North Carolina Literary Review Online Winter 2024

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

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NORTH CAROLINA DISABILITY LITERATURE

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Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize essay by Laura Hope-Gill n an essay by Elaine Neil Orr n Reviews of books by Kati Gardner, Halli Gomez, and Kelley Shinn

COVER ART The Tree of Ongoing Awakening (acrylic on canvas, 18x24) by Laura Hope-Gill Cover artist LAURA HOPE-GILL is the founding coordinator of the MFA in Writing and the Narrative Medicine Certificate Program at Lenoir-Rhyne University. Also the founder of Asheville Wordfest, HopeGill is a deaf and newly functionally-blind producer, poet, painter, pianist, and essayist who has published in Parabola, Missouri Review, and Denver Quarterly, among other journals. Her books are The Soul Tree (Grateful Steps, 2009) and Look Up Asheville (Grateful Steps, 2010). Her essay on narrative medicine, “Finding the Heart in Medicine: Intersections of Healthcare and Writing,” appeared in NCLR’s 30th issue in 2021, and her 2023 Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize essay opens this issue. More of her art is featured with the essay. Recently, the author/artist launched The Story Shepherds, a story-listening initiative for healing our lives of loss and trauma.

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 essays by Hope-Gill and Harris in this issue.

Produced annually by East Carolina University and by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association © COPYRIGHT 2024 NCLR

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NORTH CAROLINA DISABILITY LITERATURE IN THIS ISSUE 6

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North Carolina Disability Literature includes creative nonfiction and book reviews Laura Hope-Gill Elaine Neil Orr Kelley Shinn Annie Woodford

Jessica L. Allee Patricia A. Dunn Kati Gardner Halli Gomez

28 n Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues includes poetry, creative nonfiction, book reviews, and literary news

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Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams Michael Beadle Joyce Compton Brown Ken Chamlee Christie Collins Rebecca Duncan Clyde Edgerton Janet Ford Loss Pequeño Glazier Rebecca Godwin

Bill Griffin Ashley Harris Robert W. Hill Marjorie Hudson Randall Kenan John Lang Michael McFee Al-Tariq Moore Mark Powell Liza Roberts

Terry Roberts Kimberly J. Simms Melinda Thomsen Susan O’Dell Underwood Zackary Vernon Michele W. Walker Marsha White Warren Robert M. West Charles Dodd White Heather D. Wilson

North Carolina Miscellany includes poetry and book reviews Chris Abbate J.S. Absher Kianna Alexander Joan Barasovska Mason Boyles Amanda M. Capelli Sharon E. Colley Nina de Gramont Charles Duncan

n North Carolina Artists

Alan Dehmer Meredith Hebden Laura Hope-Gill Herb Jackson

Janis Harrington AE Hines Kristina L. Knotts Kelly Mustian Molly Rice Amy Rowland Cheryl Skinner Duncan Smith Julia Ridley Smith

in this issue n Peter Marin Jennifer Markowitz Dawn Surratt Walsh/Blazing

Melinda Thomsen Jacinda Townsend Shane Trayers Karen Tucker Dennis Turner Henry L. Wilson De’Shawn Charles Winslow

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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, spring, 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, Proquest, 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 2023–2024 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.

Winter 2024

Subscriptions to the print issues of NCLR are, for individuals, $18 (US) for one year or $30 (US) for two years, or $27 (US) for one year, $30 for two 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.

2025 issues will feature NC LGBTQ+ Literature guest edited by Dwight Tanner Please email your suggestions for other special feature topics to the editor.

Book reviews are usually assigned, 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 Casey Kayser 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 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

Brian Glover English, East Carolina University

Lisa Wenger Bro English, Middle Georgia State University

Rebecca Godwin Emeritus, Barton College

Catherine Carter English, Western Carolina University

Marame Gueye English, East Carolina University

Brent Walter Cline English, Hillsdale College

Kate Harrington English, East Carolina University

Celestine Davis English, East Carolina University

James Tate Hill Association of Writers & Writing Programs

Meg Day English, North Carolina State University

George Hovis English, SUNY-Oneonto

Kevin Dublin Elder Writing Project, Litquake Foundation

Amanda Klein English, East Carolina University

Gabrielle Brant Freeman English, East Carolina University

Celeste McMaster North Carolina Writers’ Network

Al-Tariq Moore Department of Language and Literature North Carolina Central University Tracy Morse English, East Carolina University Angela Raper English, East Carolina University Paula Rawlins Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning, Yale University Kirstin L. Squint English, East Carolina University Amber Flora Thomas English, East Carolina University Robert M. West English, Mississippi State University

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Winter 2024

Highlighting Disability Experiences and Voices

by Casey Kayser, Guest Feature Editor It is an honor to serve as guest feature editor for NCLR’s 2024 issues. My role as guest editor has given me the opportunity to merge my teaching and research interests in Southern literature and Medical Humanities, including Disability Studies.

I’ve discovered texts, writers, and artists of North Carolina that were new to me, as well as deepened my appreciation for familiar texts and authors.

Reading about disability experiences, whether they are those of authors through memoir and autobiographical writing or those of fictional characters, can cultivate awareness, understanding, and empathy, and lead us to a more inclusive society. North Carolina is home to many writers and artists with disabilities, whose voices have often been marginalized or overlooked, and we hope that featuring Disability Literature plays a role in highlighting the great talent and diversity of the writers’ experiences.

This Winter issue’s feature section begins with the 2023 Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize essay by Laura Hope-Gill, in which the author details her experience living with and recovering from an occipital lobe brain injury, coupled with her existing sensorineural hearing loss. Hope-Gill’s own beautiful acrylic art is interwoven throughout the essay’s pages, in much the same way that she intertwines themes related to her love of art with her injury and disability experience in her essay.

Also included is a moving piece of writing by North Carolina State University Professor of English Elaine Neil Orr, “The Anchored Raft,” words she delivered to the NC State Department of English Spring 2023 graduates. In her remarks, she recalls from her childhood in Nigeria a hardwood red raft that floated in a river she swam in. In mid-life,

while a professor at NC State, she was diagnosed with end-stage renal disease and had to go on dialysis for a two-and-a-half-year period. At that time, getting out of bed and going to work was difficult, but her students and her love for teaching steered her forward. Orr uses the floating raft as a metaphor for the ways our loved ones, colleagues, teachers, and students can serve as our anchors in difficult times – and how we, too, can anchor and guide ourselves in turbulent waters. I am certain her words must have inspired the graduates that day, and they are useful to us all.

There are several book reviews in this section, too. First, Annie Woodford reviews Kelley Shinn’s memoir The Wounds That Bind Us (2023). Shinn lost both of her legs to bacterial meningitis in high school as a runner looking ahead to a career in college athletics. Woodford describes how Shinn takes readers on her journey from that time and other challenges of her teenage years; to her adventures in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where she traveled to bring attention to the plight of landmine victims, many amputees like herself; to the deep meaning she found in becoming a mother.

Next, Patricia A. Dunn reviews Halli Gomez’s novel List of Ten, winner of the 2021 North Carolina AAUW Award for Young People’s Literature, which centers on sixteen-year-old Troy, who has debilitating Tourette syndrome (TS) and ObsessiveCompulsive Disorder (OCD). Dunn details how the story follows Troy as he moves from a desire to end his life due to his pain and embarrassment over his conditions to finding the will to live despite his struggles. As Dunn notes, Gomez’s fiction is informed by her own experiences living with TS, adding authenticity to the narrative.

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NORTH CAROLINA

Disability Literature According to reviewer Jessica L. Allee, Kati Gardner also draws on her own experiences – with cancer and amputation in her case – to develop characters and conflict in her 2020 Young Adult novel Finding Balance. Allee outlines Gardner’s story of a group of teenagers going through many of the typical joys of those years, such as dating and friendship, as well as the challenges, such as navigating school social dynamics. But, Allee points out, the teenage protagonists of Gardner’s novel have other issues to deal with, such as bullying and navigating the medical system, due to the effects of cancer.

This first 2024 issue provides a taste of what is to come in the feature sections of the year’s other issues – more finalists from the Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize contests, for example. The print issue will also include an interview with James Tate Hill, who selected Laura Hope-Gill’s essay for the Albright Prize. Hill’s 2021 memoir Blind Man’s Bluff recounts his experience with Leber’s hereditary optic neuropathy, a condition that made him legally blind. Forthcoming, too, in the print issue: literary criticism by scholars in the fields of Disability Studies and Appalachian and Southern literature focusing on texts by well-known writers Ron Rash and Lee Smith, as well as a lesser known North Carolina writer, Mary Herring Wright, whose memoirs capture her experiences growing up Black and deaf in the Jim Crow South. And as always, the special feature section –in all of this year’s issues – also showcases beautiful artwork alongside the writing, much of it by artists with disabilities.

Be sure to subscribe to NCLR, if you don’t already, to receive this important issue, featuring North Carolina Disability Literature. And in the meantime, enjoy the pages to follow. n

8 The Weight of Light

2023 Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize

essay and art by Laura Hope-Gill 18 The Map That Leads to Salvation

a review by Annie Woodford

n Kelley Shinn, The Wounds That Bind Us 20 The Anchored Raft

by Elaine Neil Orr 24 Living with Compulsions a review by Patricia A. Dunn

n Halli Gomez, List of Ten 26 Mari and Jase’s Story: Honesty, Acceptance, and Yes, Some Kissing a review by Jessica L. Allee

n Kati Gardner, Finding Balance

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE 28 n

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

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North Carolina Miscellany

poetry, creative nonfiction, book reviews, and literary news

poetry and book reviews

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Winter 2024

WINNER, 2 02 3 A LEX ALBRIGHT C REATIV E NONF ICTIO N PRIZE

weight of

by Laura Hope-Gill

THE

“All I did was to look at what the universe showed me, to let my brush bear witness to it.”

–Claude Monet

G LI HT

Facebook, November 29 Note from “mild traumatic brain injury” land. Can’t use screens (except to teach/meet with colleagues), can’t read, can’t think, can’t stress, so I paint. This massive world canvas will keep me healing. I’ll be all well when it is done, either meaning I won’t have headaches or I’ll be a better painter.

MY DOCTOR CONFIRMED THE

ER doctor’s diagnosis of “concussion” from the night before. For the next few days, I managed my life while observing the protocol, but with a few “cheats.” I still gave a talk at a faculty meeting, accompanied by my partner, Derek.

I still took my mother and my daughter to The World Ballet’s performance of Swan Lake. I spent the rest of my time in my room with the lights off, resting. I felt I was getting better. I confirmed a talk at East Carolina University and a conversation with a colleague to help

promote his new book at our local bookstore. After four days, I purchased an airline ticket to get to the reading, thinking that driving might not be so good. I was experiencing headaches unlike the one that first occurred. Something changed dramatically on the sixth day, the day before I was supposed to fly. I felt like I was on fire.

More specifically, my brain was telling me that it was on fire, and my body interpreted that to mean it was on fire as well.

It was time for my one-week post-ER checkup. I had written my notes on a yellow Post-it:

LAURA HOPE-GILL is the founding coordinator of the MFA in Writing and the Narrative Medicine Certificate Program at Lenoir-Rhyne University. Also the founder of Asheville Wordfest, Hope-Gill is a deaf and newly functionally-blind producer, poet, painter, pianist, and essayist who has published in Parabola, Missouri Review, and Denver Quarterly, among other journals. Her books are The Soul Tree (Grateful Steps, 2009) and Look Up Asheville (Grateful Steps, 2010). Her essay on narrative medicine, “Finding the Heart in Medicine: Intersections of Healthcare and Writing,” appeared in NCLR’s 30th issue in 2021. In 2023, she launched The Story Shepherds, a story-listening initiative for healing our lives of loss and trauma.

with art by the author

North Carolina Disability Literature

Blue Birds (acrylic, 45x45) by Laura Hope-Gill

Eye spasms when I close my eyes Trouble focusing Lots of headaches all over my head Hurts to open my eyes

I wore dark sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat. In the waiting area, I covered my face with my hands. When I was left to wait in the exam room, I turned off the light and drew the long plastic slats closed over the floor-toceiling window. The doctor entered and turned on the light. With a motion of my hand, he knew to turn it off. He brought in a document in the darkened room and placed it on the little desk beside the now-covered, frosted floorJames Tate Hill, a Greensboro teacher and author of the memoir Blind Man’s Bluff (W.W. Norton, 2021), served as the final judge for this year’s contest. Hill selected Hope-Gill’s story from twelve finalists. “The lesson was never in getting back to where we were but in being where we are and resting there,” writes Hope-Gill in “The Weight of Light,” upon which Hill further expounds that the winning essay “captures in equal parts the terror and wonder of our minds and bodies. What a vital, expansive, captivating journey toward understanding a familiar world and an unfamiliar self.”

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to-ceiling window. At the top of the document was the word: Concussion. I wondered if there was a massive filing cabinet holding these documents for every emergent bad thing.

I really wanted to break down and cry because of the pain, but I also didn’t want this young doctor to think he wasn’t doing a good job. He seemed pretty confident in the document.

Little stabs of light still made it through the slats. I lowered my head so my hat brim could help. The doctor read the document with his finger following under the words, inviting me to sit with him and read along.

I was unable to because the light from the window reflected off the paper. The paper wasn’t laminated. It just did what all paper normally did, but today it was a Lite Brite or a giant flashlight shining at me, causing me unspeakable pain. He read the words “avoid light” printed there so clearly and moved on to the next instruction which didn’t matter. “Avoid light” ought to have been the only ones on the page. The document was exact and also clear.

Those were the only two words it needed to say. It was what I needed to do: avoid light.

Avoid light meant avoid light.

I needed to avoid each beam, each ray, each particle, each hazy glow, every number on every digital appliance in your home,

It was what I needed to do: avoid light.

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every star, definitely the moon, absolutely the sun and everything it illuminates. “Avoid light” meant “avoid the world.”

I didn’t realize this. The two words shared a page with a thousand others and got lost. I also was not in the best position to advocate for

Winter 2024

The following day, I kept looking though. I kept using my eyes. A colleague and I had a meeting about trauma at the Columbia, South Carolina campus. He drove. I rested. To me, this was protocol. I had sunglasses on. I wore a hat.

The meetings went well. When they ended, we stepped out into the late afternoon sun, and I cried out because I felt someone had thrown a heavy rock at me. Not one to usually cry out, I was quickly attended to by my colleagues asking me what was wrong. My answer was so simple and so complicated: it was the sun. The sun was wrong. Being caring people, and having talked about trauma all day already, they all helped me as I threw my cardigan over my head and let them guide me to the parking lot through an improvised journey through trees, keeping me in the shade as much as possible. Even when I was not in the shade, even with the cardigan over my head, I could feel the sunlight, and it felt like a thousand stones.

I think I am painting my brain.

Winter Flight (acrylic, 18x24) by Laura Hope-Gill

myself. This was not my usual doctor with whom I have very good communication. I wasn’t intimidated by this new doctor; on the contrary, I wanted him to feel good about his job today. He really believed in that document. He knew nothing of me, this woman in the big hat, possibly a nut, possibly a witch, possibly a hypochondriac. As he read the words to me, I and my little Post-it just disappeared under the certainty of paper. Avoid light? I missed it. I continued my life, which is to say, I kept looking at things. Not eclipses. Not fireworks. Not the sun. I looked at the things that make up my life: the dogs I’m caring for. Loved ones’ faces. Water from a tap. Trees through a window. Things in the fridge. Clocks on so many appliances. These were the worst things I could possibly do.

Facebook, December 10 Thank you for kind messages, friends. I apologize for terse or lack of reply. I am healing my brain. Reading on phone or computer and definitely texting and phone things genuinely cause pain. I paste a reply.

I can paint for a bit each day. I think I am painting my brain. I have added branches after one month. I have painted a bird’s nest.

This means eventually I will paint a bird.

By midnight, I was unable to handle the pain. I asked my daughter and their partner to drive me. Every beam of light pommeled me. Now in the ER waiting area with a black scarf and a sleep mask over my eyes to keep all light out, I waited

North Carolina Disability Literature

for Derek to arrive, relieving Luna and Kyle to go home and take care of the dogs in our care. As dogsitters, we often have six to ten guest dogs, and it was their fault I was in pain. I had been feeding them and slipped, my legs flying up into the air like “light as a feather, stiff as a board” but not levitating well enough to stay there. I crashed down onto the slate floor, a design choice made by my soul that loved a trip to Scotland three years ago. I wanted to honor the “slate isles” with a floor made of the stuff. Lying on it, unable to remember where I was, who I was, whom to call out for, and what I had done in my life to land me there, I felt the dogs licking me and nudging me. I interpreted their activity as care and concern until I noticed dog food in every crease and fold of my sweater and blue jeans and hair. Dogs can be assholes, too.

Kyle lives in the downstairs apartments and helps me with the dogs while he builds his life as a carpenter and artist. This is also my insurance that I get to see my child on weekends. I called out to Kyle most likely when I was mid-flight because I had no memory once I landed. I know this because he was beside me quickly. He helped me walk to my bedroom where I lay down. I summoned a name, Derek, and asked Kyle to text him.

I didn’t know anything beyond the names of these three people and, vaguely, my own.

I could not recall what I had been doing before I fed the dogs. Time began once I hit the ground. Nothing about the day preceding. I had driven my mother home from Chapel Hill where we had attended an appointment with her hematologist (we don’t have one we trust in Asheville).

During the drive I had “attended” a storytelling class then a Faculty Assembly for the university.

The previous day I had driven my mother to Chapel Hill, and we had a very fine steak supper at a restaurant. We talked and sipped tea in our hotel room. She had shared with me a memory of my grandmother saying how wonderful it would be to be a painter. My mother had waved her hands in the air as my grandmother would have, imitating a mix of celebrating the Canadian North Woods and possibly painting with both hands, which I do, or did do before the fall. This struck me. I had not understood why I suddenly started painting back in March.

“It’s Nanny!” I said to my mother. It was the only way my suddenly becoming a painter made

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sense. She agreed. We went to sleep. The next day we went to her doctor. I drove us home, multitasking a faculty meeting and a storytelling class online. I then took my mother to her house, came home, changed, then smashed my head while feeding the dogs. I remembered none of this.

As my doctor says,“aside from the brain damage, I’m in great shape.”

Facebook, December 31 Hi friends. I am still healing this brain injury. Looking at computer and phone screens is painful (occipital lobe damage). Memory is working better, while I am still very aware and amazed at how and when it isn’t. I ordered a braille tablet, literally a piece of wood with the alphabet. In case this is my life now. I know we are supposed to heal. This may or may not heal. As my doctor says, “aside from the brain damage, I’m in great shape.” Love to all. Forgive all unanswered emails and texts.

I truly just can’t anymore, but I send love. Best to all in the new year.

I want to describe to you what I saw when I could not see. I feel a bit like a stranger, even to myself, who has returned from another place. We are good nowadays with promising ourselves some kind of blessing from suffering, some revelation,

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some indication we are purified by pain. I fought that kind of thinking for four months. I know Facebook friends were posting good thoughts, holding me in the light, wishing me swift recovery. I did not google much about photophobia or concussions because I could not bear the light from a computer screen or phone. I remembered a student named River who had suffered a traumatic brain injury years ago. It was from her that I got the idea to wear sunglasses and a big floppy hat.

I remembered how she didn’t have any lights on in her house when we were on Zoom. I reached out, and she replied with the names of very helpful advocates and neurologists. Lots of people had been sending me suggestions that I could not read because the words were written in light. But I could get the gist: cranio sacral, acupuncture, this kind, that kind. I appreciated and would entertain all of it, but I could not leave the house. I could not even leave my bedroom. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to heal. I did not want to feel any of the pressure to heal. My student’s world of sunglasses and hats spoke to me with reality I needed to know.

Winter 2024

I learned this reality when I was diagnosed with sensorineural hearing loss twenty years ago.

Hearing didn’t come back. I had to change into a deaf person. I am wholly aware of how fine the line is between well-wishing and ableism.

River told me about “red light glasses,” and I ordered two pairs. My student was my guide. Anything she suggested, I would do. She had been to this place. Remembering the darkness of her rooms, I gathered all my bed sheets and old curtains. Kyle and Derek devoted an afternoon and evening to covering every window and hanging curtains across the sliding glass doors. My house has a vaulted ceiling with twenty-foot-high windows overlooking the neighbor’s lake and meadow, my magnolia trees and a magnificent spruce. All of these were covered. I could not see the world.

The paradox of the chronic: if you stress it will last longer, so we stress about it lasting longer.

Facebook, January 22 I am on medication to totally lower my nervous system, to melt it, to let it just be liquid dripping on the burner. Every bit of stress hardens me and slows the process. I can be liquid again in an instant. To stay here in this place of quiet, of darkness, of brainfulness, being so aware of what it desires and serving it with the rest of me. The paradox of the chronic: if you stress it will last longer, so we stress about it lasting longer. The resolution narrative hangs heavy over the chaos narrative.

Get well. Heal. More pressure, more stress to the mending, slowing it down. Brainfulness has only the wish not to hurry. Even this – it lets me know as I write this – head burning is enough for the day, the week, a whole life.

Whispers (acrylic, 18x24) by Laura Hope-Gill

I had had a concussion years before. I had been gifted a grand piano by a local Episcopal church

North Carolina Disability Literature

after I discovered that the stained-glass windows were by Mary Tillinghast, one of the first women in the American Institute of Architects. She was also the artist whose talents both Tiffany and La Farge, the foremost Art Nouveau designers of the age, fought. Tired of both of them, she started her own stained-glass studio at 3 Washington Square, the address that, after her, Edward Hopper would call his. I was writing a book about Asheville’s eclectic architectural collection, much of it built by James Vester Miller who was born into enslavement by former governor and congressman, Zebulon Vance. My research involved a lot of staring at buildings and their features. My job was to piece together a narrative for a city in the South, and I did not want it to be just about buildings.

The buildings tell a story, but without the names of the people, the stone and bricks are just that. Asheville, like Buffalo, holds 1929 in a kind of structural amber. Declining debt upon the Crash, it halted development until it had paid off its loans in the later 1980s. Poverty is a friend of preservation, goes the saying, holding Buffalo and Asheville up as evidence. Very little changed between 1929 and 1983.

Because both John Vanderbilt and Edwin Grove’s lives were transverse by tuberculosis, the great white plague, both men resided for a time at the Battery Park Hotel atop what was then a mountain later destroyed to create a shopping district for Grove’s wealthy, white patrons, committing an act of economic genocide against the successful Black business district, itself a result of Payton’s having enslaved people to run his hotels and restaurants. Vanderbilt’s room looked South. Grove’s East. This is why when you come to Asheville today, you drive south along Biltmore Avenue (the “Bilt” being the final syllable of the family’s name) to go to Biltmore Estate (minus the acres that Vanderbilt gave to America as Pisgah and Great Smoky Mountain National Forests) and east on Patton Avenue to get to Grove Park Inn. This is how a mix of moonshine and medicine merge to form Asheville’s history as a party town.

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I studied the stainedglass windows at either end of the nave of Trinity Episcopal Church, and those along the north wall. I doubted the church history in a seventy-fifth anniversary booklet, which claimed all the original windows had been replaced The larger in the 1960s. I saw a very windows, clear difference in style the east and use of color. The larger and west windows, the east and west and the four and the four along the north, were spectacular. along the They were fluid and formal. north, were They delighted me the spectacular. way great painting and music do. I felt inspired They were and balanced looking at fluid and them. I was reading The formal.

Swan Thieves by Elizabeth They Kostova and having dreams delighted about this woman, Mary Tillinghast, living in Paris me the and New York in the fin de way great siècle. The church secretary painting tired of my coming by and music do. every day to sit and stare at the windows. Soon though, I paired the descriptions of the windows in letters stored at the University of North Carolina library to the windows themselves. This brought me very close, but I still needed physical proof. On a flight back to town from somewhere, the Episcopal Bishop sat next to me on his way to a meeting of the Episcopal “Primates.” He advised me that someone in the parish would have some of the original glass, as this was the custom with old church renovations.

The Dean of the Cathedral of All Souls facilitated this investigation with a single email to all the Episcopalians in Asheville.

Ernestine Tuten, the widow of the priest who oversaw the replacement of the original windows replied with an invitation to come to her house to see the glass her deceased

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husband had kept. When I stepped into her house and saw the exact same patterned glass hanging in her living room windows, I knew I’d solved the mystery. As a show of gratitude, the church arranged movers to bring me the piano.

Moments before they arrived, I moved a cabinet away from the doors to create more space. I was so excited; I didn’t think to move the very large brass or steel ornamental Pier One vase thing from on top of it. It landed on my forehead because I stood there in its path and watched it.

Blood streamed down my face and pooled in the rims of my glasses. It was then that the movers arrived. I welcomed them looking like Carrie at the prom. That concussion healed swiftly.

Nothing out of the ordinary except the dent in my forehead.

I did not know how to paint what I was painting. There was only an incandescent urge to use color.

Facebook, January 23 I am working on my computer to get it to read selected text out loud and to allow voice to text.

For the me before the injury, this was easy. I remember it being so easy, I found it unnecessary and said “no thank you.” Now, I look it up and read how to do it, then immediately forget. I look up the other one, the text to voice one, which was clearly not useful, and the same thing happens. I have no short-term memory. Something about Option/Escape is the answer for the read-aloud. And the metaphor there is fantastic.

There is no real option: escape.

I had painted with oils in college, then realized how much less expensive it is to be a writer.

Painting surfaced a decade later during grad school, then twenty

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years later, now, when I can afford to be an artist.

Between March and November, I painted more than two hundred paintings. I painted six or seven a day in March then slowed down a bit, but not entirely. When I closed my eyes at night, all I saw were colors unfolding, different styles of painting evolving into others. Waking up was easier than it has ever been. I knew exactly what I needed to do: paint. I covered my walls and still have piles of finished paintings on the dog crates in the library. They are all of trees and landscapes and rocks of Georgian Bay. I did not know how to paint what I was painting. There was only an incandescent urge to use color. When I first felt the urge to paint, I was living in London for my junior year. I had finished classes for the day and taken the Tube to Leicester Square. After a coffee, I went into the National Gallery to visit a painting my mother calls her “friend,” the darker of da Vinci’s Virgin on the Rocks, and my own favorite, George Stubbs’ painting of a horse named Whistlejacket. I wandered the other rooms, rooms familiar throughout childhood since they were where I attended the only art classes I ever took, even if it was finger painting. My mother actually managed all my art education by ensuring I saw the Louvre and the Uffizi, as well as the cities housing these palaces of art. My education was one of recognition rather than practice. Between these galleries and summers in the Canadian North Woods, my mother immersed me in beauty. On this afternoon, I found my way into a vast room where paintings about to be displayed in the National Gallery or about to shipped to elsewhere leaned against wooden crates. I was alone there. I sat in front of Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières and felt all the colors. It wasn’t a normal experience. I felt I was being adjusted, realigned, penetrated by all of it. I felt the desire to paint although I was over there studying theatre, literature, and philosophy. Now, I didn’t want to read another word. I wanted to paint them. When I returned to the US, I bought massive canvases and heavy tubes of oil paint. I painted for six months; each painting was an experience I can still remember just looking at the paintings themselves or photographs of them in my album. They were Abstract Expressionism at the very least. They were the mythic journey I needed at the time, at the very most. I was not painting to be good. I was

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The lesson was never in getting back to where we were but in being where we are and resting there.

Woodsong (acrylic, 18x24) by Laura Hope-Gill

Facebook, January 23, continued The lesson of deafness was always just to let go of something. To accept that everything returns in another form perceived with the heart. I feel this is the same process. This is why “hope” can lessen the power of difficulty. Deafness has also taught me that you can go looking around for treatment and solution and very likely just not find it. The lesson was never in getting back to where we were but in being where we are and resting there. For real. For seeing it, for feeling it, for being in it whatever it is. Not to mask it. Not to hide. So I use the term “functionally blind” for the first time now to describe where I am. Because only if I name it will I continue trying to remember how to do voice to text so I don’t have to type with my eyes closed. And I’ll google it, and I’ll forget, then google again. Then remember: settings, keyboard, then something else. While the headache this time burrows through my left temple after hanging out in my right eye all morning.

Rough comet-blasted rock merges with sea-level mountain peaks higher than the Himalayas. painting to learn to see what was going on within Freshwater waves. Lichen of gold, red, purple, me. That was the art for me. I had no idea how to and white grows on a great old turtle in our bay. work with oils, how to delineate space, how to do Rainy afternoons spent napping next to a winany of the things that the artists in my Art History dow allowing the petrichor to permeate dreams. books knew. There was peace in the movement The same red chairs on the high rock for watchof painting, of listening to Beethoven and feeling ing sunsets. Mayflies flopping upon the still those notes translate into those colors in that moevening water. Ribbons of quartzite and rose ment. Painting was immersion in life deeper than quartz in millions-of-years-old rock. Jack pines life. I was in my early twenties then. Returning to and Northern pines, the latter bending with a the canvas at fifty-three was still immersion. Only, permanent West Wind. Coffee on the dock. the immersion led me to something I could recA trumpet swan alighting on the night black ognize, my home in the Canadian North Woods. water when I alone, without my phone camThese paintings became the world my brain injury era, capture it and so it captured me. These are denied me: trees, water, sky, forest, rock. the sensations I articulated in color onto small canvases, not painting as painting is effected in the movies. Not heavilythought brushstrokes. For me it I was not painting to be good. I was painting was simply writing in my script (stolen from my grandfather) to learn to see what was going on within me. but breaking the words and

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letters up into different parts of the canvas and doing this over and again until the canvas was full. What did I write? Letters to friends. Questions to past lovers. Rage and love and all the rest of it. Tons of wishes.

As long as there was paint on the brush, the more colors the better, my beloved northland unfolded in the colors. All the colors. I’d paint with seven or ten brushes with different colors on them gripped between my teeth so I would not miss an inspiration, would not poorly time a stroke. The library houses the seventy first paintings that speak of Georgian Baby. My hallway houses my collection of the mythical tree that emerged from the Georgian Bay studies. My bedroom houses my painting of a mountain ridge with a lake, a large tree and a nest in the foreground with three blue birds flying intensely, plus more trees, and the first bird I painted who keeps reappearing as in the other large canvas of a cloaked, faceless figure encountering a massive bird under a great tree in the moonlight.

These latter two were done during the injury’s healing period. They speak of my brain.

They speak of being stunned into sightlessness by white light and a slow growing back of branches trimmed to the stump.

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Facebook, January 30 This morning I walked with my sleep mask on and could see all distances and proportions perfectly, I saw my room, though it wasn’t thing for thing my room, but a pretend substitute with the doors and drawers and objects in the same places. Same with bathroom. My brain’s version is beautifully painted whereas mine has peeling wallpaper. Everything was bright but did not hurt. This was a different kind of light.

Last summer, I purchased a ticket to see the Impressionist Painters exhibit at the Biltmore Estate. It was one of those installations with the two-story high screens with quotes and images by great artists. In the little museum exhibit prior to going into the ballroom-turned-art-world, I read some text next to a photograph from Monet’s funeral. According to the story, a contemporary of the artist, upon seeing the black cloth adorning the casket, ripped it away, exclaiming, “No black for Monet.” This was the secret of the Impressionists and also possibly why Van Gogh is always

In Van Gogh, black is a kind of brilliant second guest, a doubt in what is shown, a question of how we ensure we are showing what we want others to see.

Joy (acrylic, 10x12) by Laura Hope-Gill

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just a little bit off to the side, not quite in the same group with Renoir, Monet, Manet, Pissarro. Van Gogh uses black, often as an outline for the things that don’t really need them. In Van Gogh, black is a kind of brilliant second guest, a doubt in what is shown, a question of how we ensure we are showing what we want others to see. It is a mark against the interpenetrability of beings, a statement of wanting to be sure we don’t miss it. The others, though, invested it all I know in color and did not hedge for what an instant. Da Vinci says the first step in painting is to paint music is. the entire canvas black. This It has is because, he says, all things nothing emerge at differing degrees from to do with darkness into light. The Impressionists viewed the world from sound. the opposite direction, moving I know into the Englightenment yet not what quite knowing the darkness that brightness is. the Great War will cast upon humanity. Monet’s response to It has World War I was vast canvasses nothing of fragile, slow-to-regenerate to do water lilies. with light.

Maybe my brain is like a water lily. Four months have passed since my dog-feeding accident. I still wear the “redlight glasses” all the time and have red cellophane over my computer, tablet, and phone screens, plus red lightbulbs instead of white ones in strategically placed lamps at home. I still experience headaches and have named them: Drill Bit, Old Faithful, Moon Jelly, and Meteor. But I can do things. I can drive if I am very mindful. I can write again on a computer. I can paint. Thanks to a condition that occurs in sensorineural deaf people when they are not engaging external sources of sound, like human voices or music or TV, I hear music that is not really playing.

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The condition is called Musical Ear Syndrome and Oliver Sacks Syndrome. I hear it when I am healing from something. They think this is what Beethoven heard after his sensorineural deafness settled in more deeply, as mine has. I equate it with what I saw that day I walked with my sleep mask and saw everything in such glowing bright colors and very clear shapes.

I equate it with how painting has spoken to me throughout my life, affecting me like music with its visual frequencies of light. I know what music is. It has nothing to do with sound. I know what brightness is. It has nothing to do with light. n

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THE MAP THAT LEADS TO SALVATION a review by Annie Woodford Kelley Shinn. The Wounds That Bind Us. West Virginia University Press, 2023.

ANNIE WOODFORD holds an MA in creative writing from Hollins University.

She received the Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets and now lives in Deep Gap, NC. She is the author of Bootleg (Groundhog Poetry Press, 2019), which was reviewed in NCLR Online 2021. Her second book, Where You Come from Is Gone (Mercer UP, 2022), is the winner of Mercer University’s 2020 Adrienne Bond Prize and the 2022 Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry. She was awarded the Jean Ritchie Fellowship in 2019, and her work has appeared in numerous literary journals including Prairie Schooner and Southern Review.

The Wounds That Bind Us is KELLEY SHINN’S first book. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Fourth Genre, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, and elsewhere. She is a board member of the Friends of The Outer Banks History Center.

Kelley Shinn lives on Ocracoke Island, NC, where she drives out to the beach and swims in the ocean most days. After Hurricane Dorian, she lost one of her prosthetic legs in the sea and had the sea return it to her a few days later. She lives in a house built from shipwrecks by locals with names that can be traced back to the oldest families on the Outer Banks, families with a talent for carpentry work and “making do,” making beauty out of the salvaged materials that washed up on Ocracoke’s shores. Shinn can recite the names of those carpenters and knows the architectural and cultural lineage of her house, where water has washed through the bottom floors more than once. Like those creative and fiercely independent island carpenters, Shinn has taken what could have been a wreck of a life and through sheer force of will, imagination, and an innate gift for joy and jokes, made it into something beautiful. She’s written about that will, that joy, in her memoir, The Wounds That Bind Us, a profoundly lyrical, often humorous, always moving testament to the healing power of storytelling.

When Shinn was a high school runner with college offers in Akron, OH, she lost both of her legs to bacterial meningitis.

This book recounts how Shinn struggled to survive this incredible loss and persisted to find beauty and love in the world as an adventurer, artist, and mother. Specifically, it recounts how her passion for off-roading in amped-up four-wheel drive vehicles led her to journey into Bosnia-Herzegovina to bring attention to the victims

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of landmines, survivors like herself. There Shinn came to the realization that “amputation has a language of its own, a shared knowledge of such trauma and resiliency requires no translation” (175). Shinn’s narrative is structured around allusions to Greek mythology, which is appropriate given the epic proportions of Shinn’s life. Her memoir demonstrates she has suffered mightily, but she has also lived deeply, ecstatically even. The precise poeticism of her prose is a testament to that ecstasy, that laborious dedication to creating something good out of the mess of life where often “the agony is so severe that to fold back into stardust is freedom” (253).

Shinn’s examination of the imperfect manifestation of love is one of the most powerful aspects of this memoir, beyond just the facts of her story itself. Take, for instance, this description of her father’s flawed, but transformative love for her: My father, who cleaned up the blood and vomit on the porch when I crawled into the house after being raped, even though I hadn’t lived at home for several months. My father, who never asked any questions, despite the laceration under my eye, the shiner. My earthly, but heavenly father, who always wanted me to spare the details that would break him, who would sweep me up after the ravaged world left me for dead. (123)

In a heart-breaking scene where her father gives a teenage Shinn – bedraggled by grief and substance abuse shortly after the loss of her legs – his last few dollars, Shinn writes, “There was no more confusion as to what love is – it’s the act of the wounded extending mercy to the wounded” (138).

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COURTESY OF KELLEY SHINN

during a meet-and-greet with a group of amputees and speaks through her translator: “You gentlemen must think it is crazy for a woman with no legs to try to drive around the world.” Salko [an amputee she has befriended] is unable to conceal his mirth. He bursts out with laughter, everyone does. . . . Then Salko says, “We are all crazy! Welcome to Bosnia-Herzegovina!” The room bursts with laughter, and we spill out into the lobby where someone wants to take photos. (172)

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hot springs “at the base of a mountain in Thermopylae” (148) where she and her traveling companion, an archaeologist named Tina, stop to soak on their way into Bosnia-Herzegovina. There they encounter an old man who asks them, “Tell me, how old do you think I am?”

It sounds like the beginning of a riddle. Tina tells him he doesn’t look a day over sixty.

“I know,” he says, standing out of the water, buck naked. “Lucky for you I am ninety-four. I’ve been swim-

Shinn’s memoir is a testament to this mercy, as well as the magic she felt in witnessing her daughter’s early life. She became a mother despite being handicapped and found in her daughter the blood relative she so yearned for as an adopted child. In this sense, Shinn’s book is also an important addition to recent conversations about the questionable ethics of adoption practices.”* Shinn writes that the many scars on her body from where gangrenous flesh was cut out to save her life are a “map [that] leads to salvation, and it’s all I have to offer my daughter that matters – living proof that there is abiding joy in resisting the whims of cruelty” (46).

Shinn’s “abiding joy” is part of this book’s warp and woof, especially in the tonal richness of Shinn’s travels in BosniaHerzegovina. Shinn captures the threads of absurdity and humanity that run through any tragedy. For example, she states that she felt “like an asshole”

* See Larissa MacFarquhar, “Living in Adoption’s Emotional Aftermath," The New Yorker Apr. 2023: web.

Later, Shinn weeps as she ends a long night of drinking by witnessing Salko, a Muslim, praying at dawn on a little knoll above the war-torn city of Tuzla: “I hear the tremble in Salko’s voice and know that I am not alone” (178).

In another scene, Shinn recalls partying with

ming in these springs my whole life,

the kids in the nightclub in Tuzla,

Molon Labe – “Come and take (me)!” – was the Greek king Leonidas’s defiant response to the invading Persians during the Battle of Thermopylae and encapsulates Shinn’s heroic response to a world where “you begin learning that loss is loss is loss” (257). “They took my legs,” Shinn writes, “and I got up and walked away” (46).

More than anything, this memoir is a testament to Shinn’s love of life and storytelling. She is, first and foremost, a spinner of yarns, a raconteur, a talker, holding the reader in delighted suspense. She will make you laugh, she will make you cry, but most of all she will leave you with an indelible sense of her unique voice as a human and a writer. n

children who survived the war, smoking and drinking and carousing in a sorrowful haze. When I asked one of them what it was like there during the war, he blew a plume of smoke in my face and when it cleared, he declared that they’d all seen the dead there, the corpses of their loved ones strewn along the roads where they once played ball games. And when I asked him what it was like to survive the war, he nodded toward my legs and said, “You ought to know. You’re here where the music is aren’t you?”

(248–49)

It is this unerring impulse toward “the music” that drives Shinn’s memoir. One of the many scenes embodying both “abiding joy” and Shinn’s fierce drive to “repurpose the anger into intent” (2) take place in

ABOVE Kelly Shinn at her memoir’s book

launch at Books to be Red, Ocracoke, NC, 1 Jun. 2023

preserves most things, but not all,” he says, cupping his genitals with a feigned modesty.

Tina starts laughing. I’m not totally sure what’s funny. Then she raises her fist out of the water. Steam is coming off of it as she shouts at the man in Greek, “Molon Labe! Molon Labe!” (149)

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Congratulations to all of you graduates of the English Department, and warmest greetings to your families and friends, and to my fellow faculty, administration, and staff at NC State.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” American essayist Joan Didion wrote in her book, The White Album, published in 1979.1 I’ll tell you a story.

When I was growing up in Nigeria, West Africa, not North Carolina, USA, I swam in a crystal-clear, cold river. It poured out of a spring in the rain forest. Underwater, I could see to the sandy, white bottom, but because of surrounding trees, the river shone like an emerald. The current was strong and fast. You had to be a good swimmer to make it across, and by the time I was eight I could do it. The river was twentyfive feet deep and one hundred feet across.

A third of the way across the river, in front of a set I consider my of wooden piers, past recursively, that is, floated a raft conover and over, to pick structed from oil

up an image and follow it and learn something about myself and the world.

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drums and hardwood and painted red. On any day, when we drove down the sandy road and around a copse of trees to the landing, we spotted the raft on the rippling current. It was always, miraculously there. It was there like the river was there and the hardwoods and palms surrounding the river and the sky overhead. When my friends and I weren’t crossing the river to climb a tree and catch a long rope to swing out and drop into the middle of the current, we swam to the raft. We climbed on and dove off. The raft remained for years and years, all of my girlhood.

At some point, I discovered that a substantial metal chain descended from the raft into the river, that it angled upstream because the river pulled the raft downstream, and that it disappeared into the white sand at the bottom. I tried often to dive against that current all the way down to find how that chain was anchored but I never made it. So I just took for granted that the raft rode the current.

Recently I began to think about that red raft. I can’t say why except that I’m a writer and a memoirist and I consider my past recursively, that is, over and over, to pick up an image and follow it and learn something about myself and the world. Thinking of the raft, I began to wonder ELAINE NEIL ORR is the author of two scholarly books as well as her two novels, A Different Sun (Berkley, 2013) and Swimming Between Worlds (Berkley, 2018; reviewed in NCLR Online 2019), and a memoir, Gods of Noonday (University of Virginia Press, 2003). Born in Nigeria, to missionary parents, Orr later moved to the US, where she earned her MA in English from the University of Louisville and her PhD at Emory University. She is now a Professor of English at North Carolina State University. Read more about her in an interview with Kathryn Stripling Byer in NCLR 2015.

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I’ll tell you another story.

In the middle of my life and the center of In my slowed my career down life, I noticed small here at NC State, I was things: the sporangium on diagnosed the underside of fern blades, with endthe way a young puppy will trot stage renal

a little sideways down the road because its rear end is so eager, the way bark peels off a crepe myrtle in long thin pages.

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disease. I had to go on dialysis. Forty-four is not the number of years old I expected to be when I received such a startling example of my mortality. I remember feeling that the train had stopped and I had gotten off at some godforsaken station in the middle of the night. My friends and colleagues were still pursuing their lives. Some were even planning to redo their kitchens. I was using my kitchen microwave to warm the dialysate I was going to transfer into my peritoneum by way of an assortment of tubes that ended at my belly.

The dialysate in turn would, through osmosis, collect toxins in my blood. Later I would drain this liquid and refill again and R OR IL I would do this NE E N AI four times a EL day, every day of the month, no day off, for two years and six months.

Doing that much work to keep oneself alive slows a person down.

I had lots of time to think. I was also very sick. Most mornings began in nausea. I don’t remember feeling sorry for myself. I do remember how wonderful it felt around ten o’clock in the morning when the nausea faded and I could achieve some buoyancy and enter my day. In my slowed down life, I noticed small things: the sporangium on the underside of fern blades, the way a young puppy will trot a little sideways down the road because its rear end is so eager, the way bark peels off a crepe myrtle in long thin pages.

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how someone had sunk an anchor and what sort We have to find a of anchor way to be anchored in it was. It swift current. The current would have is coming always, even had to be very heavy. when we sleep. But we can’t A conconstantly be thinking crete brick about the anchor even would not though we always have held it. I surmised require one. that someone set the chain in wet concrete contained in a circular form the diameter of a truck tire. That someone would have had to start upstream with the anchor on the raft and at some point, near the landing, let the anchor go.

The force of the current would not have allowed the anchor to sink straight down as it would in a lake. It would ride in the current for some feet, maybe a dozen, before coming to rest on the bottom of the river. Over time, sand would have covered the concrete form. Someone had made a keen calculation.

As I contemplated that red raft, it occurred to me that it is a metaphor for our times and perhaps for all lives in all times. We have to find a way to be anchored in swift current. The current is coming always, even when we sleep. But we can’t constantly be thinking about the anchor even though we always require one.

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ABOVE The author as a child on the Ethiope River, circa 1964

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To show you how I think these stories relate, I quote from Cheryl Strayed, who hiked the 1100mile Pacific Crest Trail alone and published a book about it. She writes, “Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible. Let it nurture you because it will.”2 I will add that everything you do belongs to you.

After I had my transplant, I excavated those journals I had written during all of that sickness and nausea and swamp world and crafted a memoir, and it was published.3 I returned to a full-time teaching load, equal to my peers. I tried not to get back on the train but to live more deliberately and do more walking. I didn’t want to forget what I had learned about slowing down, all that I could learn and be sitting in the grass. American poet Walt Whitman had told me, in Leaves of Grass:

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I noticed all of this because I was no longer on the train.

I wrote an immensity of pages in journals.

I did not quit my job. I kept teaching here in the English Department at NC State.

The head of the department gave me a course release each semester to make teaching manageable. This was an act of grace in a secular setting.

“This arrangement is temporary,” Tom Lisk said, “because you’re going to get well.”

I was able to get onto the kidney transplant list at Duke.

I got up every day and maneuvered through nausea and dialysis because of my students.

They were up too, getting ready for class. I could imagine them arranged in the classroom, each and every one of them. I could see the books we were discussing open on their desks. I held them in my mind’s eye as I dressed and drove to campus and walked into Tompkins Hall. My students still believed I was human though I felt more like a fish in a swamp. They also needed me.

After those two and a half years, I got a new kidney. I still haven’t redone my kitchen.

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PHOTOGRAPH BY AGHOG

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Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems, You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,) You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books, You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self. (“Song of Myself,” section 2)

What he means is filter others’ thoughts but don’t mimic them. Find your own learned wisdom and build your core from every book, experience, journey you take.

This is what you have learned as English majors. To consider many perspectives and find your own understanding. It’s called critical thinking and it will serve you well. There are lots of stories in the world and some are not worth living by. You must find and make the good ones.

The way I told the story about the red raft and the anchor, or my illness and my students, you may

2

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar (Vintage, 2012) 133.

ABOVE Ethiope River, 2017

3

Elaine Neil Orr, Gods of Noonday: A White Girl’s African Life (U of Virginia P, 2003).

OPPOSITE The author as a child (girl standing on left) on the

Ethiope River, circa 1963

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Toni Morrison, Beloved (Knopf, 1987) 322.

SARAH ELKS designed this essay. A graduate of Meredith College, she is based in Raleigh, NC.

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a film, producing a work of animation, writing a novel, working for environmental justice, practicing Civil Rights law, managing a restaurant in your hometown, continuing a family business, volunteering in a prison – whatever you do that is useful and beautiful and undertaken with passion will become you, today and for the Your anchor is what rest of you give yourself to with so your much love, passion, intelligence, life. and commitment that even if You will you lose your job or a befamily member or a home come you love, you remain a intact, a complete sturdy human human being. being, capable of withstanding currents and storms as well as periods of calm and grace. As the Beatles sang on their Abbey Road album: “The love you take is equal to the love you make.”5 There is so much strength and beauty within you. Offer your anchored and buoyant self to the rich and needful flow of life around you. n

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have thought they were two things. I focused on the raft and how it rode swift current but did not get swept away. And in the second story I focused on my students. They were my anchor. But in fact, the buoyant self and the anchor are one thing.

On the dark path of my illness, I had to conjure my students and my love for the classroom. I had to remake myself each morning as an organism composed of muscle and human covenant in order to get up and go meet myself in my students’ expectation. The raft’s anchor was always there, though underwater. Your anchor is what you give yourself to with so much love, passion, intelligence, and commitment that even if you lose your job or a family member or a home you love, you remain intact, a complete human being. You have taken into yourself what you have given.

You become what you give.

As Toni Morrison writes in her novel Beloved: “you your best thing,”4 each one of you your own best thing, a raft and an anchor. You must be both. Through reflection, study and practice, whether in teaching, creating CO a documentary UR TE SY on language O F EL AI variation, N making

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From “The End,” written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, performed by The Beatles, Abbey Road (Apple Records, 1969).

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LIVING WITH COMPULSIONS a review by Patricia A. Dunn Halli Gomez. List of Ten. Sterling Publishing Company, 2021.

PATRICIA A. DUNN has published numerous articles exploring the intersections of disability studies and the teaching of writing. A Professor of English at Stony Brook University in New York, she has published five books, one of which, Disabling Characters (Peter Lang Publishing, 2015), analyzes representations of disability in Young Adult literature. Her latest book is Drawing Conclusions: Using Visual Thinking to Understand Complex Concepts in the Classroom (Teachers College Press, 2021).

HALLI GOMEZ has published five middlegrade novels, as well as a short story collection, Brave New Girls: Tales of Heroines Who Hack (Sterling Teen, 2021).

List of Ten, her first YA novel, is a YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults nominee, and it is on the Oklahoma Library Association HS Sequoyah Masterlist for 2023. Halli Gomez currently lives in North Carolina with her family.

Novels that center on a main character with a disability always run a risk of reinforcing harmful societal myths about disability.

Older novels, especially, might have a disabled character who dies at the end or is unrealistically and miraculously cured, with both endings implying that disability has no place in a “normal” society. Another common plot involving disabled protagonists has them “saving the day” at the end, with their disability somehow transforming them into a superhero of sorts, a situation which still defines them as “other.” Halli Gomez gracefully avoids all those harmful scenarios in her Young Adult novel, List of Ten (spoilers ahead!). She depicts sixteen-year-old protagonist Troy as a teenager with debilitating Tourette syndrome (TS) and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), who, while not “cured” at the end, finds a way to live his life with some good friends and enjoyable times, even as he continues to deal with his symptoms.

This novel, winner of the 2021 North Carolina AAUW Award for Young People’s Literature, is an engaging, heart-wrenching, but ultimately hopeful story of Troy, a first-person narrator who presents in the short first chapter a list of ten things he wishes to accomplish before the shocking tenth item: “Commit suicide” (2). The chapter titles progress through months and days, as Troy works his way through his list and sublists, making progress toward the most disturbing

Winter 2024

item. This topic can be dangerous territory for a young adult novel, as demonstrated in the controversy surrounding Jay Asher’s 2017 novel 13 Reasons Why about a teenage character who has ended her life. Parents or teachers may fear that teen protagonists who are planning suicide or are narrating from the grave might glorify the act, making it seem like a way to escape difficult times or get revenge on bullies. These troubled narrators might also “inspire” young people who seem to imagine they will be able to look down from a more peaceful afterlife and watch the squirming of enemies they left behind.

In List of Ten, however, Troy gradually finds reasons to live, even if his compulsions continue to interfere with his happiness. This more realistic life trajectory seems to have grown out of the author’s lived experience with TS. As Gomez writes in the Author’s Note at the end, “I thought about ending my life many times throughout my childhood” (348). She, too, lives with TS, and she says she wrote this book “To let those who have neurological disorders, or are contemplating suicide, know they are not alone” (349). The author’s own experience with this disability brings an authenticity to Troy’s painful body movements and inner thoughts.

Humor is nevertheless laced throughout the novel as seen in Troy’s sweet and amusing exchanges with his much younger brother, who can only

North Carolina Disability Literature

ABOVE Halli Gomez on the Charlotte

Readers Podcast with Landis Wade, 15 Mar. 2022 (listen here)

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COURTESY OF LANDIS WADE, CHARLOTTE READERS PODCAST

communicate in pre-toddler babbling. There’s an especially humorous scene when Troy’s dad attempts to have “the talk” about sex with his son. Regarding the typical characterization of fictional mothers and fathers, many young adult novels tend to depict parents as neglectful, clueless, absent, or cruel. This novel does exhibit some of the milder traits in that list, but for the most part Troy’s parents are represented as loving and caring, though the mother is mostly absent, and the father is kind but clueless.

In spite of the humor, it is heartbreaking to read about Troy’s frustrating struggle to control his tics, compulsions, and – to give one example – urges to blurt out “Bomb!” in a movie theater. The vivid, detailed descriptions of his suffering could have been written only by someone who has had similar experiences with TS. The author makes us begin to understand why a young person would want to end, once and for all, this constant embarrassment, emotional trauma, exhaustion, and physical pain.

Troy’s TS and OCD compel him to touch or squeeze things he shouldn’t, to be constantly counting to ten, and to feel he has to bend down and touch the floor or ground, no matter how dirty those surfaces are. He is in constant pain as he tries to control his neck tics.

For readers who might also be experiencing suffering, whether from TS or anything else, read-

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ing this novel may help them feel seen and understood. Troy’s narrative shows ways of dealing with physical or emotional issues that may never go away, and it shows him learning to be open to the positive aspects of life. He discovers some of these good things even as the weeks and months go by and he crosses off his listed items one by one, bringing him closer to the final one.

I have one minor quibble with this book: the recurrent use of the word “lame.” Granted, it comes out in the dialogue of teenagers, so it may be a typical word in their repertoire and thus part of characterizing dialogue.

But it is an offensive descriptor for many in the disability community. It would be good to see it retired or even called out as offensive by another character.

That quibble aside, List of Ten is a dramatic, engaging narrative of a young man who endures much physical pain, as well as the pain of watching other people’s reactions to his

movements. As Troy gets closer to the deadly tenth item on his list, we hope and cheer for him as he finds friends, family, and an alert and brave girlfriend, to help him find ways to live and to look forward to the future.

Gomez’s novel is an eye-opening and authentic glimpse into experiences most of us did not know existed.

Describing the misery Troy experiences because of his disability is courageous. Such descriptions run the risk of causing some readers to believe the societal myth that all disabilities are life-ruining afflictions. This, of course, is not true. That is why it is so important to have stories like this one, a text written by an author who has a background similar to that of the main character. The author’s own experiences with TS in life, therefore, provide an authenticity to Troy’s thoughts, feelings, and actions that make the novel so moving and so important. This book well deserves the many accolades it has received. n

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a review by Jessica L. Allee Kati Gardner. Finding Balance.

Flux, 2020.

JESSICA L. ALLEE is an English PhD student at the University of Arkansas. Her primary research interests are Medical Humanities and helping college students empathize with one another through personal narrative writing.

A Raleigh, NC, resident, KATI GARDNER grew up and lived most of her life in Atlanta.

She is a cancer survivor and amputee, a wife and mother, an author and teacher, and a Camp Sunshine volunteer and fundraiser.

ABOVE Kati Gardner

COURTESY OF AUTHORKATI.COM

MARI AND JASE’S STORY: HONESTY, ACCEPTANCE, AND YES, SOME KISSING

Kati Gardner’s Young Adult novel Finding Balance explores the emotional, physical, and social challenges cancer survivors and people with disabilities face and how finding balance after remission is a unique and personal journey. Inspired by her own cancer diagnosis, amputation, and summers spent at Camp Sunshine, Gardner tells a contemporary love story about Mari Manos and Jase Ellison, two teenage cancer survivors she introduced in her debut novel, Brave Enough (reviewed in NCLR Online 2021). While Finding Balance is aimed primarily at Young Adult audiences, teenage supporting characters and mature themes also make this novel engaging for adult readers. Furthermore, Gardner conveys poignant insights into the lingering effects of cancer that are minimally explored or completely omitted from other novels about cancer and disability.

Gardner picks up Mari and Jase’s story at Camp Chemo, a summer camp for children and Young Adult cancer survivors and their families. A healthy flirtation begins between the pair, and Mari and Jase are smitten – or so it seems – but before they can seal their first kiss, camp ends, and both return to their regular lives. Jase, who doesn’t remember having had leukemia at age three, has no physical reminders that set him apart from students at Atlanta West Prep. He avoids being treated differently because his friends don’t know he is a cancer survivor. Mari, on the other hand, was diagnosed with osteogenic sarcoma at ten years old and is an amputee; her missing leg is a constant reminder to herself

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and others that she is different. However, Mari seems to embrace her disability, even if her hip disarticulation makes it difficult to be fitted with a prosthetic leg, even though people sometimes stare and make rude comments about her disability, and even when she is pushed over by two boys, slips on a grape, and is forced to make a choice: use a wheelchair in school, wear an expensive and likely ill-fitting prosthetic, or transfer from South Side High to Atlanta West.

Finding balance, quite literally, becomes the novel’s theme when Mari and Jase must navigate their individual and mutual challenges and attractions at Atlanta West Prep. Jase, afraid that his secret will be spilled if he associates with Mari, makes a difficult decision that could upend his relationship with her.

And Mari’s strong and capable nature, faced with starting over at a new school, being judged for her disability, and having had cancer, is tested to the tipping point.

It is while Mari navigates a new school, new classes, and new people that Gardner brings a common problem for people with disabilities into focus, being

North Carolina Disability Literature

bullied. Gardner creates a variety of characters that showcase the various types of bullying that goes on in schools: the ignorant and misinformed bullies, the bullies who deliberately single out individuals who are “different,” and school administration leaders who treat disabled students differently from other students and yet don’t provide equal opportunities for living and learning.

In her novel, Gardner illuminates the lengths to which people with disabilities must go to navigate a broken system. Even tasks that are easy for other students, such as retrieving items from one’s locker and getting on and off the bus are difficult for Mari because accommodations do not exist for her. Additionally, the school does not provide enough time for students like Mari to get from class to class; she must leave one class early to get to the next class on time, thereby missing out on instruction that other students receive.

Gardner also explores the consequences of refusing to be honest with oneself. Even though Jase is not physically disabled like Mari, he suffers from the fear of being viewed as different from everyone else.

Jase’s fears result in sometimes displaced anger and hurtful actions that threaten to unravel relationships and the world as he knows it. However, with Mari’s help and an additional obstacle Gardner places in his path, Jase has opportunities to learn how to be more honest about and accepting of himself and his circumstances.

Gardner offers additional important insights into the lives of cancer survivors and the challenges that they and those around them face: the cost of ongoing medical care, the lingering concern that cancer may return, the worry that being fitted with a prosthetic limb will change everything or that not being fitted will keep everything the same, and finally, the devastating effects cancer treatments can have when one least expects it.

Supporting characters provide additional insights. Mari and Jase’s mutual friend, Davis, is a cancer survivor and recovering drug and alcohol addict who volunteers at the hospital as part of his probation and works at the local hangout, the Daily Grind. Noah, who also had osteogenic sarcoma like Mari, is an amputee naively unaware that not all amputations are

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alike; Mari cannot be fitted with a prosthetic as easily as he had been. In fact, at one point in the book, Mari tries being fitted and leaves the office feeling like an object rather than a person: “They continued to speak around her. She didn’t even have to be there. She was just a body they were going to attach this new part to. They were Dr. Frankenstein, and she was just the greatest experiment” (175).

Camp counselors and medical professionals who support Mari and Jase through their journeys provide readers with new views of the medical system, some parts of which are broken and other parts intact and vitally important. In addition to reading about these characters, Young Adults and adults alike will benefit from getting to know Mari and Jase’s parents and family members and how they cope with Mari and Jase’s illnesses and disabilities and provide love and support.

While some aspects of Gardner’s novel are predictable, some lines clichéd, and a mini army of characters sometimes difficult to keep track of, Gardner provides readers with an engaging and realistic storyline that gives cancer and disability the spotlights they deserve. n

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS NORTH CAROLINA LGBTQ+ LITERATURE

Guest Editor: Dwight Tanner interview and literary criticism deadline: August 31, 2024 Submit creative writing through appropriate contests.

Submission guidelines here

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Winter 2024

Congratulations Are in Order!

by Margaret D. Bauer, Editor I begin with hearty congratulations to the North Carolina book award winners reviewed in this issue: Michael McFee has won his second Roanoke Chowan Award for Poetry, and Marjorie Hudson her first Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction.

Next, kudos to Ashley Harris for publication of her second essay to receive Honorable Mention in our Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize contest (her first was published in the 2023 Winter issue; read another of her finalist essays in the 2024 print issue’s feature section). Finally, congratulations, too, to the several returning finalists of our James Applewhite Poetry Prize contest, whose poems are published in this section.

A new finalist in this contest, Loss Pequeño Glazier, is included here, along with several reviews of books that hearken back to (in Glazier’s case, both) Appalachian Literature (2010) and Literature and the Other Arts (2017). In the 2017 feature, we published an essay about the art that complements the creative writing in NCLR, and given this aspect of our award-winning design, I took notice when UNC Press released Liza Roberts’s book, Art of the State: Celebrating the Visual Art of North Carolina. I appreciate Cameron Art Museum Director Heather D. Wilson – who has so often helped NCLR acquire images and permission to feature art from the Cameron – for extending her generosity with her time for NCLR by reviewing this book

for us. (Congratulations go to her as well on her still relatively new promotion to Director of this renowned Wilmington institution).

And there’s more, including more congratulations: to longtime advocate for North Carolina writers Marsha White Warren for the North Carolina Award for Literature, and to writer, musician, artist, professor Clyde Edgerton for North Carolina Humanities’ highest honor, the John Tyler Caldwell Award for the Humanities.

So what are you waiting for? Turn the page to read Ashley Harris’s essay. Then on to the poetry and reviews. Please be sure to buy books from your local independent bookstore. And if your town doesn’t have one, check out NCLR’s listings on Bookshop.org, which allows you to direct proceeds from your purchase to one of North Carolina’s stellar stores. Find NCLR Digital Editor Devra Thomas’s convenient listing of the books reviewed in this issue here.

Addendum: This issue was complete and ready for final production before the passing of North Carolina literary icon Fred Chappell. To honor his memory with the time and space we need (and that he certainly earned), we will celebrate the life of Ole Fred later this year. In the meantime, find Fred Chappell content from our back issues shared via our social media and website postings. n

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FLASHBACKS:

Echoes of Past Issues

30 My Rembrandt Weekend creative nonfiction by Ashley Harris 37 Translating the Mysterious

a review by Robert M. West n Michael McFee, A Long Time to Be Gone 40 The Book of Whys

a review by Christie Collins

n Melinda Thomsen, Armature 42 The Poet and the Painter: Exploring Personal Landscapes a review by Michael Beadle

n Ken Chamlee, If Not These Things and The Best Material for the Artist in the World

57 After Midnight a poem by Robert W. Hill art by Herb Jackson 58 There Is No Time a poem by Kimberly J. Simms art by Jennifer Markowitz 59 Long Roads and Tall Pines a review by Rebecca Duncan

n Marjorie Hudson, Indigo Field

n Susan O’Dell Underwood, Genesis Road 62 “to love the South surgically” a review by Zackary Vernon

n Mark Powell, The Late Rebellion

46 Painting a Varied Picture of Art in North Carolina a review by Heather D. Wilson

n Liza Roberts, Art of the State

64 Writing the Hurt a review by John Lang

n Charles Dodd White, A Year Without Months

48 Spent a poem and photography by Bill Griffin

66 Stitching a poem by Joyce Compton Brown

50 Lightning Strikes Twice

a review by Al-Tariq Moore

n Randall Kenan, Black Folk Could Fly 52 This is the First Question I Ask a poem by Loss Pequeño Glazier

art by Peter Marin 54 From Big Pine to Jazz: Making a Life with Pizzazz a review by Rebecca Godwin

n Terry Roberts, The Sky Club

art by Dawn Surratt 68 Eagles

a poem by Janet Ford

art by Alan Dehmer 70 Arts Advocate Marsha White Warren Receives 2023 North Carolina Award for Literature

by Michele W. Walker 71 Renaissance Man Clyde Edgerton Receives 2023 John Tyler Caldwell Award for the Humanities

by Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE 6 n

North Carolina Disability Literature

72 n

North Carolina Miscellany

creative nonfiction and book reviews

poetry and book reviews

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Winter 2024

H ONORA B LE MENT ION, 2023 AL EX ALBRIGHT C REATIV E NONFICTIO N PRIZE

MY REMBRANDT

W E E K E N D

BY ASHLEY HARRIS “What did you say?” I asked J.P. His forehead glistened with sweat, from both heat and excitement. Given his state, I might have misunderstood him. It was Friday, also April Fool’s Day. “1656.”

“You’re kidding!”

I peered closer at the painting he held. At the bottom were the initials H.R. and, in the same slanted hand, the year 1656. No joke.

My collector husband was just home from an estate sale at the house of our friend Lenton, a watercolorist and former interior design instructor who had recently moved to Brookdale, an assisted living facility. Like us, Lenton adored antiques, and his former home, a few miles from our house in rural Randolph County, North Carolina, nearly swayed with bric-a-brac through the ages. J.P. planned to rescue a clock that had been tagged

ASHLEY HARRIS lives on the outskirts of Asheboro, NC, near the Uwharrie National Forest. She is the author of a novel, Naked and Hungry (Ingalls Publishing Group, 2011), and a poetry collection, Waiting for the Wood Thrush (Finishing Line Press, 2019). A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has written for numerous

publications, including Poets & Writers and Real Simple, among others. Her essay “A Private History of Deviled Eggs” received Honorable Mention in the 2022 Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize competition and appeared in the NCLR Online Winter 2023 issue. Read another 2023 finalist by her in the 2024 print issue.

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

The work featured a small ship with a flag. Its single sail, puffed by a breeze , gleamed in a curious dark amber, and a supernatural light illuminated the trees in the background while shadows washed the front .

“A MARRIED COUPLE’S WEEKEND QUEST TO IDENTIFY THE ARTIST OF A NEWLY ACQUIRED PAINTING CRACKLES WITH THE DRAMA OF CINEMA, BUT IT’S THE SMALL MOMENTS AND INTERROGATION OF WHAT ART REVEALS THAT MAKES THIS ESSAY SO MEMORABLE .”

—JAMES TATE HILL, 2023 FINAL JUDGE

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accidentally before Lenton could take it to Brookdale, but he also brought home this framed oil painting, about twenty by thirty inches.

The work featured a small ship with a flag. Its single sail, puffed by a breeze, gleamed in a curious dark amber, and a supernatural light illuminated the trees in the background while shadows washed the front.

“Do you know that flag?” J.P. asked.

“It’s French,” I said, judging from the stripes of red, white, and blue.

I consider myself a Francophile, but this does not impress my family. I recently made a dacquoise – a complicated French cake layered with hazelnut meringue and whipped cream – for my father’s birthday. Though I spent all day on my creation, no one fought over the soggy and abundant leftovers.

“You sure?” J.P. said.

“Absolument!” As soon as I spoke, a dagger of doubt stabbed my gut. I turned away and did a quick Google search on my phone.

The flag was not French. It was the official flag of the Netherlands. Same colors – red, white, and blue – but with horizontal stripes, not vertical as on France’s flag.

“April Fool!” I shouted. “It’s actually Dutch.”

By now I was sure of nothing. But the nationality, date, and somber colors of the painting evoked one of the most famous artists in the world.

No, I shushed myself. It couldn’t be.

The artist whose name I didn’t dare verbalize was most famous for his self-portraits, those decidedly realistic images of himself in various costumes. And if I wasn’t mistaken, didn’t his last name begin with an R? No, no. It couldn’t be.

Or could it?

The work’s proficiency took my breath away.

Only a confident painter would have attempted a broad panorama with such detail. The setting appeared to be that of a bay, defined by a cluster of trees and a strip of land in the foreground, where individual blades of grass waved in the breeze. The flagged boat, laden with sailors, drifted toward the viewer while four people, dressed in capes and knee breeches, watched the scene from afar. Other small sails rose up in the distance, and the deftest of hands had flecked the occasional seagull in the

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air. A single tone of azure permeated the sky, the least impressive element, which was scattered with clouds that seemed a little too puffy for a master.

What did I know? It was true that I had married a retired sculptor, and I’d been raised by a painter who taught art. But I What did I know? It was true preferred the lit- that I had married a retired erary arts, and my sculptor, and I’d been direct knowledge raised by a painter who of art history taught art. But I preferred was limited to the literar y arts, . . . a handful of classes in college, many, many years ago and the occasional visit to a museum, where I spent as much time watching people as studying fine art.

I opened my mouth for another question but suddenly stopped. I didn’t care how much it cost. My usually parsimonious husband wouldn’t hesitate to spend good money on something truly valuable, and if my hunch turned out to be correct, any amount seemed a bargain. My body quivered with a frisson of hope.

“I’ve got to fix this thing,” J.P. said, pointing out a gap between the frame and the painting.

He turned it over on the dining room table, and we saw a label that read The Southeastern Regional Conservation Center, Inc., with an address in South Carolina. “Look here,” he said, as he pulled the painting away from the frame.

“It’s painted on wood. You can see where the panel joins together.”

I sat down at the laptop. “Let’s Google all Dutch painters of the seventeenth century.”

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The Wikipedia list covered nearly the entire screen but our options quickly narrowed once we identified those with a last name starting with “R” and who could have been painting in 1656.

“Hmmm – here’s a Hubert van Ravesteyn,” I said. But Ravesteyn specialized in livestock and interiors. The only other possibility, given the dates, was indeed Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn. The famed Dutch painter lived from 1606 to 1669 and would have been fifty at the time of the painting. The “H” could stand for Harmenszoon, and the “R” for Rijn, we told ourselves.

I didn’t bring up the matter of the troublesome sky. It didn’t seem to bother J.P., who held a Master of Fine Arts I preferred to bask in the degree in sculpture, increasingly delicious and knew far more notion that we might own than me on such a priceless work of art. matters. Instead I preferred to bask in the increasingly delicious notion that we might own a priceless work of art.

Confession: We had been to Paris and visited the Louvre six years earlier. After hours gazing at the world’s best art – especially copies of work by J.P.’s hero, the Greek classical sculptor Praxiteles, and paintings by the Italian masters – I simply melted into a bench, punch drunk by the achievement surrounding me. I didn’t even glance in the Northern European Gallery where Rembrandt’s famous Bathsheba resided.

Shame on me.

At the time, my bladder burned with a more pressing mission. And let me tell you, winding through the labyrinthine Louvre in search of les toilettes is no small feat.When I finally succeeded, I dragged J.P. to a pâtisserie,

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

where I treated myself to the best in culinary art: une religieuse, a round éclair topped with another smaller one, held together with buttercream in some sort of naughty French nod to a nun. Ooh la la.

For now, we needed more information, starting with Lenton. J.P. called him to say that his clock had been saved and that we now owned the mysterious Dutch painting. Lenton’s recollection of its origins were foggy, but he remembered trading a circular desk for the painting to an elderly woman more than thirty years ago, and very little else. Save one titillating detail. He insisted that Sotheby’s had once owned the piece and had sent it to the South Carolina restoration company for cleaning.

Whoa. If true, that meant something.

Saturday morning J.P. and I lay Alternatively, we would in bed long after keep the Rembrandt and the sun rose and quietly enjoy the painting mused about the ourselves. We wouldn’t tell possibility that anyone, and it would be Rembrandt had our little secret. But where indeed painted was the fun in that? our new acquisition. Two scenarios arose. In the first, we would sell it and be instantly rich. Very rich. Millions-of-dollars rich. It would be just like winning the Powerball! We could pay someone to finish bricking our house, replace a fourteenyear-old car dented by falling acorns, take a cruise around the world. – And this was just for starters.

Alternatively, we would keep the Rembrandt and quietly enjoy the painting ourselves. We wouldn’t tell anyone, and it would be our little secret. But where was the fun in that?

“Before we get too carried away,” J.P. said, “we need to talk about that sky.”

Uh oh.

He finally admitted his own doubts, and we agreed the sky looked suspiciously amateurish for a Dutch master who would have been at the top of his game in 1656. But without more research, who could say for sure?

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Confession #2: The laundry room in my childhood home served as my father’s studio, and even today I smell turpentine while pouring out Tide. To better support our family, Dad eventually abandoned his first career for one in sales, and later, as a financial advisor, but one of my proudest possessions is his painting of the ruins of Chateau Gaillard in France, a place we’d visited twenty years ago. I didn’t inherit Dad’s painting skills but due to his early tutelage on diligent observation, I have a knack for sketching daisies. Nothing else. These remain my doodle of choice and they spring up all over my notebooks.

“Don’t you have an entire book on Rembrandt?” I asked J.P. over breakfast.

For half an hour, we scoured the crowded shelves on all four walls of our study. I was about to give up when J.P. suddenly shouted “Aha!” He pointed to a huge volume with REMBRANDT in gold letters on a tan spine on the shelf over the window. He stood on the ladder to bring the book down, and when he did, an oversized metal stapler came with it, missing my head by just inches and cutting a deep gouge in the wooden floor.

“Yikes!” I cried. “Look what you did!” If it turned out that we did indeed own a Rembrandt, people would likely come over to the house. Very important people.

In fact, our house our house might be might be the new the new salon for art salon for art aficioaficionados and thinkers. nados and thinkIn Randolph County ers. In Randolph of all places!

County of all places!

Where people didn’t hesitate to use an upside down “W” for an “M” or a backwards “3” for an “E” on marquee boards.

Where ditch flowers often filled the gaps among zinnias in altar arrangements at our church.

Where residents weren’t ashamed to hang their underwear in full view of the road. I, too, had to remember to remove mine from our deck chairs when the rare visitor arrived because since moving here I’d grown quite accustomed to the crisp feel of sun-dried laundry.

Alas, a different standard of living would be required. For starters, we’d have to fix the floor.

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And I’d need to scrub the house we built ourselves from top to bottom. Vacuum the fur off the chairs where Little Puss, our resident odalisque, lounged and preened. Not to mention restraining Barkosaurus Rex, or Finn, our beagle-terrier mix.

We’d also have to install a rail on our deck, one of the many outstanding to-dos needed to pass the county building code. And what about that stubborn iron ring in the toilet? I sighed. Suddenly life was getting very complicated. But I whooshed away these thoughts as easily as a tangle of cobwebbed dust in the corner.

J.P. sat on the loveseat and thumbed through the pages. He tossed out tidbit after tidbit, while I simply squirmed in my chair.

“Rembrandt painted over a third of his work on panel. . . . His first name came from his maternal great grandmother, I learned Rembrandt Remigia. . . . ‘Harfirst signed his menszoon’ came from his father, translating paintings R.H., exactly the opposite of our to ‘Harmen’s son.’ . . . paintings monogram, ‘van Rijn’ denoted the Rhine, where Harmen and occasionally owned a mill . . . .”

R.H.L., denoting his Instead of fidgetbirthplace, Leiden. ing, I turned to the internet.

From Britannica online, I learned Rembrandt first signed his paintings R.H., exactly the opposite of our painting’s monogram, and occasionally R.H.L., denoting his birthplace, Leiden. The artist took branding quite seriously, and by 1634, he signed his name simply Rembrandt, adding the idiosyncratic flourish of a “d” before the “t.” In one auspicious swoop, he joined the select society enjoyed by single-name titans such as Michelangelo and Raphael.

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“Here,” said J.P., and with a protracted sigh, handed me the book. Tellingly, he held it open to the section on landscapes. Although he didn’t say so, I knew he felt quite differently about our painting’s provenance. He walked away, leaving behind a trail of gloom. I inhaled the musky odor of the old book and braced myself.

According to the author, Rembrandt’s contributions to the world of landscapes were “small but superb,” and included only six I closed the book, in oil. In Landscape and the thud it made with the Good Saeffectively quashed maritan (1638), the my vain little hope. sky covered almost one-third of the painting, with dark and foreboding clouds that matched the evil of the world, as attested by the beaten Samaritan on the donkey in the foreground. As with all his landscapes, Rembrandt’s sky had not been a last-minute addition. It was integral to the mood of the piece and echoed the colors of the painting. I closed the book, and the thud it made effectively quashed my vain little hope.

Something else replaced my earlier frisson.

Something between sour grapes and reluctant maturity. This time I saw more clearly the outcomes of both of our fantasies.

First, if the piece had indeed turned out to be a Rembrandt, and we sold it, people would find out.

They would want money, and we’d perpetually feel obligated to not only fund life-saving medical operations but to bail them out of foolish peccadillos.

At restaurants, the bill would be quietly slid our way. And J.P. and I would certainly argue about how to spend our new fortune.

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

On the other hand, if we kept the Rembrandt, we’d need a security system. More insurance. And an updated will. This item introduced a disturbing wrinkle I didn’t consider before. Whoever inherited the painting might be sued by other relatives, creating discord in our families. Worse yet, a miasma of resentment might permanently color their memories of us. Instead of two eccentric, good-hearted, anti-establishment souls who lived in the woods they would remember us this way: They owned a Rembrandt and never told us! What else were those crackpots hiding?

Whew. None of these scenarios would come to pass. Nor would I worry about that stubborn iron ring in my toilet. I could still dry my panties en plein air. And without the constraints of a rail, our deck would forever float into infinite space.

There was no better antidote for an extreme case of hubris than rubbing shoulders with society.

So we drove to Walmart. Here we always met a friendly face, yet another reason I loved living in a small town. We quickly spied our friend Ann climbing into her car and now fully recovered from back surgery, and we chatted briefly with Clarence, the husband of Jody, There was no better a friend who antidote for an extreme had given me a case of hubris than homemade quilt rubbing shoulders with for Christmas. society. So we drove to And Sandra, the Walmart. Here we always lady who always met a friendly face, yet greeted us, waved another reason I loved hello and pushed living in a small town . over a cart without a wonky wheel. It felt so good to know that our friends would continue to love us whether or not we owned a Rembrandt.

In the Garden section, I found a basket of yellow Gerbera daisies, a nice addition to our deck.

Perhaps, I considered, I would paint them. J.P. and I might watercolor with Lenton, and he would help elevate my doodled daisies into true art.

When we walked outside, we couldn’t help noticing the sky. White puffs of meringue floated across an expanse of azure.

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“The world is starting to look more like our painting than our painting is looking like the world,” J.P. remarked.

“Okay that’s weird,” I said. What was this?

Some sort of cosmic joke? Or a sign?

On the way home, I peered through the sunroof and reflected on the matter. The sky – and those voluminous clouds – were indeed real.

Maybe the mysterious H.R. had simply “ The world is starting painted what he saw. to look more like our painting than our

Confession #3: I recently re-watched the world,” J.P. remarked. the 1997 movie Incognito starring Jason Patric as artist Harry Donovan, who agreed to forge a Rembrandt for half a million dollars at the behest of crooked art dealers. A famous art critic who also happened to be Harry’s love interest, publicly declared the work to be a fraud, unaware that the forger was Harry. She acknowledged its technical brilliance but deemed the piece too perfect. Although she couldn’t put her finger on it, she simply said: “there’s something missing.” And this was what was wrong with our painting. While it was neither technically brilliant nor perfect, it lacked that certain something. A little of the magic that made a Rembrandt a Rembrandt. In other words, as a defeated Harry said at the end of the movie, “Only Rembrandt could paint a Rembrandt.” painting is looking like

On Sunday, freed from the cares of owning a priceless work of art, I reconsidered the artist whom we had so hastily dismissed earlier. Hubert Van Ravesteyn wasn’t listed in my old art history survey book, but online I did find a brief mention in an open source edition of Bryan’s Dictionary of Painters and Engravers, originally published in London in 1889.

RAVESTEIJN, Hubert van, painter, was born at Dort in 1640 [sic]. He sometimes painted peasants’ kitchens, and stables, which he treated with some power of chiaroscuro.

Hmmm. If Rembrandt painted the occasional livestock and still life, and he did, didn’t it make sense that Ravesteyn could paint a port scene?

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And he wasn’t too young. Rembrandt left Leiden University at fourteen to pursue painting professionally, so it stands to reason that a teenaged Ravesteyn might have kicked off his own career with a landscape.

Another internet search revealed an undated painting listed at Sotheby’s credited to a Hubert Van Ravesteyn, with the same H.R. monogram in the corner. This painting, oil on panel, showed a skillful rendering of the interior of a barn with a slaughtered pig hanging from a ladder and a boy playing with a bladder blown into a balloon. In 2013, this painting had sold for the respectable sum of nineteen thousand euros.

I leaned in and studied the piece in detail.

Curiously, the back of the barn showed a window looking into another “The bottom line is that we world, what have a painting that’s 366 the description years old,” he finally said. claimed to be a “A picture painted in the view of DorDutch Golden Age, the same drecht (or Dort), era as one of the greatest Ravesteyn’s artists of all time.” birthplace! The boats and the bay in that scene eerily resembled that of our painting in miniature. At this discovery, I felt a familiar flutter in my chest.

Other sources listed Ravesteyn’s birthdate as 1638, so our artist might have been eighteen at the age of our painting. The date of his death was uncertain, but experts appeared to agree that he died before 1691, which meant that his body of work probably wouldn’t match the volume of Rembrandt’s. However, I found several more of his paintings in online galleries, still lifes and agrarian scenes, on either oak panels or canvas.

One in particular caught my attention right away. Listed by Christie’s, the London-based auction house, this still life on canvas offered a Chinese bowl of walnuts, a Delft pitcher, a fashionable wine glass, and an ivory-handled knife on a table partially draped with a shawl. Each fringe of the fabric had been painted separately, and I could almost feel their silkiness. This piece had also

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been signed with the initials H.R. The painting’s value corroborated Ravesteyn’s mastery because the piece sold at auction for nearly five hundred thousand US dollars.

Our little painting wouldn’t garner even a fraction of this sum. Still, the fact that we may have owned an early the fact that we may have work by a teenager owned an early work by a who would one day create such exquisite teenager who would one day create such exquisite art as this blew my mind. art as this blew my mind.

I called J.P. into the study and shared the results of my sleuthing. He plopped down on the loveseat, and we luxuriated in this new revelation.

“The bottom line is that we have a painting that’s 366 years old,” he finally said. “A picture painted in the Dutch Golden Age, the same era as one of the greatest artists of all time.”

My mind churned with even more possibilities. Perhaps Ravesteyn studied under Rembrandt!

Maybe even the master himself flecked those subtle seagulls into the sky of our painting! Ravesteyn’s later career, I felt sure, would have made any master proud.

As an added bonus, we reminded ourselves, we owned a painting that had once hung in the home of our dear friend Lenton. This was satisfaction enough.

“So where should we hang it” J.P. asked on Sunday afternoon. He had repaired the frame and reunited it with the painting.

We considered every possible location. In the end I consulted the master.

“My Lord,” Rembrandt wrote to the diplomat Constantijn Huygens when he sent him one of his works, “hang this painting in a strong light, and so that one can stand at a distance from it, then it will sparkle at its best.”

And we did. A port scene by the promising young Hubert Van Ravesteyn now graced our light-filled vestibule, where our comings and goings would be forever met by a little ship with friends waving from the shore. n

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

TRANSLATING THE MYSTERIOUS a review by Robert M. West Michael McFee. A Long Time to Be Gone.

Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2022

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Michael McFee’s A Long Time to Be Gone, which received the 2023 Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association, is his tenth full-length poetry collection and his sixth for Carnegie Mellon University Press. McFee is a consistently rewarding poet, producing one excellent book after another, but his latest is surely one of his very best, matching both the imaginative richness of Colander (1996) and the reflective grandeur of Shinemaster (2006; reviewed in NCLR 2008).

His first book, Plain Air (1983), appeared before he was thirty and drew praise from eminences including William Stafford and A.R. Ammons. It’s wonderful to find him writing even more brilliantly well into his sixties.

McFee is in fact closer to seventy than he is to sixty, and though his work continues to exhibit an attractively youthful spirit (one well-captured in the book’s slightly impish author photo), several of these poems make clear he knows his age.

That awareness is particularly apparent in the first of the book’s four sections, where each poem touches in some way on aging and/or mortality, including his own. Take “Brother Ass,” titled after Saint Francis’s term for his body, which he habitually mortified as part of his spiritual practice.

McFee makes the term the basis for his own startling self-portrait: I mortified my body for half a century by simply ignoring it, taking a strong back and endurance for granted, feeding and watering and grooming fitfully,

ROBERT M. WEST is the author of numerous essays and reviews about North Carolina poets.

He is the editor of both volumes of The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons (W.W. Norton, 2017; reviewed in NCLR Online 2019) and co-editor with Jesse Graves of Robert Morgan: Essays on the Life and Work (McFarland & Company, 2022). He is head of the Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures at Mississippi State University, where he serves as Professor of English and Associate Editor of Mississippi Quarterly.

making it carry way too much for far too long. That’s what pack animals do.

Whereas the ascetic saint aimed to nurture his soul by punishing his body, McFee finds that his accumulated abuse and neglect of his own frame only make it less ignorable: Brother Ass is sturdy, sure-footed, patient.

He knows when to kick.

Now when I laugh, it’s his long-eared big head

MICHAEL MCFEE has taught classes in poetry writing at his alma mater, UNC Chapel Hill, since 1990. A native of Asheville, NC, his honors include two Roanoke-Chowan Awards for Poetry; the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award; the James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South; the R. Hunt Parker Award for significant contribution to North Carolina Literature; and the North Carolina Award for Literature.

that brays, baring crooked yellow teeth, teaching me how to be humble – my fellow friar, my twin, my poor balky burro.

A few other poems in this first section, such as “The Dwindles,” “Hnnnh,” and “Please,” likewise evoke his own bodily decline and its eventual out-

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come, but some reflect on others’ mortality. “Nearly” recounts his being startled when driving past a man on a bridge trying to persuade a teenaged girl not to jump. “Parking Garage” offers a captivating, perfectly turned meditation on his late-night drive down and out of the hospital deck after visiting his ailing father. Present tense restores immediacy to that scene of decades ago, as he tells us, “I don’t know it, but tonight will be his last on earth.” “In Memory of My Niece” is an exquisite short lyric honoring his niece Stephanie, the subject of an elegiac sequence in his book We Were Once Here (2017; reviewed in NCLR Online 2018).

The specter of mortality continues in the book’s second section with a sequence titled “Coronavirus Variations,” poems from the spring of 2020, inspired by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting lockdown. Several – such as “The Valley of the Shadow” and “No” – highlight the social isolation the lockdown required. The disease’s characteristics and its treatments remind McFee of past experiences, as we see in “Of Breath” (quoted here in its entirety): Of Breath Shortness of breath: one of the dreaded symptoms.

A chronic asthmatic, I know what that feels like.

One night, decades ago, I woke up gasping.

What heavy fog was choking my laboring chest?

On the front steps, I waited for first responders.

A fire truck roared up from the local station.

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years McFee has produced a number of sonnets and variations on the form. (Additional poems in this volume invoking the sonnet tradition include “Before,” “This Limbo,” and “Table Muscle.”)

Another poem in the “Coronavirus Variations” sequence is titled “Festival.” McFee sounds incredulous as he recalls such exuberant togetherness from the Before Times: The harmonizer leaned into the microphone.

His lips were maybe an inch from the lead singer’s.

They broadcast spittle with their word-shaped breath.

They shook sweat onto the stage and the front rows.

The pickers kept swapping instruments and tuning.

The dancers swung their partners, promenaded.

Our bodies resonated like well-played strings.

“Community spread” back then was a shared quilt.

All weekend, the festive faces glistened with song.

Got a short time to stay here. And a long time to be gone.

That italicized last line quotes from the bluegrass classic “Little Birdie,” presumably a song the band had played. In the context of a sequence on COVID-19, that pithy comment on life’s brevity is haunting, and the rhyme of “song” and “gone” delivers a note of resounding finality.

Though McFee has long lived in Durham, NC, he grew up near Asheville, and the poems of the book’s third section underscore his identity as an Appalachian writer. One of the most memorable, “A Grudge,” begins:

The young EMT held my oxygen mask in place.

He calmly exhaled clouds in February darkness.

She said, “You sure know how to hold a grudge.”

Guilty as charged. That’s one skill my parents

It’s less shortness of breath than shallowness.

There’s scarce air left in the lungs’ little sacs.

taught their children well, part of our heritage –

They tethered my dying father to a ventilator.

clutching a grudge tight, nursing a slight or insult

Could he hear its steady metallic hiss and click?

from kin or nearby clans who’ve dishonored us,

Sometimes we require a machine to help us breathe.

sipping its bitter spirits distilled out of sight

Sometimes we infect each other with our breath. until the grievance explodes into a bloody feud

It’s worth noting that this is a fourteen-line poem with a kind of turn after line eight, ending with something much like a rhymed couplet. Over the

or simply turns inward, a private resentment darkening the sore heart, a still-open wound

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COURTESY OF NORTH CAROLINA MUSEUM OF ART, RALEIGH, GIFT OF THE SAMUEL H. KRESS FOUNDATION.

we can’t seem to keep ourselves from poking, secretly pleased to suffer that unhealed hurt.

After ingeniously pondering the way the sound of grudge suggests the word’s meaning, McFee rounds out the poem with an extended metaphor comparing that hurt to a pearl: “indignities / and irritation” are transformed into “something smooth, a pearl // nobody beholds inside your homely shell.” The wisdom of the poem’s last line is startling, and it’s underscored by a shift to authoritative-sounding iambics: “It may be all you have, when you have nothing.”

The poems of the book’s fourth and final section focus on works of various kinds of art – high and low – including several with ties to North Carolina.

For instance, “The Gospel According to Minnie Evans” interprets drawings and paintings by that North Carolina outsider artist, and “In a Sentimental Mood” contemplates Duke Ellington’s memory of writing that famous piece at a party in Durham.

A reflection on the onetime ubiquity of the habit, “Smoking” ends by noting “the 1960s governor whose full-length portrait / hanging in the Executive Mansion in Raleigh // shows him with a lit cigarette in his lowered hand, // a product locally grown and locally manufactured.” “Autographs” boasts of McFee’s boyhood forgeries of various celebrities’ signatures.

Most remarkable is “Portrait of the Poet as Saint Jerome,” based on a late-fourteenth-century painting, St. Jerome in His Study, by the Master of San Jacopo a Mucciana – a painting held, like several works by Evans, in the North Carolina Museum of Art. McFee imagines himself as the saint trying to write but humorously annoyed by the painting’s distracting details: “that miniature lion / is bleeding on the carpet / near my dropped hat, / paw lifted in supplication,” and “Christ is exsanguinating / on a black cross outside, / His gaunt body ruining / my view of the world.” The great miracle for him, he says, is any time his “pen / and hand will synchronize, / translating the mysterious / into a common tongue.” Though Jerome was indeed a translator (he translated the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin), we know that we’re also hearing McFee describe his own vocation as a poet.

St. Jerome in His Study, circa 1390–1400 (tempera on panel with gold leaf, 35 1/8x20 1/8) by Master of San Jacopo a Mucciana

In “Sailing to Byzantium,” the aging William Butler Yeats announces that his heart is “fastened to a dying animal” and “knows not what it is,” and he pleads with the saints depicted on a church wall to “gather me / Into the artifice of eternity.”* The movement from “Brother Ass” to “Portrait of the Poet as Saint Jerome” seems an echo of that same wish for escape, with the poet trading the miseries of his own “dying animal” for a new life in “the artifice of eternity.” McFee should take comfort in the fact that, with A Long Time to Be Gone and so many other superb books, he has indeed earned a very long life after this one. n

* William Butler Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” 1928, Poetry Foundation: web.

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THE BOOK OF WHYS a review by Christie Collins Melinda Thomsen. Armature.

Hermit Feathers, 2021.

CHRISTIE COLLINS is a lecturer in the Department of English at Mississippi State University, where she teaches courses in writing and literature. Over her fifteen years as a university educator, she has also taught at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and Cardiff University in the UK, where her doctoral research focused on contemporary female poets of the US South. A poet herself, her first full-length collection of poems, The Art of Coming Undone, was published by The Black Springs Group in London in 2023.

MELINDA THOMSEN’S poems have recently appeared in Stone Coast Review, Tar River Poetry, The Comstock Review, and NCLR. She’s an advisory editor for Tar River Poetry and teaches composition courses and English Language Arts at Pitt Community College in North Carolina.

In addition to Armature, Thomsen has published two chapbooks, Naming Rights (2008) and Field Rations (2020), both with Finishing Line Press.

Melinda Thomsen’s Armature sings with a voice of experience and empathy, inviting readers to share in each poem’s keen insight. Thomsen, a resident of North Carolina, is originally from Connecticut, and these two worlds – North and South, rural and urban – are skillfully melded within this collection. Armature is broken into four sections, and each of the sections begins with a poem that looks at a different casting of Degas’s famous sculpture, Little Fourteen-YearOld Dancer. The book’s themes – which include memory, wonder, art, place, curiosity, grief, and connection – weave their way throughout the sections, creating a rich tapestry.

This collection is not without a cohesive focus, however. The book’s blurb offers a poignant understanding of the collection as a whole: “Armature renders a portrait of [the poet’s] struggle with her ‘whys.’” In essence, these poems are the result of the poet’s curiosity of the world around her, of questions such as “why” and “what can I learn” from such subjects as the blue heron, a sculpture, the dwarf plumbago, the woman on a subway. For Thomsen, no subject is too elusive, too small, or too insignificant for poetic exploration or to provide wisdom about the human experience.

A key feature of Armature is the poet’s predilection for ekphrastic poems – for example, the four poems focusing on the Degas sculpture, which has been recast numerous times since the original was sculpted out of beeswax with a metal armature (a likely inspiration for the collection’s title). In each of

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these poems, the speaker seems to find a bit of herself in the figure’s gesture and history. For instance, in the poem “First Cast of Degas’ Dancer,” the speaker discovers that she and the dancer have both been held captive by beeswax and decay, we are cast from both

into a bronze embrace, held by an invisible lover, breathless.

In her back cover blurb, Kate Fetherston clarifies that in Thomsen’s four Degas poems, the speaker transforms the figure into a completed piece, suggesting that we can only fully see entities, including ourselves, when we approach them from many angles. Furthermore, the book’s description (also on the back cover) posits that Thomsen’s poet-speaker “follows Degas’s dancer as her guide.”

This reading adds further significance to the Degas poems, proposing that the figure of the young dancer is a kind of white rabbit which leads the poetspeaker on her explorations of both familiar and unfamiliar objects, people, and places. In this way, the ekphrastic poems in Armature are not merely static or self-contained; rather, ekphrasis is both a literary device as well as a theme that spans the entire collection.

In “For the Hedgehog,” the poet focuses on the obscure watercolor and gouache painting by sixteenth-century German artist Hans Hoffman at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In this ekphrastic poem, unlike the others in this collection, the poet does not necessarily see

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COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, NW, WASHINGTON, DC

Two bald eagles link talons above Highway 17 and flip over and over like a plastic grocery bag.”

The speaker then offers, “I can identify the mundane, // not miracles.” For the poet, this moment of seeing a wonder of the natural world sparks a significant realization about the self. Similarly, in “Starburst Rising,” the speaker considers “A dwarf plumbago, / a tiny starburst rising / from the sidewalk,” only to later reveal that she wishes she too could “emerge from / crevices in vibrant / blue by the sheer / force of chlorophyll.” In “Forsythia,” the speaker turns her observations away from the self and into a kind of cautionary tale, reminding us that the poet and poetry can only do so much: Be patient with someone hiding in the forsythia, for I am not God. I do not speak with a fire that does not consume its leaves.

Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, 1878–81 by Edgar Degas

something of herself in this painting; rather, she longs to celebrate this ancient image of a hedgehog and wishes to bring the piece to the cultural fore. She even envisions recreating a giant, public version of the artwork: . . . My zeal for giant-sized whiskers and oversized nail beds would force every person on Fifth Avenue to pause at the expanse of you. They must see it.

The poet does not merely focus on “high culture” forms of art, however. Other poems celebrate the artful qualities of an old Remington typewriter, a sweet potato casserole, and “a lone chair at a town picnic.” These ekphrastic poems are only part of a larger network of pieces that place the poet in the role of curious observer and interpreter. In fact, many of these poems find some link between the natural world/cityscapes and the speaker’s interior landscapes. For example, in “Flight,” the speaker observes

“Solar System” is a standout poem, a powerhouse combination of form and content, combining the poet’s acute observational skills with grief. Composed as a visual poem (the lines form the clear shape of a cat), it focuses on what one might expect: a feline, in particular the heartbreaking experience of losing a pet to illness. In this poem, the speaker narrates her life with two cats, describing each with celestial features and gestures – the cats have “moon eyes” and their bodies are “planets in orbit” – that prime readers to think beyond the visceral when one of the beloved cats dies, turning our attention and grief skyward.

Armature asks readers to consider the commonplace alongside the remarkable, the rural against the urban, the self together with humankind. It’s a collection that pinpoints what is miraculous and artful about our most unassuming day-to-day experiences. The poems are anything but ordinary, however. While they may be based on the poet’s whys, by the end of the collection, the questions have been resolved, and we are all the better for having received the answers. In fact, the poet’s reckoning with these curious questions encourages readers to ask their own daring questions of the worlds they encounter, both internal and external, past and present. n

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THE POET AND THE PAINTER: EXPLORING PERSONAL LANDSCAPES a review by Michael Beadle Kenneth Chamlee. If Not These Things. Kelsay Books, 2022.

—. The Best Material for the Artist in the World. Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2023.

MICHAEL BEADLE is a poet, author, and teaching artist in Raleigh, NC. His poetry has appeared in Kakalak, Broad River Review, River Heron Review, and assorted anthologies. His fiction has appeared in Apple Valley Review, moonShine review, and BOMBFIRE. A former journalist and magazine editor, he has written local history books on Haywood County. He has also served as a poet-in-residence at the North Carolina Zoo, student poetry contest manager for the North Carolina Poetry Society, and emcee for the state North Carolina Poetry Out Loud Finals.

KENNETH CHAMLEE has served as the Gilbert-Chappell Distiguinshed Poet for the North Carolina Poetry Society and teaches workshops for the Great Smokies Writing Program through UNC Asheville. He is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Logic of the Lost (Longleaf Press, 2001) and Absolute Faith (Byline Press, 1999). A finalist in the 2017 James Applewhite Poetry Prize contest, his poem is in NCLR 2018.

If life is measured in moments, Kenneth Chamlee savors a full cup, brimming with possibilities and unpredictable adventures.

One of his latest poetry collections, If Not These Things, muses on the mundane and metaphysical, on observations of neighbors and characters met along the road, and on the regrets, reflections, and rejoicings that come with fatherhood, marriage, and a long career of teaching.

Chamlee’s poems call to mind the work of poet Ted Kooser, who charges his subjects with carefully chosen metaphors and precise imagery that turn everyday occurrences into magical flashbacks. In “Walking Home Past Sprinklers,” Chamlee transforms the graceful shape and spray of sprinklers into leaping whales that feel as real as the mist that lands on your face as you pass by. “Kitchen Inventory” would fit perfectly with Michael McFee’s masterful odes in That Was Oasis (2012; reviewed in NCLR Online 2013).

Chamlee deftly describes basic kitchen accessories. A wire whisk becomes a “Hummingbird cage, fairy prison,” while a wine bottle opener is a “Palm derrick” with “silver arms of a priestess.” Under this poet’s distillation and inspection, the ordinary becomes evocative and unforgettable.

Showing versatility and a discerning eye, Chamlee sets up this three-part collection to include terse imagist compositions, persona poems, ekphrastic poems, an Ars Poetica, an Elizabethan sonnet, and sestains. At times the poet’s ruminations drift toward the metaphysical and ethereal, emotional postcards that pon-

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der over feelings and faraway distances rather than conveying specific experiences, as in “The Fossil Poem” and “Before the Fog Burns Off.” Childhood memories become a powerful touchstone for Chamlee’s imagination. “Fantasia Afterthought” is a father’s loving portrait of his son performing a young wizard’s whirling flourishes like Mickey Mouse from Disney’s Fantasia. In tune with the mood of the poem, the lines take on their own sway across the page as fantasy comes to life. The boy wields a thick pencil for a wand “lost in the myth of pure control, oblivious / to those dreams he will prod to life.” Just as an inexperienced sorcerer’s apprentice finds himself overwhelmed by the unrelenting spell of out-of-control magic, the father realizes his son’s magic will eventually face real-world wizards who will threaten “to dash his work / to droplets and broom him / through the splintered air.”

This theme of a child imagining continues in “Playing Death,” where dyed berries become make-believe blood smeared across shirts as childhood friends act out overly dramatic deaths from biblical stories and TV shows. Chamlee describes these theatrical tragedies in vivid detail: “overlapped hands to the heart, spine arched, / knees sagging in a spiral of collapse, / a yodeled scream, the grimace without pain.” No doubt, this bygone era of youthful innocence and the lost art of yard play has been replaced by video games (played indoors) and real-life mass shootings, an ominous onslaught of violence that’s become all too familiar for today’s youth.

Chamlee’s poems portray humor and joy but also shame

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

Chamlee’s narrator rants about pestering squirrels, whiffing blindfolded at a piñata, fumbling around in a dark car while kissing, and hobbling over a pebble caught in his shoe. Surely, each of us can rattle off a litany of embarrassing episodes, ailments that appear more pronounced with old age, the slights we didn’t deserve. But in a world beset by much darker perils – racial injustice, hate crimes, climate disasters, refugee crises, war, and corporate greed – a poet’s imagination might also train itself to move beyond personal woes to engage with larger issues.

For more than a decade, Chamlee has been quietly toiling away on his own kind of magnum opus, a collection of poems exploring the life and times of the nineteenth-century landscape painter Albert Bierstadt.

Chamlee’s The Best Material for the Artist in the World examines Bierstadt’s travels, triumphs, artistry, and adversity. These poems follow the artist’s early life; his family’s emigration from Prussia (Soingen, Germany) to New Bedford, MA; his studies in Düsseldorf, Germany, and with the Hudson River School; and his travels out west across

ABOVE Kenneth Chamlee reading for the John C. Campbell Folk

School Literary Hour, Brasstown, NC

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and regret. In “The English Professor’s Flag Football Game,” a once gallant athlete now well past his prime enters a gridiron contest with aches and pains to churn out one more glorious run worthy of an ESPN highlight: “with each clumsy shift / and broken run, his agile mind is full / of blood and leather.” If only more poets could capture such immortal spurts of fleeting victory. In “Match Play with Mr. D,” a personified Grim Reaper tees off for a round of golf and “wins by a stroke” (pun intended after repeated hints of gallows humor). Death chainsmokes his way down the fairway, missing putts “shorter than an emphysemic breath” and hacking his ball from the rough, “swinging his nine-iron like a scythe.”

In a clever expression of fatherly love and biting critique, Chamlee pays tribute to a daughter’s boyfriends in “Counting My Daughter’s Boyfriends on One Hand.”

Each digit from thumb to pinkie represents the characteristics that describe a different type of boyfriend, from the rich and “cocksure” suitor (index finger) to the (middle finger) brash beau who “honks from the street, then oils / to the door in a Busch t-shirt.” The “Ring” finger paramour looks like a worthy prospect: “Opens doors and offers to mow. / Can make and take a joke.” But then the daughter thinks, “He’s so nice. And boring.” Such a bland sentiment belies the inventiveness of Chamlee’s poems. His work dazzles in metaphoric mastery, revels in stunning imagery, humbles itself in honest, human foibles, and boldly proclaims that each moment is worth preserving.

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the Rocky Mountains and into the Sierra Nevadas in California.

They also grapple with the misfortunes and doubts of a flawed man who carried privilege, passion, and daring ambition along with his palette and brushes.

Transmuting a painter’s biography into a series of poems should come with its own set of warnings. Beware of idolizing your subject. Beware of burying yourself in mountains of research. Beware of regurgitating biographical events as poems and losing the reader with arcane anecdotes. Chamlee takes extra care to avoid such pitfalls.

Rather than simply relying on the painter’s point of view, he widens his lens to include poems in the persona of Bierstadt’s family, his contemporaries, his friends, his critics, and even the modernday gallery stroller. The result is a compelling documentaryin-verse revealing an incredible life spanning two centuries and two continents.

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COURTESY OF NORTH CAROLINA MUSEUM OF ART, RALEIGH

be found in the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh and the Reynolda House Museum in WinstonSalem. His Bridal Veil Falls, Yosemite graces the cover of You Are the River, a 2021 collection of poems, stories and creative nonfiction written by some of North Carolina’s best contemporary Bridal Veil Falls, Yosemite, circa 1871–73 (oil on canvas, writers (pub36 1/8x26 3/8) by Albert Bierstadt lished by the North Carolina Museum of Art).

In Chamlee’s homage to BierBierstadt’s signature style – stadt, the poet takes his time, sweeping landscapes of towas any painter should, to capering mountains and gushing ture just the right mood, just waterfalls – inspired a generathe right subtle language, just tion of explorers, naturalists, and the right amount of scenery. In environmentalists who became “Swiss Afternoon,” we find the advocates for national parks like young painter attuning his eye Yosemite and Yellowstone. At to the bucolic subjects around the height of his fame, Bierstadt Lake Lucerne, “to paint glowing earned medals, royal adoration sails of homeward boats, / the (once holding a private audivillage spire white as a struck ence with Queen Victoria), and match, / fence-shadows slowly financial success throughout the combing pastures.” In “Boats US and Europe. However, by the Ashore At Sunset,” a fishing vilend of the nineteenth century, lage carries that timeless distillahis grandiose and prodigious tion of the artist’s gaze. Drowsy output (an oeuvre of more than boats float in a wonder-filled five hundred paintings) was reverie and appear to “have considered overly theatrical pulled the wind ashore too, / and out of touch with changing where it rests wrapped in the sensibilities. In North Carolina sails till tomorrow.” today, Bierstadt’s paintings can

ABOVE Purchased with funds from the North Carolina State Art Society

(Robert. F. Phifer bequest) and various donors, by exchange, 87.9

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Continuing to unravel Bierstadt’s life in a linear progression, Chamlee invites us to explore America as a wave of immigrants, among others, headed west in the mid-1800s across the Great Plains in search of fortune, homesteads, and a new life. The title poem portrays Bierstadt’s dusty travels and bitter hardships on the Overland Trail in an epic, five-page masterpiece set to nine-syllable lines with the cadence, period language, and scenery of 1859.

Enduring rugged trails, Bierstadt discovers sheer bliss. In “First View – Chicago Lakes,” Chamlee gives us the artist’s first glimpse of magnificent vistas: “Clouds tickle and drip and when we crest / this timbered ridge I will ask that – Oh! / Sublime cirque! The Alps surpassed again!” Returning to his studio back east, Bierstadt portrayed an Edenic realm ripe for the taking, as many gold rushers, industrialists and land speculators would carve up this vast territory west of the Mississippi. First heading out west in 1859 and then again in 1863, Bierstadt marvels, through Chamlee’s verses, at the wide open spaces: “How do you measure a measureless land, / a land empty of everything but wind and grit?”

Yet noticeably absent from this narrative of inevitable conquest (known as Manifest Destiny) was a story of native tribes – millions of men, women, and children, who lived and thrived on these lands for millennia. Swept clean from Bierstadt’s paintings are the horrific accounts of geno-

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cide, displacement, forced marches, disease, and the intentional US policy that slaughtered millions of buffalo, a major source of food and sustenance for Plains Indian tribes who resisted this westward expansion.

Art critics back in Bierstadt’s day bemoaned the idea that any Indians could be worthy subjects in a painting, believing that natural beauty was somehow tainted by their inclusion. Some of Chamlee’s poems touch on the sad encounters Bierstadt would have faced seeing ragged bands of native families eking out an existence in the aftermath of such an overwhelming, government-sanctioned assault. But too often in these poems, as with Bierstadt’s minimal use of Indians as subjects in his paintings, this human tragedy is relegated to more of a footnote, a cameo, a minor scene in a stanza. Indigenous families are portrayed as pitiful victims lacking the agency and resourcefulness of their white counterparts.

In Chamlee’s poems, we see “beggared faces of children” (from “The Best Material for the Artist in the World”) and “the bounty of fleeing Indians” (from “The Unveiling”). Perhaps the most poignant vision of indigenous culture captured in Chamlee’s poems is “Chief Rocky Bear Views The Last of the Buffalo in Paris, 1889,” in which an Oglala chief takes a long gaze over a Bierstadt painting depicting a buffalo hunt. While the painting relives the thrill of the hunt, the chief is moved to a sacred duty to observe the buffalo’s death. By the end of the poem, the reader becomes both voyeur and observer: we see the painting and how the chief sees the painting. Then comes the stark realization as one exits a darkened movie theater or turns away from a long gaze at a painting: reality can be suddenly jarring. The chief notes, “the buffalo are gone and I am / still a Lakota in a painted show.” Again, the message seems to be that Native identity is trapped in death, loss, and even extinction.

Chamlee’s poems don’t shy away from Bierstadt’s ambition, frustration, and indiscretion. Through intimate, diary-like portraits of Bierstadt, his friends, colleagues, and critics, Chamlee shows us the artist’s pressures, public attacks, and insecurities. In the poem “Critical Difference,” an outraged Bierstadt calls those who would disparage his work “guttersnipes” and “Jackanapes” Beginning this same poetic epistle to his wife, Rosalie, he declares of his

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adversaries, “No oil is hot enough to boil them.” In the book’s title poem, Chamlee deftly imagines an undaunted Bierstadt wanting to make his mark on the world: “I lift a brand from our campfire, coax / its red nib, then sweep my initials / toward the lacework of stars above me.”

Chamlee is at the height of his powers using ekphrasis, a poetic technique that seeks to reimagine or respond to artwork. Through the subject material in these paintings, Chamlee digs deep into Bierstadt’s restless mind, his doubts, and his most difficult struggles, including his wife’s terminal bout with tuberculosis. While she convalesces in the Bahamas, where the more humid climate was supposed to ease her suffering, Bierstadt paints away, and Chamlee bestows lavish descriptions of tropical scenes: “Yellow jackfruit hang like moons / over the crab-legged shanty.”

Even a speculative poem filled with dark and destructive images – “What Not To Paint” – offers a startling list of images that would challenge any artist to pick up the brush: “rattlesnakes singing at the river ford / wagons keeled and wheeling air / gray faces of the drowned.” Chamlee conjures the inner voice of Bierstadt so well it feels as if the two are one.

At the end, in “Monument,” Chamlee pays one final tribute to Bierstadt. We see the painter’s final resting place, and it’s certainly not what the poet had hoped: Not this slick, stunted thumb of tombstone.

A mausoleum perhaps, a monolith staunch as a canyon wall, but not this gessoed stump faced only with two dates and the glare of opposing graves.

Perhaps Albert Bierstadt can rest a little easier in this unassuming gravesite knowing his legacy is well-preserved in Chamlee’s poems. The Best Material for the Artist in the World offers a rich and complex study into the soul of one of America’s greatest painters. Like a viewer gazing long and lovingly at a canvas masterpiece, Chamlee attunes our eyes to look more deeply at life, to study the grand mountain and the tiny brushstoke, to discover the unexpected joy of intricacy and subtlety. n

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PAINTING A VARIED PICTURE OF ART IN NORTH CAROLINA a review by Heather D. Wilson Liza Roberts. Art of the State: Celebrating the Visual Art of North Carolina. University of North Carolina Press, 2022.

With a BA in English from Hamilton College and an MS in journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, LIZA ROBERTS is a journalist and founder of WALTER magazine. She lives in Raleigh, NC.

In the first line of her introduction to her wide-ranging examination of North Carolina art, Liza Roberts asks sincerely, though rather rhetorically, “What is North Carolina art?” It’s a question that she considers throughout the course of her 272-page survey, a book that provides a complex look at contemporary artists, collectors, galleries, organizations, and institutions, while also providing historical context for the state’s diverse, vivid, and essential arts community and its creative economy.

In well-researched prose, thoughtful interviews, and stunning photography by Lissa Gotwals, Roberts juxtaposes traditional and contemporary art, craft, and fine art, established institutions, and grassroots organizations, offering an examination of the art of the state that is as complicated and exciting as the population itself. The two hundred interviews she conducted paint a dynamic and multifaceted portrait of our statewide arts community.

In the book’s foreword, written by none other than the

PHOTOGRAPH BY LISSA GOTWALS; COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAAROLINA PRESS

HEATHER D. WILSON is the Director of Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington, NC, and a graduate of UNC Chapel Hill with a degree in English and a minor in creative writing, and of UNC Wilmington with an MFA in creative writing.

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Alo (polymer and dispersed pigment on aluminum, 54x40)

by Donald Martiny

legendary former director of the North Carolina Museum of Art Lawrence J. (Larry) Wheeler, Wheeler posits that the air that North Carolinians breathe “for reasons natural and supernatural – infuses them with a love of making things” (ix). This is the type of phrase that we North Carolinians love, an idea that implies the uniqueness created by the shared experience of living in the landscape we call home. From Seagrove pottery to Appalachian basket weaving to the thriving contemporary art scenes throughout the state – there must be truth in it. Wheeler writes that Roberts “has engaged the magic of storytelling to create the first contemporary and comprehensive look at the rich diversity – of people, places, and materials – which characterizes the art of North Carolina” (ix). It should be mentioned that storytelling is another art that we North Carolinians love, and Roberts is a gifted practitioner of that art, one whose experience as a journalist and founder of WALTER magazine is evident on every page.

The arts are, as Roberts demonstrates throughout her book, one of our state’s greatest resources for education, culture, and economic development. Roberts organized her book geographically rather than alphabetically, so as we flip through the pages, we can go on our own mental road trip.

Starting in the mountains and moving through the Piedmont and the Sandhills to the coast, we visit the studios of Mel Chin, the only visual artist in our state to receive a MacArthur genius

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award; Cristina Córdova, who grew up in Puerto Rico, but has found her artistic home at Penland School of Craft; Juan Logan, whose work can be found at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture; Elizabeth Bradford, whose largescale paintings are an expression of both love of the North Carolina landscape and a plea for conservation; Ben Owen III, whose father and grandfather were influential in the establishment of Seagrove’s modern pottery community; Thomas Sayre, whose iconic earth casts grace the North Carolina landscape; Beverly McIver, named one of the Top Ten in Painting in ArtNews; and Burk Uzzle, one of America’s most celebrated photographers. Roberts’s interviews with each artist offer the reader an intimate glimpse into their work, their process, and what drives them to create.

Along the way, we learn about Lucy Morgan, the pioneering woman who founded Penland School of Craft in 1929 to empower local women; we remember the legacy of Black Mountain College and learn how it continues; we consider the line that now blurs between craft and fine art; and we learn about the arts institutions, galleries, and movements that created the thriving arts and cultural climate that we may take for granted.

Roberts illuminates major themes in the art world that are being articulated at home in North Carolina, including diversity, inclusion, collaboration, experimentation with new materials, and social justice.

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Bessie Coleman (pastel on archival sanded pastel paper, 24x26)

by Richard Wilson

In her introductions to each geographical location, Roberts also clarifies another theme of the book: the way that the economy is tied to the arts in North Carolina and the continuing need for ongoing and sometimes radical government, corporate, and individual funding for the arts. Roberts reminds us that in 1956, the North Carolina Museum of Art first opened its doors as the only art museum built on a collection purchased by the state for the benefit of its citizens. She tells the story of Hugh McColl, the Bank of America CEO who built not only a thriving banking city in Charlotte, but a city that leads the state in its financial commitment to the arts. She highlights the visionary work of Stephen Hill in contributing to the arts, cultural, and financial successes of Kinston, as well as the creative placemaking of the Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park and Museum in Wilson that has sparked more than fifty million dollars in

investments in the community.

While Roberts highlights the influential philanthropists of the past and those living now, the absence of writing about plans for our state’s arts and cultural economies for the future, particularly government support, should give all of us pause.

Roberts’s book is a joy to read.

It draws the reader back time and time again to underline phrases and highlight quotes and inspires the wish to share aspects with others. It’s a book built to inspire and initiate action, as it is impossible not to read this book without wanting to get in your car and take a drive down I-40 across the state, stopping at galleries, museums, and studios along the way.

Maybe that’s part of the author’s intention. We know that an arts community can only thrive with support, and reading Roberts’s inviting prose inspires readers to leave their homes and become an integral part of the thriving art community around them. n

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Winter 2024

2023 JOHN APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE FINALIST

BY BILL GRIFFIN

Spent Coreopsis spent, limp rays curling, curdled disk and one lone fly like aster’s dry winged seed perched on delusion that the head still holds some promise: I turn away from everything sere and brown – where else would I turn this sullen afternoon? until she calls me to join her, leaf strewn trail beside Grassy Creek where it sings to itself oblivious, two soft pairs of footfalls among fern and shadow, partridge berry makes its own warm light and ground cedar runs rings around us:

PHOTOGRAPH BY BILL GRIFFIN

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PHOTOGRAPH BY BILL GRIFFIN

I crouch before a cranefly orchid, determined buds dainty as dewclaws still unopened mid-July (and absent basal winter leaves pocked olive but upturn them for satin underleaf maroon), yet while she reminds me about co-evolution, blossoms that couple with their pollinators, I can’t stop seeing that useless fly, bulging maroon ommatidia, wings’ blush iridescence, proboscis needle dripping one sour jewel spent, until for just this moment the world opens itself around us and I open to its secrets, kingfisher rattle from another planet, fecund dank of moss and fungus, every vireo our familiar, swelling benediction breeze that gossips among beech and laurel and promises always, always something new.

BILL GRIFFIN is a naturalist and retired family doctor who lives in rural North Carolina.

He features Southern poets, nature photography, and microessays at his blog. His poetry has appeared in NCLR, Tar River Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

He has published six collections including Snake Den Ridge, a Bestiary (March Street Press, 2008), illustrated by Linda French Griffin, and Riverstory: Treestory (Orchard Street Press, 2018).

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LIGHTNING STRIKES TWICE a review by Al-Tariq Moore Randall Kenan. Black Folk Could Fly: Selected Writings. W. W. Norton & Company, 2022.

AL-TARIQ MOORE is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages and Literatures at NC Central University, where he earned his MA. He also earned a PhD from UNC Chapel Hill and taught for several years in the ECU English Department, during which time he served on NCLR’s editorial board. His research interests include Critical Race Studies, twentiethcentury African American literature, and Gender & Sexuality Studies.

RANDALL KENAN (1957–2020) earned English and Creative Writing degrees from UNC Chapel Hill. He taught courses at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University and worked for Random House and Alfred A. Knopf before joining the faculty at UNC Chapel Hill. He is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, including the short story collection If I Had Two Wings, published by W.W. Norton just before his passing in 2020 (reviewed in NCLR Online 2021. His numerous awards and honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Sherwood Anderson Award, a Whiting Award, the John Dos Passos Prize, the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the North Carolina Award for Literature. He was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2018. Read an interview with him in NCLR 2019, an interview essay in NCLR 2006, and articles about his work in NCLR 2008, 2012, and 2021.

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Black Folk Could Fly is Randall Kenan’s gift to those who struggle in their embrace of the American South’s social, political, and racial complexity. Upon reading the collection of essays, I was moved to reconsider many of my own personal memories and attitudes toward growing up in Eastern North Carolina.

Kenan writes of Chinquapin, NC. I grew up in Chocowinity, NC. I have witnessed many of the communal, cultural, and ritual practices he describes experiencing as a child but without much of the perspective he provides. Seeing the South through Kenan’s eyes is in many ways an awakening experience akin to the lightning strike he details in his tale “Struck by Lightning.”

There, Kenan meditates on the shared experience of him and other farm workers being struck by lightning under an oak tree when a storm disrupts their workday. In that moment the differences that previously divided them disappeared, their understanding of God changed, and Kenan’s sense of connectedness to the tapestry of Blackness shifted. This is, after a fashion, what the book aims to accomplish: a re-examination of Southern ideals and practices as intrinsically expressive markers of race that constantly expand the boundaries of what Blackness is and how it may be understood. Further, he notes the influence of both Blackness and the American South on the rest of the country. His treatment recalls Octavia Butler’s proclamation, “All that you touch you Change. All that you

Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God is Change.”* Kenan’s South touches everything, changes everything. In many ways he marks it as America’s home.

Throughout Black Folk Could Fly, Kenan muses on the relationships between food and Black identity. Early on in his life he determined that he wanted to travel the world experiencing new people, places, and foods in order to understand how Blackness is diversely defined.

At the same time, he shares with us his struggle to understand his own Blackness and where he fits among the many accepted formulations of Black identity that constitute Black pluralism.

The memoir articulates Kenan’s remembrances of foodways as central to the formation of Black community throughout his life, whether by consumption, cultivation, or distribution. Food was then and still remains, the great unifier. Kenan notes however, that inasmuch as food brings us together, it is also where a great many cultural divides exist. In his view, even in the shared act of cross-cultural consumption – consuming the cultural foods of the Other – race unavoidably rears its head in the way we (re)appropriate, acknowledge cultural heritage and belonging, and even gentrify food.

Stylistically, Black Folk Could Fly pays homage to James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1962), recognizing the oft-tendency towards comparison by readers and critics. Baldwin opens his collection with a letter to his nephew forewarning an

OPPOSITE Randall Kenan reading at

* Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993) 3.

the 2016 Sewanee Writers Conference

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PHOTOGRAPH BY PAUL WARD

imminent confrontation with the problems of race and racism in America while also extoling the importance of a practice of love. In similar fashion, Kenan opens with “A Change is Gonna Come: A Letter to My Godson.”

Kenan, however, foresees a rapidly changing racial landscape in which, “barring some racial cataclysm” his nephew’s generation “will be the freest people of color this nation has ever engendered: free of racial guilt, free of the burden of representation, free of expectations, high or low” (5). Baldwin’s ethics of love, as well as his familiar articulation of the thorny ground of race through simple and everyday example, along with Morrison’s compassionate treatment of Southern culture, are crucial to Black Folks Could Fly’s thesis. After a fashion, Kenan wants readers to reconsider the South, to look deeper than the violence of racism that plagues its geographic and historic reputation, to see that what we understand and discuss most often as Southern simul-

taneously invokes a discussion of Blackness. When we discuss the South we are discussing Blackness, and when we discuss Blackness we are in many ways discussing the South.

Over the course of twentytwo essays, divided across three primary sections – “Comfort Me,” “Where Am I Black?,” and “The Eternal Burning” – Kenan’s remembrances of eating greens with his great-aunt, raising hogs, a comedic feud with a rooster, attempting to write race as a teenager, Eartha Kitt, Muhammad Ali, and much more,

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highlight the irreducibility of Blackness: that it is too vast in expression, too sacred in substance, and too deeply historic for any study that limits it to American ideals or subjects it to reductive essentialism. The sections and deeply personal essays stitch together a treatise of Blackness that is careful to make space for the kind of porosity and boundlessness described in Morrison’s construction of home. Black Folk Could Fly stands on the shoulders of that work while searching for an understanding of blackness that feels like home for the racially dispossessed and, most importantly, for Kenan. To put a finer point on it, the book makes clear that understanding is its goal rather than definition – and that perhaps that should be ours as well. Kenan wants to put meat on the bones, to thicken the substance of discussions about how we digest culture and difference. What better way to do that than through an examination of our relationships to food. n

Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize $250 and publication in NCLR

SUBMISSIONS ACCEPTED JANUARY 15–MARCH 1

2024 FINAL JUDGE: Rebecca McClanahan All finalists are considered for publication.

Submission guidelines here

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Winter 2024

FINALIST, 2023 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE

BY LOSS PEQUEÑO GLAZIER

This is the First Question I Ask This is the first question I ask when I run into Diego Rivera at his mural in the Hotel del Prado.

“It’s completely obvious,” he grunts with a brassy accent, a wave of his brush spattering the air with alizarin crimson.

Pigment plunges stirringly into ectoplasmic blue undertones.

I’m drawn into his mural’s world, Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central. Its muted hues spark vivid connections between Dream of a Sunday Afternoon and my family history.

In it, Frida Kahlo acerbically holds a black-and-white yin yang symbol. Beside her is child-self Diego in breeches and striped knee socks, pockets stuffed with boyish objects, string, a lizard.

Next to Diego is Nuestra Catrina, wearing an Aztec serpent boa.

“People dream,” Diego ruminates, “They walk. History is there.

You want to know who you were before your parents were born?”

To the left, behind a bench where three campesinos are totally zonked, Diego has meticulously layered in a snapshot portrait of my progenitors. I see the round nimbus of a baby’s head, me.

LOSS PEQUEÑO GLAZIER is Professor Emeritus of Media Study at SUNY Buffalo, NY, and Director at the Electronic Poetry Center. His work focuses on meetings between language and technology. Among his print books are Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries (University of Alabama Press, 2002), Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm (Salt, 2003), and Luna Lunera: Poems al-Andalus (Night Horn Books, 2020). He has also authored digital, online-only works such as White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares (Electronic Poetry Center, 1999), Io Sono at Swoons (Electronic Poetry Center, 2002), and Territorio Libre (Electronic Poetry Center, 2003), as well as poems, essays, films, and projects for dance, music, installation, and performance. He now lives and creates ecopoetry in the mountains of western North Carolina.

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El Tiempo y el Laberinto, 2021 (acrylic on canvas, 22x24)

by Peter Marin

A lunula of mother’s face is there, radiantly gazing at her child.

Behind her, even less of my father can be seen – he is a soldier, one of the American troops occupying Mexico’s ancient capital.

My father’s heartbeat has crossed cultural borders. “Ah . . . so . . . you see them,” Diego speaks, abruptly breaking my concentration.

I savor his dreamworld rendering, trees dancing like sylvan wisps.

I look devotedly at my parents.

I am swaddled in my mother’s arms, my father unwavering in his attention.

PETER MARIN was born and raised in Mexico City. He received a BA from UC Berkeley and an MFA from Hunter College. His work has been exhibited throughout the world and appears in public and private collections and foundations including Boys and Girls Club, The City of Raleigh, and SAS. He received the 2019 Latino Diamante Inc. Award for Arts and Culture given

by North Carolina’s first Latino arts organization. He is an adjunct Assistant Professor with Wake Tech Community College and Living Arts College. He also works with cultural centers, such as the North Carolina Museum of Art, Arts Together, Pullen Arts Center, and Seratoma Arts Center. He is the owner and founder of Peter Marin Artworks, and his studio is located in Artspace in downtown Raleigh.

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FROM BIG PINE TO JAZZ: MAKING A LIFE WITH PIZZAZZ a review by Rebecca Godwin Terry Roberts. The Sky Club.

Keylight Books, 2022.

REBECCA GODWIN is the author of Community Across Time: Robert Morgan’s Words for Home (West Virginia University Press, 2023. She retired in 2022 as Elizabeth Jordan Chair of Southern Literature at Barton College.

She is past chair of the North Carolina Writers Conference and past president of the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association as well as the Thomas Wolfe Society. She serves on the North Caroliniana Society and North Carolina Humanities boards and is a consulting editor for The Thomas Wolfe Review.

TERRY ROBERTS is the author of five novels, two of which received the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction. A Short Time to Stay Here (Ingalls Publishing Group, 2012) was also the winner of the Willie Morris Prize for Southern Fiction, and That Bright Land (Turner Publishing Company, 2016; reviewed in NCLR Online 2017) was also the winner of the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award andn the James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South. Director of the National Paideia Center, the author is a native of western North Carolina.

In a page-turner set in 1929– 1931, Terry Roberts brings us jazz, bootlegging, and financial collapse, as seen through the eyes of a forward-thinking young mountain woman seizing opportunities to flourish. Following examinations of western North Carolina’s World War I German internment camp, post-Civil War violence, and Prohibition Era preacher spreading liquor on his gospel train, as well as Ellis Island’s racial and immigration tensions in 1920, Roberts turns, in his fifth book, to the greed, social climbing, despair, and resolve that marked Asheville’s – and America’s – boom and crash. Rural and urban, old ways and new possibilities meet in the speakeasy and jazz club that gives the novel its name, shaping every aspect of this first-rate narrative of economic and cultural upheaval, risk, loss, and love.

Roberts’s feisty female narrator, speaking directly and intimately to readers, keeps us intrigued. This bold, intelligent mathematical prodigy maintains her country-bred spunk after moving into town to fulfill her mother’s deathbed request: “‘Make a life somewhere else . . . a life that I can’t even imagine’” (4). At twenty-six, Jo Salter leaves her remote Madison County home for Asheville, where her cousin Sissy teaches her how to be a 1929 town girl and Uncle Frank finds her a job at Central Bank and Trust, where he is a vice-president.

Jo observes that Frank leads

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his family to “taking on the appearance of wealth” (13) and soon discovers, with her skill for checking bank numbers, that the bank itself is operating on pretense, sending out more money than it takes in, “the city and bank propping each other up” (226) while marketing the building of Greater Asheville.

She explains to directors, and later to state examiners, the fraudulent reporting that has hidden the bank’s overextension of credit. Jo shows us what a bank run and closure look like, and as she works with resolve, she faces down the sexism encountered by women who were smarter and more honest than men earning higher salaries simply because they were men.

While Jo enjoys the bobbed hair and stylish clothes, including pants, that mark her transition to town, she feels no shame about her rural upbringing and no need for wealth or social standing. Missing “the voices of home,” she strolls the farmers’ market on Lexington Avenue, where “hills and hollows . . . met the asphalt and concrete” (129), perhaps a metaphor for the book’s oppositions and theme.

Throughout The Sky Club, Roberts contrasts the values of money-focused townspeople and community-oriented, resilient rural folks, supporting the epigraph from Emerson, “Money often costs too much.” To reshape downtown, city officials use eminent domain to take Black residents’ homes. The rich treat servants merely as help,

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COURTESY OF NORTH CAROLINA COLLECTION PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVES, WILSON LIBRARY, UNC CHAPEL HILL

ignoring their full humanity. Jo, by contrast, cherishes the company of her relatives’ Black servant Pansy and ensures that her cousin Frank Junior knows not to sexually assault Pansy again.

Repeatedly, country people stick together since they know, as hill-born Pink Starnes tells Jo, that “country club people” will “plow us all under to save their mansions” (276). Like the era it describes, this novel points to the dangers of superficial values that lead to lies, such as those that city and bank leaders tell the public as the financial crisis comes to a head. While the bank president serves prison time for violating banking laws, other men facing indictment and disgrace commit suicide, including Jo’s uncle Frank, who owes half a million dollars, and Asheville

mayor Gallatin Roberts, the actual mayor who killed himself in 1931 rather than face trial. Jo reflects that certain things . . . when thrown down shatter. The china cup, the crystal goblet, the expensive vase. All of those things are city things. Then there are certain things that when thrown down, even on pavement, never break. The corn cob, the chunk of firewood, the plow point. All those things are country things, hard things and tough. Truth be told, they are used to being thrown down. (288)

Country people with little cash to lose but with homegrown food and make-do experiences that sustain them through the Great Depression verify that perception.

It is, however, at the merging of rural and urban that Jo

ABOVE Downtown Asheville, NC, circa 1930–45

finds her happy place, the Sky Club. She embraces its outdoor spaces, its homegrown food and stalwart bartender, its alcohol, its Black jazz players and their music that makes her dance – the Black Bottom, the Charleston, the Turkey Trot – and falls in love with Levi Arrowood, the hill-born bootlegger and speakeasy manager. The music consumes her, its rhythms based on mathematical intervals connecting to her propensity to “think [and dream] in numbers” (226).

She enters the bootlegging business with Levi, who treats her as his equal. They arrange a deal with her Madison County farming brothers to grow corn or apples and to make moonshine or brandy, each according to the attributes of his own land and talents, while Jo and Levi

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transport and sell the liquor.

Jo insists on learning to drive, another way that she leads the way for women, so that she can divert law enforcement from Levi. They get married, twice: once at her remote homeplace on Big Pine and again in town at the Sky Club, for she and Levi are “country and city. Lonely mountain fiddle and sweat-hot jazz” (417). Reconciling supposed opposites, this hardworking and fair-minded couple thrives, doing what they love and loving each other in the truest fashion imaginable. Jo’s telling of their evolving relationship creates a joyful read.

Humor marks some of Jo and Levi’s interactions, and at times, keeps scenes from playing into negative stereotypes. At the reading of her father’s will, her brothers refuse to let Levi come into the house to discuss business because he and Jo are not yet married. But to hear him explain how he and Jo can sell their corn, they agree to his talking through a window, as long as he does not lean in. Brother Tony quotes scripture to match their moonshining plans to the Bible. Jo willingly plays along with the rather farcical hesitancy to let a woman speak about important affairs, reconciling narrow and more progressive notions to move them all into the future. And through the hilarious banter comes the reason that many Appalachians turned to moonshining: corn

grows in mountain soil but brings too little cash to support families (besides the fact that heavy loads of corn were difficult to get down steep mountain roads to market). Turning corn into liquid transportable in jars enabled farmers to stay on their land and make it productive.

Through this part of the story, Roberts turns the moonshiner as criminal stereotype on its head.

Moonshining and the violence accompanying it – a sheriff once assaults driver Jo, and a raid on the Sky Club results in more damage to Levi’s scarred body – join myriad details that make The Sky Club an admirable historical novel blending actual places and figures with fictional characters. Now condominiums, the Sky Club edifice still stands atop Beaucatcher Mountain, being so named when owners needed to conceal their German-American heritage in the name of their supper club in World War II. Jo shops with her cousin at Bon Marché, a famous store first owned by a Jewish man named Lipinsky, as the narrator explains.

This landmark also survives in Asheville, now the site of the Haywood Park Hotel along with other businesses. Looking for a room after her uncle’s death, when the family must give up their ritzy house, Jo visits the Old Kentucky Home boarding house and meets owner Julia Wolfe, Thomas Wolfe’s mother and real estate investor. Roberts

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draws on the historical record to describe her personality and also mentions her family, the Westalls.

Details of booming construction and the Central Bank and Trust fraud credit historical figures with their roles, for instance E.W. Grove, builder of Grove Park Inn, along with Mayor Roberts.

Descriptions of Biltmore Forest and Pack Square leave no doubt that Roberts knows the place, and breadlines show the Great Depression’s effect.

The independent woman telling this story of Asheville’s crash from its real estate frenzy brings a positive note to the losses, with Roberts’s convincing portrayal of her inner life and public voice.

Jo values the land and family and meaningful traditions such as preparing her father’s body for burial.

She turns herself into a businesswoman and buys the Sky Club with her husband. She gets Levi to reconcile with his estranged father. She isn’t shy about having a Black best friend or about enjoying sex and telling us about it. She follows her attraction to the mysterious Levi Arrowood to find what matters in life and tells us what she’s discovered.

Speaking of the fraudulent bank records and coverup, Jo says that “the numbers told the truth but the words lied” (108). Words can lie. But her words, and Roberts’s, give us a true accounting of this important time of transition in Asheville’s and America’s history.

And just as importantly, they show us how to make a life. n

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2023 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE FINALIST

BY ROBERT W. HILL

After Midnight —dum spiro, spero There are 17 cattle in the pinecones.

At 1st, as I was settling to sleep, I started to say, as a startlement, to my sleeping wife COURTESY OF HIDELL BROOKS GALLERY, CHARLOTTE

that the dog is walking on the pond, but it wasn’t sleepy, edgy enough to be real, to be really what I wanted to say.

I didn’t want to alarm her by saying, well, that, but to think cattle and say it into the dark, chiseled runes inside my eyelids (burning), I was sure I’d conjured famine-dreams from cheap-book illustrations of pharic courts astonished by Joseph’s visionary schemes.

Not wise enough to slake my children’s thirsts, balm my dogs’ aging organs and frames, cut free my nation’s wrangled corpus – yet lurking

Dream Waking, 2018 (acrylic on canvas 48x60)

by Herb Jackson

like a burrowed beetle in spines of cones knocked by wind and other passings, I try tonight to say myself to sleep, while cattle surprise the jogging neighbors, sunflowers work toward August, stone fruit, bleached wing-bones of hope, tender exhaustions of our powers, two who love each other, talking into sleep-mist about foolishness – I hear 7-plus-10 prophetic animals treading our tree-fall.

ROBERT W. HILL was born in Anniston, NC, and raised in Charlotte. A five-time finalist, he has published several poems in NCLR and NCLR Online, as well as numerous other venues, such as Appalachian Journal, Broad River Review, Cold Mountain Review, Shenandoah, South Carolina Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Southern Review. He is also the co-author with Richard J. Calhoun of James Dickey (Twayne, 1983).

HERB JACKSON, a native of Raleigh, earned his MFA degree at UNC Chapel Hill. In 1999, he received the North Carolina Award for Fine Arts and in 2015, the North Caroliniana Society Award for extraordinary contributions to the state’s cultural heritage. He is a Davidson College Professor Emeritus of Art who has had over 150 one-person exhibitions and has been featured in numerous group exhibitions in the US and abroad.

His work is in the permanent collections of over a hundred museums, including the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the British Museum in London.

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2023 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE FINALIST

BY KIMBERLY J. SIMMS

There Is No Time With nods to Lou Reed and Wilfred Owen

Hard to hear the church bells, the constant parade of funerals; this is no time for shaking hands, no time for us to disengage. There is no time.

Only the monstrous anger of the nurses, drawing down the blinds with patients drowning from Covid-corrupted lungs — each day another thousand, a shortage of hearses. There is no time.

No consolations, please. The janitor is teaching math to fourth grade. If you could hear the cacophony of children wheezing; parents brought to tears.

The white-collar bankers spent a spring indoors.

The news droning on, but no one wants to hear it anymore.

No one wants to be here without you.

No time to think of the voices we’ll never hear again while maskless politicians salute their flags clutching Miami, Boise, New York in a black garbage bag.

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

Stimulus Mask, II, 2021 (drawn thread and hand embroidery on silk organza) by Jennifer Markowitz

Raleigh, NC textile artist JENNIFER MARKOWITZ received an MA in Research in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick and spent 25 years directing environmental theatre throughout the US, Scotland, Ireland, Israel, and England. Her work has been shown at Nasher Museum of Art, the National Humanities Center, and Weems Art Gallery at Meredith College, among many others. She was a Brightwork Fellow at Anchorlight where her first solo exhibition, Fleshmap: My Bipolar Embroidered Geographies, showed in November 2019. Her recent solo show, Dr. Charcot’s Hysterical Women: Embroidered Traces of the Male Gaze, opened in April 2023 at the Horace Williams House.

KIMBERLY J. SIMMS lives on the border of North Carolina and South Carolina between Henderson County and Greenville County in the Blue Ridge Mountains. She has been published in over thirty literary journals, including the Asheville Poetry Review and the Broad River Review. This is her second time to be selected as a finalist and published in NCLR. Her first full-length collection is Lindy Lee: Songs on Mill Hill (Finishing Line Press, 2017).

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LONG ROADS AND TALL PINES a review by Rebecca Duncan Marjorie Hudson. Indigo Field.

Regal House Publishing, 2023.

Susan O’Dell Underwood. Genesis Road. Madville Publishing, 2022.

REBECCA DUNCAN is Mary Lynch Johnson Professor of English at Meredith College in Raleigh. She teaches and writes on British and post-colonial literature. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Genre, Mosaic, Southeast Review, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and the Pisgah Review. Read her essay on Zoe Kincaid Brockman in NCLR 2019.

The characters in Susan O’Dell Underwood’s Genesis Road and Marjorie Hudson’s Indigo Field need a lot of love. Some have the energy and balance to pursue healthy connections, while others have much to overcome before they can take that kind of risk. They have bungled life, or life has been cruel. And a few, to the reader’s amusement or frustration, plod stubbornly on, unaware of life’s possibilities or simply unwilling to bend.

With a writer’s sense of empathy and a gift for storytelling, Underwood and Hudson create intriguing worlds for these characters to inhabit. And although both novels explore compelling issues – identity, history, race, culture, sexuality – they are most enjoyable and thoughtprovoking in their use of the land on which their characters live, work, and travel.

For Glenna Daniels, the firstperson narrator of Susan O’Dell Underwood’s Genesis Road, the land is a family farm, the acreage that formed her identity as a child: “The farm on Genesis Road was me, or who I knew I was at the time. That place was how I understood myself” (9). At ten, she moves with her mother and brother into a trailer in town to escape the charismatic yet violent father for whom she is named. At that point, she recalls, “I was lost. I would never again see the trillium patch I loved in the back of the woods, the cool green ravine” (9). Glenn Daniels follows the family to their new home and the mother takes him in. As Glenna enters adolescence, she becomes the prime target of her father’s physical and psychological abuse.

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At thirty-six, Glenna seems to function reasonably well as a social worker. But a miscarriage dims any chance of preserving her third marriage, and the death of her father churns up memories of lifelong abuse that has made trust and commitment difficult. She admits that, in bearing the brunt of her father’s violent moods and actions, she has become like him, unable to love openly and honestly.

It is with an angry heart that Glenna hears that the family farm has been deeded to her.

She alone has dared to say aloud to her enabling family that her father caused the fire that burned the house to the ground and in doing so complicated her relationship with the land. She processes her emotions during a sweeping car trip through the western United States with her high school friend Carey, who is mourning the loss of his partner Stan. Just as Glenna once protected Carey from the taunts of intolerant teens, Carey now shows her a healthier sort of grief. He’s an historian seeking out what he calls “landscape kitsch,” so he also distracts her with side trips to such oddities as Cadillac Ranch and a brothel tour.

Often the passenger, Glenna contemplates the vastness of Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons, the minute flora of a rare tundra blossoming, and Carey’s history lessons on such topics as the Trail of Tears and the spread of Catholicism.

Without forcing an artificial symmetry, Underwood creates a credible and optimistic flow between the landscape and Glenna’s self-discovery.

Old Faithful, for instance,

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PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID UNDERWOOD

produces this insight: “Whatever threatens below the surface has nothing on the tensile power of the earth’s skin, holding in all that volatility. It exhausted me to think of the turmoil and regret and grief I’d been holding back, the enormous forces at work underneath the surface of my life” (260).

This is a novel of revelation and reflection set against iconic scenes of American grandeur. Carey and Glenna have prepared to camp safely, feed themselves, and navigate highways and lesser roads in baking sun and drifted snow. Carey has even made thematic playlists to fill the dead hours. They are less prepared to acknowledge the trauma and grief set off by a certain song, a conversation, or even an image at a flea market. Although they seem to be helping each other heal, they each withhold significant details, and a few offhand remarks land badly. And so the friendship falters at times.

In less skillful hands, this novel’s premise might produce a cliched “driving and thinking” narrative. Instead, Underwood blends lyrical descriptions, lively interactions, incisive metaphors, and a few camping and

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weather-related crises to keep readers engaged and hopeful and to draw Glenna as believable and complex and ready to decide about the land that has long defined her.

In contrast to the travel/adventure motif, Marjorie Hudson’s multiple story lines in Indigo Field occur on or adjacent to a single piece of land edged by old growth “Gooley Pines” and riddled with history and bones.

Jolene, a widowed farmer, ekes out an existence to support Bobo, a son with Down Syndrome. She offers comfort to

SUSAN O’DELL UNDERWOOD has retired from teaching in the creative writing program at Carson-Newman University in Jefferson City, TN. She earned an MFA in creative writing at UNC Greensboro and a PhD in English at Florida State University. Her books include a poetry collection, Splinter (Madville Publishing, 2023). Although raised in Tennessee, Underwood treasures childhood memories among her mother’s family in North Carolina.

Read her essay, a finalist in the 2017 Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize contest, on her North Carolina grandfather in NCLR 2018.

ABOVE Susan O’Dell Underwood reading at Malaprops in Asheville, NC, 23 Feb. 2023

Reba, local midwife and a black descendant of a Tuscarora community, when the niece Reba raised is shot and killed by a white boyfriend. Reba nurtures her hatred for Danielle’s killer yet agrees to foster the man’s teenage son, TJ, who loved Danielle but “hates the country” (70).

As additional glimpses of her past reveal, Reba knows how to summon tough love for a difficult white boy. Historical background on the Tuscarora Indians’ treatment in North Carolina and their eventual displacement add important context to Reba’s character.* Down the road, at the posh Stonehaven retirement community, Colonel Randolph Jefferson Lee (Ret.), or simply Rand, jogs in defiance of doctor’s orders, sneaks biscuits at the Sunrise Grill, and maintains a running interior monologue of disdain for the life that his wife Anne is happily cultivating. She embraces the social galas, the tennis league, and a dinner she’s planning with neighbors, while he dreads “the inane chatter, the sloppy drinking, the inevitable social climbing and oneupmanship” (9). A good bit of his loathing turns inward as well, as he regrets what he considers a

* Hudson researched this history for “Among the Tuscarora: The Strange and Mysterious Death of John Lawson, Gentleman, Explorer, and Writer,” an essay published in NCLR’s premier issue. In addition, she researched and wrote on coastal tribes, including the Hatteras and Croatoan, in her first book, Searching for Virginia Dare: a Fool’s Errand (2003); reissed as Searching for Virginia Dare: On the Trail of the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island (Press 53 2012).

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make the story plausible. The focal point of both fact and fiction is the the physical land.

The massive pine trees, resonant of the Coastal Plain, hover above as heritage or commodity until even they are shaken.

Some crops thrive; others fail.

The Stonehaven ladies flock to the neighborhood farmers’ market. Every character is touched, literally or figuratively, by the soil of Indigo Field and its past. Thus “grounded,” each

ABOVE Marjorie Hudson with her book

MARJORIE HUDSON writes, teaches, leads arts and community engagement projects, and works the earth in Chatham County, NC. She holds a BA in interdisciplinary studies from American University and an MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson College.

She founded the George Moses Horton Project to honor the first African American man to publish a book in the South. Her story collection, Accidental Birds of the Carolinas (2011; reviewed in NCLR Online 2012), received an honorable mention by PEN/ Hemingway. Indigo Field is the 2023 winner of the Sir Walter Raleigh Award given by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association and the Historical Book Club of North Carolina. Read an interview with the author, who wrote for NCLR’s premiere issue, in the twenty-fifth print issue (2016).

launch audience at the Fearrington Barn in Village, Pittsboro, NC, 18 Mar. 2023

is able to glimpse a vision of life’s possibilities.

Tensions over race, love and sexuality, and disability/ableism offer a moral dimension to these characters’ struggles that would make the late John Gardner smile. And it doesn’t hurt that North Carolina readers might at some point begin to believe they have met at least one of these folks down at the Country Farm and Home store on a recent Saturday morning. n PHOTOGRAPH BY EMMA ZUNKER, FEARRINGTON VILLAGE / MCINTYRE’S BOOKS

middling career in the military and envisions a second, this time fatal, heart attack looming around every bend on his morning run.

The dead also maintain a presence in the community and on the land. Danielle and a beloved sister Sheba live on for Reba as crudely carved angel totems planted in her yard and as “listeners” to stories and revelations. The spirits of Sheba and the maternal figure Old Lucy infuse Reba with vision and prescience. An archeological dig conducted by Rand’s underachieving son Jeff (and a stray dog) produces bones and skeletons that need to be explained.

At moments, particularly during a massive intervention of nature, readers face a choice between the competing authorities of reason and spirit. Granting the possibility of the latter, we have to ask, for instance, if Reba is beset by “fits,” as her father concluded, or if she can she truly predict an epic storm or an impending death. And do her herbal remedies calm or enhance these experiences?

She admits that at one point, “Lucy give me herbs to cure the hate. But it never took, not all the way” (287).

Hudson blends fictional narrative and North Carolina history with just the right touch to

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WRITING THE HURT a review by John Lang Charles Dodd White. A Year without Months. West Virginia University Press, 2022.

JOHN LANG is an English Professor Emeritus at Emory & Henry College, where he taught from 1983 to 2012.

He is the author of Understanding Fred Chappell (University of South Carolina Press, 2000), Six Poets from the Mountain South (Louisiana State University Press, 2010), and Understanding Ron Rash (University of South Carolina Press, 2014), as well as the editor of Appalachia and Beyond: Conversations with Writers from the Mountain South (University of Tennessee Press, 2006), a collection of interviews from The Iron Mountain Review, which he edited for more than twenty years.

CHARLES DODD WHITE spent his early years as a writer in Asheville, NC, before moving to Knoxville, TN, to teach at Pellissippi State Community College. His books include a short story collection, Sinners of Sanction County (Bottom Dog Press, 2011; reviewed in NCLR Online 2013), which includes a short story first published in NCLR 2010. He is also editor of two volumes of short stories by Appalachian authors, both published by Bottom Dog Press: Degrees of Elevation (2010) and Appalachia Now (2015). He has received an individual artist’s grant from the North Carolina Arts Council and a Jean Ritchie Fellowship from Lincoln Memorial University.

A Year without Months is fiction writer Charles Dodd White’s first book of nonfiction after his publication of four novels and a collection of stories. White has received the Chaffin Award for Excellence in Appalachian Literature, and his third novel, In the House of Wilderness (2018), won the Appalachian Book of the Year Award. Born in Georgia in 1976, White didn’t move to the mountains of western North Carolina until he turned eighteen but since then has identified himself and his writing with Appalachia.

This new book is a deeply moving collection of fourteen essays, most of them “written ‘as a piece’” (xi), says White, following his eighteen-year-old son Ethan’s suicide in late 2015. Only four of the essays seem to have been previously published. Collectively, the volume provides a detailed portrait of White’s often dysfunctional extended family that includes, most prominently in addition to Ethan, his maternal grandparents, his mother, his uncle Buddy (his mother’s brother, who helped raise White), two of his great-aunts (his grandfather’s sisters), his first wife (Ethan’s mother), and his stepson Iain.

As the book explains, when White was seven, his largely absent father also committed suicide, as Buddy much later did too. Domestic and familial strife marked the marriages of White’s grandparents and his parents, of Buddy’s relationship with his father and of White’s mother’s relationship with Buddy who, readers eventually learn, had sexually molested his sister when

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she was a child. White’s own first marriage also failed, and his relationship with his mother steadily deteriorated as she increasingly relied on her parents and Buddy to care for her son. In her later years she suffered from both physical and mental illnesses, becoming addicted to pills and resentful of White for his second marriage (a happy one), just as she had been about his first. The alcoholism that besets Buddy is equally apparent in Buddy’s father, making White’s grandfather’s behavior erratic and his temperament untrustworthy.

So grim a catalogue of the flaws in these people and the resulting pain they experience might make A Year without Months seem overwhelmingly depressing. Not so, however, because White is also attentive to their positive traits and their persistent capacity for acts of kindness and love, like his grandfather’s construction of a backyard roller coaster for his seven-year-old grandson in “Coaster King.” White’s ability to empathize with others redeems what might otherwise become a bleak inventory of disasters, as he writes with keen sensitivity about loss and regret.

Although the essays are not arranged in strict chronological order, they do generally proceed from White’s childhood to adulthood and from Ethan’s childhood to his death. Many of these essays deal with interactions among the male relatives and the shaping of male identity through such activities as hunting, fishing, hiking, camping, canoeing, and drinking. “Guns formed me,”

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awareness as a child of the solace that immersion in nature can bring. As he states in a later essay, “we live beneath a sky of stark wonders” (135).

Somewhat surprisingly, White’s relationship with Ethan receives less attention throughout most of the book than those with his mother and Uncle Buddy and even his grandfather. In part this dearth of detail results from White’s near-total absence from Ethan during two years of the boy’s childhood: “I had a tenyear-old boy I’d seen fewer than half a dozen times over the past couple of years” (94), he writes.

At the time he judged himself “a failed father” (96). No doubt some of White’s reticence about his relationship with Ethan arises from the pain such memories bring, along with continuing questions about how Ethan’s death might have been prevented. In any case, except for the Preface, there is no mention of Ethan’s suicide until the opening page of “Those Boys,” the book’s eleventh essay, though that essay focuses not on Ethan himself but on a restorative camping trip that White takes two months later in the company of friend and novelist Mark Powell and Powell’s sevenyear-old son Silas.

Readers are left to imagine the unstated emotions evoked by the anguishing absence of Ethan while Silas exuberantly shares his

ABOVE Charles Dodd White with novelist Mark Powell’s son Silas

(left), and White’s stepson Iain, Carver’s Gap, NC, 2018

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“fanatical enthusiasm for raptors,” especially the ospreys the group sights (121).

While two of the last three essays deal with excursions White makes with his stepson Iain, it is the volume’s final essay, the one that gives the book its title, that offers the fullest portrait of Ethan. Artfully structured to incorporate flashbacks to various events in Ethan’s life, the essay concludes with a poignant incident from the first weeks after his birth and presents a stunning image of White nurturing his son, who initially suffered from “failure to thrive” (161).

That powerful image will linger long with White’s readers, as will his affirmation of love amid loss. White is an incisive, deeply humane writer, unafraid to confront his own failings as son and father and husband, yet keenly cognizant of not succumbing, as he believes several of his male relatives did, to the danger of allowing regret to “numb them to what remained of their lives” (8). Judging by these essays, White has successfully resisted that mistake. n COURTESY OF CHARLES DODD WHTIE

the first essay begins (1), while another, “Bethlehem Bottoms,” closes with a hidden White, at age twelve or thirteen, pointing a pistol at the men who had destroyed the hunting shack that Buddy and a friend had built.

This concern with male bonding, father-son relationships, and traditional male pursuits is also evident in such essays as “Southern Man,” “Those Boys,” “Learning a Place by Its Waters,” and “Under Weight,” and it accounts for the inclusion of the previously published “Why I Don’t Hunt Anymore,” the book’s most overtly political piece, with its sharp critique of what White refers to as a “burlesque of masculinity” and the “vain machismo” of many contemporary Southern males who embrace “reactionary politics” (89). Father-son relationships are also the principal focus of White’s first novel, Lambs of Men (2010; reviewed in NCLR 2011), whose composition he describes in “What We Gain in the Hurt,” the essay from which this review draws its title.

At the heart of this collection, running through its central pages, stands “Apart,” the book’s most extensive depiction of White’s relationship with his mother. The title term encapsulates the deep-seated estrangement that characterizes so much of the family dynamics portrayed in the book. Whereas earlier essays were set primarily in Georgia, this one notes the importance for White of his move to Asheville with his mother and his subsequent identification with the mountains, a landscape that intensified his

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“TO LOVE THE SOUTH SURGICALLY” a review by Zackary Vernon Mark Powell. The Late Rebellion.

Regal House Publishing, 2024.

ZACKARY VERNON is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Appalachain State University. His research has appeared in several scholarly publications, including Journal of American Studies, Southern Cultures, and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. He is the co-editor of Summoning the Dead: Essays on Ron Rash (University of South Carolina Press, 2018) and editor of Ecocriticism and the Future of Southern Studies (Louisiana State University Press, 2019).

In 2015 Vernon received the premiere Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize for “Boone Summer: Adventures of a Bad Environmentalist.” Regal House Publishing is releasing his YA novel, Our Bodies Electric, in 2024.

MARK POWELL is the author of nine novels. He has a BA from the Citadel, an MFA from the University of South Carolina, and an MAR from Yale Divinity School.

Read more about him in an interview with Vernon forthcoming in NCLR 2024.

Mark Powell’s ninth novel The Late Rebellion continues to mine the important cultural and regional veins he’s been exploring for two decades. His works are always intense and his characters generally radicalized – for political causes in Small Treasons (2017), environmental concerns in Lioness (2022; reviewed in NCLR Online Winter 2023), and religious reasons in Hurricane Season (2023). Their obsessive behaviors begin not in New York, Seattle, or DC; rather, they’re fostered in southern Appalachia, particularly South and North Carolina, where Powell is from and where he now calls home, respectively.

Born and raised in Walhalla, SC, Powell traveled the nation and world before landing in Boone, NC, where he has directed the Creative Writing Program at Appalachian State University for the past eight years. He has received prestigious fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Foundation, and his novels have been lauded by critics and adored by readers and other writers, even winning the Chaffin Award for his contributions to Appalachian literature.

The Late Rebellion extends Powell’s penchant for characters on the verge of becoming fanatics and once again proves what a careful literary craftsperson he is. The novel diverges, however, from his previous works; in addition to weighty explorations of local and global crises, moments of levity punctuate the narrative,

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and many scenes are brimming with witty dialogue and hilarious encounters between characters. The novel tiptoes, in other words, on the knife’s edge of tragedy and comedy, whereas his past works often left us to squirm in misfortune.

Set during the culturally divisive Trump presidency, The Late Rebellion follows the Greaves family over a single pivotal weekend when everyone returns to Germantown, SC. Their hometown is abuzz with the excitement of Octoberfest and the local high school’s homecoming, and the Greaveses are soon drawn into the melee.

At first it seems like all is well.

Richard, the founder and president of a bank, and his steadfast wife Clara happily welcome home their three adult children.

Tom is a minor celebrity from a reality show called American Ninja; Jack is the athletic director at the high school; and Emily is the county solicitor and perhaps soon the district attorney.

However, things are not as they seem. Clara’s anxiety is so high she has developed a drug habit. Tom’s career is floundering, and instead of working on it, he’s been galivanting around eastern Europe desperately trying to find himself. Jack is going through a mid-life crisis, and his daughter is involved with an abusive boyfriend. Emily’s marriage is crumbling, and she cannot face her career after having worked a case in which a man set his wife on fire in their bed.

And looming over every other

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detail is the fact that Richard, the supposed family leader with all the answers, is being investigated by the FBI for shady business dealings. As a result, the family – or at least the family as it once was – is on the precipice of a great fall, and chaos begins to ensue in the characters’ lives – fights, betrayals, affairs, scandals, even the questioning of religious faith.

The Late Rebellion showcases Powell’s deep understanding of Southern cultures as well as his ability to distill the nuances of American life when everything around us seems precarious.

His characters have an extreme love/hate relationship with the region and nation, especially as they consider the racial traumas of the past and their continuing ramifications in the present. For example, one character thinks to herself, “To be happy in a world of suffering, my lord, what kind of a monster can be legitimately happy knowing what everyone knew?” (224).

In an interview forthcoming in the 2024 print issue of the North Carolina Literary Review, I asked Powell if it’s possible today to love any part of Southern culture without slipping into some kind of nostalgic or problematically apologist position. He responded, “Sometimes we don’t have a choice. Sometimes the love is ingrained in us. So we try to love the South surgically, to love, say, the food but to disavow everything else.

But there’s a falseness to that too. This is why I appreciate

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novels. They are one of the few places left where you can seriously consider these questions without the burden of having to arrive at answers.”

This sums up the conflicted feelings many of us have about the South and, more broadly, America. The “better angels of our nature,” as Abraham Lincoln said, are all too often elusive.

They appear, in fact, to have been on hiatus for much of the past decade. Powell’s novel powerfully interrogates how we got here and maybe also how we can improve.

On one level, The Late Rebellion is a dark novel about a terrifying moment in our social, political, and environmental history. Locally, we witness coerced underage sexting, domestic violence, and teenagers beating up grandmothers for

Oxy, while nationally and globally we see income inequality, the climate crisis, and the rise of the far right.

Yet it would be a mistake to assume Powell is a writer without humor or hope. The Late Rebellion is foremost a book about families – biologically and otherwise formed. In it, outsiders, strangers in a strange land, are thrust together. These various types of family can be dysfunctional; in fact, they are more often than not. But they can provide, as one character says, a form of support that is rare in this sometimes brutal and tragic world. As the Greaves family and several community members claw their way back to one another, we are reminded to rectify wrongs and, above all, to love those around us while we still have time. n

ABOVE From right, Mark Powell with writer Charles Dodd White,

White’s stepson Iain, and Powell’s son Silas, Carver’s Gap, NC, 2018

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2023 JAMES APPLEWHITE CONTEST FINALIST,

BY JOYCE COMPTON BROWN

Stitching If you hold my mother’s small dark thimble to the light, look deep inside, you’ll see a tiny point of bright where the metal collapsed, the needlehead punched into tender skin.

You’ll need a lens to see the message beneath the thimble rim, words inscribed too small to read in tarnished darkness – “For a Good Girl.”

Hers was a time when worth was measured in stitches, when straight and tiny were codes for virtue – small stitches, small steps, no careless expectations.

My mother was a good girl – she saved that baby thimble, kept her sewing basket near her rocking chair – in case of a moment of leisure. They all stitched, women of that time and place – mended, made lace, crocheted little doilies, embroidered, for beauty, virtue, for ticking off the hours.

My mother lived in a small plank house, holding us close on poverty’s slickened cliff.

Needles were for repairs – letting out hems and sleeves for next year’s wear.

And yet, implements for beauty, for quilting,

JOYCE COMPTON BROWN is a native of Iredell County, NC. After graduate studies, she taught at Gardner-Webb University for a number of years. She has won several prizes in the regional poetry world and has published the chapbook Bequest (Finishing Line Press, 2015) and three other books of poetry: Singing with Jarred Edge (Main St. Rag, 2018), Standing on the Outcrop (Redhawk Publications, 2021), and Hard-Packed Clay (Redhawk Publications, 2022). NCLR published another of her poems in the 2010 issue, and for the 2023 James Applewhite Poetry Prize contest, she had two finalists, so read another of her poems in NCLR Online Spring 2024.

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Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

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embroidery, elevating the plainness of life, imbedding platitudes in messages of thread.

Mothers, grandmothers, unknown shapes and faces, strained at the bare fibers of histories untold.

The culture of thimbles pulsates through continents, through legends.

Ancient tapestries speak to triumphs of conquerors, kings, and queens,

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

stitched by ladies of virtuous renown.

Cave dwellers, mammoth hunters living within the edge of extinction decorated their hides with pearls.

My mother, not far removed from such raw survival, pierced the rough hide of her life, stitching pearls along the way.

Bobbin Chronicles (mixed media, various sizes) by Dawn Surratt

DAWN SURRATT earned her BA in Studio Art from UNC Greensboro. After earning a BA and MA in Social Work from the University of Georgia, she worked as a hospice social worker for over twenty years. Her work with dying patients in hospice settings is the backbone of her imagery combining photographs with photography-based book structures, installations, and objects as visual meditations exploring concepts of grief, transition, healing and spirituality. Her work has been published in The Hand Magazine, SHOTS, and Diffusion, as well as on numerous book covers. She exhibits nationally, and her work is held in private collections throughout the US. She is a 2016 Critical Mass Finalist and a 2018 nominee for the Royal Photography Society’s 100 Heroines. She is currently a full-time artist living in rural North Carolina with her husband.

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Winter 2024

2023 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE FINALIST

BY JANET FORD

Eagles A cardboard arrow pointed down the stairs to the basement where Eagles Five and Dime made room for Christmas every year.

I have ten minutes. Mama checked her watch.

Then they’ll want me back in Children’s Wear.

I followed Mama past the gun and holster sets in boxes wrapped with cellophane, past bicycles with shiny wire baskets and handlebar streamers like pastel manes, and a line of runner sleds propped against the wall.

She stopped at a row of plastic dolls, the kind that blink when you shake them back and forth. They fixed me with the shallow stares of a string of mackerel on a pier.

I thought you might find something here.

JANET FORD lives in the foothills of the Brushy Mountains in western North Carolina. A Laureate Finalist in the Pinesong Awards of 2020 and 2021, she was the recipient of the 2017 Guy Owen Prize from Southern Poetry Review, and her poems have also appeared in Poetry East, Caesura, and NCLR Online 2021 and 2023. Watch her performance poetry, selected by Glenis Redmond for special note in the premiere Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Prize. In February 2022, she was featured in Poetry in Plain Sight, and she received the 2022 Susan Laughter Meyers Residency Fellowship Award.

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COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

Nana’s Attic (Gum Bichromate Photograph) by Alan Dehmer

I looked at Mama. She knew what I wanted: a dog, or a flock of bantam hens, or the little blue boat by the river in Canada Daddy used to row out to that spit of sand, but she wanted to put something in my hand.

I think I’d like to see the bears.

They were all alike except for size, and they wore tattoos: “ten,” eight,” or “five.”

None of them was Ted, with his cinnamon fur, his sad stitched mouth and his star shot eyes.

I’d like a five.

Very well. Now run along; I’ll meet you at the door.

There was tinsel in the window and colored lights.

A Santa on the sidewalk winked through the rain, and it was Christmas. We had pulled it off again.

ALAN DEHMER is a guest lecturer at NC State University on the history of photography as an art form, and he taught photography for many years at Duke University’s Craft Center and the Durham School of the Arts. Previously, he worked as a photojournalist in Washington, DC, Europe, north Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa for publications including Africa Report, the Christian Science Monitor, and Time Magazine. For the past 25 years he has served as the photographer for Manbites Dog Theater Company in Durham. He is author of Place, Impermanence, Memory: Gum Bichromate Photography (2011), and has published on politics and religion, immigration, and cultural history. He is a founding member of the FRANK Gallery in Carrboro, NC.

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Winter 2024

ARTS ADVOCATE MARSHA WHITE WARREN RECEIVES 2023 NORTH CAROLINA AWARD FOR LITERATURE

by Michele W. Walker Witness: 100 Years of North Carolina Poetry and consulting editor for Weymouth, an Anthology of Poetry.

In 1991, and for the next thirty years, she directed the Paul Green Foundation, which makes grants to assist theaters, playwrights and social justice organizations around the state to uphold the ideals of the playwright and social activist Paul Green. In that capacity, she helped lead the foundation to establish what would later become North Carolina Freedom Park, a public space in downtown Raleigh designed to honor the African American struggle for freedom.

This park will be visited by school children across the state in their study of North Carolina history, and with Paul Green Foundation funds, educational materials will be available to teachers as they guide their students. After two decades, North Carolina Freedom Park opened in August 2023.

MICHELE W. WALKER is a Public Information Officer for the North Carolina Department of Naturaal and Cultural Resources.

ABOVE Reid Wilson, Secretary of the Department of Natural and

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF THE NC DEPT. OF NATURAAL AND CULTURAL RESOURCES

For her efforts to build and enlarge North Carolina’s literary community, Marsha White Warren received the 2023 North Carolina Award for Literature from Governor Roy Cooper. Warren has spent most of her career using her gifts in service to other writers, as a charter member and executive director of the North Carolina Wr iter s’ Net work, an officer in the North Carolina Poetry Society, and board member of Arts Advocates.

Born and raised in Ohio, Warren received a bachelor’s degree in education from Miami University in Oxford, Oh. She moved to North Carolina in 1961 when her husband, David, was accepted to Duke Law School, and took a job teaching first grade at George Watts Elementary School in Durham, passing on her love of reading and writing to her students.

In 1987, Warren became executive director of the two-year old North Carolina Writers’ Network, traveling the state to build the Network, enlarge its membership, and pushing the organization to be more welcoming and inclusive to African American and Native American writers. During her tenure Warren helped to create a standard for excellence at the Network, expanding the annual Fall Conference, the Center for Business and Technical Writing, named creative writing competitions, and regional groups such as NCWN-West. She launched a writing program for prison inmates and created the Networks’ critique service for writers at all stages of development. As a result, the North Carolina Writers’ Network is known as the largest statewide writers’ organization in the country.

Warren also served writers via editing The Collected Poems of Sam Ragan (St. Andrews Pressm 1990) and, with Ron Bayes, the anthology North Carolina’s 400 Years: Signs along the Way (Acorn Press, 1986). She was also the project director and head of the editorial board for the publication of Sally Buckner’s Word and

“ It’s meant a great deal to me to be in a f ield where I’m working with adults in arts administration, with writers, who are the most interesting people of all.”

—Marsha White Warren

Warren’s dedication to the state’s literary community has earned her numerous awards, including the Sam Ragan Award for Contributions to the Fine Arts in North Carolina, the R. Hunt Parker Memorial Award for Lifetime Contributions to Literature, the John Ty l e r C a l d w e l l L a u r e at e Aw a r d for Humanities and in 2018 she was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame.

Warren and her husband David live in Chapel Hill. n

Cultural Resources; Marsha White Warren, 2023 North Carolina Award for Literature recipient; and Governor Roy Cooper

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RENAISSANCE MAN CLYDE EDGERTON RECEIVES 2023 JOHN TYLER CALDWELL AWARD FOR THE HUMANITIES For inspiring a passion for lifelong learning in his students, for his commitment to equitable education opportunities, and for using the humanities to uplift different perspectives as a writer, musician, educator, artist, and scholar, Clyde Edgerton was presented with the John Tyler Caldwell Award for the Humanities, North Carolina Humanities’ highest honor.

tribute by Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams last example comes with a valuable illustration of his commitment to progress and transparency. As a result of working one-on-one with opportunity youth and his own children’s enrollment in an area elementary school, Clyde came to understand that a local, Spanish Immersion Program was using discriminatory recruitment methods that effectively eliminated minority students from inclusion. When Clyde filed a grievance and contacted parents who were not made aware of the program, he was initially, briefly banned from New Hanover County Schools, which shocked and outraged residents. Undeterred, Clyde provided substantial evidence and, after a thorough investigation and the resultant report in the Star News titled “Overwhelmingly White,” Clyde was vindicated. Certain administrators issued apologies and resigned their posts. I include this narrative to underscore Clyde’s abiding dedication to right wrongs and advocate for social justice. In this same year, Clyde was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame.

This is a man whose understanding of the state began with a strict Southern Baptist upbringing and evolved as he served in the air force and became a star in the arts and academia. Perhaps due to this background, Clyde famously connects with every kind of North Carolinian. His readings and lectures draw throngs of seniors and veterans as well as students, community leaders, and those who have labored faithfully in the margins.

Granted, this may read a bit rich, but there is no hyperbole here. I have yet to encounter a single person who does not light up at his name. To know him is to love and admire him. He accomplishes a great deal for the state and does it all with a winning grin and a trademark twinkle in his eyes. n

HANNAH DELA CRUZ ABRAMS is a North Carolina Humanities Trustee. She teaches in the English Department at UNC Wilmington and is the author of The Man Who Danced with Dolls (Madras Press, 2012), for which she received a 2013 Whiting Writers Award.

ABOVE Clyde Edgerton, performing at the luncheon given in his honor, Charlotte, NC, 20 Oct. 2023 (Watch the North Carolina Humanities Stories Luncheon program, featuring Edgerton receiving his award and playing music.)

COURTESY OF NORTH CAROLINA HUMANITIES

A true son of North Carolina, Clyde Edgerton was born in Bethesda, NC, and received his PhD in literature from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. His love of and loyalty to the state and broader South have become apparent in his work as an artist, educator, scholar, veteran, and philanthropist.

When it comes to the arts, Edgerton’s talents are not limited to any particular medium. He has been recognized again and again for excellence as a writer, musician, playwright, director, and visual artist. And, in all this work, he unfailingly forwards concerns central to the humanities: conversations about place, culture, civic responsibility, family, work, education, and the arts. I will not enumerate here his lengthy list of accolades and publications, except to call attention to the fact that at his most visible – whether it be an appearance on PBS receiving the Guggenheim – Clyde pays homage to the South, North Carolina in particular, elucidating its complex history, evolution, and beauty.

Humorous and humble in person, it is difficult to downplay how beloved, how inspirational this man is.

As a professor in the Creative Writing Department at UNC Wilmington, his leadership, pedagogical counsel, and tremendous generosity precede him, and the impact is as broad as it is personal. I know because I was his student. His office door is always open and, despite having one of the most weighted schedules in academia, his attention to his students is whole and patient. I could fill many pages with his genius as an instructor; instead, I suggest we measure his success in broader, community-oriented terms. He delivers commencement speeches at no cost to the university and draws in valuable donors. He hosts community events in his home to which everyone is invited. He tutors students at elementary schools. In fact, this

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Winter 2024

Do NOT Throw Rocks in North Carolina

by Margaret D. Bauer, Editor At the same time I was organizing the content of this winter issue content in December, the newly expanded selection committee for the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame met for the first time. A longtime member of the committee, now its chair, I remarked to the membership that the only difficulty is narrowing down to no more than five new inductees for each biennial ceremony, as there are so many deserving writers in this “writingest state,” including those on our ever-lengthening “watchlist.” When I took up the mantle of NCLR Editor over twenty-five years ago, one of the first things I heard was the mantra that if you throw a rock in North Carolina, you are likely to hit a writer.

I meet new writers with every contest we manage as I match judges’ selected titles with the finalists’ names and as more and more books are added to our books available for review list. I really get attached to these folks, particularly after their work has been featured in our pages. So please, do not throw any rocks in North Carolina!

With this last section of the issue, the count is in: this issue includes reviews of over two dozen new books by North Carolina writers, which facillitates our Saturday Review, a website and social media feature. Thank you to all reviewers, past and present. Make sure we hear when your book is published, so we can be sure to get it on our list. And a shoutout to those reviewers who volunteered after we reviewed a book they’d written. That’s how it works in North Carolina: writers support writers.

So would you like to review for us?

The math is easy, if daunting: releasing reviews weekly is over fifty reviews a year, which makes for very long online issues. Or . . . (drumroll here) . . . more issues? Yes, that. Less than two years after adding a fall issue in 2022, we are adding a spring issue in 2024 – coming in April, with at least

a dozen more books reviewed, as well as still more honorees from our 2023 contests. As North Carolina’s natural, cultural, and historical riches continue to inspire writers, NCLR expands our efforts to fulfill our mission to preserve and promote the state’s ever-expanding literary history. We are now a quarterly (cheer here). And four issues equals about five hundred pages of content.

We can cover the additional design costs of a fourth issue thanks to a Spark the Arts grant from the North Carolina Arts Council and the matching funds from the ECU Harriot College of Arts and Sciences, which also covers our newest staff position. Digital Editor Devra Thomas makes sure all these reviews go up weekly, along with the other daily interaction via our website and social media: Teaching Tuesday, What We’re Reading Wednesday, and Friday from the Archives, just to name the weekly features.

The additional book review formatting labor has been handled in collaboration with NCLR’s newest assistant editor, ECU English professor Desiree Dighton, who is incorporating book review layouts in one of her publication design classes. This experience inspires some students to then sign up for interning with NCLR. Others are inspired to join the team by my ECU colleague Amber Flora Thomas’s newly designed Creative Writing as a Profession class, which incorporates some work with NCLR to give students a peak behind the scenes. We certainly need our student staff members as we prepare all of this content for publication. I am so grateful to these ECU colleagues, as well as to other colleagues, here and beyond, who help with other aspects of producing this magazine.

And lastly, I am grateful to our donors. Won’t you join these Friends of NCLR to help sustain all that NCLR is doing to preserve and promote the state’s rich literary history? n

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NORTH CAROLINA

Miscellany

74 Blue Delusions a poem by Cheryl Skinner

art by Meredith Hebden

88 Split Identity and Shades of Local Color Writing a review by Charles Duncan

n Jacinda Townsend, Mother Country

76 For Those Who Cannot Speak a review by Melinda Thomsen

n AE Hines, Any Dumb Animal

90 An Agatha Christie Mystery – Not Written by Agatha Christie a review by Shane Trayers

n Nina de Gramont, The Christie Affair

78 Poetry of Place a review by Chris Abbate

n Molly Rice, Forever Eighty-Eights 80 Apple a poem by Duncan Smith

art by Walsh/Blazing 81 Found Magic a review by J.S. Absher

n Joan Barasovska, Orange Tulips

n Janis Harrington, How to Cut a Woman in Half 84 Shining a Light on History a review by Amanda M. Capelli

n Kianna Alexander, Carolina Built 86 Community as Witness in West Mills a review by Kristina L. Knotts

n De’Shawn Charles Winslow, Decent People

92 The Stories We Tell – And Don’t Tell a review by Julia Ridley Smith

n Amy Rowland, Inside the Wolf 94 Tripping on the Twelve Steps a review by Sharon E. Colley

n Karen Tucker, Bewilderness 96 Swamp Girls in Trouble: Class, Race, and the Patriarchy in the Prohibition-Era South a review by Dennis Turner

n Kelly Mustian, The Girls in the Stilt House 98 Debut Novel by Carolina Newcomer Offers Thrill Ride a review by Henry L. Wilson

n Mason Boyles, Bark On

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE 6 n

North Carolina Disability Literature

28 n

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

creative nonfiction and book reviews

poetry, creative nonfiction, book reviews, and literary news

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Winter 2024

2023 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE FINALIST

BY CHERYL SKINNER

Blue Delusions I saw Barry in a blue coffin when I was seven– Like a sleeping, plastic, painted, life-sized doll, a small, silent statue, stiff and still on blue satin.

Three days ago, he was a real boy.

He played on the playground.

He laughed and ran and said, “damn,” chased us girls in circles.

He climbed the monkey bars, hung upside down, his yellow hair dangling in greasy strings.

Looking up at him from the ground, I saw pink pumping to his motley face, mischief swirling in his eyes.

Tobacco twine wound through his belt loops, knotted for pants too big, a patched hole in the knee.

His shirt rode up his belly, ripped on the sleeve.

He drowned in the afternoon shimmer of a farm pond that from the road sparkled clean and blue, where catfish swam, and turtles slid off felled trees, where Barry searched for cattails, reached deep and yanked the roots, where the muddy gut of the pond sucked and swallowed Barry and held him there till morning.

CHERYL SKINNER was born, raised, and educated in North Carolina.

She has lived in Greenville for her entire life, attended Mount Olive Jr. College, and graduated from East Carolina University. She has published in Mount Olive Review and was a finalist in a previous Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize Competition.

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COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

In this tiny, flower-scented room, I thought I saw him move – so I watched to see it again, stared at lids where blue eyes should be.

Barry’s lips pink with fake life, his cheeks painted rosy, his hair combed, clean, parted, and shiny on smooth blue.

He wore a dark suit, like new, in his pretend sleep.

Atamasco Lily (photograph) by Meredith Hebden

The next afternoon, the box lowered with the sun, and from a distance, the grass enveloped it, and it disappeared.

The nearby pond sparkled brightly.

The cattails swayed in the breeze.

MEREDITH HEBDEN is a botanic/floral art photographer and retired horticulturist at UNC Charlotte Botanical Gardens. She studied at the University of New Hampshire and Oregon State University, and she received a BS in Photojournalism with a Botany minor from Northern Arizona University. Since 1993, she has been photographer in residence at Meredith Hebden Photography in Charlotte.

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FOR THOSE WHO CANNOT YET SPEAK a review by Melinda Thomsen AE Hines. Any Dumb Animal.

Main Street Rag, 2021.

MELINDA THOMSEN’S Armature (Hermit Feathers Press, 2021; also reviewed in this issue) was a 2022 Eric Hoffer da Vinci Eye finalist and won honorable mention in the 2019 Lena Shull Poetry Contest. She is the 2023 Eastern NC Region’s Distinguished Poet for the Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poets Mentoring Series, a 2019 Pushcart Nominee, and an advisory editor at Tar River Poetry. Her poems can be found in Salamander Magazine, Artemis Journal, THEMA, and elsewhere, including NCLR. AE HINES’S debut collection, Any Dumb Animal, received honorable mention in the North Carolina Poetry Society’s 2022 Brockman-Campbell Book contest. His poems have been widely published in anthologies and literary journals, including, among others, Rattle, Alaska Quarterly Review, Southern Review, Missouri Review, and Greensboro Review. Hines, who grew up in North Carolina, is pursuing his MFA in Writing at Pacific University.

OPPOSITE AE Hines reading at the NC Poetry

Society’s 90th anniversary celebration at Weymouth Center, Southern Pines, NC, 17 Sept. 2022

AE Hines’s debut poetry collection, Any Dumb Animal, was a finalist for the 2022 Eric Hoffer da Vinci Eye Award honoring “books with superior cover artwork” that are “judged on both content and style.” Hines’s poems delve into themes suggested by the title and the cover image of a boy looking upward, holding his breath at the bottom of a lake as he attempts to escape drowning. Hines grew up in North Carolina, and his childhood forms the foundation for these engaging, well-crafted poems struggling with the complexity of the poet’s life as the son of an abusive father.

In “How We Learn,” which inspired the cover art, Hines describes the physical and psychological abuse he receives from his father, who traumatizes his son by forcing him to face his fear of drowning. The father grabs the boy, drags him down to the pier, and throws him into deep water, so he can learn how to swim and says, “any dumb animal / can learn.” The poet returns to animals throughout this collection, identifying with them and their inability to speak.

Starting from the first poem, “Phone Call,” when the son comes out to his father as gay, their relationship is broken.

The father responds, “Wasn’t hard enough on you. I failed.”

Rejected by his father, the poet finds himself abandoned like the figure in the waters with only his air bubbles ascending to safety. In the collection’s final section, a poem also titled “Phone Call,” recalls how he broke with his father completely. The poet can no longer listen to a father unable to love his child because the poet

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refuses to “develop the habit / of conversing with the dead.”

The author’s broken relationship with his father is one of the underlying themes in Any Dumb Animal. By viewing himself as an unwanted child, the speaker severs his role as his father’s son. Since the poet’s father rejects his son’s sexual identity, their communication breaks down, and his son is muted.

He can’t speak with his father because he refuses to listen to his son. In “Language Immersion,” Hines realizes how language doesn’t have to be used as a weapon of force but can encourage a healthy relationship.

As he learns Spanish, he admits he sounds like “a donkey / braying at the sky.” He converses, not in the elegant way he hopes for, but by simply trying, and both he and his lover understand each other better.

The donkey’s head tilting upward amplifies the cover image in a positive way, as does the poet in “Hoyt Arboretum Under Spring Rain.” He looks up at the beautiful trees and is dumbstruck, unable to talk at all: Here in this city forest, I am the young boy at high church, sitting dead center of the cross-shaped nave, staring up, dumbstruck by the misty limbed vaults, the dripping pine cones like beatified faces of saints looking down from stained glass.

He feels nature looking down on him with the caring of “beatified faces,” and such beauty takes his breath away.

As he is looking upward from below the water’s surface, the figure’s dumbness physically

North Carolina Miscellany

To wake at all, a kind of grace, even this day when in the garden you stumble into a nest of wasps, and each insect bestows stinger and venom to your ankle, swelling your mouth, closing your throat.

What grace, your new lover being there.

That he knows about adrenaline, to jab that harpoon of a needle into your leg.

Here, the poet becomes the dumb animal through the allergic reaction closing his throat, and the harpoon transforms from a death weapon into one that saves him. The lover who rescues him here also appears in “Latin Dancing” where the poet begins to accept the awkwardness of his physical self. His partner “is grateful a white boy /

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PHOTOGRAPH BY BILL GRIFFIN

comes from the inability to breathe underwater.

Hines’s poems also weave back and forth between the difficult moments he faces that prevent him from expressing himself fully: in “Language Immersion,” the speaker realizes that he once used words as weapons with his partner, and concedes that his words “flew / from our lips like machine gun fire,” but with his new lover, there is understanding, no need for this type of ammunition. They can communicate in broken Spanish or English. When he refers to his father in “My Father’s Son,” he describes him as “hard, cold like the hood of his Pontiac / on a January morning.”

The poet admits his father was once tenderhearted when he cherished his son’s photo taken at about four years old, but his father preferred that photo, a silent image of his son, instead of the man he became.

In “Grace,” the poet sees that there are others who can interact with the “dumb animal” in a way that is helpful, not abusive:

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can follow, keep time with his music / and for the most part / avoid his feet.” Although the poet does not move like Fred Astaire, he is appreciated for trying by the man who loves him.

Any Dumb Animal dives deeply into the poet’s North Carolina terrain like the poem “Regret,” which takes place on the Cape Fear River. The poet watches a boy he loves diving, “his brown body spinning / into a comma” before he “becomes an exclamation point to pierce / and disappear beneath the rust-colored water.” That beautiful moment of watching another boy dive into North Carolina waters reveals how vested Hines is in North Carolina, its people and land.

Throughout Any Dumb Animal, Hines recounts not only our culture’s brutality, but also its moments of grace. Some of these poems may pain those who have witnessed violence in their homes or community, but we need this book. Hines’s poems navigate from the most aggressive to gentlest moments, resulting in poems that speak directly to us, and for those who cannot yet speak. n

James Applewhite Poetry Prize $250 and publication in NCLR

SUBMISSIONS ACCEPTED IN APRIL All finalists are considered for publication and honoraria.

Submission guidelines here

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POETRY OF PLACE a review by Chris Abbate Molly Rice. Forever Eighty-Eights.

Press 53, 2022.

CHRIS ABBATE’s poems have appeared in numerous journals including Connecticut River Review, Cider Press Review, and South Florida Poetry Journal. He is a two-time nominee for a Pushcart Prize, has been nominated for a Best of the Net award, and has received awards in the Nazim Hikmet and North Carolina Poetry Society poetry contests. His latest full-length collection is Words for Flying (FutureCycle Press, 2022).

MOLLY RICE has held several residencies teaching poetry, storytelling, theater, film, and English as a Second Language in hundreds of schools, colleges, and organizations in North Carolina and beyond. She has taught for seventeen years at St. Stephens High School in Hickory, NC, where she is the director of the Tractor Shed Theater. Her poetry has been widely published, and her chapbook, Mill Hill, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2012. She lives in Hickory with her husband, Adrian, and their son, Micah.

In the poem “McAdenville” of Molly Rice’s Forever EightyEights, the poet introduces us to her place of origin: “Walking everywhere you go, the whole town a family that you / know – a village.” The poem is Whitmanesque in its long lines and sweeping imagery of McAdenville, NC, a nineteenth-century textile village along the Catawba River. It is an intermingling of the town and her life within it, complete with its downtown and river, its schools and homes, and her coming-of-age experiences that give meaning to her surroundings.

Rice, however, avoids whitewashing her hometown, reminding us that there is more to a place than meets the eye.

In “McAdenville,” the speaker branches out, becoming both an objective bystander and an integral participant. Throughout the poem, Rice counterbalances innocence with uncertainty, as in the lines “fishing for crawdads and minnows, careful / not to cut your foot wide-open on broken beer bottles.” She describes the town’s abandoned mills: “Horrible monster noise when opening the mill’s doors / beware of the textile teeth,” and the “yarn mills – inside a hive of lost parents – outside kids latch- / keyed – the village raised their young.”

The two poems that follow springboard into a gripping portrayal of Rice’s hometown in its post-industrial state. In “Pharr Yarns,” the speaker ponders the future of the mills and their workers:

Across the threadbare distance.

The poem, “T,” a reference to markings that indicate an abandoned mill house that will be razed, begins with these four terse lines: “Terminate. / Tear down. / Take away. / Torch.”

It continues, “Nothing’s left / Even the memories / Are tagged by time.”

McAdenville is such a significant presence in this collection that Rice carries its dirt; its very ground is embedded in her and the objects around her. In “Many Moons Ago,” she recounts walking in mud until it caked into her shoes, and they became “boulder boots.” In “Clipping for Quarters,” she recalls a neighbor, Old Man Gladden, paying her a quarter for cleaning earth from his tractor: I dug out the dirt, Dirt from the turnip-green fields, Dirt from his plow and potted plants, Dirt that he couldn’t get out.

Dirt that waited for me.

Throughout Forever EightyEights, Rice’s memories are both plentiful and powerful.

In her opening poems, she paints a mosaic of the wonder and magic of childhood, but deftly includes a reminder of the town’s origin. “Homefront” recounts the delight of catching lightning bugs while also describing the texture of her mother’s hands: Rough, yarn-worn fingers Press my face.

One stripe down each cheek –

Like my parents did before me.

Warm gut glow.

I have spliced till palsy comes And my canteen coffee spilt ...

Tractor Shed Theater, St. Stephens High School, Hickory, NC, Oct. 2022

Ghosts out

And I have breathed the dirt and lint ...

OPPOSITE Molly Rice at a reading at the

Winter 2024

The Mill Hill is razed And now

In “Sightings,” the speaker stargazes with a friend while eating potato chips. In “Winded,” she skates in her shoes with her brother before he spins her,

North Carolina Miscellany

But tonight, with him not home, We three little Indians Escape a scalping And dance in the dusk Glowing.

Rice begins the poem “Tough Love” with, “I’ll jerk a knot in your ass. / I’ll knock you clear into next week.” In “Lullaby,” she is banned to her bedroom after being told, “You are, little one, / A mistake.” In “Hickory Switches,” Rice recounts having to find a hickory switch for her mother to punish her with, one “that wasn’t too big / But one that would satisfy her.” And in “Christmas Town, USA,” she

PHOTOGRAPH BY ZELINA KALE

causing her to fall and lose her breath. In “To Be a Boy,” she wishes she could enjoy the freedom that boys seemed to have, “to not be told what to do and how to do it,” but concludes this could only happen, as her grandmother tells her, if she can kiss her elbow. In “Girls Only,” Rice recounts building a fire with a friend and having to call the fire department after it gets out of control.

These and other comingof-age poems portray a young speaker in relation to her surroundings, carving out her life under the historical weight of a town. It is left to the reader to determine exactly where the town ends and Rice begins. Like McAdenville’s painful transition from past to present, Rice weathers a turbulence that threatens her own transition from childhood to adolescence. She counters the carefree nature of her youth with an overarching danger from within her home that is both consuming and heartbreaking.

In “Homefront,” amid the exuberance of the moment, there is another, more personal peril that the speaker must endure:

describes her father, dressed as Santa Claus: “Under these lights, / Magic can happen. / Even Satan can turn into Santa.”

This sobering series of poems leaves the reader feeling the severity of the place the speaker inhabits and how she must fend for herself in navigating it. There are, however, some glimmers of strength and hope. In “Let Go,” Rice declares, “The trash truck of my soul hauls a heavy load,” before concluding, “But sprouting / From the pile – / The moss of / Forgiveness.” It is a poignant and satisfying line as well as a simple and solitary response to all that this place has burdened her with.

Rice primarily finds redemption by taking refuge in and paying tribute to her family and ancestors. “Forebears,” a poem that compares Rice’s ancestral search to deep sea diving, ends: Decompression From death’s kingdom

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toes”) and how her mother would write the lyrics to songs on the radio and choreograph dances for her so that she could perform them in her school’s talent show (in “DYB”).

Rice’s ancestors continually invite her to a renewal of her childlike spirit and into a place of serenity. “Genesis” depicts the poet scattering her grandfather’s ashes into the ocean while fondly remembering how he had taken her to the coastline each summer: His ashes – sand His bones – shell Gone.

Bygone.

Genesis.

In “Singer,” she recalls her grandmother sewing skirts and costumes for her and attempting to teach her to sew. Rice recognizes the precision and skill her grandmother possessed. She calls her “a pro” while also expressing a more symbolic undertone to her sewing: “Her / Patterns / Forever stitched in me.”

In Forever Eighty-Eights, Rice’s reckoning with the place of her origin, a place of both hurt and healing, conveys an undeniable need for connection.

This brings us full circle to the collection’s (untitled) introductory poem and the basis for its title, in which Rice lists the various symbolic meanings of the number eighty-eight, including

Bears a depression

. . . CB lingo for love &

And a longing

kisses; math’s untouchable,

To go home.

palindromic, mirrored, four-

Rice’s longing to connect to her roots, not just as a biological impulse, but as a means of hope and survival, is pervasive.

She describes walking through fields of tall grass with her mother (in “Fried Green Toma-

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way number; the sky’s number of constellations . . .

Rice ends her list fittingly, with a conclusive stamp of hope that underlies the entire collection, “Only forever / love is eightyeights. XOXO.” n

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Winter 2024

2023 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE SEMIFINALIST

BY DUNCAN SMITH

Apple Not the one Eve bit but the iPhone budding in my ear whispering byte-sized bits of despair.

Locust swarms savage Somalia.

Saggy-skinned polar bears swim in iceless seas.

Bomb-blasted Baghdad, chaos in Kyiv.

Rest home hot zones morph into morgues.

COURTESY OF THE ARTISTS

What to do with this daunting data?

Knowledge whose knowing numbs.

Climate change, man-made or nature?

Viruses, evolution or engineered?

Who can I, where can I, place the blame?

Are Adam’s and my accusing excuse the same?

Still image from Changing Worlds Now (multimedia projected installation) by WALSH/BLAZING

WALSH / BLAZING contracts with museums, arts organizations, municipalities, and academic institutions to bring region-specific, multi-media installations to communities to engage discussion around our current environmental trajectory and the unnecessary politicizing of the climate crisis. They bridge art and science by employing a research-based approach to environmental messaging through visual art.

CARIN WALSH graduated from State University of New York College at Buffalo with a degree in Broadcast Communications. She is a museum educator, visual artist, and exhibit organizer. Her illustration, animation, audio/video work, and assemblage sculpture have been exhibited throughout the Triangle in NC. She splits her time between her work at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and developing her studio practice.

DUNCAN SMITH is a North Carolina native and a graduate of UNC Chapel Hill. He now lives and writes in Durham, NC. His poetry and prose have appeared in Booklist, Broad River Review, Kakalak, and Red Eft Review. He is working on his first collection of poems.

JENNY BLAZING was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest and is now based in Durham, NC. She graduated from the University of California, Davis with degrees in Environmental Design and Economics and subsequently earned a PhD from UNC Chapel Hill. She is on the curatorial committee of Horace Williams House in Chapel Hill, and her work is regularly on view at Five Points Gallery in downtown Durham, NC.

North Carolina Miscellany

FOUND MAGIC a review by J.S. Absher Joan Barasovska. Orange Tulips.

Redhawk Publications, 2022.

Janis Harrington. How to Cut a Woman in Half. Able Muse Press, 2022.

J.S. ABSHER has been a frequent finalist in NCLR’s James Applewhite Poetry Prize contest, so his poetry has appeared in several issues. His work has also been published in approximately fifty journals and anthologies, including Visions International, Tar River Poetry, and Southern Poetry Anthology, VII: North Carolina. His first full-length book, Mouth Work (St. Andrews University Press, 2016; reviewed in NCLR Online 2017), won the 2015 Lena Shull Book Competition sponsored by the North Carolina Poetry Society. He lives with his wife, Patti, in Raleigh, NC. JOAN BARASOVSKA is Senior Vice President of Membership for the North Carolina Poetry Society. An academic therapist in private practice, Barasovska grew up in Philadelphia, PA, and resides in Orange County, NC. She has published two other poetry collections: Birthing Age (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Carrying Clare (Main Street Rag, 2022).

Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies such as Flying South and Kakalak.

Janis Harrington’s How to Cut a Woman in Half and Joan Barasovska’s Orange Tulips bring their readers intimate portrayals of emotionally fraught situations through well-crafted, moving poems. Their subject matters are similar – the suicide of a sister’s husband in Harrington’s book, a young woman who repeatedly attempts to harm and kill herself in Barasovska’s book. Both poets employ understated but fully nourished styles. Both books end with a return to life – “to fresh woods and pastures new” – however changed it may be.

Janis Harrington’s How to Cut a Woman in Half is a sonnet sequence that depicts two family tragedies and the loving relationship between sisters that helps overcome them. The occasion for the sequence is the suicide of Nick, the husband of Annie, a death that prompts the poet and narrator, Annie’s older sister, to make an extended visit.

The account of this visit occupies the bulk of the collection.

In the background is an earlier tragedy: some years before, the narrator’s husband was severely injured in an automobile accident and for weeks lingered unconscious before dying. The narrator’s experience with her unexpected loss, recounted here in several poems, helps her understand her sister’s situation and emotions as they change

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over time. Another strand of tragedy comes into view, as we come to see how Nick’s family background shaped his life and decisions. For example, in “Holocaust Child,” we read how the experience of Nick’s mother as a refugee inflicted traumatic “pain / marking Nick’s psyche like a port-wine stain.” Other poems depict scenes from the sisters’ childhood and young adulthood. The background stories add temporal and psychological depth and complexity to the main narrative.

How to Cut a Woman in Half consists of sixty-four sonnets, in loose iambics, that skillfully use rhyme and slant rhyme. Many of the poems end in rhymed (or slant rhymed) couplets, but many do not. The variation keeps the form fresh, as well as flexible enough to accommodate the collection’s variety of tones. In a memorable and powerful poem, “Suicidal Ideation,” Harrington imagines that state of mind as “dark starlings . . . / invading your hanging backyard feeder,” a “nonstop attack” where “in waves, like bombers, they dive and peck.”

The poem has interesting sonic qualities, especially repetition of the k sound that comes to the reader’s attention around line seven, with the “screeching and squawking” of the starlings.

The final couplet, set off from the body of the poem, does

JANIS HARRINGTON is a four-time Applewhite finalist, including a third-place poem, and in 2023 won the contest. That winning poem will be in NCLR 2024. Find her other finalist poems in earlier issues. Her work has also appeared in Tar River Poetry, Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease, Journal of the American Medical Association, Snapdragon: A Journal of Art & Healing, Kakalak, among other venues. Her first collection of poems, Waiting for the Hurricane (St. Andrews University Press, 2017), won the Lena M. Shull Book Award, given by the North Carolina Poetry Society.

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Winter 2024

COURTESY OF JANIS HARRINGTON

Nick’s and the sisters’ pasts and the untimely loss of the poet’s husband. The poems are so arranged that the title poem, “How to Cut a Woman in Half,” applies with equal force to both sisters: Fate, a cruel magician, vanishes her husband, leaving her table with half as many plates, shower rack missing half its towels, bed half empty. The trick: after the blade falls, she shrinks herself into half of her former life.

not employ end rhyme, but uses internal rhyme (the birds “blot out all light, transforming noon to midnight”) and a recurrence of the k sound: “No escape. A full eclipse of hope.” As in this last line of the poem, many lines have nine syllables, lending the poem a plain-speaking, laconic quality.

The book’s tone is not unrelieved gloom. The poet’s prior experiences and her distance, however slight, from Nick’s death provide room for exasperation, frustration, humor, even a bit of satire, all of which, like grief, are inescapable. The narrator’s experiences with her sister’s pets – “a string of dysfunctional animals / dating back to our childhood” (“Pet Sitter”) – provide opportunities for pathos as well as comedy, including the mockepic confrontation between Annie’s dog Hugo, a poodle-bichon frisé mix, and a pug named Homer (“Iliad”): Hugo “halts at a gate, / launches a ferocious recitative,” and then “Homer appears . . . tail straight / with outrage.” A moment mixing comedy and pathos occurs in “Alarm” when the narrator attempts to prepare for her sister a “fake meat loaf” that is vegan and gluten-free, “so thick a mixture, / it overheats the new blender’s motor” and triggers “the smoke alarm, / shrilling my failure to heal or nurture.”

One of the great strengths of How to Cut a Woman in Half is the construction of the narrative.

Although the sequence follows a familiar chronology – from a loved one’s death, to the funeral, to the scattering of the ashes, to the long period of mourning and recovery – it strategically reveals

ABOVE Janis Harrington at a North Carolina Poetry Society

reading, McIntyre’s Books, Pittsboro, NC, 26 Feb. 2023

This poem occurs not long after the sequence’s midpoint, and almost exactly in the middle of Part Two, immediately after four sonnets on the extended dying of the poet’s husband. The narrator is deeply involved in the progress of her sister’s grief, handling the many practical matters that require attention after a death as well as providing comfort and support. Her loving service helps her complete the long-delayed healing from her own husband’s death: being “daily witness to her reckoning with loss, / released my heart’s stubborn resistance” to accepting her husband’s fate (“Acroyoga”).

One of my favorite poems in the collection, “Prayer for My Sister,” describes the narrator’s attempt to cheer her sister by driving “to see the superbloom / promised by winter rainfall.” On the way, Annie is aloof and silent. But then they top a hill: Jeweled colors splash to the horizon: yellow fennel, poppies, verbena, blue lupine.

Annie parks on the shoulder, opens the door, finds a path into the meadow. Shedding her jacket, she lifts her face to the sun.

Let this temporary parole from distress remind her that beauty and joy still exist.

Orange Tulips by Joan Barasovska is the poet’s coming-of-age story told through powerful confessional poems. After the introductory poem, it consists of fifty-four poems in three sections: “Too Young,” “All Wrong,” and “Only Now.” “Too Young” begins with poems of innocence, but portents of trouble accumulate, like the father’s vulnerability (“His Heart”) and marginal position in the family’s power dynamics (“Physics”).

In “Sore Throat,” the child imagines she causes the sickness to which she is prone – “I’m a little girl who believes she can / make herself sick just

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The style encompasses the cryptic – “split wires / cold sweat / dark day” (“Waking at Noon”); the explanatory – “The pros knew the ins and outs of sharps” (“Hurting”); the dramatic – “Gigantic George stands naked in the waters” (“George’s Big Night”); the confiding – “What would you like to be doing in five years? / I answer, too quickly, I’d like to be dead” (“Melvin”); and the confessional – episodes of self-harm and suicide attempts. In a moving confession, “I’ve Never Told It Before,” the poet describes how a confidante in the hospital apparently carried out the poet’s suicide plan using a broken piece of light bulb.

Though the poet spends “[d]ay after day in a barrel” (“Caesura”), there are glimmers of hope, especially in trees and in prayer: O tree I prayed to. . .

I knew you, lovely one, ...

God spoke from your buds and leaves . . . (“Young Tree”)

In “No One Knows About This,” the trees “lie down to rest,” an image of the exhausted poet: “They unclench their roots, groan.” But like her, at dawn they “yank themselves upright.” “Keep Her Safe” offers another prayer, now in third person: “keep her from rooftops / . . . keep pills in their bottles // . . . Lord, send rescue.”

Inexplicably, on a day the poet cannot place – “A Tuesday in May? / My December birthday?”

– her life changes: “In one breath I could stand it” (“This One Day”). The poem “Drenched” is a PHOTOGRAPH BY JEANNE JULIAN

by being sad // . . . I want the gentleness that only sickness gets you” – while the mother, upset and angered by her constant illness, is unsympathetic.

The family dynamics may not explain the mental and emotional difficulties that overwhelm the narrator as a child and young woman, but they do explain why she conceals issues until she can no longer do so. In “A Dark Door Opens,” the first poem in “All Wrong,” she “hide[s] in bed,” “go[es] to a few [college] classes / but only hear[s] a roaring sound.” She “can barely talk.” On New Year’s Eve, she “throw[s] / [herself] down the basement stairs.”

Some of my favorite poems come near the end of “Too Young.” In “1963,” at the age of nine or ten, while crossing the Schuykill River Bridge with her Girl Scout troop, the narrator fixates on the idea of jumping: “I don’t ask Miss Kelly why people jump. / She knows about hikes, knots, campfires. / Starting today, I’m the authority on jumping.”

Equally fine is the next poem, “Girl on a Bus”: “She can’t know why / she’s cried all day at school.” As in several other poems, the third-person point of view provides distance and perspective. It is the voice of the mature poet that emerges at the end of the collection. The poem looks ahead to future events that Orange Tulips recounts – the narrator as a teenager and young woman – and to events further in the future, when the narrator is wife and mother, that are largely beyond the book’s scope.

“Too Young” also contains signs of the child’s future as a poet – the imaginary stories and worlds shared with her brother, in “My Little Brother,” and with a friend, in “Found Magic.” This gift reappears in “Friends on the Inside” when, as a patient in a locked psychiatric ward, the narrator “write[s] down the accidental / poetry of overheard hallucinations.”

The poems in the middle section, “All Wrong, confess painful events and states of mind that must have been grueling to write. The understated style works beautifully, as in this section’s title poem:

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I walk and walk.

I only feel well on trains and buses.

I draw odd diagrams in small books.

I don’t wonder why I’m done for.

ABOVE Joan Barasovska at a reading for Nexus Poets,

New Bern, NC, 2019

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declaration of the self that has emerged from the struggle: “Admire me in my bikini on the high dive, / blindfolded and in love at the same time.” This is the sole poem that ends every line with slant or full rhyme, with a startling final metaphor: “I was born without a snorkel or a skin. / No dry land, no lessons, just jump in.”

The final section, “Only Now,” includes the deaths of the poet’s parents. Barasovska gives each parent a revelatory monologue.

We see especially the mother’s resentments in “Elsie Has Her Say,” her silence when truth was needed, her unleashing of emotions on the vulnerable: “I never was one / to hide my feelings.”

But the poet can now accept life: “I love this world I yearned to shed. / . . . / light drenches my reawakened life, / warms the small planet of my heart (“Summer’s Start”).

In pondering these books, I remembered something I read many years ago: “We are continually living a solution of problems that reflection cannot hope to solve.”* Both books are thoughtful and reflective, but they are more: sensitive to language, responsive to nature and to the claims of relationship.

They demonstrate how we can survive what we cannot intellectually solve. As Harrington puts it in her title poem, “Does it matter what is real or illusion if, / when she steps from grief’s box, she feels whole?” n

*

J.H. Van den Berg, The Phenomenological Approach to Psychiatry: An Introduction to Recent Phenomenological Psychopathology (Thomas, 1955) 61.

SHINING A LIGHT ON HISTORY a review by Amanda M. Capelli Kianna Alexander. Carolina Built. Gallery Books, 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 Place, Talking Writing, NCLR, The Routledge Companion to Literature of the U.S. South, and elsewhere.

North Carolina native KIANNA ALEXANDER has been publishing across romance, women’s fiction, and historical genres since 2009. Watch a discussion of Carolina Built hosted

by North Carolina Humanities for the 2023 North Carolina Reads program.

Winter 2024

If you ever find yourself in Edenton, NC, walk down Broadstreet and pause to look at the J.N. Leary building, a two-story Colonial Revival storefront built in 1894 and now home to the Chowan Herald. Josephine Leary, nee Napoleon, was born into slavery in Williamston, NC, in the 1850s.

After emancipation, she married, moved to Edenton, NC, and began to build a name for herself as a savvy businesswoman and real estate entrepreneur. During her lifetime, Leary operated a successful barbershop and purchased six different properties in Edenton’s historical district. The 2022 novel, Carolina Built, by Kianna Alexander, offers readers a romantic revisioning of Leary’s life story. Leary’s is an important story to tell and one that Alexander recognized immediately as worthy of novelization. She recounts her decision to do so in the preface, highlighting the significance of re-establishing Leary’s presence in the American timeline: [T]he accomplishments of African Americans have so often been minimized, overlooked, or outright dismissed to serve a narrative that relegates us to the status of second-class citizenship. I decided to be a part of the solution, by putting my efforts into a project that would shine a light on someone who would otherwise be forgotten by history. (x)

OPPOSITE The J.N. Leary Building in

Edenton, NC

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PHOTOGRAPH BY KIP SHAW

It’s a thread we find throughout the body of the story as well.

For example, after giving birth to her first child, a daughter, Josephine’s mother and grandmother help her convalesce.

Four generations of women in one room represent a spectrum of history, at once suggesting a new and bright future for the Napoleon/Leary family and highlighting an unfillable chasm of loss: When Mama says “home,” I know she doesn’t mean the old Williams spread.

She means our true home, Africa.

Ghana, more specifically. Grandma Milly can trace our people back there, through the stories she heard from her mother, Amina. . . . As I gaze at my new daughter, the weight of my mother’s words settles over me like a sturdy blanket. My child may never lay eyes on the land where our family originated, but she will know from whence she came. (55)

Alexander’s novel straddles the line between rose-colored romance and historical justice, making some parts of the narrative feel uneven. But Leary’s story is bigger than a single novel. In her retelling and rebuilding of parts of Leary’s

life, Alexander begins the work of bringing her back into the American consciousness, shedding light on a story that has been buried for far too long, work that this reviewer hopes to see continued in the future. n

Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Prize $250 and release via the fall issue of NCLR Online

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2024 FINAL JUDGE: DASAN AHANU Read about the premiere contest winner and other honorees in NCLR Online Fall 2023 (with links to the performances).

FUNDED BY THE

All finalists are considered for NCLR Youtube and honoraria.

Submission guidelines here

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COMMUNITY AS WITNESS IN WEST MILLS a review by Kristina L. Knotts De’Shawn Charles Winslow.

Decent People. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023.

KRISTINA L. KNOTTS reviews for NCLR frequently. She has a PhD in English from the University of Tennessee and 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. DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW was born and raised in Elizabeth City, NC, and in 2003 moved to Brooklyn, NY. A 2017 graduate of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Winslow holds a BFA in creative writing and an MA in English literature from Brooklyn College.

His first novel, In West Mills (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019; reviewed in NCLR Online 2020), received an American Book Award and was a Center for Fiction First Novel Prize winner.

Decent People is De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s second novel and a strong follow-up to his award-winning first novel, In West Mills. Both novels are set in the small fictional town of West Mills in eastern North Carolina, close to the Virginia border, and many of the characters populating it emerge in this latest work. While his first novel spans several decades, Decent People takes place in a much shorter time span, March 1976.

One of the compelling features of Winslow’s characters in both of his novels is their uniqueness. Both novels feature women whose outlook and perception of those around them are unconventional. His characters recall Toni Morrison’s Sula, the free-spirited protagonist from the 1973 novel of the same name who became a community pariah for violating gender and sexual norms, much as the main character from In West Mills, Azalea “Knot” Center, does. Knot is independent and intelligent, though at times self-destructive. A heavy drinker, a devoted reader, and an independent thinker, she is, above all, an iconoclast. Her platonic friendships with men in the novel are the kind of relationships not often portrayed in fiction. In Decent People, the main protagonist, Jo Wright, shares similar characteristics, minus the drinking. Jo, like Knot, is an intelligent and selfsufficient woman who does not take no for an answer and is a fervent defender and fiercely protective of her brother Herschel, who is gay.

Winter 2024

When Decent People begins, Jo, a West Mills native, has returned to her hometown roots after many years in New York City. Back in West Mills, Jo is ready to settle into retirement with her fiancé, Lymp Seymore, and reconnect with the small town she left as a child. Her plans for a calm retirement, though, do not last long. The novel’s plot quickly settles into the mystery revealed in the opening chapter: Lymp’s halfsiblings (Marian, Marva, and Lazarus Harmon) have been murdered, and Lymp is a suspect. Frustrated with the local police’s efforts to track down the Harmons’ killer or to aggressively take up other leads, Jo takes it upon herself to talk to other people in West Mills to see what evidence she can uncover.

As she talks to those who reportedly feuded with the Harmons, the narrative perspective shifts to other townspeople who are also suspects. As Jo works to find answers to absolve her fiance, incriminating information emerges from many different characters, including Lymp.

Besides Jo, the novel reveals the stories of Eunice Loving (whom readers may remember from In West Mills), Savannah Russet, and Ted Temple. All were witnessed arguing with Marian or Marva Harmon prior to their murder. All had reasons to confront them.

As the reader learns more about the various characters and their stories, the narrative reveals the complicated history of West Mills. We learn about gay family members fleeing the

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COURTESY OF MARGARET BAUER

small Southern town for the North to live a freer life. Multiple white and Black characters formed relationships at great physical, social, and emotional risk, as did those in same-sex relationships. Past recollections and current scenes show policing that favors West Mills’s white and well-off citizens. The novel’s title can be read straightforwardly and sardonically: it nods to the characters who are kind and decent, but there are a fair share of characters who think highly of themselves yet prove cruel and self-serving. Only by delving into the stories of the various characters are the complexities revealed and the mystery of the Harmons’ deaths solved.

An interesting facet of Winslow’s fiction is his portrayal of parents’ concern about their children growing up in a community where racism, sexism, and homophobia are casually expressed. In West Mills shows Knot yearning for parental support as an adult even as she must make difficult decisions about herself as a potential parent. In Decent People, parents make misguided decisions that have profound effects on their

children. The parents, whether it’s Eunice or Savannah, want to shield their children from problems, though they don’t always do it for the right reasons or in the right way. The reader sees the heartbreaking effect one mother’s treatment of her gay son has on him when Eunice takes her young son, La’Roy, to Marian Harmon, a pediatrician, “to have the gay removed.”

Eventually, she recognizes her mistake “was thinking her son needed fixing” (58). The characters have flaws, but some wish to improve and demonstrate regret. There is hope for change with the younger generation in West Mills who see the limits of the older generation. Nate, Lymp’s son, admonishes his father when he carelessly refers to Knot and her friend Valley as “winos” (32). These kinds of moments draw the reader in and make the community of West Mills more compelling.

Although Decent People is set in 1976, so many of the novel’s themes and conflicts continue to plague America today: systemic racism, homophobia, and biased policing. The novel explores the staggering impact

ABOVE De’Shawn Charles Winslow talking with ECU students reading his novel In West Mills for a North Carolina literaturetalking class taught online

by NCLR Editor ABOVE De’Shawn Charles Winslow with ECU students reading hisMargaret novel In Bauer West

during pandemic, 21 Feb. 2021 class taught online by NCLR Editor Margaret Mills forthe a North Carolina literature Bauer during the pandemic, 21 Feb. 2021

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of racism on its inhabitants. For example, Savannah, a white woman, and her husband, a Black man, had to leave West Mills in the early 1960s to avoid harassment and potential violence. Besides the racism they face, several characters who are gay must confront the severe homophobia around them. In both novels, these gay citizens of Winslow’s fictional community– young, middle-aged, and older – certainly could be the centerpiece of future fiction.

Decent People shows there are many more potential plotlines to pursue should Winslow continue to write about the West Mills community he has created. Certainly, the Harmons’ past as well as their family dynamics presents possibilities: Why did they leave for the north and then return to West Mills? Why are Marva and Lazarus subservient to Marian?

In both Decent People and In West Mills, the Black characters, fearing violence, leave West Mills. What makes Winslow’s fiction still so affirming are characters like Jo (and Knot from In West Mills) who protest the discrimination that their family members and friends face and envision a more inclusive world. Winslow’s storytelling here shows ample ability and imagination for further exploration of this small but complex North Carolina community. Winslow’s Decent People takes up Morrison’s claim to see characters that represent all of us, something both Knot and Jo would appreciate. n

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SPLIT IDENTITY AND SHADES OF LOCAL COLOR WRITING a review by Charles Duncan Jacinda Townsend. Mother Country. Graywolf Press, 2022.

CHARLES DUNCAN is Professor of English and former Vice President for Academic Affairs at William Peace University (formerly Peace College). He has written two books and two dozen articles and essays on American and African American literature.

JACINDA TOWNSEND took creative writing workshops in the Duke English Department while she was enrolled in the Duke University School of Law. After a few years as a lawyer and journalist, she earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her novel Saint Monkey (W.W. Norton, 2014) won the 2015 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for best fiction written by a woman and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for that year’s best historical fiction. Mother Country was the 2022 winner of the Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence.

She has recently finished work on a third novel, “James Loves Ruth,” and excerpts from the novel have appeared in Auburn Avenue, Copper Nickel, and Transition.

Mother Country, a new novel by Jacinda Townsend, is actually a book about multiple mothers and quite a few countries, including the United States and several in Africa. The story focuses on two mothers in particular: Shannon, an African American woman who, because of a physically and emotionally scarring car accident, cannot conceive; and Souria, an African girl (when we first meet her) who escapes enslavement and travels essentially alone to set up a new life in Morocco. Souria eventually gives birth to a girl she names Yumna. The naming of the child becomes an important plot point with profound thematic resonance.

Mother Country examines multiple examples of split identity, primarily of the daughter of Souria (Yumna) and Shannon (renamed Mardi), but also in the book’s structure. In fact, the novel in many ways functions as two overlapping and overarching narratives. The first half of the novel traces the routes to adulthood for both Shannon and Souria, and both journeys impose significant trauma on the women. For Shannon, the journey mostly involves an upbringing without love, a catastrophic accident, and an unhappy marriage. When her father finds a report card she has unsuccessfully tried to dispose of, for example, she clandestinely overhears him saying,

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“Waste of a child” (36). (He later apologizes but not with a whole lot of sincerity.) Her mother, too, lacks the profound empathy we often associate with motherhood. After the car accident that renders Shannon unable to give birth, her mother makes this comment with her daughter present: “They’re going to fix her. . . . But she has no business being anyone’s mother. No business at all” (43). That’s one ominous piece of foreshadowing.

Townsend’s rendering of Souria’s even more harrowing plight is nothing short of terrifying. Kidnapped and enslaved as a child, she grows up without any family at all and faces neglect at best and much worse at worst. In one of the powerful early passages in the novel, Souria escapes her captivity in a horrifying scene that includes an unforeseen natural phenomenon killing every member of the tribe that has enslaved her: The tribe hushed itself in awe as poisonous gas darkened the lake, whose surface rippled there and here with the hot dioxide rippling from its depths; they were quiet enough to hear the earth beneath them make a hissing sound, as though it were being cooked in a steel pan. . . . It was a scene so powerful that she knew she’d retain it in every cell of her body. Men, chicken[s], women, goats, camels – all the living things of the camp – felled to the ground without so much as a chance to protest. (19)

This passage demonstrates Townsend’s compelling eloquence even when describing apocalyptic misery and death.

Indeed, creating powerful, often beautiful descriptions – not always of happy things – defines her writing in the novel.

What binds these two mothers together occurs more than

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midway through the novel: Shannon impulsively kidnaps Yumna, the twenty-five-monthold daughter of her biological mother Souria, and, through the indifference and inaction of multiple figures in the book (including her husband, Vlad), transports the child back to Louisville, KY. Once in the US, the child lives the mostly “normal” – if not especially happy – life of a young American girl.

As the daughter of both an African mother and, once stolen, an American one, Yumna functions as the moral axis of the novel. A child of two mothers (and two cultures), she understandably exhibits an essential duality – she’s both Yumna and, later, Mardi, the name she’s given in her life in Louisville.

In fact, Townsend’s novel reads, in many ways, like an updated (and internationalized) version of local color writing, a genre of American literature widespread in the late nineteenth century that interwove depictions of specific venues with fictional plots. Local color authors, such as Mark Twain (focusing on the Mississippi River and the West), Kate Cho-

ABOVE Duke Law School alumnus

Jacinda Townsend reading for National Library Week in the Goodson Law Library, Durham, NC, 14 Apr. 2016

pin (Louisiana), Mary Wilkins Freeman and Sara Orne Jewett (New England), and George Washington Cable (Georgia), made this type of writing popular in the United States.

Like those writers, Townsend’s novel offers rich detail about local customs, speech patterns (in this case including multiple dialects and languages), geography, and other distinguishing features of a given locale. The book offers fascinating and deeply specific descriptions of several distinct settings and the cultural particularities of those real places, most interestingly African cities in Morocco such as Essaouira, Marrakesh, and Rabat; parts of Mauritania; and small towns and villages near or in the Western Sahara, the desert serving as a character all its own. In addition, we get a brief glimpse of Sarajevo (in Vlad’s background), and, finally, a substantial part of the narrative takes place in Louisville, although the descriptions about it lack the power of Townsend’s depictions of the African venues.

Townsend, who teaches creative writing in the MFA program at the University of Michigan, tells the women’s (and eventually the child’s) stories through multiple perspectives and with a nonlinear narrative progression. Most of the novel reflects the perspectives of Shannon, Souria, and Yumna/Mardi, and does so by jumping back and forth between time periods in their lives, a style that can be both compelling and confusing – a reader has to pay close attention to keep track

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of the complex set of stories. (I say most of the novel is filtered through the perspectives of the three main characters, but Townsend uses a series of surrogate narrators to comment briefly on Yumna’s abduction and departure from Africa.)

The novel offers a compelling and often heartbreaking story – both of the adult women suffer enormously, and of course Shannon inflicts on Souria what at times seems unendurable pain. Townsend writes powerfully of the suffering, and there’s little joy for either of them in their ultimate relationships with (and without) men.

As for Mardi (the American version of Yumna), her naming makes me wonder if Townsend is invoking Melville’s third novel, Mardi, a book that begins as a travelogue like his first two works but then becomes deeply philosophical. When the book received much less critical success that his earlier work, he responded to the criticism

by writing, “But Time, which is the solver of all riddles, will solve Mardi.”* In her novel about mothers and countries, Townsend’s Mardi, too, asks to be solved. n

* Qtd. From a letter to Lemuel Shaw, 23 Apr. 1849, in Herman Melville, Correspondence, ed.

Lynn Horth, vol. 14 of The Writings of Herman Melville (Northwestern UP, 1968–93) 130.

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AN AGATHA CHRISTIE MYSTERY – NOT WRITTEN BY AGATHA CHRISTIE a review by Shane Trayers Nina de Gramont. The Christie Affair. St. Martin’s Press, 2023.

SHANE TRAYERS is a Professor of English at Middle Georgia State University in Macon, GA. She specializes in contemporary British and Irish literature, as well as Young Adult literature. She has been the Area Chair of the Apocalypse, Dystopia, and Disaster area of the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association for over a decade.

NINA DE GRAMONT is the author of seven books, among them The Last September (Algonquin Books, 2015) and Gossip of the Starlings (Algonquin Books, 2008), as well as novels for a young adult audience such as Every Little Thing in the World (Simon and Schuster, 2010), and the short story collection Of Cats and Men (Random House, 2008). The Christie Affair is a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick and a New York Times Best Seller. The author teaches creative writing at UNC Wilmington.

While Nina de Gramont’s The Christie Affair has “no allegiance to history” (305), what it accomplishes is creating a novel in the style of Agatha Christie, a twisting and turning mystery underlying the accidental connections between wife and mistress. It is a book about love, betrayal, motherhood, hatred, and vengeance.

The Christie Affair is a surprising and compelling novel with mystery and murder at its heart.

Though not an accurate historical fiction when it comes to the biography of Agatha Christie and her family, the novel is inspired by the very real eleven days that Agatha Christie went missing in 1926, beginning on December 3rd. She was found on December 14th at a hotel after a large search for the missing author, but the real-life mystery did not end there. Agatha Christie’s claim of amnesia suggests that not even the author seems to know what happened during the time of the disappearance. The novel creatively fills in the blanks left

by Christie’s statements that she had no knowledge of what happened or why she used her husband’s mistress’s last name as her alias when found. Unlike other speculations about the famous author’s unusual disappearance and reappearance, this novel goes beyond filling in possible events. It invents motive, back story, and a more

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complicated series of events that include both the fictionalized main character, Nan O’Dea, who fills in for Agatha Christie’s husband’s real mistress and later second wife Nancy Neele, and the fictionalized Agatha Christie character.

The novel anticipates our immediate dislike of Agatha Christie’s husband’s mistress.

As Nan O’Dea tells us, “Perhaps you’re finding it difficult to feel kindly toward a home-wrecker such as me. But I don’t require your affection” (28). Yet, after this statement we begin a cleverly interwoven bildungsroman of Nan’s life, including time spent with family in Ireland. A reader would be hard-pressed not to find empathy and compassion for someone who has lived through tragic times and life events. The transformation from “homewrecker” to heroine allows readers to rid themselves of any inherent dislike for the main character – particularly appropriate when the main character is a completely fictionalized historical figure with a different name than the historical mistress.

Ironically, the parts of this novel that are not about the Christie family have the most sense of historical veracity. Since this is a mystery, it is impossible to mention which characters are involved in this section of the novel without giving away

“ As readers our minds do reach toward the longed-for conclusions, despite what we know to be true. . . . This story belongs to me. I hold no allegiance to history, which has never done me a single favor.” —The Christie Affair

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COURTESY OF THE COUNTRY BOOKSHOP, SOUTHERN PINES, NC

integral plot, but one example is the novel’s description of a Magdalene Laundry, also called Magdalene Asylum, in Ireland where women who were pregnant and unmarried were confined. One character in the novel ends up here. Conditions in these laundries were horrific, but many of the atrocities did not come to light until recently.

The Magdalene Sisters (2002), a fictionalized film based on true stories, depicted the harsh conditions, including women doing hard labor up until birth and then years afterward to pay off their “debt,” not being able to leave of their own volition, and sometimes not at all because unmarked graves were found at many of these institutions. The Christie Affair’s depiction of the lack of food, harsh conditions, no fair pay

for work, and mistreatment of women matches the general stories of the survivors.

Additionally, these institutions adopted out babies, sometimes selling them for money, and there are claims that they did this without the mother’s consent as is depicted in The Christie Affair. Philomena Lee’s search for her son became public knowledge when Martin Sixsmith published The Lost Child of Philomena Lee: A Mother, Her Son and a Fifty-Year Search (2010). A movie, Philomena (2013), later dramatized her incarceration in the Magdalene Laundry where her son was stolen from her and adopted to a family in America without her permission. The Christie Affair takes the scant information available about the conditions for mothers and babies

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and envisions what it must have been like to be incarcerated there in a way that rings true for the very real stories of the women who suffered and is thus in line with these other Magdalene stories.

The novel depicts post–World War I well, too, from the jubilant celebrations in the streets in England as the war ended, to the hoarse voice of someone who was exposed to mustard gas, to the psychological and physical traumas men came home with. Also, the way that one character is described when afflicted with Spanish Flu, which really did accompany many men home at the end of the war, is historically accurate, as well as the high death rate mentioned tangentially in the novel.

Without giving too many clues to the overarching mystery, by the end of the novel, the speculative history takes over the main storyline as the fictional Nan O’Dea’s life collides with Agatha Christie’s disappearance, and the novel shows us a story that is likely more interesting than reality, one that diverges from known Agatha Christie biography. Yet, it is a story that respects Christie’s life and work through the telling of a clever, twisting murder mystery, grounded in the true horrors of the time period, especially for women, reminiscent of an Agatha Christie novel. n

ABOVE Nina de Gramont reading

at an event hosted by The Country Bookshop at the Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities, Southern Pines, NC, 13 Feb. 2023

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THE STORIES WE TELL – AND DON’T TELL a review by Julia Ridley Smith Amy Rowland. Inside the Wolf.

Algonquin Books, 2023.

JULIA RIDLEY SMITH is the author of a story collection, Sex Romp Gone Wrong (Blair, 2024), and a memoir, The Sum of Trifles (University of Georgia Press, 2021; reviewed in NCLR Online Fall 2022). Her short stories and essays have appeared in several literary magazines, including Ecotone, New England Review, and Southern Review. Her work has been recognized as notable in The Best American Essays and supported by the Sewanee Writers Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities, the United Arts Council of Greater Greensboro, and other arts organizations. She teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The first time I read Amy Rowland’s fiction, I was riveted by her voice on the page. We were in a graduate creative writing workshop, excited to be five hundred miles from home but also feeling pretty out of place.

Her story showed me a new vision of a familiar locale – rural Eastern North Carolina, where Rowland grew up and where I often visited family. Her stringent prose drew me in with its dry humor and love of word play, its ear for how folks talk, or don’t. Here is a young writer already reading and thinking seriously. Her sentences hearken to Faulkner and Joyce but are much more economical.

She was looking to writers who plumb the timeless mysteries of how people struggle to live together in places where some folks are always trying to keep the upper hand, and everybody knows everybody else’s business.

These very matters are at the heart of Rowland’s haunting second novel, Inside the Wolf.

The year is 2015. Rachel Ruskin has come back to Shiloh, NC, after being denied tenure at her professor job in New York City. Her brother Garland has committed suicide, her parents have died in a car accident, and she’s the only one left to sort out what remains in the house on the tobacco farm where she grew up. Rachel’s grief is further compounded by her guilt over the accidental death by shooting of her best friend, Rufus, thirty years earlier. Now that she’s

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back in the place where it happened, Rachel’s memories are inescapable. How can she begin to make sense of the stories that have been told and those that have been kept hidden?

Rachel knows a lot about how stories work, even though she was not tenured because “the committee said I was unable to make my studies on women, myth, and Southern folklore relevant for the ‘discipline’” (6).

As it turns out, her studies do prove relevant for her attempts to come to terms with the community in which she was raised.

Her homecoming becomes a kind of extended ethnographic inquiry into how stories shape life in her small Southern town.

The wolf in the novel’s title refers to real wolves Rachel encounters on her farm and in the surrounding woods, as well as to the fictional, often villainous wolves we know from fairy tales. All sorts of story traditions come into play in this novel, which looks to Aesop for its epilogue, a brief fable called “The Wolf and the Mastiff.” Throughout the book are references to Greek mythology, the Bible, Mother Goose, and the Brothers Grimm. And readers raised in North Carolina likely will recognize two pieces of state lore integral to the novel’s plot: the legend of Virginia Dare (the “first English baby in the new world” [43]) and the story of the Maco Light. In this well-known North Carolina ghost story, the spirit of a decapitated train signal

AMY ROWLAND is the author of The Transcriptionist (Algonquin Books, 2014), which received the Addison M. Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

She is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Norman Mailer Center, and the Sewanee Writers Conference. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The New York Times, Southern Review, Iowa Review, Lit Hub, New Letters, and elsewhere. Amy is a former editor at The New York Times Book Review and teaches at UC Berkeley.

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* Joan Didion, The White Album (Simon & Schuster, 1979) 11.

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PHOTOGRAPH BY LISA CALLAHAN

man searches the railroad tracks by lantern light, looking for his lost head. Amy Rowland moves the tale from the nineteenth to the twentieth century and makes the headless ghost into the great-grandfather of Jewel, the mother of Rachel’s brother’s child. Rachel and her family are white, Jewel’s family is Black, and among the things Rachel must come to grips with is how their pasts intersect.

At one point, Rachel asks Jewel if “[w]e tell ourselves lies in order to live” (79), a clear echo of Joan Didion’s famous line: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”* We can read “in order to live” as “in order to survive.” And, of course, in the South “telling a story” also can mean telling a lie. Ergo: we tell ourselves lies in order to survive. That’s exactly what Rachel’s parents did: told a story because they thought it would give their family a better chance at surviving a tragedy. But it hasn’t worked, and Rachel now recognizes how so many of the stories that fascinated her in childhood also are not entirely true – as well as how they are connected to the even bigger lie of white supremacy. About the Virginia Dare story, she says, “It started with a story I loved as a child. That was the betrayal; I had loved the story before I knew the message it held” (43).

Another story that obsesses Rachel is “The Witch Bride,” about a woman who slips out of her skin at night to roam out

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into the world, and how she is punished for it. This story, about a woman who isn’t free to move about as she wishes, resonates with Rachel, who left Shiloh in part because of the limited options for women there. Rachel is particularly suspicious of motherhood and what it demands of women who live in this deeply patriarchal society: “It became their one and only role, made frightening because the very thing they were lauded for, respected for, valued for, was the same thing that destroyed their selfhood” (29). She has no use for her parents’ religion and hates their church, where women aren’t supposed to speak and are expected to bow to the will of their husbands and fathers.

When another child in the town is accidentally shot to death,

ABOVE Amy Rowland (left) talking about

Inside the Wolf with reviewer Julia Ridley Smith at Scuppernong Books in Greensboro, NC, 14 July 2023

however, Rachel dares to speak. Compelled to confront the twin legacies of violence and mendacity that have destroyed her family and shadowed her life, she insists her neighbors face the question: how, in a gun-filled society, can we keep our children safe?

Rowland is too smart a writer to succumb to offering easy answers, but there is a note of redemption as the novel winds toward its conclusion. Fairy tales and folktales are often about how underdogs use their cunning to outwit the powerful; they are also about transformation. In the end, Inside the Wolf addresses the difficult question of how a person may be transformed by returning home to a place where things never seem to change. n

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SWAMP GIRLS IN TROUBLE: CLASS, RACE, AND THE PATRIARCHY IN THE PROHIBITIONERA SOUTH a review by Dennis R. Turner, Jr. Kelly Mustian. The Girls in the Stilt House. Sourcebooks, 2021.

DENNIS R. TURNER, JR., is from Oak City, NC, and earned his BA and MA in English from East Carolina University.

While teaching in his alma mater’s English Department, he served as Submissions Assistant for NCLR. He now teaches at Pitt Community College in Greenville, NC. KELLY MUSTIAN grew up in Natchez, MI, and in 2023 received the Mississippi Author Award for Fiction. She now lives with her family near the foothills of North Carolina.

Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals and commercial magazines, and she is a past recipient of a Regional Artist Grant from the North Carolina Arts and Science Council. The Girls in the Stilt House, her debut novel, is a USA Today and SIBA bestseller and was shortlisted for the 2022 Crook’s Corner Book Prize.

OPPOSITE Kelly Mustian at Main Street

Books for Independent Bookstore Day, Davidson, NC, 2022

The recent success of Delia Owens’s Where the Crawdads Sing (2018) has sent publishers looking for similarly-minded tales of low-bred but beautiful Southern damsels in distress, a genre of Southern potboilers that can playfully be labelled “Swamp Girls in Trouble.” Into this wake comes author Kelly Mustian, a former Mississippi native now living in the foothills of North Carolina who was a recipient of the North Carolina Arts and Science Council’s Regional Artist Project Grant, delivering us The Girls in the Stilt House, a Southern-fried yarn set in her beloved Mississippi Trace during Prohibition and Jim Crow. The story concerns two young women from the wrong side of the poverty line but different sides of the color line as they contend with domineering, corrupt men, rich and poor, while attempting to succeed in or break free from this genteel agrarian society that hides an underbelly of bootlegging and deeply ingrained class structures. Through this reluctant partnership of women bound by their misfortunes and needs, themes of race, class, and gender inequality are explored, but Mustian does not forget she is telling an oldfashioned Southern crime story.

The story unfolds over the better part of a year in 1923 and 1924. Structurally, it begins with a prologue in which the two main characters are in the midst of disposing of a body in an old Confederate tomb in the woods.

From there, the story is divided into three parts, one and two showing how each of the girls gets to this moment and part three detailing the events in the aftermath. Poor, wayward Ada Morgan, a white sixteen-year-

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old, comes home to the Trace disgraced and unknowingly pregnant a year after running off with a young man who promised love and adventure but dealt her heartbreak and destitution, and she must deal with the petty cruelty of her drunken, abusive father upon her return.

Meanwhile, seventeen-year-old Matilda Patterson, daughter of a local Black sharecropper employed by a prominent white landowning family who dabble in bootlegging as well, has had a happier homelife but longs to escape the limitations and perils of the Jim Crow South, though events have caused her to go into hiding. Circumstances thrust these two young women from the same town but different worlds together under the same roof of the stilt house at the edge of the swamp (hence the title of the novel), and an uneasy but necessary partnership forms as they learn to fend for themselves and face a slew of dangerous, unscrupulous men in their paths.

These two protagonists, Ava and Matilda, though both in precarious positions that cause them to rely on each other, have different obstacles facing them, and the dangers they face intersect their lives in interesting ways. Ada’s big problem early on is that she is naive and helpless. Lured away by a charming young fiddle player a year prior, she comes back to the Trace cast off, pregnant, and looking to be accepted back by her callous father, Virgil Morgan.

In flashback, her former flame says of her naivete before leaving her: “But being here all these months, this whole year, I’m seeing things with us different. It’s almost like you’re my kid, if you can understand

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COURTESY OF KELLY MUSTIAN

to the poor and helped their neighbors and loved their children, and at the same time would stand against making it a federal crime to hang people from trees, or beat them to death, or burn them, or douse them with acid. Year in and year out such things were happening. . . . None of it made any sense to Matilda. (117)

what I mean. The responsibility of it. I’m not ready for that.

I don’t know as I’ll ever be” (97–98). She is so naive about the ways of the world that she does not realize she is pregnant.

Her father’s assessment of her guilelessness is blunt: “‘Too goddamned dumb to know,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Too mortal dumb’” (54). She does not know how to do anything and men do not give her much respect or credit, so at first things look bleak for her, especially since she is not a good judge of character when it comes to men.

By contrast, Matilda is from a loving family and is a selfsufficient, resourceful young woman. Her big problem is that she is a Black woman coming of age in Mississippi in the 1920s when Jim Crow is in full swing, limiting her opportunities and her social standing in the eyes of society as well as her credibility in the eyes of the law. She has a very sober view of her environment, as seen here: Matilda asked herself then how anyone – anyone – could be against an anti-lynching law. But there were people, she knew, who would resist any law handed down by the federal government. People who did good things, who went to church and gave

Matilda’s view of the South is confirmed by numerous events in the story, and her social standing makes things difficult for her when she runs afoul of dangerous white men both high and low on the social hierarchy.

The girls’ unlikely and rickety partnership is borne out of circumstance and their personalities do not exactly mesh, at least not at first. Ada is friendly and open to Matilda, seemingly unencumbered by the prejudices of her time and place, but she is naïve and helpless, which Matilda finds aggravating, at least until Ava discovers she has a useful skill. Meanwhile, as stated before, Matilda is a practical and resourceful young woman, but she is not initially open to or trusting of Ada or anyone else but a select few from her side of the swamp, given that whites – particularly white men – are the source of her current troubles: “Until now, Matilda had made it plain that she was not open to inquiries. She had simply stepped into Ada’s world without a word about whatever world she had stepped out of” (76). Their relationship is both assuaged and strained by the birth of Ada’s daughter. However, in spite of their differences, each will get a chance to save the other over the course of the story, allowing for the friendship to become genuine.

The adversity these girls face is personified by the chief villains of this story, both white

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men but from different ends of the social order. One antagonist is Virgil Morgan, Ada’s father.

Poor, white, and a native of the swamp, he is a fur trapper by trade and a regular customer of bootlegging local landowner Curtis Creedle. He likes his women, both his deceased wife and his daughter, to be subservient and fearful, and he likes the Black sharecroppers on Creedle’s farm, including Matilda and her family, to know their place. Mustian describes Ada’s view of her father’s temperament as such: Some might think her father wanted people to be afraid of him, she supposed, but she knew that what he really wanted was to feel like a big man. It was that need that fueled the worst in him. Her father had so mixed up respect and fear that he could not discern one from the other, and it fed some desperate thing in him when people or animals felt helpless in his presence. (35)

Virgil Morgan is man in search of someone to look down on. He is cruel to Ada and has harassed Matilda’s family in the past, leading to tremendous personal upheaval for Matilda. His actions set the plot in motion.

The second major villain of the story is Frank Bowers, Curtis Creedle’s conniving, opportunistic nephew, who has come to town looking to get in on his uncle’s illicit liquor business.

Since, in addition to farming Creedle’s land, Matilda’s father is a reluctant participant in Creedle’s bootlegging, this puts the amoral Frank in proximity to Matilda’s family. Matilda learns some things about Frank that he wants kept secret, and therein lies the conflict between them.

For instance, not long after first encountering him, Matilda

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COURTESY OF MALAPROP’S BOOKSTORE/CAFE

catches Frank sneakily doing something he should not be doing, and Mustian describes Matilda’s reaction as such: He stood and bent to brush off his creased pants, and Matilda stopped in midstep, just as she would have if he had been a snarling dog or a rattlesnake within striking distance.

He turned around and their eyes met. If looks could kill, Matilda knew, she would have been lost to the world right then. Frank’s lips curled into an empty smile, and he raised the bottles over his head in an arrogant greeting. (144)

This conflict eventually draws Ada into the fray and Frank’s attitude toward her is not much better. Frank is an outwardly charming and respectable but deeply amoral social climber willing to exploit any leverage he has over anyone and he epitomizes the sense of entitlement many whites had during this time.

Throughout the novel, Ada’s and Matilda’s relationship strains but ultimately strengthens as these two young women, thrown together by circumstance, meet challenges both mundane and perilous and work to achieve their goals of freedom and self-sufficiency. Though she couches it in a Southern crime fiction narrative, Mustian points out that though we may be different in many ways, we can get further by working together against common obstacles and enemies. Mustian’s story is an ode to female grit in the face of adversity and a reminder that bygone days in the South were not so rosy if you were not white and male. n

TRIPPING ON THE TWELVE STEPS a review by Sharon E. Colley Karen Tucker. Bewilderness: A Novel. Catapult Books, 2021.

SHARON E. COLLEY is Professor of English at Middle Georgia State University. Her BA degrees in English and Communications are from Mercer University. She earned an MA in English from the University of Tennessee Knoxville and a PhD from Louisiana State University. She reviews regularly for NCLR and in 2021 published an essay on Lee Smith in NCLR. KAREN TUCKER was born and raised in North Carolina and now teaches fiction and creative nonfiction at UNC Chapel Hill.

Bewilderness, her debut novel, was longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize, shortlisted for the Crook’s Corner Book Prize, and selected as a “Dazzling Debut” and Indie Next Pick by the American Booksellers Association. Her fiction can be found in Missouri Review, Yale Review, LitHub, Boulevard, EPOCH, Tin House, American Literary Review, and elsewhere.

Bewilderness is an engaging novel: the story is intriguing, the characters are well-drawn (if not always likable), and the pacing is energetic without rushing.

With a plot that could easily become overly dramatic or formulaic, author Karen Tucker instead provides an original narrative with consistent but plausible surprises.

The bulk of the novel occurs in fading North Carolina towns, where industries have left, followed by much of the population. What remains of human dwellings are often rough and bedraggled. Opportunities and hope are in short supply, though some characters do genuinely care for each other. Bewilderness has some characteristics of Grit Lit, especially given the difficult economic and familial situations. The locales in bars, run-down rental properties, and places to procure drugs read as dirty, dangerous, and unpleasant. Yet the characters struggle to find escape and agency. The story is more interested in their evolving psychology than in their sociological status.

The high quality of the writing is especially fortunate given the subject matter. Bewilderness tells the story of close friends Irene and Luce, two young women who embrace drug use

ABOVE Karen Tucker in a virtual novel

release reading hosted by Malaprop’s Bookstore, 9 June 2021

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and then, at times, try to get clean. The text provides enough details for people with no experience with drug culture (like myself) to get a clear picture of the girls’ life with addiction. In fact, the specifics of how Irene and Luce procure and use pharmaceuticals are vivid enough that I wondered if it might be triggering for those in recovery.

The girls’ experimentation with and reliance on alcohol, illegally obtained prescription pills, and heroin provides a major plot focus. Irene and Luce make many attempts to get clean, some more serious than others, often utilizing a twelvestep program and meetings.

Financing for their drug use comes from a variety of sources, including legitimate employment, cons, and increasingly dangerous and illegal activities.

Their addiction costs them not only opportunities, but their safety, health, and people they care about. The author conveys the danger and tragedy that accompanies addiction, while also indicating what makes the characters give up everything for the high. The monster of addiction shows its face.

Arguably, though, addiction is not the heart of the story; the complicated relationship

between Irene and Luce forms its centerpiece. Neither young woman has significant family support. Luce’s mother has stolen money from her, for example. When the girls first meet at the rough bar where they waitress, Irene is drawn into Luce’s exciting world of danger and daring; the drugs are only part of the appeal. The relationship, at least from Irene’s point of view, seems codependent; hanging with Luce in their shared apartment becomes all Irene really wants in life: I pictured the two of us somewhere up ahead in our future, sitting at our kitchen table, maybe eating cake with our fingers and drinking huge mugs of hot sugary coffee and laughing about all the stuff we’d gone through since with first met each other. Not just the guys, but also the string of restaurant jobs, the side hustles, all the trouble we’d managed to kick up before we got clean. (8)

Irene’s desire to stay connected to Luce supersedes any other relationships or even her – and Luce’s – best interests. Their mutual devotion to their friendship, however, does not keep the girls from stealing from each other, lying, or even sabotaging each other’s attempts at sobriety.

Irene becomes threatened when

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Luce’s boyfriend wants to move her to Florida to get clean, leaving Irene behind. He is not the only character who suggests that perhaps the friends separate; Irene’s boyfriend opines that “you’re never going to get clean as long as she’s using” (234). In both cases, Irene prioritizes the girls’ relationship over everything else. In a particularly troubling incident, when she has almost a year clean and Luce has a setback, Irene intentionally starts using so they can be together. Irene is, of course, wrong that returning to drugs rather than losing Luce is “wholesome,” and her continued inability to see that is part of her tragedy. As readers, we feel the passionate attachment of Irene to the central friend in her life, even as we see they are not always good to or for each other.

A dark book in many ways, Bewilderness is a story not bereft of hope. The text enrichens Southern and specifically North Carolina literature by providing believable stories of characters not often given center stage. While not for the faint-hearted or easily susceptible, Bewilderness is a rewarding story of heartbreak, addiction, mourning, and hope. n

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

DEBUT NOVEL

BY CAROLINA NEWCOMER OFFERS THRILL RIDE a review by Henry L. Wilson Mason Boyles. Bark On. Driftwood Press, 2023.

HENRY L. WILSON is a retired English professor and native East Tennessean who taught writing and American literature for many years, including a course in Southern literature at Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania. He earned his PhD in English from the University of Tennessee in 1993 and continues to teach on a voluntary basis in a variety of areas, including literature, East Tennessee history, and Spanish.

MASON BOYLES grew up in southeastern North Carolina, where he trained and raced as a nationally competitive junior triathlete. He studied writing at UNC Chapel Hill, earned his MFA from UC Irvine, and is pursuing a PhD from Florida State University.

ABOVE AND OPPOSITE

Biking at Kure Beach, NC

This debut novel by Mason Boyles is a dynamic tour de force of the hitherto largely unexamined triathlon community. Boyles grabs the reader from the start with his compact, often barebones, prose style (heavy on nominative phrases, short on verbs, transitions, and connective “little words”), as well as his often-frenetic narrative, with a highly episodic presentation throughout, even extending to Joycean stream-of-consciousness style at times. In short, readers encounter no shortage of forward momentum in this tumbling avalanche of a novel.

While such an approach makes sense given the subject matter, as well as reflecting the problematic state of the novel’s emotionally scarred, often unreliable, narrator, the unprepared reader may find it difficult to engage with the disjointed narrative, a difficultly enhanced by the shifting perspectives and cacophonous voices that frequently take over the story line, replete with flashbacks and sporadic inner monologues that can be hard to follow.

Throughout his narrative, Boyles returns repeatedly to a rather sketchy, putatively metaphysical thread of the “Everywhen,” which can be

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characterized as the collapse of all time and space into a single unity. This chaotic leitmotif serves as a rickety framework for the almost picaresque perambulations and wanderings (both physical and mental) of the narrator.

The motley cast of characters arrayed across this sprawling novel include memorably named (if not always truly memorable) personages such as Robocop, Little Robocop, and Casper, as well as a lurking, shadowy character known only as Benji, who plays a crucial, if not clearly defined central role in the narrative, as both an inspiration and a potential object of emotional attachment for the narrator. Tellingly, one of the very few characters with a conventional human name is the narrator’s dog Sheila.

Also lurking behind the scenes – somewhat like the Wizard of Oz threatening to pull aside the curtains – is an even more shadowy Unc (presumably the narrator’s kin), whose personality and inexplicable antics might be charitably described as colorful, but more accurately labeled as deranged. Somehow, this chaotic, somewhat toxic, admixture from the narrator’s “everywhen” and “everywhere” conspires

North Carolina Miscellany

to recount the narrative from multiple perspectives, employing a wide range of tone, voices, and levels of coherence. While appropriate to the subject matter at hand and generally comprehensible, Boyles’s barebones writing style and presentation intermittently leaves the unwary (or impatient) reader confused, if not totally lost at sea. I found myself several times flipping back through the text in a frustrating attempt to clarify exactly who was saying what, as well as simply what was transpiring.

In the end, Boyles must be given credit for rounding up his unwieldy, disorderly characters and finally uniting their often discordant, if not downright cacophonous, voices in climactic harmony, and thereby bringing Bark On to a fitting and coherent resolution. By the end of the novel, the dogged and persistent reader emerges with a keen sense of the mental and emotional workings of the fanatical triathletes who form the sinews and story line of the novel, as well as an appreciation for the dedication and drive necessary to achieve success in such a demanding sport. As to whether the arduous journey through the many twists and turns, gruesome accidents, and

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sometimes unsavory actions of the cast of players has been worth the long circuitous journey to reach this ultimate resolution – well, that must be left to the individual readers.

Overall, while a daring, at times compelling literary effort, Bark On is not an easy read, challenging the reader’s focus and stamina at every turn; therefore, I wouldn’t recommend it as a relaxing summer read for whiling away the hours at the beach or in a rustic mountain cabin. Specifically, I found it hard to muster much interest in the picaresque adventures of the motley crew of characters as they alternately drive themselves to faster and faster times and higher rankings in the super-competitive triathlon subculture and submerge themselves into the despair of social awkwardness and personal ennui in their hyperdemanding sport. But if you hanker for a glimpse into the inner workings of the triathlon community, as well as a tour de force of the convoluted mental and emotional processes of one of its athletes, and you don’t mind fighting your way through occasionally impenetrable Faulknerian/Joycean thickets, Bark On is a worthwhile read. n

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF WILMINGTON BEACHES CONVENTION & VISITORS BUREAU

through an uncertain alchemy to produce a world-class competitor, in the person of the narrator, who despite his chaotic inner life and his tumultuous training experiences, manages to achieve qualified success (or what passes for it) in the grueling world of the triathlon.

Speaking of alchemy, one of the major recurring concerns of the novel is an obsessive desire to ascertain just the right balance of performance-enhancing drugs, ranging from over-thecounter pain relievers and steroids to the prescription cortisones often referred to simply as “percs.” In fact, use (or misuse) of this last drug is so ubiquitous that the triathletes have developed their own in-house dialect variants to offhandedly refer to their routine overuse and abuse of training drugs. In keeping with the rolling, stream-of-conscious presentation and rhythm of the novel, the author refrains from indulging in any authorial commentary on the wisdom or ethics of ingesting so many chemical enhancements into one’s body, preferring instead to simply describe the ubiquitous drug use without comment, thus allowing readers to form their own opinions (or judgements).

The novel begins in medias res at what to all appearances is a random time in the narrator’s triathlon training, tracing his journey through the trials and tribulations of his ceaseless, obsessive efforts to extract every last ounce of energy from his body in pursuit of improving his national ranking in the sport, as well as fanatical efforts to trim fractions of seconds from his event times. Along the way, the author employs a jarring series of flashbacks into the “everywhen”

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