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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Campfires and Conundrums

This week we welcome back Philip Lee Williams to Cover to Cover. We’ll be talking about his latest book, The Campfire Boys. It’s a wonderful comedic novel about reluctant rebels during the American Civil War who moonlight as entertainers for their fellow soldiers. The Celebrated Blackshear Brothers are three siblings who honed their musical talents and their knack for comedic sketches by performing for the gentry of their well-to-do Southern town as youngsters. The town is modeled after Williams’ hometown, Madison, Georgia.

What Williams accomplishes in this novel is a seamless meld of sometimes opposing forces—historical fact with contemporary commentary, warm emotion with calloused characters, horrific battlefields with witty quips—all within the lives of Confederate soldiers who abhor the institution of slavery. It all works because Williams never compromises his role as a storyteller in order to make a point.

It was an absolute delight to talk with Philip Lee Williams. Like him, I am also from Madison, and I’ve followed his career for some time now. Not only is he a wonderful writer, he’s also an incredibly insightful man with a passion for the arts. I’ve interviewed Williams twice now and each time I’ve come away thinking I’ve just learned something invaluable about what it means to be a writer in the South.

In addition to the new book, we’ll also talk about Williams’ selection to the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. That honor was announced earlier this year and in my opinion they couldn’t have picked a more fitting inductee.

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A Mother-Daughter Road Trip

I first met Amanda Gable many years ago as a customer in my book store. She was, in the heyday of the used and out-of-print book business, the kind of customer that embodied the spirit of the whole enterprise. She couldn't ever satisfy her desire for more books. She bought a lot of books, sold a lot of books, traded a lot of books, and often came in to simply browse at books. She was, in the sense that I learned the phrase, a true "book person."

What I didn't know was that she was also a person who could create a fantastic book. All those books she'd been reading, much of them about the Civil War, helped her create one of the most precocious young fictional characters I've read in years, the heroine of Gable's debut novel, The Confederate General Rides North: 11-year-old Katherine "Kat" McConnell.

Growing up in Marietta, with a loving but very dysfunctional family, young Kat becomes a walking encyclopedia of Civil War history, like many kids her age are about baseball statistics or dinosaurs. When Kat's sensitive, artistic and unhappy mother decides to drive back to her native north for a fresh start, the two of them make an unforgettable duo on an emotionally moving road trip.

With her mother at the wheel, buying up antiques the whole way in hopes of opening her own business, Kat becomes the journey's navigator and ensures that they hit every Civil War battlefield and memorial along the route, and in Kat's mind, she is the commanding general at every stop.

The girl's imaginings combined with the mother's adult concerns combine for a bittersweet psychological family portrait that is completely convincing.

Gable's quiet, unassuming manner--the personality that allowed me to know her for years without imagining what a creative imagination she has--comes through in her Cover to Cover interview. But so does her seriousness of purpose and dedication as a writer and her desire to present her characters in the most realistic and sympathetic light possible.

In a year when so many debuts by Atlanta authors have been published, none that I have read is a more satisfying piece of fiction than Amanda Gable's The Confederate General Rides North.

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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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