Winston-Salem native Charlie Lovett wears many literary hats, with a biography that includes being a bestselling novelist, book collector, children’s playwright, podcaster, and leading expert on the life and work of Lewis Carroll.
Now Lovett has adapted his 2020 novel, Escaping Dreamland, into a play that will have its world premiere produced by the Little Theatre of Winston-Salem.
The story follows three aspiring writers in early 20th century New York City as they team up to write children’s books. Lovett captures an era of steamships, 5th Avenue mansions, and wondrous amusement parks, and the story is, in many ways, a love letter to both New York City and the children’s books of the past.
Escaping Dreamland is being produced by the Little Theatre of Winston-Salem, and will have its world premiere this Friday through Sunday at the Hanesbrands Theatre.
Charlie Lovett lives in Winston-Salem and recently joined Neal Charnoff in the WFDD studios to talk about adapting Escaping Dreamland into a play.
Interview highlights:
On how children's books inspired Escaping Dreamland:
"The first books I got excited about reading when I was a kid were the Hardy Boys series, you know, which I'm not going to argue are great literature. But that type of book brought so many kids in my generation and in preceding generations to reading that I thought, well, maybe it would be fun to explore the history of those books ... and I just thought it might be a fascinating world. And I had some of my grandfather's old children's series books, and I opened one of them up and turned to the copyright page, and it said, 'New York City 1906'. And I thought, Okay, let's go there. Let's see what happens there. And that's where it started."
On the evolution of children's books in the early 20th century:
"In America, probably the top-selling books were The Wizard of Oz books, which were coming out right about that time. But you also start having these children's series books, which were created not necessarily by individual authors. So one of the great drivers behind this was a guy named Edward Stratemeyer, who would come up with an idea for a series, he would write outlines for the books, and then he would send those out to ghostwriters, and they would sort of fill in the book, and he would sell them as a series under a pseudonym. So that's how, for instance, the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and Tom Swift and the Bobbsey Twins, all were created that way. The people that we think we know, Carolyn Keene and Franklin W. Dixon, those people didn't really exist."
On a theme that's emerged in the book and the play:
"Escaping Dreamland had been written and was about to be published. It was published in 2020. And early in 2020, my father, who taught here at Wake Forest for 40 years, passed away. And when the book came out, that was all still kind of raw for me. And I suddenly realized, oh, every main character in this book, has lost their father. I didn't think about that when I was writing it. But suddenly, for a few months, it became for me ... a book about overcoming loss and overcoming the loss of a father. I knew one of the themes was how we overcome loss and trauma. But I hadn't really zeroed in on that until I was in that situation."
*Editor's Note: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.