McCrumb a vintage Southern storyteller
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Tickets are $8 and are available at the library. Reservations are necessary and space is limited.
“She is really just a rare talent,” said Magness Library director Mary Robbins. “She has a deep appreciation of the past and the way it relates to the present in Appalachia.”
Sharyn McCrumb is famous for her atmospheric tales of Appalachian mountain folk in which the land is as much a character as the people populating her novels, something she acknowledges on her Web site at www.sharynmccrumb.com.
“I find that the more I write, the more fascinated I become with the idea of the land as in intricate element in the lives of the mountain people,” McCrumb says, “and of the past as prologue for any contemporary narrative. This connection to the land is personal as well as thematic.”
In award-winning books like “She Walks These Hills,” “The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter,” and “The Songcatcher,” McCrumb has taken her readers into a world that is particularly Southern in nature, though she says she doesn’t consider herself a traditional “Southern writer,” as evidenced by these excerpts from an interview with Rebecca Laine:
“Hollywood doesn’t seem to pick up on this, but it’s pretty obvious to everyone else that the South has more than one culture. The Flatland South is very different from the Mountain south. The Flatland South was settled primarily by the English, by people who didn’t mind neighbors, who liked living in community. I’ve always joked that the mountain people don’t work and play very well with others.”
McCrumb says she feels caught between two cultures since her great-grandfathers on her father’s side were circuit preachers in North Carolina’s Smoky Mountains, while her mother was more a part of the Plantation South having grown up around the North Carolina flatlands around New Bern.
“Her stories didn’t resonate with me. I guess I wasn’t meant to be a Southern writer in the Pat Conroy sense of the word.”
McCrumb’s says her work is mainly influenced by the tales passed down from her mountain ancestors.
“My books are like Appalachian quilts,” she says. “I take brightly colored scraps of legends, ballads, fragments of rural life and local tragedy, and I piece them together into a complex whole that tells not only a story, but also a deeper truth about the culture of the mountain South.”
McCrumb’s newest book is “Ghost Riders” which chronicles the Civil War in the Southern mountains. Her books will be available at the event and she will conduct a booksigning after her talk.