WITH THE BIG BROKEN HEART”

a review by Barbara Bennett

BARBARA BENNETT is a Professor at NC State University. She is the author of five books including 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 and a memoir essay in 2022.

MARK POWELL directs the creative writing program at Appalachian State University. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, and twice from the Fulbright Foundation to Slovakia and Romania. He has a BA from the Citadel, an MFA from the University of South Carolina, and an MAR from Yale Divinity School.

OPPOSITE The Eastern cougar, now considered by the US Fish and Wildlife Service an extinct species in North Carolina

Mark Powell’s newest novel, Lioness, asks these powerful questions and more. The two main characters, Mara and David, have always been environmentally conscious, but Mara is the “idealist with the big broken heart” (7) when their nine-year-old son Daniel dies of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. David is a journalist and struggling playwright who works on a story about the RAIN! waterbottling plant in southwest Virginia, where they live. The water is officially found to be pure, so David ends his research and brings home gallons of water, which is drunk by the family. Much later, David finds evidence that the company had falsified documents and the water is full of dioxins. When Mara finds out, nine months after Daniel dies, she leaves her husband, builds a bomb, and blows up the bottling plant. Whether Mara has survived the blast is unclear from the beginning. Powell holds that information close to the vest.

All of this is told in the first eleven pages, the first eight showing Mara living in the wilds of Florida with a young boy. Is this real? Did Mara survive and escape? Who is the boy? It’s a long road to find out as David tries to reconstruct the past to figure out how he got where he is. But is it the truth? He claims that “[w]hat you have to do is construct an alternate life. Your life, but not quite” (11). Is that what he’s doing, or is he telling a story to help him cope? Powell takes David deep into the past to find the answers – where there are answers. Many times Powell gives us conjecture, hope, and plain fabrication.

As young adults, Mara and David believe that “everything’s mixed up these days” (5), and the “country was dying, the entire planet. . . . The world being not nearly as hard to take apart as put together” (286). They are frustrated that protesting in the streets accomplishes nothing: “They are still leveling mountains not a hundred miles from here. They’re still poisoning our water, our soil” (69). But what can turn two frustrated environmentalists into ecoterrorists? It turns out it’s not what but who

Enter Chris Bright, a man who has been fighting for ecological justice since he was a child. He felt a great affinity to animals, recognizing that it was the animals “that kept silent counsel, emerging and disappearing back into the world, and it was the animals, he realized, one day, who were dying” (96). His first ecoterrorist act, if it can be called that, was dismantling a deer stand he found in the woods – twice. As he grows into an adult, he becomes obsessed with “our dying planet. Climate change. Rising seas. The Sixth Extinction” (24). He commits several acts of ecoterrorism during his young life, some with success, some with failure.

Once Chris meets David and Mara, he begins to tutor them in his ecoterrorist philosophy. He tells them to stop wasting time and act rather than complain. Chris seduces both David and Mara, in every way conceivable, but it is Mara who becomes the true believer. The couple live with him on his farm in a kind of environmental paradise, talking and drinking and making plans that they never seem to carry out. Finally, Mara asks, “What if we did something?” (159), and she and Chris make a plan to free the caged and mistreated wild animals in a roadside zoo. David is not ready for this kind of action and leaves for home. When the plan ultimately fails miserably, it puts a hold on Mara’s fervor until years later when she is back with David, and their son dies.

It is at the roadside zoo that Mara has a close encounter with the animal in the title of the novel, a mountain lioness. As Mara peels back the fence to free the lioness, she finds herself “looking in at the golden eyes of the mountain lion” (217). It is a seminal moment for Mara because throughout the novel, she has been connected to this endangered animal. Powell has used the lioness as a symbol for all the destruction people are causing to the planet, which is now slowly dying. But the lioness is also a symbol for Mara, who continues to fight despite knowing it is a lost cause. We see – or sense – mountain lions throughout the novel. In the first chapter, Mara in Florida finds a dead and gutted deer on her porch and knows the kill was done by a lion. She is told by the Fish and Wildlife officer that the cat “represents one thirtyseventh of the remaining population” (7). Like Mara, the lioness may be dead soon – may already be dead. And like the lioness, Mara is a hunted being. The lioness shows up many times in the book: at the North Carolina home of Mara and David, in an encounter with Chris when he is a child, as a stuffed relic of the past. In all cases, the lioness is ephemeral, spiritual, and a reminder of the damage we are doing to the planet.

The novel is a manifesto of the people who still care, who still want to turn things around before it is too late. The book is harsh in its depiction of Americans. In a tense conversation between David and the wife of the CEO of RAIN!, the woman surprises David with her opinion: “My theory is that you become American not by birth but by dint of will, by your rapacity, by your willingness to eat the world because why else were you put here? You are American. You are entitled” (303). Bad things keep happening, and Powell suggests that no one responsible ever pays for their sins, especially those with money and power, like the wife of the CEO.

Powell’s descriptions of place are quite lyrical. He obviously knows the landscape he gives us in western North Carolina and southern Virginia. He has a way of taking the readers right to the spot and immersing us in the culture, landscape, and people.

He writes about difficult things in a beautiful way, reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy, who wrote violence with exquisite prose. Powell’s love for his native turf comes through tangibly. He is the author of six previous novels, which have planted him deeply within the Appalachian literature tradition. His eighth novel, he claims, is a response to the 2016 presidential election. It is also set in the mountains.

With Lioness, he attempts to remind us of the damage we all do just by living the selfish American lifestyle. It’s not an optimistic novel, more of a cautionary tale. In his previous novels, Powell has dealt with the loss of innocence in America and the loneliness and isolation of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While he dealt with the environment in his novel The Dark Corner (2012), he has never delved quite so deeply into the ecological disaster we have created on the planet. Lioness offers little hope, and in the end we are left with David’s dark words: “Everything you have loved, everything you have known – it cannot, it will not last” (314). n

2022 James Applewhite Poetry Prize Finalist

BY J.S. ABSHER

Patient Doe Escapes the Asylum and Goes on the Town

With apologies to al-Farazdaq (d. 730)

After the husband of Genghis Khan’s daughter was killed at Nishapur in 1221 by a Muslim border guard, Genghis Khan ordered the death of all in the city; as many as 1.7 million were killed, and the skulls of men, women, and children were piled in pyramids by the Mongols.

Doe is in a café. He’s not sure when. (He distrusts a man who knows “when.”) Enter a felt suit with no head, a pencil and sharpener riding his hip like a six gun.

Doe is drinking a cup of joe poured from a copper cezve (He likes the aroma: nose is the hieroglyph for joy). No-head announces: I am Jacobi. Arrived on La Paloma.

In the crook of his arm, wrapped in a towel, is a bundle the size of a noggin. He lays it on the table, unmasks its mouth, orders an Old Fashioned.

“Are you smuggling the nut?” asks Doe, “or are you a saint lugging your head like a ripe gourd to ventriloquize through? For I will not drink with the dead:

We must separate the living from the zombie and cephalophore, order the disorderly, dig the fire line, isolate contagion. I guard the border between real and fake.” When I visited hell, Jacobi says, I met the border-guard whose arrow killed at random the Great Khan’s son-in-law. O the tears of the Khan’s daughter! O the silence of Nishapur, after the Khan’s daughter had ordered them all killed, every man, woman, and child, and in pyramids stacked their skulls.

J.S. ABSHER has been a finalist in this contest numerous times, and, as a result, NCLR has published several of his poems since 2016. His first full-length book of poetry, Mouth Work (St. Andrews University Press, 2016; reviewed in NCLR Online 2017) won the 2015 Lena Shull Book Contest. The second, Skating Rough Ground, was published by Kelsay Press in 2022. His chapbooks are Night Weather (Cynosura, 2010) and The Burial of Anyce Shepherd (Main Street Rag Publications, 2006). He lives in Raleigh, with his wife, Patti.

“But most would have died; it was the Mongol way.” Nonsense! says Jacobi. “Fool!” Hater! Both in a snit, in the post-modern way, they argue not facts and reason, but snark and ipse dixit.

They share a drink. Doe says, “Speech was once a mighty horse. Its rider cantered like a hero. Then, one day, it was slaughtered. Demosthenes carried off the head, Cicero the legs, Lincoln the withers, Churchill the hooves, King the iron stomach. There remained the offal, bitterly fought over by pols on the make.

The butcher said, ‘Nothing’s left but the blood and excreta. I claim them as mine.’

He cooked and ate and voided them, then in the dark he saw how they shine.

This is something we’ll remember, No-head, into the future:

What we write and what we say is but the excrement of a butcher.”

Native New Yorker THEODOROS STAMOS (1922–1997) was the son of Greek immigrants. At thirteen, he enrolled in the American Artists School. An abstract expressionist and close friend of Mark Rothko, Stamos received early recognition with showings at the Whitney Museum of Art in 1945 and the Phillips Gallery in 1950. That same year marked the first of four summers as a member of the fine arts faculty at Black

Mountain College in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. In 1955, he began a twenty-three year career on the faculty of the Art Students League of New York and continued to build his reputation as a highly influential member of the first and second generation avant-garde New York School. His work was shown widely in his lifetime and is in the collections of prestigious art museums worldwide.

a review by Patti Frye Meredith

Proof of Me by Erica Plouffe Lazure, winner of the New American Fiction Prize 2022, proves itself with dead-on details and a pitch-perfect voice. These loosely linked stories make you gasp or laugh or both, but this collection goes further. Lazure’s people break your heart. Not in any kind of cuddly way. Lazure takes no sentimental short-cuts. Her people hurt, and you feel their hurt because you’re no innocent bystander. Lazure pulls you in.

I read the first story, then googled Lazure and found the introduction she wrote for her story “Heirloom” in the July 2021 edition of The Dead Mule School for Southern Literature. “I am not a native Southerner, but I can tell you that the eight years I lived in eastern North Carolina gave me what I needed to become one.”

She absolutely became one. How else to explain Uncle Andy’s Charger painted up for a demolition derby, or Kitty Ingram Lanford’s difficulty lining up convertibles for the Fourth of July parade. (Surely, I don’t have to tell you what for).

But this writer is a shapeshifter. She doesn’t only nail being Southern. She nails being human with all the angst that entails.

The home base of this collection is down east. Mewborn, NC, a partly fictional town on the Neuse River, but her people migrate. To Nashville, San Francisco, Boston. No matter where they go, Lazure captures the vibe. Her world is the real one and her people are flesh and blood.

One of my favorite stories, “The Ghost Rider” features Quinn, a side-player in a Nashville cover band. His girlfriend, Sage, may or may not be pregnant. Here they are at his gig at a Broad Street Bar:

I could feel her smolder as I walked my fingers up and down the neck of my Telecaster, taking my cues from Billy Dice. The melody is predictable enough on these old standards that your fingers do all the work, leaving time for your brain, when it wasn’t contemplating the likely arrival of a swaddle-clothed tot drooling on the fringe of your favorite Western shirt and the angry musician it would one day call Mama, to take in the crowd –a flirty band of Brazilian dudes; road trippers fresh off a blues night on Beale Street, assessing the two cities and their sounds as though they were in charge of them; a few regulars and a handful of tourists who actually eat those godawful fried baloney sandwiches; the overeager divorcée first dates, overdressed and sitting way up front like teenagers, hell-bent on having a good time; the line-dancing retirees clumsily keeping rhythm with their twists and turns. Say what you will about this gig – and Sage had a lot to say about it, that I was wasting my time on these old hat standards and this two-bit band – it makes people happy. We’re not fifty steps from the Ryman but if you can throw basically the same party almost every night and folks still show regular as the tide, you’re doing something right. (19)

Hearing Quinn defend his “twobit band” makes me sympathize with this guy who can’t get out of his own way. He’s kind of a mess, but you feel for him. That’s how these stories play with your affection.

In “Shad Daze,” we’re back in Mewborn at the Shad Festival, which Lazure describes right down to the t-shirt booth. Noah has brought his Philadelphia girlfriend, Wendy, home to meet his family. What he tells Wendy about his sister, Sissy, had me expecting the worst, and Sissy delivers. But then, just when I was totally comfortable with my assumption, Lazure flipped it and made me not only give Sissy a second chance, I saw her heartbreak. That same flip occurred at the end of “The Shit Branch” when we see what Wylie’s father carries in his pocket.

In “Spawning Season,” Ted Murphy, a biology professor at Mewborn College, goes out to the Neuse River to record the mating language of fish. Who knew fish talked? Lazure. It’s my belief she’s heard them because she has evidently heard everything else. Or as the story says, “Something is always there to keep you company, Murphy believed, should you care to listen” (32). Lazure cares to listen. These stories are linked in a way that makes you have to think about it. Sometimes you wonder, what’s the point? But the little bit of backstory and history make each person more complete.

If I’ve made you think this book should only be read while listening to YoYo Ma playing something serene on the cello, think again. People catch on fire, freeze in snowdrifts, burn the fingerprints off their fingers, get stabbed multiple times by pencils. Physical pain comes into play and leaves not only superficial wounds.

But, back to the heartbreak. I appreciate Lazure’s incredible talent, but I’m in awe of her respect for human nature. Here’s what a spurned wife says in the story “Annealed”: “Wholeness exists in the creation and the ruination. And I have never failed to create my own ruin” (114).

Erica Plouffe Lazure could write about anything. She could capture any time, place, person. That she chose to write about people in North Carolina is a gift and a reminder that it’s empathy and compassion that matter. Clear-eyed, unbiased, honest appraisal that sees beyond stereotypes beats insider adoration anytime. While other reviewers have compared her to Flannery O’Conner, I’m going to go with William Faulkner, who said, “The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.”*

On the difficulty scale of writing, I put the short story right up there with poetry. North Carolina is blessed with masters of the form. Jill McCorkle. Ron Rash. Elizabeth Spencer. How lucky are we that Lazure chose us, North Carolina, for her Southern home. n

Miscellaneous Contests, Prize Winners, Artists, Book Reviews, and More!

by Margaret D. Bauer, Editor

In this section, we welcome several new poets and prose writers to our pages. I believe 2022 might have been a record year for the number of finalists and semifinalists we selected to publish from our creative writing competitions. Look for fiction finalists in the fall issue, and of course, subscribe to read the contests’ winners in the print issue, coming out this summer.

Thank you to the artists who agreed to allow us to feature their work with the creative writing throughout this issue. One of our initiatives as we entered our fourth decade has been to budget an honorarium, albeit modest, from our annual funding from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association to pay artists for allowing us to feature their work. I encourage readers to click on the artists’ names in the bio notes to go to their websites and see more of their work. Thanks as well to the galleries and museums that provided art files. It is such a pleasure to work with these representatives of North Carolina’s artists. We hope you, our readers, will be inspired to show support for your local art gallery or museum: purchase original art for your home or office and attend exhibit openings.

Find in this last section, too, book reviews by writers who have not been published in our pages – yet. We invite them to subscribe and submit their writing to our contests. As this issue is released, we are accepting prose submissions for the Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize, with not one but two poetry contests coming up in April: we have added the Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry contest to our repertoire, with funding from the North Carolina Poetry Society. Also, I note a couple of mystery writers reviewed this round, and I encourage readers to consult the announcement in the front matter of the feature section on North Carolina mysteries and thrillers planned for 2026. Perhaps you would be interested in interviewing one of these authors for that issue.

As always, I am grateful to the reviewers here and in the previous sections, several who have reviewed often for us, others occasionally, some for the first time. Reviewing is a valuable service to your fellow writers. I attended a webinar in the fall on the importance of writing reviews (led by Melinda Thomsen, whose poetry we’ve published). Reviews are a way to give back to your writing community, of course, but also, Melinda reminded her audience, delving into another’s work might very well positively influence your own. And as an editor, I will tell you, I remember who writes reviews, and I will work that much harder to make sure their books get reviewed. I believe in that kind of giving back.

Speaking of reviews, we invite you to check our new website every Saturday to find a featured review of a book by a North Carolina writer. We hope you will purchase that book at your local independent bookstore or at our new affiliate site at bookshop.org, which gives a portion of each sale to us and to an independent bookstore. n

118 Hard Tailed a poem by Almyr L. Bump art by Donald Sexauer

119 Interference a poem by Joanne Durham art by Brandon Cordrey

120 Any Adjectives for Divorce a poem by Jamal Michel art by Dimeji Onafuwa

122 Fading into Reflection a review by Sharon Colley n Spencer K.M. Brown, Move Over Mountain

123 Living on Shifting Ground a review by Monica Carol Miller n Judith Turner-Yamamoto, Loving the Dead and Gone

125 Draft Animal a poem by Annie Woodford art by Alex Harris

126 Family Secrets and Amazing Grace a review by Elaine Thomas n Patti Frye Meredith, South of Heaven

128 Cross-cut a poem by Astrid Bridgwood art by Leah Sobsey

129 When Worlds Collide a review by Janna McMahan n Diane Chamberlain, Big Lies in a Small Town n —, The Last House on the Street