6
2017
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
Insight and Inspiration Across the Arts by Margaret D. Bauer, Editor Just over a year ago, I made a New Year’s resolution to write everyday. Just that – no specifications beyond putting words together toward writing something other than an email. I began with freewriting on a theme, then personal essays, and even some poetry. These are new genres for this literary scholar. The challenge of exercising different writing muscles has been rejuvenating, and I look forward to my daily writing time after work. It occurs to me now as I introduce our 2017 special feature topic that this new writing allows me a glimpse of the satisfaction a writer like Clyde Edgerton must feel as he picks up a paintbrush and tries his hand at still another medium (as NCLR readers know, Clyde is as talented a musician as he is a writer). Perhaps he too was looking for a new challenge. You can read more about this multi-talented writer in our 2017 print issue that will feature an interview in which Clyde talks about his painting (and in the meantime, see this issue’s Flashbacks section for more from Clyde). In the online issue’s special feature section, you will find the usual but always fresh juxtaposition of literature and art – certainly one of the qualities that has distinguished NCLR for a quarter century now. Its unique design caught my eye immediately when I reviewed the first four issues before my ECU interview just over twenty years ago. This state’s variety of talent makes my job as NCLR editor both easier – I don’t see us ever running out of material – and more difficult – because finding the evocative images to go with every piece we publish is so challenging and time consuming. In the case of the fine art that complements the poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction in NCLR issues, I have for a decade now, been able to rely upon the aesthetics of Art Editor Diane Rodman, whose master’s thesis examined “The Visual Elements of Art and Cubist Structure” in a literary subject. She has just the right expertise for her role on the staff, and I am so grateful for her dedication to NCLR and to North Carolina artists.
Also in this special feature section on Literature and the Other Arts, you will find interviews in which one of North Carolina’s internationally known literary stars, Robert Morgan, and a newer voice on the scene, Nic Brown, talk about how their writing has been inspired by music. Music is also an inspiration for a poet who for a time made North Carolina home – Fred Moten, whose 2015 poetry collection is reviewed here. Another way that literature and music come together will then be explored in the 2017 print issue, due out this summer, in which we are publishing an essay about the adaptation of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain into an opera, news of which was another source of inspiration for this year’s theme. At the time of this writing, the latest news is the opera’s two grammy nominations. My appreciation of the arts is inspired largely by my parents. My father’s tales gave me my love of story and are now finding their way into my new writing; and while I inherited none of my mother’s talent in the visual and textile arts, I do believe she influenced my aesthetics. So for my twentieth print issue as editor (and for this online supplementary issue), I agreed to the NCLR Art Editor’s selection of my mother’s paintings for the covers. When my mother moved to Western North Carolina, I admit I was jealous. After six years of attending summer camp in the North Carolina mountains as a child, I had determined that some day I would move here, and as I’ve said in earlier issues, I was surprised to find that the eastern end of the state looked more like my home state, Louisiana, than the North Carolina I remembered. While I am now quite enamored with Eastern North Carolina and cannot imagine a more fitting home for myself, still I enjoyed visiting my mother for the almost twenty years that she lived on the other end of this very long state. During that time, she painted the mountains that have awed me since childhood. She has now returned to Louisiana, and it is probable her future canvases will feature swamp scenes similar to what I see as I drive around Eastern North Carolina. But “her” mountains will, I am certain, add to your enjoyment of this issue, cover to cover. n
PHOTOGRAPH BY SETH GULLEDGE, NCLR INTERN
LEFT NCLR Editor Margaret Bauer, Art Director Dana Ezzell, and Art Editor Diane Rodman at the 25th issue launch party, East Carolina University Joyner Library, 22 Oct. 2016