Tag: New Dominion Bookshop

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Landmark maker: Architect Stanhope Johnson’s local legacy

The Monticello Hotel, designed by Stanhope Johnson, opened in 1923 and featured a lavish dining room. It is now the 500 Court Square apartment building. Photo: Courtesy Carolyn Gills Frasier

Stanhope Spencer Johnson doesn’t pop to the top of the list for most architectural historians, but the Lynchburg-based designer was remarkably prolific in his seven-decade career, and some of his better work—including two buildings on the National Register of Historic Places—can be found in Charlottesville. No one knows Johnson’s work better than our own Carolyn Gills Frasier, whose exhaustively researched book, Stanhope, Chronologically, came out late last year and would make a solid addition to any architecture aficionado’s collection.

Stanhope, Chronologically: The Work of Stanhope Spencer Johnson, by Carolyn Gills Frasier, is available at New Dominion Bookshop on the Downtown Mall and at The Ivy Nursery.

Johnson (1881-1973) designed the Martha Jefferson Hospital and Gallison Hall, the Georgian Revival estate in Albemarle County. Both landed on the historic register, but the less famous but much more popular Monticello Hotel —now an apartment building at 500 Court St. —endeared the architect to local residents.

Also in the Georgian Revival style, it was built in less than a year—from groundbreaking on March 9, 1926, to completion on April 8, 1926. The opening of the nine-story limestone-and-brick building was greeted with fanfare. It removed a stigma that—with apologies to the Boar’s Head Resort—still haunts the city. “No longer will the community be rendered self-conscious by the repetition of the plaintive wail: ‘if there were only a real hotel in Charlottesville,’” a Daily Progress editorial declared.

The complaint rose from the fact that Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello had opened to the public three years earlier, in 1923, causing a flood of tourists with few places to stay. By the time the Monticello Hotel opened, visitors were arriving here by train (there were two stations downtown) and wealthier travelers by automobile. The fortunate ones stayed at Stanhope Johnson’s opulent hotel.

For a 1992 Daily Progress column, David A. Maurer tracked down Mary Cabell Somerville, a New Yorker who booked into the Monticello weeks after its debut. “It was wonderful, and if we wouldn’t have known better, we might have thought we were back in New York City,” she told the writer. “We registered and went up to our rooms and took a long, hot bath.”

The newspaper clipping was a pebble in the mountain of Frasier’s research, but she shared a copy with Abode—with obvious pride and a bright smile.

Johnson designed The Monticello Hotel, which opened in 1923 and is now the north downtown apartment building 500 Court Street. Photo: Courtesy Carolyn Gills Frasier

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Arts

ARTS Pick: The Drama of Celebrity

Sharon Marcus reads from her new book, The Drama of Celebrity, at New Dominion Bookshop on Saturday. Publicity photo

Cult of personalities: Almost 25 million people have visited Graceland since Elvis’ death in 1977; Beyoncé has 134 million followers on Instagram; and over 46 million adults read People magazine every week. Why do we care so much about famous people? In her new book, Sharon Marcus looks at The Drama of Celebrity, starting with eccentric Victorian superstar Sarah Bernhardt, who slept in a coffin in her youth, and was “as famous in her day as the Beatles in theirs.” UVA professor and Slate pop critic Jack Hamilton speaks with Marcus about her exploration of fame and the way it’s carefully crafted by journalists, the public, and celebrities themselves.

Saturday, October 12. Free, 7pm. New Dominion Bookshop, 404 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. 295-2552.

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Arts

ARTS Pick: Tim Summers

Tim Summers talks about music and technology at New Dominion Bookshop on Monday. Publicity image.

Digital strings: Reflecting on the 20 years since he co-founded the Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival, violinist Tim Summers hosts a discussion about the shifts that classical musicians and composers face in the digital age as streaming, electronic amplification, and computer-generated music take hold. Summers will play selections from Bach
and Berio, and field questions about his years of touring the globe.

Monday 9/16. Free, 6pm. New Dominion Bookshop, 404 E Main St., Downtown Mall. 295-2552.

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Arts

Killer obsessions: Rachel Monroe explores women’s attraction to true crime

In her new novel, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession, Rachel Monroe touches on everything from the Manson murders and the aftermath on victim Sharon Tate’s family to the story of the West Memphis Three and their wrongful prison conviction. Publicity photo

By Benjamen Noble

When Rachel Monroe began writing Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession, she had a driving question that fueled her—why are we, as a society, so enthralled by stories of true crime? 

“The book started with my own curiosity about myself, to be honest,” says Monroe of her literary debut, released in August. “I didn’t quite understand why true crime stories had such a hold over me, [and] why I was so drawn to them as someone who is a nonviolent person.”

As she looked closer at both our societal obsession and her own preoccupation, she noticed something unique—a significant number of true-crime aficionados are women. “I started to realize that it was a phenomenon that women were disproportionately drawn to these stories even though most murderers and victims of murder are men,” says Monroe. This inspired Monroe to pay particular attention to women in writing Savage Appetites. “Growing up in this culture as a woman, you receive a lot of messages about your vulnerability,” she says.

A mix of biography, sociology, and personal narrative, Savage Appetites explores the darkest side of human nature while highlighting the ethical complexities of society’s preoccupation with nefarious activities, using the stories of four women whose interests in crime profoundly shaped their lives—for better or for worse.

Monroe uses four archetypes to frame each woman’s story: detective, victim, defendant, and killer, interspersing personal narratives and reflections throughout. “I see little slashes of myself in all of them and that was why it seemed important to include little bits of my own story in the book,” she says.

Throughout the book, Monroe elaborates on the different ways each character’s criminal connections functioned as both self-cultivating and self-destructive—often simultaneously. She begins with the story of Frances Glessner Lee, a Harvard lecturer whose interest in crime scene re-creations led to significant innovations in forensic science during the 20th century. Along the way, Monroe touches on everything from the Manson murders and the aftermath on victim Sharon Tate’s family to the story of the West Memphis Three and their wrongful prison conviction. The book ends with the story of a young woman named Lindsay, whose following of the Columbine massacre led her to formulate plans to carry out her own mass murder.

“Like everything, it can swing both ways,” says Monroe. “A preoccupation with crime can lead to fights for justice and getting wrongfully convicted people released from prison, and at the same time it can lead to much darker places.”

Monroe’s subjects in Savage Appetites are deeply complex. Lee made great strides for the forensic science community during her time at Harvard Medical School, but they came at the expense of many of her personal relationships. Lorri Davis fell in love with one of the members of the West Memphis Three, Damien Echols, after he had been wrongfully imprisoned for the murder of three young boys. While Davis’ support of Echols contributed to his eventual release from prison, the psychological toll and physical stress of being in a relationship with him left her feeling emotionally and spiritually exhausted.

Monroe argues that following crime stories can have an overall beneficial effect. In the conclusion of Savage Appetites, she writes, “These accounts of the worst part of human experience open up conversations about subjects that might otherwise be taboo: fear, abuse, exploitation, injustice, rage.” She suggests that the topic also gives us a chance for self-examination. “I think that in some ways, true crime can be a way to help us reflect on things that happened in our own lives. True crime stories can show you things about your own life through someone else’s story,” says Monroe.

Monroe brings readers into her own inner conflict about her infatuation with crime. “I’m asking readers of true crime to question what’s drawing them to these stories, so I had to do the same for myself,” she says.

Savage Appetites is a thrilling and entertaining draw for any true crime enthusiast. And while readers may be left feeling conflicted about their enjoyment of her book, Monroe says there’s no tidy moral reconciliation. “These stories can function in multiple ways, and so we shouldn’t necessarily talk about them as though they’re all one thing.”

Rachel Monroe will read from Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession at New Dominion Bookshop on September 14.

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Arts

Stranger than fiction: Casey Cep explores Harper Lee’s foray into true crime

After learning about Harper Lee’s unpublished true crime book, Casey Cep decided to write her own work of nonfiction. Cep will read from Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee at New Dominion Bookshop on May 31. Publicity image.

When word came out in early 2015 that Harper Lee was set to publish a sequel to the 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird, author Casey Cep was one of a number of reporters who traveled to Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, to cover the book’s release. Despite Lee’s enormous popularity, Go Set a Watchman was only the second book the reticent author had published.

To her great surprise, while in Monroeville, Cep met a woman who told her about a third book that Lee had worked on—a work of true crime. Cep’s interest almost immediately shifted from covering Go Set a Watchman to investigating Lee’s unpublished true crime book.

“At some point I thought, ‘Why am I not writing this? It’s fascinating,’” says Cep.

As a reporter, Lee had spent time covering a story that took place in Alexander City, Alabama, in the late 1970s. A local man, Reverend Willie Maxwell, allegedly murdered six of his family members over a period of seven years. Locals suspected that Maxwell had killed a number of his relatives in order to collect on various life insurance policies that he had taken out naming him as beneficiary (unbeknownst to them). Although suspicions mounted against Maxwell and the evidence against him seemed damning, he was never convicted of any of the murders. This was due in large part to Maxwell hiring one of the best defense attorneys in the state—Tom Radney. It was Radney’s granddaughter, who Cep met in 2015, who told her about Lee’s work covering the Maxwell case.

In Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, out this month, Cep uses the Maxwell murders and the friendship between Radney and Lee as a framework to paint a portrait of the writer, a deeply private figure who spent much of her life outside of the limelight. “In some ways, my motivation for looking at this case has always been to learn more about her,” says Cep.

On June 18, 1977, Maxwell attended the funeral of his adopted daughter at a small chapel in Alexander City. In the middle of the service, Robert Burns, seated in the pew in front of Maxwell turned around and shot him in the head three times—killing him instantly. Burns, a blood relative of Maxwell’s suspected last victim, went to trial for murder and hired Radney—the same man who had represented Maxwell in previous years and gotten him acquitted of murder—as his lawyer.

When Lee found out about the Maxwell case, she arranged to go to Alexander City to cover the Burns trial. While there, she befriended Radney, who very much admired Lee and openly discussed the ongoing case with her.

“The truth is that, by her own account, Harper Lee was always intrigued by crime,” says Cep. “Her father was a lawyer. Her older sister was a lawyer. She spent a lot of time around that courthouse in Monroeville.”

Lee’s interest in crime was likely stimulated by her friendship with Truman Capote. When Capote traveled to Kansas in the early 1960s to gather information about the quadruple murder of a family for his acclaimed book, In Cold Blood, Lee went along to help research the case.

“I think the friendship between Lee and Capote is one of the most interesting relationships in the book,” says Cep.

Despite their camaraderie, Lee was dissatisfied with the way that Capote presented the research when he published In Cold Blood. When she went to Alexander City to cover the Maxwell case, she was determined to write a true crime novel that was different than the one Capote had produced. The book that Lee was working on was to be called The Reverend. Yet, in spite of the time she spent researching the story—chatting with journalists who had covered the Maxwell case, gathering letters and court reports, talking with Radney—she never published anything.

“There is a camp of people who feel like the salient question isn’t ‘What did she write?’ but ‘What did she do with it?’” says Cep.

In 2017, a year after Harper Lee’s death, Cep traveled to Monroeville to meet Radney’s eldest daughter at the Lee family law firm. And that’s where they picked up a briefcase filled with notes and materials Lee had collected while researching the case—including a chapter of The Reverend.

What else, if anything, exists of Lee’s true crime book is unknown. “I wish I had the answer,” says Cep. “I jokingly say it’s mysteries on mysteries.” —Benjamen Noble

Categories
Arts

Creative connections: Arts organizations bridge the divide between students and locals

Julia Kudravetz is making a focused effort to attract UVA students, as well as recent graduates, like assistant manager Sarah Valencia, to New Dominion Bookshop’s events. Image: Eze Amos

For a university with such a dominant sports culture, it’s easy to forget that the arts community is thriving, too. UVA boasts over 100 visual and performing arts organizations, from aerial dance clubs to filmmakers’ societies.

The vast majority of these groups are Contracted Independent Organizations. This lack of a direct university connection can spell difficulty when finding spaces on Grounds to rehearse or congregate. Between the infamous “concrete box” of the Student Activities Building and the still hypothetical arts building to fill the lot where the Cavalier Inn once stood, it can sometimes feel as though the necessary space for university creatives doesn’t exist.

That’s where the community steps in. Many Charlottesville arts organizations make an effort to welcome UVA students.

Just ask Julia Kudravetz, owner of New Dominion Bookshop. Since taking over operations in November 2017, Kudravetz has set her sights on ensuring that the bookstore’s capacity for hosting community events is preserved, and even amplified. Selling books is only part of her mission statement, she says. Just as important is for members of the community, “a nice mix of humans,” to attend New Dominion’s events and engage with each other.

Aside from the Thursday night MFA readings, New Dominion hosts student-focused open mics. Kudravetz is branching out to more performative groups as well—one of the most recent events at the bookstore was a staged reading of Much Ado About Nothing, co-hosted by UVA drama group Shakespeare on the Lawn. She’s also expressed interest in a cappella groups performing in the store, and says she’s waiting for a student to pitch her “an avant-garde puppet show.”

Rather than see a divide between the university and the rest of the city, a tendency both students and locals can fall prey to, Kudravetz considers the two communities inextricably linked. “The fate of the town is tied to the fate of UVA, and we need to be more aware of each other’s communities,” she says.

Kudravetz also admires “the energy that college students bring to projects”—in fact, her staff is partially composed of current UVA students and recent grads. New Dominion’s assistant manager, Sarah Valencia, graduated from the creative prose writing program last May.

Valencia has an intimate understanding of why UVA creatives might not see eye-to-eye with their Charlottesville counterparts. “There’s definitely a divide,” she acknowledges, “but we’re working on that.”

Valencia is less concerned with whether students know about New Dominion and more so with whether they feel like they belong. “I wish more students would come out,” she says, describing some of the readings she went to while attending the university in the comparatively “dreary” UVA Bookstore. “We just have to make sure…they feel welcome.”

Gorilla Theater Productions is less centralized than New Dominion, but just as committed to student involvement. Artistic Director Anna Lien describes it as a “counterculture, offbeat organization…just now kinda getting in the limelight.”

Located in a tiny black building tucked into Allied Street, Gorilla Theater is easy to overlook but impossible to forget. The organization’s programming tends towards the violent, absurd, or otherwise controversial—but its intent is not to shock, Lien explains. Rather, Gorilla wants to foster conversation.

“We have a big focus on LGBTQ issues and transition,” she says, explaining her plans to partner with a transition support group at the university in order to bring visibility to these students in creative fashion. Gorilla Theater’s current student- based project is its annual Summer Shorts, which consist of short plays typically directed by and starring high school or university students. “It’s young people being able to rise to an occasion that they wouldn’t otherwise have.”

Lien also acknowledges that a barrier exists between UVA arts and the Charlottesville equivalent, but she doesn’t think it’s a mental one. “The biggest challenge we have is transportation,” she says. “That’s something that I’m working towards figuring out. How can I bring theater to UVA? How can I build that bridge?”

Alan Goffinski seems to have found an answer. As executive director of The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative, he has poured his organizational efforts into a partnership with the UVA music department to create the Telemetry Music Series, a monthly event that features both student and local performers.

When he took on the role a couple years ago, Goffinski says he “wanted to build on the assets that Charlottesville already has.” He recognized the enormous resources possessed by the music department and, with the help of its technical director Travis Thatcher, created Telemetry. The goal was to foster a “cross-pollination of ideas,” he explains. Based on the typical crowds at the events, which he judges to be half Charlottesville residents and half UVA students, the two have succeeded.

“Some students are less inclined to explore the quirkiness of their community,” Goffinski admits. “There’s oftentimes not a perceived reason to venture out…we like to try to provide that reason—to show students what they might be missing.”

Even if you’re not artistically minded, he urges students to better appreciate their city. “I would ultimately just recommend that students look around every now and then at what might be happening in the community in general…Charlottesville is less than five miles wide. There’s no excuse.”

Julia Kudravetz is making a focused effort to attract UVA students, as well as recent graduates, like assistant manager Sarah Valencia, to New Dominion Bookshop’s events.

Eze Amos

Julia Kudravetz
considers the two
communities
inextricably linked. “The fate of the town
is tied to the fate of UVA, and we need to be more aware of each other’s communities.”

Rather than see a divide between the university and the rest of the city, a tendency both students and locals can fall prey to,

Categories
Arts

Sober perspective: Author Leslie Jamison’s new memoir goes deep on artist-addicts, AA, and recovery

“To me the most compelling stories will always be those investigating the complexity of emotional experience, what it feels like to be alive," says Leslie Jamison, who will read from The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath at New Dominion Bookshop on January 18.

Leslie Jamison writes in the beginning of The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, “I wanted to know if stories about getting better could ever be as compelling as stories about falling apart. I needed to believe they could.” The author of the New York Times bestselling essay collection The Empathy Exams struggled with alcohol dependence throughout her undergraduate and graduate education.

Accepted into the competitive Iowa Writers’ Workshop at 21, she drank among older writers and the legends of famous writers who drank before them. After losing memories of whole nights to blackouts, she tried to stop drinking on her own and eventually sought the structure and support of Alcoholics Anonymous.

The artistic result of Jamison’s entry into recovery is more than an account of addiction and sobriety—The Recovering is an exploration of narrative itself. Interweaving her personal experience with the lives of those she meets in AA as well as deceased writers and artists who battled their own addictions, Jamison gives shape to the “ongoingness” of recovery.

While questioning the draw of the addiction story, she examines her internal narration as well. “The questions at the heart of the book,” she says, “are about storytelling. What kinds of stories we tell ourselves and what their limits are.”

Whether our culture is preoccupied in a given moment with glorifying or demonizing the artist-addict, it is generally more captivated by “that darker energy of falling apart” than the journey to wellness. But in writing her story and encountering other addicts in person and on the page, Jamison found that stories about recovery can be some of the most interesting, precisely because of the effect sobriety has on perception.

“So much of recovery is about coming into sharper, more acute, more specific emotional awareness, and getting sensitized to the things that make a story interesting in the first place,” Jamison says. “To me, the most compelling stories will always be those investigating the complexity of emotional experience, what it feels like to be alive.”

When Jamison began attending AA meetings, she was humbled to learn her experience wasn’t exceptional. Having striven most of her life to distinguish herself from others, this knowledge came as relief. She was tired of the version of herself that pursued “uniqueness at the expense of a certain kind of self-possession and self-sufficiency,” she says. And she realized that uniqueness and commonality are not mutually exclusive. ”I think everyone is unique and the same at the same time,” she says with a laugh. “Most of our emotional experience is shared, and there’s value in investigating that sharedness.”

The structure of The Recovering illustrates this by supporting a plurality of stories within it. Jamison examines the art and addictions of Raymond Carver, John Berryman, Charles R. Jackson, Jean Rhys, Billie Holiday, George Cain, David Foster Wallace, and Amy Winehouse. Much of the book is about how these writers and artists do and don’t function creatively through addiction and sobriety. The concept evolved from the roots of her doctoral thesis, and at one point Jamison writes about having to defend the interestingness of her subject—writers writing without the influence of alcohol or drugs—to an advisor more interested in the relationship between addiction and creativity. After the encounter, she reflects on our cultural mythology: “The lie wasn’t that addiction could yield truth; it was that addiction had a monopoly on it.”

For Jamison, sobriety has fueled her writing in many ways. On the physical level, the effects of alcohol no longer impede her daily life and work. On a deeper level, she says, “sobriety is a form of waking up” that impels her to be present for difficulty and nuance, which then shows up in her writing. Her experience has also influenced the kind of work she pursues.

“The attention recovery asks you to pay to the lives of other people was part of what started to inspire my desire to bring other people’s lives into my work” through interviewing and reportage, she says. In addition to exploring the lives of addicts, her research examines the origins of AA, U.S. drug policies, and the racism embedded in policies that determine who is a victim and who is a villain.

Yet writing The Recovering also required that she address her own life in a way she hadn’t before. “The essay provides a lot of room for lateral motion and you can land where you want to land and leave again,” she says. “Drinking was lurking around the edges of The Empathy Exams even though I didn’t label it that way. People in recovery could see recovery in it even though I never talked about it.”

While the memoir form imposed “more pressure to tell a cohesive narrative,” Jamison says, “in a way there was something liberating and exciting about reckoning directly with the subject that had been a guiding force and guiding pressure all along.”

As she writes toward the end of The Recovering, “yearning is our most powerful narrative engine.” Jamison’s desire to tell a story of recovery, and to tell it well, results in a compelling and beautifully crafted book.

Leslie Jamison will read from The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath at New Dominion Bookshop on January 18.

Categories
Arts

Dancing with disaster: Adam Nemett offers hope for the future in We Can Save Us All

Adam Nemett will read from and celebrate the launch of We Can Save Us All on Thursday at New Dominion Bookshop. Photo by Jen Fariello

After months of involvement with SURJ and Charlottesville Resistance Choir, author Adam Nemett saw the statue debate become a community catalyst during the events of August 11 and 12, 2017.

“I have tremendous respect for the anti-racist and anti-fascist heroes that were out there on the streets putting their bodies on the line to protect our community when the police refused to,” he says. “That experience showed how much needs to be improved here, but it also showed that there’s a lot of resilience in Charlottesville.”

Nemett notices how people band together in the face of potential disaster because he’s a longtime student of the subject. After graduating from high school in Baltimore, he went to college at Princeton during what he describes as a “pretty heavy” time. “1999 was Columbine, 2000 was the Bush/Gore election, 2001 was 9/11, and then the war that followed,” he says. “I feel like it was a period where we [as Americans] went from this naiveté, or feeling of pure safety and security in this country, to something a bit darker.”

Against this backdrop, Nemett took writing and religion classes while building something new on campus: a student organization that hosted parties and events showcasing diverse forms of music. “There was no one else that was going to come in and create the kind of social life that I and a lot of other people wanted,” he says. “So we all just said, ‘Well, let’s do it. Let’s us do it.’”

The group’s grassroots approach, taking one slow step after another, created a “mini-movement” with nearly 600 members at Princeton. Eighteen years later, MIMA Music has morphed into a global non-profit organization, one that provides innovative music education to kids and adults in underserved areas.

When Nemett started the Charlottesville chapter of MIMA two years ago, he drew on those same community-building skills, knowing “if you put in the hours and do the work, something cool can happen.”

His novel, We Can Save Us All, is a testament to his dedication (it took 12 years to write and publish), as well as to Nemett’s observations of how people behave during periods of upheaval. The story centers around a group of Princeton students leading a movement across college campuses while the world teeters on the brink of apocalypse: climate disasters create a global state of emergency and America is perpetually at war.

Those speculative aspects that “felt really far-fetched 12 years ago,” Nemett says, “now feel really realistic. Especially in terms of this very charismatic but very unhinged leader figure coming to power at a dangerous time, and other apocalyptic phenomenon going on around it. Unfortunately, the world caught up to the book a little bit.”

Crafting disaster while watching the world follow suit has been a jarring experience, he says. “Some of the book was based on 1930s and ’40s Germany. I’m Jewish and I’ve always been horrified and fascinated with how something like that could happen. In the beginning, it felt like light years in the past, and it was hard to imagine something like that could ever happen again.”

Writing the book became a thought experiment of sorts, a way for Nemett to challenge his own complacency around systems, institutions, and norms he felt could come crashing down at any minute. “What kind of organization might I have wanted to start if my issue hadn’t been ‘there’s not enough good music to listen to on campus,’ but ‘Oh, God, the power’s been out for three weeks’? What would happen if a new student movement rose up around this very dark period where the future was uncertain, and what would that look like?”

Officially out on November 13, We Can Save Us All has already garnered critical praise and landed on numerous top 10 lists. At a time when life imitates art—climate disasters loom large and political upheaval fuels fear—you might expect such a book to feed your anxiety. But after dancing with disaster for more than a decade, Nemett says he came away with a real sense of hope.

“We think of dystopia, the apocalypse, and the post-apocalyptic world in this very cinematic, Mad Max hellscape way,” he says. “Everything is terrible and everyone’s trying to kill each other over cans of soup.”

But, he says, the mob riot mentality doesn’t bear out in real life. “Historically, all the way up to Hurricane Katrina, the people on the ground do an amazing, beautiful job of banding together and creating these improvisational, mutual aid societies. The danger comes when the state or the elites or the media just want to portray it as a dog-eat-dog scenario.”

Which leads Nemett to another thought experiment. “What if it wasn’t dog-eat-dog?” he asks. “What if this destructive period is building something very progressive and evolved—a model for how civilization and communities can and should exist in the future? Maybe it looks very different. Maybe it’s simpler, harder, and there’s less comfort involved. But it might just be more human, more spiritually satisfying, and more uplifting in the long run. If we can keep our heads during these tough periods and work to help each other.”

Adam Nemett will read from and celebrate the launch of We Can Save Us All on Thursday at New Dominion Bookshop.

Categories
Arts

Aja Gabel strikes a chord with The Ensemble

Author Celeste Ng praises Aja Gabel’s debut, saying, “In the tradition of The Interestings and The Secret History, The Ensemble teases apart the strands of an intense and long-lasting group friendship that both bolsters and binds its members.” Gabel will read at New Dominion Bookshop on May 19.

Around the same time Aja Gabel began learning the alphabet, she began playing the violin. As she became more adept at writing, filling “notebooks with stories as kind of a way to play,” she became more skilled at reading and playing music. When she was 10 years old she traded the violin for the cello and continued her studies through graduate school, stopping short of pursuing music as a career.

“I just never had the professional chops,” Gabel says. “I was good but I couldn’t get to that next level. It was always this thing I really loved and wanted to be a part of.” A 2009 graduate of UVA’s creative writing program who now lives in Los Angeles, Gabel says, “The way I became part of it was by writing a novel about it.”

Aja Gabel
New Dominion Bookshop
May 19

That novel is The Ensemble, published this month by Riverhead Books. It details the lives and relationships of Jana, Henry, Brit and Daniel—the central characters who make up the titular string quartet struggling to establish a career together. Gabel first had the idea for the book as a teenager when she took a chamber music seminar led by members of the St. Lawrence String Quartet. Observing them for 10 days, Gabel came away with a strong sense of the interconnection their art required.

“I’d never been around professional players of that caliber that were also like people I would want to be friends with,” she says. “It sort of humanized that world in a way it often isn’t.” And that’s exactly what she sets out to do in The Ensemble: Bring the reader into rehearsals, hotel rooms and the homes of these four interdependent people, and trace the fascia that binds them, as well as the tender secrets they keep from each other.

Jana and Henry share an emotional intimacy and platonic friendship while Brit and Daniel dabble in physical intimacy but struggle to understand each other emotionally. The novel follows the quartet members as their career and relationships evolve and their intimacies with each other deepen.

“It became clear to me they had to have some kind of personal relationship in order to make this professional relationship work,” Gabel says. “And you have to do that for years. It’s not normally the case for any other profession.” She explains, “In a string quartet, the thing you’re doing is so intimate that you end up having these relationships that aren’t necessarily romantic but are some weird breed of closeness.”

She details beautifully in the book the hyperawareness each musician has of the others’ bodies and movements. “You come to know somebody’s physicality very well,” Gabel says, with a depth of knowledge you might not even have about your closest friends. “You have to be able to anticipate, react and respond to their physicality with your own physicality. It’s essential when you’re playing music together,” she says.

Gabel addresses the messiness of life and human relationships, of ambition and personal and professional fulfillment, often drawing on music as metaphor. In one particularly poignant line, Brit questions the phrase “inner harmony” (“How can you harmonize with yourself?”) and Daniel responds: “I don’t know about you, but I contain many pitches. It’s about moving from polyphony to harmony. People are so much music. People don’t recognize that enough.”

Categories
Arts

Reading from inspiration at New Dominion Bookshop

Hear Jeffery Renard Allen (above) and Angie Hogan read from their work during the Charlottesville Reading Series at New Dominion Bookshop on Friday. Submitted photos

As a kid in grade school, Angie Hogan began writing poetry for the same reason her peers wrote in a diary or passed notes in class: She wanted privacy.

“I felt the need to express myself, but I didn’t want to express myself straightforwardly,” she says. “I was definitely writing things that were extreme metaphors. Not to go so far as to say coded and secret—but kind of.”

Now a multi-award-winning poet with an MFA from UVA’s creative writing program, Hogan pauses as she thinks back.

“They were bad,” she says with a laugh. “They were really bad mixed metaphors. Lots of stuff about the natural world, but also ships and rocks and things, and always protective in some way. You know, ‘I’m strong as a rock,’ or ‘The shipwreck can’t destroy me.’”

Perhaps that’s why, years later, she points to confidence and calculated risk-taking as some of her biggest lessons learned.

“Having Rita Dove as a mentor [at UVA] helped a lot with that, actually,” Hogan says. “One time she defended my work to a critical male, to a somewhat haphazard response to one of my poems that I put in the workshop, and that really taught me how to stand up for my own work.”

By the time she graduated, Hogan knew how an audience would respond to her work. “I could make my own decisions about whether I was going to revise the poem based on that or whether I’d just as soon take the risk and do what I wanted.”

While her first manuscript involved “a lot of autobiographical things” but “plenty of fiction too,” ranging on topics like identity, performance, role playing and multiple selves, she says her recent work is different.

“It’s more historically informed, layered in terms of other people’s thinking over the course of history,” says Hogan. “…The risk here is that I don’t really know what I’m doing. I’m writing from what I’m trying to understand, as opposed to just writing what I know.”

Sharing Hogan’s appetite for historical exploration is Jeffery Renard Allen, the celebrated author of two poetry collections, two works of fiction, one collection of short stories and countless essays, who spends his days teaching at the college level, most recently as a professor with UVA’s creative writing program.

The writers, both of whom will read from their newest work in this month’s Charlottesville Reading Series, share more than their interest in reference material.

Like Hogan, who grew up in Tennessee and learned to love words because her father constantly read children’s books out loud to her, Allen began to write because he loved to read as a child.

“When I was 8 or 9 I started trying to write stories that were based on the stories that I read,” he says. “From a young age I saw myself as a writer, something I would like to do as a career someday, even if I didn’t really know what that meant.”

Educated in Chicago public schools, and the first in his family to attend college, Allen says he feels fortunate to have teachers who supported him along the way.

“In the very first writing workshop I took, I wrote a terrible story, but the professor pointed out one word and one sentence, and he said something like, ‘That’s the way a writer uses language,’” says Allen. That single boost of confidence was so tremendous, that he began to take writing seriously.

He went on to receive his Ph.D. in English (creative writing) from the University of Illinois at Chicago, then he taught by invitation at writing programs around the globe and co-founded a writing conference in Ghana. He says he spends a lot of time talking about inspiration, how writers think and exist in the world.

“I don’t feel that a writer has to be a public figure, to be a political voice or a social voice,” he says. “Writing might be the only medium of art that allows this type of empathy, this ability to be in someone else’s shoes. As writers, we show something about our common humanity, despite whatever kinds of cultural, racial or gender differences and sexual differences might separate us or distinguish us.”

He finds himself concerned with questions of family and levels of reality. Though he often uses historical subject matter as source material, “I’m drawn to doing stories that somehow broaden our sense of reality, of possibility,” he says.

“There’s a lot that’s said about African-American boys or people in terms of their feelings of being limited, but truth to tell, as a kid, I always believed that I could do anything. I never saw race as a barrier, even though I lived in a segregated city like Chicago. I really feel that reading encouraged me to believe that I could go any place and that I could think about anything and that I could do anything. I think I still feel that way.”