Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues
of scenery, haunts the novel fully as much as the otherworldly influences. Soon after their arrival in Yorkshire, Charles has a conversation about In the Night Wood with a detective who is investigating a local child’s disappearance. The detective says, “I remember now. You think she’s going to find her way out. That’s the way these things are supposed to go.” Charles replies that “She has to figure out what she’s lost before she can escape” – and Detective McGavick asks, “Who among us is lucky enough to do that?” (54). It is clear that the solution and the escape and the reconciliation,
if there is one, will hinge on the recognition of what has been and may still be lost, in both the past and the present. It’s clear, too, that one man alone cannot come to this knowledge, just as Caedmon Hollow himself was not able: it will require assistance, and union, and forgiveness. In the end, in both novels, it is the otherworldly influences that allow the possibility of reunion and forgiveness. And there is hope, in both novels, that something can be salvaged from the worst kinds of wreckage. Instinct and experience and poetry tell us
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that it is a fragile chance. After all, in “To Marguerite: Continued,” Arnold claims that our inability to truly connect is so absolute that, even when we most desire it, it is as though “A God, a God [our] severance ruled!” In this context, despite our stories and beliefs and poetry in common, despite our intelligence and sympathy, any moment of wholeness or unification becomes a victory in the face of the “Unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.” If we can unite for even a moment to slay the dragon, or solve the mystery, or heal a breach, then we have accomplished something of a miracle. n
JIM GRIMSLEY RECEIVES 2018 HOBSON PRIZE COURTESY OF CHOWAN UNIVERSITY
ABOVE Jim Grimsley, Chowan University,
Murfreesboro, NC, 2 Apr. 2018
The 2018 recipient of the Mary Frances Hobson Prize for Distinguished Achievement in Arts and Letters is Jim Grimsley, an accomplished novelist and playwright. Grimsley is a native of rural Eastern North Carolina and studied writing at UNC Chapel Hill. For many years, he was playright in residence in Chicago and Atlanta, and now teaches creative writing at Emory University. His first novel, Winter Birds, won the 1995 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and received a special citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation. His second novel, Dream Boy, won the American Library Association GLBT Award for Literature (the Stonewall Prize) and was a Lambda finalist. It was made into a film, which Grimsley talks about in an essay in NCLR 2012. Grimsley has received numerous other awards for his plays, novels, science fiction, and short stories. Read more about him and his work in an interview and article published in NCLR 2009 and a short story by him in NCLR 2016. The Mary Frances Hobson Prize is awarded annually and aims to recognize achievement in arts and letters, preferably by authors from the South or whose work relates to the South. Chowan University hosted Grimsley for an open dialogue with students, a lecture and the conferral of the Hobson Prize. n