Mamas Told Me to Come

Floodmarkers, faux interviews and Como Mamas at Thacker Mountain Radio, November 15

This Thursday, November 15 at 6 p.m., Thacker Mountain Radio welcomes two writers with roots in North Carolina, Nic Brown and Matthew Vollmer. The Como Mamas, a gospel trio, will also perform. Admission is free and the show can be heard on Rebel Radio, 92.1 FM, or online at https://www.myrebelradio.com/live/.
Nic Brown is the author of the novel, Doubles and the story collection Floodmarkers (Counterpoint). By turns trippy, tender and riotous, Doubles follows the washed-up, woozy “Slow” Smith through his return to professional tennis, the ordeal of his wife’s coma and his misadventures with his manager, his tennis partner and his high school crush and her ostensibly lesbian girlfriend. Publisher’s Weekly said the book is “that rare sports novel with big heart and wide appeal.”
In Floodmarkers, Brown concocts an assured series of vignettes focusing on 24 hours in a small North Carolina town in 1989, as Hurricane Hugo is bearing down. The book was selected as an “Editor’s Choice” by the New York Times Book Review. Brown, a former rock and roll drummer, is currently the John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. He lives in Oxford with his wife Abby and their daughter Frances.

Matthew Vollmer is the co-editor of Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, “Found” Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts (Norton). Vollmer and his co-editor David Shields have gathered 40 short fictions: counterfeit texts that capture the barely suppressed frustration and yearning that percolate just below the surface of most official documents. The innovative stories collected in Fakes—including pieces by Ron Carlson (a personal ad), Amy Hempel (a complaint to the parking department), Rick Moody (Works Cited), and Lydia Davis (a letter to a funeral parlor)—trace the increasingly blurry line between fact and fiction and exemplify a crucial form for the 21st century. Vollmer is also the author of the story collection, Future Missionaries of America and inscriptions for headstones, collection of essays. He lives in Blacksburg, Virginia, with his wife Kelly Pender, their son Elijah and boxer Ruby.

The Como Mamas are a capella gospel/soul singers consisting of Ester Mae Wilbour, Angela Taylor and her sister Della Daniels. The trio are cousins who have been singing all their lives. In 2008, they were signed to Daptone Records, which released the CD, Como Now: The Voices of Panola County, MS, which showcases gospel groups from across Panola County including the Mamas. The group’s recent appearances include at the New Orleans Voodoo Fest and at the Bear Creek Festival in Live Oak, Florida.
Join host Jim Dees and Thacker house band, the Yalobushwhackers, this Thursday, November 15 at 6 p.m. at Off Square Books. You can hear the radio show locally Thursday on Rebel Radio (92.1 FM). Tune in to Mississippi Public Broadcasting every Saturday night at 7 pm for Thacker Mountain Radio immediately following A Prairie Home Companion, or listen Saturday online: (https://www.etv.state.ms.us/radio/index.html). More information at www.thackermountain.com.
Check out more details about the dates for the current season.
Thacker Mountain Radio is a live radio show broadcast weekly for 15 years from the Square in Oxford, Mississippi, and rebroadcast every Saturday night on Mississippi public radio.