78
2019
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
I can go on and on and name countless people who have been indispensable to the growth of North Carolina’s literary culture and the simultaneous growth at North Carolina State University of a degree-granting undergraduate and master’s level English program. NC State is a land grant university. Though I have degrees from Chapel Hill and Duke, I want to spend the last minute or two of my celebration of this afternoon praising the land grant impulse that by the late 1980s NC State felt confident enough to begin to come forward with the Humanities Extension program that could spread the writers’ news and images and works across the state. No one else in North Carolina in public education has an office in every county. No one else in the higher education system of North Carolina is thus equipped for classroom space to be devoted to the showing of video tapes that we had made about our writers or sometimes to have the writers themselves travel to these counties across the state to speak with their readers face to face. Many of you have taken part or have benefitted from this astonishing place, so what I want to leave with you is the sense that Weymouth and North Carolina State University say to the people of this state, “May we help you? May we have your permission to introduce you to the writers who celebrate in most ways the North Carolina culture, the North Carolina language, the North Carolina sense of place, the North Carolina sense of history? All of these things come to bear upon what’s happening here this afternoon. And for those of you who are writers, this house behind you is a place where writers can come and spend a day or two or three or four working on a manuscript, and the work gets done here. Now before I came up here, I told Randall Kenan that I was going to steal one of his titles, A Visitation of Spirits. Some of you have read that book that Randall put out in the late 1980s. What I’m going to use it for this afternoon is to assert that this house is haunted. There are many people of credibility who can swear that when they have been here, the house has spooked them, but two spirits in particular, I want to visit upon you in saying thank you. The first is Sally Buckner, a great lady of this place and of North Carolina poetry and of North Carolina education and former head of the English department at Peace University. Sally died just this past January.3 She had not
3
Read tributes in memory of Sally Buckner in NCLR Online 2018.
been inducted into the Hall of Fame, and so I want to animate her spirit here with you this afternoon. The other person I want to bring to your attention is Richard Walser. He was inducted in the first class on a hot May afternoon in 1996. Mr. Walser was at NC State when I arrived there in 1967. He became my mentor. He taught me a lot. We travelled together across the state to talk about North Carolina writers. He even was settled enough in his reputation to include the best sentimental romances of the day in his lectures to North Carolina high school teachers. He was broadminded in that sense of inclusiveness back then, but Professor Walser had no doctorate. When he was a student at Chapel Hill, he told the faculty members that he wanted to write his dissertation on North Carolina writers, and do you know what they said? “You can’t do that Dick, because there’s been no scholarship worth a damn about North Carolina writers, and so there’s nothing to make a dissertation out of.” And he set himself the course after serving in the second World War to create the scholarship on Paul Green and Bernice Kelly Harris and Thomas Wolfe and other writers, so that today I and other people can stand in his stance. So I leave you with the image of Sally Buckner and Richard Walser as people who help us do what we have done. I thank you very much. n n n
MARSHA WHITE WARREN, ALWAYS ASKING, “WHO’S MISSING?” presentation remarks by Georgann Eubanks When she first came to North Carolina, Marsha Warren took a job as a first-grade teacher. By 1987, the fledgling North Carolina Writers’ Network had barely passed Kindergarten. It was a perfect match. The Network was a sound concept. Judy Hogan, Margaret Booth Baddour, Paul Jones, and I had spent many evenings sitting cross-legged in a circle just like children on Judy’s living room floor in Chapel Hill. We hashed out the by-laws, the statewide mandate, our desire for the North Carolina Arts Council to pay more attention to literature and writers. We had been to the NEA to solicit funding. We went to The Bethesda Writers Center to