‘Paradise will be some kind of library’: Carden cements legacy with historic library donation
Gary Carden. File photo
Gary Carden has accomplished a great deal in his life. But by his own estimation, none of it compares to his most recent endeavor — donating a treasure trove of books to the Jackson County Public Library that took him a lifetime to collect.
“They’re not gonna remember me because I wrote plays and they’re not gonna remember me for the books I wrote. I won’t be remembered for any of that. I want to be remembered for leaving those books to the library. That’s the most important thing I did,” said Carden. “That’s the best thing I ever did in my whole life.”
According to Jackson County Librarian Tracy Fitzmaurice, Carden donated a couple thousand books to the library on a wide range of topics.
“The highlight, from the library’s perspective, is Gary had a pretty wide array of writings about indigenous folks across the nation,” Fitzmaurice said. “He also had a lot of folklore, some of them probably out of print, and very good histories from different cultures of folklore and myth that will be very popular with patrons and very useful.”
Some of the rarer items will be kept in the library as reference materials, and others will be available for normal circulation.
“Those are some that we’re really, really excited about,” said Fitzmaurice. “A lot of North Carolina history, folklore, all those things that Gary called upon in his writing over the years.”
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Carden has had a long and storied career in the arts, teaching literature and drama, winning the Appalachian Writers Association Book of the Year award for a 1999 collection of stories called “Mason Jars in the Flood,” and writing and producing multiple plays, one of which became a feature film on PBS.
In 2006, Carden was the recipient of the Brown-Hudson Award from the North Carolina Folklore Society, and in 2012, he was given the North Carolina Award for Literature. He holds an honorary doctorate from Western Carolina University for his work in storytelling and folklore.
The idea for the book donation was first sparked more than 50 years ago when Carden was working at Lees-McRae College in Banner Elk, and where his best friend worked as the librarian.
“I’ve always loved libraries; I’ve always been crazy about them,” Carden said. “I stayed in the library with him most of the time that I was there.”
But Carden’s love of books goes back even further to a time when there was little else to turn to. Little else to comfort him.
“I was obsessed, as a child, with funny books. I had several hundred and I stayed locked up in the back bedroom with them,” said Carden. “I had a lousy childhood because I was raised by my grandparents.”
Born in Sylva in 1935, Carden’s father was murdered at a gas station he ran in Moody Bottom just a year later. His mother, herself a child of severe physical abuse, left town when Carden was just two years old.
“The nicest way I can say it is, when I grew up in this house with my grandparents and uncles, I always felt like I was visiting,” said Carden, who still lives in that same house. Though now, instead of grandparents and uncles, the walls are covered in floor to ceiling bookshelves and the place is populated with an array of painting canvases and friendly cats.
His father’s parents adopted Carden and in a house that never quite felt like home, he found refuge in books, radio and his own imagination.
“I read constantly,” said Carden. “There came a time in my life when, instead of Superman and Batman and Submariner, I had King Arthur. You know, you graduated to folklore. And I just got worse, got more addicted.”
Carden’s grandparents looked at his love of books and his vivid imagination with fear and concern and sometimes even disgust, constantly telling him he was “queer” and “not too bright.”
“That’s the way they raised me, and that’s what they thought of me,” Carden said. “But I did have books, and I love books, and I love the library.”
Some of Carden’s brightest early memories are of afternoons spent in the library, a slice of his life that he says set him up for success in his future career.
“All of it came from the library,” said Carden. “I read everything I could get and listened to radio drama and I became a schoolteacher and I became a playwright and I wrote plays and they were produced, and all that was wonderful.”
After high school, Carden received a scholarship to attend Western Carolina University as a day student, and eventually got a job in the cafeteria to earn enough money to stay on campus. At WCU he worked for the newspaper and got involved in theater and after playing the lead in “The Glass Menagerie,” he was hooked. There was no looking back.
But Carden credits his prolific, cross-genre career, to some extent, to his upbringing.
“Those of us who did not have a mother and father, we are fantastic teachers,” Carden said. “But you will always have the sneaking suspicion that you are worthless. You only win to have to win again, and again, for the rest of your life. You’ll always have to prove to yourself that you’re important. For what it’s worth, your life made you a storyteller.”
For Carden, passing along a carefully curated set of thousands of books to the public library is just one more win in a long string of wins. A way of cementing his legacy and giving back to his community in a way that may be more concrete than any of his other accolades or accomplishments.
“Some authors leave their stuff to university libraries, but for Gary to leave it in the public arena, it’s just more accessible. People are more likely to come here,” said Fitzmaurice. “We see the whole spectrum of the community.”
Most of Carden’s collection will be displayed in a barrister case alongside several of his awards, storytelling posters and playbills that are already exhibited in the library. And for this Jackson County native, this Appalachian great, this literary stalwart, there couldn’t be a better place to know he will rest in perpetuity.
“One of my favorite writers was a librarian in Argentina,” said Carden. “His name is Jorge Luis Borges. I’ve never forgotten this, he said, ‘I’ve always felt that paradise was some kind of library.’”
