Important Links:
Actor Jane Holding reading Elizabeth Spencer’s “Rising Tide”
Read “The Novel That Elizabeth Spencer Wanted to Be Remembered for” from The New Yorker (May 20, 2021)
https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/the-novel-that-elizabeth-spencer-wanted-to-be-remembered-for
Read “National Treasure, Elizabeth Spencer” by Allan Gurganus, from The Paris Review (Feb. 21, 2020) https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/02/21/national-treasure-elizabeth-spencer/
Watch Elizabeth Spencer on PBS’s “Book Watch,” which aired on July 10, 2002
https://www.pbs.org/video/nc-bookwatch-elizabeth-spencer-southern-woman/
Read more about Elizabeth Spencer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Spencer_(writer)
For more information on Allan Gurganus, see Episode 6 Show Notes, “At Home With Allan Gurganus”
Purchase 27 Views of Chapel Hill (Eno Publishers)
Music for this episode: “Inseparable,” by Rikard From on Epidemic Sound: Inseparable
Episode 8: Show Notes
Elizabeth Spencer & Allan Gurganus in Conversation
Photo by Tom Rankin
Two Literary Greats Discuss Friendship, Spencer’s Story “Rising Tide” & Other Works
Living in neighboring towns in North Carolina’s Piedmont, writers Elizabeth Spencer and Allan Gurganus were close friends for decades. A few months before she died in 2019, he visited her one afternoon to talk to her about her story, “Rising Tide” (featured in Eno Publishers’s 27 Views of Chapel Hill: A Southern University Town in Prose and Poetry), to discuss writing, and how leaving her native Mississippi sharpened her focus on racism.
Bio notes—
Elizabeth Spencer was the author of nine novels, including The Voice at the Back Door, The Salt Line,and The Night Travellers, as well as short fiction collections, such as The Southern Woman andStarting Over. Her novella, The Light in the Piazza, was adapted to stage and screen. She also published a memoir, Landscapes of the Heart. She won many awards and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2021, two years after her death at 98, Library of America issued a forever-in-print edition of Elizabeth Spencer: Novels and Stories.
Allan Gurganus is an award-winning author whose books includes The Practical Heart, Plays Well With Others, Local Souls, White People, and Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. His short stories have been published regularly in The New Yorker and were recently collected in The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus. He is also the subject of a previous episode of the “27 Views” podcast entitled “At Home With Allan Gurganus.”