By Vicky Dickson
A river runs through Belle Boggs’ life. Actually, two rivers.
One is the Haw: Boggs lives very near its waters and will be teaching English to 10th, 11th and 12th grade students at Hawbridge School, on the Haw’s banks, next fall.
The other is the Mattaponi River in Tidewater Virginia, where the author grew up fishing and boating and listening to the creaks and groans of river ice in winter. Though Boggs left Virginia to live in California, New York, Durham, Washington, D.C., and Chatham County, the Tidewater area stayed with her, and has inspired her debut collection of short stories, Mattaponi Queen.
The stories in this collection were written over a couple of summer vacations. Though she never intended to be a teacher, Boggs became a New York City Teaching Fellow after getting an MFA from the University of California at Irvine, and found herself with a classroom of first-graders in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Since leaving New York, she’s taught everything from kindergarten-to-fourth grade writing lessons to GED courses. Which left her little time to submit her stories to magazines, journals or contests. She could muster little enthusiasm for that process anyway, since her efforts at selling the novel she’d written as an MFA thesis had left her pretty disheartened. But her husband, Richard Allen, submitted the stories – without telling her – to the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference Bakeless Prize 2009 competition, and they won.
Belle Boggs is a gifted writer who doesn’t shy from challenges, as with her portrayal of Marcus, a young black athlete from Bedford-Stuyvesant who comes to Virginia to live with his grandmother after the other adults in his life go to prison for drug dealing. That Boggs succeeds in making this character believable, despite the vast differences between his life and hers, is tribute to her empathy, and to her substantial talent.
Empathy and compassion shine throughout Boggs’ stories. Because she cares about the people she describes so well, we care about them too. We root for Skinny, the alcoholic ex-drug addict, in his effort to mend fences with his kids before he dies. We find ourselves unable to condemn Jeremy’s dad for getting thoroughly drunk at the Bob Dylan concert he takes his son to, or the people who steal Cutie’s ancestral silver. We even (kind of) forgive Cutie her imperial grumpiness.
Since winning the Bakeless Prize, Boggs has been shortlisted for the 2010 Cork City-Frank O’Connor Story Award for the best original collection of stories published in English. Quite an honor when you consider that the list consists of only six authors. We’ll be pulling for Boggs when she goes to Ireland in September. After you read Mattaponi Queen, you will too.
Another local author getting a lot of attention these days is Rosecrans Baldwin, whose You Lost Me There has made the summer reading lists of the Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, the Chicago Tribune and other national media outlets. Baldwin, co-founder of the online magazine The Morning News, will hold his book-launch party at Flyleaf on Aug. 12 at 7 p.m. If you can’t make it that night, head to McIntyre’s in Fearrington Village on Aug. 14 at 11 a.m. or the Regulator in Durham on Aug. 19 at 7 p.m. for a chance to meet the author and pick up some great reading for the dog days of summer.
Stieg Larsson fans will want to check out Millennium: The Story, a one-hour documentary about the author of the Girl with The Dragon Tattoo trilogy. Featuring interviews with Larsson’s close friends and relatives as well as leading actors and professionals from the films, the movie will be shown at Flyleaf this Saturday at 6 p.m. It’s suitable for all ages.
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