Friday from the Archives: “Freedom and Power: A Talk with Zelda Lockhart” by Sara Whitestone from NCLR Issue 21 (2012)
We are looking forward to catching up with many of our writer friends at the North Carolina Writers’ Network Spring Conference in Greensboro on April 22. We are also hopeful that the writers attending who we haven’t previously published will submit their work to us, too!
In our 2012 issue, we published an interview with Zelda Lockhart, writer, poet, and teacher. Lockhart will be leading a session entitled “Before You Publish That Book: The Key to Pre-Sales,” a critical skill for any writer these days. We imagine her session will be full of encouraging words, much as this interview was.
“How do you integrate writing into your everyday life no matter how busy you are?” Lockhart poses in the interview, then answers: “You do that by removing the notion that you have to have a particular instrument with which to get the work done. You can have a crayon and a napkin. You can have toilet paper in the bathroom. You can have a Post-it note. You can have anything.”
She is a firm believer that it is a writer’s own truth which comes out on the page and to change that truth for someone else’s comfort denigrates the story itself. She explains, “We don’t know who might need our creations. We don’t know who needs them for food, for medicine, or for kinship. So the minute we change the organic nature of it, we change the organic ecology of who called for it.”
Read the whole interview in the 2012 issue, featuring “North Carolina Literature into Film,” available on ProQuest. The issue has limited availability so order for your collection.
