The Professor Tells His Story

It’s quite possible we’ve never had a guest on Cover to Cover quite as comfortable in the talk studio as this week’s guest, longtime Atlanta Braves broadcaster Pete Van Wieren. In 2008, Pete retired from a distinguished career of 33 years with Atlanta’s Major League Baseball club. His new memoir, Of Mikes and Men, is chock full of anecdotes about the club and insights into the mind of the team’s scholarly voice.

Obviously, the natural appeal here is to Braves’ fans, of which there should be no shortage. The team’s radio network is reportedly the largest radio network of any sports franchise in the United States, and Van Wieren and his longtime broadcast partner, Skip Carey, hold a special place in the hearts of many of those fans.

Van Wieren talks about Caray’s declining health and how it affected his work in his final broadcasts before he passed away suddenly in 2008. He also talks about his early days knocking around with a rock band at Cornell University, the lean years broadcasting minor league games, the elation when he got the call to Atlanta, the sudden death of baseball’s first African-American general manager, hustling out of downtown Los Angeles during the Rodney King riots, Ted Turner’s one-game stint in the dugout as manager, and much more.

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Will Jesus Buy Me a Double Wide?

A title that was originally intended as a joke sold the book before it was even written. Karen Spears Zacharias recently published this book - her fourth - titled: Will Jesus Buy Me a Double Wide. She is a journalist and author of 3 other non-fiction books and has won dozens of writing awards.

Karen traveled the country collecting stories of ordinary and not so ordinary folk. Each chapter anonymously titled: The Preacher, The Evangelist, The Sister, The Marine. Karen investigates what role God and money play in people's lives. The book is filled with humor and also asks some incredibly tough questions like: What does it mean to be blessed by God? And Karen isn't afraid to give the answers.

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Hold Up the Sky

In Patricia Sprinkle’s latest novel, Hold Up the Sky, she takes a temporary hiatus from crime fiction to tell the story of four women, devastated but ultimately strengthened and united by the hardships that beset them.

Mamie is facing an overwhelming secret. Margaret has lost her home. Billie can no longer care for her disabled daughter alone. And Maria is living with an untenable choice. When these four women come together to live on a drought-stricken Georgia farm, they must open their hearts, and share their burdens, before they can find the bounty that lies hidden in tough times, and once again see the glorious pattern of meaning in their lives.

Lisa Wingate, author of The Summer Kitchen calls this "A heartfelt story of the women who catch us when we fall-the sisters and friends who hold up the sky and show us who we were meant to be," and Patti Callahan Henry, national bestselling author of Driftwood Summer says, "Patricia Sprinkle takes us deep into the thoughts and feelings of four women who realize the only way to true strength is to share their faith, their hearts and each other's lives.”

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The Interrogative Mood

Padgett Powell's first novel, Edisto, immediately established him in the 1980s as one of the most original fiction writers of his generation. His subsequent books have done nothing to diminish his reputation among critics, but as they have become more and more experimental--in the vein of his mentor, Donald Barthleme, he hasn't exactly broadened his readership. With the publication last year of The Interrogative Mood--an entire book composed of nothing but questions--that pattern didn't seem likely to change. But, to his surprise as much as anyone's, the book brought more attention to Powell than anything had since his illustrious debut.

Powell toured the country in support of the book in the Fall of 2009, and came through Atlanta just a week after being profiled in The New York Times Sunday Magazine. Interviewing an author about a book like The Interrogative Mood, in which there is no plot, no true characters, not necessarily, as Powell admitted, even a book, was a bit of a daunting task. But simply being in earshot of Powell using the English language is a rewarding experience. In addition to sharing an illustrative passage, Powell talked about how he came to write such an unusual book and the surprising ways readers have responded to it. And, strange at it is, he discussed how this 150-page string of questions actually wound up revealing quite a bit about its author and, as all great fiction does, actually addresses some of life's eternal, well, questions.

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The Majic of Bloodroot

Amy Greene grew up in the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee. She was born to a family of natural story tellers and a rich tradition of folklore. Bloodroot is her debut novel about a family spanning three generations. It weaves through time and space with a mystical dream like quality starting with the Great Depression and ending in present day.

The novel is told in a myriad of voices, each character more vivid and compelling than the last. Bloodroot is filled with mystery, grace and rich Appalachian folklore. The book is named for the flower whose sap has the power to heal and also to poison.

At the center of the story is the character Myra Lamb whose "haint blue" eyes are said to liberate her family from an old curse. Haint blue is a very special shade of blue that wards of evil spirits. This kind of blue can be found on the doors and windows of many houses in Appalachia.

Amy Greene lives with her husband and her two children in East Tennessee where she grew up. Her novel Bloodroot is published by Knopf and her second novel is in the works. Listen to this episode

Through the Eyes of a New Generation

Noni Carter is only 18 years old. Despite her young age, she has recently published her first novel - Good Fortune. Good Fortune was inspired by her great-great-great-great grandmother - Rose Caldwell. Noni and her siblings listened to the stories of Rose and other accounts of her ancestors' histories around the family's kitchen table. Rose's story in particular inspired Noni to embark on a three-year journey researching her family's history and the history of black America.

The book that started as a short story has evolved into a historical slave narrative, tracing the story of Ayanna Bahati from Africa to a plantation in Tennessee, and finally to freedom.

Noni's desire is not only to teach history to young African Americans, but also to inpsire them to value and embrace their legacy.

Noni Carter is a student at Harvard University. She is not only a novelist, but also a classical pianist and poet.
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Pearl Cleage: Activism and Writing

Atlanta-based essayist, poet, journalist and novelist Pearl Cleage joins us for Cover to Cover this week. Cleage ventures into new territory as an artist and American in her latest novel Seen It All and Done the Rest. Cleage talks about how she’s been as much an activist in her life as an author. And the activist in her, fighting for civil rights as an African American in the 1960’s and 70’s and women’s rights after, dissociated herself from being American.

Cleage explores this idea with a new heroine, Josephine Evans, an actress of the international stage who returns stateside. Through Evans and the characters she encounters (some familiar— Abbie Browning’s back and Zora too), Cleage breathes life into current events and the issues of our age that read black and white in newspaper headlines. Josephine asks questions like "What is the free woman’s role in wartime," and with the full palette of human feelings, Cleage masterfully answers.

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America's Lost Musical Genius

In The Ballad of Blind Tom, Australian author Deirdre O’ Connell describes her subject as “The most famous black performer of the Civil War generation.” Was he a naive genius or a freak? Was he a gifted, original American composer or a mere mimic of the reigning piano styles of the day? O’Connell wades through 50 years of press clips and testimony searching for the answer to the question, “Who was Blind Tom?”

He was born a slave in Columbus, Georgia. Despite his autistic condition, he made his guardians piles of money, perhaps, by today’s standard, millions of dollars, of which he and his family saw almost none. It would be story of overpowering sadness had Blind Tom not been so full of life. He took great delight in playing piano up to 12 hours a day, never regarding it as work even in the midst of a staggering itinerary. (In 1999, the pianist John Davis recorded a selection of his songs, John Davis Plays Blind Tom.)

Full of wit and wild anecdote, The Ballad of Blind Tom has an astonishing cast of characters. It is Deirdre O’Connell’s first book, and she spent a good deal of time in Georgia conducting research. She has also made documentaries for the Jimi Hendrix Estate and the United Nations Environment Program and has worked in news at SBS Australia.

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Fear Came to Town

Doug Crandell is an award-winning author of fiction and memoir, who ventures into the genre of True Crime with his latest book, Fear Came to Town, the disturbing true story of the Santa Claus, Georgia, Murders.
Years ago, Danny and Kim Daniels had taken in Jerry Scott Heidler through foster care. Kim had grown up within the foster care system herself, and she sympathized with the troubled boy. But it soon became clear that Heidler’s problems were far more disturbing than they had thought – and they cut him from their lives.
One terrible night in December 1997, Heidler broke into the home of his former foster family and with methodical madness short Danny and Kim, teenage Jessica, and eight-year-old Bryant. He then kidnapped and brutalized three surviving children, abandoning hem on a remote dirt road in the dead of winter.
Man Martin interviews Doug Crandell about his process of researching and writing this chilling true story and the remorseless sociopath who destroyed the family that tried to rescue him.

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Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes

Michael Gray’s Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell (Chicago Review Press) is an exhaustive reconstruction of McTell’s life and times. It will surely stand as the definitive work on the man Michael Gray calls “the greatest blues singer Georgia has ever produced” and “The finest 12-string guitarist of his generation, barnone.”

Beginning in the 1990s, Gray made several trips to Georgia searching for information about McTell. His interest endured years of frustration. (He was even rousted by security officials while trying to photograph the Milledgeville state hospital where McTell died.) Nonetheless, he finally assembled a family tree which includes over 100 of McTell’s relatives, beginning with the singer’s white great-grandfather who fought in the Civil War under Robert E. Lee.

Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes is the portrait of a self-sufficient man who was blind from birth, a gifted black musician who moved freely about the American South during the mean years of segregation. When he died in Atlanta at the age of 56, McTell was just short of the early 1960s folk revival, which most certainly would have embraced him as a major figure. Despite this historical mischance, recognition for McTell would begin to grow within a months of his death. In 1983, Bob Dylan stepped forward to say, “Nobody can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.” McTell’s “Statesboro Blues” has become universally known as a Southern Rock anthem as played by the Allman Brothers. McTell was inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame in 1990.

Michael Gray writes for the UK Guardian and many other publications. He’s the author of several books, including The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia and The Elvis Atlas: A Journey through Elvis Presley’s America.

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The Motel of the Stars

The novel, The Motel of the Stars is set in Kentucky and North Carolina. It takes place on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the Harmonic Convergence, a new age event where the planets align signaling more peaceful times ahead.
The book tells the story of Jason Sanderson, a foreclosure expert working in the eastern part of Kentucky. He travels to a burned down motel in Kentucky to begin foreclosure proceedings. By chance he meets his son’s former girlfriend, Lory Llewellyn. The two of them are still dealing with the loss of Jason’s son and Lory’s boyfriend, Sam who died ten years earlier while in the military.
The book combines a sometimes satirical look at New Age philosophy with the very powerful emotion of grief and loss.
Author Karen McElmurray is on sabbatical from her job as a professor at Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville. Her other books are, Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven, which won the Thomas and Lillie D. Chafin Award for Appalachian writing in 2001, and Surrendered Child: A Birth Mothers Journey. The book is a moving memoir of McElmurray and her decision to place her son up for adoption.

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Don't Leave Hungry: 50 Years of Southern Poetry Review

The idea of Southern literature rankles some writers. There are those who rather would disassociate with the region, saying there's more to their writing that the place they were born. Other writers embrace a Southern identity to the point of caricature. And just what defines Southern literature, anyway? Writer, subject or both?

This question of Southern literature is frequently talked about in terms of fiction, but Southern poetry is rarely discussed. In this conversation for Cover to Cover, GPB's weekly program about books, Orlando Montoya talks with the editor of a new anthology chronicling 50 years of Southern Poetry Review.

James Smith, the editor of "Don't Leave Hungry" and the associate editor for the venerable journal, makes the case for a journal that has staunchly stuck to a founding -- and some might say, provocative -- vision of Southern poetry. Namely, it doesn't always have to be about the South.

Smith reads three poems, including one by U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins. He also talks about the journal's founder, Guy Owen, and what made him tick. And he explains how the journal has -- and hasn't -- changed over the years. Smith also teaches at Armstrong Atlantic State University. "Don't Leave Hungry: 50 Years of Southern Poetry Review" is published by the University of Arkansas Press.
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Poetry or Prose?

James Iredell’s Prose. Poems. A Novel. is a series of pieces that are impossible to classify – poetry? prose? vignette? – that when brought together along with haunting illustrations by the author and Christy Call create a loosely-woven narrative of a journey from the West Coast to the East, a journey – among other things – out of self-destruction.
Tom Franklin (Hell at the Breech and Smonk) writes of Iredell’s book, “Absorbing, fascinating, strange in the best way. This “novel” reinvents the novel, the short-short story and the prose poem, at the same time. Iredell’s spiritual uncle, Richard Brautigan, is happy in heaven, drinking with Raymond Carver, who’s happy too. A delightful book.”
This week on Cover to Cover Man Martin and James Iredell discuss James’ book, writing, life in California, Nevada, and Atlanta, talking cockroaches, and other topics you can’t afford to miss.
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A Live Recording from the Bartow County Library in Cartersville

This week we present Lauretta Hannon who will read from her debut novel Cracker Queen: A Memoir of a Jagged, Joyful LIfe. This interview was recorded in front of a live studio audience at the Bartow County Library in Cartersville.

Raised in the deep south but she's no southern belle, Lauretta Hannon exposes the underbelly of growing up poor in a broken family in rural Georgia. Her literary debut Cracker Queen: A Memoir of a Jagged, Joyful Life is a knock-you-over-the-head testament to living graciously in the face of hardship.

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A Live Recording from the Bartow County Library in Cartersville

This week on Cover to Cover we present a special live recording from the Bartow County Library in Cartersville, hosted by GPB's John Sepulvado. We are featuring award-winning novelist Terry Kay. He is a 2006 inductee into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame and has been a sports writer and film/theater reviewer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Terry Kay is the author of ten published novels, including The Book of Marie, To Dance with the White Dog, The Valley of Light, Taking Lottie Home, The Kidnapping of Aaron Greene, Shadow Song, The Runaway, Dark Thirty, After Eli, and The Year the Lights Came On, as well as a book of essays, Special K, and a children’s book, To Whom the Angel Spoke.

The interview was recorded live in front of a studio audience. Terry Kay will read excerpts from some of his novels followed by questions from the audience.

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Crossing the Lines

Atlanta resident Richard Doster was in advertising for most of his career and currently edits a magazine published by the Presbyterian Church. Over the last several years, he has focused his writing and interest in spiritual matters, the South, race and culture in an intriguing approach to fiction.

His fist novel, Safe at Home, chronicled a fictional southern town in the 1950s experiencing the integration of its minor league baseball team.

Having covered that explosive story in his hometown newspaper, Doster's sportswriter hero Jack Hall caught the attention of editors in Atlanta and takes a job in the big city just as the Civil Rights movement was beginning to take shape. Thus the story of Doster's follow- up novel, Crossing the Lines, is set in motion.

Hall and others eventually start a magazine that celebrates all that is great about the South--its literature, its music, its culture-- while the region is being understandably ridiculed by the national media during the period for its racial intolerance. Through the journalistic travails, Hall, a man entirely of his times, experiences an evolution in his own race consciousness.

In his Cover to Cover interview, Doster talks about his inspiration for taking on such volatile subject matter and discusses his methods of bringing to fictional life such historical figures as Martin Luther King, Ralph McGill and Flannery O'Connor in his work.

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Heart of a Patriot

By the time he had reached middle age, Max Cleland thought he had nothing to live for. A grenade explosion in Vietnam had left him a triple amputee. He had lost his seat in the U.S. Senate, and in the grip of depression he had lost his fiancée, too. But instead of giving up, Cleland reaches deep into his soul and discovers that he has what it takes to survive: the heart of a patriot.

Born and raised in Georgia, Cleland came back from Vietnam missing three limbs and was confined for months at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Doctors didn't give him much hope of living an active life, but through the bonds he formed with other wounded soldiers, and through his own Southern grit, he learned how to be mobile and overcome his despair. He returned to Georgia and pursued his passion for public service by becoming the first Vietnam veteran to serve in the Georgia state senate. Jimmy Carter appointed him head of the Veterans Administration. Later he became Georgia's youngest secretary of state and then in 1996 was elected to the U.S. Senate.

But during his reelection campaign he is singled out by Karl Rove and the Republicans, who campaigned against him as "unpatriotic." He lost the election and sank into deep depression. A long-dormant case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, awakened after 9/11 by the invasion of Iraq, pushed Cleland to the brink. Forty years after Vietnam, having reached -- and fallen from -- a pinnacle of power, Cleland returned to Walter Reed as a patient, this time surrounded by veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan. There he found the faith and endurance to regain control of his life.

In a memoir in which he pulls no punches about the costs of being a soldier, Max Cleland describes with love the ties America's soldiers forge with one another, along with the disillusionment many of them experience when they come home. He spares no one his humiliations and setbacks in this gut-wrenching account of his life in the hope it will keep even one veteran from descending into darkness. Heart of a Patriot is a story about the joy of serving the country you love, no matter the cost -- and how to recover from the deepest wounds of war.

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The Bonfire: The Siege and Burning of Atlanta by Marc Wortman

2009 marks the 145th anniversary of the fall of Atlanta during the Civil War, so Mark Wortman's book is a timely look at this fascinating chapter (some would say dark chapter) in Georgia's history. Wortman has a journalist's flair for keen insight and detail, and above all he tells a good story.

Like most of my interviews, 30 minutes proved all too short to ask the author everything I was interested in. Some of the ones I posed to Marc Wortman: How does a guy with a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Princeton get interested in Atlanta and the Civil War?

One of the things in his book that most intrigued me was the fact that we now take it for granted that Atlanta is an important city, that it's the Gateway to the New South, the home of Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, the Atlanta Braves, Home Depot, CNN, Coca-Cola, etc., but the Atlanta he describes wasn't all that big or seemingly all that important as a city. Wortman writes, "Few people in the North or among Union military officials had heard of Atlanta before the outbreak of the rebellion." How then did two great armies find themselves in and around Atlanta in the summer of 1864? And why is Atlanta's fall directly credited with paving the way for Lincoln's re-election the following November?

A book like this is full of fascinating characters, among them of course William Tecumseh Sherman. He obviously plays a very prominent role in this book, and in fact Wortman gives him the very last word. Even today, his name evokes fierce passions and emotions in Georgia. And yet, when he returned to Atlanta in 1879, Wortman writes that "few people in Atlanta remained ill disposed toward Sherman." How is that possible? I'm quite certain that wouldn't be the case now, 145 years later. Last year the Georgia Historical Society had a public program about Sherman, and we received numerous letters and emails from people across Georgia (and the rest of the country) vehemently denouncing him. How was it possible that "few" of the Atlantans who actually lived through Sherman's siege were so forgiving in 1879?

Finally, with the Civil War's 150th anniversary fast approaching, there will be commemorative events across the country. One of the questions I like to pose to writers of Civil War history: What do the events in your book still have to teach us in the 21st century?

by Stan Deaton

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Former AJC Reporter Tells Tale of Murder, Bridge and the Great Depression

Gary Pomerantz honed his skills as a reporter at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and it was while he still lived in Atlanta that he wrote what is widely considered one of the best and most important books ever authored about the city: Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn: A Saga of Race and Family. With the same narrative skills that gave that work, and subsequent others, such vividness, Pomerantz, who now teaches at Stanford University, earlier this year published The Devil's Tickets: A Night of Bridge, A Fatal Hand, and a New American Age.
This latest work focuses on a once notorious Kansas City murder case. But, with the attorney for the defense being one-time presidential candidate Jim Reed, and the killing having taken place after a game of Bridge, a craze that would captivate the country during the ensuing decade of the Great Depression--thanks in large part to a larger-than-life impressario named Ely Culbertson, Pomerantz's tale is truly a panorama of the era, full of wonderfully colorful characters, significant historic detail and astute social commentary.
Like in his writing, Pomerantz in conversation is brimming with energy and finds intrigue and excitement in whatever subject he immerses himself. He is the sort of fellow with whom you could talk for hours. Alas, Cover to Cover only last 30 minutes. For a little more of Pomerantz, however, he will speak about his book at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library in Atlanta on Thursday, September 24 at 7 p.m.

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Raven Lover, Poet, Novelist

I had the pleasure of first meeting George Dawes Green at The Moth in Savannah, Georgia. This one of a kind story-telling ensemble, was founded by Green back in 1997. It mimics evenings spent on his friend Wanda's porch in St. Simons Island. Green and his friends would gather there to drink and tell stories. Moths would find a way into the porch and flutter around the light. The Moth travels all over bringing story telling to life like never before. It has become such a popular event, that most Moth slams are usually sold out. They attract raconteurs from all walks of life with an occasional celebrity or three thrown in for good measure.

Green has published three novels to date. The latest, Ravens, just hit bookstores this summer. It is a thriller set in Brunswick Georgia about a family who has just won millions, but whose fate takes a twist downhill when two drifters from up north show up and hold the family hostage. It is a gripping, humorous, under the covers kind of read.

His other novels, both highly acclaimed - The Caveman's Valentine (1994) which won an Edgar Award and The Juror (1995) were both made into major motion pictures.

When Green isn't writing he is bringing The Moth coast to coast and across the ocean. The story-telling not-for-profit group has become a -not to be missed- sensation.

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