Hub City Writers Project

Author Interviews

Big-time authors pass through Spartanburg, and many of them are lucky enough to sit down for a conversation with our own Jeremy Jones, writer, editor, teacher and interviewer extraordinaire.

A Certain Circularity: A Conversation with Sebastian Matthews

Poet Sebastian Matthews was in town for Hub City's 2008 Writing in Place conference. The author of the poetry collections We Generous and Coming to Flood, Matthews teaches part-time at Warren Wilson College and is the founding editor of the place-based journal, Rivendell. Matthews is perhaps best known for In My Father's Footsteps, a memoir of life with and the loss of his father, the poet William Matthews. I spoke with Matthews about writing poetry and non-fiction a few days before the conference.

Rocking the Boat: A Conversation with Thomas Rain Crowe

Twenty-five years ago, Thomas Rain Crowe returned to the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. After an early career of writing poetry, translating poetry, and traveling the world, he re-discovered the beauty of his native soil—its rhythms, its colors, its sights, sounds, and smells. Much—if not all—of Crowe’s writing, whether poetry or prose, reveals a deep love of the land and the people who inhabit it. Crowe is the author of more than twenty books, including The Laugharne Poems, Zoro's Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods, and two volumes of translations of the 14th century Sufi mystic poet Hafiz. In the last year alone, Crowe published a collection of short stories, A House of Girls, and a collection of lyrical poems, Radiogenesis. A book of essays on activism and the environment, The End of Eden, is due out this fall.

The Public Environmentalist: A Conversation with John Lane

Best of the Kudzu Telegraph, released in September by the Hub City Writers Project, gathers 48 of John Lane’s weekly columns for the Spartanburg Journal. His readers will recognize their favorite stories and themes and will surely be surprised by some of the “oddballs,” such as “Old Maps Tell Stories,” “The Battle for Sugar Tit,” and “Venison Tacos.” In the columns gathered in the book, Lane talks about land use, sustainability, and urban planning. He also covers pawpaws, dead deer, and parting with his beloved old pick-up truck. Folks familiar with his books, such as the recent Circling Home, will recognize Lane’s bold honesty regarding all things local, as well as his deep and abiding love of Lawson’s Fork.

A Sense of Hope: A Conversation with Tommy Hays

Novelist Tommy Hays writes about families-families in crisis, families in despair, and families in love. And he does so in achingly simple prose that draws the reader into characters' lives. Hays' third novel, The Pleasure Was Mine, has been chosen for citywide reading programs in Greensboro, NC and his native Greeneville, SC. It was read on Dick Estell's "Radio Reader" and was a finalist for the SIBA Award in Fiction 2006.

"The Pleasure Was Mine was inspired at least in part by my family's struggle with my father's Alzheimer's," said Hays. "However, it's not autobiographical. It's told from the point of view of a housepainter named Prate whose wife, a retired high school English teacher, has Alzheimer's. And while it is in part about Alzheimer's, it's more about how Prate grows in terms of connecting with his nine-year-old grandson and his grown son."

Though set against a backdrop of grief, the novel resonates with a pervasive-and comforting-sense of hope.

I spoke with Hays soon after the announcement that he will be the keynote speaker at the Hub City Writers Project's Writing in Place conference, which runs August 1-3, 2008.

Believeable Actions: A Conversation with Janna McMahan

Janna McMahan, who was born in Kentucky, is the author of Calling Home. In the late 1990s, while undergoing chemotherapy, McMahan was told that she'd have four years to live. She'd always wanted to be a writer, so she decided to quit her job and write a novel.

Just as McMahan made the best of a difficult situation in her personal life, Virginia Lemmons, the central character in Calling Home, finds a way to make do and move on when her marriage falls apart.

Lemmons' teenage daughter, Shannon, seems to be on the verge of making the same mistakes-or worse-that Virginia made. Their lives seem to be mere moments away from collision and tragedy. Remarkably, Target stores ordered the entire first print run of Calling Home. Within a month of its release, Calling Home has gone into its third printing. The novel has been equally popular with fans of Jodi Picoult, the superstar of "women's fiction," and fans of Lee Smith, a more literary but no less popular Southern novelist.

Surprises Along the Way: A Conversation with Susan Meyers

Keep and Give Away is filled with poems about childhood and marriage, the past and the present--poems about the ebbing and flowing of life and the ultimate resiliency of people. The delicacy of Meyers' poetic vision often sits on the front porch with hardship, the fragility walks hand in hand with perseverance. Overall, Meyers' poems reflect a love for the landscape of South Carolina and for everyday things, and also a respect for the volatility and uncertainty of life.

"I love sitting down to a blank sheet of paper or a blank computer screen," Meyers says, "and stumbling my way through to the end of a poem, not knowing where I'm going with it until I get there--and even then not knowing where all these things I've said have come from. It's the mystery of it--the surprises along the way, the pulling from within--that make it all worthwhile."

Prior to her reading at The Showroom, Meyers and I spoke of surprise, the power of poetry, and what it means to be a South Carolina poet.

To Save Something Beautiful: A Conversation with Erik Reece

Kentucky-born poet and essayist Erik Reece went to Robinson Forest in Kentucky, intending to write poems and to expose his students to some of the most diverse wilderness in the United States. To write about the forest he loved, he discovered, he must first write about the forces working to destroy it. He must first expose the radical practice of strip mining called mountaintop removal. A year of hopping fences, infiltrating restricted areas, nestling in trees to shoot photographs resulted in Lost Mountain: A Year in the Wilderness, a book that describes in painful detail the systematic stripping away of a mountain. Reece read from and discussed Lost Mountain on May 7^th at 7:30 at The Showroom as the final event in the Hub City Writers Project's spring season. In preparation for his visit, Reece and I discussed Robinson Forest, activism, and his next book.

Never a Dearer Friend: a Conversation with Dot Jackson

Dot Jackson kept the manuscript of her novel, Refuge, under her bed for fifteen years. However, she had kept the “family secret” that inspired the story for much longer. After a career of writing for newspapers throughout the South, Dot Jackson began to piece together the story of Mary Seneca Steele, who leaves a life of privilege in Charleston society for a life of love, tragedy, and redemption in the Blue Ridge Mountains. In anticipation of her Jan. 15, 2007, reading hosted by Hub City Writers Project, Ms. Jackson and I recently discussed writing, the South, and her interesting cousins.

New Universes: A Conversation with Claire Bateman

Claire Bateman’s poetry has been praised for its originality and range of sensibilities. Her poems bring together a multitude of topics in new ways. A consummate daydreamer and voracious reader, Bateman pulls seemingly divergent ideas into poems filled with wonder and what she calls “contrary energies.” Bateman is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Clumsy and Leap. In preparation for her reading March 12, 2007, we discussed poetry, teaching, and creating new universes.

Mike Curtis reads cover letters from Atlantic Monthly submissions

Gatekeeper and mentor: Atlantic Editor C. Michael Curtis

As fiction editor at the Atlantic Monthly, C. Michael Curtis reads more than 12,000 short stories a year in search of the few that will appear in the pages of one of the most prestigious literary publications in the world. Curtis is both gatekeeper and mentor, guiding writers and their stories toward greater resonance and greater accomplishment. Curtis, who teaches creative writing at Wofford College in Spartanburg, discussed his career as an editor and a teacher Feb. 19, 2007, as part of the Hub City Writers Project reading series.