
{"id":13472,"date":"2010-10-30T10:55:11","date_gmt":"2010-10-30T18:55:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/?p=13472"},"modified":"2010-11-03T12:50:30","modified_gmt":"2010-11-03T20:50:30","slug":"writer-and-mentor-par-excellence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/2010\/10\/30\/writer-and-mentor-par-excellence\/","title":{"rendered":"Writer and mentor par excellence"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By Vicky Dickson, Columnist<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Jill McCorkle grew up surrounded by storytellers. As a kid, she was very interested in her family\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s stories.<br \/>\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153People were always talking, and disagreeing about how it really happened,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she says. <\/p>\n<p>So it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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. <\/p>\n<p>But it wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Algonquin Books published McCorkle\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s received numerous accolades and awards. <\/p>\n<p>Her mentors\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 influence also inspired McCorkle\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s career as a writing instructor. She\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the great gift of that benefit\u00e2\u20ac\u009d that was conferred on her in her student days. <\/p>\n<p>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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s most recent books have been short-story collections rather than novels. <\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I love to have the draft of a short story that I carry around in my purse,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she says; \u00e2\u20ac\u0153you can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t carry around a novel.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<br \/>\nFortunately, McCorkle\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153PS\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is a letter written by an almost-divorced woman to her former marriage counselor; \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Another Dimension\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is the story of a sister confronting her adult brother about a long-ago lie; and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Driving to the Moon\u00e2\u20ac\u009d concerns a reunion between a married woman and her also-married dying former lover. <\/p>\n<p>McCorkle sees a happy ending as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153one where a character does accept a truth or reality,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d so while these stories don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t tend to end in a conventionally happy way, the power of their insights, and the wry humor with which they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re told, make them a joy to read.<\/p>\n<p>And a joy to listen to, as well. So come to McIntyre\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Fine Books Oct. 30 at 11 a.m. to hear McCorkle read from Going Away Shoes. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be a delight.<\/p>\n<p>McIntyre\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s presented another delightful event at Fearrington on Oct. 12, the Floating Island Writer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Market), concluded cookbooks can continue to thrive \u00e2\u20ac\u201c as long as they have a really good voice.<\/p>\n<p>Kim Sunee, the workshop\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s founder, pointed out that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153food is very emotional and evocative,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d which helps explain why her plans to write a cookbook turned into a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153memoir with recipes\u00e2\u20ac\u009d called Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love and the Search for Home. <\/p>\n<p>Mayes described the genesis of her own memoirs-with-recipes: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t write about Italy without writing about food.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d And Reusing told how she discovered she wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t passionate about the restaurant cookbook she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t wait.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Vicky Dickson, Columnist Jill McCorkle grew up surrounded by storytellers. As a kid, she was very interested in her family\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s stories. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153People were always talking, and disagreeing about how it really happened,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she says. So it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not surprising that the Hillsborough author discovered her love for writing early on, embracing it as a means&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-features"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13472","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=13472"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13472\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13505,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13472\/revisions\/13505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}