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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
Winter 2022
An Interview with
Rock ‘n’ Roll Novelist
Christy Alexander Hallberg
By George Hovis
Christy Alexander Hallberg’s debut novel, Searching for Jimmy Page, is an anthem to mother-daughter love and to the liberating influence of Rock ’n’ Roll. The story follows Luna, a teenager from eastern North Carolina, who is grieving the death of her mother by obsessively rediscovering a shared passion for the rock band Led Zeppelin and especially for the band’s guitarist Jimmy Page, whom Luna comes to believe is her biological father. Liza Wieland says of Searching for Jimmy Page, “It’s a book that begs to be read twice, first to find out the true story of Luna’s parentage, and then again, immediately but more slowly, to savor the beauty of the language.”1 Hallberg’s short fiction, creative nonfiction, book reviews, and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as North Carolina Literary Review, storySouth, Still: The Journal, Main Street Rag, Fiction Southeast, Riggwelter, Deep South Magazine, Eclectica, Litro, STORGY Magazine, Entropy, and Concho River Review. Her creative nonfiction essay “The Ballad of Evermore” was a finalist for the Sequestrum 2020 Editor’s Reprint Award. Her flash story “Aperture” was chosen Story of the Month by Fiction Southeast for October 2020 and selected by the editors of the Best Small Fictions anthology series for inclusion in the 2021 edition. Hallberg teaches literature and writing at East Carolina University, where she earned her BS and MA in English. She received her MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from Goddard College. In addition to teaching, Hallberg serves as Senior Associate Editor of North Carolina Literary Review. She is a former editor of #FridayFlash USA at Litro. A native of eastern North Carolina, she now lives in the western part of the state on the outskirts of Asheville, near the Great Smoky Mountains. This interview was conducted by email in August 2021, and it underwent only minimal copy editing for style and flow.
North Carolina native GEORGE HOVIS is a Professor of English at SUNY Oneonta. He earned his PhD in English from UNC Chapel Hill. He is the author of Vale of Humility: Plain Folk in Contemporary North Carolina Fiction (University of South Carolina Press, 2007) and the novel The Skin Artist (SFK Press, 2019; reviewed in NCLR Online 2020). He writes frequently for NCLR, including essays, interviews, and book reviews.
1
Quoted from the cover of Christy Alexander Hallberg, Searching for Jimmy Page (Livingston, 2021); quotations from this novel will be cited parenthetically.
