Mr. Will Garland, Montverde Academy Upper School English teacher/Department Chair, has been included in a new literary anthology Found Anew: Poetry and Prose Inspired by the South Caroliniana Library Digital Collections. According to Mr. Garland, “…the idea behind this book was to have a group of writers with close ties to South Carolina to comb through the University of South Carolina’s extensive digital archived collection of South Carolina photographs from the past century and then respond to one of them. The photographs comprise the full collections of some of the state’s most prominent photographers, and were of an array of subjects, including landscapes, formal portraits, and snapshots of everyday life in South Carolina.”
Mr. Garland’s contribution is a second-person essay entitled “The Art of Telling a Story about a Southern Family Living in a Small Southern Town” and was published by The University of South Carolina Press. The anthology includes work from two National Book Award Winners, Guggenheim Fellows, the South Carolina Poet Laureate, best-selling authors that have had their work featured as an Oprah Book Club pick, and writers that have been included in most recent edition of Best American Short Stories. The book’s introduction asks, “What would happen if writers located an image, without knowledge of historical context, and simply wrote in response to it? We invited writers to this book project with more questions than goals. What would writers see in these collections? How would they approach the idea of ‘using’ an image? How would they decide on an image to use? Would writers be inspired to create a response or would they feel compelled to invent what they felt was missing?”