Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues
PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW MOREHEAD
included Paul Green, so Jim connected her with me to talk about our mutual interest in Green, and NCLR ended up with both her important interview with Eddie Swimmer about his revival of Unto These Hills and later, thanks to our discussions of Green while she visited, an essay on Green’s play The House of Connelly, written by a student of hers.2 By then Gina was Georgia State Professor Caison teaching The House of Connelly in her classes. Her student, by the way, wrote the essay in her next step toward becoming a professor, as a PhD candidate at LSU – so you see how Jim has helped North Carolina literature to reach beyond our borders -- another example of his continued and continuing influence on the preservation of North Carolina literary history. I know that so many others would have appreciated the opportunity to stand before you all and say, thank you, Jim Clark, on behalf of the whole state. So I will borrow from another such person, as I’ve done from Frannie, and read to you a likely incomplete but still overwhelming list of just Jim’s leadership roles in public and community service, that Bob Anthony compiled when we honored Jim back in 2015 (and I’m going to cut Bob’s already selected list down to just Jim’s roles related to the liberal arts): President of the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association, the Thomas Wolfe Society, the Paul Green Foundation, the North Caroliniana Society, and the Friends of the Gregg Museum of Art and Design; Co-chair of the North Carolina Freedom Monu-
2
Find Kelly Vines’s “A Drama of Class and Race: Southern Progressivism in Paul Green’s The House of Connelly” In NCLR 2016.
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ment Committee; very active past Chair of the North Carolina Writers Conference; and Chair of the Selection Committee of the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame (speaking of which, I’m on that committee and will admit unapologetically that we went behind Jim’s back to add him after he led the committee through selecting inductees this year. His name has been on our list of possible nominees for years, of course, but since he never seems to get any closer to really retiring, we just had to take matters into our own hands). So, Dr. James W. Clark, Jr., I appreciate the privilege of introducing you as a 2018 North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame inductee, and I want to assure you that we have learned your lesson. I, for example, in my capacity as NCLR editor, will continue to make those connections you taught me to make, which encourage the next generation to preserve one of North Carolina’s treasures, its literary history, and I will continue to do everything I can to support writers like the other inductees here today, who create that literature. Congratulations to you all. n n n
REVISITING THE SPIRITS OF NORTH CAROLINA LITERATURE acceptance remarks by James W. Clark, Jr. As a literary historian, I think of Weymouth as the great expression of North Carolina’s literary culture, a culture that shows who we are, a culture that is transformative, and it is a special pleasure to be inducted into the Hall of Fame that’s located here in Weymouth. I want to think of a group of people whose collaboration with me makes today possible for me and for them, and these are the videographers and script writers and authors who agreed over many years to be a part of Humanities Extension’s effort to spread the news about North Carolina’s writing all across the state and beyond on television, in videography, in classrooms, who have been absolutely indispensable to the effort we’ve made to make North Carolina’s literary culture get the attention it so richly deserves. We started this work in the late 1970s, when the literary revolution that Guy Owen had brought to NC State by joining its faculty a decade before got underway. And some of you know that Sam Ragan, who was instrumental in the preservation of this fabulous place, taught poetry workshops at NC State in addition to his job as publisher of the News & Observer.
ABOVE James W. Clark, Jr. at the ceremony, Weymouth Center of Arts & Humanities, Southern Pines, NC, 7 Oct. 2018 (Watch Bauer’s presentation and Clark’s acceptance remarks.)