Tag: Literary Arts

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Inside the opioid epidemic: Author Beth Macy tells the story of a crisis 

Bestselling author Beth Macy's first book, Factory Man, told the story of a small-town Virginia factory owner fighting globalization. In Dopesick, she traces the causes and the cost of the opioid epidemic.

When the opioid crisis began to unfold, Virginia journalist Beth Macy was at its epicenter. As a beat reporter for the Roanoke Times, southwest Virginia’s largest newspaper, Macy focused on social and economic trends and how they affect ordinary people. The paper covered the stories of the addicted and their families, the corrupt doctors that both over-prescribed opioids and dealt with the aftermath, and the cops, judges, and first-responders caught up in the encroaching epidemic.

Now, more than two decades and two books later, Macy has returned to those experiences for her latest bestseller. 

In Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and The Drug Company That Addicted America, Macy traces how the profit-driven Purdue Pharma, a drug company, began aggressively marketing OxyContin for pain, and how the cycle ultimately led to the abuse of heroin when prescription opioids became harder and harder to come by.

I spoke with Macy about the book, and what it was like to be among the first reporting on—and paying attention to—the opioid epidemic. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

The title of the book, Dopesick, refers to the nightmarish and extremely painful symptoms a heavy drug-user experiences during withdrawal. Addicted users eventually don’t use drugs to get “high,” but to help ease the debilitating sickness that comes from quitting cold-turkey. Would you describe some of the symptoms you’ve witnessed of someone being dopesick?

Beth Macy: Sure. Almost to a person, everyone I’ve interviewed said it’s like the worst flu times a hundred. Night sweats, diarrhea, vomiting, fever, restless legs; it’s a physical pain that everyone I spoke with would spend [their whole days] avoiding feeling.

I know [Dopesick] is an in-your-face title. If people could just understand that number one, a lot of people weren’t [using] to get high, but because they’d been addicted to this drug, some of them initially through no fault of their own, maybe that would go a long way towards the public understanding and reducing the stigma that prevents some of these people from getting life-saving treatment.

Do you remember your first assignment for the Roanoke Times 20, 30 years ago?

I worked [at the Roanoke Times] for 25 years. I was the family beat reporter. My last big series I did was in 2012, a three-part series about heroin. I was following the travails of these two families whose lives had been upended by heroin. One was a 19-year-old kid who had died of overdose. And the other, the same age, his former classmate [Spencer], was about to go to prison for his role of handing him the heroin that led to his death, and of course he was an addicted user himself.

Not excusing what he did, but they were all at an apartment partying and that happened and Spencer got the blame for it. I was following him around trying to figure out what was happening, because everyone was like “what, wealthy white kids are doing heroin in the suburbs?” Nobody had any idea, myself included.

In some way this was my first experience writing about this. I had read when OxyContin first broke out in the coalfields in central Appalachia in the late ’90s, [but] I didn’t quite put together the connection between all the stories until after the series on heroin. And most people in the country didn’t…The pills are chemical cousins, when the pills get hard to get—if there’s no treatment available for people—they go out to the black market and switch to heroin. That was an important thing to get across.

Not only is it somewhat of a surprise that we see the abuse of these drugs in the middle and upper-middle class, but also how… the opioid epidemic began in a rural environment, here in Appalachia.

Right, so for that reason it was easy for it to happen in “politically unimportant” places. Regional media like the Roanoke Times stopped covering the rural hinterland. Newspapers were dying, and politicians stopped giving a crap about poor people from the mountains, as one of my sources Dr. Van Zee said. He was the first doctor in the country, from rural St. Charles, Virginia, in the heart of central Appalachia, to pick up the phone and call Purdue and say, “This drug has got to be addictive. I’ve got kids I immunized as babies showing up in the ER with overdose.” [This was] in the late ’90s. People he had treated for years, farmers and coal miners, most of them in their 70s, losing everything they had built their lives around because of OxyContin.

Your closeness with your sources, who shared their most private feelings during the darkest times in their lives, is remarkable. Why do you think you were welcomed in such a way?

The last third of the book follows the travails of Tess Henry, this beautiful former honor roll student and basketball star and poet. By the time I met [Tess] it was November 2015, she was three years into her addiction. Her dad is a surgeon, her mom is a hospital nurse, a very educated family. She grew up with a second home. I mean just not what you would expect. Not the kind of person that falls through the cracks typically in our society, and yet over and over and over, [clinic after clinic] denied her treatment. They were so worn out with it.

Unlike a lot of other people who may have said “no we don’t care to be interviewed,” [the Henrys] were like “no, come in, see us all,” and I was just so grateful to them. And similarly with some of the first responders I interviewed, drug court judges, recovery coaches, they had seen these cases for so many years, they were like, “Please. We need somebody to speak for us, we’re too worn out to speak for us.”

Dr. Van Zee, who I talked about in the book, he still works 14-hour days and I think he’s 71 now. Sister Beth Davies is 86. She’s the activist nun that also fought Purdue in the early years, she works 12-hour days. She’s a drug counselor. I mean these are incredible people, and they’re so worn out.

I saw a drug-court judge’s hair turn from salt and pepper to white in the course of about 18 months. I was shocked by the last time I interviewed him how much his hair had changed…People were coming up to him at the grocery, in tiny Lebanon, Virginia, begging him to put their children, their adult children, in drug court—people who don’t even have charges. I think I showed up at the time when they were so worn out they didn’t care about the stigma at this point. I mean, some people still do, but a lot of people are just willing to let me in.

I’m sure you were aware there was a good chance that some of the people you were speaking with weren’t going to make it. Did you prepare for that possibility, that these stories may not necessarily have a good ending?

I did. I spoke with one of my good friends, Roland Lazenby, who has written a lot of sports books, a really excellent writer. He’s been writing books a lot longer than I have.

He said you should focus on the heroes because that’s what the readers will come to identify with and those are the people who are going to help get us out of this crisis. He quoted Mr. Rogers—“find the helpers”—and that really became my lodestar, because I knew I could live in the material a bit better if I focused on the families and the first responders that were fighting back.

You know at no point in the book do I hang out with active users in the middle of their using. I hang out with active users but…I’m not necessarily living in their homeless world or watching them inject heroin into their veins. At no point do I watch anybody use or describe anybody using. That was partly to protect myself. And also so many people in America have no idea how bad this epidemic is. I wanted to write something that would illuminate it and make them care and make them really understand how hard these families and first responders are working to keep their loved ones alive.

At the end, did I know that I was eventually going to get a call that one of my main sources in the book had died? I had [seen] the data. It takes the average user eight years of fortified treatment to get one year of sobriety, I knew [with] fentanyl [emerging], people didn’t have eight years.

Tess Henry had only six. And I knew eventually I would get the call from her mother but didn’t know when and then the day after Christmas. [But] it wasn’t the call that we thought.

[Tess] was dead but she was murdered. She was left to fend for herself in this faraway city where she had relapsed and been kicked out of abstinence-only treatment. It’s another huge telltale sign of how important treatment is, that we allow the narrative that abstinence-only works, and that hurts people with opioid abuse disorder. People continue to fall through the cracks unless they are given easy access to medication-assisted treatment.

Can you elaborate a bit on medication- assisted treatment and why this form of treatment is a big point of a contention between recovery centers, law enforcement, addicts and their families, and the medical community?

Maintenance drugs are basically weak opioids that block the receptors [in the brain that allow you to get high]. Buprenorphine and suboxone…if you’re taking them like you’re supposed to, and then you shoot up heroin, you won’t feel the effects.

Study after study shows, people who take these drugs correctly with counseling are less likely to [commit] crime, less likely to relapse, and less likely to die. They are 50 to 60 percent [less likely to die], compared to abstinence-only models that show only a 6 to 10 percent (success rate). Fifty to 60 percent is pretty good, but that’s still 40 to 50 percent that it doesn’t work for all of the time, and a lot of people have to go through numerous attempts.

There is also a lot of diversion and abuse, which is why law enforcement is against it. But still, if you say your goal is to prevent overdose, there is no question that it is the number one way to do that. It’s the low-hanging fruit.

Is it accurate to say the opioid epidemic has the signs of getting worse before it gets better?

It’s completely accurate. The latest statistics from the Centers for Disease Control show that we lost 72,000 [people to drug overdose] last year, which is up 10 percent from the year before, which are largely due to opioids.

The few states that have MAT widely available, emergency room to MAT programs as a standard, and also have syringe exchanges, and harm-reduction programs in place—there’s three New England states, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont—we’re starting to see a slight decline. But overall, epidemiologists and public health experts have shown it’s going to plateau sometime after 2020. That’s unnerving, “sometime after 2020.” These [three New England states] were early passers of Medicaid expansion. In Virginia, we just passed it. It is the number-one way to get people that don’t have insurance into treatment.

This interview was originally published by 100 Days in Appalachia, a digital news publication incubated at the West Virginia University Reed College of Media in collaboration with West Virginia Public Broadcasting and the Daily Yonder.

Categories
Arts

Back to life: Donna Lucey unearths the stories of history’s forgotten women

Donna Lucey, who never expected to settle in the South, moved to Charlottesville with her husband in 1992. She says she was pleasantly surprised by the community of writers and artists she found here. Photo: Jackson Smith

Local author Donna Lucey has made it her life’s work to research and write about “badass women.” Her stories often focus on spirited women born into conventional families, who defied expectations and social norms. But even in 2018, such stories can be a hard sell. Publishers tend to want to publish biographies about famous people, Lucey says, which leaves out women who may have done remarkable things but were ignored in their own times. “It’s really frustrating because there are endless men who are famous, but women have been lost to history,” she says.

With her latest book, Sargent’s Women: Four Lives Behind the Canvas, Lucey says the fame of American portrait painter John Singer Sargent provided the hook she needed to sell the story of four fascinating women, three of whom he painted, one of whom he mentored. This month the book, which was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, will be awarded the Mary Lynn Kotz Award for Art in Literature.

Given annually by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Library of Virginia since 2013, the award, which comes with a $2,500 cash prize, recognizes an outstanding creative or scholarly book that is written primarily in response to a work (or works) of art.

Lucey’s book beat out well-known biographer Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo da Vinci, a number one New York Times bestseller, as well as Laurie Lico Albanese’s novel Stolen Beauty, about painter Gustav Klimt, and Christina Baker Kline’s novel A Piece of the World, about the woman in Andrew Wyeth’s painting “Christina’s World.”

The Gilded Age

Sargent’s Women takes an intimate look at the lives of four women in a singular age.

“I’ve always loved the 19th century and the Gilded Age,” says Lucey, whose five books touch on the epoch in some form or other. “I love that era because of the sheer exuberance and the over-the-top, eccentric characters. In some ways it was grotesque.” She gives the example of one of the male characters in Sargent’s Women, who thrusts his arm into a fire after beating a man in a jealous rage. “You can’t make this stuff up,” Lucey says. “If I were to write this as fiction people would say, ‘This is a little bit over-the-top.’ And, in fact, every inch of it is true.”

But it was Elizabeth Chanler, an orphaned Astor heiress, who first drew Lucey to the project. Lucey’s previous book, Archie and Amélie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age, focused on Chanler’s brother, committed to an insane asylum for losing the family money. In a family that suffered the loss of both parents when the children were young, Chanler was the one, Lucey says, “who had to take care of everyone, and the one everyone adored in a family that was really unmoored.”   

Her other subjects are Elsie Palmer, who grew up among intellectuals and artists and, after years as a spinster and the family caregiver, ran away to get married; Lucia Fairchild, who gave up her family’s money to paint miniatures and live in an artists’ colony; and Isabella Stewart Gardner, the New York City transplant who never fit into her husband’s puritanical Boston society but would end up contributing her significant art collection to the city.

Lucey winnowed down her selections from the over 900 portraits Sargent painted. In a way, one woman led her to another: “All of these women knew each other,” says Lucey. “It was a very rarefied world. When I was up at the Astor house in the Hudson Valley talking to the owner of the house, right next to me was a miniature by Lucia.”

The final four subjects “seemed very personal in a way that many of Sargent’s portraits don’t,” she says. That’s in part because Sargent knew these women and their families well. “He had this uncanny way of seeing into their souls,” she says, “capturing their personalities and characters…through his choice of clothing and his choice of composition.”

Take, for instance, Sargent’s portrait of Palmer, her wide eyes and blank stare set off by her blunt bangs. “It freaked out everybody in London when they first saw it,” Lucey says. “They thought she was insane. …It has this weird aura to it, and in a way her life played out in that way, ending with her marrying this crazy spiritualist.” Likewise, Sargent’s portrait of Gardner captures her plain features but bold style, attired as she is in a long black dress with a dramatic neckline. Lucey laughs, recalling that while on her book tour at Chanler’s summer home in Newport, Rhode Island, just as she began talking about Gardner, out of nowhere a black balloon floated into the crowd. “It was like she was making her grand entrance. …It was almost uncanny. Typical of Isabella that she would want to be there.”

As for Lucia Fairchild, you won’t find a Sargent portrait of her as her story is really about how, watching Sargent paint her sister Sally, Fairchild was inspired to learn to paint. “I love doing that kind of bait and switch,” Lucey says. “Sally was the golden child, the one that Sargent painted over and over again… She was the one who was going to be a star, but she ended up doing nothing with her life.” Her sister, on the other hand, befriended Sargent and became an artist in her own right. While doing research for the book, Lucey found an uncatalogued scrapbook at the Boston Athenaeum, and in it, she says, is “this incredible Kodak portrait of Sargent lying in the foreground, and in the middle ground was Lucia, the ugly duckling sister, taking notes.”

While Lucey say she has a special spot in her heart for Fairchild because her story is “just so poignant, and she was so courageous,” there was an added benefit to including her in the narrative: “She was one of the few people who actually recorded [Sargent’s] personal thoughts, his impressions and opinions about art and music and literature…She was one of the people who kind of caught his personality.” As in the moment when Fairchild fell in love with Henry Brown Fuller, her future husband, and Sargent warned her that “terrific love” could lead to “terrific hate.” (He turned out to be right.)

For Lucey, Sargent would prove more difficult to delineate than the women he painted. “He burned all of his papers. He was gay and had to hide that,” Lucey says. “He lived right across the street from Oscar Wilde,”—the Irish playwright who was convicted of “gross indecency” in 1895—“and so he knew what happened to people who expressed their sexuality openly.” But though Sargent destroyed his personal papers, he left behind “incredibly erotic male portraits,” Lucey says, some of which were found only recently in a storage unit housing Gardner’s furniture.

Lucey in Montana in 1979. In a farmhouse basement, she uncovered a trove of diaries and photo negatives from the forgotten photographer Evelyn Cameron, who became her next subject. Photo courtesy of Lucey.

The writing life

It is this sort of psychological detective work that attracts Lucey to biographical research. Growing up in suburban Connecticut, she dreamed of moving to New York City and becoming a writer. After graduating from Georgetown University, she got a job at Time Life as a photo editor. While working on a series of books about women in the 19th century, she pitched a volume on women in the American West and ended up in Montana. There, in the basement of a wheat farmer, she stumbled upon several thousand photo negatives and 35 years’ worth of diaries, all belonging to a woman named Evelyn Cameron. The discovery led Lucey to write Photographing Montana, 1894-1928: The Life and Work of Evelyn Cameron.

“That was the Gilded Age on its head,” Lucey says of her story of the pioneer artist who taught herself glass plate photography. “She was a very wealthy woman from England who, instead of embracing the Gilded Age life, renounced it and reinvented herself out West.”

It was research, too, that brought Lucey to Charlottesville in 1992, only then it was the research of a different writer: her husband, Henry Wiencek. At the time he was working on his book The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White, about a plantation-owning family, the people they enslaved, and the descendants of both. The research was only supposed to take a year, but eight years passed by and they set down roots. Lucey, who never expected to settle in the South, says she was pleasantly surprised by the community of writers and artists she found here.

In her second book, I Dwell in Possibility: Women Build a Nation, 1600-1920, Lucey expanded her scope in order to explore the ways in which American women helped shape the country even before winning the right to vote. But she got such a kick out of writing the chapter on the Gilded Age, she says, that it led her to write Archie and Amélie. Throughout her writing career she has followed her research wherever it takes her, and “one thing has led to the next.”

Recalling her days at Time Life, she says, “I always had this visual sense. So I feel [Sargent’s Women], in a way, is a culmination of making use of imagery and diaries and letters, and plumbing, trying to figure out the psychology of these people.”   

‘How women get buried’

In the case of Sargent’s Women, she says,  “None of these women had been written about before except for Isabella Stewart Gardner, so there wouldn’t have been any interest except [for] Sargent. He was the key.”

“[All these] women did such amazing things,” she adds, “and yet nobody knows about it.”

She cites the true story regarding the fate of Sargent’s portrait of Elizabeth Chanler. After her death, Chanler’s son took the portrait with the intention to sell it to the highest bidder. His family advised him to donate it instead for the tax break. But when he approached the National Portrait Gallery, the museum didn’t want it, Lucey says. Chanler was not considered important enough. (The portrait now hangs in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where it is a major feature of its Gilded Age collection.)

Likewise, says Lucey, the Houghton Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts—Harvard’s rare books and manuscripts library—rejected the donation of Chanler’s papers while accepting those of her husband, John Jay Chapman. Again, Chanler was not seen as sufficiently important.

It’s a vicious cycle in which women and their contributions are not recognized as important, therefore they aren’t written about and don’t develop any prominence or lasting impact on the historical record. “This is how women get buried,” Lucey says. In some of her research, as was the case with Elsie Palmer, Lucey says she was the first person to read all of her subject’s papers. Yet she was drawn to these women because, “They lived in a very conventional world and they all managed to shock in some way… These were the great museum builders, the people who helped create American culture.” It’s the discovery of them that has helped shape the trajectory of her writing career, she says. “The fun of my life is to uncover hidden stories of women who have been forgotten.”

Even when women are remembered and written about, Lucey says, they aren’t always given their due. In the case of Gardner, she says, too often it is the art student she sponsored, Bernhard Berenson, who is given credit for her art collection. He did conduct art purchases for her, Lucey says, but everything was her decision. “She was the one who bought a Vermeer, before he was even famous, on her own.” And besides, she says, pointing out a double standard, J.P. Morgan and Henry Frick had art buyers, too, but are still given credit for being great collectors. “[Because Gardner] was so unconventional, and such a character, she’s portrayed in a kind of cartoonish way and never given the credit as the serious art student that she was.”

“The fun of my life is to uncover hidden stories of women who have been forgotten,” says Lucey, who has written four books.

 

Recognition

Sargent’s Women has brought Lucey the most attention of all her books to date. In addition to the Kotz award, it is a nonfiction finalist for a Library of Virginia Literary Award, which will be announced October 20. Lucey says she was especially thrilled to win the Kotz award. “It’s so wonderful that they honor people who write about art,” she says. “This is a unique kind of award.”

Indeed, Amy Bridge, the executive director of the Library of Virginia, says, “There is no prize like this in the country.”

The award is named for Virginian Mary Lynn Kotz, a contributing editor at ARTNews and author of an award-winning biography of artist Robert Rauschenberg. It honors Kotz’s ability to write about art and artists in an accessible way, says Lee Bagby Ceperich, director of library, archives, and special collections at the VMFA.

Lucey will be recognized at a special event at the VMFA on October 19, and give a brief talk about her work. It’s a particularly apt setting, Lucey says: “They have a fantastic collection of Sargents in their new McGlothlin Galleries.”

The near decade’s worth of research Lucey did in archives, libraries, and private homes to complete Sargent’s Women “is not for the faint of heart,” she warns. But in the same way that Sargent was captivated by these extraordinary women and compelled to record their expressions in paint, so Lucey was compelled to record their lives in ink. Through this undertaking, she helps to ensure that their stories won’t be buried any longer.     

Editor’s note: The author and subject are colleagues at Virginia Humanities. 

  

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
Uncategorized

Self-published and small-press authors connect for book signing event

Author and (self-appointed) marketing guru Carolyn O’Neal organized an area author book signing. “Buying local also means local authors. Books are biodegradable, eco-friendly gifts. And you can have a book signed by the author, or dedicated to a friend as a gift,” she says. Photo by Farine Benz

For many artists, the act of promoting their own work can feel counterintuitive, a business that necessitates turning outward to the public after so much time spent turned inward in order to create. For this reason, local author Carolyn O’Neal says with some surprise, “I’ve become, oddly, a marketing guru.” Her firsthand experience with marketing began last year when she launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the publication of her novel, Kingsley, a work of eco-fiction about the last boy on Earth. “It’s a lot of work to market the book, more than to write it,” she says.

But once she started building relationships with local and regional bookstores she reached a point where she’d booked herself almost every weekend. She pondered what to do next and came up with the idea of cross-marketing with other self-published and small-press authors for a one-day book signing event, which takes place on Sunday at WriterHouse.

While Charlottesville has no shortage of big-name authors who sign with large publishing houses, O’Neal says, “I specifically wanted authors who didn’t have a thousand other avenues to publicize their work to be included in this. …And two of them are launching their books on this date, so it’s a celebration.” Those two authors are Pamela Evans and AM Carley.

Evans, a preschool teacher, will be signing and selling her book, The Preschool Parent Primer, alongside picture e-book authors Marc Boston and Amy Lee-Tai in a room designated for young readers and their parents. Evans’ book grew out of the classroom notes she has accumulated over the last 14 years at Chancellor Street Preschool Co-operative regarding challenges and solutions. Each chapter begins with a list of key factors on which she elaborates with examples and anecdotes. “It’s not so much telling you what to do but sharing best practices, examples and resources,” Evans says. She also details what to look for in a preschool and what kinds of behaviors are appropriate for children of this age.

Evans decided to self-publish after receiving what writers affectionately call a “positive rejection.” A small press told her they liked the book, it just wasn’t in their wheelhouse. Rather than changing the concept of the book to tailor it to a publisher, she decided to move forward with that bit of encouragement and publish her original concept according to a timeline that worked for her.

Meanwhile, professional writing coach Carley is debuting her book, FLOAT: Becoming Unstuck for Writers. Similar to Evans, Carley’s book grew out of the notes she kept for her profession, helping writers develop their books. “It’s different for each writer,” she says, “but I noticed patterns that kept coming up for different authors and thought, ‘People could want to know this stuff.’”

The title is an acronym that stands for Focus, Listen, Open, Analyze and Tool. It is a craft book with exercises to stimulate the writing process, and each is independent of the other so the reader is free to pick and choose. It’s a practice in “having a conversation with yourself or asking for help from the cosmos, or however you want to frame it,” Carley says. “The point is that there are ways to pull in inspiration…that work for each writer. They often find that they can solve their own problem. This is to jump-start it.”

Perhaps what sets this apart from other writing craft and prompt books is that she keys the exercises based on their impact and how connected the reader is feeling. “We’re all living with a tension between our hardwiring to want to connect with others and our primate need to distrust everyone,” she says. “They’re both in there so how do we negotiate that?” Her answer regarding the creative process is to start with a tool based on how connected you’re feeling on a given day.

A total of 12 authors will be signing their books. “We had more people who wanted to join us,” O’Neal says, “but we’re limited by the space.” The range of books by participating authors includes a coffee table book on Wintergreen, a travel memoir about Italy, mysteries and political fiction.

“Carolyn is our curator,” Carley says with a smile.

Categories
Arts

Hannah Pittard’s third novel ratchets up marital tension

Hannah Pittard will read from her latest book, Listen to Me, at New Dominion Bookshop on Thursday. Publicity photo

Even under ordinary conditions, a road trip can be the ultimate test of a relationship. But when torrential rain and tornado warnings cross the path of an already tense couple, it creates the perfect storm.

Hannah Pittard’s third novel, Listen to Me, explores the interior of a marriage that has been shaken by recent trauma. The novel begins months after Maggie is assaulted and mugged near the Chicago apartment she shares with her husband and just weeks after a neighbor is murdered, causing her anxiety to return. But instead of continuing therapy, which she had found to be effective, she withdraws into herself and seeks out stories of violence online that confirm what her own experience has taught her about humanity. Maggie’s husband, Mark, is baffled and frustrated by the response of his formerly optimistic wife and proposes they leave the city early for their annual summer trek to his parents’ house in rural Virginia, believing that removing Maggie from modern technology is the answer.

“I am very interested in the ways that technology has been changing my life and affecting my interactions with other people,” Pittard says. Having earned an MFA in fiction from UVA in 2007, she now teaches English at the University of Kentucky, where she’s witnessed the impact of technology on her students. “More than anything, what inspired the novel was me wanting to make sense of the extent of my own relationship with technology.”

Hannah Pittard
New Dominion Bookshop
September 22

At the start of the road trip, Maggie’s cell phone serves as a point of contention when she continues to use it to descend into the rabbit hole of violent headlines even as Mark is literally trying to drive her away from such thoughts. But when they find themselves caught in a storm, her phone becomes a convenient informational and directional tool to help them navigate their way, and Mark finds he is more dependent on it than he would like to admit.

To paraphrase author Robert McKee, placing individuals under pressure reveals their character. Among the many character revelations on this intense road trip is that Maggie and Mark are competitive in their decision-making and in their assumptions about each other. As they try to maneuver their way through the storm, each wants to be right in predicting the other’s motivations and the outcome of their actions to the point that they prioritize it over creating an honest and trusting relationship.

“I wanted to try to crystallize the intimacy of what it’s like when people know each other so well; they’re more capable of comforting that other person, but because of their intense and intimate knowledge, they’re also more capable than anyone else of hurting that person,” says Pittard.

Mark’s desire for Maggie’s return to normal often means he isn’t present in the moment to support her, and is instead frustrated with whom she’s become. In fact, most of his positive thoughts about Maggie occur when she isn’t present, as if he likes the idea of her more than the reality.

“I think Mark is having a really honest reaction,” Pittard says. “He loves her. He wants to take care of her. But he’s also literally tired, fatigued by the energy that her prolonged crisis is taking away from him. I don’t want him to be viewed as a monster. I want him to be viewed as honest and complicated and maybe a reflection of how we all feel from time to time whether or not we want to.”

Along with Mark’s inability to accept Maggie in the present, he likewise refuses to accept her newly adopted, morbid worldview. Despite his occasional cynical thoughts about the impact of technology on society, he doesn’t share Maggie’s fear of imminent danger at every turn.

“One of the tensions in the book is that Maggie has, in many ways, this experience equivalent to eating the apple in the Garden of Eden,” Pittard says. They’ve been living contented, not too introspective lives. After her mugging, she’s trying to re-evaluate her formerly naïve outlook on the world and her understanding of other humans in the world with her. I feel like the tension of the book is whether or not Mark is going to take a bite of the apple, too, and begin to see the world in the way she does.”

By the end of the book, the reader will have to decide for herself whether the journey has had a positive or negative impact on the marriage.

“This book and the ending has anecdotally, in speaking to friends and colleagues, seemed a sort of litmus test on where they are in their own relationships,” Pittard says. “Some have said, ‘Thank you for giving me hope.’ And others have said, ‘They’re doomed.’ You might see the ending as happy or as a tragedy.”

But even if you see it as a tragedy, Pittard recognizes that telling ourselves everything is going to be all right can be a useful tool.

“I think the world is a really hard place,” she says. “Romantic delusions are what allow us to cope.”

 Contact Raennah Lorne at arts@c-ville.com.

Categories
Arts

WriterHouse Fiction Contest Runner-Up

Author Ann Beattie picks Claire Rann's "Aim" as this year's fiction contest runner-up. Photo: Provided by author.

Aim

By Claire Rann

I see a pale circle of flesh. He is holding me toward the side of her neck, a few inches away. The skin looks tired and freckled. It quivers.

He did not take me out until a few seconds ago. His hand had been curled tightly around my grip in his coat pocket. I’d heard yelling but seen nothing. I was ready.

He’s never used me before. This is the first time he’s taken me out of the house, out of the dark desk drawer where I lay for weeks after he brought me home. A fine layer of dust had settled along my barrel. I didn’t get bored, though. I am used to waiting. And then everything happens so fast.

I’d heard the tiny lock click, seen the silver bar flash and twitch, but I didn’t know for sure he’d be taking me out. As he pulled open the drawer, I caught a glimmer of light. I felt myself being lifted, considered.

His hands felt hot and damp. They shook. He put me down on his desk. I heard a gulp, then the rattle of glass meeting the surface. He slid my magazine out and rummaged through a drawer. I heard him snap in each shell and felt the magazine push back into place. A satisfying weight rested in my grip.

He put me in his pocket, and we walked. The door to the house slammed; the car door shut; the engine rumbled. We drove.

I know what I am made for. I have no illusions about my purpose. Just the sight of me inspires a fearful stillness. Reverence, from some, admiration, even, but always with a hushed undertone. My presence can persuade, force a hand, protect. But really, I am built to kill. To propel a hard hot ball of metal at an alarming rate, one that stops pulses, rupturing the thin barrier between liquid and bone and the rest of the world. It is no great feat to burst this flimsy boundary, but I do it quickly and well. Efficiently.

He’d waited to take me out. We parked, then paced, his fingers rubbing the rough stippling of my grip.

I heard heels clicking along the concrete, and his gait quickened, following the echoing sound.

“Argo,” he yelled. His fingers stopped fidgeting, and he gripped me tightly. “Argo! I need to talk to you.” His voice was unsteady and loud.

The clicks paused.

“Mr. Davidson, I have nothing to say.”

We moved in front of the voice.

“This is bullshit. No one will tell me where Angie’s gone with the kids.”

“The judge made her decision,” she said. “There’s nothing left to do.” The clicking continued, but we moved with her, and again she stopped.

“Those are my kids, goddammit.” His voice grew louder.

“You need to get help, Joel.” She was curt. “Go to AA, start getting your life back together, and request another hearing—”

“That’s bullshit! She can’t do this. You can’t do this.”

Another voice farther away called out, “Mrs. Argo, is there a problem?”

“No, officer, this gentleman was just leaving,” Argo said.

Heavy footsteps started in our direction. “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you…”

That’s when he reached for me. He must have grabbed Argo with his other arm while he aimed me at her neck.

And now here we are.

“You can’t let this happen,” he says, his hand quaking slightly as he speaks. “You can’t let them take my kids away.”

―

I’d heard them before, two high voices, singing and shouting. Usually far from me. Their feet thrummed up and down the padded stairs. Once, though, a set of small feet pitter-pattered toward my resting place.

“Nate, we’re not supposed to go in Daddy’s office,” said one little voice.

“Stop being such a sissy Mollie,” said the other. “He doesn’t even do anything in here anymore.”

The little hand slid out each drawer in the desk before getting to mine. His fingers jerked the handle over and over, but the silver bar between my dark resting place and the air and light wouldn’t budge. Then I heard Joel’s deep bellow, admonishing the little hands with high voices for playing in his office. They cried and left, but he did not follow. The door shut. He checked my drawer again and again, pulling the handle over and over to feel the bar’s reassuring clink.

―

The firm voice—not the one at whose neck I stare, but the other, the one who called out before—speaks again. She is closer. Her voice does not waver. “Sir, put the gun down,” she says. She sounds in control. She must also have a gun.

I shift a hair to the right as his head moves to address the cop.

He says, “Stay out of this.”

He corrects me back toward the woman with the shivering skin. His hands become hotter and his breath quicker, each exhale bobbing me slightly up and down.

A jolt forward, and now I am pressed against the brown curls of the woman, who sobs. Flecks of silver and white hide at her roots.

I itch to be used.

His finger barely rests on my trigger. It will take just the tip to decide, the bend of two small knuckles. It all happens so fast. There will be a spark, a flash of burning in my barrel and then all will go black for a nanosecond, and I will see the shiny tip fly and pierce. It will sear a hole where it hits. I’ll hear the casing arc behind me and clink against the ground.

Another shell will already have snapped into place, ready to fulfill its promise. It, too, is dutiful. We do not change our minds like those who control us. Once we are set into motion with the flick of a finger, it has been decided. The mechanics do not change. When called upon, we are unyielding.

―

That night in the office, after the little voices had left, after he’d satisfied himself that my drawer hadn’t been opened, another, deeper voice entered.

“Joel,” she said. “What the hell is going on?” The door shut.

“The kids were messing around in my office.”

“They’re five years old. Don’t scream at them.”

“You baby them.” Another drawer slid out, and I heard a bottle clatter against the desktop.

“There’s something else,” she said. Papers slid across the surface above. “What exactly did you charge at Kankakee Arms and Ammo?”

―

Outside, Argo breathes faster, exhaling in sharp spurts. “Joel, please,” she says, nearly panting through each wet quick breath. “Please don’t do this.”

From this distance, if he used me, her head would shatter. It would cover us both in blood and brain and sharp splinters of skull. The blast would force them apart.

The anticipation is getting to me.

“Joel,” the cop says, “think about what you’re doing. Think about your family.”

―

“Who do you think you are, opening my mail?” The floor creaked as Joel stood. “You have no right, you—”

“When I’m the one supporting us, then, yes, I do have the right. How could you spend that kind of money right now? Without a job, with a mortgage—”

“I know that!” he said. “God knows, I know. After that last interview, after I’d driven to the middle of nowhere and sat there for hours with a bunch of kids in their dads’ suits, they have the nerve to tell me I’m overqualified for the position, but thanks for coming. I needed to let off some steam.”

“You didn’t tell me that.”

“Why would I tell you? So you can explain to me how I fucked it all up again?” Liquid swished as he took another gulp from the bottle. “I saw the range on the drive home and shot a few rounds. I figured it wouldn’t be a bad thing to have around the house. For protection.”

“You can’t just bring a weapon into our home without saying anything to me. We have two small children, Joel, we―”

“I’m so tired of your lectures.” Joel’s voice vibrated the desk. “You have no idea what you’re doing to me.”

“Do you know what you’re doing to us?” Angie said. “You sit around the house all day in your pajamas, drinking in your office, spending money we don’t have, and now you go out and buy a gun―”

I heard him step to the side of the desk, and then glass shattered against the wall.

“Shut the fuck up, Angie,” he yells. “Just shut up.”

More objects clattered against the wall and then against the floor. Glass, metal, many different thuds.

“What the fuck are you doing?” she said. “Stop tearing your office apart. You’re acting like a child.”

Slam. Slam. Slam.

“Get off my fucking back,” he said.

―

His grip tightens.

“You’re making me do this,” he says. “You’re letting Angie and the judge take them.”

“No one is taking your kids away, Joel,” the cop says. “Put down the gun, let Mrs. Argo go, and let’s talk about this.”

“I’m done talking,” he says. “Nobody listens. I make one mistake, and all of a sudden I’m unfit.”

He presses me further into her as he speaks.

She whimpers. “Please, you’re hurting me.”

―

That night, the little voice hadn’t whimpered. She’d wailed.

Through the ricocheting slams and thuds, the deeper voices yelling, I heard the door creak open.

“Mommy, Mommy,” said a high-pitched voice moving across the room.

Then I heard a different kind of thud, the sound of a hard object hitting something softer than the wall or the floor. The little voice wailed. Everything else stopped.

“Oh, sweetie, oh God, you’re bleeding,” she said. Then, more sharply, “Get the fuck away from us, Joel, don’t touch us.”

―

That was weeks ago, long before he finally took me out.

Now, his hand loosens slightly with Argo’s cry, but he keeps me pressed to her temple.

“You can make this stop,” he says. “You can tell Angie not to take them away. She listens to you. You know I’m not a bad guy. You know Angie is too angry to see. She’s not thinking about the kids. They need me.”

He no longer sounds like he wants to hurt her. He does not want to use me to do what I am made for. I will wait once again, gathering dust in the darkness.

“That’s a tough situation, Joel,” the cop says. “We can work this out, but you need to give me the gun.”

“Shut the fuck up,” he says. “Mrs. Argo, please, you have to help me. You have to make her see what’s she’s doing.”

His hand trembles.

“They’re afraid of you,” Argo whispers. “Mollie, Nate, even Angie… they’re all so scared.”

“No, no, Angie exaggerates—”

“Mollie still has nightmares,” she says. “She won’t leave Angie’s side, she hardly sleeps… they’re broken, Joel.”

His grip loosens. I am hardly pressed against her any more.

“I’m sorry,” he says. His voice splinters. “I didn’t mean to… ” He lets the sentence hang, half-finished. A hot wet drop falls along my spine.

“Tell them I’m sorry.”

I am swung violently upward. I see the stubbled skin of his neck, the lump of his throat for a split second before

BANG

and I fall. The casing rushes away and clinks against the concrete.

I land and bounce with a clatter seconds before his body meets the ground opposite me in a tired slumping collapse.

It is not what I expected, but I am satisfied. I have served my purpose.

Photo: Provided by author

Categories
Uncategorized

WriterHouse Fiction Contest Winner

Author Ann Beattie picks Gail South's "Home," as this year's fiction contest winner. Photo: File photo

Fans of fiction

C-VILLE Weekly and WriterHouse partnered again this year for our fiction contest, in which readers submitted works to be judged by author Ann Beattie, who was the Edgar Allan Poe professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Virginia. Forty-seven entries were received, and they revolved around a variety of subjects, including an intergalactic voyage, pizza night and a high school reunion. The winning author, Gail South, receives $500 and a one-year WriterHouse membership; the runner-up, Claire Rann, gets $250 and a one-year WriterHouse membership. You can read Rann’s story, “Aim,” here.

Home

By Gail South

Eric curbed the old Chevy next to the sidewalk. He glanced around to make sure no one was close, then tugged off his T-shirt—gritty with sweat and muck from digging in orange dirt—swabbed it under his arms, and snatched a brown one off the passenger seat. He sniffed it, shrugged, and pulled it on.

He slipped off his shoes, removed the damp insoles and pulled out the money. He tied his shoes back on, shoved the money into his sagging jeans pocket, and headed down the pedestrian street where people sat around outdoor tables with cold beers and plates of food.

He pulled open the post office door, conscious of his filth and smell. He asked a man in a crisp uniform for the smallest mailbox available. He would probably never use it, but he needed an address for job applications. Plus, an address made you feel a little more civilized. Like you really did belong someplace. Though if you gave a P.O. box, prospective employers often asked for a street address. Especially if they thought you didn’t have one.

He pulled the folded money from his pocket, peeled off two 20s, and shoved them back into his pocket. He bought a money order made out to his daughter, Liz, with the rest. He wrote her name, then his ex-wife’s address. He hoped it was still correct.

Liz hadn’t responded to his e-mails, though they hadn’t bounced back. He had the same e-mail as always, but in his last post he asked if she would respond if he changed his address to sorryIfuckedup yourlife@gmail.com. She didn’t respond to that e-mail either, but he hoped she at least got a chuckle.

He drove to Food Lion and grabbed a cart. He tossed in two gallons of water, bananas, bread, carrots, onions, potatoes, and a hefty package of beef stew meat. He got some peanut butter, grape jelly, and chocolate chip cookies. He added it up in his head then picked up a 12-pack of Pabst.

He headed down Arno Road, turned onto the gravel trail, then the dirt path, then into the secluded spot where everyone with a car—five now—parked. Sheila, a young black woman who was living at the camp when Eric arrived, had a big pot that she kept beside her tent. He pulled out his camp stove, grabbed her pot, and went about making soup. Right on time, Sheila returned with her kids.

“Got some stew on,” Eric nodded at the blue plastic bags. “There’s bananas and stuff in those bags. Take what you want.”

“That’s awfully nice of you,” Sheila said. The boy eyed the bag.

“How’s it hanging, dude?” Eric held out his hand and Jamil high-fived him. “There’s cookies in there, and assuming it’s okay with your mama you can have some after you do your homework.”

Eric leaned over and put his hand on the little girl’s head. “You too, Punkin. But you just gotta help your mama watch this soup.” He nodded toward the river. “I’m going to go clean up.” He glanced at Sheila. “There’s beer in the cooler.”

He took his soap and towel and made his way through the woods, across the City Circuit Trail, and down to the secluded swimming hole. He glanced around then stripped down to his blue flip-flops and stepped into the water. People complained about it being cold, but compared to lakes in Michigan, where he was from, this was tepid. He quickly moved to a depth that covered his privates, careful to hug the thong of his sandals with his toes. There were sharp rocks and glass and who knew what all on the bottom of the river. The water was too murky to see through, but he had cut his feet here before.

He scrubbed his body with a bar of soap tied up in a hand towel, then dunked his head and scrubbed his wiry gray hair. The muscles in his arms and legs stiffened with pain in the cool water. He was getting too old for this kind of life.

He pressed his body against the force of the water and made his way to shore. He quickly dried off and pulled on his least dirty pair of jeans. He rolled them up to his knees, grabbed the work clothes that he’d been wearing for several days, then waded back into the river with the bar of soap. He squatted down and scrubbed the clothes against the rocks.

He twisted the waterlogged jeans through his cold red hands, then laid them dripping on a large boulder. He did the same with his shirt and socks, then wrung the jeans again. He hung everything from the line he had strung between two trees next to his tent.

He opened a beer and stashed another in his tent. He made sure Sheila got one, then stuck a couple in Brad’s tent. Brad was probably out hustling, but he’d be in soon. The earthy smell of stew drifted through the campground. Eric spread the word that stew would be ready in a while, and if anybody wanted a cold one they better hurry. The beer disappeared almost instantly.

Sheila dished out steaming bowls for her and the kids and they sat on the ground and ate soup and slices of wheat bread. Eric filled a big green Tupperware bowl, then he walked through the woods by the tents and shanties calling out that soup was ready. Brad showed up just in time—he was good at that.

“I’ll take this down and wash it,” Brad said when the pot was empty. “Give me your bowls and I’ll take them too.”

At dusk Eric sat in the green canvas chair to read. Roger Rowe cranked his generator to run his TV. He had a shanty on the other end of the camp filled with all kinds of shit people said he had brought in on a trailer behind his SUV. Even inside the shanty, you could hardly hear the TV for the noise of the generator, but Roger said it was the last vestige of a normal home. He usually just ran it long enough for one sitcom a night. Otherwise people complained vigorously. Eric was glad to be on the other end of camp. The noise of the generator didn’t bother him as much as people arguing about it—he’d already heard enough arguing for several lifetimes.

“Man, you got anymore beer?” Brad handed Eric his clean bowl and spoon.

Eric shook his head. “Sorry dude. Don’t you have any of that rocket fuel you usually drink?”

“Yeah. I was hoping for another cold one—don’t get those too often. Hard to carry beer and ice walking two miles.” Brad pulled off his baseball cap and scratched his head. His dark locks fell into his face. “It’s supposed to get stinking hot this week. I’ll try to get some money for beer tomorrow.” He pushed his hair back and slid his cap over it.

The next day was a scorcher, and all day Eric’s muscles burned from brutal labor and a fiery sun. All he thought about was how good that river would feel at the end of the day. When work was done, he drove straight to camp.

He saw the sign posted on the big oak as soon as he turned onto the dirt trail. He didn’t stop to read it, he knew there would be more—there were always more. He parked in the grass. Another sign was posted just beyond his car. It was the same message as always—camping here was illegal and people had to move.

A few people were gathered at the fire pit, though it was too early and too hot for a fire. They were having a bitch session about how they weren’t hurting anybody and where the hell were they supposed to go when there was nowhere to go. He didn’t bother to join—he knew how it would play out. People would gripe until there was nothing else to say, then they’d start talking about where they might go. Another spot in the woods, another town, crash on somebody’s couch until they wore out their welcome.

Just like the other camps. The first was that great place in Michigan where he stayed almost a year. It had been there for 10 years. They had a mess hall, an area for families, a place for games; they even had an infirmary. Every night after dinner people played euchre. It was a good bunch of people. They didn’t tolerate drunkenness or even meanness at that camp.

Then a couple teenagers—kids who lived in warm houses with soft beds and parents who loved them—thought it would be a whole bunch of fun to beat the living shit out of a couple of 60-year-old women. The city closed the camp after that. Then there was the place in Jackson, then one in Detroit. One was an old farm that had been fallow for years, but it was on a lake and authorities said they were worried about water contamination. The truth was, people with fancy vacation homes didn’t want to see a camp of derelicts while they were buzzing up and down the lake in their boats and Jet Skis. He couldn’t blame them. There was a time in his life—a time not so long ago that now seemed like a dream—when he would have felt the same way. Another camp closed because business owners said having homeless people nearby was bad for business. They were probably right.

Eric wished he had picked up some more beer. He could go back out, but he was filthy and exhausted and this news just made his body ache that much more. He took an extra-long bath in the river, then pulled out the pint of whiskey. He plopped down in his chair and took a hefty swig. He didn’t usually drink this early in the day, but it wasn’t every day he got evicted.

The notice said anything left here would be “cleaned up” a week from today at 9am. That meant men in hazmat suits would show up with a bulldozer and a dumpster. It’d take some extra man hours because the tents were spread through the woods. It’d be hard to doze—they’d either have to take out some trees or clean up a lot by hand. It’d take a dumpster or two just for the trash pile behind the camp. Then the 23 tents and shanties packed to the hilt inside and out. Three plywood shanties with couches and chairs and camp stoves. John and his generator. The antenna on top of his shack that picked up two or three channels, depending on the weather.

Those with cars—like him—could haul some of people’s belongings to another place, except people didn’t have another place. They’d be wandering now. Nomads. You go somewhere for a night, then you get up in the morning and carry every single item with you to another place. If you stayed in a shelter, you were only allowed two trash bags full. People learned to leave things behind, start all over. If you had a good tent and the possibility of pitching it someplace, you’d carry it. And a sleeping bag. A few clothes. Food. Water. Maybe one small item of purely sentimental value. Nothing else.

He took another swig of whiskey. The burn felt good in his throat. It was a good thing he only had half a pint, because he’d probably drink every drop even if he had a whole quart.

He picked up his book. A used bookstore across from the library had a small table outside marked “FREE.” There was usually something or other on it and Eric had picked up several books over the last few weeks. This was Aerodynamics for Naval Aviators. He’d read pretty much anything. Like every other person on the street, he hung out at the library a lot—to get warm, get cool, stay dry. To sit in a real chair. He read magazines and newspapers, short stories. Novels were hard because you started one and then had to put it back without finishing it. You had to have a local photo ID and a street address to check out books. He didn’t have either.

“Hey man!”

Eric looked up to see Brad sauntering over. He nodded.

“Looks like they’re kicking us out of here. Shit. Where the fuck they think we’re going to go?” He sat down in Eric’s second chair. “Least you got a car to sleep in.”

Eric nodded.

“Though back in the day, I would of called it a piece of shit junker. Man, I used to have me a shiny black Toyota Highlander. Bought it brand spanking new—V6, all-wheel drive. And the sound system—like you’s at a concert or something. Now that’s a car I could’ve slept in.”

“But you went bankrupt trying to pay for it.”

“Got laid off. Just like you, I guess.” He picked up Eric’s whiskey bottle and shook it. “Looks like you need some spirits.”

“Got any?”

“Not much.” Brad prowled around his tent for a minute and brought back a bottle that had just a few swigs. The men quickly finished off both bottles.

“I got some money today. Let’s go get some booze. Or beer. A few cold ones would go down real smooth about now.”

“Too tired. I don’t care enough to move.”

“Gimme your keys, I’ll go.” Brad pulled two 20s out of his pocket. “I’ll buy.”

Eric eyed him warily. “Can I trust you? Straight to the store and back?”

Brad grinned. “Sure man. I’ll get us a case of cold ones. And ice.”

Eric pulled out his keys. “Come straight back.” He tossed the key ring to Brad who caught it easily in his left hand. Eric had a sinking feeling as he watched his car disappear up the path.

He thought about walking over to the fire pit where people were still hanging out, but he could hear enough to know that folks were angry. And resigned. Hell, he was resigned too. Resigned past the point of getting angry. If any one of these people—including him—owned a fancy house in town and brought their kids to that fancy paved trail, they’d be screaming about the derelicts too. And those people doing the screaming—put them on the street for a couple days and they’d change their tune so fast it’d make their heads spin. He picked up his bottle, then remembered it was empty. People gathered like this up north would at least be playing a round of euchre while they contemplated their fate.

He read until his eyes strained in the fading light, then pulled out his small flashlight. He shined it on the aerodynamics handbook. It lasted about 10 minutes before it went dark. He had bought batteries the other day, but they were in his car.

Fuck! Brad should have been back by now.

Eric picked up his whiskey bottle and felt the emptiness. He slung it in the woods and leaned back in his camp chair with his fingers laced behind his neck. If he tilted his head in just the right way, he could see a single star through the tree cover.

He closed his eyes. If he had been a praying man he would have prayed for some way through this. But he wasn’t a praying man, and so he picked up his chair and carried it to the circle and sat beside Sheila.

“Where’s the kids?”

She nodded toward her tent. “Eshe’s sleeping and Jamil’s doing homework. I ought to be in there with them.” She sighed. “I came out here because if I stayed in there, I was going to cry. I can’t do that, I gotta be strong.”

Eric nodded. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. We could go back to Mama’s, but that man living with her is such bad news.” She shook her head again. “I got to figure out something and then go tell those kids what that something is.”

“What do you tell kids?” Eric said, as much to himself as to her. “My daughter’s grown and she still doesn’t understand. Hell, I don’t understand.”

“Jamil read the notice. He’s heard people talking. Eshe doesn’t know what’s going on, but she understands anger. And fear. Kids pick up on that stuff real quick. Even babies. Jamil said, ‘Where will we go now?’ and I said, ‘I’m going to go out and talk to people and you do your homework and watch your sister. They’ll be a plan.’” She shook her head. “I don’t like lying to my children that way. Too much lying in the world. I want my babies to believe in Jesus and do right, but it’s hard. I know we’re all gonna find salvation in the next life, but my children’s got a long time till then. The street ain’t an easy place to instill the kind of values kids need to be ready when they meet their maker.” Her voice was low and confidential.

Eric had been watching the small fire while he listened and when she stopped talking, he turned to look at her. She had been pretty once but life on the street had taken its toll. Still, she obviously took pains to look nice. Her hair was straight and shiny, her body still almost plump. Sometimes she even wore makeup though he couldn’t tell in the firelight if she was wearing it now. What he could see was a stream of tears shining on her dark cheeks. He reached over and took her hand, interlocking her fingers with his. She grasped his hand and they sat there quiet like that, steadfastly holding on to each other.

Author’s bio

Photo: Dave Metcalf

Gail South says the first time she tried to write a short story it turned into a novel. To date she has written three novels and says they generally take on issues of social justice. “Home” is part of Lana, a novel that South has begun submitting to agents, which centers on Eric, a homeless man, and Lana, a widowed elderly lady whom he befriends.

“We’re so separate in society socially and racially,” South says. “I like to take different parts of our society and put them together and see what would happen.”

One of South’s novels, “The Solitude of Memory,” was a 2012 finalist for the PEN/Bellwether prize for socially engaged fiction, founded by Virginia author Barbara Kingsolver. The novel was about desegregation and tells the story of a black teacher, a white teacher aid and their families.

“My favorite part is just discovering these characters and what makes them work,” she says. South is “fascinated with people” and says she loves hearing snippets of conversations while dining at a restaurant, and often sees someone and makes up a story about them in her head—what their background is, what motivates them.

About the writing process, she generally has characters in mind as well as an outline, but she just starts writing and “things come together.” The majority of the first draft of Lana was written during an artist’s retreat at northern Michigan’s ISLAND Hill House, where she was awarded a fellowship. And much of the editing of the novel was done during three separate fellowships at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

South has loved writing since she was young (her first and only play was written in fifth grade), but says she made a conscious decision in high school that she would not be a starving artist. She got her degree in marketing from Steed College, and worked as an account executive in Tennessee for 14 years. She moved 20 years ago to Charlottesville after marrying her husband, Dave Metcalf, and a few years ago received her MFA from Goddard College, in Vermont.

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Arts

Poet Amie Whittemore finds growth in Glass Harvest

Amie Whittemore reads at the launch party of her poetry collection, Glass Harvest, at New Dominion Bookshop on Thursday. Photo: Publicity photo

For some new readers, poetry feels light years away from reality. It reads like a dense abstraction—the literary equivalent of a modernist painting that makes you tilt your head sideways and wonder what the heck you are missing.

But when poet Amie Whittemore first found poetry, the self-described “voracious reader” felt like someone flicked on the lights.

“In my high school freshman English class, we got an assignment to find 10 poems that we liked and create a little anthology,” she says. “As a 14-year-old angsty girl growing up in the middle of a cornfield in Illinois, discovering poetry was like discovering a way to deal with being a teenager in a format that I already loved.”

Whittemore saw poetry as a way to explore the truth from new angles. “Poetry reminds me of making a collage,” she says. “You’re looking at feelings and impressions, a lot of different pieces and how they feel when they’re next to each other. You’re not necessarily fitting them together to make a realistic photograph.”

Ultimately, she says, “It’s a way to grapple with the world, with being alive. It’s a way to think about things. It’s not necessarily linear, doesn’t necessarily have to fall into a clear logic, yet it brings me clarity in how I’m trying to engage with an idea or feeling or moment in my life.”

Despite her love for the subject, she denied her dream of pursuing poetry for many years. “It really did feel a little self-indulgent to get an MFA,” she says. “I was like, ‘Why should I get this degree just to write poems? It’s not going to get me a job, blah, blah, blah.’ I talked myself out of it for years and got a teaching degree instead, because I thought, ‘It’s more important to help other people love poetry. It’s not important for me to write it.’”

But the truth won out, and five years after Whittemore graduated with a bachelor’s in creative writing, she went back to school at Southern Illinois University Carbondale for her MFA in poetry.

Photo: File photo

“I found with time, if you deny a part of yourself that really gets you jazzed, you’re diminishing your own life,” she says. “The more I choose to do the things I love, the more I serve the world. It lets me be a better teacher and a better member of my community when I am doing what fulfills me.”

As a Piedmont Virginia Community College English teacher, WriterHouse writing instructor and co-founder of the Charlottesville Reading Series, a monthly event that presents poetry and prose readings for community members, Whittemore has helped hundreds of locals engage with the written world.

This month, she amplifies her voice in that world with the publication of Glass Harvest, her debut poetry collection. Layered with farm and prairie imagery, the book meditates on Midwestern landscapes and the personal lives that unfold there.

“When I started the book, I thought it was going to focus on two of my grandparents who died six months apart,” says Whittemore. “I’d talked to relatives and done research on my family’s history, but I didn’t write many poems about me.”

Unlike nonfiction, poetry gives writers the ability to speak the truth without risking wrong facts. “In my thesis defense, I was told that the Amie character was not well-developed,” she says. “And I realized that for the book to ring true, I had to be more honest.”

As Whittemore says, you have the ability to reveal yourself while feeling a bit protected. But even poets aren’t exempt from sweaty hands and pounding nerves.

“A friend of mine challenged me to write a poem I was afraid to write,” she says. “So I asked myself to think of a gentle audience. Who would that be? My granddaughter, I realized. A granddaughter who wants to know the secrets of my soul.”

So began “To my future granddaughter,” a poem-turned-vehicle for the discussion of Whittemore’s recent divorce.

“That was definitely a poem that I was very nervous about writing, but once I wrote it, it clarified for me why I was so nervous,” she says. “More often now I try to go toward that [nervous feeling], because I think good art should make you feel a little uncomfortable. It invites people into a space where they can talk about uncomfortable things and feel like, ‘Okay, we’re all here together. This is part of being alive.’”

Like witnessing art, honoring our creative instinct isn’t always easy. “It did take eight years to do this book, and it wasn’t an easy eight years,” Whittemore says. “There’s a lot of crying and freaking out and having self-doubt. For any artist, skill is important, but resilience is also really important. You need to be able to come back again and again. You need to have faith in yourself even when you feel defeated.”

In other words, poetry is as real as it gets.

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Arts

Patsy Asuncion cuts through barriers with poems and prose

Poet Patsy Asuncion will read from her poetry collection Cut on the Bias at Rapunzel’s on Friday. Photo: Publicity photo

As American citizens of all races and colors march in protest of police brutality and racial profiling this summer, the publication of local poet Patsy Asuncion’s collection, Cut on the Bias, offers a message of peace, inclusion and an account of the deep pain of growing up with two separate identities in such a divisive climate.

Born to an Irish mother who left when Asuncion was just 1 year old, Asuncion was raised in inner-city Chicago by her Filipino father who had immigrated to the United States in his 20s and taught her that blending in as much as possible was the best way to ensure her security.

“My father wouldn’t teach me his language, because of the extreme prejudice against Asians right after World War II,” says Asuncion.

In her poem “Pigmentocracy” she writes about the whitewashing of people of color through the idealization of white skin and Western facial features.

“There is a billion-dollar industry in lightening products for blacks and for Asians,” she says. “Everyone wants to blend in with the white god. As a high school and college student, I’d go lay out at the beach and pour baby oil on my skin with iodine in it so I could get dark. And my father had no idea what I was doing. He wanted me to be light. He didn’t want me to stand out.”

She likens his fear to what Arabs face in America today: “Blend in or you’re a danger.”

Her father served in the U.S. military in a segregated Filipino unit that was sent back to the Philippines to fight the Japanese, earning him his naturalized citizenship. She says he felt pressure as an immigrant to do well in this country and worked very hard. “He thought he was doing right by me,” she says. But she did not receive the affection she craved.

“He was a shadow,” Asuncion says. “He wasn’t approachable. It wasn’t until years later I realized he was living in a foreign country, always on guard. I never got him until toward the end when I chose to take care of him out of love and devotion. I’m starting to unravel that mystery and see who he was: a loving father who protected me no matter what.”

To cut on the bias in either cooking or sewing means to cut at an angle, or slant. “I always felt different,” Asuncion says. “Cut on the Bias refers to my bias, my slant on the world from being biracial.” The collection includes poems about her family, her experience of the world as a child and reflections on the current state of the world—particularly war and the abuse of women—with hope for peace and healing.

Patsy Asuncion as a baby with her father and mother. Photo: Courtesy Patsy Asuncion
Patsy Asuncion as a baby with her father and mother. Photo: Courtesy Patsy Asuncion

But her hope is not a passive one. On the fourth Wednesday of every month she hosts an open mic at The Bridge PAI, where she encourages members of the community of any age, gender, race, economic background and ability to share their stories, poems, songs, comedy and performance.

“At the Bridge, it’s really, really important to me that it’s a safe space for diversity,” says Asuncion. “In Charlottesville there’s a lot of art but not always a lot of mingling of different artists.”

When Asuncion moved here three years ago, she wasted no time seeking out and connecting with local spoken word poets and performers. She attended a Verbs & Vibes open mic where she read a hip-hop poem called “Grandma’s in the House.” “I went there looking for my community,” she says.

The next year she started her own open mic at Bon, which then moved to C’ville Coffee, and has now found its home at the Bridge. “I knocked on doors,” she laughs. “I have no shame. The Bridge is perfect. It’s a well-known place, the location is accessible to 250, and we have the same vision to involve the community on a grassroots level.”

An activist first, she sees poetry as a way to use language to find common ground. And while she has always written and was once a traveling singer-songwriter, as well as the principal for two art schools, she has honed in on the practice of writing since retiring and connecting with other writers in Charlottesville.

On July 22, she will give a reading at Rapunzel’s in Lovingston on the theme of “home,” before and after which her friend, Ukulele Katie, will play and sing old tunes from the 1920s-’50s. You can also find Asuncion hosting the open mic at The Bridge on July 27, at the Senior Center on August 1 leading a support program for caregivers and at WriterHouse on September 8, with two other women artists of multicultural heritage.

In her spare time, Asuncion is hard at work on another collection of poetry.

“The working title is Room for Rent,” she says. “It’s about how everything is transient. It’s wise to not hold on to things that we can’t, to realize that everything is fluid.”

In other words, this too shall pass. But in the meantime, we can come together with our differences and our pain, and listen to each other, a profound action toward affecting change.

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Arts

Local author Emma Rathbone stays focused with Losing It

Photo: Renee Reighart

Writing a novel isn’t easy by most measures, but it’s said that your second novel is where the anxiety really kicks in. Pressure builds to craft a book that’s readable and critically embraced, without being too similar to its predecessor. Of course, this is even more true if your first was met with popular success. Just ask author Emma Rathbone, whose second book, Losing It, was released on July 19 by Riverhead Books.

A recent transplant to Los Angeles, Rathbone is an alumna of both the UVA Creative Writing MFA program and Charlottesville itself. She is known for her first book, The Patterns of Paper Monsters, and as a contributor to The New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs column. In the latter, her oddball comedic knack is on full display in pieces with titles such as “The Lost Pages of Fifty Shades of Grey” or “A Few Things I’d Like to Convey with My Funky Lizard Brooch.” (If those leave you with any doubt of Rathbone’s sense of humor, you might also be interested in knowing that her MFA thesis was titled, Retarded revolutions around the dickface sun.) This same eccentric jocularity provided an undercurrent for her debut novel, but Rathbone really hits her stride in Losing It.

Perceptions and stereotypes about the second novel aside, Rathbone found the opposite to be true. “Losing It was a little easier because, having written Patterns, I knew it was possible to finish a novel,” she reflects. “I knew how hard it was going to be, and that it’s okay to have many fits and starts, and to have to throw a lot of stuff away. So, there was a little less anxiety about the process the second time around. Both times it was about generating material, figuring out what was chiming, finding a through line, shucking away what doesn’t work, rewriting, then tightening and tightening and tightening.”

Rising to the challenge of the second novel with wit and verve, Emma Rathbone reads from Losing It on July 23 at New Dominion Bookshop. Photo: Publicity photo

Working on the idea on and off since 2010, Rathbone wrote the vast majority of Losing It in Charlottesville. “It’s a great place to write because it’s fairly quiet and inexpensive, compared to a big city at least,” she says. “I love the beautiful, overgrown South, and that had a lot of influence on the book. There are some aspects of Charlottesville that I kind of grafted onto Durham, where the book is set, because it’s fiction and you can do whatever you want.” Indeed, a character closely resembling Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall Harmonica Man makes a cameo in the novel as do various downtown shops, the Sprint Pavilion and nearby carousel, Cismont, Sperryville, Ivy Nursery—even the Lazy Parrot.

On its surface, this book is about Julia, a 26-year-old virgin who’s determined to finally lose “it” one summer after also losing a promising career as a swimmer and other social identities from her youth and early 20s. “I wanted to explore the conundrum of wanting something very badly—to the point of obsession—while on some level knowing that the more you want it, the harder it will be to get,” Rathbone says.

The quest keeps Julia distracted throughout the book as she considers a smorgasbord of options for doing the deed but also ponders whether she’s made some sort of irreversible error that led her to a sexless fate. All of this is exacerbated when Julia moves in with her Aunt Vivienne, a 58-year-old virgin. “I thought it would be interesting to put someone who is grappling with the question of ‘meeting someone’ and what that means, next to someone for whom the worst-case scenario has played out,” says Rathbone. Elevating the work beyond the plot of a Judd Apatow movie, however, Rathbone uses Julia’s first-person narration as a framework to dig deeper into underlying anxieties and expectations about life that are surprisingly universal.

“Most people who know me will admit I’m not a chilled-out cucumber,” jokes Rathbone. “I’m pretty anxious and neurotic, so it was not hard for me to channel that side of Julia, and it was kind of fun. I like characters that have a constant, antic, kind of bitchy narration going and are always pulling out the threads of themselves and other people, and so that’s the kind of vein I tried to write in.” She balances this high-energy and, at times, off-the-wall style with a careful and considered approach to characters. As a result, Julia and the book’s major supporting characters—including Aunt Vivienne—exhibit peculiarities and personalities that extract the reader’s empathy for those in the throes of self-discovery, while suggesting that no one ever really finishes that process.

Rathbone’s likable wit and finely tuned ability to expose the intricacies and absurdities of social interactions are evidenced in all of her work, and Losing It is no exception. Next up, she’s expanding her oeuvre by joining the team of writers for an upcoming Netflix comedy series while also beginning work on her third novel.

Do you have a favorite book that incorporates Charlottesville landmarks?

Tell us about it in the comments below.