BY TUCKER REILLY, MANAGING EDITOR
St. Bonaventure University hosted a keynote speaker this week, as a part of the All Bonaventure Reads (ABR) program. Nora Shalaway Carpenter, editor of the anthology “Rural Voices,” spoke to an audience of freshmen, faculty and others from the Reilly Center court on Oct. 20. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Carpenter was the first in-person ABR speaker since Jose Antonio Vargas – author of “Dear America” – in 2019. Austin Channing Brown, author of 2020 ABR book “I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness,” gave her speech last October via Zoom.
“Rural Voices” is a collection of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction essays from 15 authors of varying backgrounds. The anthology features pieces from rural communities across the country. Carpenter, who grew up in West Virginia, focused much of her presentation on the numerous stereotypes ascribed to people from rural areas.
“I grew up on an isolated mountain ridge in West Virginia. My closest neighbor was a mile away, the town had 1000 citizens and no stoplights,” said Carpenter. “We had no fast food, still don’t. It hit hard, when we were trying to sell the book; so far people hadn’t cared, or only did insofar as rurality was a thing someone could be made fun of for.”
When Carpenter first began requesting work for the book, she realized the vagueness of the term “rural,” and sought to define the landscape that she and others called home.
“I had to come up with a definition for the term, which was harder than I thought,” said Carpenter. “Rural refers to a community of 10,000 or less that is a significant drive away from an urban area, that’s an important thing to understand.”
The second half of Carpenter’s speech covered her own origins as a writer and the development of her voice. Carpenter described the encouragement she received from friends and professionals when conceptualizing “Rural Voices.”
“It mattered more to me than to my friends, that I wasn’t an established writer or an academic; those are the people that write anthologies,” said Carpenter. “But we needed rural stories, and nobody else had done it yet.”
After Carpenter’s presentation concluded, a short question-and-answer period was held. Students were then given the opportunity to meet Carpenter outside of the Bonaventure Bookstore and have their copies of “Rural Voices” signed. Carpenter’s next book, titled “Ab(solutely) Normal,” is slated for release in 2023.
reillyt19@bonaventure.edu
