Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues
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JILL MCCORKLE RECEIVES 2016 THOMAS WOLFE PRIZE The Thomas Wolfe Prize recipient for 2016 is Lumberton, NC, native Jill McCorkle, author of ten novels, most recently, Life After Life (Algonquin Books, 2013; reviewed in NCLR Online 2014). She made literary history when her first two novels were both published in 1984, the first two books published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. The author was twenty-six. McCorkle has a BA from UNC Chapel Hill and an MA from Hollins College (now University). Her other honors include the New England Booksellers Award, the John Dos Passos Prize for Excellence in Literature, the R. Hunt Parker Award for significant contribution to North Carolina literature, and the North Carolina Award for Literature. She is also a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Currently she lives in Hillsborough, NC, and teaches at North Carolina State University. Read an interview with her and Lee Smith in NCLR 2016. The Thomas Wolfe Prize is offered to recognize notable contemporary international writers; it was established in 1999 in honor of Look Homeward, Angel author Thomas Wolfe who graduated in 1920 from UNC Chapel Hill. Recipients of the Thomas Wolfe Prize receive a medal and monetary award and give a lecture at UNC Chapel Hill. n ABOVE Jill McCorkle wearing her Wolfe medal and
delivering the Prize lecture, Chapel Hill, 4 Oct. 2016
relationship with language and literacy in “The Gift of Silence,” recounts anecdotes about the basketball career of David Thompson, recounts the music career of Gary Stewart, and reflects on the art of writing the short story. The “Uncollected Stories” include the “The Harvest,” a prime example of Rash’s use of minimalistic writing, which balances suffering with the healing power of kindness, and “White Trash Fishing,” which Wilhelm calls “unique in the Rash canon” (26). The Ron Rash Reader will appeal to readers who are seeking a thorough introduction to the body of Ron Rash’s writing, whether through general interest or through the high school or
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college classroom. It represents a thoughtful culling of representative works that demonstrates, in Wilhelm’s words, “an intensity and immediacy that promises a longevity beyond the temporary whims and fads that flash and fade in trendy fashion” (28). In Understanding Ron Rash, John Lang ends his discussion of Rash’s poetry by lamenting the lack of national recognition it has received outside its region, pointing out that it “will likely take a volume of collected poems or of new and selected poems to overcome the relative obscurity his remarkable poetry has tended to experience outside the American
South” (55). Lang may well have been writing with the poetic selections of The Ron Rash Reader in mind. It is an uncanny coincidence that this text answers a need that Lang identifies in his 2014 study: in the Reader, Randall Wilhelm offers readers several poems from each of Rash’s four volumes, enough to get a strong sense of the themes, motifs, and structures that Rash plays with in each publication. It is important to note that in grouping the selected works together by genre, readers can easily trace a theme from an early text like Eureka Mill through the next several volumes and conclude with poems from his most recent volume, Waking. n