Joyner Library hosted the Sixth Eastern North Carolina Literary Homecoming on September 25th and 26th. On Friday evening, Reynolds Price, a prolific writer of novels, poetry, drama and memoir, and author of the notable A Long and Happy Life and Kate Vaiden, received the Roberts Award for Literary Inspiration. Due to his fight against Spinal Cancer, Price was unable to be on hand to accept the award. However, Gary Richards, assistant professor of English at the University of Mary Washington, delivered a respectful presentation detailing the life and career of Price. Following the presentation, the ECU School of Theatre and Dance performed a touching and powerful adaption of Price's first novel A Long and Happy Life skillfully adapted and directed by Tracy Donohue. The performance brought to life this story which has touched readers since its publication in 1960. The events of Friday evening left the audience wanting more and anticipating the next day.

The second day of the event featured several authors, living or born in Eastern North Carolina, who engaged the audience through thought-provoking panel discussions and workshops. Authors featured throughout the day included: Allan Gurganus, Allison Hedge Coke, Lenard Moore, Robert Inman, Samm-Art Williams, Bland Simpson, and Don Dixon. Panel topics ranged from the place of politics in writing poetry to adapting novels into films. The authors were very accessible throughout the day and offered question and answer periods to interact with the audience after each panel discussion or workshop. There was also time to mingle with the authors and speak with them one-on-one between panel sessions and workshops. This interaction provided a chance for aspiring writers and fans to have a conversation with their favorite authors.
   
An author luncheon was served in Mendenhall student center and following the meal, Allan Gurganus, author of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All and Plays Well With Others, read an unpublished story titled "A Fool for Christmas" which he had previously read for National Public Radio's All Things Considered.  Gurganus had the audience laughing uproariously throughout the performance, an inspired mix of humor and sentimentality. After the performance, I was able to sit down with Gurganus and ask him about the Literary Homecoming and his current projects:
  
Sean Aube: What do you feel were some of the highlights of this year's Literary Homecoming?

Allan Gurganus:  I'm always glad to meet readers from Eastern North Carolina and writers from Eastern North Carolina. I mean I try to write for people in other regions, but I think that there are certain in-jokes, there are certain geographic references that really come through loud and clear, and it's reassuring to know that there are people still living books, you know. One of the highlights for me was the student production of the Reynolds Price play last night. They were all freshman, and I don't think they've unpacked yet, and yet they're already performing together. It seemed very professional and very lovingly done. He's a friend of mine, and I hope I'll see him in the next week or so. He's in very bad health. It's nice to be able to give him a report that he's respectfully remembered especially by eighteen year-olds.

Aube: How did you feel about Reynolds Price receiving the Roberts Award on Friday evening?

Gurganus: ...I think that nobody deserves it more, he's done so much to promote the literature of the state. The first time that I ever saw Rocky Mount in a novel was in A Long and Happy Life in the Rocky Mount Public Library. I had a wonderful librarian who would tell me what to read and I was smart enough to follow her advice. And she said, this is written by a twenty-five year-old boy from Warrentown. That's how we described each other. And it was shocking to me that all the material of my own life could be made into a work of art. My grandfather had a farm, you know a hobby farm, and businesses in town, and Warrenton is about thirty miles north of Rocky Mount. In his novel, somebody falls in the ditch and gets frostbite on his toes, so they take him to Rocky Mount to cut the toes off, and they mention the name of the hospital where I was born, so I just felt enlarged and amazed that you could use local material so perfectly.

Aube:  Who would you say are some of your literary influences?

Gurganus: Henry James, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Twain, Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, whoever I'm reading at the moment, Conrad. For me the great nineteenth century novelists are the ones who used certain kinds of forms which I've found useful. I go back to them for inspiration; Thackery, Trollope. I mean, those are the people that I read, and Chekov is probably preeminent.

Aube: The story you read today at lunch had kind of a local flavor. Do you feel that growing up in this region has affected your writing at all?

Gurganus: Oh yeah, the work is very much out of the region.  And I think I'm very interested in village storytelling, stories of villages, and how a village can become a single organism made up of separate organisms. How what one person lacks in terms of talent or character or physical advantage, other people sort of step in to provide. And my work is, you know, there is certainly things that happen outside of North Carolina, but I think most of the work is set here.

Aube: It seems that many Southern writers don't have a significant body of published work until they leave the South, which also seems to be the case in your life. Do you have any thoughts as to why that is?

Gurganus: Well, I think there's the psychology of exile and expatriate vision of the home place. Joyce couldn't have written Ulysses in Dublin, he had to go to Paris. Part of it is to escape legal implications, but part of it I think is that distance makes you see things more clearly. It becomes kind of a lens. And I think especially moving away from North Carolina when I was eighteen and then moving back in my forties -- I didn't do that lightly, and in a way I was looking for an alternative reality, and then I discovered somewhat belatedly that this is what interested me most and that my material was here. I subscribe to three newspapers, two of them are North Carolina papers, and I'm always fascinated in reading about local scandals, local corruption, and local heroism.  It's an unending source for me, for material.

Aube: Are there any projects which you are currently working on which you would care to discuss?

Gurganus: Yeah, I'm finishing a book of stories and novellas which I think will include the story I just read. And I'm working on a novel that's a companion piece to Oldest Living Confederate Widow called An Erotic History of a Southern Baptist Church, which is one hundred years in the life of a small rural Baptist church with an emphasis on confusion between ecstatic religious experiences and ecstatic erotic experiences. They all start in the solar plexus and some go up and some of them go down. You never know which is which until you're in a lot of trouble. So that I think it will be at least a couple more years in the works.

Aube: Is there any one of your projects of which you are most proud?

Gurganus: Well always the one you're working on right now. I'm very excited about this church book. I think it has tremendous potential. The book that I think is, in terms of the best book I've written so far, The Practical Heart, which is a book of four novellas. It had the misfortune of coming out five days before September 11, 2001. There were positive, rave reviews in Time and Newsweek that were not because of the event. The people at magazine sent me the reviews, and they were career making reviews. But, because of the catastrophe, no books of fiction were  reviewed for five or six months. So that book was sort of one of the many victims of that attack. Since then, it's found its audience in paperback, but I think it's a book I'm especially proud of, and I guess, like parents, you always feel closest to the child who sort of got to the trough last. But I think it's a book I'm very proud of and I don't think its gotten its due.