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.

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

ABOVE Playwright Jim Grimsley with the cast members in his play Mr. Universe, 7 Stages Theatre, Atlanta, GA, 1988 * 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.

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 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