Join The New York Times best-selling author and North Carolina native Wiley Cash as he highlights great writers across the state and their work each month. Listen in on conversations between Cash and his author friends as they discuss how North Carolina inspires them on the Our State Book Club podcast.
Like many writers, including yours truly, novelist and short-story writer Michael Parker cites Jack Kerouac’s 1957 release, On the Road, as one of his formative reading experiences.
“It was the spirit of the novel, the exuberance of it,” he says. “The fact that Kerouac was so influenced by Thomas Wolfe. These reading experiences were happening to me when I was in high school, and even though I was not a great student, I read a lot of books.”
On the Road tells the story of a young man named Sal Paradise, who leaves the East Coast for California on a cross-country odyssey. Parker, born in Siler City and reared in Clinton, made it as far west as Appalachian State University, where he spent unimpressive freshman and sophomore years. After a stint in Seattle, Parker attended UNC Chapel Hill, taking writing classes at night with professors like Lee Smith and doing odd jobs — everything from retail to warehouse work — during the day. He later received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia before beginning a 28-year career teaching creative writing at UNC Greensboro in 1992, the year before his first novel, Hello Down There, was published.
Over the next three decades, Parker would publish eight novels and three short-story collections, the majority of his work inspired by the landscape and voices of the people he’d grown up with in eastern North Carolina.
“My father’s family is from Tarboro,” he says. “I paid attention to the way they talked. It was very different from my mom’s family, who are all from Lenoir.”
Parker’s mother was a high school teacher, and his father was the editor of the local newspaper.
“They were both very interested in language,” he says. “My father had to cover everything in town for the newspaper, so he was in tune with all kinds of people. I would go with him to cover stories, everything from high school football games to illegal moonshine stills discovered in the woods.”
Even though Parker was rooted in eastern North Carolina, he developed a love for Texas and eventually bought a second residence in Austin in 2008. After retiring from UNC Greensboro in 2019, he relocated there, a move that he assumed would be permanent. It made sense — his last four novels were set either entirely or partly in Texas, including his most recent release in 2022, I Am the Light of This World.
But after the pandemic, Parker felt the call of home. He missed North Carolina, and he especially missed his daughter, who lives in Durham. He moved to the Triangle, the area where he first felt certain that he could become the writer he’d long dreamed of being. He found the Bull City to be particularly welcoming of artists.
“I didn’t really know Durham before moving here,” he says. “All I know is what I see now, and what I see reminds me of Austin when I first got there in 2008. It feels wide open and brimming with possibility, and there are also pockets that feel really authentic. It’s an interesting place, but it’s got complicated issues of race and class.”
Kerouac’s On the Road closes with Sal Paradise back home on the East Coast after his cross-country adventures. In the novel’s final scene, Sal is sitting on a pier looking out over the New Jersey skies. Who knows what Michael Parker can see from his new home Durham? Is it the pine forests he grew up among in eastern North Carolina, or the prairies of central Texas? Regardless of what he sees, hopefully it’ll end up in a new book.
photograph by Alex Boerner
Michael Parker’s most recent novel, I Am the Light of This World, opens in 1970s East Texas, where a teenage loner named Earl is influenced by the vagaries of fate almost as much as he’s influenced by the sound of the slide guitar. Fate seems to play a hand when he falls under the sway of a young woman who convinces him to borrow his cousin’s car so they can visit her institutionalized mother in Austin. But the trip goes sideways when the girl ends up dead, a crime that Earl didn’t commit but nonetheless pays for, spending four decades in prison.
The novel’s second half follows Earl after he’s released into a world that he doesn’t understand. For a brief moment, it seems that Earl will finally chart his own course, but the feeling is short-lived. Fate comes for him again in a concluding scene that is as stunning and mournful as any other that readers are likely to encounter. This is a beautiful, brutal, yet often hilarious novel, made all the darker by the bright spots hiding in the pages.
More to Explore: Catch Michael Parker in conversation with Wiley Cash. New podcast episodes air September 3 and 17. Find out where to listen at ourstate.com/podcast.
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