{"id":635,"date":"2013-12-15T11:12:00","date_gmt":"2013-12-15T16:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ncseagrant.ncsu.edu\/coastwatch\/?page_id=635"},"modified":"2024-09-26T12:31:08","modified_gmt":"2024-09-26T16:31:08","slug":"qa-with-georgann-eubanks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ncseagrant.ncsu.edu\/coastwatch\/qa-with-georgann-eubanks\/","title":{"rendered":"Q&A WITH GEORGANN EUBANKS"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n\n
Georgann Eubanks is author of all three books in the North Carolina Literary Trails series. She is a writer, teacher and consultant to nonprofit groups. Director of the Table Rock Writers Workshop, she was a founder of the North Carolina Writer’s Network and is past chair of the North Carolina Humanities Council. Her latest project is the North Carolina River Writers \u2014 a series of public interviews with North Carolina writers that look at how North Carolina’s rivers have inspired stories, novels, plays and poems. Here, Eubanks chats about her travels in eastern North Carolina, what influence place has on writers and how she thinks readers can best use her guidebooks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You don’t have to start at the beginning. People have told me that they will look up a place they know they’re going to visit and read in advance about what’s there. If they have time to plan ahead, they might check out a book or two that is mentioned on a tour \u2014 something they can read while there. I think a lot of people have used the tours vicariously \u2014 to experience the sites in their imaginations while sitting comfortably in an armchair. But the books are meant to serve as guides to things both seen and unseen, like a map. If you want to delve deeper, go to the library and keep reading from an excerpted author whose work interests you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Writers tend to be people who have a knack for putting into words what they are seeing, feeling, smelling and tasting. Good writing recreates experience. The excerpts from writers along the Literary Trails are intended to help you see more, look harder and appreciate the history of a place. And there are places in North Carolina where the history is almost palpable. Walking through the Elizabethan Gardens in Manteo \u2014 even though they are a recent development \u2014 you can look out across the water where the first colonists came in and marvel at their hardship. Or you can step right into the Dismal Swamp and feel the forbidding quality of the landscape there \u2014 the cypress knees, the mosquitoes. Suddenly it is possible to imagine the terror of the enslaved people who chose to run into those woods and hide rather than remain in bondage. Those are some forbidding, thick and dangerous woods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n