Tag: books

Categories
Arts

Book marks: A year of reading local authors

There’s no denying it: Charlottesville is a wordsmith-rich town. Whether you’re looking for a page-turner for the beach, autumnal meditations in the form of poetry, or a fireside companion for a winter’s night, there are enough local writers publishing books each year to keep your shelves well-stocked. Here are some of the titles published by area authors in 2017.

Fiction

Corban Addison, A Harvest of Thorns

A journalist seeks to expose an American retailer’s culpability in a factory fire in Bangladesh that killed hundreds of workers.

Hannah Barnaby, Garcia & Collette Go Exploring

Two friends go on separate adventures, one into space, one under the sea.

Rita Mae Brown, A Hiss Before Dying

Set in Crozet, two present-day murders point to a mystery dating from the American Revolution.

John Grisham

Camino Island

Diverging from his legal thrillers, Grisham spins a literary mystery, beginning with the disappearance of some F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscripts.

The Rooster Bar

A return to form, this legal thriller finds three law school friends confronting a moral dilemma as they discover their professional future is in jeopardy.

Jan Karon, To Be Where You Are: A Mitford Novel

Fourteenth in the series, this Mitford novel sees Father Kavanagh into retirement.

BettyJoyce Nash and Deirdra McAfee, Lock & Load: Armed Fiction

This edited anthology centers on the gun in contemporary American short stories.

Anne Marie Pace, Groundhug Day

A groundhog is invited to a Valentine’s Day party but is afraid he’ll see his shadow.

Caroline Preston, The War Bride’s Scrapbook

Through vintage postcards, photographs and historic headlines, Preston weaves a story of love and shifting gender roles during World War II.

Erika Raskin, Best Intentions

This medical thriller, which takes place in Richmond, raises questions about medical practice and social justice.

Sean Rubin, Bolivar

In this beautifully illustrated graphic novel, a dinosaur lives in New York City undetected, mostly.

Shelley Sackier, The Freemason’s Daughter

Told through the eyes of a Scottish lass, this YA historical novel tells the story of the Jacobites.

Non-fiction

Kathryn Erskine, Mama Africa!

This book illustrates the life of a South African singer who challenged apartheid.

Khizr Khan, An American Family

Khizr Khan recounts his life as a Muslim American immigrant, Harvard Law School graduate, and husband and father whose son, Humayun, died in the Iraq War in 2004.

Donna M. Lucey, Sargent’s Women

The author reveals the lives of four women who sat for American portraitist John Singer Sargent.

Stefan Bechtel and Laurence Roy Stains, Through a Glass, Darkly

This work explores Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s role in spiritualism and his communications with the dead.

Sharon Harrigan, Playing with Dynamite

A daughter seeks answers to questions surrounding her father’s mysterious death.

Elizabeth Meade Howard, Aging Famously

In this collection of short essays, Howard discusses aging with locals and celebrities.

Lisa Jakub, Not Just Me

Through her own experience and interviews with others, Jakub explores treatment for anxiety.

Joe Junod, INK: A Life in Letters

This memoir recounts the author’s career and experiences in journalism.

Jeff Kamen with Leslie Stone-Kamen, Warrior Pups: True Stories of America’s K9 Heroes

With color photographs, this book tells the stories of the humans and canines in the U.S. Military Working Dog Program.

Beatrix Ost, More Than Everything: My Voyage with the Gods of Love

Beginning in Munich at the end of World War II, this memoir follows the author into a marriage inevitably impacted by war.

Lisa Russ Spaar, Orexia

Spaar explores late-middle age desire in this collection of poetry.

Lynn Thorne, Who Am I, If You’re Not You?

This love story chronicles Jennifer and Marika, and Marika’s decision to transition from female to male.

Brendan Wolfe, Mr. Jefferson’s Telescope

An overdue library book from dropout Edgar Allan Poe and a key in the hands of a freed slave are among the objects that tell the history of the University of Virginia.

Categories
Arts

A selection of local authors’ fall releases

As the weather starts to turn cool, now is a good time to find a book to curl up with on those chilly, overcast days. Local author releases this season offer a wide array of subjects from which to choose, such as history, fiction, psychology and memoir. Here are some highlights:

Lisa Jakub, Not Just Me: Anxiety, Depression, and Learning to Embrace Your Weird

Jakub, whose first book, You Look Like That Girl, recounted her adventures in Hollywood as a child actor and her decision to leave that life, explores mental health in her sophomore effort—part memoir, part research journey. Yet she writes with an irreverence and levity that creates a comfortable space for exploring weighty subjects.

“I wanted to write the book that I most needed when my anxiety and depression was at its worst,” she says. “I wanted to explore my experience with mental wellness, offer a space for other people to share their stories and look at the science and research behind these issues.” The title arises from the fact that “We think no one else feels like this and we need to go it alone. And that’s just not true,” she says.

Donna M. Lucey Sargent’s Women: Four Lives Behind the Canvas

In this biography of the late 19th century, Lucey details the lives of Elsie Palmer, Lucia Fairchild, Elizabeth Chanler and Isabella Stewart Gardner—all painted by American portraitist John Singer Sargent. “I’ve always loved the Gilded Age,” Lucey says, “that giddy era of excess and opulence that spawned the most wonderfully eccentric characters.” While writing her last book, Archie and Amélie, she stumbled upon the story of Chanler, Archie’s sister. After she learned that Chanler had been a subject of one of Sargent’s portraits, she “began to wonder about the lives of other women he’d painted,” and a book revealed itself.

Jan Karon, To Be Where You Are: A Mitford Novel (September 19)

The 14th novel in Karon’s beloved Mitford Years series follows the Kavanagh family through an identity crisis caused by retirement, a financial challenge for a newly married couple, a death and a birth. The recurring cast of characters will be familiar to faithful fans of the series. Karon, who won the Library of Virginia’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015, told the Charlotte Observer this spring that she began writing the series to “give readers a safe place to go.”

Sharon Harrigan Playing with Dynamite: A Memoir (October 1)

Harrigan’s life has been haunted by the absence of a father who blew off one of his hands with dynamite before she was born and died in a suspicious accident when she was 7. In this memoir, Harrigan chronicles her two-year search for answers to questions surrounding her father’s death—a journey that takes her from Virginia to Paris to Michigan. “My father’s death was the defining event of my life, and his mysterious accident haunted me,” she says. “He went hunting for a deer and a deer killed him? That never made sense.” In the process of seeking the truth about her father, Harrigan instead learns about her mother.

Categories
Arts

Stefan Bechtel’s new book inspects the Conan Doyle conundrum

Stefan Bechtel’s Through a Glass, Darkly chronicles Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s real-life pursuit of spiritualism, an early 20th century movement that promoted contact with the afterlife. Photo courtesy of the subject

For Charlottesville-based author Stefan Bechtel, mystery is the essence of life.

“I grew up in Chicago, in the white-bread suburbs where every lawn was perfect. But way out on the edge of town there was a swamp. Lincoln Swamp,” Bechtel says. “We would ride our bikes all the way out to Lincoln Swamp, and we basically raised ourselves there. It was mysterious and alive, the strange and incredible all wrapped in one. It was kind of our religion.”

Now, with a dozen books and countless articles under his belt, the writer explains that the truism “write what you know” doesn’t really suit him. He quotes David McCullough when he says, “‘I want to write about what I don’t know.’”

The thrill of exploration—and sharing his discoveries—is the fuel that powers Bechtel’s work, which has appeared in 10 languages and publications such as Esquire and the Washington Post.

After graduating from the University of Miami with a degree in journalism, he worked at newspapers and magazines. While working for Rodale Press as a senior editor for Prevention magazine, Bechtel and his boss, Mark Bricklin, struck gold by creating a monthly newsletter called Men’s Health. That newsletter went on to become the largest men’s magazine brand in the world.

But it wasn’t until Bechtel got his first book contract with HarperCollins, while taking a leave of absence from Rodale, that he discovered his true calling.

“I remember, when I finished that first book, walking around the block probably 50 times,” he says. “I was just so high, so excited that I had done something I knew was good, and that I was going to be able to share this terrific story with people.”

That story began many years earlier, when Bechtel worked at a small city magazine in Greensboro, North Carolina. Out of the blue, he got a call from a woman who described unusual phenomena in her home, “like, she’d walk into a room and the fire would be going in the fireplace, but she had no memory of putting the fire there.”

His curiosity piqued, Bechtel joined the woman as she worked with Duke University researchers to investigate a potential haunting in her home. The results of that research were inconclusive—and so was Bechtel’s article.

But several years later, he received another call. This time, the woman, Kit Castle, had a definitive answer to the mystery.

“She said, ‘I been working with a psychiatrist, and it turns out I’m a multiple personality,’” says Bechtel. “‘And my spirit guide, Michael, asked me if you’d be going to write a book about me and what’s going on.’”

After checking with Castle’s doctor, psychiatrist and ex-husband, Bechtel dove back into the story, fell in love with the process, and Katherine, It’s Time: The Incredible Journey into the World of a Multiple Personality was published in 1989.

“It’s beyond exciting,” says Bechtel. “To be taken out of my life completely and confronted with something that’s utterly confounding and thrilling, because you can’t understand it. That’s writerly bliss.”

Since then, Bechtel has authored or co-authored 12 books, which have collectively sold more than 2 million copies. But writing books for a living hasn’t been the easiest path. His latest novel, Through a Glass, Darkly, spent five years gestating as a 13,000-word book proposal before St. Martin’s Press picked it up.

His latest project gave him a chance to re-engage with “the mysterious, the inexplicable. Not sci-fi or horror, but the uneasiness of something that doesn’t really make sense to the rational mind.”

This time, Bechtel’s search focused on the transformation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a shift he offhandedly calls the “Conan Doyle conundrum.”

After becoming famous as the creator of hyper-rational sleuth Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle transformed into a (widely ridiculed) champion of spiritualism, a kind of do-it-yourself religion wherein the living communicate with the dead.

“[It was] this crazy mania that swept across the United States and Europe,” Bechtel says. “In the 1920s, Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla were actually competing to develop a machine called the ghost machine, which would discover the precise electrical frequency that would allow people to communicate directly with the spirit world. That’s how big it was.”

Bechtel and his co-author, Laurence Roy Stains, spent months researching historical records of trance mediums and séances, following Conan Doyle’s trail. “He read very widely and had come to his beliefs pretty cautiously,” Bechtel says. “He had hope that spiritualism would become the world’s first scientific religion, based on demonstrable facts and not on faith.”

Because in those days, Bechtel says, the theological war was a fight between the materialists and the spiritualists, the materialists being “the super scientific people who had reduced human life to four bags of water and a sack of salt.” And Conan Doyle “wanted to believe in magic. He wanted the world to be filled with mystery. And he felt like the materialists were completely ignoring or blocking that out.”

In this way, Bechtel echoes his subject from Through a Glass, Darkly.

“I love things that confound the rational mind. I love the creepy series of coincidences,” he says. “Our world is mysterious and wonderful. And if you lose sight of that, I think you might as well be dead.”

Categories
Real Estate

Up Close and Personal: The 2017 Virginia Festival of The Book

By Ken Wilson – 

Up and down Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall on a recent Saturday morning, the literati were looking. At New Dominion Bookshop, the oldest bookstore in town, dating back to 1924, a woman was checking out the Lit Crit section.  At the Blue Whale, where original prints, antiquarian maps, and rare volumes sit alongside 20,000 used books, a man was browsing in the philosophy of science section. At Read It Again, Sam folks were eyeing the racks out front. And just off the Mall at Daedalus Used Bookshop, the oldest used bookstore in town, a couple was navigating three floors with 100,000 books in search of . . . What is it with all these people? Haven’t they heard of the Internet, Kindle downloads, free shipping and next day delivery? Chances are they have. No, the reason there are so many booksellers on the Mall in addition to a great big chain store elsewhere in the city is that around here we like to get up close and personal with books and the good people who write them.

That’s why the annual Virginia Festival of the Book—five days of mostly free talks and panels bringing together writers and readers in celebration of books, reading, literacy, and literary culture—is the largest community-based book event in the Mid-Atlantic region, attracting audiences of more than 20,000 each year. That’s why more than 400 authors will be in town for over 260 programs this March 22-26 as part of the 23rd Festival.

“I love our book-loving community!” says Jane Kulow, Director of the Virginia Center for the Book, which programs the Festival. “While we’re proud of the audiences we attract from the region and from across the country, Charlottesville and Albemarle County residents have been  remarkable in their support for the Virginia Festival of the Book for twenty-three years. Our local community helps keep the Festival going strong; this support brings national attention to the Festival and to the community for being a ‘book-loving town,’ and it aids our efforts to bring in top-notch authors.”

Asked what she is especially looking forward to this year, Kulow singles out two programs, one hyper-topical, one highly imaginative. “Given the news cycles of the past year, through the Presidential campaign and since, we all have a greater appreciation for the necessity for media literacy,” she says. “Questions, Expertise, and the President: Not Just for News Junkies,” on Saturday March 25 from 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. in the City Council Chambers will meet that need with a panel featuring National Security Affairs professor Tom Nichols, former CNN anchor and GWU School of Media and Public Affairs director Frank Sesno, and Washington Post reporters Marc Fisher and Michael Kranish.

“On a lighter note,” Kulow says, “I cannot wait to hear from the authors in “Wild Fiction!! Attacks! Exorcism! Animation!” with Manuel Gonzales, author of The Regional Office is Under Attack!, Grady Hendrix, author of My Best Friend’s Exorcism, and Kayla Rae Whitaker, author of The Animators. We’ve passed those books around the office for all to enjoy!”

Economic Inequality
No issue is more central to the national conversation currently than economic inequality, and two Friday programs, presented in collaboration with the interfaith, Central Virginia group, Clergy and Laity United for Justice and Peace, will shed light on the subject. Former CNN Anchor and White House correspondent Frank Sesno will moderate a discussion with Daniel Hatcher (The Poverty Industry), Thomas Shapiro (Toxic Inequality), and Jennifer Silva (Coming Up Short) from 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. From 7:00 to 8:30 p.m. at the Martin Luther King Jr. Performing Arts Center, Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, author of The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them, will speak on the rise of inequality in the West and a possible solution. Frank Sesno will join Stiglitz for discussion and questions. Tickets for this event are $5.

Religious Satire
In today’s charged political atmosphere, the urge to mock comes quick and often. True satire, argues Virginia Wesleyan College professor Terry Lindvall, is at heart moral outrage expressed in laughter. Lindvall’s 2015 book, God Mocks: A History of Religious Satire from the Hebrew Prophets to Stephen Colbert, received the 2016 Religious Communication Association Book of the Year Award. Lindvall will speak about his book on Saturday, March 25 from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. at St. Paul’s Memorial Church. UVA’s Theological Horizons will host a reception honoring Dr. Lindvall, with book sales and signings, following the discussion.

Local Author Writes for Kids
Ninety of this year’s authors are Virginians, including Priya Mahadevan, who worked as a political reporter in India before moving to Charlottesville 15 years ago, began blogging about vegetarian cooking and the birth of her third child, Shreya, and now works as a caterer specializing in vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free cuisine. Mahadevan calls her first published book, the children’s picture book Princesses Only Wear Putta Puttas, “a labor of love, an embellished version of truthful events that happened during her second trip to India, which Shreya was actually able to remember. It was fascinating to watch her revel and assimilate and embrace so quickly everything she saw and experienced.” 

Bestselling author Kwame Alexander has written twenty-one books for kids and young adults, including The Crossover, winner of the 2015 Newbery Medal. Illustrator Ekua Holmes’s debut book, Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer: The Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement (written by Carole Boston Weatherford), won the Caldecott Honor Book and a Sibert Honor Book awards. Alexander and Holmes will appear at UVA’s Culbreth Theatre on Wednesday March 22 at 7:00 p.m. to talk about their careers, the children’s publishing industry, creating books for minority readers, and their new collaborative volume, Out of Wonder: Poems Celebrating Poets. While Out of Wonder is meant for children, says Assistant Director of the Virginia Center for the Book, Sarah Lawson “as an adult reader it’s fantastic as well. It’s composed of different poems honoring poets over the course of time, from all areas.”

Storyfest
Kids will enjoy their own day-long literary blowout Saturday, with eleven “Storyfest” programs including a “Book Swap” from 10:00 to 12:00 p.m. and a “Storytime Marathon” from 2:00 to 4:30 p.m. at the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library (JMRL), and a “Wild About Reading” program with stories and live animals at the Discovery Museum from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m.

Lawson calls Christiansburg author Tom Angleberger—author of Rocket and Groot: Stranded on Planet Strip Mall, the bestselling Origami Yoda series, and the Fake Mustache, Horton Halfpott, and the Qwikpick Papers series—a “rock star” of children’s literature. Angleberger and Out of Abaton author John Claude Bemis will tell tales of betrayal, fantastical adventures, and other hijinks from their popular novels and illustrated comics at JMRL from 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. Angleberger, Mahadevan and Alexander are among the children’s authors who will visit public and private schools in Charlottesville-Albemarle during the Festival to entertain and inspire students in personal encounters.

Crime Wave
Festival Saturdays bring a daylong Crime Wave to the Omni, with seven programs worth of mystery and suspense, spies and private eyes. “The Mysterious Worlds of Abbott, Dahl, Lin, and Tran” from 12:00 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. in Ballroom A will feature what Lawson calls the “dark but really immersive” psychological thrillers of Mystery Writers of America winner Megan Abbott and three whodunit “up-and-comers”: Julia Dahl, Ed Lin and Vu Tran.

Two of the three writers in “Private Eyes You’ll Want to Follow,” from 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. in Ballroom C, are poets as well as crime novelists. Poets Erica Wright (The Granite Moth) and Greer Macallister (Girl in Disguise) will be joined by Michael Robertson, author of The Baker Street Letter series, featuring a Sherlock Holmesian London solicitor. Moderator Ed Lin’s six acclaimed thrillers are set in New York City’s Chinatown and in Taiwan.

Publishing Day
As always, Saturday at the Omni Hotel is Publishing Day, with a Lit Fair featuring literary magazines, publishers, and writing resources and seven programs designed to aid, instruct and encourage both published and aspiring writers. “Keys to Success in Book Publishing and Promotion,” from 10:00 to 11:30 a.m. in the Monroe Room, will bring novelists Ann Garvin and Tom McAllister and young adult novelist Brenda Drake together with moderator Jane Friedman, an internationally known speaker on writing and publishing in the digital age. Conversation will center on working with publishers and using traditional and new-tech publicity techniques to direct readers to an author’s books. Literary agents Lisa Bankoff, Michael Carlisle, and Eric Smith will take part in a roundtable discussion on the publishing business and will answer audience questions from 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. in Ballroom A.

Audiobook sales were strong in 2016 and are expected to grow in 2017, according to Publishers Weekly. Love and lust were widely reported as well, and are expected to remain universal phenomena. Romance audiobook narrators and voice actors David Brenin, Will Damron, Luke Daniels, Derek Perkins, and Aiden Snow will discuss the world of audiobook publishing from 12:00 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. in the Preston Room at the Omni, and divulge—and possibly demonstrate—the vocal techniques that make listeners swoon.

Inspiration
That a great book can change your life is a truism, but do they retain that power in the digital age, and how do you find the right ones anyhow? While the Festival itself might be seen as five days of resounding answers (“yes,” and “here they are!”), “Get Lit: Books That Inspire,” from 2:00 to 3:30 p.m. at the Central Branch of the JMRL Library, gets a little more specific, with authors David Denby (Lit Up: One Reporter. Three Schools. Twenty-four Books That Can Change Lives) and Bethanne Patrick (The Books That Changed My Life: Reflections by 100 Authors, Actors, Musicians, and Other Remarkable People). JMRL’s Central Branch manager and assistant director Krista Farrell, a used bookstore owner in a former life, and thus doubly entitled to her own opinions, will moderate.

Middlemarch in Song
Virginia Woolf called George Eliot’s tragic but searching novel Middlemarch, published in 1872 and subtitled A Study of Provincial Life, “one of the few English books written for grown-up people.” “What do I think of Middlemarch?” wrote Emily Dickinson. “What do I think of glory?” On March 23 and 24 at the Paramount Theater Charlottesville Opera (formerly Ash Lawn Opera) will give the East Coast premiere of Middlemarch in Spring, a new chamber opera based on Eliot’s masterpiece by composer Allen Shearer and librettist Claudia Stevens. New Yorker staff writer Rebecca Mead, author of My Life in Middlemarch, a memoir of the novel’s instructive role in her own life, will speak before the March 23rd performance, at 6:30 p.m.

Presented each year by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, the Virginia Festival of the Book has produced legions of dedicated fans like Sarah Lawson, who go primed for new discoveries. “It’s always been amazing,” says Lawson, who grew up attending with her librarian parents, “to realize how many things I just stumble into. Prior to working for the Festival I would be very open to just wandering into programs and seeing if they struck my fancy, and often they did. I would learn something new, or find a new author that I loved. I think that joy of discovery is such an important part of the Festival, and something that is so crucial and so loved by the local community and the people who attend each year.” That’s for sure.

Categories
Arts

A round-up of 2016’s C’ville scribes

There’s something about Charlottesville. Recently included in “The Ultimate 50-State Road Trip for Book Lovers,” this small city’s appeal to writers and bibliophiles can be attributed to the annual Festival of the Book, Edgar Allan Poe’s enshrined West Range room at UVA, Thomas Jefferson’s library at Monticello, the Rare Book School, the Virginia Art of the Book Center, the University of Virginia’s renowned Creative Writing MFA program and an abundance of bookstores. But there’s something else, too. It’s not just a destination. Many writers choose to make Charlottesville their home. At least 40 local authors published books in 2016. There are so many, in fact, that we could not print an exhaustive list, but here are some of the highlights.

Fiction

Jane Alison, Nine Island (Catapult)

A woman in Miami translates Ovid and considers giving up romantic love.

Hannah Barnaby, Some of the Parts (Knopf Books for Young Readers)

A teen searches for the recipients of her deceased brother’s organs.

Rita Mae Brown

Cakewalk: A Novel (Bantam)

Sisters in a Southern town test social boundaries after World World I.

Tall Tail: A Mrs. Murphy Mystery (Bantam)

Before solving a recent crime in Crozet, Harry must research a murder that happened in 1784.

Jen Swann Downey, Ninja Librarians: A Sword in the Stacks (Sourcebooks Jabberwocky)

Dorrie time travels to 1912 England to learn how to protect freedom of speech.

John Grisham

The Whistler (Doubleday)

A lawyer takes on a corrupt judge with Coast Mafia ties.

Theodore Boone: The Scandal
(Dutton Books for Young Readers)

A 13-year-old seeks the truth when high standardized test scores indicate a cheating scandal.

Lee Clay Johnson, Nitro Mountain:
A Novel (Knopf)

A cast of Virginians grapples with mental health issues, addiction, love, loss and music.

Joel Jones, Barhoppers: The Answer Man and Other Bar Plays (Indie Theater Now)

Short, comedic plays with a philosophical bent.

Jan Karon, Come Rain or Come Shine,
A Mitford Novel (G.P. Putnam’s Sons)

Dooley Kavanaugh and Lace Harper tie the knot in a rustic barn wedding.

Kristen-Paige Madonia, Invisible Fault Lines (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers)

A teen’s search for her missing father leads her to research the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

Ethan Murphy, edited by Susan L. Holland, art by Luigi Teruel, Grave New World, Slate & Ashe Series No. 4 (Echelon Graphic Novels)

Slate, an evolved zombie, and outlaw Ashe run for the hills and encounter a militia.

Anne Marie Pace, Pigloo (Henry Holt & Co.)

A young pig plans an expedition to the North Pole.

Emma Rathbone, Losing It (Riverhead Books)

A 26-year-old virgin seeks sex and love, and to avoid the fate of her maiden aunt.

Non-fiction

Rosalyn Berne, Waking to Beauty: Encounters with Remarkable Beings (Rainbow Ridge)

The author communicates with a horse and considers the presence of divinity in all creatures.

Alison Booth, Homes and Haunts: Touring Writers’ Shrines and Countries (Oxford University Press)

A study on literary tourism and our fascination with the spaces writers inhabit.

AM Carley, FLOAT: Becoming Unstuck for Writers (Be Well Here)

Writing exercises and prompts by a professional writing coach.

Mark Edmundson, Why Write? A Master Class on the Art of Writing and Why It Matters (Bloomsbury USA)

Practical advice and encouragement for writers.

Pamela Evans, The Preschool Parent Primer (IvyArtz)

Everything preschool teachers wish parents knew.

Russell Grieger, The Perfect Season:
A Memoir of the 1964-1965 Evansville College Purple Aces (University of
Indiana Press)

The author recounts his college basketball team’s perfect season.

Mary Buford Hitz, For Love of the Land: A History of the Wintergreen Community (The Nature Foundation at Wintergreen)

A historical account of conservation efforts.

Edward G. Lengel, First Entrepreneur: How George Washington Built His—
and the Nation’s—Prosperity (Da Capo Press)

Business lessons from our first president.

Joan Z. Rough, Scattering Ashes:
A Memoir of Letting Go (She Writes Press)

The author chronicles the challenges
and rewards of caring for an aging
parent.

Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race (William Morrow & Company)
The true story of four African American women whose calculations for NASA sent rockets and astronauts into space.

Charles Shields, Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, from Scout to Go Set a Watchman (Henry Holt & Co.)

This revised biography of Harper Lee addresses the posthumous publication of Go Set a Watchman.

Kristin Swenson, God of Earth:
Discovering a Radically Ecological
Christianity (Westminster John Knox Press)

An exploration of divinity in the natural world.

Screen Shot 2016-12-28 at 11.17.57 AM

Poetry

Patricia Asuncion, Cut on the Bias:
Poems (Laughing Fire Press)

This collection of poems tackles issues of identity, race and social justice.

Rita Dove, Collected Poems: 1974-2004 (W.W. Norton & Company)

A range of poems on diverse subjects spanning three decades.

Charlotte Matthews, Whistle What Can’t be Said: Poems (Unicorn Press)

A collection that chronicles childhood, cancer and survival.

Debra Nystrom, Night Sky Frequencies and Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow Press)

These poems weave a narrative about the lives of two abandoned children.

Lisa Russ Spaar, editor, Monticello in Mind: Fifty Contemporary Poems on Jefferson (University of Virginia Press)

A diverse group of poets examines Thomas Jefferson as a human dichotomy.

Amie Whittemore, Glass Harvest
(Autumn House)

Deeply rooted in the natural world,
these poems explore the life and death of relationships.

Art books

Matt Eich, Carry Me Ohio (Sturm & Drang)

Photographs documenting the lives of Ohioans.

Beatrix Ost, The Philosopher’s Style
(Grey Book)

Short stories, interviews and art from the author’s collection.

Steve Trumbull, Flash: The Photography of Ed Roseberry: Charlottesville, Virginia 1940s-1970s (C’ville Images)

A visual history of Charlottesville.

Categories
Arts

Joan Z. Rough pens emotional memoir about elder care

Joan Z. Rough will read from her memoir, Scattering Ashes, at New Dominion Bookshop on Friday. Publicity photo

In the epilogue of her book, Scattering Ashes: A Memoir of Letting Go, Charlottesville-based author Joan Z. Rough describes the process of writing about her aging alcoholic and emotionally abusive mother as “the day-by-day knitting together of a broken bone.” In this way, she says, “The writing of the book was probably the most healing thing I’ve ever done for myself.”

The memoir chronicles the six years Rough and her husband spent caring for her mother, Josephine, who was eventually diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer at age 82. And while Josephine abstains from alcohol for the duration of their time together, her prescription Vicodin has a similar effect of unleashing her rage, leaving Rough, most often, as the target. The renewed emotional abuse after so many years apart stirs Rough’s repressed childhood memories and she comes to recognize how much she blames her mother for not stopping the physical abuse she suffered at the hands of her father, a World War II veteran battling with PTSD. Rough was able to make peace with her father before he died and hoped to do the same with her mother.

Joan Z. Rough
New Dominion Bookshop
September 30

“I had invited her to live with us hoping that I could repair our relationship that had not been great all along,” Rough says. “So when she started getting more abusive, a lot of things I had completely and totally forgotten about came up for me and I began to resent her and dislike her a lot.”

Rough says that Josephine would yell at her in doctors’ offices and tell the doctor she was a horrible person and caregiver. “When I tried to help her she would tell me to get lost, that I didn’t know what I was doing,” says Rough. “She would criticize just about everything that I did.”

In Scattering Ashes, Rough acknowledges the abuse and dysfunction that her mother also lived through. Josephine’s parents married very young and had four children. Her mother was mentally unstable and her father eventually left. When her mother was declared unfit to raise the children, they were separated and placed in foster homes. Josephine lived with her mother again in her teens until she was kicked out at age 16. Instead of going to school she had to work as a maid.

Recognition of her mother’s own pain and the culture in which she was raised allowed Rough to tap into a well of compassion for her. “She really did the best she could,” she says. “She did not have the tools that I had when I became an adult. In my mother’s generation, going to a therapist would be the worst thing you could do because people would talk. Her drinking was self-medication. In those days nobody really examined their lives. My mother in particular just accepted what she had.”

Throughout the narrative, Rough acknowledges that alcohol and painkillers provided a release to Josephine, a channel through which she felt free to express her rage and then forget about it the next day. “It made her feel better and less fearful,” she writes. “The booze allowed her to speak her anger and hatred.”

Rough also recognizes the moment when her formerly fiercely independent mother is terrified at the loss of mobility and freedom that comes with aging, when she can no longer drive and needs help sorting her pills. Even when Josephine has nowhere to direct her rage when it’s time to bring in hospice, Rough writes, “I am the safest target for this woman who is suffering so terribly and is extremely frightened.”

“Particularly after the fact in the writing process,” Rough says, “I recognized more fully that she was so scared of dying and what was happening to her.”

In the midst of caring for her mother, Rough seeks help for her own medical concerns and three different medical professionals suggest she might have PTSD, caused by the prolonged stress of her childhood. As a result, Rough’s introspection leads her to discover the importance of self-care, especially for caregivers. “You need to have as much compassion for yourself as the person you’re taking care of,” she says, advocating for accepting help from others, talking about your experience and not allowing yourself to become weighed down with guilt.

Not only does Scattering Ashes lay bare Josephine’s flaws and shortcomings, but Rough’s as well, including her temper, which she terms “the dragon.” Even as she strives to be the perfect daughter, she acknowledges her missteps. “Occasionally it feels like, ‘Whoa, should I have let all that out?’” says Rough. “But, yes, I think for the book to have the impact I want it to, I should have.”

Her book ultimately offers a message of forgiveness and understanding, for ourselves and for those who raised us. “I am no longer a victim,” she says. “I take full responsibility for who I am and I think that’s what we all have to do. I don’t blame my parents for who I am. I don’t blame anybody.”

Categories
News

Anticipation: Local author predicted another Harper Lee book

Harper Lee told Charles Shields when he requested an interview for his biography of her, "Not just no, but hell no." Photo: Michael Bailey

Charlottesville writer Charles Shields was not surprised to learn that more than 50 years after the publication of Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, To Kill a Mockingbird, a second novel has been discovered and will be published this summer.

“I knew of its existence,” said Shields, who wrote Mockingbird, an unauthorized biography of Lee, in 2006. He’d come across references to Go Set a Watchman in correspondence between Lee and her agent.

Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins (and not named for the vaunted author, although it maybe should be, given the anticipation over the new Lee book) will publish Go Set a Watchman July 14. It’s Lee’s first novel, and features Scout as an adult woman.

“My editor, who was taken with the flashbacks to Scout’s childhood, persuaded me to write a novel from the point of view of a young Scout,” said Lee in a press release. “I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told.”

Lee said she was unaware that first effort had survived, and she was “pleased and delighted” when her lawyer, Tonja Carter, discovered it in a “secure location where it had been affixed to an original typescript of To Kill a Mockingbird,” according to the release.

The title refers to Atticus Finch waiting outside the county jail for the mob to come, explained Shields. There, he represents the legal system and the Constitution, trying to protect his client from vigilante justice.

“I feel like Go Set a Watchman will be very familiar to readers of To Kill a Mockingbird,” said Shields. He admits he’s skeptical that the new discovery will be of the same caliber as the classic.

“This is the work of a beginning writer, an early version of To Kill a Mockingbird,” said Shields. “Most writers don’t want their apprenticeships published.” He also notes that To Kill had the benefit of Lippincott editor Tay Hohoff’s “wise counsel.”

Lee, 88, the most reclusive of writers who never gave interviews, said, “I am humbled and amazed that this will now be published after all these years.”

Shields said he sees no advantage to Lee in publishing the book at this late date, and repeated her famous quote: “When you’re at the top, there’s only one way to go.”

Said Shields, “I think it’s more than coincidence that her sister Alice died in November. Alice was always a buffer,” and he doubts she would have allowed publication. Lee suffered from a stroke in 2007, and now lives in an assisted-living facility in Monroeville, Alabama.

In the wake of the announcement and questions about whether Lee was involved in the decision to publish, HarperCollins issued a statement February 5, provided by Lee’s attorney, Carter, in which Lee said she was “happy as hell” with the response to the new book. The publisher also said it had no direct contact with Lee, and dealt with Carter and her agent, Andrew Nurnberg.

For others, the news of a new Lee brought pure joy. UVA Dean of Students Allen Groves conducts a discussion of To Kill a Mockingbird every February with a group of first-year students, and had just had a “robust” discussion the day before the new book was announced February 3.

“The students absolutely feel that the book’s message remains very relevant today,” he said in an e-mail. “I’m delighted to have the chance to now read how Harper Lee saw Scout maturing over the years. I’ll be among the first to read it.”

Groves won’t be the only one snatching up a copy. Said Shields, “This is Harper Lee summer. Every beach in America will have people reading it.”

And he offered a special wish for Lee. “May the reviewers be kind,” he said.

Updated 2/6/15 with the latest HarperCollins statement.