
{"id":11746,"date":"2010-07-29T08:37:06","date_gmt":"2010-07-29T16:37:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/?p=11746"},"modified":"2010-07-29T08:39:42","modified_gmt":"2010-07-29T16:39:42","slug":"tales-of-the-tidewater","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/2010\/07\/29\/tales-of-the-tidewater\/","title":{"rendered":"Tales of the Tidewater"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><figure id=\"attachment_11747\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-11747\" style=\"width: 150px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/2010\/07\/29\/tales-of-the-tidewater\/vicky-pic-bysky-boggs\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-11747\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/07\/Vicky.pic-bySky-Boggs.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"Vicky.pic-bySky-Boggs\" width=\"150\" height=\"199\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11747\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/07\/Vicky.pic-bySky-Boggs.jpg 500w, https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/07\/Vicky.pic-bySky-Boggs-112x150.jpg 112w, https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/07\/Vicky.pic-bySky-Boggs-85x113.jpg 85w, https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/07\/Vicky.pic-bySky-Boggs-225x300.jpg 225w, https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/07\/Vicky.pic-bySky-Boggs-60x80.jpg 60w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-11747\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photo by Sky Boggs.<\/figcaption><\/figure><strong>By Vicky Dickson<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>A river runs through Belle Boggs\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 life. Actually, two rivers.<\/p>\n<p>One is the Haw: Boggs lives very near its waters and will be teaching English to 10th, 11th and 12th grade students at Hawbridge School, on the Haw\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s banks, next fall. <\/p>\n<p>The other is the Mattaponi River in Tidewater Virginia, where the author grew up fishing and boating and listening to the creaks and groans of river ice in winter. Though Boggs left Virginia to live in California, New York, Durham, Washington, D.C., and Chatham County, the Tidewater area stayed with her, and has inspired her debut collection of short stories, Mattaponi Queen.<\/p>\n<p>The stories in this collection were written over a couple of summer vacations. Though she never intended to be a teacher, Boggs became a New York City Teaching Fellow after getting an MFA from the University of California at Irvine, and found herself with a classroom of first-graders in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Since leaving New York, she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s taught everything from kindergarten-to-fourth grade writing lessons to GED courses. Which left her little time to submit her stories to magazines, journals or contests. She could muster little enthusiasm for that process anyway, since her efforts at selling the novel she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d written as an MFA thesis had left her pretty disheartened. But her husband, Richard Allen, submitted the stories \u00e2\u20ac\u201c without telling her \u00e2\u20ac\u201c to the Breadloaf Writer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Conference Bakeless Prize 2009 competition, and they won.<\/p>\n<p>Belle Boggs is a gifted writer who doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t shy from challenges, as with her portrayal of Marcus, a young black athlete from Bedford-Stuyvesant who comes to Virginia to live with his grandmother after the other adults in his life go to prison for drug dealing. That Boggs succeeds in making this character believable, despite the vast differences between his life and hers, is tribute to her empathy, and to her substantial talent. <\/p>\n<p>Empathy and compassion shine throughout Boggs\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 stories. Because she cares about the people she describes so well, we care about them too. We root for Skinny, the alcoholic ex-drug addict, in his effort to mend fences with his kids before he dies. We find ourselves unable to condemn Jeremy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s dad for getting thoroughly drunk at the Bob Dylan concert he takes his son to, or the people who steal Cutie\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ancestral silver. We even (kind of) forgive Cutie her imperial grumpiness. <\/p>\n<p>Since winning the Bakeless Prize, Boggs has been shortlisted for the 2010 Cork City-Frank O\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Connor Story Award for the best original collection of stories published in English. Quite an honor when you consider that the list consists of only six authors. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be pulling for Boggs when she goes to Ireland in September. After you read Mattaponi Queen, you will too.<\/p>\n<p>Another local author getting a lot of attention these days is Rosecrans Baldwin, whose You Lost Me There has made the summer reading lists of the Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, the Chicago Tribune and other national media outlets. Baldwin, co-founder of the online magazine The Morning News, will hold his book-launch party at Flyleaf on Aug. 12 at 7 p.m. If you can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t make it that night, head to McIntyre\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s in Fearrington Village on Aug. 14 at 11 a.m. or the Regulator in Durham on Aug. 19 at 7 p.m. for a chance to meet the author and pick up some great reading for the dog days of summer.<\/p>\n<p>Stieg Larsson fans will want to check out Millennium: The Story, a one-hour documentary about the author of the Girl with The Dragon Tattoo trilogy. Featuring interviews with Larsson\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s close friends and relatives as well as leading actors and professionals from the films, the movie will be shown at Flyleaf this Saturday at 6 p.m. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s suitable for all ages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A river runs through Belle Boggs\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 life. Actually, two rivers.<\/p>\n<p>One is the Haw: Boggs lives very near its waters and will be teaching English to 10th, 11th and 12th grade students at Hawbridge School, on the Haw\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s banks, next fall. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":11747,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11746"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11746\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11754,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11746\/revisions\/11754"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}