Word: creeks
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...surprisingly, Tims Creek is much like Chinquapin, N.C., the impoverished outpost where Kenan grew up "going to hog killings one minute and watching Star Trek the next." He was sent there at six weeks old by his parents, who were unmarried and residing in New York, to be reared by his great-aunt. His upbringing became the collective endeavor of a group of elderly relatives with abiding faith in both religion and folklore who spent endless hours telling fantastical stories--"tales of ghost dogs and people rising from the dead." The residue of these stories has found its way into...
...region's writers and the expectations of readers and critics. It could therefore be construed as an act of either bravado or foolishness that Randall Kenan, who lives in Memphis and was raised in North Carolina, has also constructed a fictional Southern locale, a swampy speck called Tims Creek, N.C. "I could have run," says Kenan, 37, of the inevitable comparisons, "but I'd be spending a lot of energy in vain. It's like the Bible in that sense. Faulkner's language is just a part...
Kenan does not, however, shy away from reinterpreting the sacred texts. While Faulkner explored the remnants of a failed white aristocracy, Kenan is concerned mainly with Tims Creek's black population, descendants of the former slaves who founded the town. This network of working-class families, introduced in his novel A Visitation of Spirits (1989) and the short-story collection Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (1992), recurs in the novel he is currently writing, Fire and the Baptism, due early next year. It is a community clinging to the traditions of the past while grappling with the pressures...
...With reporting by Carole Buia, Amy Lennard Goehner, Georgia Harbison and Benjamin Nugent/New York, Jeanne McDowell and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles, Karen Ann Cullotta/Chicago and Rachele Kanigel/Walnut Creek...
...Sally's room, with its lime green walls, holds a series of bowls she purchased in Senegal, fancy hats and a new addition: a "Dawson's Creek" poster...