54
2017
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
Reviewing the Writingest State’s Writers by Margaret D. Bauer, Editor As has become usual for the Flashbacks section of our online issue, you will find many book reviews by writers familiar to NCLR readers from previous issue content. We are happy that these online issues allow us to review so many more books than we used to in the print issues. This is, after all, the writingest state. (Do I still need to attribute this phrase to Doris Betts after all these years?) Books are sent out for review in the spring, so to the North Carolina writers among our readers (and remember, we do define that broadly to include those who have moved here from elsewhere and those from here who have moved away), please have your publisher mail us your new book. We can’t promise to review every book we receive, but we do promise to send your book out for review consideration if it meets our review criteria. While on the subject of book reviews, let me take this opportunity to thank our reviewers. In my early years as an editor, my colleague Peter Makuck shared his review philosophy with me: he writes at least one review a year (this year a review for NCLR Online of two poetry collections), conscious of his own wish to have his books reviewed. I have never forgotten the generosity and self-awareness in that philosophy. You will also find a review of Peter’s two new books in this issue, written by Marly Youmans, whose books we’ve reviewed in the past – another writer who gives back to our literary community. If you are interested in reviewing for us – published/reviewed writer wanting to give back or new scholar seeking some publication experience (which I talk about in the introduction to the next section of this issue) – please contact me with either your genre of interest or particular suggestions of books you would like to review.
Usually, you’d also find in the Flashbacks section creative writing by authors who have appeared in our pages before, but since our special feature section is on Literature and the Other Arts, all of the creative writing, paired, as usual, with samples of North Carolina’s riches in the fine arts, is in that section of this issue. So I’ll take this space to remind writers to check the submission periods of the competitions in your genre. By the time this issue is published, for example, the Doris Betts Fiction Prize competition deadline is probably just a week or so away. For an opportunity to have your fiction published in NCLR, please submit by February 15. Find out more about submissions in other genres here. In our twenty-fifth issue, we published an essay by Anna Dunlap Higgins-Harrell, who revisited all of the subjects of the interviews she conducted during my early years of editing NCLR. I’d also asked Sheryl Cornett to revisit her interviewees, but she was traveling, so we were unable to get the completed set from her until it was too late for that issue. You will read her compilation of return visits here, while I am putting together my twentieth print issue and feeling nostalgic and amazed by all we have done in the past twenty years, including so many interviews like Sheryl’s (and Anna’s). I thank Sheryl and the writers she interviewed for the 2003–2006 issues for bringing back such wonderful memories as they reconnected, revisiting their earlier interviews. And I know our readers will enjoy the updates on their writing and honors since those earlier interviews. Congratulations to these writers and the other award-winners you will also read about in the literary news stories in this section (and the next). The writingest state, indeed. n
RIGHT Jan DeBlieu speaking about
environmental writing on a panel with Ron Rash and David Gessner, moderated by Liza Wieland, at the Eastern North Carolina Literary Homecoming, East Carolina University Joyner Library, Greenville, 24 Sept. 2011