For The Daily Southerner
TARBORO —
"Liza Wieland understands down to the bone how loneliness and love compel her characters to make their impossible choices. Not only does she have a searing intelligence and wisdom, her prose is by turns graceful and astonishing."
— Jane Hamilton, author of "A Map of the World"
Novelist Liza Wieland pays close attention to the world around her. To be in her company is to watch a novelist on the job: her eyes are constantly at work, slowly gauging the room as she takes in whispered conversations in corners and silent looks between strangers thought to be unwatched. She’s engaged in her surroundings, trained or compelled to absorb the small details of life necessary to any novelist’s success.
And Wieland is also watching the larger world as it suffers through the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. Her novels include reworked looks at the family dynamics of a domestic terrorist ("Bombshell") and the tragedies of lost children in Atlanta ("The Names of the Lost"). She uses actual characters – the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and the victims of Atlanta child murderer Wayne Williams – from history, but her imaginative energy changes them and the people around them into fictional corollaries to history. The events are familiar, but used for her own artistic purposes; she brings the hard-to-comprehend cruelties of major events into the smaller understandable framework of relationships gone wrong.
And Tarboro will see and hear her art on Saturday at 7 p.m. as part of The Sketchy Happening Reading Series. This is the third event in the series and follows readings by poet Al Maginnes and fiction writers Jason Brown and Stephen Jackson.
Recent East Carolina University creative writing graduate Jenna Miller will also read at the Saturday event.
Wieland was born in Chicago and grew up in Atlanta, but lives now in Greenville and near Oriental. She is currently at work on a novel that begins with the D-Day invasion at Normandy and follows her characters through the 1980s.
She has published three novels, "The Names of the Lost" (Southern Methodist University Press, 1992), "Bombshell" (SMU, 2001) and "A Watch of Nightingales," (University of Michigan Press, 2009), two collections of short fiction, "Discovering America" (Random House, 1994) and "You Can Sleep While I Drive" (SMU, 1999), as well as a book of poems, "Near Alcatraz" (Cherry Grove, 2005). A third collection of short fiction, "QUICKENING," is forthcoming from SMU next spring.
Sketchy Happening events take place at 104 1/2 E. Saint James St. and are always free to the public.
Wieland’s books will be available for purchase and she’ll be happy to sign her books as well, but watch what you say or you’ll wind up in a future novel.
