Culture Surfing

1) Snoop Dogg and Slightly Stoopid perform at the Masquerade.

2) Amanda Gable signs The Confederate General Rides North at Charis Books & More.

3) Whitfield Lovell and Carrie Mae Weems discuss Mercy, Patience and Destiny: The Women of Whitfield Lovell’s Tableux at the Woodruff Arts Center.

4) Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp perform at Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre.

5) Wanda Sykes begins a two-night stint at Uptown Comedy Corner.

See more Atlanta events.

(Photo by Jeff Farsai)

Bookmark It

In the summer of 2001, Amanda C. Gable found the battlefields she’d been looking for. Living for the season as a resident writer of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, she traced out an Atlantic road trip of vital Civil War sites — Appomattox, Manassas, and Gettysburg among them. Walking among the calm grassy fields of silent canons and entrenchments, Gable felt her first novel finally taking a distinct shape. It would be fair to say that Gable doesn’t write quickly, not by anyone’s standards. When The Confederate General Rides North is published this August, it will arrive more than 20 years after Gable first started writing about Katherine McConnell, an utterly complex 11-year-old girl who, on occasion, imagines herself as the Gen. Robert E. Lee.

This narrator, Kat, is as passionate for Civil War history as a preteen girl living in Marietta during the late 1960s could possibly be. She covets the Confederate gray coats and hats, visits Kennesaw Mountain and the Cyclorama with awe, and memorizes dates and famous names, though the violent gravity of slavery and war eludes her. Her historical enthusiasm is as anxiety-inducing for the reader as it is for Kat’s mother, who bristles at the thought of “gruesome” war celebrations and the legacy of “idiot Southern white people.” Her father is less concerned, even supportive and happy that she’s interested in their family history.

Continue reading “Riding North with Amanda C. Gable”

(Image courtesy Scribner)

Bookmark It