Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues
deals with a college professor from a fine family who has descended into the life of an addict, suggesting both upper middle status and descent from it. “Heritage” features a woman trying to move up socially by being accepted into the Daughters of the American Revolution by women who looked down on her in high school. She ultimately decides that the prize is not worth the cost. In Hampton’s final story, “Sparkle,” the protag-
onist is upset when asked if her childhood home was like the three-room shack Dolly Parton grew up in, now on display at Dollywood. “No, Professor, . . . I had plumbing and everything. . . . Heck I even read a few books when I was a kid, when I wasn’t losing teeth. . . . Even managed to gra – jee – ate college” (176). With the social classes and educational variations in the texts, as well as some connections to outside
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culture in both books (two of White’s stories are set in Florida), the short story sequences contribute to a more realistic and expansive view of Appalachia. White’s stories read as more interior monologues or third person tales than speakerly texts directed to an audience. At the end of “All Grown Up,” the speaker says, “I shake my head. He can’t ever give me back what review continued on next page
2019–2020 MANLY WADE WELLMAN AWARD WINNER Michael G. Williams received the 2019–2020 Manly Wade Wellman Award for his novel A Fall in Autumn, published by Fallstaff Books in 2019. Williams’s futuristic noir novel takes his real-life experiences of growing up an outsider and having to find his own truth and puts it in a flying city where a washed-up private eye, reviled for his imperfect genetics, must solve a mystery from the fog-shrouded past. What Williams planned as a detective story wound up a memoir of refusing to settle for less than the truth. Williams is a native of western North Carolina. He has written several short works of speculative fiction, as well as the Withrow Chronicles and the Servant/Sovereign series. He and his husband live in Durham, NC. The Manly Wade Wellman Award was founded by the North Carolina Speculative Fiction Foundation in
2013 to recognize the state’s own speculative fiction writing community. Upon accepting the award, Williams thanked: everyone else who was nominated, the longlist, the shortlist, finalists, most of all for helping to create an environment in North Carolina where it is possible for someone to join in and try to find their voice and be a part of this amazing environment of writers, and feel very supported and very welcomed at all times.
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the award ceremony was conducted during the Con-Tinual livestream, which has allowed North Carolina’s conventions to continue online. (Watch the award ceremony here.) Read about Manly Wade Wellman in NCLR 1993. COURTESY OF SAMUEL MONTGOMERY-BLINN
ABOVE Michael G. Williams receiving the Manly Wade Williams
Award from Samuel Montgomery-Blinn at Con-Tinual