2019
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
it was to be a poet, got up the courage to take his poetry to W.H. Auden. The famous poet responded to Albee’s poems by tossing them one by one into the river as they sat drinking coffee. And I wrote a poem entitled “Even Root Cellars can Burn” about my friend’s house that burned to the ground. I wasn’t very cheerful in those days. Then six months after Mother died, I saw a tiny announcement in the Chapel Hill Weekly. It reported that the Friday Noon Poets would be meeting as usual at the Red Barron Restaurant in Carrboro, and that all you had to do, was to come and bring something to read. So I took up with the Friday Noon Poets, joined the North Carolina Poetry Society and, as a charter member, joined the brand-new North Carolina Writers’ Network. When I retired as director of the Network, there was a great gathering at White Cross School, and I was presented with a scrapbook full of good wishes and wonderful memories. So to prepare for today, I decided to open up that scrapbook and be reminded how the literary community of North Carolina – its writers and readers, its funders and audiences – had benefited from Georgann’s motto that she created for the North Carolina Writers’ Network: “Writing and Reading, Everybody’s Art!” We really believed it – it would become our mission. Writing wouldn’t be just for a few – it would be for everyone. I’d seen that firsthand, how writing had played a seminal role in my life. Now, about some of those teammates! When you look inside the scrapbook, you see a picture of Marty Silverthorne there in front of the lovely old 1928 White Cross School, but what you don’t see, is that at the back entrance to the school is a ramp. As we were reaching out to writers in our wide “mountains-to-thesea-shaped state” we got a letter from a group Down East who called themselves “Bards of a Feather.” It was from Marty. I was enchanted with their name so I called them up. Later when Marty came on my board and we had meetings at my house or here in the Great Room at Weymouth, he could get inside. But not at White Cross. Well, badger isn’t quite the right word for Marty, but I can tell you that he made it crystal clear that he was going to get inside that building on his own power! I knew he meant business, so I made a pitch to Tom Whisnant and Gary Phillips,
PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID POTORTI
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owners of White Cross School and to Mary Reagan, Nancy Trovillion, and Debbie McGill over at the state Arts Council, that we needed to be ADA accessable. We needed a grant to build that ramp, and build it we did. Marty is one of those teammates, as well and Tom and Gary and Mary, Nancy, and Debbie. Let me also add Betty Ray McCain and Betsy Buford at Cultural Resources, to our list of teammates. In the early years, we knew that the key to building membership was the newsletter – the Network News – and in its pages was a column, “Submit It,” that gave the writers valuable publishing opportunities. Nancy Peacock was the person who perfected it by contacting, by US snail mail, national journals and magazines for updated information. But the Network News required funds so I trapsied over to see Frank Daniels, Jr. at the News & Observer and he funded the newsletter for three years then turned us over to Rolfe Neill at the Charlotte Observer for three years who passed us on to Joe Doster at the Winston-Salem Journal. All members of the team.
ABOVE Marsha White Warren with Eastern North Carolina poet Marty Silverthorne at the induction ceremony, Weymouth Center of Arts & Humanities, Southern Pines, NC, 7 Oct. 2018 (Watch Eubanks’s presentation and Warren’s acceptance remarks.)