70
2012
NORTH CAROLINA L ITE R A R Y RE V IE W O N L INE
number 21
Parker Receives Parker Award adapted from presentation remarks by Margaret D. Bauer North Carolina Literary and Historical Association Meeting Raleigh, NC, 18 November 2011
Margaret D. Bauer is the Editor of NCLR. Her book on Faulkner and other Southern writers is called William Faulkner’s Legacy: “what shadow, what stain, what mark” (University Press of Florida, 2005).
photograph by Alan Westmoreland; courtesy of NC State Archives
In the afternoon program earlier today, we celebrated twenty years of the North Carolina Literary Review. Michael Parker is a writer who was also just getting started about twenty years ago. His first novel, Hello Down There, was published in 1993, and that year, too, he published an essay in NCLR titled “I Know 8,000 Lunatics: Reflections of an Apple-Stealing S.O.B.” Michael was perhaps at this very meeting the next year when his 1994 collection of short stories, The Geographical Cure, received the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction. And the next year, another NCLR essay. NCLR also published an interview with Michael (in 2005) in which he expresses his concern about the declining role of the imagination in our technological world. Michael Parker is definitely not lacking in imagination: in 2001, he published a third book, Towns without Rivers, a sequel to his first novel. I was sorry my reading schedule runs a couple of years behind because by the time I got to this book, my own book on Southern writers who are echoing Faulkner in style and substance was already in press, so it was too late to add another chapter – but maybe I’ll write a sequel to explore how Michael’s character Reka Speight is reminiscent of Faulkner’s Lena Grove – and the Faulknerian echoes continue in the little postage stamp of North Carolina soil that Michael Parker writes about. Sure enough, with Michael’s next two novels, Virginia Lovers (2004) and If You Want Me to Stay (2005), reviewers regularly compared him to Faulkner. Virginia Lovers may be my favorite of Michael’s books so far, but I’ve fallen behind again – I haven’t yet read the new novel, The Watery Part of the World, which he is going to talk about tonight. I’m also partial to his most recent collection of stories, Don’t Make
Me Stop Now (2007), which includes the hilarious story “Hidden Meanings: Treatment of Time, Supreme Irony, and Life Experiences in the Song ‘Ain’t Gonna Bump No More No Big Fat Woman.’” If you were not an NCLR subscriber back in 2008 when we included a recording of Michael reading this story on the CDs that accompanied the humor issue, you have missed a truly entertaining listening opportunity, comparable to the famous recording of Eudora Welty reading her story “Why I Live at the P.O.” (it’s not too late – those CDs are still available for purchase). I was certainly not surprised to learn after the first time I heard Michael read that story that it had been selected for New Stories of the South: The Year’s Best.
above Recipient of the 2011 R. Hunt Parker Award Michael
Parker giving the Keats and Elizabeth Sparrow Keynote Address at the annual meeting of the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association, Raleigh, 18 Nov. 2011