CHAPEL HILL - The Chapel Hill Public Library Foundation will celebrate the library's 50th anniversary today with an event at the Barn at Fearrington Village featuring barbecue, live music and readings by local authors.

"Long Story Short" the celebration is called, a name it shares with a new book of "flash fiction" by 65 North Carolina writers, edited by Marianne Gingher, director of UNC's creative writing program.

The Carolina Chocolate Drops and the Midtown Dickens will perform. D.G. Martin, host of WUNC-TV's "Bookwatch" and a columnist for The Chapel Hill News, will emcee, and Gingher will introduce the readers: Lee Smith, Haven Kimmel, Daniel Wallace, Michael Malone, Sarah Dessen, Jill McCorkle and Will Blythe.

The Chapel Hill News asked Gingher and the other participating authors a few questions about the writing life. They weren't all able to respond, but most of them did. Here's some of what they had to say:

Q: Was there an author or book that was especially important in leading you to become a writer, and why?

Smith: Actually, many books have led me to become a writer -- in fact, I started writing in the very first place, as a child, because I just couldn't stand for my favorite books to end. So I wrote additional chapters onto them ... and sequels ... often including myself in the story! For instance, Nancy Drew's "chums" included not only Bess Marvin and George Fayne, but also Lee Smith... and the Bobbsey Twins rapidly became the Bobbsey Triplets. ... In college, I was struck by James Still's magnificent novel "River of Earth," a sort of Appalachian "Grapes of Wrath," written entirely in first person Appalachian English, the language of my own childhood in southwest Virginia. I was galvanized to realize that the material of my childhood could also be the stuff of literary fiction. Eudora Welty's simple plot lines, characters, and communities had an empowering effect upon me, as well.

Blythe: Thomas McGuane's novel "92 in the Shade" -- I loved it so much I wanted to live the life of that book. Its prose seemed to articulate my own sense of things before I ever knew I had that sense. Also, my grandfather, the novelist Legette Blythe, made being a writer seem almost reasonable by his modesty and proximity. (He also flirted with his deadlines, apparently a genetic trait passed on to succeeding generations.)

Malone: As a young person, I read the classics with an indiscriminate enthusiasm -- anyone (Austen, Dickens, Twain, Welty, Faulkner) who could create a a fictional world in which it was a joy to live and that it was a sorrow to leave. But for a particular book, I'd say Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird." All contemporary Southern novelists, particularly anyone who makes a claim that "mystery fiction" can be "literary fiction," owes Lee a debt so large, so lasting, that every novel we write is, in a sense, a token of our gratitude. It was through "To Kill a Mockingbird" that I learned how our Southern literature takes its place at the heart of our national literature; our best works -- she taught us, and showed us -- look with honesty at race relations in this country, and the characters in those works -- like Huck Finn, like Atticus Finch -- "need be no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity" of what is right and true.

Gingher: I've been writing since I was 6 years old, and my earliest influence was a Chinese folktale, "The Five Chinese Brothers," by Claire Huchet Bishop, illustrated by Kurt Wiese. That book was magical, sly, shocking, comforting, and just the right amount of wicked.

Dessen: I remember reading Fannie Flagg's "Coming Attractions" when I was in seventh grade or so, and just suddenly thinking, "If I ever write a book, I want it to be like this." I was always a big reader, but that's the first time I remember thinking that I might actually want to try a novel myself.

Q:What's the best thing about writing for a living? The worst?

Smith: The best thing about writing is that it enlarges your life. Anne Tyler once said, "I write because I want to have more than one life." I do, too. The worst is that the finished story is never what you thought it would be when you were just making it up ... No, the very worst is putting a finished novel in a box and sending it off to the publisher. That box is like a little coffin. All those characters are dead now, who lived in your head for years....

And P.S., hardly anybody ever "makes a living" writing. As I once heard Doris Betts tell a student: "You may not make a living, but you'll make a good life" as a writer. It's a calling and a privilege, but it's not a "day job."

Blythe: The solitude. The solitude.

Malone: The best -- you work solely motivated by yourself, and all alone by yourself on your own schedule. The worst -- you work solely motivated by yourself, and all alone by yourself on your own schedule.

Gingher: I don't. I teach for a living and write for my life. The worst thing? Beautiful weather outside my writing room, filling the window like a colossal butterfly, tempting me outside to play, because who really cares if I write or play? And who's to say whether it might do my imagination more good to play than to write? These are the sorts of exhausting unwinnable arguments that writers are always having with themselves.

Dessen: The best is definitely getting to do something you really love, and it's never dull. That said, the worst part, for me, are the days when the writing's not going well, and I feel like a total failure, and there's nobody to just pass it all off to and say, "You do this. I'm taking a break!" You have to be all in, good days and bad.

Q: The Chapel Hill Public Library is 50 years old this year. Given the pace of technological and social change, are you concerned about the future of books and reading over the next 50 years?

Smith: I am very concerned about the future of books and reading -- in fact I cannot even imagine what the state of reading and publishing will look like in even 25 years. I feel like a brontosaurus, myself -- I still love books, old fashioned physical books, and I write in longhand.

Blythe: No. All I have to do is remember watching my niece Anne reading "The Secret Garden" at the table during a recent meal at Crook's Corner. People will keep reading, even on that monstrous Kindle.

Malone: No, I don't think readers will stop reading fiction. The imminent death of the novel has been predicted ever since I started writing novels, many decades ago, and doubtless even 18th-century novelists heard the same dirge. Humans will always love to hear stories -- what happens next to characters they come to care about. But how they hear the stories has changed and will go on changing. I hope that libraries will always be a central place for keeping those stories safe.

Gingher: As long as there is the human need for quiet, uncomplicated privacy enriched by thought, I think there will be readers of books. Their numbers may dwindle and they may in time be thought of as oddballs, eccentrics, and cranks. But why would something as universally accessible as the book disappear entirely any more than art canvasses and paint brushes?

Dessen: I do think that the way that we read will change, and already is changing. But I am hopeful that books will not become obsolete. Personally, I don't have a Kindle or any kind of reader because I like the feel of a book in my hands: carrying it to lunch with me, dog-earing pages. I hope I'm not the only one who feels that way.