88.5 WFDD - BookMarks: Recent Episodes
Paul Garber
Yusef Salaam listens to a question from the audience during an apearance at Forsyth County's Central Library Sunday. PAUL GARBER/WFDD
A man wrongfully convicted in connection with a horrific attack on a jogger in New York’s Central Park has a new book out. Yusef Salaam discussed the work in an appearance in Winston-Salem Sunday.
The attack and rape made national headlines in 1989. The Black and Latino youths charged in the crime became known as the Central Park Five and were widely vilified in the press.
All were later cleared after another man confessed to the crime.
Salaam was just a teen when arrested and spent more than six years in detention. Still, he describes the case as a love story between God and his people. Salaam says it gave him a chance to grow.
“My grandmother always said to me, she said: ‘Be still and listen,’” he says. “And when you listen long enough, you hear God. And then you realize what you’re supposed to do.”
Salaam’s memoir “Better, Not Bitter: Living on Purpose in the Pursuit of Racial Justice” was released this year. His appearance closed the 2021 Bookmarks Festival of Books and Authors.
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yusef salaam #central park five #memoir #bookmarks
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Erin Brockovich speaks virtually from her home in California with WFDD's Keri Brown. Screenshot: KERI BROWN/WFDD
The local literary arts organization Bookmarks is hosting a virtual conversation with environmental activist and author Erin Brockovich. She will discuss her new book called Superman's Not Coming. It looks at several communities experiencing contamination from toxic chemicals and other substances and focuses on drinking water systems.
Brockovich says she gets a lot of emails and questions from people in the state about coal ash and other environmental concerns. There’s a portion of her new book that is set in Camp Lejeune where residents were exposed to numerous contaminants in their drinking water.
She says the book is filled with inspiring stories and resources to help communities find out more about the quality of their drinking water. Those include various websites and information on how to request and analyze local water quality reports.
“Knowledge is power,” says Brockovich. “It gives you some assurance, it gives you a little more confidence and it becomes a little bit contagious. Now I get this, what could I do further, and so it’s about getting curious.”
The Bookmarks virtual conversation with Erin Brockovich on Tuesday, October 20 will be led by Wake Forest University professor Justin Catanoso.
*Follow WFDD’s Keri Brown on Twitter @kerib_news
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erin brockovich #bookmarks #superman's not coming #contaminants #water quality #north carolina
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Author Yaa Gyasi will be in conversation with author Bryan Washington as part of a virtual event hosted by Bookmarks this Thursday evening. Image courtesy: Penguin Random House and Peter Hurley/Vilcek Foundation
The award-winning author of Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi, has just published her second novel titled Transcendent Kingdom. It follows the story of Gifty, an intellectual young researcher struggling to understand her mother and the pain that addiction and depression have played in her family. Gyasi spoke with WFDD’s Bethany Chafin ahead of her virtual appearance with Bookmarks Thursday evening.
Interview Highlights On how Transcendent Kingdom was born out of a previous short story:
I really loved the voice of this story. I loved thinking about this character who was incredibly academic, having to think about how to relate to her very religious mother. I found it just to be a really kind of fun and freeing exercise to write a story so different from the novel that I had been working on for several years [Homegoing].
On what our younger selves would think of the adults we've become:
Transcendent Kingdom is Yaa Gyasi's latest novel. Image courtesy Penguin
One way that writing this book had me reflecting on my childhood is that, like Gifty, I did grow up in the Pentecostal church. And similarly to Gifty as well, I grew up in a predominantly white community attending a predominantly white Pentecostal church. And so I think I was thinking back to what it felt like to go to that church, what it felt like just to be a child who had all of this faith and what became of that. So I think that was an aspect of my childhood that I was thinking about. But ... wondering what a child's self might think about the woman that you become is certainly something that I think about a lot, particularly around the times when I have a book coming out, because this was such a childhood dream. I wanted to be a writer from a very young age. And every time I publish a novel, I kind of feel proud not just of myself, but of the child who believed fervently in this.
On what propels Transcendent Kingdom forward:
I think it's just the characters and their relationship to one another. I think the thing that makes the novel feel propulsive is that you get to see how much care Gifty is giving to her mother. You feel this hopefulness and this drive to see Gifty and her mother repair the things that are broken, to connect, to take care of each other, to heal. And so I think that's what's driving this forward, that desire to know what will become of both of these women.
On seeing characters in many dimensions:
Well, the goal is to always try to see them in as many dimensions as possible and to allow them to kind of reveal themselves to me. I'm not really a big planner when I write novels. Like, I don't have character sketches and I don't have outlines. I want to still feel — even though I'm aware of the fact that I am creating the characters — I want to still feel surprised by them and interested in getting to know them. And I feel like part of how that happens is by just kind of letting the story emerge as it will. And so I don't know if I have a better explanation for how that kind of work happens other than to say that it feels like another form of listening, I guess, to try to find out what a character wants to tell you and who she is.
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yaa gyasi #transcendent kingdom #homegoing #novel #books #penguin random house #bookmarks #bryan washington
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An overflow crowd enjoys a performance at the 2017 National Folk Festival in Greensboro. The event has since evolved into the North Carolina Folk Festival. DAVID FORD/WFDD
Two of the Triad’s most popular festivals have announced their plans for the fall. Music fans can rejoice, but book lovers may be disappointed.
The 16th annual Bookmarks Festival of Books and Authors has been canceled. The event had been scheduled for September 26th. The non-profit is still planning on holding a Sweet Sixteenth party on September 25th.
Jamie Rogers Southern is Bookmarks Operations Director. She says in a news release that the safety of visitors and staff is a priority, and there are too many unresolved questions to plan an event that can bring up to 15,000 people to downtown Winston-Salem.
The nonprofit plans on continuing outreach with smaller socially distanced events in the coming months, as well as extending curbside pickup and phone order service at its bookstore.
Meanwhile, in Greensboro, The Carolina Blues Festival is partnering with the North Carolina Folk Festival to present a weekend of free concerts September 11th through the 13th.
The Folk Festival is entering its third year, and recently announced plans to present a modified version of the event. The Carolina Blues Festival had originally been scheduled for this month.
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bookmarks festival of books and authors #bookmarks #north carolina folk festival #carolina blues festival #nc folkfest
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Ben Folds played a few songs and spoke with WFDD's David Ford about his new memoir at R.J. Reynolds Auditorium in Winston-Salem. Credit: Jessica Blackstock.
Singer, songwriter, and producer Ben Folds has a new book out. A Dream About Lightning Bugs: A Life of Music and Cheap Lessons debuted at #7 on the New York Times Best Seller list. For years the Winston-Salem native enjoyed a kind of cult status atop the alternative rock world as the leader of Ben Folds Five. But getting there was messy: failed marriages, musical battles lost, and lessons learned.
Ben Folds recently returned to his hometown and a packed Reynolds auditorium in his old high school to promote the new book. He spoke with WFDD’s David Ford.
Interview Highlights On the dream in the book's title:
It stuck with me and I began to kind of see it as a metaphor of — real simple — of art. Not that I’m the guy who can see and everybody else can’t, but that everybody can see what someone else doesn’t see. The next step is the bottling of it which is, you know, that just depends on whether you’re crazy enough to spend all the time, or you’ve dedicated your life, or you’re lucky enough to have grown up maybe in an environment that was supportive or fostered the bottling of ideas, you know?
On listening to music eight hours a day as a two-year-old:
I mean, I don’t think that there’s any better training for a kid than listening. So, the first thing that you’re going to do for a kid is you’re going to start learning tonality as we know it. The more that you hear that, you know you ‘ve got it under your belt the better. Now, you know, parents who would have said, 'Well, that’s a little weird. We’re going to take the turntable from him. We’re not going to let him do that anymore,' I wouldn’t be here. I needed that as a step, and I think that anyone whose got kids who are learning music I do think that’s an incredible first step. In the liability camp is that, if you’re so obsessive as to listen to that much music, you’ve got some wiring that might be a little bit of a challenge when you grow up. But at the same time, it gave me an incredible vocabulary, so by the time I was about six-years-old I was dreaming songs all the time.
On songwriting:
Rock 'n' roll had been around long enough that it seemed like it had a little trademark over it. Even though rock stars would say something that would seem vulnerable, it seemed like disingenuous vulnerability to me. They’d sing, “I cried for you, girl.” First of all, no you didn’t. And second of all it’s just supporting a narrative that he’s weaving throughout a song that she did him wrong and he’s showing how vulnerable he is and how sensitive he is. And maybe that’ll, you know, he’ll get lucky again with someone else I guess after he sings that song. So, from my point of view I wanted really badly to hear someone be just the dude next door and have things wrong. One of the first things that occurred to me was, "All these guys being so super, like, I feel this and everything I feel." Well, what about if you don’t feel anything? What about that? Like the times you’re sitting there, and somebody tells you something and you’re like staring at a bowl of fries and you don’t feel anything at all? And some of it is cut off like you felt too much. Sometimes it’s because, I don’t know, you might laugh, like you might laugh at a funeral. What if these things were in a song? Those are real. Then you’re not going to look so cool. And what I found that it did over the course of my career was that everyone else seemed to feel that way. Everyone else was like, “Actually, I don’t feel cool either.”
On growing up in Winston-Salem in the 1970s:
First of all, there was the racial thing, so you hang out with both sides of that. And then it’s like, we lived out in the county for a while, so people on the street we lived on sometimes it’s just, well they talked like that [in a deep Southern accent]. And when you come into town suddenly it’s like an influx of people that come from up north somewhere and they have like a straight accent, like that accent you hear on TV, and so there’s a whole strata. I would get on a couple of times on a Learjet with family friends who were big stuff. And then the next day it would be like the kind of kids who couldn’t afford shoes and I think that being in all of those puts you in a real observer's position. And when it came to songwriting, I feel like it gave me a sense of empathy in songwriting that is a rare gift that I see it that way.
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ben folds #ben folds five #a dream about lightning bugs: a life of music and cheap lessons #winston-salem #bookmarks #memoir
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Image courtesy: Scholastic
A bestselling children's author is kicking off his national book tour at Bookmark's Festival of Books and Authors in Winston-Salem this week. Dav Pilkey is the illustrator and writer of the popular Captain Underpants and Dog Man series. It's been over 20 years since the first of Pilkey's illustrated chapter books became a hit, turning the "waistband warrior" into a hero. Pilkey spoke with WFDD's Bethany Chafin.
Interview Highlights On Pilkey's early comic book days:
In second grade my comics were very very simple, usually just one or two pages, and sometimes I would staple them together. I was getting in so much trouble in school, and I was so disruptive that my teacher actually moved a desk out into the hallway for me, and I would keep the desk filled with papers and pencils, just kind of expecting to get into trouble. And when I was out there I would just let my imagination, you know, just kind of go crazy. And as soon as I would finish something I would share it with my friends.
On his protagonists, George Beard and Harold Hutchins:
Author and illustrator Dav Pilkey. Photo credit: Kai Suzuki, Image courtesy: Scholastic
Harold and George are two boys who are very much like me. They have ADHD. They have have some challenges in school. They're very silly. They love to make comics just like I did. So they're kind of based on me when I was a kid. They have this creative friendship. They love to write and draw. And I think it's their friendship that helps them get through the hard times.
On what Pilkey would tell his second-grade self:
You know, this is going to seem kind of strange, but it would have really helped me to know that there were successful people out there who had some of the same challenges that I did. And I didn't know that as a kid. When I was a kid there was a very popular television show called Happy Days, and there was a guy called The Fonz. Everybody had a Fonz T-shirt when I was a kid. He was the coolest guy, and he [Henry Winkler] had dyslexia, and I didn't know that. And I wish I had known that because ... I sometimes I felt like I was the only one. So I think if I could go back, I would tell my second grade self, "Hey, Fonzie has dyslexia. You're going to be OK."
Pilkey's latest graphic novel was published in August. Image courtesy: Scholastic
On how "reading without judgment" was encouraged during Pilkey's youth:
A lot of the judgment came from my teachers because I was having trouble reading, but I always kind of had my nose in a book. I was either reading MAD Magazine or reading a joke book or reading a collection of comics, and they would take those away from me. They would say, well that's not real literature. ... So when I would come home from school I would be a little discouraged sometimes. And I think my mom picked up on that, and she felt, instead of focusing on what I was reading, she thought it was more important that I was reading, so she took me to the library and let me pick out whatever I wanted. ... As long as I was home I could read whatever I wanted, and that's what changed everything for me.
On what he's learned from his fans over the years:
I've really gotten a lot of inspiration from my fans. To be honest, you know, being a writer and illustrator can be kind of a lonely job. You're in your studio for sometimes 12 to 15 hours a day. And so going out on the road and meeting kids is incredibly inspirational. And I see a lot of kids on the road that remind me of myself when I was a kid. It's really nice because in a way I feel like I'm making books for the kid I used to be. And so when I see these kids on the road who are identifying with my books and who are really getting into my stories it inspires me to keep going and to keep thinking of new ideas.
(Ed.: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
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dav pilkey #captain underpants #dog man #bookmarks #bookmarks festival of books and authors #illustrated chapter books #graphic novel #comics
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Courtesy: Bookmarks
Local literary arts organization, Bookmarks, has announced the lineup for its fall festival.
The 14th Festival of Books and Authors includes presentations, panels, workshops and school visits throughout the Triad which will highlight 51 writers from around the world.
Bookmarks Executive Director Ginger Hendricks says this is the first year there will be a kids' keynote speaker: author and illustrator Dav Pilkey, creator of "the waistband warrior," Captain Underpants.
“We’re really excited about that because every child basically 8th grade and younger knows Dav Pilkey," she says. "He dealt with ADHD and dyslexia when he was growing up, and so really will speak to students [and] help them become, hopefully, readers.”
Other writers making appearances include Zinzi Clemmons, author of “What We Lose,” and local author Charlie Lovett.
The festival takes place September 6th through 9th in downtown Winston-Salem.
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books #bookmarks #festival of books and authors #dav pilkey #zinzi clemmons #charlie lovett
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A book tent at Bookmark's 2016 festival. Photo courtesy of Susan Smith.
For 13 years, the literary nonprofit Bookmarks has been sharing a love of literature in the Triad.
Their annual book festival is the largest in the Carolinas. The Bookmarks "Authors in School" program reaches 7,000 students. Upcoming public events include meetups with best-selling authors John Grisham and Daniel Wallace.
And this Saturday marks a new milestone for Bookmarks, when they’ll have a grand opening for a brick and mortar bookstore in downtown Winston-Salem.
WFDD’s Neal Charnoff sat down with Bookmarks executive director Ginger Hendricks to learn more.
Interview Highlights: On opening a brick and mortar store:
Since 2011, our strategic plan has really called for us to create a home for the literary arts. It's a place where we can gather, where we can have author events, where we can have storytimes, and really make it our third place, meaning work, home, and then this new space, Bookmarks.
On what will distinguish Bookmarks from other regional bookstores:
We work very hard to know Winston-Salem, Forsyth County, and the Triad area. And because of that, we've worked very hard to curate a collection of books and authors that represent a variety of subjects that our community enjoys.
On whether Hendricks prefers paper or e-books:
Always on paper. I love feeling that book in my hands. I love having the author autograph that book to me, or to someone special, and I treasure that, whether it's for myself or for my children.
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Radio Camper Michael Fournaier talks with Ginger Hendricks about BookMarks
Molly Davis
Ginger Hendricks is the executive director of BookMarks, a literary arts nonprofit organization. She helps plan the annual BookMarks festival, where authors talk about their books and attendees speak with them. WFDD Radio Camper Michael Fournaier has more.
I met with Ginger Hendricks on the campus of Wake Forest University. She approached me with a bright voice and a bright smile. We sat down and talked about her dedication to BookMarks. We also talked about what her favorite part about BookMarks is.
My favorite part, honestly, is the authors and schools work that we do. So as I’d said, we’d bring in [an] author into the schools, and it can be with a group of 10 or 15 or it can be an assembly, depending on what serves the school best ways and what they’re trying to accomplish with their curriculum. And I get so excited seeing these students as they watch, and hear, and ask questions and participate with the authors.
During our time, I asked Ginger how the festival is planned, and how they pick the authors that attend the events.
When we’re thinking about a festival, we’re thinking specifically about what authors we want to bring. And more importantly, we’re looking at authors who are on tour. We want, specifically, to bring an author that has a book out within the last year. That’s really important to us, because it excites our public a lot to be able to meet these authors after they’ve just had a book. It also helps us because we’re able to work with publicists and publishing houses to set up book tours and be part of their book tours, and it’s very competitive. We have to be chosen to present these different authors.
To learn more about BookMarks, visit their website at www.bookmarksnc.org, or be sure to attend their upcoming festival on Saturday, September 6th, 2014, in downtown Winston-Salem.
For 88.5 WFDD Radio Camp, I’m Michael Fournaier.
radio camp #ginger hendricks #bookmarks
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