North Carolina Literary Review Online Winter 2022

NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE VI E W ONLINE

WINTER 2022

WRITERS WHO TEACH, TEACHERS WHO WRITE

FEATURED IN THIS ISSUE Interview with Christy Alexander Hallberg n Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction and James Applewhite Poetry Prize Finalists n Book Reviews and Literary News n And more n n n

COVER ART Selections from the 100DayProject 2021 (mixed media/collage) by Joan Mansfield Cover artist JOAN MANSFIELD is an alumna of ECU where she earned a BFA in Communication Arts in 1976 and an MFA in Illustration in 1982. Her art and illustration has been published and exhibited widely in regional, national, and international venues. After two years as visiting faculty at East Carolina University from 1982 to 1984, she joined the faculty in the Art Department at Florida State University for four years, teaching graphic design and illustration and coordinating the Visual Communications program there. She rejoined the ECU School of Art & Design faculty in 1990 and retired in 2018 as an Associate Professor and the Area Coordinator of the Illustration program. Upon retirement she continues her work and interests in mixed media in art and illustration applications. Find her on Instagram at kestrel_studio.

The cover art is a selection of works from a project called the 100DayProject.

The 100DayProject was a creative prompt advertised on Instagram to challenge those on that social media platform to engage in a creative project of their own design to span a period of 100 days.

The COVID pandemic, having made retirement travel plans more problematic, prompted Joan to focus on work in her studio and engage in the 100DayProject in the Spring of 2021 with a series of small, square mixed media/collage works.

COVER DESIGNER NCLR Art Director DANA EZZELL LOVELACE is a Professor at Meredith College in Raleigh. She has an MFA in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. Her design work has been recognized by the CASE Awards and in such publications as Print Magazine’s Regional Design Annual, the Applied Arts Awards Annual, American Corporate Identity, and the Big Book of Logos 4. She has been designing for NCLR since the fifth issue, and in 2009, created the current style and design. In 2010, the “new look” earned NCLR a second award for Best Journal Design from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.

In addition to the cover, she designed the Rash creative nonfiction in this issue and the cover.

Produced annually by East Carolina University and by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association © COPYRIGHT 2022 NCLR

NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE VI E W ONLINE

WINTER 2022

WRITERS WHO TEACH, TEACHERS WHO WRITE IN THIS ISSUE 6

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Writers Who Teach, Teachers Who Write includes an interview, poetry, creative nonfiction, book reviews,

and literary news Jen Fawkes Sylvia Freeman Donna A. Gessell Judy Goldman Halli Gomez Jim Grimsley Christy Alexander Hallberg James Tate Hill Laura Hope-Gill George Hovis Justin Hunt Kelly Jones Max Kilgore James W. Kirkland Kathryn Kirkpatrick

Kristina L. Knotts Mirinda Kossoff Vicki Lane John Lang Michael Loderstedt Karen Salyer McElmurray Kevin McIlvoy Rose McLarney Kat Meads Monica Carol Miller Jason Mott Charles Murray Grace C. Ocasio Gwen Priest Caroline Rash

Anthony S. Abbott Lavonne J. Adams Alex Albright Robert G. Anthony, Jr. Margaret D. Bauer John Blythe Lisa Wenger Bro Mary Othella Burnette Wayne Caldwell Wiley Cash Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle Jim Coby Naima Coster Tracy Deonn Sandra Dreis

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Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues includes poetry, book reviews, and literary news

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J.S. Absher Dale Bailey Natania Barron Jill Caugherty James W. Clark, Jr. Michael Amos Cody

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North Carolina Miscellany includes creative nonfiction

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Sharon E. Colley L.C. Fiore Heather Frese Tim Garvin Allan Gurganus Fred Hobson

Pat Riviere-Seel Lorraine Hale Robinson Faith Shearin Maureen Sherbondy Jimmy Dean Smith Mark Smith-Soto Helen Stead Timothy B. Tyson Michele Walker Mark I. West Charles Dodd White Alicia D. Williams Matthew Wimberley Gideon Young John Zheng

Neal Hutcheson Margaret Maron Jessica Martell D.G. Martin Anna McFadyen Priscilla Melchior

Benjamin Pryor Terry Roberts Ed Southern Zackary Vernon

Moriah LeFebvre Michael Loderstedt Joan Mansfield Lacey McKinney Jesse Murry

Kenny Nguyen Sue Holder Rash Linda Foard Roberts

Emily Dunlap Carter Eve Odom

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North Carolina Artists in this issue Charles Alston Alicia A. Armstrong Cynthia Bickley-Green Peter Butler Chris Foley

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Francisco Gonzalez Carmen Grier Stephen L. Hayes, Jr. Meredith Hebden Rand Kramer

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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W

Winter 2022

North Carolina Literary Review is published annually in the summer by the University of North Carolina Press.

The journal is sponsored by East Carolina University with additional funding from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association. NCLR Online, published in the winter and fall, is an open access supplement to the print issue.

NCLR is a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, and it is indexed in EBSCOhost, the Humanities International Complete, the MLA International Bibliography, and the Society for the Study of Southern Literature Newsletter.

Address correspondence to Dr. Margaret D. Bauer, NCLR Editor ECU Mailstop 555 English Greenville, NC 27858-4353

Submissions NCLR invites proposals for articles or essays about North Carolina literature, history, and culture. Much of each issue is thematically focused, but a portion of each issue is open for developing interesting proposals, particularly interviews and literary analyses (without academic jargon). NCLR also publishes high-quality poetry, fiction, drama, and creative nonfiction by North Carolina writers or set in North Carolina. We define a North Carolina writer as anyone who currently lives in North Carolina, has lived in North Carolina, or has used North Carolina as subject matter.

252.328.1537 Telephone 252.328.4889 Fax BauerM@ecu.edu Email NCLRuser@ecu.edu NCLRsubmissions@ecu.edu

See our website for submission guidelines for the various sections of each issue. Submissions to each issue’s special feature section are due August 31 of the preceding year, though proposals may be considered through early fall.

http://www.NCLR.ecu.edu Website

Issue #32 (2023) will feature NC Native American Literature, guest edited by Kirstiin L. Squint

Subscriptions to the print issues of NCLR are, for individuals, $16 (US) for one year or $27 (US) for two years, or $27 (US) annually for institutions and foreign subscribers. Libraries and other institutions may purchase subscriptions through subscription agencies.

Individuals or institutions may also receive NCLR through membership in the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association. More information on our website.

Individual copies of the annual print issue are available from retail outlets and from UNC Press. Back issues of our print issues are also available for purchase, while supplies last. See the NCLR website for prices and tables of contents of back issues.

ISSN: 2165-1809

Issue #33 (2024) will feature NC Disability Literature, guest edited by Casey Kayser Issue #34 (2025) will feature NC Mysteries and Thrillers, guest edited by Kirstiin L. Squint Please email your suggestions for other special feature topics to the editor.

Book reviews are usually solicited, though suggestions will be considered as long as the book is by a North Carolina writer, is set in North Carolina, or deals with North Carolina subjects. NCLR prefers review essays that consider the new work in the context of the writer’s canon, other North Carolina literature, or the genre at large. Publishers and writers are invited to submit North Carolina–related books for review consideration. See the index of books that have been reviewed in NCLR on our website. NCLR does not review self-/subsidy-published or vanity press books.

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Editor Margaret D. Bauer Art Director Dana Ezzell Lovelace Poetry Editor Jeffrey Franklin Fiction Editor Liza Wieland Art Editor Diane A. Rodman

Founding Editor Alex Albright Original Art Director Eva Roberts

Graphic Designer Karen Baltimore Stephanie Whitlock Dicken Senior Associate Editor Christy Alexander Hallberg Assistant Editors Anne Mallory Randall Martoccia Editorial Assistant Megan Smith Intern Sarah Godfrey

EDITORIAL BOARD Dale Bailey English, Lenoir-Rhyne University

Kate Harrington English, East Carolina University

E. Thomson Shields English, East Carolina University

Barbara Bennett English, North Carolina State University

John Hoppenthaler English, East Carolina University

Kirstin Squint English, East Carolina University

Catherine Carter English, Western Carolina University

George Hovis English, SUNY Oneonta

Amber Flora Thomas English, East Carolina University

Matt Cox English, East Carolina University

Donna Kain English, East Carolina University

Monique Truong Author, Brooklyn, NY

Celestine Davis English, East Carolina University

Kathryn Kirkpatrick English, Appalachian State University

Gabrielle Brant Freeman English, East Carolina University

Kat Meads Red Earth MFA program, Oklahoma City University

Guiseppe Getto English, East Carolina University Brian Glover English, East Carolina University Marame Gueye English, East Carolina University

Eddie A. Moore English, East Carolina University Michael Parker Professor Emeritus, English, UNC Greensboro Angela Raper English, East Carolina University

Dean Tuck English, Wayne Community College Zackary Vernon English, Appalachian State University Eric Walker Professor Emeritus, English, Florida State University David Wilson-Okamura English, East Carolina University

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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W

Winter 2022

The Many Hats a North Carolina Writer Wears

by Margaret D. Bauer, Editor In fall 2021, NCLR celebrated thirty years in print, and I started my twenty-fifth year serving as Editor. We began our third decade broadening our digital reach with NCLR Online in 2012, producing an annual issue released in winter. In 2022, we are adding a fall issue, publishing more book reviews, more frequently. Indeed, in addition to compiling them in now biannual online issues, we are sharing them weekly via social media in fulfillment of our mission to promote North Carolina writers.

Evolving in the midst of a pandemic has not been easy. Our staff size shrank rather than expanded as we were assigned only one graduate assistant in the fall and did not get the permanent staff position we’d hoped for after last spring’s strategic planning. Still, we are moving forward with our plans: UNC Press has digitized the early print back issues for us, and we are now preparing those for distribution. Therefore, if you are looking for content previously available in print only, you will find it through libraries’ digital subscriptions, in PDFs that maintain NCLR’s unique design. Your clicks will provide another (albeit modest) revenue source for NCLR. Providing the full run of NCLR via digital databases will also fulfill an NCLR mission: to preserve North Carolina’s rich literary history.

We are also working on transforming the NCLR website, last updated with our 2009 design transformation. Stay tuned for progress on that. And we continue to campaign for permanent, fulltime editorial staff support, for, like the rest of the NCLR

editorial staff, I too am a writer who teaches (and edits), and there are still only twenty-four hours in the day.

As do so many of the writers in our pages, I understand the many hats we don in our vocation, each representative of a labor of love – at times exhilarating, at times exhausting. My own passion for both teaching and writing and my appreciation of those who do both inspired the special feature topic I chose for my twenty-fifth year as NCLR Editor. In the following pages, read the bio notes of the writers whose poems and essay are published in this section, as well as the authors of the books reviewed, the reviewers themselves, and the awardees: all are or have been teachers. Celebrate with me the gift they are to their students as well as to their readers – indeed, to their communities and to the state of North Carolina.

As this academic year began with optimism that normalcy was resuming, we hosted some in-person events at our home institution, including a reading by our Senior Associate Editor Christy Alexander Hallberg from her first novel, Searching for Jimmy Page. Longtime NCLR contributor George Hovis interviewed Christy for these pages. In more than the obvious way, her interview is particularly appropriate for this section of the issue featuring Writers Who Teach. Christy’s significant role in getting the word out about her own novel teaches through example what is expected of so many writers these

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days: self-promotion. Authors are largely expected to market their own books: build websites, go on book tours, attract interviews, and make connections to keep this activity going to prompt sales. All this while also working whatever job pays their bills.

Introducing Christy at her ECU reading, NCLR Assistant Editor Randall Martoccia pointed out to the audience that our colleague earned her MFA and wrote this novel while teaching four sections of Writing Intensive courses every fall and spring, as well as additional sections during her summers. As a fellow fixed-term faculty member here at ECU, Randall understands how hard it is to do anything besides grade papers during the academic year. And still Christy makes time to read for NCLR throughout the year. She has also conducted several in-depth interviews with North Carolina writers: you’ll find one forthcoming in our print issue – or rather, two, as her interview with Leah Hampton was so in-depth I had to divide it up into two interviews. I was pleased to have the tables turned on her and receive an interview with her, and I know readers will enjoy reading about the inspiration for her novel.

And speaking of folks in the NCLR family: we celebrate our founding editor in these pages too: Alex Albright was honored in 2021 with the John Tyler Caldwell Award for the Humanities, the highest honor given by North Carolina Humanities.

Indeed, all of the big honors we typically cover in these issues went to NCLR “family.” Retired UNC

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Chapel Hill North Carolina Collection curator Bob Anthony, who has helped my staff (and Alex’s, I’m sure) throughout our three decades, was honored by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association with the Christopher Crittenden Memorial Award. Regularly featured NCLR writer Jim Grimsley received the Hardee Rives Dramatic Arts Award, also from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association. Tim Tyson, who wrote about watching his book Blood Done Sign My Name turned into a film (in NCLR 2012), received the North Carolina Award for Literature. And, for only the second time in North Carolina literary history, Jason Mott, interviewed in NCLR 2019, received the National Book Award for Fiction (as well as the 2021 Sir Walter Raleigh Award). Read more about all of these honorees (and others) in the pages to come.

If you are a North Carolina writer, I invite you to join our family: submit your creative writing to our contests, send us an interview or critical analysis, tell us about your new book so we can send it out for review, offer to review a book for another writer. Join the literary family that is the writing community of “the Writingest State” of North Carolina.

And thank you – to Christy, Randall, and all of the other volunteers who have helped me to produce NCLR for twenty-five years; to all of the writers and artists who have shared their talent; and to you, our readers for your loyal support of what we do. n

BELOW LEFT NCLR Assistant Editor Randall Martoccia

introducing Senior Associate Editor Christy Alexander Hallberg at her hometown reading from her debut novel, East Carolina University Joyner Library, Greenville, NC, 11 Nov. 2021; BELOW RIGHT NCLR Editor Margaret Bauer and Fouding

Editor Alex Albright cutting the 25th issue cake, East Carolina University Joyner Library, Greenville, NC, 22 Oct. 2016

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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W

Winter 2022

10 One Hell of a Book (By a North Carolina Writer) Receives the National Book Award for Fiction

by Margaret D. Bauer

28 Linking the Common and the Uncanny a review by Lisa Wenger Bro n Jen Fawkes, Tales the Devil Told Me

12 “The Black Condition” in Hell of a Book a review by Helen Stead n Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

31 You Can Come Home Again – and Be Lauded: Jim Grimsley Receives 2021 Hardee Rives Dramatic Arts Award

by Lorraine Hale Robinson

14 Borrowed Light a poem by Kelly Jones

art by Rand Kramer 16 People Constructed of Pain and Grief a review by Jim Coby n Wiley Cash, When Ghosts Come Home 18 Mixed Messages: A Southern Childhood a poem by Sylvia Freeman

art by Charles Alston

32 An Interview with Rock ‘n’ Roll Novelist Christy Alexander Hallberg

by George Hovis 48 The Eye a poem and photography by Michael Loderstedt 49 An Unsung Legend a review by Max Kilgore n Tracy Deonn, Legendborn

20 New Fiction Reckons with Landscape of Change 52 More Than a Haircut a review by Kristina L. Knotts a poem by Gwen Priest n Naima Coster, What’s Mine and Yours art by Moriah LeFebvre n Kevin McIlvoy, One Kind Favor 54 Stories about Growing Up 23 Betrayal Black and Female in America a poem by Charles Murray

a review by Mark I. West

art by Lacey McKinney n Alicia D. Williams, Genesis Begins Again, n Jump at the Sun, and Shirley Chisholm Dared 24 They Have Been at Something, Some Carrion, a Deer, or Such 56 Ghazal: Reflection and We Think of Night as Still a review by Jimmy Dean Smith two poems by Lavonne J. Adams n Vicki Lane, And the Crows Took Their Eyes art by Carmen Grier and Alicia A. Armstrong 26 First Published Novel by a Member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Receives 2021 Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award

by Margaret D. Bauer

58 A Roving Search for Provisions of Any Kind

a review by Kathryn Kirkpatrick n Rose McLarney, Forage

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NORTH CAROLINA

Writers Who Teach, Teachers Who Write 60 A Reading Full of Light a review by John Zheng n Gideon Young, my hands full of light

84 Being Christian, Being Jewish a review by Judy Goldman n Mirinda Kossoff, The Rope of Life

62 Why I Flinch at the Thought of Daylight Squandered a poem by Justin Hunt

art by Linda Foard Roberts

86 J.J. – 1985 a poem by Sandra Dreis

art by Jesse Murry

64 Poems of Love and Loss a review by James W. Kirkland n Anthony S. Abbot, Dark Side of North

88 A Year of Collected Notes: Storytelling Sublime a review by Donna A. Gessell n Kat Meads, Dear Deedee

67 Clichés a poem by Mark Smith-Soto

art by Francisco Gonzalez

90 Wintering a poem by Charles Dodd White

art by Kenny Nguyen

68 Charting Grief, Seeking Solace a review by John Lang n Faith Shearin, Lost Language

92 The Transformational Potential of Writing a review by Monica Carol Miller n Karen Salyer McElmurray, Voice Lessons

71 Debut Novel by Halli Gomez Wins NC AAUW Award

94 2021 Crittenden Award, Well-Deserved Honor for “Mr. North Carolina,” Robert G. Anthony, Jr.

by John Blythe

72 Turning Reality on Its Head

a review by Grace C. Ocasio n Pat Riviere-Seel, When There Were Horses n Maureen Sherbondy, Dancing with Dali 76 Love – and Mushrooms and Zooms – in the Ruins an essay by Caroline Rash

art by Sue Holder Rash 83 Timothy B. Tyson Receives 2021 North Carolina Award for Literature

by Michele Walker

96 Calling the Bluff on Show-Don’t-Tell a review by Laura Hope-Gill n James Tate Hill, Blind Man’s Bluff

art by Cynthia Bickley-Green 98 Tireless and Selfless Promoter of North Carolina Literature Alex Albright: Recipient of the 2021 John Tyler Caldwell Award for the Humanities presentation remarks by Margaret D. Bauer 98 A Lifetime's Labors acceptance remarks by Alex Albright

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE 102 n

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

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North Carolina Miscellany

poetry, book reviews, and literary news

creative nonfiction

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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W

Winter 2022

ONE HELL OF A BOOK (BY A NORTH CAROLINA WRITER) RECEIVES THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION

by Margaret D. Bauer, Editor It seems to me that every year there is a particular book that I find myself recommending every time I get into a book discussion – which is often, given my profession as English Professor / NCLR Editor. This year, that book was Jason Mott’s aptly titled Hell of a Book (Penguin Random House, 2021). So, on the evening of November 17, 2021, I logged onto the National Book Foundation’s website to watch the National Book Awards ceremony and find out how right I am about “ I would like to that novel – very, very right, as it turns out. dedicate this award Hell of a Book by Jason to all the other Mott received the 2021 Mad Kids. To all National Book Award for Fiction, selected the outsiders, from the longlist and the weirdos, then shortlist of strong the bullied, the contenders. I’m going to admit here that I’ve ones so strange not (yet) read the others that they had no in the shortlist. As NCLR Editor, I find myself choice but to be mainly reading regionmisunderstood ally to keep up with this by the world and state’s prolific writers, listening to some while by those around I travel, clean house, them – the ones run errands, work in who, in spite of this, the yard. That’s how I “read” Hell of a Book, I’ll refused to outgrow admit (his earlier novel their imagination, The Returned, too, and refused to abandon as I write this, I’m listening to The Crossing, their dreams, and another of his novels). refused to deny I recommend the audio version of Hell of a Book or diminish their to any who like audio identity, their truth, books – which is not to their loves, unlike say that I find it superior to the published novel. I so many cold and just haven’t had time to timid souls.” sit down and read it –

—Jason Mott, from his acceptance remarks

but I will. I am looking forward to assigning it in my next section of North Carolina Literature at ECU. I finished listening to the novel on the way to Hillsborough, where, coincidentally, I was giving a presentation for Carolina K-12 on teaching North Carolina literature. As Mott’s novel opens with the protagonist running naked through a hotel after a sexual liaison with a married woman is interrupted by the cuckolded husband, it is probably not appropriate for K-12 classes, but I still could not resist telling my audience of teachers about it. “I need to talk about this book,” I told them, “which means I need people to hurry up and read it.”

What begins as a typically comical picaresque novel turns as dark as the summer we all watched a police officer kill George Floyd, over and over, on national television, and it certainly seems the killing of Ahmaud Arbery the preceding winter was a significant source of inspiration for Mott’s novel.

As I listened to Mott’s story unfold, I was reminded that I’d listened to his novel The Returned during the time when the Trump administration was separating refugee children from their parents on the southern US border, and I was struck by how Mott’s exploration of people’s fear of the unfamiliar “Other” could lead (has led) to internment camps, even in the US. And as I am now discovering, The Crossing imagines a plague killing the elderly, then the late middle-aged (I’m not yet finished listening).

A native of Bolton, NC, Mott earned his BFA and MFA from UNC Wilmington, where he now teaches.

Writers Who Teach, Teachers Who Write

(if that’s you, then please like us on Facebook, follow NCLR on Twitter, because boy did we follow and update this story – from Hell of a Book’s longlisting to its shortlisting to its win, as well as the other honors in between and after) that for only the second time in our state’s rich literary history,2 a North Carolina native has received the National Book Award for Fiction! Congratulations, Jason Mott! n

His first two books are poetry collections, We Call This Thing Between Us Love (2009) and “. . . hide behind me . . .” (2011), both published by Main Street Rag. His debut novel, The Returned (MIRA, 2013) a New York Times Bestseller, was adapted as a television series titled Resurrection. His other novels are The Wonder of All Things (MIRA, 2014) and The Crossing (Park Row Books, 2018; reviewed in NCLR Online 2019). A national bestseller, Hell of a Book also received the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction;1 was longlisted for the 2022 Carnegie Medal Fiction, the 2021 Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and the 2021 Aspen Words Literary Prize; and is also on several 2021 lists of “must reads.” Read an interview with Mott in the 2019 print issue of NCLR. Long before we had any idea what a splash Hell of a Book was going to make, indeed, before the novel was even released, a review was assigned, which you can read in the pages to follow. My intention here is to spread the news of this moment in North Carolina literary history to anyone who missed it

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The Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction is sponsored by the Historical Book Club of North Carolina and and the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association. Hear Jason Mott’s acceptance remarks for the Raleigh Award here.

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“ With audacity and invention, Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book weaves together three narrative strands – an unnamed author, a boy named Soot, and a figure known as The Kid – into a masterful novel.

In a structurally and conceptually daring examination of art, fame, family and being Black in America, Mott somehow manages the impossible trick of being playful, insightful and deeply moving, all at the same time.

A highly original, inspired work that breaks new ground.”—National Book Foundation Judges Citation

In 1997, Charles Frazier received the National Book Award for Cold Mountain. South Carolina’s William Styron, who attended both Davidson and Duke in North Carolina, received it for Sophie’s Choice in 1980. Other North Carolinians to receive a National Book Award (in poetry) are, in 1961, Randall Jarrell, a native of Tennessee who taught at the UNC Woman’s College (now UNC Greensboro), and in both 1973 and 1993, native North Carolinian A.R. Ammons.

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COURTESY OF NBC

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“THE BLACK CONDITION” IN HELL OF A BOOK a review by Helen Stead Jason Mott. Hell of a Book: A Novel. Dutton, 2021.

HELEN STEAD earned her PhD in creative writing from the University of Tennessee, where she was the Editor of Grist, and her MFA in creative writing from the University of Missouri, Kansas City. Her writing has appeared in journals including Echo Ink Review, Blue River Review, and Rougarou and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She previously taught at ECU and served as an Assistant Editor of NCLR. She now lives in Colorado.

Read about JASON MOTT in the preceding coverage of his National Book Award for this novel.

Last year millions of Americans watched in horror as they saw George Floyd take his last breath under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer as bystanders cried for mercy. The people erupted into protests and riots, which took over cities across the nation and beyond, demanding justice and answers to systemic racism in our institutions. It is crises like these that North Carolina native Jason Mott explores in Hell of a Book, asking whether black authors have a responsibility to provide commentary in their fiction on what it means to be Black.

The book is told mostly through two perspectives: an author on a book tour with a vacillating mental state, and a young boy, who watched police kill his father. The unnamed author bursts into the book naked, running down a hotel hallway to evade an angry husband of a quick lover, and as things unfold, it becomes apparent that this author has more than a drinking and affair problem; he has a condition that sparks conversations with peo-

ple no one else can see. He can’t tell whether the person he is speaking to is real or not, which calls into question every interaction throughout the novel.

The Kid, also unnamed but called “Soot” because of his skin color, hangs out in the author’s chapters, which adds a layer of unknown to The Kid’s sections, prompting the reader to ask, who is this kid? Why is he important to the author? And why do we see him in the author’s sections and not vice versa?

The author’s book is also titled Hell of a Book, and so the entire novel works in layers of metafiction, which delightfully complicates the question Mott must wrestle with: how much of himself has he written into the book? Is the book about him? Or is it about something larger than himself? The book draws the reader through these moments of the unknown by giving us just enough to figure out what situation is real and what isn’t, which is a little more than the narrator knows. This is done expertly.

There is this moment that seems to be the exigence of

ABOVE Jason Mott appearing on TODAY to discuss his book with

Read with Jenna [Bush Hager] book club members, 28 July 2021

Writers Who Teach, Teachers Who Write

Black author to say something about the world? No. Not at all. . . . I’m a good person with pain all of my own. Why do I have to fix the world?” (276). What is delicious about this is that Mott clearly disagrees – hence why the real Hell of a Book is immersed in the current climate – but it also seems to be saying that readers shouldn’t trust fiction writers to impart reality, as they are unreliable and can only present certain truths about the human condition.

However, the novel’s examination of the implications of skin color and how that should or shouldn’t impact the writer’s work is fascinating. The author’s agent brings this up when PR Jack says, “You didn’t tell me he was Black” and the author’s agent responds, “I wanted to see if you could tell from his writing” (89). This comes back to the initial probing of how much of the book is really about the writer of the book and how much of it is about something larger.

And does it matter how much is steeped in reality if the message or the characters impart the thing the writer wants?

Just as in The Crossing and Mott’s other works, his fiction style is well informed by poetry at the sentence level: the writing is imagistic and poetic without being indulgent. This, along with the attempt to iron out the author’s reality and the intrinsic humor of these situations, drives the narrative forward. However, because some of the characters are imaginary, they can come across as far too all-knowing so that there ends up being a

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plethora of guide-like characters, leading the author to his truth, which feels like we’re being told more than shown. In addition to this, there is a Field of Dreams scene where people just disappear into the cornstalks. I wanted to draw meaning from this, but in the end, I couldn’t get past this scene. The most disappointing element of the novel is that the last several chapters undo what Mott has expertly crafted by telling the reader how to interpret the parallels between the author and The Kid and what this all means when it comes to writing about the Black condition.

Ultimately, if Mott trusted his readers to see what is already there and cut out some of the end material, the novel would leave a much stronger flavor. As is, however, this exploration into reality and race is worth savoring in light of what fiction should do and how it should inform and shape our perspectives. n

PHOTOGRAPH BY CLAY BANKS

why Mott wrote the book: Renny, a limo driver/escort for the author, makes a comment about the author’s blackness, how he’s “supposed to be a voice” and how his book didn’t have “anything about the Black condition in it” (77). Perhaps this is the author’s inner self responding to being told that writing about the black condition isn’t going to get him anywhere. The Kid is told by his grandfather, Daddy Henry: “You gotta tell the right stories. You gotta tell them the right way.

No n[***]r stories, okay?” (55).

And the author is told by his PR guru Jack: “don’t write about race. Specifically, don’t write about being Black. You can write about Black characters, but just don’t write about being Black” (106). Hell of a Book pushes back in an intricate way.

The author’s response to Renny’s comment is initial shock at his own skin: “I’m still processing my sudden blackness. . . .

Was I born that way? If so, why don’t I remember it? Or maybe this is all just another part of my condition” (76).

For the most part, there are some well-done insertions of humor in the novel, but in this case, he is talking directly to the reader and the tone comes off as serious. But then he is clearly facetious to Renny, so his reaction is inconsistent in a critical moment when the reader needs to see him process this honestly.

Later, the author comes to his own conclusion that he does not need to address the Black condition: “Renny tries to tell me that I’ve got a responsibility as a

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ABOVE A Black Lives Matter demonstration

in Charlotte, NC, 3 June 2020

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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W

Winter 2022

2021 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE FINALIST

BY KELLY JONES

Borrowed Light We’re made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.—Carl Sagan the burning parts of us, thirsty for light look to the stars to tell us who we might be but it is the darkness that tells us who we are you and i are cinders of stars, children of darkness and light all we know, and will know, is debris before memory forgotten worlds remembered on our fingertips our breath, the pearled grass, the flocked wing of a luna moth dancing towards the shadowed moon all borne from familiar darkened ashes we see ourselves in the red-shifted, old ones glowing like periods in a comma sky plumped, fading to black, meaningless no craters, or explosions, or universal truths just the remains of complete incompletion there will be more nights to borrow but never as many as before before the days and nights became shadows in the bottom of our cups before we mortgaged the sky for a ceiling with lead stars before we learned a simple truth darkness follows all light

KELLY JONES is an Arts Education Coordinator for Columbus County Schools.

He lives in Tabor City, NC. A member of the A.R. Ammons Poetry Contest Committee, North Carolina’s longest running student poetry contest, his works have appeared in Flying South and Kakalak.

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COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

Cosmos (mixed media on panel, 12x12) by Rand Kramer

the great ones warn that everything dies, dims, becomes what it never was but you and i must become what is left when stars die pull the night in all around us and stick it under our jackets draw our own blackened constellations our own shadowed creations thread the moonlight through a needle and piece together all the remnants of night we can find we may have borrowed our light from the stars but the darkness is ours to keep.

RAND KRAMER was born in Maryland, where he earned a BA at The Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. He spent many years in Northern Virginia before moving to Asheville, NC, in 2017, where he lives and works in his studio in the River Arts District. After a thirty-year career in digital design, he redirected his creativity to fine art. His work is located in public and private collections throughout the Washington, DC, metro area, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and California. He is represented by Citron Gallery in Asheville.

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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W

PEOPLE CONSTRUCTED OF PAIN AND GRIEF a review by Jim Coby Wiley Cash. When Ghosts Come Home: A Novel.

William Morrow, 2021.

JIM COBY grew up in Alabama and is an Assistant Professor of English at Indiana University Kokomo. He is the editor in chief of IU Kokomo’s student journal Field: A Journal of Arts and Sciences. He has reviewed regularly for NCLR. Read his interview with Cash in the 2022 print issue.

WILEY CASH is the author of four novels, the previous two reviewed in NCLR Online 2015 and 2018. He talks about his first novel in an interview in NCLR 2013. He is a professor at UNC Asheville where he teaches fiction writing and literature. He currently resides in North Carolina with his wife and daughters. Read an interview with him in NCLR 2013 and another in the 2022 print issue.

New York Times bestselling author Wiley Cash has previously published novels exploring fundamentalist religions, family dynamics, recording the lengths to which an estranged father will go to reach his children, and reimagining labor disputes of the early twentieth century in the mill towns near Gastonia, NC. In his newest, and arguably best novel, When Ghosts Come Home, Cash continues his streak of notable stories with a literary thriller that grapples with institutionalized racism and violence, policing practices, and the psychological and emotional tumult of losing a child, all while a vexing and haunting murder unfolds in the background.

The novel begins on October 30, 1984, with an atmosphere very much like a classic thriller – ambiance, secrecy, and a latent, lurking malevolence seemingly around each corner and waiting to be released. From that haunted evening, three parallel narrative threads emerge.

Winston Barnes, the sheriff of the small community of Oak Island, NC, investigates a mysterious Mischief Night plane crash that leaves community figurehead Rodney Bellamy dead in its wake. Barnes also navigates his home life as his wife Marie struggles with cancer. Next, we follow Bellamy’s nephew as he navigates the vexing world of matriculating to a new high school and grappling with small-town racism after his parents send him to live with his sister Janelle following a shoplifting incident in his native Atlanta. The final thread revolves

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around Winston’s daughter Colleen who is reeling from the loss of a child and retreats from her home in Dallas to Oak Island to seek refuge among the sights, sounds, and people with whom she is most intimately familiar.

As each of these characters continues their journeys, their lives become increasingly entangled until acts of shocking violence evince the ways in which everything connects to everything else in small Southern towns.

Cash has always shown himself to be a gifted author of place, and this trend continues within his latest novel. Rather than dealing with Appalachia or Piedmont regions of North Carolina as he has in his previous books, he instead turns his attention to the coastal Oak Island, which he describes as “a place that had either gone undiscovered or had been forgotten by the rest of the state” (13). From its first pages, When Ghosts Come Home inundates the reader with a sense of uneasiness and loneliness.

Despite characters readily traveling to Oak Island from locales like Miami, Dallas, and Wilmington, the setting feels completely isolated and removed –claustrophobic in its very openness.

This sense is amplified by the constant reminders of autumnal weather and the fact that restaurants and tourist spots have closed down for the season, as their patrons have all fled for warmer climates. “As fall turned toward winter,” Cash writes, “the island always seemed to grow smaller, more remote, more insular” (13), and we as readers

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COURTESY OF PBS NORTH CAROLINA

– and witnesses – feel the walls closing in on us as well.

Given the dark subject matter of this novel, Cash strikes a remarkable balance in crafting a text that walks the tightrope of appealing to our more prurient curiosities, while also allowing for some light to peek through the cracks. There’s no shortage of trauma and violence, to be sure, but what readers leave this novel with is not so much horror at the reflections of our world, as a deep appreciation for the intractable kindness that refuses to leave even during the worst of times, for the small mercies that we grant one another. For example, throughout the novel, Colleen, a character “constructed of pain and grief” (29), finds herself haunted by the stillborn death of her child. As a means of both confronting her grief and measuring time in her liminal world, she is constantly consulting a child care manual to learn

approximately what developmental stage her child would be experiencing had they lived.

The manual provides Colleen a temporal framework from when days and weeks muddle together and time becomes incalculable.

It is not the consultation of her manual that provides her the greatest relief from anxiety but her interactions with others in her community who have likewise experienced loss. Late in the novel, Colleen visits Janelle Bellamy’s home, where the two recount their memories of Rodney and where Colleen has the opportunity to hold Janelle’s newborn child. Remarkably, a simple request becomes laden with the weight of the goodness that each woman is providing the other – Colleen relieving Janelle, however briefly, of a chore, and Janelle providing Colleen the opportunity to feel a newborn child close to her. Such tenderness, such instances of

ABOVE Wiley Cash (right) with D.G. Martin, host of North Carolina Bookwatch,

talking about When Ghosts Come Home (PBS North Carolina, 14 Nov. 2021)

minor but profound kindness allow Cash’s novel to delve into the darkness of this world, while reminding readers that kindness exists alongside it.

If Wiley Cash’s new novel, When Ghosts Come Home, didn’t so well encapsulate the myriad universal tumults of aging, fear, and loss, then it might well be described as the perfect encapsulation of the year 2020. Despite the 1980s setting, the novel is animated by the anxieties of our collective recent past: loss of family, reckonings with racial injustice past and present, a high-stakes election, and the belief that such concerns are beyond one’s control. But even with these pressing and weighty concerns, the novel moves with the rapidity of the most well-plotted thriller, and readers will hardly be able to set the novel down once they’ve picked it up. n

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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W

2021 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE FINALIST

BY SYLVIA FREEMAN

Mixed Messages

a Southern Childhood

1 In my grandmother’s kitchen, Dora sang her favorite gospel hymns ‘He’s got you and me sister in His hands, He’s got the Whole World . . .’ she tied a red and yellow patterned scarf around her head scrambled eggs, fried bacon, made frying pan toast let me stir the grits, drop butter in to make them creamy.

When I asked Mamaw why Dora always comes through the back she looked at me like I was crazy, whispered because she’s colored.

So were some of the traveling musicians in my uncle’s jazz band who came in the front door, joked with Mamaw, ate dinner with us slept upstairs in big-windowed rooms, practiced for gigs in the music room, piano, standing bass, sax ‘It don’t mean a thing If It Aint’ Got That Swing’ floated down the hallway. Dora knew all the words swung her hips side to side, kneaded biscuits to the beat.

She met the ice man, milkman, grocery man at the back door handed out food to the hungry waiting outside.

I begged to go home with her, play with her daughter exactly my age but Mamaw said, No. You’d have to ride in the back of the bus walk to her house and she lives in a real bad part of town.

2 Mama worked at the front counter of a cleaners.

They called it dry although I remember steamy heat fans blowing hot air both winter and summer smell of chlorine solvents that made my eyes water sweat dampened shirts stuck to the backs of black workers in the stuffy back room where they removed buttons, ornaments pre-treated garments by hand, Tetrachloromethane in the air, the water so toxic it corroded washers and dryers they loaded, unloaded.

SYLVIA FREEMAN’s poems have been published in storySouth, The Lake, Galway Review, Muddy River, and other venues. She is the 2018 winner of the Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition from the North Carolina Writers’ Network, the 2018 Franklin County Arts Council Writer’s Guild Carolina Prize for Writing for Best Overall Poetry and a 2021 Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize semifinalist. A native of North Carolina, she lives in Durham. Her photography – of writers and birds, in particular – has been featured in NCLR’s pages.

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© 2021CHARLES ALSTON / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK

Pressing machine added more heat to the room pressure from top, hiss of steam underneath buttons, lace, sequins stitched back in place wedding dresses carefully wrapped in tissue for storage silky evening gowns, cashmere coats hung on tall racks rolled out front where Mama smiled, tagged clothing talked to customers, wrote sales slips.

She grew fond of the workers, heard their stories met their families, told me The world’s a big place people come in all shapes all sizes all colors but inside we’re the same.

Woman Washing Clothes, 1970 (pastel on paper, 30.5x20.5)

by Charles Alston, in the Permanent Collection of the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture Generously donated by Bank of America Corporation

3 In the First Baptist Church on Main Street first graders sang ‘Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world, red and yellow black and white, they are precious in His sight . . .’

The Girl’s Auxiliary raised money for missionaries in Africa to spread the Word, save souls, promise them heaven but at a meeting about desegregating the church the head deacon, a leader in town, stood up, raised his fist, shouted I’ll walk out the back door if a Negro ever sets foot inside the front door.

The meeting ended like all the others with 1st Corinthians 16:14 Let all that you do be done in love, and then, we sang a gospel hymn one of Dora’s favorites she sang in my grandmother’s kitchen.

North Carolina native CHARLES HENRY ALSTON (1907–1977) moved with his family to New York at the age of seven, but spent summers with his grandmother in Charlotte. He earned a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from Columbia’s Teaching College. He was an influential painter, sculptor, educator, and prominent figure of the Harlem Renaissance. He was the first African American supervisor for the Works Progress Administration and founder of the Harlem Artists Guild. His art appears in the collections of the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African American Arts + Culture, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W

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COURTESY OF FLYLEAF BOOKS

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NEW FICTION RECKONS WITH LANDSCAPE OF CHANGE a review by Kristina L. Knotts Naima Coster. What’s Mine and Yours: A Novel. Grand Central Publishing, 2021.

Kevin McIlvoy. One Kind Favor: A Novel. WTAW Press, 2021.

KRISTINA L. KNOTTS is Assistant Director of the Banacos Academic Center at Westfield State University and a Program Advisor in the Westfield State Learning Disabilities Program. She has a PhD in English from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.

Two new novels set in contemporary North Carolina display the familial and social fractures instigated by racial trauma and a shifting social landscape.

Naima Coster’s What’s Mine and Yours portrays a family struggling with the strains of racism and prejudice, while Kevin McIlvoy’s One Kind Favor intersperses surrealism with unsparing truth-telling to portray the conditions that led to a black youth’s murder and the fallout in the small community.

What’s Mine and Yours is Naima Coster’s second novel, set primarily in an unnamed town in the North Carolina Piedmont region, though other parts of the novel take place in Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Paris.

The novel covers 1992 to 2020, twenty-eight years of race, class, colorism, and social stratification that the novel’s young people wrestle with and endure.

Coster’s work follows two different families and shows how their children emerge from early trauma and disruption and grow

NAIMA COSTER is a novelist, essayist, and creative writing teacher in Brooklyn, NY. Her debut novel, Halsey Street (Little A, 2017) was a finalist for the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Her essays have appeared in various publications, including The New York Times, Elle, Time, and The Paris Review Daily. She was named a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 Honoree in 2020. She has taught in creative writing programs across the US, including the Duke University Young Writers Camp in 2016 and Wake Forest University from 2016 to 2018.

into adulthood to confront their early choices.

What’s Mine and Yours is an impressive follow-up to Halsey Street (2017), Coster’s notable first novel that explores a changing Brooklyn, NY, neighborhood undergoing gentrification and its characters’ adjustment to the alteration in their own lives – whether it’s a change in work, school, or the loss of a loved one. Halsey Street, like What’s Mine and Yours, exposes families whose parenting styles are sometimes dysfunctional, and the impact on their children is explored here as the young people go on to build relationships of their own. Both novels, though set in different regions, show how parents are often dealing with their own past loss, unintentionally impacting their children’s adult relationships.

The opening chapter in What’s Mine and Yours introduces Ray and his son, Gee, preparing Superfine, a small restaurant and bakery, for a journalist’s visit in hopes it will improve their

ABOVE Naima Coster (left) talking about

her novel What’s Mine and Yours with Christina Baker Kline, hosted by Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill, NC, 2 Mar. 2021 (Watch interview here.)

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ditionally, the South is seen as a place consisting of white people and black people, Coster shows a more ethnically diverse region that has citizens from Columbia, El Salvador, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. The one same-sex relationship in the novel is the happiest and the most supportive of any relationship depicted. Above all, Coster uses a humanistic brush to draw her characters, showing that all in her world are worthy and have a story to tell.

Kevin McIlvoy’s North Carolina in One Kind Favor is more ominous, even deadly, especially for its citizens of color. His sixth novel takes a surreal, Joycean narrative journey through contemporary North Carolina. The novel’s epigraph, dedicated to the memory of “North Carolina victims of racial violence or injustice, past and present,” sets the scene for the story’s events.

McIlvoy has discussed how the 2014 controversial death in North Carolina of Lennon Lacy (a suspected hate crime/lynch-

KEVIN MCILVOY’s previous books include A Waltz (Lynx House Press, 1981), The Fifth Station (Collier Books, 1989), Little Peg (Atheneum, 1990), Hyssop (TriQuarterly Books, 1998), and At the Gate of All Wonder (Tupelo Press, 2018). He has been published in The Scoundrel, The Collagist, Pif, The Kenyon Review Online, and The Courtland Review, among others. He is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction and taught in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program in creative writing from 1987 to 2019. He lives in Asheville, NC.

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ing but officially ruled a suicide) prompted his exploration of racial trauma that haunts his fictional town of Cord, NC, in One Kind Favor.

From the novel’s first chapter, the unnamed narrator, in a kind of Greek chorus fashion, paints the town’s setting with a sardonic and cutting tone.

A chief setting for some of the action is a “combined bar and consignment shop” that is so instrumental in the town’s community and becomes a metaphor for recurrence and reemergence. This important first chapter introduces the idea of “white Presences and Black Presences” (3). Some of the Presences (or apparitions) are recent and some are centuries old, but all seem to have suffered an untimely death or murder. Describing the sociopolitical setting within North Carolina (and within the greater US), the narrator tells us that President Obama’s election heightened white racists’ anxiety, that the essence of the KKK COURTESY OF MALAPROP’S BOOKSTORE

business’s future for Ray and Linette, Superfine’s owner and Ray’s mentor. Gee is “one child with [Ray] – easy, bright – and another without him” (6). This first chapter, which ends with Ray’s murder, sets in motion its devastating impact on Gee and Ray’s friends and loved ones.

The young people in Coster’s novel come of age as their school system integrates children from another part of town, inevitably stoking racial tensions. The novel’s characters are varied in terms of their temperaments, choices, and decisions, as well as how they confront change. Above all, Coster has empathy for her characters.

The subjects in What’s Mine and Yours work in small steps to improve their lives and have to recognize their own flaws, sometimes imperfectly and unsuccessfully. Even characters as confounding as Lacey May have sympathetic moments and are treated compassionately by the author. (Lacey May is an openly racist white woman once married to a Columbian man with Latina daughters.)

Coster creates a world that she could certainly revisit in future works as her characters’ growth suggests other stories waiting to be told. For instance, the maternal characters here are flawed, yet capable of self-awareness and change, and the novel shows healthy single-parent families as well as ones where difficulties exist, especially when compounded by poverty and scarcity of resources. While tra-

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ABOVE Kevin McIlvoy (left) talking

about his novel One Kind Favor with Steve Almond, hosted by Malaprop’s Bookstore, Asheville, NC, 26 May 2021 (Watch interview here.)

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never went away, and that the NRA’s politicization polarizes the country. The chapter ends with an angry diatribe: “The moneyed who died sucking the poor dry are here sucking Koch and Pope, and more of the Kochsuckers and the SuckPopes and Mercernaries are here than ever before, now that the redhats rule us, blood and soil” (4).

Evidently, the narrator does not suffer fools. This voice prepares readers for an unconventional and gripping tale.

One Kind Favor’s events begin in November 2016 and center on the relationships among the main characters: Acker, Lincoln Lennox, and Woolman. Acker is the (white) female companion and friend of Lincoln (who is black) and Woolman (who is white). Of indeterminate age, Acker is no typical Southern belle. As the narrator says, “Acker, too, could be confusing.

Thirty or so, or fifty or sixty or so, or undefinably epochal, she had a punk thing going from the white face makeup to the blue lipstick (black sometimes) to the white fingernails to the bright white boots so bright you could not really see her feet. And that – the blurring of her feet – is, perhaps, why she seemed without weight” (8). The reader wonders then if Acker is a Presence. The chapter goes on to say that “She was lifelike. . . . ‘Realistic, am I right?’ she said to Woolman the very first time she caught his gaze” (9). As an older white woman, she would not seem to be the usual companion for two teenage boys, but as the narrator tells it, “Our community in North Carolina was not at all where Acker belonged, but

at certain times revenants like her did appear out of nowhere, did grow here, became regulars and not and regulars once more” (9). Since a revenant is one who has returned, readers must discern why Acker has returned or appeared in Cord.

Her relationship to Lincoln and Woolman is critical, and readers who delve into this story will speculate on her role or connection to those in the town, or the reason for any Presence in Cord for that matter.

Early in the novel Lincoln is found hanging – like the actual Lennon Lacy – from a swing set.

Lincoln’s lynching takes place on November 8, 2016, the day of the American presidential election. Though Lincoln’s death is thought by most to be a murder, officials deem it a suicide.

His death sets off a series of stories – from Lincoln’s mother Jadia’s grief and her search in the swamp for the truth of his death, to the arrival of the mysterious Mr. Panther as an agent who seeks the truth of Lincoln’s death, accompanied by a mockingbird, who embodies the spirit of a deceased teenage girl, as well as the arrival of other agents who investigate Lincoln’s death.

Along with its critique of deadly racism, One Kind Favor explores the corporate corruption of those who profit from the fears and prejudices of the white working class in America.

While this is not a new story in the South, the novel shows how people such as Woolman’s mother Marie works for the Americans for Prosperity Foundation to identify “politically ‘aligned but unengaged’ people among the populations of rural poor and middle-class-poor who

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could be set afire with hate and who, guided rightly, would spread it like coal ash” (56). McIlvoy’s jeremiad is directed at the forces in American society that actively work to stoke division and hatred.

Often the voice in this novel is sharp, sardonic but sometimes exhausted and disappointed in the manipulation taking place.

McIlvoy’s prose ranges from straightforward, reportage style when the narrator is describing the events of Lincoln’s death to a speculative, inventive tone when describing the various Presences inhabiting Cord and their actions.

There is even a kind of Alice in Wonderland character (named Alice) who stumbles into the odd wonderland/nightmare of Cord and is trapped. In fact, from the novel’s first page, the narrator, commenting on the consignment store, says the location “has been a place of escape – every community has such rabbit holes – for those of us wishing to be ourselves and trueselves and otherselves” (3).

McIlvoy’s style is, depending on the scene, whimsical, fantastical, earthy, and absurdly funny at times, but the reader can see there are life and death issues ready to boil over: of injustice, inhumanity, and desecration of human life – the theme of racism haunting America is inescapable here. The absurdity and the haunting continues until the last page.

McIlvoy’s novel, like Coster’s, warrants a second reading as there are sections to untangle and passages that deepen on a second reading. Their portrayal of the shifting social and cultural landscape of North Carolina is unflinching and more necessary than ever. n

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2021 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE FINALIST

BY CHARLES MURRAY

Betrayal All those months apart I made a patchwork idol of you from a thousand fragments of memory and bowed down to my beloved.

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

Forgive me if on the day of your returning I betrayed you by running off with the stranger you had become.

Reconfiguration 55, 2021 (analog silver gelatin photograms, collaged, 55x48) by Lacey McKinney

CHARLES MURRAY taught English at Western Carolina University, then worked as a software developer for thirty-six years before rediscovering a writing vocation in retirement. He lives with his wife in Charlotte, NC.

LACEY MCKINNEY resides in Upstate New York. Her awarded art residencies include McColl Center for Art + Innovation in Charlotte, NC, Post Contemporary in Troy, NY, and Fremantle Arts Centre in Western Australia. Her work has been exhibited in Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY; UNC Charlotte; and Urban Zen in New York, among others, as well as in Virginia, Washington, and throughout New York State. Her work can be found in numerous private collections and has been featured in publications such as Huffington Post, ARTnews, Art Zealous, and Cultured Magazine. She was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Keep NYS Creating grant in 2020. See more of her work on her website.

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The library of Shelton Laurel literature keeps growing. With such precursors as Charles Frazier (Cold Mountain, 1997), Ron Rash (poems dating from the late ‘90s and the novel, The World Made Straight, 2006),1 Sharyn McCrumb (Ghost Riders, 2003), Sean O’Leary (Beneath Shelton Laurel, 2005), and Terry Roberts (That Bright Land, 2016), Vicki Lane draws inspiration from a seemingly inexhaustible source. And the Crows Took Their Eyes is historical fiction that does what history cannot do on its own: rescue survivors of an Appalachian tragedy from the din of the past.

Of note is the novel’s focus on the suffering – and courage – of the women of Shelton Laurel.

Like her predecessors, Lane expresses the snow-pelted horror of the murders themselves but goes on, in greater detail than others, to describe the events leading up to and following the massacre, defining the bedrock divisions in Madison County not just as Confederate/ Unionist but also as urban/rural, a theme with much pertinence today. In ways, then, And the Crows Took Their Eyes offers a more comprehensive historical context than other Shelton Laurel writing while also giving characters the “inner emotional life” (293) history leaves out.

Vicki Lane is best known for her six Elizabeth Goodweather mysteries. Like Lane, Elizabeth Goodweather is a transplant to Madison County and often finds her city ways tested, and improved, by her occasionally homicidal neighbors. Since

THEY HAVE BEEN AT SOMETHING, SOME CARRION, A DEER, OR SUCH a review by Jimmy Dean Smith Vicki Lane. And the Crows Took Their Eyes. Regal House Publishing, 2020.

JIMMY DEAN SMITH teaches in the English Department at Union College in Barbourville, KY. He has written about Ron Rash in NCLR 2011 and Tony Earley in NCLR 2020.

Formerly of Florida, where she taught in private schools, VICKI LANE has lived and farmed with her husband in Madison County, NC, since 1975.

And the Crows Took Their Eyes was a finalist for the 2021 Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award.

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1

Read Ron Rash’s essay about his novel The World Made Straight in NCLR 2008.

2007, Lane has operated a blog where she posts photographs of flowers and chickens and talks honestly about her writing. On the site, she emphasizes that she is a popular novelist and not a literary writer, a claim she might consider revisiting on the evidence of And the Crows Took Their Eyes. In generous detail, Lane discusses her anthropological reasons for using eye dialect in her Appalachian mysteries, even though she notes being aware of reasons not to, including that the practice is frowned upon in literary circles.

From that literary point of view, her technique has improved since the first page of Signs in the Blood (2005). There is nary a “cain’t” in And the Crows Took Their Eyes, and “kin” always means “relatives,” not “the opposite of cain’t.”

Lane posts about her fiction projects, including her Shelton Laurel novel, sympathetically engaging with commenters, including descendants of characters in And the Crows Took Their Eyes. Max Hunt’s Mountain Xpress article is not only a good primer on the massacre but its comments are also an indication of how contentious the event still is.2 Lane is both brave and polite to open her own blog to the possibility of hostilities still simmering 160 years after the event.

The Shelton Laurel Massacre is a more complicated affair than its commemorative roadside marker (“Thirteen men and boys, suspected of Unionism, were killed by Confederate soldiers in early 1863. Graves 8

2

Max Hunt “Blood in the Valley: The Shelton Laurel Massacre’s Haunting Legacy,” Mountain Xpress 28 Jan 2016; web.

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COURTESY OF THE JAMES O. HALL COLLECTION, SOUTHERN APPALACHIAN ARCHIVES, MARS HILL UNIVERSITY

cally, and she is “a treasure, if ever there was one” (24) – the fulsome praise of the genteel enslaver. And Polly’s presence reminds us that the massacre itself, awful as that singular event was, was only the climax of a series of atrocities, including the torture and eventual deaths of Polly’s children (and, the novel suggests, the rape of Polly) by backcountry, perhaps Laurelite, marauders.

The more interesting narrators are Simeon Ramsey, Judith Shelton, and Marthy White. The one narrator not based in history, Simeon first appears as COURTESY OF THE JAMES O. HALL COLLECTION, SOUTHERN APPALACHIAN ARCHIVES, MARS HILL UNIVERSITY

mi. E.”) makes it seem. One way Lane expresses that complexity is through the polyphony of five narrators. Even Colonel James Keith of the 64th North Carolina, a villain in several literary works, gets a fair deal from Lane: she lets him make his case and, though he betrays personal flaws in his narration, one does not feel that he is a defendant taking the stand and flat out lying. Keith and Polly Allen, wife of another despised Confederate officer, represent Marshall in this story. They own the more conventional narrative voices, with Lane partly basing their language on primary documents. They sound like characters in historical fiction, a technique that does not always pay off, especially when Keith, secretly in love with Polly, engages in romantic treacle: “Her smile was still sweet and the violet shadows beneath her eyes merely enhanced her fragile beauty” (201). Still, Polly’s habitual recourse to cliché when reporting on Juliann, the enslaved woman who runs her household, is chilling in its bourgeois niceness: Juliann “came to us” (26), says Polly, euphemisti-

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PHOTOGRAPH BY VICKI LANE

rigorous and non-partisan, with a Quaker sweetheart in Tennessee. He declares a separate peace – “What I say is let the Unionists and the Secesh fight it out amongst themselves” (9) – but cannot escape the gravitational pull of American hatred.

His eventual conscription into the North Carolina 64th leads him both to the most decent act in the entire novel but also to the most atrocious and to the story’s tragic denouement.

Excepting David Shelton, the boy who died at the massacre, Judith Shelton may be the best known of the Laurel’s historical personages. “Aunt Judy” is perhaps this novel’s hero. Like other women of the Laurel, she is tortured but still silent when Confederate troops demand information. After the massacre, she organizes the mass burial of family and friends. After the war, she increasingly assumes her role as matriarch. Expanding on the historical record, Lane takes Judith Shelton’s fecundity and lack of a husband and creates something new in Appalachian literature: an unashamedly horny granny-woman. And Lane turns little more than a historical reference to an “idiot girl” in the Laurel into Marthy White, the nonverbal teen whose love story is both unsurprising (any reader of Shelton Laurel literature should be able to guess who her sweetheart is) and immensely moving. At the same time, the voiceless Marthy reminds us how often history silences some of its witnesses, even when it is they who bear so much of its terrible weight. n

ABOVE BOTTOM North Carolina historical

ABOVE CENTER Dr. James A. Keith, circa

ABOVE TOP Lawrence Marion Allen and his

marker located on NC 208 at NC 212, west of Shelton Laurel

1880 (courtesy of his granddaughter, Mrs. James F. Arnold, El Paso, TX)

wife, Mary Margaret Peek Allen, reproduced from a glass negative made in the late 1850s (courtesy of Mrs. Helen Allen, Huntington Beach, CA)

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FIRST PUBLISHED NOVEL BY A MEMBER OF THE EASTERN BAND OF CHEROKEE INDIANS RECEIVES 2021 THOMAS WOLFE MEMORIAL LITERARY AWARD

by Margaret D. Bauer, Editor

Even As We Breathe immerses us in a specific place and time, Asheville’s Grove Park Inn when it was being used to house Axis diplomats and their families in 1942, and in the Qualla Boundary where Cherokee traditions are deeply embedded but in conflict with an ever encroaching outside world.

But the story of Cowney Sequoyah and Essie Stamper is also timeless and universal, exploring what it means to lose innocence and to find “who we are supposed to be.” Most importantly, the book is beautifully written, with convincing, well-drawn characters and compelling imagery that tie the various stories together.1

Clapsaddle lives in Qualla, NC, and teaches at Swain County High School.

For the second year, due to the COVID pandemic, the Western Historical Association presented the awards virtually, with readings by the winner and other finalists. Frank began her introductions by explaining the committee’s process narrowing down from “almost forty works” to their finalists, which included history, archaeology, memoir, guidebooks, anthologies, poetry, and all varieties of fiction for adults, young adults, and children. Each member of the committee donated hours and hours of time reading, thinking, and talking to carefully consider and weigh the merits of such a diverse group of authors and work. Our most challenging decisions involved narrowing the field, since there were so many intriguing and well-crafted offerings. For our finalists we sought and found books that depicted Western North Carolina or represented the talents of the writers and scholars of the region. We looked for books that were well-written and represented a fresh point of view, a voice that we wanted to hear more of or that we hadn’t heard before. We considered how best to balance all of these criteria. We feel we came up with a group of works that represent the ongoing effort to create a more accurate and complex view of our region,

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works that suggest the ways that the past continues to shape our present, and that show at every turn the ways the natural beauty of our region serves as comfort and inspiration and a reminder of the need to protect all of our people and resources to remain a unique place.

The final shortlist included two historical novels, two collections of poetry, and a memoir.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ROB TAYLOR PHOTOGRAPHY AND DESIGN; COURTESY OF ECU THOMAS HARRIOT COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES

From an impressive slate of five finalists, Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle’s first novel, Even As We Breathe (University Press of Kentucky, 2020), was selected for the 2021 Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award, given annually since 1955 by the Western North Carolina Historical Association for printed works that focus special attention on Western North Carolina. Catherine Frank, Chair of the selection committee, describes the award selection thusly:

The memoir is Lige of the Black Walnut Tree: Growing Up Black in Southern Appalachia, published in 2020 by Mary Othella Burnette. Committee member Jim Stokely described this narrative, inspired by Burnette’s paternal grandmother who was born into slavery, as a wonderful memoir of mid-20th century life in a closely knit African American community in Black Mountain, North Carolina. Mary Othella Burnette takes us on an episodic journey among neighborhood people, places and change as seen through the eyes of a curious child/teenager/ young woman. Whether she is describing an elderly laundry woman carrying her basket of newly cleaned and folded clothes on her head, or reflecting on the unequal educational opportunities between black and white, Ms. Burnette maintains a clear eye for the way things are as well as a stubborn sense of the power of individuals to imagine the way things might be.

Quoted from the award’s information page, where you can find a link to watch the 2021 award ceremony featuring readings by all of the finalists (also available on YouTube).

Read more about the author and her novel in an interview published in NCLR 2021.

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Woodsmoke (Blair, 2021) is finalist Wayne Caldwell’s first collection of poetry. The Asheville native is known for his Cataloochee novels, including 2010 Wolfe Award winner Requiem By Fire.2 Committee member Terry Roberts writes of Caldwell’s poetry volume: Woodsmoke. Just that single word flirts profoundly with the senses: the rich, deep smell of burning wood; the radiant heat of a fireplace blaze close by; the rich memories conjured by staring into the flames. Come sit with Posey Green, Wayne Caldwell’s narrator in most of these wonderful poems, and you will live simultaneously in the past as well as the present. Read through this magical collection once to gain a feel for this haunting landscape. Then read each poem again separately, slowly, perhaps one per day, so that they have time to take root in your mind and heart. In so doing, you will learn much about the Appalachian mind and the music of the Appalachian voice. This collection should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand how and why the past lives on in these mountains.

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Many historians and fiction writers have written about the massacre, but in truth, the whole story has never been presented nor the deepest implications examined. Until now.

Vicki Lane’s marvelous And the Crows Took Their Eyes is a fictional treatment of this bloody period in regional history that explores the details of the tragedy and why it still resonates, over 150 years later. Significantly, she does so from a variety of points-of-view, giving full play to all those involved. This is a vitally important book for anyone who desires to understand the long-divided loyalties that haunt these mountains.

Accepting the award for the winning novel, Annette Clapsaddle remarked that its being the first novel by a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians “is all the more astonishing” given that the Eastern Band has “the oldest written Native American language in the United States.” She expressed her appreciation “for the consistent recognition of diverse voices of this landscape,” reminding the audience that in 2020, the winner was Dr. Sandra Muse Isaacs for Eastern Cherokee Stories, which Clapsaddle asserted, “confirms that the Western North Carolina Historical Association and its selection committee truly embrace the breadth of narratives our region produces with equal regard.”

PHOTOGRAPH BY ROB TAYLOR PHOTOGRAPHY AND DESIGN; COURTESY OF ECU THOMAS HARRIOT COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES

The other poetry collection finalist is Matthew Wimberley’s first book, All the Great Territories (Southern Illinois University Press, 2020). This volume of elegies for the author’s estranged father has also received the Weatherford Award, granted annually by Berea College and the Appalachian Studies Association for a book that “best illuminates the challenges, personalities, and unique qualities of the Appalachian South.” Wimberley is an Assistant Professor of English at Lees-McRae College in Banner Elk, NC, and is serving as the 2021–22 Rachel Rivers-Coffey Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Appalachian State University.

Frank reported during her introduction of this finalist before his reading that committee member Gordon McKinney, who believes himself

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the “least poetic person in Western North Carolina,” . . . found this book “engrossing” in its treatment of grief and loss. He called this “an outstanding piece of work set in the heart of Western North Carolina” and noted that it is particularly poignant to read such finely crafted expressions of loss at a time when we are all feeling isolated and disconnected.

After publishing a series of six Elizabeth Goodweather Appalachian Mysteries, Vicki Lane turned to historical fiction for the novel that added her to this auspicious list of finalists. And the Crows Took Their Eyes (Regal Publishing, 2020; reviewed in this issue) was inspired by the Shelton Laurel Massacre during the Civil War. Terry Roberts explained the impact of this event and the novel it inspired:

Following the readings, Frank concluded the award ceremony praising the finalists and winner for how their books help us to understand the beauty and complexity of our region, for examining our past so that we may know what is important in the present and for helping us to face the future full of possibilities for new stories, for uncovering more of what is still mysterious and unknown in this beautiful landscape.

Each of these books allows us to examine social, cultural, and ethnic divides in our personal and collective history as a way to see our present more clearly. n

2

Read an interview with Caldwell about his first two Cataloochee novels in NCLR 2010.

ABOVE Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle at East Carolina University,

Greenville, NC, 4 Oct. 2021

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LINKING THE COMMON AND THE UNCANNY a review by Lisa Wenger Bro Jen Fawkes. Tales the Devil Told Me. Press 53, 2021.

LISA WENGER BRO is a Professor of English at Middle Georgia University where she specializes in Postmodern American Literature with a focus on magical realism and science fiction. She is co-editor of Monsters of Film, Fiction, and Fable: The Cultural Links between the Human and Inhuman (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018).

JEN FAWKES is a former resident of Asheville, NC, and now lives in Little Rock, AR. She has a PhD from University of Cincinnati and an MFA from Hollins University. She taught during graduate school and afterwards at West Liberty University. Her first short story collection, Mannequin and Wife (Louisiana State University Press, 2020), was a Shirley Jackson Award nominee and won two Foreword INDIES. Tales the Devil Told Me won the 2020 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction. Her stories have appeared in One Story, Crazyhorse, Lit Hub, The Rumpus, The Iowa Review, Best Small Fictions, and elsewhere.

Jen Fawkes’s The Tales the Devil Told Me is a collection of short stories that reimagines classic myths, fairy tales, and literature in a way that touches on common, yet deeply personal experiences. These experiences, however ordinary, are far from simple, and the complexity reveals itself in the way that days or even weeks later, readers will still be digesting the stories.

Much like the author’s own tactic for reimagining the stories, readers will keep finding new angles to approach each.

Also contributing to this complexity are the words that connect the stories and their ideas: unsettling and unheimlich, Sigmund Freud’s German for the uncanny where something old and long forgotten is now reinserted and seems both out of place/strange, yet also familiar.

What distinguishes these stories is the way they encapsulate common experiences that we are often unable to adequately vocalize or that are so much a part of everyday life that words frequently don’t capture the deeply personal aspects of those experiences. In taking these well-known stories and coupling them with everyday life experiences, Fawkes’s rewritings defamiliarize both, leading readers to new insights about both the original works and the ideas these new stories explore.

One of the threads that runs through many of the stories is the opposition of reality and fantasy. As the female narrator relates in “Dynamics,” if she just ignores her dead father’s manuscript, “I wouldn’t be forced to reevaluate my position on the man around whom I planned to build my life. My illusions would remain unshattered, my

Winter 2022

foundations unshaken” (49–50).

Time and again, characters come up against an uncomfortable or unpleasant reality, and even when confronted with the truth, they retreat to the comfort of fantasy.

In this way, one of the dominant ideas Tales explores is the repercussions of clinging to ideals and fantasies, as with the plastic surgeon in “As You Can Imagine, This Makes Dating Difficult,” who can’t help but mentally alter the faces and bodies of all women he sees so that they conform to his ideal of beauty.

The focus on fantasy vs. reality also lends itself to ideas about change that emerge across the works. The inability to face reality often leads to characters’ stagnation – they desperately want to change, but because they’re unable to face or deal with reality, they end up trapped.

The unnamed female narrator in “Demerol, Demerol, Benzedrine, Schnaps” believes her son’s birth “would be a catalyst, transforming her into the woman she should have been all along. Tractable. Decent. Normal. Her son was an undeniable gift, but when he turned three, the girl was struck by the unbearable certainty that she was the same person she’d always been” (4–5). Stories such as “Demerol” indicate the way that, despite the fact people desperately want to change, change does not come easily.

Even further inhibiting change is when that change is based on a fantasy, such as the narrator’s (and the rumpelstilt’s) belief that having a child will change everything, or when fantasy becomes all-consuming, trapping characters and prohibiting any sort of growth, as with Peter in “Never, Never” and the narrator of “Dynamics.”

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Stagnation and paralysis are at the heart of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, yet it’s another result that’s explored in Fawkes’s retelling, “The Tragedie of Claudius, Prince of Denmark.” Following Claudius and his brother Hamlet from childhood on, we see the series of choices and actions each undertakes through the course of his life. Late in life, Claudius is “seized by the uncanny sensation that he was following a script” (92). Introducing the idea of fate, here, destiny becomes a rote act, a mimicry of a prescribed performance. Yet in that mimicry, Fawkes forces the reader to question those ideas about fate and destiny, to examine the way the characters’ decisions – decisions frequently backed by unrealistic fantasies and an inability to truly change – trap them in that “predefined” path that leads to only one potential, or “fated,” outcome.

This same exploration is found in “Penny Dreadful” when the narrator realizes she’s no longer a “supporting player,” believing herself, “[b]ereft of the hand that has been pulling your strings.

Freed from fate. Discharged from destiny. As though for the first time, it’s up to you to write the next chapter of your life” (124). Yet we’re left questioning how much of that freedom is tied to a person’s ability and desire to change.

Fantasy is what also prohibits the formation of the deep and lasting connections characters desperately crave, connections that would drive away their loneliness. In fact, the first story in the collection, “Demerol, Demerol, Benzedrine, Schnaps,”

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beautifully and hauntingly sets up this idea of connections. Both the woman and the rumpelstilt crave connections they cannot find, replacing the hollowness with addiction. After spending time together, the rumpelstilt “sensed she suffered from a similar ailment. That she was as forsaken as he” (12). Here, we see the beginnings of the ideas about connections and their complexity that run throughout Tales, the way that people are drawn together, the strengths connections provide, and what happens when the connection isn’t enough or is one-sided. As Peter remarks of his mother’s marriage to James Hook in “Never, Never,” “My mom never seemed to notice the things that set her husband apart from other people – she saw only the man who’d rescued her from a lonely, loveless existence” (29).

While the mother’s relationship is one of mutual connection, it’s quickly apparent that there are few happily ever afters. All too often, people sabotage relationships and happiness.

In fact, fantasy leads not just to the destruction of connection, but also to potential connections and even individuals.

Ophelia, noting Claudius’s love for Hamlet’s wife, Gertrude, in “The Tragedie of Claudius,” wonders “if he knew that the profundity of both his love and his desolation was etched always into his face,” (91). Yet Claudius is unwilling to set aside this love, to move on with his life, to change. An idea the stories explore, moreover, is the way that the desperation for connection can lead to obsession, with characters so consumed by the longing for and fantasy of another that they can’t establish the relationship they desire. The narrator in “Dynamics” stalks and obsesses over Moriarty, following him everywhere, breaking into his office, yet believes, “Our relationship was so very clandestine that we ourselves never discussed it” (46). Her fantasy is so complete that she builds a nonexistent relationship, and in return, Moriarty uses that obses-

ABOVE Jen Fawkes at Scuppernong Books, Greensboro, NC, Oct. 15, 2021

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sion for his own advantage. In “A Moment on the Lips,” the obsessive drive for connection and companionship is literally consumptive. When the Cyclops encounters Odysseus and his crew, his actual love for humans and desire for companions only comes out as the opposite in words and actions. The Cyclops realizes too late – after picking off and eating the crew one by one – that “my feelings will never match the consumptive love I bear the tiny men” (116).

Not only do the stories raise philosophical questions about humanity and human emotions, but also about human nature. How much of who we are is based on heredity?

On nature and the environment around us? On selfish motivations? “Tiny Bones,” for instance, reimagines “Hansel and Gretel” and combines it with Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” Mowgli from The Jungle Book, a “civilized,” white collar businessman in “Tigers Don’t Apologize,” can’t understand human nature and law or the ways those aspects

are more animalistic than the animal nature and law that he knows. When what he teaches and what he knows get twisted as they’re passed down to his son, who believes he’s a tiger, Mowgli ends up spending the night hidden in a closet, “hugging his knees, wondering how he’d ever imagined that he’d successfully made the transition from animal to man” (137).

Within Mowgli’s story also is the exploration of the way humanity encompasses the beliefs about violence that they project onto animals. Even in war, violence frequently is not about protection or self-preservation, but instead transforms into the love of violence itself.

In “The Story Within,” the wartime narrator is known as “The Butcher” and as the conquered Sultan tells him, “A soldier kills with honor. There is no honor in eating a man’s still-beating heart” (166). Hamlet admits to Claudius in their “Tragedie” that while he was at war, “My lust for blood overtook me, and I became a true berserker.

Exterminating without cease,

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without heed” (83). Thus, the stories raise philosophical questions about what it means to be human, what differentiates us from animals, and whether violence is embedded in human nature itself.

Equally fascinating is the exploration of beauty found in several of the stories. The objectification and idealization of women and women’s beauty is central to “The Story Within,” the rewrite of “Snow White” from the mirror’s perspective. Both issues are central to the rape that results in the narrator’s conception, for his mother’s “loveliness marked her more surely than a harelip or a clubfoot, setting her apart as an aberration, pushing her outside the realm of the natural” (156). In fact, stories such as this one highlight the ways that women become objects that must be possessed as well as the way women internalize the male construction and definition of beauty. The story’s narrator obsesses over a sleeping woman, falling in love with her beauty and a fantasy before

Doris Betts Fiction Prize Short Story Competition

SUBMISSION PERIOD: SEPTEMBER 15–OCTOBER 31

2022 Final Judge: Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle Winner receives $250 and publication in NCLR and up to $250 for finalists selected for publication.

Read the 2021 winner in the 2022 print issue and two finalists in the fall online issue.

Submission guidelines here

SPONSORED BY

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YOU CAN COME HOME AGAIN – AND BE LAUDED: JIM GRIMSLEY RECEIVES 2021 HARDEE RIVES DRAMATIC ARTS AWARD

by Lorraine Hale Robinson

Hear Jim Grimsley’s award acceptance remarks here.

ABOVE Playwright Jim Grimsley with the cast members in his

play Mr. Universe, 7 Stages Theatre, Atlanta, GA, 1988

he even gets to know her. It doesn’t matter who she is; she’s simply an object of beauty he must have. Yet when she awakens, it’s discovered that she, as her mother before her, has internalized these views of beauty to such a degree that she’s consumed with her own physical appearance – to the point that she will kill if another woman threatens her beauty.

Beauty, after all, equates to self-worth and value. In “As You Can Imagine,” we see how those ideas develop, as well as the ways they’re projected onto women. So enraptured with

PHOTOGRAPH BY RICH ADDICKS; COURTESY OF THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVES, GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

Endowed by Ralph Hardee Rives (longtime East Carolina University professor and performer/director in productions in North Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia), the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association’s Hardee Rives Award for Dramatic Arts was first presented in 2009 to Bo Thorp. The 2021 recipient is Jim Grimsley for his impressive body of dramatic literature, beginning in 1983.

Eastern North Carolina native Grimsley was born in Rocky Mount and was educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he studied writing with Doris Betts and Max Steele. When Grimsley moved to Atlanta, he was a secretary at Grady Memorial Hospital for nearly two decades while continuing to write and eventually went on to become Senior Resident Fellow and Director of Creative Writing at Emory University. He retired as an emeritus faculty member in the 2019–2020 academic year and returned to his native state.

Grimsley received the George Oppenheimer Award for Best New American Playwright and the Bryan Prize for Drama for his debut four-play collection Mr. Universe and Other Plays (1998), which

was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Drama. Grimsley’s broad corpus of literature (drama and novels) received the 2005 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has served as playwright in residence at Chicago’s About Face Theatre and Atlanta’s 7 Stages Theatre. His novel Dream Boy has been adapted for both the stage and screen.* n * Read Gary Richards’s essay on Mr. Universe and interview with the playwright in NCLR 2009 and Grimsley’s essay on the film adaptation of Dream Boy in NCLR 2012.

his girlfriend’s perfection – her physical beauty – the narrator can no longer see how to fix women. His therapist, who has now undergone plastic surgery, tells him to recite, “Beauty is subjective. There is no ideal form. The face I saw is an illusion. Whether she’s as the divine power of the universe made her or surgically enhanced, every woman is beautiful in her own way” (23). Yet still he fixates on his girlfriend’s beauty rather than on the person she is.

Fawkes’s Tales the Devil Told Me takes well-known stories, stories that are complex in their

own right, and reimagines them in a way that highlights issues prevalent in contemporary society. The fact that these are common experiences readers can relate to, yet experiences no two people can ever share, gives the collection a rich depth. Furthermore, many of the ideas Fawkes tackles in her book raise philosophical questions that have no solution. Perhaps it’s in these personal yet individualistic aspects that the uncanny truly lies, raising questions related to human life, and inspiring emotions and an inner nature we frequently bury. n

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An Interview with

Rock ‘n’ Roll Novelist

Christy Alexander Hallberg

By George Hovis

Christy Alexander Hallberg’s debut novel, Searching for Jimmy Page, is an anthem to mother-daughter love and to the liberating influence of Rock ’n’ Roll. The story follows Luna, a teenager from eastern North Carolina, who is grieving the death of her mother by obsessively rediscovering a shared passion for the rock band Led Zeppelin and especially for the band’s guitarist Jimmy Page, whom Luna comes to believe is her biological father. Liza Wieland says of Searching for Jimmy Page, “It’s a book that begs to be read twice, first to find out the true story of Luna’s parentage, and then again, immediately but more slowly, to savor the beauty of the language.”1 Hallberg’s short fiction, creative nonfiction, book reviews, and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as North Carolina Literary Review, storySouth, Still: The Journal, Main Street Rag, Fiction Southeast, Riggwelter, Deep South Magazine, Eclectica, Litro, STORGY Magazine, Entropy, and Concho River Review. Her creative nonfiction essay “The Ballad of Evermore” was a finalist for the Sequestrum 2020 Editor’s Reprint Award. Her flash story “Aperture” was chosen Story of the Month by Fiction Southeast for October 2020 and selected by the editors of the Best Small Fictions anthology series for inclusion in the 2021 edition.

Hallberg teaches literature and writing at East Carolina University, where she earned her BS and MA in English. She received her MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from Goddard College. In addition to teaching, Hallberg serves as Senior Associate Editor of North Carolina Literary Review. She is a former editor of #FridayFlash USA at Litro. A native of eastern North Carolina, she now lives in the western part of the state on the outskirts of Asheville, near the Great Smoky Mountains.

This interview was conducted by email in August 2021, and it underwent only minimal copy editing for style and flow.

North Carolina native GEORGE HOVIS is a Professor of English at SUNY Oneonta. He earned his PhD in English from UNC Chapel Hill.

He is the author of Vale of Humility: Plain Folk in Contemporary North Carolina Fiction (University of South Carolina Press, 2007) and the novel The Skin Artist (SFK Press, 2019; reviewed in NCLR Online 2020). He writes frequently for NCLR, including essays, interviews, and book reviews.

1

Quoted from the cover of Christy Alexander Hallberg, Searching for Jimmy Page (Livingston, 2021); quotations from this novel will be cited parenthetically.

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GEORGE HOVIS: Part of the set-up of Searching for Jimmy Page involves the growing conviction of Luna, the story’s eighteen-yearold protagonist, that Jimmy Page is her father. This belief in celebrity paternity is not so uncommon – and, yet, I’ve never read a novel on the subject. I’m curious if you have. Where did the idea come from?

CHRISTY ALEXANDER HALLBERG: Actually, I had never read a novel on this particular subject before I wrote mine. It wasn’t until I was shopping around for a publisher that Elaine Neil Orr told me about a novel by Kim Wright, entitled Last Ride to Graceland,, recipient of the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction.

The book follows a young woman on her epic road trip from South Carolina to Memphis in Elvis Presley’s Stutz Blackhawk, which she finds in her dead mother’s shed, to learn if Elvis Presley is her father. I quickly got my hands on a copy and enjoyed it. There are some similarities between our books, but the core of the story and characters, of course, are very different, as are tone and writing style.

There are scads of nonfiction books about Led Zeppelin and Jimmy Page, the band’s founder, producer, and enigmatic guitarist, but to my knowledge, there are no literary novels about them (pulp fan fiction, yes). I’ve been a huge fan of theirs since I was fifteen years old, and I read everything about them I could, but I was jonesing for a book that would combine my love of Led Zeppelin and literature. Toni Morrison said, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”2 That’s what I did.

The basic plot took a long time and many incarnations to jell into what it ultimately became. Initially, Luna left home for different reasons than she does in the final novel. There was a quest of sorts, but it didn’t have enough depth, I thought. There wasn’t enough at stake. That’s when I decided, or rather Luna revealed to me as her character developed, that the quest needed to be about self-discovery in a more multi-faceted way. So the question at the heart of her mission evolved into whether or not this legendary rock star, whom her dead mother idolized, was her father, which begs the more existential and universal question that she also grapples with: to what, if any, degree does a name, lineage, define us? That shift in focus gave me a wider canvas to work with, more themes that I could explore, like the complexities of memory and

“ Christy Alexander Hallberg’s debut novel, Searching for Jimmy Page, is an anthem to mother-daughter love and to the liberating influence of Rock ’n’ Roll.”

—George Hovis

All photographs courtesy of Christy Alexander Hallberg

2

Quoted in Ellen Brown, “Writing Is Third Career for Morrison,” Cincinnati Enquirer 27 Sept. 1981: F11.

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Winter 2022

PHOTOGRAPH BY MATT PEIKEN, BLUE RIDGE PUBLIC RADIO

obsession and the power of art and myth in shaping one’s personal narrative. The impetus for a lot of what happens in the novel is art: hearing a particular song, seeing an album cover, watching an old black and white movie. Art – and I use that as an umbrella term that includes music, literature, film, paintings, etc. – has real power in the novel.

The novel’s commentary on celebrity, and our f ixation on celebrity, feels so relevant to this age of social media, although the action of the novel happens prior to the Internet. Do you feel that our attitudes about celebrity have changed? If so, in what ways does Searching for Jimmy Page chronicle a different age?

Set primarily in 1988, with flashbacks to the late 1970s, Searching for Jimmy Page does chronicle a different time, one that in some ways was more cordial, if not more innocent, because of the absence of the echo chamber that is social media, where otherwise nice people go to spew venom and fallacious information they would never dream of uttering to your face. Billy Crystal once said, “People are always telling you you’re done. Someone’s always telling you that, especially now in the day of social media.”3 There are all kinds of studies that show social media contributes to anxiety and depression in users, but I think it also contributes to a general noxious ethos that glories in tearing down people rather than honoring them. Yes, there were tabloids and tell-all books in the ’70s and ’80s, but on the whole, information about artists was far less readily available than it is now in the age of the Internet.

Having said that, I don’t think people’s fixation on celebrity has changed – from the days of Rudolph Valentino (after whom my father is named) to Jean Harlow to Marilyn Monroe to Miles Davis to Frank Sinatra to Billie Holiday to Elvis to The Beatles and on and on – but the way they go about expressing that fixation certainly has. Nowadays, people seem to feel a sense of entitlement about how much information about public figures they have a right to, which fuels the tabloid fire. Think about how much we didn’t know about Elvis’s private life in the 1960s and 1970s. He could never have remained a venerated superstar and lived with his sixteen-year-old girlfriend in 2021. He would not have been able to hide that sort of egregious behavior now the way he did then. Artists were afforded not only more privacy in the decades before the Internet but also, deservedly or not, more respect. There were no online chat rooms

ABOVE The author in her study at home

in Leicester, NC, 2020

3

The Shelf Staff, ”Interview: Billy Crystal,” That Shelf 19 June 2013: web.

Writers Who Teach, Teachers Who Write

“ I thought, that’s it! I’ll go to London and meet Jimmy Page."

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in 1977 in which people could say the most vile things about Mick Jagger with the impunity that the anonymity of a social media handle like @herpesfreesinceyesterday affords Internet trolls. In that regard, perhaps people’s attitudes about celebrity have changed, in that there’s less willingness to put artists on pedestals, to keep them separate from us or allow them a modicum of privacy. We want unfiltered access to know about and say to them whatever we please.

We want carte blanche to uncover every skeleton in their gilded closets, then tell them in a midnight Ambien-fueled all-caps Twitter rant what assholes they are. The mystique that used to shield celebrities is less prevalent because of that kind of boldness that comes with accessibility, thanks to the Internet.

In my novel, Luna reads the 1985 much-maligned Led Zeppelin biography by Stephen Davis, Hammer of the Gods, which drops a few bombshells about the band’s “naughty” behavior while on tour in America in the ’70s, but she doesn’t read it because she’s got a prurient desire for salacious gossip; rather, she wants to know everything she can about this rock guitarist because he may or may not be her father. The only way for her to gain that knowledge is to do both secondary and primary research – hence her trip to London.

I can’t see Luna (and definitely not her mother, Claudia) loitering in an online classic rock chat room throwing shade at Jimmy Page for kicks, and I’m certainly not interested in doing that.

When Luna travels to England in search of Jimmy Page, part of the fun of the story involves visiting landmarks famous for their association with Led Zeppelin – the famous “stairway to heaven,” for example, or John Bonham’s grave. I read in your acknowledgments that you made two “vision quests” to England as research for the book.

Could you talk about those visits and how they helped the story reveal itself to you? Did you jump any fences? Were the people as welcoming as they are in your novel?

I’ve actually made four trips to the UK between 2005 and 2018, all solo and all with a focus on Led Zeppelin and Jimmy Page to one degree or another. The 2005 trip was the first time I’d ever been out of the country. I didn’t even have a passport before then. My mother had died in late 2003, and I was struggling with grief. I needed to do something out of character – something far more audacious and less well behaved than I am or was – to help me deal with the crippling pain. I heard about a charity guitar contest Jimmy Page, Dan Hawkins of The Darkness, and Brian May of Queen (who makes an appearance in my novel) were judging at the Hammersmith Palais in London that summer, and I thought, that’s it! I’ll go to London and meet Jimmy Page. He’d been a constant in my life since I was a

ABOVE TOP Jimmy Page at the guitar

ABOVE BOTTOM with Queen’s Brian

contest in London where the author “met” him, 2005

May (The boy in the photograph won third place.)

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“ . . . if I could go all that way on my own, make that vision quest and succeed, then maybe I would find the strength to heal.”

teenager, and a poignant connection to my mother, brother Steve, and me. Somehow, I thought that if I could muster up the grit to be in the same room with him, to speak to him and have him speak to me, if I could go all that way on my own, make that vision quest and succeed, then maybe I would find the strength to heal. It was during that 2005 trip that I had my one and only encounter with Jimmy Page. It didn’t turn out exactly as I’d planned, but hey, I spoke to him, and he spoke to me. Sort of. Like Luna, I had several near misses that night before something snapped, and I wound up chasing him down the hall at the Palais. He finally stopped and I said the only thing I could think of: “Jimmy, I came all the way from America just to meet you!” Not my most dignified moment, but there you go. His bodyguards urged him onward, but before he left, he looked at me, smiled, and said, “I’m sorry.” That was it. That was my meeting with Jimmy Page.

To answer your question about whether or not people were as helpful and friendly to me as they are to Luna, yes! This didn’t make it into the novel, but in 2005, I took a train from London to Machynlleth, Wales, to find a secluded eighteenth-century cottage called Bron-Yr-Aur, where Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin vocalist Robert Plant vacationed in 1970 and wrote many of the songs that appear on their third album. They also began working on “Stairway to Heaven” there and finished it later at a Victorian manor house called Headley Grange, about an hour-and-a-half away from London. Anyway, I found a cab driver in Machynlleth whose grandmother used to own a pub and hotel in the village that Jimmy and Robert would frequent, and he not only drove me up that vertiginous mountain road – with sheep gates he had to keep stopping to open – all the way to the head of the path that leads to Bron-YrAur, but he also carried my backpack and walked me up the rugged road to the property. When we got there, a couple who was vacationing there happened to be sitting in the yard and greeted us warmly. We got to talking and I told the woman about losing my mom and being on a Jimmy Page pilgrimage. She couldn’t have been more sympathetic. She said her “mum” had recently died too; then she invited me inside the tiny cottage and showed me around. I have wonderful photographs of the interior

ABOVE TOP The “stairway to heaven”

ABOVE CENTER The author on her way to

ABOVE BOTTOM Bron-Yr-Aur in

at Headley Grange, 2015

Bron-Yr-Aur in Machynlleth, Wales, 2005

Machynlleth, Wales, 2005

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“ Before I left, I remember, she told me she knew my journey would be successful because she was psychic.”

and grounds. Before I left, I remember, she told me she knew my journey would be successful because she was psychic.

On my 2006 trip, like Luna in Searching for Jimmy Page, I lost all of my cash at one point and had to stowaway on a bus to get from Liverpool back to my hotel room in London because I was flat broke.

I’d miscalculated when my paycheck would show up in my bank account. I made it back to London without incident by pretending to be asleep every time the driver stopped and checked tickets, but I had to go without food, other than the hotel breakfast grub, for a couple of days. Also, on that 2006 trip, I visited Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham’s grave near Kidderminster. While I was there, his sister, Deborah, showed up and we had a magical encounter. She was delightful. We stood in that bucolic churchyard by her brother’s headstone with the drumsticks and drum cymbals fans had left and talked, not about the wild man rock star Bonzo, but about our adored big brothers, both of whom had been drummers in rock bands. I thought that was too coincidental and sentimental to work in fiction (plus, Luna doesn’t have a brother), so I left out that part when I wrote the scene in the novel in which Luna travels to Bonham’s grave. Unfortunately, I don’t have a photograph of my encounter with Deborah Bonham; I almost asked her for one but stopped myself because I felt it would sully the purity of the moment.

In July 2015, I boarded a flight to London for a third time – ten years to the day of my first journey – after having done a Google search and tracked down the proprietor of Headley Grange, where much of Led Zeppelin’s fourth album was recorded, or at least partially recorded, including the song “Four Sticks,” which is a significant motif in my novel. By the summer of 2015, I was back in the grief spiral, as my husband had died the year before of cancer.

As I did after my mother’s death, I set off on another Led Zeppelin pilgrimage to heal. This time I zeroed in on the Mecca of Led Zeppelin sites, Headley Grange, where the “stairway to heaven” is located and where Robert Plant wrote most of the lyrics to the song while sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace in the parlor. The property is privately owned by the same family who owned it when Led Zeppelin recorded there decades ago and is not open to the public. I’d written the owner a letter asking to visit the house, and he invited me, which isn’t typical. “Your story is particularly poignant,”

ABOVE TOP Headley Grange, 2015

ABOVE CENTER John Bonham’s

ABOVE BOTTOM The author on the

gravesite, 2016

“stairway to heaven” at Headley Grange, 2015

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he told me when I got there. So, no, I didn’t have to jump any fences like Luna did, although the owner told me people do it all the time, to his dismay. That visit definitely informed the chapter I would eventually write about Headley Grange.

On my fourth trip, in 2018, I made it to Boleskine House, outside Inverness, Scotland. The occultist Aleister Crowley used to own it and the cemetery right across the road that overlooks Loch Ness.

Jimmy Page bought it in the early 1970s and sold it in the 1990s, I think. I depended on the kindness of a couple of kids who worked in the Inverness bus station to help me navigate that excursion. I don’t drive when I’m abroad, a policy anyone who’s ever been a passenger in my car here in the States would applaud me for, so getting to some of these out-of-the-way locales has been interesting. Before I left for that trip, I’d already drafted the part of the novel that’s set at Boleskine House. When I arrived, I realized I’d gotten some of the logistics and other details wrong. That sojourn proved tremendously helpful.

“ I eavesdropped like crazy on all those trips!

Since I was by myself, it was easy to zero in on conversations other people were engaged in on the tube or at a pub or on a street corner. I listened carefully for cadence and idioms and expressions.”

Another aspect of the London scenes I enjoyed is the language. What did you do to capture the dialect?

I eavesdropped like crazy on all those trips! Since I was by myself, it was easy to zero in on conversations other people were engaged in on the tube or at a pub or on a street corner. I listened carefully for cadence and idioms and expressions. I remember going through security at the Hammersmith Palais in London before the guitar contest Jimmy Page and Brian May were about to judge and hearing the ticket person say, “Good on ya,” which I’d never heard before.

Then there’s “mind the gap” that everyone who’s ever been in a British tube station has heard. And I’ll never forget the first time someone called me “love.” Just like Luna, I was in the airport, and after I heard that, I thought, “I have arrived.” I had so many encounters like that. I carried a journal with me everywhere I went and took every opportunity to jot down bits of conversations I overheard.

I also made a point of reading contemporary British books, like Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, Nina Stibbe’s Love, Nina, and Andrea Levy’s Never Far From Nowhere, and noting any expressions or syntax that struck me as quintessentially British. Then there are all the films I watched for the dialogue: Bridget Jones’s Diary, Sliding Doors, The Iron Lady, Shirley Valentine, My Beautiful Laundrette, Sid & Nancy.

Finally, I Googled British slang and kept a file on my computer.

I want to avoid spoilers, but I think it’s safe to observe that Luna does succeed in some level of interaction with the famous guitar icon. Much more of Page’s personality is revealed through other people, who tend

ABOVE TOP Boleskine House and

ABOVE BOTTOM The author standing

cemetery, 2018

outside of Page’s Tower House in Kensington, London, 2005

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to humanize him. The bartender at the local pub, for example, says he’s a regular and calls him “Pagey.” I was deeply impressed by your ability to balance the celebrity’s humanity with his near-mythological status (Luna repeatedly refers to him as a “god”). Although you make it look effortless, I’m guessing that this was a diff icult thing to pull off, particularly for a character seen primarily from a distance.

Thanks! Because I’ve been such a fan for so long, there’s a certain closeness – proprietariness, I dare say – I feel to Jimmy Page, even though I’ve only had that one brief encounter with him in 2005, the only time he’s set eyes on me (Unless he’s got surveillance video of me standing outside his house in London like a dork). I remember taking a friend to the woodshed, so to speak, one morning in high school because he had the temerity to suggest Pete Townshend of The Who was a better guitarist than Jimmy. I used to have Jimmy’s pictures in my locker at school and all over my bedroom walls at home. Every significant other I’ve had in my life has had to sit through The Song Remains the Same (Led Zeppelin’s concert movie) at least once and listen to me wax poetic about Jimmy's genius. That dedication to him has never waned, although it has evolved into a more mature and measured admiration than a teenage visceral craze. Anyway, it wasn’t that hard to create a balance between Jimmy’s humanity and the mystique that has always surrounded him because I felt that closeness. Little touches like having the bartender at The Swan, a pub that Jimmy actually did patronize and is located down the street from his former home in Windsor, refer to him as “Pagey” came from my knowledge of the fact that “Pagey” is what his friends called him. I think the juxtaposition between those kinds of personal details with the almost saintly image of him in the iconic black and white photo taken by Neal Preston at Kezar Stadium in 1973, which is a motif in the novel, crystallizes that dichotomy.

I love the dramatic climax of the book. I must confess that I was taken entirely by surprise by that outcome, although after it arrived, it felt inevitable. Did you know early on how Luna’s quest would resolve itself, or did you f igure it out along the way? What were some of the surprises you encountered in writing?

I wasn’t entirely sure how the climax would play out when I started writing. In fact, when I started the last incarnation of this book (it began as a novel then moved into memoir then back to a novel),

ABOVE TOP High school Christy

ABOVE BOTTOM Old Mill House ,

Alexander, 1986

Jimmy Page’s former home in Windsor, England, 2006

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I knew the first chapter and the very last sentence, so, as you can imagine, there were a lot of surprises. Getting from Point A to Point Z sometimes felt like slogging through a bog in knee-deep mud with a blindfold on. Every now and then the muse would lift the veil and I would catch a glimpse of the path and surge forward. Those moments were exhilarating and productive. But for the longest time I wrote with the nagging question – how am I gonna resolve this?

– churning in my head. I didn’t outline – I never do when I write.

Instead, I wanted to go on the journey with Luna. I knew the answer to the question of Luna’s parentage from the beginning; I just didn’t know the details. Research helped. I Googled Led Zeppelin North American concert dates for 1969, and a possibility presented itself.

(I’m trying not to give too much away here.) In fact, I did a lot of research, right down to moon cycles, leap years, astrological signs, Led Zeppelin major events’ dates and locations. I wanted to be as accurate as possible with those kinds of details.

One huge surprise was the character Peter, the young man who works at the London hotel where Luna stays and who becomes her close friend. My intention was for him to be in one or two hotel scenes, but I liked him so much and saw how great his chemistry with Luna was that I let him stick around and develop. That friendship took the second half of the book in a whole new direction.

In your acknowledgments you mention that Searching for Jimmy Page began as your MFA thesis at Goddard College but that it went through several major revisions over a number of years afterward.

Can you talk about the process of drafting?

The novel took me over fifteen years to write, but then, as I mentioned earlier, it has seen many different incarnations during this period. My MFA creative thesis was the first version: a novel called And When the Owls Cry, which is a line from the Led Zeppelin song “Four Sticks.” That song plays a significant role in all versions of the book. I graduated from Goddard in 2006 with a complete manuscript of that novel. I shelved it, though, because I knew it needed more work and I couldn’t muster the energy to write after I graduated. In fact, I hardly wrote at all between 2006 and 2014. My mother’s death from cancer in the early 2000s knocked the wind out of me. I think I was too gutted to receive creative inspiration. My focus was on healing and then, after I married my husband, Bill, in 2008, my focus was on enjoying finally being happy again. But then he was diagnosed with cancer in 2012 and died in 2014, and I was right back in the bell jar. This time I was determined not to wither away there for years as I’d done before. I forced myself to channel my

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grief into making art and write my way through it. I chose writing – and Jimmy Page – as a catalyst to my own healing, something Luna, her mother Claudia, and I have in common.

During that time, I wrote a memoir based on my mother’s and husband’s deaths and the trips to London I’d taken to try to find Jimmy Page. When I finished the memoir, also entitled Searching for Jimmy Page, I had to come to terms with the fact that that version was more of a grief therapy tool than something I wanted to put out into the world. It focused on my love of the band and, especially, Jimmy Page and how they’ve been a constant in my life, through joy and sadness, ever since I was fifteen years old, when I first saw the band’s concert film, The Song Remains the Same, on MTV with my mother and older brother Steve. Steve used to play drums in several rock bands in my hometown when I was growing up. He was a huge fan of the group, especially John Bonham, so that’s how I became familiar with them.

After I came to the realization that the book needed to be a novel, I went back to the drawing board, taking bits from the original novel and bits from the memoir and crafting a whole new story, which finally became what it is now. It’s been a long journey.

“ The nitty gritty work of learning to write – the discipline, drive, dedication – came when I was on my own with my beloved Chihuahua, Corniglia, after my husband died and I felt totally without a safety net.”

What is something you learned about writing a novel from the MFA program? What is something you taught yourself purely by doing it?

I think the greatest gift my MFA studies gave me was to teach me how to read like a writer, to unpack the nuts and bolts of a scene, dissect sentences to savor the rhythm and beauty and power of language and how it shapes tone and mood, analyze the voices of the amazing writers I was privileged to study. The nitty gritty work of learning to write – the discipline, drive, dedication – came when I was on my own with my beloved Chihuahua, Corniglia, after my husband died and I felt totally without a safety net. That feeling of do or die was real, so I honored it and wrote a lot of crap for a long time until I began to craft out a style and voice and story that I’m now proud of.

ABOVE The author’s late husband, writer Bill

Hallberg, and beloved dog, Corniglia

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Two of Luna’s best friends back home in North Carolina are African American. Luna and her family are white. Did your view of that relationship change as you revised the novel?

From the outset I tried to be sensitive about how I presented the African American characters since I’m a white writer. I was extra sensitive after George Floyd was murdered. The book had already been accepted for publication by Livingston Press by then, but I had the opportunity to make changes in the typeset copies I was sent to proofread. There were a few small places that I did tweak. Overall, though, my view of the relationship between Luna and Connie has remained primarily the same. I love their friendship, how beautiful their devotion to each other is. At the same time, to ignore the ugly truth about racism in the South would have been an injustice, so I did address it; in fact, I implicated Luna’s own family. Connie’s parents and Luna’s grandparents have a tenuous history, and the two girls recognize this. The vestiges of Luna’s grandmother’s Jim Crow upbringing are still there; she’s evolved, but they’re still there. As a white writer, I didn’t want to appropriate anyone else’s culture. I tried hard not to do that. Luna is very clear in her narration that she’s assessing the incidents of racism she is aware happened to Connie’s parents at the hands of Luna’s grandfather from her own limited perspective as a white girl.

One of the novel’s central elements – and one of the most beautiful – is the story of the love between a daughter and the mother she has lost.

In the acknowledgments you write that the loss of your mother to cancer sowed the seed that would become Searching for Jimmy Page. Would you mind talking about that relationship and how your mother helped to form the artist that you would become?

My mother and I were very, very close – from the time I was born until her death when I was thirty-three. Our relationship was different from Luna’s and Claudia’s because my mother wasn’t anything like Claudia. She was really more like Luna’s grandmother, Margaret – steady, loving, supportive, old-fashioned, and stoic, not at all mercurial or prone to hero worship. As I wrote in the dedication, my mother “never owned a tie-dye skirt or Tarot cards but loved ‘Kashmir’ and ‘Immigrant Song’ and helped me cover my bedroom walls with Led Zeppelin posters when I was a teenager.”

She definitely indulged my passions. I remember Jimmy Page was appearing on a call-in radio show after his solo album Outrider was ABOVE The author and her mother at her

graduation from ECU, 7 Dec. 1991

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released in 1988, and I was desperate to talk to him. I started dialing on my yellow Princess rotary phone (I’m showing my age!) right before the show went live and kept dialing for the entire first hour of the two-hour broadcast. No cigar – I kept getting that freaking busy signal. At the halfway mark, I was in tears. Mom sent me to the kitchen to get a soda to calm down and this woman who pin-curled her short, self-trimmed, salt and pepper hair every night and still wore a girdle and clip-on earrings and kept babies in the church nursery every Sunday morning spent the next thirty minutes or so dialing and redialing so her neurotic teenage daughter could speak to a rock star. That was my mom. And before you ask, no, we never did get through.

Losing her had always been my greatest fear, and even though she was ill with cancer for several years before she died, I wasn’t emotionally prepared. I guess one never is prepared for that kind of loss. I recently read The Bohemians by Jasmin Darznik and was struck by this line: “In the history of every tortured soul comes a moment when its mind parts from its body – pushes off like a boat without oars from the shore and gives itself up to the current.” That sort of fits how I handled her death – like a boat without oars, giving myself up to the current. I drifted for a long time, joyless and empty, carrying that heavy grief with me, clutching every memory of her in a white-knuckle grip as if the echo of her voice in my head were a life preserver.

Luna, on the other hand, reacts much differently to her mother’s death. I’ve always thought she suffered from dissociative amnesia disorder, which, according to the Cleveland Clinic, “occurs when a person blocks out certain information, often associated with a stressful or traumatic event, leaving the person unable to remember important personal information.”4 There’s a lot in the novel about the loss of memory, selective memory, forgetting, avoidance. Luna’s aunt Lorraine’s go-to strategy for dealing with pain and stress is to not talk about it. She packs up Claudia’s belongings after her death so that Luna won’t be reminded of her. “Out of sight, out of mind,” Luna overhears Lorraine say. “She’s young. She’ll forget in time” (175). Eventually, Luna realizes forgetting isn’t the panacea Lorraine has cracked it up to be and she wants to face the truth of what happened to Claudia rather than continue to linger in a kind of limbo. She wants to take action.

That’s the tack I took the second time I faced great loss. I also had to learn that letting go of pain and moving forward doesn’t mean I have to forget the people I love. It took a long time to get back on my feet and feel whole and strong on my own, but my story did take a happy turn. To my great good fortune, shortly after I finished the novel and began submitting it to publishers, I met a new love and we are now engaged. So I have this wonderful partner and his equally wonderful family in my life now.

ABOVE The author and her fiance, Hub

Respess, Mount Mitchell, NC, 2021

4

“Dissociative Amnesia,” Cleveland Clinic 23 Nov. 2020: web.

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One of the elements I most enjoyed about Searching for Jimmy Page was the multi-generational family. You render so fully four generations and their sometimes diff icult relationships. Were there aspects of your own family that informed your view of this f ictional family?

Definitely! In some ways the novel is a love song to my mother and her side of my family, and to Jimmy Page. I use a lot of family lore, stories I heard from my maternal grandmother, to form the backbone of Luna’s extended family. Luna’s great-grandfather is named after and inspired by my maternal great-grandfather, Jesse Baker, who died in 1946, twenty-three years before I was born. My grandmother told me he took a mail order course on faith healing because he believed he could cure his wife, my great-grandmother Emily, of breast cancer, which, of course, he couldn’t, and, according to my grandmother, Emily died in agony with flies swarming the window screen. That story is in Searching for Jimmy Page.

Maybe I’ll have to write about my father’s side of the family in another book. There are certainly some interesting stories there too. He’s a little over ninety years old but has a steel trap for a mind, so he’s still able to share those stories. I’m luckier than Luna in that although my parents divorced when I was seven, my dad has always been very present and active in my life, and we have a great relationship. Until he retired, he was an associate vice chancellor at East Carolina University, where I earned my BS and MA in English and now teach online.

The performing arts series there is named for him.

What aspects of eastern North Carolina did you most want to capture?

Oh gosh, a lot. I was born and raised in Greenville in Pitt County, which is the town Full River is based on in the novel, and I have so many memories of Greenville from my childhood in the ’70s and ’80s.

There really is a Tar River that flows through town and by the Town Common, where my family took me to see the fireworks on the Fourth of July, and there used to be a strip mall that became what is now called the Greenville Mall, where Jerry’s Sweet Shop and a record store used to be, both of which I mention in the novel. In my mind, the high school Luna and Connie and their friend Denzel attend is my old high school, J.H. Rose.

What’s totally fictitious is the Kane family farm. When I began working on the story, I thought their tobacco farm was still operaABOVE TOP The author’s maternal great-

ABOVE BOTTOM The author with her

grandparents, Jesse and Emily Baker; great-great-grandmother Amanda Baker in the back; and great-uncle, John Baker, as a baby, circa 1900

father, Rudy Alexander, at Sunnyside Oyster Bar, Williamston, NC

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tional. The problem was that I know next to nothing about farming or that sort of life. My maternal grandfather was a carpenter who did some farming, but that’s not how he made his living. They lived in the country near Aurora in Beaufort County, but their land and house looked nothing like the farm Luna grew up on.

I have long been interested in the experience of popular culture in the rural South. Your novel captures as well as any I can think of the conflicts between (and intertwinings of ) popular and traditional cultures. I think especially of Luna’s great-grandfather’s rejection of pop culture on religious grounds. He even burns books. And, yet, he has his own past engagement with pop culture – there was the banjo he played. And his belief in magic mirrors those of Luna and her mother when they listen to Led Zeppelin. Could you talk about how popular and traditional cultures informed your own life or the lives of your characters?

I find the convergence of the sacred – or the traditional – with the secular – popular culture – fascinating. That is definitely a theme I play with in the novel: who gets to say what is holy and what is profane? Are those terms inherently binary with different values, or are they cultural constructs whose values are imposed on us by those in power? If we deconstruct the terms holy and profane, does that shift power from one to the other? Might the two coexist in the guise of a rock star (I refer to Jimmy as a “sacred sinner” at one point) or an elderly Southern man who believes his beloved granddaughter and he were “marked at birth”? That kind of ambiguity intrigues me, as it does Claudia and Luna. Claudia especially is devoid of judgment when it comes to matters of spirituality and pop culture. She doesn’t feel a need to separate the two, although she does reject organized religion. Jesse does the opposite. As you noted, after his beloved wife dies, he burns the novels she cherished and the banjo he used to play, and he becomes a warped version of a devout Christian.

I wrote a creative nonfiction essay some years ago called “You Shook Me” that details the origin of my obsession with Jimmy Page, and I use that word, obsession, not in the pejorative here. Here’s a passage from that essay: I was beginning the transition from junior high to high school, and I’d grown bored with my friends’ pedestrian interests: Friday night jaunts to the mall to scope out cute boys, school pep rallies, church youth group hayrides. I felt like a gum-smacking teenage cliché. I was searching for something that tapped into

ABOVE The author’s maternal grandparents,

Rufus and Lottie Baker; her mother, Frances; and uncles, Ed and Herman, circa 1940

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“ Arguing that Jimmy Page (or whomever the object of one’s obsession is) isn’t worthy of that kind of adulation is a moot point. The real question is: do obsessions augment our lives in a positive way, help us navigate our world, or do they restrict us from growing?”

my dormant dark corners and, as such, legitimized my feelings of alienation and my desire to escape eastern North Carolina conventionality. Not that I had any interest in selling my soul to the devil, as I’d heard Led Zeppelin had done, or dabbling in black magic, which was a rumored avocation of Jimmy Page’s, a rumor nurtured by the man himself at the beginning of The Song Remains the Same when a bicycle messenger approaches him to deliver the group’s tour dates and Jimmy stares at him with bubbling red eyes. I’d become enraptured by the forbidden, the apple my Sunday school teachers and youth pastor warned me not to bite. I didn’t know it then, but I had been waiting for the likes of Led Zeppelin and Mr. Page for a long, lonely time.5

That’s a perfect example of how traditional and pop culture have informed my life and how this particular rock star became a passion of mine, just as he became for Claudia. He served a purpose for us both. The novel is in part about obsessions and how they function in our lives. Rick Moody asserts in his memoir, The Black Veil, that obsessions are protean, and I mention this in the novel, but Luna and Claudia’s obsessions aren’t protean.

Nor are they necessarily rational. They are, like with most of us, based on passion, which by definition isn’t rational; therefore, trying to justify or denounce obsessions seems a moot point. Arguing that Jimmy Page (or whomever the object of one’s obsession is) isn’t worthy of that kind of adulation is a moot point. The real question is: do obsessions augment our lives in a positive way, help us navigate our world, or do they restrict us from growing? I’d say the latter is ultimately true of Claudia and the former true of Luna.

ABOVE Christy Hallberg signing at Quail

Ridge Books, Raleigh, NC, 12 Nov. 2021

5

Christy Alexander Hallberg, “You Shook Me,” Litro 27 July 2019: web.

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What are you working on now?

I’m currently drafting a sequel to Searching for Jimmy Page. I don’t want to say too much about that since I’m so early in the process and don’t fully know the plot, but I will say there’s a big focus on Connie’s young adult daughter, who is Luna’s namesake, and the main settings are Corniglia, Italy, and London, with some bits set in Full River.

I’m also thinking about writing a book of essays and reviews on rock novels, such as Jeff Jackson’s Destroy All Monsters,6 Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document, and Zachary Lazar’s Sway. I’d love to teach a class on this subgenre.

Other than those projects, I’m always plugging away at short stories and creative nonfiction essays, most of which have rock themes. As Anne Rice wrote in the foreword to a collection of Kafka’s stories, “follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”7 I guess I’m not done with mine yet.

Thank you, Christy, for your generous and thoughtful responses to these questions – and for the wonderful gift of Searching for Jimmy Page. You’ve inspired me to pull out all my old Led Zeppelin vinyl.

I’m looking forward to the sequel. And, please let me know when you teach this course on rock novels. I want to sign up!

Thank you so much for your insightful questions and kind words, George. And I’m thrilled to know you’ve got those Zeppelin albums on vinyl. A kindred spirit, you are. Best of luck with your own wonderful work! n

ABOVE Christy Hallberg and Jeff Jackson,

Scuppernong Books, Greensboro, NC, 20 Nov. 2021

6

Read Hallberg’s interview with Jeff Jackson in NCLR 2020.

7

Anne Rice, Foreword, The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony and Other Stories, by Franz Kafka (Schocken, 1995). Find links to Hallberg’s rock ‘n’ roll essays on her website.

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Winter 2022

2021 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE FINALIST

BY MICHAEL LODERSTEDT

The Eye How many warm nights I’d lie awake listening to waves crashing into troughs, a rising hiss then falling softly, always beckoning I am here, I am always here, this unwavering sea.

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I never thought you’d come for us, breach thin dunes and lift this house from its blocks. Even as winds roared and beds shook, oak branches slamming their fists all around us.

A heavy silence fell when the eye passed over, the sky a pale yellow.

Children wandered the tangled yard, lost like drunks, waiting for another wind to switch and blow us back inside.

Entrance (after Florence), Atlantic Beach, NC, 2019 (silver gelatin print, 16x16”) by Michael Loderstedt

We’d pull groaning nails from boarded windows and drain the tub as lights flickered back.

Pots on the stove, water salted, the broken bay tree gave leaf to our unholy sauce. Outside the sound of many hands clapping, the sea’s distant applause.

MICHAEL LODERSTEDT is Professor Emeritus of Kent State University where he taught printmaking and photography. He received an Ohio Arts Council Fellowship in Non-Fiction Literature for his book, The Yellowhammer’s Cross (PHOTOcentric, 2020). His work has been published in Neighborhood Voices, and he has written for The Land and CAN. His visual work can also be found in the public collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Akron Art Museum, the Kupferstich-Kabinett in Dresden, Germany, and others. He has completed international artist residencies at the Frans Masereel Centrum and at AIR Antwerpen in Belgium, Grafikwerkstatt in Germany, and the Vermont Studio Center, among others. The poet/artist grew up on the Outer Banks, a region that continues to inspire his art and now his poetry. His poem “Why We Fished” won the 2021 James Applewhite Poetry Prize. Read it in the 2022 print issue.

Writers Who Teach, Teachers Who Write

AN UNSUNG LEGEND a review by Max Kilgore Tracy Deonn. Legendborn.

Margaret K. McElderry Books/ Simon & Schuster, 2020.

MAX KILGORE earned his M.A., with a concentration in Creative Writing from East Carolina University, where he also earned his BA in English. As an undergraduate, he served as an NCLR intern, and during his graduate program, he served as an editorial assistant and then as Senior Editorial Assistant.

TRACY DEONN is a central North Carolina native. Legendborn, her debut novel, is a New York Times bestseller and recipient of the 2021 John Steptoe New Talent Award. A sequel, Bloodmarked, is forthcoming in 2022.

She earned bachelor's and master's degrees in Communication and Performance Studies from UNC Chapel Hill and has worked in theater and video game production, as well as teaching at both K-12 and university levels.

Tracy Deonn’s 2021 John Steptoe award-winning novel Legendborn whisks readers away on an Arthurian epic set in today’s urban North Carolina. This story follows rising high school freshman Briana “Bree” Matthews as she mourns the death of her recently deceased mother, who died tragically in a hit-and-run car accident. Determined to honor her mother’s death, Bree enrolls herself in the early college program of UNC Chapel Hill, her mother’s alma mater.

However, upon her student-led (and school-prohibited) initiation night in the woods, Bree finds herself in the middle of what can only be described as a demon attack as strange creatures suck the energy from those around her. This attack is thwarted by a group of mysterious students who beat back the beasts and place a spell over the students, causing them to lose any memory of the altercation. For Bree, this spell evokes a memory of a moment after her mother’s death when a doctor performed a similar incantation on both her and her father.

Realizing that there may be more to her mother’s death than a mere car accident, Bree becomes determined to solve the mystery of what actually happened to her mother and what these magical men-inblack types have to do with it.

This quest – and Bree’s unaccounted for time in the woods – leads Bree to Nicholas Davis, the Dean’s golden boy and Bree’s new peer mentor. At first, Bree cannot stand to be around Nick but that quickly changes when Bree is attacked by yet another demonic entity and Nick rescues her. It is here Bree learns of Nick’s connection to a

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magical force called ether and a clandestine organization known as the Order of the Round Table whose members, the Legendborn, are tasked with upholding the safety of the human realm from an onslaught of demonic creatures known as the Shadowborn. Nick is a descendant of the fabled King Arthur and is destined to lead the order against the forces of the Shadowborn in a battle known as Camlann.

Bree decides that the best way to unravel the mystery behind her mother’s death is to infiltrate the order under the guise of Nick’s squire. Once in, she plans to question the regents about why she and her father’s memories of her mother’s death were tampered with and how the event intertwines with their organization. Nick grudgingly agrees to Bree’s offer but warns the process will not be as easy as she believes. To become a squire, Bree must undergo three trials. In these trials, Bree will be faced with the children of vassal families who have spent their entire lives training for the battle to come, and she will be expected not only to hold her own but to best them in each category to achieve her place by Nick’s side and find the answers she seeks.

Nick goes on to explain that the order is one of bloodlines and that outsiders are rarely admitted, painting even more of a target on Bree’s back as she is not only seemingly unrelated to the order through blood but will also be the only non-white prospect undergoing the trials.

The utilization of an early college program in this novel not only serves the purposes of setting the stage for the plot and adding an element of contem-

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Winter 2022

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porary realism to the setting but also sets up one of the novel’s sources of conflict. For those unaware, early college programs are one that students can apply for at the end of their middle school career and, if accepted, begin at the start of their freshman year in high school. These programs streamline the learning process of high school classes, condensing courses, and preparing students for their junior and senior years when their class schedule will be entirely comprised of collegelevel courses taught in college classrooms, earning these students the equivalent of an associate degree by the time they graduate high school. While programs like these have taken off and are available across twentyeight states culminating in over 230 different schools, 133 of these programs exist within the North Carolina public school system, making this state one of the most influential pioneers in this education program.1 These programs were developed to help a diversity of students achieve a more well-rounded and fast-tracked

1

education, and one of the program’s main goals is to aid in the acquisitions of college-level degrees by first- and secondgeneration college students, specifically looking for students whose parents had earned no higher than an associate degree themselves. This idea would theoretically aid in both the college readiness as well as the college acquisition of many in lower-income communities, thus providing an important tool in helping these children out of such communities later in life.

While Briana Matthews is by no means a “lower-income” or “first-generation” student at the university itself, her story within the Order of the Round Table mirrors that of someone who is.

Bree is surrounded by students her age who look nothing like her and have been trained in the art and history of their craft since birth, whereas she is just now stumbling upon it. It is here the character’s mournful “After Bree,” a self-designated persona showcases the walls put up after her mother’s passing, takes hold and, with each glare from the Legendborn order members,

Joel H. Vargas and Marc S. Miller, “Early College Designs: An Increasingly Popular College-readiness Strategy for School Districts to Reach More Traditionally Underserved Students,” AASA:: web; Liz Bell, Rupen Fofaria, Alex Granados, and Molly Osborne, “A Look at NC’s Early College Model,” NC Center for Public Policy Research 27.2 (20 Dec. 2019): web.

becomes more entrenched in her own self-doubt, perceiving herself to be viewed as a charity case. With this plot, then, the author explores the “imposter syndrome” often experienced by people of color in collegiate settings but especially minority women as they or those around them begin to devalue their own accomplishments in favor of believing that this success was achieved by “chance.”2 At first, this syndrome takes hold in Bree, who believes mere chance resulted in her place

by Nick’s side. However, as the story unravels, Bree uncovers a secret that reveals her rightful place within the order even as some of her classmates’ parents express vicious slurs – Her blood is dirty, She’ll taint the Line!” (417) – against the young girl, accusing her of having stolen their child’s rightful place in the order.

Deonn employs the realworld history of the UNC Chapel Hill campus as she develops the lack of appreciation for her black protagonist’s achievements. For example, Bree meets with her therapist, Patricia, seat-

2

Darlene G. Miller and Signe M. Kastberg, “Of Blue Collars and Ivory Towers: Women from Blue-Collar Backgrounds in Higher Education,” Roeper Review 18.1 (1995): 27–33.

Writers Who Teach, Teachers Who Write

with the infamously brutal Carr.

Through both monuments, Bree comes to learn of her ancestors, their unsung history with the university, and the forgotten atrocities they faced at the hands of men like Carr. It is after such revelation that Bree finds herself standing before the Confederate monument, affirming,

bodies lifting the table than the eye could ever see” (160). Patricia explains, “I find it difficult to sit here and do anything else but get sad. . . . Carolina’s way of acknowledging the enslaved and servants who built this place . . . how can I be at peace when I look down and see that they’re still working” (160–61).

The story also features the infamous Silent Sam, a Confederate monument unveiled in 1913 with a speech by former Confederate General Julian Carr. The statue has received much criticism in recent years due to its implicit support of the white supremacist values of the Confederacy and its association

“I stand at that statue and claim the bodies whose names the world wants to forget. I claim those bodies whose names I was taught to forget. And I claim the unsung bloodlines that soak the ground beneath my feet, because I know, I just know, that if they could, they would claim me” (240–41). Then, with two palms pressed firmly on unyielding granite, Briana Matthews sends a push.

Through complex discussion of psychological phenomenon, the harsh stories of enslaved people, and an appropriate real-world setting rich with history, Deonn shows readers the continued prevalence of white

OPPOSITE Tracy Deonn (right) in an

ABOVE The Unsung Founders

interview with Hilary Green, hosted by Main Street Books in Davidson, NC, 22 Apr. 2021

Memorial at UNC Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, draped during the protests demanding its removal

PHOTOGRAPH BY MARTIN KRAFT, WIKI COMMONS, CC BY-SA 3.0

ABOVE RIGHT Silent Sam at UNC

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supremacist attitudes. The novel won the 2021 John Steptoe Award for New Talent, which is “given annually to outstanding African American authors and illustrators of books for children and young adults that demonstrate an appreciation of African American culture and universal human values.”3 Briana’s story is one of triumph in the face of adversity, the source of which comes from both in and outside of herself, building a character from a mournful child into a warrior leading her own chosen family into a brighter future.

By the story’s end, Bree finds the courage to lift herself up, place one foot in front of the other, and dive headfirst into the future, letting whatever may happen wash over her but not drown her. n

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ed at the university’s Unsung Founders Memorial described as a table “Underneath [which], bronze figures reach their hands high to the thick granite tabletop as if holding its weight up in the air. The figurines are staggered in rows that disappear under the slab, giving the impression that there are more

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The Coretta Scott King Book Awards,” American Library Association 18 Jan 2009: web.

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Winter 2022

2021 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE FINALIST

BY GWEN PRIEST

More Than a Haircut Yesterday my child was a girl, all pigtails, dimples, bows, stolen powder-pink lipstick smeared on her freckled face.

Today they are new.

The name we fought over in the birthing center left behind in a chat room.

Today they are brave, telling me their greatest fear: that finding themself might mean losing me – Losing friends, family, God. There is so much to lose, not just a name or symbol, but a life when change demands its turn.

GWEN PRIEST is an award-winning poet, author, and editor. Her essays, poetry, and short stories can be found in several anthologies and in the Remington Review, Southeast Review, and NCLR (a 2018 finalist in this competition, published under the name Gwen Holt in the 2019 print issue). Her latest YA novels have been published with Owl Hollow Press. She currently lives in North Carolina and teaches high school English and Poetry at Longleaf School of the Arts.

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Today I run the clippers over their head, my child wrapped in a black cape, tight but not choking, pieces of girlhood falling to the floor.

Tomorrow we will order a binder.

We will work together to break anything that smothers who my child feels blossoming from their soul.

Tomorrow we will walk past the bathrooms with their block people in pants and skirt, and I will watch the door as they use the non-binary, family bathroom, somewhere in between.

Her Release, 2010 (mixed media on plexiglass, 15x23) by Moriah LeFebvre

Today, I realized my daughter was never mine. They are their own, twirling in a mass of boundaries, smashing into the beyond I didn’t know was there.

My dead expectations for this femaleassigned-at-birth to a world of boxes, now lay on the floor with light brown waves, the sun warming them with promise.

Durham, NC native MORIAH LEFEBVRE graduated from the North Carolina School of the Arts and UNC Chapel Hill. She earned her MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University. Her work has been shown in numerous exhibitions, including Through This Lens in Durham, the LGBTQ Center in Raleigh, and the ArtsCenter in Carrboro. Her art is included in the Rubenstein Arts Center Collection at Duke University and the Triangle Community Foundation Collection, also in Durham, among others. Her art has appeared in such publications as The Sun, Essere Magazine, and Cellar Door.

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STORIES ABOUT GROWING UP BLACK AND FEMALE IN AMERICA a review by Mark I. West Alicia D. Williams. Genesis Begins Again. Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2019.

—. Jump at the Sun: The True Life Tale of Unstoppable Storycatcher Zora Neale Hurston.

Illustrated by Jacqueline Alcántara. Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2021.

—. Shirley Chisholm Dared: The Story of the First Black Woman in Congress. Illustrated by April Harrison. Anne Schwartz Books, 2021.

MARK I. WEST is a Professor of English at UNC Charlotte, where he teaches courses on children’s and young adult literature.

He also holds the title of Bonnie E. Cone Professor in Civic Engagement. He has written or edited sixteen books, the most recent of which is Shapers of American Childhood: Essays on Visionaries from L. Frank Baum to Dr. Spock to J. K. Rowling (McFarland & Co, 2018), which he co-edited with Kathy Merlock Jackson.

His articles have appeared in various national publications, including an essay on “Martin Gardner: North Carolina’s Historian of Oz and Annotator of Alice” in the 2001 issue of NCLR. Before entering academia, he worked as an early childhood educator and professional puppeteer.

North Carolina is home to many well-known children’s authors, including Gail E. Haley, Sheila Turnage, and Carole Boston Weatherford. Such well-established authors, however, are now sharing shelf space with a rapidly expanding list of children’s authors from North Carolina. Of these new children’s authors, Alicia D. Williams, a writer from Charlotte, has had an especially auspicious debut. Williams burst on the children’s literature scene in 2019 with the publication of her novel Genesis Begins Again.

She received both a Newbery Honor Award and the Coretta Scott King-John Steptoe New Talent Award for this novel. She has quickly followed up her novel with two picture book biographies of prominent African American women: Jump at the Sun: The True Life Tale of Unstoppable Storycatcher Zora Neale Hurston and Shirley Chisholm Dares: The Story of the First Black Woman in Congress.

With the publication of these three books, Williams has not only established herself as an upand-coming North Carolina children’s author, but she has also provided much-needed stories about the experience of growing up black and female in America.

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self-esteem. She keeps a list of ninety-six reasons she hates herself, and one of these reasons is that she thinks her skin is too dark. Her grandmother often makes hurtful comments about Genesis’s dark skin complexion, and these comments have a negative impact on Genesis.

Genesis has internalized a form of racism known as “colorism.” In a recent interview, Williams discussed this aspect of her novel.

The story, she said, “evolved to be about colorism – discrimination within the same ethnic group based on skin tone and facial features. . . . I continued to see children of color – every colonized country has a colorism issue – struggle with self-acceptance and self-love based on skin color and hair texture. The need to speak to them was the driving force of completing this story.”* Fortunately, for Genesis, her life gradually changes when she moves to a new school and

Genesis Begins Again, which is intended for middle school readers, focuses on a thirteenyear-old girl named Genesis Anderson. Genesis lacks confidence and has a low sense of

ALICIA D. WILLIAMS is a graduate of the MFA program at Hamline University; before becoming a full-time children’s author, she worked as a teacher in Charlotte, NC, where she currently lives.

* Interview with Alicia D. Williams, Shelf Awareness 30 Jan. 2020; later quotes from the author are also from this interview.

Writers Who Teach, Teachers Who Write

has a chance to begin again.

She makes new friends, and she comes to the attention of a music teacher who recognizes her musical talent. Her teacher introduces her to Billie Holiday and other great jazz singers, and Genesis begins to look to these jazz greats as positive role models. In many ways, the second half of this book celebrates the life-affirming power of music.

The novel also shows the value of providing black girls with positive role models. For Genesis, Billie Holiday is not just an important figure in the history of jazz; she is a successful black woman with whom Genesis can identify and, in so doing, imagine a positive future for herself.

focuses much of the book on Hurston’s childhood and early adulthood, but she touches on Hurston’s career as a folklorist, anthropologist, and professional writer. The book has a lively, joyful tone that is matched by Jacqueline Alcántara’s vibrant and energetic illustrations. The book also includes memorable lines from some of the tales that Hurston published in her folktale collections.

In her “Author’s Note” that comes at the end of Jump at the Sun, Williams recalls her introduction to Hurston: “I remember when I first met Zora.

I was in college, studying in the library. My friend, only a table over, giggled and giggled. She’d get quiet and then giggle again.

Finally, I got up from my seat to find out what was so funny. She held up a book by Zora Neale Hurston. And she later gifted me the anthology I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive” (1979).

This book became one of Williams’s treasures. She found in Hurston an author she loved but also a role model of sorts. Like Hurston, Williams has a passion for storytelling.

Williams’s most recent book, Shirley Chisholm Dares: The

Williams’s interest in presenting children with black women role models is also reflected in her picture book biography titled Jump at the Sun: The True Life Tale of Unstoppable Storycatcher Zora Neale Hurston.

Williams shows how Hurston’s experiences growing up in Eatonville, FL, during the 1890s shaped her interest in African American folklore and sparked her love of storytelling. Williams

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Story of the First Black Woman in Congress, is also a picture book biography. The illustrator, April Harrison, is a well-known folk artist from Greenville, SC, and her illustrations reflect her interest in folk art. Williams covers Chisholm’s growing-up years in Brooklyn and Barbados, her education at Brooklyn College and Columbia University Teachers College, and her entrance into the world of New York politics. Williams shows how Chisholm’s formative years helped her become such an effective political leader. Williams does not go into the details of Chisholm’s political career, but she does cover the values and beliefs that motivated Chisholm over the course of her career in Congress. Williams presents Chisholm as a daring, rebellious, and persistent role model.

As a children’s author, Williams draws on her previous experience as a teacher and storyteller in Charlotte. She clearly knows how to hold the attention of a child audience. She also knows from her experiences as a teacher and parent how important it is for black children to see themselves reflected in the books they read. Williams has already written three such books, and she’s just getting started. n

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS NCLR Seeks Pedagogical Essays for K–12 and post-secondary classes on

TEACHING NORTH CAROLINA LITERATURE Submission guidelines here

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Winter 2022

2021 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE FINALIST

BY LAVONNE J. ADAMS

Ghazal: Reflection Against sable sky, the clouds seem dipped in mercury, mirrors of moonlight.

Still, lacking lightning and thunder’s glissando, the night belies the word storm.

From eaves to ground, solitary raindrops mime a watery wind chime, distill the weather front from ephemeral to earthy – something we can feel.

Like a small resurrection, the air is laundered of exhaust, the tang of garbage.

Stilled stoplights flash, cast amber pools like pollen across pavement.

Those of us who are awake during night’s opaque envelope crave this stillness, our neighbors’ windows glistening like sheets of black ice.

Branches of live oaks mimic an opera-gloved audience. Yet dreams instill an unease that will shadow dawn like an unfed dog. Then . . .

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

the revenant sun shall spread its carpet, resurfacing the water-glazed streets.

Be still, dear reader. Wait for the clarity that every transformation brings.

Bathed in Light (oil and cold wax on cradled panel, 24x24) by Carmen Grier

CARMEN GRIER’s studio and home are located in Bakersville, NC, near Penland School of Craft in rural Mitchell County. She earned a BA in music from the University of Iowa, an MA from UI in Textile Design, followed by an MFA in Fiber from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI. She has been creating functional and art textiles for forty years and has recently added painting to her current practice. She has taught and exhibited nationally, been awarded national and international residencies, and her award-winning work has been featured in Fiberarts Magazine and Surface Design Journal.

LAVONNE J. ADAMS is the author of Through the Glorieta Pass (Pearl Books, 2009), two poetry chapbooks, and more than 150 individual poetry publications. Retired now, she was a lecturer and MFA Coordinator for the Creative Writing Department at UNC Wilmington. Her most recent publication is a group of fourteen poems and an introductory essay appearing in Artful Dodge. She has completed residencies at the Harwood Museum of Art (University of New Mexico-Taos), The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Vermont Studio Center, and she was a GilbertChappell Distinguished Poet for Eastern North Carolina.

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2021 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE FINALIST

BY LAVONNE J. ADAMS COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

We Think of Night as Still But outside our muted homes, air conditioning units click on and off like crickets, whir like cicadas’ wings.

Against the susurrus hush of occasional vehicles traveling from somewhere to somewhere else, the disembodied thrum of music pours from a car’s lowered window.

Perhaps God prefers to listen to the thrum of beating hearts, and perhaps it is our bodies that create the heavenly chorus described in Sunday school, which we once envisioned as angels with lyres and lutes, harps and harpsichords. Those of us who lift oversized

Concerto (3) (oil on canvas, 40x40)

by Alicia A. Armstrong

boxes, who bolt and unbolt tires; those of us who run, who rest on couches, who rock in chairs on planked porches sipping malt or sweetened tea, are riffs in that complex chorale.

Suppose we return to earth again and again, not for some philosophical notion of what we might learn, but to embody particular notes. What if we decide which forms of emotional pain, what measure of joy, we’ll experience as a means of reaching perfect pitch. What if blessedness is not located in some glittering rendition of heaven, that the gathering of souls is instead a luminous audience, anticipating our encore – the exquisite suffering of note after note.

ALICIA A. ARMSTRONG lives and works in Charlotte, NC. She earned her BFA from UNC Asheville. Her work is collected internationally and has appeared in national publications such as American Art Collector, regional publications such as Carolina Home & Garden, and local publications such as Asheville Made. Her art appears in numerous corporate collections, such as the Mission Hospital in Asheville, UNC Asheville, and the South Carolina Environmental Law Project. She is represented in North Carolina

by Haen Gallery in Asheville and Sozo Gallery in Charlotte.

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A ROVING SEARCH FOR PROVISIONS OF ANY KIND a review by Kathryn Kirkpatrick Rose McLarney. Forage.

Penguin Books, 2019.

K AT H RY N K I R K PAT R I C K i s Professor of English at Appalachian State University where she teaches creative writing, environmental literature, and Irish studies. She is the author of seven books of poetry, including Unaccountable Weather (Press 53, 2011; reviewed in NCLR Online 2013), Our Held Animal Breath (WordTech Editions, 2012), and The Fisher Queen: New and Selected Poems (Salmon Poetry, 2019), which received the Roanoke Chowan Poetry Prize from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Society.

ROSE MCL ARNEY grew up in western North Carolina. Her poetry has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Missouri Review, and many other journals.

She is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University and Co-Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor of the Southern Humanities Review.

Rose McLarney frames the poems in her new collection with references to Virgil’s agricultural hymn, The Georgics (29 BCE). It’s a bold and evocative gesture, a choice, I’d argue, informed by McLarney’s own rural origins in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina.

Yet, while her first collection, The Always Broken Plates of Mountains (2012), addresses the life and land of her homeplace, her second, Its Day Being Gone (2014), a National Poetry Award winner, explores subjects beyond Appalachia, including settings in Central America.

Forage, as the roving search in the title suggests, is even less specifically place-based – ranging through suburbs and across state lines – even as its poems ruminate on the idea of place. In this larger context, McLarney’s work might be said to display an Appalachian perspective, a standpoint informed by a regional culture independent enough to allow her narrators to assess the often rapacious values and practices of modernity.

As McLarney herself has put the case, “Someone with the close focus of a local, who has loved a place intimately, should be able to take that way of looking wherever they want to.”* Georgics translates as “the facts of farming,” and McLarney’s opening and closing allusions alert us that the poems in this volume will engage with the complex history of the pastoral. Virgil’s question (and by extension McLarney’s) – “What need have I for loftier song to

* Kathryn Kirkpatrick, “A Conversation with Rose McLarney,” Cold Mountain Review 45.2 (2017): web.

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sing?” – addresses his decision to take as his poem’s subjects the nurturing of olive and fruit trees, the tending of bees, the growing of grapes, the care of livestock, and the praise of what the earth provides. Though the pastoral came to be known in the west in the early modern period as an idealization of the rural with an emphasis on the care of flocks and herds, Virgil, as the son of farmers, gives us a more nuanced text with an up-close and detailed view of human labor on the land. Millennia later, McLarney ironically negotiates the accreted layers of the pastoral mode in “Seasonal,” where “Neighbors have erected an inflatable pumpkin / out of which arises an inflatable dog.” Rather than reading the stars to know when to sow and when to harvest, inhabitants of this suburban landscape know the change of seasons by “lawn decorations, the lawn mowers / trimming the football field.”

Yet the poem refuses nostalgia.

Unapologetically equivocal, McLarney questions even Virgil’s question by naming the racism of the agrarian Southern United States: “Why not such a field as subject for study, / rather than a farm’s, which was never pastoral / for many, not in the land of cotton, not for those // who hoed and picked it?”

“Pastoral” examines head-on the question of who benefits from the romanticization of rural life by exposing what holds in place modernity’s constructed version of the good life. Here, two of the main driv-

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PHOTOGRAPH BY SANDY CARAWAN

ers of climate crisis – cattle and fossil fuel – appear anything but natural, the cattle represented, for example, as “black weight” holding in place land from which they’ve eaten away the native grasses. McLarney makes a point to show how the scene might be misread as bucolic: “Perhaps the impression is scenic because their necks are bent // with the downward stroke of feeding.” The rest of the short poem draws attention metatextually to the poet’s own constructions: “I could say the oil derricks / too are feeding, with enormous avian pecks.” The poem lands with the combined voices of cattle and oil derricks – “Let us strike, again, the pose of plenty” – McLarney’s lan-

ABOVE A field viewed from a North Carolina

highway near Wesser Bald

guage suggesting the violence inherent in striking this particular pastoral pose.

Elsewhere in Forage, McLarney takes on Virgil’s attitude of instruction. The book’s opening vignette of five lines unfolds in imperative voice: “In the subdivision, walk looking at the pavement / for spatterings and pits.” The first half of the passage contains images of a wasted harvest, the squandered resources of a modern culture: “These from falling plums / no one will pick, not in this setting.”

With the mirroring and repetition of “this setting,” the lines recommence with what the reader must do instead: “Walk looking down so as to know when to look up.” The com-

mand manages to reground the sacred in the earth by suggesting that up above can only be known through intimate contact with what’s below. And what is to be found when looking up in this passage is literally ripe fruit. Just so, in “American Persimmon,” the narrator calls attention to another neglected harvest, ripe persimmons “[t]oo fragile” to transport, the speaker herself transported by eating them “right / on the roadside.”

In the context of poems bearing witness to the devastations of climate crisis, these squandered harvests become productively didactic, an element of Virgil’s pastoral McLarney retains.

This language of instruction continues, aptly, in a poem

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addressing the linguistic erasures of the natural world from the collective vocabulary of childhood.

In “After the Removal of 30 Types of Plants and Animals from the Junior Dictionary,” McLarney deftly links lost words alliteratively with what we humans will come to lack by losing them, the coupling and uncoupling inherent in her subject unfolding in the poem’s two-line stanzas: “Leave a few things intact, // allow the possibility of turning books’ pages back / to lobster, leopard, lark, then forward to last – to lasting – to live.”

As a noun, forage is fodder or winter feed for horses and cattle, a laying up and laying by, a preserving, of plums, of persimmons. Conversely, as a transitive verb, forage can mean to “plunder, pillage, ravage,” the path along which Western cultures have travelled to bring us to our current pass. And as an active verb, forage is the opposite of agriculture, of planting and tending. Rather, it’s the action of a “roving search for provisions of any kind.” Indeed, these remarkable poems might be said to forage for hope in a time of environmental and social crisis, a crisis this poet refuses to sit out. n

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Gideon Young’s my hands full of light is a small collection of thirty-four haiku vibrating with a new voice that represents a prism of the haiku world. One frequent image in this collection is the hand.

The first haiku of the collection uses hands to present a father who works hard to support and protect the family: “fatherhood – / weathered brown hands / shield a candle.” A poet uses imagery not only for a new creative expression but also to help the reader understand metaphoric language through visual correspondence. Though the first line of this haiku is an abstract word (which suggests a question – what is fatherhood?), the visual correspondence in the second part is metaphoric and helps the reader superimpose the concrete image upon the abstract idea. While “brown” suggests race, “weathered hands” indicates hardworking, and hope or family is like the candlelight being shielded.

This haiku echoes Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays,” which presents a father whose – “cracked hands that ached / from labor in the weekday weather made / banked fires blaze.”* Both Young’s and Hayden’s descriptions recognize the effort of a father figure as the backbone of family.

The second haiku with the hand image is a complete sentence, which seems to function against the traditional technique of using a kireji to cut the haiku into two parts –

A READING FULL OF LIGHT a review by John Zheng Gideon Young. my hands full of light. Backbone Press, 2021.

JOHN ZHENG is author of A Way of Looking (Silverfish Review Press, 2021), which won the Gerald Cable Book Award, and Enforced Rustication in the Chines Cultural Revolution (Texas Review Press, 2019), editor of five books including Conversations with Dana Gioia (University Press of Mississippi, 2020) and African American Haiku: Cultural Visions (University Press of Mississippi, 2016), and Professor of English at Mississippi Valley State University.

G I D E O N YO U N G w a s b o r n i n Connecticut and received his BA in Literature from the University of Connecticut and MA in Elementary Education from NC State University.

He is a member of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective, the Haiku Society of America, the Carrboro Poets Council, and the state advisory board for the Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet Series. His work can be found in publications such as Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora, The Long River Review, Black Gold: An Anthology of Black Poetry, and Modern Haiku. In 2020, he received second place in the James Applewhite Poetry Prize competition for his poem “kwansaba crown,” which was published in NCLR 2021.

OPPOSITE Gideon Young during his reading

of his 2nd place poem for NCLR’s Zoom celebration of 2020 James Applewhite Poetry Prize awardees, 14 Apr. 2021

*

Robert Hayden. Collected Poems, ed.

Frederick Glaysher (Liveright, 1985) 38.

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“nose tickles / from the sprig of mint / in my daughter’s hand” – but, this statement presents a delightful moment of family life enjoyed by both the father and the daughter. This haiku has a nice synesthetic presentation of relationship and family life.

The transference of the senses from sight (the mint sprig in the daughter’s hand) to touch and smell (tickle in the nose) vivifies the scene.

The next haiku using a hand image is the title poem – “father of two / my hands full / of light” – which seems to echo the first one discussed. Both haiku have a father figure and use the hand as the focal point. However, light in the third one conveys happiness because in a father’s eyes, his two daughters held in his hands are surely the light of joy.

Jazz has a place in Young’s collection as well. Personally, I feel it is always a challenge to write about jazz in haiku because haiku is too brief to encompass jazz, but Young smartly chooses only a brief

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moment to establish a linkage between the sound of a bird and the tune of Duke Ellington: “shaded chickadee / her first notes / an Ellington tune.” This is also associative thinking, as the song moves from the song in nature to the tune in human nature. The next jazz haiku – “blue of winter / Moonlight / jazz bassline” – involves the sense switching between seeing and hearing. The winter moonlight (a visual image) interacts with the jazz baseline (an audi-

tory image) as if to add a color of blue to tranquilize the mood in a cold night.

Young’s haiku is about the interdependence of nature and human nature. Reading it is an experience of the senses and an aesthetic appreciation of the figurative language used to create a new voice that offers an ah ha moment. In short, it is a joy to read Young’s debut haiku collection as my hands are full of light when I hold it to read. n

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2021 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE FINALIST

BY JUSTIN HUNT

Why I Flinch at the Thought of Daylight Squandered Deep into her last year, my mother would rise from breakfast and proclaim, Gotta get movin’! She grabbed time by the neck, throttled every second into purpose and task: dishes washed and jangled back to shelves, floors swept, sweaters knit and hauled to church bazaars, flowers planted and watered from the well-pump hose she dragged across her yard, housedress aflutter, knees stabbing above her knotted, twitching calves – until she could drag and twitch no more.

And so it was with my father, too, that life-timer in the art of harnessed living, graduate cum laude of my granddad’s open-air school for cattlemen, butchers, and farmers.

Like a plow horse, he never slipped the reins of work, never balked at the gee and haw of doing,

JUSTIN HUNT grew up in rural Kansas and lives in Charlotte, NC. His work has won several awards and appears, or is forthcoming, in a wide range of literary journals and anthologies in the US, Ireland, and the UK, including Five Points, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, Florida Review, Arts & Letters, Bellingham Review, Crab Creek Review, Cider Press Review, and New York Quarterly.

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My Father’s Hands, from the series Simple Truths, 2009 (gelatin silver photograph, 28x36) by Linda Foard Roberts

though late one summer I saw him sitting on an old railroad tie at the end of the driveway – squinting into sun, legs like sticks in tattered Bermuda shorts, purple veins spidering into frayed socks and a pair of wingtips too worn for anything but puttering. Ninety years old.

Retired at last, not long before the stroke that cut him down:

eight months in bed, lucid until the end, chained to not-doing and the anguish of knowing it.

Weddington, NC, native LINDA FOARD ROBERTS lives in Charlotte, NC. She received a BFA from Intermont College and an MFA from the University of Arizona. Her work has been exhibited internationally and throughout the US. Her first monograph, Passage (Radius Books, 2016), debuted at Paris Photo. In 2020, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship Grant in support of her series Lament, a song of sorrow for those not heard, which was exhibited at Annenberg Space for Photography and Mint Museum of Art. Her work is held in numerous private and corporate collections, as well as in the permanent collections of Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, North Carolina Museum of Art, Davidson College, New Orleans Museum of Art, and Ogden Museum of Art. She is represented by SOCO Gallery in Charlotte and Sol del Rio Gallery in Guatemala City. See more of her work in NCLR 2011, 2014, and 2017.

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POEMS OF LOVE AND LOSS a review by James W. Kirkland Anthony S. Abbott. Dark Side of North. Press 53, 2021.

JAMES W. KIRKLAND is a Professor of Folklore, American Literature, and Rhetoric and Composition at East Carolina University. He has co-authored and co-edited seven books including Writing with Confidence: A Modern College Rhetoric (Heath, 1989), Herbal and Magical Medicine: A Traditional Healing Today (Duke UP, 1992) and Concise English Handbook, 4th ed. (Houghton, 1997).

ANTHONY S. ABBOTT (1935–2020) was the author of seven books of poetry, two novels, and four books of literary criticism.

He won many prestigious awards for poetry and teaching, including the North Carolina Award for Literature, the James Larkin Pearson Award, and the Roanoke-Chowan Award for this collection of poetry. Watch the video about this most recent honor here. Before his passing, he was selected to be a 2020 inductee into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. That ceremony was postponed until 2022 due to COVID.

ABOVE Anthony Abbott In his office at

Davidson College

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PHOTOGRAPH BY LOGAN CYRUS; COURTESY OF CHARLOTTE MAGAZINE

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Dark Side of North, Anthony Abbott’s eighth and final poetry volume, is, as Jacqueline Bussie observes in her “Foreword,” “a dying poet’s last gift to us” – a collection of more than ninety previously unpublished poems organized into seven self-contained books, which collectively form what Abbott describes in the “Acknowledgements” as “a unified manuscript about the last twenty years of life, and how we deal with diminishing health, retirement, changes in living, losses – how we maintain our joy for living in the midst of these challenges.”

Even before we begin our journey through the collection’s seven books, the title poem, which stands alone as the Prologue, offers us a brief glimpse of what is to follow.

Set in the present, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, Dark Side of North captures the essence of this strange “upturned world” of “hurricanes without rain” and “tornadoes without wind” – a world where “college students frolic on the

beach” while “trucks with bodies” line “the streets outside the hospitals” and “On Palm Sunday, the Pope spoke / alone to an empty Saint Peter’s Square.”

Yet amidst the confusion and uncertainty of the time, there are signs of hope: “azaleas pink and white quiver in the breeze,” the “cherry blossoms smile to the empty paths,” and “the fingers of love beckon through the greening leaves.”

In many other poems too, Abbott is an astute observer and interpreter of the world around him, finding joy and inspiration even in the smallest and most familiar things: “the April sun slanting through the new leaves” (“A Poem for My Daughter on Her Fiftieth Birthday”); “the smooth river flowing by / and the click of the oars as the crew shells /made their way along in perfect rhythm” (“What the Prefects Would Never Know”); “the naked branches / of the trees the sound of humming, the whirr / of wings” (“All Saints’ Day”); “the fading light of evening / sky pink in the west” (“Even the Grass”); “the cres-

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cent moon / sharp against the clear black / night” (“Suppose”); “leaves / yellow and red and orange, / which floated slowly down / into our waiting hands” ("The Long Afternoon”); “Halfmoon high in the night sky / sliding upward from the cover / of trees” (“Half Moon”); “the gold crowned kinglet” perched “in the pines” (“The Light in the Window”); a luna moth “slowly, tentatively / then surely, / rising / into the sweet / June air” (“Grace”); “the circling / hawk who bends to the shimmering pool / and dives” (“The Crazy Man Visits the Zoo”); and all the other moments “we wait for live for” that impart “to all life / the aura of the mysterious, the sacred, / blessed and consecrated by the heart” (“That Without Which”). More often than not, these images of the beauty and sublimity of the natural world are inseparable from remembrances of its human inhabitants, especially those Abbott memorializes in an effort to fulfill what he describes in his essay “In His Own Words” as one of the poet’s most important

roles: to “find words to keep . . . alive in our hearts” the “people who would otherwise be lost.”

Some of the most poignant of these elegiac moments occur in Part One: The Book of Remembrances and Grace, which includes “love poems” addressed to his daughter Carolyn, who died unexpectedly at the age of four (“A Poem for My Daughter on Her Fiftieth Birthday" and "Lyn’s Poem”); his sister Nancy, his “true mother, . . . teacher, . . . protector,” whom he imagines at her death wrapped in an angel’s “bright wings,” transported to “where that brightness is” (“The Light in the Window”); the calculus teacher who lives on in the memory of all who knew him, “walking home toward us all, telling us / to live” (“Even the Grass”); and numerous other beloved friends and family members.

In other sections, too, there are poems that “keep alive in our hearts” both those who have died and those near death like the dialysis patients described in Part Three: The Book of Driving and Music. They are “coura-

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geous souls” who “batter against the brittle end of things / forcing their blood through the dark machines / to buy forty-eight more hours” (“Ashes to Go”), and so too are the retirement home residents pictured in Part Five: The Book of Departures in poems such as "In the Retirement Home Eva," "In the Retirement Home Patrick," "In the Retirement Home the Widows," and "A Day with the Doctors."

Eva lives in a constant state of confusion, suffering from memory loss and beset by worries that the nameless “they” are watching her, waiting for her “to do something / strange.” “Sometimes,” she says, “I / forget my whole name. Sometimes / I walk and walk and my mind wanders / to the sea, where I lived as a girl.” Patrick (another resident) is seemingly “happy here,” but his words belie the fact that he is living out his remaining years in a place he equates metaphorically with “a piece of starched heaven,” separated physically and emotionally from his children and grandchildren, who “do not come to visit.” Herbert,

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a third resident, measures out his days in endless doctors’ visits. “Just an ordinary day,” he says, “another damned ordinary day,” much like days the widows (principal figures in a poem written in emulation of Eliot’s The Hollow Men [1925]) spend sitting at a table for eight and “whisper[ing] of past transgressions” and “happier times” while “at the tables of four / the matched couples snicker / smartly between bites,” gazing “furtively” at the women they will soon be joining.

There are numerous self-portraits, too, of the artist as he confronts the reality of his own failing health and fading memory. In the two poems at the beginning of The Book of Departures, we find him in the liminal space between his old life and the new, contemplating his move from family home to retirement home. A few pages later, in "No Time to Make Desserts" and "Something to Be Done," he thinks about his own “strange waning days” in this strange new place and reflects on what really matters most following his cancer diagnosis: not the debilitating effects of the treatment but “the surge of the soul / down the steps to the water” and “the color of the sky, as the sun / sinks southwestern into the blue lake / and it is still possible for something / to be done.” And in the penultimate poem "Suppose," he strikes a similarly hopeful note, urging us to imagine what it would be like to return for just three days to a place we love after a long absence and . . . walk down the familiar street which now shines with strangeness with the unearthly light of eternity itself and . . . weep for this day and the two others you have been given to come back before you are gone again into whatever place they send you.

In the next section, however, there is a significant change in tone as the poet begins to view familiar scenes through the lens of “these new days,” which “like snow in November” are beautiful and white” – but “troubling.” The Half-moon high in

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the night sky” – a source of beauty and wonder in earlier poems–now elicits only a brief glance: “I stand on the deck / and look, then close the door / and go to bed. No more of this.” In "Quite the Opposite" he views his current state as “these odd days edging into the ether world” and himself as this stupid old man who begs for one more bite, and gets instead these odd days, as I say, . . . these doddering edgings into sleep into the wax figures of dreams.

In "The Nameless," people once familiar . . . drift in and out of namelessness, caught for a moment in a bright flash of light, then gone again for months at a time drifting with other forgotten down the green streams of the lost.

And in the last of the twelve poems in The Book of These New Days, “The Man Who Reads the Newspaper,” a man much like the poet, once happy and attuned to all the things around him, Now . . . stares out the window and wonders how he will spend the day.

It will be too cold to walk. He will read his biography and look up the unknown words on his smart phone, the lost places of the heart dim in the haze of another dawn.

Ultimately, the sense of sorrow and loss that permeates The Book of These New Days recedes as the poet embarks on the last stage of life’s journey in The Book of the Last, where each poem is an invitation to learn “what the heart knows” and all that it teaches us (“What the Heart Knows”). To “Be thankful for the gift of life / and the small birds who drink / from the pool outside your window” ("Do Not Forget This”). To “give thanks for the rain / which soaks the roots of the trees / and gives life again to the small / plants and the nameless purple / wildflowers the mowers have missed” (“Rain”). To savor every moment as it “opens like a gift” in “the stunned silence / of here and now.” To “receive / each morning as a wrapped gift” (“The Last”). And to remember that “the last poem, the last linking / of lines, . . . / the last silence between words” is not really the last because the words live on in the pages of Dark Side of North and the hearts of all who read them. n

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2021 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE FINALIST

BY MARK SMITH-SOTO

Clichés Time flies is one, and so is love and so’s that third repeat in a riff meant to resound.

And so’s the appearance, in the rosy morning light, of two hearts traced on COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

a dusty window. And so is death and so are those grey poodles in their winter best, rose-printed bows tied at their necks. And so’s an apple plucked from a low branch, held half-bitten in the hand, and so is death.

Too corny for words – well, almost. Isn’t it what words aspire to after all is said, to repeat memorably like “What the eyes don’t see, the heart won’t feel,” or “Love’s like a red, red rose” – or say, just for example, death?

And at the End (mixed media on paper, 30x22)

by Francisco Gonzalez

Costa Rican-American poet MARK SMITH-SOTO has been with the International Poetry Review at UNC Greensboro for almost thirty years.

Along with three prize-winning chapbooks, he has authored three full-length poetry collections, Our Lives Are Rivers (University Press of Florida, 2003), Any Second Now (Main Street Rag, 2006), and Time Pieces (Main Street Rag, 2015; reviewed in NCLR Online 2016). He won the James Applewhite Poetry Prize in 2012, and his winning entry and another finalist were published in the 2013 NCLR issues. NCLR Online 2013 also featured him in an essay on North Carolina’s Latinx writers, and his poetry has also appeared in NCLR 2001, 2012, and NCLR Online 2020.

Smith-Soto’s work has been nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize and was recognized in 2006 with an NEA Fellowship in Creative Writing.

His Fever Season: Selected Poetry of Ana Istarú (2010) and his lyrical memoir Berkeley Prelude (2013) were both published by Unicorn Press.

Charlotte, NC resident FRANCISCO GONZALEZ is a native of Mexico. A mostly self-taught artist, his work has been exhibited throughout the Carolinas, Georgia, Oregon and New York. He was a featured artist in the exhibitions Celebrating The Legacy of Romare Bearden at The Mint Museum Of Art in Charlotte, The Mint Museum’s Arte-Poesia-Música and the annual Con A de Arte, and the Arte Latino Now at Queens University, Charlotte.

His art appears in several private, permanent, and corporate collections throughout North Carolina. He has received awards from Associated Artists of Winston-Salem, NC, and the Charlotte Art League. His affiliations include ArtSi and the OBRA Collective, both in Charlotte, and Art for Art’s Sake in Winston-Salem.

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PHOTOGRAPH BY BEN DEAN

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CHARTING GRIEF, SEEKING SOLACE a review by John Lang Faith Shearin. Lost Language: Poems. Press 53, 2020.

JOHN LANG is an English Professor Emeritus at Emory & Henry College in Emory, VA, where he taught from 1983 to 2012. He is the author of Understanding Fred Chappell (University of South Carolina Press, 2000), Six Poets from the Mountain South (Louisiana State University Press, 2010), and Understanding Ron Rash (University of South Carolina Press, 2014; reviewed in NCLR Online 2017), as well as the editor of Appalachia and Beyond: Conversations with Writers from the Mountain South (University of Tennessee Press, 2006), a collection of interviews from The Iron Mountain Review, which he edited for more than twenty years.

FAITH SHEARIN grew up in Kitty Hawk, NC. She is the author of six previous books of poetry, most recently Darwin’s Daughter (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2018). She has received awards from Yaddo, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She has been a visiting writer at American University, Carver Center for the Arts, and Interlochen Center for the Arts.

Her poems have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac more than thirty times and included several times in former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s syndicated column, “American Life in Poetry.”

Lost Language, North Carolina native Faith Shearin’s seventh collection of poems, maps a landscape of grief following her husband’s sudden death at age forty-eight from a massive coronary caused by a congenital heart valve defect. The couple had been married for two dozen years. Shearin traces the varied calculus of loss in seventyeight poems, most no longer than a page, though ten run to two pages. Fifty of the poems are addressed to her deceased husband, Thomas J. Murdock (1970–2018), to whom the book is dedicated, as the poet negotiates the new circumstances of her life, “each doorknob a strange planet // in my hand” (“Navigation”).

The volume’s title poem, placed near the book’s center, finds the poet remarking to her husband, “I am the last // native

speaker of the language / of our marriage,” and language is a major motif throughout the collection. In “Death in Other Countries,” for example, Shearin explores the diverse idioms different languages use to speak of the dead: not English’s “pushing up daisies” but French’s “eating dandelions / by the roots” or German’s “looking at the radishes / from below.” In “I Heard the Cardinals This Morning,” one of the book’s very best poems, Shearin listens to the birds while reading a textbook written for Germans who are trying to learn English. The italicized sentences quoted from that text move subtly through assorted verb tenses and moods, ending powerfully with, “I may borrow a book / from the library. He may never come home.” Although in this poem Shearin indicates that “I only speak / grief,” and

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OPPOSITE Faith Shearin and Thomas J. Murdock during their high school years together and RIGHT on their wedding day in

Duck, NC, 1984

I was asked to tabulate a number based on a life stress inventory and you know how bad I am at math; I thought of your father drawing a circle on the chalkboard of our high school geometry class, his hand like dust. I received 100 points because you died and another 28 because our daughter started college, 20 for our new apartment, 30 because I have trouble sleeping and eating.

I remembered you at 24: your age when we promised till death do us part; your life was already half over when you danced with me beneath white balloons; I have been counting those balloons in our album of wedding photographs where they drift out the door of the reception hall into a cypress forest heavy with moss.

You were 30 when our daughter was born, and she was 18 when you died at 48, and your father would have said all of these are even numbers: divisible by 2 with no remainder.

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in “Babel” tells her dead husband, “I search for / the language I can speak with you,” she remains committed to articulating not only human vulnerability and sorrow but also humanity’s resilience, its capacity to surmount the gravest loss. “Let Us Mourn like the Victorians” employs marked hyperbole to warn poet and reader alike to resist self-abandonment to grief, while the book’s penultimate poem, “Listening to Beethoven’s Ninth the Summer after You Died,” refers to this symphony as the composer’s “anthem to humanity,” containing as it does Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” inspired by Schiller’s poem of the same title.

Shearin’s reference to Beethoven’s last complete symphony is one of her book’s many allusions and historical references that enrich its portrait of loss, extending that portrait beyond the personal to the archetypal and universal. Plunged suddenly into widowhood, the poet recognizes in “Glass Piano” that “the language of widows . . . is diluvian.” She likewise emphasizes the ancient roots of grief in her rather unwieldy title “Poem in Which I Make a Cave Painting of Our Life Together,” a poem that includes the poignant line, “I am mixing my paint with ash.” Shearin draws from fairy tale, history, and myth for images of love and marriage, mortality and abandonment and longing: the lost Gretel, the dancing plague of 1518, sailors shipwrecked in “the graveyard of the Atlantic,” marooned aviator Amelia Earhart, Isis’s piecing together and resurrecting of Osiris, Psyche’s fraught marriage to Cupid, Odysseus’s visit to the Underworld, the Gaelic harvest festival of Samhain, when “the boundaries between this world / and the Otherworld opened” (in “The Day of the Dead”), a festival whose dates nearly coincide with the dates of Shearin’s husband’s heart attack (October 31) and death (November 2). Through such references the poet enlarges the scope of her vision, reminding readers of our temporal–and all too temporary–existence, encouraging us to embrace love and human connection as antidotes to the ravages of time.

Lest readers assume, incorrectly, that Shearin’s poems are overly allusive, let me hasten to stress the clarity and directness of most of her writing.

Perhaps the book’s second poem, “Math,” written in the two-line stanzas she favors in nearly half the collection’s poems, will illustrate:

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The striking extended metaphor of the life stress inventory and the other numerals used in this poem unify the text as it builds toward its haunting final line.

Perhaps Shearin’s penchant for two-line stanzas in Lost Language is meant to remind readers of the contrasting decoupling of wife from husband caused by his death, for her marriage no longer mirrors such pairings.

Shearin offers an abundance of other apt metaphors and images for the emotions she experiences as a bereft spouse.

Several of the poems focus on animals of various kinds rather than on her personal loss. “Animals in Space,” for instance, presents various creatures caught up in events they neither willed nor wanted. “They never meant to be passengers / or

ABOVE A selfie of the poet and her

husband at Sam and Omie’s restaurant on the Outer Banks, 2016

astronauts,” the poem begins, “never meant to experience // weightlessness.”

A similar sense of powerlessness and insubstantiality besets the poet. Likewise, in “Early Lab Mice” Shearin recounts scientist Robert Koch’s experiments with anthrax, narrowing her lens at poem’s end to the imagined perspective of the mice, animals “sensing danger, discovery,” although not a discovery that will benefit them but rather a discovery like that of the ship’s passengers in “The Iceberg That Sank the Titanic,” more than 1500 of whom died.

Occasionally, Shearin falls under the spell of an image or metaphor and repeats it more often than seems advisable. Early in the book, for example, she speaks of her husband as having vanished “into the white rafters // of the afterlife” (in “Keeping Warm”), a vivid phrase initially but one whose impact diminishes when it occurs again (with the adjective “white” omitted).

She is likewise drawn to metaphors involving the word “pages” so that readers encounter “the pages of the afterlife” (“Afterlife”), “the pages of afternoon”

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(“Hammock”), and “the pages of winter” (“Janet”). Far more effective is the metaphor she uses in “Horse Latitudes” to describe the waves along the graveyard of the Atlantic, “where the ocean grows a thousand manes.”

Despite such quibbles and despite Shearin’s tendency to overuse one-line stanzas to end her poems (well over a third of the poems conclude in this fashion), Lost Language is a deeply moving, diverse, thought-provoking collection.

The poet’s ultimate stance is that of survivor, not victim.

Her poems probe the pain of bereavement and abandonment while simultaneously attending to life’s pleasures and wonders that persist amid intense trauma.

For Shearin, I suspect, composing this book provided her a version of the mythical Greek drug Nepenthes, an antidote to sorrow mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey that also serves as the title of one of her poems. Shearin’s book invokes not a “drug of / forgetfulness” (“Nepenthes”), however, but one that enhances memory; it defends against sorrow by recalling and celebrating the beloved. She thus concludes the collection by continuing to address her vanished husband: “Wait for me in the Underworld,” she urges; “tell me whether you / are living in Elysium or Asphodel meadows” (“Wait for Me”). “I am your widow,” she declares, embracing an identity thrust upon her by his death. n

NORTH CAROLINA WRITERS: Submit your books to the annual North Carolina book awards, given by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association and affiliates. Find eligibility and submission guidelines here. Due annually on July 15.

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DEBUT NOVEL BY HALLI GOMEZ WINS NC AAUW AWARD Halli Gomez received the 2021 American Association of University Women of North Carolina Young People’s Literature Award for her novel List of Ten (Sterling Teen, 2021). This Award was founded with the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association in 1953 to recognize “the most significant work of original literature for young readers published over the course of the last year by a North Carolina author.” Published by Sterling Teen, Gomez’s debut Young Adult novel follows the story of a sixteen-yearold living with Tourette Syndrome and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. In this heart-wrenching yet hopeful novel, Troy Hayes suffers daily under the influence of the number ten, which controls his life.

In her award acceptance remarks, Gomez explains two wishes for her novel’s influence upon readers: first, she “wanted people to be able to have an outlet to see themselves where they may not normally see themselves. . . . Just knowing they’re not alone can help make a big difference.” Second, she says, “Not everybody has the same upbringing, . . . the same family life, or the same mental or physical health issues. But, if we’re able to look at another person and understand and accept them for who

they are, that is the beginning of change for everybody’s lives.”

Born in New York and a longtime Florida resident, Gomez now lives in North Carolina with her husband and two children. She writes for both children and young adults and is a contributor to The Winged Pen. A teacher of another sort than the rest of the writers in this section: according to her website, Gomez, with her fourth-degree black belt in Taekwondo, taught martial arts for almost a decade. n

ABOVE Halli Gomez giving her acceptance remarks, Dec. 2021

(Listen to the author’s full acceptance remarks here.)

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TURNING REALITY ON ITS HEAD a review by Grace C. Ocasio Pat Riviere-Seel. When There Were Horses. Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2021.

Maureen Sherbondy. Dancing with Dali. FutureCycle Press, 2020.

Currently, GRACE C. OCASIO serves as a Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet.

A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her second full-length volume of poetry, Family Reunion (Broadstone Books, 2020), received honorable mention in the Quercus Review Press Fall 2017 Book Award Contest. She also placed as a finalist in the 2015 Aesthetica Creative Writing Award in Poetry and was a recipient of the 2014 North Carolina Arts Council Regional Artist Project Grant. Her first full-length collection, The Speed of Our Lives, was published by BlazeVOX Books in 2014. She has published poetry in Rattle, Court Green, Black Renaissance Noire, The Chaffin Journal, Minerva Rising, and many other journals. Her chapbook, Hollerin from This Shack, was published by Ahadada Books in 2009.

She is a member of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective.

Although the subject matter in Maureen Sherbondy’s and Pat Riviere-Seel’s latest poetry collections is dramatically different, both poets seize upon memory to reshape reality. For her part, Sherbondy taps a wide range of surrealist paintings to forge new realities. New realities emerge in Riviere-Seel’s work through a painterly precision of words. In fact, some of her poems prompt this reader to imagine how they would appear as paintings. Each poet tackles universal themes like death, unfulfilled wishes, and the transience of human experience with aplomb. Clearly, both are reinventing the wheel, so to speak, as evinced in how their respective language succeeds in altering our perception of reality. The way each poet reformulates reality educes for us Salvador Dali’s own words: “One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.”

In Dancing with Dali, Maureen Sherbondy presents an impressive array of poems based on surrealist artwork from the likes of Frida Kahlo, René Magritte, Nikolina Petolas, Max Ernst, and Salvador Dali. In a very real sense, Sherbondy’s poems based on surrealist paintings, especially by the aforementioned artists, stand as a tribute and testament to the oeuvres of these artists. Sherbondy’s statement, “Nothing is as it should be” from her poem

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“Journey,” represents an overarching theme of the collection – whether she unveils specific images associated with a painting or catalogs personal incidents from her life. Sherbondy’s exploration of surrealist artwork is exhaustive. Her highlighting of Dali’s art in particular sets the pace for other surrealist works that she thoroughly examines within her poems.

“Summer Wasteland,” the first poem in the collection, is a referential piece, evoking for us Dali’s brand of surrealism. Sherbondy’s admission, “No coffin / exists for the headless woman,” should immediately conjure Dali’s Playing in the Dark. Sherbondy explains further about the headless woman: “Her giant head floats / between two places / facing its body / with closed eyes.” What are we to make of such a description? If nothing else, we can orient ourselves to this vision, this new reality, which may seem so at odds with what we deem as normal. But we are not left bereft of meaning.

Sherbondy interprets for us the significance of her image of the head and trunk dislocated from each other: “We turn away / from our own end.” No matter that we may find this brilliant insight to be unpalatable, it snares us with its truth.

In “Frozen Clock,” a poem based on Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory,” Sherbondy delves into her past, remembering her mother and father, articulating that “As a child it seemed / I could freeze the hours.” Who

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provides the means for an airplane to launch. The poem begins, “Enter the museum of wishes; clutch / a star and let it burn your hand,” and at once, we are drawn into this poem, responding on a visceral level to its language, wincing at the prospect that a hand could be burned by a star. And yet, through the vehicle of imagination, Sherbondy effortlessly guides us like a docent into a world beyond the mundane.

The invitation to enter this world offers us the rare opportunity to glean truths about the diminished status of dreams.

The “star,” though it entices us, must be dropped, too bright in its promise to be real. Curious is the image in the second stanza of the janitor who “gathers crumbs / of disappointment.”

To whom do these disappointments belong? The poet doesn’t tell us. The janitor appears to exist as a neutral agent, simply doing his job. But the job concerns us as we reflect on our own disappointments.

Further into the poem the poet asks, “What will you learn here?” This rhetorical question, like the many others in Sherbondy’s collection, tests us. Will we walk away from the poem resolved to remember how and when our dreams were torched?

The poet’s additional commands, “Release / all that you once desired; spit honey / from your tongue,” cause us to contemplate whether our dreams really matter. The directive to “spit honey from your tongue”

MAUREEN SHERBONDY teaches at Alamance Community College and is the editor of its Explorer Magazine. Her works have been published in many journals, including Prelude, Calyx, European Judaism, and The Oakland Review. Her books include Eulogy for an Imperfect Man (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2013), Beyond Fairytales (Main Street Rag, 2014), The Art of Departure (Kelsay Books/Aldrich Press, 2015), six chapbooks, and the short story collection The Slow Vanishing (Main Street Rag, 2009).

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among us has not desired to freeze time? The yearning is always there to dismantle time, as when Sherbondy muses, “My mother would remain forty, / moving as fast as a NASCAR race car” and “My father would continue mowing / the lawn through summer’s wilting grass, / his shirt drenched in Saturday sweat.” In the act of remembering, we long for something else, a chance to part ways with the most troubling facts of our past, wishing to summon only the most enriching and life-affirming aspects of our life experiences. It is not lost on us that Sherbondy recalls endearing memories of her parents.

By evoking positive memories, we allow ourselves to live on, embracing our futures. It is, in fact, Sherbondy’s “persistence of memory” that wins out in the end as when she asserts, “the only thing frozen in time – / my father’s heart and body stopped / and still beneath this heated ground.” This last image of the poem lingers with us. We understand that the place where a dear friend or cherished family member lies buried is hallowed ground. We realize that this imagery of a final resting place unlocks for most of us memories of a departed loved one.

One of the most thoughtprovoking poems in Sherbondy’s collection, “Museum of Lost Wishes,” reminds us of the stuff that lost dreams are made of.

Sherbondy’s employment of the imperative creates momentum for the poem just as a runway

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lends a sense of urgency to the message that anything good or hopeful must ultimately be surrendered. The last two lines of the poem, “That janitor will return to sweep away / any clues or crumbs you left behind,” come across as a stark warning. If our unfulfilled wishes are doomed to fade from our conscious awareness, how will we ever muster the courage to pursue our unknown future dreams?

The final poem, “The Tactile Memory of Clay,” aptly closes the volume by revealing how a childhood memory morphs into an arguably life-changing moment.

Sherbondy confides, “As a child I dug clay / from a stream with my bare / hands, then shaped the lump / into figures – .” The act of molding clay as Sherbondy describes it seems simple enough, yet we discern that this act is not merely physical but creative, an act of discovery, the author as child becoming a creator. In her second stanza, Sherbondy details the more banal, administrative aspects of ABOVE Maureen Sherbondy at the Nazim

Hikmet Poetry Festival as the winner of the NC Poetry Society’s Poet Laureate Award, 24 Mar. 2019

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teaching and hints at the sense of futility that may arise: “Most days, lessons vanish, fly / out open windows, away / from twenty pairs of ears.” However, the tenor of the poem drastically changes in the last stanza. Here, Sherbondy conveys how a student reaches out to her, saying, “My friend said you helped him become / a better writer.” The poet confesses that her palms “open up like flowers, / as if his words dug up that old found / clay, set the familiar shape inside / my patient, waiting hands.”

From a craft point of view, we can appreciate how Sherbondy’s poem flows in a circular direction – the ending circling back to the beginning. More importantly, we perceive that the poet has undergone a metamorphosis.

She once again becomes a creator, only this time she creates knowledge that flourishes in the minds of her students.

Reading Sherbondy’s collection helps us reconsider how we regard reality. Her mind-bending images capture our imaginations in the most delightful of ways.

While Sherbondy strikes a tone of resignation as regards the inevitability of loss, Pat RiviereSeel seems more defiant in When There Were Horses, thumbing her nose at the notion that lost dreams can’t be redeemed. Indeed, resilience is key in her collection. The poet makes a stunning statement in “Wander Until You Find the Trail Back,” a poem from the collection’s second section (“What to

Tell, What to Leave Out”): “Getting lost may be the last / best thing that ever happens.” When we read Riviere-Seel’s poems, we feel as if we are on a journey. She doesn’t so much lead us as show us her path, pointing to the gems she finds along the way.

The collection’s first poem, “Into the Night,” is full of images that we can easily envision in paintings. This poem possesses a distinctively dreamlike quality. It begins, “The chestnut mare rests her chin / on my left shoulder, nuzzles my neck // with her velvet nose as I stroke her forehead. / We walk a dirt track side by side.” RiviereSeel’s portrayal of this moment instantly transports us to this pastoral place. Her sensory, tactile language, as when the mare “nuzzles . . . with her velvet nose,” lets us know this setting is a place of serenity. RiviereSeel regales us with exquisite details about her interaction with the mare: “She lifts my left ankle // with her hoof, breathes out / stars that swirl around us while we spin // through an unexplored galaxy” (an image that might evoke Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night”).

Anything is possible in this landscape of the imagination.

When the poet says in her next line, “I try to read each star’s wish,” we intuit that she reaches for the unattainable, grasping for infinity. In a very real sense, the dream is grounded in the reality of the poet remembering being twelve years old, riding a horse. She further divulges,

PAT RIVIERE-SEEL’s books include The Serial Killer’s Daughter (Main Street Rag, 2009), which won the 2009 NC Literary and Historical Society’s Roanoke-Chowan Award, and Nothing Below but Air (Main Street Rag, 2014), which was a semifinalist for the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award. She received the Charlie Award from the Carolina Mountains Literacy Festival in 2017, and she was the poet-in-residence at the NC Zoo in 2012. She taught poetry classes for fifteen years at UNC Asheville’s Great Smokies Writing Program.

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“I wake to a peace I have not known, // the mare and I still bound, / traveling down an unremembered road.” Here the poet accomplishes what we may believe to be impossible: she weds the dreamlike scene to reality, creating a new reality, teeming with promise.

Like “Into the Night,” the poem “When There Were Horses” exhibits a painterly quality. We might imagine the first three stanzas as a triptych, calling forth our knowledge of Rembrandt’s genre scenes. The first panel would consist of the sketch that unfolds in the first stanza: “I miss the hammocks, / the teenagers swinging between trees, / high pitched laughter, urgent talk.” The second panel, based on the second stanza, would showcase how “Riders still gallop horses across the field, / into the woods.” The third panel would be, from the third stanza, “a black Mercedes parked beside the gate” around dusk along with a “field” where

ABOVE Pat Riviere-Seel giving a reading

for her new website, 2021

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“a man / and a woman lay on a blanket.” Viewing the first half of the poem as a triptych helps us to think of the poem as one with moving parts, with various players inhabiting the same space at different times.

In the second half of the poem, the poet becomes more philosophical, suggesting who the man and the woman are: “Maybe they are lovers who / will wait until the sun sets, / then shed their clothes, offer / their bodies to God, desire unbridled.” We, like the poet, are curious about this couple – who they might be and what they might mean to each other. Her supposition moves us beyond the initial idyllic image of the couple to one that is far more edgy. In her penultimate stanza, the poet reminisces: When there were horses stabled here there was a cat that asked for love the way cats do running figure eights around your legs, arching her back.

Even the cat assumes a space of importance in this place.

Our perception of reality changes in the final stanza when the poet shifts her focus from the cat to herself, announcing, “I loved like that once.” We understand, through the illustration of the cat, the simplicity of such a love. According to the poet, “The man / said he had always loved me.” And yet Riviere-Seel suggests that securing love is an uncertain prospect at best: . . . Maybe he had. Maybe he never loved me.

It no longer matters what is true.

I head back to the house, searching for the car now lost in darkness.

Rather than bask in disappointment or her sense of loss, the poet defies the law or logic of

disappointment, suggesting that she will overcome the loss with the determination to move on with her life into the unknown.

In the succinct and powerful, “Everything Is Saying Goodbye,” Riviere-Seel turns the title’s statement on its head, implying that “goodbyes” do not necessarily indicate the end of relationships. The poet vividly portrays one couple in particular: “the woman / sporting the long black ponytail / hugging the man who steps / out of his white Corvette, arms wide.” If body language is a tell-tale sign, then we might conclude from the description of the man that the relationship is in progress as his arms sprawl out “wide,” signaling that the man is at least receptive to the woman he’s saying goodbye to and certainly not hostile toward her. Most likely, this couple is on affectionate terms. We may conclude, then, that in this instance the couple’s departure from one another is temporary, a brief pause in the relationship.

Riviere-Seel provides one final example of how “everything is saying goodbye” in the guise of two horses later in the poem: “The white stallion and the chestnut mare / graze opposite ends of the paddock.” She further details the nature of the horses’ interactions: “They do not know regret – a summer / galloping together, nuzzling neck / against neck.” Animals are both creatures of habit and comfort, never questioning their circumstances, unable to process their lives as humans do. Yet Riviere-Seel anthropomorphizes the horses when she declares, “If they should turn to face each other / they would love each other still.” Contemplating this final image of the poem,

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we must acknowledge that the horses are not ordinary but extraordinary beings who have at their disposal the ability to alter their fate. In the end, we identify with them because they remind us of ourselves.

Coinciding with Sherbondy’s connection between art and poetry, “Reflections,” the last poem of Riviere-Seel’s collection, was inspired by a work of art. Visually, this poem possesses perfect symmetry, the first and second stanzas containing seven lines each. The sense of symmetry is no accident since the poem is a palindrome in form: each line of the first stanza mirrors each line of the second, which reverses the line order of the first stanza. Furthermore, the poem itself is a work of art, similar in appearance to a reflecting pool. Beyond the artful form is the poem’s meaning.

In all its immensity, this poem seems to stand as a metaphor for the entire collection. We see this in phrasing such as “how enormous our dreams,” “within the infinite,” and “magic becomes reality.” Have we not explored with the poet how what we perceive as reality may be an illusion, even a distortion? Whether or not the poet intended to have the final poem serve as a thematic bridge for the entire collection, this poem performs a dual role: it allows us to look back at all the other poems, finding a resounding message amplified in the final poem, and it closes the volume succinctly and resolutely.

We learn, we discover when we visit the texts of Sherbondy and Riviere-Seel. As a result, we grow in our humanity, equipped to tread over the unplowed landscapes of our lives. n

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FINALIST, ALEX ALBRIGHT CREATIVE NONFICTION PRIZE

Love – and Mushrooms and Zooms – In the Ruins

BY CAROLINE RASH Rumor has it, the first living thing to emerge from Hiroshima’s blasted landscape was a matsutake mushroom.

It was mid-March, remember? The New Year’s Eve champagne bubbles had long burst.

I had just transitioned my ninth-grade English class to online learning. No more 5:30 a.m. alarms, but rather long hours staring at a computer screen, interspersed with terrifying transmissions from the White House Rose Garden.

At first, we all had hope. On my laptop, I still have a folder labelled “Two Week Online Lesson Plans for Coronavirus.”

In this strange space, I began reading about matsutake mushrooms. An offhand recommendation from a friend. I ordered The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, a nearly three-hundred-

CAROLINE RASH’s poetry has been published in Connotation Press and an essay in Decider. She was a finalist in Peauxdunque Review's Words & Music Writing competition. She currently teaches high school English and is an Associate Editor for the South Carolina Review.

She grew up between North and South Carolina and earned a BA in English Language and Literature from Clemson University and an MFA in Poetry from Rutgers University.

The quilts featured throughout this essay were created by the author’s grandmother, Sue Holder Rash, of Boiling Springs, NC.

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page volume that offers “what a rare mushroom can teach us about sustaining life on a fragile planet.”1 I was curled up in my bed with another headache (I hadn’t yet realized I could adjust the blue-light settings on my screens). Australia was still burning. My grandmother, a normally healthy Scottish dancer, had just broken her femur in a freak accident.

Okay, I thought. Tell me about mushrooms – those rebellious, eukaryotic forest dwellers. Tell me how to live.

The Mushroom at the End of the World opens in Oregon, 2004, in an ugly industrial forest. Ethnologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing beckons us to follow her into a semi-legal encampment of Hmong, Japanese, Lao, and Mien immigrants who pick matsutake mushrooms. Why are we here? Where are the beautiful ponderosa stands that drew settlers and logging companies so many decades before? Of course the timber business felled most of them by the 1980s, but couldn’t they rebound after the conservation movements, dead owls hung from logging trucks?

In fact, due to the Forest Service’s policy of fire exclusion – a chimeric result of business and environmental interests that ended up serving neither – the great ponderosas could no longer reproduce. They are a casualty, collateral damage, of man’s myopic attempts to heal what he gutted.

And yet – In place of the once-king ponderosa broadleafs, spindly lodgepole pines shot up, flourished, and “in this ruined industrial landscape, new value emerged: matsutake. [Lodgepoles grow quickly if not overshadowed by larger trees.] Matsutake fruit especially well under mature lodgepole, and mature lodgepole exists in prodigious numbers in the eastern Cascades because of fire exclusion” (30).

Unexpected collateral, unexpected openings. In other words, the beloved mushrooms are here not in spite of – but because of – human destruction.

By April, it is clear to everyone that “back to normal” is not a place we can go, that the virus will not suddenly vanish. It tears through bustling urban centers first.

1

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton UP, 2015); subsequently cited parenthetically.

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I BEGIN TO THINK OF MYSELF AS A MUSHROOM. ALL MY MYRIAD CONNECTIONS AND THREADS HAVE COME INTO RELIEF WITH THE CONCEPT OF CONTACT TRACING.

Tsing notes that the logic of expansion, the “flourishing” into thicker and denser thickets can be, in reality, a step toward destruction; those happy pines that finally have their day in postmillenium Oregon will seed, and sprout, seed and sprout until they’re thick enough that just one ember can send the whole forest up in flames.

Indeed, the streets of New York City and Seattle resemble burned-through, empty forests.

What we see of the mushroom above ground is only the small fruiting of a vast underground organism. Beneath the soil, threadlike filaments called hyphae fan out into wide nets that connect and nourish parts of the forest we see, such as trees.

I begin to think of myself as a mushroom. All my myriad connections and threads have come into relief with the concept of contact tracing.

Who of us truly understood before how connected we all are? My god, we think now, if I go to visit my friend, I could be contaminated by her boyfriend, who plays in a band with three other people, all of whom have roommates, who . . .

Of course, in the Before Times, the game Six Degrees of Separation hinted at this truth.

We had some faith in it while putting out feelers for jobs, waiting for that one person to say, “Hey, my husband has a college roommate whose wife works there. I can put you in touch.”

Now touch is frightening. Our physical threads and pathways must sever.

Still, through the filament, the wires and electrical signals connecting us, comes news: a student’s mother dies; my friend, a performing artist, loses all his gigs for the next six months; my neighbor buries her husband, alone.

What is time anymore?

It lurches and bucks, then sits across from us and wins an endless staring contest. Time has

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always been deep and uncontrollable, a pit across which we build rickety rope bridges from day to day, week to week, year to year. The ropes fray and break.

Tsing notes that [p]rogress is a forward march, drawing other kinds of time into its rhythms. Without that driving beat, we might notice other temporal patterns. Each living thing remakes the world through seasonal pulses of growth, lifetime reproductive patterns, and geographies of expansion. . . . Instead, agnostic about where we are going, we might look for what has been ignored because it never fit the time line of progress. (21)

Time becomes one more walk with my dog, one more glass of water, one more bottle of wine, two more zucchinis in the garden, three more red tomatoes. Trash and recycling on Thursday. The slow filling of a green watering can: I leave it that first day in the sink – because I am human, and I just can’t stand to be still for even one minute – and it overflows onto the counter and the floor.

My friend S— tells me she is reading a book of Buddhist lectures by Pema Chödrön called When Things Fall Apart.

One of the very first pages: “Things become very clear when there is nowhere to escape.”2 I feel like Narcissus staring into the Zoom screen during empty office hours, waiting for the occasional, unpredictable pop-up of a student’s name.

“Do you need help with the classwork?” I ask.

“No,” they always say, “I just wanted to talk to someone.”

I plan an ill-advised visit across five states to see my grandmother. When she was almost healed from the broken leg, her car was sideswiped while she sat buckled tightly in the passenger seat.

Tsing pushes back against the “selfish gene” paradigm (popularized by Richard Dawkins) that focuses on autonomous units – be they genes, human workers, or even a single species. In fact, she explains, some species only develop necessary traits through relationships/encounters with other species.

In this vein, the matsutake mushroom is notoriously impossible to cultivate in captivity, 2

Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (Shambhala, 1997) 2; subsequently cited parenthetically.

“plantation-style” (as standardized units) by the many interested parties who might turn a profit with this Japanese delicacy. The mushrooms are finicky, almost shy, peeping out of the wasteland.

Inseparable from their symbiotic relationship with certain trees, slowly nourishing and rebuilding with all living things around them.

I am driving. Time becomes border signs: Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, North Carolina again, and on back up.

We measure the way by four hours on, four hours off, the time it takes to drink a twenty-ounce gas station coffee, miles per tank of gas, the length of a podcast.

My grandmother is too weak to teach me her art of quilting like last time, but I tuck a blanket around her and go back to her childhood, a time and place of two-room schoolhouses in lower Appalachia, before power lines sprouted one-byone up the mountain and connected her to the rest of the world. The time it took her to run from her parents’ home to the schoolhouse even before she was old enough to matriculate, the missing minutes of her naps on older students’ coats, the number of books she could read between each rumble of the mobile library bus.

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I start to adapt. Whereas before I would leave the house before dawn, work indoors until 3:35 p.m., return home, maybe drive to the gym, cook dinner, and prepare for the next day – over and over and over – I now sleep until the sun floods my bedroom, have coffee sitting down, stand on the porch in my pajamas to feel the day’s temperature. Yes, like everyone else I am afraid to go grocery shopping, afraid for my students with unstable homes, afraid for my grandmother, afraid for my friends who suddenly have lost all income.

Chödrön describes entering fear as “a complete undoing of old ways of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and thinking” (2-3). Slowly my brain stops flitting from item to item on my to-do list. One day, I get curious about the plant my dog munches on; it’s called Jerusalem artichoke.

Another day I look up the cicada killer wasps on my neighbor’s lawn. (If you’re feeling down, don’t investigate further; the things they do to cicadas are similar to what other wasps do to caterpillars, such horror that Charles Darwin said it made him question the possibility of a “beneficent and omnipotent God.”3) Without the hundred distractions that normally eat into my class time, I find an entirely new reading of a Rita Dove poem we’re studying. Oh my god. I breathe into the computer microphone.

This narrator might be performing a cover-up of childhood abuse. Look at these images, how ambiguous – they could actually be good or bad.

EVERY MUSHROOM PUSHES THROUGH THE EARTH AT A DIFFERENT TIME, IN A DIFFERENT SOIL, WITH A DIFFERENT TREE. SOME MIGHT NOT FRUIT ABOVE GROUND FOR FORTY OR FIFTY YEARS.

3

Francis Darwin, ed., The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (Appleton, 1898) 105.

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I am sitting at my dining room table recording the lesson for my students. My boyfriend, J—, is doing the same in our bedroom. We have to keep a door closed between our work. A few years ago, the first time I read this poem, it seemed like a simple childhood memory. But the windows are dark now, and I’m alone, reading slowly. I sit with the poem; it opens to me, suddenly, without preamble. My students will hear their teacher overcome by these words when they log on in the morning.

You’re a good teacher, J— says when I’m done.

He overheard the part about the poem. But this isn’t the teacher I was in February. And my students aren’t the same students either. Some drop off the grid the day we dismiss in-person classes.

I and a team of social workers and counselors will spend the next few months trying to find them.

Others – released from the eye-rubbing darkdawn bus rides, rigid bell schedules, and ceaseless assessments – finally hit their stride.

Every mushroom pushes through the earth at a different time, in a different soil, with a different tree. Some might not fruit above ground for forty or fifty years.

I am looking at my bookshelves one night in June and notice The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. It’s been on my to-read list for years. I know it is about grief – her husband’s death – and would soon be followed by yet another memoir of loss – Blue Nights – about her daughter’s death. I take it with me to bed.

As The Year of Magical Thinking begins, Didion sits down to dinner one evening with her husband, John. She reaches toward the salad bowl; he falls out of his chair, incapacitated by a massive cardiac arrest. The paramedics arrive, work on him for forty-five minutes in their dining room.

She assumes he’s still alive, goes about the house gathering paperwork and checking off items he’ll want at the hospital.

He was dead the whole time. The rest of the book is her attempt to believe it.

Early in When Things Fall Apart, Chödrön tells a story of a man who sits in a tent meditating;

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he has been unsuccessful in putting aside his ego thus far, totally distracted. This time, however, he is suddenly faced with a king cobra that rises out of a dark corner. The man stays up all night waiting in terror; finally at dawn he collapses in delirium, utter exhaustion, and goes to hug the snake.

The fear broke him. It opened him. For in that moment, “[h]e felt the longing of all the animals and people in the world; he knew their alienation and their struggle . . . that much intimacy with fear caused his dramas to collapse, and the world around him finally got through” (4).

I have seen loss break – and break open. You never know which it’ll be.

The pain from her wreck has made my grandmother quiet. They refuse to give her more pain medication because of, well, the opioid epidemic.

The Sackler family and their pharmaceutical associates wrote a script for America – mostly rural working-class people – that said you don’t have to feel anything anymore.

My grandmother asks me to help her get to bed. We go into her dim bedroom in the back of the house; I get her cotton pajamas laid out and help her undress. She’s never needed help before; it was always her helping me.

I remember Chödrön: “Right now – in the very instant of groundlessness – is the seed of taking care of those who need our care and of discovering our goodness” (9).

I HAVE SEEN LOSS BREAK – AND BREAK OPEN. YOU NEVER KNOW WHICH IT’LL BE.

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I rub some kind of icy-hot type of pain reliever across my grandmother’s skin, and time becomes each dip of my fingers into the jar, the minutes of spreading cool lotion on her back, hips, knees and ankles.

She turns on the little TV at the foot of the bed, and I tuck her in like she tucked me in decades before. I hope she’ll be able to sleep tonight. Last night, she measured time by creaking trips to the restroom, diminishing minutes of unconsciousness – any little bit she could steal.

And yet –

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart.

Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy (Chödrön 8).

Why do we speak of the times before February as having some kind of certainty? In January 2001, my healthy fifteen-year-old friend came to school one day wearing a T-shirt with a rhinestone horse on it. We talked at our lockers about her latest crush. That afternoon she collapsed on the way to her mother’s birthday dinner. A brain aneurysm.

A few days later she was dead. Then – a student is shot and killed. My grandmother’s femur snaps. A husband collapses at the dinner table.

Of course, it goes the other way too: I get the call offering me a scholarship to one graduate school program – and accept – minutes before the other one calls. My uncle goes to the hospital for something minor and they catch a heart problem that should have killed him that week.

Further back, decades and decades, my grandmother holds up a hand to shade her eyes and sees her soon-to-be husband exit a car to work alongside her in the fields.

Didion, an agnostic or reluctant Episcopalian, says she has dealt with such indeterminacy by finding meaning in geology, the ever-changingness of the natural world. This, she explains, is why she’s drawn to, and can recite with full conviction, the Episcopal litany: “As it was in the beginning, is

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now and ever shall be, world without end.”4 Amen. She also takes comfort in domestic rituals – the family dinner, the coffee with two sugars, the dusting and decorating, the rhythm of each holiday season.

The matsutake pickers Tsing interviews find meaning in mushroom picking beyond profit; it connects them to childhood memories, to others in their community, to the earth. Across the sea in Japan, another ritual of tending the earth becomes popular. Satoyama forest restoration is an initiative based on the Japanese concept of satoyama: a type of landscape that includes both human production and natural habitats, notably in which human influence is an essential aspect.

Tsing notes that a satoyama landscape, in fact, requires humans to “make a mess,” allow for erosion and other seemingly negative qualities, in order to advantage pines. At first, it may look bad, interrupted, but the trees will come and then – the matsutake. We can’t cultivate it, we can’t make a factory farm of it, but if we make a mess, it will come.

I find myself waiting with the watering can, watching it fill. I sit on the porch and talk to my neighbors – a family – over the fence. I tell the mother at the last minute we are leaving for my grandmother’s house; we’ll be gone for over a week, and I worry about my garden. “I’ll take care of it, don’t worry,” she says.

In fact, I forget the garden, I don’t worry about it one bit. Driving in the darkness through Virginia’s deciduous forest makes me feel even more groundless, if it were possible; I’m worried about so many things, about the “plans” for school reopening, everything. Every single decision comes with an asterisk: * Subject to change.

I try to just drive, just sit with my thoughts, but there seem to be more wrecks this time than ever before. An awful tangle of metal, a full sixteen-wheeler tipped over in the grassy ditch. I don’t want to die. I’ve started crying; I need to pull over like when the rain’s too much for my windshield wipers. I don’t want my grandmother, or my students, or their grandmothers, or my friends, or anyone else to ever die. I know I’m throwing a fit.

J— drives until we see a sign for a Red Roof Inn; he takes the exit.

4

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (Knopf, 2005) 190; subsequently cited parenthetically.

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SHE FILLS HER DAYS WITH A VERY SPECIFIC KIND OF MEDITATION, STITCHING QUILT AFTER QUILT, BEAUTIFUL WORKS OF ART.

There is a plan for reopening my school. Every school, at this point, has a plan.

Everyone is running about, fretting and demanding and providing expert opinions. What if we paused, just for a minute as our watering cans fill? What if we grieved?

“Impermanence becomes vivid in the present moment,” Chödrön writes. “[S]o do compassion and wonder and courage” (2). It’s still possible for us to attend to those around us. It’s still possible for us, as a society, to build and dream and love through this.

As Didion describes her life before John’s death, she has an epiphany: she always lived by a sort of dedicated uncertainty, improvisation. Those moments she felt most alive on a sudden flight to meet John, abandoning their marital “planning” meetings to go enjoy lunch with friends, the moment she and John swam into a Pacific cave that opened only when the tide was “just right” (209, 227). Then they had to make a perfectly timed exit on the current to escape the flooding cave; she had faith even in that: “Somehow it had all worked” (211).

My grandmother has been a widow many decades longer than she was ever married. That wasn’t the plan. She fills her days with a very specific kind of meditation, stitching quilt after quilt, beautiful works of art. She gave me a wall hanging years ago with an image of a woman pulling water from a well.

Is there a plan? If there’s a plan, I hold it lightly.

I saw a set of three mushrooms on my walk yesterday; they delighted me. Today they are gone, though the broad net of organism still must live beneath the soil, still lunches with the nearby trees.

I call my grandmother. The pain is abating some; she went to this doctor and that, and someone along the way did something right. I promise I’ll be back as soon as this mess is all over.

School begins. I’m anxious as always because there’s no way to get it all right. You clear-cut the

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broadleafs, the pines shoot up, you privilege the ponderosas, the mushrooms never arrive. There is no calculation of all possible outcomes. I’ll do my best with my human understanding.

I take comfort that learning is something akin to delight: indeterminate, both slow gathering and sudden bloom. The rocking of two chairs on a porch, the fruit of a tossed-out seed, the pause on a long walk home: “I wonder why?”

I rub my grandmother’s bruised and broken legs and remember how they carried her flying across the field toward a two-room schoolhouse. I ask her to tell me the story again.

What if we took this moment to truly attend to our world?

My neighbor – still a stranger, really – promised she would care for my garden. The night we return, in our road-tired rush to unpack and go to sleep, I forget to check it. That night I dream of the hot afternoon I took a shovel to the earth and turned it inside out, rows upon rows of it, a total mess.

The next morning I wake up and go out. One of my squash plants is dead – some kind of bug I’ll have to read about and fight next summer – but the rest are in full bloom. n

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TIMOTHY B. TYSON RECEIVES 2021 NORTH CAROLINA AWARD FOR LITERATURE

by Michele Walker COURTESY OF THE DEPT. OF NATURAL AND CULTURAL RESOURCES

‘Race Riot’ and the Rise of White Supremacy," which won the Excellence Award from the National Association of Black Journalists.

Tyson's second book, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams & the Roots of Black Power (1999), now slated to become a Hollywood movie, won major awards from the Organization of American Historians.

Tyson’s work reflects his growing up in North Carolina. In his hometown of Oxford in 1970, three white TIMOTHY B. TYSON plumbs the history of race in men killed Henry Marrow, a young Black veteran, award-winning books, in the classroom, and in the in public but an all-white jury acquitted them. The public square. His unflinching look at the past helps incident inspired Tyson’s third book, Blood Done us move towards a better future. Tyson writes: “Loud Sign My Name (2004). Selected for the UNC Sumvoices have always demandmer Reading Program and the ed that we teach sanitized “ My work is a love letter to Southern Book Award, it was a histories, as if amnesia was finalist for the National Book North Carolina. Forces of love a cure rather than a disease.

Critics Circle Award. Tar Heel and respect for humanity and History proves that neither equality and justice can win here. genius Mike Wiley adapted it ignorance nor innocence of for the stage and Jeb Stuart, It is possible. And that makes it the past will save us from its also a Tar Heel, directed a Holan exciting place where what we consequences. If there is to lywood adaptation. do matters.”—Timothy B. Tyson be reconciliation, first there In 2017, his fourth book, The must be truth.”

Blood of Emmett Till, won the For his powerful works that explore the history of Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and was among ten race in America, Timothy B. Tyson receives the 2021 finalists for the National Book Award.

North Carolina Award for Literature.

“The history that matters is the history that ordiTim was born in Raleigh to Martha Tyson and Revnary citizens carry around in their heads,” Tyson erend Vernon Tyson. In 1971, the Tysons moved to says. His lasting works deepen our understanding, Wilmington. School integration ignited widespread spark public discussion, and help effect change. violence, including riots at Tim’s school. Beneath Tyson graduated from Emory University, earned this festered the city’s 1898 massacre, the overthrow his 1994 PhD at Duke and became Professor of of a biracial state government, and the disfranchiseAfro-American Studies at the University of Wisconment of Black voters by what their architects called sin. In 2005, he came home to teach at the Center the “White Supremacy Campaigns.” News & Observfor Documentary Studies at Duke, Durham Technier editor Josephus Daniels, termed these “permacal & Community College, and UNC Chapel Hill. He nent good government by the Party of the White serves on the executive board of the North CaroMan.” Tyson’s first book, Democracy Betrayed: The lina NAACP, Repairers of the Breach, and advisory Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy, pubboards for VISIONS and the once and future UNC lished with David S. Cecelski, marked the centenCenter for Civil Rights. He lives in Durham with his nial. In 2006, the News & Observer published Tim’s wife, Perri Morgan. They have two adult children, sixteen-page insert, "Ghosts of 1898: Wilmington’s Hope and Sam, and two granddaughters. n

Watch the award ceremony here.

MICHELE WALKER is a Public Information Officer at the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

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BEING CHRISTIAN, BEING JEWISH a review by Judy Goldman Mirinda Kossoff. The Rope of Life: A Memoir. Lystra Books & Literary Services, 2020.

MIRINDA KOSSOFF has written for national magazines and newspapers, including a weekly column for The Spectator. She has also taught essay writing at Duke University Continuing Studies.

JUDY GOLDMAN is the author of seven books, the most recent, Together: A Memoir of a Marriage and Medical Mishap (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2019). Her new memoir, Child, will be published Mother’s Day in 2022.

We do not write memoirs because we believe we have something important to say. We write because we have questions. North Carolina author Mirinda Kossoff fulfills this charge with passion, intelligence, and a keen desire for fairness. Throughout the pages of her debut memoir, The Rope of Life, she seeks answers.

Her most crucial questions involve her father: “Was he conflicted about the choice he made to renounce his birth religion and Jewish identity?”

(202) “Did he regret his marriage and conversion?” (217) “Had he felt an outsider with his family as I did with mine? Is that why he sought the opposite of what he’d grown up with?” (222) Pondering these questions, she arrives at this conclusion: “I would never be able to wring out of him the answers I sought” (212–13).

Kossoff’s father was born into a New York Jewish family. As a young bomber pilot in World War II, his B-17 plane is “riddled with German bullets” (149).

Terrified, he prays to God that if he survives, he will become a Christian. This is the splitsecond decision that sets the course for his life, his wife’s life, and – most important to the reader of this memoir – their daughter’s life.

When this Christian convert meets a fundamentalist Southern Baptist woman, she does not realize that he was once Jewish.

The couple marry and eventually settle in Danville, VA, where they become prominent members of the Christian community.

Although he is a professional (a dentist), he seems to be more comfortable with “the men at

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the country store” than with the country club set (59). He plays the role of a redneck, a good ol’ boy, going on weekend hunting trips with buddies, chewing and spitting tobacco. The family belongs to the Baptist church.

Their daughter Mirinda accepts Jesus as her savior and, soon after, is baptized. The minister cups her head with his hand as he slides her under the water.

Early in her life, she discovers that Southerners view her as different. They ask about her last name: “‘Kossoff,’ they’d say, as if biting into some exotic fruit. ‘That’s an unusual name.

Where y’all from?’” (63). In Sunday school, she is asked by her teacher to explain the Jewish holidays to the class.

This is the story of a father and a daughter. It begins with a Cessna: reluctantly, she agrees to go up with him in his private plane. (The young girl does not want to disappoint her father by saying no.) Minutes into the flight, she notices him frantically searching the sky, sweating. He admits to her that he doesn’t have a transponder in the plane yet, which means he must navigate by landmarks.

The situation worsens.

Now he’s lost. And the plane is low on gas. Because he cannot locate the landmarks he originally intended to use, he is now trying to find new ones.

Kossoff writes, “A surge of fear heated up my intestines. But I stayed mum” (Prologue).

Staying mum is what every member of this family does.

There is great tension inside the walls of their house, primarily the result of parental neglect of the four children, sometimes to the point of cruelty. But no one

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COURTESY OF MIRINDA KOSSOFF

speaks of any of this. Kossoff’s mother resorts to the silent treatment when she is upset with her husband. Her silences are a key feature of her personality, regardless of which family member she’s dealing with. An uncle and cousin veer close to sexually abusing young Kosoff.

Through it all, everyone in the family stays mum.

Kossoff’s father is more overt in his cruelty. He calls his eldest daughter derisive nicknames: Cruella, after the evil villain in One Hundred and One Dalmations. When he takes her out for a driving lesson and she is unable to use the clutch properly and the car stalls on a hill, he says, “Just floor the damn thing, bitch” (130). He does not apologize.

The pull of belonging/not belonging – within her family and in the outside world – creates a deep insecurity in Kossoff.

Is she good enough . . . to win her father’s love? Her mother’s love? Good enough to win acceptance from her Christian

ABOVE The memoirist with her father

shortly afterMirinda his return from with World War II OPPOSITE Kossoff her father, recently retruned from World War II, circa 1946

friends? She writes, “Not being good enough would become a permanent part of the story I told myself and would follow me through the years and the challenges to come” (72).

After graduating from The College of William & Mary, Kossoff is eager to escape her family home and smalltown life. She becomes a hospital social worker for the Red Cross in Fairfax County, VA, hoping the job will lead to work abroad. Soon she is transferred to Yokosuka, Japan. But loneliness and depression follow her.

She resigns from the Red Cross, returns home, to Danville, then is soon hired as a medical social worker at UNC Memorial Hospital, serving on the spinal cord rehabilitation team, becoming a specialist in sexual function for post-trauma patients.

Kossoff identifies more with her cultured Jewish grandparents than with her rigid fundamentalist Southern Baptist grandparents. In her twenties, she explores Judaism, attending services at a Durham synagogue. But she does not find a home there. “I felt as much an outsider in synagogue as anywhere else. I realized that organized religion of any variety was not a natural for me. . . . I would take my place with the agnostics and atheists” (178).

During this time, she is also searching for love. She meets Will, a college-educated, counter-culture craftsman who lives in a Durham, NC, commune.

Will knows about depression from his family but will not talk about it. Like her, he grew up

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in a family that copes with turmoil and tension by staying mum.

They are married in the Baptist church. Even on her wedding day, Kossoff’s dad uses his demeaning nickname for her. Just before the ceremony, he comments on her bouquet: “Hey, Cruella, look at those flowers” (193). A reception follows the ceremony – no dancing or alcohol allowed.

The first two years of the marriage are happy. But as time passes, Kossoff realizes she has married a man who, like her dad, is emotionally unavailable.

She gives birth to identical twin sons.

Her dad suffers serious back problems. They grow worse. He finds it more and more difficult to handle the pain and, finally, commits suicide.

After she learns of her dad’s death, her husband drops her off at the bus station so that she can attend the funeral. She writes: The bus followed the familiar highway.

Route 86 North. I had driven it many times, as recently as the previous week.

The lowering sun slanted across the grimy bus window. I watched the farms with their harvested fields slide by.

There were yellow stalks where rows of tobacco stood earlier. Other fields were only stubble. It was October 1, 1980, and a foreboding of fall was in the air. The bus passed a vacant two-story farmhouse set back in a field with a large tree sheltering one side. I always looked for it on 86, to see if it was still standing.

Its sightless windows reminded me of abandonment. (211)

Abandonment. Loneliness. Longing. The promise of re-inventing oneself. The promise of hope. The rope of one woman’s life. n

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2021 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE FINALIST

BY SANDRA DREIS

J.J. – 1985 He was a jar of honeybees you’d try to contain; but then, you felt guilty even with holes in the lid and you took off the cover. Let go.

Bye-bye. Free as a bee.

After the tour, we traveled to Vegas to our Producer’s new home.

His wife cried at the sight of cacti on the lawn.

Then she saw the white convertible, and Jerry. He was a flirt. A gorgeous dancer.

Had a make-believe girlfriend in Chicago.

I went along, pretended to believe.

So we shined as friends.

Perennial show-off, almost got us arrested at Niagara Falls, posing in arabesque for photos at customs; adored Maple Leaf flag.

Security guards ordered him back to the van.

SANDRA DREIS, a member of Winston Salem Writers, has just completed her first poetry chapbook, entitled “Black Pearl Diary.”

Her poetry appears in Flying South, Main Street Rag, Poetry in Plain Sight, Dark Moon Lilith and Snapdragon, among others.

She is a retired Arts Connection Teacher for the Winston-Salem Forsyth County Schools.

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COURTESY OF TIBOR DE NAGY GALLERY, NEW YORK

Threshold, 1990 (oil and beeswax on canvas, 9x12) by Jesse Murry

He was cooking a fluffy egg-white omelet when the floor shook. Low-key response from our boss, just nuclear testing underground.

Unshaken, Jerry auditioned. Vegas MGM Grand.

We met no-nonsense choreographer, ex-showgirl lifted by surgery into middle age.

I returned from a stroll to find Jerry employed.

Days later, he’s a swing replacement.

Sinking of the Titanic, a bit cheesy, big budget, costume-heaven. Five gaudy changes for JJ. He killed it. A hula number. A tango.

A yellow raincoat. An elaborate sinking.

Jerry waved farewell from the doomed ship.

I watched as he went down into the waves.

Two years later, contracted AIDS. Left no forwarding address. Just friends in the lifeboat.

Fayetteville, NC, native JESSE MURRY (1948–1993) was raised in White Plains, NY. He earned a BA at Sarah Lawrence College in 1976, and at the age of thirty-eight, earned an MFA at Yale. A painter and poet, his art criticism and essays appeared in national publications. In addition to exhibiting his work, he lectured, participated in panels, and was a visiting professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. His awards included a Mellon Individual Project Grant and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. In a 1987 published collection of essays, he acknowledged he had struggled against racial barriers. Despite such obstacles, the artist achieved critical recognition in his short lifetime; it continues to this day. He died of AIDS-related illness at the age of forty-four.

See more of his work at the Tibor De Nagy Gallery in New York and on the Visual AIDS website.

NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W

A YEAR OF COLLECTED NOTES: STORYTELLING SUBLIME

Winter 2022

PHOTOGRAPH BY SANDY CARAWAN

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a review by Donna A. Gessell Kat Meads. Dear DeeDee. Regal House Publishing, 2020.

DONNA A. GESSELL is a Professor of English at the University of North Georgia in Dahlonega. She holds two BA degrees from Ohio State University and an MA and PhD from Case Western Reserve University. She has published on such writers as Flannery O’Connor, Gabriel García Márquez, Judith Ortiz Cofer, and Graham Greene. She is also the co-editor of Graham Greene Studies. She has reviewed regularly for NCLR, including other books by Kat Meads.

KAT MEADS is the author of twenty books, most recently, Miss Jane: The Lost Years (Livingston Press, 2018; reviewed in NCLR Online 2019). She writes fiction, poetry, essays, and plays and has been recognized by two Independent Publisher (IPPY) medals, an NEA fellowship, a California Artist fellowship, and two Silicon Valley artist grants. A five-time ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year finalist, she has received four Best American Essays Notable citations and writer residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo, Millay Colony, Blue Mountain Colony, and Montalvo Arts Center. A native of Currituck County, NC, she holds a BA from UNC Chapel Hill and an MFA from UNC Greensboro. She currently lives in California and teaches in Oklahoma City University’s Red Earth MFA program. Read interviews with her in NCLR 2009 and NCLR Online 2020.

According to the United States Post Office, the number of pieces of first-class mail for 2020 was only about half of its 2002 high.* We seldom mail and collect personal letters anymore, choosing instead digital means of communication. An unintended consequence of the switch, personal communication has become largely ephemeral, lost to posterity as soon as it is sent, read, and deleted. Significantly, we have lost a means of storytelling, losing the personal and family histories made available through collected letters.

Enter Kat Meads’s Dear DeeDee, ostensibly a collection of a year of correspondence to twenty-something DeeDee from her Aunt K. Beginning tentatively with a mostly crossed out list of greetings – “Dear, / Dearest, / Darling DeeDee, / Darling niece, / Greetings, // DeeDee,” (1) – on Monday, February 5th, and lasting through Christmas Eve, the collection

*“

First-Class Mail Volume Since 1926,” United States Postal Service, web.

allows the reader to become privy to 139 letters from Aunt K to DeeDee. Termed “notes,” the letters consistently run a page or less. As Aunt K pens the notes, the reader reads the letters in their immediacy. We only gradually become aware that the missals have been saved, reread, and then reordered into a collection. The collection appears whole, until we find that she inconsistently omits “August Notes [Missing/presumed lost]” (109) and “October Notes [Destroyed]” (131).

Reading the remembered anecdotes, we center on Aunt K and her family and friends living their lives in North Carolina as well as occasional reports from Aunt K’s current West Coast life.

For instance, the May 21st note starts by reporting, “Whereas your grandmother preferred to annihilate copperheads and cottonmouths with a .22, the fat tires of a heavy-ass car were my weapons of choice, ‘smushed

Writers Who Teach, Teachers Who Write

flat’ my best assurance of snake FUBAR.” It shifts to “the backyard of your parents’ starter house, above their makeshift hot tub, [where] your mother strung an overhanging oak branch with lights; nature strung it with a snake that plopped into the hot tub with them one evening as they soaked.” However, the notes are as much about the identity of the author. While telling stories about snakes, “Aunt K” reveals herself: “Far less confident outside a vehicle, I constantly scanned the territory around my feet for slitherers.

In retrospect, it’s a distraction I sorely regret. I could have been observing so much else!” Her reflections expand the experiences far beyond the individual.

She ends the note by observing, “The most proficient snake killers in our family were the women – no question. I’m ashamed to admit how long it took me to realize snuffing out vipers counted as the least of their braveries” (63).

As with the rest of her writing, Meads does much more than offer insights into what it means to grow up in rural North Carolina during the 1960s and ’70s, expanding her remarks to comment on the larger human experience. For instance, when she writes about “‘next year’ people – as in people who believed their situation would / had to improve the following year” as not only “Coastal Carolina farmers whose fields regularly flooded shared the same

hope, the same reasoning” but universalizes the experience to ask, “Is there a farmer anywhere who doesn’t?” (10).

The collection reveals a realist, as Aunt K discusses “the deal I struck with myself when I started these notes,” which was to avoid “progress where there’d been none" and "describ[ing] my own twenties as a period of pure nirvana.”

Instead, she admits, “I spent most of the decade unhinged and terrified” (11). The stories are not romanticized: she shows events for what they are. On a road trip on the West Coast, she does some “co-snooping” with a friend at the compound in “Henry Miller’s post-Paris neighborhood,” complete with its “time warp”: “Here the Sixties came, settled, and refused to budge. No locks on any doors (bathrooms included), dining communal, clothing optional (but scorned) when taking a dip in the hot springs.” The list continues, but concludes with the wry observation, “As with other free-and-easy enclaves, there were plenty of rules – they just weren’t posted” (24).

Through the act of reading the collection to enter the everexpanding world the one-sided notes create, we increasingly wonder about DeeDee’s reactions. Meads shows the reader her hand only at the end of the collection, in the “Ephemera” section. “DeeDee,” she opines, “I like to think that, had you existed, I’d have written to

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you precisely as I’ve written in these notes” (165). The note, still signed “Love, / Aunt K,” then provides insights into what Meads hopes to achieve with the collection: I like to think that writing about semiancient family history to a figment of my imagination isn’t solely the result of my brother and me being the last of our line, no one after us to tell our stories to, no one to remember those stories, no one who will pass those stories along. I like to think that the motivation fueling these notes to a nonexistent niece can’t be chalked up to mere ego, mere sentiment, mere regret at not being anyone’s aunt or mother or the sheer dread of being closer to silenced as a storyteller myself. But I am not quite that shameless a liar. Not yet. (165)

Despite her disclaimer about why she writes “about semiancient family history,” Meads presents the materials in a way that makes that history fascinating: its honesty, pieced together across the collected letters.

As Aunt K admits to DeeDee, “My new working theory pimps nostalgia as connection, a connection with who I was and therefore am.” Her harsh judgment is tempered by the honesty readers have come to expect from Meads: “Unfortunately that face-saving spin ignores a basic horror. The past is set. No revising or improving it” (30).

Nostalgia may be pimped, but its seeming lack of pretentiousness and sophistication makes it sublime in its simplicity in representing human nature. n

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Winter 2022

2021 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE FINALIST

BY CHARLES DODD WHITE

Wintering Memory is alluvial, you explain.

A flood that masks a former shape, An injured spread against a time-torn riverbank.

The jealous bones beneath are leached, The pulp and membrane recede on the tide While we have the sump of mud and clay To smooth gaps in a place bent by desire.

We coupled in autumn, too late to bear later fruit, Sang one another songs of spring While departed summer kept its brood Imperfectly.

Time tricked us, converted us to its Arrangement, certain that wintering would come With the calendar.

But days piled up And the burden of what we should carry Together was sloughed off, Moldered and matched itself to the muck Like it meant to shovel us under, Bury us with what wasn’t.

CHARLES DODD WHITE is the author of four books of fiction (reviewed in NCLR 2011 and NCLR Online 2013, 2020, and 2021) and an essay collection, A Year without Months (West Virginia University Press, 2022). Read his short story “Controlled Burn” in NCLR 2010. He has received the Appalachian Book of the Year Award and the Chaffin Award for his fiction. This is his first time as a finalist for the James Applewhite Poetry Prize. He lives in Knoxville, TN, where he is an Associate Professor of English at Pellissippi State Community College.

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COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

Topography of Memory, 2019 (hand-cut silk fabric, acrylic paint, threaded and mounted on canvas, 70x98x10) by Kenny Nguyen

If you were quartered by grief, I was halved.

Not that my grief could master yours But so that I could fit into you, Make us more than what we were.

There’s broken beauty this time of year When the freeze brittles the world And we have time to bitter our taste.

From all this, I have learned a new proverb: Memory is a fire, I want to tell you.

An army come to tear down city walls, To found new countries of the heart, So our mild citizenry can learn riot And cultivate fields of wild flame.

KENNY NGUYEN was born and raised in South Vietnam. He earned a BFA in Fashion Design from Vietnam National University of Art and Architecture and was an assistant fashion designer in Ho Chi Minh City before moving to the US in 2010. He lives in Charlotte, NC, where he earned a BFA in painting at UNC Charlotte.

His works have been exhibited at Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, Katzen Arts Center at the American University, and the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, among others. In 2016, Nguyen received an Excellence Award in the Asia Contemporary Young Artist Award exhibition from Sejong Museum of Art. He has been awarded artist residency fellowships, and he is the recipient of a 2019 Charlotte Regional Artist Project Grant and the 2019 Denis Diderot A-i-R Grant.

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THE TRANSFORMATIONAL POTENTIAL OF WRITING

by Monica Carol Miller Karen Salyer McElmurray.

Voice Lessons: Essays. Iris Press, 2021.

MONICA CAROL MILLER is an Assistant Professor of English at Middle Georgia State University. She is the author of Being Ugly: Southern Women Writers and Social Rebellion (Louisiana State University Press, 2017) and co-editor with Katharine A. Burnett of The Tacky South (Louisiana State University Press, 2022).

KAREN SALYER MCELMURRAY is the author of multiple award-winning books of both fiction and nonfiction, including her novel The Motel of the Stars (Sarabande Books, 2008), partially set in North Carolina, and her memoir Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother’s Journey (University of Georgia Press, 2004), which won the AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction.

Her other awards include grants from the North Carolina Arts Council and the NEA.

On Karen Salyer McElmurray’s author website, she identifies herself as, “Teacher, Mentor, Writer.” The essays in McElmurray’s new collection Voice Lessons explore all three of these aspects of McElmurray’s life, especially as one who came to academia and academic writing as an outsider. At the heart of the collection is McElmurray’s familial life, beginning with the book’s dedication “to the ghosts of my ancestors” and its opening preface titled “Before I was Born.” This preface consists of a rough outline of her family history conveyed through a series of anaphoric statements, from “Before I was born” and “Being young” to “Less young” and “No longer young” (9–10).

Beginning with “Before I was born. My father tells me there was a shootout in Floyd County involving the Baisden’s and the Gray’s [sic], my mother’s kin.

I do not know if this is true. A history of Floyd County says one of my ancestors was Belle Starr” (9), McElmurray anchors her life story in a specific Appalachian place and outlaw history. Such themes reverberate through the rest of the section in statements such as, “Being young. There was a well with sulfur water,” to “No longer young. I went back to school.

I thought I wanted to study D.H. Lawrence, but my own poetry interested me more,” to “Less young. I found my son because I wrote a memoir,” and “Less young. I had cancer. I am glad. I love my life. I love being alive. The cat sleeps in the sun next to me right now” (10–11; author's italics).

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The series of statements that opens the collection sets up the themes and content of the subsequent essays, in which McElmurray describes her struggles with her mother’s Alzheimer’s, through graduate school and finding her writing voice, to a career in academia where she searches for her role in a place that treats her like an outsider. In all of the essays, McElmurray consciously writes her way through various modes of pain, difficulty, tragedy, and confusion, explaining that she is using her writing as a way of “creating a map of scars” to follow (22). In “Geography of Scars,” she explains her project: “If I follow the map long enough, surely I will find the path forward that will make me whole” (22). The uncharted ground that McElmurray finds herself on requires that she draw her own map, but the agency that it requires will also provide a way out.

Writing is not only a method for McElmurray but also the focus of many of these essays, like how her study of poetry as an undergraduate at Berea inspired her to write her own poetry, initiating her into a community of poets and scholars.

As she describes preparing for her comprehensive exams and defending her choice of subject matter in her writing, she illustrates the ways in which her feelings of marginalization within the academy were exacerbated not only by her Appalachian identity but also by her choice to write creative nonfiction, a genre that was still suspect at that time.

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COURTESY OF CHARLOTTE READERS PODCAST

Though she does not specifically discuss her work on Walk Until the Dogs Get Mean (2015), a compelling anthology of essays by contemporary Appalachian writers, or her North Carolina–set novels, she does refer obliquely to the growing place of Appalachian Studies–inflected work within the academy. In the essay “Knowing What it Takes,” for example, she talks about figuring out what to say on a panel she was invited to be on with the title of “Kiss My Grits: On the Badass in Appalachian Literature” (115). Thinking about canonical literary works such as Harriette Arnow’s The Dollmaker (1954) and more contemporary works such as Robert Gipe’s Trampoline (2015) series allows McElmurray to consider her own family history of resilience in the face of trauma, a resilience that may be invisible to many, but visible “if you look at the eyes, at the palms of the hands. The kind of strength you

ABOVE Karen Salyer McElmurray

appearing on the Charlotte Readers Podcast, 11 Sept. 2020 (Watch here.)

see in the . . . mended places of the spirit” (117). McElmurray draws strength not only from her family community, but also from the community of writers, scholars, and students in which her academic life has immersed her, noting especially how “[p]oets and their poems . . . taught me to write, think, build, rebuild” (101). In multiple essays, she quotes her friend, poet Alice Friman, who told her, "Poems . . . are ghosts in our bones” (101).

The repetition of Friman’s words is not the only repetition in the collection. In “Driven,” for example, McElmurray describes the cognitive dissonance of undergoing cancer treatment while unable to divorce or divest herself from her more mundane work responsibilities: I am sick with cancer, tied down by morphine and arm tubes and a monitor that keeps time with my heart. I want to sleep, but words, ground to an irritating powder, drain from an IV into my blood. I think of my list of things to do back in my office, two hours south of the hospital. Applications. Proposals. Thesis students.

Defenses. Offenses. Submissions.

Guidelines. CV’s. Cover letters. Reference letters (88).

This list – immediately familiar to anyone in academia – seems outrageously insignificant in contrast to McElmurray’s cancer treatment. The passage appears in a slightly different form in “Elixir” later in the collection: I’m tied down by morphine, arm tubes, and a monitor that keeps time with my

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heart. I want to sleep, but I’m lost in worry instead. Applications. Proposals.

Thesis students. Defenses. Offenses.

Submissions. Guidelines. CV’s. Cover letters. Reference letters. Words, ground to an irritating powder, drain from an IV into my blood. (104)

Encountering such nearly verbatim wording as these two examples can be distracting, though a generous reading might understand the repetition as underscoring the importance of these ideas: that McElmurray takes Friman literally at her word. While the tragic realities of life, such as the painful life interruptions of cancer treatment, cannot escape the mundanities of professional responsibilities, such as writing recommendation letters, McElmurray is also able to give voice to the ancestral ghosts that she feels in her bones by writing poetry. Or, taken together, these essays demonstrate that the life of a poet – giving voice to the ghosts in our bones – requires so much mundanity of scheduled thesis defenses and letter writing. In fact, the content of the writing life, which consists of so many explanatory and defensive elements, such as literal defenses and recommendation letters, goes a long way toward explaining the imposter syndrome McElmurry describes throughout the collection, of a first-generation college student pursuing graduate education in creative writing. The pursuit of the academic writing life requires tenacity and badassery, the source of which McElmurray traces poetically throughout this engaging collection. n

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2021 CRITTENDEN AWARD, WELL-DESERVED HONOR FOR “MR. NORTH CAROLINA,” ROBERT G. ANTHONY, JR.

by John Blythe Some have called him Mr. North Carolina. It has a the exploration and colonial eras. And then there’s nice ring to it. And it’s an apt description. But RobThomas Wolfe. For the past decade or so, Bob has ert “Bob” Anthony is too modest to accept such been on the trail for illustrations of Wolfe’s Look a sobriquet. He prefers just “professional North Homeward, Angel. So far he’s found three sets.

Carolinian.” That’s the phrase he used to describe As for writing about North Carolina history, you his job when The News & Observer named him Tar will find Bob among the contributors to two of the Heel of the Week in 2016. And for almost forty years most often used and critical references related to of working with the UNC Library’s North Carolina North Carolina: the previously mentioned EncycloCollection, that’s essentially pedia of North Carolina what Bob was. He retired as and the Dictionary of Curator last spring. He took North Carolina Biograon that job in 1994. You phy. He’s also written might say he was a steady about Wolfe’s “What presence. And we sure do A Writer Reads,” a litmiss him. tle-known short essay Bob ticks all the boxes for in which the Asheville the Crittenden Award. The native discusses some of major criterion is “adjudged his favorite books. And performance in the advanceBob co-authored a his—Elaine L. ment of North Carolina histotory of the North CaroWestbrooks, UNC University Librarian ry.” Jerry Cashion provided a lina Writers Conference, few more details in his Encyan annual gathering of clopedia of North Carolina entry on the award. He the state’s most well-known authors and poets that wrote that the recipient “engaged in the study, began in 1950.* You’ll also find Bob’s work in the writing, teaching, publication, preservation, restoNorth Carolina Literary Review, the North Carolina ration, or dissemination” of North Carolina history.

Historical Review, and North Carolina Libraries. And The study of North Carolina history? Bob is the look for another Wolfe-related piece in the next perpetual student. You might say he’s been working year or two from Bob. He’s co-authoring a publion his PhD for four decades. But how could he do cation about the friendship and correspondence otherwise? The North Carolina Collection (we call it between Wolfe and Catherine Brett, who taught at the NCC) includes 323 thousand books, more than a school for special needs children in Pennsylvania. six thousand maps, fifty thousand reels of microBob has also served as an editor and publisher. filmed North Carolina newspapers, and more than Upon her death in 2002, Gladys Hall Coates left three million photographs. That’s a lot of resources money to support the publication of books about for a literature review. And so many potential PhD her husband Albert, the founder of UNC Chapel topics! One that recently captured Bob’s fancy: Hill’s Institute of Government, and UNC’s past William Jennings Bryan’s campaign tour of North presidents and chancellors. Bob was the person Carolina in 1896. Bob suggests that few, if any, left to work out the details. He organized an editoPresidential candidates visited North Carolina rial board, hired writers for several volumes, and prior to Bryan. Other topics that Bob returns to freforged an agreement with UNC Press to assist with quently: North Carolina maps, especially ones from publication and distribution of the Coates Univer-

“ Few people are more versed in the history, culture and literature of the state than Bob. He responds to all inquiries with generosity of spirit and gentle humor.”

JOHN BLYTHE is the Assistant Curator of the North Carolina Collection at UNC Chapel Hill. He is the most recent past president of the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association, which gives this award.

OPPOSITE Bob Anthony exiting Wilson Library, UNC Chapel Hill

(Listen to his acceptance remarks for the Crittenden award here.)

* Wolfe’s “What a Writer Reads,” edited by Alice R. Cotten and Robert G. Anthony, Jr., was published in 2002 by the North Carolina Writers Conference and the North Carolina Collection of UNC CH Library, which also published (in 1999) Fifty Splendid Summers: A Short History of the North Carolina Writers Conference, 1950-1999, was compiled by Charles Blackburn, Jr. and Robert G. Anthony, Jr.. Read the latter online here.

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to genealogists, scholars, amateur historians, and homesick North Carolinians around the globe.

You need not spend much time with Bob to learn that his roots are on the eastern side of I-95 in soil that grows peanuts and cotton. He’s from Hobgood, in Halifax County. According to the 2020 census, 268 people live in the town. I daresay Bob could tell you a story about most of the residents or their ancestors. I note Bob’s small-town roots to underscore his strong allegiance to the people and organizations beyond the Piedmont, the region that he’s called home since the 1970s. He remains involved with the Historic Halifax Restoration Association.

And he was also active in the Friends group for Hope Plantation, a Washington County property whose agricultural history dates to the eighteenth century. Bob has also generously given time to and often taken leadership roles in such organizations as the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame, the Thomas Wolfe Society, Historic Stagville, the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association, and the Historical Society of North Carolina.

Just before Bob’s retirement in May, Governor Cooper awarded him the Order of the Long Leaf Pine. In her nominating letter of support, UNC Librarian Elaine L. Westbrooks wrote that Bob “is an unselfish ambassador for all things North Carolina.” Indeed, he is. And for that reason, I am pleased to award Robert G. Anthony, Jr. the Christopher Crittenden Memorial Award for 2021. n PHOTOGRAPH BY JON GARDINER/UNC CHAPEL HILL

sity Leadership Series. Thus far the series includes biographies of Coates and UNC presidents Edward Kidder Graham, Harry Woodburn Chase, and Frank Porter Graham. A work on David Lowry Swain’s tenure as president in the mid-nineteenth century is scheduled for publication later this year.

More Crittenden award qualities. Teaching about North Carolina. Yep. Bob’s done that, too. I won’t count his first foray – student teaching while an undergraduate at Wake Forest. Apparently, that didn’t go well. Ask Bob for the details. Despite the rough start, Bob persisted. And, though he’ll deny it, he’s remarkably skilled at keeping the attention of an audience – be it Carolina undergrads, Colonial Dames, or public school teachers.

Speaking of teachers, Bob made special effort to ensure that North Carolina’s public school teachers are aware of the NCC’s rich resources and have access to them. He was instrumental in developing the library’s partnership with Carolina K-12, a program at UNC Chapel Hill that works to extend the University’s resources to teachers across the state.

Bob supported Carolina K-12’s annual William Friday Teachers Retreat with funding and with Library time and expertise, including his own. The threeday retreat brings teachers from across the state together to learn from noted scholars and develop lesson plans on North Carolina history. And, perhaps eager to revitalize the Hyde County blood that runs through his veins, Bob traveled numerous times to Ocracoke Island to speak at the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching.

Bob is a model of the statement, often attributed to UNC President Edward Kidder Graham in the early twentieth century, that the University’s borders are coterminous with those of the state.

As curator, Bob worked to connect the NCC and the UNC Library to organizations and individuals throughout North Carolina. Bob was one of the driving forces behind the creation of the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center, which is a statewide digitization and digital publishing program housed at Carolina’s library. In the mid-2000s he worked with Mary Boone, State Librarian of North Carolina at the time, to develop a way for the UNC Library to share its digitization expertise and infrastructure with institutions around the state. The result was the Digital Heritage Center. Since its launch in January 2010, the Digital Heritage Center has worked with more than three hundred cultural heritage organizations around the state. There are partners in all the state’s one hundred counties.

The Digital Heritage Center’s collection of college and high school yearbooks, historic newspapers, and other items have made local history accessible

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CALLING THE BLUFF ON SHOW-DON’T-TELL a review by Laura Hope-Gill James Tate Hill. Blind Man’s Bluff: A Memoir. W.W. Norton & Company, 2021.

LAURA HOPE-GILL directs the Thomas Wolfe MFA Program at Lenoir-Rhyne University and is the founding director of Asheville Wordfest. She was diagnosed in 2001 with bilateral sensorineural deafness and is a North Carolina Arts Council Fellow for her writings on deafness, which she is developing into a memoir entitled Deaf Sea Scrolls (Pisgah Press, forthcoming). Read her essay on narrative medicine in NCLR 2021. She was named poet laureate of the Blue Ridge Parkway by the National Forest Service and Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation for her collection, The Soul Tree (Grateful Steps, 2009), which also won the one of the first Okra Pick Awards by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance. She has written two architectural histories of Asheville, Look Up Asheville 1 and 2 (Grateful Steps, 2010). She has produced two short films with Climate Listening Project (Earth People Words, Planet Prescription) and God’s Promise, a play by Palestinian playwright and director, Ahmed Najar, at Cockpit Theatre in London, England, the first in a series.

A resident of Greenboro, NC, JAMES TATE HILL is a a columist for Literary Hub, a fiction editor for Monkeybicycle, and a Professor of writing at North Carolina A&T State University. He is also the author of Academy Gothic (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2015), which won the Nilsen Literary Prize for a First Novel.

As a disability memoir, Blind Man’s Bluff by James Tate Hill deepens the treads left by other vehicles exploring this off-road world of the body gone wrong.

Some that have gone before include Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face (1994), Tom Andrew’s Codeine Diary (1998), Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (1997), Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind (1996), and more recently Haben Girma’s Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law (2019). Hundreds of titles fall between, each one harnessing the power of the personal discovery we find when our limbs, senses, cells, and minds drive us into it. Articulating that discovery, Hill selects scenes of friendship, dating and relationships, and solitude and switches point of view from first to third

person, adding to the theme of relating to others by drawing the reader into his point of view, making it ours. The choices he makes follow the rules of contemporary memoir where abiding by simpler methods of storytelling might better serve the story he tells.

While Hill presents conversations and uncomfortable social situations in novelistic precision, generous with dialogue and character, the best sections of Blind Man’s Bluff arise when he is engaging the mentation of the memoirist revealing the interior life of disability. In these sections he proffers wisdom and eloquence, which are lacking in the telling of what happens. Luminous sentiments only occasionally break through the mundane, then vanish under the more prosaic, showing rather than telling. With Hill’s sensibility and

ABOVE Lady Bug/Covid Two, 2021 (acrylic paint on Arches

watercolor paper, 12x16) by Cynthia Bickley-Green, another work from the series featured on the covers of NCLR’s 2021 issues, which featured Writing Toward Healing

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insight, telling would push the book deeper into its purpose, to illuminate the experience of overcoming one’s own ableism in an ableist world. The necessary problem (and the unwritten law of the memoir) is how much time we must spend showing how many messes we make before we have a realization.

In structuring Blind Man’s Bluff, Hill respects this imperative as he tracks his journey to divorce and through a chronology of concealment, from himself and others, of the reality of his disability, blindness. When Hill tells a Cracker Barrel cashier he can’t use the touchscreen, it’s a revelatory moment that only happens in three sentences.

This moment, a moment iconic for people with hidden disabilities, could start the book for its weight and meaning.

The book is about one man’s search for a partner, and he happens to be blind, when it could be a book about the power of disability to transform us and our lives, even if it means letting go of people who won’t help us.

The imperative of memoirs keeping the narrator ignorant of their own awakening really lets Hill and us down. The story is framed meticulously by the impending doom of the marriage, whereas it ought to be framed by the acceptance of help from others and the question, don’t we all need this? Also, the narrator’s decision to live a big life opens the final chapters to a richer narrative told in a warmer, more introspective voice, almost as though Hill is relaxing into the memoir’s gift of reflection. That’s the book that would place the narrative in an essential question, rather than

in a recounting of a dating-andmarriage-and-divorce history.

In every scene, that question of help lies at the center. Why not bring it to the fore? By focusing on the trappings of “good storytelling” – dialogue and scene – we lose Hill’s voice, which when he writes honestly about blindness and love and life draws the reader into his interior world.

From that vantage, all experience in the memoir shimmers with lessons that the current structure withholds to meet what seem to have become the requirements for memoir.

Another imperative of contemporary memoir often leads us to experiment with form.

For three sections, Hill jars the reader into second person point-of-view. The technique adds variety but little else, although one could argue that it symbolizes the narrator reaching out to have his experience seen through other’s eyes. Readers don’t work that hard, though.

Hill overestimates the appeal of his subject-position. Second person narration barely worked in Bright Lights Big City, and it is perhaps too gimmicky for a memoir, a genre in which vulnerability and honesty ought to champion quip and wit, these latter two of which Blind Man’s Bluff has plenty. These chapters, as with the whole book, could be heartbreaking. In the flash of contemporary narrative fashion, we miss out on the beauty Hill is capable of rendering but renders too seldom, a beauty that needs simply to be told the old way, from beginning to end, in one voice, one perspective.

As is the case with most books, there is another book hiding behind this one, a book about being blind. Hill’s insights

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are gorgeous on this topic, as are his details of the switches and levers a blind person learns to use in order for the world to work for him. But would W.W. Norton pick up such a book? Are we there yet in the world of (disabled) letters? Books that sell are about change more than they are about being. (Movies about being gay are usually movies about coming out.) The all-powerful narrative structure costs us in this regard. Virginia Woolf observes this in her essay on being and non-being (“A Sketch from the Past,” 1939–40) and in all her works, wherein the reader loses herself in pages of gazing into a tidepool by the sea.

Viewers and readers in the status quo need their antagonists and their conflict and often prey, as a result, on our years of adjustment more than on our tales of just being disabled and having lives. At what point on the map of the world of letters will the genius of being disabled be the story rather than an elegy on "normalness"? While we wait, Blind Man’s Bluff warrants a place in the literature insofar as it maps the presence and experience of a person with a disability. This library can always expand with our journeys, our stories, our exhausting efforts to make our way in an ableist society, our anxieties regarding relationships, our impulses to give up on all of it and just dwell in solitude, our hope that we will find people who will keep us connected to the social world and jobs that will keep us connected to the economy.

All of this is in Blind Man’s Bluff, related in blistering clarity, just in too short bursts through the dominant narrative of finding love, itself a tale worth telling. n

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TIRELESS AND SELFLESS PROMOTER OF NORTH CAROLINA LITERATURE ALEX ALBRIGHT: RECIPIENT OF THE 2021 JOHN TYLER CALDWELL AWARD FOR THE HUMANITIES award presentation remarks by Margaret D. Bauer, Editor

COURTESY OF NORTH CAROLINA HUMANITIES

I have the privilege of introducing to you Alex Of course, when it comes to NCLR, I am Albright, the 2021 recipient of the John Tyler certainly not unbiased. So I will let another’s words Caldwell Award, and I could not be more pleased.1 explain Alex’s contribution to North Carolina with As editor of the North Carolina Literary Review for the creation of NCLR. Jim Clark, former Dean of going on twenty-five years now, I owe Alex, my colthe School of Humanities and the Elizabeth H. Jorleague and friend, so much for the direction my own dan Chair of Southern Literature at Barton College, career took. wrote in his letter of support for Before his retirement in 2018, Alex’s nomination, NCLR “is a Alex was my colleague at East compendium of the best of the Carolina University. He joined the history and culture of North ECU Department of English faculty Carolina. As editor of NCLR, Alex in 1981. Just imagine the number tirelessly and selflessly promoted of students he inspired in his over North Carolina literature.” Profesthirty-five years at ECU, helping to sor Emeritus Clark continued, “It shape many into writers. At ECU, is impossible to overestimate the too, he created the North Caroimportance of NCLR to the cullina Literary Review, which gives ture of the state of North Caroliour students significant experina. It is truly a treasure, providing ence in editing and publishing to the intellectual and creative work take with them into the work force of the state a concrete ‘local habiafter graduation. Former Dean of tation and a name.’ Every issue is Arts and Sciences, the late Keats an immediate collector’s item for This is a special award Sparrow, once explained that he both its content and its design.” asked Alex to create what became Alex served as Editor for NCLR’s because it’s for a NCLR because he “wanted to make first five years, establishing its lifetime’s labors in sure [he] was getting the journal reputation for in-depth coverage promoting what has into the best hands possible,” addof the state’s writers – worldtruly been my pleasure ing, “Anything Alex does, he does renowned, just getting started, to promote. superbly.” Indeed. and those in between – and he —Alex Albright Within its first three years, was honored for this contribution NCLR won the Best New Jourto preserving and promoting the nal Award from the national Council of Editors of state’s rich literary history and culture with the R. Learned Journals and numerous awards for its Hunt Parker Memorial Award, given by the North unique design. Alex would credit, rightfully so, his Carolina Literary and Historical Association, and Art Director Eva Roberts for that design, but as Edithe Roberts Award for Literary Inspiration, given by tor, he had to be open to a design layout outside of ECU’s Joyner Library. the norm. From what I’ve witnessed, Alex has never Alex’s important contribution to promoting shied away from trying something new (He once North Carolina writers is also reflected in his edico-edited a whole collection of poems on collard tions of the North Carolina poems of A.R. Ammons. greens). In the decades since NCLR’s founding in But Alex’s interest in North Carolina extends 1992, long before a time when we all have access beyond literature. In the 1980s he wrote and coto easy-to-use graphic design software, that unique produced the UNC TV documentary Boogie in Black design influenced the look of literary magazines and White about an early African American movie across the country. produced by Lord-Warner Pictures and filmed in 1

Watch the whole ceremony, which premiered 29 Oct. 2021. Read the North Carolina Humanities press release about this award here.

ABOVE Alex Albright wearing his Caldwell Award medal during

his acceptance remarks, filmed in Greenville, NC, 29 Sept. 2021

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Greenville, NC. More recently, he published The Forgotten First: B-1 and the Integration of the Modern Navy, which was a finalist for the 2014 Montaigne Medal and winner of a 2014 Willie Parker Peace History Book Award from the NC Society of Historians.

Not too long after handing NCLR over to me, Alex and his wife Elizabeth had a son, Silas, and then the three of them moved to Fountain, just outside of Greenville, where Alex has been active in town and county politics, serving on the Fountain Board of Commissioners and as Mayor pro tem.

He has since been elected to represent District 4 on the Pitt County Board of Commissioners. In downtown Fountain, Alex and Elizabeth opened the R.A. Fountain General Store, which hosts music – mainly bluegrass – most weekends, as well as, no surprise, the

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occasional reading by a visiting writer. Neither will you be surprised to hear that the walls of this local gathering place are lined with bookshelves, filled with first and special edition, rare and recent, used and new, cloth and paperback books for sale. For this enterprise (and so much more), Alex was honored in 2017 by the North Carolina Writers Conference for his “efforts to create a vibrant and unique literary and cultural center and community resource.”

The John Tyler Caldwell Award for the Humanities “honors distinguished individuals who have strengthened the educational, cultural, and civic life of North Carolinians through their life work.” Well, that certainly describes the career of my colleague and friend, Alex Albright, and I am honored to bestow the 2021 Caldwell medal upon him. n n n

A LIFETIME’S LABORS adapted from the honoree’s prepared and delivered acceptance remarks

ABOVE Alex Albright and Eva Roberts, the original Art Director

who created NCLR’s unique design, during the 25th issue celebration, Oct. 2016

This first issue has the grackle on it. That kind of became our unofficial state bird and our unofficial campaign to establish East Carolina as the fiftyfirst state. We chose the grackle for this cover because there are so many of them and so many people look at them and think, “Where did all these things come from, they’re so common.” We took that as a badge of honor for what we were trying to show the rest of the state as we demonstrated not only what could happen in Greenville and in East Carolina, but how we could tie that in to, not only the rest of North Carolina, but to the rest of the world: a worldview that encompasses the humanities and all that it brings to us in our understanding of how we live in that world.

I also thank Fred Chappell who was for me, as for many, a writing mentor, and though I didn’t know it at the time, also a teaching mentor in graduate school. I had no interest in teaching, in fact didn’t much care for academics, didn’t want PHOTOGRAPH BY SETH GULLEDGE; COURTESY OF NCLR

This is a special award because it’s for a lifetime’s labors in promoting what has truly been my pleasure to promote. And I believe that it’s an award also for the North Carolina Literary Review.

NCLR would not have happened without the tutelage of Bertie Fearing, or the vision of Keats Sparrow, who was our Dean of Arts and Sciences – but he was really the uber dean of Humanities at ECU for many years. It wouldn’t have happened without Eva Roberts, whose artistry in design literally changed how I see the world.

When NCLR first came out, our co-sponsor, “Lit & Hist,” was having their meeting in Raleigh, and Roy Parker, who was president then, held up the first issue. And he talked in glowing terms about this gorgeous new magazine that had come out, being published in, he said, “of all places, East Carolina University.” And the room full of folks kind of laughed. They chuckled, and said, “Wow, East Carolina is doing this.” And we still are, thanks to Margaret.

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PHOTOGRAPH BY JASON DEBRUYN;COURTESY OF WUNC

to be in their club. But after starting careers in this song, “Stand in the Place Where You Are.” But I public relations and then retailing books, in Rocky already knew about bioregionalism from Thomas Mount, Greensboro, and then Gastonia, I left “Buck” Gavin, who played trumpet in the US Navy North Carolina where chance would eventually B-1 band. I met Mr. Gavin because of Pitch a Booget me to Chalmette High School in a suburb of gie Woogie. He was part of the band soundtrack New Orleans, where I would discover under the for that and part of the US Navy bandsmen who guidance of principal Wayne Warner that teaching helped integrate the modern Navy. When I first was okay, was not only interesting but fun. met Mr. Gavin, I drove up to his house in FayI was subsequently visetteville, and he had on his iting friends in California car a license plate that said when Erwin Hester, the EARTH. I got into his living chair of English at ECU, room, and we were talking, caught up with me in the and I said, “Mr. Gavin, why late summer of 1981 to do you have a license plate offer me a job teaching on your car that says Earth freshmen on a one-year on it?” He looked at me like, contract, renewable “You don’t know anything, for three years. On our dude,” and he said, “Man, phone interview, he said that’s where I’m from.”

I should come home, I took that lesson back to that I’d love B’s Barbemy freshmen and that concue, which I did, and cept became a third thing: I We’re both looking at the same do – and will likely pick wanted to teach them where thing but seeing something up a pound and a pint on they were from. So when I different. Neither of our views are my way back to Fountain had a student from Alamance wrong; they’re different. And they’re County, and that person said later today.

I taught freshmen for they were from Burlington, determined by where we are. all these many years. And I would say, “Where in Burlon the first day of class during each semester I’d ington,” and they would say maybe, “Well, it was try to teach them just two things: The first, how really just outside of Burlington, it was more in to turn off your TV, which morphed over the Haw River,” and I would say, “Where in Haw River?” years into how to turn off your phones. It’s a lesand they would say, “Well, maybe it was a little bit son I never successfully taught to anyone I don’t out of Haw River. It was at Hawfields.” And I would believe. But the second was to consider all that say, “Was it near Hawfields Presbyterian down by they saw, all that they thought, as originating the cemetery there?” The point being that all those from very distinctive points of view based on the different places matter. And being from Hawfields primary factor of where they are and how they is different from being from Burlington. Being from watched, how they saw the world, and to see how Haw Fields is different from being from Graham. different things look when you change your place And being from Graham, graduating in 1969 is difor your age. How the layering on of experience ferent from graduating from Graham in 1869 when changes how you’ll see things. you might have been the first Black city councilman First of all, you think of it maybe as a wall, and living on North Main Street and you might be taken you’re looking at the wall, but someone else is from your home and lynched at the court square in looking at that wall from a different point of view.

Graham, a history lesson that we never heard growWe’re both looking at the same thing but seeing up. So all that leads us to trying to understand ing something different. Neither of our views are a little bit more about the forces that molded us as wrong; they’re different. And they’re determined we grew up even when we didn’t know about those by where we are. That’s a bioregionalist’s point of forces. I went to high school with students whose view. In the mid-’80s, REM, the band, came up with great-grandparents were awfully treated by the ABOVE Protesters in downtown Graham, NC, 1 July 2020 (Read

about Wyatt Outlaw, whom Albright is speaking about, in A Red Record: Revealing lynching sites in North Carolina.)

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often in the pages of NCLR, with this thing that was called at the time a literary essay, but soon became known as creative nonfiction. And I started to understand Black Mountain College, how learning there was made so integral to living, a lesson furthered patiently by Fielding Dawson and Jonathan Williams especially.

So when my family moved to Fountain, I was happy to be back in a small town. I’m not so sure I would have thrived quite so much going back to Graham. I do go back there often now, and I love the place. Having grown up in Graham with parents that valued education and public service – my dad was on the school board, the local town council, he and my mom were both active in civic groups and their local church – so I knew all of those things, I knew how to be in a small town when I got to Fountain. I’ve loved being there with Elizabeth, with our son, who’s now graduated Appalachian and gone out on his own as a sports editor in Waynesville.

But Graham’s where I go back to in my mind and in my heart, when I’m looking elsewhere.

But often I’m looking right where I am, which is what I want all of us to do. To pay attention to where we are, and how we got where we are, and how, as we age, we see things differently and we think about things differently, and we can continue to grow.

NCLR has grown and grown and grown. It has changed, it has thrived under Margaret Bauer’s editorship. It will go on after her, just as it went on after me. And these are the stories that will get told in new generations, as those people come along year after year after year, and we’re all forgotten.

I’m glad to be here and to remember all these folks that helped me going back all the way to Ms. Farell. The first word I ever learned was “look.”

So I keep looking, I keep watching, keep paying attention. And I turn my phone off, regularly; it’s hardly ever on. And right now our TV isn’t even working. So we’re fine out in the world where we live, and I hope y’all are too, and stay safe. n PHOTOGRAPH BY MATTHEW WAHNER; COURTESY OF NC DEPT. OF NATURAL AND CULTURAL RESOURCES

Klan in 1868. One was lynched. And we never talked about that. We never heard about it until last summer, the summer of George Floyd, and Black Lives Matter, and all that anger, all that misunderstanding, the statues. We’re still here today, fighting some of those same things. I didn’t even realize until I was grown that I had grown up in the Jim Crow South.

I thought of that as a historic period. It certainly wasn’t over when I was growing up, and it doesn’t seem to be over now.

So back to that notion of place, I’d also like to thank Jake Mills for his role helping me understand where I come from. Jake was from Burlington, and he became my colleague at ECU in the 1990s. He introduced me to a lot of what I had not paid attention to in Alamance County, the eccentric nature of it. The depth of character that exists in folks that you don’t really pay that much attention to sometimes, that we drive right by. And Jake knew them.

He knew all the places. And I remembered the places; I remembered a lot of the people he talked about. I tried to get away. I left Graham, I think, the day after I graduated high school and went off to college as quickly as I could get away.

It was a long journey to get back to that place in my mind, and in my heart and in my understanding so that I might understand better Faulkner’s notion of that “postage stamp of native soil,” Eudora Welty’s dictum to “Let your stories grow out of the dirt beneath your feet.”

And I did. I looked at the dirt in North Carolina.

The soil, the difference in Eastern Carolina and West, in the Piedmont. When I got back to North Carolina in ’81, when Erwin Hester brought me back to teach freshman English, I discovered here a new generation of North Carolina writers – Bland Simpson, Janet Lembke, David Cecelski, Joseph Bathanti – to name but a few, who were telling stories about where they were from. And they were all from different places, and their stories were all different. But they came together,

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ABOVE Alex Albright holding up the premiere NCLR with the grackle

cover (illustration by Stanton Blakeslee) during his remarks at the 2016 North Carolina Literary and Historical Association’s fall conference panel celebrating the 25th issue (student staff on screen behind him)

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Back Issue Bonanza

by Margaret D. Bauer, Editor In this section, find reviews of books by writers we’ve published – Allan Gurganus’s selected stories collection and Ed Southern’s memoir – and on the subject of previous content – Popcorn Sutton. Enjoy poems by writers who have been James Applewhite Poetry Prize finalists before: J.S. Absher, Priscilla Melchior, and Benjamin Pryor. And here too we pay our respects to North Carolina's much lauded and beloved mystery writer, Margaret Maron, and her husband, Joe, who passed away within months of each other this past year. As D.G. Martin often advises new North Carolina residents, I learned much about the many treasures of North Carolina through Margaret's Deborah Knott series, while also enjoying the escapades of her central sleuth and admiring Judge Knott for refusing to accept limitations often put upon women of her region and time. I am so grateful to Margaret for the lovely essay she wrote for our 2018 issue.

Other reviews and the literary award stories in this section hearken back to the special feature topics of past issues: 2017's Literature and the Other Arts, 2015's Global North Carolina, 2005's Outer Banks literature, 2001's speculative fiction,

and 2000's focus on genre.* As Dale Bailey contemplates the genre of the oddly paired books we sent him to consider for review, he reflects on where we find books in our favorite bookstores, which inspired us to promote several independent bookstores of North Carolina within the layout of his review.

And here I add my own promotion of independent bookstores, who contribute so significantly to the strong literary culture of our state. Congratulations to their owners and operators for holding on through the pandemic, and thanks to them all for providing so much of our entertainment while we were secluding ourselves for safety. Many bookstores drastically reduced and even waived postage charges for mailorder book buying. Bookstores were also among the first to host Zoom readings, allowing writers to celebrate and talk about their new books. I am sure the reviews in this section – in the whole issue – will inspire book purchases, and I urge you: please buy those books from independent bookstores. Consider the cost difference from what you might pay Amazon to be a donation to a very good cause. n

* Who out there is reading the issue introductions? Match the back issue themes listed here with a review or award story, and receive free copies of all of these issues mentioned. Already have one or more them? We can offer substitutions from back issues to help complete your set of NCLR. Email your response to NCLRStaff@ecu.edu before the print issue release in June.

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FLASHBACKS:

Echoes of Past Issues

104 That ye be not judged: A Remembrance of Margaret and Joe Maron

by D.G. Martin

124 Confederate Memorial Day a poem by Priscilla Melchior

art by Stephen L. Hayes, Jr.

106 Gluttons for Local Color a review by Zackary Vernon n Allan Gurganus, The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus

126 The Ladder a poem by Benjamin Pryor

art by Chris Foley

108 Memory’s Songbook

a review by Anna McFadyen n Jill Caugherty, Waltz in Swing Time 110 Two New City-Set Novels

a review by James W. Clark, Jr. n L.C. Fiore, Coyote Loop n Terry Roberts, My Mistress’ Eyes Are Raven Black 114 Telling Her Story

127 The Vitruvian Outlaw a review by Jessica Martell

n Neal Hutcheson, The Moonshiner Popcorn Sutton 130 A Tale of Two Souths a review by Fred Hobson

n Ed Southern, Fight Songs: A Story of Love and Sports in a Complicated South 132 Natania Barron Wins 2021 Manly Wade Wellman Award

a review by Sharon E. Colley n Heather Frese, The Baddest Girl on the Planet 116 Lost in the Maze of Genre a review by Dale Bailey n Michael Amos Cody, A Twilight Reel n Tim Garvin, A Dredging in Swann 122 Flower of Zeus a poem by J.S. Absher

art by Meredith Hebden

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE 6 n

Teachers Who Write, Writers Who Teach

133 n

North Carolina Miscellany

an interview, poetry, creative nonfiction, book reviews, and literary news

creative nonfiction

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THAT YE BE NOT JUDGED: A REMEMBRANCE OF MARGARET AND JOE MARON

by D.G. Martin Judge Knott, that ye be not judged.

No, it’s not just a typo in a Biblical quote; rather, it is meant to be an insider’s signal to the fans of the popular North Carolina author Margaret Maron.

Maron died on February 23, 2021, following a stroke, leaving behind a group of admiring fellow authors, bookstore owners, and loyal readers. She was best known for her twenty-book mystery series featuring Judge Deborah Knott and Knott’s extended family in rural North Carolina. It all began thirty years ago with Bootlegger’s Daughter.

Set in fictional Colleton County, it was obviously inspired by Johnston County, just east of Raleigh where Maron grew up.

Maron’s work regularly dealt with art and artists, inspired by Joe Maron, her husband of sixty-one years, himself a talented artist and teacher. After a few years living in Brooklyn, where Joe grew up, Margaret brought him home where they settled on part of her family’s former tobacco farm.

Joe died on June 20, 2021, just three months after his wife’s death.

People sometimes ask me what is the best book to learn about North Carolina.

If the questioners like murder mysteries, I tell them to try one of the books in Maron’s Judge Knott series. Knott is a smart country woman lawyer who became a state district court judge in a typical North Carolina rural community. Deborah Knott is smart and

Longtime host of North Carolina Bookwatch (1999– 2021) is just one of D.G. MARTIN's many careers.

good, but not perfect. She lives amongst a large farm family led by her father, Kezzie Knott, the former bootlegger, and his twelve children from two marriages, plus spouses and numerous grandchildren.

Having a former bootlegger as Judge Knott’s daddy and a few other mischievous kinfolks whose lives sometimes intersect with the law adds spice to Maron’s stories.

Knott’s many friends and work colleagues also enrich Maron’s books. Everybody in Colleton County seems to know everybody else. Rich and poor; black, white, and Hispanic; farmers and townspeople; old and young; good and bad. We meet them dealing with problems of the environment, migrant worker issues, hurricane damage, political shenanigans, real estate development, and other challenges in addition to the murder mysteries that move every book along.

Maron used Judge Knott not only to solve crimes but also to make her readers aware of social issues and other local government challenges, always giving the viewpoints of society’s underdogs. At the same time she shared the rich, and not always pretty, family life in a North Carolina small town.

Every now and then, Maron moved the action to other North Carolina scenes: the furniture market, the Seagrove pottery community, the mountains, and the coast.

Along the way, Maron’s readers get a good look at our state and its people.

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

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PHOTOGRAPH BY DONALD BARLEY

A lovely human being, Always giving, mentoring, While coming out with all those books Over 30.

And l knew she had a huge following in England.

But mostly she would go back to times In school at Cleveland, And Growing Up on a small farm As l did She would say Shelby, we are third cousins once

Maron brought back many of the same characters in book after book. She made them so real and compelling that some fans say they read the books just to keep up with the characters in Deborah’s family. Most important was a deputy sheriff named Dwight Bryant. First, he was just one of many characters.

He worked his way up to boyfriend, then fiancée, and then husband. Maron stretched out that courtship over several books, reminding this reader of the courtship of Father Tim and Cynthia in the Mitford series of books written by another popular North Carolina author, Jan Karon.

Former state poet laureate Shelby Stephenson, Margaret’s cousin and neighbor, responded in poetry to my request for his thoughts about Margaret and Joe:

ABOVE Margaret and Joe Maron at the North Carolina

Literary Hall of Fame induction ceremony, Weymouth, NC, 16 Oct. 2016 (Read about her induction in NCLR Online 2017.)

removed.

I have no idea what that means.

As Margaret never ever let go of those things, Her roots.

About Joe, Shelby wrote, again in verselike lines He bought and served lobster For our dinners together. He was always Margaret’s mentor. Margaret said so.

His paintings and artistic flourishes settle like companions on the walls of their home.

Like Shelby, we will remember Margaret and Joe Maron, and promise that we will not forget to “Judge Knott.” n

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GLUTTONS FOR LOCAL COLOR a review by Zackary Vernon Allan Gurganus. The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus.

Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2021.

ZACKARY VERNON is an Associate Professor of English at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC. He has published numerous articles in magazines and journals, such as The Bitter Southerner, Southern Cultures, Carolina Quarterly, and NCLR. He is also the editor of two recent essay collections: Summoning the Dead: Essays on Ron Rash (University of South Carolina Press, 2018; reviewed in NCLR Online 2019) and Ecocriticism and the Future of Southern Studies (Louisiana State University Press, 2019).

He is currently working on a novel.

ALLAN GURGANUS has been featured regularly in NCLR – an essay by him in 2007, essays about him in 2008, 2014 (by Zackary Vernon), 2018 (online and print issues), an interview with him in 2018 (also by Vernon), and most of his books reviewed over the years. His numerous honors include the North Carolina Award for Literature, and induction into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame.

Allan Gurganus’s stories have a splendidly antique feel about them. That’s not to say they’re out of fashion. Rather, Gurganus refuses to bend or pander to trends in contemporary fiction.

His style is both his own and one that possesses the gravity of nineteenth-century literature; the stories are ornate, the prose at times flowing and florid.

Henry James comes to mind, as does Chekhov, whom he mentions specifically in the opening story of the collection. This is, as one of his characters says, “King James” storytelling (171). Gurganus’s luminous tales are told in voices that don’t feel of our time, and they are stranger and more beautiful for it.

Gurganus’s preoccupation with past worlds and styles is immediately apparent in this new collection of nine stories. Take, for example, the first one, “The Wish for a Good Young Country Doctor,” which was published in The New Yorker in 2020. The story begins with a frame narrative in which a graduate student from the University of Iowa’s American Studies program travels to small-town, Midwestern antique stores in search of “folk manifestations” and “outsider art” (17, 19). The importance of the material objects themselves quickly diminishes, and it becomes clear that what matters to the character is the human connections these objects evoke.

He is, like Gurganus, a collector and curator of stories.

Beyond the playful metafictional elements of “The Wish for a Good Young Country Doctor,” there is a serious and pressing message for our current moment. One of the stories that the student discovers concerns a mid-nineteenth-century doc-

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tor who arrives in a small town during a deadly cholera epidemic. The doctor saves many lives with his scientifically informed advice and compassionate approach, believing as he does that “civilization depends on nobody going untended” (35).

This, of course, resonates beyond the context of this nineteenth-century plague.

Gurganus also offers commentary on more recent events – from the AIDS epidemic that he himself lived through to our current battle with COVID-19.

In such crises, surely the most important thing we can accomplish is to ensure that everyone is well tended to.

Other stories have less clear ethical imperatives to offer.

“The Mortician Confesses” is told from the perspective of a sheriff in Falls, NC (the fictionalized version of Gurganus’s own hometown of Rocky Mount) as he investigates a funeral home worker whom he catches having sex with the body of a dead woman. It’s an intensely uncomfortable story from start to finish, inviting us to try to understand not only a man who violates a corpse but also a sheriff who finds the whole ordeal titillating.

Taboos abound in Gurganus’s work, and he forces readers to face them and consider whether they should remain taboo. In some instances, his characters overcome racism and homophobia, but in others, as in “The Mortician Confesses,” the characters continue to dwell in a very dark place. At one point, the sheriff remarks, “When it comes right down to it, we think we know decency and what local folks will do for other locals, but we ain’t got clue

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

PHOTOGRAPH BY DALE EDWARDS

supply company, so his family tricks him into thinking he is still employed by setting up a fake office, where they enable him to pretend to work until his death. Although I struggle to connect with this man, even here Gurganus manages to get me to think deeply about his tragic life. The character is so vividly presented that I feel like I know him, and in knowing him could extend a kindness to him or to people like him.

All the stories in this collection maintain Gurganus’s customary focus on the lives of local people, most often those from Falls. In “Unassisted Human Flight,” a reporter investigates a middle-aged man who, at the age of eight, was picked up by a tornado and allegedly flew through the air for a quarter of a mile. Everyone in the town is obsessed with the case because they’re “gluttons for local color” (92). The reporter “worship[s] unvarnished ‘Nonfiction’” and is “downright antinovelistic,” saying, “Who needs make-believe – given a world constructed so weirdly as ours?”

(96). In a later story, another character makes a similar point, noting that “In a town this small, fiction’s unnecessary” (176; emphasis in original).

After he confirms the veracity of the child’s “unassisted flight,” the reporter states, “We grant ourselves so little daily hope. Meanwhile, barely notic-

number one as to what-all lurks in any human heart, much less lower-down especially, now, do we? Ever?” (69).

Gurganus is a writer who thrusts the unexpected and unexplainable onto ordinary characters. But he’s kinder to, and more accepting of, the people who populate his works than, say, Flannery O’Connor.

The way to grace for him is less narrow, less about salvation in a religious sense and more about learning to empathize.

And empathy can be a tricky or even dangerous business if we confront characters like those in “The Mortician Confesses.”

Gurganus leaves us to squirm in some of these stories, as we struggle to comprehend both the good and evil that gain purchase in his characters’ hearts.

Some characters arrest my attention more than others.

The protagonist in “He’s at the Office” is less engaging than most. This man cannot cope with retirement from an office

ABOVE Allan Gurganus on his porch in Hillsborough, NC, during an

interview with Dale Edwards for The News of Orange County, Jan. 2021

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ing, we’ve already managed wonders” (124). This theme continues in “A Fool for Christmas,” a story about a mall pet shop owner who helps a teenage girl delivery her baby after her religious parents reject her.

The owner asserts, “Ain’t people wonderful!” (143), as he reminisces about the girl’s aplomb.

Although sometimes dark and distressing, Gurganus’s stories possess a sense of unadulterated curiosity. Human nature thrills and horrifies the characters in turns. Gurganus seems to be similarly enamored by human potential. To limit one’s potential for any reason – fundamentalism, sexism, racism, homophobia – is rendered tragic in his stories, for to do so prevents the individual from attaining happiness and fulfillment, and collectively we then miss out on whatever may have resulted from that person’s full experience and expression. To limit another’s potential, in other words, is tantamount to murder by increments.

At the end of a story about an aging woman who leads historical tours of Falls, she remarks that God must have taken “early retirement,” leaving us on earth with “no practical instructions” (192). Gurganus suggests that in the absence of a divine intermediary, we must look to one another for help. As one character reminds us, “It’s a privilege to at least try saving one another” (209). Perhaps we should more often look to stories like these for models of how to live and how to treat one another, attempting compassion always, imperfect but incessant. n

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MEMORY’S SONGBOOK a review by Anna McFadyen Jill Caugherty. Waltz in Swing Time. Black Rose Writing, 2020.

Raleigh native ANNA MCFADYEN has reviewed for NCLR since 2018 and was a semifinalist in the 2020 James Applewhite Poetry Prize competition.

Her latest articles appear in EcoTheo Review and, forthcoming in 2022, Journal of L. M. Montgomery Studies.

She received her MA in English Literature from NC State University and her BA from Meredith College, where she served as a chief coeditor of The Colton Review and was awarded the Norma Rose and Marion Fiske Welch scholarships in English and Creative Writing.

JILL CAUGHERTY’s short stories have appeared in 805Lit, Oyster River Pages, and The Magazine of History and Fiction.

Her debut story, “Real People,” was nominated for the 2019 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. The author is a graduate of Stanford University with an MS in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an MBA with honors from UNC Chapel Hill. She worked for twenty-five years in the tech industry as an award-winning marketing manager and now pursues creative writing full-time in Raleigh, NC.

Jill Caugherty was inspired to write her debut novel, Waltz in Swing Time, by the life and letters of her maternal grandparents. In this testimony to the power of music, ninety-yearold Irene Stallings remembers her career as a pianist, singer, and dancer during the Great Depression. Chapters alternate between Irene’s vibrant youth and her troubles in old age – a temporal dance that prevents readers from losing sight of her core identity, regardless of her external deterioration.

Throughout this book, Caugherty explores one of the most overlooked but important forms of social invisibility today: the devaluation of the elderly. With frankness, she examines seniors’ loss of agency and visibility amid physical decline, as well as their plight of loneliness.

Irene rebels against these issues by secretly recording her memoir on a handheld device.

Unfortunately, assisted-living personnel think she is “talking to [her]self,” a senile behavior to medicate (23). Their misunderstanding epitomizes assumptions that younger people make about Irene. Her reactions against agism remind me of “Gynecology,” a poem from Kay Bosgraaf’s The Fence Lesson (2019), which I previously reviewed for NCLR. The poem’s narrator refuses to discontinue her pap smear screenings in her seventies, protesting, “How dare [the doctor] tell me I am not / viable? I will have my exams.”* Irene similarly wants her life to matter – to be seen as more than old. She declares, “[R]esistance . . . is all I have left,” as she fights to remain herself. She

* Kay Bosgraaf, The Fence Lesson: Poems (Kelsay, 2019) 71.

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does not wish to be drugged into docility, thinking, “Even if I’m sad, my emotions are real, not out of a bottle” (26–27).

However, as Irene begins to make “wrong turns” in confusion, she admits, “I can’t help feeling that something essential is slipping away from me, ever so gradually, not unlike the eating away of a sandstone cliff in a canyon from years of harsh winds and water, until the cliff’s definition collapses, and its composite gravel and clay have washed down the mountain” (51). Her (appropriate) metaphor recalls the terrain of her youth in Utah.

Irene’s recordings narrate her escape from farm life into the exciting world of entertainment, set during the era of jazz clubs and Fred-and-Ginger musicals.

Songs like “Someone to Watch Over Me” and big band hits play across the pages, evoking the glamor of the time. These elements shine between shadows cast by the Depression, and yet Caugherty paints the desperation of this period carefully.

When Irene’s Mormon parents sell their piano to survive, their daughter’s artistic soul starves, but her dreams persist.

Irene’s musical talent becomes her ticket away from hardship and rural conventions. A summer entertainment job at Zion National Park provides the professional opportunity she craves, but Irene’s chances are jeopardized when she falls for a seasoned dancer at the camp.

Her electric scenes with Spike bring Dirty Dancing to mind, as the young couple escapes the Depression through the thrill of performing together. Their

ABOVE Jill Caugherty’s maternal grandparents,

Harold and Margene Thurston, circa 1955

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

courtship unfolds among the natural wonders of the canyons, where CCC boys build trails for Roosevelt’s economic relief program. For a time, this young pair escapes the Depression in the thrill of performing together.

Lines from Irene and Spike’s favorite song foreshadow the protagonist’s twilight years: “Someday, when I’m awfully low . . . I will feel a glow just thinking of you, and the way you look tonight” (238). She will depend on memories of love to make her final trials endurable, finding company in the backward glow of her musical history. As Irene copes with discouragement, Caugherty emphasizes the power of music therapy for the elderly. Music is a lifeforce to Irene, imparting inner freedom and solace.

More than any other grievance of her changing lifestyle, Irene resents being treated like a child in old age. The swapping of mother-daughter power roles is difficult for her to accept, as her daughter becomes the parent figure. Irene feels angry when Deirdre and the doctors talk past her head during appointments, making decisions as if she were not present. She knows her daughter “means well,” but Irene has fought for independence her entire life, and she does not surrender the habit easily (27). Caugherty’s novel explores this and other frictions between mothers and daughters across four generations. Although Irene disagrees with Dierdre, she tries not to repeat her own mother’s mistakes that prevented healing between them.

When Irene first moves to an assisted-living community, her cynical humor brands the Golden Manor the “Golden Manacles,” despite its elegant dining room, movie nights, bridge parties,

beauty parlor, budding geriatric romances, and bevies of stylish white-haired ladies (6). She admits, “The forced jollity of the Manor sometimes makes me want to scream. I never chose to spend my final days in a Disney Land for seniors” (76). To her amazement, other residents behave like they are not approaching the end, and they do not resist being coaxed into a second childhood. Irene scoffs that staff members “don’t dare publicly acknowledge the other possibility, that we are entering a horror . . . a steady downward spiral” (199). Instead, they throw parties with “cake . . . ice cream, birthday hats . . . balloons, even a few . . . favors for the guests,” especially for “residents whose families may have forgotten them completely. That is to say, whose relatives have abandoned them here, signed away checks, and, like the three monkeys, closed their eyes and ears to any bad news from inside these walls.”

Irene observes that residents are eventually “pushed around the garden in wheelchairs that might as well be adult-strollers,” and she is aware of their “spoon feedings and diaper changings” (198–99). In her view, the Manor is an anteroom to death, with a nursing wing waiting conveniently around the corner.

The Manor’s carnival atmosphere cannot distract her fellow residents from every reality, however. When Irene’s friends visit her in her final stage of care, they “inch ever so slightly away, and gaze out the open door into the hallway,” uncomfortable in the knowledge that “once people arrive in the nursing wing, they don’t come out alive” (274).

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As they leave, Irene says, “I have the sensation that I’ve just seen someone very dear off at the train station,” but it is her own self that slips away: “I fill with the quiet, inescapable knowledge that the person who has left will not return” (275). She must make peace with her departure.

Caugherty knows assistedliving culture well, including its routines, ironies, and forged alliances. Her observations ring true in my own experience: for a decade, I spent hours every week visiting my grandmother in an elegant assisted-living community like Irene’s. And like this protagonist, my grandmother was always a young person trapped inside an old person’s body, with the fight to enjoy life still surging in her, even though doctors, blinded by her age, overlooked her potential to contribute further to society.

At 101, she had not given up on achieving a fuller lifespan.

Fortunately, she had advocates in my parents, who helped her pass the century mark, but too many elderly people do not have defenders against ageism, even in high-end facilities. This novel illustrates how a balance of care and listening must be achieved to preserve a person’s individuality – and it acknowledges that the longings of the elderly are no less important than those of the young.

These topics are seldom addressed at length in fiction with an insider’s perspective, and few novels open with a nonagenarian narrator. I applaud Caugherty for addressing the emotional and intellectual value of the elderly without dismissing or diminishing them in the process. She draws attention to a deserving subject. n

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TWO NEW CITY-SET NOVELS a review by James W. Clark, Jr. L.C. Fiore. Coyote Loop.

Adelaide Books, 2021 Terry Roberts. My Mistress’ Eyes Are Raven Black.

Turner Publishing, 2021.

JAMES W. CLARK, JR.’s most recent honor is the 2020 John Tyler Caldwell Award from North Carolina Humanities.

Read more about him in that award coverage in NCLR Online 2021 and in the coverage of his 2018 induction into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in NCLR Online 2019.

ABOVE Terry Roberts talking about

the work of his friend and mentor John Ehle at the 2021 John Ehle Prize Celebration, a virtual event organized

by NCLR and Press 53 of WinstonSalem, 24 Mar. 2021

What would Lee Roberts think of My Mistress’ Eyes Are Raven Black, his son Terry Roberts’s latest novel? Set on Ellis Island, it is a hard-boiled detective thriller, the type of book Mr. Roberts was addicted to, short chapters and all. Having died many years ago, he will not be reading My Mistress’ Eyes Are Raven Black. Nor does Mr. Roberts know that his talented son’s three previous historical novels are bringing distinction to the family name and to Western North Carolina in particular.

Stephen Robbins narrates the Hot Springs, NC, book about internment, A Short Time to Stay Here (2012), and this new book also. In each, the subject is processing alien people: first the German nationals detained stateside during the Great War and now the masses of immigrants pouring into Ellis Island in 1920 where US immigration policies and practices had become a hateful mixture of xenophobia and religious bigotry. Administrators as well as staff in the thriller become suspects in vicious

murders intended to preserve this country for white Christians and to spare the government the expense of caring for poor, tired newcomers and their offspring.

The narrator clearly details surges of hatred fueled by Christian hypocrisy and the fear of difference on Ellis Island. Simultaneously this troubled place fosters a sizzling love affair for him and a bold female detective.

Both arrive to investigate the brewing cultural disaster.

Lucy Paul and her partner Stephen are themselves outside the American mainstream. She is a mulatto nurse working undercover for the American Medical Association to find out who is killing immigrants of color and other aliens deemed undesirable by Ellis Island insiders. Stephen, from the North Carolina mountains, had, until recently, been managing the restaurant in the Algonquin Hotel on West Forty-Fourth Street. A “mixedblood mongrel” (176) by his own account, he can close his “eyes and imagine things other people couldn’t see” (8). Gifted to know

TERRY ROBERTS’s first two novels – A Short Time to Stay Here (Ingalls Publishing Group, Inc., 2012; the subject of an interview with Roberts in NCLR 2014), and That Bright Land (Turner Publishing Company, 2016; reviewed in NCLR Online 2017) – received the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction, given by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association and the Historical Book Club of North Carolina. His other honors include the 2017 James Still Award for Writing in the Appalachian South, the 2016 Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award, and the 2012 Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction. Roberts grew up near Weaverville, NC. His family has lived in Madison County, NC, since the Revolutionary War. He is the director of the National Paideia Center in Asheville, NC.

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“something before knowing was strictly possible” (185), Stephen is employed by the US Department of Justice to find, in particular, a missing pregnant Irish lass named Ciara McManaway.

The federal agent from whom Stephen accepts his new assignment is blunt: “I think the fish ate her weeks ago” (6). He and Lucy suspect that some of the pious staff probably cooked Ciara in the laundry autoclave before she was served up to the fish.

They also share a narrow cot in the psychopathic ward “up under the roof of Building E on Island 3” (20). Lucy in her late thirties and Stephen in his forties, both are single, childless adults who despite having been damaged in earlier romantic liaisons seem to be willing to go through the fires of vulnerability again. After a forced abortion in England, Lucy had been told by her lover, the abortionist, that she would be unable to conceive another

child. Formerly married, Stephen has very recently moved away from 1000 Fifth Avenue where since 1918 he had been living with his lover, the photographer Anna Ullman, whom he met in the earlier novel.

If Lee Roberts would expect his son’s layered thriller to lead to any very clear answers, he would be shocked to see what Terry Roberts has done with both crime and romance in the hard-boiled form.

No one ever knows for certain what became of poor Ciara. The vicious and fanatical suspects in the disappearance of her and several other immigrants, plus one staff nurse, are not brought to court. The higher administration of Ellis Island remains largely in place. In the last three chapters, Stephen, badly injured, is having visions, talking to himself and an absent dog named King James on a train heading homeward to Western North Carolina.

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As My Mistress’ Eyes are Raven Black seeks its end in readers’ imaginations, the thrust and momentum of the narrative are very personal for Stephen and Lucy. Poor Ciara is gone and forgotten. It is clear that Nurse Lucy is the “mistress” of the title.

What do readers imagine the fate of the child they are expecting will be in Anderson Cove?

Given the horrible torment some immigrants faced at Ellis Island due to their physical and racial differences, how will this child fare in the upland South? The narrative gifts attributed to the recovering father must now be employed by his readers.

Visiting a library with Daddy is one of the earliest memories of L.C. Fiore, author of Coyote Loop, set in Chicago. The “About the Author” note at the end of the novel reports, “Even today, the world never quite opens out for him the way it does when

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he renews his library card – the surging sensation that suddenly, through books, anything is possible” (333).

Fiore’s raw 2008 Christmas season tour in and around the Chicago Board Options Exchange in the Loop is guided

by John Andrew Ganzi, or JAG, a “millionaire at twenty-six” (14) with a nasty gift of gab. He is a short, fat, greedy, parent of a high school basketball star named Jeanie or Jeans. Following her parents’ divorce when she was ten, Jeanie had lived with her mother until the late winter of 2008 as the economy in which her daddy is a hero is tanking. Just seventeen, she has moved in with him because her mother, a college professor of religion, was denied tenure at the University of Chicago and has moved to Florida. In the holiday chaos, will young Jeanie be able to meet Georgetown University women’s basketball coach New Year’s Day morning 2009?

In addition to madly loving his rambunctious daughter and trying in a broad spectrum of unseemly ways to be her sufficient, single parent, JAG has long experience as the father figure to the mostly male, aggressive traders who work with him in the pit where until now he spent most of his time. Indeed, before Jeanie came to live with him in his eighteenth-floor apartment, the trading pit was the center of JAG’s beastly world.

The clerk of the pit scene is Pasternak, a large Polish man.

Eager himself to become a

ABOVE L.C. (Charles) Fiore at the North

Carolina Literary Hall of Fame induction ceremony, Southern Pines, NC, 2018

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trader, while JAG prefers him as his experienced clerk, this financially underwater, lifelong friend from the old neighborhood drowns himself in the Chicago River after the office Christmas party, a boozing fest held at the Art Institute. When Jeanie and JAG attend Pasternak’s wake, options traders from the pit learn for the first time that JAG even has a daughter.

Lucas, now a Chicago policeman, is a former pit trader who left that job because he could not take the stress: “his soul was too pure for finance” (159).

In his public safety position he intervenes several times during Jeanie’s Christmas season with her father. This impressive black officer uses his position and his knowledge of JAG to keep as much adult and juvenile misbehavior as possible from destroying his former boss’s parenting experiment in its first weeks. It is Lucas, for instance, who kindly

comes to the pit to inform JAG about Pasternak. For reasons of his own, JAG soon makes up an elaborate false account of the suicide of his friend Pasternak.

JAG and Jeanie do have less fraught moments. While making pancakes for dinner, they explore the “practical application of mathematics to real-world issues” (109). Laptop open, Jeanie asks her father to “guess how many cattle are lost to coyotes every year?” (109). He flips pancakes while crunching numbers in his calculator brain.

The answer he comes up with is 0.20 percent of all US cows.

She checks the laptop and confirms that he is close; the online answer is 0.23 percent. “No big deal” (110). But then he goes into a brief lecture about percentages during which the smoke alarm goes off. When the smoke clears with part of their dinner burned to a crisp, JAG switches from numbers to just plain words. If

L.C. FIORE hosts the A440 Podcast and is the Communications Director for the North Carolina Writers’ Network. His work has been published in such venues as The Good Men Project, Ploughshares, Michigan Quarterly Review, New South, storySouth, and The Love of Baseball: Essays of Lifelong Fans (McFarland & Company, 2017). His novel The Last Great American Magic (Can of Corn Media, 2016) won Underground Book Reviews’ Novel of the Year award, and Green Gospel (Livingston Press, 2011) was First Runner-Up in the Eric Hoffer Book Awards in General Fiction.

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the number of cows killed by coyotes each year is roughly equal to the population of Ann Arbor, he adds, “you can work up some indignation that way” (110).

In subsequent references to coyotes, Board Options Exchange Chairman Sar reports that coyotes are killing cattle and other animals in South Dakota, JAG wonders if Jeanie can see coyotes from the “L” at night, and she asks him if he knew that coyotes mate for life.

This motif earns the novel its title when JAG addresses the whole options trading force in the cafeteria of the Exchange in the Loop.

His rambling speech, of course, is extemporaneous, like his entire life, but his serious topic is “Adapt or die” (284), code words for their becoming “a publicly traded company or risk losing this beautiful industry entirely” (283). He says in his characteristic idiom: “I tell you who I see when I look in the mirror. A fucking coyote. That’s right. And here’s why: coyotes adapt to their environment. City, country, woods – they don’t give a fuck” (287). The traders, despite the financial losses coming their

way, vote overwhelmingly to do as JAG has advised. He thinks to himself as the session concludes: “sometimes, it’s in your best interest to let yourself be fucked” (288). Happy holidays.

Remaining to be considered in Coyote Loop is the New Year’s Eve party JAG allows Jeanie and her underage friends to celebrate in the apartment he shares with her. She ends up naked with alcohol poisoning and is rushed to a local hospital’s emergency room. Lucas shows up there, as before, to help this most irresponsible parent and his child, whose alcohol level was 0.32. Her doctor says she will recover. Later that early morning, the cop hands JAG an order for him and his daughter to undergo rehabilitation. This order is on top of the alcohol counseling JAG has been receiving since his recent DUI. Finally allowed outside the hospital to smoke, JAG is improvising the next act of his tragic parenthood. A getaway for him and Jeanie. Lucas is speaking, but JAG is oblivious.

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Then daddy-o bolts away in pursuit of a lone coyote and follows it into and up to the top of a parking deck. All alone there this rich, desperate fortyfour-year-old Chicago addict greets the dawn of January 1, 2009, “like a new born-scavenger” (330).

How he gets safely down from there, where helpful Lucas has gone, when and how JAG gets Jeanie out of the hospital and to their trashed apartment: all these parenting roles are left up to chance and the readers’ imaginations. The coyote JAG was following is unaccounted for, too.

These two novels set respectively in New York City and Chicago show the creative energy of North Carolinians Terry Roberts and L.C. Fiore. In late 1920 an unborn and unexpected child is on its way to life in Western North Carolina. Seventeen-year-old Jeanie Ganzi of Chicago could as easily be on her way to an early grave as to basketball stardom in 2009 at Georgetown University. n

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TELLING HER STORY a review

by Sharon E. Colley Heather Frese. The Baddest Girl on the Planet. Blair Publishing, 2021.

SHARON E. COLLEY is Professor of English at Middle Georgia State University. Her most recent article, “Kaleidoscopic Swirls of Lee Smith,” was featured in NCLR 2021.

HEATHER FRESE, a resident of Raleigh, NC, has published fiction, essays, and poetry in Michigan Quarterly Review, the Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere, earning notable mention in the Pushcart Prize Anthology and Best American Essays. She earned her MFA from West Virginia University.

OPPOSITE Cape Hatteras Lighthouse

Heather Frese’s debut novel, The Baddest Girl on the Planet, is the 2021 winner of the Lee Smith Novel Prize. The novel tells the story of spirited Hatteras Island, NC, native Evie Austin and her struggles as a young mother and divorcee trying to make sense of her life.

A strong-willed young woman telling her own story is familiar to readers of late twentiethand early twenty-first century Southern women writers, such as Kaye Gibbons, Connie Mae Fowler, Jill McCorkle, and, of course, Lee Smith, whom the award honors. Smith’s female characters need courage to thrive in their challenging and at times impoverished environments. Frese’s book updates and offers an original contribution to this popular vein in Southern women’s fiction.

While most of the thirteen chapters (note unluckiness reference) use first person, three chapters, including the final, are in second person.

With many young writers, this choice can come off as experimenting for its own sake, but Frese’s effective usage helps readers empathize with the protagonist. Furthermore, the orally-inflected novel skillfully alludes to multiple text forms.

In Chapter Five, Evie tries to cope with the death of her aunt, “the one constant presence in my life” (67). She playfully organizes the narrative around rules from her imaginary Big Book of Funeral Etiquette: “Even if the deceased did indeed enjoy both fishing and the company

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of fishermen, waders are never appropriate funeral attire” (70).

Chapter Seven, “Postpartum, 2009,” is punctuated by letters to Dear Abby, while Chapter Ten, “An Open Letter to Patricia Balance, 2008,” is written as a class assignment during Evie’s only semester in college. The oral quality of the narrative slips seamlessly into these minitextual forms, creating a varied and lively book.

The novel’s title, The Baddest Girl on the Planet, is an ironic reference to former heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson, at times called the Baddest Man on the Planet. Evie begins the book by stating, “My husband is not the first man to disappoint me. That honor goes to Mike Tyson” (1). This combination of the spoken voice, sarcastic whimsy, and complicated feelings about men thread through much of Evie’s narrative.

The popular culture image of Mike Tyson is a touchstone for Evie. As a child, she met Tyson in passing during a vacation and proudly exaggerated their friendship at school, until he was accused of rape. Then her social stock plummeted. Frese adeptly returns adult Evie to the symbol of Tyson at several significant moments, to surprisingly gratifying effect.

Evie is entertaining from the start, but not appealing initially.

While she does not deserve the novel’s title, in the first chapter she seems mean-spirited and weary as she rationalizes an affair near the end of her short marriage. Much of this energy

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than Evie’s, and their lives significantly diverge when a pregnant Evie leaves college to marry while Charlotte continues through graduate school. Their

perspectives clash in Chapter Four, “Dominican Al’s Once-ina-Lifetime Honeymoon Extravaganza, Sponsored by Dominican Al’s Rum and Fine Spirits, 2014.”

Post-divorce, Evie has entered and won a free honeymoon in the Caribbean; she takes Charlotte as her “partner.” When Charlotte bemoans the resort’s exploitation of poverty-stricken islanders, Evie explodes: “You mean the way you colonized my island every summer? How come that never made you uncomfortable? How come

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you think you have the right to exploit the locals there but not here?” (58).

Evie is smart and perceptive; though Charlotte often provides her a rational, calming influence, Evie pushes Charlotte out of her comfort zones, intellectually and emotionally. The friendship is as significant as and longer lasting than Evie's romantic relationships.

Similarly, motherhood is a central theme in the book. As she narrates her experiences with her newborn, Evie is unsentimental and honest about her physical and emotional exhaustion. Her unromanticized description of life with a sometimes confusing, sometimes exasperating, but dearly loved child is convincing and moving. Her difficulties trying to sort out what is best for each of them, and how much motherhood requires of her, serve as an ongoing conflict in the book.

The Baddest Girl on the Planet is an engaging, clear-eyed, and emotionally nuanced story of a young woman’s twenties.

The text’s oral narrative voice, its use of humor and unexpected mixtures that work, as well as its exploration of perennial themes of relationships, friendship, and motherhood, provide a fresh voice engaging with familiar Southern themes. n PHOTOGRAPH BY SANDY CARAWAN, SANDY SHORES PHOTOGRAPHY

reflects the way she sees herself and her circumstances at this difficult moment.

By the end of the novel, we discover that Evie has believed too much local gossip about herself.

After acquiring a not completely deserved reputation in high school, followed by an unplanned pregnancy and a tumultuous early marriage, Evie embraced a negative view of herself. Eventually, the reader and Evie learn that she is kind-hearted, somewhat responsible, and not nearly as wild as advertised. The novel’s development allows the reader to see Evie’s growth in self-esteem and self-respect. In the penultimate chapter, Evie wanders around Las Vegas, hoping to find and “to get revenge on [Tyson] for ruining my life” (204). Tyson represents for Evie the men and things she has trusted only to feel betrayed. The rather tipsy but humorous pilgrimage enables Evie to finish processing negatives in her past and possibly move towards embracing a positive future.

Evie’s relationships with men, however, do not provide the only thematic material. Her friendship with Charlotte, who vacationed on Hatteras Island as a child, surfaces at important moments in Evie’s life.

Charlotte’s family is wealthier

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LOST IN THE MAZE OF GENRE a review by Dale Bailey Michael Amos Cody. A Twilight Reel: Stories. Pisgah Press, 2021.

Tim Garvin. A Dredging in Swann. Blackstone Publishing, 2020.

DALE BAILEY’s new short stor y collection, This Island Earth: 8 Features from the Drive-In, is forthcoming from PS Publishing. He is the author of eight previous books, most recently In the Night Wood (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018; reviewed in NCLR Online 2019), The End of the End of Everything: Stories (Resurrection House Press, Arche Books, 2015), and The Subterranean Season (Resurrection House Press, Underland Press, 2015). His story “Death and Suffrage” (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 2002) was adapted for Showtime’s Masters of Horror television series. He has won the Shirley Jackson Award and the International Horror Guild Award, and has been a finalist for the World Fantasy, Nebula, Locus, and Bram Stoker awards. He lives in North Carolina with his family.

In many ways, the question of genre shapes how we understand literary production in the twenty-first century. How do we pigeonhole the books we read? How do those pigeonholes influence the way we read and value them? These questions come into clear focus in the juxtaposition of Tim Garvin’s A Dredging in Swann, the first volume in a projected series of mysteries and police procedurals set in the fictional county of Swann, NC, and Michael Amos Cody’s collection of short fiction, The Twilight Reel, set in the Appalachian Mountains. Neither book is entirely successful (what book is?), but both possess significant merits. Taken together, they reveal some key insights into what we mean by genre as we begin the third decade of a new millennium.

Academic critics have conventionally seen genre in broad terms – poetry, fiction, drama – that can be broken down into more narrowly defined subgenres: the lyric poem is a different animal than the epic one, the realistic and naturalistic fiction of the late nineteenth century contrasts with the postmodern fiction written a hundred years down the line.

Marketing directors at publishing companies and bookstore buyers take a different tack. They shove books into commercial categories meant to goose sales. Got a hankering for spaceships and robots?

Check out the sci-fi shelves on Aisle 11. Feeling randy? You’ll

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find the bodice-bursting heavypanters over in Aisle 14. Looking for something gruesome?

Stephen King’s your man. You wanna know whodunnit? You’ll find Philip Marlowe over in Mystery, keeping company with Miss Marple. Genres, in short, are a marketing tool.

As for the quality stuff, you’ll find it over this way, walled safely off from the commercial ghetto. You can call it general fiction or mainstream fiction if you’re feeling generous, “literature” if you’re inclined to turn up your nose at lowly hackwork about elves and dwarves or pirates with a penchant for their lusty maiden captives. Lennon and McCartney may have extolled the life of the paperback writer, but it’s a losing game.

It goes without saying that as an academic and as a category writer myself, I have a dog in this fight. I don’t see a lot of difference between the “good” stuff and the “rubbish” the common folk read. And I think the juxtaposition of Garvin’s police procedural and Cody’s literary short stories drives my point home.

In A Dredging in Swann, Tim Garvin checks off the boxes of the police procedural with the requisite skill. Take Seb Creek, his hard-boiled protagonist, an off-the-shelf police detective who works the shady, gray areas at the edge of the law (he has a penchant for violence) and keeps pushing at the murder case that drives the book, kicking awake sleeping dogs his

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fellow cops are more inclined to let doze. He’s damaged goods (stints as a marine in Iraq have left him scarred with PTSD), but he insists on looking for true north in a world without a clear moral compass. He has a quirky side gig (he’s started a singing group called Pass the Salt to help heal other PTSD-damaged veterans) and a near-death experience. He has a budding romance with an artsy type (a local pottery instructor) whom he’d like to protect from the horrors of the world around him and the horrors that bloom in his own damaged heart.

And of course he’s as deeply rooted in place as the great detectives that precede him.

Philip Marlowe owns Los Angeles (except for Watts, which is Easy Rawlins’s turf). Spenser is to Boston as Dave Robicheaux is to the bayous of Louisiana.

Tess Monaghan polices the mean streets of Baltimore, Nick Stefanos those of Washington, DC (at least when he’s sober).

And when he’s not falling off the wagon himself, Matthew Scud-

der sees to the seedier parts of New York City. Seb Creek is a creature of the fictional Swann County, NC, but his world seems to be roughly contiguous to Camp Lejeune and its surroundings (one subplot involves the theft of a handful of Stinger missiles, another the poaching of Federally protected Venus Flytraps) and the puzzle he’s set to untangle is deeply rooted in the military culture of the nearby Marine base, the local hog-farming industry (you’ll never look at bacon the same way again), and the state’s long history of racism. Tangled family histories come into play. Axes are wielded to horrific effect.

Extortion, illegal gambling, and prostitution make cameos.

There’s even a gas chamber.

It’s a task to keep track of all this, but by the novel’s end Garvin winds it up skillfully.

One only wishes he had been more careful with his language.

At its best, the book’s prose is workmanlike; however, it too often veers off-track, wandering down little-trodden paths

A Dredging in Swann is the first volume in TIM GARVIN’s Seb Creek mystery series, and he has completed the second, currently titled “Four Evenings.” The author lives near Durham, NC. He also makes pottery and porcelain jewelry.

of the English language that are little trodden for good reason.

When Garvin describes a lawyer making “a mouth smile” (147), one can’t help wondering what other smiling options are available – nose smiles? ear smiles? what? More problematic is Seb’s penchant for portentous, quasipoetic musings. Wondering how he will respond when Mia, his potter paramour, asks him what he does for a living, Seb imagines saying, “I am the sandman. I put the past to sleep” (47).

One senses that Garvin thinks it’s a great line (he isn’t averse to repeating it, anyway), but it’s hard to imagine how Mia might respond to this pronouncement without a snicker. The line might – might – work in the context of a more lyrical prose style (but then again, it might not). In the context of Garvin’s windowpane thriller prose, however, it’s as out of place as a peacock crashing a party of house wrens. And the book hosts a chapter title that might have been plucked from a Dead Kennedys playlist: “A Really Pussy Heart Song” (102). These

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are only blemishes, however, on a solid, if unsurprising crime novel – a book that is enjoyable enough to read and that bodes well for enjoyable-enough Seb Creek mysteries to come.

For those novels to achieve their real potential, however, Garvin must do more than employ the conventional tropes of his genre; he must innovate within them. The pleasure of reading a fine novel in any commercial genre is not dissimilar to the pleasure one derives from reading a good sonnet: we enjoy the constraints of the form only to the extent the writer does something unique within those constraints. Frost tells us that writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net.

We watch the match not for the net, however, but for the artistry of the great player who can send a forehand rocketing over it to land an eighth of an inch inside the baseline. The same rule applies in commercial fiction of any genre. Readerly pleasures lie not in the constraints themselves, but in the writer’s skill at deploying them in fresh and illuminating ways.

ABOVE Malaprop’s Bookstore/Cafe in

MICHAEL AMOS CODY is also the author of the novel Gabriel’s Songbook (Pisgah Press, 2017). He grew up in the community of Walnut, within Madison County, NC. He has a PhD in English from the University of South Carolina and is a Professor in the Department of Literature and Language at East Tennessee State University.

Asheville, NC

The same thing is true of “literary” fiction, as Michael Amos Cody’s collection of short fiction, A Twilight Reel, makes clear. In “Overwinter,” the book’s third story, a cuckolded professor passes the long midnight hours of a blizzard with Joyce’s Dubliners – as one does, espe-

cially if one is a character in a collection of stories meant to trace the threads of meanness and grace woven through the deeply interconnected lives of a single town’s inhabitants. In short, the allusion is a bit too on the nose (it’s like being blindsided with a bottle of Bud Light in a bar fight, actually); Cody might have been better to dispense with it altogether. Failing that, he might have used Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, a specifically American story cycle that sets the bar somewhat lower. If, in the end, Cody doesn’t clear either hurdle, it hardly matters.

Who could?

He does give it a game shot, and in doing so he produces an

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So it goes.

The weakest stories here have a paint-by-numbers quality: they deliver your standard small epiphanies about the way you’d expect them to. “Conversion” presents us with a gang of small-town Pentecostals confronting the transformation of their divided church into a mosque. This goes about as well as one would expect.

Despite the friendliness of their new Muslim neighbors, the Pentecostals condemn them as “devils” up to “God-knows-what unholy business” (145) before racing off in their Dodge Rams and Chevy Silverados, flinging up rooster tails of invective as they go. The ones who stick

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around have trouble distinguishing between Native Americans and immigrants from the Indian sub-continent. They are prone to saying things like, “If ya’ll are gonna talk in front of me . . . you talk American” (147). Only matriarchal Big Granny looks on with mountain-granny wisdom as the “mosque’s crescent moon rose above the dark mountain ridges” with “a pulsing white star in [its] silhouette-black embrace.” The sight stirs her into voice. “Well, ain’t that something,” she says in the story’s final lines. “Reckon what it might mean, Livvy?”

(156). But we really don’t have to reckon very hard at all, do we? The story’s intent is laudable, to be sure, but it fails to COURTESY OF FLYLEAF BOOKS

occasionally acute portrait of small-town Appalachia. But the allusion is a pointed reminder that “literary” stories are every bit as genre bound as their commercial cousins. With his small epiphanies, Joyce laid down the court lines of the genre wherein thousands of MFA aspirants have set stories with small epiphanies of their own. Many such stories are quite good, of course; they’re the artful equivalent of low backhand smashes over the net. The less successful ones barely clear the net at all. In A Twilight Reel, Cody has a fair amount of both.

His Dublin, his Winesburg, OH, is Runion, NC. Runion is (or was) a real place, a mill town near Hot Springs that began to fail a century ago, when the land was timbered out.

The body blows of the Great Depression and World War II finished the job. Cody, however, imagines a present-day Runion and peoples it with an ensemble cast of small-town types. The preacher who encounters a hitch-hiking eccentric who may or may not be a demon (“The Wine of Astonishment”), for instance, turns up as a bit player in “The Loves of Misty Sprinkle,” the (unfortunately) eponymous hairdresser who endures his theme-appropriate sermon while pondering her romantic entanglements.

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push past self-congratulatory sentiment into the ambiguities and complexities of real-world human conflict. In challenging one set of stereotypes, it merely reinforces another one.

Other stories are drawn in similarly broad strokes. In “The Invisible World Around Them,” an insurance salesman struggles to accept his gay son, Mike, who is dying of AIDS. In “A Poster of Marilyn Monroe,” a lonely widower surrenders the solitary pleasures of fantasy for the possibility of love. Poor Mike turns up again in “A Fiddle and a Twilight Reel,” to face down smalltown bigotry against people with the “queer sickness” (250).

There’s nothing inherently wrong with such stories, of course. People do come to terms with their gay children. Widowers do fall in love. Small-town big-

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otry often does prevail. But Cody tends to lay his thumb heavy on the scale. Ben Frisby and his sons, the rednecks who burn a straw effigy of much-abused Mike in “A Fiddle and a Twilight Reel,” are comically broad hillbilly villains. If Cody depicted them with more nuance, the story would gain weight and power. The genius of Southern writers such as Faulkner and O’Connor lies in their capacity to depict even their most despicable characters with a complexity that inspires our compassion.

Abner Snopes in Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” is a violent monster, but underneath his fury one feels the frustration and despair of a man lashing out against a crushing social hierarchy. In O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” the murderous Misfit’s spiritual agonies are palpable.

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Cody’s stronger stories push hard against the boundaries of the “small epiphany” genre story and move powerfully in the direction of such complexities.

These tend to be longer stories, and their structural complexity reflects their more nuanced explorations of what we used to call the human condition. The two best pieces here are “Decoration Day” and “The Flutist.”

Both stories are built upon simple premises, but they employ shifting points of view to rove through time and space, setting up mirror mazes of revelatory reflections between worlds past and present and worlds waiting to be born. In “The Flutist,” the strongest of the two stories, Jubal Kinkaid, one of the flutists the title alludes to, travels to Runion State University to interview for the position vacated by the untimely death of beloved faculty member Brian Anderson, the second flutist in question.

Cody gives us a deft and amusing overview of the faculty job search process. But the story transcends its academic focus to become something larger and more significant. Jubal’s potential job offer unsettles his partner back home in Chicago, who isn’t at all sure he wants to move to a southern Appalachian town that might not welcome gay men (he’s right on that score, as poor Mikey can

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to argue with Frost that watching a writer wrestle with the constraints of form, whether it’s a sonnet or a space opera, can provide one of the genuine pleasures to be had from the creative enterprise. But it’s also clear that it’s not the only, or even the most important, pleasure. The lines drawn between and within genres – even “literary” genres that pretend they’re not genres at all – may showcase a writer’s dexterity in manipulating a set of conventions; but coloring inside the lines poses real dangers to writers who have the chops to step outside those lines and find new ways to tell new stories – or old stories in new ways.

Tim Garvin’s A Dredging in Swann is engaging enough, but

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it might be something more than an entertainment (to borrow Graham Greene’s term) if it pushed harder against the conventions that govern category mysteries – or pushed past them altogether. The weakest stories in Michael Amos Cody’s The Twilight Reel likewise highlight the dangers of adhering to the protocols of its literary predecessors. When Cody puts down Dubliners and unlocks the prison cell of the quiet epiphany, more of his stories, like “The Flutist,” will find wings. It’s a utopian fantasy, but indulge yourself for a moment: imagine a bookstore not cordoned off by categories, a library of dreams where you might reach up to any shelf on any aisle, take down a volume, open up its pages, and find anything, anything at all. n

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attest). This troubled relationship finds its echo in Anderson’s love affair with a European flutist named Anna, who chooses a few months with her lover in Amsterdam every year over marriage in America. Anderson’s longing for Anna outlasts her death; it’s reflected in his paternal affection for a talented young student who much resembles her – an affection that spills over into a tentative kiss hours before his unexpected death. These events are presented in the context of an academic department where personal friendships, marriages, and professional jealousies are held in careful equipoise. Cody, to his credit, resolves none of these complications. No one has an epiphany summing up the point at hand with a bit of tidy mountain lyricism. As the story draws to a close, we’re not even sure Jubal will get the job. But by the time his plane lifts off from Asheville and turns toward home, the story has unfolded for the reader a sense of the manifold complexities of love as it ranges over gulfs of time, geography, gender, and age. In the final paragraphs, the story, like Jubal’s plane, takes flight.

It’s a memorable piece in part because it resists the constraints of the “small epiphany” genre that so often dominates “literary” short fiction. It’s hard

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2021 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE FINALIST

BY J.S. ABSHER

Flower of Zeus He had seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen, five hundred donkeys, and very many servants.—Job 1:3 Trellising the one rose, admiring the surviving verbena, deadheading the marigold, and watering the solitary peony and four hellebore, 18 irises, 13 begonias (in pots and out), three pansies, spreading phlox and bugleweed; caring for one son (far), one stepson (near), two elderberries, two kinds of mint, one kind wife to cling to in pain and in peace, the Holy Spirit – all cultivated against ruin and despair: I ponder that man who loved his herds and flocks, his sons and daughters, secure in his sense of rightness, of a life of plenitude and joy.

J.S. ABSHER is a six-time finalist whose first full-length book, Mouth Work (St. Andrews University Press, 2016; reviewed in NCLR Online 2017) won the 2015 Lena Shull Book Competition sponsored by the North Carolina Poetry Society.

His work has been published in approximately fifty journals and anthologies, including Visions International, Tar River Poetry, and Southern Poetry Anthology, VII: North Carolina. He lives with his wife, Patti, in Raleigh, NC.

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Viola, 2008 (photograph) by Meredith Hebden

A single day took it all from him, by theft and murder, by fire from heaven, by a gust of wind. These days I fear one microbe, a fearful cop, an angry canceler’s lust to erase, one moment’s inattention at the wheel or in a friendship.

In prayers as short as breath, I offer up a bleeding heart, crushed muscadine and pink dianthus, flower of Zeus: Purge me from fear and anger, give me a cheerful face, a heart of gladness and tender mercies, wisdom’s beginning.

MEREDITH HEBDEN is a botanic/floral art photographer, a horticulturist, and the gardens manager for Van Landingham Glen at UNC Charlotte Botanical Gardens. She studied at the University of New Hampshire and Oregon State University, and she received a BS in Photojournalism with a Botany minor from Northern Arizona University. Since 1993, she has been photographer in residence at Meredith Hebden Photography in Charlotte.

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2021 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE FINALIST

BY PRISCILLA MELCHIOR

Confederate Memorial Day April 1958

Even the mules seemed tired, every bit as exhausted as the old men who drove the wagons, gray as the uniforms they wore to plod down Nash Street, heads bowed, solemn, righteous.

Children followed the parade, romping, teasing, summoned by the marching commands, the clop, clop of feet, utterly unaware of the reason for such a rare display of flags and guns, this march for soldiers in a cause long disgraced.

Few even paused to watch as they passed.

Only the young would follow across town, giggling, dodging that which mules left behind, half interested until, at last, the procession came to a halt at the graveyard, where faded headstones formed a battalion of memorials to men who took up arms against their country and called to their aging sons and grandsons to resurrect the past, cover it with a veneer of honor and pride and ignore the irony of Taps as it lifted on the April air and drifted over the hill.

PRISCILLA MELCHIOR is originally from Wilson, NC. She is now a four-time finalist for the James Applewhite Poetry Prize, and her poems have previously appeared in NCLR 2017, 2018, and 2020.

Throughout her career, she worked at various newspapers in eastern North Carolina, including The Daily Reflector. She retired to Highland County, VA, in 2011.

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALAN CRADICK ;COURTESY OF CAMERON ART MUSEUM

Boundless, 2021 (bronze sculpture, 16x7.5x3) by Stephen L. Hayes, Jr., Collection of Cameron Art Museum

STEPHEN L. HAYES, JR. was born in Durham and is an Assistant Professor at Duke University. He earned a BA at NCCU in 2006 and an MFA at Savannah College of Art and Design in 2010. He was the 2020 winner of the prestigious 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art. The artist’s work has been featured at the National Cathedral, Rosa Parks Museum, and Harvey B. Gantt Center for African American Art + Culture, among others. His art explores the African American experience, often incorporating historical context, as in his thesis exhibition, Cash Crop, which has been traveling and exhibiting for nearly a decade.

Stephen L. Hayes, Jr. was commissioned by CAMERON ART MUSEUM to commemorate the United States Colored Troops (USCT), who fought for freedom and won the Battle of Forks Road in Wilmington, NC, the current site of the museum. The pivotal battle led to the fall of Wilmington, location of the last seaport of the Confederacy, and soon after, to the end of the Civil War. The life-sized bronze sculpture features eleven of the 1,600 soldiers, many from the region, whose faces were cast from present-day African American descendants of the soldiers, reenactors of the battle, veterans, and community leaders. Boundless was unveiled at Cameron Art Museum on 13 Nov. 2021. Read and see more on the museum's website.

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Born Here (photography printed on canvas, 22x33) by Chris Foley

2021 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE FINALIST

BY BENJAMIN PRYOR

The Ladder Pa made a ladder from locust poles he cut in the pasture and hung it on the woodhouse wall. At twelve I propped it on the rancid tin and climbed the roof to view metropolis sheds of Hazelwood.

It seemed a trinket town of lockets and dead soldiers. Below, the creek was choked with leaves. The trees were close and I could jump and scale where squirrels nested, and take a baby in my hands and study hard its plum of wrinkled face. But then my Ma would holler me down; the rusted roof might cave. Sheepish, I’d take the ladder Pa had built back to its iron nails. I’d find another way to sing above the town I knew.

CHRIS FOLEY was born in New York City’s Greenwich Village. He earned a BFA in painting and sculpture at Georgetown University. He also attended the School of Visual Arts in New York and the Visual Information Technology graduate program at George Mason University. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at Michihito Ohtagaki Gallery in Tokyo; Troyer Gallery in Washington, DC; and the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD. He moved to the Asheville, NC, area in 2004, and is the owner and director of Haen Gallery in Asheville, as well as a second gallery location in Brevard, NC.

BENJAMIN PRYOR is a native of Maggie Valley who now lives in Orange County, NC. He earned a BA in English from UNC Greensboro and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Florida and now works in IT and educational assessment in Chapel Hill. His writing has appeared in, among other venues, Oxford American, Southern Review, Cimarron Review, and Best New Poets 2010, as well as in NCLR 2005 and 2016. This is his second time as a finalist.

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THE VITRUVIAN OUTLAW a review by Jessica Martell Neal Hutcheson. The Moonshiner Popcorn Sutton. Reliable Archetype, 2021.

JESSICA MARTELL is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Appalachian State University. She is the author of Farm to Form: Modernist Literature and Ecologies of Food in the British Empire (University of Nevada Press, 2020) and co-editor of Modernism and Food Studies: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Avant-Garde (University Press of Florida, 2019). Her work has also appeared in a variety of scholarly journals and collections. Her current research explores transatlantic whiskey-ways in the UK, Ireland, and Appalachia.

The Moonshiner Popcorn Sutton, a volume of photographs, essays, and interview transcripts, is part of Neal Hutcheson’s multidecade efforts to document the life and work of the famous Appalachian moonshiner Marvin “Popcorn” Sutton (1946–2009).

Preceded by several films by the author about Sutton, this beautifully presented book is billed on the back cover as “the full story of the man behind the legend.”

Hutcheson is an author, filmmaker, and producer affiliated with the Language and Life Project at NC State University. His diverse range of films records lesser known but significant aspects of North Carolina cultures in transition, from Core Sound fisheries to mountain music. He has an abiding interest in language and has particularly focused on the struggles to preserve Appalachian, Black, and indigenous dialects and languages in the state. Interviewing people in the western North Carolina mountains about dialect initiated a working relationship with Sutton early in his career. The ensuing years spent shadowing Sutton shaped multiple projects that sought to bring the complexities of Appalachian culture to unfamiliar audiences, while documenting aspects of mountain life that are often perceived as passing out of recognition.

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Sutton, a Haywood County native, remains one of the most famous moonshiners in the world. Known as an old-time craftsman with a dedication to quality, he became notorious as a colorful TV star who defied the law by running illegal shine on camera for a variety of documentaries, including Hutcheson’s early films. His operations straddled the border between North Carolina and Tennessee, a secluded area of the Blue Ridge that he knew intimately. The book touches on the important role that the Great Smoky Mountain National Park played in the gradual mainstreaming of moonshine, as tourists conditioned by stereotypical media representations of Appalachia came in search of “authentic” mountain culture. By “leaning-in” to the perceptions of outsiders (27), Sutton’s deliberately manufactured “hillbilly” aesthetic brought him fame and prosperity, and his iconic image left a legacy that continues to characterize legal moonshine marketing today.

Hutcheson’s early films were arguably vehicles that catapulted Sutton into the domain of reality TV. The Emmy-winning film The Last One (2009) and A Hell of a Life (2013) achieved cult status by introducing this Appalachian “outlaw” figure whose hostile relationship to

NEAL HUTCHESON is a filmmaker, author, and photographer. He has been the recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council Artist Fellowship, the North Carolina Folklore Society Brown-Hudson Award, and The North Carolina Filmmaker Award. His documentary films, including: Talking Black in America (with Danica Cullinan, The Language & Life Project, 2017), First Language: The Race to Save Cherokee (with Danica Cullinan, The Language & Life Project, 2015), both of which received regional Emmy awards. Core.Sounders: Living from the Sea (The Language & Life Project, 2013) also received an Emmy nomination.

Land and Water Revisited (Empty Bottle Pictures, 2021) aired on PBS. He has also adapted Gary Carden’s stage plays The Prince of Dark Corners and Birdell for the screen. He is a founding member of Empty Bottle Pictures. He lives in Raleigh, NC. Read more about Popcorn Sutton in an interview with Kerry Madden in NCLR 2008 and an essay by her in NCLR Online 2020.

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mainstream American culture was also an implied subject of the works themselves. Sutton later appeared in moonshiner programs on PBS, CMT, the History Channel, and the Discovery Channel. After being sentenced to jail time while suffering from cancer, Sutton’s suicide in 2009 cemented his reputation as a legendary folk hero who would rather die than submit to government authority. The pain of this loss inflects Hutcheson’s essays, which investigate the boundaries between the man himself and the public image.

Sutton was both “an archetypal mountain moonshiner, to the point of courting stereotype, and yet, remarkably real and present” (40).

Any documentarian seeking to represent marginal figures to a broader audience faces challenging ethical dilemmas and must guard against commodifying their subject. In this book, Hutcheson’s approach to depicting Sutton shows he is aware of the dangers. His introduction plus three essays labeled “Further Reading” take the time to outline some of the core concerns of the academic field of Appalachian Studies, wherein many writers have critiqued the exaggerated depictions of outlaws, hillbillies, and moonshine that court a national or global audience to the detriment of the region’s reputation. Hutcheson clearly states his belief that degrading Appalachian stereotypes are “a repulsive expression of inequitable power dynamics in the nation” (27). At the same time, what makes anything truly Appalachian is anything but clear, he notes. Sutton provides

an apt subject to illustrate the complexity of the debate over authenticity.

One way that this book aspires to realism is to present Sutton in his own voice through extensive interview transcripts.

The Sutton recorded here is humorous, barbed, and always seems to have the edge on those around him. From the rowdy threats on the signage of his property (“WHAT PART OF NO GOD DAM TRESSPASSING [sic] DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND . . . STAY OUT OR BE CARRIED OUT” [166]) to the carefully curated gravestone he commissioned several years before his death (“POPCORN SAID FUCK YOU” [167]), his X-rated gift of gab illustrates the signature quick wit undergirding his reputation, suggesting that the distinction between person and persona is smaller than one might think. The photographs help color myriad anecdotes and exhibit Sutton’s style.

Even as he intends to tell the “unvarnished facts” about the man he knew, Hutcheson describes the difficulty of leaving behind popular perceptions about him (29). His choice to make this struggle transparent lends the book its credibility, although some shortcomings are on display as well. The ratio of space devoted to evincing the large, boisterous public persona, especially by letting him speak so much, overshadows some unsavory details that linger long after the all-caps noise, exemplified above, have faded.

According to the author, Sutton was forthcoming about his ancestry but never discussed his own numerous family ties: “His life as a moonshiner was in fact

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tightly interwoven with a secret history of relationships, populated by women and children who have (for the most part) chosen to remain anonymous” (105). Sutton was a negligent father who denied his paternity or remained estranged from most of his children. In Daddy Moonshine (2009), his daughter’s account of failing to know her famous father, Sky Sutton writes, “He may be a phenomenal moonshiner but sadly he’s a complete loss as a father” (qtd. on 105). Without violating anyone’s anonymity, I wonder what else could have been done to expand the discussion of these less-than-heroic realities. What would it look like, post #MeToo, for a weighty contribution to the public record like this book to actually treat these “tightly interwoven” stories as central features of Sutton’s life and legacy (105), rather than as intriguing sidebars?

To his credit, Hutcheson does include them, acknowledging that not everyone who knew Sutton enjoyed his generosity like he did.

Yet the choice to devote so much of the text to Sutton’s own words has the effect of omitting the fallout from the discomfort, and even trauma, his choices must have caused to those around him. The glimpses that this book provides into the domestic danger and turbulence of Sutton’s secret personal life – such as his insistence on showing polaroids of himself performing oral sex on an unidentified woman to anyone who entered his stillhouse, “whether they want[ed] to see them or not” (144–45) – creates an unsettling backdrop that, for many, will overshadow the masculinist focus on craft.

In contrast to so many accounts of Sutton, this book

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* Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford UP, 1973) 43; Mark Essig, “[Pop]Corn from a Jar,” Gravy 24 Sept 2015: web.

vate, he shared another opinion: They’ll make it as long as water runs downhill. Somebody will” (31). In other words, moonshine will always be made, even as it evolves and changes hands.

The book instead implies what is really gone – the time before reality TV and other oversimplified, short-form media came to dominate the public’s consumption of regional cultures in transition from past to present.

One valuable claim is to position Sutton not as an artifact of a bygone era, but as a modern man, though one could argue that his performativity is thoroughly postmodern. One striking feature of this book as artifact is a bonus print, also included on the title page and etched into COURTESY OF RELIABLE ARCHETYPE ILLUSTRATION

takes a more measured approach to his legacy. If some fans are moved to declare Sutton “one of the last real men left in the world!!!,” or see his law-defying trade (ironically) as a “stand against the law to take care of family and neighbors,” Hutcheson contextualizes their remarks as romanticized notions from those who view Appalachia as the “embodiment of the best of traditional America” (qtd. 188). Scholars have long challenged such misunderstandings. The great rural theorist Raymond Williams warned against glorifying any lost Golden Age, which he famously called “a myth functioning as a memory.” As Mark Essig writes, the “mood-altering substance Popcorn peddled was not so much ethanol as an ersatz nostalgia.”* Yet nostalgia is hard to shake. Even the first preface of this book, written by David Joy, mourns the loss of a golden age of old timers, declaring Sutton’s Appalachia “a culture on the brink of extinction” (17).

To declare it a loss is to deny the privilege of modernity to a region in flux – a region that is still very much alive, even as its identities multiply, its composition diversifies, and its people produce new, more inclusive cultural forms to market to curious outsiders.

Hutcheson resists Joy’s peddling of nostalgia by ending his own introduction with a direct contradiction of the extinction thesis. Although Sutton “made a lot of noise about being the last one,” the author notes, “in pri-

the cover, that depicts Sutton as Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man.” In the famous sketch, da Vinci proposes the alignment of the human form with the workings of the universe, centering humanity in Renaissance visions of the cosmos.

While such an image romantically exaggerates Sutton’s heroism, it also suggests his control over his own destiny. The book underscores Sutton’s complicity

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“Vitruvian Man,” by Ruby Hutcheson

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with, and enjoyment of, his own commodification; for instance, he learned to dress, adapt his moonshine still, and otherwise embody a hillbilly from the Snuffy Smith cartoon strip in his local newspaper. Sutton delighted in the “bankable reputation” produced by his notorious image, and it is significant that he licensed his name over to a legal distillery venture before he ended his life (170), allowing him to participate in the coming commodification of moonshine in its legal form.

For fans of Hutcheson’s moonshine films, this book could feel redundant, as many of the most intriguing moments in the transcripts have already been included in them. But the book offers a valuable entry for those new to Sutton’s practice because the author contextualizes the figure of the hillbilly and the public image of moonshine with vital scholarly research.

For those who are familiar with Sutton and wish to learn more about his last arrest, trial, and eventual suicide, Hutcheson’s postscript, inflected by personal memories and insider knowledge, provides a rich account of Sutton’s last months and some insightful analysis of his legacy.

If Sutton “came to embody . . . the pride of the downtrodden, a class not restricted by ethnicity or nationality” for a global legion of admirers (191), then this book offers an invitation to reexamine a seemingly universal story for the very real, very specific complexities beneath the heroic veneer. n

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A TALE OF TWO SOUTHS a review by Fred Hobson Ed Southern. Fight Songs: A Story of Love and Sports in a Complicated South. Blair, 2021.

FRED HOBSON is Lineberger Professor of Humanities, Emeritus at UNC Chapel Hill. His numerous books include the memoir Off the Rim: Basketball and Other Religions in a Carolina Childhood (University of Missouri Press, 2006; reviewed in NCLR 2007). His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times Book Review, The Times Literary Review, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, and other publications.

ED SOUTHERN is the Executive Director of The North Carolina Writers’ Network. He has authored and edited three previous books: The Jamestown Adventure: Accounts of the Virginia Colony 1605–1614 (John F. Blair, 2004), Voices of the American Revolution in the Carolinas (John F. Blair, 2009), and Parlous Angels: Stories (Press 53, 2009). He has also written for storySouth, the North Carolina 10x10 Festival, South Writ Large, The Dirty Spoon, and NCLR, among others. He was the 2015 recipient of the Ethel N. Fortner Writer and Community Award. He lives in Winston-Salem, NC.

I suppose you could call Ed Southern’s Fight Songs a holistic book. It’s a narrative about football and basketball, about the joys and perils of excessive fandom, but it’s also a book about Southern history, politics, regions (and their differences), race, class, culture in a broader sense, and – toward the end – Covid.

It is also a memoir and one that turns into a study of two states, North Carolina and Alabama, and two universities, Wake Forest University and the University of Alabama – two institutions, athletically speaking, rarely mentioned in the same sentence. It is in this respect that memoir comes into play. Southern is a Demon Deacon who grew up largely in Winston-Salem, who was a Deacon fan as a child and then went to Wake Forest. He happened to meet and then marry a young woman from Birmingham, a graduate of Alabama who was a rabid Crimson Tide fan. Stricken at first with Bama envy – the nation’s leading football program over the past decade – he becomes in time an Alabama fan, but he is aware that his own school is the smallest, and one of the weakest, of all Power Five schools (although with a recent record of modest success).

His wife graciously becomes a Deacon fan as well; being so different in every way, the two schools are in no way rivals.

But the story Southern tells is about much more than the tale of two universities; it is the

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story of the differences between two states, two regions – and the culture of each. Alabama has always been conservative, North Carolina is – or was until recently – reputed to be progressive. Beyond that, Alabama lives and dies with football, North Carolina with basketball. In fact, the entire Southeastern Conference, to which Alabama belongs, is obsessed with football; the Atlantic Coast Conference, to which Wake Forest University (as well as Duke University, UNC, and NC State University) belongs, is obsessed with basketball.

(Though Southern doesn’t push it further, the reader might: only the northernmost part of the SEC, at least until recently, has cared much about basketball; only the southernmost part of the ACC, traditionally speaking, has been passionate about football – which, in the age of conference realignment, might prompt one to propose an ACC swap of Clemson and Florida State to the SEC for Kentucky and Vanderbilt).

But, as I’ve suggested, Southern’s book is about much more than sports. He understands the South well, drawing on a number of Southern historians and commentators – chief among them W.J. Cash, who, he proudly points out, is an alumnus of Wake Forest. Southern is keenly aware of the larger issues in college sports – the exploitation of players who make millions for the universities that give them scholarships and who usually get little in the

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ABOVE W.J. Cash’s senior portrait and bio in

the Wake Forest University 1922 yearbook

way of an education in return.

He examines, as well, the recent assertiveness of black athletes, particularly in the powerful football programs of the Deep South – and the extent to which these athletes have brought along their white teammates, who join them in racial protests, and finally even coaches like Alabama’s Nick Saban and Clemson’s Dabo Swiney, who until recently had hardly been seen as passionate spokesmen for social justice Southern’s book is not perfect. His goal of inclusiveness means he often juggles too many thematic balls, which can lead to a narrative that is fragmented in places. Or to change the metaphor, at times he bites off more than he can chew, or at least can fully digest. But his is a readable and entertaining book as well as a valuable contribution to the current debate over sport and society. And as he approaches the end, he returns to the passionate fandom that had motivated him in the first place. Two years ago, early in the season, as he sits with his wife in Bryant-Denny Stadium looking at an Alabama game, word comes to him that Wake Forest has beaten a moderately good Boston College team and that number one Clemson, looking vulnerable, had barely beaten Carolina, winning by a single point in Chapel Hill: “There in Tuscaloosa I’d begun to dream: the Deacons,

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come November, rolling undefeated down to South Carolina . . . into Death Valley, facing the undefeated Tigers for the Atlantic Division title and a spot in the ACC Championship game” (247).

And if the undefeated Deacs beat the undefeated Tigers, they might be in the College Football Playoff. “Would the mighty Demon Deacons have a shot at a national championship? Would they face – for the first time ever – Alabama?” (248).

It was not to be, of course, But wasn’t it nice to think so.

Or so I wrote before the 2021 season began. But now – as I write in mid-November of 2021 – most of Southern’s dream has indeed come true. A chance in a hundred: the Deacons find themselves in their finest season in a century. Almost undefeated Wake Forest (only one loss, by three points, to the despised Tar Heels), the smallest of all Power Five colleges and universities (and over the years arguably the least successful), indeed finds itself in first place in the ACC and heading down to Clemson, twice recent national champions, to play for a spot in the ACC title game. The Deacs almost had a shot at the national title, but that part of the dream would not come true. Still, their record at this point is as good as Alabama’s, superior to Clemson’s, and the author must take some satisfaction in almost calling it perfectly. The football gods will take it from here. n

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NATANIA BARRON WINS 2021 MANLY WADE WELLMAN AWARD in July 2021 in Winston-Salem, NC, at ConGregate, a science fiction convention.

The author of novels, novellas, and short stories, Barron has a bachelor’s degree in English from Loyola University in Maryland and a master’s degree in medieval literature from UNC Greensboro. Queen of None, she says, is the “thesis [she] should have written.”1 In it, she reimagines the tale of Anna Pendragon, King Arthur’s sister. The book follows Anna Pendragon’s journey back to Carelon (Barron’s version of Camelot) after she is widowed and the adjustments to life and troubles in King Arthur’s court. A sequel, Queen of Fury, is coming out in 2022.

Barron, originally from Massachusetts, lives in Chapel Hill, NC, and works as a Global Marketing Director in clinical research.

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Natania Barron received the 2021 Manly Wade Wellman Award for her 2020 novel, Queen of None, published by Vernacular Books.

Founded in 2013 by the North Carolina Speculative Fiction Foundation, the Manly Wade Wellman Award honors and recognizes North Carolina’s own speculative fiction writers. The award was presented to Barron

1

Quoted from the author’s website.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: THE PAUL GREEN PRIZE sponsored by the Paul Green Foundation To inspire scholarship on the works of North Carolina’s preeminent playwright, the author of The Lost Colony, the Paul Green Foundation has provided a $250 honorarium for the author of the best Greenrelated content accepted for publication in NCLR. Submit for prize consideration using the Flashbacks category in Submittable, unless your submission is relevant to the next issue’s special feature section theme. Submissions will be blind reviewed by appropriate Green experts.

Scholars interested in this opportunity might consider applying for an Archie K. Davis Fellowship for funds to visit the Southern Historical Collection at UNC Chapel Hill, where the Paul Green Papers are located (Davis fellowship applications are due by March 1 each year).

Upon receiving the Wellman Award at the ConGregate science fiction convention, Barron credited John Hartness and Falstaff Books, and the group that has really invigorated my career when, about five or six years ago, I wasn’t sure I was going to keep writing. . . . So, if you’re a writer, if you feel that you’re struggling, if you want to tell stories, find your community, find your people, you never know what is there – and that’s one of the things I love so much about being here, and being part of this. We’re so incredibly lucky.

Thank you to everybody.2

Barron may not be a native North Carolinian, but these remarks suggest she has figured out what makes the writing community of the Writingest State so special. Welcome to North Carolina and congratulations to her. n

2

Quoted from “Announcing the Winner of the 2021 Manly Wade Wellman Award,” North Carolina Speculative Fiction Foundation, WordPress, 15 July 2021: web.

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Miscellany New Voices

by Margaret D. Bauer, Editor In this section, enjoy two honorees from the Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize competitions.

The winning essay will be in the print issue, due out this summer, so make certain your subscription is up to date. A subscription allows you to submit your own essay, as well as poetry in the James Applewhite Poetry Prize competition. Note that submissions are now open for the 2022 Albright CNF competition. Get your essay in by the March 1st deadline, and you might find your writing in NCLR next year. Both Emily Dunlap Carter, whose submission last year was selected by final judge Michael Parker for second place, and Eve Odom, selected for Honorable Mention, are new to our pages, and Eve reports that this is her first publication. You'll find another excerpt from Emily's “Sandspurs and Briars” in our first fall issue of NCLR Online, where we’ll also publish finalists from the Doris Betts Fiction Prize competition.

I remind you here that the North Carolina Miscellany section of our issues allows us to publish interviews with and essays on new writers – and not so new but previously uncovered by NCLR. Submissions of such material are open year round and are likely to be contenders for the John Ehle or Randall Kenan Prize, the former recognizes material about writers who have not received the critical attention their work deserves, the latter, our newest award, goes to the best content on a new writer. In either case, both critical essays and interviews qualify.

Lastly, please see the back cover for information about giving to NCLR. We appreciate our donors, whose generosity will help us to expand the staff support as we expand all that we do to preserve and promote North Carolina’s rich literary history. n

134 Sandspurs and Briars, I an essay by Emily Dunlap Carter 140 Semi Shallow an essay by Eve Odom

art by Peter Butler

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE 6 n

Writers Who Teach, Teachers Who Write

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Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

an interview, poetry, creative nonfiction, book reviews, and literary news

poetry, book reviews, and literary news

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SECOND PLACE, 2021 ALEX ALBRIGHT CREATIVE NONFICTION PRIZE

BY EMILY DUNLAP CARTER with photographs by the author

SANDSPURS AND BRIARS, I Red and Green, Reappraised

In the mid-1930s my daddy and Uncle Max were gifted wool caps. I think Uncle Daniel received one too and I think his was green, but he and his cap don’t star in this story. Daddy got a blue cap and Uncle Max a red one.

My daddy was the knee baby. His brother Max arrived just shy of Daddy’s second birthday, robbing him of the cherished spot of the youngest. With three older sisters, an older and younger brother, Daddy felt unremarkable as the fifth kid, the nothing special middle boy. He begrudged Max’s birth in a way that only siblings can, both loving and resenting the very air that Max breathed.

It’s hard on a person in a family bent toward typecasting and branding to create distinction without clear birthright. In spite of his good looks, charm, smarts, and personality, when it came to his family of origin, Daddy felt he was an extra in the movie.

My six-year-old father wanted the red cap.

Along came a day when cap-clad Daddy and Uncle Max were chopping kindling at the wood pile. Daddy snatched the red cap from Uncle Max’s head and axed it. He hacked and spliced and severed and slashed leaving remnants of red across the wood yard, a woolen massacre.

Hearing Max’s cries, Grandma came running.

Since it was the ’30s, and I know how my family rolls, I suspect a switch or belt entered the crime scene. Daddy was forced to surrender his blue cap to Max. Though left capless, this justice was fine by him. As long as Uncle Max didn’t have the red one, Daddy was happy.

This same plotline went down a few decades later between two of my three brothers, the middle and youngest boys. A coveted Matchbox was totaled in a single car accident involving a kid-size Converse sneaker.

There was a similar lack of remorse with the Matchbox incident. The theme of if I can’t have it, then you can’t have it runs deep and wide in my family. There’s something about envy that bores flesh-eating wounds into the heart, causing us to hew mohair and stomp metal.

It’s been my personal experience through lots of lessons (some painful) that it is both good and bad news that I don’t always get what I deserve. If others have what I desire, that’s on me to work to gain what I want. Others aren’t taking my share.

It hurts my heart to think that my daddy didn’t feel special enough in his family. He was never happier than in fellowship with his siblings, yet some deep-seated sentiment of inequity drove him to lop at the confidence of his children and struggle to extend grace and joy for the success of those around him. That little red cap didn’t die in the wood yard.

It rose again and haunted much of his life.

My daddy was a good man and I loved him.

This isn’t about him not being enough or having enough in my eyes. It’s about his own view of himself and how that lens distorted the scenery around him.

Not all that is wrecked in the wake of envy is tangible. Envy can injure relationships through its henchmen: gossip, snarking, and overt and

EMILY CARTER is a lifelong North Carolinian. She grew up in the Sandhills, went to Appalachian State University, and currently lives in Beaufort with her husband, John. She is a board member of The Writers’ Exchange and a contributor to Haunted Waters Press. Read more sketches from “Sandspurs and Briars” in the fall issue of NCLR Online 2022.

Final judge Michael Parker selected Carter’s “Sandspurs and Briars” for second place, describing it as “vignettes assembled . . . from the wispiest of memory or detail . . . developed, without evident exertion, and with great economy, into nuanced observations about family, time, memory, landscape and language.” Parker remarks that Carter “has brought the world, lively and flawed, to us.”

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IF I CAN’T HAVE IT, THEN YOU CAN’T HAVE IT The theme of

runs deep and wide in my family.

subtle tearing down. Happiness and praise can be withheld, allowing doubt to take root. Omission and commission cards can be played.

Hotel Envy has an easy registration process.

As comedian James Gregory poignantly puts it, “If you’ve been married nine times, hell, it might be you.” Less energy is required to point fingers, place blame, and topple others onto their sides, subtracting significance or relevance. It’s harder to aspire toward the best version of yourself and even harder still to reflect on why you haven’t arrived at your own personal dream destination.

In my experience, jealousy has many cousins to whom these ideas also apply: anger, resentment, rage, petulance, and the beat goes on.

I learned a phrase this week, cognitive reappraisal: choosing to be grateful, choosing to replace negative with positive, choosing to rewire thinking, crowding out the bad by seating the good first. I like this law of reaction capacity. I control the door.

I decide what gets across the threshold.

The first time our family went to Disney World, my oldest daughter was six. When we were walking through Epcot’s World Showcase, which features eleven countries, Snow White entered the park from a side character door right in front of us. Riley’s eyes grew big and she exclaimed, “I didn’t know Snow White lived in China!”

My mind went into silent Mom overdrive.

That isn’t really Snow White. We’re at Epcot in Orlando, Florida. Snow White lives in the Enchanted Forest and that is definitely not in China.

A few seconds passed and Riley reset her sixyear-old self, “It’s okay, really, I’m happy for her. It’s not what I thought, but China’s a nice place to live.”

Riley righted the moment without lingering in the negative, and off we went to Germany.

Even when it’s not what I thought, even when I don’t get the red hat, even when I feel or want something different, even when another’s values or opinions or decisions clash with my own, I choose how to appraise and reappraise and I’m choosing abundance and happiness.

Now, that’s a nice place to live.

Peanut and Them

While my siblings and I dabbed Solarcaine on sunburns and relished the extravagance of window unit air conditioning in the efficiency apartment rental, my dad settled himself on the Indian Beach fishing pier. The second week of August was our designated yearly vacation time, even though the North Carolina heat beat down with abandon. My daddy, transformed nocturnal, dressed in angling armor of long pants, long-sleeved shirt, and fishing boots, accessorized with tackle box, thermos of Sanka, and carton of Pall Malls. He baited hook and cast line to set the right ambiance. The rod and lures and occasional fish he caught (and gave away) served as props for his all-nighters. His goal was to meet friends and swap tales. His favorite part of the family vacation happened away from his kinfolk.

On one of these summer evenings, Daddy met a man and his four-year-old grandson. As conversation unfolded over spin-casts and surf, Daddy asked the young boy where he was from.

“You know where Peanut and them live?” the boy inquired.

Having never met the people before, Daddy said no, he didn’t believe that he knew where Peanut and them lived. Undeterred by the response, the boy, plowed forward with his explanation, “Well, we live down the road a piece from their house.”

I always loved this story. For years, it was a memory reference for my family when something was obvious to one of us but not the rest or when someone was making the world all about them. It makes me grin just thinking about that little boy and his geography reference wrapped around an individual named Peanut.

This can be the way sometimes, not considering how knowledge and understanding build on experience and personal bandwidth to establish footing in the human equation. Big fish, small pond, small fish, big pond, big fish, big pond, microcosm, Mississippi River.

The ability and willingness to compare and contrast impacts the view both in the world and of the world. While I have my own personal Peanuts,

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IT MAKES ME GRIN just thinking about that little boy and

HIS GEOGRAPHY REFERENCE wrapped around an individual named Peanut.

I can’t expect the universe to know them. It’s endearing in a four-year-old, not in a full-grown adult. It’s up to me to bring myself to the world, lest I risk suffering from terminal uniqueness, causing a long, slow decline towards short-sightedness and need-to-be-right-ness.

I grew up in a family with five kids. We had one bathroom. Many fishies, mudpuddle. It didn’t matter so much how I felt about things as our modus operandi was wrapped around service and volume. I don’t feel as though I was slighted, and my parents often even called me by the correct name. I was part of something bigger and that meant giving and taking. We were a school of fish and in that school, there was indeed a teacher imparting knowledge and wisdom.

I learned that as a contributing Homo sapien, I was tasked to have confidence in myself, yet

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not be selfish. I was asked to stand my individual ground while considering the greater good of others. I was taught to consider both the significance and teeny-ness of my spot on the planet.

I was expected to take responsibility seriously but find humor in my mistakes. I was taught to know that I am neither fully good nor fully bad.

I learned about the tipping scale of balance and the purposeful practice of common-sense type moderation.

I don’t know what the grandpa of the little boy said after the exchange about “Peanut and them.” I like to think he chuckled and gently reminded the boy that they were from Sanford or Kinston or Robbins or Martinsville. I like to think that he lovingly coached the boy to see beyond what he had always known and interface with others on broader terms. The truth is that I don’t know what happened next, and based on what I observe lately in our world, there are situations where if we don’t know or resemble the same Peanuts or swim in the same watering holes, then we ain’t going to be friends.

I’m complicit in not keeping the covenants that I learned as a youngster. It’s hard for me not to stereotype based on a litany of judgments that have been canned and sealed inside me, even whether or not you’re left-handed and your birth order, as though my learning these two things about you would allow me to diagnose your personality and predict your behavior. And if I happen to be right, my beliefs are reinforced, paving the short road to my little pond, where I live near Peanut and them.

I am going to be bold here. It’s easy to take a side and hunker down in a position. It’s the force of the common mind to backstroke in the familiar and fail to interrogate authentic reality. I am talking about ethnicity and politics and sexuality and religion and gender. I am talking about the things that make me uncomfortable and the things I don’t understand. I am talking about it being okay for people to be different from me and look different from me and think different from me, not just from a place of tolerance but with a spirit of respect.

North Carolina Miscellany

It’s one thing to start out down the road from Peanut and them, it’s quite another to grow up and move.

Whale, ocean.

The Fringe

I grew up in the North Carolina jungle. My parents’ farm, incased by over a thousand acres of protected land called the James Goodwin Forest, made our world feel limitless. NC State botany students studied the trees and plants, and Army soldiers stationed at nearby Fort Bragg maneuvered over the creeks and terrain of Mr. Goodwin’s donated land. While we respected those who visited, to us, those woods were ours. They served as the venue for education and play for my siblings, cousins, and me.

At the risk of sounding mushy and emoting like a bad country song, those were the days of backroads, pickup trucks, tractors, crops in the field, and Mama. They were the days of party lines and encyclopedias. It wasn’t all good old – , but it wasn’t all bad old – either.

We didn’t have central heating and air, and you might describe the Sandhills of North Carolina as a geography that is prone to gnats and home to mosquitos. Opening a window could lure in a breeze, but there was an entomological cost for that air flow. There were times in my childhood that things weren’t comfortable, and that was okay. I learned patience with discomfort, and perhaps that lessened my natural bend towards human selfishness.

In recent years, the road that I grew up on has become vogue with the rich folk. They have turned what used to be working farms into showplaces with koi ponds and other water features, edged by high-dollar split rail fencing. They have given the farms kitschy ranch names and although I don’t know these people, they annoy me.

A real estate agent asked to list the old homeplace, telling me it was a sought-after part of the county. She referenced the road that I grew up on as “the fringe.” I’m wise to the ways of the fringe, thank you very much. I lived on that other side of nowhere during the ’70s gas crisis when my parents squeezed dollars and measured miles.

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We quarantined because we couldn’t afford the fuel. I wouldn’t sell that piece of land because, while complicated, it’s a tinder box of memories.

The writer Willa Cather said that there are two main themes in literature that relate to the human condition. One is the adventure away and the other is the journey back home. Both of these themes have been important to me. I wouldn’t be able to lift either over the other in terms of soulshaping significance. One revealed that I didn’t know what I was missing until I found it, and the other illuminated that I didn’t know what I had.

Adventure out and journey back have made me the person I am. I spent most of my formative years plotting my fringe escape and most of my adulthood circling back to its embrace.

At the risk of sounding mushy and emoting

LIKE A BAD COUNTRY SONG,

those were the days of backroads, pickup trucks, tractors, crops in the field, and Mama.

As a child, I had a pony named Calico and he was the best horsey who ever lived. He was inclined to inflate his belly when I saddled him with the sole intent of sucking it in later to tumble me off and beat hooves for the barn. He also liked to reach back when my feet were snug in the stirrups and bite me. These behaviors were part of our relationship, and I didn’t mind that much. I deduced that things would be different when Calico and I were discovered by the circus. He would behave better, and I would be recognized as a star.

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I spent a lot of time practicing my acts. I’d never been to the big top or knew much about what circus life might be like outside of what I’d seen in books or the carton of animal crackers. I just thought that Calico and I had a real shot at hitting the road as performers. Snaggle-toothed and six years old, I dreamed large.

I was born when kids were sent outside to run out their energy and had to

IMAGINE THE ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES.

I broke my arm that summer attempting to stand on Calico. He was bareback, and I was barefoot, and for about three seconds, we were pure circus magic.

At seven, I decided that Calico and the increased parental supervision were holding me back, and I turned my attention toward training as an acrobat on my swing set. Boy, was I some kind of flyer, I was ninja before ninja was cool. Then I broke my shoulder.

My dad stopped my budding career on the way home from the bone setting. He wasn’t angry. He just outlined the fact that my greatest show on earth had come to an end. He was clear in his instruction that if I broke any more bones, I would be banished to a life inside. It was bad enough I was being made to take piano lessons and wear a dress to church. Imagine not being able to be outside.

STEPHANIE WHITLOCK DICKEN, who designed this essay and the Mott and Albright award stories, has been working with NCLR since 2001, serving as Art Director 2002–2008.

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After the Ringling Brothers left my life, I took up other aspirations. I was an engineer, damming creeks. I was a soldier after my brother and I found an abandoned military canteen in the woods. I was a designer and a chef in the makeshift playhouse that I bordered with old brick and stocked with orphaned pots and pans. I was a bobsled racer, as I flew down the hill in my wagon. I was an Olympic cyclist, measuring the miles on my blue bike. At nighttime, I was John Boy Walton, recounting my day’s adventures in a spiral bound notebook.

When I left for college in the North Carolina mountains, I had never before traveled to a state that didn’t neighbor my own. I had a library card and an imagination, and aside from joining the circus, I thought I could do or be most anything.

My admission ticket was punched with dreams, access, and hard work.

If I had been born thirty years later, I am confident that I would have been medicated for hyperactivity and restlessness. But I got lucky. I was born when kids were sent outside to run out their energy and had to imagine the endless possibilities. Google hadn’t been born yet, so my mind couldn’t veg-out and wait for search engine results.

I had to break bones and figure it out.

I was a 4-Her. I can read a map and use a compass. I believe I could forage for food and scrounge for water if I were trapped in the wilderness. I could find a way to create fire and scare off creatures that wanted to make a snack of me.

I could study the lay of the land and watch the weather patterns to hike out to safety. I know how to identify vegetation and how to climb a tree. If it weren’t for the naked part, I’d be a good candidate for Naked and Afraid.

I learned foundational, critical thinking skills in the James Goodwin Forest. I have friends with similar skills who grew up in the city. They learned life lessons on bus routes and subways. They learned them delivering newspapers and negotiating bridges on bicycles. They learned from living life outside of their bodies, outside of the screen.

I have a smart phone and I like the Internet.

Netflix is my friend and I use social media. I don’t plan to adorn myself in camo and get off the grid.

I’m just wondering about the power of wandering.

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Of course, there are apps now that lock me out of my phone, keep me on task, report my screen time and productivity. My watch suggests that I might not be breathing. The very thing that is controlling me is suggesting ways for me to be less controlled, as if the off button weren’t a viable solution.

Siri proposes where I might have dinner and Audible recommends books I might like. I appreciate this fine level of service, but how slothful have I become if I place myself into a track without ever deviating to the land of the outlier?

I met my husband when we worked together.

We have different views on the amount of sleep we need and on religion and politics, and there’s a gap in our ages. I doubt that the algorithms of a dating site would have paired us. There might be people who would have been easier to be married to (and he would say the same), yet I have never known a love like this. I’m glad he isn’t a mirror version of myself, my yin would miss his yang.

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In Pilates, being able to balance with your eyes closed awakens the proprioceptors. These are sensory beings that receive stimuli from within the body. A stirring from the inside is what I need, and maybe what the world needs. Engaging with our intellectual and emotional proprioceptors might just make us come alive.

Last fall, I was overnighting at the old homeplace. James Goodwin Forest still hugs the acreage and at night the absence of light lures the stars down low, and they touch and warm me.

I don’t have cable or Wi-Fi there. I could use data or make my phone a hotspot and engage with the machine, but I don’t.

I sit on the deck in awe of the quiet expanse of God’s planetarium and the unique beauty of being on the fringe.

Maybe the rest isn’t what follows but rather the still of the very space you are in. n

Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize $1000 for winner and finalists selected for publication (at least $250 for the prize-winning essay)

SUBMISSION PERIOD: JANUARY 15–MARCH 1

2022 FINAL JUDGE: David Cecelski Read the 2021 winner in the 2022 print issue.

Submission guidelines here No submission fee / Subscription required to submit

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HONORABLE MENTION

2021 Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize

i m e S

Shallow

by Eve Odom

with art by Peter Butler

EVE ODOM lives in Asheville with her husband and son. She received her MA degree from UNC Greensboro and now writes nonfiction about her family and personal life. This is her first publication. Final judge Michael Parker gave honorable mention to “Semi Shallow,” remarking that the essay’s humor “comes from its honesty and its gentle ribbing of our most earnest altruistic impulses” and that it “explores our impulses to be ‘good people’ with intelligence and the slightest edge of irony.”

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Maybe I am a bit shallow. Probably. I mean, not any more than the next person. Truly, it isn’t something that I normally think about myself.

Does anyone really sit around thinking, Well, I am pretty shallow. This whole self-dive all started when I was on Facebook one day and someone asked, “What do you want to do before you die?”

And as I sat and reflected about what I wanted to do before I die, the only thing I could think of was this: I want to see a semi-truck lose its brakes and hit one of those runaway sand ramps.

The answers below the question seemed thoughtful and heartfelt. Someone said they wanted to help a child in need. Others talked about doing righteous things like saving a life. And as I sat and reflected about what I wanted to do before I die, the only thing I could think of was this: I want to see a semi-truck lose its brakes and hit one of those runaway sand ramps. The smell of burning brakes catches your attention first, like hair on fire. Then you see a truck trying not to plow over the surrounding cars as it loosely and dangerously accelerates down a mountain, unable to stop. Eighteen wheels scorching and gyrating as the driver frantically tries to save himself from his foreseeable fate, until a shining light burns bright on his escape. A sandpit patiently awaits to take all that dangerous momentum and stop this imminent catastrophe in its tracks. Without anyone getting hurt, of course.

I really want to see that.

PETER BUTLER earned his BFA from UNC Chapel Hill in 1976 and has a studio in Clinton, NC. His work can be seen in private and public collections throughout the country, including the Duke Children’s Hospital in Durham and City Art Gallery in Greenville.

North Carolina Miscellany

When I was three years old, my mother told me to sit by the pool while she grabbed a towel from inside. “Sit right here and don’t move,” she said. I still question that decision. I was certainly raised in the era of go-outside-and-take-care-of-yourself, but instructing a three-year-old not to yield to her basic instinct of pleasure and believing she would in fact listen in the face of extreme danger is something I do not subscribe to as a parent.

The pool was so new that there was red clay on each side, as landscaping and concrete had yet to be laid. Of course, I jumped in with no life jacket, wingies, life preservation device, or parent. Luckily, a guy working on our new pool house roof jumped in to save me. He spent the rest of the day picking up roofing tacks from the ground and the bottom of the pool. He reminded me of the event each time he saw me as I grew up. He saved a life, which is not something one forgets easily.

Another time, I peddled my tricycle straight over the edge and into the pool. I always came up laughing, looking at the scared and ragged adult who came in after me. By age four, I was a great swimmer, which was a survival requirement. Soon I could swim lengths of the pool holding my breath.

As a child, I remember peering out the window while crossing tree-covered mountain tops as we drove from one place to another. Multiple shades of green blurring the window. I grew up in rural North Carolina, so it was a forty-five-minute drive to places like Pizza Hut or Walmart. We would pass runaway truck ramps going from one town to another, and I always envisioned seeing one in use. Runaway ramps are sand or dirt pits built angled off mountain roads to provide an exit and stopping place for semi-trucks whose brakes go out from wear caused by the downhill mountain terrain. The ramps are long with sand

KAREN BALTIMORE designed this essay, the Hallberg interview, and the poetry in this issue. A graduate of Meredith College, where she was taught by NCLR Art Director Dana Ezzell Lovelace, she has been designing for NCLR since 2013.

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speed bumps that assist massive trucks in losing momentum and safely slowing down. Once I saw a truck on one, but I was too late. The drama had already unfolded. I was moments behind a thirty-five-thousand-pound truck that had hastily barreled down a mountain with no brakes. There had been a sudden and exciting exit, and the truck, after hitting mound after mound, finally came to an abrupt stop, but I had missed all that. I just saw a frazzled driver standing next to his incapacitated truck, gazing at his brush with mortality.

It’s always been there in my mind. The drama, the danger, the thrilling yet successful escape. And the happy ending.

In high school, working as a certified lifeguard, I spent my summers perched in the tall, white lifeguard stand, covered in glistening tanning oil, blowing a whistle at kids. “No running!” I would shout down to the kids who quickly transitioned to a fast walk. During my breaks, I would swim laps or play a hand of Rook with the other offduty lifeguards in a small fly-infested office with the AC blowing on high. I still regard it as the best job I ever had. Once I rescued a girl who jumped off the diving board at the town pool but had, unfortunately, forgotten she could not swim.

Her head came up one time and then under she went. I leapt in to rescue her and pulled her to the safety of the concrete edge.

I’m sure I had passed a truck ramp recently, that it was in the forefront of my mind when I saw that post on Facebook. I understand that some people might have thought my response was funny and others possibly thought I was mocking them. But it was an honest, truthful statement, the first thing that came to mind. A few months later, we passed a truck ramp and I thought, Should I want more?

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Am I shallow for not wanting to do more? Should I be feeding the hungry at a soup kitchen or knitting hats for cancer patients? Maybe I should donate my savings fund to feed kids in a ramshackle orphanage. As I reflected, I thought that I should want to do more, but, at the same time, I don’t want to change myself to fit someone else’s idea of who I should be or what is socially acceptable. Can’t we all have a dream? I did feel some shame for not wanting to help people more. I do want starving children to eat but feeding them is just not on my bucket list. I do really want to see a truck hit that runaway ramp.

During Labor Day, we had a family gathering for a long weekend on the Isle of Palms just off the Charleston, South Carolina coast. There are no other people that I trust more than my family to give me their honest opinion. But if I asked for their genuine thoughts, then I had better leave my feelings checked out. I sat on a low, blue beach chair looking across the wide expanse of sand out onto the Atlantic Ocean. Slowly, I dug a small hole with my forefinger, rubbing against the grit of the sand. It was the perfect setting to pop the question. First, I asked my husband, “Do you think I’m shallow?”

“What?

“Do you think I’m shallow?” I repeated.

“No, why?” Good answer. Good man.

“Because the top of my bucket list is to see a semi-truck hit a runaway ramp.”

He smiled. “No, but if you want to see one, we could set some chairs up there and wait. I don’t think it’ll take too long.” Answers like that make me love Mitch. He has a commanding presence, standing six-foot-four and broad, but his nature is kind. Once during a college football scouting trip, he verbally committed to a school because he learned that players had access to unlimited amounts of Lucky Charms cereal to eat.

Next, was my younger sister, Elizabeth. She is twenty-four and fresh out of law school.

I told her

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about the Facebook post and asked if she thought I was shallow. She responded, “I have passed those so many times and never thought that. How did that idea even come into your mind?” Answering a question with a question wasn’t going to bring any conclusions.

“I guess it’s just always been there,” I said. She looked at me curiously, trying to understand the person in front of her. Silence. Our thirteen-year age difference can be a barrier at times. Looking at her for what felt like hours, I admired her glacierwater-colored eyes.

Breaking the silence, I asked her, “Well, what do you want to do before you die?”

To which she responded, “I want to see that all children have the same access to a great education.”

I said, “I think you may be overthinking this.”

In college, I taught swimming lessons at the YWCA. The building was old and located in the seedy part of downtown. There was a pool in the basement and the top floor provided temporary housing for women who needed shelter. I didn’t have a teaching certification, but they didn’t seem to care or think to ask for it. It was supposed to be a life guarding gig; then all of a sudden I was teaching swimming lessons. Once, I was teaching a student who was in her forties, and she started having a panic attack when she realized she was in the deep end of the pool. The funny thing was, she was swimming great until her mind got involved.

She swam freestyle down the pool. A large woman with a black swim cap covering her hair. Next to her, I swam side stroke pulling a kickboard behind me, watching her form. She thought she couldn’t swim. She was wrong. At least, that is what I thought. Things changed very fast. In one second, I was gliding across a pool, and the next, a look of panic flashed across her wide eyes as she turned her head toward me. That was the only warning I had before being pushed under. She almost drowned me while I

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Later, I brought my question up with my brother, Cale, and his wife, Tara, who had joined me in the pool. Cale and I are probably the most similar of our siblings, although he is seven years my senior. When COVID hit and we had to quarantine, we both, though separately, described our Floating (oil on canvas, 55x78) by Peter Butler response to staying home and six feet away from people as, “I was born for this.” confidence. It’s true. Every day, she puts on her “I really wanna see a semi-truck hit a runwhite coat, fills, and dispenses medicine to hunaway ramp,” I said. Tara leaned over laughing, her dreds of people, directly helping save lives or at muscles visible with each movement. While the the very least making lives better. rest of the house was sleeping, each morning Tara Cale chimed in calmly, “But, seriously, saying was up and running down the road. When she you want to help someone certainly is the easy stopped laughing at my statement long enough to answer.” His hands rested effortlessly on the surspeak, she said, face of the water, slightly moving back and forth.

“Girl, I know the perfect one!”

He wore a blue hat from a nonprofit that he sup“Really? Where?” I responded in a voice close ports and Wayfarer sunglasses that protected his to a scream. eyes from the aggressive sun baring down on us.

“On Blood Mountain towards Blairsville, He’s right, I thought. I was feeling validated, Georgia. I pass it all the time going to work, and less shallow. Floating on purple and orange pool I always think about someone hitting it.” A large noodles in the humidity that had taken an almost smile draped across her face at this unexpected solid form, we tried to submerge in the water as turn in conversation. far as we could while keeping our heads above the Now we were getting somewhere. I stood surface. I held my insulated cup just high enough chest deep in the refreshing water. The sun cast to keep it safe. Gin and tonics don’t mix well with moving shadows from the waving palm trees pool water. overhead.

Country music played in the “But am I shallow because my dream isn’t background from Cale’s to help someone?” portable speaker sit“Well, surely, I’ve already done ting on the pool that by now,” Tara said with deck. “So, a discernible look of

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tried to save her, or, maybe, I was trying to get away from her as she thrashed on top of me, holding me under. But either way, with a quick move and fast thinking with a blue foam kickboard, I saved her life and mine too.

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what do you want to do before you die?” I asked.

Everyone had great answers. Go to Red Rocks and listen to a great band play, go to Iceland and bathe in those gorgeous turquoise hot springs, watch semi-trucks lose control and plow into a sand pit.

It was a great pool day.

In my twenties, I started swimming longer distances in the lake. Not just any lake, but Lake Santeetlah. A pristine headwaters mountain lake whose beauty is so profound that it must have been touched by the hand of God during its creation. Mountains reflect blue off the clear, glassy water. Bald eagles watch from above. I grew up swimming in that lake, but never far from the dock and always under my mother’s eye. At some point, she finally let me take off my life jacket, but I was probably a teenager before that happened.

I remember her explaining that lake swimming is not the same as pool swimming. “If you go under, I can’t see you to help you.” Her words were her way of trying to instill a little bit of fear in me.

“I’ll be fine!” I would say throwing my hands up, boats passing in the distance. Once she finally let me loose, I wanted to swim across the cove.

“Stand on the dock facing the bank, bend over, and look between your legs. That’s actually how far it is,” she told me, like it was science, standing with her hand on her hip. I bent over and looked between my legs. It did look farther. Uncertainty crept in. What if I couldn’t make it?

At one point during the island weekend, I was sitting with my mom and her

Winter 2022

husband, Daniel, in the living room. I inherited my mom’s entire body. Our features are the same, from our toes to the bridge of our narrow noses.

Our odd knees only look dissimilar because of the difference in days they have seen. I told them the story about seeing the question on Facebook and my response. The TV blared in the background.

They both laughed and then Mom said, “Yes, Eve. That’s a very shallow answer.”

I pushed the air out of my lungs, forcing myself to inhale fresh air. Dammit. Well, there is your honest answer.

Daniel leaned in. “It’s really neat to see.” He excitedly scooted to the edge of the khaki couch and went on to explain how he had seen a truck hit one, how abruptly the truck stops, almost like it hits a wall. Daniel is a happy and kind man, who always gives very thoughtful responses to questions. His cheeks are flushed with red, and he has grown slightly rounder since marrying my mom.

Santa Claus. I just described my stepdad basically as Santa Claus. It was fun to listen to his story and, of course, I was jealous because he had lived my dream.

We talked about their bucket list ideas. “I just want to see all my children succeed,” my mom said. Yeah, that was a good answer and probably a long shot considering she has one daughter dreaming of sandpits and semis and another dreaming about utopian education opportunities.

Most recently, I have been teaching my son to swim. “Kick, Kick, Kick!” I instruct. And show him how to blow bubbles with his face in the water so he learns to breathe out. He jerks back with surprise and shock each time his face touches the water.

“Towel!” he screams almost blindly. He is too young to understand my lecture on

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Those open swims at the lake were scary at first. My mind would fight me, using fear to cloud my judgement. Was that a snake or a stick? Could anyone hear me if I called for help? What if I couldn’t make it? Could they reach me in time?

water displacement, so we just enjoy the splashing for now.

After that long weekend with my family, I thought through their answers. Tara’s answer stuck with me: “Surely, I’ve already done that by now.” I had not considered that I had already saved someone.

And as I reflected on my past, it occurred to me, I had. Two people actually. There is also no record of how many people I taught to swim, but I would safely say twenty, and that is a lifesaving skill. I will not even try to calculate the lives that my defensive driving has saved, but they no doubt add up to a very large number.

Those open swims at the lake were scary at first.

My mind would fight me, using fear to cloud my judgement. Was that a snake or a stick? Could anyone hear me if I called for help? What if I couldn’t make it? Could they reach me in time?

Being unaided in vast open water provoked anxiety that had to be dealt with, or, at least, moved around until I could release it. Even in the face of drowning alone, I was compelled to continue. All worst-case scenarios had been thought through and planned for. For safety, I would swim twenty yards offshore, so in the event of a cramp, I could thrash my way to the shallow water, but far enough out that my feet would never

graze the slimy bottom. Also, boats don’t usually go fast close to shore, so I could avoid the death by motor scenario. The idea of being diced by a propeller was stomach turning. Blood and body parts everywhere. Nope, not today because I had an exit plan. I mean, what are the chances of a deer swimming across and trampling over me in the water? I refocused my attention on the beautiful surroundings. Once I became comfortable and calmed my racing heartbeat from the anxiety of the unknown, I knocked out quarter miles without a problem. Later, I eased my way into mile-length swims and the freedom I found there was as close to meditation as I have ever come. The rhythm of my breath, the weightlessness of my body moving through a liquid space, visibly looking down into darkness with moments of light coming through with each head turn, and the incredible moments of silence. Unless, of course, something touched my leg, and then I would somehow propel my body out of the water with the speed of a wet cat.

“What was that?” I screamed to myself because no one could hear me. But then, after verifying I was not being attacked by some unknown creature, I regained my composure, took in a breath, and pushed my way forward. One stroke at a time. n

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