Today’s scheduled interview, with N.C. sportswriter Brett Friedlander, has been slightly delayed, but with good reason. Friedlander is the co-author of a new book on Moonlight Graham, the real-life baseball player and physician made famous in W.P. Kinsella’s novel Shoeless Joe and the film adaptation Field of Dreams. More recently, however, Friedlander has been covering the NCAA Tournament, and with Carolina going all the way to tonight’s championship… well, we’re glad to wait on those answers. Go Heels!
In the meantime, just a quick note about yesterday’s reading by Richard Currey, author of Fatal Light, a novel just recently republished in a 20th anniversary edition by the Santa Fe Writers’ Project. The book launch party at The Writer’s Center was a great success, and Currey not only read an introduction he’d penned for the new edition but also sampled several passages throughout the book, from the opening lines to the closing coda, given readers a sense of both the book’s overall narrative arc and its lyrical intensity. Robert Aubrey Davis provided a warm introduction, looking back to Currey’s first published work and reflecting on Alan Cheuse‘s glowing review of Fatal Light when it first came out back in 1988. Cheuse himself showed up for a quick chat with the author and with Jon Peede, director of the NEA’s national initiative, Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience. Serena Agusto-Cox, fellow blogger over at Savvy Verse and Wit, was in the audience. (Glad to finally meet her in person, if only briefly!) And special kudos go to Kim McGlynn and Stephanie McBride of the George School in Newtown, PA, who are preparing study guides to be published online in conjunction with Fatal Light‘s rerelease and who drove down especially for the reading; the novel has been taught at the George School since soon after its first publication, with Currey himself giving the school special privileges to photocopy it for students during the book’s long stretch out of print. Publisher Andrew Gifford beamed happily throughout the event, for reasons both professional and personal.
All in all, a great event — and Gaffney’s afterwards was fun too (though I should have stopped before that third glass of wine).
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Sorry I couldn’t stay long, but the reading was excellent! I will have to provide all my readers with a run down later this week. It was great to meet you as well.