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2014
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
Savoring the Literary Landscape of Eastern North Carolina a review by Lorraine Hale Robinson Georgann Eubanks. Literary Trails of Eastern North Carolina: A Guidebook. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.
From 1998 to 2007, Lorraine Hale Robinson wrote the entries in NCLR’s serialized “Dictionary of North Carolina Writers,” as well as various ar ticles, sidebars, and reviews, while serving as Senior Associate Editor of NCLR. She retired in 2012, but continues to respond readily, enthusiastically, and astutely when called upon for advice. See her reviews of the previous two volumes in this series in NCLR 2008 and 2011. Georgann Eubanks was a founder of the North Carolina Writers Network and a past chair of the North Carolina Humanities Council. She has taught writing in public schools, prisons, and corporate settings. For twenty years, she served as director of the Duke University Writers Workshop, and now she is the director of the Table Rock Writers Workshop at Wildacres Retreat in Little Switzerland, NC.
As an academic writer in many a class, I was continuously advised “Don’t complain about the assignment. Don’t say it’s too hard. Just write.” Ignoring this sage advice, I assert that writing this review was really hard. As I write, April’s showers and May’s flowers have come, and the Ram and the Bull have coursed through Eastern North Carolina’s skies. It’s time to think about summer vacations – or a fall outing, or a winter excursion, or a jaunt next spring. And a timely arrival to our bookshelves is Georgann Eubanks’s Literary Trails of Eastern North Carolina: A Guidebook. The third in a series, this book completes a trilogy of volumes that invites readers to explore from armchairs, on foot, by car, or by bicycle the rich vastnesses of literary North Carolina. The wealth of literary-related places – from the mountains to the coast – is simply astonishing. For example, right here in New Bern, just a few blocks from where I am typing at my computer, are the sites of James Davis’s printing press (the first in the colony) and the home of William Gaston (author of the poem that became our state song). Like Nick Bottom in Midsummer Night’s Dream (who wants to play all the roles in the play within that play), I want to write about all of the remarkable places that Georgann Eubanks has included. I also want to pack a tomato sandwich and get in the car and go. Such works as this trilogy are an important resource for heritage tourism. As the Old North State
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increasingly becomes a preferred destination both for leisure travel and for relocation, people learn about and are drawn to locales large and small, participating in the “discovery” of writers and their haunts. Since Eastern North Carolina is big, Eubanks has once again (as in the two previous volumes) created “tours” along “trails.” In this volume, tour one begins in Raleigh. There is so much literary and literary-related to see and do in the City of Oaks that it may be hard to leave. Eubanks brings readers’ attention to the obvious (museums, historic sites, and educational institutions) and then to fiercely and courageously independent bookstores, to local eateries that have been magnets for writers and subjects in many literary works, to the North Carolina State Archives and the Wake County Public Library. But buckle up – the tours continue to the southeast. On the way to Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities (in Southern Pines), stop by the birthplace of Paul Green, author of The Lost Colony and “father” of the outdoor drama, an art form now found across the country. If this were a dinner and not a book, we might commence with an amuse gueule – a tidbit that whets the palate for what is to come. On trail one, the reader meets an eighteenth-century Muslim who wrote in Arabic – in Fayetteville; learns about the relationship between the prestigious Pulitzer Prize and Tabor City; or discovers a totally legitimate crime festival convened by a public library and
Donna Campbell, the photographer for the three Literary Trails volumes, began her career as the founding publisher of Lake Norman Magazine. Since 2000 she has worked with Eubanks as one of the principals of the documentary firm Minnow Media. Campbell’s first documentary, Any Day Now (1990), received national awards from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Association of Women Broadcasters in Radio and TV.