Staff writers
Employees share their stories of storytelling
By Russell C. Campbell
III
"Gazette" contributing writer
Editor's note: It's been
said that you can't throw a rock without hitting a good North
Carolina author. You don't have to throw anything to find three
excellent writers in our own backyard. There are no doubt more
lurking in the cubicle jungles, but here are brief snapshots
of novelist Pam Duncan, short-story author Dave Shaw and poet
Jeffery Beam.
Pam
Duncan
Pam Duncan's talent isn't so much a gift as an inheritance.
Growing up in the mountains and foothills of Black Mountain,
Swannanoa and Shelby in western North Carolina, Duncan recollects
her grandmother's voice as the family matriarch spun tales of
her native Madison County.
"I spent so much
time with her," said Duncan, who works as a data processing
assistant in continuing education at the School of Public Health.
"She was really an important person in my life. She told stories
all the time and read out of books, and I loved that. I could
sit and listen to her talk all day.
"I feel like if
she were born in a different generation, she would've been doing
what I'm doing. She just didn't have the opportunity."
This is perhaps what Tillie
Olsen had in mind in her essay "Silences" when she referred
to the "mute inglorious Miltons." But Duncan's grandmother was
anything but silent, and her knack of a good yarn left an impression
on her granddaughter.
It was Duncan's love of
these stories that inspired her to create her own. She admits
that she has not inherited her grandmother's sense of storytelling
in the oral tradition.
"That's why I started
writing it all down," she said. "Partly so I wouldn't forget
and partly so I can go back and revise. I can do a better job
writing than I can telling the story."
With a pair of well-received
novels to her name, Duncan is proving she is doing a fine job
of writing. Her debut novel, "Moon Women," was a finalist for
the 2001 Southeast Booksellers Association Award. Her follow-up,
"Plant Life," won the 2003 Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction.
"A lot of people
I know started writing when they were kids, but I just wrote
stupid poetry and things like that," Duncan said, laughing.
"I didn't start writing stories until my late 20s."
It wasn't until her grandmother's
death several years ago that Duncan began to become serious
about writing. She was always a good writer and majored in journalism
at Carolina with the intention of making her living as a reporter.
But journalism wasn't her calling, and she found herself drifting
along and working for the University.
"In my early 20s
I thought I'd try to write a romance novel because I loved to
read them, and I'd scribble away a little bit but I never finished
it."
When her grandmother died,
Duncan decided to act on her talents.
"I didn't have her
to tell me stories anymore so I finally figured out that I was
going to have to tell them myself," she said. "I felt like I
could hear her voice in my head saying something about `Let's
do it now, don't keep talking about it,' so I signed up for
a writing workshop and wrote my first story that January after
she died [in April] and kept going from there."
After taking a few years
off from her job to write "Plant Life," Duncan is back at Carolina
working in the same office where she was previously employed.
Working full-time again has taken a bit of getting used when
it comes to the time she can spend writing.
"I'm trying to get
better about being more regular in my writing habits, but for
me a lot of the process takes places in my head," she said.
"Doris Betts once said -- and it's true -- when you're working
on a novel, everything feeds it.
"I started this
new novel, and I get excited about everything because I think
I can use that, I can use that, it makes the world a lot more
interesting when you're working on a book. It's all material."
Dave
Shaw
Dave Shaw's stories usually begin with a feeling attached to
a particular image. He remembers where he got the idea for "Holding
Pattern for D.C. National," the second story in his soon-to-be
released collection of short stories "Here Comes the Roar."
"One day I was driving
around D.C. and I was on one of those outer beltlines and I
was struck by how many planes I could see at one time based
on all the landing lights," he said. "It just kind of had a
sense of wonder attached to it, and that's where the idea for
that story began.
"Images and the
feelings that are associated with them are the meat that I hang
everything on in these stories," Shaw said. "At least for this
collection."
The three short stories
and novella that comprise "Here Comes the Roar" received the
Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction from the University
of North Texas Press. The award carried some prize money and
publication with UNT Press.
"I was about to
give up on trying to get these published. These stories had
been a finalist for two other collections," Shaw said. "The
stories are pretty quirky, which is probably why they haven't
been published before but the judge for this prize must have
overlooked that and appreciated their originality."
Shaw's stories have been
published in "Literal Latte," "Carolina Quarterly," "Southern
Exposure," England's "Stand Magazine" and the "Greensboro Review."
"They've all been
previously published in some form, and they are all at least
five years old now with the exception of the novella," Shaw
said. "It's not the most current work that I've done, so it's
nice to have them published as a collection because it kind
of validates all that energy I put into them."
Shaw began working at
Carolina in 1994 as a social research associate with the Frank
Porter Graham Child Development Center. In November 1998, he
started working for the Center for the Study of the American
South. Today he is the deputy editor for "Southern Cultures,"
an interdisciplinary, nonprofit print quarterly published for
the center by the University of North Carolina Press.
With a family and a full-time
job, scheduling time to write isn't easy, but Shaw has never
been a writer to establish a routine.
"There's lots of
different ways to write," he said. "I don't have to be in front
of a computer, I can have a pen and paper or I can just be thinking
about what I want to do. There are a lot of different ways to
write with the time I have.
"Having this book
out has motivated me to write because it lets me know that there's
at least a chance that my writing is going to end up as a book
and that makes a difference to my approach to it."
Shaw, a Carolina alumnus,
credits the Creative Writing Program and teachers Doris Betts,
Max Steele and Bland Simpson for fueling his interest in writing.
"They were more
than encouraging, and they sped up my learning of the craft,"
he said. "It would have taken me a lot longer to figure out
what I was doing."
Many of his former teachers
have lent their approval to Shaw's collection.
"Here they are 20
years later still helping, still being teachers -- that's pretty
cool," he said.
Jeffery
Beam
Award-winning poet Jeffery Beam doesn't actually remember the
first poem he ever wrote, but he can recall a story from his
high school graduation that may have unearthed that forgotten
moment.
"A woman in my class,
who I had been in school with since the first grade, walked
up to me and she said `I remember the first poem you wrote.'
I said, `No you don't, because I don't even remember it.'"
She claimed it was in the
seventh grade that Beam wrote: "If I was a starfish/I'd make
a wish."
"Only a two-liner,"
Beam said. "Maybe in the seventh grade, my poetry was already
fleshed out."
Beam is a poet who condenses
his language to the fewest words possible.
"I'm not a poet
who writes very long narrative poetry," he said. "My poems are
very short.
"There's not a lot
of personal detail in my poetry. Sometimes it's very much like
Eastern or Asian poetry where I'm looking at the natural world
to see what it can tell me rather than what I can tell it."
One cannot talk about
Beam's poetry without mentioning the balance of the spiritual
and natural world. Take his collection, "An Elizabethan Bestiary:
Retold."
Beam found a 15th-century
bestiary book in the biology library where he works as an assistant
to the biology librarian in the botany section. A bestiary,
according to Beam, blends mythology, early science, early zoology
and religion and was used by the early Christian church to teach
moral principles to the illiterate. Each animal was put on this
earth to teach a particular lesson.
As a writing exercise,
Beam set out to create very sparse poems that capture the totality
of the many pages they were taken from.
"I started showing
these to people, and they said that these were great poems,"
Beam said. "But to me, these were like sketch book poems."
The final result was awarded
a 2000 IPPY Award as one of the 10 Best Books of the Year with
a special notation for Best Book Arts Craftsmanship from "Independent
Publisher" magazine and it was awarded one of the 50 Books 2000
Awards from the American Institute of Graphic Arts.
Accompanying Beam's poems
are illustrations by Ippy Patterson and photographs by poet
M.J. Sharp.
"It's important
for me to collaborate with other people," Beam said. "The book
should be as much of the work of art as the poetry."
The publication of "Elizabethan
Bestiary" led to exhibitions at the Duke Museum of Art, the
North Carolina Zoological Park, as well as a yearlong program
of visiting schools and teaching children about ecology and
animal diversity.
Beam also collaborates
with musicians, as evident by the soprano Shauna Holiman's CD
"New Growth: Shauna Holiman and Friends - New Songs and Spoken
Poems."
Composer Lee Hoiby took
five of Beam's "Life of the Bee" poems from an unfinished manuscript
and set them to music for cello, voice and piano. The work,
commissioned by Carolina's Institute for the Arts and Humanities,
premiered April 2002 at the 2nd North Carolina Literary Festival
and at Carnegie's Weill Recital Hall in New York.
Another enhanced spoken
work two-CD collection, "What We Have Lost: New & Selected
Poems 1977-2001," provides the perfect medium for Beam's multimedia
approach to poetry, with musical and visual accompaniment to
his words. The CD was one of five finalists for the 2003 Audie
Award in Poetry.
