The Novelist's Journey

Angela Davis-Gardner is a Southern writer, but that doesn't mean she sets all her stories in the South: Her novels take place in Nova Scotia, Illinois and Japan, as well as North Carolina.

She grew up in Greensboro, earned degrees from Duke and UNC-Greensboro, and lives in Raleigh. "My family was unusual — not typical Southerners — so I never felt I had anything Southern to write about," Davis-Gardner says. "I thought I was supposed to write like Eudora Welty, but it just didn't work."

Davis-Gardner will be the William Blackburn Visiting Fiction Writer-in-Residence at Duke April 1-7 and will give a public presentation April 6 called "The Novelist's Journey." She will discuss the writing process and read from her latest novel, Plum Wine, and her novel-in-progress.

"I am delighted that someone who has been writing and publishing such good fiction, but to a certain degree under the radar, has come into considerable prominence," says Joe Porter, professor of English and chair of the English Department's creative writing committee. "We're seeing her at a moment of blossoming."

Davis-Gardner is the first William Blackburn Writer to have been a student of the noted Duke professor of English and creative writing for whom the program is named, Porter says.

"William Blackburn changed my life," Davis-Gardner says. "He gave me excellent criticism and a lot of encouragement at a time when I didn't have much confidence. And that has sustained me over the years."

Plum Wine features a young Southern woman named Barbara who is teaching English in Japan in the 1960s. It begins when she receives a mysterious inheritance from her Japanese surrogate mother: a chest full of bottles of homemade plum wine, each one wrapped in paper covered with Japanese writing. Barbara finds a translator to help her decipher the papers, setting in motion a complex love affair played out in the context of wars past and present.

Like the protagonist of Plum Wine, Davis-Gardner lived and taught in Japan as a young woman. Her novel-in-progress, tentatively titled Butterfly's Child, is set in Japan and Illinois.

Dial Press is publishing Plum Wine in paperback this month and will reissue her first two books, Felice and Forms of Shelter, in the fall.

The commercial success of Plum Wine has allowed Davis-Gardner to retire from full-time teaching at North Carolina State University to concentrate on her writing.

"It's a golden time for me," she says.