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.

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.