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2012
NORTH CAROLINA L ITE R A R Y RE V IE W O N L INE
number 21
Litflix: Adapting North Carolina Literature into Film Margaret D. Bauer, Editor Welcome to the first issue of NCLR Online. As you see, this electronic issue maintains the fresh and unique design created by our Art Director, Dana Ezzell Gay, and unveiled with the 2009 issue. NCLR Online is an open access supplement where we will now publish the book reviews and literary news that used to appear in our annual print issue, as well as some content related to the year’s special feature topic. Providing book reviews to as broad an audience as possible helps to fulfill NCLR’s mission to serve as ambassador for North Carolina writers. Now writers can link our reviews and award stories to their websites and Facebook pages. And drawing attention to the annual special feature topic in advance of publication will give readers time to subscribe before the summer mailing of the print issue. To introduce our 2012 focus on North Carolina Literature into Film, we reprint here an essay by preeminent North Carolina playwright Paul Green on the subject of moviemaking. Since another of NCLR’s missions is to bring attention to writers whose work has been recently neglected or even forgotten, reprinting essays like Green’s and making them widely accessible will, I hope, reintroduce the writer to the public beyond North Carolina. Indeed, when I sent Laurence Avery’s essay on Green’s screenwriting experience (forthcoming in the print issue) to our film experts on the editorial board, their feedback included requests for more information about Green. New to North Carolina, they did not know of his important role in drama and so wanted to learn more about the literary relevance of his screenwriting. In NCLR’s other mission of introducing new writers, Editorial Assistant Amanda Stevens reviews a debut story collection that reflects how film finds its way into literature as much as literature into film: Tamra Wilson’s “Dining with Robert Redford” and Other
Stories (the title story of which was first published in NCLR). Wilson’s stories explore Americans’ fascination with movie stars and other celebrities. This section also includes essays by two of the writers who will join us here in Greenville in September for the ninth Eastern North Carolina Literary Homecoming, the theme of which is “Litflix: Adapting North Carolina Literature into Film”: James Dodson and Eleanora E. Tate have written about seeing their books turned into movies. More such content relevant to the writers coming for the literary homecoming (on September 21–22) will appear in the print issue forthcoming this summer. Between now and September, several community events will take place throughout Eastern North Carolina, where participants will have the opportunity to talk about various film adaptations of North Carolina literature. The ENCLH website and NCLR’s Facebook page will post more information about these events and the literary homecoming program in the coming months. Check back frequently. The 2012 literary homecoming will begin, as usual, with the Friday evening presentation of the Roberts Award for Literary Inspiration, and the recipient this year will be, we are pleased to announce here, Eastern North Carolina poet James Applewhite. Read also in the special feature section of this supplemental issue two poems by our honoree that are relevant to the theme – or perhaps a reversal of the theme – film finding its way into North Carolina literature, one poem alluding to actress Joan Crawford and the other to a movie musical, South Pacific. We thank James Applewhite and LSU Press for permission to reprint these poems, and you can look forward to more film-inspired poetry by this eastern North Carolina poet to come in the print issue – two previously unpublished poems. We invite you then to