Chapel Hill
Nic Brown book release party
The CaveSure as Sherwood, if you write a book consisting of small-town vignettes and sketches, it’ll get compared to Winesburg, Ohio. “So true,” says Chapel Hill’s Nic Brown, whose debut novel, Floodmarkers, unfolds in fictional Lystra, N.C. “I get it all the time.” Thing is, Brown has never read all of Winesburg, most recently abandoning it while knee-deep in Floodmarkers. “I liked the way things were progressing with my own book and was afraid of Sherwood Anderson exerting too much influence on it.” And, despite Brown’s experience as a drummer (he’s played in Athenaeum and Longwave and with Ben Lee), the influence music exerted on the book was indirect at best. “I’ve never formatted any sort of long narrative before, but I have sequenced a bunch of records,” he explains. “Since records usually have around 12 songs on them, I set that as my goal: If I can get 12 stories that I like, it’ll be a book.” There’ll be plenty of music at the book release show, though, from a band consisting of Snuzz (“He’s literate and funny and weird, and, in a way, that’s how I think of my book,” Brown offers), Andy Ware, Sam Frazier and, at times, Brown himself. The free words and songs start at 10 p.m. Rick Cornell
