Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues
2
Seamus Heaney, “Verses for a Fordham Commencement” and “A Carolina Commencement” [an excerpt], North Carolina Literary Review 5 (1996): 41–43. See also, in the same issue, Thomas E. Douglass, “Time and the Smell of the Earth: Seamus Heaney Returns to the Land of Henry Pearson,” 27–40.
3
William Carlos WIlliams, “Charles Olson’s Maximus,” NCLR 6 (1997): 28-31.
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PHOTOGRAPH BY CLIFF HOLLIS; COURTESY OF ECU NEWS SERVICES
become an obsessive collector of Heaney manuscripts and had illustrated more than a few of them. So in addition to the wonderful piece Tom wrote about Heaney and Pearson and the beautiful illustrations Pearson allowed us to use at no cost, we also wound up as the first publication for Heaney’s commencement address at Fordham in a weird exchange with Heaney’s agent, which went something like this: Tom asked the agent for permission to reprint a couple of the poems that Henry Pearson had illustrated. “Sure, for three hundred dollars a piece,” the agent said. So Tom, knowing that wouldn’t work, said, “Well how about that graduation poem he wrote? And the commencement address at Carolina?” “Oh those,” the agent said. “You’ll have to ask Mr. Heaney for permission. Which Tom did, and Mr. Heaney said sure, and here we have both the poem and the first publication from that speech.2 In addition to Seamus Heaney, Tom also, I will add, managed to bring William Carlos Williams into the fold of North Carolina writers in the 1997 issue of NCLR, which he edited.3 I got off to a good start with Tom when, the first time he came into my office, he picked out from my over-stuffed book cases a copy of Tom Kromer’s obscure Depressionera novel Waiting for Nothing. It was a well-read copy, he could tell, as he thumbed slowly through it, chuckling a couple of times at either a familiar passage or perhaps one of my notes. I had used it several times as a text for my freshman composition classes. In the next few minutes, I learned more from him than anyone, perhaps, other than Tom Douglass himself, knew about Kromer, and in that process I got just a glimpse of the depth of Tom’s knowledge of Appalachian literature, and a really strong notion of the passion he brought to the reading of it and talking and thinking and writing about it. But by far the most amazing editorial chore I’ve ever witnessed was how he managed to take a three hundred–page screed typed on a manual typewriter and sent to us unsolicited by Jake Grant, a reclusive Vietnam veteran who was living in Snow Hill. We’d later find out that Jake had gathered and sold pecans to get funds for photocopying his mauscript, and that this was the only copy other than his original. I was fascinated by its complexity and the power and urgency of Grant’s voice, but I couldn’t imagine what could be done with it. Tom shared my admiration and frustration with the manuscript and said simply, “Let me take it home this weekend and see what I can do with it.” He came back on Monday with a meticulously edited (and re-typed) piece of creative nonfiction – without changing a word of
N C L R ONLINE
Grant’s raw poetic prose – that connected the industrial evils permeating the big businesses of commercially raising tobacco and hogs with Grant’s own desperate life as a trucker driving hogs to slaughter through the back roads of East Carolina, all the while haunted by a failing marriage and the little daughter with whom he is losing touch. By simply cutting and rearranging, Tom made it what we both considered the best thing we published in that issue, and it remains today one of my all-time favorites.4 Tom wanted no credit for what he had done with Jake Grant’s manuscript, and it was that selfless editing style that, I think, was at the heart of his success as editor of the University of Tennessee’s Appalachian Echoes series, which had for him the ideal job description: edit and prepare for contemporary publication a neglected or forgotten Appalachian novel. It was for this series that Tom also wrote the first biographies of Breece D.J. Pancake and Davis Grubb and brought into contemporary print such remarkable novels as Hubert Skidmore’s Depression-era novel Hawk’s Nest. As we remember Tom Douglass today, I’m reminded of an African proverb: “So long as you will say my name out lout I will be alive for you.” In this process of remembering, then, I say aloud the names of those who worked on NCLR who went on before Tom: our associate editor Bertie Fearing, our staff poet A.R. Ammons, our correspondents Linda Flowers, Jonathan Williams, and Janet Lembke, and our student editors Trish Evans and Alice Rene Cavelry. But it is Tom I most want to keep alive with us today, and I ask that you all join me in saying once more his name out loud: Tom Douglass. n 4
Jake Grant, “Smoke, Hog-Wild, Hauling,” an excerpt, NCLR 5 (1996): 243-63.
ABOVE Tom Douglass (1951–1917) with materials from the Stuart
Wright Collection in Joyner Library (Read Tom Douglass’s story about the Stuart Wright Collection in NCLR Online 2013.)