Tag: Carson McCullers
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Carson McCullers at 104
“Mick is perhaps the most outstanding character in the book.” Carson McCullers is describing a central character in her remarkable debut novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. “At the beginning of the second part of the work she steps out boldly—and from then on, up until the last section, she commands more space and…
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Discovering Carson, Discovering Herself: A Review of My Autobiography of Carson McCullers
Jenn Shapland is no doubt right that those who fall under the spell of Carson McCullers are an obsessive lot. (And I count myself among them.) As she surveyed the landscape in writing her new book My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, she found that “everyone had a claim to lay, an attachment to prove. Everybody…
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Difficult Like Carson: Meditative Poetry for McCullers Day
In honor of Carson McCullers’ birthday: I could be difficult like Carson McCullers. I could drink too much have wild fantasies about what the next exciting trip would be believe that I deserved to be loved and doted on love inordinately but badly treat those around me with indifference All because of genius—charge it to…
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How I Lost My Way to the Heart of America
There are at least two ways to look at a concept like The Heartland. You could look at it as a search for meaning, in which uprooted, sometimes traumatized people, seek to understand their lives in relation to a place. It’s in this sense that the great Southern writer Carson McCullers talked about American homesickness.…
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A Book You Shouldn’t Read: The Unfortunate Autobiography of Carson McCullers
The title promises more than it delivers. Illumination and Night Glare, the unfinished autobiography of Carson McCullers, purports to be a chronicle of the artistic process, giving us insight into the inspirations (illumination) and trials (night glare) of McCullers’ life. There is some of that in this slight book, but it retains its interest…
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The Soul of Place–Carson McCullers
“In the quiet, secret night she was by herself again. It was not late–yellow squares of light showed in the windows of the houses along the streets. She walked slow, with her hands in her pockets and her head to one side. For a long time she walked without noticing the direction. “Then the houses…
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Observing Carson McCullers Day
February 19 – the 101st birthday of Carson McCullers, author of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and other Southern Gothic masterpieces. Followers of this blog will know of my fascination with McCullers, one of the great writers about longing. Or what the poet Nick Norwood has called “spiritual isolation.” But there are moments when…
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Freaks & Monsters – Being an Artist in the South – My interview with Nick Norwood concludes – Part 3 of 3
Nick Norwood, director of the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians at Columbus State University, is also a great poet. Like McCullers, he writes about what he knows – the American South and its eccentricities. In previous segments of this essay we talked about the universal themes in McCullers’ work and her sense…
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Carson’s Place – My Interview with Nick Norwood Continues – part 2 of 3
In the first part of my interview with Nick Norwood, director of the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians at Columbus State University, we talked about the universal themes of McCullers’ writing. Today we talk about the strong sense of place in her work and the way Columbus, Georgia, her hometown, informs it. So we…
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The Spiritual Isolation of Carson McCullers – An Interview with Nick Norwood – part 1 of 3
So, I’ve got a thing for Carson McCullers. Anybody who read this blog through the McCullers-palooza that was her 100th birthday celebration in February will know that this Southern writer speaks to me. The characters that she introduced us to in such classics as The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Member of the Wedding, and The Ballad of…
Heartlands 