By Gene Galin
Chatham County, NC – On Wednesday, April 22, Daniel Wallace — the novelist best known for Big Fish — came to the Governors Club not simply to read from his work, but to explain how stories begin. Speaking at Chatham Literacy’s 15th Annual Spring for Literacy Luncheon, Wallace offered supporters of adult education a deeply personal meditation on writing, memory and the small objects that carry human feeling: a glass eye, a shark’s tooth, cigarette foil twisted into braids, the smell of wet grass, even the image of an old man once seen in a window. The event doubled as a fundraiser for Chatham Literacy, which provides free adult education and literacy-related services in Chatham County.
For Wallace, the day’s subject was not celebrity, nor even the long afterlife of Big Fish, the 1998 novel that became a 2003 film and later a Broadway musical. Instead, it was the hard, almost invisible work of showing young writers how emotion actually reaches a reader. Wallace, who teaches fiction at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as the J. Ross MacDonald Distinguished Professor of English, framed his talk as a lesson in craft, but also as a philosophy of attention: people do not enter memory through abstractions, he suggested, but through things.
That message resonated powerfully at a luncheon built around literacy. Chatham Literacy’s mission is to help adults living or working in Chatham County acquire the literacy and educational skills needed to function successfully in society. The organization’s programming includes English for Speakers of Other Languages, citizenship preparation, traditional literacy, financial literacy and digital literacy. In its 2024-25 impact reporting, Chatham Literacy says it served 344 adult learners, worked with 79 tutors and logged 5,934 instructional hours.
A fundraiser built around the written word
The luncheon itself was designed as more than a literary appearance. Chatham Literacy advertised the April 22 event as its 15th annual spring fundraiser, with Wallace appearing in connection with his recent short story collection, Beneath the Moon and Long Dead Stars. The proceeds from the event support the Chatham Literacy adult learning programs.
That pairing — a celebrated storyteller speaking on behalf of an organization devoted to reading, writing and adult opportunity — was more than a matter of convenience. Wallace’s appearance underscored a central truth of literacy work: literacy is not only about decoding words on a page. It is also about connection, memory, belonging and the ability to translate inner life into language others can understand.
Wallace made that argument from the moment he began. He opened with gratitude for the audience and with a personal link to literacy work, recalling that he had been associated with literacy for “a really long time” and had worked for the Orange County Literacy Council in the mid-1980s. The anecdote was comic, characteristically wandering and deeply local. Looking for a job, he said, he once arrived for an interview at the literacy council only to realize the listed address was a place where he himself had once lived. The coincidence became the kind of looping story he has made a career from: intimate, slightly strange and rooted in place.
Wallace was speaking as a North Carolina writer with longstanding ties to literacy work, a teacher, and someone who plainly relishes the odd ways a life circles back on itself.
Teaching feeling is harder than teaching plot
Much of Wallace’s luncheon address turned toward his classroom at UNC. There, he said, he teaches fiction at multiple levels and spends much of his time helping younger writers solve a difficult problem: how to communicate emotion in a story.
Many beginning writers, he said, start from the “inside out.” They begin with feelings in their raw, unshaped form and linger there, hoping emotion alone will do the work. But that is not how readers experience feeling on the page. Readers cannot be handed emotion directly. They have to arrive at it through something concrete.
“The life cycle of a book or story is never complete until you read it,” Wallace said, shifting attention from the writer’s pleasure to the reader’s experience. The question, then, is how a writer can make a stranger laugh, cry or feel altered by a page of text. His answer was that emotion travels through the senses.
“What I believe,” he said, “is that our emotions are created through things — through tangible things in our life.”
Smell, sight, touch, sound — these are not decorative details, he suggested. They are the access points to heart and memory. People remember the clothes a loved one wore, the smell of bread, the feel of jewelry, the joke told at the right moment, the texture of a keepsake saved long after a person is gone. Fiction becomes moving not when it announces sadness or longing, but when it brings readers into contact with the object or sensory detail through which those feelings live.
Wallace’s method begins from the premise that ordinary life is enough. The writer does not need a grand theory to reach a reader. He or she needs the right concrete detail — one that is specific enough to feel lived, yet open enough for others to enter with memories of their own.
How a glass eye became part of “Big Fish”
The most memorable example Wallace offered was one of the strangest. As a sixth grader at a former military school in Birmingham, Alabama, he befriended a classmate named Frank who had a glass eye. Once a week, Wallace recalled, Frank would ask permission to go “wash my eye,” and then ask whether “Danny” could accompany him.
In Wallace’s retelling, this story is a study in childhood intimacy and oddity. The ritual was simple: Frank turned on the water, took out the eye, rinsed it, dried it with paper towels and placed it back in his head. Wallace served as witness and company. “He just wanted company while he was washing his eye,” Wallace said, a line that drew laughter but also something deeper — recognition, perhaps, that the strange and vulnerable moments of life are often the ones people most want another person beside them for.
Wallace made clear that the memory stayed with him. Later, when he began writing seriously, “I started writing a lot about glass eyes,” he said. Eventually, the image entered Big Fish, where a chapter called “The Old Lady in the Eye” sends the father figure on a quest involving a missing glass eye. Wallace read a passage from the novel at the luncheon and then drew the line directly for his audience: the eye in the story, and later in the film adaptation, grew from Frank’s eye in real life.
That revelation was a working demonstration of Wallace’s broader point. A story need not reproduce life exactly in order to be true to it. What matters is the transformation. A boy’s weekly trip to the school bathroom with a classmate becomes, years later, a literary image with enough force to survive the jump from book to film to stage. The factual event changes shape. The emotional charge remains.
Wallace even joked that Frank’s eye “made me a lot of money,” one of several places during his talk where humor softened the intensity of his reflections. But the larger point was serious: art often begins when a writer learns to recognize that no experience is wasted, especially the peculiar ones.
The long search for a shark’s tooth
Another object Wallace brought into the room was smaller, but no less loaded with meaning: a shark’s tooth.
For 50 years, he told the audience, he went to the beach looking for one and never found it. The longer the search lasted, the more charged it became. The desire intensified through repetition and failure. Then, finally, he found one.
That simple story allowed Wallace to pivot toward another short piece of fiction, this time involving an aging husband and wife on what may be one of their last walks together on the beach. In the story, the husband confesses that he has been searching for a shark’s tooth for 65 years. But when his wife reacts with regret that she never knew of this wish, he answers with one of the day’s most piercing lines: “I’m glad I’ve never found one. Hoping is better, you know, because when you do find it … you’re hopeless.”
Played aloud, the line drew both laughter and a kind of hush. Wallace himself noted that the story was not funny but sad. The shark’s tooth had become more than a souvenir. It was a symbol of longing itself — of the tension between desire and completion, anticipation and ending, the human instinct to keep looking partly because the search gives shape to life.
That insight fit neatly with the description of Beneath the Moon and Long Dead Stars on Wallace’s own website, where the collection is presented as a series of flash fictions in which lives turn on apparently minor moments and small details gather into something mysterious and magical. The book’s characters, the description says, are often “hungry for connection,” with everything hanging on “a gust of wind or a single word.”
The shark’s tooth anecdote demonstrated exactly that sensibility. Wallace did not need a battlefield, a murder mystery or a sweeping historical canvas to make a point about mortality and longing. He needed a person scanning the sand for years, and the terrible, beautiful thought that the act of hoping may itself be the thing that keeps us alive.
The smell of wet grass and the architecture of memory
One of the strongest points in Wallace’s talk was his insistence that sensory experience is the truest path back into memory.
He asked listeners to think of someone they loved who is no longer present. What comes back first, he suggested, is rarely an abstract description. Instead it is the smell, the clothing, the object left behind, the specific joke, the little private habit. He spoke of bread from a bakery, of wet grass, of the involuntary transport that happens when a familiar scent reopens a whole period of life.
For him, the smell of wet grass returns him to fifth grade on Mayfair Drive in Homewood, Alabama. In a few sentences, Wallace demonstrated the very mechanism he was describing. The detail was small, but it summoned houses, neighbors, a vanished geography and a vanished self. That is what he wants his students to understand: not how to announce emotion, but how to trigger it.
It is easy to hear, in that philosophy, why Wallace has remained such a durable teacher. UNC identifies him not only as a distinguished professor but as a longtime instructor of introductory, intermediate and advanced fiction writing, and as a recipient of the Johnston Award for Teaching Excellence.
Good writing, in his account, depends on noticing what other people skip: the object on the nightstand, the bit of foil in a smoker’s hand, the strange window on a childhood street, the search that lasts so long it becomes a life.
Turning childhood fear into art
If the glass eye story illustrated Wallace’s delight in the uncanny, one of his final readings showed the emotional depth that can emerge from the same method.
He read a short piece called “Neighbor,” inspired by a frightening old house from his childhood. In the story, a boy imagines the old man in the upstairs window as a predatory, nearly supernatural figure. After the man dies, the child goes into the house for the first time, eats a small sandwich and then looks back up toward the window, where he believes he sees the man once again. Years later, newly married, he tells the story to his wife and asks what it means. Her answer is devastating in its simplicity: one day, she says, “It means you’ll be a ghost one day. And so will I.”
That story brought Wallace’s themes together. The original childhood event — a house, a window, fear — is recast into fiction that has little to do with factual accuracy and everything to do with emotional truth. The child’s fear becomes adult recognition. Mortality enters the room. Love enters with it.
Wallace then stated plainly what he wanted his students to understand: lived experience is “the source of all art.” He was not saying every memory becomes literature. He was saying literature begins when memory is transformed — shaped, reframed and offered back in a form that lets someone else feel its weight.
Why Wallace’s message fit the mission of Chatham Literacy
There was an especially fitting symmetry in Wallace’s appearance at a literacy fundraiser. Chatham Literacy’s work is practical and community-based: one-on-one tutoring, small classes, citizenship support, English-language instruction, digital skills, adult goal-based education. The group stresses opportunity, confidence and everyday function.
Wallace’s remarks added a complementary argument. Literacy does not only enable a person to fill out forms, get a better job, navigate systems or pass a test, though all of that matters. It also gives people the means to preserve experience, interpret memory, tell stories, and locate themselves within the larger human exchange of language. In that sense, Wallace’s talk was not a diversion from Chatham Literacy’s mission. It was a deepening of it.
The organization’s recent impact statistics point to measurable progress: more learners served, more tutoring hours, more volunteers, strong short-term goal attainment. But the luncheon reminded supporters that behind every statistic is an interior life — a person carrying memories, objects, losses, ambitions and private forms of hope.
A North Carolina writer still finding new ways to surprise
Wallace arrived at the luncheon with established credentials. UNC describes him as the author of six novels, along with children’s books, short stories and essays, and notes that Big Fish was adapted into both film and Broadway form. Chatham Literacy’s event materials emphasized his standing as a best-selling author and the release of Beneath the Moon and Long Dead Stars.
Wallace presented himself as a writer still animated by curiosity, still amused by coincidence, still haunted by childhood images, still working out what objects mean and why certain scenes endure. There was no sense of a writer delivering prefabricated wisdom from a podium. Instead there was the more valuable thing: a working artist showing his process in public.
That openness likely helps explain why his work continues to feel accessible even when it turns strange. His stories often admit fantasy, fable and myth, yet their engines are ordinary human recognitions — embarrassment, longing, grief, fear, tenderness, absurdity. The objects he discussed at the luncheon were not symbols first. They were things first. Their symbolic life came later, after they had settled in memory.
That is also why the event succeeded on its own terms as a literary fundraiser. Wallace gave supporters something better than promotional remarks. He gave them a usable way of thinking about art and memory. In a room gathered to support literacy, he argued that the smallest details of a life may contain the largest meanings.
The takeaway: literacy begins in utility, but it does not end there
By the time Wallace finished, the lesson was clear. Stories are not built from grand declarations about love, grief or fear. They are built from the thing in the hand, the smell in the air, the object kept in a drawer, the odd ritual in a school bathroom, the impossible little hope that a person returns to for half a century.
For Chatham Literacy, that was an apt message. The organization’s mission is grounded in practical adult education, but Wallace’s visit suggested a larger horizon. Literacy is a civic tool, an economic tool and a personal tool. It allows people to function in society. It also allows them to remember, interpret, imagine and be understood.
Wallace closed with gratitude, but his real closing argument had already been made. “Your own experience becomes so much more valuable,” he said, “when you know that really it’s the source of all art.”
In a county where Chatham Literacy is working to expand opportunity one learner at a time, Wallace made the case that reading and writing do more than open doors. They help people make meaning from the lives they have already lived.
Chatham Literacy continues to seek community support for its adult education programs, including volunteers and donors.
Watch on YouTube – “Big Fish” author Daniel Wallace at Chatham Literacy luncheon – 4.22.26
Daniel Wallace Discusses Literacy, Writing Techniques, and His Journey as an Author at Chatham Literacy Luncheon.
00:16 Daniel Wallace discusses his journey in literacy and teaching writing.
- Wallace reflects on his long-standing association with literacy, highlighting his early work with the Orange County Literacy Council.
- He shares insights from his experience teaching fiction at UNC, emphasizing challenges young writers face in expressing emotion.
05:00 Emotions in writing are linked to tangible life experiences.
- Writers create emotional connections through sensory experiences, influencing how readers respond to their work.
- Personal mementos and memories evoke emotions, shaping how we perceive love and loss.
09:13 Memorable personal experiences shape storytelling and connections.
- Daniel Wallace shares how unique personal memories, like a childhood teacher’s impact, influence his writing.
- Relating vivid details, such as a friend’s glass eye, demonstrates the universal nature of individual experiences.
13:07 Daniel Wallace reflects on an impactful memory involving glass eyes.
- He shares a story about a boy with a glass eye named Frank Brower, detailing their unique friendship.
- The narrative connects to Wallace’s writing in ‘Big Fish,’ specifically a chapter involving an adventure to retrieve a stolen glass eye.
16:58 Daniel Wallace discusses inspirations and experiences behind ‘Big Fish’.
- Wallace describes how ‘Big Fish’ transitioned from a book to a movie and a musical, reflecting on its impact.
- He shares a personal anecdote about searching for a shark’s tooth for 50 years, linking it to themes of desire and persistence in storytelling.
20:51 Daniel Wallace shares insights on storytelling and personal memories.
- He describes a poignant story about a couple’s final walk on the beach, emphasizing themes of regret and hope.
- Wallace reflects on personal memories of his father, particularly highlighting his father’s smoking habits and their significance.
25:05 Daniel Wallace shares personal stories about family traditions and childhood nightmares.
- Wallace recounts how his father created art from tin foil, braiding strands into unique pieces he gifted every Christmas.
- He reflects on a neighborhood witch’s house that inspired a haunting story, highlighting childhood fears and the experience of loss.
28:38 Daniel Wallace reflects on childhood experiences shaping storytelling.
- Wallace recounts a haunting childhood memory that profoundly impacted him.
- He emphasizes how personal experiences enrich artistic expression and storytelling.