Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, September 24, 1994 TAG: 9409260028
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV7 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RADFORD LENGTH: Medium
The addition will be formally dedicated at 11 a.m. Oct. 1. Speakers will include David McConnell of Graybeal, grandson of John Preston McConnell, the school's first president, for whom the library is named.
Edgerton, whose novels include ``Raney,'' ``Walking Across Egypt,'' ``Killer Diller,'' ``In Memory of Junior'' and ``The Floatplane Notebooks,'' kept his audience laughing with excerpts from his books. He proved adept at doing his characters' different voices, ranging from a child to an old lady and a couple of ``good ole boys.''
In one excerpt, Mattie, an elderly woman, falls through a chair and gets stuck while watching daytime dramas on television. Unable to free herself, Edgerton's story continues, ``she looked at Erica on the TV screen.''
Audience-wide laughter followed. ``This is where I can tell how many people watch `All My Children,''' Edgerton observed. ``A lot of you.''
He put on a cap and took bites out of an apple during his reading of the ``good ole boys'' talking over environmental issues in a down-home manner. The chewing added immeasurably to the character of the dialogue.
Occasionally, Edgerton would put down his books and move to a piano on the stage in the Muse Hall Banquet Room to play and sing some of his more humorous music. Some of the words to those songs appear in his books, but readers miss the timing and flavor of the piece by reading rather than hearing it.
Following his hour-long presentation, he and the audience moved over to the library where he spent another hour meeting his readers and signing copies of his books. He also sells compact discs and audio tapes of his musical presentations, which proved popular with his fans.
Edgerton says he is now writing a Western, tentatively titled ``Redeye.'' It started as another of his North Carolina settings featuring a family doing free-lance embalming out of their home-based on an actual family, he said-but moved West when he became interested in the cliff-dwelling American Indians of Colorado.
So he moved the time back about 100 years, moved the setting to Colorado, and maintained the character connection by featuring some of the mummified remains of the cliff dwellers as elements of the story. In the excerpt he read, a group of entrepreneurs tries to revive a mummy using a newfangled electric generator. It doesn't work but, the way Edgerton told it, it still made a good story.
by CNB