2014
Fo
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
s i r o rD
by Michael McFee
“It’s a pleasure to sing to such a responsive audience.”
number 23 Courtesy of the Department of English and Comparative Literature, UNC-Chapel Hill
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Michael McFee was born in Asheville, raised in Arden, and educated in the south Buncombe County schools. He is a Professor of English at UNC-Chapel Hill, his alma mater. Author of numerous books, including ten collections of poetry, his honors include the Thomas Wolfe Literary Award (from the Western North Carolina Historical Association) and the James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South (from the Fellowship of Southern Writers). Read poetry by McFee in NCLR 1997, 2008, and 2010.
1. I hadn’t been in Pittsboro, North Carolina, for almost a year, not since the funeral of Doris Betts in the little brick Presbyterian Church just off the traffic circle, on April 25, 2012. That was a very hard Wednesday morning for those of us who’d known and loved Doris, not just because our friend – one of the most vigorously alive human beings in this world – was gone, but also because the Service of Witness to the Resurrection was so impersonal and presbygeneric. Our spirits had not been resurrected that day. In early April of 2013, I heard that some of Doris’s many many books were soon to be sold at the annual Chatham Community Library book sale. I’d been trying to get rid of books in recent years, not buy more; the older I got, the less I liked overflowing shelves of read and unread pages. Too many words, too much dusty yellowing paper. But I knew how steadily and how widely and how well Doris always read. I knew this was as close as I’d ever get to seeing my dear friend again, by holding what she’d held and beheld and loved enough to keep.
doris Betts (1932–2012) joined the faculty of UNC-Chapel Hill in 1966. In 1973, she received the Tanner Award for distinguished undergraduate teaching, and in 1980, she was named a UNC Alumni Distinguished Professor of English. Read more about this author after this essay in a review of one of her early novels, which was reprinted in 2013 by Press 53.
A native of Tennessee, the poet Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) came to North Carolina to join the faculty of the Woman’s College of UNC (now UNC Greensboro). An essay on Jarrell by Fred Chappell opens the premiere (1992) issue of NCLR. The 1996 issue included a short essay on the poet by his widow, and in 2003, NCLR published a sidebar on his “Wartime Flight Poems” by Maryscott Mullins.
—The mockingbird in The Bat-Poet by Randall Jarrell