Walter Edgar's Journal

Dr. Mark M. Smith, of the University of South Carolina, returns to The Journal to talk about his book The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2014). No other book has looked at the Civil War through the prism of the five senses, or considered their impact on various groups of indviduals. Smith is widely considered America's leading practitioner of the new and burgeoning field of "sensory history." Using engaging accounts from diaries, letters, and journals Smith gives readers a first-hand glimpse of the experience of the Civil War.

Bestselling author Ron Rash returns to Walter Edgar’s Journal to talk about his life and work. He’ll also tell Dr. Edgar about The Ron Rash Reader (USC Press, 2014), the 20th anniversary edition of The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth (USC Press, 2014) as well as his collection entitled Something Rich and Strange (Harper Collins, 2014). And he’ll talk about co-writing the screenplay for the upcoming movie Serena (March, 2015), starring Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper, and based on Rash’s 2008 bestselling novel.

With the passing of former South Carolina Governor James B. Edwards, on December 26, 2014, Walter Edgar's Journal offers an encore of a conversation between Dr. Edgar and the Governor, which first aired in October of 2004.

-Walter Edgar's Journal- Greenville's downtown is widely recognized as one of the best in America. In Reimagining Greenville: Building the Best Downtown in America (The History Press, 2013), authors John Boyanoski and Mayor Knox White tell the story of the careful, deliberate efforts by city and community leaders who banded together to build something special from a decaying city center. Mayor White joins Walter Edgar to share some of this story.

Novelist Sharyn McCrumb talks with Dr. Edgar about her new book Nora Bonesteel’s Christmas Past (2014, Abingdon Press) When someone buys the old Honeycutt house, Nora Bonesteel is glad to see some life brought back to the old mansion, even if it is by summer people. But when the new owners decide to stay in their summer home through Christmas, they find more than old memories in the walls. Nora agrees to help sort things out, and is drawn into a time and place she never expected to revisit.

A product of the industrialized New South, Eugene Healan Thomason (1895–1972) made the obligatory pilgrimage to New York to advance his art education and launch his career. Like so many other aspiring American artists, he understood that the city offered unparalleled personal and professional opportunities for a promising young painter in the early 1920s. Thomason returned to the South in the early 1930s, living first in Charlotte, North Carolina, before settling in a small Appalachian crossroads called Nebo. For the next thirty-plus years, he mined the rural landscape's rolling terrain and area residents for inspiration. Eugene Thomason embraced and convincingly portrayed his own region, becoming the visual spokesman for that place and its people.

In 1954, the U. S. Supreme Court made it's landmark ruling to end segregation in public schools in the case of Brown v. Board of Education. Fifty years on, Dr. Jon N. Hale, of the College of Charleston, and Dr. Millicent E. Brown, of Claflin University, join Dr. Edgar to talk about the road to school desegregation and civil rights in South Carolina.

Rep. James Clyburn drops by to talk with Walter Edgar about his life and career, and about writing his autobiography, Blessed Experiences: Genuinely Southern, Proudly Black.

A city that has nearly five million visitors a year definitely needs a tourism management plan. And Charleston, SC, has one, which has been revised several times since its creation in 1978. Now, it's time to craft a totally new plan, and Historic Charleston Foundation's Katharine Robinson has been tasked with leading the committee responsible. She talks with Walter Edgar about the challenges and opportunities the committee faces in its work.

- All Stations: Fri, Oct 31, 12 pm | News Stations: Sun, Nov 2, 2014 -

Deb Richardson-Moore, a middle-aged suburban mom and journalist was inspired to become a pastor after writing a story exploring God’s call in our lives. Seven years ago, a recent graduate of Erskine Theological Seminary, she took a position as pastor of the non-denominational Triune Mercy Center, an inner-city mission to the homeless in Greenville, S.C. “What I found there absolutely flattened me,” she says. It also inspired her. Today, she and a dedicated staff continue to build a worshiping community that focuses on drug rehab, jobs and housing for the homeless. (Originally broadcast 12/13/13)

In The Hurricane Sisters (2014, Harper Collins), Dorothea Benton Frank again takes us deep into the heart of her magical South Carolina Lowcountry on a tumultuous journey filled with longings, disappointments, and, finally, a road toward happiness that is hard earned. There we meet three generations of women buried in secrets. The determined matriarch, Maisie Pringle, at eighty, is a force to be reckoned with because she will have the final word on everything, especially when she's dead wrong. Her daughter, Liz, is caught up in the classic maelstrom of being middle-aged and in an emotionally demanding career that will eventually open all their eyes to a terrible truth. And Liz's beautiful twenty-something daughter, Ashley, whose dreamy ambitions of her unlikely future keeps them all at odds.

All Stations: Fri, Oct 3, 12 pm | News Stations: Sun, Oct 5, 4 pm

(Originally broadcast 04/18/14) - In his 2013 memoir, The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and his Son, author Pat Conroy admits that his father, Don, is the basis of abusive fighter pilot he created for the title role of his novel, The Great Santini, and that his mother, Peg, and his brothers and sisters have all served as models for characters in The Prince of Tides and his other novels. Now, for the first time, Pat gathers with four of his surviving siblings, Kathy, Tim, Mike, and Jim, to talk about the intersection of “real life” and Pat’s fiction, and what it was like to grow up with “the Great Santini” as a father.

(Originally broadcast 04/04/14) - Pat Conroy, author of The Water is Wide, The Great Santini, The Prince of Tides, The Death of Santini, joins Dr. Walter Edgar for an event celebrating the author’s life; his work; and One Book, One Columbia’s 2014 selection, My Reading Life (Nan A. Talese, 2010). The conversation was recorded before an audience of over 2000, at Columbia’s Township Auditorium, on the evening of February 27, 2014.

All Stations: Fri, 09/12/14, 12 pm | News Stations: Sun, 09/14/14, 4 pmWalter Edgar's Journal:

(Originally Broadcast 02/28/14) - Begun as an open letter to strangers and fellow misfits, The Minus Times grew to become a hand-typed literary magazine that showcased the next generation of American fiction. Contributors include Sam Lipsyte, David Berman, Patrick DeWitt, and Wells Tower, with illustrations by David Eggers and Brad Neely as well as interviews with Dan Clowes, Barry Hannah, and a yet-to-be-famous Stephen Colbert. With sly humor and striking illustrations, The Minus Times has earned a fervent following as much for its lack of literary pretension as its sporadic appearances on the newsstand. All thirty of the nearly-impossible-to-find issues of this improvised literary almanac are now assembled for the first time, typos and all, in The Minus Times Collected, by Hunter Kennedy (Featherproof Books, 2012).

Dr. Melissa Walker is the author of numerous books on the Civil War and is co-editor of Upcountry South Carolina Goes to War (USC Press, 2011). She talks with Dr. Walter Edgar about the role of “plain folk”—especially women—during the war.

In May of 2013, a one-story, rectangular, weatherboard-clad, 19th-century slave cabin was dismantled at the Point of Pines Plantation on Edisto Island, SC, and transferred to the collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, DC. The reconstructed cabin will be on view in the “Slavery and Freedom” exhibition when the museum opens in 2015.

(Broadcast August 23, 2013) - In April of 2013, an Army veteran from South Carolina returned to Okinawa, Japan, for the first time since he fought there in World War II. Retired Col. Ted Bell, 93, went back to the island after more than 67 years, this time with a film crew for South Carolina ETV, shooting part of the upcoming documentary, Man and Moment: Ted Bell and the Ridge.