Columbus State to celebrate Carson McCullers’ 100th birthday with series of events

Columbus State University has announced a series of events, highlighted by the directorial debut of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” actress Karen Allen, to celebrate the 100^th birthday of Carson McCullers, the late award-winning novelist who was born and started her writing career in Columbus.

“Carson at 100: The McCullers Centennial” will culminate on Feb. 19, when Allen will show the first movie she has directed, “A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud,” a short film based on the McCullers story by the same name, although McCullers used periods in her title.

“We are tremendously excited to have Karen Allen partner with us on this celebration,” English professor Nick Norwood, who directs CSU’s Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, said in a news release. “I just returned from visiting the movie set and can confirm that it is going to be a stunningly beautiful film.”

The film is in the post-production phase after being shot June 13-20 in Sandisfield, Mass. The McCullers Center is among the sponsors of the not-for-profit project, which has a budget of $125,000, according to its website.

On the website promoting the film, Allen explains her connection to McCullers.

"I came across this story when I was in my early 20’s,” she said. “As a young actor I was drawn to Carson McCullers as a playwright and novelist at first, and then began to read everything she’d written that I could get my hands on. ‘A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.” always loomed large for me among her many short stories, It is a quiet, subtle, mysterious story. It sneaks up on you and has stayed indelibly etched in my imagination all these years.

“It is a delicate, Zen-like passing of wisdom from an older man to a young boy on a rainy day in a roadside café when their two lives unexpectedly intersect briefly. The story, as I see it, is flooded with the raw, tangible beauty of the natural world, set in contrast to the complex, intangible yearning for love in their interior worlds. I intend to stay very close and true to the story Carson McCullers wrote and to illuminate in the film the characters she has so beautifully drawn in the pages of this story."

Other than appearing with Harrison Ford in the 1981 blockbuster that started the “Indiana Jones” saga of movies, Allen also is known for acting in films such as “The Sandlot” (1993), “Scrooged” (1988), “Starman” (1984) and “National Lampoon’s Animal House” (1978).

The complete schedule for “Carson at 100: The McCullers Centennial” isn’t finished, but several events already are set:

▪  October through February: CSU Schwob Memorial Library’s exhibit of McCullers archive material.

▪  Jan. 15 through Feb. 19: Art installation at the Smith-McCullers House, 1519 Stark Ave., her childhood home now containing the McCullers museum, a literary-event space and a residence for visiting writers, artists and scholars as part of the Southern Literary Trail.

▪  Jan. 17 through Feb. 25: Exhibit about McCullers in the Illges Gallery at the CSU Corn Center for the Visual Arts, including opening reception Feb. 7 from 5:30 to 7 p.m.

▪  Jan. 28 through April 9: Columbus Museum exhibit about McCullers, including the opening reception Feb. 2, although the time hasn’t been announced.

▪  Feb. 7: Norwood’s lunchtime lecture about McCullers at the museum.

▪  Feb. 19: On the 100^th anniversary of McCuller’s birth, Allen’s film will debut, 4 p.m., in the Bill Heard Theatre at the RiverCenter for the Performing Arts.

All of the events will be free and open to the public, Norwood told the Ledger-Enquirer.

The art installation at the Smith-McCullers House will be called “The Back Alley Project” and, Norwood explained, “will consist of a textile facsimile of the back fence” at the house, “accompanied by text plaques describing the culture of the back alley in Columbus during Carson McCullers' childhood. That culture figures prominently in several of McCullers' works, especially ‘The Member of the Wedding.’”

Also to coincide with the McCullers Centennial, her novel “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” will be CSU’s Common Read for all incoming first-year students and the Chattahoochee Valley Libraries’ Big Read for the community Jan. 15 through Feb. 28.

McCullers was born Lula Carson Smith on Feb. 19, 1917, in Columbus. The Georgia Encyclopedia considers her among the most significant American writers of the 20^th Century.

She wrote five novels: “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,” “Reflections in a Golden Eye,” “The Member of the Wedding,” “The Ballad of the Sad Café,” and “Clock Without Hands.” She also wrote two plays, 20 short stories, more than two dozen nonfiction pieces, a book of children’s verse, several poems and an unfinished autobiography, according to the center’s website. At least four films based on her work have been produced.

In 1934, at age 17, McCullers moved to New York City, supposedly to study piano at the Juilliard School of Music but actually to pursue her secret ambition to write, according to the news release. Working various jobs to support herself, she studied creative writing at New York's Columbia University and at Washington Square College of New York University, the release said. She continued her writing career in a house in Nyack N.Y., which was gifted to CSU as part of the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians. She died from a stroke at age 50.

In her obituary on the front page of The New York Times on Sept. 30, 1967, Eliot Fremont-Smith wrote, "It is not so much that the novel (“The Heart is a Lonely Hunter”) paved the way for what became the American Southern gothic genre, but that it at once encompassed it and went beyond it.”

According to the center’s website, in addition to the New York Drama Critics Circle and Donaldson awards for her play “The Member of the Wedding” (1950), McCullers also received two Guggenheim fellowships (1942, 1946), an Arts and Letters Grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1943), and various other awards and honors. McCullers was inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1952.

This story was originally published July 11, 2016 at 2:29 PM with the headline "Columbus State to celebrate Carson McCullers’ 100th birthday with series of events."