58
2018
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
Reconnections and Remembrances by Margaret D. Bauer, Editor In this section, we welcome back writers who have published with us before (Annie Frazier, Lenard Moore, Marty Silverthorne) and take another look at subjects we’ve covered previously (Appalachian writers and war in North Carolina literature, for example). As editor, I enjoy reconnecting with people from past issues and finding out what they’ve been up to since they were last in our pages – some recently, others many years ago. Several, as you see from the reviews here, have published new books. Find their connections to previous issues in the biographical notes and footnotes with these reviews and poems, and remember that all back issues are available for purchase. I am pleased to include here too Emily Herring Wilson’s tribute to NCLR Founding Editor Alex Albright, given at the North Carolina Writers Conference last summer. I take advantage of every opportunity I have to thank Alex for creating and then passing NCLR into my hands while he went on to his next project, which was then the R.A. Fountain General Store and Internet Cafe. As NCLR is a venue where North Carolina culture is celebrated, so too is R.A. Fountain, where you can hear many of North Carolina’s talented musicians in the tiny Eastern North Carolina town of Fountain. The Flashbacks section seems an appropriate place to remember three people important to NCLR’s history, who are all gone too soon: poets Kathryn Stripling Byer and Susan Laughter Meyers and my ECU colleague Tom Douglass, who edited NCLR with Alex in its early days. Of Kay Byer, as I have said before, what an incredible advocate she was for NCLR: encouraging her audience members to subscribe, writing letters of support, planning new issue launching events. Last spring, I invited her to serve as the final judge for the 2017 James Applewhite Poetry Prize competition. She told me of her pending chemotherapy, but enthusiastically accepted the invitation to judge,
saying that by the time we had the finalists ready for her, she would be cancer-free and ready to read fine poetry. Sadly, her recovery did not go as expected. And about two weeks later, also suddenly and unexpectedly, Susan Meyers, whose poetry and reviews appeared often in NCLR, suffered a stroke and then slipped away from us as well. Quiet, calming, and always working diligently to support the poetry community in both Carolinas, the one she grew up in, the other she lived in until her passing, Susan was one of Poetry Editor Jeff Franklin’s favorite poets. “Take them all,” he wrote to me in response to five poems she submitted one year, and Fred Chappell ultimately chose one of these for the Applewhite Poetry Prize. Upon whispering this news to her at the North Carolina Writers Conference that summer, I enjoyed her modest and humble expression of surprise and pleasure. At the 2017 North Carolina Writers Conference, we were all reeling from the recent losses. You’ll find in this section tributes given to these dear ones at that event, as well as tributes to poet Sally Buckner, who has also recently passed. The East Carolina University community, particularly the Department of English – and most especially, students past and present – was similarly shocked and saddened by the news of our colleague/friend/ professor Tom Douglass’s illness about this time last year and then of his death just before the fall term began. Read here Alex Albright’s eloquent eulogy, given at the memorial held in, appropriately, Special Collections of Joyner Library, where Tom brought so many students to show them treasures in the Stuart Wright Collection, the acquisition of which he played a major role in. This ECU collection is quite a legacy to Tom. You can read Tom’s own story about that in NCLR Online 2013. You can honor Tom by visiting this collection and enjoying its treasures. Perhaps something you find will inspire future content for this section of NCLR. n