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their own emotional and aesthetic standards to a roomful of near-strangers, a decent sense of human solidarity requires at least a modest repayment. When we sit down to talk about a new story – one I didn’t choose and about which I know no more than they – the atmosphere shifts. Students suddenly seem to understand that their ideas matter, that I have no “right” interpretation to offer them – ultimately, that they can stand on their own as thoughtful, competent, and articulate adults. With any luck I can sit back and shut up while the students take the lead, and then watch that sense of agency flower in the students’ final essays – in most cases, the first critical responses ever written about that particular piece of art. What have I learned from their choices? Among other things, I’ve learned that the North Carolina Literary Review does great work for young readers in North Carolina. By and large, my students at ECU are not a privileged or cosmopolitan group; while they can definitely appreciate the international literary scope they encounter in Granta or Callaloo, it’s the NCLR stories that really hit home. Twice now, groups have chosen David McGuirt’s “Blind Faith” (2010), and in each case I feared that the students would exoticize and (to use an appropriate word) demonize the snake-handling Appalachian characters in that powerful story of family, vision,
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and love. Its subject, after all, lends itself to the most hurtful stereotypes about the western part of our state. I shouldn’t have worried. As the conversation progressed, the distance evaporated. “My grandmother went to a church like that.” “My church isn’t quite that extreme, but they do believe in literal interpretations of the Bible.” “I can see where he’s coming from, because my family is important in our church, too, and they expect me to believe what they believe.” Bit by bit, the students drew out the knotty questions McGuirt asks us to consider, questions about the interpretation of stories and the meanings of those stories in our lives. What should we do with McGuirt’s own creation? Is it a parable, or something else? In what sense was our own English classroom a “Church of the Living Word”? At the intersection of the Bible belt and the secular university, a literary exploration of Biblical literalism can bear rich fruit. If religion is a big part of students’ experience in Eastern North Carolina, military life is even bigger. Among every class at ECU, you’ll find a significant proportion are either children and spouses of servicemen and women or active and retired soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines themselves. Most of the rest have grown up in communities closely tied to the region’s bases. Thus, when a student group presented Robert
Students suddenly seem to understand that their ideas matter, that I have no “right” interpretation to offer them – ultimately, that they can stand on their own as thoughtful, competent, and articulate adults.
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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y R E V I E W
Blind Faith
by David McGuirt
2009 dORIs BeTTs fICTION pRIze wINNeR Final Judge, Kat Meads
Valle Crucis, NC, 1979, by John Rosenthal
DAVID MCGUIrt lives in Charlotte, NC, with his wife, Patty, and three children, Avery, Casey, and Emmy. He is a graduate of Appalachian State University and a past winner of the Garland Keever award for humor writing from UNC-Charlotte. The 2009 Doris Betts Fiction Prize final judge, KAt MEADS, says of McGuirt’s winning story, “‘Blind Faith’ is fiction that mercilessly observes and indicts with the means by which all good fiction indicts: plot, pacing, powerful imagery, and characters who stay with the reader long after the reading is finished.”
JOHN rOSENtHAL’s photography has been exhibited throughout North Carolina and the Southeast, as well as in the Panopticon Gallery in Boston. Some of his work is also collected in his book, Regarding Manhattan (Safe Harbor Books, 1998), on Chapel Hill’s online Tyndall Galleries (www.tyndallgalleries.com), and on his website (www.johnrosenthal.com), which includes his American Spaces series of photographs featuring his son in Valle Crucis in western North Carolina. The photograph above is from that series. Rosenthal has published essays and lectures in a wide variety of periodicals. rOB AMBErG’s photography is featured here, with the preceding stories and review, and with the Byer short story. For more information about him, see pages 103, 131, and 141.
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COURTESY OF NCLR; PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN ROSENTHAL
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