For Immediate Release Fall 2010

Traveling ’s Literary Trails

Literary Trails of the North Carolina Piedmont is the second book in a three-part series that directs curious travelers to the places that inspired more than 200 N.C. writers and literary visitors. This guidebook offers some of the backstories of these writers as they struggled with their craft to make a name for themselves and to tell their stories.

The guidebook is scheduled for release Friday, Oct. 15, by UNC Press and the N.C. Arts Council. A public launch event is planned at 7 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 20, at the Regulator Bookshop in Durham.

The book features poems, novels and nonfiction excerpts that are meant to enhance your appreciation of these writers and the places, people and practices that figure prominently in their work.

The book focuses on N.C.’s Piedmont or the central portion of the state, including Winston-Salem, with its strong history of tobacco and textile manufacturing; Charlotte, N.C.’s largest city known for its thriving cultural scene and big banks; Greensboro, the home of influential women’s colleges and African-American universities; Durham, known as the black Wall Street and home of ; and Chapel Hill, a liberal college town that drew Harlem Renaissance writers Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes to the area to work with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paul Green.

The Piedmont serves as home to some of the most notable Southern writers of our time — Reynolds Price, Lee Smith, Allan Gurganus, Randall Kenan, Elizabeth Spencer, Maya Angelou, Doris Betts and Fred Chappell, one of the state’s former poet laureates, and Cathy Smith Bowers, the state’s current poet laureate.

Other important authors have spent time in the Piedmont including master short story writer Peter Taylor, award-wining poet Margaret Walker Alexander, who taught at Livingstone College in Salisbury, and writer Alex Haley, the author of the groundbreaking Roots, who discovered a critical link to his African ancestors in Alamance County, which allowed him to finish the book that would go on to become a bestseller and the basis for the landmark television miniseries.

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The tradition of mentorship among writers based at the state’s universities, the influence of mill culture and agriculture on Piedmont writers and the transition from old South to new South in terms of economic development and civil rights resulted in the diversification of N.C.’s literary voices. These elements are central to the book.

“The focus of the book is writing about place,” says Georgann Eubanks, who was contracted by the Arts Council to write the series. “My choice of authors has to do with place opposed to prominence. You have some famous writers, obscure writers and notorious writers. The point is that they have written about place in a way that makes us see something we haven’t seen before or see something in a new light.”

Eubanks has been roaming the state, searching out stories of writers since the N.C. Arts Council asked her to create tours based on literary landmarks and places that authors have written about over the years, such as the Carolina Coffee Shop, located on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill near the UNC campus. Retired professor and novelist Doris Betts would grade papers there, and humor writer David Sedaris once washed dishes at the shop.

Sedaris wrote about it for The New Yorker magazine. Here’s an excerpt: “I longed for a home where history was respected — and, four years later, I finally found one. This was in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I’d gone there to visit an old friend from high school — and because I was between jobs and had no real obligations, I decided to stay for awhile and maybe look for some dishwashing work … I hoped that dishwashing might lead to a job in the dining room, bussing tables, and, eventually, waiting on them, but I kept these aspirations to myself. Dressed as I was, in jodhpurs and a smoking jacket, I should have been grateful that I was hired at all.”

And to think Eubanks was sent on this journey because Nancy Trovillion, the deputy director of the N.C. Arts Council, asked her to stop by her office. Trovillion was still excited about an article she had read in by Josephine Humphreys entitled, “Roaming Carolina.” It was a story about Humphreys’ driving down U.S. 17 discovering all kinds of treasures in South Carolina’s Low County.

Trovillion still has a copy of the story that described the food, the history, the people and the landscape. “In part, I was reacting to a writer writing about place. It was so compelling,” she said.

Trovillion thought, “Our state’s literary heritage is so rich. It was overwhelming to think about how to approach it.”

So Debbie McGill, the former literature director for the Arts Council, and Eubanks started mapping the fertile terrain. “We wanted people to see North Carolina through the eyes of its writers,” McGill said. “The guidebooks take people to travel destinations, but they also take people well off the beaten track. I adore getting off the interstate and taking back roads of the beautiful and interesting countryside and small towns, where these

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Since the state has so many authors, it was decided to divide all the information into three volumes. The first guidebook, Literary Trails of the North Carolina Mountains, was released in October 2007 by the University of North Carolina Press. The third book in the series is scheduled for publication fall 2012. There is a companion Web site available at www.ncliterarytrails.org which includes a complete list of author book signings and events.

The N.C. Arts Council in conjunction with UNC Press also published the Cherokee Heritage Trails Guidebook by Barbara R. Duncan and Brett H. Riggs and Blue Ridge Music Trails: Finding a Place in the Circle by Fred C. Fussell. To learn more about these cultural trails, visit http://www.ncartstrails.org.

About the North Carolina Arts Council The North Carolina Arts Council works to make North Carolina The Creative State where a robust arts industry produces a creative economy, vibrant communities, children prepared for the 21st century and lives filled with discovery and learning. The Arts Council accomplishes this in partnership with artists and arts organizations, other organizations that use the arts to make their communities stronger and North Carolinians — young and old — who enjoy and participate in the arts.

The N.C. Arts Council is a division of the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources, the state agency with the mission to enrich lives and communities and the vision to harness the state’s cultural resources to build North Carolina’s social, cultural and economic future. Information on Cultural Resources is available at www.ncculture.com.

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