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Writer and mentor par excellence

Posted on October 30, 2010November 3, 2010 by Staff

By Vicky Dickson, Columnist

Jill McCorkle grew up surrounded by storytellers. As a kid, she was very interested in her family’s stories.
“People were always talking, and disagreeing about how it really happened,” she says.

So it’s not surprising that the Hillsborough author discovered her love for writing early on, embracing it as a means of trying to capture the voices of the people around her.

But it wasn’t until McCorkle left her hometown of Lumberton to come to UNC that she began to consider writing as a possible way of making a living. The guidance and encouragement of her teachers, Max Steele, Lee Smith and Louis Rubin, played a key role; Rubin’s Algonquin Books published McCorkle’s The Cheerleader and July 7th, on the same day, when the author was only 26. And that precocious debut was no fluke. McCorkle has since written three more novels and four short-story collections, for which she’s received numerous accolades and awards.

Her mentors’ influence also inspired McCorkle’s career as a writing instructor. She’s a professor in the creative writing MFA program at N.C. State, and has taught at UNC, Tufts, Brandeis, Harvard, Bennington and Sewanee, which has given her her own list of published former students (including Chapel Hill author Sarah Dessen). McCorkle can well be proud of passing along “the great gift of that benefit” that was conferred on her in her student days.

Teaching does limit the time an author is able to devote to her own writing, however, which perhaps explains the scribbled notes on loose scraps of paper that McCorkle devotes herself to organizing when she can find the time these days. And it may help explain, as well, the fact that McCorkle’s most recent books have been short-story collections rather than novels.

“I love to have the draft of a short story that I carry around in my purse,” she says; “you can’t carry around a novel.”
Fortunately, McCorkle’s grasp of the short-story form is masterful. Her most recent collection, Going Away Shoes, contains 11 stories that are mostly focused on women in difficult transitions. “PS” is a letter written by an almost-divorced woman to her former marriage counselor; “Another Dimension” is the story of a sister confronting her adult brother about a long-ago lie; and “Driving to the Moon” concerns a reunion between a married woman and her also-married dying former lover.

McCorkle sees a happy ending as “one where a character does accept a truth or reality,” so while these stories don’t tend to end in a conventionally happy way, the power of their insights, and the wry humor with which they’re told, make them a joy to read.

And a joy to listen to, as well. So come to McIntyre’s Fine Books Oct. 30 at 11 a.m. to hear McCorkle read from Going Away Shoes. It’ll be a delight.

McIntyre’s presented another delightful event at Fearrington on Oct. 12, the Floating Island Writer’s Workshop. The workshop featured a panel on cookbook publishing and asked the question: With so many recipes now available on the Internet, with iPads in so many kitchens, what’s the future of traditional cookbooks? Panelists, including Frances Mayes (author of Under the Tuscan Sun, Every Day in Tuscany), Andrea Reusing (chef/owner of Lantern restaurant) and Sarah Foster (cookbook author and owner of Foster’s Market), concluded cookbooks can continue to thrive – as long as they have a really good voice.

Kim Sunee, the workshop’s founder, pointed out that “food is very emotional and evocative,” which helps explain why her plans to write a cookbook turned into a “memoir with recipes” called Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love and the Search for Home.

Mayes described the genesis of her own memoirs-with-recipes: “You can’t write about Italy without writing about food.” And Reusing told how she discovered she wasn’t passionate about the restaurant cookbook she’d been planning to write when she realized that she was more worried about ways to feed her kids. The book she ended up writing, Cooking in the Moment, emphasizes recipes that anyone can cook, and comes out this spring. We can’t wait.

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