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.
Writers come to the page for a host of reasons. Some explore images that have long haunted them. Others attempt to understand a confusing world. Author Allan Gurganus writes to understand his hometown of Rocky Mount; in the process, he’s rekindled a love for a place that he once dreamed of leaving behind.
Gurganus grew up in the eastern North Carolina town in the 1950s. Drawn to visual art, the boy often carried a sketchbook.
As an artist, Gurganus had a keen eye and observed the culture in which he was raised. He took note of the performative aspects of small-town religion, the casual yet insidious effects of racial prejudice, and the strictures of social class. All of it was kindling he would later burn to fuel his fiction.
But like so many young artists, Gurganus thought the real story — at least his story — would be found outside his hometown, which at times felt provincial and suffocating. He fantasized about leaving: “When I got my first pair of hard shoes and saw where the bus station was,” he says, “I thought, I’m going to go north.”
After studying art at the University of Pennsylvania for a few years, Gurganus dropped out and was drafted into the Vietnam War. Three years later, he left the service and went back to college to explore his passion for literature, eventually attending the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He studied under John Cheever who sent Gurganus’s short story “Minor Heroism” to The New Yorker, where it was published in 1974.
After graduate school, Gurganus spent 15 years writing in Manhattan, although much of that time was devoted to caring for loved ones suffering through the AIDS epidemic. The toll of loss in his life caused him to look toward home. Gurganus eventually decided to return to North Carolina, settling about 90 miles west of Rocky Mount in Hillsborough. He purchased a gorgeous old house next door to a cemetery rumored to be haunted by Confederate ghosts.
photograph by Andrea Cheung
The author of four collections of short fiction, a novella, and three novels, including the 1989 bestseller Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, Gurganus is surprised that the novella would end up as his favorite form in which to work.
“Stories are wonderful, but they take forever to finish,” he says, “and I seem unable to do a novel that’s less than 700 pages.” He notes that Henry James called the form “the beautiful and blest nouvelle.”
“And I think it was Peter Taylor who said the novella is a form that you can sit down to read after dinner and finish by bedtime,” Gurganus says. “That seems to be the way we live now. Novellas seem to be the perfect form for this distracted time of life.”
The three novellas in Gurganus’s 2013 Local Souls are all set in a fictionalized Rocky Mount that he has long portrayed as Falls, North Carolina, where Widow and many of his short stories have been set. Gurganus believes that his years spent away from Rocky Mount allowed him to look upon his hometown with clarity and compassion.
“I think my love and appreciation of my hometown gets deeper and wider as I live longer,” he says. “Initially, it was a place to escape. I was eager to get out of town and see what the world had to offer.”
But, in a plot twist, Gurganus’s world has always been Rocky Mount, and if you read Local Souls, you will find it there in Falls.
photograph by Matt Hulsman
Obsessions drive Allan Gurganus’s Local Souls, a collection of novellas that feature both the razor-sharp characterizations of his short stories and the narrative sweep of his novels. “‘Obsessed’ literally means to sit before something that you are overwhelmed by or magnetized toward,” Gurganus says, “and obsession is the only kind of recognition that you can find adequate.”
In the book’s opening novella, Fear Not, a novelist awaiting a response from his editor grows obsessed with two strangers he encounters at a middle school play. In Saints Have Mothers, a woman long obsessed with her own life’s disappointments finds her calling in celebrating the life of an overachieving daughter who disappears while on a high school mission trip. And in Decoy, a man recounts the story of a beloved town doctor who discovers an obsession with carving and painting wooden ducks just as the narrator realizes his own obsession with the doctor he’s long admired. These stories are funny, bold, and insightful. In writing about Falls, Gurganus tells the story of small-town North Carolina and the world beyond, obsessions and all.
More to Explore: Allan Gurganus chats with Wiley Cash in new episodes out January 7 and 21. Find out where to listen at ourstate.com/book-club-podcasts.
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Mark our words: Whether they nod to North Carolina or were penned by its residents, these notable, quotable passages remind us of the power of speech inspired by our state.
When one stream flows into another, the two chart a new course for the future — together.
When the weather outside is frightful, one chef serves loved ones dishes so delightful.
A historic Rose Bowl pitted Duke University against Oregon State in Durham. Then, in the dark days of World War II, those same football players — and a legendary coach — joined forces to fight for freedom.
