Today we’d like to introduce you to Jonathan Haupt.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I came to South Carolina in 2004 as the new marketing director for the University of South Carolina Press, a publisher in Columbia. In that role, I met and befriended many of the Palmetto State’s pantheon of literary luminaries—from writers, poets, storytellers, and historians, to booksellers and librarians. When I later became USC Press’s publisher, I wanted to add to the rich literature of our state by publishing fiction, poetry, and children’s and young adult books as well, as an expanded vision which would benefit more readers and writers.
Pat Conroy (author of The Water Is Wide, The Prince of Tides, and many more) was the brightest star in the constellation of South Carolina writers at the time and one of the South’s most beloved storytellers. Pat became my mentor and my publishing partner in Story River Books, an original southern fiction imprint we created together. During the last few years of his life, when he could have focused on his own writing, he committed himself to teaching me and our Story River writers as much as he could from his 50-year writing career as a bestselling author. He also committed himself to teaching his millions of readers about our Story River writers.
Those years were transformative for me. Pat was a model servant leader, showing me what a life of service and generosity can mean to a community of readers and writers. When he passed away in March 2016, his family and friends created the nonprofit Pat Conroy Literary Center as a living legacy to Pat, honoring and continuing his work as a writer and teacher, and I was invited to serve as the Center’s first executive director. I left the world of publishing after nearly 20 years to help create our nonprofit.
As director, I have the honor of helping our communities of readers, writers, teachers, and students through our popular interpretive center (601 Bladen St.) and our year-round calendar of writers’ workshops, author events, book club discussions, a summer camp, a children’s book fair, and a literary festival. Our Conroy Center has already become TripAdvisor’s top-ranked attraction in Beaufort, and we’ve been recognized nationally as South Carolina’s only affiliate of the American Writers Museum and second American Library Association Literary Landmark. Locally, we’ve also been presented with the Civitas Award for Tourism Leadership.
The Center is both a museum to Pat Conroy’s writing and teaching life and also teaching center to inspire others to lead impactful lives as writers, mentors, and servant leaders. My role as director is a multi-faceted one, inclusive of administrative and fundraising roles as well as teaching, mentoring, and writing. I am fortunate to also frequently have the opportunity to interview authors, educators, and advocates on stage in public events, including for CSPAN’s Book TV. And sometimes my work means being interviewed myself, including on ETV’s By the River and WHHI-TV’s monthly program North of the Broad. Mr. Conroy taught me that the spotlight was a teaching tool, always meant to be shared with people and issues that need to be illuminated. Doing this work, all of it, for the Conroy Center is incredibly rewarding. Beyond that, it is my way of paying forward what I can never truly pay back to my friend and mentor.
Separate from my work with the Conroy Center, I am also honored to serve as a co-mentor (with Claire Bennett) to the student leaders of DAYLO: Diversity Awareness Youth Literacy Organization. DAYLO was founded in 2021 by the Conroy Center’s original high school intern Holland Perryman when she was 16. It has since grown to include chapters based in schools across South Carolina. DAYLO is a student-led book club with a mission that includes community literary outreach and volunteerism. The students organize and carry out projects like our monthly Teddy Bear Picnic read-aloud, the popular Beaufort Human Library, restocking Little Free Libraries, and volunteering with collaborative author programs and workshops with our Conroy Center. DAYLO students contribute greatly to the vibrancy of literary life and literacy education across our communities. They have also embraced the opportunity to be pro-literacy advocates in response to a national rise in book bans and education censorship, issues which Pat Conroy was quite outspoken about as well. And for that, DAYLO has been honored and recognized by the South Carolina Education Association, the South Carolina Library Association, and the American Association of School Librarians. It’s an absolute honor to help guide the many DAYLO leaders as they begin to step into very their bright and promising futures.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Launching a new nonprofit was quite the undertaking! Sustaining it is an ongoing challenge, too. Our Conroy Center began in a small rental space and now occupies a 3,000-square-foot building, near the Beaufort River, a building we were able to purchase through the generosity of our donors. We are fortunate to have such a supportive group of donors and volunteers who make the vital work of the Center not only possible, but an absolute pleasure. We recently hired a director of development, Bruce Murdy, who joins the Conroy Center as our second full-time staff member and who is taking on the responsibilities of working with new and existing donors and grant-makers to see that we not only continue but continue to grow as well.
Pivoting during the pandemic into a robust catalogue of virtual programs, including virtual tours and online workshops, helped introduce our Conroy Center to an audience far beyond the South Carolina lowcountry. It has been fascinating to see just how many of those folks have since come to visit us in person. We continue to make many of our educational programs available through livestreams on our social media, keeping our Center connected to readers and writers in a wide and welcoming online community as well, even as our primary focus returned to in-person programs and events.
As we approach the tenth anniversary of Pat’s death, and therefore the tenth anniversary of our Center’s founding, I am beyond grateful for the myriad ways in which we have honored and continued Pat’s legacy as writer and educator, through activities that positively impact the lives of so very many—near and far alike.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
During nearly 20 years in publishing, I worked on the marketing or editorial side of about a thousand books. But I never wrote one—and I still haven’t. I am, however, the proud co-editor of the anthology Our Prince of Scribes: Writers Remember Pat Conroy, which was published in 2018 by the University of Georgia Press, with funding from the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.
The book has since won 17 book awards, and its royalties support the educational mission of our nonprofit Conroy Center, honoring Pat’s legacy as a lifelong mentor. Scribes collects the memories of 67 writers, including me, who were taught, mentored, or befriended by Pat over the course of his writing life. The contributors include Pulitzer Prize winners Rick Bragg and Kathleen Parker; New York Times best-selling novelists Mary Alice Monroe, Patti Callahan Henry, and Ron Rash; two-time Lillian Smith Book Award winner Anthony Grooms; National Book Award-winning poet Nikky Finney; and many others. Coeditor Nicole Seitz (author of the novel The Cage Maker) and I spent more than a year gathering these empowering, inspiring stories from our fellow Conroy mentees, each one giving freely of their time and words in recognition of Pat’s generosity in their own lives. Most of the contributing writers have also participated in public conversations and workshops inspired by the book and held across more than a dozen states, further paying forward Pat’s faith in us as writers and as educators.
I’ve since had the opportunity to write essays for other anthologies, and I am very fortunate to be able to write book reviews on occasion for the Pulitzer Prize-winning Charleston Post and Courier. But Our Prince of Scribes remains the book I am most proud of from the full span of my writing, editing, and publishing career.
In my life, I have now been fortunate to have had several truly inspiring mentors, including Pat, and also to have been able to mentor many others, to the best of my own abilities. Mr. Conroy talked and wrote quite a lot about paying attention to the circles in our lives. The lineage of mentors and mentees, into which Pat welcomed me, and I now welcome others, is one of those circles—touching the pasts, present, and futures of so many. Our Prince of Scribes honors that circle, as does my work with our Conroy Center and the world-saving students of DAYLO.
Let’s talk about our city – what do you love? What do you not love?
Beaufort is truly a magical place. There is a serendipity here that seems to bring the right people and places together far more often than not. It’s a very literary town, too, a place that genuinely loves and values its stories and its storytellers.
Beyond our Conroy Center, Beaufort is also home to three independent bookstores—NeverMore Books, the Beaufort Bookstore, and McIntosh Book Shoppe—each with its own unique character. We also have an excellent public library system, with branches across the county, including a new one in the wonderful little town of Port Royal, near where I live.
I am so grateful to live in such a pet-friendly community, too. Last year, I became more intentional about taking advantage of that, so every weekend I make sure to explore multiple locations with Rommie, our brindle-coated mountain cur. We have some favorite walking spots—like the Spanish Moss Trail’s Depot Trailhead, Hunting Island State Park, Penn Center, Crystal Lake, and Pigeon Point Park—and favorite dog-friendly restaurants—like Beedos, Foolish Frog, and the Smokehouse—but we also try to find new places to walk and eat each week, too. Thankfully, there is an endless list of destinations here in our beautiful lowcountry.
I once asked Pat his advice about how to make sure I never lost sight of how special this place truly is. He spent his 50-year writing career trying to do justice to it on the page, even during the years he was too controversial to make his home here. He told me that you must make a practice of appreciating it. A ritual of it, really. I try to begin and end each day with a walk along the creek in neighborhood. A lot can go wrong in a day, but a marsh walk can always reset the spirit to try again the next day.
I’ve gotten better at photographing our lowcountry, too. That’s also act of gratitude, of committing moments to memory and anchoring experiences in a practice of intentional documentation. I’ve come to realize that this also an act of resistance. In an era that has become increasingly perilous to the free expression of ideas, the opposite of destruction is creation—it’s art in any and every wondrous form we can create or enjoy.
And that’s a might nice word to end on, it’s it? Enjoy? In joy.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.patconroyliterarycenter.org
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/patconroyliterarycenter/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/patconroyliterarycenter
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/PatConroyLiteraryCenter
- Other: https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g54135-d14152832-Reviews-Pat_Conroy_Literary_Center-Beaufort_South_Carolina.html
