Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 7, 1993 TAG: 9311070173
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RADFORD LENGTH: Medium
She and five other authors signed their books and addressed about 150 people attending a $25-a-plate benefit luncheon for the DiscoveryWorks museum on the second floor of the Norwood Building.
The other speakers were Nikki Giovanni, Ann Goethe, Sharyn McCrumb, Nancy Ruth Patterson and Donald Secreast.
"One of the reasons we have so much violence in our society is because we don't have good stories," said Giovanni, a Virginia Tech professor of English who has written poetry, children's books and been a guiding force in a book publication at the Warm Hearth Village retirement community.
Of course, a poem abolishing violence isn't all it takes to fix the problem, she said. But many young people today have lost a tradition of spoken stories connecting them to other generations and are left with the violent images of visual entertainment. "They do not even hear radio," Giovanni said.
Some of the speakers knew from childhood that they wanted to be writers.
Ann Goethe of Blacksburg, who has published short stories, plays, a novel that became a Literary Guild selection and is working on an opera with Roanoke Symphony Orchestra conductor Victoria Bond, said that as a child, she would always sit in the center of any adult gathering at her home with pencil and paper pretending to be writing books.
She no longer pretends but is still mystified by much of the creative process, she said. "The artist, looking back on it, will wonder how on earth she did it."
McCrumb, who lives in Shawsville, joked that she has been labeled as a mystery writer because she is genetically incapable of writing books without plots.
Her favorites among the novels she has published are her so-called "ballad" series set in Appalachia, she said, in which she tries to do "what Tony Hillerman has done for the Navajo and the American Southwest" in his mysteries set in those climes.
Patterson, director of CITY School in Roanoke and writer of children's books, told of hearing from one young reader who wrote that he "picked out your book because it was the shortest one on the shelf" and another who asked for a fast response to her questions about a story "as my book report is due on Wednesday."
But her writing also established one of those generational connections that Giovanni had mentioned, when a young reader responded to the qualities of a character patterned on Patterson's own grandmother, who died in 1976. It meant her grandmother still lived in a way, Patterson said, since the reader had gotten to know her.
Secreast, who teaches at Radford University, has published two collections of stories. He said he was a child of the 1950s and rock 'n' roll era but found, in researching that decade for his stories, that the '50s "were a very dark time."
One example was polio epidemics, he said. He used the iron lung of a polio victim as a central focus of one of his stories.
Neville, of Radford, was another author who has been writing all her life. But she put her first novel - which had parallel stories happening 200 years apart in the French Revolution and Arab oil crisis - on hold "because I thought that no publisher would ever accept a book like this."
But when she sold her second novel, she found that the publisher wanted to buy both manuscripts, "so I had to finish the book . . . It took me another year and a half."
That first book, "The Eight," sold to publishers in 12 countries.
Visitors to the DiscoveryWorks museum saw an exhibit on a visit to the region by Russian students in 1991, depictions of other children's museums around the world as an indicator of future plans for this one, an exhibit on printing and a display about an interactive museum.
DiscoveryWorks is seeking members ($15 for individuals and $25 for families) and volunteers for its various program and class offerings. Further information is available by calling 633-2233.
by CNB