A New Flavorful Edge 

The 10th annual CPCC Spring Literary Festival begins Monday at Central Piedmont Community College, subtitled this year as "A feast for the senses." Every year, the festival blends three or four keynote speakers, loads of workshops and writing programs, and youth activities to make a festival that evinces an appealing grassroots flavor -- inclusive and uncompromising on quality -- that has won the attention and praise of regional lit lovers. This year's festival will also feature the first annual presentation of the Creative Loafing Creative Non-Fiction Award, which will take place Wednesday at 7:30pm. A full schedule of events appears below, as does an interview with food writer John T. Edge, one of this year's keynote speakers. Other keynoters this year are Susan Ludvigson, professor of English and Poet-in-Residence at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, SC; cartoonist-turned-author Doug Marlette; and NC Poet Laureate Fred Chappell.

The prolific Ludvigson's recent collections include To Find the Gold (1990), Everything Winged Must Be Dreaming: Poems (1993), Trinity: Poems (1996), and Sweet Confluence, New and Selected Poems (2000). Her work has also appeared in many prestigious literary journals, and she is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Fulbright, Witter Bynner and Rockefeller Foundations.

Born in Greensboro, NC, keynoter Doug Marlette graduated from Florida State University and began drawing political cartoons for the Charlotte Observer in 1972. He joined New York Newsday in 1989 and now syndicates his cartoons nationwide. He has won almost every major award for editorial cartooning, including the 1988 Pulitzer Prize. Marlette's first novel, The Bridge, was published by HarperCollins in October 2001. He currently lives in Hillsborough, NC, where he lives with his wife and feuds with novelist Allan Gurganus.

Fred Chappell, appointed NC Poet Laureate in 1997, is one of those "writers' writers" whose reputation rises every year. Chappell has authored 14 books of poetry, eight novels, two story collections, a book of criticism, and more. Born in Canton, NC and educated at Duke University, Chappell's career achievements include the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry, the T.S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, the Prix de Meilleur du Livre Etranger from the Academie Francaise, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry of the Yale University Library, and the Leila Lenore Heasley Prize from Lyon College. Chappell's most recent works include the novel, Look Back All the Green Valley (1999), and a book of poetry, entitled Family Gathering (2000).

John T. Edge, columnist for the Oxford American magazine and one of the country's best known culinary writers, is the author of Southern Belly: The Ultimate Food Lover's Companion to the South (Hill Street Press), a loving look at the story of Southern food told through profiles of people, places, and restaurants. Edge is also the author of A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections from the American South, a cookbook nominated for the James Beard Award. Edge is a regular contributor to GQ and Gourmet, and his commentaries are often heard on NPR's "All Things Considered." Edge is the director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, a sort of thinktank for culinary anthropology and an affiliated institute of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. At present, Edge is at work on Map of Dixie on My Tongue, a look at the connection between race and food in the South. We spoke by phone with John T. Edge last week. Here are some excerpts from that conversation.

Creative Loafing: How did you first start writing about food?

John T. Edge: I'm not one of these people who began scribbling on a Big Chief tablet in the third grade. I didn't really know I had it in me until I moved to Oxford, Mississippi in 1996. I was kind of a refugee from corporate America -- I had a corporate job for about nine years selling financial information and all kinds of boring stuff. I guess I shouldn't say that in Charlotte, but nonetheless, I enjoyed the thrill and the ego boost of sales, but I didn't have a true passion for it. I was living in Atlanta at the time, quit my job, sold my house, and moved to Oxford, where you can get a Masters in Southern Studies. That's what I fixed my mind on doing -- getting a Masters in Southern Studies, which is an interdisciplinary study of the American South. When I got here, people were studying the music of the South, the literature of the South, and the religion of the South, and I realized that I could parlay my own interest in food into academic study. I applied that approach to the study of foodways, which is just a fancy-shmancy term for the study of food as culture. I got here and started writing and doing traditional academic papers. At the same time a friend of mine was starting a web magazine in Atlanta called yall.com, and asked me to start writing a few things for them. People seemed to respond well, and I started picking up magazine assignments and it just took off from there.

How did people react when you started placing food in a larger societal context? Did the program down there help with that?

Yeah, that was very much shaped by the program here. This interdisciplinary approach helped me understand that to write about food, it was not enough to say just how darned good that chopped barbecue was, but to understand the interplay between the black and white pit masters of the time. . .to understand how the Good Roads Movement in the South spurred the building of roadside restaurants, which in turn was a catalyst for barbecue culture in the South. I started thinking about those kinds of big questions that have always faced the South, like race, class, and gender and things such as that. So I applied the approach I learned here to writing about food as social history, food as kind of a cultural document, food as a text to be read and to be understood. That sounds sort of pompous, although I don't mean it as such. Although I think this is important stuff, I don't mean to imply that one can't sit down in someplace like the Coffee Cup in Charlotte and figure it out themselves.

In your travels, what do people tend to think of as the quintessential Southern food? Grits? Barbecue pork? Pimento cheese? Moon Pies? Is there a quintessential Southern food?

There are a number of totemic Southern foods, and those include grits. I mean, grits were sort of a passkey to the South when Carter was running for president. There was a flurry of prestige paid to grits. That was an entry to understanding the South. Barbeque functions in that way, fried chicken has functioned in that way -- I think there are dishes that are markers of who we are and what the South is. Pimento cheese would fit that way to a certain extent for me, because it is a curiosity: if you don't need it explained to you, you probably belong.

The book you're working on, Map of Dixie on My Tongue, is a meditation of sorts on race and food in the South. Can you tell us something about it?

This may have something to do with my own upbringing, but I've chosen restaurant culture as my primary means of exploration. When I think about the civil rights movement, one of the surefire catalysts for it was the struggle that began in the state of North Carolina, that took fire in Greensboro, over who could sit down and eat with whom in a restaurant. This kind of intimacy that the sharing of a meal embodies is really interesting to me. I've chosen that as one of my focal points in the book. There's a restaurant in Athens, GA that I've just done a piece on for the Oxford American that will figure into the book that was my hangout when I went to college. It's only in the past few months that I've done a good bit of research and learned the truth and depth of the story that I think I already knew in the back of my mind. That restaurant was an incubator for resistance to the civil rights movement. It was owned at the time I went there -- back in the 60s -- by a woman who was a member of the ladies auxiliary of the KKK. I'm interested in how restaurants function as both incubators of the civil rights movement itself -- you think about a restaurant like Pascal's in Atlanta where Martin Luther King and his lieutenants schemed and planned the events of the civil rights movement -- and then 90 miles away in Athens here's a restaurant where counterattacks were planned. I think that matters and it's important that these events take place in restaurants because they function as kind of de facto clubhouses for groups of people -- a place people call home.

The talk I'm going to do in Charlotte will basically sketch out this book. I've been asked too many times, "So you're a food writer, so what's your favorite restaurant and what's your favorite recipe." I want to help people understand to write about food is to write about the depth of our culture. It's to write about human expression, to write about all these things that matter so deeply. That's what I'm going to try and explain in my talk and whether I pull it off or not, the good folks of Charlotte will be the judge. I hope to help people understand that food really matters. *