Close to Home
Revelations and Reminiscences
by North Carolina Authors

edited by Lee Harrison Child

978-0-89587-154-1
0-89587-154-8
$19.95 hardcover
8 1/2" x 8 1/2"
  178 pages black-and-white drawings 

"I used to believe that any thoughts of home worth recording had to include suppertime, rocking chairs, family gatherings, dogs, and sunsets," notes Lee Harrsion Child, former editor of NC Home magazine. "I don't anymore."

Jerry Bledsoe's thoughts of home set his stomach rumbling for barbecue and "fish camp" seafood, both served with that most modest accompaniment, slaw. His twenty fellow authors in Close to Home offer perspectives as varied as the writing that made them famous. Tim McLaurin describes his late-night ritual of closing up the house and checking on his children. Lee Smith examines her association with one of America's definitive college towns, and the haphazard process by which it becomes home. Fred Chappell contemplates his garden. Elizabeth Spencer recalls the "pure ozone" of the Smokies and her rescue from summer camp.

One of Child's favorite duties at NC Home was enlisting some of the South's finest authors to contribute to a column called "Writers Write." Later, judging the work "too good to let go with a single sighting," she decided to request essays from different writers and publish the collection in book form.

What unites the authors in Close to Home is a "willingness to be intimate" about home, a willingness "to tell us what they know of that place and how it makes them feel." Their essays are sometimes funny, sometimes moving, always insightful--but never predictable. As Child says, there's "not a rocking chair among them."

Writers featured in Close to Home include:

about the editor
A Southerner in her soul, Lee Harrison Child has called many paces home. She spent her early years in Camden, South Carolina, started writing at Hollins College in Virginia, survived first employment in Boston, developed a taste for cooking and a love of goat cheese in the south of France, and returned to the American South to rear her three daughters where the air is soft and the light gentle. Home today is Chapel Hill, where she has been editor of North Carolina Homes and Gardens and NC Home.