Greensboro Bound returns as Indy bookstores are doing better than ever

“There are other notable book festivals, but Greensboro Bound is the preeminent North Carolina one,” said acclaimed novelist Daniel Wallace about the free three-day celebration of reading, writing, and publishing taking place downtown on May 18-20.

“It’s run meticulously, which is unbelievably di cult to do, as they’re dealing with hundreds of moving parts and Herculean scheduling, and they somehow pull it o . It’s also the best festival for showcasing Southern and, particularly, North Carolina writers, lifting their profile in a way no one other one does. I can’t believe we haven’t always had it, but it’s still relatively new.”

Wallace is one of 55 authors participating in the festival’s 32 events. His novels include “Big Fish”, which was adapted into a film directed by Tim Burton and starring Ewan McGregor. He’s been inducted into the Alabama Literary Hall of Fame and is the J. Ross MacDonald Distinguished Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Before its publication last month, his genre-bending memoir “This Isn’t Going to End Well: The True Story of a Man I Thought I Knew” was named a Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by Garden & Gun, Goodreads, the Atlanta JournalConstitution, and “Deep South,” and has received rave reviews from the New York Times and Washington Post

The aptly titled “This Isn’t Going to End Well” is a moving meditation on memory, mortality, and masculinity and a beautifully written mixture of memoir and true detective story. Wallace’s longtime friend, mentor, and brother-in-law William Nealy, who committed suicide in 2001, seemed a man of endless capability and confidence, a fearless adventurer and MacGyver-like jack-of-all-trades who not only mastered whitewater kayaking but was a talented writer and cartoonist whose books made him a cult figure and hero to the extreme sports community.

Not everyone with a beloved older sis- ter likes her boyfriend, but from their first meeting, which occurred when Wallace was 12, 19-year-old Nealy seemed like the model of everything a man should be.

Nealy and Holly Wallace fell in love and stayed that way until one abandoned the other and life. At 21, Holly was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, which put her on the cover of Newsweek as what Wallace calls “the unlucky but beautiful face of the disease.” She married William and was his partner in adventures even after she could no longer hold a paddle, her hands taped to the canoe’s stirrups and her shoulders doing the work. William took care of Holly until he killed himself, leaving his disabled and dying widow to other caregivers, mainly Wallace, who now hated the man he once worshipped.

At least until he read the journals Nealy left behind.

“I found them after Holly died,” said Wallace. “When I finally read them, I realized that his dual self, the radically di erent way he portrayed himself in his journals and his everyday life, was emblematic of how we hide aspects of ourselves from even the people we’re closest to. I thought it would be fascinating to survivors of suicide, and a possible balm to them, as what I had was something they all wanted, an explanation of why something like this happened.”

At 5 p.m. on Saturday, Wallace joins Lee Smith, another nationally bestselling and award-winning North Carolina novelist, in the Van Dyke Performance Space of the Greensboro Cultural Center for “All’s Well That Ends Well: North Carolina Literature at Its Apex,” a celebration of Algonquin Books sponsored by the Historical Book Club of North Carolina. Another of Greensboro Bound’s most high-profile events occurs in that space at 7 p.m. on Friday with Charles Frazier, the acclaimed and bestselling author of “Cold Mountain,” which was adapted into an Oscar-winning film. Frazier will discuss and read from his new historical novel The Trackers.

The festival opens on Thursday with the one event that isn’t free but has proved so popular it’s already sold out. In “Abide & Imbibe: An Evening with the Dude,” André Darlington, an award-winning beverage writer who abides (and imbibes) in Greensboro, presents recipes from his “The Uno cial Big Lebowski Cocktail Book.”

The festival’s events and authors are too numerous to completely list here, but include the following:

At 9 p.m. on Friday, Scuppernong Books will show the documentary The Renegade Legacy of Bleecker and MacDougal, about how a handful of cafes on those Greenwich Village streets launched the careers of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Wavy Gravy.

At 10 a.m. on Saturday in the Greensboro Cultural Center Greenhill Center, children’s book author Shelly Anand will lead a read-along of her book “I Love My Body Because.” In the same space and time on Saturday, New York Times and Washington Post reporter Sindya Bhanoo, novelist Bushra Rehman (“Roses in the Mouth of a Lion”), and memoirist Neema Avashia (“Another Appalachia: Growing up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place”) discuss “Belonging in a New America.”

On Saturday at 12:30 p.m. in the Greensboro History Museum Auditorium, politics and wrestling tag-team in “The Unmaking of America and the Future of North Carolina,” in which Gene Nicholas, author of “Lessons From North Carolina,” describes how this state’s politics have been a testing ground for national Republican strategies, and Abraham Josephine Riesman, author of “Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America,” argues that the WWE impresario reinvented not only wrestling and himself but contemporary politics.

At 3:30 p.m. on Saturday, banjoist and rapper Justin “Demeanor” Harrington” joins Kristina Gaddy, author of “Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo’s Hidden History” (which features an introduction by Harrington’s aunt Rhiannon Giddens) in the Greensboro History Museum Auditorium.

At 4 p.m. on Saturday, four authors of fantasy, horror, and speculative fiction discuss “The Revelations of Genre” in the Greensboro Cultural Center Hyers Theatre. The panel consists of Lambda Award finalist Chana Porter, whose “The Thick and the Lean” is about how an aspiring chef, a cyberthief, and a kitchen maid reclaim pleasure as a revolutionary act; Veronica G. Henry, whose “The Foreign Exchange” is the second adventure of Vodou priestess turned amateur detective Reina Dumond; and Erika T. Wurth, whose literary horror novel “White Horse” is about an urban heavy metal Indigenous woman in Denver who is literally haunted by her past. The panel is moderated by J. L. Herndon, a Black author of speculative fiction and poetry who resides in Greensboro.

At 5 p.m. on Saturday, activist and teacher D Noble joins minister, organizer, and author Brandon Wrencher and thought leader and speaker Rev. Doctor Leonard Curry at Scuppernong for a panel on the legacy of author, theorist and social critic bell hooks, whose writings on the intersection of race, class, and gender have become even more popular and influential after her 2021 death. Although Greensboro Bound began in 2018, this is only the fourth time the festival has been held in person.

“We canceled in 2020 for obvious reasons,” said Brian Lampkin, who is cofounder of both Scuppernong Books and Greensboro Bound, and vice chair of the non-profit that runs the festival. “2021 was done virtually, with featured writers that included Roxane Gay, John Sayles, Nnedi Okorafor, and Billy Collins, so this is our second year back in person.

What’s di erent this year?

“We really tried to market the festival much more e ectively and will see if it worked! Otherwise, we lucked into the fact that a bunch of the major North Carolina writers had books published this spring, so Charles Frazier, Lee Smith, and Daniel Wallace provided an easy way to think about the major events on Friday and Saturday evenings. As always, we’re thrilled with the way we’re able to bring conversations around sometimes challenging issues and with the way we bring authors from a variety of racial, cultural, and economic backgrounds. We moved one of the major events, Marlon James, into April so that UNCG students could benefit from his appearance (which was sponsored by the UNCG University Libraries). I’m also happy to see that we keep expanding into other genres like sports, cooking, and film. I’ll o er one event as a surprise must-see: “The Unmaking of America and the Future of North Carolina,” which combines the history of professional wrestling with the treachery of the North Carolina State Legislature!”

“I’m always happy to be there, and one of the great things about publishing a new book is that you get to go back,” said Wallace.

In a March Triad Business Journal profile, Lampkin called both Scuppernong and independent bookselling in general “in many ways better since before the pandemic.”

Wallace agrees. “When COVID happened, there was a period when I thought a lot of independent bookstores would fail like one in Chapel Hill did when it opened weeks before we went into quarantine. But what happened for others is that book sales went up during Covid, and independent bookstores changed the way the way they sold books, and gave everybody a chance to safely buy them. And so many indy bookstores actually prospered, that may have slacked o now that we’re getting outside more and have less time on our hands at home, but I still think they’re in a stronger position now.”

For more information, check out GreensboroBound.com. !

IAN MCDOWELL is the author of two published novels, numerous anthologized short stories, and a whole lot of nonfiction and journalism, some of which he’s proud of and none of which he’s ashamed of.