• The Wheel of Time
• Kirk Jones
• Meet Your Dead Neighbors
• Jeff Mapes
• My First Movie

Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series lives on thanks to his wife Harriet McDougal and writer Brandon Sanderson.

by Nick Smith April 14, 2010

In Robert Jordan’s fantasy world, wars raged, Trollocs and Halfmen ravaged the land, and the forces of Light and Dark faced off for a final battle. It was a world of wonder that held millions of armchair adventurers enthralled for almost two decades.

But then Jordan’s time on this earth ended, and the inhabitants of his world ceased to breathe. It seemed that the Last Battle would not be chronicled.

But like all great heroes, Jordan’s protagonists refused to die. Over the course of 11 hefty Wheel of Time books, he’d encouraged a huge fanbase to explore and embellish his world on the internet, in comic books, RPGs, video games and music. Sites sprang up with names like Age of Legends, Theoryland, and WOTmania. And one fan would post a eulogy so touching that it captured the attention of Jordan’s widow and series editor, Harriet McDougal.

To the 44 million readers who bought a Wheel of Time book, Jordan was a cross between Tolstoy and Tolkien, a writer of hardcore fantasy fiction who created a believably complex mythos packed with warriors, magic, and prophesies. To McDougal and other residents of the polite pocket of calm that is Charleston, he was just plain ole Jim Rigney.

McDougal, a kind-hearted film buff with streaks of white gilding her dark hair, says that the couple purposely chose to live off the radar of the New York publishing pundits. “If you listen to [all their praise] it makes you crazy,” she says.

By contrast, Charlestonians tended to treat Rigney like a regular fellow. When his first Wheel of Time best-seller The Eye of the World came out in 1990, they would greet him with, “Hi Jim, are you still writing?” While McDougal admits that they could have lived a quiet life anywhere if they’d chosen, Charleston was their home and a place where Rigney could work at his own, often breakneck, pace. Every day he would get up, have breakfast, then pad down the yard to his desk in his carriage house. The pages he forged there were packed with intense battle scenes, dense interwoven plots, and a vast cast of characters. This material was tempered by McDougal, Rigney’s assistant Maria Simons, and series continuity manager Alan Romanczuk.

In 2006 Rigney announced that he had a rare medical disorder called cardiac amyloidosis, caused by a build-up of amyloid protein in the heart. The average life expectancy for someone with his condition was four years. In that time, he would do his best to finish The Wheel of Time saga with one more book. Eighteen months later, he was gone.

Rigney had worked so hard and for so long to wind up his saga that his widow felt it was her mission to see the series finished. “My husband left a tremendous amount of material,” McDougal says. “My duty is to that above all.” The author had made outlines and copious notes, along with about 50,000 words for at least one more book. Some chapters were finished, merely requiring an edit by McDougal. Some scenes were fully defined. As his illness progressed, he’d told an oral version of the story, which was recorded on tape by his friends and family. This enabled McDougal to create a comprehensive outline of his planned final book. But these breakdowns and fragments still had to be inserted into a complete novel by a new writer, with Rigney’s notes as a thorough guideline.

Near the end of 2007, McDougal found a strong candidate when she read a eulogy blogged by a 31-year-old fantasy writer named Brandon Sanderson.

“I thought it was wonderful,” says McDougal. “It was very loving. I wondered if he was any good.” She checked out Mistborn, Sanderson’s 2006 novel. After 45 pages, she fell asleep.

But when McDougal woke up, his characters and all the book’s elements were perfectly clear in her mind. She’d found her guy.

Sanderson says, “Like most fans of the series, I was just shocked and saddened that Jim Rigney wasn’t going to be there to finish it himself.” He adds, “About a month after his passing, I woke up one morning and found that I had a voicemail. I listened to it, and it said, ‘Hello, Brandon Sanderson, this is Harriet McDougal, Robert Jordan’s widow. I’d like you to call me back. I’ve got something I want to talk to you about.’ ”

Sanderson wasn’t sure how to take it at first. The author was certain that someone was playing a joke on him. Then he started to shake nervously at the thought that it might not be a prank. “When I got hold of her, I found out that she was looking at me as one of the candidates to finish The Wheel of Time. I hadn’t applied for this or anything like that.”

Even though Sanderson had never met Rigney, he considered him a mentor. “I had read a lot of his books when I was trying to decide how to write myself, and he strongly influenced what I produced. But I didn’t know him personally, and that’s what dumbfounded me when I got the phone call,” recalls Sanderson. “I was absolutely stunned. I’m afraid I stammered a bit when I told her I would be honored to be considered; in fact, a while after I got off the phone I sent her an e-mail that started, ‘Dear Harriet, I promise I’m not an idiot.’ ”

Sanderson felt honored and overwhelmed at the same time. Although he was a respected and prolific fantasy writer with a growing career, his name on a Wheel of Time book would introduce him to hordes of new readers and send him to the top of the best-seller lists for weeks. But he would have to take time off from his own ambitious epics, and he faced a huge challenge: To be true to Jordan’s work while retaining his own distinctive style.

Sanderson wrestled with the question for a long time before deciding that he would concentrate on keeping the character voices authentic and consistent. “We don’t want these stories to become about Brandon,” he says, “but in the same way, the original Wheel of Time books … weren’t about Jim. They were about the story and the characters. As long as I can make the characters feel right and do the story the right way, I think it will turn out all right.”

Sanderson made it his “prime directive” to make sure the characters sounded like their old selves. “My second rule was that if Jim said it, the default is to do it as he said, to put it in as he said. And then rule No. 3 is that I can contradict rule No. 2 if it’s necessary for the storytelling.”

By considering these three rules, Sanderson ensured that Rigney’s story was told consistently. “I’m continually going back and reading Jim’s original notes and his previous books,” says the author, “balancing that with looking at what I think he was trying to do, what he said he was trying to do, and what would make the best story. In some cases I trust my instincts as a writer, and in other cases I just say, ‘This is what Jim said. We’re doing it.’ I can’t really tell you where I draw the line, when I do one or the other. Oftentimes when the situation comes up, I’ll write to Harriet and her assistants and say, ‘What do you think?’ ”

McDougal’s association had its own complications. As the book progressed, she would send her reactions to Sanderson. These didn’t always equate with his own ideas or those of Simons and Romanczuk. “I’ve learned not to do that horrible thing to Brandon,” she says. “Three different people were giving him different reactions. We weren’t all on the same page.”

Nevertheless, Sanderson pushed on, producing hundreds of thousands of words in a matter of months. He knew that if he succeeded, he would be set for life. If he dropped the ball, he’d disappoint a legion of fans. He felt that it was his job to please as many of them as possible, because this was as much their project as his. Without their intense desire to see the saga completed, there would be no sequel.

The new novel, The Gathering Storm, follows central characters Rand al’Thor and Egwene al’Vere. Rand prepares for the Last Battle while Egwene attempts to reunite the inhabitants of the White Tower under her rule. An attack by Seanchan forces is inevitable. Both protagonists try to piece together the fragmented factions around them in preparation for the great conflict to come.

One million copies of the book were printed for its launch on Oct. 27, 2009. It shot to the top of The New York Times best-seller list, with sales encouraged by a 25-city book tour. Sanderson thought he’d feel out of place and disoriented at the first signing. Rigney’s printed “autograph” was included in the book because Sanderson “felt that it would seem really strange to be signing a Wheel of Time book without his signature also there.” Sanderson didn’t feel as overwhelmed as he expected. “I guess that’s because I had just spent 18 months to two years living in this world and living in these books.”

He’d poured so much blood and sweat into The Gathering Storm that he’d earned the right to be a part of its promotion. “I still don’t claim the book as my own,” he says. “The book is Jim’s. And yet there’s a whole lot of me in there, and because of that, it felt right in a way. I didn’t think that it ever would.”

McDougal had gone on tour many times with her husband, where she says she “just lurked in the back.” Sometimes she would find a book to read in the store they were visiting, get through a chapter, then continue reading with another copy in the next town. Every now and again people would track her down and ask, “Are you Harriet? Would you sign my book?”

With Rigney gone, McDougal found herself front and center at The Gathering Storm events. “The tour was amazing,” she says. “It was awful to be out there without my husband. At the same time, people were so kind. They said, ‘Thank you for finishing the series. Thank you for Robert Jordan.’”

“Harriet’s a trooper,” says Sanderson. “I tried to be as respectful as was possible, letting her take the lead.” At some of the signings, if McDougal was present, he would ask her to do the reading. “That was really fun,” he says. “Harriet was in control, though there were some hard times for her. Most of them came during the process of working on the book. When it was time to go out and promote the book, I think she just put her best face forward, and I didn’t really see any of the troubles that I’m sure she was feeling.”

Sanderson acknowledges what a terrible thing it is to lose someone close to you, “yet at the same time, Jim’s writing was part of what drew them together in the first place. So I think I saw her finding a bit of solace in it.”

The Wheel of Time fans are very vocal and some diehards were resistant to reading a new book with a different authorial voice. But the tone and characters were so consistent with the early novels that the response was generally positive.

“I don’t think you can find a fan reception about anything that is all positive,” Sanderson reflects. “I’ve certainly never seen one. Not everyone liked the book, but not everyone liked Jim’s books. Heck, not everyone likes Hamlet. That’s just the way we are as people. There is no way to please everyone.”

The writer knows it’s important to listen to the fans. “There are some one-star reviews out there, [but feedback] has been overwhelmingly positive. I very much appreciate hearing that I’m on the right course. I hope I can make the next two books turn out as well.”

Those two books will be Towers of Midnight (scheduled for November 2010) and A Memory of Light (November 2011). Rigney’s single concluding volume has become three because there’s just too much story to cram into one book; 750,000 words would be impossible to bind. “Even Jordan couldn’t have written everything he left in one volume, although he thought he could,” said McDougal in a Dragonmount blog. “But you recall that he thought he could write the entire Wheel in six volumes.”

Although Sanderson produced A Gathering Storm quickly and efficiently, McDougal understands that the ending can’t be rushed. She quotes from the Jack Nicholson movie Wolf: “If you push a deadline, you get a first draft,” she says. “If Brandon needs the time, he needs the time. It’s gotta be good.”

Meanwhile she’s under contract to develop a Wheel of Time encyclopedia, and Rigney is the focus of The Wit of the Staircase, a documentary by local filmmaker Hunter Wentworth, son of South Carolina poet laureate Marjory Wentworth. The series continues to gain new admirers, and there are ongoing rumors of TV and film adaptations.

Beyond meeting the expectations of readers old and new, Sanderson has his own personal reasons to roll The Wheel of Time to its conclusion. “I love this series,” says the author, now 34, “and I want to see the last book written as much as any other fan. For a writer like me, the next best thing to having Jim write the novel is being able to work on it myself.”

Rigney’s effect on Sanderson and countless others continues to amaze McDougal. “Robert was bigger than I really understood,” she realizes. “He was a bigger person on the world stage than I knew. People came up to me and said, ‘These books changed my life.’”

The end of the series seems more inevitable now than when Rigney was alive, constantly weaving new characters and plots with his epic imagination. After years of toil and guidance from the mentor he never met, Sanderson is ready to bring us the Last Battle. Perhaps that’s what Rigney wanted all along, to build a world so rich and real that Sanderson and all his fellow readers — all of us — would become part of the story.

Kirk Jones creates a superhero based on his hard-knock life

by Nick Smith March 31, 2010

Like a lot of other young men in the ’60s, Kirk Jones was drafted into the military. The Ohio native seized the opportunity to go overseas. “That’s something every young man and women should do, go and see how life really is in other places,” he says. “When you get home, you appreciate life here.” Now settled in Charleston, Jones published his first novel, Nab Jones, last year under the pen name B.C. Kidd (B.C. stands for Butler County).

The book’s title character is a unique African American superhero, an alter ego of Nate Jones. In his military years, Nate gambles and takes drugs until an ancient tribe saves him from death by resurrecting him as Nab. Nate/Nab devotes his life to combating drug abuse and distribution before settling down and starting a family with journalist Rita Dunn. When Rita is kidnapped, Nab comes out of retirement. Many storylines in the book were directly inspired by Jones’ life.

Jones was nicknamed Kidd by his peers during his time in the Air Force. “Air Force personnel aren’t really known to be combat guys, but I was proud to be associated with the troops,” he explains. “I used to count bombs, inventory them, and make sure their shelf life hadn’t expired.”

Jones says that he would also go to bombsites, dismantle dangerous munitions, and ship them back to America from Cambodia. The high-pressure work needed a safety valve, so he drank, gambled, and partied a lot.

However, it was his bad attitude that really got him in trouble. “The military thing to do was get drunk and go AWOL,” he says. “The Philippines was the land of AWOLs, which was acceptable for everyone from grunts to generals. It was all kinda messed up.”

Jones left the military in 1975. Dreaming of being a writer, he decided to develop a thriller that would eventually be called Nab Jones. He had plenty of material; he’d logged every detail of his service, and he always had a story to tell. But getting started on the book was easier said than done.

“I automatically got a slide tech job with the federal government,” he says. “That kept me busy.” But when his son contracted lymphatic cancer, Jones went back to school, “to get health qualifications to help him out.” The newly trained occupational therapist was present for his son’s surgery and saw him through his recovery. Jones continued the same career for 13 years, working with clients who had suffered gun shot wounds, head traumas, and injuries from motor vehicle accidents or assaults. Eighty to ninety percent of them were due to drug abuse, he says. Every patient had a story, and Jones filed them all away in his mind.

His life changed again when, according to Jones, he suffered a spinal injury in 1996. He finally had time to pen his novel, which he sweated through for the next three years. “There’s a lot of truth in the book even though it’s fiction,” he insists. “A lot of things I write about took place, with the exception of the supernatural elements. The travel, the people, the food, the sights, the trouble I got in. I just ran with it as if it was something.”

With the book complete, Jones was ready to submit the manuscript. Then he encountered the biggest obstacle of his life. “In 2000 I experimented with crack cocaine,” he sighs. “I’d heard about the lifestyle and the women.”

After getting heavily hooked, he finally contacted the VA. “They have a program that helps vets out, but to this day it’s a battle for me. I struggle with my sobriety. Crack haunts me, tells me to get a fix. This drug will kill you — I know a lot of people who are not here today because of it.”

Last year, Nab Jones arrived in paperback via Xlibris, a self-publishing company. He heralded its release with ads on CARTA buses and posters stating, “Jesus walked on water. Nab Jones ran across it.”

As with most self-published books, Nab Jones could use the touch of a good editor. It’s marred by typos, unlikely dialogue, and a scattershot structure. The author makes the bold choice of having Rita narrate, describing events, thoughts, and feelings she doesn’t witness. Nevertheless, the core concept of Nab Jones is sound, there are lots of entertaining ideas, and the story has the pace and excitement of a blockbuster movie. Best of all, there’s Kirk Jones’ autobiographical cautionary tale running throughout. The book ends with a message: For a drug addict, love and affection is AWOL. Typos or no, that’s a message worth reading.

Meet your neighbors in Magnolia Cemetery

by Nick Smith February 10, 2010

Author Ted Phillips spent years researching the lives of the inhabitants of Magnolia Cemetery, digging up as many biographical details as he could for people who were often only known as a name carved on a gravestone. Sadly, Phillips did not live to see his labor of love get published.

The cemetery is a large-scale monument to man’s ability to give the murky subject of death an elegant, poetic façade. Consecrated in 1850, it lies on the banks of the Cooper River, surrounded by oak trees and shrouded with Spanish moss. It’s filled with statues, sarcophagi, mausoleums, and unmarked graves.

Phillips wrote short biographies for over 200 of its occupants, working from history books, registers, and Library Society obits. Some only warrant three quarters of a page, others a page and a half. All are concisely written, highly readable, and give just enough information to create a sense of what the person was like. If that person has been mentioned in another book or other major source, Phillips lists it. He often expounds on parents or children, and maps out their resting place at the end of the book. This is more than an encyclopedia of the dead — it’s a walking tour, a collection of human interest stories, and a love letter to a cemetery all wrapped up in a tight 200 pages.

Phillips’ love for Magnolia was kindled when he worked there as a teenager, digging graves and tending the grounds. Between burials he was able to explore the cemetery and read the names on the tombstones. He began wondering who these people were. Twenty years later he decided to answer that question in City of the Silent.

What really makes the book work is its alphabetical structure. Because the biographies are laid out by name rather than era or social status, politicians share pages with paupers, merchants with thieves, generals with carpetbaggers. By doing this, the author acknowledges that death is a great leveler. No matter who or what we are, we all end up the same way.

Some have downtown streets named after them, while others, like murderer Thomas Ballard McDow, the city would prefer to forget. With deaths spanning the cemetery’s entire history, Phillips captures Charleston’s changing society in an intriguingly morbid manner.

Phillips was a Harvard and USC School of Law grad and a member of the state Bar Association. He later became a member of the Brown Fellowship Cemetery Committee, a trustee of Magnolia Cemetery, and, for a time, a tour guide. For the last 11 years of his life he battled with the onset of AIDS. Eventually he had to retire from his work as a public defender and his beloved personal tours of East Coast historic sites. But by the time he passed away in 2005, he’d found the strength to complete most of the manuscript.

Thomas J. Brown stepped in to complete and edit City of the Silent, with Ted’s mother LaVonne Phillips as the uncredited transcriber, coauthor, and co-editor. The two collaborators will be joined by Ted’s brother Al to sign copies of the finished product at The Preservation Society’s Book & Gift Shop this week. Phillips had a longstanding relationship with the nonprofit group, working his way up from board member to vice president and secretary, so all proceeds from the book sales will go to preserving old buildings.

“I think it’s wonderful that Magnolia Cemetery’s being preserved,” says Cynthia Setnicka, manager of the shop. “It’s worth a lot of money to developers. I’m glad it’s still here — in fact it’s expanded.” She urges anyone who wants to help preserve historic Charleston to “buy the book and get the word out that it’s there. It’s a treasure.” She hopes that the information in City of the Silent will be used as the basis for an official tour.

Ted Phillips is buried in Magnolia alongside the people who inspired his book. Although they’re silent, they speak through Ted’s stories, celebrating their achievements beyond the grave.

Jeff Mapes is a bicycling revolutionary

by Nick Smith February 2, 2010

Jeff Mapes isn’t your typical revolutionary. He doesn’t sport a moustache or carry a little red book, and you won’t find his face on any T-shirts. But he’s peddling radical change with his investigative book on cycling culture, Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists are Changing American Cities.

The change may come sooner than expected. Some one million people regularly commute or run errands by bicycle, many of them in cities that have accommodated their needs with bike lanes, shared roadways, or weekend street closings.

“There’s been a steady growth of interest in this subject,” says Mapes. “Obama’s transportation department is quite interested. The stimulus bill early last year had a good chunk of transport money in it, with a pot of money for enhancements that states and locations can spend on biking and walking projects.”

This week, the Clemson Architecture Center is flying Jeff Mapes in from the bike-friendly town of Portland, Ore., where he works as a political reporter. He’ll talk about the alternative transport movement taking place in enlightened cities around the country, from Long Beach, Calif. to New York and Chicago.

“I hear from people in towns I knew nothing about,” he says. “I just heard from a guy with a blog in Wichita. There’s progress everywhere. Maybe it’s only a half dozen folks, but they’re vigorous bike advocates.” There are far more in Portland, which Mapes describes as “the most bike friendly place, with the largest road share for bikes in a large city.”

In his book, Mapes explains how forward-thinking cities in Europe and the U.S. have adopted policies that encourage cycling and walking. He uses statistics and hard facts to show that cyclists, aided by sympathetic politicians and urban planners, are helping to transform their streetscapes.

“People in the urban bike movement are rethinking how cities function,” says Mapes. Instead of organizing a city so that traffic flows in and out of it as quickly as possible, their goal is to make the journey more enjoyable. This goes beyond simple bike advocacy to a desire for “active transportation” — avoiding the asphalt jams in commercial centers where the public can do more without having to get in their cars.
 

Mapes supports denser living within a two to four mile radius because he understands that “when they get used to it, get comfortable and strong enough, people love riding around. A bicycle is a more elegant way of getting to a destination,” he adds. “It’s a great way to experience a city.”

Mapes particularly enjoys the unanticipated things that happen on a bike ride, the people you meet and things you see that would be missed if you’re stuck in a car. He recounts a recent example of the unexpected effects a ride can have. “I went to see Avatar at a big old fashioned theater three to four miles from my house. It was raining like hell, the wind was blowing in my face and I thought, ‘This is pretty sucky.’”

After the movie everyone ran for their cars, creating an instant bottleneck. “My bike wended through the crowd. The wind was at my back, pushing me along. I was speeding past the cars and I felt like I was an Avatar character, swooping and flying back home on a big beast. That blew my mind! Where else does a 55-year-old man have adventures like that?”

Signed copies of Pedaling Revolution will be available at the event, at Blue Bicycle Books on King Street, and online. The talk is sponsored by the Clemson Architecture Center in Charleston and the Charleston Civic Design Center as part of a series called Revolution on 2 Wheels.

My First Movie: Take Two

My First Movie: Take Two — Ten Celebrated Directors Talk about Their First Film [Buy Now]

Edited by Stephen Lowenstein

Pantheon, $26, 286 pages

In theory, this book should be a wet dream for would-be filmmakers. It aims to get inside the skulls of talented maverick filmmakers, finding out what made them tick as they created their first features.

Interviewees include Richard Linklater, Terry Gilliam, and Sam Mendes, none of whom are known for being coy about their working process. So why is this book such a disappointing bore?
The staid format of the book doesn’t help. There are dry questions and big chunks of text. Editor Stephen Lowenstein’s repetitive interview techniques don’t help much either; he takes his subjects through their early filmic yearnings, then from pre-production to the critical responses to their films — and how they feel when their celluloid “babies” are praised or boiled in the media spotlight.

But the real reason why the book is so unedifying is its overall lack of commentary; Lowenstein comes to no conclusions of his own about the filmmakers’ processes, leaving directors to speak for themselves. Because of this, the book comes across like a series of extended interviews from a nerdy filmmaker magazine, crammed into a hardcover.

For all Lowenstein’s faults, he obviously had fun tracking down directors and interviewing them. Quite right too — the subjects have juicy stories to tell. Richard Kelly is the new kid on the Hollywood block, making the deliriously uneven films Donnie Darko and Southland Tales. He admits that visuals are his forte, and that if you mute the sound on his graduate film (Visceral Matter), then it’s watchable.

Linklater is one of the few directors in the book who seems to have attained his reputation through sheer hard work, rather than a lucky break with a studio. His attempts to make an “anti-movie” where nothing happens became an unexpected cult phenomenon — according to the book, the film’s title even introduced a new word to the popular consciousness: Slacker.

Mendes is one of the lucky ones, leaping from a Broadway revival of Cabaret to a multimillion dollar Dreamworks project. Mendes gushes about receiving advice from Spielberg (“be strong”) and is humble about this good fortune (his first film, American Beauty, won five Oscars and three Golden Globes).

The main linking element between the directors seems to be their lack of technical knowledge. When Lowenstein asks them which lenses they used, they often reply that their grasp of all that stuff is limited — they have their directors of photography to rely on for that. Being a director, it seems, is more about communicating ideas and getting a job done than creating an artwork.

It’s been two years since Aryan Kaganof shot SMS Sugar Man, the first feature to be filmed entirely with cell phones. In this age of digital videography where a professional production doesn’t have to cost millions of dollars to make, Lowenstein’s book should raise interesting questions about what constitutes a “movie.”

In the first book of this series, Oliver Stone refused to talk about his early films (Seizure and The Hand). Lowenstein included the interview anyway, presumably so that he could use Stone’s name to sell more copies of his book.

This time around, Linklater only briefly mentions his original Super 8 mm feature, It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books. His interview focuses on his breakout 35mm film Slacker instead. Lowenstein seems to be cheating, which isn’t very fair on his readers. So a more appropriate title for this book might be My First Movie of Consequence or My First Movie that Didn’t Suck.

While this book has the potential to instill you with interest in filmmaking, it’s more likely to put you to sleep because of the way it’s presented. If only Loweinstein had taken his cue from some of his maverick interviewees to do something fresh and interesting with this material.

BOOK REVIEW: Force of Nature

Force of Nature

By Mark Sloan & Brad Thomas

Published by Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art & Van Every/Smith Galleries

$30

Force of Nature, a 144-page hardcover book that documents the groundbreaking exhibit of the same name, is a sober affair compared to Mark Sloan’s previous publications, which include circus/sideshow tributes Hoaxes, Humbugs & Spectacles and Wild, Weird & Wonderful. But in its own right, Force of Nature captures the exuberance of the 10 Japanese artists who visited the Carolinas last year to make site installations.

Sloan, director and senior curator of the College of Charleston’s Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, co-curated the exhibition with Brad Thomas, director of the Van Every/Smith Galleries at Davidson College in North Carolina. About five years ago, the two men decided that it would be a good idea to organize an art show together, putting contemporary work on display at both institutions. The idea escalated into a mammoth multi-site undertaking, encompassing the College of Architecture at UNC/Charlotte, Winthrop University Galleries, Clemson Architecture Center in Charleston, McColl Center for Visual Art and Sumter Gallery of Art. For art lovers who couldn’t take the bus tour to the various sites, this book documents the entire project.

It’s far more than a simple catalog, though. The rich color photography shows the artists at work, using their paraphernalia, sketches, schematics, and captures the final works along with visitor reactions.

A chapter devoted to Motoi Yamamoto accentuates the sheer scale of the artist’s elaborate labyrinths made of salt, mirroring the logistical and red-tape issues that the curates faced when coordinating Force of Nature. The shots of Motoi’s salt art trickle off the page, in one instance stretching off into a distant white desert of miniature salt dunes. Close-ups show Yamamoto’s incredible attention to detail.

The Addlestone Library on Calhoun Street wasn’t the only site used by Yamamoto, who also went to Davidson and hung a 40-foot gouache on mylar drawing above a delicate horizontal piece in the Belk Visual Art Center.

On the ground floor of the Halsey, Noriko Ambe transformed trees into otherworldly drawings and cut-paper sculptures. One of the latter graces the book’s cover, giving it a three-dimensional look. One chapter shows her at work, projecting a photograph of a dissected tree trunk onto a wall and then drawing over it. For Noriko the process is as important as the final product, and the book serves her well. Wider shots indicate the relationship between her drawings, the sections of tree trunk, and her paper art.

All 10 artists get equal face time. Their creative processes receive as much attention as their completed art. Takasumi Abe is shown with helium-filled garbage bags, kite string, and an iPod, preparing to record cloud sounds. There are dramatic photos of Ayako Aramaki and Junko Ishiro, who use fire to forge their work in unexpected ways.

The book’s only failing is a consequence of the original project’s ambitious scope. Extensive blogs, videos, podcasts, and Flickr photos were posted on Force of Nature’s “online exhibit” website, telling the full story of the project from the artists’ viewpoint. Although some self-portrait photos of the participants are included, there’s no way to adequately reveal this fascinating aspect of the show. Fortunately, the online component is still accessible through the Halsey website (www.cofc.edu/halseygallery).

Force of Nature ultimately teaches and delights, providing a behind-the-scenes look at the creative process while telling the over-reaching story of the project itself. Sloan’s photography is compelling, focusing on the forces of nature — trees, clouds, even something as common as salt — that inspired these artists to create.