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By Kim Stacks Mills

Sparkle Girl and Doobins are quite the adventurers. But don’t expect to find them visiting a farm, taking a safari in Africa or even heading to the beach on a family vacation. Their adventures are much more imaginative. And with good reason.

“The Wonderful World Of Sparkle Girl & Doobins” (Author: Ralph Kim Underwood, Garnet Goldman; hardcover, 48 pages, Published by Books By Kim Underwood September 2009, Distributed by John F. Blair, Publisher) was taken directly from stories the author dreamed up to share with the two kids the book is named after. The kids encounter a magic store (where you can buy magic milk and magic ice), fairies (who return kisses to their rightful owners), the man in the moon (who comes for tea) and Jerome the giraffe (who usually drives a convertible but takes his bicycle when his car is in the shop).

As you can guess, kids who have vivid imaginations will enjoy this book more than kids who don’t. I read it to one child who is a dreamer and one child who has a more practical outlook on things. The first child loved it, the second child … not so much.

The artwork was created by Garnet Goldman and looks a lot like the artwork she features on her Web site: garnetgoldman.com. It’s simplistic but full of details at the same time. The characters’ facial features are simple but then you see a photo hanging on the wall that includes intricate details. And much like the stories, you have to let your imagination roam to appreciate the illustrations. Anything, including the sky, grass and trees, can be covered in polka dots. Flowers can look more like butterflies than blooms.

Sparkle Girl and Doobins are surrounded by strong family connections, and the stories teach good lessons, including generosity, not judging things by how they look and working together to accomplish more than you could alone. But they are stories and lessons best shared with children who really like to pretend.
 

Mark Smith-Soto’s chapbook, “Waitingroom,” (Red Mountain Review: Birmingham, Ala.; 20 pages, $6 paper) calmly chronicles a brush with cancer. The tone is conversational from diagnosis to recovery, layering the anxiety.

Walking around with cancer makes you ask yourself questions. You come up with your own answers or decide there aren’t any.

The opening poem, one of the strongest of the nineteen assembled here, seems to ask, with grace and aplomb, OK, how do I handle this? It’s titled “Putting Cancer in a Poem”:

You have to be careful how you do it –
The first line for sure’s no place, even
The second or third might let it spring
Leaks and streak everything beneath. No,
First you need to let the light flap in
From the uncurtained window, catch
The deep breath off the gardenia bloom
Doing the backstroke in its brandy snifter
As the doctor on the phone says what he
Has to say, and your wife and friend wait
With wine glasses and the porch fan on,
Chatting and looking for you to come back
With the hors d’oeuvres, the Vinho Verde,
The poem of your life with its new name.

The poem answers that you have to stay in control to avoid the “leaks,” suggestive of tears and self-pity that can “streak everything.” You need to be reasonable, “let the light flap in” even though like the “gardenia bloom,” you’re fragile, “doing the backstroke,” and can’t see where you’re going.

The poem also moves in marvelously subtle ways. It pulls you in at the opening with its “first line” then “second or third,” leading you. It moves from the interior of the house to the porch, from the interiority of the narrator to a social setting. The narrator’s wife and a friend wait, chatting, expecting him. That expectation, it seems to me, echoes softly in the last line with “life with its new name,” a rebirth. The tone now becomes almost festive. That’s quite a feat after a cancer diagnosis.

Mark Smith-Soto teaches at UNCG, where he directs the Center for Creative Writing in the Arts, and edits the “International Poetry Review.” Smith-Soto’s poems have been published widely. They’ve appeared in such places as the “Antioch Review,” “Kenyon Review,” “Literary Review,” and “Nimrod.” He received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in creative writing in 2005.

Another of the chapbook’s strong poems is “Waiting Room”:

I can’t make out the words. But there’s no need.
Fear and surprise make meaning parsable,
Pulse it clearly through the plasterboard, a code
That stutters almost into sense, only to fall
Into a murmur so low it feels it comes
From my own chest. We sit and wait
To enter one by one the appointed room
Where the humane doctor will explain
What being human means for us today,
Trying not to care too much while caring
For others caught in the same trap, our refrains
Of loss well known, gamely grin-and-bearing
The common wound there is no way to stanch.
Ten minutes more? Of course, I understand.

This poem turns your expectations for it upside down in the final line. “Of course, I understand.”

But you don’t. Nobody does.
 

This year’s edition of “The North Carolina Literary Review” (East Carolina University and the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association: Greenville; 259 pages, $15 paper) is especially dramatic. With the theme of North Carolina drama and a redesign, the Review steps to center stage as the most handsome such publication in the state.

Theater in North Carolina gets overshadowed. The state’s novelists, poets and story writers hog the spotlight, upstaging the playwrights. The Review, edited by Margaret Bauer of the English department at East Carolina, brings the dramatists from the darkened wings in this edition.

You can’t talk about North Carolina drama without talking about Paul Green. By reprinting a 1960 interview with the playwright in his Chapel Hill home, the Review lets Green get in a word, too. “The real theater of our country should be – and is rapidly becoming – the theater of the people, the amateur theater,” he told an interviewer. “ ‘The death of drama’ in America that everybody is worried about, I believe, is nothing more than the righteous whittling down to size of Broadway.”

In addition to novels and stories, Green wrote seventeen outdoor historical plays, “four of which are still in production in Texas, Kentucky, Ohio and North Carolina,” writes Laurence Avery, who is retired from the English department at UNC-Chapel Hill. Avery notes that each summer across the country 35 to 50 such dramas are staged. “But in terms of his legacy, the thing to understand is that this vigorous national movement grew … from the first of his outdoor historical plays, “The Lost Colony,” which opened in the summer of 1937 at the Waterside Theater on Roanoke Island.” It’s still in production today, the oldest such drama in the country.

Another form of theater is rooted in North Carolina, too. It sprang from “Diamond Studs: The Life of Jesse James, A Saloon Musical,” written by North Carolinians Bland Simpson and Jim Wann. Critics raved when the musical, performed by the Red Clay Ramblers and the Southern States Fidelity Choir, began its off-Broadway run in New York in 1975. “Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!” wrote Clive Barnes of The New York Times.

“Ultimately,” Simpson writes, “it scarcely matters whether one calls ‘musicians’ theater’ a new musical form, a sub-genre, or an identifiable hybrid. Certainly it is an approach to stagecraft that has served a lot of us musicians (many with Tar Heel roots) quite well over most of four decades.”

The only play by story writer Elizabeth Spencer of Chapel Hill is reprinted here. The wickedly funny short play, “Husbands Found Dead,” is here, too. It was written by Kat Meads, a graduate of the MFA creative writing program at UNCG. (There’s also a nice interview with Meads, a native of Currituck County.) Sam Post, a resident of Salisbury, is here with three of what I would call short-shorts. Interesting.

June Guralnick, who now lives in Apex, writes in one piece that in 1997 she was artist in residence at Rockingham Community College in Reidsville. She planned to work on a play about the Jazz Age.

“It took a few months before I realized that a seismic volcanic shift – the end of the Industrial Era – was erupting in this corner of the world,” she says. “I wasn’t sure how to understand or respond to what I was seeing and hearing. To better grasp what was happening around me, I determined to find out more about the history of mills in the Piedmont.”

The result was “Finding Clara.” Guralnick describes it this way: “The play counterpoints the life of Mary Victoria Woolson, a North Carolina ‘linthead,’ with her idol, silent screen actress Clara Bow, against a background of labor and racial unrest in pre-Depression 1929 America.” Excerpts of the play are reprinted.

One notable interview is with Jim Grimsley, the North Carolinian who is director of the creative writing program at Emory. He’s a playwright, and many of his novels and stories are set in North Carolina. He surveys the state of Southern drama.

This edition of the Review has more than drama. The section titled North Carolina Miscellany includes a snapshot of what’s up across the state in poetry and fiction with reviews and interviews. I can’t remember if it’s in this section, but there’s a good interview with Betty Adcock, the outstanding poet who lives in Raleigh. The analysis of  “Kate Vaiden” by Reynolds Price as an example of Southern gothic realism is rewarding, too.

The new design, while full of movement and abounding in entry points, should be reined in. The doodads get in the way of clarity and coherence at times. In the parsing of a Tennessee Williams play set in Asheville about the Fitzgeralds, the graphics went overboard. I suppose they reflected the chaos of the Fitzgeralds’ lives.

Another annoyance: The Review lacks a workable table of contents. You’re made to do a lot of thumbing through when you’re trying to find something you’ve read and want to look at again. The Review contains a lot of literary award stories. You know, the grip and grin kind like, oh, Rotarian of the Year. They are hardly arresting reading.

Even so, North Carolina is fortunate to have such a publication. It merits your support. http://www.nclr.ecu.edu/

Reviewed by Kim Stacks Mills

I find myself conflicted after reading "Shlemiel Crooks" (Written by Anna Olswanger, illustrated by Paule Goodman Koz, publisher: Junebug Books: P.O. Box 1588, Montgomery, Ala. (www.newsouthbooks.com; 36 pages – color illustrations throughout, $11.95 paperback with French flaps).
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As a non-Jewish reader, I couldn't imagine sharing such a story with children. The book is aimed toward kids 9 to 12, but it includes robbery, the ghost of a not-nice Pharoah, an instance of gunfire, curses such as "they should die of indigestion" and "his teeth should fall out except one, then he could have a toothache." I know kids see and hear worse than these things on TV, but I just didn't have a good feeling when I was finished with this book.

All that said, I went online and read some reviews for "Shlemiel Crooks" and found that a lot of people love it.

It's based on the true story of a robbery in 1919 at a saloon in St. Louis where a couple of crooks tried to steal Passover wine from the saloon owner. Their attempt was thwarted by the neighbors of the saloon owner, but the police never found the crooks.

The people who loved this book said it sounded like something a Yiddish grandmother would tell them, and that it's a good introduction to Passover. It includes Yiddish phrases and references and would probably be more entertaining read aloud.

The illustrations were interesting, even though some of the drawings didn't exactly match the part of the story they shared the page with. Real photographs of the saloon owner and his wife were included in the back of the book, along with a newspaper clipping of the event from the St. Louis Jewish Record from Feb. 21, 1919.

I think I would recommend that parents skim this book before handing it over to the kids. Of course, when I told my husband my concerns about it, he said, "Yeah, but think about Grimm's Fairy Tales. You love the story of the "Little Match Girl," and she dies in the end." He's got a point.

Love with its needs and heartaches burrows through Sam Howie’s “Rapture Practice” (Main Street Rag: Charlotte; 124 pages, $12.95 paper).

The collection of ten stories offers a variety characters. They live in Upstate South Carolina: a drunk, an economist, a tow-truck driver, a counselor, prostitutes, a fiddle player and children. They share a common denominator – they’re all hurting.

Howie lives in the Upstate, too. (I can’t resist Upstate. The names South Carolinians give the regions of their dreary state kill me: Lowcountry? Midlands? Those translate as swamp and out-of-the-swamp.) He’s an instructor at Converse College and teaches in the writing center. He’s published fiction and nonfiction in Shenandoah, The Writer’s Chronicle, Potomac Review and other places.

These stories are ambitious in their intent, and Howie appears comfortable taking risks with his storylines. The title story, “Rapture Practice,” is set in an orphanage for boys. The narrator is a counselor who pulls the night shift. The boys, preteens, report monsters outside their windows. The narrator, flashlight in hand, dutifully investigates and reports back to them. The narrator is saddled with the monster of loneliness, too, as well as the elderly groundsman at the orphanage.

The story, though, falls short of the high mark Howie set for it. It seems to me that here, and throughout the collection, there’s a heavy handedness. It’s a lack of restraint -- too much is spelled out. It gives the stories a weighty tone.

This going over the top affects the sentences, too. They feel heavy, rather than clean and sharp. This blunts the emotional impact of the stories, time after time.

Unless I’ve misread his story, “The End of Summer,” the narrator is a preteen girl in pigtails. If there’s a passage early on saying this is from the perspective of an adult, I read over it. This kid talks like an adult, not a little girl. She speaks of the percussive sounds of crickets. If she’s in an accelerated class at school, we have no way of knowing that.

But there’s attitude here, and hard-headed looks at the Upstate (hehe), always a plus.
 

A fire, later ruled arson, burned one-third of the Thomas Wolfe house in downtown Asheville on the the night of July 24, 1998. In Wolfe’s day, the 29-room Queen Ann built in 1883 was a boardinghouse – “Old Kentucky Home” -- run by his mother. It has since been restored to its 1916 appearance, the last year Wolfe lived there.

The Thomas Wolfe Memorial http://www.wolfememorial.com/news_upfrom.html reopened to visitors in 2004.

Somebody threw an object through the dining room window to start the fire. The Associated Press also reported in 1998 that a $20,000 reward was offered for information leading to an arrest. No one has ever been charged, as far as I can find in a Web surf.

This whodunit apparently has caused rumor and speculation in that hipsterville west of Carrboro. As evidence, here’s “Fire Gazer: Arson at the Wolfe House” (Reminiscing Books: Asheville, 100 pages, $11.95 paper. The distributor is John F. Blair, Publisher; Winston-Salem) by Kevin Burton McGuire. He lives in Asheville.

What to call this? A novel? A short story? A novella? A press release calls it a fictional account. That I’ll concede, with one caveat: It’s not a good one. It reads like an early draft.

The account centers on a young Asheville newspaper reporter assigned to do a story about ghosts. He encounters a charismatic street person, DC, with a gift for gabbing about spirits and a new world order. He has a following, Rank Dave, two teen-age runaways and unnamed others or maybe they have names, I don’t remember. You wouldn’t either. As the reporter, let’s call him Ben -- the author does, hangs out here and there with DC, the reader encounters DC’s fascination with fire (aha!), paganlike rites, and the ghost of Zelda Fitzgerald, loony wife of F. Scott. (She burned to death in an Asheville mental hospital in the, oh, ‘30s or ‘40s?)

So where’s the drama here, the conflict to drive a story? Consulting the press release again, I read: “Through Ben’s private journal entries, learn of his struggle to overcome DC’s destructive cynicism and his pursuit of an artistic vision. Will Ben follow his own artistic calling, or will he adopt DC’s anti-social lifestyle?”

Oh.

Somebody misspelled O. Henry throughout this fictional account. He takes a period, not an apostrophe.

Read the first poem of Rhett Iseman Trull’s collection and you’ll know why she won the Anhinga Press prize for poetry. It jumps at you.

Here’s part of “The Real Warnings Are Always Too Late:”

I want to go back to the winter I was born and warn you
that I will flood through your life like acid
and you will burn yourselves on me.
On my sixteenth birthday, I will use the candles
to set the basement aflame and run out laughing,
wearing smoke like a new dress. With a pocket knife,
I will try to root out that life you so eagerly started.
I’ll dent the garage door with my head, siphon Crown Royal
from your liquor cabinet, jump from a gondola in Venice. I’ll smash
my ankle with a hammer, drive through stop signs
with my eyes closed, cost you thousands
in medical bills. Forget about sleeping.

“The Real Warnings” (Ahinga Press: P.O. Box 10595, Tallahassee, FL.; 84 pages, $15, http://www.anhinga.org/) is her first book. Trull lives in Greensboro and grew up in Winston-Salem. A graduate of Duke, she holds an MFA in creative writing from UNCG. She and her husband edit a poetry magazine, “Cave Wall,” which is published in Greensboro.

The language in her best poems avoids abstract words as if they were poison ivy. Her word choices are the things of this world. You can smell and touch and bark your shins on them. Line breaks swing. They build momentum into compelling narratives. The most intense poems sweep like fast water across the page. They carry you to unforeseen eddies. You catch your breath and feel the undercurrent before being buoyed to shore.

Here is “Signs”:

Today has been hollowed out by your death
like a thrown-away fruit rind rotting in the fairgrounds
in the off-season, between a gum wrapper and a torn ticket,
beside what used to be The Ghost Train.

The sky is the color of dirty rain and nothing
flies in it. Skeletal trees rasp their limbs together
like a witch’s ready fingers. And I am glad.
What I can’t say, the tipped-over shopping cart outside Wal-Mart

says for me. And the hub cap rusting in the ditch grass, the bent
candy-cane decoration losing its grip on the streetlight
downtown. The world is a tied-on fender, you once said,
Then winked, But the rope is strong. When the doctors

moved you from home, your lawn was kept mowed,
and even now someone remembers to plug in your tree, the one
your best friend strung with three thousand lights
while your lungs worked against your bucking heart.

Tonight: no moon, no stars. I never realized before
how noisy planets are. I praise their choice
to be absent. I praise the protruding ribs
of the stray ducking under the crawl space. For I know

there will come a day when the trees
are a Kelly green belly-laugh in a sugared breeze, dogs
with meaty voices will frisk under a rekindled moon,
and I’ll fall asleep without tears, traitor to my grief.

Insights, like mushrooms, pop up among the shards of emotion:

You will learn to loathe and love
The yes that saves you …

…And we give
with unthinned hearts, little knowing
how, even if banked by the best words

and buoyed by honesty, love can fail.
Or maybe we do know
and unharbor ourselves anyway.

Gritty and fierce, the poems celebrate love, passion, and how the wounded survive strung-out loneliness, break-ups, and self-destructiveness. At times, the tone is “an alarm wailing in the night, set off by a banging shutter.” But there’s also plenty of humor and wit and tenderness.

From “Lotion Cigarettes Candles Wine:”

I suppose she’s the better choice. She cooks you
healthy dinners, gives the best back massage.
She’s read more books and had more sex than I.
She’s thinner with longer eyelashes and always wins
Trivial Pursuit. Even the contents of her freezer,
scallops and coffee beans, speak of sophistication. …

In the Triad, Trull will read at 7 p.m. on Oct. 29 in the UNCG Faculty Center, 2 p.m. on Nov. 22 at Barnes & Noble in Winston-Salem, and 4 p.m. on Dec. 5 at the Community Book Shop in Greensboro.

Catch her if you can. Trull rules.
 

Reviewed by Kim Stacks Mills

Everybody has a job to do in Kibbutz Hanan, and Rody has found his niche in the chicken coop. He loves the chickens, and the chickens love him. And so, he earns the name “Chicken Man.”

A National Jewish Book Award winner, the children’s book “Chicken Man” (Author: Michelle Edwards, publisher: Junebug Books: P.O. Box 1588, Montgomery, Ala. (www.newsouthbooks.com; 32 pages – color illustrations throughout, $16.95 hardback) is a “grass is always greener” tale that takes place in a made-up self-sustained Jewish community (or a kibbutzim) in the real-life Jezreel Valley in Israel.

Rody makes working with the chickens look so appealing that another villager comes along and asks to be reassigned to the coop. So Rody moves on to the laundry. He makes that look so good, a villager asks for that job, and Rody gets shifted to gardener.
Rody’s hard work and enthusiasm makes each job seem better than the last. But alas, the egg production from the chickens has come to a halt.

Can “Chicken Man” make his way back to the coop?

This story is filled with Jewish history references, but not so many that a non-Jewish reader can’t enjoy it. The artwork, which includes a labeled map of the village and illustrations of each job Rody takes on, adds humor to the tale.

Parents can use this book to have discussions with their elementary school-age kids about a sustainable lifestyle and living within their means. They can also talk about having a strong work ethic and finding areas in which the kids excel.

One hint: If you’re not up-to-date on your Jewish history, flip to the back of the book first and read the author’s notes from the original printing in 1991 and this second printing from 2007. She sets the scene and gives you all the information you need to enjoy the book without having to Google “Jewish culture.”
 

Could it be? Maybe.

Greensboro thriller writer John Hart will leave Monday for London, get ready to go on English television and spend four days with a bunch of publishing big-wigs -- many of them "talking royal'' as Hart's daughters like to say. All to see if he'll get one of England's biggest literary awards.

It's the Dagger Award from the Crime Writers Association. Or really, it's the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award. And yes, the award is named after the well-known writer of James Bond. Fleming judged all thrillers by one rule:  "If a reader turns the page, it's a thriller.''

Hart got nominated for his latest book, "The Last Child,'' which came out in May. It's about Johnny Merrimon, a modern-day Huck Finn from small-town North Carolina who's trying to find his sister who has mysteriously disappeared.

Hart wrote "The Last Child'' on his laptop at his third-floor office that overlooks South Elm. He spent 15 months, there, writing anywhere from 600 to 1,000 words a day as he dove into the world of a soda-loving teenage boy trying to survive in the tragic South.

It's a sweet read.

If he wins, Hart will pocket $3,000. At least that's what we at Page Turners remember. He's up against some stiff competition, writers like Michael Connolly ("The Brass Verdict"), GIllian Flynn ("Dark Places")  and Daniel Silva ("Moscow Rules").

But does he have a chance? Who knows? Still, Hart is going to London. And it's a sort of homecoming for him.

Two decades ago, in his early 20s,. Hart worked a series of dead-end jobs in London. He tended bar and  worked behind a scent counter -- as in perfume, for all you inquiring readers. He also became an actor, talking to magazine writers and pretending to be Giorgio of Giorgio of Beverly Hills fame for a public relations firm.

And yes, as Giorgio, he had a tan. With his sports jacket, teal T-shirt and boat shoes. Very Don Johnson.

But every time he got on the London subway to go somewhere, he'd always see these posters of books. And every time, he kept telling himself, "That would be a great way to make a living.''

And now, he is. When Hart turned 40, he quit his stockbroker's job in Greensboro and started to write full-time.

Since 2006, his first book, "King of Lies'' has been translated into 26 languages and published in more than 30 countries. His second book, "Down River'' has, too. Last year, “Down River’’ won the Oscar of mystery writers: The Edgar, named for writer Edgar Allan Poe.

Today, Hart pockets seven-figure advances from his publisher. He also keeps on his office desk off South Elm the award for The Edgar, a bust of Poe. But will he get to put a dagger there, too?

We'll find out next week.

 When it comes to musical tastes, I’ve always been an old soul. In college in the early ‘90s, when I should have been listening to so-called “college radio,” I was a huge Bruce Hornsby fan. Even now, you’re more likely to hear Hootie & the Blowfish on my iPod than, say, Grizzly Bear.

So Merge Records has never really been on my radar. Formed in Chapel Hill in 1989, it has been the home of such of-the-moment bands as Superchunk and Spoon, but the label never really lost its small-market hospitality. “Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records” is an oral history, compiled by journalist John Cook with the blessing of the label’s founders, Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance, and input from most of the musicians, producers and others who have contributed to its growth.

Want to know why some bands make it and others don’t? It’s all here, from the prototypical stories of “we didn’t get along on tour” and “we had to fire the drummer” all the way to the overnight successes.

The most recent and biggest breakthrough has been the Montreal band Arcade Fire, which sold copies of its debut CD “Funeral” faster than Merge could print them, yet has remained with the label despite big-money offers from competitors.

Despite its multiple perspectives, the narrative zips along, and often feels like a big backstage round-table interview. Take this quote from producer Robert Schneider describing late-1990s band Neutral Milk Hotel:

“That band was never, in any way, what you would call tight or polished. They were like, if you took a carnival, and you played it on an AM radio, and then you stuck it in a bucket with a microphone and recorded it, and then took that recording and played it on a Victrola, and then rolled it down the stairs, and there’s someone there to catch it – that’s a Neutral Milk Hotel show.”

I don’t know about you, but I have to hear that band. I may not like it, but I can’t ignore it. And that’s the biggest strength and the biggest flaw of this book: if you know the music, it’s an excellent companion piece. If you don’t, you’re going to have to spend some more energy or cash to take a listen – and you can conveniently find both the book and the music at www.mergerecords.com.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to listen to some Neutral Milk Hotel.