6
2013
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
number 22
Introducing the Third Issue of NCLR Online by Margaret D. Bauer, Editor With this third issue of NCLR Online, I am convinced: these supplemental issues are a good idea. Without the worry of exceeding any page limit, we have been able to publish more reviews – two dozen books are reviewed in the pages that follow; that is 150 percent more book reviews than were in the print issues before NCLR Online. We are also able to publish all of the finalists in our James Applewhite Poetry Prize competition – all fifteen of the poems that Poetry Editor Jeffrey Franklin recommended for publication from the submissions we received for the 2013 competition. Seven of the finalists are in this issue; the rest, along with Susan Laughter Meyers’s winning poem (selected by former North Carolina Poet Laureate Fred Chappell from among all the finalists), will be published in the print issue, due out this summer. Here, too, are announcements of other literary awards given around the state this past year, and we offer congratulations to all the honored writers. However, perhaps the best part of publishing NCLR Online is the exposure these authors, and of course, NCLR receive because each issue can be easily shared around the world. I began writing this introduction while the 2013 issue featuring the “Changing State of North Carolina” is still in bookstores, but, as we know, the more things change . . . Indeed, war, the special feature topic of the 2014 issues, is one such constant. Wherever the fighting may be, the effects can be felt throughout the state, from the military installations across North Carolina to the hometowns (and homes) of the troops and their families. The special feature sections of this online issue and of our forthcoming print issue will include writing about war, covering the American
Revolution to the current conflicts in the Middle East. And the writing is certainly not all about the battlefield; in fact, it also focuses largely on the people left behind at home. In this issue, for example, Terry Roberts’s fiction, set in Madison County during World War I, focuses on the family of the man assigned to run the German internment camp in Hot Springs, NC. In Kelly Clancy’s nonfiction piece, a young boy growing up in the Appalachian mountains during World War II is instructed by his soldier brother, who moved to Raleigh to build military aircraft, that “it was up to him now to look after their sisters.” In another nonfiction piece, we read about how teenaged Jen Julian learned soon after 9/11 that a bomb flying above Wayne County, NC, during the Cold War could very easily have destroyed her hometown decades before she was even born. The novels reviewed in this section are also stories of people back home during war time. But we also have a review of Katey Schultz’s collection of short stories focusing on men and women in the service, as well as noncombatants (and more folks at home), dealing with the Middle East conflicts of the past twenty years. The special feature section then closes with Seth Peavey’s short story, a finalist in the 2013 Doris Betts Fiction Prize competition, set in war-torn Afghanistan. It should be no surprise that there is so much war literature and that so much of it focuses on the survivors. As Robert Morgan notes at the conclusion of his interview, forthcoming in the 2014 print issue, “when wars are over, the damage to millions of lives lingers. After the fighting the scars remain, the grief among the survivors, the heirs.” The dead are at peace. Those trying to make sense of it all are the ones who tell the stories.