Georgann Eubanks, author of Literary Trails of the
North Carolina Mountains: A Guidebook, on the rewards in store
for readers retracing her route.
Q: Why do you think that cultural tourism in
general, and literary tourism in particular, is gaining popularity in
the United States?
A: I think that as our built
environment in the United States has become increasingly homogenized by
the brand name hotels and chain restaurants at every Interstate exit,
tourists now have to look much harder to find what makes any destination
interesting, memorable, and distinctive. It seems increasingly true that
only through the arts, the indigenous crafts, and the cultural history
of a place and its people can we find what makes a destination truly
special, what gives it an identity that's worth visiting. Of course
geography can be a powerful variable in this country, but even the
vistas are diminished by so many familiar logos lighting up the sky
everywhere.
In response to this situation, my family long ago
adopted a rule on vacation that no matter where we go, we avoid the mall
and chain, even in hotel/motel choices if we can. Instead, we drift off
the Interstates, follow two-lane highways and seek out the shops, sites,
and vintage restaurants that can still reveal the history, tastes, and
culture of a place. This practice makes travel a much more authentic
process of discovery.
In terms of literature, our North Carolina
writers and those from outside the state who've spent significant time
here have done a pretty amazing job over the past 200-plus years of
capturing the language, dialects, syntax, quirky characters, and sensory
aspects of this state. Their works are a natural companion for the
tourist who is looking to go beyond the surface and learn about North
Carolina, past and present.
What continues to motivate me in the
Literary Trails project is the hunt for those places, authors, and
quirky stories that I didn't know before. As Robert Frost said, "...no
surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader." I hope that
Literary Trails of the North Carolina Mountains and the subsequent
volumes on the Piedmont and East will surprise and delight readers in
the same way that I was delighted and surprised in the research and
writing.
Of course, the Trails books contain information that anyone
could find if they look hard enough, but what I hope makes this project
different is the aggregation of stories, anecdotes, and literary tidbits
that accompany the poems and excerpts of narratives from NC writers.
Lots of people take books they've been meaning to read on vacation with
them. This project suggests books that tourists can carry on vacation
that are about the places they're headed.
Q: The University of North Carolina Press is
publishing this book in association with the North Carolina Arts
Council, an agency of the Department of Cultural Resources. How does
this guide tie in with other North Carolina Arts Council
initiatives?
A: This series of books follows
two other distinguished volumes. Blue Ridge Music Trails: Finding a
Place in the Circle, written by Fred C. Fussell, is a comprehensive
traveler's guide to finding old-time and bluegrass music and dance
venues in the mountains. Cherokee Heritage Trails Guidebook, written by
Barbara R. Duncan and Brett H. Riggs, traces the heritage of the
Cherokee people in sacred places, historic sites and through
descriptions of the community ties, storytelling, and folk arts of these
indigenous people. It covers the southern mountain region of western
North Carolina, eastern Tennessee and northern Georgia.
I am really proud to be a part of this innovative way to share North
Carolina culture with visitors, new residents, and natives. Our Arts
Council is nationally recognized for such creative projects.
Q: Literary Trails of the North Carolina
Mountains is the first of three planned guidebooks in this series.
When will the two companion volumes about the Piedmont and Coastal Plain
be available?
A: Obviously, this is an enormous undertaking, but we hope to bring out the next books in 2009 and 2010.
Q: In the book's preface, you talk about your childhood experiences with literature. Did you have any early encounters with literary tourism?
A: I actually grew up in Georgia.
I came to North Carolina for college, and I've been here ever since,
more than 30 years.
As a child, I do remember that my family took me to visit Joel Chandler
Harris's home, "The Wren's Nest" in Atlanta when I was very young and
was just getting to know the Uncle Remus stories. From that and several
other experiences, I'd have to say that my earliest awareness of history
and the fame of certain writers was totally informed by place. I was
actually born 90 years to the day after Sherman burned Atlanta, and the
first movie my father ever took me to see was "Gone With the Wind" when
I was five. (Of course that was a revival showing, though my mother had
actually been to the premiere at the Loew's Grand Theater in 1939.) For
better or worse, Margaret Mitchell was an Atlanta icon.
Later, I remember going to the public library in downtown Atlanta as a
teenager and gazing into the glass case that held Mitchell's portable
Remington typewriter. Today, seeing Thomas Wolfe's typewriter in
Asheville gives me the same thrill as does walking the halls of the
Grove Park Inn and trying to imagine F. Scott Fitzgerald gazing across
the hills to the site of Highland Hospital where his wife Zelda was a
patient.
Q: How do you envision literary tourists
using your book?
A: I imagine some people reading
it straight through and skipping over the driving directions, just
enjoying it as armchair tourists. I also hope that travelers will grab
it as they go out the door on a business trip, hoping to find something
to do in addition to their work in a given locale. And of course, I hope
that families and groups of friends will decide to take the actual
tours - there are 18 - going to the sites that interest them, and most
importantly stopping to read aloud from the excerpts included from
novels, short stories, and poetry collections. That's exactly what Donna
Campbell (the photographer on the project) and I did. We'd climb a trail
and stop and read a poem and keep going. Or when I'd find an excerpt I'd
copy it down, print it out, and we'd go hunting for the spot described.
The NC Arts Council is also creating a magnificent website based on the
book where travelers can access a good bit of the book and also keep up
with developments in literature—new books coming along by local authors
in the area. Eventually we hope to add podcasts, video and other tidbits
so that curious travelers might actually hear the voices of the writers
included along the Trails.
Q: Why is it important that people remember these literary landmarks? Are any of them in danger of being forgotten?
A: Well, as I learned so plainly
from my colleagues at the North Carolina Humanities Council, we cannot
fully know who we are today without knowing where we have come from.
Again, I think the present fascination among so many folks to explore
their genealogy has been amplified by the homogeneity that's overtaken
certain parts of our lives. People today seem to have a deep desire not
to relinquish their identities and histories in the midst of so much
destruction of the cultural artifacts that once defined the small towns
and family traditions of all kinds of peoples in North Carolina. These
identities are being blurred. Material culture is moving so quickly
toward fusion, as is our food. This blending is certainly not all bad.
It can be very exciting and interesting to mix traditions and tastes,
but our state's writers - past and present - remind us of who we were, where
we've been, what our core values have been, and how we have lived. Books
are a preservation mechanism, whether fiction or nonfiction.
As for the literary landmarks, of course they are changing and
disappearing all the time. The second book of the Trails Project will
make this quite plain, particularly in the literature that's come out of
Charlotte - a town that has destroyed its landmarks in favor of progress.
In the Piedmont we've gone from textiles to high tech, from shade tree
mechanics to the big business of NASCAR. In fact, the Piedmont Trails
really do lift up the transition from Old South to New South, from
"muscle to mind work" as one sociologist put it. But contemporary North
Carolina poets such as James Applewhite and Barbara Presnell remind us
of our roots.
Q: How does touring these places help one both gain insight into the authors' minds and understand the personalities behind their works? Did every author actually visit the places with which they're associated?
A: The only writer I can think of
who did not actually visit the place he wrote about that's included in
the Trails is Jules Verne. Amazingly, he launched a whole novel based on
something he read in a library in France about the Brown Mountain
Lights - a mysterious visual phenomenon near Morganton in the Blue Ridge.
Verne never visited North Carolina, and beyond the first few pages of
the novel, it shows! Still, how could I leave that fantastical story
out?
That said, my assignment from the N. C. Arts Council has been to create
tours that take people to actual places written about by writers who
lived and worked there. So I must confess that finding excerpts that
speak first to actual places has been my priority more than trying to
offer some kind of inventory of all the good works written by every NC
writer or visiting author of some note. This series of books is
fundamentally about seeing North Carolina places through the eyes of the
writers who have documented them.
Of course the anecdotes and foibles of these writers are also
irresistible fodder. I have delved into the scholarly investigations and
eye-witness accounts of how some of the writers lived and did their
work. For example, reading Carl Sandburg's granddaughter's memoir brings
the Sandburg home in Flat Rock alive. Would-be novelist and bookstore
owner Tony Buttitta's encounters with F. Scott Fitzgerald in Asheville
are quite remarkable. University of Tennessee English professor Alison
Ensor shared his research with me about the separate visits to Biltmore
House of Gilded Age novelists and good friends Edith Wharton and Henry
James. James hated the place; Wharton was charmed.
Though I have used some literary biography, criticism, and academic
research to inform the book, I wouldn't want prospective readers to
think this is a highly analytical or scholarly work. I have tried to be
very ecumenical and down-to-earth in the selections, hoping to offer
stories, anecdotes and excerpts that will appeal to all kinds of
readers - of popular fiction, mysteries, literary fiction, poetry,
biography, and memoir.
Q: Do you have a favorite literary landmark in the North Carolina mountains?
A: I love the North Carolina
mountains, period, so that's a very hard question. I suppose the French
Broad River and the New River are two landmarks that tie together many
stories, peoples, and a vast swatch of real estate in the mountains.
They have inspired a raft of powerful writing. Notably, the late Wilma
Dykeman's lyrical history, The French Broad, was a key resource to me
and likewise should be to travelers in the region. The New River has
also been written about, most recently by Noah Adams of NPR fame. Both
rivers are often mentioned in the same breath with the Nile as being
among the oldest on the planet.
Of course when we're talking about rivers in western North Carolina, the
Pigeon is also important, especially in the work of our state's literary
jack-of-all-genres, Fred Chappell.
Q: How did you organize the tours, and how long did it take you to put them together?
A: I began with each county in the
region by turn, trying to find references to as many writers as I could
who had a connection to that county. Then I'd look at the works of the
writers, searching for mentions of actual places or fictional places
that bore a resemblance to the actual. Beyond the usual suspects, I
searched the Internet and my hometown libraries for leads to both
literature and writers. I also drew upon my 30 years of reading and
getting to know the literary community in North Carolina, so I already
own a lot of relevant books. But I soon found out how much I didn't
know.
Once I had a list of promising excerpts, books, and anecdotes,
photographer Donna Campbell and I set out to see how to connect the
dots. Once we were in a county, I would spend time in at least one local
library per county to double check for someone I might have missed. I
also asked bookstore owners, phoned writers I knew in an area, and asked
other local experts. Putting the tours together was then basically a
matter of tracing out a driving route that was not too long for a day's
worth of touring and that offered some interesting literature to inform
the travel. It took a couple of years to get through the region since
traveling some of these routes in winter was not something I wanted to
try.
Q: There are several authors whom many people
connect with the mountains of North Carolina - Thomas Wolfe with Asheville
and Charles Frazier with Cold Mountain, for example. Who are some other
notable authors with ties to the area?
A: Kathryn Stripling Byer is our
state's current poet laureate, whose work is both brilliant and
accessible, full of mountain talk and rich rural images. Likewise,
Robert Morgan, born in Zirconia near Hendersonville and inspired by his
grade school teacher to become a writer, is best known now for his
novels about the mountains. (He's been on Oprah for his book Gap Creek.)
But Morgan's poetry was invaluable to me in helping to reveal the
mountain culture and history while also getting us from one place to the
next. His poems offer surprising tales focusing on place, character, or
landscape.
Sharyn McCrumb, whose forebears are from Mitchell County, has written a
series of "ballad novels" that lift up longstanding mountain legends and
tragedies. She has carved out a niche that is all her own. Jan Karon,
who was born in Caldwell County and lived for a time in Blowing Rock, is
of course a nationally known voice in popular Christian fiction.
Then there are other surprises. Novelist Anne Tyler spent her early
years in Celo - a Quaker community near Burnsville. Frances Hodgson
Burnett, who wrote My Secret Garden and Little Lord Fauntleroy, was fond
of the Chimney Rock area and spent time writing there. Tony Earley, who
teaches now at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, is, to me,
one of the most insightful essayists and short story writers from the
region. He is from Rutherfordton.
Q: Why has North Carolina attracted so many
celebrated authors and poets? Do you think the state will continue to be
a magnet for literary talent in the future?
A: The state is and continues to
be a magnet for literary talent. I believe partly it is the
noncompetitive and generous literary community here, where seasoned
writers help beginning writers learn their craft and navigate the
publishing world. The natural beauty and the variety of cultures and
landscapes in the state continue to be powerful draws. The strength of
higher education in North Carolina is also a significant force, as is
the longstanding emphasis placed on nurturing the arts in communities at
the grassroots. This is fertile literary soil! There is so much more to
be written about North Carolina, and nothing would make me happier than
knowing that a child on vacation tried his or her hand at a poem after
being inspired by some of the excerpted works in this book.
