Marianne Gingher
Marianne Gingher has published seven books, both fiction and non-fiction. Her novel Bobby Rex’s Greatest Hit was made into an NBC movie, and she has published widely in magazines and periodicals including the Oxford American, Southern Review, New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Magazine, Veranda, Our State, and O. Her latest books are Adventures in Pen Land, a comic memoir about the writing life, and two anthologies for which she served as editor: Long Story Short, and Amazing Place, both published by UNC Press. Until her recent retirement in July, 2021, she was the Doris Betts Term Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UNC where she taught creative writing and literature for more than four decades and was the recipient of three teaching awards.
In 2009, with writer friend Deborah Seabrooke, she co-founded Jabberbox Puppet Theater and the collaborators wrote, built, and performed salon-style puppet theater in Greensboro, Chapel Hill, the Artscenter in Carrboro, and Wilmington, North Carolina for ten years. Their last play, performed at the Greensboro Bound Book Festival in 2019 was based on Fred Chappell’s latest book of poems, As If It Were, a re-telling of Aesop’s fables with a contemporary spin.
Due to Covid, the little Jabberbox Puppet Theater has gone dark, but there are inklings of some new artistic enterprise in the works, so stay tuned.
Ten Things I Can’t Do Without
- Family, immediate and extended, especially my sons Rod and Sam, friends, good neighbors, and my cat Dewey Moon
- Kindness
- Humor
- My front porch
- Shade trees
- French roast coffee and cabernet sauvignon
- Color and art
- Reading an all-consuming book or watching an all-consuming movie or writing an all-consuming something
- My goofball brother Mark’s daily phone calls
- Mozart and birdsong