16
2021
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
AT HOME IN
North Carolina:
An Interview with
Belle Boggs by BARBARA BENNETT PHOTOGRAPH BY TRACE RAMSEY
Belle Boggs is the author of a 2010 short story collection, Mattaponi Queen; a 2016 memoir, The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood; and a 2019 novel, The Gulf, all published by Graywolf Press. The linked stories of Mattaponi Queen are set along the Mattaponi River in Virginia, the author’s native state. It won the Bakeless Prize and the Library of Virginia Literary Award and was a finalist for the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. The Art of Waiting was a finalist for the PEN/DiamonsteinSpielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay and was named a best book of the year by Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, the Globe and Mail, Buzzfeed, and O, the Oprah Magazine. Boggs’s stories and essays have appeared in such prestigious venues as Atlantic Monthly, Slate, Paris Review, Harper’s, and Ploughshares. Boggs has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers’ conferences. She is an Associate Professor of English at North Carolina State University, where she also directs the MFA program in creative writing.1 Like many encounters these days, this interview was accomplished through various electronic means during the summer of 2020. The author was born in 1976 in a rural area of Virginia and grew up on a farm where she spent many hours communing with nature. She describes her parents as hippies and has wonderful memories of her pre-school life living among nature and animals.
BARBARA BENNETT is a Professor of English at NC State University. Her areas of specialty include Southern literature, women’s writing, and ecofeminism. She is the author of five books and numerous articles, interviews, and reviews. Read her interview with Lee Smith and Jill McCorkle in NCLR 2016 and her essay on the film adaptation of Daniel Wallace’s Big Fish in NCLR Online 2019.
ABOVE Belle Boggs
BARBARA BENNETT: What were your parents like? Did they prepare you to be a writer in any way? BELLE BOGGS: My parents are both creative and funny, both really good storytellers. My mom is an artist, and my dad, when I was young, was a carpenter. He actually built roller coasters at Kings Dominion in Virginia, and before I was born my mom sculpted
1
Much of this introduction is taken from the author’s website. Quotations from Boggs’s books will be cited parenthetically. Read Barbara Bennett’s review of The Gulf in NCLR Online 2020.