North Carolina Literary Review Online Fall 2023

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

FALL 2023

NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE OF NORTH CAROLINA

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Randall Kenan Prize Essay by Jane Haladay on Lumbee Children’s Literature n Poetry by Tonya Holy Elk n Essays by Brittany D. Hunt and Synora Hunt Cummings n Excerpts from the lumBEES’ Women of the Dark Water

COVER ART Moon Dancer #1 (watercolor, textured media, and acrylic, 14x14) by Joan C. Blackwell After retirement from a career of many years as a Department of Defense classified management analyst in northern Virginia, JOAN C. BLACKWELL returned to her roots in Lumberton, NC, and completed a master’s in Art Education at UNC Pembroke, where she formerly earned her bachelor’s degree. As a recognized artist in the Lumbee Tribe community, she has been featured often in newspapers, on television, and has conducted art workshops for several National Art Education Association events across the US, as well as offering classes and events in her Lumbee community. Her work has been shown in numerous solo exhibitions and appears in many private and public collections.

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 Haladay essay on Lumbee children’s books, the Katz and Powell short stories, and the Green Performance Poetry Prize story.

Produced annually by East Carolina University and by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association © COPYRIGHT 2023 NCLR

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FALL 2023

NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE OF NORTH CAROLINA IN THIS ISSUE 6

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Native American Literature of North Carolina includes poetry, prose, and drama Leslie Locklear Christina Pacheco Darlene H. Ransom Devra Thomas

Synora Hunt Cummings Jane Haladay Tonya Holy Elk Brittany D. Hunt

38 n Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues includes poetry, fiction, pedagogy, and book reviews

Cori Greer-Banks Michael Keenan Gutierrez Christy Alexander Hallberg Allison Harris Allison Adelle Hedge Coke Kimi Faxon Hemingway George Hovis Lockie Hunter Shelley Ingram Emily Alice Katz Randall Kenan Jon Kesler Kristina L. Knotts

Phillip Lewis Al Maginnes Joseph Mills Daniel Moreno Michael Parker Terry Roberts Josh Roiland Ann Rotchford Lee Smith Elizabeth Spencer Elizabeth Wellman Jesse Wharton Barbara Wright

J.S. Absher Joseph Bathanti Barbara Bennett Richard Betz Charles Waddell Chesnutt Jim Clark Marie T. Cochran Sharon E. Colley David Wright Faladé Charles Frazier Sarah Gaby Michael Gaspeny Jill Goad Sally Greene

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North Carolina Miscellany includes poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and book reviews

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Onyx Bradley Amanda M. Capelli Johnny Cate Keith Flynn Janet Ford Roxanne Henderson Mimi Herman

n North Carolina Artists

Joan C. Blackwell Bea Braveboy Gabriela Costas Bre Barnett Crowell Raven Dial-Stanley

Culley Holderfield James W. Kirkland Michael Loderstedt Dale Neal Alessandra Nysether-Santos Scott Owens

in this issue n Sharon Dowell Frank Holliday Alisha Locklear Monroe Evynn Richardson Jeremy Russell

Deborah Pope David E. Poston Gary V. Powell Cheryl Skinner Katherine Soniat Allan Wolf

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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 252.328.1537 Telephone 252.328.4889 Fax BauerM@ecu.edu Email NCLRstaff@ecu.edu https://NCLR.ecu.edu Website

NCLR has received 2022–2023 grant support from the North Carolina Arts Council, a division of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, and from North Carolina Humanities.

Fall 2023

Subscriptions to the print issues of NCLR are, for individuals, $18 (US) for one year or $30 (US) for two years, or $30 (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.

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.

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.

Issue #33 (2024) will feature NC Disability Literature, guest edited by Casey Kayser Issue #34 (2025) will feature NC LGBTQ+ Literature, guest editor James A. Crank Issue #35 (2026) will feature NC Mysteries and Thrillers, guest edited by Kirstin 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.

ISSN: 2165-1809

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Editor Margaret D. Bauer Art Director Dana Ezzell Lovelace Guest Feature Editor Kirstin L. Squint Digital Editor Devra Thomas Art Editor Diane A. Rodman Poetry Editor Jeffrey Franklin Founding Editor Alex Albright Original Art Director Eva Roberts

Graphic Designers Karen Baltimore Stephanie Whitlock Dicken Sarah Elks Senior Associate Editor Christy Alexander Hallberg Assistant Editors Desiree Dighton Anne Mallory Randall Martoccia Editorial Assistants Amber Knox Daniel C. Moreno Wendy Tilley Interns Dasani Cropper Megan Howell Abby Trzepacz

EDITORIAL BOARD Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams English, UNC Wilmington

Rebecca Godwin Emeritus, Barton College

Christie Hinson Norris Carolina K-12

Catherine Carter English, Western Carolina University

Marame Gueye English, East Carolina University

Angela Raper English, East Carolina University

Celestine Davis English, East Carolina University

Kate Harrington English, East Carolina University

Glenis Redmond Poet Laureate, Greenville, SC

Meg Day English, North Carolina State University

George Hovis English, SUNY-Oneonto

Amber Flora Thomas English, East Carolina University

Kevin Dublin Elder Writing Project, Litquake Foundation

Amanda Klein English, East Carolina University

Robert West English, Mississippi State University

Gabrielle Brant Freeman English, East Carolina University

Celeste McMaster North Carolina Writers’ Network

Brian Glover English, East Carolina University

Tariq Moore Department of Language and Literature North Carolina Central University

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Fall 2023

NCLR’s First Guest Editor Signing Off

by Kirstin L. Squint, Guest Feature Editor

It is with mixed emotions that I introduce the 2023 fall online special feature section on literary production by the state’s Indigenous peoples, the final one in my term as the journal’s guest feature editor. The most prominent emotion I feel is pride at what the editorial team has accomplished and how we have been able spotlight so much incredible writing and artwork by Native American citizens from North Carolina’s tribes.

The fall online feature begins with Jane Haladay’s important essay on the way she uses Lumbeeauthored children’s books (Whoz Ya People? and It’s Lumbee Homecoming Y’all: Nakoma’s Greatest Tradition, both published in 2020) in her service learning classes at UNC Pembroke to engage with local elementary schools. Haladay’s essay demonstrates the importance of representation and how meaningful it is for both Lumbee college and elementary students to see themselves in the pages of books authored by Lumbee tribal citizens, Brittany Hunt, Christina Pacheco, and Leslie Locklear.

Haladay’s essay is the winner of the 2023 Kenan Prize for best essay on a new North Carolina writer, and though it is also included in the 2023 print issue, sharing the full essay here broadens the access to and impact of this important work. Haladay’s teaching materials are available through NCLR’s Teaching North Carolina Literature initiative, funded by a Community Research Grant through North Carolina Humanities. Complementing Haladay’s essay is a reflection by Brittany Hunt, author of

Whoz Ya People?. Hunt poignantly details how she came to write her story, which was a response to a professor who assigned a blatantly misrepresentational children’s book about Native peoples in a graduate-level course she took. Hunt articulates the love she poured into Whoz Ya People?, a nuanced tale of a Lumbee boy from Baltimore finding his community in Robeson County, explaining her purpose powerfully: “I grew up without any Lumbee children’s books. But now no Lumbee child will ever have to do that again.” Hunt is also the co-host of The Red Justice Project, a podcast dedicated to illuminating the stories of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples; my interview with her and her co-host, Chelsea Locklear, was included in the Winter 2023 online issue.

Following Hunt’s essay, Lumbee citizen Synora Hunt Cummings reflects on her experience watching the new version of Paul Green’s well-known outdoor drama, The Lost Colony, which has been staged in Manteo since 1937, depicting the events surrounding the first short-lived English colony in North America. The production was changed significantly in 2021 when all of the Native American roles were played by Native peoples, rather than white actors in redface, for the first time, and Cummings tells about seeing her people finally represented on the stage. She also reminds us that the story is not one “of a colony lost in history”; rather, it is one of “Natives and settlers forging rapport and interrelation.”

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NORTH CAROLINA

Native American Literature of North Carolina We are honored to include here, too, an excerpt of the play, lumBEES, Women of the Dark Water, which was staged in 2019 at Fayetteville’s Cape Fear Regional Theater. NCLR’s digital editor, Devra Thomas, attended one of the six sold-out performances, noting in her introduction that the play was remounted in 2022 at UNC Pembroke. Our excerpt here attempts to capture the play’s memoir and autoethnographical elements.

Our guest feature section ends with a poem by Tonya Holy Elk, who has another poem in the print issue. “Women of the Red Earth” celebrates the strength of Indigenous women and their sacred role in relation to the natural world. The poem underscores these ideas through its use of quatrains that emphasize “the four corners, the four directions.”

Alisha Locklear Monroe’s painting Symbolic accompanies Holy Elk’s poem, and the artist featured with Holy Elk’s print issue poem, Joan C. Blackwell, shares another Moon Dancer painting for this issue’s cover. You will find other Native artists’ works with the other content in this section (and throughout the other 2023 issues’ feature sections).

I am thankful to Margaret Bauer for asking me to be NCLR’s first guest feature editor. This has been a tremendous journey, and it is my hope that NCLR will continue to receive work by and about North Carolina’s Indigenous peoples beyond the 2023 issues.

Though this issue highlights work by Lumbee writers and artists, NCLR always welcomes submissions from all of North Carolina’s tribal nations. n

8 Coming Home: Affirming Community through Lumbee Children’s LIterature

2023 Randall Kenan Prize essay

by Jane Haladay illustrations by Bea Brayboy, Raven Dial-Stanley, and Evynn Richardson 24 Whoz Ya People?: Musings from the Author on Her Lumbee Children’s Book an essay by Brittany D. Hunt illustration by Bea Brayboy 26 Living My Native Past in the Present an essay by Synora Hunt Cummings 28 lumBEEs, Women of the Dark Water a play excerpt introduced by Devra Thomas 37 Women of the Red Earth a poem by Tonya Holy Elk art by Alisha Locklear Monroe

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE 38 n

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

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North Carolina Miscellany

poetry, fiction, pedagogy, and book reviews

poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and book reviews

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Fall 2023

2023 RANDALL KENAN PRIZE WINNER

COMING HOME

by Jane Haladay

AFFIRMING COMMUNITY THROUGH LUMBEE CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

EVERY ASPECT OF INDIGENOUS EXPERIENCE AND CULTURE is deter-

distinctiveness through shared stories, language, and place are the themes of two recent Lumbee children’s books, each of which is simultaneously an engaging story and a space for Lumbee children in Robeson County and beyond to read their own stories into the lives of the young protagonists, Henry and Nakoma, whose names, faces, families, and speech allow all Lumbee children to see and hear themselves and their people joyfully represented in the boys’ experiences. The National Council of Teachers of English underscores the power of such representation in its 2015 “Resolution on the Need for Diverse Children’s and Young Adult Books,” affirming that “Stories matter. Lived experiences across human cultures including realities about appearance, behavior, economic circumstance, gender, national origin, social class, spiritual belief, weight, life, and thought matter.”1 Mr. Jim, the elder in Brittany D. Hunt’s

COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

mined by being in relationship – with humans, with more-than-humans, and with places – and relationships are created and fortified through storytelling. Down in Southeastern North Carolina, in the Lumbee community of Robeson County, asking someone “Who’z ya people?” is both an invitation to discover and understand connections through kinship and place and a kind of vetting process for figuring out who someone belongs to, which stories might be shared or embellished between individuals, families, and the larger community. Belonging, kinship, and expressing cultural 1

JANE HALADAY is a Professor of American Indian Studies at UNC Pembroke, where she teaches Native American literature and other AIS courses that incorporate service learning, writing enrichment, and international Indigenous travel study. She has published a range of critical and creative work. Among other recognitions, Jane has received UNCP’s Excellence in ServiceLearning Award (2016) and the Outstanding Allyship Award from UNCP’s American Indian Heritage Center (2021).

“Resolution on the Need for Diverse Children’s and Young Adult Books,” National Council of Teachers of English 28 Feb. 2015: web.

I am grateful to Dr. Brittany Hunt, Dr. Leslie Locklear, and Ms. Christina Pacheco for sharing their time with me to discuss their books for this article. I continue to be extremely grateful to the dedicated third-grade teachers at Union Elementary School, including Ms. Katara Bullard, Ms. Ginger Brayboy, and Ms. Karen Revels, who always find time for service-learning in their busy teaching schedules, and always treat my students and me with kindness and positivity. I am in awe of the good work they do with their students and am honored to be in community partnership

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“As a child, I read a lot of books. I read constantly. I loved learning about new characters and exploring the world from my own house.

The characters . . . might be adventurers, witches, wizards, doctors, lawyers, spies, explorers . . . However, there was one thing that they were not: Lumbee.”

—Brittany D. Hunt (Author’s Note)

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Jane Haladay’s service learning assignment is included among the “Teaching North Carolina Literature” materials on NCLR’s website.

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Institute of Education Sciences’ National Center for Education Statistics in the United States website for Union Elementary School’s data from the 2020–2021 school year. Of note in this data is the fact that of 403 enrolled students at UES during this school year, four hundred were eligible for the free lunch program, one indicator of children living in low income and/or food insecure homes in Robeson County. According to the NCChild.org website scorecard for Robeson County elementary students, only 24.9% of third graders countywide scored proficient in reading. These are some of the reasons my service-learning community partnership with the third-grade teachers at UES for the past nine years has been so meaningful to me, to the teachers at UES, and to the third-grade Union Eagles and UNCP Native Literature students.

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For information on the eight state-recognized and one federally recognized American Indian tribes in North Carolina, see the Triangle Native American Society’s website. For a map of North Carolina tribal communities, see the North Carolina Department of Administration’s website.

Brittany D. Hunt, Whoz Ya People?, illus. Bea Brayboy (Independently published, 2020), unpaginated.

with them. I also thank Mr. Sandy Jacobs, the Director of the Office of Community and Civic Engagement at UNCP for his continued and unquestioning support of my service-learning activities with UES. Dr. Scott Hicks of the UNCP Teaching and Learning Center has long been my role model for best practices in service-learning, and he was the person who nudged me to take the plunge years ago, a step I have never regretted. A sincere miigwech to my writing pal, the author-scholar Dr. Carter Meland at the University of MinnesotaDuluth, for his suggestions on the original draft of this essay.

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children’s book Whoz Ya People?, reminds the story’s protagonist of a people’s powerful connections when he tells him, “Henry, Henry, don’t you know / there’s much power in your kin? / And when we ask ‘whoz ya people,’ / we want to know who you are and who you’ve always been.”2 Themes of kinship, community belonging, and cultural affirmation are also the centerpiece of the service-learning assignment I included in my fall 2021 Introduction to American Indian Studies class and spring 2022 Native American Literature class at The University of North Carolina Pembroke (UNCP).3 While I have regularly taught this service-learning literacy assignment in some form over the past nine years, during the academic year 2021–2022, I used for the first time the two Lumbee children’s books Whoz Ya People?, by Brittany D. Hunt and illustrated by Bea Brayboy, and It’s Lumbee Homecoming, Y’all!

Nakoma’s Greatest Tradition, written by Leslie Locklear and Christina Pacheco and illustrated by Raven Dial-Stanley and Evynn Richardson. This service-learning collaboration takes place between my UNCP students and three third grade classes at Union Elementary School (UES) in Rowland, North Carolina, where the student population is approximately ninety two percent Lumbee.4 Authors Hunt and Pacheco are both Lumbee, as are all three of the wonderful third-grade teachers at UES – Katara Bullard, Ginger Brayboy, and Karen Revels – who have been my community partners in service learning for many years, along with other UES teachers. Author Leslie Locklear is Lumbee, Waccamaw Siouan, and Coharie, three of the staterecognized Native nations in North Carolina.5

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. . . one student group’s writing prompt was, “If you had to pick one person to take with you to Lumbee Homecoming, who would you pick and why?

What would you do with that person?”

Fall 2023

My experience using these two books in service-learning courses last year makes clear the tremendous power of tribally, regionally, and culturally specific representation in literacy education for both local Lumbee third graders and my own Lumbee university students, particularly, as well as for students of all heritage groups.

The service-learning assignment I’ve developed has several elements, some of which have been modified over the past two years to accommodate a virtual format because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Prior to spring 2020, my students always went to Union Elementary to teach the third-grade classes in person, but in 2021–2022, these assignments were taught virtually. (Happily, we returned to in-person teaching in fall 2022.) The UNCP students taught from video classrooms on campus, and the UES students participated from their three individual classrooms in Rowland, with their dedicated teachers negotiating troublesome tech issues to keep us all connected.

The first step in my assignment with UNCP students is reading the children’s book aloud together in class, and I ask every student to read at least a line or two. We discuss the books and possible ideas for teaching them. I assign student groups to each third-grade class, and each group is responsible, based on my clear criteria, for creating a pre-lesson handout for the third graders that UES students complete with their teachers before meeting with my students, to help the younger learners focus on themes and events in the children’s book they’re about to hear. Next, each UNCP student group creates a lesson plan for the literacy activity that includes pre-reading questions based on the pre-lesson handout, reading aloud Whoz Ya People? (fall 2021) or It’s Lumbee Homecoming, Y’all! (spring 2022) to the third graders, checking for understanding and asking post-reading questions. The UNCP student groups (which I designate Corn, Beans, and Squash for important and sacred traditional Southeastern Indigenous foods, frequently referred to as “the three sisters”) then create a simple writing prompt for the third graders so each might connect personally to the story they just heard. An example of a writing prompt created by UNCP students for Whoz Ya People? in fall 2021 was “Describe what you remember from your first day of third grade or your first day at Union Elementary.

Write at least two sentences.” This prompt connected third graders to Henry’s first day of school in Hunt’s book. For Locklear and Pacheco’s It’s Lumbee Homecoming, Y’all!, one student group’s writing prompt was, “If you had to pick one person to take with you to Lumbee Homecoming, who would you pick and why? What would you do with that person?” The activity takes place on two separate days, during two UNCP class periods, working around the best times for the UES teachers. After the teaching activity concludes, my students are required to write a Reflection Essay on the servicelearning experience.6 6

Haladay’s Reflection Essay assignment is included among the “Teaching North Carolina Literature” materials on NCLR’s website.

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Both It’s Lumbee Homecoming, Y’all! and Whoz Ya People? are about different types of homecomings. It’s Lumbee Homecoming, Y ’all! focuses on Nakoma, the book’s eight-year-old Lumbee protagonist, as he excitedly describes to his white friend, Spencer, the joys he anticipates at Lumbee Homecoming, the annual event that takes place in Pembroke, North Carolina, each July. Lumbee historian Malinda Maynor Lowery explains the significance of the fifty-three-year Homecoming tradition:

For a Lumbee boy like Nakoma, grape ice cream, the firetruck that tosses out candy during the parade, riding in golf carts, the strength and beauty of the powwow dancers, and the fireworks show are all highlights of Lumbee Homecoming.

The local [Robeson County] population swells by untold thousands for a wonderful cacophony of family reunions, beauty pageants, art exhibits, book readings, a powwow, a car show, and a gospel sing, among other events. Plenty of outsiders visit because it is simply one of the most entertaining happenings of the year in southeastern North Carolina. But it is far more family reunion than festival.7

ART ©2020 BY RAVEN DIAL-STANLEY AND EVYNN RICHARDSON

In Nakoma’s description of this atmosphere to Spencer, the authors effectively use the device of Nakoma explaining to his non-Lumbee friend the delights of Lumbee Homecoming to simultaneously celebrate this annual cultural event and to offer a model of inclusive, cross-cultural friendship between these eight-year-old boys.

The book opens with Spencer asking Nakoma what his plans are for the upcoming weekend as the boys play at the park on “a hot July day.” Nakoma replies that he and his Grandma Etta will be “spending the whole weekend together” and “going to Lumbee Homecoming! All I can think about is my grandma, golf carts and grape ice cream. Good gah, I can’t wait!”8 When Spencer asks what Lumbee Homecoming is, Nakoma regales him with stories of the wonders of Homecoming, each of which is a cultural touchstone for Lumbee people and for all who attend Lumbee Homecoming. For a Lumbee boy like Nakoma, grape ice cream, the firetruck that tosses out candy during the parade, riding in golf carts, the strength and beauty of the powwow dancers, and the fireworks show are all highlights of Lumbee Homecoming. Grandma Etta likes her lemonade and a collard sandwich, a beloved Lumbee delicacy, and Nakoma likes his funnel cake (7). All of these events take place in the embrace of family and cultural community, the overarching theme of Locklear and Pacheco’s book. Homecoming for Nakoma, as for so many Lumbee people, is an “annual reunification celebration” (Lowery xii ). Nakoma tells Spencer that at the fireworks show, the final event of Homecoming, “Grandma always pulls me in close and Uncle Jerry smiles. This is the best part of the day” (13). The book

ABOVE Nakoma and Spencer, an

illustration by Raven Dial-Stanley and Evynn Richardson for It’s Lumbee Homecoming, Y’all!

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Malinda Maynor Lowery, The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle (U of North Carolina P, 2018) 40; subsequently cited parenthetically.

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Leslie Locklear and Christina Pacheco, It’s Lumbee Homecoming, Y’all!: Nakoma’s Greatest Tradition, illus. by Raven Dial-Stanley and Evynn Richardson (Independently published, 2020) 1; subsequently cited parenthetically.

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The authors of It’s

ends with Nakoma and Spencer standing on the playground facing each other, smiling. Nakoma tells Spencer, “It’s Lumbee Homecoming,” while Spencer, thoroughly won over by Nakoma’s stories of this magical event, asks, “Wow can I come?” (15).

The authors of It’s Lumbee Homecoming, Y’all! use Nakoma’s repetition of what he’s looking forward to about Homecoming to emphasize key themes: “Grandma, golf carts, and grape ice cream.

Good gah, I can’t wait,” is repeated three times in the book, and a fourth time with a slight variation when Nakoma thinks about “Miss Lumbee, golf carts and grape ice cream. Good gah, I can’t wait!” (10). The alliteration in the G sounds and the cadence of these repeated phrases – especially when read aloud – animate this story with Nakoma’s excitement. A lively, colorful illustration shows Spencer and Nakoma sitting on the back of a golf cart facing readers, with Spencer’s eyes drawn in spirals and his tongue out in a lickyour-lips revery as five imaginary grape ice cream cones form a fan above his head (8). Throughout the book are Dial-Stanley and Richardson’s illustrations of significant and familiar Pembroke landmarks that are some of the locations embedded in Lumbee Homecoming happenings, including Berea Baptist Church and The University of North Carolina Pembroke.

It’s Lumbee Homecoming, Y’all! was born from Locklear and Pacheco’s idea that, as elementary educators in Robeson County, they wanted to see literacy materials for Lumbee students that reflected Lumbee children’s contemporary experiences, recognizing the way they dress, eat, speak, play, and celebrate traditions. To find such a book, these authors realized they had to write it themselves.

Like many inspirations, this book grew out of a casual conversation between Locklear and Pacheco as they discussed the lack of Lumbee representation in children’s literature. Pacheco explains that after a conversation with a colleague, “I walked over to Leslie’s office, I said, ‘Hey, we should write a book.’” Locklear emphasizes Pacheco’s central role in lighting the flame that would bring their book into being.

“So I truly credit her with . . . being the [visionary] because I was like, Oh, this is a cute little book,” Locklear explains. “And then Christina [said], Yeah, I already communicated with Amazon, this is how we’re going to [do it]. And I was like, Whoa, she’s for real. Like, she’s for real for real.”9 The energy of these author-educator collaborators and friends in creating what Locklear calls their “passion project” is evident in both the book itself and in the conversations I have engaged in with them about the book and its work in the world.

Locklear visited my UNC Pembroke Native American literature class in spring 2022 to read her book to my students, who would be teaching it during service-learning the following week.

Lumbee Homecoming, Y’all! use Nakoma’s repetition of what he’s looking forward to about Homecoming to emphasize key themes: “Grandma, golf carts, and grape ice cream.

COURTESY OF LESLIE LOCKLEAR COURTESY OF CHRISTINA PACHECO

ABOVE TOP Leslie Locklear ABOVE BOTTOM Christina Pacheco

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Personal interview with Christina Pacheco and Leslie Locklear, 4 May 2022; quotations from these women, aside from those from their book, are from this interview.

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Although my students and I had previously read the book aloud together in class, experiencing Locklear’s animated, elementary educator reading/performance brought the story fully to life. UNCP students had a chance to ask questions of the author, during which time Locklear explained that while It’s Lumbee Homecoming, Y’all! was written for any reader, it was also written with Robeson County elementary educators in mind, because “as an elementary educator [herself ], [she wasn’t] seeing this kind of material in the classroom and [she] heard the same thing from other elementary educators.”

To this end, the book includes a page titled “Digging Deeper Educator Resources,” followed by a page with a short history of Lumbee Homecoming. The “Educator Resources” page includes questions for “Whole Group Discussion” and a prompt for a “Writers Workshop” in which teachers might ask their students to “Tell me about your favorite family tradition.” One group discussion topic points out the phrase “good gah” as one that students might not be familiar with and asks them to speculate on what it might mean, without providing an answer.

Brittany D. Hunt’s Whoz Ya People? tells the story of a different kind of Lumbee homecoming. In Whoz Ya People?, which is written in rhyming verse, we follow the story of eight-year-old Henry (named for the Lumbee hero and Confederate conscription resistor Henry Berry Lowry) and his family, who return to their Robeson County home place from Baltimore, Maryland, where young Henry was born and raised. Baltimore isn’t a random reference, of course; a large and vital Lumbee community lives in East Baltimore, which formed after many families moved there after World War II seeking work.10 Thus, although Henry in Hunt’s book is presumably leaving a familiar Lumbee community in Baltimore to return to the original homeland of his Lumbee people, he is still “nervous as could be” on his first day of school, when the story’s events take place. Before he arrives at school, Henry asks, “Mama, Daddy, / what do I do if no one talks to me?” His parents reassure him that will certainly not

One group discussion topic points out the phrase “good gah” as one that students might not be familiar with and asks them to speculate on what it might mean, without providing an answer.

10

See Maynor Lowery (130–31) and Stephanie Garcia, “A UMBC professor Is Documenting the History of the Lumbee Indian Community in Baltimore,” Washington Post 13 Dec. 2020: web.

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be the case, and it isn’t. The remainder of the story details Henry’s encounters with the many teachers, school staff, students, and cousins, all of whom know – or are – his “people,” which quickly solidifies his deep, immediate connection to the Robeson County Lumbee community and puts Henry increasingly at ease. Hunt includes names in the story that are familiar to all Lumbee people, including Henry’s teachers, Ms. Locklear (who may or may not be related to the Locklears of Locklear’s Collards in Locklear and Pacheco’s book) and Ms. Oxendine. The janitor, Mr. Sam, tells Henry he knew Henry’s Grandma Hazel (who “sewed the finest quilts”), his Grandpa Jerry (who “made the best cornbread”), and that once a long long time ago, I took your Aunt Rhoda on a date.

ARTWORK ©2020 BY BEA BRAYBOY

But please don’t tell your Uncle Earl, boy, he might kill me out.

But son, it’s sure good to see you.

You’ll do good here, I have no doubt.

Aunt Rhoda, Hunt told me, is named in honor of Henry Berry Lowry’s wife, Rhoda Lowry, another historical reference Lumbee people will recognize.11 In this scene with Mr. Jim and Henry, illustrator Bea Brayboy depicts Mr. Sam talking to Henry while mopping the school hallway. The illustration is framed on two sides by four thought clouds with scenes of Grandma, Grandpa, Aunt Rhoda and Mr. Sam on a date at the Pembroke McDonald’s, and Aunt Rhoda with Uncle Earl, his weightlifting biceps bulging, letting readers know that Mr. Sam has a point about keeping his long-ago date with Aunt Rhoda a secret. These image clouds are not directly connected (as thought bubbles often are by a succession of smaller bubbles) to either Mr. Sam or Henry, making readers wonder whether these are Mr. Sam’s memories or Henry’s imaginings of what Mr. Sam is describing.

That these images are likely both is an effective visual device for strengthening the growing ecosystem of relationships we see Henry coming to understand as he learns who his people are. The last page of Henry’s story shows his nuclear family, Lumbee historical figures, and the new relatives and friends he met at school that day in an arch behind his smiling, blue-eyed face. He is “so amazed” reflecting on his day, thinking to himself, “these really are my people, / they know me and I know them.”

Like Locklear and Pacheco, Hunt’s book emerged to address a lack of representation – and also out of personal academic frustration. Hunt recalls “a very specific moment” that spurred her to write the book. She explains that “I actually had to write it because I took

These image clouds are not directly connected (as thought bubbles often are by a succession of smaller bubbles) to either Mr. Sam or Henry, making readers wonder whether these are Mr. Sam’s memories or Henry’s imaginings of what Mr. Sam is describing.

ABOVE Mr. Sam and Henry,

illustrated by Bea Brayboy for Whoz Ya People?

11

Personal interview with Brittany Hunt, 3 Jan. 2022; all unattributed quotations from the author are from this interview. See Lowery, The Lumbee Indians for details about Henry Berry Lowry’s reputation, resistance to conscription, and the formation of the Lowry Gang.

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“As I grew older, I wondered why there were not more Native children’s books or Native characters in children’s books. In most children’s books that do have Native characters, the way we are depicted is extremely inaccurate and outdated.”

—Brittany D. Hunt (Author’s Note)

COURTESY OF BEA BRAYBOY COURTESY OF BRITTANY HUNT

ABOVE TOP Bea Brayboy ABOVE BOTTOM Brittany D. Hunt

a multicultural children’s literature class [in] my PhD program, and so we had to write a children’s book as a part of the class.” While most of her classmates composed their books using digital clip art, Hunt wanted original illustrations and invited Bea Brayboy to draw them. Hunt describes writing the book as “like a boom, like a resistance.” She elaborates:

[I]t was a really problematic class for me. . . . We were reading all of these wonderful books by Black authors and by Hispanic authors. And then once we got to the Native book week, that book was written by a white author. . . . I was so disappointed in my professor for choosing a book by a white author when there are so many different examples of Native children’s books that have Native authors. . . . And the book also was not even a good book. It was full of stereotypes, and it had like buffalos and tipis and like this . . . mysticism that people always associate with Native identity so much. . . . I wanted [my] book to be very much rooted in modernity and also in Southern culture as well, because most people [don’t associate] Natives with being Southern, and that’s a very big part of Lumbee identity. . . . I wanted a book that was super Southern and super Lumbee and super modern to kind of exist in contradistinction to the ways that my professor was trying to portray us . . . from the perspective of the white gaze [rather than] the perspective of, you know, actual indigeneity.

The book that resulted in collaboration with Brayboy’s illustrations is one that Hunt is extremely proud of. Like Locklear and Pacheco, authentic visual representation of Lumbee characters in Whoz Ya People? was important. Hunt’s characters were modeled after her own relatives, including Hunt’s Grandpa Jerry and her niece and nephew, Peyton and Paxton, to whom she dedicates Whoz Ya People?

Also significant, according to Hunt, Henry’s long hair reflects how Brayboy’s grandson wears his own hair.

Hunt, who has lived outside of Robeson County for years and will be living in Blacksburg, Virginia, beginning in 2023 when she

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Born in Lumberton, Hunt explains that “going home” will always mean going back to Robeson County. The same isn’t true of Henry in Hunt’s book. The fictional Henry was born in Baltimore, and so feels nervous “coming home” to Robeson County for the first time.

COURTESY OF RAVEN DIAL-STANLEY COURTESY OF EVYNN RICHARDSON

ABOVE TOP Raven Dial-Stanley ABOVE BOTTOM Evynn Richardson

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begins her faculty position at Virginia Tech, describes Henry’s story as one way she worked to reckon with her mixed feelings about calling Robeson County home but believing she is unlikely to ever live there permanently again. Born in Lumberton, Hunt explains that “going home” will always mean going back to Robeson County. The same isn’t true of Henry in Hunt’s book. The fictional Henry was born in Baltimore, and so feels nervous “coming home” to Robeson County for the first time. Although this aspect of his story isn’t Hunt’s experience, she explains that this is true for many Lumbee children who were born and raised outside of Robeson County.

“And so [I’m] kind of reckoning with this belief that even if you’re not from there, you can always find home there,” Hunt states. “And I think that’s a major tenet of Lumbee homecoming celebrations as well. Like, even if you live in California or Iraq or England, you can always come home to where your people are and your people are going to accept you, or they should at least accept you.” Hunt elaborated on this latter aspirational aspect of envisioning Lumbee people’s acceptance of those who have lived away through Henry’s very positive experience in Whoz Ya People?: “I’m trying to write Lumbees in a way that I wish we could be all the time,” she admits.

“Lumbees at certain points in history have been very accepting and at other points have not been. And so I’m trying to also reckon with those feelings, I think, of frustration as well.”

Whoz Ya People? and It’s Lumbee Homecoming, Y’all! Nakoma’s Greatest Tradition are currently the only two children’s books that feature Lumbee kids in contemporary contexts.12 These books were written to honor today’s Lumbee children, to let them see themselves in books about “Indians” who don’t live in tipis or have grandmas with long silver braids; to see themselves as rural kids riding in golf carts or relocating to the country from distant cities. Like Hunt’s characters who mirror some of her own relatives, Locklear emphasizes that she and Pacheco: got very particular, as [illustrators Dial-Stanley and Richardson] were detailing out the photos, about what we wanted to see, even the hairstyle. . . . So even when we thought about the grandma, . . . my Aunt Claire . . . does not have this long gray hair. She’s got that short hair that a lot of our grandmas in our community kind of transition to in older age, because that was just common for us.

And she’s not like a super skinny grandma. She’s a pretty meaty grandma. And we were like, okay, we want that representation because that is what we see.

Locklear and Pacheco’s and Hunt’s books stand alone as telling stories specifically about contemporary Lumbee boys in Robeson County. Other books published by Lumbee authors for children and juvenile readers include Arvis Boughman’s Chicora and the Little People: The Legend of Indian Corn (Aeon, 2011), Legends of the Lumbee (and some that will be) (Boughman, 2014), and the picture book How the Oceans Came to Be (7th Generation, 2022); Adolph L. Dial’s The Lumbee (Indians of North America) (Chelsea House, 1993); and Charlene Hunt’s You Don’t Look Indian To Me (Charlene Hunt, 2011).

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Christina agrees, adding that the act of authentically representing Lumbee people as they are today “creates this connection of kinship” so that

when a reader or someone reads the story, they can say, Oh, man, that skin tone resonates with my family. That hair texture resonates in my family. . . . So changing up the representation just a little bit and giving people a different perspective of not all Native Americans, Indigenous people look the same. And like I said, just to kind of continue building on the relationship of kinship. . . .

Oh, that looks like me in that book. I can see myself and I have those similar experiences.

COURTESY OF JANE HALADAY

Karen Revels, one of the UES third-grade teachers whose students participated in last year’s service-learning activity, echoed Pacheco’s words almost exactly when I spoke with her and the other UES third-grade teachers during our virtual debriefing meeting in December 2021. After using Hunt’s Whoz Ya People? in fall semester with my Intro to AIS class of mostly first-year students, I asked the three elementary educators how their students had liked Hunt’s book. Revels said that her students enjoyed Whoz Ya People? for many reasons, but primarily

because there were names in the book that they could relate to.

Some of the kids had the same last name [it was a] name they knew. . . . It helped . . . them make a connection to what they were hearing. So we really enjoyed it, you know. And we could say that the author is, her family is from this area. She knows exactly what you’re going through. She probably knows some of your family.

So, that connection, it helped them to really enjoy what they were listening to.13

During this interview, I asked Revels, Bullard, and Brayboy if teaching Lumbee-authored books was even more of a “hook” for their students – who are always engaged when “the college students” come to visit – than the other books I’ve used for our service-learning

“Some of the kids had the same last name. . . . It helped . . . them make a connection to what they were hearing.

So we really enjoyed it, you know. And we could say that the author is, her family is from this area. She knows exactly what you’re going through.”

—Karen Revels, Elementary School teacher

ABOVE Several students in Jane Haladay’s

2022 UNC Pembroke class and the Union Elementary class they worked with

13

Personal interview with Katara Bullard, Ginger Brayboy, and Karen Revels, 15 Dec. 2021. Other quotations from these teachers are from this interview.

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COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

collaboration. All agreed this was definitely true. Ginger Brayboy added, “Yes, I told them in fact, I went to high school with Brittany’s dad. And they thought that was interesting, that I knew her on that level.” Katara Bullard told us, “And see, Brittany [Hunt] and I are sorority sisters; we crossed at the same time. So I told them I knew her and they were like, ‘How?’And, you know, that brought up another discussion.” Bullard added that Leslie Locklear, author of It’s Lumbee Homecoming, Y’all!, is “another sorority sister and is my husband’s first cousin, so it’s like, I’m connected with all of them.” She waved her hand in a circle of inclusion in the air in front of her on Zoom in a truly “Whoz ya people?” moment of interrelatedness.

Hearing these books read aloud provides yet another way that the third grade Union Eagles (the UES school mascot) are able to recognize themselves in Whoz Ya People? and It’s Lumbee Homecoming, Y ’all!. In addition to the familiar names and faces of those they know and love and the places they live, work, play, and pray in Robeson County, linguistic representation is also written into each of these stories, proudly announced in each book’s title with the words “whoz,” “ya,” and “y’all,” and within the speech of the stories’ characters. Through Nakoma’s eager expression, “Good gah, I can’t wait!,” Locklear and Pacheco privilege Lumbee English and community language, as Hunt also does in Whoz Ya People?. The rhythm, cadence, and sound of the Lumbee language is not monolithic but varies according to which community or city someone is from, their age, and, at times – as in Henry’s story in Whoz Ya People? – by how much time they may have spent living outside of Robeson County.

The distinctive rhythm, cadence, and sound of the Lumbee language is one way Lumbee people immediately recognize each other, whether their paths cross in Wilmington or Seattle, Raleigh or New Orleans. While recognizing these variations in Lumbee speech, linguist Walt Wolfram affirms that “The facts of Lumbee English demonstrate how community members define themselves and are defined by others through their language. . . . Study of Lumbee

In addition to the familiar names and faces of those they know and love and the places they live, work, play, and pray in Robeson County, linguistic representation is also written into each of these stories, proudly announced in each book’s title with the words “whoz,” “ya,” and “y’all,” and within the speech of the stories’ characters.

ABOVE Detail from Whoz Ya People? bookcover

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“In an important sense, language reflects the status of the Lumbee people, who defy conventional stereotypes while at the same time maintain a resolute sense of who they are as Indian people.”

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English indicates that it is a robust, distinctive dialect that embodies important dimensions of a community-based culture.”14 Like all communities with culturally distinct languages, Lumbee people also code-switch, as Hunt discussed with me during our interview.

“Maybe you don’t have the accent,” she said of some Lumbee people.

“And for me, I do have it. I don’t have it right now talking to you. It shifts. But when I’m home and talking to my family, it immediately morphs back into a very distinctive Lumbee dialect like I’m sure a lot of your students have.”

Importantly, there is no code-switching in either Whoz Ya People? or It’s Lumbee Homecoming, Y’all! Like other Indigenous authors who write their languages into their texts, readers of the same Native community understand what they’re reading and hearing, and those outside those communities are welcome – and expected – to work to learn those meanings. Wolfram explains, “In an important sense, language reflects the status of the Lumbee people, who defy conventional stereotypes while at the same time maintain a resolute sense of who they are as Indian people” (vii). When Henry’s art teacher, Ms. Oxendine, asks him, “Boy, whoz your people?” and he tells her, she responds, “Them Hunts in Fairmont you said? Off Five Forks? / Boy, them Hunts down there’s a mess.” Lumbees in Robeson County will recognize the Hunt name, the Fairmont community, and where Five Forks is, as well as understand that in calling Henry’s people “a mess,” Ms. Oxendine (and the author) are using a common Lumbee phrase to affectionately tease, not criticize, Henry’s kin while establishing connections: “I’m real good friends with your Daddy’s folks.”

Acoma Pueblo author Simon J. Ortiz has also recognized Indigenous people’s resistance in having claimed imposed colonialist languages “and used them for their own purposes.” Ortiz insists, “This is the crucial item that has to be understood, that it is entirely possible for a people to retain and maintain their lives through the use of any language. There is not a question of authenticity here; rather it is the way that Indian people have creatively responded to forced colonization. And this response has been one of resistance; there is no clearer word for it than resistance.”15 Resistance to erasure through cultural and individual relatability, one of the themes I discuss with my UNCP students in both the Intro to AIS and Native American Literature classes, was clear to my students through reading and teaching these two Lumbee children’s books during service learning. Reflecting on teaching Whoz Ya People? in our fall Intro to AIS class, one student, Kendall Chavis, wrote that he felt the book worked well for service learning at UES

—Walt Wolfram

14

Walt Wolfram, Clare Dannenberg, Stanley Knick, and Linda Oxendine, Fine in the World: Lumbee Language in Time and Place (U of North Carolina P, 2002) 78; subsequently cited parenthetically.

15

Simon J. Ortiz, “Toward a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism,” MELUS 8.2 (1981): 10.

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because it “allowed students to feel familiar within the book as it referenced people and places that the students were accustomed to. The students specifically responded positively to the places in the book like Maxton and Saddletree. They also showed interest in knowing familiar last names such as Locklears.” Relating Lumbee language both to herself and to the third graders her group was teaching, Kaya Carter (Lumbee) observed, “The way [Hunt] used our ‘lingo’ and ‘slang’ helped me, our group[,] . . . understand and relate to it more. I feel it being written in that way made it [easier] for anyone to understand at any level.” Students in my spring Native Literature class reflecting on It’s Lumbee Homecoming, Y’all! observed similar reactions of excitement and connection by the UES third graders during their teaching lessons: “It’s Lumbee Homecoming, Y ’all! is a great book and I am glad that I was introduced to it in this class,” wrote Brittany Best (Black), a student in that spring class, continuing, “I love how specific Dr. Locklear and Christina Pacheco were in their characters because they understood the power of representation.” Brittany noticed “how relatable [the book] was to the kids. . . . That goes to show that books like these are needed in schools. When children are given the opportunity to see themselves, their cultures, and traditions it gives them a sense of pride and encouragement.”16 Thoughtful educators and members of historically underrepresented communities know well that “Representation Matters.” This sentiment is much more than a social media hashtag. To those who have long been rendered invisible, silenced, or have remained chronically unrecognized in the artistic productions of majority culture, including children’s literature, “Representation Matters” is a rallying cry demanding the right to be seen and heard, a declaration of dignity that insists upon opportunities to express one’s identity and the collective cultural or national identity of one’s people through stories authored by members of those communities. The nonprofit We Need Diverse Books (WNDB) reports “2019 statistics from the Cooperative Children’s Book Center [showing] that the percentages of children’s books depicting main characters from diverse backgrounds” identified only “11.9% of main characters are Black/African, 1% are Native/First Nations, 5.3% are Latinx, 8.7% are Asian/Asian American, .05% are Pacific Islander, 41.8% are white, and 29.2% are animal/other.” Of children’s books whose author/illustrators who have the same “race or ethnicity” as the characters they are writing about, “The percentage . . . is 68.2% for Native/First Nations, 46.4% for Black/African, 80% for Pacific Islanders, 95.7% for Latinx, and 100% for Asian/Asian American.”17 Thus, it is clear that books like Hunt’s

“It’s Lumbee Homecoming, Y’all! is a great book and I am glad that I was introduced to it in this class.”

—Brittany Best, student

Books like these are needed in schools.

When children are given the opportunity to see themselves, their cultures, and traditions it gives them a sense of pride and encouragement.

16

17 The cited students’ names, heritage self“What are the Statistics Supporting identification, and quotations are used (here the Dearth of Diverse Literature?,” and later in this essay) with permission.

We Need Diverse Books, 2022: web.

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The impact of these two books to promote positive models of Native boyhood extends beyond the third graders and the UNCP students who were involved in these service-learning lessons with them, creating new sets of relationships through reading.

COURTESY OF THE AUTHORS

ABOVE Detail from It’s Lumbee

Homecoming Y’all! bookcover

Whoz Ya People? and Locklear and Pacheco’s It’s Lumbee Homecoming, Y’all! are fulfilling a compelling community need for both Lumbee cultural expression and literacy education in Robeson County. Additionally, the fact that both Henry in Hunt’s book and Nakoma in Locklear and Pacheco’s book are eight-year-old Lumbee males is yet another intentional act of representation. Locklear explained that as professional educators, she and Pacheco gave a great deal of thought to what they observed as “a lack of American Indian male representation in any positive light, but also in terms of American Indian male literacy rates.” Therefore, they pondered “a way to build positive representation for American Indian males” and “spent a lot of time talking about character development.”

The impact of these two books to promote positive models of Native boyhood extends beyond the third graders and the UNCP students who were involved in these service-learning lessons with them, creating new sets of relationships through reading. Ahelayus Oxouzidis (Kwakwaka’wakw), a student in my fall Intro to AIS class, felt that Whoz Ya People? “was a good choice for these third graders because it teaches some of the values as Native peoples we learn in class, [and] it also is a book made by one of their tribal members that speaks on their own nation[.] I love these kinds of books and I even recently bought a few just so I can read them and read them to my siblings.” In her reflection on teaching It’s Lumbee Homecoming, Y’all! with the third graders, Native Lit student Makaylie Jacobs (Lumbee) noticed that “All of the children, except for one, had been to Lumbee Homecoming. I think that this book made them feel seen.” She considered what having a book like It’s Lumbee Homecoming, Y’all! would have meant to her as a Lumbee third grader to “have had a book like this when I was younger.

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“When books are removed or flagged as inappropriate, it sends the message that the people in them are somehow inappropriate. It is a dehumanizing form of erasure.

Every reader deserves to see themselves and their families positively represented in the books in their schools.”

—”Letter from 1,300 Children’s and YA Book Authors on Book Banning”

When I was little I saw barely any accurate representations of myself in books and movies. . . . I think a very positive thing about them listening to this book was that they had experienced Lumbee Homecoming and the characters represented them and the things they enjoy and connect with.” These observations by Makaylie, Ahelayus, Brittany, Kaya, and Kendall connect directly to Hunt’s, Locklear’s, and Pacheco’s purposes and intentions in writing these books, and illustrate the success of both books in achieving their authors’ goals Even as students and educators at UNCP and Union Elementary School celebrate the impact of Hunt’s and Locklear and Pacheco’s Lumbee children’s literature, and the longstanding representational void their stories have begun to fill, we are witnessing growing energy by some to see books like these banned. Nationwide, conservative lawmakers, local school boards, and some parents are ramping up their xenophobic efforts to pull from school libraries books that, as Learning for Justice authors Coshandra Dillard and Crystal L. Keels state, “challenge white-centric narratives and offer more honest retellings of history.” In May 2022, a “Letter from 1,300 Children’s and YA Authors on Book Banning” was published by We Need Diverse Books, pointing out, “This current wave of book suppression follows hard-won gains made by authors whose voices have long been underrepresented in publishing,” and raises alarm about the fact that “[w]hen books are removed or flagged as inappropriate, it sends the message that the people in them are somehow inappropriate. It is a dehumanizing form of erasure. Every reader deserves to see themselves and their families positively represented in the books in their schools.”18 The powerful testimony of the Robeson County educators, authors, and students whose voices I share in this essay amplify the statements of these thirteen hundred authors that the need for specific Indigenous literary representation for Lumbee

“I wish I would have had a book like this when I was younger. When I was little I saw barely any accurate representations of myself in books and movies. . . . I think a very positive thing about them listening to this book was that they had experienced Lumbee Homecoming and the characters represented them and the things they enjoy and connect with.”

—Makaylie Jacobs (Lumbee)

18

“Letter from 1,300 Children’s and YA Book Authors on Book Banning,” We Need Diverse Books, 19 May 2022: web.

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ARTWORK ©2020 BY BEA BRAYBOY

elementary children in books like Whoz Ya People? and It’s Lumbee Homecoming, Y’all! is crucial.

Hunt, Locklear, and Pacheco have other children’s books in the works, stories that Lumbee children in Robeson County and all of us can look forward to. The work these Native women author/educators do every day to write, teach, and share their people’s stories show their resistance to those who would silence Lumbee voices by suppressing authentic media representations of their community.

The American Indian Studies students in my UNCP classes and the UES third graders who come together through service learning to hear, read, and discuss the stories of Henry and Nakoma also support the ongoing resistance to Lumbee erasure in children’s literature that Hunt, Locklear, and Pacheco have spearheaded. The simple act of reading a children’s book is, of course, not a simple act. All of us, by buying, reading, teaching, and sharing books like Whoz Ya People? and It’s Lumbee Homecoming, Y’all! are helping ensure that contemporary Lumbee children have positive role models to identify with.

This type of literary affirmation is a daily homecoming for Native children, like Henry’s return to Robeson County from Baltimore and Nakoma’s cuddles with Grandma Etta and Uncle Jerry under the exploding summer night sky during the fireworks finale at Lumbee Homecoming. Whoz Ya People? and It’s Lumbee Homecoming, Y’all! invite Lumbee children to come on home to their people, at least for a bit, from wherever they are, wherever they’ve been, and wherever they may be going next. n

The simple act of reading a children’s book is, of course, not a simple act. All of us, by buying, reading, teaching, and sharing books like Whoz Ya People? and It’s Lumbee Homecoming, Y’all! are helping ensure that contemporary Lumbee children have positive role models to identify with.

ABOVE Detail from Whoz Ya People?

Eric Gary Anderson wrote explaining his selection of this essay for the 2023 Randall Kenan Prize: I loved this report from the field, detailing how and why the author’s UNCP students teach local, mostly Lumbee, third-grade students. The author skillfully balances discussion of literature, culture, literary criticism, pedagogy, and the all-important, thriving community partnerships between the University and local public schools.

The service-learning assignments are well designed and sure to be useful for teachers, students, and other stakeholders not just in Robeson County but across the country.

The closing discussion of recent efforts to ban books from public schools is timely.

And the stories of Lumbee teachers meeting a clear need by writing their own Lumbee-centered Young Adult books is downright inspiring.

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WHOZ YA

PEOPLE?:

by Brittany D. Hunt

Musings from the Author on Her Lumbee Children’s Book with art by Bea Brayboy

As a kid, I remember being transported through the wardrobe to Narnia, and from Platform 9 ¾ to Hogwarts, and into the dystopian future through books like The Giver. Books provided a portal to new worlds and alternative realms that fascinated me. These worlds and realms, however, were often unequivocally white, and I rarely if ever had books that reflected my own life experience as an Indigenous girl. Throughout school, the books assigned told of Gatsby or Raskolnikov or Valjean, and I was captivated and enraptured by these tales. But again, time after time, book after book reflected experiences foreign to me in most ways, while my white peers relished unknowingly in the simplicity of representation. Of being the forever main character.

This problem followed from K-12 to undergrad, to grad school, and to my PhD program in 2019 when I signed up for a multicultural children’s literature class.

As a part of the requirements of the course, we had to buy several children’s books to read and

discuss in class. The books were generally diverse, reflecting the experiences or histories of Black, LGBTQ+, and Latinx communities, to name a few; all of these books were by members of the community they represented. There was also one book whose name I have purposefully forgotten that was meant to reflect Indigenous people. This book was written by a white author. It featured pictures of teepees, buffalo, and other imagery considered stereotypically Native. How could a multicultural children’s literature course assign a book about Indigeneity that was written by a non-Indigenous person? Wasn’t the point of the class to be more representative of the experiences of diverse people and of the perspectives of diverse authors? Why was the only non-BIPOC author chosen for the course the author of the Indigenous-themed book?

I was not shocked that this professor had made this choice since he had made several uninformed comments about Indigenous people in past classes, but I was disappointed that he didn’t take the time to choose a children’s book by an Indigenous author, especially when this is not difficult to do. I made sure to voice my concerns in front of the entire class and I refused to read the book.

Later in the course, we were assigned with writing our own children’s book. This task felt so monumental to me – to not only correct the ignorance of my professor, but to correct a lifelong journey of exclusion of Indigenous perspectives from books and media in general. I knew that this was not just a class assignment for me, but an opportunity to create something for my com-

BRITTANY D. HUNT is an Assistant Professor of Education at Virginia Tech and the owner of Indigenous Ed., LLC, co-host of the podcast The Red Justice Project, and the author of the Lumbee children’s book Whoz Ya People?. She is a graduate of Duke, UNC Chapel Hill, and UNC Charlotte.

BEA BRAYBOY, a member of the Lumbee Tribe, is the illustrator for Hunt’s Whoz Ya People, and the illustration here is from this book. She earned a BA in Spanish from UNC Pembroke and taught Spanish in North Carolina and South Carolina public schools for thirty-six years before retiring.

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munity to be proud of. And so, while my professor babbled on in class, I am proud to say that I ignored every word and instead wrote my children’s book.

The idea for Whoz Ya People? was already in my heart. I knew I wanted to create something that was unabashedly Lumbee, which is the tribe I belong to. I wanted it to be about community, love, and our incredible history. And so I started with Henry, named after a notorious Lumbee/ Tuscarora man from my community named Henry Berry Lowry (you should look him up immediately!). In the book Henry, an eight-year-old Lumbee boy, has moved from Baltimore, Maryland, where there is a pretty large Lumbee community, back to Robeson County, North Carolina, where his parents are from. He’s nervous about beginning his first day of school and not knowing anyone or making any friends. But as soon as he steps foot in the door, he realizes his teacher and his momma are old friends. And then later, he meets the janitor who knows his aunt. He plays with his cousins on the playground. He meets an elder who tells him he’ll see him at church or for supper on Sunday.

I WANTED TO CREATE SOMETHING THAT WAS

UNABASHEDLY

LUMBEE

Henry quickly realizes that to be Lumbee in this community means you are never really alone; you are surrounded by your kin and by people ready to embrace and love you.

The titular phrase Whoz ya people? is a common Lumbee colloquialism. It’s a phrase often used when two Lumbees are meeting for the first time to establish connection. It is contradistinct from American culture’s greeting of “what do you do?” – which is or can be a fundamentally hierarchical question. When people in my community ask me, “Whoz ya people?,” I often share that I am the granddaughter of Sonja and Jerry Hunt of Fairmont and Hazel and Haywood Johnson of Lumberton, and the daughter of Cordelia Chavis

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and Ron Hunt. Typically, another Lum (short for Lumbee) will know at least one of my family members, and then they will share with me who their people are and what communities they are from. It is a fundamentally Indigenous way of communication that establishes relationality and kinship. Audra Simpson notes similar relationality methods amongst her own Kahnawà:ke people: “Who are you?” There is always an answer with genealogic authority - “I am to you this way . . .” ; “this is my family, this is my mother, this is my father”; “thus, I am known to you this way” . . .

[T]he webs of kinship have to be made material through dialogue and discourse. The authority for this dialogue rests in knowledge of another’s family, whether the members are (entirely) from the community or not. “I know who you are.”

Pointe finale. We are done; we can proceed.*

Throughout my storybook, several people ask little Henry who his people are, or they come up to him without needing to ask and mention knowing his family. This is a great source of comfort for Henry and for many Indigenous people more generally, who are also seeking to be known in a world hellbent on erasure.

Also, the book features the use of Lumbee dialect throughout, mentions Lumbee foods, and Lumbee art forms. My own niece and nephew, Paxton and Peyton, are featured in the book (which is dedicated to them). Throughout the school year, the book is read in several schools in Robeson County, where most Lumbees live.

This book is one of the things I’m most proud of creating. As Indigenous people, sometimes the path before us was already paved by some brave ancestor, or maybe our own mother or father. But sometimes there is no path at all, and we must be that person for someone else. I grew up without any Lumbee children’s books. But now no Lumbee child will ever have to do that again.

I want to end this essay in thanks to all of the Lumbee children who inspired me to write the book, but also to all Lumbee adults who were once children and had to live in a world where Indigenous characters never made it into their books; Whoz Ya people? is my love letter to all of you. n

SARAH ELKS designed this layout. A graduate of Meredith College, * Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across she is based in Raleigh, NC, and works as a graphic designer with the Borders of Settler States (Duke UP, 2014) 9.

Liaison Design Group.

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Fall 2023

Living My

NativePast Past Native

in the Present

by Synora Hunt Cummings Photographs by Cindy McEnery Photography; courtesy of The Lost Colony

The night has beckoned me here to this amphitheater as a spectator of the longest running outdoor drama, Paul Green’s The Lost Colony.

Rain clouds hover against the sky, offering cool crisp air on a summer’s evening. The atmosphere is clear and inviting. The tar-top path meanders into rows of stadium seating. The set glows, as if beaming with pride at the birth of this acculturation. The crowd is not so large, and I find much solace in that. It is a mixed crowd: those who view the storyline as past tense and those who feel it in the present. Because there are fewer people here tonight, a presence of peace swaddles me and the meaning of this play is able to rest gently against my soul.

Taking a seat, I am excited to be among my people as each character breathes life into this history. The characters of this drama are my people, the people of the Lumbee, are the people of the pine, people of the dark waters, rich with tannins, that lap against the knees of cypress trees. My people are the survivors of tribes whose cultures and rituals intertwined with the English colonizers who are being portrayed here. My people are part of the history put into motion long before “CRO” was carved into a tree. And on this night, my people live to tell the story of how we came to thrive along the present-day Lumber River.

Having grown up in Johnston County, North Carolina, not so far removed from my own community of Natives, though just far enough to feel ostracized both in The face of my the place where I lived and from people matters. the home that I longed for, I feel the palpable connection between the characters on the stage and the observers. It took many years before the painted red face no longer suited this play’s script. It has previously been a disappointment to look upon the cast and not see a face reflecting my own. The face of my people matters.

Change has come. Native actors now portray the Native characters. Now, I see my own face and hear my own voice as the story pulses through my veins. I am Lumbee, a descendent of

. . . on this night, my people live to tell the story of how we came to thrive along the present-day Lumber River.

ABOVE Kat Littleturtle, a member of Snipe Clan,

representing her Kahtehnuaka Tuscarora people as the 2023 season narrator Born in Lumberton, NC, SYNORA HUNT CUMMINGS is an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. She lives in Johnston County with her husband and three children where she works as a school counselor and volunteers in her Native community. This is her first publication.

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I am joyful seeing my Native people cast as the ancestors who fought against toil and trouble.

the Croatoan peoples. My DNA emerges from lines, scenes, and monologues. I am more than an observer. It is now my face the observer sees, my voice the observer hears, and it is my story being shared. Watching the story unfold feels like triumph. I am joyful seeing my Native people cast as the ancestors who fought against toil and trouble.

Each is as familiar as my mother’s rocking when she caressed me against her bosom, humming songs of comfort in the soft light of the moon. My people represent me, and each face is glorious. My people, the descendants of this history, shatter the boundaries of representation.

This performance is not about a colony lost in history, but rather one that was birthed beneath this sky and of these estuaries, inscribing a heritage of its own.

Natives and settlers forging rapport and interrelation.

This is an account that gives rise to the opportunity to thwart misrepresentation with heartbeats that keep time with our sacred drum.

This is an account that raises our fists against red

face and embraces the raw reality of “we are still here.” We are still here.

Paul Green’s The Lost Colony is a story of my people. The story of who we are intertwines like needles of long leaf pine in the fabric of English colonists, our histories seaming together to create panels of resilience, affability, and fortitude. There is not just one side to this story. One cannot exist without the other. One cannot be represented without the other.

My people were cultivated from the very grains of this sand, harvested, and replanted in soil as red as their souls. The breath of my people filled the lungs of this narrative. The heart still beats with the rhythm of the drum. Every footstep continues to stir up the dust of our ancestors. The strength of our men remains as tall as the trees, and the hum of our mothers continue to beckon in the still of the night. This story, one of an English colony mingled among the Natives of this land, is certainly not lost on me. It touches my soul. n

ABOVE TOP One of the custom puppets designed by

Emmy-nominated puppet and theatrical designer Nicholas Mahon ABOVE BOTTOM Two of the Lumbee actors during the

2023 season

This essay will appear in Paul Green: North Carolina Writers on the Legacy of the State’s Most Celebrated Playwright, edited by Georgann Eubanks and Margaret D. Bauer, forthcoming in 2024 from Blair.

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Fall 2023

lumBEES,

Women of the Dark Water Directed by Bo Thorp Produced by Darlene H. Ransom introduced by Devra Thomas

PHOTOGRAPH BY PAUL RUBIERA

North Carolina’s rich literary culture includes its long history of local-penned dramas. In 2009, the North Carolina Literary Review featured North Carolina drama and has run an occasional short play in other issues over the past thirty-plus years, as well as a few essays about dramatic works. Recently, we were delighted to discover we could include the following excerpts from a staged performance within the 2023 special feature on Native American Literature of North Carolina.

The summer of 2019 had several momentous occasions for members of the Lumbee Tribe: in addition to the annual Homecoming Celebration held in Robeson County, Lumbees were able to celebrate their stories in music in Raleigh at the Governor’s Mansion as part of the “Music at the Mansion” series and on stage at Cape Fear Regional Theatre (CFRT) in Fayetteville with the original show lumBEES: Women of the Dark Water – A Memoir with Music.

The theatrical show started because Darlene Holmes Ransom lived next door to CFRT’s founding artistic director, Bo Thorp. So when Ransom had an idea for a Lumbee women–inspired performance while watching a play Thorp was directing, she went back stage to tell her neighbor about her idea and ask if she would direct it. Old friends, the two got to talking about Ransom’s experience as a Lumbee woman, growing up in North Carolina. Thorp agreed to help shape the story for theatrical purposes. Starting in 2014 and over the course of several years, Ransom invited five other women to share their stories with the community. Given her extensive theater background, Thorp provided direction and dramaturgy, and renowned writer and filmmaker Georgann Eubanks provided scriptwriting assistance.

The women sharing their lived experience with Ransom, The BEES as the women came to call themselves, were Roberta Bullard Brown, Dolores Jones, Jinnie Lowery, Jo Ann Chavis Lowery, and Della Maynor. “Traditionally, our people transmitted their ABOVE lumBEES (left to right) Della Maynor, Darlene

Holmes Ransom, Dolores Jones, Jo Ann Lowery, Roberta Bullard Brown, and Jinnie Lowery

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history, the stories of their lives, face to face sitting on the back porch after a long hard week of working on the farm,” Ransom explained to a reporter. “We wanted our audience, especially our people, to experience what those types of conversations looked and felt like.”1 The resulting production lies somewhere between autobiography and memoir, with a good dollop of music mixed in for emphasis and to showcase more Lumbee talent.

The writers performed their original script. The show also included two Lumbee narrators and a cadre of Lumbee musicians playing and singing music: The Carters, Lorna McNeill Ricotta (Miss North Carolina 2000), Alexis Raeana Jones, Alexis Lane Jones, and John Oxendine, with musical direction by Brandon McLean.

The play premiered at CFRT at the end of June 2019 and sold out every seat of the four original performances, extending the show for two more performances in July, which also sold out. “We were glad to be able to provide a platform for their work to shine brightly,” said CFRT Artistic Director Mary Kate Burke.2 As someone who believes in the importance of new work and regional stories on our stages, I was excited to watch this premiere.

A full house of friends and family members brought high energy to the show. The musicians were as impressive as the performers.

CFRT tries hard to reflect the diverse community around it; this show brought the Lumbee portion of the town (and surrounding counties) to center stage.

The play was remounted in 2022 at the Givens Performing Arts Center on the campus of UNC Pembroke. That version was directed

by Dr. David Oxendine. As a “memoir with music,” the play is not constructed in traditional dramatic fashion. Rather, much like oldfashioned storytelling, the remembrances are shared from early childhood through the present day and back again. From childhoods coming out of agricultural families and education from K-12 to college to marriages, children, and livelihoods, the full script touches on both highs (first crushes, high school prom) and lows (divorces, “Me Too” experiences) of these women’s lives. Throughout, the poetry of the dialogue and lyrics, echoed in the drum rhythms, are reminiscent of the sounds of a Lumbee Homecoming.

Music is an important aspect of both the play and Lumbee heritage. Within, the script honors “One that we are most proud to call our own: Willie French Lowery. He never forgot his Lumbee heritage. He honored his Robeson County roots with music and songs that paid tribute to us all.”3 Lowery was a co-creator of and wrote the music for the original outdoor drama Strike at the Wind, which is performed every year for the Lumbee Homecoming. Lowery’s songs included in Women of the Dark Water are the unofficial Lumbee anthem, “Proud To Be a Lumbee Indian,” and “Brown Skin.”

1

Qtd. in “GPAC to feature ‘lumBEES: Women of the Dark Water,’” Robesonian 24 June 2022: web.

2

Qtd. from a 6 July 2023 phone call between Thomas and Burke.

3

Qtd from the full 8 Apr. 2022 script of lumBEES – Women of the Dark Water, A Memoir with Music; for an in-depth interview with Willie F. Lowery, see, Michael C. Taylor, “Hello, America: The Life and Work of Willie French Lowery,” Southern Cultures 16. 3 (2010): 79–101.

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Fall 2023

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The show also includes “Who’s Your People,” an original song written by Shane Baker. Other songs performed are “I’m Here,” “Change Is Gonna Come,” the Cherokee version of “Amazing Grace,” and a medley of traditional hymns. Later that summer, two of the play’s musicians – Brandon McLean and Alexis Raeana Jones – joined Charly Lowry, Aaron Locklear, Zachary Hargett, Jonathan Locklear, and Shawn McNeil to perform some of Lowery’s work (in addition to other covers and original tunes) at Music at the Mansion, a signature project of the North Carolina Arts Council.4 Memoir and autoethnographical theatrical work provide context for a group’s stories in ways a fictional telling may not be able to convey. The Lumbees’ own outdoor drama attests to the desire to share their own story on stage.

Women of the Dark Water is the latest in a long line of North Carolinians bearing witness to themselves, and we hope these excerpts convey the essence of their stories. As the BEES remind us, “[They]’re still here!”

Excerpted and adapted for reading from the 8 April 2022 Script of lumBEES, Women of the Dark Water

Jo Ann: I am from brush brooms of blueberry bushes for sweeping the yard.

Backdrop: Picture of Swamp

Della: I am from moon pies, nabs, and peanuts in RC Colas.

Bo: lumBEES, Women of the Dark Water.

...

Native Sisters: Growing up brown in a black and white world.

All step forward. Jo Ann leads.

Darlene: We are from a dark rich earth that grows tall stalks of sweet corn.

All: We are Lumbee. We are our history. We are native sisters. We are Women of the Dark Water.

Jinnie: Long rows of fluffy white cotton with prickly stickers.

. . . . BEES move together to a different formation on the stage for a brief history lesson.

Roberta: Big leaf tobacco filled with tar and gum.

Jinnie: Lumbee: a tribe recognized as Indian by the State of North Carolina in 1885 but not by the federal government.

Jo Ann: I’m from water drawn at the well with buckets and dippers.

Dolores: You know the legend: English settlers arrived on Roanoke Island in 1587 and disappeared after three years.

Dolores: I am from a hand wringer washing machine and hanging clothes on the line.

ABOVE Art created for the play by Lumbee artist

Gloria Tara Lowery (1944–2020)

4

Music at the Mansion with Charly Lowry and Friends, North Carolina Arts Council Blog 6 Nov. 2019: web.

Native American Literature of North Carolina

Darlene: The word Croatan carved on a tree was the only clue to their disappearance.

Della: Nobody knows for sure what happened to that colony.

Dolores: But some say The Lumbee are part of that Lost Colony.

Roberta: They are native people who mixed with the English explorers and somehow ended up in what is now Robeson County. The Congress didn’t pass the Lumbee ACT until 1956. That ACT recognized the Tribe as Indian. [Backdrop with Headdress and names on parchment] Jo Ann: A 1790 census in Robeson County turned up twenty-four surnames of people from the English “Lost Colony.” Chavis, Pierce, Oxendine, Darlene: Lowery, Locklear, Hammonds, Della: Brooks, Brayboy, Bullard, Jinnie: Revels, Carter, Maynor, Dolores: Hunt, Jacobs, Dial Della: Hey, y’all be careful who you take up with.

You might be cousins!

Pause for laughter then shift back to serious mood.

Jo Ann: I remember the men in white coats, coming to the field where my family was working. They stopped us and drew our blood, right there in the field. They were collecting samples of our blood to

They stopped us and drew our blood, right there in the f ield. They were collecting samples of our blood to be sure we were real Indians.

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be sure we were real Indians. Anthropologists came and measured our skulls, determining that twentytwo of their sample group were real Indians. The others were not. They kept records, they still do.

These tests and the focus on bloodlines created divisions among us.

...

Darlene: Back then, the government made special loans to Indian families so they could buy a onemule farm. But the interest rates were terrible, ten percent or more. Indian families had so many children because they needed the hands on the farm.

Jinnie: And then there was the government’s pencil test.

Roberta: Lumbee scholar Malinda Maynor Lowery described it: “A pencil was slipped into a subject’s hair. If the pencil stayed after mild to vigorous shaking of the head, the subject’s hair was deemed too tight or ‘non-Indian.’ If the pencil fell, it was understood to have fallen out of real Indian hair.”

[Ladies model pencil test shake head.]

All: I’m a real Indian!!! . . . . BEES sit and then each rises as she introduces herself.

Jo Ann: I am Dr. Jo Anne Chavis Lowery, the knee baby girl of Ulysses Preston and Lena Oxendine Chavis from Bear Swamp, born on April 28, 1948, baptized at Burle’s Landing on the Lumbee River.

My dad always said we were Siouan. I am number twelve of thirteen children, and the only one born in a hospital.

Jinnie: I am Jinnie Lowery, born February 21, 1953 to David and Heather Lowery, sharecroppers in the Saddletree community. I am the eighth of nine children. I am the great-great niece of Henry Berry Lowery on my father’s side. My mom’s

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mother came from Bladen County. My mom never knew who her dad was, but two men claimed her.

Dolores: I am Dolores Carter Jones, born at home on August 12, 1944 in the Mount Airy community in Pembroke. I am the sixth of nine children. My dad, John Carter, traced his bloodline to the Carters in England, and he identified as Croatan. My mother, Mary Ellen Jacobs, was a Tuscarora. I was named Dolores by my oldest brother who had dated a Spanish Gypsy by that name, which accounts for my love of Spanish, dancing, and traveling.

My dad, John Carter, traced his bloodline to the Carters in England, and he identif ied as Croatan.

Della: My name is Della Maynor, and I was born in the old Scotland County Hospital in Laurinburg. It was May 1955, a Friday the Thirteenth, a lucky day!

My sister Debbie is fifteen minutes older, and we are in the middle of six children. My parents were Joseph Maynor and Eula Mae Locklear Maynor, Hoke County sharecroppers living on the Gillis and McNeill farms. My mom’s dad was a Dial.

Roberta: I am Roberta Bullard Brown, daughter of Belton and Lucinda Bullard, born on the Hog Bay in the Prospect Community. I am the third of six children. We were sharecroppers, but my dad was a part-time pastor, later becoming Bishop in the Lumbee Holiness Methodist Conference.

Darlene: I am Darlene Holmes Ransom, the kneebaby born to Normie Holmes, a farmer, and Aileen Bell Holmes, a beautician, and social activist. I was conceived in Detroit Michigan, so I’ve always considered myself a little bit Yankee. I was born March 25, 1958, one month after mama and daddy moved back home to North Carolina, in the Saddletree

Fall 2023

Community. I was born at Southeastern General Hospital in Lumberton. I have one sister and two brothers.

Bees move to new position. Backdrop of family photos, musical underscore Roberta: Family is everything to our people. This is an Indian card. [Show card to audience.] Not everybody has a card, you must be registered.

Darlene: Every five years you have to go back and get it renewed.

Della: You don’t get a permanent one until you are over fifty-five. . . . . Bell rings, Bees enter for classroom formation Jo Ann: [at the podium] Education in my family was so important because my mother left school in second grade to become a washerwoman for some white families in our town. She never talked much about that job. I was much older when I realized how young she was and how hard that kind of work must have been at seven years old. My dad got through the tenth grade and then went to work. It was a big day when he rode me on a bicycle to Pembroke Grade School so I could enroll.

I remember getting a measles shot, cookies, and a paper cup of orange juice – in that order.

Dolores: My dad always worked four jobs in order to provide an education for his nine children! Our mom sacrificed her education to help Dad rear the nine of us. Mom returned to school the year my baby brother was a senior, and they graduated together. We are very proud of our mother’s accomplishment.

Roberta: I rode the bus to school three hours each way. I got my school lunch in exchange for bags of fresh turnips that my mother grew.

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She would gather a small group of students into a semi-circle, and we would read stories about Dick and Jane. The kids in the book didn’t look like me, the stories weren’t me, but I was fascinated by them, by the differences.

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Della: Our dad passed away in 1973 when we were in the twelfth grade. Momma became the head of the family with four kids in school. She had to feed and clothe us with only an eighth-grade education.

She wanted us to have a better life. She said the white people went to college, and she wanted the same for us.

...

Jinnie: Ms. Armenda Locklear was my first-grade teacher at Piney Grove School. She would gather a small group of students into a semi-circle, and we would read stories about Dick and Jane. The kids in the book didn’t look like me, the stories weren’t me, but I was fascinated by them, by the differences.

Jinnie: Mom would tell us to get our education so we could get a good job, get off the farm, and gain our independence. She didn’t want us to look to a man for support.

Dolores: When I started first grade, I was in Miss Rockie Lowery’s class, but then I switched to Mrs. Maggie Maynor because she could teach me piano, she did crafts, and she raised goats. My sister thought I was the teacher’s pet, so she called me “Maggie’s Goat.”

Darlene: Yippee!!!!

...

Darlene: I began school at age six, Magnolia School, an all-Indian School, grades one to twelve.

Mrs. Mary was my first-grade teacher. She was the sweetest teacher. I adored her. I loved school, I loved my teachers, my classmates, school dances, the monkey bars, and ice-cream sandwiches, after lunch, if I had a nickel. The stories I read about Dick and Jane took me to places I knew nothing about and gave me reasons to daydream. I was a daydreamer. I still am!

Jo Ann: I never missed a day of first grade. I had the greatest teacher, Mrs. Jesse Maynor. I was lucky.

She taught me to read, the best gift a child could have. The second gift she gave me at the end of the year was a silver dollar for coming to school every day. I have that silver dollar strung on a necklace to this day and I am wearing it tonight. [Jo Ann walks to front to show necklace.]

Della: And then came summertime.

BEES go to boxes for shades/hats . . . .

Dolores: On Monday nights we’d go to the drivein. Seventy-five cents for a carload, our whole family. My mom would never go because she thought it was a sin to watch movies, but Daddy would let us sit on top of the car for the whole show. Fridays were the best day. At the end of work, we’d leave the field and go to the Lumber River to swim.

Beach Balls thrown out to audience . . . . Back-to-school bell rings, classroom formation Jinnie: I was a senior at Magnolia High School the year the Robeson County schools were desegregated. Kids were no longer bused to the nearest black, white, or Indian school but to the schools in their districts. Kids I had gone to school with my entire life were gone. My senior class was decimated! On the first day of school the principal gave the Native students a pep talk and then released us to our classes and our first contact with non-Native students. For the first time in my life, I had white and black classmates. I loved the diversity of my senior year.

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all white schools. I had attended “all Indian” schools all my life. When I arrived at school the next day, I was driven back home by the principal of the high school. It was obvious, I was not white. I was confused as to why I was not allowed to stay. I felt different and unwanted. I didn’t realize this was racism. I better understood this when the local newspaper reporter showed up at our home to take pictures and ask questions. I later learned that school officials were discussing what to do with us. In the meantime, we could not attend school. The school board decided to make an executive decision to allow us to attend the local schools, since there was no provision for Indian children in Lee County.

We made front-page news. We were celebrities! [slide show-news clipping]

Della: I was in Hawkeye, an Indian School in seventh grade. I was transferred to Upchurch Elementary, an all-black school. The Indian guys and Black guys were always fighting on the bus or anywhere else for that matter.

Roberta: [Standing] Our family moved from Robeson County to Lee County, when I was sixteen. My daddy enrolled my brothers and me in school. My dad being a fair skinned man, we were assigned to

...

COURTESY OF DARLENE HOLMES RANSOM

Darlene: I got married right out of high school, I thought that was what I was supposed to do. I knew, and he understood, that I was going to college. In the fall of 1976, I received a scholarship to Pembroke State University.

Jo Ann: I always knew I would go to college. I only applied to Pembroke. I didn’t want to leave where I was comfortable. I just knew there would be so many people smarter than me. Boy did I get fooled.

Dolores: There was never a question that I would go to college. So, at the age of sixteen, I began my college career. I wanted to go to East Carolina, but my dad was the registrar at Pembroke. So naturally I rode with him to campus for three years. We got there so early I had nothing to do but study. Pembroke was the site of the first Indian School in the United States, founded in 1887. We are still proud of that fact.

ABOVE TOP Lumber River by Chevron Lowery ABOVE BOTTOM Front page of The Sanford Herald,

20 Dec. 1935

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Only whites could work behind the cash counter.

I could assist customers. I could wrap gifts.

But I couldn’t touch the money.

Jinnie: I was shy and introverted. I didn’t think I was smart enough to go to college. I didn’t have a plan and I was depressed. I think my family was afraid I’d meet some guy and get married. Then my sister called me from Charlotte and asked me to come work in her beauty shop. So my first college was cosmetology school.

Darlene: I attended classes during the day and worked part-time in a department store on the weekends. Only whites could work behind the cash counter. I could assist customers. I could wrap gifts.

But I couldn’t touch the money. It was never said, just understood. I was Indian.

...

Roberta: A young Methodist minister named Vernon Tyson took me under his wing. He drove my father and me to Louisburg College and marched right into the President’s office with us. Before we left that day, the president, Dr. Robbins, had made arrangements for me to earn my way through college by working in the cafeteria.

...

Darlene: I enjoyed my college years. By the time I walked across that stage for my diploma. I knew I was going to keep on walking – right out of my marriage. With many regrets – I had married too soon.

...

Jinnie: By ’76 I had recovered from full-time partying and re-entered Pembroke and graduated with honors in ’78. I received a full scholarship in Public Health Administration to Chapel Hill and there I was in grad school with Mr. Yale to my right and Ms. Berkeley to my left. It was intimidating but I worked my tail off and kept up with them. On more than one occasion classmates would ask me, “Are you a real Indian?” . . . I am the first American

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Indian to serve as Chairperson of the board of the North Carolina Community Health Center Association. I am also the founder of the Rape Crisis Center of Robeson County.

Darlene: I am the first American Indian female to become an Adult Probation and Parole Officer for the state of North Carolina.

Della: I am the first American Indian elected Register of Deeds in North Carolina.

Dolores: I am the first Lumbee Indian certified to teach Spanish in Robeson County. [Say line in Spanish.]

Roberta: I am the first Lumbee Indian to attend Louisburg Methodist College.

Jo Ann: I am the first Lumbee and American Indian National Secondary School Counselor for the Year for 2000–2001.

...

Roberta: It is easier to be a Lumbee now than when I was a child. There is so much diversity in our country today. We encourage people to embrace their culture. I can proclaim my origins now, but when I was a child growing up, it was nothing to be proud of.

Dolores: We have a saying that describes the competition and jealousy among Indians – they say we are like crabs in a bucket, clawing over each other to get to the top.

I heard more than once, “ You are not going to amount to much. After all, your father was just a farmer.”

Jo Ann: Yes, I experienced bias from my own people who would say to me, “Don’t you have enough education?” And I heard more than once, “You are not going to amount to much. After all, your father was just a farmer.”

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Della: I have worked hard to be a strong, proud, independent Lumbee woman. When I was a child, I was just an Indian.

Darlene: Our culture and way of life is being resurrected daily by a generation of strong-willed and determined young people. Young people standing on the shoulders of their ancestors who paid the ultimate price for the salvation of America’s first people.

...

Remove color skirts. Turn around and sit down Darlene: Come sit on the porch.

Jinnie: Come get something to eat.

Jo Ann: I made a coconut cake.

Dolores: That’s how it was in the old days.

Della: Everything goes faster now.

Jo Ann: But the tribe still looks after each other.

Darlene: We survived by assimilation.

Jinnie: And by not assimilating.

Darlene: We survived by assimilation.

Jinnie: And by not assimilating.

Dolores: As I look back on my life, I feel very blessed. I am rich in life experiences and lessons learned along the way.

Darlene: I still think of my teachers who believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself. One of those teachers was Dr. Jo Anne Lowery – today I call her my friend! [hug] Jo Ann: [Stand up] As I grow older, I realize I am still growing up. Learning new things, taking on new responsibilities. I am living life every day.

Della: [Stand up] I can be happy all by myself with family and friends.

Fall 2023

Roberta: [Stand up] I am very involved with volunteering in church, community, and school.

For twenty years I have shared my Lumbee heritage with middle, elementary, and high schools throughout the state. For fifteen years I have volunteered in the cancer center at Cape Fear Valley.

I was diagnosed with breast cancer nine years ago.

I am a survivor!

The Lumbee woman is complicated, experienced, simple, savvy, intuitive, and forgiving.

Darlene: [Stand up] I hope my children and grandchildren never forget who they are. I hope they live large and give graciously. I hope they share their native lineage with pride, not arrogance. I hope they always dream big and never live with regrets or what ifs.

Dolores: [Stand up] I am a strong Lumbee woman with a clear sense of my purpose on earth. [Then say it again in Spanish!]

Jinnie: The Lumbee woman is complicated, experienced, simple, savvy, intuitive, and forgiving. She is the center of her family; the homemaker, emotional stakeholder; the confidant; the disciplinarian; the soother of all ills; she is a wealth of spiritual knowledge; and the instiller of faith.

Jo Ann: I feel that I am a strong, wise woman. I love with a depth and breath of kindness and passion. I hope for prosperity for my Lumbee people – prosperity from a positive source.

Jinnie: The Lumbee woman rises to the occasion, whether good or bad, whether she feels like it or not. She is there, claiming her space as the depository of the past and future within the family and within the community. She is the rock upon which the waves of life crash, and yet she stands, and she smiles, and she says – All: God will work it out! Amen! n

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BY TONYA HOLY ELK

Women of the Red Earth Dedicated to our Ancestral Matriarchs

From the place where Creator started dust sprinkles gently upon Mother Earth.

Matriarchs emerge with strength, resilience, wisdom named Women of the Red Earth.

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

Deep ancestral roots of our Grandmothers bond daughters, aunties, sisters, mothers.

Like clay vessels we carry stories, medicine struggles, sorrows and triumphs.

From the four corners, the four directions we are all different, yet the same we travel on the winds inside the sacred circle share, teach and listen in one voice.

From the most delicate and precious bundle, to the knee of the wisest of the wise.

Our roots run deep and we are many Women of the Red Earth.

Symbolic (acrylic on paste board, 30.5x41)

by Alisha Locklear Monroe

Robeson County, NC native ALISHA LOCKLEAR MONROE, Poet, author, and educator TONYA HOLY ELK grew upWriter, in southeastern North author and educator, TONYA HOLY ELK grew up in a member of the Lumbee Tribe, is a visual arts educator and Carolina. She’s an enrolled member of the Oglala Lakota Nation of Pine Ridge, Southeastern North Carolina. She is an enrolled citizen of the former museum educator of ten years with the Museum of SD, and has kinship ties to the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina.

Tonya’s focusof South Oglala Lakota Nation Dakota and descendant of the Southeast American Indian. She received a BA in Art and an is Native American literature, and her poetry is themed aroundTribe land,ofkinship Lumbee North Carolina. Her poetry is themed around MA in Art Education from UNC Pembroke. Her art has shown and food while reminding readers about the importance of kinship, preserving land, andNative food, while reminding readers the importance in venues such as the Guilford Native American Art Gallery American culture and identity through oral history traditions.

As a poet, sheAmerican of preserving Native culture and identity through and the Center for the American South at UNC Chapel Hill and shares her work within the community through workshops and a literary oral history traditions. She has presented her poetry in many is in the collections of UNC Greensboro and UNC Pembroke. project for youth in collaboration with North Carolina Poet and Laureate Jaki venues has published work in poetry anthologies and In 2021, she was one of three female artists commissioned by Shelton Green. Tonya has traveled and presented her poetry many venues, variousinIndigenous journals. Her new poetry collection entitled the North Carolina Museum of Art to complement the exhibit and she has published work in poetry anthologies and Soulvarious Food isIndigenous forthcoming from That Painted Horse Press in Los Alphonse Mucha: Art Nouveau Visionary. journals. Her new poetry collection, entitled Soul Food, is forthcoming from Angeles, CA. That Painted Horse Press in Los Angeles, CA. Read another of her poems in the 2023 print issue of NCLR.

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Fall 2023

Broadening Our Mission

by Margaret D. Bauer, Editor I have been so fortunate that ECU has had a North Carolina Literature class among our course offerings since before my arrival and that I have had the opportunity to teach that class, as well as graduate seminars on North Carolina writers, fairly regularly.

As NCLR editor for over twenty-five years, I am definitely in the position to know that I will never run out of good material to choose from for this class.

But of course North Carolina writers can (should) be included in numerous other classes besides those focused specifically on the writers of this state. Certainly my general Southern literature survey course includes North Carolina writers, but also, I have a tried and true unit on Josephine Humphreys’s North Carolina-set novel Nowhere Else on Earth that I employ in my first-year writing class to teach students about archival research.

(I am old enough to remember – fondly – when literature was part of all first-year writing classes.)

All this is to repeat the invitation to teachers – from K-12 through Lifelong Learning – to help us broaden the reach of NCLR’s mission to preserve and promote the state’s rich literary culture by sharing your experiences of including North Carolina writers in your curricula. Submit via a unit or lesson plan, narrative, a combination of both, or whatever way makes sense for the work and the teaching method.

This project has been aspirational for some years, and now we have collected several pedagogical pieces on our website that we hope will inspire more. Read about this project in the opening essay of this section, followed by the story of a collaborative teaching experience by several instructors at UNC Wilmington. Within the first, you will find links to more of the projects we received in response to

our initial call for submissions for this initiative. That essay will also take you to the pedagogical section of our website, within which we’ve collected all of this material and earlier content from our back issues related to Teaching North Carolina literature.

Thank you to all of the teachers who have shared their experiences, as well as their course materials; to Carolina K-12 for help spreading the word about this initiative; and to North Carolina Humanities for the Community Research Grant that transformed a goal into a reality.

Following the pedagogical content in this issue, which hearkens back to the 2022 issue theme, Writers Who Teach, Teachers Who Write, you’ll find several reviews of books related to other back issues’ special feature sections or books by writers who have appeared in our pages before.

Also here, a kind of addendum to George Hovis’s interview with Phillip Lewis, which we published in the 2023 print issue’s Flashbacks section, given their discussion of the Thomas Wolfe influence upon Lewis’s debut novel. In this excerpt cut from that interview, Lewis explains some of the many other literary allusions in his novel. And finally, the section includes a short story echoing the 2017 feature theme, Literature and the Other Arts (in this case music), by Doris Betts Fiction Prize finalist Emily Alice Katz; a poem by Richard Betz, one of our multi-year James Applewhite Poetry Prize finalists; and a third essay by Lockie Hunter selected as a finalist in the Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize contest (her other two in the previous two issues of NCLR Online). Read more of our contest finalists in the next section of this issue and in the 2024 issues. n

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FLASHBACKS:

Echoes of Past Issues 40 WANTED: Teachers Teaching North Carolina Literature 80 Where the Road Ends

by Daniel Moreno a review by Barbara Bennett n Charles Frazier, The Trackers 46 Teaching Local: Interdisciplinary Archival Methods for Community-Based Learning in Wilmington, NC 82 Lee Smith Goes to Key West

by Allison Harris, Sarah Gaby, Kimi Faxon Hemingway, a review by Sharon E. Colley Ann Rotchford, and Elizabeth Wellman n Lee Smith, Silver Alert 63 A History of Violence, a History of Beauty a review by Jill Goad n Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Look at This Blue 66 Moving Bodies, Healing Places a review by J.S. Absher n Joseph Bathanti, Light at the Seam n Joseph Mills, Bodies in Motion 70 Phillip Lewis on the Intertextuality of The Barrowfields introduced by George Hovis 74 A Story to Tell from North Carolina’s Past a review by Kristina L. Knotts David Wright Faladé, Black Cloud Rising 76 Regarding Edward a review by Terry Roberts n Elizabeth Spencer and Sally Greene, The Edward Tales

84 Naming the Unnameable and Communicating the Unknowable a review by Christy Alexander Hallberg n Michael Gaspeny, A Postcard from the Delta n Michael Parker, I Am the Light of This World 88 A Wayfarer at Devil’s Elbow a short story by Emily Alice Katz

art by Jeremy Russell 97 Isaac Hollifield a poem by Richard Betz 98 Transmission Lines an essay by Lockie Hunter 101 On the Bus with Al Maginnes a review by Jim Clark n Al Maginnes, Fellow Survivors

78 Port of Despair a review by Jon Kesler n Michael Keenan Gutierrez, The Swill

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE 6 n

Native American Literature of North Carolina

104 n

North Carolina Miscellany

poetry, prose, and drama

poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and book reviews

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WANTED: Teachers Teaching

by Daniel Moreno, NCLR Editorial Assistant

North Carolina Literature

In addition to reading Jane Haladay’s essay in the feature section of this issue, link to the instructor’s Service Learning assignment and Reflection Essay assignment.

DANIEL MORENO is working on his master’s degree in English at ECU where he served as an Editorial Assistant for NCLR from fall 2022 through summer 2023.

One of NCLR’s latest initiatives is to actively solicit more pedagogical content – focused, of course, on North Carolina literature. In 2022, North Carolina Humanities included ECU among its Community Research grant recipients for the NCLR Editor’s “Teaching North Carolina Literature” proposal. The goal of this project is to create what Carolina K-12 Director Christie Norris calls a “professional community of support” in which educators can contribute and have access to a collection of teaching materials focused on North Carolina Literature. The NCLR editorial staff and collaborators recognize the value of literature as a method of discussing difficult subjects such as race, sexuality, religion, politics, family discord, and more by approaching it through the lens of another person’s story.

And literature that is set in a place that students recognize and relate to can connect students to the literary subject matter as well as evoke a sense of pride in them for their state. “I love witnessing my students’ delight,” Editor Margaret D. Bauer reports, “when I introduce them to a novel set in their home town – even a tiny place like Lumberton ( Jill McCorkle) or Chinquapin (Randall Kenan) – in my own North Carolina literature classes. ‘These are internationally known writers,’ I tell them.”

With this grant funding, NCLR’s editorial staff and teaching and content expert collaborators have been engaging since summer 2022 with writer-teachers who have employed North Carolina literary texts in their various classrooms, from K-12 through college, toward determining how best to share their experiences – and their course materials – with other teachers. According to Bauer, this new targeted effort toward receiving pedagogical submissions expands NCLR’s mission “to preserve and promote the state’s rich literary history” across the state and beyond.

In the following paragraphs, you will read about the projects brought to fruition during the grant period.

To start, we call your attention to the essay by UNC Pembroke Professor Jane Haladay in this issue’s special feature section on Native American Literature of North Carolina. It is rare that NCLR includes the same content in both the print and online issues, but we’re making an exception this year to include Dr. Haladay’s Randall

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Kenan Prize essay among the open access content of this project as it so fully reflects the goals of this initiative, and Professor Haladay kindly sent us her course materials to share.

The Randall Kenan Prize is given each year to the best essay on or interview with a new North Carolina literary voice to be published in one of the NCLR issues. Eric Gary Anderson read this year’s issues’ contenders for the prize, and his explanation for selecting “Coming Home: Affirming Community through Lumbee Children’s Literature” for the honor reflects how well it suits NCLR’s pedagogical initiative, as well as our mission to promote new North Carolina writers: I loved this report from the field, detailing how and why the author’s UNCP students teach local, mostly Lumbee, third-grade students. The author skillfully balances discussion of literature, culture, literary criticism, pedagogy, and the all-important, thriving community partnerships between the University and local public schools. The service-learning assignments are welldesigned and sure to be useful for teachers, students, and other stakeholders not just in Robeson County but across the country.

The closing discussion of recent efforts to ban books from public schools is timely. And the stories of Lumbee teachers meeting a clear need by writing their own, Lumbee-centered Young Adult books is downright inspiring.

COURTESY OF JANE HALADAY

In her essay, Haladay shares her UNC Pembroke Native American Literature students’ service-learning assignment on Lumbee children’s books Whoz Ya People? by Brittany D. Hunt, illustrated by Bea Brayboy, and It’s Lumbee Homecoming, Y’all! Nekoma’s Greatest Tradition by Leslie Locklear and Christina Pacheco, illustrated by Raven Dial-Stanley and Evynn Richardson. Haladay reports that this experience “makes clear the tremendous power of tribally, regionally, and culturally specific representation in literacy education for both local Lumbee third graders and my own Lumbee university students, particularly, as well as for students of all heritage groups.”

Karen Revels, one of the UES third-grade teachers whose students participated in the assignment, said her students enjoyed the lesson for many reasons, but primarily “because there were names in the book that they could relate to. Some of the kids had the same last name [which] helped . . . them make a connection to what they were hearing. So we really enjoyed it.”

ABOVE Several students in Jane Haladay’s

2022 UNC Pembroke class and the Union Elementary School class they worked with, Robeson County, NC

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PHOTOGRAPH BY JIM WHITE

It seems fitting to move from the Kenan Prize essay to a class on Randall Kenan’s work. In Summer 2022, another college professor, Shelley Ingram, designed and taught an upper-level, single-author course on celebrated author Randall Kenan (1963–2020) at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. The class was an online asynchronous eight-week summer course with an enrollment of only ten students, mostly senior English majors and graduate students. Beginning the class with published remembrances of Kenan and the communal mourning of his death led students to approach the author’s work more personally, and according to Ingram, their comments were “exceedingly kind, almost affectionate, paying very close attention to moments that spoke of hurt and grief and oppression.” Aware that much of Kenan’s writing relates to community, a sense of which could be difficult to establish in an online, asynchronous class, Ingram designed the majority of the course to be collaborative. Find Professor Ingram’s reading list and schedule for this class here. Included, too, with the permission of her students, are links to a curated (but still lengthy) transcriptions of the students’ online class exchanges among each other (minimally edited for publication). Ingram reports that using Google documents to communally analyze Kenan’s works, “the students produced over eighty single-space pages of notes, conversation, analysis, and insight. At sixty thousand words, they had written a book. And because our class read all of A Visitation of Spirits, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, and If I Had Two Wings, they were often writing about stories that had been slighted or ignored by other literary critics.” Hence, NCLR readers might explore these materials to find insightful readings of their own favorite Kenan stories, encouraging them, we hope, to teach those stories in their own classes.

Read the story of Shelley Ingram’s Kenan class, and find her course materials here.

While Randall Kenan’s fiction is inspired by Black folk from his Eastern North Carolina roots, two other teachers are sharing stories of Black folk from the western end of North Carolina. Educators Marie T. Cochran and Jesse Wharton have developed lesson plans for use in English Language Arts and Social Studies classes.

ABOVE Randall Kenan teaching at UNC Chapel Hill

(from photographs taken for an essay on the author’s childhood reading, published in the NCLR 2006 issue’s feature section on Children’s/YA literature of NC)

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Read the story of Marie Cochran and Jesse Wharton’s Affrilachia lesson, the lesson plan, and other teaching materials here.

Read the story of Cori Greer-Banks’s experience teaching about the 1898 coup and her lesson plan here.

COURTESY OF PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE

Another English Language Arts / Social Studies collaboration has been shared with our readers by Cori Greer-Banks, a middle school teacher at The Exploris School in Raleigh, who moved to North Carolina from Virginia and was surprised to find that the events of the historic Wilmington coup d’etat are largely unknown to her eighth-grade students, their parents, and her coworkers. To fill this missing history lesson, she assigned Barbara Wright’s 2012 YA historical novel Crow, a fictional account of the 1898 events in Wilmington. And after discussing the novel, Greer-Banks reports, “we drove all seventy-five of our eighth graders, a whole bunch of their parents, and the rest of the eighth-grade team, down to Wilmington, and walked the path of the violence. We stop at the Cape Fear Club, where the Secret Nine plan was hatched, the Sprunt Cotton Compress, where a fire broke out, and Thalian Hall Center for the Performing Arts, where Alfred Moore Waddell riled up the white citizens of Wilmington to mob rule.”

ABOVE 2022 edition of Just Over the Hill,

published by UNC Press, available now as a paperback and e-book

COURTESY OF UNC PRESS

Inspired by Wharton’s teaching about Affrilachians (available via Carolina K-12), Cochran proposes a lesson that would provide insight into the realities of life in Jackson County, NC, for African Americans from the Civil War into the Civil Rights era. In her unit plan, students do close readings of Victoria Casey McDonald’s Just Over the Hills: Black Appalachians in Jackson Country, Western North Carolina (Western Carolina University Hunter Library, 2012), a collection of McDonald’s friends’ and family’s narratives of life experiences in the region. Cochran points out, “This lesson focuses on the lives of rural African American Appalachians, because too often their stories, contributions, and accomplishments are overlooked.” She and Wharton employ group work to divide up the reading, allowing them to cover the content within this unit’s time. The class then comes together to report on their groups’ chapters. In the course of these discussions, both in groups and all together, the students identify key themes of community-building and realize the importance of storytelling as a necessity for preserving cultures and history.

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PHOTOGRAPH BY JOSH ROILAND

Start here to explore the detailed course description and syllabus for Josh Roiland’s course on the 1898 Wilmington coup d’etat.

Fall 2023

Find Greer-Banks’s narrative about what led to this unit in her and her colleague Jessie Francese’s complete lesson overview here. Also, note that Carolina K-12 provides an open-access in-depth guide with numerous resources for using Crow to teach the Wilmington massacre, including a PowerPoint presentation on the topic.

Greer-Banks points out in her narrative that her students’ parents were as unaware that the only successful coup d’etat in American history had occurred here in North Carolina as were her eighth graders. And not every adult is fortunate enough to go along with The Exploris School teachers to Wilmington for such a lesson. But Professor Josh Roiland has been teaching about this dark chapter of North Carolina history in two classes at UNC Wilmington and created for this project a blended syllabus of the two. The first class was 1898: Writing and Recovery, which has students explore the history of the massacre via David Zucchino’s 2021 Pulitzer Prize winning history, Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy, then use that knowledge to research the massacre using the seven surviving issues of the Wilmington Daily Record, the only Black daily newspaper in the country at the time.

The second was A Literary & Cultural Approach to the 1898 Wilmington Massacre, which introduces new English majors to various ways to interpret and understand both literary and historical texts utilizing Chesnutt’s 1901 novelization of the massacre, The Marrow of Tradition.

The blended course, Teaching the 1898 Wilmington Massacre: Literary, Historical, and Archival Perspectives, is divided into three five-week units with the first being devoted to doing literary analysis of The Marrow of Tradition, the second focusing on understanding the historical and cultural context of the time by reading Wilmington’s Lie, and the final unit having students do primary archival research of the surviving copies of the Wilmington Daily Record.

Roiland proposes that “the significance of this blended course is that it allows students three distinct ways to engage with North Carolina literature and history and provides them with research models they can use as they advance their academic careers.”

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COURTESY OF THE PUBLISHING LABORATORY, UNC WILMINGTON

Email proposals to the editor, or upload complete pedagogical submissions via Submittable.

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Also at UNC Wilmington, an interdisciplinary group of teacherscholars, aware of the importance of basing their humanities classes in their students’ realities, address the issue of an incomplete literary history of African Americans in Wilmington. These professors – Allison Harris (Literature), Sarah Gaby (Sociology), Kimi Faxon Hemingway ( Journalism), Ann Rotchford (Sociology), and Elizabeth Wellman (Theatre) – designed interdisciplinary courses that employ archival records, “defining North Carolina authors, not just as those published through formal channels, but also as those individuals whose narratives may only appear by piecing together legal documents, correspondence, economic ledgers, and the ephemera collected through centuries.” Read in the pages to follow these professors’ narrative about their three projects, showcasing distinct ways of utilizing archives in the classroom, while incorporating interdisciplinary dynamics that allow their students the opportunity to build complementing skill sets and cultivate fresh perspectives in their fields.

Going forward, we will continue to invite pedagogical content on teaching North Carolina literature – for K-12 or post-secondary classes. We encourage you to include a narrative about the experience and the lesson’s value, which we will consider for publication in NCLR Online, with links to your course materials that we add to our website repository. We are open to unit plans or individual lesson plans – and the story behind your inspiration or the story of your experience. Lastly, if you have an idea for how you might use NCLR in your classroom, we’d like to hear that too – and back issue supplies allowing, we’ll reward those ideas with copies for your students.

Finally, the NCLR editorial staff would like to take this opportunity to thank North Carolina Humanities for the Community Research grant that funded the first year of this initiative, providing honoraria to the teachers and consultants who read and offered guidance on proposals and submissions. We also thank Carolina K-12, the North Carolina English Teachers’ Association, and the university and college English and Education department chairs for their aid in circulating our call for submissions. And of course we thank all of the teachers who submitted to this initiative and, in particular, those who have allowed us to share their course materials here. n

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Fall 2023

Teaching Local: Interdisciplinary Archival Methods for Community-Based Learning in Wilmington, NC On a Tuesday morning in August, on the campus of the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW), seven phenotypically by white students arrive, with some trepidation, to the first day of a class entitled “Resilience Over Racism: An Interdisciplinary ExAllison Harris, ploration of Inequality in Wilmington.” Their hesitation stems in Sarah Gaby, part from coming to the course from majors like biology, chemistry, and environmental science with little experience studying race and Kimi Faxon Hemingway, racism. When asked, the students acknowledge that they don’t know Ann Rotchford, much about the lived experience of Black members of their comand munities, either in Wilmington or their hometowns. While they have some educational experiences discussing the nation’s “original Elizabeth Wellman sin” of enslavement, few students have any sense of what Wilmington’s enslaved population endured or the subsequent experiences of horrific racial violence that followed Emancipation. Over the next fifteen weeks, they will use interdisciplinary methods to examine both quantitative data and Over the next fifteen weeks, they will use literary narratives to try to unpack the legacies of interdisciplinary methods to examine both racial violence in Wilmington and to understand quantitative data and literary narratives to how Black resilience over inequality and oppression has produced a vibrant community central to try to unpack the legacies of racial violence Wilmington’s success. in Wilmington and to understand how Black Understanding the past and present violence resilience over inequality and oppression experienced by the Black community in the Cape has produced a vibrant community central Fear region is a more daunting task than in other to Wilmington’s success. places because of both historical erasure and the continued dominance of white data, perspectives, and interpretations. In “Teaching Hometown Literature: A Pedagogy of Place,” James Cahalan argues that reframing literature courses to center place, particularly the places that students identify as significant to them, encourages better contextual understanding for students.1 In this article, we make a similar argument, but with a significant caveat: What if the stories of a community have been actively erased, purged, ignored, or otherwise kept out of the literary canon? What if the stories that are told about a Black community come primarily from white outsiders? To address this

1

James M. Cahalan, “Teaching Hometown Literature: A Pedagogy of Place.”

College English 70.3 (2008): 249–74.

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What if the stories of a community have been actively erased, purged, ignored, or otherwise kept out of the literary canon? What if the stories that are told about a Black community come primarily from white outsiders? To address this issue, we suggest turning to archives, thus defining North Carolina authors not just as those published through formal channels, but also as those individuals whose narratives may only appear by piecing together legal documents, correspondence, economic ledgers, and ephemera collected through centuries.

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issue, we suggest turning to archives, thus defining North Carolina authors not just as those published through formal channels, but also as those individuals whose narratives may only appear by piecing together legal documents, correspondence, economic ledgers, and ephemera collected through centuries.

Archival research is often considered primarily the purview of history, social science, and, at times, composition classes. But engaging with materials in the archives can provide powerful learning opportunities for students in any course. We represent an interdisciplinary group of teacher-scholars in Literature, Journalism, Sociology and Criminology, and Theatre, and through three projects, past, ongoing, and future, we show here that using archives fosters unique opportunities to get students excited about what they are learning. Alexandra Mills, Désirée Rochat, and Steven High point out that analyzing difficult narratives through the process of physically engaging with primary documents produces better student investment and more conscientious contextualization.2 We contend that situating lessons in local archives helps students understand the social, historical, economic, and environmental stakes in what they find, and, in fact, most important when considering teaching North Carolina authors in North Carolina public schools, gets students out of the classroom and into the community.

Community engagement is no easy feat, however. Universities have long represented isolated and sometimes antagonistic actors in their places. This is perhaps more true of the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Considered a PWI (primarily white institution), UNCW opened as a segregated institution in 1947 and was not integrated until 1962. UNCW had only a 4.6% Black student population in 2021, raising the number of black students back to the level of 2016 enrollment at 674, after that number had decreased from 2016 to 2019 despite record enrollment growth and increases

ABOVE Wilmington, NC, 1890s–1900

2

Alexandra Mills, Désirée Rochat, and Steven High, “Telling Stories from Montreal’s Negro Community Centre Fonds: The Archives as Community-Engaged Classroom,” Archivaria 89 (2020): 34–69.

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in almost all other ethnic categories. However, this increase in the number of students still represents a 0.2% decrease in the population proportional to total growth.3 This is particularly significant considering UNCW’s location in Wilmington, North Carolina, which was a Black-majority city with a thriving Black professional middle class until the white supremacist massacre of November 10, 1898. New Hanover County went from approximately 19,000 Black citizens in 1890, to 18,000 in 1900, to around 15,000 in 1910, despite being the most densely populated county in North Carolina at the time, according to the 1910 census. Today, Wilmington’s Black population makes up about 13.1% of the total population, according to the 2020 census.4 UNCW has only just begun to address its position in Wilmington in relation to race and racial inequality. In fact, the authors have worked to pilot courses specifically centering research on the 1898 massacre and Black Wilmington as part of a curricular initiative.

The projects discussed in this article represent partnerships with key collaborators in Wilmington and the Cape Fear region. Given UNCW’s student (and faculty) demographics, community-engaged work of this nature often means taking young white students into Black communities that have been actively shut out from access to the very institutions they are now being asked to assist. They have every reason to be wary of interloping faculty presenting service-learning projects that position students as one-and-done saviors of impoverished or marginalized neighborhoods.5 Ethical engagement requires careful relationship building, planning, and a re-evaluation of learning goals so that the outcomes are beneficial, not just for students but for the community as well. And those relationships should be supported by financial compensation for labor and expertise whenever possible.

In each of the projects discussed here, our goal in introducing students to archival and community-engaged research is to deepen their understanding of the Cape Fear region and the legacies of

ABOVE Wilmington, NC, circa 1900

3

Common Data Sets (2016–2021), UNC Wilmington Institutional Research, 2022: web.

4

United States Census Bureau. “1910 Census: Volume III, Population, Reports by States, with Statistics for Counties, Cities, and Other Civil Divisions: Nebraska-Wyoming, Alaska, Hawaii, and Porto Rico” (Government Publication Office, 1913) web; United States Census Bureau. “Wilmington, North Carolina Quick Facts” (US Census Bureau, 2022) web.

5

See Casey Kayser, “‘Not the Stereotypical View of the South’: An Oral History Service-Learning Project in a Southern Women’s Literature Course,” Pedagogy 17.3 (2017): 397–422.

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Most of all, we propose that the key learning outcome from teaching North Carolina writers to students in North Carolina must be developing empathy by asking tough questions of their local stories and reflecting on their own responsibility as participants in the creation of those stories.

We believe that students, faculty, and universities have a fundamental imperative to use their privilege of resources, access, and opportunity to help marginalized communities come to the table as equitable partners and experts.

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white violence and discrimination. Of course, they can learn the facts about 1898 or the Wilmington 10 trial from textbooks. But decades of theory have shown that history and literature, especially about Black people, is frequently skewed, biased, or obfuscated.6 Here in Wilmington, we may never know the truth about how many were killed in November 1898 because after the coup, the white supremacists physically destroyed the evidence.7 During the Civil Rights era, the school board chose not to record minutes for their meetings regarding the segregation and racial discrimination that Black students were protesting.8 Therefore, we must think creatively about how to find narratives from communities that have been denied formal storytelling methods through acts of oppression and violence.

We create opportunities to engage these communities by creating new archives of oral histories, revisiting white-dominant archives to look for what is not said, or re-envisioning archives as something that can be experienced. We press students to consider how academic knowledge production has long diminished the contributions of Black artists, theorists, and cultural stewards who have rich stories to tell about humanity and the human condition and to recognize their privilege and responsibility as researchers and scholar-citizens to help negotiate power exchanges that place the students in the role of novice and Black communities in the role of expert.

Most of all, we propose that the key learning outcome from teaching North Carolina writers to students in North Carolina must be developing empathy by asking tough questions of their local stories and reflecting on their own responsibility as participants in the creation of those stories. Jen Hoyer observes a “civic engagement gap” between low-income, non-white, and immigrant students and white middle- and upper-class students, which disproportionately affects students’ knowledge of history and political action and their belief in the significance of their individual civic participation; she argues for using archives as a way to encourage “civic empowerment.”9 At UNCW, most of our students, being primarily white, cisgender, and middle-class, enter the university with a strong sense of civic empowerment from decades of education that has reinforced history that looks like them. However, we have observed a civic engagement gap between the students and their sense of responsibility to the communities in which they will spend at least four years of

6

See W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Propaganda of History” (1935): web; Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Beacon Press, 2015); and Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2007).

7

Henry Leon Prather Sr., We Have Taken a City: The Wilmington Racial Massacre and Coup of 1898 (Dramtree, 2006); David Zucchino, Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy (Grove, 2020); LeRae Sikes Umfleet, A Day of Blood: The 1898 Wilmington Race Riot (U of North Carolina Press, 2020).

8

John Godwin, Black Wilmington and the North Carolina Way: Portrait of a Community in the Era of Civil Rights Protest (UP of America, 2000); Margaret Mulrooney, Race, Place, and Memory: Deep Currents in Wilmington, North Carolina (UP of Florida, 2018).Read about the Wilmington Ten in Kenneth Robert Janken, The Wilmington Ten: Violence, Injustice, and the Rise of Black Politics in the 1970s (U of North Carolina Press, 2015).

9

Jen Hoyer, “Out of the Archives and into the Streets: Teaching with Primary Sources to Cultivate Civic Engagement,” Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies 7 (2020): web.

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their adulthood, particularly to marginalized groups in those communities.

We believe that students, faculty, and As an interdisciplinary group of researchers universities have a fundamental imperand instructors, we seek to demonstrate the ative to use their privilege of resources, ways that the university and the community can access, and opportunity to help marcollaborate to honor and pass on narratives of ginalized communities come to the table as equitable partners and experts.

Black community members through the creation, As white women in the academy, we use, and reconceptualization of archives. recognize our own positionality as outsiders and enter into relationships with humility and an attitude of listening and learning. We center Black and local voices in course design, methodology, and pedagogy, not as an afterthought added into course readings but as leading knowledge production and innovation. We ask students to regularly reflect on their own viewpoints and evaluate how those views might change over time. We emphasize social justice as a core component of all academic work. This is not to say that we, the authors, are perfect at it. We regularly make mistakes. We listen, evaluate, learn, and practice, over and over again, to do better the next time.

In what follows, we offer three imperfect but earnest attempts to engage students in the work of connecting to Black southeastern North Carolina. These projects represent past, present, and future engagements with communities whose stories have been largely ignored by the academy at large. As an interdisciplinary group of researchers and instructors, we seek to demonstrate the ways that the university and the community can collaborate to honor and pass on narratives of Black community members through the creation, use, and reconceptualization of archives.

Capturing Archives

by Kimi Faxon Hemingway KIMI FAXON HEMINGWAY earned her MFA at UNC Wilmington where she is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English. She is currently working on a collection of essays about exile and the politics of place.

In the late fall of 2016, I traveled with a group of Journalism students to Navassa, North Carolina, to begin a year-long oral history project which culminated in the publication of the anthology Facing Community Change in Navassa.10 Our work grew out of support from the national storytelling effort The Facing Project, founded by writers J.R. Jamison and Kelsey Timmerman, which connects communities with writers and seeks to create understanding and empathy “through stories that inspire action,” according to the organization’s mission statement.11 Our goal was to gather stories about Navassa in order to contribute to the preservation of the town’s rich history as it faces continued contamination from creosote and fertilizer plants shuttered and abandoned

10

Collen Reilly and Kimi Faxon Hemingway, eds., Facing Community Change in Navassa, North Carolina (U of North Carolina Wilmington Press, 2017); people interested in copies of the printed anthology can contact Kimi Faxon Hemingway.

11

Mission statement quoted from The Facing Project.

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PHOTOGRAPH BY JEFF JANOWSKI

in the 1970s. The project sought to address the danger that Navassa has become a single story for those who do not know it well – that of a place marked by environmental contamination rather than one of great triumphs, innovations, resiliency, and beauty.

Nestled between the Brunswick River, Sturgeon Creek, and the Cape Fear River, Navassa is a Black-majority town of 1,300 residents of Gullah Geechee heritage. This tightly knit community in the southeastern corner of the state is about five miles from UNCW, and although it is close enough to spot from the hull of the U.S.S. North Carolina battleship anchored near downtown Wilmington, neither my students nor I had ever been to Navassa before the start of the project. The town was officially incorporated in 1977, but its history reaches deeply into the past and tells the story not only of a settlement of formerly enslaved people who lived and toiled on the five rice plantations in the marshy lowlands of this corner of Brunswick County, but also of the resilient and enterprising community to which their labor gave rise.

On the first October afternoon visit, the sky glowed crimson over the marsh flanking the road to Navassa, Eulis Willis Highway, named for the mayor whose tenure began in 1999 and continues today. My student, Casey McAnarney, the linchpin of the project, and I exchanged sidelong glances at the sight of a pair of black boots tidily placed in the middle of a field where a large sign welcomes visitors to town. It appeared that someone had stepped right out of their boots mid-stride on their way to somewhere else, and while we noted this detail, we didn’t register the metaphor in that moment: that this has always been a place of migration and change.

As Casey, several of her classmates, my colleague and co-coordinator Dr. Colleen Reilly, and I made regular trips to Navassa over the many months that followed, we came to know the town and its people as warm, welcoming, hopeful, and deeply proud of their community. In the years prior to our project, UNCW had established relationships with the mayor and many Navassa town leaders through an alliance with the Environmental Protection Agency’s CUPP (College/Underserved Community Partners Program).

UNCW had partnered with Navassa on projects related to health outcomes, soil testing, and town planning, among other topics.

Until my students and I began our weekly visits, however, UNCW’s focus had primarily been on interactions with town leadership, rather than the local citizens, and the university had not engaged in any community work related to the humanities. Consequently, the process of building relationships between predominantly white, middle-class students and Black residents, essential to storytelling’s demand for empathy and attunement, took time, patience, and, ultimately, trust.

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The first step was establishing context. Mayor Eulis Willis’s book, Navassa: The Town and Its People proved invaluable.12 The students dug into the region’s history and learned that a century after enslaved men and women performed the back-breaking work of clearing a swath of more than one hundred acres on the banks of the Brunswick River and Sturgeon Creek for the cultivation of rice, the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corporation built a wood-treatment plant on the site that operated for more than 40 years before closing in the 1970s. Kerr-McGee’s operations left a legacy of contamination, specifically from creosote, the tar-like substance used in the wood-treatment processing of railroad ties and utility poles. After the EPA designated the land a federal Superfund site in 2011, the federal government, in partnership with residents, town leaders, and the Multi-State Trust, have investigated the extent of the contamination and begun the process of remediating the land.

Each week, my students and I attended Navassa Town Council meetings, read census reports, tried to interpret soil sample test results, and met with the mayor, community leaders, and residents in order to write the story of the town and its people. Our interdisciplinary approach to this project afforded my students the opportunity to apply the classroom lessons on audience, interpretation, contextualization, and information literacy, but most importantly, to remember that in writing narratives of the people they were meeting, they were creating an archive and a testament.

However, it wasn’t until Casey and I met two Navassa residents, Conswalia Green, board member of the Navassa Community Economic and Environmental Re-Development Corporation and the Town Planning Board, and her cousin, Chris Graham, the youth coordinator of Mount Cavalry African Methodist Episcopal Church and current Town Council member, that we really came to understand the spirit and history of this place.

Chris invited Casey to attend Sunday church services at Mount Calvary A.M.E in order to meet residents potentially interested in being profiled for the project. This was the turning point of the project. As Chris described it, members of the congregation were “really surprised to see someone who didn’t look like them to actually come and worship and fellowship with them. She was very accommodating and very patient.”13 By the end of that initial service, Casey had endeared herself to dozens of Navassa residents; not only had she been granted interviews with some of the town’s most senior residents, but she was asked to return the following Sunday for worship and dinner. Casey had realized the impact of showing up, being present, and listening, not just as a journalistic approach, but as an expression of empathy.

PHOTOGRAPH BY JEFF JANOWSKI

ABOVE Conswalia Green tirelessly

advocating for her community, worked with students and faculty to collect oral histories from Navassa’s elders

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12

Eulis Willis, Navassa: The Town and Its people, 1735–1991 (Self-Published, 1993).

13

Unattributed quotations are from conversations and correspondence with the speakers.

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PHOTOGRAPH BY JEFF JANOWSKI

By the spring semester, students had interviewed and written profiles about more than a dozen residents. They listened raptly to stories about the men who worked in the creosote plant, an elderly woman who shared her memory of learning to swim in a creosote pool, or the pride in planting a garden readily extinguished by a shifting wind that blew sulphuric acid from the fertilizer plant and promptly killed every single plant in the yard; the joyful recollections of playing on the town’s all-star baseball team; tales of the juke joints, otherwise known as piccolos, run by the infamous Edna “Monkey” Fields, who ran a “shot house” and is deemed one of the first woman entrepreneurs in Navassa. The stories were rich and funny and heartbreaking by turns. And in the cumulative telling, a powerful portrait of a town emerged.

Casey recalled her time in Navassa as “enlightening” and throughout the course of the project realized “the importance of having some kind of connection to the community in which you are writing,” that the experience of listening to stories of those she interviewed “really opens your eyes to how we treat people and how we have treated people in the past and how we need to remember and learn from these things, which is why it is important to write them down and chronicle them.”

Six years have passed since my students and I first visited Navassa. Casey has long since graduated, but recently shared her reflections about the project: Working with UNCW and Kimi to tell stories of Navassa and its residents was one of the highlights of my college career. Academically and professionally, it opened me up to new forms of storytelling. It equipped me with abilities to shape my writing to fit unconventional parameters. I’ve worked in writing and editing across numerous fields, including journalism, pharmaceuticals, and now tech. Being able to distill narratives and messages and then telegraph them in ways that are palatable for your intended audience is a valuable skill for a writer. I also would say that working in such a community helped me to grow as a person. The residents of Navassa are some of the kindest people I have met.

They are fierce in their loyalty and pride in their community, and their desire to share their stories was a beautiful experience. From speaking to folks in this community as well as attending church services and community events, I feel as though I learned a lot about myself as a writer, interviewer, and human being.

Since the publication of Facing Community Change in Navassa, I have remained in touch with Chris and Conswalia and have learned that plans are underway to designate a portion of the

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eighty-two-acre plot identified as the eastern uplands portion of the former Kerr-McGee Chemical Corporation site to the proposed Moze Heritage Center. The center would establish the first cultural heritage museum in the state dedicated to preserving the stories of enslaved men and women who worked the rice plantations along river banks in southeastern North Carolina.

Not long ago, Conswalia told me of a meeting she attended with several Navassa stakeholders, including residents, town leaders, and representatives from the EPA and Multi-State Environmental Response Trust, the entity that owns and is responsible for remediating and facilitating the transfer of the approximately 154-acre Multi-State Trust property, which includes most of the Superfund site. In this meeting, Navassa was described as an “aging community,” a place where more people are dying than being born. The causes are multifold: COVID-19 and its ensuing complications, access to health care, environmental and socioeconomic factors, and the exodus of many young people who leave for college, opportunities, jobs. Navassa is a place on the precipice of change yet again, and Conswalia rightly worries about the stakes: who will be left to tell the stories of this place? I hope to follow up soon to capture more of these important voices to pass on to the descendants of Navassa.

Mobilizing Archives

by Allison Harris and Sarah Gaby ALLISON HARRIS is an Assistant Professor of English at UNCW. Her teaching focuses on antiracism and social equality, multiethnic and hemispheric American literature, and archival and literary studies.

The first time we entered the former home of the Latimer family with our students, we could feel the palpable awe as the students took in the opulent home furnished with priceless possessions. Up a set of creaky stairs in a secluded and somewhat worn room, on the table before them lay a set of SARAH GABY is an Assistant Professor of unassuming file folders. Thanks to the labor of the archivist, Sociology at UNC Willmington. Her research interests are social movements and ethnic Alison Dineen, we wrestled with materials that were often inequality. personal, uncomfortable, and, at times, nearly unbelievable.

These included white supremacist petitions to remove Black politicians from office prior to November 1898, bills of sale and loans of enslaved persons, and material objects celebrating white supremacy. Students and instructors alike felt an inherent uneasiness at reviewing documents on enslavement and racial violence in the home of one of Wilmington’s well-known enslaving families. The dual experience of being physically in the archives examining these documents, along with the documents themselves, produced transformative experiences for the students, just on that first day.

The Latimer House is the physical space of the Lower Cape Fear Historical Society (LCFHS), whose under-resourced and

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COURTESY OF THE NORTH CAROLINA DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL AND CULTURAL RESOURCES

under-utilized archives comprise one of the largest collections of materials on a wide array of events and topics in Wilmington’s early history, particularly the 1800s and early 1900s, and the 1898 massacre. The primary documents are extensive, including records of enslavement, photographs, published materials, newspaper clippings, personal letters, and other ephemera currently managed by a single parttime archivist. In the documentary Wilmington on Fire, in which filmmaker Chris Everett interviews researchers and descendants of the victims of the 1898 massacre, one researcher highlights the significance of the materials that he has uncovered at Latimer House, documents that provide damning evidence of the planning and execution by white supremacists of the coup d’etat. He even jokes about the poor quality of the Latimer House’s scanner and printer.14 As a historical site, the LCFHS is faced with the precarity of both funding the home’s maintenance and protecting and preserving its archives under less than ideal material conditions. The breadth of their holdings makes these archives a valuable resource for academic researchers of many disciplines, and they are also open to the public for genealogical and historical research.

It is important to note that Latimer House is a white-dominant institution, led by a primarily white executive board and staff. Efforts have been made to restructure the home tour to include more emphasis on the role of enslaved people in building the Latimers’ wealth, but the main focus remains on the white Latimer family.

The archives also suffer from this white bias, as the collection has long been maintained with the interactions of the Latimer family in mind. Therefore, collection, categorization, and preservation of the materials has not often considered ways to combat white supremacy. This is not to suggest something insidiSince history is written by those in power, ous committed by the home and archives’ keepers, but rather a reflection of the standard practice of the producarchives reflect the economic and social tion of history, as indicated by theorists like Michel-Rolph realities of who has access to information, Trouillot and Michelle Caswell.15 Since history is written who has generational wealth to donate, by those in power, archives reflect the economic and social and whose stories and materials are realities of who has access to information, who has generaperceived worth keeping. tional wealth to donate, and whose stories and materials are perceived worth keeping. Alison Dineen notes that the Latimer House archives mostly come from donations made by white and elite families in Wilmington, which means that Black voices are missing from the collection.16 Therefore, students must consider what is not present, not said, by the archives just as much as what is contained within the preservation boxes.

ABOVE Latimer house in Wilmington, NC

14

Wilmington on Fire, Dir. by Chris Everett (Speller Street Films, 2015).

15

Michelle Caswell, “Teaching to Dismantle White Supremacy in Archives.” Library Quarterly 87.3 (2017): 222–35 (Trouillot cited previously).

16

Alison Dineen, archivist, Latimer House.

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COURTESY OF THE AUTHORS

ABOVE A SOC 399: Social Movements

student working with Stephanie Norris, UNCW Director of Arts and Programs, to hang a gallery exhibit

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We wanted students from both the discipline-specific Sociology course (SOC 399) and our co-taught interdisciplinary Honors course to hear from and interact with members of the community, but during a COVID peak, physically encountering community members could have disproportionate negative health outcomes on the very community the students were meant to engage. However, the underexplored materials from the past offered an opportunity.

Although there are some published histories of topics like white supremacist protests in Wilmington, we believe that students connect more deeply to the material and form more concrete and extensive connections when they engage primary sources.

For the Sociology students, the arts seemed to provide a pathway towards creating a pandemic-safe outlet for this learning that could reach both the university and local populations. Students spent the first weeks of the semester studying the theoretical concepts surrounding social movements and protest; by midterm, students were given the opportunity to explore the archival materials related to protests in many areas (environmental justice, anti-racist, white supremacist, etc.). Students examined these materials, ultimately focusing on two local social movements – white supremacist and antiracist protests. They collected, digitized, and annotated materials from the archive including news media, photography, and firsthand accounts and displayed their data and analysis in a public gallery installation entitled “Protest in Wilmington Past and Present.” They then had the opportunity for a gallery talkback session with local community members who work in anti-racism, including Vance William, Lily Nicole, Kevin Roberts, and Brenda Galloway, all of whom are connected to the Sokoto House, a community center that “strives to create a space of learning and teaching that values the local genius of our community,” according to their website.

For our Honors students, those whose first-day jitters in many ways set the tone for the semester, the process was quite similar.

Their research was primarily driven by their own interests, despite not being Humanities majors. They were curious about business, education, and voting, so Alison Dineen helped them pull files and documents related to those topics. Turning through delicate pages from the 1880s and not so delicate pages from the 1980s, they keenly noticed that there was very little representation of Black individuals in “official” documents like city guide publications. From the materials that had piqued their interests, the students developed interdisciplinary digital humanities projects that included quantitative data analysis, narrative reflections, and visualizations supplemented by secondary research. One group followed up with additional archival research in the Heyward Bellamy collection housed in the Center for Southeast North Carolina Archives and

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COURTESY OF THE AUTHORS

History, finding copies of school board records thought to be lost in a fire at the New Hanover County Central Office at Hemenway Hall in 1971.17 These records included letters and documentation of students and families requesting to be reassigned to different schools after the closing of Williston High School and the integration of schools in Wilmington in 1968. The group traced the individuals in these requests, all Black students in Wilmington in the 1960s and early 1970s, through social media, Ancestry.com, newspapers, and online searches. They made an astute observation that the students whose requests were approved seemed more likely to go on to future academic and professional success, while the students whose requests were denied seemed to have less recognizably middle-class success.

This project, fully conceptualized, executed, and articulated by the students themselves, shows the fascinating narratives that can come from engaging in archival research, even if those narratives are being created by the research rather than coming from the page. At the end of the semester, the students presented their work in a public forum entitled “Intersectional Fields of Experience: A Symposium on Racial Inequality, Violence, and Resiliency Research,” giving them an opportunity to share their findings with an audience and participate in a collective conversation around these topics.

One of the Honors students, Jane Hance, a freshman nursing major, reflected on researching in the archives:

Visiting the Latimer House opened my eyes up to the reality of a lot of history that I have never seen before. Sitting in that house looking through archives of real papers from the 1800s and 1900s was extremely surreal. Seeing the things that white supremacists actually wrote to one another and believed to be true blew my mind. All my life I have seen myself as more of a “colorblind” person regarding race, not knowing much better and thinking that was the right thing to do, so holding physical newspaper clippings that actively advertised hate against Black Americans made me think more about how these individuals were so incredibly suppressed before and deserve so much recognition and justice for what they have overcome throughout history that they really are not getting right now. I thought about why these historical documents are not more widely known to the public because I believe if everyone saw what the white supremacists wrote, everyone would also want to help rectify relations with Black Americans and give them the justice they deserve. But then I thought back to one of the readings we had done in the classroom [“Propaganda of History” from W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction] that stuck out to me, and in the opening statement he wrote how ‘the facts of American history have in the last half century been

ABOVE Latimer House archivist Alison

Dineen meet with Honors 211: Resilience Over Racism students

17

UNC Wilmington Special Collections, “Civil Rights in Southeast North Carolina: The School, the Market, and the Ballot Box,” UNCW Randall Library: web.

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falsified because the nation was ashamed.’ This resonated with me as it is still true today and visiting the Latimer House showed me physical proof of that.

In our experience, archives give students the ability to interact with voices in the community and give the academy the capacity to expand whose voices can be considered. Exposure to these kinds of firsthand accounts of history provides a memorable and affecting encounter for students. As a result, we both have developed further opportunities to learn from Wilmington’s Black community through narratives and historical records that often challenge and expand intellectual understandings of course topics and the emotional experience of studying these topics. Bringing together research inquiry and visual and artistic displays of uncovered, underexplored, and often intentionally hidden content can broaden the set of resources we consider literature and create opportunities for high impact instruction as well as the production of new materials, arts, and performances.

Embodying Archives

By Ann Rotchford and Elizabeth Wellman ANN ROTCHFORD majored in Sociology at UNC Wilmington and earned her PhD at SUNY Stony Brook. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at UNC Wilmington

In this third project, currently in its planning stages, we will apply Cahalan’s “place” in pedagogy by blending courses in radically different disciplines: Social Science and Theatre Studies. As a means of exploring Black history and memory in Wilmington, students in both courses will collaborate on ELIZABETH WELLMAN is an Assistant Professor in the Theatre Department at UNC research, culminating in a public-facing event. Social SciWIlmington. An historian and theatre-maker, ence students will analyze the written historical records of her work centers on intersectional voices Black life housed in the archives at Latimer House, compiling and experiences on stage, in studio, and in traditional classroom environments. verbatim quotes as qualitative data points. Theatre Studies students, immersed in foundational research on the history of African American theatre and performance, will search additional local archives for accounts, descriptions, and narratives related to culture, expression, and artmaking in Wilmington. Throughout the research process, students from both classes will reflect on the experience of encountering the archival materials, as well as the experience of the archive space itself.

The two courses incorporated in this project represent different levels of curriculum and will involve undergraduate students at various levels of their university studies. Social Science Research Methods, a core course for both Sociology and Criminology majors, offers students direct experience working with data.18 The course emphasizes applied learning, student-driven research projects, and an introduction to the various tools employed in studying aspects of

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human social interaction, systems, and developing tools for solving social problems. While the class is sometimes perceived as an inconvenient core requirement, this interdisciplinary project gives students an opportunity to engage the data they have collected through a more creatively expressive medium. Black American Theatre is an upper-level seminar centering theatre and performance artists from across the Black Diaspora.19 Offered for both Theatre majors and students from across disciplines, the course embeds the local history and literature of Black Wilmington within the larger context of African American theatre in relation to works such as Georgia Douglas Johnson’s A Sunday Morning in the South (circa 1925), August Wilson’s Piano Lesson (1987), and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate (2013). The course also centers the work of regional artists like Wilmington-born Willis Richardson, survivor of the 1898 coup and massacre, who went on to become the first Black playwright of a non-musical produced on Broadway.20 We conceptualized this collaboration to encourage students to connect their foundational knowledge of research methods or dramatic literature to some of the lived experiences of Black citizens in North Carolina. The goal of the project is to help students understand the relationship between the researcher and the subject as both an intellectual and an embodied one. Using the curated archival excerpts collected by the Social Science students and the student reflections from both classes as their primary textual sources, the Theatre students will develop a performance script for a shared event, using verbatim theatre technique, pioneered by theatre practitioner Anna Deavere Smith, in which the text is transcribed, memorized, and performed exactly as originally written or delivered in order to provide a unique way to experience textual data.21 Attention to detail and the accuracy of transcription is essential.

For example, a student’s video reflection recorded in Social Science Research Methods may include a vocal hesitation, pauses, breaths, or other vocal “fillers.” Verbatim theatre asks actors to include these audible variations in expressive delivery as part of the performed text. Once the script has been created, theatre performers (either the students in the course or actors they cast from outside the class) will embody, both physically and vocally, representations of the individuals from both the archival literature and the students in both courses who interacted with that archival literature in a staged reading of the script.

At its most effective, this technique offers both its performers and its audience the chance to reflect on the duality of narrative and textual data. The script acts as both a direct quotation of the source

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18

View Professor Rotchford’s Social Science Research Methods course plan here.

19

View Professor Wellman’s Black American Theatre History course plan here.

Students poring over primary sources

20

Willis Richardson’s The Chip Woman’s Fortune opened at the Frazee Theatre in New York, 15 May 1923.

21

See Carol Martin, “Anna Deavere Smith: The Word Becomes You,” Drama Review 37.4 (1993): 45–62.

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material and an embodiment of the text in the vocality and physicality of the live performer, operating simultaneously as fixed citation and dynamic exploration of textual meaning. The experience of this duality is often disconcerting and engrossing for audiences who can recognize the “humanness” of the text through this delivery. During the event, original data and reflections will be present through projections, lobby displays, and printed programs, along with accompanying archival images and other artifacts. By intentionally juxtaposing the materials of the archive with the performance of that same data, students and the audience are invited to understand the text not just as words on a page, but as the expression of a life being lived, of the troubles and anxieties and triumphs of a real person moving through the world just as they do. Asking students to reflect metacognitively throughout the process, the project invites participants to consider the emotional impact of voicing both their own experiences and the experiences of others. The inclusion of these reflections within the performed script also allows us to consider questions of representation, cultural appropriation, and gaps in the archive by acknowledging the individual positionality of each participant in selecting, curating, cutting, arranging, and expressing data.

By including the original archival literature and personal reflections of students from two vastly different professional fields engaging with those archives, we seek to bridge disciplinary methodologies, building complementing skill sets from Social Science and Theatre. In this model, students are invited to practice interdisciplinary collaboration, acknowledging both its challenges and rewards. By borrowing concepts, methodologies, and techniques from scholars in We seek to help students understand other fields, this project offers a potential model that narratives, especially those found in for expanding our canon of literature within North archives or created through oral histories, Carolina, and for addressing complex socio-culare not just data points to be charted on a tural challenges. Because this project is still in the graph, but opportunities to build empathy planning stages, the outcomes are hypothetical, but the learning goals and core community engageand collective care for one another. ment goals remain the same as the others described in this essay. We seek to help students understand that narratives, especially those found in archives or created through oral histories, are not just data points to be charted on a graph, but opportunities to build empathy and collective care for one another.

Reflections

Significantly, building and maintaining archives does not come free.

Whenever possible, teachers and researchers should ensure that the

KAREN BALTIMORE has been one of NCLR’s graphic designers since 2013. For this issue, she designed both pedagogical essays, the poetry, the Lewis piece, play excerpt, and Cummings essay.

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communities they enter receive actual financial compensation for the labor and expertise that they provide for student engagement. To support an equitable relationship and access to the materials in the archive, we have used a UNCW Community Engagement Grant to develop a continued partnership with the Latimer House. The grant provides remuneration for the use of Latimer’s materials, a stipend for the archivist Alison Dineen as recompense for her time and labor, and funding for a UNCW student worker to assist Dineen in archival maintenance. With this financial investment, we hope to foster and expand the important collaborations with Latimer House and build further opportunities to protect and engage with one of the most significant collections of archival materials in Wilmington.

Moreover, a key component for outsider researchers doing archival research in communities that have experienced violence and oppression is recursive reflection in which students and researchers continually reflect on their positionality, privilege, power exchange, and responsibility to people and places. Additionally, projects relying on the ethos of the local community must be oriented toward respectfully and ethically contributing knowledge back to that community in ways that can be accessible and useful. For example, Sarah Gaby’s student research assistants have also searched local archives to identify evidence of the 1898 white supremacist plot and subsequent property loss for Black citizens, thereby serving Wilmington’s Black community and descendants of the massacre by leveraging university resources in data collection in hopes of leading to reparative action.

We emphasize ethical pedagogy and restorative justice practices in academic research to center local knowledge and ways of knowing as not only sites for investigation but also collaboration and service.

Scholars have often noted how the literary industry has long ignored, dismissed, or silenced marginalized communities of color.

Therefore, in considering how to incorporate North Carolina authors, teachers must recognize that traditional “literature” may perpetuate, knowingly or unknowingly, systems of oppression. Local community archives, especially when approached with an anti-racist lens, can thus provide an opportunity to work against canonization, periodization, nationalism, and whitewashing in literary studies while still incorporating the most significant learning outcomes of critical thinking, textual analysis, and contextualization. Michelle Caswell, Marika Cifor, and Mario H. Ramirez point out, “The social impact of archives in particular manifests itself in issues surrounding the development of personal and community identity, the preservation of culture, broadening understandings of history, and the positive representation of communities.”22 Especially when students

22

Michelle Caswell, Marika Cifor, and Mario H. Ramirez, “‘To suddenly discover yourself existing’: Uncovering the impact of community archives,” American Archivist 79.1 (2016): 63.

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Local community archives, especially when approached with an anti-racist lens, can thus provide an opportunity to work against canonization, periodization, nationalism, and whitewashing in literary studies while still incorporating the most significant learning outcomes of critical thinking, textual analysis, and contextualization.

enter into communities about which they know so little, positive representation matters. One of Sarah Gaby’s students reflected,

I’ve lived in Wilmington my entire life and I didn’t know any of this. I did not realize until I was much older how much our history has been shaped by white supremacy. Well, I knew about slavery, but that was also hardly ever talked about. But when it comes to 1898 or even the Wilmington 10, that’s never even mentioned.

I think it’s important to talk about these things, spread awareness, and share knowledge.

Especially in times when attacks on education focus specifically on suppressing histories of racialized violence, oppression, and inequality, creating opportunities for students to interact with and internalize firsthand accounts of these histories, which help them build empathy and civic responsibility as scholar-citizens, stands as the most important outcome for any course. n

Additional Resources Nancy Bartlett, Elizabeth Gadelha, and Cinda Nofziger, Teaching Undergraduates with Archives (Maize Books, 2019).

James Cahalan and David B. Downing, Practicing Theory in Introductory College Literature Courses (National Council of Teachers of English, 1991).

“Document Analysis,” National Archives (The US National Archives and Records Administration, last reviewed 6 Apr. 2023): web.

Verne Harris, Archives and Justice: A South African Perspective (Society of American Archivists, 2007).

—, Ghosts of Archive: Deconstructive Intersectionality and Praxis (Routledge, 2020).

Christopher Prom and Lisa Hinchliffe, eds. Teaching with Primary Sources (Society of American Archivists, 2016).

“Teacher’s Guides and Analysis Tool: Primary Source Analysis Tool for Students” (Library of Congress) web.

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, A HISTORY OF BEAUTY a review by Jill Goad Allison Adelle Hedge Coke.

Look at This Blue: A Poem.

Coffee House Press, 2022.

JILL GOAD grew up in Mount Airy, NC, and is currently Associate Professor of English at Shorter University in Rome, GA. She has recently published articles on nature-centered and ecocritical readings of Southern prose and poetry for Cambridge Scholars and in the journals Eudora Welty Review and Revenant. Read her essay on Cherokee poet Gladys Cardiff in the 2023 print issue of NCLR. ALLISON ADELLE HEDGE COKE, raised in North Carolina, is the author of several poetry collections, including Streaming (Coffee House Press, 2014; reviewed in NCLR Online 2016. She has also written a memoir, Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer (University of Nebraska Press, 2004). Hedge Coke’s poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in a variety of venues, including Poetry Out Loud, World Literature Today, the New York Times, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, and elsewhere. Read an interview with her in NCLR 2020.

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s Look at This Blue, a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award, is a book-length assemblage poem that tells the story of California, where she currently lives, mingling its past and present while focusing on episodes of violence against people and the environment. Alongside depictions of familial abuse, genocide, mistreatment of people at the hands of the state’s institutions, and destruction of flora and fauna, she offers subtler descriptions of human resilience and the persistence of natural beauty. Hedge Coke’s portrayal of California is not a hopeful or optimistic one; it is instead vast, diverse, frightening, and sometimes redeeming, a push to make readers aware of the varied and often unpleasant stories that make a place what it is.

Two epigraphs set the book’s tone and establish its thematic focus of Look at This Blue.

The first, reads, “once, the world was gleaming, open, we entered / unknowing, believing all we came to / we must deserve, knowing we did not faced / extinction.” And the second, a quotation from Tanya Tagaq’s “Retribution,” reads, “The path we have taken has rotted / Ignite, stand upright, conduct yourself like lightning.”

Together, the epigraphs are an indictment of everyone who has played a part in California’s various extinctions, a realistic portrayal of a decaying world, and a call to action that encourages readers to understand the chaos of current life without resigning themselves to it.

Hedge Coke’s work is heavily concerned with the violence people perpetrate against each other, implying that such

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violence is unjustly part of the fabric of life. In fragmented lines, choppily spaced to create a disorienting, stress-inducing series of images, Hedge Coke depicts victims of violence such as the “Child choked out, belt at throat” or the beautiful boy, made to eat cat feces, vomit, pepper sprayed, made to live in a cabinet, box, bound and gagged at eight because you might be gay.

Turning the lens on her experiences with domestic violence, Hedge Coke remembers being “bruised from brow to jaw, pummeled / what a mess”; lying to her mother-in-law about the nature of her frequent injuries; and suffering each time her husband was released from prison and found her again. Although the poet pays much attention to the ways people can brutally and physically hurt each other, in Look at This Blue, individual violent acts do not exist in a bubble: the personal is connected to the historical and to the collective, as is evident in Hedge Coke’s examples of California’s fraught history.

Indicting California’s past, Hedge Coke refers to the state’s dubious label as “free-soil state upon statehood” when the Indian Act of 1850 “authorized arrests / of any vagrant Natives to be hired out to highest bidder,” allowing “Native children to be indentured. . . . / by any white persons who wished for laborers.” Other parts of the poem refer to the enslavement, torture, and murder of Indigenous people in missions in the 1700s. Additionally, Chinese immigrants were blocked from immigrating to California

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in the 1880s, and in the 1920s, California violently removed four hundred thousand Mexican American people who were misnamed as “illegal aliens.”

After providing a formidable list of massacres that took place in California, Hedge Coke refers to it as the “Land of the – / war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide / without limitations, statute.” For readers who might assume that California’s violent

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treatment of these populations is safely in the past and sufficiently acknowledged, Hedge Coke refers to California’s failure to ratify the 14th and 15th Amendments “granting citizenship to former / slaves and ensuring the rights of black men to vote – until the middle of / the 20th century.”

More recently, California border agents have shot fleeing migrants in the back, claimPHOTOGRAPH BY NATHALIE SCHUELLER

ABOVE Allison Adelle Hedge Coke with her granduaghter Hazel

at the 2022 National Book Awards, New York, 16 Nov. 2022

ing “fear of life.” Over the past few years, detained California immigrants have died in police custody when denied lifesaving medical care. These instances, according to Hedge Coke, are emblematic of daily cases of institutional neglect and abuse suffered by California’s citizens, such as an impoverished old woman injured in a car accident, sent home by the police in a cab to suffer, “walking on an unattended broken leg,” or a bullied child at school ignored by teachers, leading Hedge Coke to the declaration, “Schools were made to break us.”

In connecting the personal to the collective and the historical, Hedge Coke relates violence against humans with violence against nature, another aspect of California’s story. Because “nothing here [is] on guardian watch,” 120,000 acres of Los Padres National Forest were destroyed in a wildfire, displacing wildlife, including pumas and foxes. Hedge Coke mentions, too, that defunding national parks during COVID left this wildlife unprotected from destructive visitors.

Almost twenty pages of Look at This Blue list mammals, birds, amphibians, insects, and fish that are extinct because they have been treated as “temporary, expendable” by humans’ focus on “taking / taking, taking, taking,” and Hedge Coke notes that this overwhelming list is only “a partial recount.”

(Climate change means that “We’re all sitting on ground near enough what might go under, liquify, / on what used to be an ocean” and that the “1989 Loma

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

ABOVE Allison Adelle Hedge Coke at the

2022 National Book Awards, New York, 16 Nov. 2022

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PHOTOGRAPH BY EVAN AGOSTINI/INVISION/AP

Prieta earthquake / will be less costly than 2025 rise.” Ultimately, Hedge Coke argues that “we will surely not endure” because natural elements such as rain, “savanna grasses, / forests, sea oats” have been commodified.

Despite the formidable darkness that pervades Hedge Coke’s assemblage poem, there are moments of resilience and beauty, a testament to California’s complicated history. In one evening scene, cranes “chortle trill night language.” The return of a male gray wolf for the first time in almost a century in Ventura County is a symbol of hope as bright as the “100 thousand million stars in the sky.”

In another part of the poem, the return of the condor is akin to the rise of the phoenix, and immediately after, Hedge Coke encourages humans to similarly pull themselves from the ashes: “Let love lead. / . . . . / Let all of us, all of us, all of us, let all of us be unbroken. / Take heart.” As an example of letting love lead, Hedge Coke tells the story of a woman “who loved children so much / she forced the city to put in a crosswalk / for grade school kids crossing, running late,” a seemingly small gesture that kept children safe for decades. Again, the individual and collective and the personal and the historical are all entwined.

One thread that speaks to the complexity of California’s story is the repetition of the title, Look at This Blue. In six places, the phrase is left aligned at the top of the page. The first mention of the phrase precedes a description of the Xerxes blue butterfly, “first-known American butterfly to

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become extinct due to humans / first known,” while the second comes before a discussion of the Palos Verdes blue butterfly that was thought extinct but was rediscovered. Other references depict mutant blue-eyed coyotes, endangered Mission blue butterflies, the blue whale that ingests plastics along with krill, and the vulnerable Hidden Lake bluecurl flower. All these living things have a common link – the potential for destruction at human hands the potential to persist if humans pay attention.

Hedge Coke gives these plants and animals a story that indicts humans for their destructive tendencies while urging them to do something about the problems they have caused.

Look at this Blue ends with two short lines from singer Joni

Mitchell: “Will you take me as I am? / California?”* This probing question follows more than one hundred pages of often overwhelming images of death, degradation, injustice, and struggle in the state.

Will the book’s readers accept California as it is – beautiful, burning, sinking, a site of pain and persistence? Although Hedge Coke dedicates her book in part to “California, our beloved,” she does not expect an easy answer to her closing question, nor does she provide one. Her emphasis on complication and contradiction gives Look at This Blue its appeal while also leaving the reader with a sense of uncertainty as to where California’s story will go next and where, perhaps, it will end. n

* Joni Mitchell, “California,” Blue (Reprise, 1971).

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MOVING BODIES, HEALING PLACES a review by J.S. Absher Joseph Bathanti. Light at the Seam. Louisiana State University Press, 2022.

Joseph Mills. Bodies in Motion.

Press 53, 2022.

J.S. ABSHER is a seven-time finalist of NCLR’s James Applewhite Poetry Prize. He is the author of two poetry collections: Mouth Work (St. Andrews University Press, 2016; reviewed in NCLR Online 2017), which won the 2015 Lene Shull Book Competition sponsored by the North Carolina Poetry Society, and Skating Rough Ground (Kelsay Books, 2022). His work has been published in approximately fifty journals and anthologies, including Visions International, Tar River Poetry, NCLR, and Southern Poetry Anthology, VII: North Carolina. He lives with his wife, Patti, in Raleigh, NC.

Light at the Seam and Bodies in Motion participate in our longterm conversation on how to live fully while conscious of how technology and history endanger our well-being. In Light at the Seam, Joseph Bathanti offers a vision of nature that can heal and revive us, if we can learn not to destroy it. In Bodies in Motion, Joseph Mills provides the vision of how life may be wisely lived, disciplined, and yet spontaneous. Both volumes urge an ethic of responsibility in beautifully wrought verse.

Light at the Seam by Joseph Bathanti is a poetry of place; people are present, but often as names or figures in the landscape. The geography includes coal country, its boundaries described in the first poem (“Removing the Mountain from the Coal”): “eastern Kentucky, Tennessee, / all of West Virginia, into western / Virginia”; the New River Valley from its headwaters in Western North Carolina (“Headwaters of the New”), including several tributaries, like Glade Creek (“Glade Creek Falls”) and Wolf Creek (“Near Fayette Station”); the area around Linville Creek in Watauga County; and more, including Buncombe County (“A Map from Clyde Hollifield”). Bathanti often guides us through a place, as in “Near Fayette Station” and “A Map from Clyde Hollifield.” These poems move quickly over and through the

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landscape, as if one were driving – some include directions and landmarks for a driver – or flying. But others, like “Headwaters of the New,” are intimate; the poet is slowly walking with us, pausing to contemplate places too intimate and sacred to be mapped : “Someone who believes / in a single drop of water / must guide you.”

The poems guide the reader in other ways. Often successive poems offer different perspectives on similar experiences. In “Fall Webworms,” the webs are depicted as “veiled widows in white bridals, / cradling their stillborn.” The language is beautiful and disturbing, capturing exactly the emotions that the webs evoke in me; they become a dark omen, for “they tell the jilted future of this plat” under environmental assault. But Bathanti is not done with webworms, for in the next poem, “The Assumption,” they “sleeve the locust in smoke,” another stunning image. Two back-toback poems deal with flooding caused by coal mining. In “The Windows of Heaven,” “water leaks from invisible understories”; in a “sizzling rain,” a creek escaping its banks is “airborne, creek no more”; and “folks huddle on the rise / beyond Rainey’s swamped trailer.” In “Runoff,” one of the folks, “the Horton girl – not but three –” catalogues the homely and precious items swept away by the flood, including, memorably

Former Poet Laureate of North Carolina JOSEPH BATHANTI earned BA and MA degrees from the University of Pittsburg and an MFA from Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. He teaches at Appalachian State in Boone, NC. He is the author of several books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including The 13th Sunday After Pentecost (Louisiana State University Press, 2017; reviewed in NCLR Online 2018).

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

“Fate Biddix’s cabbage field . . . / heads bobbing – a tale of epic slaughter.” The next poem returns to “Rainey’s Trailer” after its ruin, already being reclaimed by nature: “tiger swallowtails – // fanning black and gold bellows, / ascending through the pierced roof.”

The attentive reader traversing the landscapes of Light at the Seam begins to notice the recurrence of places – like Linville Creek, Agnes Ridge – and of people, including those probably no longer living who have lent their names to the land – for example, the meadow (in “April Snow” and “The Coal Miner’s Wife: A Letter”) and the maple (in “The Assumption”) that bear the Billings name. The reader comes to feel an intimacy with these places where people live, work the mines and hayfields, and die (we visit several cemeteries), all vulnerable to coal mining – the drag lines, the haul trucks, the explosions that crack the foundations of houses (in “Floyd County, Kentucky”) and with fragments of black shale that “pocks the earth, / like bullets,” even “straf[ing] the very names / hewn in [graves’] ledger stone” (in “Flyrock”).

Many words also recur in the poems; a small sample includes swale, thurible, truss, and augur, often in different contexts.

These repetitions add another level of intimacy and recognition, another set of directional markers for the reader. The lan-

guage throughout is taut and vivid; the diction encompasses a wide range of the natural and human condition, from the demotic in “nary,” to the pastoral and industrial, to the liturgical, as when we hear “Saint John // the Evangelist coughing in the shaft house” in “Oracle.”

Light at the Seam strikes me as the reworking of a minor genre, the topographic poem, from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In this genre, a landscape, viewed from on high or at ground level, is defined by nature, the human inhabitants (usually unnamed), and the historical context, usually with a political burden. A subgenre is the aristocratic country house poem; Bathanti gives us several country homes of farmers and miners, including Rainey’s trailer, all abandoned and ruined by mining. The wide-ranging diction accommodates this broad vision.

In a topographic poem, the landscape mediates a sacramental relationship with the divine.

In Pope’s “Windsor Forest,” gods and goddesses, like Artemis, invest the landscape. In “Daylily,” this flower bathes on the bank of Linville Creek, “like Artemis, / for just a day.” Pope’s divinities

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are decorative; Bathanti’s sacramental vision is essential, based on the poet’s spiritual practice and habits of mind. The title poem for the book’s first section, “The Assumption,” is drawn from the Feast of the Assumption, a day marking “the taking up of the Blessed Mother, / body and soul, into Heaven.” “Near Fayette Station” has us “make the sign of the cross” as “you pass . . . / the Church of Saints Peter and Paul.”

One of my favorite poems is “Agnus Dei” about an old ewe sheared on Holy Saturday, the day before Easter. The poem is set in a place we have come to know, near Agnes Ridge and Linville Creek. The unnamed shearer is memorable: “shaven head, golden beard, / ear hoops.” The old ewe, “teeth like field corn,” has provided “the woolens / of each baby born heir to this plat.” She settles down to be sheared “prim as a

ABOVE Joseph Bathanti accepting

the Roanoke-Chowan Award for this collection at the 2022 North Carolina Literary and Historical Association award ceremony, Raleigh, NC, 2 Dec. 2022

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sheep at tea.” The sheared wool “scrolls from her” in “bound volumes” that provide the archives for the place: “a bard owl’s ossified heart, / wedding band, possum skull, / Cherokee potsherds, // the 31st chapter of Deuteronomy.” Nearby, at the Horton place, a woman can be heard singing an old ballad. It is a sacred place, representative of the nature and humanity that can save us – if we do not destroy them first. As the shearer works, the nearby creek is bracing for an imminent, possibly ruinous flood.

Bodies in Motion by Joseph Mills portrays dancing across geography and time. The poems include the scandalous Renaissance dance, the volta (“La Volta, or ‘Queen Elizabeth Dancing with Robert Dudley’”), and Bill Robinson’s tapping stair dance (“The Rise and Fall of Bill Robinson”). They include a broad swath of Americana, from Billy the Kid’s mastery of Mexican “gaits” (“Reasons I’m Nervous When My Daughter Goes Dancing”) to dancing around the Maypole in Plymouth Plantation; from Black Elk’s ghost dance before the Wounded Knee massacre to the minuet and its African American parody, the cakewalk (“Found Across America” and “George Washington, Entwined”).

Despite this breadth, Bodies in Motion is grounded in the poet’s life. The most intimate moments

are perhaps the impromptu dances in the kitchen, as in “Three Minutes”: “They twirl and spin almost soundlessly, / navigating the cramped space with ease, / locked into one another like those times / they try not to wake the children at night.”

In Mills’s graceful poems, dance mediates relationships throughout life – whether the poet is the son of an aging mother (“Rita Moreno, Say”), a teacher of poetry (“At the Arts Conservatory”), a man self-conscious about aging (the poems in Act V), or a citizen engaged with social media (“In Jane Austen”), tragic events (“After the Pulse Massacre”), and changing mores: Ignore the imperative, the possessive “your,” the complicated questions of trust, and simply ask, how you can both “follow your partner’s lead.” (“When the Dance Instructor Says ‘Follow Your Partner’s Lead’”)

“[T]he complicated questions / of trust” include American’s painful past and present in racial relationships, from problematic imagery in the beloved songs of childhood in “America Singing” to the poet’s experience as the white father of a black son in “White Father, Black Son.” Dance serves as a metaphor – for growing up as a responsible, savvy adult; parenting and growing old; ruling the self and ruling a state; making life decisions; controlling the self and

JOSEPH MILLS is a faculty member at the UNC School of the Arts, where he holds the Susan Burress Wall Distinguished Professorship in the Humanities and was honored with a 2017 UNC Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Teaching. He has published six volumes of poetry with Press 53, including This Miraculous Turning (2014; reviewed in NCLR Online 2016), which won the 2015 Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry. He also writes literary criticism, drama, and fiction, including Bleachers: Fifty-four Linked Fictions (Press 53, 2019; reviewed in NCLR Online 2020).

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representing the self through controlled performance that can break loose when the time is right – but the metaphors do not obscure the sweating, painful, joyful movement of dancing bodies. The poems draw energy from several aspects of dance.

First, dance is an observed performance – sometimes on stage or film or in the studio, where the teacher observes and comments, “you’re not on top / of what you’re doing / you are / what you’re doing,” in “contemporary dance class.”

The audience – sometimes a single observer, like the dancer alone seeing her reflection in the studio’s mirrors in “Gaze” – is inescapable. In an intimate performance between partners, each observes the other and responds to the other’s movements. Even when the dancer is alone in the kitchen, the poet and his audience are observing. The young are observed by their parents, like the twoyear-old at the “Nutcracker” in “The Exit of the Bear”; adults on the dance floor in “Threads” are watched by adolescents looking for clues on how to grow up, “thinking it meant wearing certain clothes, / holding one another at arm’s length.”

Second, dance is a form of conduct, performance viewed from an ethical perspective.

Moments in Bodies in Motion remind me of a conduct book, a text “intended for an inexperienced young adult or other

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

human life, and especially of the right conduct of life”2 but was not tied to a specific nationality or religion: it was above all pragmatic. Bodies in Motion is remarkably wise in its understanding of how to live well in our difficult, unbalanced times, of how to submit to the disciplines of living while remaining able to find release and joy in spontaneity.

The poet offers Fred Astaire as an exemplary figure in understanding dance as performance and as conduct. Astaire created, with Ginger Rogers, “moments of beauty and / equality, dancing in a way that reveals / who we are and who we can be together” (“Isn’t This a Lovely Day”); he and Ginger were devoted to their craft: “they did takes until she bled” (“Set Pieces”); his dress and behavior demonstrated that “elegant insouciance” that the poet wants in a hat (and character) – “something / that shows I’m both in control and not / afraid to toss it away” (“Matchmaking”). Finally, in contrast to the unnamed dancer in “Framework,” Astaire demonstrated responsibility: if a dancer wants his partner, “to be like Ginger, / then he needs to be like Fred and start / taking responsibility for his steps and / recognizing what those require of her” (“Framework”). Near the middle

what remains is simply work so unremarkable it’s painful; it is bracing against a gray stone wall for a moment, then standing, moving on, and returning the next day and the next.

Bodies in Motion is a modern version of wisdom literature, an ancient genre that “rais[ed] questions of value and moral behavior, of the meaning of

1

Sarah E. Newton, Learning to Behave: A Guide to American Conduct Books Before 1900 (Greenwood Press, 1994) 4.

2

Robert Alter, The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes (Norton, 2010) xiv.

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youthful reader, that defines an ethical . . . code of behavior, and that normally includes gender role definitions.” 1 Mills, however, turns traditional definitions on their head. The young men in these poems learn from observing young women. In one of my favorite passages, a young woman helps clean up a drunken young man and the floor, both covered in vomit.

In “Ever After,” what the narrator remembers best from prom night is “this woman who knew what work was / and who did it because she knew it needed to be done.”

Third, like living well, dance is demanding. In “The Recruiting Brochures Feature Grand Jetés,” after every class a young dancer “cries / silently, matter-of-factly,” partly because “she aches / in so many places and ways,” partly because she is encountering her limits as a dancer and as a human, recognizing she was “unremarkable / in the beginning,” and may remain so “even at the story’s end”:

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of Bodies in Motion, in “A Brief History of Time,” the poet muses: “I wonder if there is anything / that can’t be explained by dance.” Not much, I would say; not much at all.

Reading these two books has reminded me how much enjoyment can be found in poems that engage the reader in conversation about the good life.

Light at the Seam reveals a sacramental vision of life and nature, a hope in regenerative possibilities balanced against a fear of industrial exploitation and climate change. Bodies in Motion shows through dance how to live responsibly and joyfully through all the roles and stages of our life, from youth to old age. n

ABOVE Joseph Mills at his launch reading

at Bookmarks Bookstore in WinstonSalem, 14 Apr. 2022

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Phillip Lewis Phillip Lewis Intertextuality

on the Intertextuality of Intertextuality Intertextuality The TheBarrowfields Barrowfields introduced by GEORGE HOVIS

COURTESY OF PHILLIP LEWIS

In the 2023 print issue of NCLR, I talked with Phillip Lewis about the influence of Thomas Wolfe on Lewis’s debut novel, The Barrowfields, which has met with widespread critical acclaim and has been translated into five languages. One of the great pleasures of The Barrowfields is its characters’ unabashed immersion in a world of arts and letters. The narrator is constantly making reference to writers: Thomas Wolfe, Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, to name a few of the most important echoes in the text. Henry Aster, Sr., is an obsessive book collector. Henry, Jr., is evidently well read himself, as evidenced by the gorgeously lyrical narration of his tale. The whole family is constantly reading, and Henry, Sr., and Jr. are frequently playing Chopin and Mozart and Beethoven and Liszt on the piano. Henry, Jr., reads and tells stories to his younger sister. The names of characters even feel metafictional at times: Henry’s girlfriend has “the curious name of Story.” 1 (154). Henry’s sister’s legal name is Threnody. The name of his hometown is Old Buckram.

As in Wolfe’s body of work, Lewis’s novel concerns itself with familial dysfunction and with the the artist’s race against time. For most of the interview, we talked of these Wolfean themes and of other literary influences – notably Poe and Hemingway. Lewis delved deep into a consideration of the other literary works with which The Barrowfields enters into dialogue. That lengthy response is featured here.

This interview was conducted by email in May, 2022, and is presented here fully intact and with minimal editing beyond inserting citations for quoted matter.

I did not have any particular goals in mind; in fact, I thought that if I did it properly, most of it would go by unnoticed, at least on an initial read. Chiefly, I thought of the character and place names that are imbued with extrinsic meaning and the other metafictional devices as literary easter eggs: that is, little bits of treasure for the close reader who cares to delve a little deeper and find meaning in other layers of the story. They are scattered throughout the text. Some

ABOVE Phillip Lewis in Paris

1

Phillip Lewis, The Barrowfields (Random House: Hogarth, 2017) 154; subsequently cited parenthetically.

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COURTESY OF BOMPIANI

ABOVE Italian translation of The

Barrowfields (Bompiani, 2018)

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are simple (e.g., a man of exceptional midbody girth that Henry encounters upon his return to Old Buckram is named Cetus, i.e., whale); most are more complex.

The old mountain town where the story takes place is called Old Buckram. Buckram is a type of fabric that, at least in the days of old, was used to make book covers. Thus, the story takes place, figurately speaking, within the covers of an old book. And it goes on from there. In depicting Old Buckram in all its haunting bleakness, I wanted to convey a sense of the primitive religiosity and latent superstition present in the town. Part of this lay in the notion that, in Old Buckram, persons skeptical of a literal and unacademic understanding of the Bible (such as the Asters) were, in the minds of the locals, condemned to an eternity in hell upon their death. To this end, I created dark and austere parts of Old Buckram that were representative of this bleakness and unforgiving religiosity and gave them names such as Abbadon Creek, Avernus, and Ben Hennom (see ben-Hinnom, Gehinnom), all of which have some extrinsic significance.

As just one example, Avernus is, in the book, a family cemetery set up on top of a hill where the engraving on the tombstones, “if there had ever been any, was so eroded by time and weather that it was no longer visible” (80). The cemetery is a desolate, cheerless place with few trees and a monochrome sky overhead. It is here that members of the Aster family will be buried when they pass. The name Avernus derives from a volcanic crater in Cumae, Italy, that gave off noxious gases which killed birds flying overhead. This is suggested by the word’s etymology (it means, “no birds”). Virgil, in Book 6 of the Aeneid, uses the name Avernus to signify the entrance or gates to the underworld, and this is the sense of the word for which I use Avernus in The Barrowfields.

Character names get a similar treatment, like the mountain preacher Harold Specks, who “had no special insight into the machinations of God or Jesus or the Holy Spirit . . . or the schemes of the demons . . . but the certitude with which he condemned sinners to hell elevated him to the head of his church at a young age” (81). Harold, who chews a piece of slippery elm (sometimes used for divination) and carries a Bible he hasn’t read, was given his name in the book as a reference to the word “haruspex,” a species of priest in ancient Rome who practiced the dubious art of divination on the basis of what could be seen in the entrails of dead animals. It was probably Mencken who broadened the meaning of haruspex to include all unlearned charlatans and mountebanks (another Mencken favorite), and that is essentially the meaning to be applied here.

Much of the story in Old Buckram takes place in a hillside mansion the narrator refers to as the Vulture House, which is

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described in the book as a “monstrous gothic skeleton” that “towered black and malefic into the gray of the cindered sky” (34). Behind the Vulture House was an immense forest that “ran up the mountain for hundreds of acres over boulder and crag” (68). After moving into the Vulture House, Henry’s father names these woods the “Gnarled Forest” (68), a reference to Canto XIII of Dante’s Inferno, which describes a hellish grove where fat, winged harpies feed on the leaves of the gnarled trees that house the souls of men who, having “sought refuge in death from scorn,” took their own lives.2 The father, being a person of exceptional literacy, gave the woods this name of literary heritage quite purposefully, perhaps foretelling events to come and raising the question of the extent of the father’s prescience regarding his own life and eventual fate.

A further literary allusion appears in chapter 36, as Henry sits alone at a grand piano in the center of the Vulture House after the rest of his family has fled elsewhere. As darkness fills the house and he consumes wine to excess, his mood grows increasingly despairing to the point that he can no longer tolerate the sound of the piano and his own playing.

To demonstrate this transformation of mood and perspective, I included a reference to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp,” but more importantly, to his “Dejection: An Ode.” Coleridge writes about an Eolian harp (or Aeolian lute; same thing) in both poems.

In the former, pensive Sara rests sweetly upon Samuel’s arm and all is delightful and the “long sequacious notes” from the Eolian harp “over delicious surges sink and rise.” In “Dejection: An Ode,” however, Samuel is, as the title implies, dejected, and his mood casts a pall on the lute’s music. He writes of the “dull sobbing draft, the moans and rakes / Upon the strings of this Aeolian lute, which better far were mute.”3 Similarly, for Henry, after playing for some time and then descending toward a depression of his own, “the piano, old and disconsonant, began to jangle like a band of drunken minstrels. The keys struck and raked upon the wires and grated upon my ears” (250).

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ABOVE TOP Book cover of the UK

(Sceptre, 2017) ABOVE BOTTOM Book cover of the

French (Belfond, 2018) translations of The Barrowfields

2

Dante Alighieri and Henry Francis Cary, Inferno, 1814, Project Gutenberg, 1997.

3

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Eolian Harp,” 1795, “Dejection: An Ode,” 1802, quoted from The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 5th ed., ed.

Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, Jon Stallworthy (Norton, 2004) 805, 828.

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ABOVE BOTTOM Book cover of the

Polish (Prószyński i S-ka, 2018) translations of The Barrowfields

4

Tennessee Williams, Clothes for a Summer Hotel: A Ghost Play (New Directions, 1983). Read an essay on this North Carolina-set play in NCLR: Annette J. Saddik, “Recovering ‘moral and sexual chaos’ in Tennessee Williams’s Clothes for a Summer Hotel,” North Carolina Literary Review 18 (2009): 53–65.

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In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the galaxy’s most advanced computer, Deep Thought, is tasked with the ultimate philosophical and religious inquiry, to wit, calculating the answer to “Life, the Universe, and Everything.” After seven and a half million years of computing, Deep Thought at last arrives at the answer: 42.

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(BTB Verlag, 2019)

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In chapter 42, as Henry and his girlfriend, Story, make their way up the hill to the Vulture House one warm, sunlit afternoon.

While the mansion never sheds its malefic aura, on this day the midsummer green of the surrounding fields “caused the baleful house to fade momentarily from view and brought to my mind a happy, nostalgic vision of Scott and Zelda playing on the terrace of the Grove Park Inn, Scott in his plus fours and Zelda resplendent in her clothes picked out special for the summer hotel” (294). The chief reference here is Clothes for a Summer Hotel, a bitterly desperate play by Tennessee Williams about Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald that portrays the honest tragedy of their circumstance.4 Despite the pleasantly nostalgic context apparent in this excerpt, the scene was written with an overlay of foreboding, and the reference to the doleful Tennessee Williams play was designed to further a sense of dread just outside one’s awareness.

And there are many more allusions that are a bit more fun.

Henry’s dog, Buller (named for the overly ambitious dog in Beryl Markham’s wonderful 1942 book West with the Night), is tagged with number 42 as a puppy, and in one scene Threnody tells Henry that their mother’s boyfriend is “mostly harmless,” with the number 42 and “mostly harmless,” the number significant in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and works beyond.5 I also got in a reference to one of my favorite books, The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster: When Story visits Henry at the Vulture House for the first time, he describes it to her as “faintly macabre,” which is the name of a “not-so-wicked which” (which, not witch) in Tollbooth. The list goes on. n

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ABOVE TOP Book cover of the German

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A STORY TO TELL FROM NORTH CAROLINA’S PAST a review by Kristina L. Knotts David Wright Faladé. Black Cloud Rising. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2022.

KRISTINA L. KNOTTS is the Assistant Director of the Banacos Academic Center and a Program Advisor in the Learning Disabilities Program at Westfield State University in Westfield, MA. She has a PhD in English from the University of Tennessee and reviews for NCLR frequently.

DAVID WRIGHT FALADÉ is co-author of two previous books, including Away Running (Orca Book Publishers, 2016) with Luc Bouchard. A Professor at the University of Illinois and former Fulbright Fellow to Brazil, Faladé holds a BA from Carleton College and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

When history refers to African American soldiers’ service in the American Civil War, the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment – famously portrayed in the 1989 film Glory – usually comes to mind. Black Cloud Rising, an historical novel by David Wright Faladé, shows there is much more to learn about the heroism of Black Union soldiers than just the 54th Regiment. Black Cloud Rising recreates the gritty and inspiring true story of Sergeant Richard Etheridge. Born into slavery and living on Roanoke Island at the start of the Civil War, in 1863 Etheridge joined the Second North Carolina (Colored) Volunteer Infantry regiment in Company F, also called the African Brigade, under Union Army General Edward Wild. Wild commanded an army of both black and white soldiers, with many of his black soldiers recruited from the areas of southeastern Virginia and eastern North Carolina and recently freed from slavery.

Faladé’s novel arises from his earlier historical book, written with David Zoby, about Richard Etheridge, Fire on the Beach: Recovering the Lost Story of Richard Etheridge and the Pea Island Lifesavers (2000), which focuses on Etheridge’s exemplary service commanding an all-black lifesaving unit on the North Carolina coast.

Black Cloud Rising covers a month of Etheridge’s Civil War service from November 1863 to Christmas Eve 1863 with an afterword set in 1899. Much of the novel’s action explores the struggles the black soldiers encountered during their service, from the resentment from white Union soldiers, as well as the local whites, bushwhack-

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ers and Home Guard, who were loyal to the Confederacy, and conflicts among the black soldiers. Faladé’s novel shows the tensions the young soldiers must navigate in the swiftly changing world around them.

The black soldiers in Wild’s regiment, with a few exceptions, were recently enslaved. Aside from the stress of combat, much of their anxiety stems from their worry about family and friends who are not yet free. The Confiscation Act of 1862 allowed the Union soldiers to seize property used to support the rebellion, which could certainly mean soldiers could confiscate and set free those who were still enslaved. As Wright and Zoby make clear in Fire on the Beach, the “men of the Second had a stake here. Most came from the region or nearby, and they would be freeing family and friends. But there was a larger goal [here] also. These men all wanted to make a strong statement about their unwillingness to see in bondage themselves, their families, or anybody who looked like them” (69).

Black Cloud Rising portrays the soldiers going into the community to find relatives and friends and bring them into the protection of the Union troops.

As the men of the Second travel into hostile territory, Etheridge’s childhood friend Fields goes in search of his still-enslaved brothers when it’s rumored their enslaver left the area with them. In one of the most powerful scenes, Fields asks one of the white relatives of his former owner where his brothers are but is mocked for inquiring, and Etheridge must restrain Fields, who tells them: “You will tell me where my brothers are, or you

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

RIGHT Keeper Richard Etheridge (left)

and crew, Station Pea Island, NC (The appearance of US Department of Defense (DoD) visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement.)

ard’s growth, psychologically, in his relationships, in his reflecting on his past, in his reassessment of the white Etheridges, and in his dawning understanding of his mother. He has moments where he acknowledges his limited perspective of the women in his life, and he reckons frequently on the considerable scrutiny and suspicion the black soldiers face. In one scene, Richard critiques General Wild’s tactic of taking local white women hostage: “If the general intended to use this method of combat against the Rebels – menacing the men by the threat of terror to their women – it put us colored soldiers in a tight spot. For would we not be seen as the lustful brutes that Southern men already believed us to be in the first place?” (151).

Faladé’s narrative shows Richard vigilant during the conflicts and difficult situations the soldiers find themselves in, mindful of the racist views they’re constantly subjected to, which their general, though an abolitionist, is oblivious to.

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Faladé’s novel also sheds light on the various groups Richard encounters who populate the region. As he and his fellow soldiers traverse the southeastern Virginia and coastal Carolina landscapes, they encounter a variety of people: hostile Home Guard types, defensive Confederacy sympathizers, black men and women who joyously greet the troops, and the free black people who populate the Swamp and live by their own rules and creed, preferring their bartering lifestyle to what the military offers. Faladé’s storytelling gift is that he reveals the complexity of those in the South, black and white. He shows there are more stories to tell, not only about Richard Etheridge who continued his military service and later had a distinguished career with the Life-Saving Service on the North Carolina coast, but also the other soldiers he served with, as well as the newly freed men and women who made up the Outer Banks landscape who deserved and fought for freedom. n COURTESY OF GREENSBORO LITERARY ORGANIZATION

will lose like I have lost” (156).

Richard and his men’s mission could not be any clearer: to end slavery and assert their rightful humanity.

As narrator of Black Cloud Rising, Richard’s voice is earnest, intelligent, and introspective. Twenty-one years old at the novel’s beginning, Richard rises to the rank of sergeant.

As the troop moves into armed conflict, he embraces his role as a leader even as he wrestles with troubling memories and his new identity. At various times in the novel, Richard examines his own life and background to make sense of his past with the white Etheridges. He’s been taught to read and write, for example, a rarity among his peers. Throughout the novel, he wonders if this unusual favor is because the white master, John B. Etheridge, is his father, as he suspects. Richard’s embrace of his role as a sergeant and the respect he garners from the white officers aggravates some of Richard’s peers, especially when Richard is called on to discipline the men in his troop.

Revere, another soldier who, like Richard, joined the regiment after leaving slavery, serves as his antagonist throughout the narrative. At times he calls Richard a “lackey and a lickspit” and remarks, “How much you despise your own black skin” (107–108).

One of the considerable strengths of this novel is Rich-

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REGARDING EDWARD a review by Terry Roberts Elizabeth Spencer and Sally Greene. The Edward Tales. University Press of Mississippi, 2022.

TERRY ROBERTS is the author of five celebrated novels most recently, The Sky Club (Keylight Books, 2022). In addition, he has written extensively about Elizabeth Spencer, most notably Self and Community in the Fiction of Elizabeth Spencer (Louisiana State Press, 1994).

North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame inductee E L I Z A B E T H S P E N C E R (1921—2019) moved to North Carolina in 1986 and taught at UNC Chapel Hill under her retirement in 1992. Her numerous awards include the Award of Merit Medal for the Short Story from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the North Carolina Award for Literature.

SALLY GREENE is an independent scholar who specializes in the literature of twentieth-century British and American women.

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Elizabeth Spencer’s masterful career – beginning with the publication of her first novel in 1948 and lasting through the collection of her late stories in 2014 – lasted for six decades.

During this long and distinguished passage, she worked her way through at least four different phases of maturing artistry, while producing nine novels, eight collections of stories, an underappreciated memoir, and a play. All of which led to her being recognized by the Library of America with a 2021 selection of her work.

At several points in her career, Spencer used her fiction to revisit an important character, one who provided her with the perspective or magnitude to investigate an evolving collection of themes. The first of these characters is Marilee Summerall, who appeared in three stories between 1960 and 1978: “A Southern Landscape,” “Sharon,” and “Indian Summer.” The Mariilee stories provide an elegant summary of these twenty years of Spencer’s career in that they move from relatively traditional narration to a complex mix of chronology, direct and indirect encounters, imagined conversations, and dreams.

Read in succession, they reveal how Marilee’s inner landscape becomes Spencer’s primary concern, rather than any objective, external reality.

So important were these three stories in the evolution of Spencer’s imagination that they were collected by the University Press of Mississippi in 1981

under the simple title of Marilee: Three Stories. In the Foreword, Spencer herself wrote that “it’s the voice you talk about it with that makes the difference.”1 For eighteen years, Marilee’s voice provided Spencer with a means to explore the inner lives of her characters and gave her an increasingly sophisticated persona with which to explore her own artistic process.

Then came Edward Glenn.

Unlike Marilee Summerall, Edward is not the narrative persona through which Spencer regards the world. Rather, he is the object of that regard and remains in essence a mystery, despite the author’s long and careful consideration. In The Edward Tales, Sally Greene has compiled Spencer’s four portraits of Edward: her one play, For Lease or Sale (1989); and three short stories, “The Runaways” (first published in 1994); “The Master of Shongalo” (1995); and “Return Trip” (2009).

Greene’s thoughtful and carefully worked-out Introduction captures why Edward became so important to Spencer and why he is the key to understanding her late fiction.

As Greene suggests, there are a number of possible forerunners to Edward. The first is Arnie Carrington, the protagonist of Spencer’s 1984 novel, The Salt Line. Although The Salt Line features a full cast of characters, at the novel’s center is the soulful, wounded Carrington, who – unlike Edward – finds healing through the rebirth of community. Carrington is a precursor to

1

Elizabeth Spencer, Foreword. Marilee: Three Stories by Elizabeth Spencer (UP of Mississippi, 1981) 8.

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

appears several years later in For Lease or Sale and who continues to surface for the next twenty years of Spencer’s writing life.2 What do we know about Edward Glenn?

Greene does a masterful job of summarizing how the four puzzle pieces we are given (the play and three masterful stories) fit – or don’t quite fit – together.

Juxtaposing the chronology and cartography of the four works sheds a reflective light on each, but in the final analysis, the edges of the picture are still blurred. With Greene’s help, we see that Edward Glenn is a Southern intellectual of great promise. He grew up in the house that provided the stage in For Lease or Sale and also has family connections to the mysterious old house named Shongalo (both houses in Mississippi).

His life is derailed, however, by a disappointing marriage and a disastrous divorce, which leave him disoriented. While licking his wounds in Mexico, he meets a dying woman and returns with her to California, where they marry. By the time we see him in “Return Trip,” he is a widower in search of a home, a refuge, that will once again give him a certain sense of his own identity, his place in the world.

Edward is both cynic and romantic, extraordinarily sensi-

2

Read reviewer Terry Roberts’s essay on this play, “Waiting for Edward: Elizabeth Spencer’s For Lease or Sale,” in NCLR 2009: 85–92.

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Edward in that he is searching for a home and a family within which he can live again.

From that same period is Spencer’s 1985 long story titled “The Cousins,” which is narrated by the restless, fifty-year old Ella Mason. Ella is in search of her cousin, Eric, who is, she reflects, a lifelong puzzle. Ella Mason has returned to Italy to visit the mysterious Eric and in so doing recalls for the reader another trip she made to Europe thirty years before with Eric and other young cousins. As the story develops, the clues that Spencer has dropped early in the story come to fruition: even thirty years later Ella Mason cannot find herself until she finds Eric – both literally in the present and figuratively in the past – and so this story is a tale of an internal as well as external journey of discovery. As Greene notes, Spencer herself saw a connection between the mystery of Eric and the mystery of Edward.

Spencer was famous throughout her career for her portrayal of rich, complex female characters; indeed, the 2001 Modern Library Collection of her work was appropriately titled The Southern Woman. What is intriguing about the Arnie Carrington of The Salt Line and Eric of “The Cousins” is that she has turned her attention to male characters who have fully developed inner landscapes, even though Eric’s inner life remains mysterious to us until the very end of the story. They, and other characters like them, set the stage for Edward Glen, who first

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tive and yet willing to wound.

He is a mystery to himself, as he admits from time to time, and often almost opaque to others. But here is the consistently interesting thing about him across all the pages and the years: he invariably angers and alienates men while drawing women to him like a magnet.

Claire, Patsy, and even Aline, his ex-wife, in For Lease or Sale; Jocelyn in “The Runaways”; Milly in “The Master of Shongalo”; and Patricia in “Return Trip” – all find in Edward the clues to their own identity while he wanders across the landscape seeking his own.

Part of the magic of Spencer’s mature storytelling is that the past and the present coexist for her characters. Edward is obsessed with the past, in particular the past as it existed in

ABOVE Terry Roberts with Elizabeth Spencer

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specific places where knowing is possible. And he rouses the same obsession in the women who encounter him. With the exception of Jocelyn, the dying woman in “The Runaways,” all the women who cross paths with Edward – especially in the stories – are themselves faced with the mysteries encapsulated in their own past lives. It’s as if he unlocks the past for them, and in order to make peace with what happened all those years before, they must answer his questions as well as their own.

In this sense, Edward Glenn is “The Master of Shongalo.”

Ultimately, the questions go unanswered, which gives these stories their unique power. And peace comes to these women, who regard Edward so intently, only when they are able to live in harmony with both past and present, able to hear, as does Patricia at the end of “Return Trip,” the “Mississippi voices” of the past as they intertwine and converse with the voices of the present. Perhaps that is what made Edward Glenn so irresistible to Elizabeth Spencer and to us as readers: his ability to take us home even as he continues to wander.

In this slim volume, the University Press of Mississippi has given us a beautiful book (the cover illustration is a story in and of itself). Sally Greene has performed miracles of persistence and scholarship to honor Elizabeth Spencer – who has left us – and Edward Glenn – who has not. My advice? Read and reread The Edward Tales to savor the mystery. n

A PORT OF DESPAIR a review by Jon Kesler Michael Keenan Gutierrez.

The Swill. Leapfrog Press, 2022.

JON KESLER is an organization development consultant, retired Air Force Officer, and aspiring author working on his first novel, based loosely on the letters his father wrote to his mother during World War II. MICHAEL KEENAN GUTIERREZ is the author of The Trench Angel (Leapfrog Press, 2015; reviewed in NCLR Online 2017). Originally from Los Angeles, he earned degrees from UCLA, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of New Hampshire and has been teaching at UNC Chapel Hill since 2012. His short work has been published in Cobalt, 805 + Art, The Delmarva Review, The Collagist, Scarab, The Pisgah Review, Untoward, The Boiler, and Crossborder. His screenplay, The Granite State, was a finalist at the Austin Film Festival, and he has received fellowships from the University of Houston and the New York Public Library.

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Set in the fictional Port Kydd, USA, circa 1929, Michael Keenan Gutierrez’s novel The Swill captures the gritty feel of a place and point in time that seems based on New York and is also reflective of any port city up and down the eastern seaboard, be it Baltimore, Philadelphia, or Boston, or any of the smaller ports across the Great Lakes such as Cleveland, Chicago, and Duluth. Although the post– World War I Port Kydd had its share of aloof, well-to-do citizens in fine neighborhoods, The Swill is primarily set in Port Kydd’s underbelly, the Bonny, a downtrodden neighborhood that is the home of last resort for those born into it and the unlucky who wandered in and could not find their way out again.

Gutierrez’s protagonist, Joshua Rivers, is the proprietor of The Swill, a below ground speakeasy in the heart of the Bonny that has been the life bread of the Rivers family for decades. Joshua pours the alcohol, prepares the food, sweeps the floor, and counts the too few dollars in the cash register from the not quite enough customers daily, in his futile attempt to provide for his pregnant wife Lily, whose beauty and refinement, coupled with her passion for photography, do not fit the mold of a Bonny barkeep’s wife.

Haunted by his experiences in Europe during the first World War, Joshua frequently reflects on the acts he committed and tries hard to forget,

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

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keeping his distinguished service medals stowed away: “A purple heart. A silver star. A victory medal. They were in a box somewhere in the attic. He’d sent them home after the War and forgotten all about them” (181). Throughout the book, Joshua seems to wish he could place his war-time memories in the same box and forget about them, too.

In his descriptions of Joshua’s feelings about dragging his memories of the war along into his future, Gutierrez captures the essence of a soldier afflicted with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder – or shell shock in the vernacular of the day – when the only available medication was alcohol and the only source of therapy came from the silent compassion of one’s drinking buddies. (The PTSD is so well woven into Joshua’s character that it made this reader wonder whether the author has lived or witnessed at close hand the experience of combat’s lingering aftereffects.)

The story unfolds around Joshua as he becomes the reluctant, yet cooperative accomplice to his unscrupulous half-sister Olive, born of the same mother

ABOVE Michael Gutierrez at Flyleaf Books

in Chapel Hill, NC, 22 Sept. 2022

with a different father. Through his participation in another of Olive’s many misdeeds, the long-standing contentious relationship among Joshua’s family, the Smyths of Port Kydd’s upper crust, and the Vanderhocks, a multi-generational family of religious zealots, is brought to light.

The rich, powerful Smythes and the Vanderhocks with their nefarious balance of righteousness and disingenuousness are everything the Rivers are not.

Indeed, those two extremes represent all the things that hold down the Rivers and people of their lot. Through this tangled web of relationships, Gutierrez artfully blurs the lines between the virtuous and the villainous.

As a society, we are unfortunately becoming increasingly aware of the reality contained within the common observation that history is written by the victors. In this case, the history spoken of dates back to the 1870s, touching upon the class and racial tensions of that era.

In short flashback chapters that wing the reader back to 1873, Gutierrez gives us a glimpse into but never a clear picture of the Bonny’s most notable night of social unrest through the eyes of the current day Vanderhocks’s, Smythes’s, and Rivers’s grandparents, who were integral to the day’s unrest, none of whom spoke the truth of that day, but one of whom knew that truth and with a few brush strokes documented the cataclysmic spark that ignited the night of terror.

She turned to the sailor cropping the boy and the sailor felt her stare,

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their eyes meeting, before his mouth twisted into a frightening grin, like a man possessed, and half his skull fell away, his brains seeping down his shoulder to the street, before he dropped. A stray bullet had fallen back to Earth.

“Oh my god,” she said.

The little Black boy stood above him, stunned. ...

And then Nellie turned away.

That’s how she remembered it.

That’s the story she told for the next fifty years.

She turned away and saw nothing thereafter. The moment petrified.

The story that followed erased from her private history.

She went to her stool and sat before her canvas. She had the image in her head, knew the truth. (82–83)

Returning to Joshua’s era, the picture painted by Nellie, Joshua, and Olive’s grandmother, planted the seed for their not so legitimate after-hours visit to the city library. In an ongoing quest for money and power, Joshua’s nemesis, Jasper Symthe, draws Olive into an insurance fraud and historical cover-up scheme that she quickly flips into a double cross on Symthe and just as quickly disappears, leaving Joshua to gallantly try to protect his sister, shelter his wife, and cover his own ass, while continuing to plot his family’s escape to California, which predictably never happens.

Gutierrez’s character development, coupled with his indepth depictions of place and what at times are quite essential graphic depictions of violence, draw the reader in and leave one cheering for Joshua as his co-dwellers in the Bonny rally around him. n

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Southerners have a long history of going West, heeding Horace Greeley’s supposed 1865 call to “Go West, young man.” Huckleberry Finn plans to “light out for the Territory” at the end of Twain’s novel rather than be civilized. Robert Penn Warren writes a whole paragraph on it in All the King’s Men when his protagonist Jack Burden reminds us the West is “where you go when the land gives out and the old field pines encroach. . . . It is where you go to grow up with the country.”1 And more recently, Doris Betts’s character Nancy heads West when a gunman kidnaps her and takes her on a strange internal and external journey in Heading West.

So goes Charles Frazier’s protagonist in his latest novel The Trackers. Recovering from a near miss of a bad marriage, Valentine Welch is a young Virginia artist who finagles a WPA job painting a mural on a post office wall in Dawes, WY. He is full of the romance of the West with its wide-open spaces and promises of freedom and grandeur. Val says the “journey to Wyoming felt epic and magnificent” (10), seeming like a good place to start over. He is filled with idealism and wants to illustrate these feelings in his mural which he says is “going to express waves of history always swelling and cresting and breaking and rising again, and all the images will be slightly tilted forward, leaning into the future” (48). He calls his painting “The Trackers.”

WHERE THE ROAD ENDS a review by Barbara Bennett Charles Frazier. The Trackers.

HarperCollins, 2023.

BARBARA BENNETT received her PhD in American Literature from Arizona State University. She is a Professor of English at NC State University.Her books include Understanding Jill McCorkle (University of South Carolina Press, 2000) and Comic Visions, Female Voices: Contemporary Women Novelists and Southern Humor (Louisiana State University Press, 1998).

She is a frequent contributor to NCLR, including an interview with Lee Smith and Jill McCorkle in NCLR 2016, an essay on the adaptation of Daniel Wallace’s Big Fish in NCLR Online 2019, an article on McCorkle’s Ferris Beach in 2006, and frequent reviews.

CHARLES FRAZIER received critical acclaim for his debut novel, Cold Mountain (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997), which earned him the 1997 National Book Award and Sir Walter Raleigh Award. He also received the Raleigh Award in 2012 for his third novel, Nightwoods (Random House, 2011; reviewed in NCLR Online 2013). Varina (HarperCollins, 2018; reviewed in NCLR Online 2019) received the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award, given by the Western North Carolina Historical Association. Read an essay on and a review of Cold Mountain in NCLR 1999, an essay by Frazier about the film adaptation of Cold Mountain in NCLR 2012, two interviews with Frazier in NCLR 2013, and an essay on the opera Cold Mountain in NCLR 2017.

1

Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1884 (Oxford UP, 1996) 366; Robert Warren, All the King’s Men (Harcourt Brace, 1946) 286.

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Rather than stay in a small room in town, Val is invited to live with the local rancher named Long and his wife Eve who was formerly “on the road with the railroad bums for a while before she started singing with dance bands” (29). Long has roped and tied her and they are living seemingly untouched by the Depression in a mansion described as “aggressively new” (3). Val becomes embroiled in their lives and Long begins to trust him – so much so that when Eve disappears, he asks Val to track her, find out what went wrong, discover if she’s still married to her first husband Jake, and hopefully bring her back to Long. Long has political ambitions, and a scandalous marriage would sink him.

Val’s journey west from Wyoming uncovers the real America of the 1930s, far away from the luxury of Long’s ranch. Val, while still holding a bankroll from Long, sees the America that won’t get painted on his mural. He visits camps of displaced Midwesterners right out of The Grapes of Wrath.

He visits squatters in mansions once owned by the wealthy who have now been evicted.

He shows Eve’s picture all over “to people who represented the final expression of America’s fast three-century westward movement from the Outer Banks to here, jammed up against the end of the line, the last frontier” (105). Seattle, San Francisco – and even a quick

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

ABOVE Charles Frazier being interviewed

by Elaine Neil Orr at the Greensboro Bound Literary Festival celebrating the release of The Trackers, Greensboro, NC, 19 May 2023

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When there is no more territory to light out for, a Southerner has to face the truth: the West is not a place to reinvent yourself anymore. It is not a peaceful refuge from bad choices: there is a “violence inherent in the concept of the West, the politically and culturally and religiously ordained rapacity smearing blood over all the fresh beauty.” That is what Val ultimately finds in the West – something missing in his mural of “hope and price, optimism and energy” (319).

Frazier asks the oft-asked question: is the American Dream dead? Val concludes it never existed, that the wealthy “use those convenient dreams to mash lower classes flat and build personal fortunes on that foundation.” Otherwise “we’d end up with some nightmare of egalitarianism that would drag the handful who run the country down to some frightening level of mediocrity” (147).

At the end of Cold Mountain, Frazier gives us an optimistic epilogue set ten years later, the remaining characters all happy and thriving, recovered from the grim and bloody Civil War – an ending that, to me, belies the brutality of the rest of the novel.

Frazier gives us no such solace here. He sees an America full of “the brutal, ugly undertow of reality, the violence of the heart of the human animal, the gluttony and greed.”2 Our southerner returns home with a darker vision than of the America he painted on the mural in Dawes, WY. n

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but memorable trip back east to Florida by air to visit the family of Jake, who rival anyone out of James Dickey’s Deliverance.

The Southern Gothic comes alive for a section of the book that would be funny if it weren’t so terrifying.

When he returns to the west coast and eventually finds Eve singing in a dingy bar, things get complicated fast. Jake is alive and well and tracking Eve in hopes of getting a payoff from Long back in Wyoming. Add to this Long’s right hand man Faro, who’s been enlisted to follow Val to make sure he’s doing what he is supposed to. The trackers become the tracked, and again once over. With everyone chasing everyone else, chaos ensues with a final confrontation on a lonely road near the California coast.

The subject of the book is ultimately movement and stories – much like Frazier’s masterpiece

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Cold Mountain, in which a man named Inman travels west to his home in the mountains, stopping to listen to stories of the people he meets on the way. Val is another Inman. People seem drawn to him, wanting to tell him their stories, unburdening themselves of sins of desperation because they can no longer run away. It’s about the need for movement, for being on the road. Even the cover shows a road heading somewhere unknown. Frazier asks what a nation in love with the road does when that road ends and we can no longer go west to escape our problems. Val muses, “When people come all the way across the continent and see the Pacific, they usually know for sure the road has ended, maybe in a way they hadn’t planned on, but that particular dream or fantasy of running away forever from your problems is done. You can’t keep running west forever” (258).

2

Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain (Atlantic Monthly, 1997) 148.

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LEE SMITH GOES TO KEY WEST a review by Sharon E. Colley Lee Smith. Silver Alert: A Novel.

Algonquin Books, 2023.

SHARON E. COLLEY is Professor of English at Middle Georgia State University in Macon, GA. Her BA degrees in English and Communications are from Mercer University, also in Macon.

She earned an MA in English from the University of Tennessee Knoxville and a PhD from Louisiana State University, where she researched social class and status in Lee Smith’s works. Her scholarship includes an article on Elizabeth Spencer’s Starting Over as a short story sequence. Her article “Kaleidoscopic Swirls of Lee Smith” was featured in NCLR 2021.

LEE SMITH published her first novel in 1969; since then, she has written twelve more novels. Additionally, Smith has published four short story collections and a memoir. Her honors include the North Carolina Award for Literature, induction in the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame, and an Academy Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Read interviews with her in NCLR 2016 and 2021.

Fans of Lee Smith’s work might at first consider her newest novel, Silver Alert, a departure for the critically acclaimed writer. Unlike Smith’s most famous books, such as Fair and Tender Ladies (1988) and Oral History (1983), Silver Alert is not set in the Appalachian Mountains or small towns of Virginia or North Carolina. Instead, it is set in sunny Florida, specifically quirky Key West. Additionally, instead of foregrounding a spunky female protagonist, as Smith did in Saving Grace (1995) and Guests on Earth (2013), Silver Alert begins with a male point of view. Rich, grumpy, and often foul-mouthed retiree Herb Atlas has been looking after his beloved third wife, Susan, in their pink Key West mansion.

Susan has early onset dementia, and Herb has covered and cared for her. As Susan’s condition has worsened and Herb has gotten cancer, their adult children (from previous marriages) want to place the pair in a care facility. It seems like the right thing to do.

But Herb will fight it. Hard.

Despite the frequent association of her fiction with the Appalachian Mountains, Smith’s texts have included town and non-mountainous settings throughout her career. The Last Girls (2002), for example, features locations on the Mississippi River, The Devil’s Dream (1992) highlights Nashville, Guests on Earth includes scenes in New Orleans, and many short stories, while set in the South, are not in Appalachia.

Notably, the collection News of the Spirit (1997) includes the story “Live Bottomless,” which ends with a family vacation in Key West; the story was reprint-

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ed as Smith’s recent novella, Blue Marlin (2020; reviewed in NCLR Online 2021). The novella is accompanied by a new essay, “The Geographical Cure,” in which Smith explains that the story is loosely inspired by a trip she and her parents took to Key West.

Additionally, in her memoir, Dimestore: A Writer’s Life (2016; reviewed in NCLR Online 2017), Smith includes an essay meditating on the death of her adult son, Josh. He enjoyed annual trips to Key West, and Smith’s essay is framed by scattering his ashes on a sunset cruise off the island. So perhaps it is not surprising that Key West would eventually hold center stage in one of her novels.

And while Smith is known for her strong female protagonists, Herb Atlas is not the first central male character in her work.

Oral History, for instance, gives one of the longest narratives to Richard Burlage, a self-involved young schoolteacher, while The Devil’s Dream gives several chapters to R.C. Bailey, patriarch of a country music family.

Still, Herb is distinct in Smith’s fictional world: he is wealthy, retired, and besotted with his elegant third wife: “Susan enjoyed everthing, and she had taught, or tried to teach, him to enjoy it, too” (10–11). Together, they became art patrons and recognizable local figures. He is anguished about how their lives are evolving and wants to hang on to some control.

Herb does not remain the dominant character in Silver Alert. Almost immediately, Dee Dee (calling herself Renee), who is from North Carolina, arrives to give Susan a mani/ pedi. Observing how she finds

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

PHOTOGRAPH BY KRISTEN LLOYD

ways to help Susan feel calmer and more present through singing and art, Herb hires her as a caretaker. Dee Dee thinks that her life is finally going well, with her odd new boyfriend and the unexpected new job.

She is especially hopeful when she learns she is pregnant. The truth, however, is that Dee Dee’s past has been tougher than anyone’s should be, and her cheerful demeanor covers years of exploitation.

Though Herb’s is the point of view for many chapters in the book, his narration is not first person. Rather, Smith uses a Tom

ABOVE Lee Smith at Quail Ridge Books,

Raleigh, NC, 19 Apr. 2023

Wolfe technique referred to as the “downstage narrator” or what Lucinda MacKethan has called Smith’s “close” third person narrator, a limited omniscient narrator whose words are colored with the character’s language,* as in this passage: “Their house would go for a coupla mil right now. The song [doorbell] sounds again through the scented air of the solarium, big flowers blooming everyplace in here, Susan used to love them so, bless her soul and damn it all to hell” (1).

While Herb isn’t narrating here, the phrasing mirrors what words he would use, giving us a sense

* Dorothy Combs Hill, Lee Smith (Twayne, 1992) 11; Lucinda MacKethan, “Artists and Beauticians: Balance in Lee Smith’s Fiction,” Southern Literary Journal 15.1 (1982): 10–11.

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of his character. This technique is used with other characters, too, like his adult children. Furthermore, the book includes a variety of written artifacts, including poems and letters.

DeeDee employs first person in most of her chapters, beginning her first chapter, “I swear, it was all I could do to keep from skipping all the way down Washington street, skipping just like me and Martha used to do coming up the holler” (17). The language reveals her dialect and her character and creates a direct connection with the reader. As the novel unfolds, we gradually learn of Dee Dee’s past. Dee Dee’s later chapters use a limited omniscient narrator to delve further into her dark past, distancing both the character and the reader from the most jarring parts of Dee Dee’s history.

I will confess that, at a certain point in the novel, I thought I’d figured out where the plot was going. While I wasn’t wrong, I also wasn’t right. Smith knows what she is doing, and the novel ends with that wonderful sense of surprise and inevitability found in good literature. Smith’s publishing career has passed the half-century mark, and she continues to create vibrant fiction.

Her texts include appealing voices, skillful manipulations of point of view, and a powerful combination of pathos and hope. Silver Alert is both in harmony with her previous fiction as well as a new direction for it. n

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NAMING THE UNNAMEABLE AND COMMUNICATING THE UNKNOWABLE a review by Christy Alexander Hallberg Michael Gaspeny. A Postcard from the Delta. Livingston Press, 2022.

Michael Parker. I Am the Light of This World. Algonquin Books, 2022.

CHRISTY ALEXANDER HALLBERG wears several vocational hats: Teaching Professor in the English Department at ECU, Senior Associate Editor of NCLR, author, and, donned recently, podcaster. Following the publication of her own rock novel, the award-winning Searching for Jimmy Page (Livingston Press, 2021), Pantheon Podcast Network invited her to host Rock is Lit.

Full disclosure: I’m obsessed with rock novels – stories as feral as headbangers in a mosh pit or as sweet with melody and harmony as the most earnest singer-songwriters or as rife with mystery and lore as the whiskeysoaked voice of a bluesman.

When rhythm and backbeat collide with prose, the result is often explosive, or at least worthy of a Largehearted Boy playlist. Two of my most recent favorite rock novels just happen to have been penned by fellow North Carolina natives: Michael Parker’s I Am the Light of This World and Michael Gaspeny’s A Postcard from the Delta. Like the protagonists of their books, both Michaels are rabid music fans. “Music is everything to me.

I am distrustful of people who don’t listen to music,” Michael Parker proclaimed when he was a guest on my podcast on rock novels, Rock is Lit, in the fall of 2022. This is a sentiment echoed

by Michael Gaspeny when he too appeared on Rock is Lit that fall.* And it is the creed by which their main characters live their fictional lives. I Am the Light of This World and A Postcard from the Delta explore myriad themes and topics – socioeconomic issues and the criminal justice system, homophobia, and the transformative power of water in the former; racial tensions, absentee mothers, alcoholism, and toxic masculinity and high school football in the latter – but it’s the role music plays in the stories that I’ve chosen to

* Hallberg’s Rock is Lit podcast featuring Michael Parker, episode 11, 17 Nov. 2022; Michael Gaspeny, episode 12, 24 Nov. 2022.

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focus this review on. As Leonard Bernstein once said, “Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.”

Add a compelling plot and cast of characters, and you’ve got something even more elusive and, dare I say, ethereal.

I Am the Light of This World

by Michael Parker is a gripping story that follows Earl, a musicloving dreamy teenager who serves time in a Texas prison for a heinous crime he didn’t commit, then, upon his release some forty years later, has to navigate a whole new world he can barely comprehend. The novel, which begins in the early 1970s in a small east Texas town, takes its title from the song “I Am the Light of This World” by blues and gospel singer Blind Gary Davis, who was a fixture on the Piedmont blues scene of Durham in the 1930s but rejected “the Devil’s music” in favor of gospel tunes after he became an ordained Baptist minister, then experienced a career rebirth as part of the American folk music revival that peaked during the 1960s. The lyrics of the chorus, “Just as long as I’m in this world, I am the light of this world,” resonate with a young Earl, who struggles to create meaning and a sense of belonging in his life, and he often quotes these words when he finds himself in precarious situations. For example, when Earl is at a party in Austin shortly before the crime occurs for which he will be arrested,

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Earl couldn’t even remember who was singing or about what. He just remembered lying on the floor watching the warped vinyl hiccup and here came an ample solo of what he would learn was pure pedal steel. Earl felt draped by a blanket and shocked by a cattle prod.

The pedal steel both softened and sharpened. . . . Pedal steel could turn a song into what, Earl didn’t

know, your heart struggling to stay in rhythm and burst out of you at the same time? Trying to define it made Earl feel foolish and that is how he knew it was true. He would die trying and that is how he knew it was true. (5–6) ZOOM READING SCREENSHOT

someone asks him what he’s good at, and “Earl said he was the light of the world” (71). Later, when he is sitting in the police station with his lawyer, Arthur, following his arrest, he thinks, “If he had time and means to leave his mark, he’d say, I am the light of this world. He’d say, Tell everybody in this world” (44).

Earl’s passion for music begins with his capricious father, who teaches him the words to “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” by Hank Williams when Earl is a child. When his father would disappear for weeks at a time, leaving Earl in the care of his indifferent mother and delinquent brothers, Earl would listen to his father’s 45s and find not only solace but also a purity and truth in the music that eluded him elsewhere in his life:

Eventually, Earl replaces his biological father with a spiritual one in the form of folk and blues legend Lead Belly, whose songs, such as “Good Night, Irene,” “Midnight Special,” and “Where Did You Sleep,” are American classics. Earl carries a biography of Lead Belly with him everywhere and memorizes whole passages, as though the book were scripture. While he admires Lead Belly’s undeniable musical talent, Earl tends to romanticize the artist, who went to prison multiple times for violent acts. After Earl is

MICHAEL PARKER is a North Carolina native and retired professor of creative writing at UNC Greensboro. A three-time winner of the O. Henry Award for short fiction, Parker is the author of eight novels and three collections of stories. Over the years, NCLR has published several of his essays. Parker was the honoree of the 2015 North Carolina Writers Conference in Washington, NC. His other honors include the Thomas Wolfe Prize and the North Carolina Award for Literature.

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arrested for an equally violent act, he tells his lawyer that he was reading Lead Belly: His Life and Times at the time he first met Tina, the young woman whose murder Earl witnesses and is convicted of. Arthur quips, “Not a great role model” (35). The correlation between Lead Belly’s life and what happens to Earl in the story is not lost on Earl: After Earl tells Arthur and the police all he knows about Tina’s murder, Earl realizes that he’s following in his hero’s footsteps: “What they were writing down right now was Clothesline: His Life and Times” (137), referring to Earl’s alter-ego, Clothesline, and the Lead Belly biography.

More than just the music of Lead Belly echoes through the pages of I Am the Light of This World. Earl is a teenager in the early 1970s, and the radio hits of that decade figure prominently in the novel. Parker’s song choices are perfect for the scenes in which they appear, always augmenting the story or adding some other layer of intrigue. “Crystal Ship” by The Doors is playing as Earl snorts crystal meth and cocaine the

ABOVE Michael Parker presenting

“Blackwinging it in the Digital Age” sponsored by UNCG Special Collections and University Archives (NCLR published this essay in the 2023 print issue.)

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first time he parties with Tom, a psychopath who is Tina’s real killer and who sexually assaults Earl prior to the murder. “Play ‘Crystal Ship,’ [Earl] told Tom. You got it, boss. Before I slip into unconsciousness I’d like to have another kiss, sang Earl into a plastic spatula he found in a drawer” (71).

“Gimme Shelter” by The Rolling Stones, that quintessential end-of-the-freelove-1960s anthem, plays during a subsequent scene, tense with sex and violence, that reflects much of what Mick Jagger is wailing about in the song: Ooh, a storm is threatening My very life today If I don’t get some shelter Ooh yeah, I’m gonna fade away ...

Rape, murder

sound of the water pelting the plastic curtain. The James Gang, ‘Walk Away’” (166).

Earl’s fate is sealed at that point. By the time he emerges from prison as a fifty-something-year-old man and plays The Zombies’ Greatest Hits for a woman he meets in Oregon, where he relocates after his release, he has effectively become a zombie himself – lifeless, apathetic, and incapable of rebirth – which foreshadows the end of Earl’s story.

Michael Gaspeny’s debut novel from Livingston Press, A Postcard from the Delta, cranks the music-as-religion motif hinted at in I Am the Light of This World up an octave. The story follows Johnny, a white smalltown Arkansas high school football PHOTOGRAPH BY ALICE OSBORN

It’s just a shot away . . .

“Gimme Shelter” propels the narrative into grisly terrain, ramping up the sense of dread and impending tragedy, upping the ante. Earl and Tina are indeed without shelter in that moment.

Their very lives are threatened.

Even more disturbing is Parker’s use of “Walk Away,” the jaunty hard rock/funk song by the James Gang about the end of a relationship, which takes on a haunting quality in the context in which it appears in the novel: Tom cavalierly sings it in the shower after he’s murdered Tina. “[Earl] had cradled Tina’s bloody head and stroked her hair. He still heard the shower running. Tom singing over the

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star whose obsession with the blues threatens to thwart his football aspirations and alienates him from his longtime girlfriend, Missy, and just about everyone else in town. “Every day I go to Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Robert Johnson like a fun-

MICHAEL GASPENY is the author of a collection of poems, short stories, and this novel, as well as a novella in verse The Tyranny of Questions: Poems (Unicorn Press, 2020; reviewed in NCLR Online 2021). During his time as a reporter, he covered President Bill Clinton’s first campaign for national office. Before retiring, he taught journalism and English courses at High Point University and Bennett College. His poems have appeared in NCLR Online 2020, Tar River Poetry, Kakalak, and Cave Wall. His works of fiction have been published in storySouth and the Greensboro Review.

damentalist studies the Bible,” Johnny professes at the beginning of the novel. “Their music is sacred to me” (7). As he soon discovers, it’s not easy worshipping at the altar of the blues in a town like Spinkville, an Ozark hamlet named for Johnny’s ancestors, “where the holy trinity consisted of football, faith, and the fishing report” (37).

Johnny’s boyhood dream had been to be a star Razorback at the University of Alabama, a dream he shared with his father, the mayor of Spinkville and former owner of Ozark Poultry, the largest employer in town. Johnny begins to question that dream after his football coach pressures him to run a thousand yards in a single game, a near-impossible feat.

Flummoxed, Johnny asks him why a thousand. “It’s a magic number,” Coach Hurd responds.

“It grabs attention! You rack up a thousand, and that record’s gonna stand a good while” (17). Coach Hurd’s vision of the thousand-yard game soon reaches the townspeople, who latch onto it as though it were the shot in the arm they need to revive the stagnant Spinkville, with its “abandoned homes and scorched-looking trailer parks smack up against churches with landscaped terraces, quaint log-cabin gas stations, and mom-and-pop businesses with pot-holed parking lots and drooping gutters” and “a nursery school [that] sat next to a junkyard, adjacent to the Tanner Family Funeral Home” (20).

ABOVE Michael Gaspeny reading at

Scuppernong Books Greensboro, NC, 2021

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

The dream is further derailed after Johnny develops a crush on the new girl in town, a brilliant African American named Rae. They bond during a senior class trip, and she asks him what he wants to do with his life. He tells her about his sports ambitions, but then says, “I think what I want now is to find out who I am and not be afraid of myself when I do” (127). This new introspection has its roots in Johnny’s love of the blues and his guilt at being a privileged white boy in a world that he thinks doesn’t value his musical idols or black people in general.

When Rae asks him what it is about this music that speaks to him, Johnny waxes poetic about the artistry of musicians like Muddy Waters and Son House, how “[t]he blues are deeper than other music” (122), but ultimately, he confesses, “[m]aybe it reveals what’s deep inside me – for better and worse. Maybe I’m trying to compensate for injustice. Whatever. What Muddy Waters calls ‘deep blues’ tell the truth about life. They hit me in the heart or the crotch or right between the eyes. I read books, I go to church, I try to crush people on the football field, but the blues are the truest thing I know” (124–125).

Once Johnny makes that proclamation, he is primed and ready to fully indulge the roman-

tic notion he has of the blues – “I wanted to kill my roots. Sick of my status as an aristocrat and a knight, I wanted to be a twelveyear-old bluesboy hopping freights” (60) – and embark on a literal and metaphorical search for self that results in a pilgrimage to Clarksdale, MS, home of the Delta Blues, a trip author Michael Gaspeny has made himself for similar reasons. “I owe [these blues musicians],” Michael said on Rock is Lit. “They have given me so much inspiration and helped me through hard times. It’s not exactly like going and bowing down and saying thank you for what you’ve done for me, but it’s not very far from that.” Nor was it very far from Johnny’s experience in A Postcard from the Delta.

On a lark, Johnny ditches school one afternoon, pops one of his many blues mix tapes into his car tape player, and heads South on his holy mission, thinking, “[m]aybe I could wash myself in the Mississippi and become a new person” (133). He drives headlong into the fabled Delta night, eager for transformation, enlightenment, salvation, the sacred music his soundtrack. “Robert Johnson sang ‘Crossroads,’ his slide guitar vibrating between my eyes. The Mississippi River, ‘Old Man’ of legend, wasn’t far now. Somewhere out in the darkness lay

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the spot where myth said the Devil had tuned Robert Johnson’s guitar in exchange for his soul. I wondered what Robert Johnson would think if he were around to look at me” (134).

Onward Johnny travels, through Clarksdale, the bleak town seemingly abandoned, a far cry from how he’d portrayed it in his mind. “I had dumbly imagined a picturesque Clarksdale designed for my ease, clubs lit in pastels” (136). The reality is lonely and scary for Johnny, and he begins to question his decision to make the journey. Still, he continues on to the outskirts of town and finally finds a juke joint that’s open. What transpires next involves a holy intercession with music as mediator and a violent stripping away of illusion, both of which will change Johnny’s life and his standing in his hometown forever.

A Postcard from the Delta by Michael Gaspeny and I Am the Light of This World by Michael Parker are exceptional examples of how a great rock novel can “name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.”

That is the power music has in these two stories, for it is music that drives the narratives, feeds the souls of the protagonists, and stays with readers long after the last beats of the final scenes fade out. n

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F I N A LIST, 2 02 2 DORIS BET TS FICTIO N PRIZE

A WAYFARER AT DEVIL’S ELBOW

“Rumor has it that human ingenuity built the synthesizer, the bass, the guitar, the drum. Yet there’s nothing recognizably human about Nyssa and Virgil’s music – aside from its pumping, bloody heart.”

by Emily Alice Katz

—John Paul Durang, Next Beat Monthly, January 1974

W I T H A R T B Y J E R E MY R U S S E L L

I knew just the basic facts when I first

Virgil Ridenhauer: a session drummer among the Woodstock crowd in the late sixties. Then, briefly, in the early seventies, bandmate of out-ofnowhere Nyssa Adcock. In his apparent prime, in the 1980s, he morphed into a producer of electronica, at first abstruse and then arena-ready. Prostate cancer in the late ’90s, his wretched end.

Nyssa, in contrast, burned brightly and then disappeared. Occluded herself from the music scene to amble down other roads, unseen – as far as I could tell.

The magazine articles on Virgil were many and fawning, though a couple of detractors surfaced after his ugly, public breakup with his wife during

EMILY ALICE KATZ is a Pushcart-nominated writer, editor, and musician living in Durham, NC. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in the pages of Jelly Bucket, Salamander, Solstice, Flyway, Jewish Fiction, Sky Island Journal, Mud Season Review, and Kindred. She is the author of the book Bring Zion Home: Israel in American Jewish Culture, 1948-1967 (SUNY Press, 2015), and holds a PhD in Modern Jewish Studies from the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Abstract Expressionist JEREMY RUSSELL earned a BFA in painting at UNC Asheville in 2001. He is the co-owner, with Alicia Anne Armstrong, of Russell & Armstrong Gallery located in downtown Asheville. He is also represented by Blue Spiral 1 Gallery in Asheville and Light & Art Gallery in Charleston, SC. His lifelong interest in creating art was sustained throughout multiple career paths, including owning and operating a mural company for commercial applications. His work has been exhibited widely in galleries, as well as in academic and not-for-profit venues.

His art is held in corporate collections, such as BCA Architects and the Mission Hospital, both in Asheville, as well as in private collections across the US and Europe.

started digging: in the wake of their studio debut in late 1973, the duo was hailed by critics as breakthrough artists, their album – the only one they were ever to make together – an instant icon of experimental rock. I read every article on Nyssa and Virgil in existence when I was given the go-ahead from the editors of Works on Paper to write my own story. I thought this was my shot at the musiccritic firmament. Me at the time, three years ago: a twenty-four-year-old with a take-notice blog and a handful of ferocious album reviews in the local free weekly. Ms. Badass Music-Critic Nobody. I’ve learned a thing or two since then.

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

his superstar-producer days. The writing on Nyssa specifically, though, was slim. A short, cryptic interview in a weekly that folded two months after it launched in 1975. A “throwback” blurb in a British style magazine in 1991. I tunneled and excavated, sneezing dust and breaking microfilm rolls in university library basements. Did he discover her, or did she discover him? Were they true partners? Or was she his unwitting tool – overpowered and manipulated – as so often happened to women in the industry, back then and still today. I couldn’t pin down the nature of their collaboration.

I had to talk to her. She was impossible to find.

Until she wasn’t.

Brain Maze, 2022 (oil on canvas, 24x30) by Jeremy Russell

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I unearthed her in the mountains of western North Carolina. Or, I should say, she let herself be unearthed by me.

When she agreed to the interview, through the organic-farmer nephew of the spouse of an old college friend of mine, I was amped, the dial to eleven. And intimidated. And most of all, mystified. I twisted myself through the spiraling wisps of quotes and hearsay and documentary-film-musings – the traces of her life – a thousand times, it seemed, in the months before we met. It could be some kind of truth, what I had ferreted out and pieced together. Or no kind of truth. I wouldn’t know till I sat down with her. Or wouldn’t know, ever. But I was sure it was worth the gamble.

The famous-and-then-forgotten album is eponymous. The cover art: a frontal shot of a couple staring into the camera, a riff on a family daguerreotype you might find in a rusty locket in your great-grandmother’s attic. A pen-and-ink, brier-and-rose wreath twists along the oval border of the portrait. In the photograph, Virgil wears his trademark railroad cap. He gazes at the photographer with a lazy, just-waking-up hunger – a courtier catching a first glimpse of his fated damsel.

When I first saw the album on my uncle’s shelf, at thirteen, it was Virgil I ached for.

As for the other half: in the Times, Phil Galperin wrote, “Nyssa Adcock is a cipher. Her gaze tells no tales. La Belle Dame Sans Merci through the masking planar brushstrokes of a Modigliani.”

Randall Quint in Riot Xpress: “We hear in the music she (supposedly) makes that the lady is not lobotomized. But you wouldn’t know it from the looks of her. Anybody home?”

Other critics, too, scoured that photograph for clues.

But the woman on the album cover – she wasn’t Nyssa.

I was just beginning research – bookmarking web sites in my mildewy studio apartment in an underserviced edge of the city – when eureka struck. Down an internet rabbit-hole, I stumbled upon a public-television documentary from years before. One of the interviewees, aging rocker Jeanie Skull, spoke of the hippie commune outside Oakland into which she was born; how its freewheeling icon-smashing artistic ethos shaped her sensibilities.

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Cut to a photograph of Jeanie the post-punk queen as pigtailed toddler. She sits in the lap of a woman on a DIY driftwood throne on a forlorn beach. Her hands wound through the woman’s long hair. A caption fades in on the bottom left – with musician Nyssa Adcock, 1972 – and fades out again. No explanation; the photograph is window dressing. When the camera cuts back, Jeanie is glaring at her interviewer, waxing furious about the implosion of the commune when she was eight, thanks to the preening ambition of its abusive, sellout founder ( Jeanie’s father, natch).

I pulled the image backward, hit pause, plucked my copy of the album from its hallowed shelf above my bed. I held the album up to the computer screen, clutching it with both hands. The woman next to Virgil in that sepia album-cover photograph: wild curls cascading; dead eyes in a broad, heart-shaped face; slack, rosebud mouth.

The barest hint of freckles spackling her nose and cheekbones.

The woman in the photograph, in the Jeanie Skull documentary: angular, dark, a curtain of straight black hair framing her face. A forehead like a sweep of naked cliff. A long, straight nose.

Her mouth a slash of imperious amusement. It wasn’t the same person depicted in the dual-portrait album cover two years later. No way.

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“Blowing past cheap psychedelic tricks to land at the sonic godhead, Nyssa and Virgil are no art-school tinkerers. The duo has built a contemplative architecture for the ages – and they ask us to swing from rafter to rafter, naked.”

—Warren Grainger, Rocks Off Magazine, December 1973

There are only ten songs on the album. “Make Me Mayhap” is folk music wrung through a 1920s Dada readymade apparatus – what sounds at first like a mechanized bird call is, according to one critic, a tinny off-key player piano. “Our Ouroboros Burrows” is little more than whispers, until the marching-band drumline and fuzzed out upright bass drop in. In “Idyll Wild,” two children sing a capella in Inuit. The final track, “The Effing Barouche,” is like a lullaby broadcast by a deranged cephalopod – a muffled, twisted call from the Abyss.

At the center of the album – the final piece on Side A, on the LP – is the duo’s twelve-minute opus, “Devil’s Elbow.” The song and arrangement credited to Nyssa alone, though Virgil lent his hand to several instruments, according to the sparse liner notes.

You have to listen to it to believe it. Every time I slip my headphones on, I’m sent somewhere I’ve never been; there’s some sound, or space between

Night Jam In Blue Light, 2022 (acrylic and oil on panel, 30x80) by Jeremy Russell

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

sounds, that’s always new. It’s uncanny and raw and melancholy and fierce and seismic. It is Life Flashing Before Your Eyes the moment you take your last, rattling breath.

“I love the song madly. But whatever or wherever Devil’s Elbow is,” quips the critic Sylvester Wiggins in a contemporaneous documentary on the 1970s underground rock scene, “this is the closest I care to come.”

I pined to meet the woman who made the song. It itched red-hot under my skin, this desire to see her, to speak to her, to inhabit the same space, if only for an afternoon. And an afternoon was all we did have, in the end.

“If they tell you Nyssa is a hoax and Virgil made all the music, believe it. If they tell you the opposite, believe it. If they tell you this album is the gift of an alien civilization, sent to earth in a meteorite shower: believe it.”

—Annabel Fairfield, Musikopolis, December 1973

The night before the arranged interview with Nyssa, I stayed at a hiker’s hostel in a trail town in the Walnut Mountains. I lay on my back on a thin mattress among the residue of flattened mosquitos and stared at the cedar ceiling of my room, against which a mayfly bobbed and bumped its spindly body for hours before dawn. And then, suddenly, the sun was a glowing palm against the window. I rose and dressed. Folded my few items back into my bag. Nyssa. I breathed her name, a warning whisper, a devotion. I blinked at myself in the cheap hostel mirror as I pulled my hair back from my face.

I shared a friendly word by the outdoor coffee station with a backpacking couple. They asked where I was headed.

“Up the mountain,” I said. “Near the bald.”

“Devil’s Pate? Breathtaking up there,” said the man. “Hiking?” I made a noncommittal noise.

Devil’s Pate was the closest landmark to Nyssa’s road. A treeless scrubland among the clouds from which, I read, you could see for miles in

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every direction. Storms gather there without warning; every year or two, some hiker gets sizzled by lightning.

“Cosmic,” the woman said. “You really feel it, God’s finger stirring the air. Those vibrations.”

“They didn’t name the bald for God, though, did they,” I said, forcing a joke.

“God or the Devil, guess it depends on your point of view,” the man said. He spoke into his coffee cup, unsmiling, and gulped the last of the muddy brew. The woman laughed, though. A sandpapery exhalation. I waved a vague farewell.

A creek raced along the road, then dropped back as I nosed my car up, up. All around, the dappled flash and shimmer of the day. At a juncture, a haphazard bouquet of signs announced a private campground, a Free Will Baptist church, a farmer’s stand. There was no evidence of any of those things. I passed a state park on my left, the metal gate across the entry cobwebbed with vines.

Steering hard around a bend as a Yamaha whizzed past, the folder of Nyssa research slid off the passenger seat. I hoisted it back into place, tucked a sheaf of papers inside again – the few relevant pages of a University of Tennessee doctoral dissertation in sociology, dating from 1987.

Mountain High: From Folk Medicine to the Drug Economy in Southern Appalachia, 1945-1985. The manuscript clocked in at 370 pages and I read every one of them. I found Nyssa on page 232, in a chapter on the region’s first brush with the sixties counterculture.

The student had interviewed a then-fortysomething, male informant, “Walter,” who spoke of “the Adcock girl”: the only daughter of the county’s esteemed doctor. The girl’s mother was known far and wide as a folk healer. Walter nursed a crush on the girl in grade school, he admitted. “A real firecracker, that one,” he said. “She’d sit there, tall and dark and mute, and then out of nowhere she’d light up” – wielding jokes in class that got her sent to the principal for a paddling. She was smart as hell, he said. She had no real friends among their school cohort that he could recall. “Music people they were, her Adcock and Tolliver folks, both sides,” Walter said; he claimed her to be a piano prodigy, who also played the fiddle and the dulcimer at community suppers, growing up.

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Then she almost got sent to jail the summer after senior year because of things she was growing and compounding, Walter said. “I don’t even know what it was. She didn’t come off as any kind of hippie but you saw her around from time to time toward the end of high school with long-hairs from somewhere else.”

Nyssa – her first name never appears in the dissertation pages, but it’s her, all right – vanished not long after that. The rumors had it she was shipped off to a girls’ college up North, or maybe it was California. Or she simply ran away. Her family left the mountain shortly after Nyssa’s exit, so the news he gleaned was an echo of a hint of hearsay.

He heard through the grapevine, around the time his first child was born, that the Adcock girl was some kind of musician up in New York City – or maybe just a groupie. “She was the first we knew of around here to get in trouble with drugs in some way,” he said, “but she wasn’t the last.”

This shadowy history accompanied me as I drove, pinching the scribbled directions to the steering wheel with my thumb. I fiddled with the radio and caught a swell of plaintive crooning, then static, then a patch of news: storms on the way.

There were houses here and there along the route, hugging the curve of road – some sturdy, some decaying. From one sinking stone façade, the grim flag of no known nation flew, flapping, violent, in a sudden gust of wind. Around another bend, the grounds of Green Hope Farm – the property of the guy who had arranged the visit with Nyssa – rolled up and away from the road, a carelessly tossed quilt. A goat stood by a fence working its jaw. A state sign for Devil’s Pate heaved into view by a crop of mossy boulders; just after the turn, the asphalt became gravel and the road inclined steeply to the right. The trees huddled thick and fell away and gathered again. I was close now.

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There was a mailbox of nailed-together scraps.

No name. I inhaled a sharp prayer of courage and swung the car up and over a rocky berm, onto a drive of sorts.

And what if there was no one waiting for me?

I was never given a phone number; either Nyssa didn’t want me calling, or – as I was starting to suspect – she didn’t have a phone. You could go crazy out here on your own, I thought, with only your rattling brain and the trees and squirrels and deer to keep you company.

The drive meandered around a stand of fattrunked, towering trees, then hugged a ledge shaded by a tunnel almost tropical in the gloss of its teeming leaves. Bright open air glittered beyond.

I bumped along the narrow shoulder of road and then, almost as if my body knew the way, veered without thinking back toward the slope. And found myself in front of Nyssa’s place.

The house was one story, rangy, built of wood and quarried stone. It sat on a jutting ridge, its face toward the forest, shadowed by tall bristling pines that creaked now in a breeze. The roof was gleaming tin, clean of debris. The façade, though, seemed a living thing, its stones uneven and mottled with moss. Paint peeled from the wooden front door and the windows on either side showed no light within.

I gathered my bag in my shaking hands, whacked the car door closed with my foot to inspire mettle. I stepped up to the house and knocked.

Nothing. I squelched the urge to turn around, get in the car, thump and rattle my way back over the drive and down the mountain. If I quit now, there’d be no cover story. But I could still pull together an ironic, speculative, postmodern kind of piece. Meditate on my ultimate defeat, pitched as a generational disjunction between me and Nyssa Adcock.

Anger forked through me: Who cared, anyway, about an interview with a country-bred, art-rock

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At the Crook of Devil’s Elbow: An Interview with Nyssa Adcock Violet X. Barrows

Rhythm on The Rocks, 2022 (mixed media on panel, 12x12) by Jeremy Russell

fossil? A person – a woman – no one had heard of, and whose sparse, dusty oeuvre, in the glare of the zeitgeist, was an acquired taste, at best. Who cared about Nyssa’s vindication, aside from me?

I knocked once more.

I felt it before seeing or hearing it: the barest stirring of the hairs on my leg that might simply have been static, a shift in mountain-air molecules.

It was a cat. It trailed its rust-and-cream tail over my shins. It looked up, the black discs of its irises expanding and retreating.

The cat leaped, one-two, onto the deep stone window ledge. It reared up, batting a paw against the clouded glass. That’s when the front door shuddered open.

I won’t leave breadcrumbs for you, won’t tell you which road to take to find her, in her house perched on the lip of a mountain. She lives by herself, composed and self-sufficient. Hangs mushrooms of bewildering varieties from the rafters nearest the fireplace. She mothers an old tiger-striped cat of uncanny sentience.

Her mind: philosophical, tangy, quicksilver, orphic. But when she answers your questions – the ones she chooses to answer – she speaks plainly. A former classmate of her youth once described her as smart as hell, and you need no convincing on that score. (A music historian/critic Who Shall Not Be Named recently wrote of her, in a footnote of his tome on ’70s rock, as Hillbilly Yoko Ono. You might think of this, as she opens the door to you for the first time – and probably the last – and if you do, you will raise a silent middle finger in your mind to the chorus of music-journo-frat-bros who have dismissed her.)

Driving away afterwards, aiming to outrace a sudden poltergeist of thunderstorm, I sucked my tongue and thanked the gods: Nyssa Adcock offered me blood-red tea, all berries and bright herbs. She sat me on a tattered fainting couch that smelled of burnt sugar and turpentine. She talked to me of the local legend of the moon-eyed people and shared the mountain tale of a spurned lover who transforms herself into a hawk. She discoursed on the patterns of nature.

White magic, black magic. Nyssa is all that.

Born of the mountain and sprung from her own head: no Zeus necessary.

Following is an edited version of our conversation.

VXB: As a kid, what were you like? Did you always have ambitions to be a musician? What did you want to be when you grew up?

NA: I was a strange kid. I have an early memory of looking in the old tin mirror on the back of my door, when I was maybe four – hand-painted scrolling strawberry vines, I loved that mirror more than life itself – I understood that my eyes were just gigantic in my skinny face. Crater lakes. Watchful. People felt me charmed, somewhat. Otherworldly is what I

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THOSE CITY BOYS THOUGHT THEY KNEW PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING – BUT AT LEAST THEY SENSED THEIR LIMITS, OUT ON THE MOUNTAIN. THEY LET ME SHOW THEM WHICH LEAVES YOU COULD STEEP FOR TEA IF YOU NURSED A HEADACHE. WHAT THE EARTH COULD GIVE YOU FOR FREE, IN TERMS OF HEALING. AND HARM. AND . . . EXPANDED CONSCIOUSNESS, I SUPPOSE YOU’D CALL IT. I GOT ALL THAT FROM MY MOTHER’S PEOPLE.

mean. Out here, there are stories of little moon-eyed people who lived in mountain caves, way before the Indians even. They still told those stories when I was coming up. No chance I was a changeling, though I sometimes wished it – dreaming I’d been switched at birth with a mythic creature.

VXB: Can you tell me about the ’60s, how that moment came to this part of the country?

NA: I used to hike up a piece of the AT to a shelter, near an old homestead and gravesite. Sometimes I’d run across through-hikers. Even in the late 1960s, most who came through were not the turn on, tune in, drop out kind; not yet. But once or twice some long-hairs came through, and I sat around the fire up there with them. I wasn’t much to them. A slip of a teenaged girl. Those city boys thought they knew pretty much everything – but at least they sensed their limits, out on the mountain. They let me show them which leaves you could steep for tea if you nursed a headache. What the earth could give you for free, in terms of healing. And harm. And… expanded consciousness, I suppose you’d call it. I got all that from my mother’s people.

VXB: This guy, in an interview I found, he knew you growing up and said you got in trouble with the law, in high school.

NA: Folks didn’t really know me, but they trusted my people. My mother for being theirs, my father for doing good works as a doctor. But that new sheriff, all puffed up – he was yellow-haired and pink-faced, tried to shunt attention from his candycoated looks by masquerading as an Old Testament bully – he came after me, thought that town folks wanted a scapegoat. It didn’t work out for him.

VXB: What happened? How were you able to come out of that okay?

NA: Never mind that. You asked me first off, if I had musical ambitions, as a child. Music was always part of my life, growing up. I knew it always would be.

But I never thought about it as something I might do for a living.

VXB: Because you were a girl.

NA: It may be that, in part. But I didn’t even think of myself as a girl for a long time. I daydreamed a whole lot: inventing languages, talking to oaks – I made a royal lineage and attendant court consisting of the trees I knew, up the mountain. For a time, I told folks I was going to create a zoo when I grew up, full of animals I read about in the encyclopedia.

Lemurs from Madagascar, dwarf elephants. Anyhow. In junior high and high school, I did sometimes loan myself out on fiddle, at mountain festivals. I played dulcimer. Piano too. Church potlucks, primary-school holiday pageants. I got paid something, sometimes. But I didn’t do it for the money.

VXB: I read you were introduced to Virgil by music producer and editor of Strum magazine Shep Willits.

I understand that Willits was interested in revisiting that Richard Fariña-Mimi Baez vibe, but giving it an edge, bringing it into the seventies. He was hoping you and Virgil would be that. Is that accurate?

NA: No. He didn’t introduce me to Virgil.

VXB: Who did, then?

NA: No one did.

VXB: What do you mean?

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NA: Me and Virgil? We weren’t introduced. I knew him from way back.

NA: Weather coming. It blows through quick, but there’s no telling how the roads will be, after.

VXB: Really? From – from when you were a kid?

But he grew up in California.

VXB: I’m thinking of this as a chance for you to set the record straight.

NA: I’ve known him forever. That’s all.

NA: I don’t give a damn about that. You made a good effort to find me, is all, and that’s a novelty.

I’m honored you tried. I don’t get to conversing much with humans, these days.

VXB: I’ve listened to your album so many times over the years. My uncle had a copy I found on a shelf.

The first time I heard it, I was thirteen. “Devil’s Elbow” blows my mind every time. Even now. Can you tell me about it? How did you start writing it?

Where did it come from?

NA: A thirteen-year-old putting the needle down on “Devil’s Elbow”? That’s an image. Never pictured a kid listening to it. The kind of thing to give you nightmares, at that impressionable age.

VXB: “The Devil’s Elbow” – it strikes me as something like a siren’s call. Beautiful and dangerous. Like, swim at your own risk. Would you say that’s fair?

NA: I didn’t have a meaning in my head when I started working on that song. It just came.

VXB: What was the process? Did you have a melody you brought in to work on with Virgil? Did the seeds of that come from the mountain music you performed, growing up?

NA: It was always patterns. I can see them, pick them out when others can’t – like catching sight of a spider’s web from just the right angle. Here’s the danger: If you’re so wrapped up in your own version of things, you’re telling the universe ‘this goes here, this goes there.’ Nuh-uh. Working with the pattern – that’s when you’re moving in rhythm. White magic, some term it. But then looked at another way, white can be poison. Darkness too shines with life.

I tried to teach Virgil to see the patterns. But I came to understand, the patterns can’t be taught.

VXB: How do you feel about how the media covered you in the 1970s, after the album came out?

What did they miss? Are there things they got right?

NA: I didn’t read any of it. So I can’t say.

VXB: You knew that the album was doing well, right? Did Virgil read reviews? He certainly talked to the press.

Nyssa shrugs.

VXB: Did your relationship change once the album came out?

NA: Our work together, I liken it to a Luna moth: rare beauty, for a day. And then it’s over. That’s how I thought of it.

VXB: So you intended all along for there just to be this one album? Reading the interviews, it seems to me that Virgil assumed this was just the beginning, for the two of you. Did he know you felt that way about your collaboration?

NA: He was out of his depth.

VXB: In what way, do you mean?

Nyssa laughs now, sharp as a ricochet – though when I look up from my notepad, her gaunt face, framed with cropped gray hair, shows no sign of movement. Only a flicker of amusement in her eyes.

VXB: Virgil, he tried to take control of the music? Is that what you mean?

NA: In every possible way. He learned, though, eventually. A few lifetimes of work. But he learned.

Nyssa lifts the cat off her lap and goes to the kitchen. A minute or two passes – dishes clanking in the sink. She comes back, stands in the kitchen doorway. Rubs a knuckle against her jaw.

VXB: Did he – and you don’t have to answer this question. But I’m going to ask. Did he ever hurt you?

Emotionally or… physically. Or both. I’m thinking of what happened with Lida Krouch, his ex-wife,

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her accusations in the early ’90s. No one took her seriously at the time. But times have changed.

NA: I wasn’t afraid of Virgil then. And I’m not afraid of him now. Here, cat. Get you gone. See him there, pawing at me? No name, many lives, this one.

She nudges the cat, which has been rubbing against her shins; it bolts away as if singed.

VXB: Is there anything else you want to say about the album?

NA: Let folks take whatever they can from the music. It’s not mine. It’s no one’s. It’s everyone’s.

VXB: Anything you want to say, just for yourself?

NA: Whatever can an old witch like me need to say to the world? There’s only cause and effect, giving and taking, pattern and chaos. I do believe I’m all paid up on the human side of the ledger. And that I’ve collected what’s due. It’s just me and the plants and animals now. Breathing for as long as there’s breath. That’s my path. You can tell that to whoever cares to hear.

My editors at Works on Paper liked the first draft I put together, asked me to arrange a second visit. The plan was to send a photographer with me this time; they waxed ecstatic over the prospect of a full-page portrait of Nyssa the Excavated Wonder.

I slept badly in the weeks after my interview with Nyssa. I’d wake up from wandering in endless dreamtime brambles, dislodging rocks as I stumbled, the faint glow of Nyssa’s house beckoning but never reached.

For weeks, I waffled, evading Works on Paper emails. I doubted Nyssa would agree to talk again, I told my editors. Too much Virgil in the story, I

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explained. Too much Nyssa, even: she didn’t care to set out her version of events for readers. My editors grew incredulous – why did I go to all that trouble?

Didn’t I want her story out in the world?

Once I told them no, the nightmares stopped.

That’s when I grasped that I had read the patterns right.

It took me a month, after I withdrew the article from consideration, to take the record down from its display shelf and hold it in my hands again.

Seduced and left with nothing but this gorgeous relic. I hadn’t betrayed Nyssa in any way; I was proud of that. But I also hadn’t done her any favors, really. I hadn’t done myself any favors either.

I put the needle down on “Devil’s Elbow.”

Poured myself a glass of wine, settled my spine against the wall, my ass aching against the merciless wood floor. I don’t remember closing my eyes; I came to consciousness in the lupine-blue gauze just before dawn, the needle caught in the record’s last groove. No sound but gentle rolling static.

That was more than three years ago. These days, I’m finishing a book on Jeanie Skull: the story of her life, a cultural history of her moment. I’ll spare you the details of how it all happened; let’s call it kismet.

I’ll tell you only one last thing. The day I signed the book contract, I received a visitor. Grappling with the key to my apartment building, I felt a phantom breeze against my calves and startled.

A cat. Tiger-striped tail swishing. It nosed me, apprehended me with its slow blink. I lifted it to me. My nose in fur: the scent of burnt sugar and turpentine.

No name, many lives, Nyssa had said. He learned, though, eventually, she told me. He learned.

The cat – my cat – answers to Virgil. n

TOO MUCH VIRGIL IN THE STORY, I EXPLAINED. TOO MUCH NYSSA, EVEN: SHE DIDN’T CARE TO SET OUT HER VERSION OF EVENTS FOR READERS. MY EDITORS GREW INCREDULOUS – WHY DID I GO TO ALL THAT TROUBLE? DIDN’T I WANT HER STORY OUT IN THE WORLD?

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2023 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE FINALIST

BY RICHARD BETZ

Isaac Hollif ield We all drap off one by one.

And when your time comes, we’ll miss you fer a spell.

And then – we’ll fergit.—Isaac Hollifield

COURTESY OF CHRIS HOLLIFIELD AND DAVID BIDDIX

Here’s the irony, Isaac: we do remember you, even now, for your succinct view of mortality, people dropping like the last leaves of autumn, one by one when the season comes around, and for your handsome handlebar mustache, arms crossed defiantly in that photo on the wall of Switzerland Inn, from a vanished time, the long slope downhill, the corner of the shed, the team of horses just out of sight waiting to take summer tourists to Mount Mitchell camp, and the delicious relish in your sharp old eyes as those tender outsiders climbed aboard your most uncomfortable horse-drawn wagon, eighty-seven years old, five children from Millie Shuford, nobody but a neighbor and sometimes-midwife to help a woman in labor, as tough as old leather as you, I expect, you, who did not go gently before you dropped and expected us all to forget, would never have expected to be preserved this way, have believed I would be standing here today in this comfortable old inn, studying your face, while the morning fog rolls away slowly, down the Blue Ridge to distant Lake James.

Isaac Hollifield (1860–1947)

RICHARD BETZ grew up in New England but has lived in North Carolina for almost fifty years, first in Asheville, then in Highlands.

An outdoorsman and an avid runner, he has run twenty marathons including the Boston Marathon. He has been a finalist for the James Applewhite Poetry Prize seven times now, twice receiving Honorable Mention. His poetry collection Bells in the Night was published by Outskirts Press in 2021.

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FINALIST, 2022 ALEX ALBRIGHT CREATIVE NONFICTION PRIZE

Transmission Lines

by Lockie Hunter

The transmission lines chewed through the mountains of my hometown in East Tennessee.

“Your uncle ruined your view,” my mother said.

My uncle worked for the TVA. Their transmission lines stretched upward in a “V,” aching for the sky. The TVA was a New Deal program, the goal to provide jobs and electricity to the rural Tennessee River Valley. It displaced thousands of people in the process.

North Carolina photographer Micah Cash took a photo of the Boone Dam and noted that it “illustrates the interaction of landscape, utility, and community while contemplating the visual and cultural compromises we make as a society for the necessity of electricity.”

PHOTOGRAPH BY MICAH CASH

At the dam, we jumped off the rusted trestle into Boone Lake and recited the same tired joke. “It’s about dam time you jumped.” My arms oaring, a skein of baby oil still sticking to my neck. We had been sitting on the dock all day, lazy, our bikini tops off, trying to avoid tan lines, drinking Miller Lite, listening to Hank Williams Junior’s song “All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight.”

We covered ourselves in baby oil tinted with Tabasco, so that when we slathered it on, we already looked a little pink. The goal was to fry in the summer sun. A fishing pole was in the water, just in case we snagged the local-legend catfish, Big Ed or Big John or Big Ned. There was reportedly a huge prize (no one knew what the prize was. Gold? Jewelry? 8-track songs? A year’s supply of Hawaiian Tropic?) Given by whom exactly (the mayor? The Tennessee Valley Authority?)

Nonetheless, no one I knew ever sat on a dock without putting in a pole for Big Ed/John/Ned.

In 1948, the TVA flooded the town of Butler, Tennessee. The government paid to relocate people, churches, homes . . . 1,281 graves. TVA created Watauga Lake with a dam that would generate electricity for the residents of East Tennessee.

“The next mayor of Butler will be a catfish,” said a local.

ABOVE Boone Dam, Recreation Area, from the book Dangerous Waters: A Photo Essay

on the Tennessee Valley Authority (University of Tennessee Press, 2017) by Micah Cash

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

There are no rusted trestles to jump from in the lost town of Butler, but there is the Butler Memorial Bridge, a three-span deck truss bridge over the Watauga River on State Highway 67.

It won an award from the American Institute of Steel Construction for the beauty of its metal, patina-green, mesh-lace, at once solid and delicate.

If I were a composer of country songs, I’d create a verse for it. All my rowdy friends are jumping off Watauga Bridge tonight.

Eighty feet high. I stared hard at the water. If I could launch high enough and land toes-first on the water, bruise my heel and sink sink sink, would the momentum convey me deep enough to touch the town’s history? I’m afraid to dive too deep, impale my foot on the church steeple of a congregation that was not important enough to save.

Inundated. The technical term for flooding a town is inundated.

As in, Bulter was inundated by a TVA reservoir.

As in, we are inundated with news about the virus.

As in, we waited for hours to speak to someone on the inundated unemployment helpline.

As in, Trump inundated the media with quack ideas about injecting Lysol as a cure.

As in, New York City is inundated with requests for ventilators.

As in, before she died, her lungs were inundated with fluid.

As in, the town in which I live, Asheville, was once inundated with tourists, but is now deserted.

The world has a watery feel to it now. When we do go out, we wear a mask.

The town of Butler is still there. It is the people who have moved on.

Does Butler still have a zip code?

Perhaps the mayor is Big Ed the Catfish.

In 1983, the lake was drained to make critical repairs to Watauga Dam. The technical term is drawdown.

As in, draw the water down-away.

As in, draw the water down into the soggy earth.

As in, draw the water into another container, one that does not harbor a once-town.

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“ If I could launch high enough and land toes-first on the water, bruise my heel and sink sink sink, would the momentum convey me deep enough to touch the town’s history?

I’m afraid to dive too deep, impale my foot on the church steeple of a congregation that was not important enough to save.”

As in, draw quick conclusions about which churches needed saving.

As in draw down your arms and hands. No hugs allowed. Allow a six-foot distance.

As in draw down your expectations of seeing your first grandchild in person.

As in, draw a picture of the town that only resides in your memory.

The water drained and visitors could view the ghost town. Thresholds of homes, tumbling chimneys, dead trees.

“It was like a year-long funeral,” one resident said of the relocation.

If we define a town as a collection of buildings, is it no longer a town when the buildings are submerged? If we define a town as its community, then is the town of Butler still alive in its citizens, now scattered? What of the Atlantises of the world? There are many TVA once-towns.

Their names all begin with “The lost town of . . . ” When does a town stop being a town?

If we define a church as a congregation, then is Grace Church in North Asheville still a church?

The church bells still ring every Sunday, the sound bouncing off the pews, empty because of the virus.

STEPHANIE WHITLOCK DICKEN , who designed this essay, began work with NCLR’s with the 2001 issue, then served as Art Director 2002-2008.

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“ If we define a town as a collection of buildings, is it no longer a town when the buildings are submerged?“

What of the empty stores in Manhattan? Michael Hendrix writes in the New York Daily News that “New York City is not dead, but it is on life support.” Support is a good place to be, where the hand is lifted, the heart is lifted. Support lifts, we stand taller on supports, like a juggler on stilts. I remember the mountains supporting the powerlines, or was it the powerlines that supported the mountains? We could view it either way.

The world has a watery feel to it now.

When we do go out, we wear a mask.

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Sometimes, when the water level dips very low, I am sure I can see that church steeple. A knife-stab of white triangle, rising out of the water, like the sword in the stone. If a local teen can just grab it, pull it from the watery depths, they will be king.

A modern-day Excalibur, the Lady in the Lake sirening to the new King of Butler.

Will the King sit with the Butler community on the water-logged pews at the church, will the footsteps in the main square ring out again, with muffled, watery babbles?

Artist Jason deCaires Taylor created a collection of sculptures based on people that live in Puerto Morelos. They are in the midst of everyday activities: watching TV, driving a car.

He buried these people in the Caribbean, and now, fish swim in and out of their ears, their open mouths. I imagine it is the same in Butler. Schools of fish occupying the K-12 building, haunting the classroom with their quiet rhythm.

Taylor titled his installation, The Silent Evolution.

They call it the Lost Town of Butler. This implies it is people who create a town, not the edifices. The people of Butler have moved on.

During the Butler drawdown, new artifacts were discovered, not belonging to the original era.

Objects (old boots, lace panties, underwire bras, rusted gas cans) thrown over the bridge into the welcoming embrace of the once-town. There was rumor that there was a body down there. A spectral visitor to the tunnels of murky streets.

The body sinking to the bottom, craving his post-office, his barber shop, his favorite meatand-three restaurant, his seat in the family pew of the church. He once sat right up front, where the voice of the ghostly preacher rang out, loud and true. So close he could see the preacher’s fillings.

The once-resident frequenting the watery shops.

The first to walk those paths in more than forty years.

The world has a watery feel to it now.

When we do go out, we wear a mask.

There is no rickety trestle. Only an eighty-foot plunge to jump into the town. No real danger of impaling my foot on the church steeple. It is too far regressed.

There are few people in Asheville now. The downtown streets are deserted. Pandemic has sent people into their homes; the restaurants are shattered/shuttered/ghost-inhabited. The church bells ring, but they feel hollow.

Is our town lost?

Are others?

The world has a watery feel to it. When we do go out, we wear a mask.

It feels, instead, as if our town is not lost like Atlantis but suspended like Butler. The buildings waiting for their inhabitants to come home. The shuttered shops deferred.

In many ways, we are all swimming, untethered, hoping when this is over, our town will re-emerge. n

LOCKIE HUNTER had three essays make it to the final round of consideration for the 2022 Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize. Read the other two in NCLR Online Fall 2022 and Winter 2023. The author serves as associate producer of the poetry and prose radio program Wordplay on 103.3 FM in Asheville.

She holds an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College in Boston and has taught creative writing at Warren Wilson College.

Her work has appeared in a variety of periodicals, like Brevity, Christian Science Monitor, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Blue Mountain Review.

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

ON THE BUS WITH AL MAGINNES a review by Jim Clark Al Maginnes. Fellow Survivors: New and Selected Poems.

Redhawk Publications, 2023.

JIM CLARK is Professor Emeritus of English at Barton College in Wilson, NC, where he was the Elizabeth H. Jordan Professor of Southern Literature from 2007 until 2019 and served as Dean of the School of Humanities. Some of his honors include the Randall Jarrell Scholarship, the Harriette Simpson Arnow Short Story Award, and the Merrill Moore Writing Award. He served as the President of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association in 2015 and the Chair of the North Carolina Writers Conference in 2017.

AL MAGINNES spent most of his career teaching at Wake Technical Community College in Raleigh. He earned his BA in English from ECU and his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas.

He is the author of several poetry collections, including, most recently, Sleeping Through the Graveyard Shift (Redhawk Publications, 2020; reviewed in NCLR Online 2021). Read an interview with him in NCLR 2007.

For some years now I’ve carried a small list of names in my head, poets, about my age (sixties), who it seems to me are due a “Selected Poems” collection.

The wait is over for the poet at the top of that list, Al Maginnes, whose Fellow Survivors: New and Selected Poems is out from Redhawk Publications. A “Selected Poems” volume signifies several things and performs several functions in a poet’s career. It indicates a certain level of achievement, a sense of the poet having fully arrived on the scene. In this volume Maginnes includes poems from about a dozen previously published titles. An impressive achievement, unquestionably. A “Selected Poems” also provides a summation of the poet’s career to date, focused and enhanced by the editorial winnowing such a volume entails. The result is a curated showcase of the poet’s best work for the initiated, and a handy, impressive one-volume introduction for the uninitiated.

Finally, such a collection, especially if it contains new poems, as this one does, sets the stage for what is to come – the poet’s continuing, mature work.

My acquaintance with Maginnes’s poems coincides with my move to North Carolina in 1994 to teach creative writing and modern poetry at Barton College. Among the first lines of his I encountered are these from “The Angels of Our Daily Bread,” a poem included in his first book, Taking Up Our Daily Tools (1997): Beside the imperfect cobble of each task our tarnished and clumsy hands turn to rises the ghost of its conception, built in imagination’s pure moment by the angels of our daily bread.

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This nearly perfect little Platonic reverie contains the merest whiff of Wallace Stevens in its depiction of the old holy war between Imagination and Reality. Replete with lovely phrases like “imperfect cobble,” contrasted with the visceral sense of ornery English words supplied by the alliteration of lightly percussive “t” sounds, these lines have echoed through my brain for a quarter century. Here is a poet who knows what work is, I thought (and still think), and knows that despite being constructed from rough cobblestones, a poem can be an avenue to transcendence.

I got on Maginnes’s bus and, no matter how long or strange the trip, never looked back.

Yes, the Grateful Dead allusions are intentional. I am surely old enough to not worry about claiming that part of my lived experience. We all choose certain artists as guides, teachers, explainers, and bellwethers.

They help us make sense of our experiences. When, as a young man, I encountered these lines

by Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter in “Ship of Fools,” “I won’t leave you drifting down / But oh, it makes me wild / With thirty years upon my head / To have you call me child,” I thought, I’m not the only one; someone else has been here before and experienced this same thing. It was clarifying, illuminating, and I felt I’d found a kindred spirit. This is what Maginnes’s poetic voice provides for me. It’s a lodestar by which I calibrate my humanistic gyroscope.

I suppose that’s a heavy load for a poet, but so be it.

Happily, this volume contains many personal favorites like the aforementioned “The Angels

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of Our Daily Bread,” along with the magnificent “Punishment” (which I shared with my students for years), “Elegy with Clifford Brown Playing the Trumpet,” “Film History,” “For a Glass of Red Wine,” “A Broadcast from Flyover Country,” “The Jesus Year,” “Playlist for a Photograph of a Record Burning,” “Stern,” the marvelous poems of family and parenthood in Inventing the Constellations (2012), and the surprising but indispensable long narrative “From Dry Glass Blues.”

However, it’s really the new poems that call to me, especially those displaying Maginnes’s great gift of empathy. Is there a college professor in the trenches anywhere who doesn’t react to a title like “Thirty Years of Teaching, No Sabbatical” with an involuntary shudder and a rueful laugh? After an extended meditation on “time’s ability to erase itself / to inconvenience once the spell / of waiting is done” the speaker, with “two-thirds of a life spent / in classrooms,” recollects the many semesters now behind him, peopled by students “who came every fall and spring to confront / syntax and punctuation, to let / their essays come limping forth, their shy poems / peeking from behind their legs.” Now, with all the time in the world to devote to writing, he frets over his meager accomplishments: “So what if the language of birds eludes me?” Employing the everyday language of education, he celebrates the moment when the power of language visits its gift upon an unsuspecting teacher who passes it on to his students: In the end

there will be a roster

of things undone, but somewhere someone might recall an afternoon when I said something I had not known until I said it, a twist of thought that became true when words found it.

The teacher in the previous poem might well have been discussing the Beat poets when words found his first, best thought. Next we have Maginnes’s own reckoning with those poets in the compelling narrative “Allen Ginsberg and the Purloined Bible.” The poem begins with the speaker’s confession that he missed his chance to see Ginsberg because, at the time, “I didn’t love him enough when he walked the earth, gentle, / seem-

Fall 2023

ingly immortal, to drive that distance” of three hours. The poem’s funky, bohemian details should be familiar enough to any poet coming of age in the 1970s or ’80s: Poetry in the Schools work, friends with a precarious grasp on reality, alcohol, mushrooms, cigarettes, cheap motels. In a strategically placed flashback, we see the speaker working menial jobs on “a college campus whose buildings resembled my idea of / medieval castle,” using his lunch break to read “Kerouac – even The Town and the City – Corso, Bukowski, Snyder,” and trying his hand at writing “my own half-made poems.” By the time the speaker enrolls in college, his beloved Beats are superciliously dismissed by au courant professors eager for the next big thing.

The speaker keeps at it, though, winding up in a graduate program where the teacher of his first literature course is coincidentally John Clellon Holmes, who regales the class with tales of Kerouac “coming to his house at three in the morning / bearing the now-famous scroll manuscript of On the Road.” The speaker eventually finds a packet of mushrooms tucked into the pages of the Bible purloined from a seedy motel room by his friend Bailey and left at his house. After downing them, he has his own psychedelic epiphany reading Ginsberg’s early imitations of Blake. As the poem moves toward its conclusion, we flash forward to 1994 when the speaker attends a writers’ conference in Washington, DC: “I was in another hotel when / I heard that Allen Ginsberg had died.” Many writers, myself included, very likely remember that writers’ conference, that hotel, and hearing the news of Ginsberg’s death, adding to the sense of inclusion and recognition that Maginnes’s poems often elicit. The poem ends with the speaker putting on his token Jack Kerouac t-shirt before leaving, a modest ritual, instead of reading the verses Bailey read from the hotel Bible or chanting om mani padme hum, “something Ginsberg would have done. / But I was not Ginsberg. The universe had him now.”

The memorable “Iggy Pop Died for Our Sins,” perhaps the centerpiece of the new poems, contains several of Maginnes’s favorite elements: pop culture references, music and musicians, youthful excesses, brushes with mortality, survival, redemption. The poem begins with the

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

The romance of the drug life evaporates and then it’s just the drug and the withering veins.

And I was never so in love with my own demise that I planned anything other than a long life.

Newly sober, he begins to view the “anachronistic” Pop in a different light: “and now I heard / not a role model but a fellow survivor, / someone whose tracks I could follow / even if he walked in gold lame slippers.” Not surprisingly, this powerful poem contains the title of Maginnes’s Selected Poems. Thinking of the extremes to which Pop would often go – “stage dive, smear himself / with peanut butter, roll in broken glass, / taunt bikers into beating the shit out of him” – the speaker realizes the need for an audience as an element in such behavior, “people who hoped / he would do those very things / so they could tell stories about

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young punk rock icon Sid Vicious, bass player for the Sex Pistols, wishing to be like the older punk rock icon, Iggy Pop, lead singer for The Stooges.

Vicious romantically (and mistakenly) views Pop as a deceased “martyr for rock and roll,” and “would not be persuaded that Iggy was / thirty by then, living in Berlin, working / with Bowie on his third or fourth comeback.” Pop, whose real name is James Osterberg, grew up in Ann Arbor, MI, and the speaker remembers a friend who also grew up there and “recalled Iggy shuffling around / in torn jeans and gold lame slippers / like your grandma might wear when / her bunions hurt.” These contrasting depictions of Iggy – the self-destructive punk performer and the almost comical harmless neighborhood eccentric – constitute the heart of this meditation on life, mortality, and the choices of self-destruction and redemption. The speaker reveals that he has never seen Pop in concert, but “as long as Iggy and I are alive / there’s hope.”

Pop offers a model of redemption for the adult speaker, who, as a young punk, “claimed ‘Better living through chemistry’ / and believed it,” choosing as role models “Keith Richards, / Harry Crews, Bukowski” rather than the has-been Pop, “an anachronism by then.” The speaker eventually must deal with his self-destructive tendencies, especially as his age begins to catch up with him:

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it later.” Sid Vicious died shortly after declaring his mistaken admiration for Pop. The speaker comes to realize, Destruction requires an effort, as well as someone to monitor the wounds, to warn how close you came this time and tell you not to do it again.

The poem ends with the realization, using the ambiguous pronoun “we,” that: “We had to kill Iggy Pop / so we both could walk away.” Who is the other, who justifies the plural pronoun?

Perhaps the self-destructive persona of Iggy Pop created by James Osterberg. At any rate, at the poem’s end, two fellow survivors walk away.

There’s no doubt that this impressive collection announces that Al Maginnes has fully arrived.

The book is also a fine showcase of Maginnes’s best poems, and a tantalizing introduction to his work. But for those initiates among us who look to Maginnes and his poems to calibrate our internal gyroscopes and record our testudineous progression through the zeitgeist, this book only makes us hungry. Hungry for the next poem, the next dispatch from one who possesses one of the keenest antennae of the race, as Ezra Pound once defined the role of poets. We know that, come hell or high water, Maginnes is out there somewhere, working on a new poem. And we can hardly wait for it. n

ABOVE Al Maginnes at Scuppernong Books in Greensboro, NC,

8 Oct. 2023

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There’s Always Room for New Voices

by Margaret D. Bauer, Editor Another recent NCLR initiative (see my introduction to Flashbacks for the first) is a new contest, inspired by my ECU colleague Celestine Davis, who some years ago asked me how NCLR might include spoken word poetry. Working with Celestine and the poet Glenis Redmond, we decided upon defining the contest broadly for performance poetry. Read in the pages to follow more about this new contest and find links to the performances by the premier winner and other honorees. I thank these women as well as the North Carolina Poetry Society, who agreed to sponsor the contest, providing honoraria to the judge and honorees. And thanks to NCLR Digital Editor Devra Thomas, who took over from that planning stage to manage the contest and put the videos up on NCLR’s YouTube channel.

Congratulations to all of the Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Contest honorees, and welcome to NCLR’s newest writers, two of these four poets, as well as finalists and semifinalists from the Applewhite and Betts Prize contests published here. With funding from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association and the North Carolina Writers’ Network, we are able to pay honoraria to all of the authors of the creative writing we publish, as well as to the artists who allow us to complement the creative writing with their work.

Here too, read reviews of new books by writers we’ve not previously published. If you follow us on social media (and we hope you do – or will do so), you’ll note that we’ve been releasing a book review each week. As our Saturday Review is a still somewhat new initiative, we have on occasion (and

through most of the summer) released a review re-run. But our goal is to review over fifty books a year and thus release a new book review every week. To do that, we need your help! Would you like to review for us? Find out how on our website.

And note that, in addition to our gratitude and the gratitude of the writers reviewed, reviewers receive a complimentary subscription to the print issue.

Also, don’t let us miss your new book or a recent book you’ve read by a North Carolina writer. You can contact us through our website form to let us know the author, title, publication date, publisher, and the contact information to request a review copy from the publisher. We welcome books published by large commercial presses and small independent publishers, but no self-published books, please: we have a small staff, and given how prolific North Carolina writers are, we don’t have time to screen. We want to know the book has undergone a publisher’s review process before we spend time matching it to a reader for review consideration.

Allow me, too, this space to remind you that author interviews and literary analyses can be submitted to the North Carolina Miscellany section year-round. Help us expand our mission to promote the state’s rich literary culture with your essay on or interview with a new North Carolina writer or one whose work has not received the critical attention it deserves. Such articles and interviews could be awarded the Randall Kenan or John Ehle Prize. Read more in our submission guidelines. We look forward to reading your work and welcoming you to the NCLR family. n

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Miscellany

106 Poetry Off the Page: Premiere Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Prize Contest

115 Dogwood a poem by Johnny Cate

To Leo

Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Prize poem by Allan Wolf

116 Bent Fork a poem by Roxanne Henderson

A Letter to the Little Girl I Used to Be

and To the Monster Under My Bed

by Onyx Bradley

118 Clarity, Consolation, and the End to Definition

a review by David E. Poston n Deborah Pope, Wild Liar n Katherine Soniat, Polishing the Glass Storm

Why We Fished

by Michael Loderstedt His Time and Grandfather Mountain

by Janet Ford 109 how / like you see me

a poem by Alessandra Nysether-Santos art by Gabriela Costas 110 Uniformity of Carcass a short story by Gary V. Powell art by Frank Holliday

art by Bre Barnett Crowell

art by Sharon Dowell

122 Poems of Hope and Redemption a review by James W. Kirkland n Scott Owens, Prepositional 125 Ever Haunted

a review by Amanda M. Capelli n Mimi Herman, The Kudzu Queen n Culley Holderfield, Hemlock Hollow 128 The Forgotten South, Remembered a review by Dale Neal n Keith Flynn and Charter Weeks, Prosperity Gospel: Portraits of the Great Recession

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE 6 n

Native American Literature of North Carolina

38 n

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

poetry, prose, and drama

poetry, fiction, pedagogy, and book reviews

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POETRY OFF THE PAGE: PREMIERE JAKI SHELTON GREEN PERFORMANCE POETRY PRIZE CONTEST While Green doesn’t consider herself a performance poet per se, on Juneteenth 2020, Soul City Sounds released her spoken word album, The River Speaks of Thirst. Green has performed and taught around the globe, and her laureate duties have had her on stages (or video online) from Murphy to Manteo. The audience for her readings (performances) are typically mesmerized by her presence and command of her artistry. Her commitment to community, advocating for inclusion and diversity, resonates throughout her mission: “what’s really at the core of doing the public work is helping young people understand that they are worthy of their own stories: to be able to see them and read them or dance them, to see them into being,” Green has stated.1 NCLR accepted video submissions to the inaugural Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry contest in April 2023. The contest’s first judge was Glenis Redmond, an accomplished spoken word poet, currently serving as the inaugural Poet Laureate for Greenville, SC, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. She has also been a Kennedy Center Teaching Artist and traveled internationally performing and teaching poetry. Redmond says she began her poetry career during her years living in Asheville, NC, in the 1990s. In her 2019 NCLR interview, Redmond said, “I appreciated the call-and-response aspect of poetry, creating spaces with live poetry, having a conversation with the audience.”2 PHOTOGRAPH BY B. KNOX PHOTOGRAPHY; COURTESY OF GLENIS REDMOND

The North Carolina Literary Review has long championed our state’s poets sharing their verse on the printed page: the early issues under Alex Albright’s editorship published new poems by National Book Award winner A.R. Ammons of Columbus County.

After Editor Margaret Bauer developed a similar relationship with James Applewhite, we started the James Applewhite Poetry Contest in 2011 and over the years have published numerous winners, honorees, ad finalists in our print and digital pages. In 2022, in collaboration with the North Carolina Poetry Society (NCPS), we expanded our support of North Carolina poets to include the oral tradition of poetry: performance poetry, spoken word, praise poetry, slam poems. As is the case with our other competitions, NCLR’s new Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Prize competition is open to any writer who fits the NCLR definition of a North Carolina writer: anyone who currently lives in North Carolina, has lived in North Carolina, or uses North Carolina as subject matter.

This contest is the brainchild of longtime member of NCLR’s editorial board Celestine Davis, who first asked the editor some years ago how NCLR might include spoken word poetry. “Then in spring 2022, it occurred to me that answering that question is exactly the kind of project development we should apply gift funding to,” reported Bauer, who, providing a summer stipend from NCLR’s Foundation account, invited Davis to develop her idea into another contest for North Carolina poets. Upon doing so, Davis, then President of the NCPS, brought her project (and Bauer) to that board to propose a collaboration. Davis regards this “support and collaboration with NCLR for this contest as an essential step toward the more inclusive and extended vision of the North Carolina Poetry Society.”

The NCPS sponsors the contest, providing the prize money and judge’s stipend. Jointly, NCLR and NCPS determined that the current North Carolina’s Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green would be the natural namesake for this new contest. Current NCPS President Alana Dagenhart notes, “To have a performance poetry prize that honors our vibrant Poet Laureate, Jaki Shelton Green, and gives a stage to new voices is thrilling. It makes me feel like we are on the cusp of dynamic growth in North Carolina poetry, and The North Carolina Poetry Society is delighted to be a sponsor.”

ABOVE Glenis Redmond performing at Greenville Jazz Fest, Greenville,

SC, June 2023 1

Liberation Station Bookstore, Full Interview with NC Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green, Youtube, 6 June 2023: web.

2

Lisa Sarasohn, “Glenis Redmond: Poet, Teaching Artist, Griot,” NCLR 18 (2019): 47.

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For the inaugural Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Prize, Redmond selected Allan Wolf’s performance of his poem “To Leo,” “calling it “a master class on how to take a well-crafted poem and deliver it with both passion and intention.” She added, “He draws the audience in with his direct gaze and expert pacing. ‘To Leo’ is a palpable tribute poem in which Allan creatively resurrects his grandfather, Leo Vernon Wolf. Because of this lovely homage, we are better for having met Leo.”3

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Onyx Bradley’s “A Letter to the Girl I Used to Be” and “To the Monster Under my Bed” both received Honorable Mention, Redmond appreciating how the poet “weaves engaging stories and uses direct address in both poems as an effective craft element.”

The audience, she says, “is invited into the poet’s world and made insiders. With a conversational and casual delivery, they carry us and set the mood. These poems are charged. They strike chords, resonating with both welcome and warning.”

“ a master class on how to take a well-crafted poem and deliver it with both passion and intention.”

—Glenis Redmond

PHOTOGRAPH BY JON GARDINER/UNC CHAPEL HILL

“ the poet weaves engaging stories and uses direct address in both poems as an effective craft element.”

—Glenis Redmond

ALLAN WOLF’s picture books, poetry collections, young adult novels, and nonfiction celebrate his love of research, history, science, and poetry. This versatile writer is a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, two-time winner of the North Carolina Young Adult Book Award, and recipient of New York’s Bank Street College Claudia Lewis Award for Poetry. Booklist placed his The Watch That Ends the Night on its list of the 50 Best YA Books of All Time. Wolf believes in the healing powers of poetry recitation and has committed to memory nearly a thousand poems. In 2023 he has performed poetry in person for over ten thousand children.

ABOVE Alan Wolf performing his winning poem, “To Leo” ABOVE RIGHT Onyx Bradley performing their poems, selected

for honorable mention 3

This and other quotations from the judge are cited from “Allan Wolf Wins Inaugural Green Performance Poetry Prize,” NCLR 4 June 2023: web.

ONYX BRADLEY was born in Charlotte and grew up in Pikeville, NC. While they enjoy poetry a great deal, their main focus lies in writing stories featuring LGBTQ+ characters in the fantasy and science fiction settings they had always been drawn to as a child.

They graduated with a BA in English from East Carolina University in 2023.

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Redmond also selected Michael Loderstedt’s performance of “Why We Fished” (his 2021 James Applewhite Poetry Prize poem of the same title) for Honorable Mention, calling it “a love letter to fishing, a beautiful poem akin to prayer because of the detail. The speaker’s voice is confident, as he sets the scene via fishing lures, equipment and a photograph of a fish is projected above him. The poet outfitted in fishing regalia, the fishing why becomes evident, not only through props, but captivating lore. The poem’s beauty contracts and expands from fishing into a much larger statement about life.”

“ a love letter to fishing, a beautiful poem akin to prayer because of the detail.” —Glenis Redmond

Finally, special note was made of Janet Ford’s two submitted performances, “His Time” (recipient of the 2017 Guy Owen Prize) and “Grandfather Mountain,” both of which Redmond found reminiscent of Eudora Welty. All of these poets received honoraria from the NCPS and were invited to perform at the September 16 meeting.

The inaugural Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Prize recipient and honorees, which you can watch on Youtube at the links provided herein, reveal how performance poetry can include both poetry written for the page and poetry written to be performed. As our submission guidelines for this contest indicate, performance is the critical component of this contest. We look forward to watching more performances across the state and for next year’s second annual Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Competition. Submissions will be open throughout April. n

ABOVE Michael Loderstedt performing his honorable mention

ABOVE Janet Ford performing her special mention poems

poem, “Why We Fished” MICHAEL LODERSTEDT’s recent writings have been featured in Muleskinner Journal, Bangalore Review, and Musepaper. He received a 2020 Ohio Arts Council Fellowship in Literature for his memoir manuscript The Yellowhammer’s Cross. His first book of poems, Why We Fished, published by Redhawk Publications, is inspired in part by his upbringing on the barrier island of Bogue Banks, NC.

JANET FORD lives in the Brushy Mountains of western North Carolina. Her poems have appeared in NCLR Online, Poetry East, Caesura, and elsewhere. In 2022, she received the Susan Laughter Meyers Residency Fellowship Award, and her work was selected for Poetry in Plain Sight 2023.

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2023 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE FINALIST

BY ALESSANDRA NYSETHER-SANTOS

how / like you see me after Lauren Zuniga, “Submissive” I am the prayer mat & you, the devoted whispering divinity like moonbeams so soft it flutters into kisses all over / through me a breeze rippling all my pages.

You understand electricity / my body – can see it glowing, feel it / me slow & open / surrender to the frequency – an ancient current, you a conductor attuned to the humming deep within.

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

Lips buzzing & begging kiss / bite me, here & here touch / hold all of me love / worship me till I see gods / my self how / like you see me holy

Blue Breeze (acrylic on canvas, 15x30 by Gabriela Costas

ALESSANDRA NYSETHER-SANTOS is a Brazilian American writer and teacher in eastern North Carolina. She has had poems published in the lickety-split, Space538 Poetry Hotline, Expressions, and the anthology Atè Mais: Latinx Futurisms.

GABRIELA COSTAS is a native of Orán, Salta, in northern Argentina. She earned BAs in Art Education and Fine Art, with a major in painting, at the National University of Córdoba.

She has taught art both in secondary and tertiary institutions in Argentina and Montreal.

Her works have been exhibited in Salta and Córdoba, Argentina, in Montreal, Quebec, and in Winston-Salem, NC, where she now lives. In 2021, her art was recognized by the FedEx Global Education Center at UNC Chapel Hill, and she was selected as one of thirteen North Carolina artists of Latin American heritage to be included in an exhibit at the UNC Global Education Center in Chapel Hill.

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F INA LIST, 2 02 2 DO RIS BET TS FICTIO N PRIZE

Uniformity

by Gary V. Powell with art by Frank Holliday

of Carcass

That was not the story, but it was the story Mitch McCloud often repeated, a mantra of sorts to convince himself everything would be all right.

GARY V. POWELL, a reformed lawyer, lives near Lake Norman, North Carolina. He is the author of a novel, Lucky Bastard (Main Street Rag Publishing, 2012), and winner of Press 53’s 2022 Prime Number short fiction prize. He has been a finalist for several other fiction awards, and his work appears in many literary magazines and reviews, including the Thomas Wolfe Review, carvezine, 2012 Press 53 Awards Anthology, Atticus Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Pisgah Review, Best New Writing 2015, and Sleep Is a Beautiful Color: 2017 National Flash Fiction Day Anthology. Read another of his finalist stories in NCLR 2024.

THIS WAS THE STORY: AN ORDINARY middle-aged man meets and falls in love with someone much younger, an extraordinary human being, intelligent and kind, beautiful inside and out, who returns the older man’s love with equal ardor. Following a brief courtship, the unlikely couple forms a union and lives happily ever after.

That was not the story, but it was the story Mitch McCloud often repeated, a mantra of sorts to convince himself everything would be all right. He was mouthing the words while staring out his window, looking south from his twenty-sixth-story perch in uptown Charlotte and admiring the Bradford pears blooming along Providence Avenue when his law partner, Potter Mills, burst into his office.

New York artist FRANK HOLLIDAY, born in Greensboro, NC, was a key figure in the East Village Scene of the 1970s and ’80s. Along with artists such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, he helped found the seminal Club 57, while working days at Andy Warhol’s Studio 54. His work has been exhibited most recently at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Mucciaccia Gallery in Singapore, and the Carlo Bilotti Museum in Rome. He is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. His work is collected in the Museum of Modern Art and the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, among others.

North Carolina Miscellany COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

Heart and Soul, 2014 (oil on linen, 72x62) by Frank Holliday

“Thinking of jumping?” Potter asked.

“Why would I jump?”

“Exactly.”

Potter had a request inasmuch as Mitch wasn’t getting anything done in the office anyway – drive to Duplin County and meet with Deal Graham’s widow, Sweety. She was in a flat-out tizzy.

“Drive to Duplin County? Are the phone lines down?”

“Her will needs revising, and we’re not revising Sweety Graham’s will over the phone. Besides, you’re scaring the admins. Have you looked in the mirror?”

“I’m good, man.”

“Yeah, right.”

This was the story: a successful Gen X partner with a successful mid-sized Charlotte law firm engages in an affair with a considerably younger professional associated with a successful competing

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firm. The younger professional is a Millennial whose “starter marriage” is faltering; despite raising eyebrows in Charlotte’s legal and religious communities, the Gen Xer and Millennial form a union and live happily ever after but for the occasional picadillo arising due to generational differences.

That was not the story, but it was the story Mitch told the attractive Starbucks’ barista who prepared his Grande non-fat latte and remarked he looked under the weather.

“Didn’t sleep well,” Mitch conceded.

“Picadillo?”

“You could say that.”

He estimated four hours to Duplin County, a half-day’s drive on a sunny spring day, the azaleas in bloom, the air sweet with the scent of honeysuckle. Once on the road, he was actually glad to be out of the office, away from scrutiny, real or imagined, of co-workers. He confirmed by cell phone his appointment with Sweety from his sporty little BMW. “Bless your heart, Mr. McCloud. I so appreciate you driving all this way.”

“It’s my pleasure, Miss Graham.”

While alive, her husband had owned and operated massive hog farms, concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) throughout eastern North Carolina. Potter Mills and Deal went way back, as in grew up together in Duplin County, so no surprise Mills and McCloud, LLP, represented Graham Foods, Inc. from its modest start-up to its place at the pinnacle of the hograising industry. Shortly before Deal Graham’s death, the firm, mostly in the person of Mitch, drew up documents for its A-list client. The estate plan minimized inheritance taxes, protected assets from claims of nuisance creditors, and vested control of the business in Deal’s surviving spouse’s hands.

Now, Sweety wanted to change the plan.

East of Raleigh, Mitch stopped for a hot dog, a bag of chips, and a Cheerwine soda. Not the best choices, he knew, but he promised himself to take up a healthier diet once his life returned to a semblance of normal. He also bought a disposable razor and shaved in the bathroom using soap from a wall dispenser, managing to nick himself only once.

The man behind the checkout counter noted the stain on Mitch’s tie.

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“And you haven’t even eaten the hot dog,” the clerk observed with a smile. “Maybe, you ought to take an extra napkin.”

“Actually,” Mitch said, “that’s from last night’s Cabernet. Matches the tie, don’t you agree?”

“Looks more like blood to me. That’s quite a hunk you took out of your chin.”

“I think it’s Cabernet.”

“Whatever you say.”

This was the story: a successful, middle-aged lawyer, husband of fifteen years to a woman from a well-regarded Charlotteean family and father to two pre-teen daughters, is swept off his feet by a much younger, married professional; despite the odds, the love-struck couple disentangles from prior commitments with minimal emotional damage to all parties involved, forms a union, and lives happily ever after.

That was not the story, but it was the story Mitch settled on shortly before arriving at the Graham residence in Duplin County, a Charlestonstyle mansion with a horseshoe drive out front.

“I apologize for my disheveled appearance,” Mitch said. “I was up all night working on behalf of clients. And then, half asleep, I walked into a door.

Caught the corner right here.”

Sweety Graham, a slender octogenarian with silver hair and a tremor, patted his hand. “No need to apologize, Mr. McCloud. We’re common folk here.”

They met in the formal dining room, relatively modest for a family of the Graham’s means, the only clues to their wealth being the vintage Tiffany chandelier and the Mottahedeh china residing on shelves inside the Mahogany Connoisseur cabinet from Scully & Scully.

Sweety’s oldest son, Dwight, operations’ manager for Graham Foods, Inc., sat across the table from Mitch, sipped his sweet tea, and studied Mitch’s purple bruise with suspicion. “That’s right, we’re plain folk here, third-generation farmers,” Dwight said. “Count ’em, three generations.”

Multi-multi-millionaire plain folk, Mitch was thinking. He looked into Sweety’s blue eyes, not the cerulean blue of her deceased husband’s eyes but, instead, a somewhat milky blue, and asked what changes to her will she had in mind.

Sweety sighed, then glared at Dwight and spat out the words with a ferocity that surprised Mitch.

“Well, sir, it’s the grandchildren.”

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“Mama,” Dwight said. “I believe I’ll wait on the porch.”

This was the story: a professional couple with a significant age difference between them falls in love and engages in a torrid affair, despite the older partner’s fifteen-year marriage and two pre-teen daughters, not to mention the younger associate’s “starter marriage” to a former UNC football player; in a city where privacy is at a minimum, the affair does not go unnoticed, and now, the outed couple struggles to move forward and find a way to live happily ever after.

That was not the entire story, but it was the story Mitch related while riding shotgun in Dwight’s pickup truck. Following the meeting with Sweety, Dwight offered to show him around. Exhausted and nerves on edge, Mitch had already decided to spend the night in Duplin County and return to Charlotte the following morning, so he figured why not. Although he’d represented the Graham family business for years, he’d never visited one of their large hog operations and was curious how it all worked.

“Looks like that football player landed a pretty good one,” Dwight said.

“Oh, it’s not that bad.”

Dwight maneuvered his truck through security. A forbidding electric gate manned by armed guards slid open after the guards recognized the man behind the steering wheel. Inside the gate and surrounding chain link fence, row upon row of long, low corrugated-steel buildings stretched as far as they eye could see. The stench, which Mitch had been aware of since arriving in Duplin County, intensified. It hurt his eyes and seemed to penetrate the pores of his skin.

“I can get you some ice,” Dwight offered.

“You’ll probably have a shiner tomorrow.”

“It was a glancing blow. I’m still pretty quick on my feet.”

“Suit yourself.”

Before hogs, the Grahams had raised tobacco.

Dwight lit a cigarette made by a former buyer of the family leaf, claimed it helped with the odor. “Anyhow,” he said, “this is the smallest of our five farms.

Momma say which charities she had in mind?”

“You know your momma. Religious charities, of course.”

“So, everything to charity? Every last dime?”

North Carolina Miscellany

“This whole operation depends on uniformity of carcass.

Everything – hogs per lot, feeding, hours of daylight and dark – is geared to producing hogs that are of uniform carcass.

That way, when we process, the machinery needs calibrating only once. Margins are thin, and profitability depends on uniformity of carcass.”

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“What she said.”

Dwight drew on his cigarette. “You try talking her out of it?”

“That’s not my job. I’m a mere scrivener.”

Dwight grunted and pitched his cigarette butt before advising Mitch he might want his hanky for the next part.

They walked through the yard and entered the nearest barn. From the overhead platform on which they stood, Mitch looked down on the writhing mass. What he saw looked like maggots on putrefying flesh. Without his handkerchief, the dust alone would have choked him.

“As they grow,” Dwight explained, “we move the survivors to the next building and so on. Momma tell you why?”

“Said your brother’s boy came out gay.”

“C’mon,” Dwight said. “I’ll show you where we contain the run-off. The thing is, Bryce is just a kid.

What’s he know? This year he’s gay, next year he’s crazy for some girl.”

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

Breathe, 2012 (oil on canvas, 18x24) by Frank Holliday

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“Right.”

Behind each building, large ponds collected pig poop. Mitch’s knees went weak, and for a moment he thought he might faint. “Why’s it pink?” he asked.

“The coloration’s due to treatment. Plus, you get blood in the run-off.”

“Blood?”

“Pigs don’t cut themselves shaving, but they bleed. It all goes down the chute and into the pond.”

“Where’s it go from there?”

Dwight pointed. “We spray it into our fields.”

“I bet the neighbors love that.”

“It’s our land to do with as we please.”

Dwight said the neighbors, mostly poor, black families, were suing. He’d offered to buy them out, but they refused to sell. “They’ve lived there forever.

It’s family land, and they don’t want to leave to live in a damn apartment.”

“That’s understandable.”

“Damn straight it is. I wouldn’t sell if it was me.”

Dwight went on to explain he expected the charities to which Sweety wanted to leave her estate would liquidate the Graham farms to avoid the lawsuits.

Mitch agreed. “That’s what I’d recommend if I represented the charities.”

“I’ll be out of a job. It’s the end of the family business.”

Mitch expressed condolences before asking why Sweety was cutting everyone out of her will in favor of charity. “It’s only Bryce who’s gay, right?”

Dwight shrugged. “Uniformity of carcass.”

“Say what?”

Dwight cleared his throat and spat a yellow stream. “This whole operation depends on uniformity of carcass. Everything – hogs per lot, feeding, hours of daylight and dark – is geared to producing hogs that are of uniform carcass. That way, when we process, the machinery needs calibrating only once. Margins are thin, and profitability depends on uniformity of carcass.”

“What’s that got to do with Bryce?”

“Way Momma sees it, Bryce and his cousins including my kids are all the same, useless and spoiled. She doesn’t want any of them to have a dime of what Deal worked for all those years.”

“That’s not right. To clump them all together like that.”

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“I’m just saying, our carcasses aren’t uniform. And that’s a beautiful thing.”

“Maybe not, but it is what it is.”

They returned to the pickup. Dwight fired up and to Mitch’s relief put the air conditioning on high. “Bryce?” Mitch asked. “Is he all right?”

“Hell if I know. Shit, I don’t know if I’m all right.”

Mitch stared ahead. They traveled a gravel road that eventually intersected a blacktop. They needed to get back to Sweety’s where Mitch had left his BMW. “There’s nothing uniform about it,” he said.

“Some guys know early on and want the world to know. Some guys know but don’t want anyone else to know.”

“I couldn’t say.”

“Some guys go for years trying to be someone they’re not. They deny, deny, and deny. Maybe get married. Maybe even have children. Maybe manage to convince everyone around them they’re straight as the next guy when, truth be told, they’re queer as that three-dollar bill you always hear about.”

“I can’t imagine.”

Mitch slapped a tear. “I hope Bryce finds his way.”

“You okay, Mitch?”

“I’m just saying, our carcasses aren’t uniform.

And that’s a beautiful thing.” Mitch held his head in his hands and barked out a sob.

Dwight slowed the truck, pulled off the road.

He reached past the console and laid a big, strong arm across Mitch’s shoulders. “C’mon pardner. Get ahold of yourself.”

“I don’t know.”

“Think happy ever after, bud.”

Mitch took a deep breath, wiped tears from his cheeks. “My wife hates me.”

Dwight gave him a pat. “She’ll get over it. Your daughters, too. They’ll probably think more highly of you eventually.”

“Ryan is beautiful in body, mind, and spirit.”

“That your boyfriend?”

“He’s really something.”

Dwight dropped the truck into gear. “Well, he better be. I mean, I’m sure he is.” n

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2023 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE SEMIFINALIST

BY JOHNNY CATE

Dogwood I knew every crook and vantage of its branches, high havens in the daylight that illuminated the cool cream of the blooms. Alone in a white T three times my size and hanging off a shoulder, I’d climb and place my bare feet where they’d made the bark smooth and move limb to limb with arboricole confidence. As I climbed higher, squirrels would acrobatically bail, slinging themselves from twigs to catch and clamber up the oak across the yard, vanishing in its gargantuan leanings.

For hours at a time I’d hide and listen to nothing but the slish on slish of leaves around me, breathing, slowly, with lungs as pink as the edges of those petals, yet unaware I had lungs at all – unaware there was a single thing, within me or without, that I could not see.

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

Carolina Dogwoods I (acrylic on board, 24x20) by Bre Barnett Crowell

JOHNNY CATE is a poet, copywriter, and vintage T-shirt collector from Asheville, NC. He is currently an MFA candidate at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives in Black Mountain, NC, with his wife Luci and their newborn son, Jaden.

NC native BRE BARNETT CROWELL earned a BA in Studio Art at UNC Chapel Hill. She is a Master Pastelist and Signature Member of the Pastel Society of America, an Eminent Pastelist and Circle of Excellence Member of the International Association of Pastel Societies, and a founding board member of the Piedmont Pastel Society. Her art was selected for the 2023 US Embassy in Geneva, Switzerland, by the Art in Embassies Program, US State Department.

In NC, her art has shown at Hickory Museum of Art and Cameron Museum of Art. Publications include North Light’s Abstract Painting: A Celebration of Contemporary Art.

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Fall 2023

2023 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE SEMIFINALIST

BY ROXANNE HENDERSON

Bent Fork I can pick the bones out of your trash can eat your scraps with my bent fork I am brave enough to eat your garbage with a bent fork because courage is part rage and rage is pure energy – you are brave too, brave enough to own the world - I have no bed but I can sleep on the steel bench at the dog park I can admire the leaping sheep dog you paid more to buy than the car I would have if I had one – please listen to the dog – his bark is a hammer carried by the wind – I can do any job you will let me but there is no letting – gates are locked you are the prince – you ride your horse in a shirt of iron – your bags of money locked in the cellar like slaves who work for you so you can have no job – so let your job be to stop pushing me into the river under the bus over the cliff I can bend the fork, can straighten the fork but I can’t be the fertilizer that greens your grass, can’t be the pilings holding up your water-view porch – let your job be

ROXANNE HENDERSON is a twelfth-generation North Carolinian who grew up all over the world as a military brat. She is a graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, where she received two poetry prizes as an undergraduate and graduated with honors in creative writing. Since then, she has had a career as a communications professional and fundraiser, particularly in the field of global health and women’s health and reproductive rights, with long stints as a senior staff member at two North Carolinabased international NGOs. She has published in such literary magazines as the Carolina Quarterly, Cellar Door, 3rd Wednesday, and Quartet.

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COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

Sanctuary (Pandemonium) (acrylic on multiple cut wood panels, 20x48)

by Sharon Dowell

only to stop crushing the bone that cradles my brain - to stop pushing me under the waves to stop throwing me into a hole when I seek relief – I want an easeful life I want a pile of clean pajamas inviting me to crawl in there and enjoy an endless pearl necklace of good night sleeps but instead I can crawl on my knees over gravel - gravel is nothing it’s softer than popcorn - I can crawl all night on a gravel road and your only job will be to not lock every gate so I can’t get in not lock every gate so I can’t get out to not pretend you don’t see me not pretend you don’t hear my song the ringing the singing of my bent fork a song cut of cheap metal, a song of thin breakable tines – a bent song one note only E sharp – it is what I have E sharp your only job can be to restrain your self

SHARON DOWELL received her MA in Arts Administration from Winthrop University and her BFA from UNC Charlotte. She has served as an Adjunct Professor and Rowe Galleries Coordinator at UNC Charlotte and as Director for Center of the Earth Gallery. A 2014 TedX Charlotte speaker, she regularly lectures and teaches art workshops. Her commissions include large-scale mural and transit projects for Chicago, Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham, Boulder, CO, and Rock Hill, SC. Her residencies include McColl Center and Penland School of Craft in North Carolina, as well as others in Barcelona, Mexico City, Ireland, Iceland, Costa Rica, and Vermont. She has received multiple ASC grants, and her work is in corporate collections nationwide.

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CLARITY, CONSOLATION, AND THE END TO DEFINITION a review by David E. Poston Deborah Pope. Wild Liar (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2023) Katherine Soniat. Polishing the Glass Storm: A Sequence (Louisiana State University Press, 2023)

DAVID E. POSTON lives in Gastonia, NC. He is the author of two poetry chapbooks and the full-length collection Slow of Study (Main Street Rag, 2015). His poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in Atlanta Review, Broad River Review, Ibbetson Street, Pedestal, Pembroke Magazine, NCLR, and others. He has taught at UNC Charlotte, at Charlotte’s Young Writers’ Workshop and for thirty years in North Carolina public schools. He leads workshops on writing as grief therapy, most recently at Novant Health Hospice, and is an editor at Kakalak.

DEBORAH POPE is the author of four previous poetry collections, beginning with 1992’s Fanatic Heart, which was re-issued in 2022 by Carnegie Mellon University Press as part of its Classic Contemporary Series. In 2018, she was awarded the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry. Her work has appeared in EPOCH, Poetry, The Southern Review, Tar River Poetry, Threepenny Review, and many others. She is a Duke University Professor Emerita of English whose scholarly interests include twentieth century American poetry, women’s poetry, and feminist theory.

Katherine Soniat and Deborah Pope are accomplished, award-winning North Carolina poets and teachers who have published multiple books over the last thirty years. Their new collections show how they continue to create noteworthy poetry and to explore similar themes and questions, even as they employ markedly different poetic techniques.

Deborah Pope’s Wild Liar ranges from wry and playful to poignant and confessional, always with subtle command of language, pace, and form. Its themes are not new: memory, mortality, family, love, grief, the power of art and myth to challenge, and the power of nature to console.We are invited into the first section with an auditory rush of clichés in “Sometimes a Voice,” echoed in the later poem “Notes for My Eulogy.” In “Introduction to Poetry,” Pope uses concrete imagery to provide extraordinary clarity. Poems, she writes, “sway / to their own music, like a woman balancing / a basket with clothes pounded clean in a river.” In “Waning Crescent,” the moon is “a thin, white wire / curved like the indentation when a hammer / just misses a nail.”

Another fine examples of poetic craft, “Winter Rain,” begins in media res with And still it comes on, the sound and pound

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of it drilling the roof with a pocking of drops pinging up from the tin like mercury pop beads

It continues in primarily twobeat lines of accentual meter that flow down the page in one single sentence. Its sonic devices – internal rhyme, alliteration, assonance – are a delight to the ear. Similarly, the closing lines of “The Old Fathers” glide down the vowel register through “journeys / of moonlight and shadow, / the dogs long since whistled home.” “Solitaire,” from the third section, employs slightly longer lines, enjambment that breaks syntactical units to keep the eye moving and vivid sensory details: the smell of Lifebuoy soap, the “slight tic when a card / is laid,” the glitter glued on a wooden dowel to make a magic wand. The nostalgic images of how “The Old Fathers” passed away are beautifully comforting.

“Solitaire,” which appears just before a series of poems about grief, returns to the theme of the unreliability of memory as we struggle to find both meaning and consolation.

The opening playfulness turns to longing, to the reflections that arise when, as “Remainder” puts it, “suddenly you see / the years ahead are fewer / than the years behind.” In “Memory for Beginners,” the last line of which provides the collection’s title, we find a rush of unanswerable questions, what Pope calls an “endless deciphering” of

KATHERINE SONIAT has taught at the University of New Orleans, Hollins University, UNC Asheville, and Virginia Tech. Her previous collections include Bright Stranger (Louisiana State University Press, 2019), The Swing Girl (Louisiana State University Press, 2011), and A Shared Life (University of Iowa Press, 1993). Her work has appeared in journals such as Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, and New Republic. She has been the recipient of fellowships to Bread Loaf, The MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. Her awards include the Camden Poetry Prize, The Iowa Poetry Prize, and a Jane Kenyon Award. She lives in Asheville and teaches in the Great Smokies Writing Program.

North Carolina Miscellany

All the lost people and times of memory, the remnant, the disappeared – like a child’s game of musical chairs, except when the music stops it is the child, not the chair, that is gone.

The sense of loss is tempered by whimsicality in poems such as “Confessions of a Failed Theologian” and the decidedly wry, but not irreverent “The Duties of Saints,” which notes that the literally roasted St. Lawrence must watch over comedians and chefs and St. Martha has become the patron of baristas. “Winter Solstice” relates an archetypal quest that symbolically traces the emotional arc of this collection from questioning the uncertainty of life to acceptance of it.

The middle section is a series of tightly focused portrayals of female figures from myth, art, and history who speak through these poems against exploitation and objectification. “Who does not know of the men?” begins “Pasiphaë,” referring to everyone from Minos to Praxiteles to Lewis Carroll.

One of the cleverest subtleties of “Daphne in Arcadia” is its title. Notice that when Apollo “saunters off, / wearing his victor’s wreath” plucked from this abandoned girl, he is sauntering through the paradise imagined by male shepherds.

The most powerful poem is “Gentileschi’s Self Portrait as St. Catherine of Alexandria,” the story of how Artemisia Gentileschi was raped at age seventeen and subsequently humiliated at the trial of her rapist. Her response was her depiction of St. Catherine, martyred after besting fifty of the emperor Maxentius’s orators and philosophers in debate, a story which “echoed Gentileschi’s own in its defiance, vindication, / then torture on an iron-spoked wheel.” Where Caravaggio give us St. Catherine in the context of masculine tropes, Gentileschi gives us

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The final poem of the section depicts how Bellini’s Annunciation shows the Virgin Mary “in the held moment – / not the one of announcement, / but of before” the angel Gabriel will stride in and forever co-opt her life and identity. Others are coopted in these poems, by artists, audiences, and critics: awkwardly exposed Lorina Liddell, the exquisitely passive Aphrodite of Knidos. But Aphrodite, though prized by men for passivity, has an influence that has lasted for two millennia. Manet’s Olympia “is nobody’s canvas.” Like St. Catherine, like Gentileschi, she refuses to deny her own worth.

The book’s final section continues to explore memory, moving through grief toward solace, often in familiar North Carolina locales: Black Mountain, Topsail Island, Raleigh’s venerable Angus Barn steakhouse. There is an unflinching vulnerability in the six consecutive poems, which describe the painful contradictions of grief, climaxing in “An Evening at the Angus Barn” and “Portrait of a Marriage.” It is the wife’s pain which is most poignant, even as her actions seem callous. She may appall some readers when she scolds her husband for wearing his cap in an upscale restaurant, though she knows that he is chilled from chemotherapy. Yet “Portrait of a Marriage” relates how she fights to deny the unspeakable burden the couple shares, one from which release is unimaginable for either. What Pope shares in these poems rings true to anyone who has experienced the welter of bitterness, helplessness, and denial felt when one is witness to dying.

The ending lines of “Losing My Father” describe perfectly (to my mind) how acceptance and what passes for solace arrive: My crazy hope that he could hear, could be comforted by, the neighbor’s mower seemed suddenly irreverent, wrong,

the portrait of a woman who sees what her truth

He was beyond hearing.

has cost her and faces it with fated resolve.

Then a great onrush of air blew into my chest

And subtle triumph, for close against her body

and everything inside went small and away.

she holds an upright martyr’s palm in her fingers.

Outside, the unspeakable ordinary

Its stem touches her heart and tapers to a point,

outrageously carried on.

like a poised paint brush.

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The final two poems return to the natural world.

“Hard Climb Trail” ends with

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peacocks, the cry of the whippoorwill, the parrots that “tilt brilliance above the fern” in the poem “(earth:.” “Bird Gnosis” tells us “(think bird and it sets you free like that)” and goes on to say

As we turn back up the trail, leaning together as we go, it is not clarity I want. What I want is to be

Bells from far away suggest another life –

in these woods for an afternoon,

after / over / before

with those I love, without need

Questions from the ocean Can love be here but not there?

of comfort, irony, or question.

Touch the place where the heart in began

Whatever tricks memory may have played, whatever has been lost, whatever questions may remain, love sustains.

an alpha or omega

PHOTOGRAPH BY SYLVIA FREEMAN

Rather than expect a beginning or an end, expect to find scenes of grief and suffering mixed with images of profound lyric beauty. One sister gazes at “shaggy natured” cloud shapes in “Plate Tectonics”; another’s small bones are buried in the ground beside the Severn River. There is also the “quiet gold blur on the ridge” of the mountain lion at sunset in “A Curious Few” and “those wild diamond-caked shards of dream” in “Ameen.”

Readers must surrender to the unmoored fluidity of Soniat’s poetics and follow the emotional arc of the principal speaker, as grief leads to natural and supernatural explorations. Everything in these poems is at once personal and universal, idiosyncratic and archetypal, ephemeral and eternal. Time is recursive and untethered from order: events happen or have happened, were only dreamed or keep happening. Here the chronological context encompasses multiple lifetimes, the cycles of geological time, and a continuum of rebirth and reincarnation that transcends time. One does not navigate so much as intuit the seemingly real and the clearly imagined. One subliminal guide here is the concatenation of key words from one poem to the next. Interspersed throughout are titles bracketed by a beginning parenthesis and a colon, beginning with the poem “(passageway:”; each of these poems adds to an open-ended series of what the poem “Peaches” calls “moments into a new temporal pool.”

PHOTOGRAPH BY SYLVIA FREEMAN

Now, how does one read Katherine Soniat’s latest book, Polishing the Glass Storm? In her prefatory notes, Soniat advises that, as the subtitle indicates, it “is best read sequentially within each section . . . and also from section to section, as one would read a novel.” What will be created here, she explains, is “a dissolving context in which time and space disintegrate on occasion – only to reassemble as a web of the vaguely familiar: Such pattern enables archetypes to play an integral role in the movement and arrangement.” So – what movements, what archetypes, what web will readers find?

Regarding movement, these poems are filled with images of the flitting and the fleeting. Follow the birds: owls, phoenix, cranes, loons,

No one

asked for a home in space

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The passageways are both literal and figurative, taking us to places from the speaker’s childhood and from earlier lives: Pearl Harbor, New Orleans, Asheville, Key West, Dresden, Annapolis. The preternatural awareness of children is contrasted with the hubris of their elders. The opening poem introduces the narrator’s mother as a child with her cat Gray in her lap, just beginning to contemplate loss and leaving. Later, as the narrator’s three-year-old granddaughter is playing under her sheet in the poem “In the Bed at Night,” her smallest toy figure whispers, “You know, there’s so much sadness in this world.”

To read this collection as novel, think of Lincoln in the Bardo or The Death of Artemio Cruz. Expect a web of characters, rather than a linear plot, such as the suicidal woman in “(sway:” caught in midair in a flash of headlights. The poem “Pedagogy” begins with an acknowledgement of readers’ needs: “Who knows how insistent the mind can be / about its need for words, syntax, and sudden flashes / of plot?” The center of this web is the dying of a beloved husband and father in hospice, and the web extends outward, upward, forward, and backward from there.

The archetypes are drawn from a wide range of mythologies and faith traditions, with the central figure being Kuan Yin, bodhisattva of compassion and mercy. From Egyptian myth come the hovering Ba spirit and Ma’at, who weighs the soul. Orpheus and Eurydice’s doomed experience becomes a vehicle for exploration of the loss of that beloved and of the effort to defy the cycle of life and death.

In “A Curious Few,” Prof. Eaglesmith ponders “how inexplicably some people get along / with the symptoms of this life, while others succumb without / trying.” The poem’s third section echoes the parting of Orpheus and Eurydice, recounting how the protagonist “turned away like a deceased ghost, so hard was it to walk away” before “evening came / to stretch her across the hospice then farther.” The poem’s final section is central to apprehending the book as a whole:

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Near the end of the collection, “The Time It Takes” opens by stating the Buddhist belief in transition of the dead into a new life. Weeks after the death of her beloved, the speaker speaks to him directly: Two of us in your hospital room that afternoon: you mindless of me or who I ever was.

Tonight, I knew you’d come, the cicadas that loud. It just takes time to make it up the tangled ravine, and into my room

In “Apostrophe,” he speaks for the first time in the book, part of a dialogue between them that employs symbols found throughout the collection: mirrors, birds, weather, Kuan Yin’s “bedside elixir.” The next poem, “Mummy Tales,” invokes the promise that the Ba Soul will welcome the beloved one back into the house of the living. However, the title poem seems to undercut that hope with thoughts like “bees in a crazed terrarium” about “myth Ba erects / skeletal joke of naked-as-you-go poor / old kings and queens relentlessly tied and bundled.” The final line of the book begins with the word “SHUT” (all upper-case). However, it is not the last word here, but rather “a directive lovers and young souls deny.”

For this reader, Soniat does not end in denial, however. Rather, she invites readers into what the title poem calls “the royal we / who cross every boundary and will not be set aside.” She offers readers the gift of being allowed to go on the journeys experienced in these poems, to imagine consolation beyond the temporal experience.

In her poem “War Memorial,” Katherine Soniat connects an interaction between the speaker’s husband and hospital caregivers to a ninth-century Zen story about the fox-spirit asking abbot Baizhang for release from endless reincarnation – reincarnation into what Deborah Pope calls the “unspeakable ordinary.” Both of these poets address the grief, the suffering, and the joys of this life, and both in their own way look to the transcendent. There is much to admire in both collections. Foremost, in Pope’s case it is the clarity of observed detail; in As a child she imagined death and blindness’s pale flicker as the same.

Soniat’s, it is the expanse of vision, Recall the song of the empty room – litany thrust against shades. leading us to, if not acceptance, at The end to definition. least an awareness that transcends Without a word Kuan Yin leans in beside him the need for definition. n with her seven yellow feathers of compassion. She listens for his least inhalation. How does breath return again and again in the humid decathlon of a jaguar

panting?

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POEMS OF HOPE AND REDEMPTION a review by James W. Kirkland Scott Owens. Prepositional: New and Selected Poems.

Redhawk Publications, 2022.

Scott Owens’s latest book, Prepositional: New and Selected Poems, follows a course much like the one familiar to readers of his previous two collections Counting the Ways (2020) and Sky Full of Stars and Dreaming (2021), both reviewed in NCLR Online Fall 2022, combining new and previously published poems in a single volume organized into multiple sections based on a recurrent theme or motif. There are significant differences, however, as Owens explained in a recent Emerge interview:

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often different than you thought they were,” taking on new meaning in each new context. “Life as a Preposition,” for example, tells the poet’s life history in a series of one-to-two-word lines, almost all of which end with a preposition: I was born from brought into raised by mostly did without left behind looked over steeped in reminded of shouted at held back

While most of my prior books had

kept under

some pretty heavy content, each also

Until I

contained a certain number of poems about “redemption,” and when I looked at those, I realized that most of them found redemption through relationships. Aiming to fulfill my reader’s wish, I set out to explore that idea more fully and write new poems about the redemption inherent in relationships to go along with those that had already created a thread throughout my previous work. Writing with such a positive idea in mind JAMES W. KIRKLAND has taught in the ECU Department of English for over fifty years.

His reviews and articles on subjects ranging from Melville’s literary uses of tall tales to composition pedagogy and magico-religious healing traditions have appeared in such journals as English Language Notes, Medium Aevum, Western Folklore, North Carolina Folklore Journal, and Tar River Poetry. He has co-authored or co-edited seven books including Writing with Confidence: A Modern College Rhetoric (Heath, 1989), Herbal and Magical Medicine: Traditional Healing Today (Duke University Press, 1992), and Concise English Handbook, 4th ed. (Houghton, 1997).

SCOTT OWENS teaches at Lenoir-Rhyne University, edits Wild Goose Poetry Review, and runs Taste Full Beans in Hickory, NC, where he hosts Poetry Hickory, a reading series he founded in 2007. He is the author of thirteen poetry collections, including several that have been reviewed in NCLR.

. . . made the whole process enjoyable, and having the opportunity to play around with my favorite part of speech (prepositions) made it fun.*

At first glance, Owens’s penchant for “playing around” with prepositions may seem difficult to reconcile with his efforts to “explore . . . more fully the redemption inherent in relationships” and related themes, but as he explains in “13 Ways of Prepositions” (one of several poems modelled on the “13 Ways of” formula of Counting the Ways), prepositions are not only “always different / from other parts of speech but also / *“Owens To Debut 18th Book At Poetry Hickory, December 13th,” FOCUS Newspaper 17 Nov. 2022: web.

woke up

then “moved beyond” and “never looked back.” Owens continues this prepositional word play in “The Problem with Deciding on a Single Object to Follow the Preposition ‘With’ Preceding the Gerund Phrase in This Fragment of a Title,” a humorous account of the plight of the writer facing “too many problems / to choose from” ranging from the mundane (“food allergies,” “blind dates,” “a comfortable couch”) to the profound – “the way the world ends, / whatever way that is.” In a third variation on the prepositional theme, he adopts a more serious tone, celebrating the natural beauty of “cedar waxwings in a greening tree / along the tracks in downtown / Blue Ridge, GA,” linking birds and tracks in “Prepositional” “with the sun / rising from mountains behind them / to the top of a clear blue sky / on a warm morning in early April.”

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PHOTOGRAPH BY RICHARD MCGEE

In other poems, too, Owens takes us on a journey from, to, of, with, and through the book’s varied sections, each named for a different preposition, pausing along the way at locations both familiar and strange. In “On Realizing the Importance of Place,” a child playing in “a place you think / that hardly matters, / red hill, white trailer / dog behind one wheel” brings the realization that every place matters to someone, the sunset the trees, the silence of birds gliding above, the perfection belied by imperfect vision.

It all matters to whatever child knows this as home

In “On Settlemyer Bridge,” “a boy stands” on a bridge “where time stands still, / casting bait, dreaming of water running / to places he’s never seen, but never seem out of range.” In a third, “Water Ways,” the “coves and slues” of a boundary lake “tucked away behind every curve / of land” remind us of “how it feels / to find belonging / in being alone.” In a fourth, “Orchard,” an orchard “bulging [with] fruit” dangling from “limbs bent low from / harvest weight” offers hidden boughs to rest in when there’s no one else to count on and little certainty of where we’re from, as if the whole world might be made of trees. . . .

In many others, we find ourselves in places “defined only by relativity to other places, / North Augusta, Ninety-six, Due West” (“By”).

Just as important as these “prepositional location[s]” are the people who inhabit them – people such as the poet’s grandmother, an “accidental conservationist” skilled in stitching into quilts patches of worn out clothing “whose

squares felt as familiar / as anything saved from oblivion” (“Economy”); his loving, self-sacrificing brother, who ”has never kept a single lake, / single lost grave to himself” but “Always . . . calls, then waits until I / can come” (“Common Ground”); an anonymous mountain climber with his “head bent, legs pumping, / swinging out and back / farther and higher each time,” sharing with all of us the same dream, letting go, rising above what holds us down, going beyond such mundane limitations. (“The Allure of Flight”)

Similarly, in “Behind,” “a gardener / long forgotten” leaves “to children / not his own” a “legacy of growth / beyond years, beyond the reach / of knowing, where all that’s left / is what is left behind.”

Equally memorable, for very different reasons, are the many humorous poems interspersed with those more serious in tone, including “Almost or Ode to JT O’Sullivan,” inspiration to understudies, stand ins, second-rate poets, career minor leaguers, Hollywood extras, perennial bridesmaids, VPs whose POTUS was never impeached, assassinated, or just found dead.

ABOVE Scott Owens at the launch for his

children’s book, Worlds Enough, Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse, Hickory, NC, Aug. 2022

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“Communication During Covid” is the story of a couple attempting (and failing) to communicate during the pandemic: “You say, He has a PhD, / but I hear, He has PTSD. / You say, You can take off your mask, / but I hear, You’ve got cake on your ass.” And “What’s Wrong with Super Powers” is a comical self-portrait of the poet as a would-be superhero named “The Alliterator,” who appropriately enough speaks in alliterative language “fraught with possibilities / for misuse, misunderstanding, misinterpretation / leading to mischief, misery or mundane misfortune.”

When Owens is not acting the part of a makebelieve superhero, we see him in other roles: a father engaging his two-year-old daughter in a conversation about the “awesome power of stars” (“Naming the Stars”); a husband assuring his wife that love does not diminish with age but endures until the last leaf falls, trees refuse to bud, buds refuse to flower, flowers refuse the intimations of bees, directive of spring’s unfolding (“Until”);

a teacher seeking to convince his students “that despite everything, the world / is a fine place to be and that they / can make it even better” (“At the Reading”); a time traveler seeking to redeem from the past moments of intense sensory expe-

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rience: the “smell [of] camellias blooming in the dark” (“With”), a wood thrush’s “song , resounding / through farm and village / and a thousand years / of furrowed fields” (“Triptych”); the “screen door hum / of unseen cicada” (untitled); the sight of “Footprints . . . washed or blown away / by nightfall, words drowned in the wind / and waves, everything else / consumed by time or sea” (“Barrier Islands”).

As these examples suggest, Owens is above all a gifted poet, repeatedly reminding us that “the hope we have / is strongest when we find a way / to put it into words” (“Words and What They Say”); that “Where there is language there is art” (“The Art of Everything”); and that where there is art there are poems that leave us “almost exhausted, / tongue-tied and dripping sweat, / gasping for breath, for words, for anything / that might make a single moment more of meaning” (“Towards”). That meaning may reside in something as small and seemingly insignificant as a preposition (“Nearing the end of my sentence”) or as momentous as Owens’s apocalyptic vision of the “last day of the world” in “Away,” the last poem in the book, where in an act of quiet courage the girl at the Dollar General on Highway 16 puts everything on sale, then walks out, turns toward the river and just keeps going. n

James Applewhite Poetry Prize $250, publicaton in NCLR, Pushcart Prize Nomination

ANNUAL SUBMISSION PERIOD: APRIL 1–30

Submission guidelines here All finalists considered for publication; all published receive honoraria.

North Carolina Miscellany

EVER HAUNTED a review by Amanda M. Capelli Mimi Herman. The Kudzu Queen.

Regal House Publishing, 2023.

Culley Holderfield. Hemlock Hollow. Regal House Publishing, 2022.

AMANDA M. CAPELLI lives and writes in New York. She holds a PhD in literature from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and was a recipient of the Global South Research Fellowship from Tulane University. Currently, she is a clinical associate professor in the Expository Writing Program at NYU. Her research and writing interests include Southern women writers, female madness, poetics of place, and the intersections of objects and memory. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Cagibi: A Literary Space, Talking Writing, The Routledge Companion to Literature of the U.S. South, NCLR, and elsewhere.

In 1950, at the banquet dinner for the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, William Faulkner reminded young writers that the inner conflicts of the human heart were always and will always be the fodder of great writing. He reminded them of the “old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” And he reminded them of the writer’s duty to reflect these values in their work. “It is his privilege,” Faulkner said, “to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.”* Faulkner’s old truths, pillars of US Southern literature, reverberate throughout the pages of Culley Holderfield’s Hemlock Hollow and Mimi Herman’s The Kudzu Queen. In fact, one might say they are haunted by them. In both historical novels, we feel the lineage of the writers who came before – like William Faulkner, Alice Walker, and Harper Lee – and in both we sense the universal truths of love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and, ultimately and always, sacrifice. But the hauntings, like the ghosts we meet in each text, aren’t nefarious.

Mimi Herman’s The Kudzu Queen is a coming-of-age novel that follows fifteen-year-old Mathilda “Mattie” Lee Watson as * “William Faulkner: Banquet Speech,” 1950, Nobel Prize Outreach AB: web.

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she discovers the kind of person she wants to be and the work needed to become that person.

In a scene toward the end of the novel, Mattie answers a question for the Kudzu Queen beauty contest. Her response underscores one of the major themes of the novel: growth. Addressing the audience, Mattie describes herself as a compass, steady in its determined pointing north, but also imperfect and fallible in the right conditions: Sometimes it gets stuck, and you have to shake it to get it on track again. . . . And if you put a strong magnet next to a compass, the needle is attracted to it, and you have no idea what direction to go. I’ve been like that sometimes, losing my direction because of some attraction, and I’m not always proud to remember how I acted. But when the magnet’s moved away the compass goes back to reading right, and that’s probably me too. (298)

The year is 1941 and kudzu has just come to Cooper County, NC. Some of the townsfolk are skeptical, including Mattie’s father, but Mattie, along with many of the town’s female residents, are quickly taken by the looks and charm of the dynamic salesman, James T. Cullowee, the self-proclaimed “Kudzu King.” Cullowee introduces the miracle plant from the pulpit of his traveling kudzu van: “Kudzu, the perfect plant! You can jam it. You can jelly it. It’ll cure headaches and heart attacks.

You can grind it into flour or fry it up as a side dish” (3). However, Mattie soon learns that like the

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COURTESY OF MIMI HERMAN

kudzu, which will swallow up anything in its path, Cullowee isn’t as innocuous as he seems.

Growth can be painful.

Mattie’s relationships with the other women in her community are what really make this novel special. The interactions between Mattie and her mother, her best friend Lynette, her old friend Rose, now separated from Mattie due to segregation, are all richly developed, but it is the quiet, reflective moments with Aunt Mary, or rather Aunt Mary’s ghostly presence, that illustrate just how much Mattie has grown, from the child, afraid to even touch the door of Mary’s cabin, to a young woman, aware of the sacrifice life often requires:

If Aunt Mary had a ghost and that ghost was angry, now was the time to let me know, before I got too comfortable. I thought my heart could take it. I thought my heart could take anything – it was so loose and fluid from my dance with the Kudzu King. But her ghost was quiet, maybe listening. Maybe no one had ever confided in Aunt Mary while she was alive. When she was a girl, the other girls were probably afraid she’d take their heads off if they said anything to her. I slitted my eyes open, and looked at the picture of the young man in uniform. Maybe him, I thought. Maybe he’d told her his secrets, and she’d confided hers in him. (89)

Herman’s text is beautifully written and, like the kudzu vines that spread across the cover

MIMI HERMAN is a poet, fiction writer, and teaching artist. She holds a BA from UNC Chapel Hill and an MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson College. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Logophilia (Main Street Rag, 2012) and A Field Guide to Human Emotions (Finishing Line Press, 2021). Her writing has also appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Shenandoah, Crab Orchard Review, and elsewhere. The Kudzu Queen is her first novel.

of the novel and envelop Aunt Mary’s house, offers readers a complex narrative tapestry that explores the rocky transition from childhood to young adulthood steeped in historical detail and told from the perspective of a narrator willing to sacrifice it all for her community.

Culley Holderfield also takes readers on a trip into North Carolina’s past in Hemlock Hollow, which splits its time between dual storylines. Caroline McAlister is an archeology professor on sabbatical attempting to renovate her family’s old cabin, and Carson Quinn is a young boy who lived on the same patch of land in the 1880s. The impetus of the narrative stems from the death of Caroline’s father and her subsequent inheritance of the cabin. Her return to the hollow where she spent many a childhood summer forces Caroline to contend with deeply buried trauma surrounding her mother’s death and the fraught relationship she had with her father following it. The scenes around the cabin are dredged in pain, but also a deep sense of place. Holderfield knows this land as well as Caroline does: Carson Quinn’s sanctuary became my play place a century later. Up the hill a bit lay a fissured granite boulder with a nearly perfectly flat top. As a child, it was my special place. I called it Caroline’s perch. Sometimes I would go up here and lie on my belly.

Peering over the rock’s edge, I could look down on the hollow. . . .

ABOVE Mimi Herman reading at Flyleaf

Books in Chapel Hill, NC, 23 Feb. 2023

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Now, I climbed to my old spot and took in the view of the steep Appalachian forest below. The creek still gurgled, salamanders no doubt still darting around. Ferns clustered in damp places still. (15)

ABOVE Culley Holderfield reading at Quail

Ridge Books in Raleigh, NC, 18 Jan. 2023

It comes as no surprise that Herman was an early reader of Holderfield’s novel, which includes a blurb from Herman on the cover. Both texts seem

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to speak to one another despite taking place in very different geographies and time periods.

And both avoid the trap of romanticizing the South and its past. Racial tension, class dynamics, sexuality, and the ways those things are intertwined are embedded in both narratives, leaving readers with a deeper sense of North Carolina’s unique history and the way it fits into the larger tapestry of Southern narratives.n COURTESY OF QUAIL RIDGE BOOKS

Ultimately, Holderfield’s richly textured novel is a study of place and past, and of the hold that the past can have on a particular square of geography.

As Caroline learns, it is a place “ever haunted by the spirits of those who loved it and left it and returned” (276). Through Caroline and Carson, we learn about the land and only begin to scratch the surface of some of the mysteries buried there.

In her preparation to renovate the now dilapidated building, Caroline finds Carson Quinn’s old journal that reawakens old rumors and questions. Though the journal trope as plot device has the potential to stymie the action – the extensive dialogue Carson documents and the sheer length of what would have been handwritten entries feel implausible at times – it’s not enough of a distraction to pull us away from the characters and the discoveries they make about each other and the hollow they call home. How could it be that the same Carson who carefully documented the flora and fauna of the forest, quoting Darwin and Emerson, would grow up to murder his own brother? Is the old man she keeps seeing in the liminal spaces – the dark corner of a room, the moments when

one is neither asleep nor entirely awake, the dimly lit memory from her childhood – real or a figment of her imagination?

Why did her father leave her this cabin and what will she do with it (and herself) when the renovation is complete?

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CULLEY HOLDERFIELD studied creative writing at UNC Chapel Hill where he received his BA in comparative literature and history. He is the author of short stories, essays, and poetry, and has been published in Wildfire Magazine, Literally Stories, Yellow Mama, 2Leaf Press, Scarlet Leaf, Kakalak, Dime Show Review, and Floyd County Moonshine, among others. Hemlock Hollow, his debut novel, is the winner of the 2023 Eric Hoffer Award in Historical Fiction.

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THE FORGOTTEN SOUTH, REMEMBERED a review by Dale Neal Keith Flynn and Charter Weeks.

Prosperity Gospel: Portraits of the Great Recession. Redhawk Publications, 2021.

DALE NEAL is a novelist, teacher, and journalist in Asheville, NC. His most recent novel, Appalachian Book of the Dead (Southern Friend Karma, 2019; reviewed in NCLR Online 2020), was a finalist for the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award.

KEITH FLYNN is the author of six collections of poetry; his latest is The Skin of Meaning (Red Hen Press, 2020; reviewed in NCLR Online 2021. He is the founder and managing editor of The Asheville Poetry Review.

CHARTER WEEKS is a documentary photographer living in New Hampshire since the 1970s. In the 1960s, he was a commercial photographer and filmmaker in New York City, NY, working for major agencies and the BBC. Outside of the US, he has photographed in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Central America.

His work has been showcased in galleries around the US and has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Graphis Design, South Loop, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Hanging Loose, and Corvette Fever

Prosperity Gospel is a peculiarly American twist on the message that Jesus preached with compassion for the poor and wariness of the rich. In this Red, White, and Blue version, God rewards the righteous with material riches on earth, not just in an afterlife. It’s the same impulse that led the US to put “In God We Trust” on the currency in 1954, aligning the Almighty Dollar with the divine.

The dark side of that message is that if you’re broke, you’re probably to blame. The devil can take the hindmost if you fall behind and through the cracks.

In their eye-opening book Prosperity Gospel: Portraits of the Great Recession, poet Keith Flynn and photographer Charter Weeks take to the back roads and secondary highways of the Southern Appalachians around Asheville, NC, to document the voices and faces of those left behind after the financial collapse of 2008. More than fifteen years later, sixty percent of Americans lack the savings to cover a four-hundred-dollar bill in a sudden emergency.

The Great Recession for many has not ended, and their story has been largely ignored. Flynn and Weeks aimed to correct that oversight. “We entered this arena with no preconceived notions and a handful of unspoken prejudices, which were promptly upended and scattered from our minds, as we worked and traveled and listened,” Flynn writes in his introduction (8).

The Great Recession has receded into history for most Americans in the past decade.

But the Good Times did not roll on the roads that the pair travels in western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, southwest

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Virginia, and upstate Georgia and South Carolina. They stopped and talked with families, small business owners, farmers, tradesmen, gun store owners, and retirees. Closer to Asheville, they crept along kudzu-choked riverbanks and inside abandoned warehouses where the homeless had sought shelter.

They included a foray into the Qualla Boundary, home of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. They include tattooed preachers, and church ladies, bikers and advocates working on behalf of addicts or the environment. The faces Weeks candidly captures are Black and white, Hispanic and Indian, gay and straight, young and old.

In his appearances at bookstores and literary festivals, Flynn downplays the perhaps inevitable comparisons to the classic Now Let Us Praise Famous Men, James Agee and Walker Evans’s portrait of Alabama sharecropper families in the 1930s. Agee was more focused on his voice, espousing his aesthetic and philosophic ideas even while living alongside the families. Evans’s black and white portraits have become iconic images of the Great Depression, perhaps even romanticizing a rough rural pride in their unforgettable compositions.

Flynn is careful to let people speak their own minds, while Weeks captures honest and candid portraits with his camera. They find Carl Rice farming the steep slopes of Walnut Mountain in Madison County, north of Asheville. Rice patiently explains how he keeps his tractor from flipping on those tricky inclines, and his business on an even keel. “Lots of people

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PHOTOGRAPH BY CHARTER WEEKS

pain some folks carry in their sad lives. They find Tonya camping and homeless by the river.

She recounts a history of bad marriages, bad health, bad luck.

And in that pathos, there are no easy answers or solutions, but Tonya saves her tears for a reconnected daughter and news of a grandbaby.

Flynn finds hard poetry in the moment: “we stare at the slow muddy river ten steps away, gliding past us like a giant brown cloud, filled with the detritus of all these lives, an escape and a barrier at the same time, hypnotic and terrifying in its quiet power, absolving this land of nothing” (102).

These people don’t leave us in despair, but remind readers that as a nation, we could do more

ABOVE TOP Photograph from Prosperity Gospel

of Carl Rice by Charter Weeks ABOVE BOTTOM Photograph from Prosperity Gospel

of Tonya Alexander by Charter Weeks

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to face social, economic, and cultural problems head-on, rather than turn our gaze back to our screens of social media.

The book ends with an interview with Karen Cragnolin, who formerly headed the RiverLink nonprofit, advocating for greenways along the once sullied French Broad River. “This is America. We are a nation of problem-solvers,” Cragnolin insists (143).

Flynn and Weeks make their art matter by making sure that the stories and faces of these Americans are not lost to our attention. After the COVID pandemic and the economic and political upheavals of recent years, the wise photographer Weeks reminds us that “their story is the ongoing story of our time” (9). n PHOTOGRAPH BY CHARTER WEEKS

are hurting right now,” Rice says. “You fellers won’t have no shortage of hard luck stories” (78). They stop in Morristown, TN, at a roadside strip mall where Carrie, twenty, is spinning a cardboard arrow sign “We Buy Gold” for ten dollars an hour.

“Least I’m not in a clown suit, or wearing a mattress on my back,” she says, laughing (22).

What comes through in these fifty-seven vignettes and black and white portraits are the dignity, good humor, and persistence of people in hard times.

Flynn identifies “It could always be worse” as the catchphrase of the Great Recession among the people he meets. “We’re fine now, the phrase says, we have mobility, choices, and it ain’t gonna get worse than this.

That’s what they say. And then it does. Get worse, that is” (58).

Some stories are simply soulcrushing, particularly for those without jobs, shelter, food, or family. Flynn and Weeks are present to bear witness to the

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