Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues
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after the Network had moved out of the spare bedroom in Marsha’s house where she could work in her pajamas. Marsha navigated and won the allegiance of book groups, local bookstores, writers’ groups – always honoring geographic differences and multiple genres and reckoning with territoriality and artistic quirks. Making new writers feel welcome and honoring them at whatever stage in their development of craft has been the key. Marsha firmly secured the ethos of hospitality and fun that characterizes the Network to this day. The one thing I worried about in all this was that Marsha could never be replaced. She did so much. How could anybody else really fill her shoes? We never paid her enough. But in hindsight, I realize that the care and feeding required of a first grader is very different from that of a full-grown being, which is what she nurtured and what the Network has become. Now we have our routines. We are mature. Case in point: we are here today honoring the newest among the sixty-plus inductees already in the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame, which Marsha and the Network also helped establish with her dear friend Sam Ragan and the North Carolina legislature. Diplomacy, grace, perseverance, grit – these are the traits of Marsha Warren. We know what to do now. We have been taught well. We had a sterling mentor. Friends, let us now praise Marsha Warren for all she has given us. n n n explore the model of a place-based literary center where writers could come and write, get their chapbooks printed, take classes. But that could not be our model. The greater DC area had a population close to that of the entire state of North Carolina back then. We needed a traveling show. And after the good work and relatively short tenures of our first two directors, Robert Hill Long and Phil Hines, we found our leader for the long haul, Marsha White Warren. She carried us from first grade to graduation, building a true statewide network of writers, establishing contests, finding financial support and distinguished advisors, and always asking, Who’s missing? Five middle-aged white people started the Network. Marsha saw that we needed to do better than that. African American voices and Native American voices became a priority – better reflecting the full history of North Carolina literature. Our annual conferences were grand affairs with the likes of Alex Haley, Li Young Li, Sharon Olds, Rita Dove, and Patricia Cornwell. Marsha worked tirelessly and on a shoestring. Sometimes I’d be coming back to Carrboro on Highway 54 at night and see the lights still on in the White Cross School at ten or eleven o’clock. This was
GEORGANN EUBANKS is one of the founders of the North Carolina Writers’ Network. She is the author of the three-volume series, Literary Trails of North Carolina.
IN PRAISE OF TEAMWORK acceptance remarks by Marsha White Warren I’d like to begin by saying that if everyone who should be up here with me, were here, we wouldn’t fit behind this lecturn. I’m a member of a team and I’d like to tell you about just a few of my many teammates from those early, formative years at the Network. But before I do that, I’ll tell you how I got to know them, so I get to tell you about the Red Barron Restaurant in Carrboro, NC. After my mother died in 1977, I was inconsolable and for some unknown reason – as I had not been a writer before – I began writing. I began writing sad poems – not about her – I couldn’t do that – yet. I wrote a poem about Beatrix Potter’s lonely little life in the top floor nursery of her home, while her parents went about their fancy London lives and how she had her butler, Cox, bring her a mouse from the pantry to play with and to draw. And I wrote a poem about the time young Edward Albee, whose dream