that it really occurs. Not all the time, not to everyone, but it does happen.

You mentioned that L.A. tends to sap creative energy. But I’m curious how your novels were helped by your time as a screenwriter in Hollywood — and before that how your background in theater and dance may have influenced you. Is the act of, say, choreographing a dance ultimately more similar to or different from “choreographing” a scene in your novels? Are there “rules” for screenplay writing that particularly helped you in terms of character and plot when you first sat down to write a book?

All of the arts influence the other arts. Choreography and directing taught me how to bring emotion and shape and dramatic tension to characters and an overall story – and also about the importance of production design and visual imagery. They’re all ways of creating a particular emotional experience for a viewer or reader. My background in dance is especially good for rhythm and pacing. I know when a scene is going on too long; I know how to build emotion and intensity; I know where to cut. I know the biggest artistic sin is boring people!

Theater was fabulous training for film writing, and film writing is fantastic training for novel writing. I grew up with the three-act structure in theater and then applied it to film, and I’ve applied the three-act, eight-sequence filmic structure to novels – I’m sure that was why I was able to sell my first novel right away. I would be very uncomfortable saying there are rules to screenwriting – but there are classic structural elements in drama that have worked for thousands of years, since the very beginning of storytelling, and those can be learned and taught. Those elements are what my Screenwriting Tricks For Authors blog and workshops are about.

Finally: Since your story “The Edge of Seventeen” just won the award for Best Short Story at Thrillerfest — and congratulations there! — are there any more short stories in the works? Or are you just concentrating on the next novel?

Thank you! I love that story. I am in fact working on an anthology of four interconnected novellas with three other amazing new female dark suspense authors: Sarah Langan, Sarah Pinborough, and Rhodi Hawk. I’m very excited about that book. I just finished my fourth novel and am outlining two others, and this is my living – short stories don’t pay the bills! So I would really have to have my arm twisted to write another short piece right now.

Famous last words!

What’s Coming Up, Including Several N.C. Events (And Lots of Name Dropping)

Yes, I know it’s been a quiet week on the blog here, but many reasons why. So what have I been up to? Well, the last few days have included a phone interview with James Ellroy, an email interview with Alexandra Sokoloff, and prep for an upcoming interview with Michael Taeckens about his terrific new anthology Love Is A Four-Letter Word; look for all those soon at a blog near you (in fact, very near you at this moment). Last night was a reading in D.C. by Denny Drabelle (interviewed earlier this week), and then Tara and I had dinner with the truly delightful Kathy Fish, a flash fiction master; and on the heels of that, Tara had another of her own flash pieces accepted this morning, at the Northville Review, following another story’s recent acceptance at Barrelhouse. Congratulations! And throughout the week, I’ve been toiling away at writing the Fall for the Book program — many things still to be announced there, so keep watching that website! — and enjoying the novels of John Shannon for an article I’m working on for Mystery Scene. Oh, and my editor at Mystery Scene just asked me to interview Nevada Barr about a new stand-alone novel set in New Orleans. How could I say no? 

 

Excuses aside, however, it’s back to blogging. And since it’s Thursday, that means a quick look ahead at the North Carolina literary scene. Highlights of the next few days include two appearances by John Hart with his third (and in my opinion best) novel, The Last Child; he’ll be reading at McIntyre’s Books in Fearrington Village on Saturday, July 18, and again at the Barnes & Noble in Cary on Tuesday, July 21.

Also making the rounds this weekend is MaryAnn McFadden, one of the writers who’s made that inspiring transition from self-published novelist to bestselling author, with her new book, So Happy Together; she’ll be at McIntyre’s Books on Sunday, July 19, and then at the Country Bookshop in Southern Pines the following afternoon, Monday, July 20.

And since I mentioned Alexandra Sokoloff above, don’t miss my interview with her on Monday, in advance of her reading at Durham’s Regulator Bookshop on Wednesday, July 22.

Sorry for the quickie update here; I’ll be back on track early next week.

An Interview with Dennis Drabelle, Author of “Mile-High Fever: Silver Mines, Boom Towns, and High Living on the Comstock Lode”

Dennis Drabelle is the author of Mile-High Fever: Silver Mines, Boom Towns, and High Living on the Comstock Lode, released just last week and already earning high praise.  A review in the Washington Post Book World said that Drabelle “provides vivid insight into the mines and the world of Western newspapering,” and Open Letters: A Monthly Arts and Literature Review called Mile-High Fever “a fantastic book, one that instructs and entertains in equal measure, one that sheds some new light on the banging, awkward adolescence of America, revels in an enormous cast of well-drawn characters, and is from first to last a fun reading experience.”

Virginia City, one of the most important of the Comstock’s mining towns, served up its own nuggets of the gunslinging Western myth; as Mark Twain wrote in Roughing It, “The first twenty-six graves in the Virginia cemetery were occupied by murdered men.”  But as Drabelle explained in an interview last week at First Person Plural with my friend and fellow writer Kyle Semmel, the region’s history also “crystallizes so much that was going on in America at the time (the late 19th century): robber barons looting the country, while at the same time certain inventions and developments — the cable that will make elevators safe and permit the building of skyscrapers, modular cubes as a construction form that will allow those buildings to really scrape the sky — were being developed in what amounted to a kind of industrial lab. At the Comstock and in San Francisco, where the mining stock market was headquartered, you can see fraud galore as well as the evolution of a new kind of American writing in the newspapers springing up in the mining towns.”

Drabelle has been a contributing editor at the Washington Post Book World since 1985 (and for full disclosure, one of my own editors there), and in 1996 he earned the National Book Critics Circle’s award for excellence in reviewing. In addition to his regular work for the Post, he has also written for publications including The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Civilization, American History, and Smithsonian. Contributing to his background on the topic at hand were six years as a lawyer at the U.S. Department of the Interior, in part monitoring the effects of the 1872 Mining Law on national parks and wilderness areas.  

Drabelle will discuss Mile-High Fever on Wednesday, July 15, at 6:30 p.m. at the Barnes & Noble, 555 12th St. N.W., Washington, D.C., and he’ll also appear in September at the Fall for the Book Festival (which, another disclosure, I also help to promote). On the heels of  the interview mentioned above and in advance of those appearances ahead, Drabelle indulged some questions for me below. 

Art Taylor: This story began as an article for Smithsonian. What brought you to that story in the first place? And then what drew you toward broadening that article into a book?

Dennis Drabelle: Actually, the book began as a not-quite article for Smithsonian. They commissioned it, I wrote it, they accepted and paid for it, and then they changed editors. The new one wanted me to cut the piece in half and then might or might use it, and I resisted. Ultimately, they restored the rights to the piece to me and let me keep the money, and I resold the piece to American History, where it was published.

The article was on William Stewart, and I found my way to him in a very bookish way. I was reading Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (which, despite being written by an Englishman and set in Britain, is in my view the best novel of the Gilded Age). [Note: Newsweek thinks it's the best book about today's world as well.] In the novel American shysters sail to England and sell wildcat mining and timber stocks to unsuspecting British investors. After I finished the book, I consulted The Penguin Companion to Trollope, which said that this episode was probably based on the Emma mine scandal. I researched that, and found that at the heart of the fraudulence was William Stewart, a U.S. senator from Nevada who first made a name for himself as a go-getter of an attorney on the Comstock Lode. I think you can finish the chain yourself: the story kept getting larger and more interesting as I went along, and eventually I thought there might be a book in the Comstock, especially one that emphasized its ties with San Francisco, where almost all the profits ended up. 

San Francisco benefitted greatly from the Comstock — whether we’re talking about banking and finance or even the development of the iconic cable car, which relied heavily on technological advancements made in the mines — and in terms of finance, law, industry, architecture, even literature, the Comstock story offers several influential, even foundational developments for the history not just of the West but also of the nation as a whole. And yet throughout the book, I kept having to remind myself that there was a Civil War going on back East, and a difficult Reconstruction in its wake. How does the Comstock story offer an alternate history of a country in transition, an alternate perspective on what formed the U.S. that we know today? And how has the Comstock story been overshadowed by the Civil War? 

The Comstock was so far removed from the Civil War that its big events were old news by the time they reached Virginia City. But that doesn’t mean there was no connection. Nevada was admitted to the union prematurely in 1864 because the Lincoln administration needed more solid Republican votes in Congress, not to mention the ability to cite the mines’ value in balance sheets when the feds went to Europe looking for credit. And the best thing William Stewart did as a senator was to perfect the language that became the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, which guaranteed (on paper at least) the right of freed slaves to vote.

As for the Comstock being overshadowed, yes, I think it has been—but perhaps not so much by the war (which ended when the Lode’s heyday still had 15 years to run), but by the whole phenomenon of the boom-and-bust mining town. They popped up and died all over the West, and one is pretty much the same as the other—except for Virginia City, where indeed you had all these industrial inventions and developments, along with the making of Mark Twain. 

What stands in your mind as the most positive contribution of the Comstock to the U.S.? Is it industrial advancement? Is it literary, through Twain? Is it that San Francisco cable car? or something else entirely?

I do think it is Mark Twain and the demotic kind of writing that revolutionized American prose. As I said at the end of the book, the best you can say about the great mass of humanity that flocked to Virginia City is that on the whole they had a good time while a few voracious entrepreneurs and speculators were hogging the wealth. But the crackling atmosphere of tall tales and applied wit and polyglot language did lead to something rather magnificent.

Another  follow-up: The Bank Ring, the Bonanza Kings, and the stockbrokers’ schemes — and the disparity between the very rich and the “rest of us” — can’t help to resonate with some headlines in more recent newspapers. How does this tale of boom and bust shed some light on what’s happening today?

One lesson is probably not to invest in mining stocks: there are simply too many chances of being hoodwinked. And I don’t want to get on a soapbox, but on the Comstock you can see the beginnings of the unbridled laissez-faire capitalism that has gotten us in trouble so many times in our history. Stewart made sure that the mining laws gave everything to the miners (which meant large corporations, in most cases, not the romantic image of the rugged individualist with a mule and a pick and a grubstake), with no royalties being paid to the federal government even though most of the mines occurred on federal land. Same with the mining stock market — very little regulation by any level of government. The Comstock may be an extreme case, but I think you can there, in embryo, some of the hands-off trends that have culminated in our current economic calamity.

Back to the question of writing once more: Even beyond Twain, much of the period writing that you quote throughout the book is often beautiful prose. J. Ross Browne’s article for Harper’s; the great excerpts from Dan De Quille (William Wright); even fire chief Kettle Belly Brown’s words in the closing pages — each offers vivid, often lyrical language. But writing about the journals of Alfred Doten, you comment that “many entries are humdrum… but some lines crackle with the wonder of life.” Was finding good writing from this era more often like panning for gold nuggets, or was there, as with the Comstock Lode, a wealth of literary treasure to be mined?

There is amazingly good writing all over the literature of the Comstock. Besides the people you mention—and I totally agree about J. Ross Browne, a fine stylist—there was also Eliot Lord, a fellow who visited Virginia City after the heyday was over and wrote a book-length report under contract with the Geological Survey. Soon, in fact, it was indeed published as a book, Comstock Mining and Miners, and it’s an invaluable source. Among other things, Lord tracked down Bucke, the guy who survived the horrible blizzard that killed the last surviving Grosh brother. Without him, we would not know nearly as much as we do about that tragic episode — and Lord, mind you, was funded by the government. Even Mary McNair Mathews, the keeper of a lodging house, wrote good prose, and her book Ten Years in Nevada is very readable. The conclusion I draw is that before the distractions of electronic media, people paid far more attention to the words they used and the sentences they constructed. The level of superior writing made my research a pleasure from beginning to end. 

You write early in the book about “the difference between sentimental fiction and callous reality” and toward the end you discuss Virginia City as the inspiration for the TV show Bonanza and as a tourist destination today. To what degree did you find that this story supported many of the expectations/tropes of the Western myth and to what degree did this story resist or refute all that?

The reviewer for the Washington Post quite rightly pointed out that I much preferred telling stories of fraud and excessive litigation and heirs trying to break wills over tales of gunslingers shooting it out on the streets of Virginia City. There was some of that, but it was pretty much over by the end of the rush’s first five years, and what, really, does it tell us? Rather than feed the image we already have of derringer-wielding poker players and dancehall floozies, I thought I would follow the money — which, of course, is what brought 15 or 20 thousand people to Nevada in the first place. It’s not so much that the Comstock refutes the Wild West myth as it points out that the myth is a bit shallow: there was a lot more going on in the West than gunfights at high noon.

N.C. Events: Nic Brown at The Regulator

This weekend’s events feature a couple of authors already profiled on this site — both on Friday, July 10. Laura Brodie (interviewed earlier this week) brings her debut novel, The Widow’s Season, to Quail Ridge Books that night, and across the Triangle, Ed Southern (interviewed here) talks about his new book, Sports in the Carolinas: From Death Valley to Tobacco Road, at McIntyre’s Books in Fearrington Village.

But it’s a third author that night who deserves mention here: Nic Brown, riding a small wave of complimentary reviews toward his signing at Durham’s Regulator Bookshop. Brown’s debut short story collection, Floodmarkers, is set on the day Hurricane Hugo hit the Carolina coastline and follows the storm’s impact on the residents of fictional Lystra, N.C. — “a vivid portrait of life in one small, Southern town,” wrote The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, concluding that “At just 172 pages, Floodmarkers can be read in less than the day it took Hurricane Hugo to pass over Lystra. But thanks to its author’s skill, its emotional storm surge will linger long after the rain has passed.” And even a mixed review in The News and Observer, while perhaps over-emphasizing a comparison between Brown and Clyde Edgerton, finds much to admire; on the plus-side in that comparison, the review notes that “Brown writes in the raggedy voice of his raggedy characters, injecting his stories with a bracing directness that Edgerton, deity of the turn of phrase, sometimes lacks.” (And for some quick story-behind-the-almost-story, check out Brown’s playlist for the New York Times book blog, where he notes that Springsteen’s “Stolen Car” inspired the first story for Floodmarkers, a story ultimately left on the cutting-room floor.)

Brown’s reading begins at The Regulator at 7 p.m. on Friday. For a complete schedule of upcoming events, check out the MetroBooks calendar here.