60
2019
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
“YOU KNOW YOU’RE STILL PROBABLY A TAR HEEL WHEN PEOPLE ASK YOU WHERE YOU’RE FROM AND YOU SAY YOU’RE LIVING IN KENTUCKY BUT ARE FROM NORTH CAROLINA. THAT PARSING IS WHAT FEELS LIKE BEING AN EXPAT.”
PHOTOGRAPH BY JOON POWELL
—Dale Ray Phillips
In Texas, I learned to pick blue crabs and to actually like the yellow goo of sucked crayfish heads. In Arkansas, I learned to appreciate something called a Frito Pie and to dip trout and bream filets in mustard before the egg wash and cornmeal battering. In Georgia, I learned to cook quail and re-established my love affair with collards. South Carolina hooked me on peach daiquiris and boiled peanuts, and Carbondale, Illinois, had the best deer summer sausage and Bloody Marys I’ll ever probably enjoy. Their trick is cheap Smuck’s tomato juice and Old Bay seasoning. In Murray, Kentucky, I learned not to drink. Are there other reflections on the expatriate experience you wish to share? Some random pontifications: The curse of the expatriate is also its greatest gift: while you can’t go home again, home becomes wherever you are. You learn to dwell. Distance provides the best spot to peeping-tom on home. All honest Southerners have a love/hate relationship with the South. You know you’re still probably a Tar Heel when people ask you where you’re from and you say you’re living in Kentucky but are from North Carolina. That parsing is what feels like being an expat.
TARA POWELL
PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL MARESKA
Tara Powell grew up in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, on a river between the swamps and beaches, but has been living, teaching, and writing in Columbia, South Carolina, since 2005. She is the mother of three small children and many poems and essays about the people and landscapes she loves. Through her mother’s side of the family, Powell is descended from Waldensians who in the late nineteenth century immigrated to America and established a community in Valdese, North Carolina, a subject Powell has explored in her poetry. Her poems have appeared in Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry, Pembroke Magazine, South Atlantic Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology: North Carolina, storySouth, and elsewhere. She is also the author of Physical Science (2010), a chapbook of poems from Finishing Line Press, and a book of literary scholarship called The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature (2012), published by Louisiana State University Press. She co-edited with David A. Davis Writing in the Kitchen: Essays on Southern Literature and Foodways (2014) published by the University Press of Mississippi. After receiving a PhD in English from UNC Chapel Hill, she joined the faculty at the University of South Carolina, where she teaches courses in Southern literature and poetry. She has also served on the executive committees of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, Society for the Study of Southern Literature, South Atlantic Modern Language Association, and American Waldensian Society.
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