The Store of Joys: Writers Celebrate the North Carolina Museum of Art's Fiftieth Anniversary

To celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, the North Carolina Museum of Art plans to stage several special events involving all the arts in the state. As a part of this celebration, the Museum invited some of the state's major writers and poets to contribute responses to works from the Museum's permanent collection. The contributors were asked to submit a previously unpublished poem or a work of short fiction or creative nonfiction that connected the written word with the visual representation. The book that evolved from this project includes new works from forty-five writers and poets. Each written piece appears adjacent to a full-color reproduction of the artistic piece which inspired the writer. The anthology includes 19 poems, 13 non-fiction essays, and 13 fiction pieces. For example, Alan Shapiro responded to the image of a victorious hero on an ancient Greek vase by composing a poem about men weeping_and more generally about notions of sexuality, a subject he has examined in his recent work. Inspired by Milton Avery's "Blue Landscape," Lee Smith wove a haunting tale about a lonely little girl named Daisy who finds solace with an "orchard girl" on a nearby ridge. With The Store of Joys, the Museum has created a lasting tribute to its own collection and to the literary genius for which the state has become so well known.