Saturday, March 14, 2009


Lit Links

I have only one link this week but it’s a fun one. Worst book covers ever. (Don’t visit if you’re easily offended. )

Also one announcement:

Literacy Volunteers of Atlanta (LVA) and the Southeast Chapter of the Guild of Book Workers invite you to unleash your imagination and your culinary talents for the sixth annual Edible Book Festival on March 28, 2009, 3:00–5:00 p.m. For more info, visit: http://www.lvama.org/

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've been reading some of the submissions for the New South writing project sponsored by the North Carolina Writers Network. Lee Smith appears as one of the first to offer a piece, and it reads with the affection for her roots you'd expect.

Others were each in its own way really fine writing. A short story worth of many names like Faulkner and Lee Smith called "Hats" leads off on the NCWN website. This is followed by a poem by Marilyn Wolf called "Corner of Martinsville Road." It is like a sepia-toned photograph -- nostalgic and vivid. I loved it. Third in this sequence is a piece of reportage that in my ancient past might have been tagged "human interest." John Manuel witnessed a hearing in a small town about a government effort to relocate an agricultural research facility. The title of this essay is "Banana." After reading it, I realized it would have been more accurate to have used all uppercase letters. The consensus of the meeting was "Build absolutely nothing anywhere near anybody."

What strikes me about what I've read is that so few authors have addressed what I (as a northerner and a transplant) would have thought was to do with the stated subject: The New South. I don't think it matters much whether one discusses New England, California, Kansas, our worlds are growing so fast in directions we can hardly perceive ahead of time we seem to find it impossible to look at the new because we're so busy trying to let go of the old or to protect it regardless of practicality, reality, and the possibility of compromise. Thus far, it's as if the New south is of interest to its natives only because of how it tends to upset the Old.

I look forward to more submissions to discover whether anyone can look at what's new without letting what isn't take over our perceptions. You can't look at anything without reference to what you already know; that's understood. Can we learn to look first and with objectivity at the new in order to find what might or might not be worth our attention and not our immediate rejection?

Joan L. Cannon
www.hilltopnotes.blogspot.com
www.seniorwomen.com

Anonymous said...

that book cover made me LOL