Charlotte Lit’s Blog

Welcome to Charlotte Lit’s literary arts blog. What you’ll find here: reviews, interviews, craft essays, previews of literary arts events, and anything else that catches our attention.

Horizons

Once I wrote “The distance to the horizon is a fierce happiness,” and I believe it’s true.  I had a good friend once who was a fine painter, and a series of paintings he did right before he retired from the art department inspired me so much that I wrote tiny stories about the characters […]

Rewriting Southern Traditions

LAKE HARTWELL, SOUTH CAROLINA By Beth Gilstrap   It’s past lunch hour and Grandmother is still wearing her housecoat. Tings and sprays bounce from the stovetop. A glimmer of steam gathers on her upper lip, not sweat, mind you—not sweat. The peonies on the fabric are wide and heavy pink, like they’d fall over if […]

Five Steps Every Author Needs to Take Before Finishing a Manuscript

In 2016, after six years of writing, I finally finished my first manuscript. I truly believed that writing a book was the most difficult part of becoming an author. No one told me selling a book is tougher than writing one. It is almost as if I believed, “If I write it, they will come.” […]

That Fragile Moment

We are always at the beginning of things, in the fragile moment that holds the power of life….we are always at the morning of the world. I often think of this quotation by the Chinese-born French writer François Cheng, but especially in the morning. This is indeed the most “fragile moment” for me as a […]