Get Rosecrans Baldwin some Duke basketball tickets.
Even though he’s a Carolina fan, the Chapel Hill-based writer—whose first novel, You Lost Me There, was released about a month ago—is determined to see a game in Cameron Indoor Stadium.
“I did not, despite promises, get to sit behind Coach K’s wife last year,” Baldwin said. A best friend from high school and now-Duke alumnus had promised Baldwin plum tickets and never delivered—so there’s that.
But why this matters: Basketball is just one facet of Connecticut-native Baldwin’s full immersion into the Triangle, where he’s been living since early 2009. Prior to a house on the southern edge of Chapel Hill, he and his wife lived in New York for seven years and most recently Paris—where Baldwin worked at a graphic design agency for 18 months. He did not know French, and after burning out on big cities, the two decided to return to his wife’s childhood hometown.
“We’ve got this little house we bought in the woods, but we’re ten minutes from Franklin Street,” Baldwin said. “So it has all the cultural stuff that we would miss had we moved more rurally or somewhere else, but allows us to have the sort of isolation and return to nature that we’d been craving.”
Since their arrival, Baldwin’s book has been released, and he’s become a willing member of the Triangle’s thriving, dynamic literary scene. His path, and that of many Durham-Raleigh-Chapel Hill writers, mirrors the one taken by all those students from north of the Mason-Dixon who end up enrolling at Duke.
You Lost Me There is a number of things at once. It’s a love story, with one lover dead before the book’s even begun; a portrait of the brutal grind many modern scientific researchers confront daily in their work; and a tale of Mount Desert Island located off the Maine coast—a place where Baldwin spent much of his youth.
Beyond the funny and colorful prose, narrated by neuroscientist Victor Aaron—an Alzheimer’s researcher obsessed with the brain and memory, he’s fittingly haunted and confused by remembrances of his deceased wife—You Lost Me There affects an impressively knowing air that never turns pedantic. Without ever feeling lectured at or knee-deep in a textbook, the reader learns considerably about both the brain and scientific life.
To nail the factual aspects, Baldwin worked with researchers at Stanford University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke, but in a literary age characterized by Marco Roth’s “rise of the neuronovel,” Baldwin stays focused on the characters rather than trading in any sort of heady discourse. The book was Baldwin’s third attempt at a novel—the first he wrote for practice, and the second gained him an agent and 15 kind rejection letters before he tried to light it on fire.
“It [was] like trying to burn a phone book,” Baldwin said, of his failed attempt to immolate the manuscript; the novel remains, bound and slightly charred, in a Weber grill on Mount Desert Island. “The whole point of that being, when I started on this book, I wanted to write something that would be meaningful to me, no matter what happened to it.”
So he set You Lost Me There on the island that he loved, and this kept him rising early in the mornings, when he does all of his writing. He wrote the novel over the course of four years.
In addition to his fiction, Baldwin is the co-founder, along with Andrew Womack, of the The Morning News, which began as an e-mail newsletter in 1999 and has since grown into a web magazine with 400,000 monthly readers, he said. One of the magazine’s signatures is a March Madness-themed fiction prize, annually pitting the year’s best novels against each other in bracket format, called the “Tournament of Books.”
The tourney demonstrates Baldwin’s involvement in contemporary literature—he cites J.M. Coetzee, Philip Roth, David Mitchell, Chimamanda Adichie, Jennifer Egan and Maile Meloy as some of his favorites—but arriving in Chapel Hill gave him the opportunity to become part of a local scene. In serendipitous coincidences while house-shopping over Craigslist, Baldwin encountered Chapel Hill writer Wells Tower and Duncan Murrell, an instructor at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies, and Murrell soon set up a drinks-night for Baldwin to meet some of the crowd.
Murrell moved to Chapel Hill in 1996 after graduate school to work for the Durham Herald-Sun, and he fondly described experiencing for the first time an intimate community of writers.
“For me it was new. There were writers working up the street from where I was, people I would meet in bars and so forth… seeing Max Steel talk, meeting Bill Henderson, they were very welcoming,” Murrell said. “If you were interested in writing, they were very welcoming. If you were interested in anything, they were very welcoming. It’s just a cool place, man.”
All of a sudden, Murrell had men and women to look up to, people he admired who were doing what he wanted to do: Larry Brown, Allan Gurganus, Doris Betts, Max Steel.
“I had jumped into a place where I was just spoiled with all the people who were just terrific writers, who were very generous to me; that’s important,” Murrell said. “It’s how to live, how to work, how to make a living, how to teach, how to be around other writers, how to be appreciative of the people who read your work—all these people were models for me.”
And the writing life itself—one of necessary solitude and considerable discipline—benefits heavily from a supportive framework of peers. It can get lonely, Murrell said, and being able to call and see people who understand this is indispensable.
Both Murrell and Baldwin stressed two other, location-specific advantages to the Triangle over the great Mecca of literary writing, New York City: It’s radically cheaper, and the atmosphere is healthier, less competitive and more encouraging.
“What’s cool about [the Triangle], what’s different about it: In New York, it’s like, you go to a party, and it’s envy fever—the hives on everyone’s neck as they think about each other’s advances and reviews,” Baldwin said. “It’s nice here. People are low-key, and frankly, are more concerned about their car payments. It’s a supportive, friendly environment.”
And then there’s the charms of the South itself, which Kathy Pories, senior editor at Algonquin Books, emphasized as a major part of what kept her in the area after coming from Cleveland to study at UNC. Algonquin Books itself is a large reason for the Triangle’s literary community: Founded in 1983 in Chapel Hill, the now-national publishing house just put out the 25th edition of the New Stories from the South series, a collection of the best Southern-oriented short stories from each year.
But Pories also praised the unique situation of the Triangle, and the fact that if you drive ten minutes you’re out in the country—an area with a cultural sophistication directly formed and shaped by the South.
“When I came here, it was a big culture shock for me, but it suddenly started to grow on me and I couldn’t leave,” Pories said. “The culture here, to me, is great.”
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