Author to visit Hartsville for two events Tuesday

Southern author and 2009 Georgia Author of the Year for Fiction Jack Riggs will be in Hartsville from noon to 2 p.m. Tuesday for a luncheon co-hosted by Burry Bookstore and Black Creek Arts Council where the author will discuss his latest novel “The Fireman’s Wife.” At 7 p.m. Tuesday night, Coker College will host a Meet the Author event at Coker College in the C.W. Coker Auditorium in Davidson Hall. Riggs will speak and sign copies of his book afterwards. Admission to the Coker College event is free.

Tickets for the luncheon, held at the Gallery at Black Creek Arts Center, 116 W. College Ave., are $25 and include the book, lunch catered by Biizzell’s Food and Spirits and the opportunity to chat with Riggs and have your copy of the book personalized. Tickets may be purchased at Burry Bookstore and Black Creek Arts Center.

“The Fireman’s Wife,” Riggs’ second work of fiction, was released in 2008. This novel is set in the Lowcountry of South Carolina and the mountains of North Carolina.

In a telephone interview, Riggs said the character in his latest book is not based on anyone; however, it is dedicated to a writer and good friend of his, Larry Brown, who had been a fireman in Mississippi.

Riggs said he had the idea of writing about a fireman before he started reading his friend’s memoirs as a fireman. As he wrote, the story took a different direction and became the story of a fireman’s wife.

“When the Finch Rises” (Ballantine 2003), Riggs first novel, has been compared to the classics “A Separate Peace” and “To Kill a Mockingbird” for its themes of redemption and salvation and has earned Riggs the Georgia Author of the Year Award for First Novel. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution named it one of the year’s top Southern novels. This novel is set in 1968 and is about two boys growing up in a fictitious mill town in North Carolina.

Raised in the small town of Lexington, N.C., Riggs holds an MFA in creative writing from UNC-Greensboro. He also earned a master’s in film from the University of Michigan and spent 10 years in Los Angeles working as an assistant director and for HBO. Riggs said he mostly worked on video projects so that he would have time to write. He helped produce the music videos for the Guns and Roses songs “Welcome to the Jungle” and “Sweet Child of Mine.”

The author went to California to be a screenwriter and hopefully to one day direct his own screenplays, but as he wrote, what Riggs discovered was his talent was for writing fiction.

“What I discovered as I struggled to become a screenwriter was I enjoyed writing fiction,” Riggs said.

He decided to take a course in creative writing at UCLA.

“It was a moment of grace,” Riggs said, as he suddenly knew what it was he needed to do.

He came home to the South. He said he thought he was looking for an excuse to head back this direction.

Riggs moved to the Atlanta area because that is where he found a teaching job. He is writer-in-residence at the Writer’s Institute of Georgia Perimeter College in Atlanta and lives in Decatur, Ga., with his wife and two children.

To find out more about the author and his works, visit his Web site at www.jackriggs.nety.
Info: Luncheon, (843) 332-2511 or e-mail burrybooks@msn.com.