44
2017
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
PHOTOGRAPH BY GINNY DIGUISEPPI
“part of a little counterculture”: An Interview with Musician Turned Writer Nic Brown
by Leslie Maxwell In 2008, writer Nic Brown, a Greensboro native, was the director of communications for the Ackland Museum of Art in Chapel Hill. I was working in communications, too, but I wanted to change my career path. I was applying to MFA programs in creative writing. Nic had already completed an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, so hoping to learn from his experiences, I met him for lunch at the now-closed Pepper’s Pizza on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill. Just a year after that lunch, his first book, Floodmarkers, would be published.1 Set in the fictional Piedmont town of Lystra, Floodmarkers is a collection of linked stories that take place during Hurricane Hugo in 1989. Hugo brings the problems and situations of the characters into relief: kids get into trouble; adults struggle with their marriages, their lives, and themselves. The destruction of Hugo is, in some ways, no match for the destruction the characters themselves cause. A year after this first book, Brown’s first novel, Doubles, came out. Doubles, set in North Carolina and New York, is about a professional tennis player struggling in his personal and professional life. In the novel, the main character, Slow Smith, has a wife who is in a coma. Slow tries to understand her and their marriage in the Polaroid photos she took daily, photos he continues to take of her in her hospital bed. At the same time, he tries to re-start his tennis career, but things don’t go as he expects. In 2015, Brown added another novel, In Every Way, to his publications.2 This most recent novel is about Maria, a college-age woman who finds herself unexpectedly pregnant and learns that her mother has been diagnosed with cancer. Maria gives the baby up for adoption, but when she and her mother go to Beaufort for an extended stay, she becomes a part of the lives of the couple who adopted her baby. When I met Nic, back in 2006, he was working at a record label with the man who would soon become my husband. Nic and his wife had just moved back to Chapel Hill after some time away. He’d previously lived in Chapel Hill in the late 1990s when he was in the band Athenaeum, left the area to attend school and live in New York City, and moved again to Iowa City to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for graduate school. He and his wife stayed in the Triangle area until 2010, when he began teaching creative writing at the University of Northern Colorado. He returned to the South for a year when he was the Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. During that year, he returned to the Triangle area frequently, including to read a very short story at my husband’s and my wedding.
Notes contributed by NCLR staff
LESLIE MAXWELL teaches writing at Duke University and creative writing at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies. Her work has previously appeared in Rappahannock Review and The Fourth River, among other journals, and is forthcoming in Fourth Genre.
ABOVE Nic Brown
1
Nic Brown, Floodmarkers (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2009).
2
Nic Brown, Doubles (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2010); In Every Way (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2015).