Writer of Creative Nonfiction, Fiction, Poetry and Master Photographer
I’ve really enjoyed the emails, texts, posts on social media and responses from readers about Galvanized: The Odyssey of a Reluctant Carolina Confederate. People have sent me copies of documents and photographs, and in some instances, ideas for future blog posts. I love it, and that’s what I started this blog for — to interact…
In my first book, Memory Cards: Portraits from a Rural Journey, I wrote about the three girls who are buried on my parents’ farm, in a small plot near my house. The Winstead sisters, Mamie Harriet, 21; Mary Frances, 18; and Eula Pearl, 9 went swimming in the Tar River during a blistering July heat…
There were a lot of interesting things I ran across while researching Galvanized that either didn’t get much coverage in the book, had to be cut or edited, or just simply weren’t relevant. The story of the Immortal 600 got brief mention in Chapter 13 “Statues of Limitation” because there is a statue in Washington,…
(Feedback used in this post was not solicited. —MKB) Let’s face it, writers have egos. Those egos are fragile and no matter how large, they need feeding. I tell my creative writing students that a writer has to have an ego. If you’re going to put words out in the world for people to read…
One thing about writing a book is that you learn so much. Galvanized was a fun education for me, mostly North Carolina history from the early 1800s through the late 1880s. One of the characters I’d always been fascinated about is Zebulon Vance. Vance was a legislator, governor, senator, and mostly loved by the people…
“‘The Civil War is just as complicated now as the day it started.’ . . . Brantley deftly combines military and social history, a gripping narrative of one private soldier, and his personal struggle to make sense of a savage, fratricidal war and the morally fraught heritage that continues to haunt the South.” —Philip Gerard,…