Authors share inspirations at Literary Festival

BY DAWN BAUMGARTNER VAUGHAN

dvaughan@heraldsun.com; 419-6563

CHAPEL HILL -- Elizabeth Spencer grew up listening to the stories of Beatrix Potter, the Bible and Greek mythology before she could even read. Allan Gurganus didn't care much for books until he used them to pass time in the Navy. Both came to be published authors in diverging ways, but shared their "Influences and Inspirations" together Sunday afternoon at the final day of the N.C. Literary Festival at UNC Chapel Hill.

"You find your own path in writing," Spencer said.

Gurganus and Spencer acknowledged that they are each best known for one book -- for Spencer, "The Light in the Piazza," which became a Broadway hit, and for Gurganus, "The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All," which has also launched media beyond a bound book. But both have larger bodies of work.

Gurganus is the author of "White People" and is working on a short story collection and the novel "The Erotic History of a Southern Baptist Church." At 62, he also thinks it might be time to write a memoir. He told the audience a story about a beehive in the woods near his childhood home in Rocky Mount and sharing the honey with the neighbors. He lived outdoors, since indoors did not have the televisions and air conditioning of today, he said. He found his entertainment outside. When he was drafted during the Vietnam War, he turned to books while working on an aircraft carrier, though his first creative love was art.

Spencer said she tried painting a picture of a wood fire once, but realized she couldn't do it and wrote a poem about the fire instead. She wore a Carolina blue blazer on Sunday to the university where she taught from 1986 to 1992. Growing up, she wrote stories from actual things, she said, then began to study more literature when she went to finishing school in Mississippi and then Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. While at Bellhaven College, she lived across the street from Eudora Welty, who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize.

After Gurganus left the military, he went to Sarah Lawrence College, which gave him two years of credit, he said, for the books he had read over the past few years.

"It seemed destined, the way these things worked out," said Gurganus, who now lives in Hillsborough. When he attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop, his teacher John Cheever, also a Pulitzer winner, submitted Gurganus' first story to The New Yorker.

"It's the kind of thing only a great mentor can do for you," he said. And now he has felt the same thing. "Yesterday I had the great pleasure of introducing a new novel and stories," Gurganus said. At a festival event Saturday, he introduced the new work of novelist Erica Eisdorfer and writer Wells Tower.

Gurganus said that the joys of publication have limits and jeopardies. Writing only for the public is kind of a trap, he said. While his book released aren't frequent, he writes every day.

"It's honestly the act of writing that is the holiest of holys," he said.

Spencer said she doesn't like the idea of writing toward what's popular or repeating the same kind of writing that first brought an author success. Instead, she said, writers should be adventurous.

"I think the adventuresome part of writing intrigues -- it gives a strain of vitality to what's being done," she said.