fiction by Randall Kenan n reviews of books by Georgann Eubanks, Jim Grimsley, Zelda Lockhart, Minnie Bruce Pratt n And more . .
ART thy word
I
ASHON T. CRAWLEY, Professor of Religious Studies and African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia is the 2024–2025 Keohane Distinguished Visiting Professor, sponsored by Duke and UNC Chapel Hill. He earned his BA at the University of Pennsylvania, his MA in Theological Studies at Emory University, and his PhD in English with a certificate in African and African American Studies at Duke University. His audiovisual art includes the AIDS crisis memorial at the National Mall in Washington, DC, titled Homegoing, honoring fallen Black queer musicians and spirituality. His project, Otherwise/Revival Black pentecostal church choral music, as well as “Yes, Lord” chants, which he equates with openness, surrender, vulnerability, and blackqueer possibility. Among numerous honors, he was a Princeton Crossroads Art Fellow and Visiting Scholar-Artist at the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. His art appears in such venues as Charlottesville’s Second Street Gallery and Welcome Gallery, as well as Bridge Projects and the California African American Museum, both in Los Angeles.
COVER DESIGNER NCLR Art Director
Professor at Meredith College in Raleigh. She has an MFA in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. Her design work has been recognized by the CASE Awards and in such publications as Regional Design Annual, the Applied Arts Awards Annual, American Corporate Identity, and the Big Book of Logos She has been designing for the fifth issue, and in 2009 created the current style and design. In 2010, the “new look” earned honors for Best Journal Design from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. In addition to the cover, she designed the Kenan short story, the North Carolina Writers Conference award story, and Ed Southern’s essay about the North Carolina Writers’ Network’s fortieth anniversary.
i will fear no evil – number 1 (mixed media on canvas, 24X30) by Ashon T. Crawley (See the full work on page 12.)
COVER
have
hidden in my heart –number 8 (mixed media on canvas, 30X40) by Ashon T. Crawley (See the full work on page 9.)
IN THIS ISSUE
Gregory Ariail
Margaret D. Bauer
Bridget Bell
Onyx Bradley
Ann-Cabell Baum
Michael Beadle
Barbara Bennett
Andrew K. Clark
Michael Amos Cody
Catherine Carter
Georgann Eubanks
Jim Grimsley
Randall Kenan
NORTH CAROLINA LITERARY
Rebecca Duncan
Clyde Edgerton
Sylvia Freeman
David Gessner
Amber Knox
Zelda Lockhart
Minnie Bruce Pratt
Jayme Ringleb
Christy Alexander Hallberg
Angel Khoury
Chelsey Parsons
Glenis Redmond
John Rosenthal
Evan Peter Smith
Dwight Tanner
Han Vanderhart
Asma Abike
Bridget Bell
Terry Cawley
Sharon E. Colley
Tracy Deonn
Terri Kirby Erickson
Doris Barahona
Donna Campbell
Ashon T. Crawley
Marcial Harper
Janis Harrington
Irene Blair Honeycutt
Dionne Hunter
Hunter Mendenhall
JeanMarie Olivieri
Alan Michael Parker
Joanna Pearson
Dustin Pickering
David E. Poston
Kashiana Singh
Kristi Southern
Jane Shlensky
Ed Southern
Carole Boston Weatherford
Hannah Bunn West
Nat Dickinson
Michael Dorsey
Sylvia Freeman Stephen L. Hayes, Jr.
Devra Thomas
Elisa Troncoso-Cabello
Abby Trzepacz
SD Williams
Larry McCarter
James O. Reynolds
Anne Marshall Runyon
Jeffery Boston Weatherford
North Carolina Literary Review is published annually in the summer by the University of North Carolina Press. The journal is sponsored by East Carolina University with additional funding from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association. NCLR Online, published in the winter, spring, and fall, is an open access supplement to the print issue.
NCLR is a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, and it is indexed in EBSCOhost, the Humanities International Complete, the MLA International Bibliography, Proquest, and the Society for the Study of Southern Literature Newsletter.
Address correspondence to Dr. Margaret D. Bauer, NCLR Editor ECU Mailstop 555 English Greenville, NC 27858-4353
NCLR has received 2025–2026 grant support from the North Caroliniana Society and from the North Carolina Arts Council, a division of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
Subscriptions to the print issues of NCLR are, for individuals, $20 (US) for one year or $40 (US) for two years, or, for institutions and foreign subscribers, $30 (US) for one year, $54 for two. Libraries and other institutions may purchase subscriptions through subscription agencies. Individuals or institutions may also receive NCLR through membership in the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association. More information on our website
Individual copies of the annual print issue are available from retail outlets and from UNC Press. Back issues of our print issues are also available for purchase, while supplies last. Find prices and tables of contents of the back issues on the NCLR website
Submissions
NCLR invites proposals for articles or essays about North Carolina literature, history, and culture. Much of each issue is thematically focused, but a portion of each issue is open for developing interesting proposals, particularly interviews and literary analyses (without academic jargon). NCLR also publishes high-quality poetry, fiction, drama, and creative nonfiction by North Carolina writers or set in North Carolina. We define a North Carolina writer as anyone who currently lives in North Carolina, has lived in North Carolina, or has used North Carolina as subject matter.
Consult our website for submission guidelines for the various sections of each issue. Submissions to each issue’s special feature section are due August 31 of the preceding year, though proposals may be considered through early fall.
2026 issues will feature Literature by Veterans, Active Military, and their Families, guest edited by Anna Froula
2027 issues will feature Southern Gothic Literature by North Carolina Writers, guest edited by Barbara Bennett
Please email your suggestions for other special feature topics to the editor.
Book reviews are usually assigned, though suggestions will be considered as long as the book is by a North Carolina writer, is set in North Carolina, or deals with North Carolina subjects. NCLR prefers review essays that consider the new work in the context of the writer’s canon, other North Carolina literature, or the genre at large. Publishers and writers are invited to submit North Carolina–related books for review consideration. See the index of books that have been reviewed in NCLR on our website NCLR does not review self-/subsidy-published or vanity press books.
EDITORIAL BOARD
Joseph Bathanti
English, Appalachian State University
Michael Bibler
English, Louisiana State University
Christina Bucher
English, Rhetoric, and Writing, Berry College
Jim Clark
Emeritus, Barton College
Paul Crenshaw
Writer, Lawrence, KS
Kevin Dublin
Elder Writing Project, Litquake Foundation
Editor
Margaret D. Bauer
Art Director
Dana Ezzell
Guest Feature Editor
Dwight Tanner
Digital Editor
Devra Thomas
Art Editor
Diane A. Rodman
Poetry Editors
Jeffrey Franklin
Amber Flora Thomas
Fiction Editor
Rebecca Bernard
Founding Editor
Alex Albright
Original Art Director
Eva Roberts
Graphic Designer
Karen Baltimore
Senior Associate Editor
Christy Alexander Hallberg
Assistant Editors
Desiree Dighton
Anne Mallory
Randall Martoccia
Book Review Editor
Kristi Southern
Senior Editorial Assistant
Kenly Corya
Editorial Assistant
Trevor Mason
Senior Intern
Abby Trzepacz
Interns
Morgan Boyce
Matt Cole
Aija Everett
Samantha Higgins
Josefine Klaker
Vicki Maas
Axel Snyder
William Eddins
English, East Carolina University
Gabrielle Brant Freeman
English, East Carolina University
Rebecca Godwin
Emeritus, Barton College
Rebecca Hardin-Thrift
English, Wayne Community College
George Hovis
English, SUNY-Oneonto
Jessica Jacobs
Executive Director, Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry
Angela Raper
English, East Carolina University
Kirstin L. Squint
English, East Carolina University
Amber Flora Thomas
English, East Carolina University
Lyra Thomas
English, East Carolina University
Dean Tuck
English, Wayne Community College
Zackary Vernon
English, Appalachian State University
Robert M. West
English, Mississippi State University
De’Shawn Charles Winslow
Writer, Newark, NJ
The Productive Power– and Possibility –of Redemption and Healing
by Dwight Tanner, Guest Feature Editor
As clichéd as it sounds, a variety of bittersweet feelings accompany preparing this, the final special feature section of NCLR’s 2025 issues on North Carolina LGBTQ+ writers. Working with the NCLR staff and the incredible writers and contributors has been an honor and a privilege. And, celebrating and engaging with rich, varied stories about queer experiences and perspectives is, now more than ever, truly critical.
The special feature begins with a reprinting of Randall Kenan’s acclaimed short story “The Foundations of the Earth,” which first appeared in Kenan’s 1992 collection Let the Dead Bury Their Dead. Kenan’s story primarily focuses on a Sunday afternoon visit amongst neighbors, but is full of the reveries and internal deliberation of Mrs. Maggie, a Black woman who now owns an old plantation but is focused on the mourning of her grandson, who she only learned was gay after his death.
In addition to reminding us of the beauty and simplicity of Kenan’s indelible voice, the short story delves into the complexities of being Black and gay in the South, examining societal norms, identity, and what it means to love. The story is accompanied by some of the sublime works of the multidisciplinary artist Ashon T. Crawley, which are also on this issue’s cover.
As Margaret Bauer reminds us in her introduction to Kenan’s story, NCLR aims “to introduce a writer or a work to as broad an audience as possible, and we hope the readers will, in turn, want to read the full book.”
I am hopeful and optimistic that the six book reviews that finalize the special feature accomplish just that.
In the first review, Catherine Carter unpacks the poetry in Minnie Bruce Pratt’s 2021 collection Magnified, which documents seven years of anticipatory grief and loss following the illness and death of her spouse, trans-activist Leslie Feinberg. Drawing on interviews, Carter provides fascinating insight into
Pratt’s composition of the poems and highlights the connections between them. Carter ultimately describes Pratt’s work as deeply crafted, blending explorations of the power (and at times the lack of power) of words with broader reflections on time, grief, and love.
The recent reprinting of Jim Grimsley’s Dream Boy by Levine Querido is, as I argue in my review of the novel, a cause for celebration. Depicting queer violence and trauma against the potential of young love, Dream Boy tells the story of Nathan, a gay teenager who develops a secret relationship with his schoolmate Roy amidst the trauma of his father’s continued abuse. Grimsley’s minimalist yet emotionally charged prose expertly captures the tension and contradictions between love and trauma and the complexities of adolescent queer experiences.
Onyx Bradley describes Gregory Ariail’s novel The Gospel of Rot as a surreal and fantastical journey of self-discovery in the North Carolina mountains. The story follows seventy-year-old Amelia, through her journal, interspersed with letters and notes that reveal her father’s secrets and her own truths. Bradley highlights the ways the narrative blends local history, Cherokee mythology, and the fantastic to create a unique late-in-life coming-of-age story that emphasizes the importance of confronting hidden truths and embracing personal change.
Bridget Bell provides a review of poetry volumes by Jayme Ringleb and Han Vanderhart, both of which explore themes of family, trauma, and forgiveness. Vanderhart’s work delves into the legacy of racism and the complexities of Southern familial history, while Ringleb’s poems focus on the pain of rejection from those who should love and accept us. Attending to the choices and insights of each collection individually, Bell also draws out connections between the two works and their themes about confronting the emotional landscapes of trauma and healing.
As a teacher and scholar of speculative fiction, I’m delighted to include a Amber Knoxs review of Zelda
Lockhart’s novel Trinity, a ghostly multi-generational story of the Lee family. Exploring themes of racial violence, personal and inherited trauma, and spiritual healing, the narrative spans three generations of the Lee family’s struggles with abuse, PTSD, and societal inequality as they grapple with the presence of restless spirits. Knox celebrates Lockhart’s novel for its emotional depth and exploration of healing.
The special feature section concludes with Evan Peter Smith’s review of two books by Georgann Eubanks. Of the first, The Fabulous Ordinary, Smith emphasizes Eubanks’s vivid descriptions of natural phenomena in the biomes and ecosystems of the South, which highlight both the wonderment and the environmental challenges. Smith describes Eubanks’s debut poetry collection, Rural Astronomy, as snapshots of everyday life that reveal the beauty and potential for grace in the ordinary and unexpected.
I am struck reading most of these reviews by the powerful ways that each contributor describes these works as artfully depicting the reality of pain and trauma while still illustrating the productive power – and possibility – of redemption and healing, which feels like an apt way to wrap up 2025’s special feature. Once more I express my sincere gratitude to Margaret Bauer and the entire NCLR staff for their tireless work on behalf of the journal and its contributors. I am so grateful to have worked with them all. Thanks, also, to the many people who assisted and supported me in this process; to name just a few: Rachael Isom, Zackary Vernon, Jessica Martell, and Kyle Alexander.
Looking forward, I am excited to hand over the guest editor role to Anna Froula at East Carolina University, who will be overseeing the next NCLR special feature celebrating North Carolina’s veteran writers and their impacts. To adapt a famous line from Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, let the great work continue! n
LGBTQ+ Literature NORTH CAROLINA
8 The Foundations of the Earth a short story by Randall Kenan introduced by Margaret D. Bauer art by Ashon T. Crawley
22 In the End at the Beginning a review by Catherine Carter n Minnie Bruce Pratt, Magnified
26 Fragile Beauty a review by Dwight Tanner n Jim Grimsley, Dream Boy
29 The Beginning in the End a review by Onyx Bradley n Gregory Ariail, The Gospel of Rot
31 The Courage to Confront What Hurts Us a review by Bridget Bell n Jayme Ringleb, So Tall It Ends in Heaven n Han Vanderhart, What Pecan Light
34 Restless Spirits a review by Amber Knox n Zelda Lockhart, Trinity
36 The Beauty of Noticing a review by Evan Peter Smith photography by Donna Campbell n Georgann Eubanks, The Fabulous Ordinary and Rural Astronomy
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE
40 n Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues poetry, book reviews, and literary news
68 n North Carolina Miscellany fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and book reviews
by Randall Kenan
FOUNDATIONS EARTH THE OF THE
introduced by Margaret D. Bauer, Editor
with art by Ashon T. Crawley
EARTH THE FOUNDATIONS
“The Foundations of the Earth” was included in the 1998 Literature of the American South anthology published by W.W. Norton & Company; the author, Randall Kenan, born in 1963, was the youngest living writer in the volume. And that is how I first encountered Kenan: hearing him read this story at a conference during a panel celebrating the publication of this new, long-awaited anthology that promised to expand the Southern canon beyond the largely white, male voices of the Agrarians.
I’ve read and reread “The Foundations of the Earth” almost annually since then, as I’ve included it more often than not in my Southern literature survey course. There is so much in this story to bring such a class to a close: set on a plantation of a sort, though it is owned by a Black woman named Mrs. Maggie, which tells us from the start that this is not a traditional plantation story. The story explores religion, family, race relations, but in the context of human relations: which is more difficult in the South – being Black or being gay? A different take on passing: it’s easier to pass for straight than pass for white. Food and farming referenced, manners and mores examined – it is quintessential Southern literature. And I never tire of rereading it in preparation for discussing it with a new set of students.
I spoke with Randall Kenan some years ago about including this story in an issue of NCLR Online. We didn’t get around to making that happen before his passing, but when I reached out to HarperCollins for permission, they responded quickly and generously, and I thank them for allowing us to bring our 2025 feature to such an auspicious close by including this story in the fourth issue featuring LGBTQ+ literature of North Carolina. As with all NCLR Online content, our goal is to introduce a writer or a work to as broad an audience as possible, and we hope the readers will, in turn, want to read the full book. After two pieces on Kenan in the 2025 print issue (and all of the Kenan content we’ve published in the past), perhaps the author needs no introduction to our regular readers. But I hope this story will lead readers, regular and new, to the other stories in the collection in which it originally appeared, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, Kenan’s acclaimed first short fiction collection first published in 1992 –and then to his other works.
RANDALL KENAN (1963–2020) grew up in Chinquapin, NC, and earned English and Creative Writing degrees from UNC Chapel Hill. He taught courses at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University and worked for Random House and Alfred A. Knopf before joining the faculty at UNC Chapel Hill. He is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, including the novel A Visitation of Spirits (Grove Press, 1989); the short story collection If I Had Two Wings (W.W. Norton, 2020; reviewed in NCLR Online 2021); and the posthumously published collection of essays, Black Folk Could Fly: Selected Writings (W.W.
SHE WOULD SOMETIMES SIT BY HERSELF ON THE PATIO LATE OF AN EVENING, IN THE SAME CHAIR SHE WAS SITTING IN NOW, SIP FROM HER COCA-COLA, AND THINK ABOUT HOW BIG THE EARTH MUST BE TO SEEM FLAT TO THE EYE.
IOf course they didn’t pay it any mind at first: just a tractor – one of the most natural things in the world to see in a field – kicking dust up into the afternoon sky and slowly toddling off the road into a soybean field. And fields surrounded Mrs. Maggie MacGowan Williams’s house, giving the impression that her lawn stretched on and on until it dropped off into the woods far by the way. Sometimes she was certain she could actually see the earth’s curve – not merely the bend of the small hill on which her house sat but the great slope of the sphere, the way scientists explained it in books, a monstrous globe floating in a cold nothingness. She would sometimes sit by herself on the patio late of an evening, in the same chair she was sitting in now, sip from her Coca-Cola, and think about how big the earth must be to seem flat to the eye.
She wished she were alone now. It was Sunday.
“Now I wonder what that man is doing with a tractor out there today?”
Norton, 2022; reviewed in NCLR Online Winter 2024 ). Among his numerous awards and honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Sherwood Anderson Award, a Whiting Award, the John Dos Passos Prize, the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the North Carolina Award for Literature. He was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2018. Read an interview with him in NCLR 2019, an interview essay in NCLR 2006, and articles about his work in NCLR 2008, 2012, 2021, and 2025.
thy
have I hidden in my heart – number 8 (mixed media on canvas, 30x40) by Ashon T. Crawley
They sat on Maggie’s patio, reclined in that after-Sunday-dinner way – Maggie; the Right Reverend Hezekiah Barden, round and pompous as ever; Henrietta Fuchee, the prim and priggish music teacher and president of the First Baptist Church Auxiliary Council; Emma Lewis, Maggie’s sometimes housekeeper; and Gabriel, Mrs. Maggie Williams’s young, white, special guest – all looking out lazily into the early summer, watching the sun begin its slow downward arc, feeling the baked ham and the candied sweet potatoes and the fried chicken with the collard greens and green beans and beets settle in their bellies, talking shallow and pleasant talk, and sipping their Coca-Colas and bitter lemonade.
“Don’t they realize it’s Sunday?” Reverend Barden leaned back in his chair and tugged at his suspenders thoughtfully, eyeing the tractor as it turned into another row. He reached for a sweating glass of lemonade, his red bow tie afire in the penultimate beams of the day.
“I . . . I don’t understand. What’s wrong?” Maggie could see her other guests watching Gabriel intently, trying to discern why on earth he was present at Maggie MacGowan Williams’s table.
“What you mean, what’s wrong?” The Reverend Barden leaned forward and narrowed his eyes at the young man. “What’s wrong is: it’s Sunday.”
“So? I don’t . . .” Gabriel himself now looked embarrassed, glancing to Maggie, who wanted to save him but could not.
“‘So?’ ‘So?’” Leaning toward Gabriel and narrowing his eyes, Barden asked: “You’re not from a church-going family are you?”
“Well, no. Today was my first time in . . . Oh, probably ten years.”
“Uh-huh.” Barden corrected his posture, as if to say he pitied Gabriel’s being an infidel but had the patience to instruct him. “Now you see, the
HE GAVE HER AN UNDERSTANDING SMILE, WHICH MADE HER CRINGE SLIGHTLY, FEARING HER GESTURE MIGHT HAVE BEEN MISTAKEN FOR A SIGN OF INTIMACY.
Lord has declared Sunday as His day. It’s holy. ‘Six days shalt thou labor and do all thy work: but the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore, the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.’ Exodus. Chapter twenty, verses nine and ten.”
“Amen.” Henrietta closed her eyes and rocked.
“Hez.” Maggie inclined her head a bit to entreat the good Reverend to desist. He gave her an understanding smile, which made her cringe slightly, fearing her gesture might have been mistaken for a sign of intimacy.
“But, Miss Henrietta – ” Emma Lewis tapped the tabletop, like a judge in court, changing the subject. “Like I was saying, I believe that Rick on The Winds of Hope is going to marry that gal before she gets too big with child, don’t you?” Though Emma kept house for Maggie Williams, to Maggie she seemed more like a sister who came three days a week, more to visit than to clean.
“Now go on away from here, Emma.” Henrietta did not look up from her empty cake plate, her glasses hanging on top of her sagging breasts from a silver chain. “Talking about that worldly foolishness on TV. You know I don’t pay that mess any attention.” She did not want the Reverend to know that she secretly watched afternoon soap operas, just like Emma and all the other women in the congregation. Usually she gossiped to beat the band about this rich heifer and that handsome hunk whenever she found a fellow TV-gazer. Buck-toothed hypocrite, Maggie thought. She knew the truth: Henrietta, herself a widow now on ten years, was sweet on the widower minister, who in turn, alas, had his eye on Maggie.
“Now, Miss Henrietta, we was talking about it t’other day. Don’t you think he’s apt to marry her soon?” Emma’s tone was insistent.
“I don’t know, Emma.” Visibly agitated, Henrietta donned her glasses and looked into the fields. “I wonder who that is anyhow?”
Annoyed by Henrietta’s rebuff, Emma stood and began to collect the few remaining dishes. Her purple-and-yellow floral print dress hugged her ample hips. “It’s that ole Morton Henry that Miss Maggie leases that piece of land to.” She walked toward the door, into the house. “He ain’t no Godfearing man.”
“Well, that’s plain to see.” The Reverend glanced over to Maggie. She shrugged.
They are ignoring Gabriel, Maggie thought. She had invited them to dinner after church services thinking it would be pleasant for Gabriel to meet other people in Tims Creek. But generally they chose not to see him, and when they did it was with ill-concealed scorn or petty curiosity or annoyance. At first the conversation seemed civil enough. But the ice was never truly broken, questions still buzzed around the talk like horseflies, Maggie could tell. “Where you from?” Henrietta had asked. “What’s your line of work?” Barden had asked. While Gabriel sat there with a look on his face somewhere between peace and pain. But Maggie refused to believe she had made a mistake. At this stage of her life she depended on no one for anything, and she was certainly not dependent on the approval of these self-important fools.
She had been steeled by anxiety when she picked Gabriel up at the airport that Friday night. But as she caught sight of him stepping from the jet and greeted him, asking about the weather in Boston; and after she had ushered him to her car
and watched him slide in, seeming quite at home; though it still felt awkward, she thought: I’m doing the right thing.
II
“Well, thank you for inviting me, Mrs. Williams. But I don’t understand . . . Is something wrong?”
“Wrong? No, nothing’s wrong, Gabriel. I just thought it’d be good to see you. Sit and talk to you. We didn’t have much time at the funeral.”
“Gee . . . I – ”
“You don’t want to make an old woman sad, now do you?”
“Well, Mrs. Williams, if you put it like that, how can I refuse?”
“Weekend after next then?”
There was a pause in which she heard muted voices in the wire.
“Okay.”
After she hung up the phone and sat down in her favorite chair in the den, she heaved a momentous sigh. Well, she had done it. At last. The weight of uncertainty would be lifted. She could confront him face to face. She wanted to know about her grandboy, and Gabriel was the only one who could tell her what she wanted to know. It was that simple. Surely, he realized what this invitation meant. She leaned back looking out the big picture window onto the tops of the brilliantly blooming crepe myrtle trees in the yard, listening to the grandfather clock mark the time.
III
Her grandson’s funeral had been six months ago, but it seemed much longer. Perhaps the fact that Edward had been gone away from home so long without seeing her, combined with the weeks and
NOONE DEPENDED
AT THIS STAGE OF HER LIFE SHE DEPENDED ON NO ONE FOR ANYTHING, AND SHE WAS CERTAINLY NOT DEPENDENT ON THE APPROVAL OF THESE SELF-IMPORTANT FOOLS.
days and hours and minutes she had spent trying not to think about him and all the craziness that had surrounded his death, somehow lengthened the time.
At first she chose to ignore it, the strange and bitter sadness that seemed to have overtaken her every waking moment. She went about her daily life as she had done for thirty-odd years, overseeing her stores, her land, her money; buying groceries, paying bills, shopping, shopping; going to church and talking to her few good living friends and the few silly fools she was obliged to suffer. But all day, dusk to dawn, and especially at night, she had what the field-workers called “a monkey on your back,” when the sun beats down so hot it makes you delirious; but her monkey chilled and angered her, born not of the sun but of a profound loneliness, an oppressive emptiness, a stabbing guilt. Sometimes she even wished she were a drinking woman.
The depression had come with the death of Edward, though its roots reached farther back, to the time he seemed to have vanished. There had been so many years of asking other members of the family: Have you heard from him? Have you seen him? So many years of only a Christmas card or birthday card a few days early, or a cryptic, taciturn phone call on Sunday mornings, and then no calls at all. At some point she realized she had no idea where he was or how to get in touch with him. Mysteriously, he would drop a line to his half-sister, Clarissa, or drop a card without a return address. He was gone. Inevitably, she had to ask: Had she done something evil to the boy to drive him away? Had she tried too hard to make sure he became nothing like his father and grandfather? I was as good a mother as a woman can claim to be, she
SO SHE CONTINUED PICKING
thought: from the cradle on he had all the material things he needed, and he certainly didn’t want for attention, for care; and I trained him proper, he was a well-mannered and upright young fellow when he left here for college. Oh, I was proud of that boy, winning a scholarship to Boston University. Tall, handsome like his granddad. He’d make somebody a good . . .
So she continued picking out culprits: school, the cold North, strange people, strange ideas. But now in her crystalline hindsight she could lay no blame on anyone but Edward. And the more she remembered battles with the mumps and the measles and long division and taunts from his schoolmates, the more she became aware of her true anger. He owes me respect, damn it. The least he can do is keep in touch. Is that so much to ask?
But before she could make up her mind to find him and confront him with her fury, before she
i will fear no evil – number 1 (mixed media on canvas, 24x30) by Ashon T. Crawley
HER ANGER WAS BURNING SO INTENSELY THAT SHE KNEW IF SHE DIDN’T GET OUT SHE WOULD
TEAR HIS HEART FROM HIS CHEST, HIS EYES FROM THEIR SOCKETS, HIS TESTICLES FROM THEIR SAC.
HEART BURNING
could cuss him out good and call him an ungrateful, no-account bastard just like his father, a truck would have the heartless audacity to skid into her grandchild’s car one rainy night in Springfield and end his life at twenty-seven, taking that opportunity away from her forever. When they told her of his death she cursed her weakness. Begging God for another chance. But instead He gave her something she had never imagined.
Clarissa was the one to finally tell her. “Grandma,” she had said, “Edward’s been living with another man all these years.”
“So?”
“No, Grandma. Like man and wife.”
Maggie had never before been so paralyzed by news. One question answered, only to be replaced by a multitude. Gabriel had come with the body, like an interpreter for the dead. They had been living together in Boston, where Edward worked in a bookstore. He came, head bowed, rheumy-eyed, exhausted. He gave her no explanation; nor had she asked him for any, for he displayed the truth in his vacant and humble glare and had nothing to offer but the penurious tribute of his trembling hands. Which was more than she wanted.
In her world she had been expected to be tearless, patient, comforting to other members of the family; folk were meant to sit back and say, “Lord, ain’t she taking it well. I don’t think I could be so calm if my grandboy had’ve died so young.” Magisterially she had done her duty; she had taken it all in stride. But her world began to hopelessly unravel that summer night at the wake in the Raymond Brown Funeral Home, among the many somberbright flower arrangements, the fluorescent lights, and the gleaming bronze casket, when Gabriel tried to tell her how sorry he was . . . How dare he? This pathetic, stumbling, poor trashy white boy, to
throw his sinful lust for her grandbaby in her face, as if to bury a grandchild weren’t bad enough. Now this abomination had to be flaunted. – Sorry, indeed! The nerve! Who the hell did he think he was to parade their shame about?
Her anger was burning so intensely that she knew if she didn’t get out she would tear his heart from his chest, his eyes from their sockets, his testicles from their sac. With great haste she took her leave, brushing off the funeral director and her brother’s wives and husband’s brothers – they all probably thinking her overcome with grief rather than anger – and had Clarissa drive her home. When she got to the house she filled a tub with water as hot as she could stand it and a handful of bath oil beads, and slipped in, praying her hatred would mingle with the mist and evaporate, leaving her at least sane.
Next, sleep. Healing sleep, soothing sleep, sleep to make the world go away, sleep like death. Her mama had told her that sleep was the best medicine God ever made. When things get too rough – go to bed. Her family had been known as the family that retreated to bed. Ruined crop? No money? Get some shut-eye. Maybe it’ll be better in the morning. Can’t be worse. Maggie didn’t give a damn where Gabriel was to sleep that night; someone else would deal with it. She didn’t care about all the people who would come to the house after the wake to the Sitting Up, talking, eating, drinking, watching over the still body till sunrise; they could take care of themselves. The people came; but Maggie slept. From deeps under deeps of slumber she sensed her granddaughter stick her head in the door and whisper, asking Maggie if she wanted something to eat. Maggie didn’t stir. She slept. And in her sleep she dreamed. She dreamed she was Job sitting on his dung heap, dressed in sackcloth and ashes, her body
covered with boils, scratching with a stick, sending away Eliphaz and Bildad and Zophar and Elihu, who came to counsel her, and above her the sky boiled and churned and the air roared, and she matched it, railing against God, against her life –Why? Why? Why did you kill him, you heartless old fiend? Why make me live to see him die? What earthly purpose could you have in such a wicked deed? You are God, but you are not good. Speak to me, damn it. Why? Why? Why? Hurricanes whipped and thunder ripped through a sky streaked by lightning, and she was lifted up, spinning, spinning, and Edward floated before her in the rushing air and quickly turned around into the comforting arms of Gabriel, winged, who clutched her grandboy to his bosom and soared away, out of the storm. Maggie screamed and the winds grew stronger, and a voice, gentle and sweet, not thunderous as she expected, spoke to her from the whirlwind: Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare if thou hast understanding . . . The voice spoke of the myriad creations of the universe, the stupendous glory of the Earth and its inhabitants. But Maggie was not deterred in the face of the maelstrom, saying: Answer me, damn you: Why? and the winds began to taper off and finally halted, and Maggie was alone, standing on water. A fish, what appeared to be a mackerel, stuck its head through the surface and said: Kind woman, be not aggrieved and put your anger away. Your arrogance has clouded your good
mind. Who asked you to love? Who asked you to hate? The fish dipped down with a plip and gradually Maggie too began to slip down into the water, down, down, down, sinking, below depths of reason and love, down into the dark unknown of her own mind, down, down, down.
Maggie MacGowan Williams woke the next morning to the harsh chatter of a bluejay chasing a mockingbird just outside her window, a racket that caused her to open her eyes quickly to blinding sunlight. Squinting, she looked about the room, seeing the chest of drawers that had once belonged to her mother and her mother’s mother before that, the chairs, the photographs on the wall, the television, the rug thickly soft, the closet door slightly ajar, the bureau, the mirror atop the bureau, and herself in the mirror, all of it bright in the crisp morning light. She saw herself looking, if not refreshed, calmed and within her the rage had gone, replaced by a numb humility and a plethora of questions. Questions. Questions. Questions.
Inwardly she had felt beatific that day of the funeral, ashamed at her anger of the day before. She greeted folk gently, softly, with a smile, her tones honey-flavored but solemn, and she reassumed the mantle of one-who-comforts-more-than-needing-comfort.
The immediate family had gathered at Maggie’s house – Edward’s father, Tom, Jr.; Tom, Jr.’s wife, Lucille; the grandbaby, Paul (Edward’s brother); Clarissa. Raymond Brown’s long black limousine took them from the front door of Maggie’s house to the church, where the yard was crammed with people in their greys and navy blues, dark browns,
PURPOSEDEED HEARTLESS
WHY DID YOU KILL HIM, YOU HEARTLESS OLD FIEND? WHY MAKE ME LIVE TO SEE HIM DIE? WHAT EARTHLY PURPOSE COULD YOU HAVE IN SUCH A WICKED DEED?
and deep, deep burgundies. In her new humility she mused: When, oh when will we learn that death is not so somber, not something to mourn so much as celebrate? We should wear fire reds, sun oranges, hello greens, ocean-deep blues, and dazzling, welcome-home whites. She herself wore a bright dress of saffron and a blue scarf. She thought Edward would have liked it.
The family lined up and Gabriel approached her. As he stood before her – raven-haired, pinkskinned, abject, eyes bloodshot – she experienced a bevy of conflicting emotions: disgust, grief, anger, tenderness, fear, weariness, pity. Nevertheless she had to be civil, had to make a leap of faith and of understanding. Somehow she felt it had been asked of her. And though there were still so many questions, so much to sort out, for now she would mime patience, pretend to be accepting, feign peace. Time would unravel the rest.
She reached out, taking both his hands into her own, and said, the way she would to an old friend: “How have you been?”
IV
“But now, Miss Maggie . . . ”
She sometimes imagined the good Reverend Barden as a toad-frog or an impotent bull. His rantings and ravings bored her, and his clumsy advances repelled her; and when he tried to impress her with his holiness and his goodness, well . . .
HIS RANTINGS AND RAVINGS BORED HER, AND HIS CLUMSY ADVANCES REPELLED HER; AND WHEN HE TRIED TO IMPRESS HER WITH HIS HOLINESS AND HIS GOODNESS, WELL . . .
“. . . that man should know better than to be plowing on a Sunday. Sunday! Why, the Lord said . . . ”
“Reverend, I know what the Lord said. And I’m sure Morton Henry knows what the Lord said. But I am not the Lord, Reverend, and if Morton Henry wants to plow the west field on Sunday afternoon, well, it’s his soul, not mine.”
“But, Maggie. Miss Maggie. It’s – ”
“Well,” – Henrietta Fuchee sat perched to interject her five cents into the debate – “but, Maggie. It’s your land! Now, Reverend, doesn’t it say somewhere in Exodus that a man, or a woman in this case, a woman is responsible for the deeds or misdeeds of someone in his or her employ, especially on her property?”
“But he’s not an employ – ”
“Well,” – Barden scratched his head – “I think I know what you’re talking about, Henrietta. It may be in Deuteronomy . . . or Leviticus . . . part of the Mosaic Law, which . . . ”
Maggie cast a quick glance at Gabriel. He seemed to be interested in and entertained by this contest of moral superiority. There was certainly something about his face . . . but she could not stare. He looked so normal . . .
“Well, I don’t think you should stand for it, Maggie.”
“Henrietta? What do you . . . ? Look, if you want him to stop, you go tell him what the Lord said. I – ”
dancing in one spot – number 12 (pigment powder and acrylic on canvas, 48x64) by Ashon T. Crawley
AT THAT MOMENT SHE UNDERSTOOD THAT SHE WAS BEING CALLED ON TO REALIGN HER THINKING ABOUT MEN AND WOMEN, AND MEN AND MEN, AND EVEN WOMEN AND WOMEN. TOGETHER . . .THE WAY ADAM AND EVE WERE MEANT TO BE TOGETHER.
TOGETHER
The Right Reverend Hezekiah Barden stood, hiking his pants up to his belly. “Well, I will. A man’s soul is a valuable thing. And I can’t risk your own soul being tainted by the actions of one of your sharecroppers.”
“My soul? Sharecropper – he’s not a sharecropper. He leases that land. I – wait! . . . Hezekiah! . . . This doesn’t . . . ”
But Barden had stepped off the patio onto the lawn and was headed toward the field, marching forth like old Nathan on his way to confront King David.
“Wait, Reverend.” Henrietta hopped up, slinging her black pocketbook over her left shoulder. “Well, Maggie?” She peered at Maggie defiantly, as if to ask: Where do you stand?
“Now, Henrietta, I – ”
Henrietta pivoted, her moral righteousness jagged and sharp as a shard of glass. “Somebody has to stand up for right!” She tromped off after Barden.
Giggling, Emma picked up the empty glasses. “I don’t think ole Morton Henry gone be too happy to be preached at this afternoon.”
Maggie looked from Emma to Gabriel in bewilderment, at once annoyed and amused. All three began to laugh out loud. As Emma got to the door she turned to Maggie. “Hon, you better go see that they don’t get into no fistfight, don’t you think? You know that Reverend don’t know when to be quiet.” She looked to Gabriel and nodded knowingly. “You better go with her, son,” and was gone into the house; her molasses-thick laughter sweetening the air.
Reluctantly Maggie stood, looking at the two figures – Henrietta had caught up with Barden – a tiny cloud of dust rising from their feet. “Come on, Gabe. Looks like we have to go referee.”
Gabriel walked beside her, a broad smile on his face. Maggie thought of her grandson being attracted to this tall white man. She tried to see them together and couldn’t. At that moment she understood that she was being called on to realign her thinking about men and women, and men and men, and even women and women. Together . . . the way Adam and Eve were meant to be together. V
Initially she found it difficult to ask the questions she wanted to ask. Almost impossible.
They got along well on Saturday. She took him out to dinner; they went shopping. All the while she tried with all her might to convince herself that she felt comfortable with this white man, with this homosexual, with this man who had slept with her grandboy. Yet he managed to impress her with his easygoing manner and openness and humor.
“Mrs. W.” He had given her a nickname, of all things. No one had given her a nickname since . . . “Mrs. W., you sure you don’t want to try on some swimsuits?”
She laughed at his kind-hearted jokes, seeing, oddly enough, something about him very like Edward; but then that thought would make her sad and confused.
Finally that night over coffee at the kitchen table she began to ask what they had both gingerly avoided.
“Why didn’t he just tell me?”
“He was afraid, Mrs. W. It’s just that simple.”
“Of what?”
“That you might disown him. That you might stop . . . well, you know, loving him, I guess.”
“Does your family know?”
“Yes.”
“How do they take it?”
“My mom’s fine. She’s great. Really. She and Edward got along swell. My dad. Well, he’ll be okay for a while, but every now and again we’ll have these talks, you know, about cures and stuff and sometimes it just gets heated. I guess it’ll just take a little more time with him.”
“But don’t you want to be normal?”
“Mrs. W., I am. Normal.”
“I see.”
They went to bed at one-thirty that morning. As Maggie buttoned up her nightgown, Gabriel’s answers whizzed about her brain; but they brought along more damnable questions and Maggie went to bed feeling betrayal and disbelief and revulsion and anger.
In church that next morning with Gabriel, she began to doubt the wisdom of having asked him to come. As he sat beside her in the pew, as the Reverend Barden sermonized on Jezebel and Ahab, as the congregation unsuccessfully tried to disguise their curiosity – (“What is that white boy doing here with Maggie Williams? Who is he? Where he come from?”) – she wanted Gabriel to go ahead and tell her what to think: We’re perverts or You’re wrong-headed, your church has poisoned your mind against your own grandson: if he had come out to you, you would have rejected him. Wouldn’t you? Would she have?
Barden’s sermon droned on and on that morning; the choir sang; after the service people politely and gently shook Gabriel and Maggie’s hands and then stood off to the side, whispering, clearly perplexed.
On the drive back home, as if out of the blue, she asked him: “Is it hard?”
“Ma’am?”
“Being who you are? What you are?”
HE SPOKE MORE SOFTLY, GENTLY, THE WAY A WIDOW SPEAKS OF HER DEAD HUSBAND. OR, INDEED, THE WAY A WIDOWER SPEAKS OF HIS DEAD HUSBAND.
He looked over at her, and she could not meet his gaze with the same intensity that had gone into her question. “Being gay?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I have no choice.”
“So I understand. But is it hard?”
“Edward and I used to get into arguments about that, Mrs. W.” His tone altered a bit. He spoke more softly, gently, the way a widow speaks of her dead husband. Or, indeed, the way a widower speaks of his dead husband. “He used to say it was harder being black in this country than gay. Gays can always pass for straight; but blacks can’t always pass for white. And most can never pass.”
“And what do you think now?”
“Mrs. W., I think life is hard, you know?”
“Yes. I know.”
VI
Death had first introduced itself to Maggie when she was a child. Her grandfather and grandmother both died before she was five; her father died when she was nine; her mother when she was twentyfive; over the years all her brothers except one. Her husband ten years ago. Her first memories of death: watching the women wash a cold body: the look of brown skin darkening, hardening: the corpse laid out on a cooling board, wrapped in a winding-cloth, before interment: fear of ghosts, bodyless souls: troubled sleep. So much had changed in seventy years; now there were embalming, funeral homes, morticians, insurance policies, bronze caskets, a bureaucratic wall between deceased and bereaved. Among the many things she regretted about Edward’s death was not being able to touch his body. It made his death less real. But so much about
What was supposed to be and what truly was. Maggie learned these things from magazines and television and books; she loved to read. From her first week in that small schoolhouse with Miss Clara Oxendine, she had wanted to be a teacher. School: the scratchy chalkboard, the dusty-smelling textbooks, labyrinthine grammar and spelling and arithmetic, geography, reading out loud, giving confidence to the boy who would never learn to read well, correcting addition and subtraction problems, the taste and the scent of the schoolroom, the heat of the potbellied stove in January. She liked that small world; for her it was large. Yet how could she pay for enough education to become a teacher? Her mother would smile, encouragingly, when young Maggie would ask her, not looking up from her sewing, and merely say: “We’ll find a way.”
However, when she was fourteen she met a man named Thomas Williams, he sixteen going on thirty-nine. Infatuation replaced her dreams and murmured to her in languages she had never heard before, whispered to her another tale: You will be a merchant’s wife.
Thomas Williams would come a-courting on Sunday evenings for two years, come driving his father’s red Ford truck, stepping out with his biscuit-shined shoes, his one good Sunday suit, his hat cocked at an impertinent angle, and a smile that would make cold butter drip. But his true power lay in his tongue. He would spin yarns and tell tales that would make the oldest storyteller slap his knee and declare: “Hot damn! Can’t that boy lie!” He could talk a possum out of a tree. He spoke to Maggie about his dream of opening his own store, a dry-goods store, and then maybe two or three or four. An audacious dream for a seventeen-year-old black boy, son of a farmer in 1936 – and he promised, oh, how he promised, to keep Maggie by his side through it all.
Thinking back, on the other side of time and dreams, where fantasies and wishing had been realized, where she sat rich and alone, Maggie wondered what Thomas Williams could possibly have seen in that plain brown girl. Himself the son of a farmer with his own land, ten sons and two daughters, all married and doing well. There she was, poorer than a skinned rabbit, and not that pretty. Was he looking for a woman who would not flinch at hard work?
DREAM PROMISED
AN AUDACIOUS DREAM FOR A SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD BLACK BOY, SON OF A FARMER IN 1936 –AND HE PROMISED, OH, HOW HE PROMISED, TO KEEP MAGGIE BY HIS SIDE THROUGH IT ALL.
yes. surrender. bloom. – number 5, PRINT 1 (mixed media, 24x36) by Ashon T. Crawley
IN
A
WORLD NOT REAL, IS THERE TRULY GUILT IN
WILLING
REALITY TO COHERE THROUGH THE LIFE OF ANOTHER? IS THAT SUCH A GREAT SIN?
REALITY
Somehow, borrowing from his father, from his brothers, working two, three jobs at the shipyards, in the fields, with Maggie taking in sewing and laundry, cleaning houses, saving, saving, saving, they opened their store; and were married. Days, weeks, years of days, weeks of days, weeks of inventory and cleaning and waiting on people and watching over the dry-goods store, which became a hardware store in the sixties while the one store became two. They were prosperous; they were respected; they owned property. At seventy she now wanted for nothing. Long gone was the dream of a schoolhouse and little children who skinned their knees and the teaching of the ABCs. Some days she imagined she had two lives and she preferred the original dream to the flesh-and-blood reality.
Now, at least, she no longer had to fight bitterly with her pompous, self-satisfied, driven, blaspheming husband, who worked seven days a week, sixteen hours day, money-grubbing and mean though – outwardly – flamboyantly generous; a man who lost interest in her bed after her first and only son, Thomas Jr., arrived broken in heart, spirit, and brain upon delivery; a son whose only true achievement in life was to illegitimately produce Edward by some equally brainless waif of a girl, now long vanished; a son who practically thrust the few-weekold infant into Maggie’s arms, then flew off to a life of waste, sloth, petty crime, and finally a menial job in one of her stores and an ignoble marriage to a woman who could not conceal her greedy wish for Maggie to die.
Her life now was life that no longer had bite or spit or fire. She no longer worked. She no longer had to worry about Thomas’s philandering and what pretty young thing he was messing with now. She no longer had the little boy whom
Providence seemed to have sent her to maintain her sanity, to moor her to the Earth, and to give her vast energies focus.
In a world not real, is there truly guilt in willing reality to cohere through the life of another? Is that such a great sin? Maggie had turned to the boy – young, brown, handsome – to hold on to the world itself. She now saw that clearly. How did it happen? The mental slipping and sliding that allowed her to meld and mess and confuse her life with his, his rights with her wants, his life with her wish? He would not be like his father or his grandfather; he would rise up, go to school, be strong, be honest, upright. He would be; she would be . . . a feat of legerdemain; a sorcery of vicariousness in which his victory was her victory. He was her champion. Her hope.
Now he was gone. And now she had to come to terms with this news of his being “gay,” as the world called what she had been taught was an unholy abomination. Slowly it all came together in her mind’s eye: Edward.
He should have known better. I should have known better. I must learn better.
VII
They stood there at the end of the row, all of them waiting for the tractor to arrive and for the Reverend Hezekiah Barden to save the soul of Morton Henry.
Morton saw them standing there from his mount atop the green John Deere as it bounced across the broken soil. Maggie could make out the expression on his face: confusion. Three blacks and a white man out in the fields to see him. Did his house burn down? His wife die? The President declare war on Russia?
A big, red-haired, red-faced man, his face had so many freckles he appeared splotched. He had a big chew of tobacco in his left jaw, and he spat out the brown juice as he came up the edge of the row
“How you all today? Miss Maggie?”
Barden started right up, thumbs in his sus penders, and reared back on his heels. “Now I spect you’re a God-fearing man?”
“Beg pardon?”
“I even spect you go to church from time to time?”
“Church? Miss Maggie, I – ”
The Reverend held up his hand. “And I warrant you that your preacher – where do you go to church, son?”
“I go to – wait a minute. What’s going on here? Miss Maggie – ”
Henrietta piped up. “It’s Sunday! You ain’t supposed to be working and plowing fields on a Sunday!”
Morton Henry looked over to Maggie, who stood there in the bright sun, then to Gabriel, as if to beg him to speak, make some sense of this curious event. He scratched his head. “You mean to tell me you all come out here to tell me I ain’t suppose to plow this here field?”
“Not on Sunday you ain’t. It’s the Lord’s Day.”
CHILDISH,
HYPOCRITICAL
IDIOTS
AND FOOLS. TIME IS JUST SLIPPING, SLIPPING AWAY AND ALL THEY HAVE TO DO IS FUSS AND BOTHER ABOUT OTHER FOLK’S BUSINESS WHILE THEIR OWN HOUSES ARE BURNING DOWN.
“‘The Lord’s Day’?” Morton Henry was visibly amused. He tongued at the wad of tobacco in his jaw. “The Lord’s Day.” He chuckled out loud.
“Now it ain’t no laughing matter, young man.” The Reverend’s voice took on a dark tone.
Morton seemed to be trying to figure out who Gabriel was. He spat. “Well, I tell you, Reverend. If the Lord wants to come plow these fields I’d be happy to let him.”
“You . . . ” Henrietta stomped her foot, causing dust to rise. “You can’t talk about the Lord like that. You’re using His name in vain.”
“I’ll talk about Him any way I please to.” Morton Henry’s face became redder by the minute. “I got two jobs, five head of children, and a sick wife, and the Lord don’t seem too worried about that. I spect I ain’t gone worry too much about plowing this here field on His day none neither.”
“Young man, you can’t – ”
Morton Henry looked to Maggie. “Now, Miss Maggie, this is your land. and if you don’t want me to plow it, I’ll give you back your lease and you can pay me my money and find somebody else to tend this here field!”
Everybody looked at Maggie. How does this look, she couldn’t help thinking, a black woman defending a white man against a black minister? Why the hell am I here having to do this? she fumed. Childish, hypocritical idiots and fools.
THEEARTH
Time is just slipping, slipping away and all they have to do is fuss and bother about other folk’s business while their own houses are burning down. God save their souls. She wanted to yell this, to cuss them out and stomp away and leave them to their ignorance. But in the end, what good would it do?
She took a deep breath. “Morton Henry. You do what you got to do. Just like the rest of us.”
Morton Henry bowed his head to Maggie, “Ma’am,” turned to the others with a gloating grin, “Scuse me,” put his gear in first, and turned down the next row.
“Well – ”
Barden began to speak but Maggie just turned, not listening, not wanting to hear, thinking:
When, Lord, oh when will we learn? Will we ever? Respect, she thought. Oh how complicated. They followed Maggie, heading back to the house, Gabriel beside her, tall and silent, the afternoon sunrays romping in his black hair. How curious the world had become that she would be asking a white man to exonerate her in the eyes of her own grandson; how strange that at seventy, when she had all the laws and rules down pat, she would have to begin again, to learn. But all this stuff and bother would have to come later, for now she felt so, so tired, what with the weekend’s activities weighing on her three-score-and-ten-year-old bones and joints; and she wished it were sunset, and she alone on her patio, contemplating the roundness and flatness of the earth, and slipping softly and safely into sleep. n
EARTH FOUNDATIONS THE
ASHON T. CRAWLEY, Professor of Religious Studies and African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia is the 2024–2025 Keohane Distinguished Visiting Professor, sponsored by Duke and UNC Chapel Hill. He earned his BA at the University of Pennsylvania, his MA in Theological Studies at Emory University, and his PhD in English with a certificate in African and African American Studies at Duke University. His audiovisual art includes the AIDS crisis memorial at the National Mall in Washington, DC, titled Homegoing, honoring fallen Black queer musicians and spirituality. His project, Otherwise/Revival, also focuses on Black pentecostal church choral music, as well as “Yes, Lord” chants, which he equates with openness, surrender, vulnerability, and blackqueer possibility. Among numerous honors, he was a Princeton Crossroads Art Fellow and Visiting Scholar-Artist at the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. His art appears in such venues as Charlottesville’s Second Street Gallery and Welcome Gallery, as well as Bridge Projects and the California African American Museum, both in Los Angeles.
IN THE END AT THE BEGINNING
a review by Catherine Carter
Minnie Bruce Pratt. Magnified. Wesleyan University Press, 2021.
Last year, a friend died after a seven years’ struggle with cancer; she was survived by her spouse. And while we all want to hope that there’s healing and mending somewhere along that trajectory, perhaps what there is is simply survival – a person left alive as a singular I, but destroyed as one intertwined, imbricated half of a we
I mention this because of Minnie Bruce Pratt’s Magnified I’m not sure whether to give the surviving spouse a copy; it may be the best possible choice because Magnified so painstakingly, observantly documents precise moments of seven years of anticipatory grief, and, eventually, of final loss. Or, equally, it may be too painfully apposite to share with someone still laboring to survive that loss.
brink of the plunge, and half the misty, unknowable depth into which it hurtles.
CATHERINE CARTER the author of four poetry collections with Louisiana State University Press, most recently By Stone and Needle (2025), and two chapbooks with Jacar Press. She is co-editor and co-translator, with Brian Gastle, of the first full-length verse translation into modern English of John Gower’s Middle English poem The Lover’s Confession (Medieval Institute Publications, 2024). Her work has appeared in Poetry, Orion, Ploughshares, Asheville Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, NCLR , and Best American Poetry 2009 She has won the Randall Jarrell Poetry Award, the Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry, the James Applewhite Poetry Prize, and Louisiana State University Press’ L.E. Phillabaum award. She is a professor at Western Carolina University.
For background, Magnified is a collection whose poems were written over the seven years of a deeply beloved spouse’s illness and eventual death, a documentation of a terrible loss considered, dreaded, and lived in advance. Minnie Bruce Pratt’s spouse was Leslie Feinberg, who died in 2014 of tick-borne illness and whom Pratt described in an interview as a “trans activist, historian, theoretician, communist revolutionary.” 1 The book’s cover captures this long view of loss perfectly with a striking photo from the very edge of Niagara Falls. The image is half river water rushing toward the
1
a range of pronouns, I have followed Pratt’s practice in multiple interviews of using she/her for Feinberg.
2
But although these are the poems that Pratt wrote in the effort to endure the knowledge that her beloved was dying –first slowly, then all too quickly – they’re also micro-portraits of the world both inside and outside the couple’s apartment, where the world simultaneously shrinks down to the patient’s restricted mobility and deepens into evergreater awareness. Pratt told her interviewer, “[T]here were a lot of moments between these poems where we were just living. Leslie was sick, but we were still living in our world as vibrant, active people while struggling against the illness and all the prejudices that Leslie was facing around trans issues.” 2
Sarah Heying, “Labors of Love and Loss: An Interview with Minnie Bruce Pratt on the Occasion of Magnified, Her Latest Poetry Collection,” Autostraddle 15 Mar. 2021: web. Although Feinberg used
Hooper Schultz, “Minnie Bruce Pratt on Magnified, Making A Home We Can All Be Safe In,” Lambda Literary Review 7 May 2021: web.
And this is true. Even the deepest fear and grief can’t occupy every moment of seven years; even the longest book of poems couldn’t begin to include all the moments. Nor do cruelty or greed suddenly cease because their victims fall ill. In a 2021 interview for Lambda Literary Review, Pratt explained, “[M]y work, as I understand it, as a poet, is at least in part to try to make poems that reestablish the link between the sensuous external world and our daily human life, which is battered under capitalism.”2
Living while dying, wavelength and wave, political and personal, outer lives and inner, sensuousness and the quotidian, are all inseparable here, which means that to a great extent this is a book about inseparability. Consider the short poem “Licked”:
The people we were, the people we are now. The apple blossoms blown, flowers fallen, blight biting into every leaf, skin scaling on the trunk and branches, skeletal shadows on the walk as I pass, grieving and loving this boney brittle world that breaks and opens day after day, the bees gnawing at the red-hearted rose-of-sharon, licked, sticky all over from flower tongues, pollen bristle, until it’s hard to tell the flower from the bee, the insect from the tree, me from you, you from me.
It’s also, though, as one can see from this poem (or indeed from any of them), a profoundly crafted book whose concerns both span the years of anticipated grief and spin the sufferings and insights of those years out into broader planes. I’ve seldom read a collection with tighter, more complex connections between poems, or whose concerns and images recur so strongly.
For instance, we can certainly read the book’s central subject as the rending that comes when the inseparable and imbricated are forcibly torn apart; its progression and its imagery strongly support such a reading. However, it’s almost equally true that this is a book about time: the time that’s lost, the time that’s left, the time we get with one another, exterior and interior time. The first sec-
tion is titled “Hourglass” from the poem of the same title, in which “Time tumbles us back and forth in its giant hourglass” and “Time rattles at our window, trying to get in.” Poem after poem interrogates Pratt’s and Feinberg’s concepts and awareness of time. As Pratt told Sarah Heying, “[T]he eternal time of death, the short intense time of work, and the focused, magnified time of the intimacy between us – there was a lot of back and forth. I think what readers have to remember when they’re reading Magnified is that I didn’t –we didn’t – know the outcome while I was writing the poems.”
In “Saved [Voice] Messages,” for example, the speaker tries to preserve her spouse’s voicemails: “I hit save, save, save, but I can’t save everything. / Today I have eleven messages of us traveling / through time together, when there is yet no end.” Here time is an almost physical medium through which the couple travels together, as if through space or water or a tunnel; it’s also recursive, replicative. The voice messages were recorded at particular moments of the marriage, moments, when the end was as yet unknown to both spouses; at those points in time, there is/ was “yet no end.” The key word is yet, meaning both that there is still no end and that at some point, the end is coming, just not yet. And yet the moments also reach past Feinberg’s death into the ongoing present which follows it. No amount of writing or “saving” can preserve the moments at which the messages were spoken – and also, and still, and yet, there are the messages, belonging to both times at once. Neither experience of time counters or cancels the other; both experiences of time are real, and, in the seconds of listening to the recorded voice messages, simultaneous. Both/ and. And/yet.
Likewise, the poems often figuratively treat time as space into which people can physically move, as in “Do Not Seek to Remain,” in which “the words are ripping up / the moment and I fall into a tomorrow without you.” But as the savage image
MINNIE BRUCE PRATT (1946–2023) is an Alabama native. She earned her PhD in literature from UNC Chapel Hill, where she helped to found WomanWrites, a Southeastern lesbian writers ‘conference and spent five years as a member of Feminary , a Southern feminist writing collective based in the area (read an article on it in NCLR 2000). She co-founded Night Heron Press, spent many years as contingent faculty at various universities, and ended her academic career as a professor in the writing
program and gender studies department at Syracuse University, where she participated in the development of Syracuse’s LGBT studies program. She is the author of five poetry collections. Her honors include the Lambda Literary Award for Poetry, in ForeWord magazine’s Gay/Lesbian Book of the Year, the Academy of American Poets’ Lamont Poetry Selection, the Lillian Hellman-Dashiell Hammett award, and the American Library Association’s Gay and Lesbian Book Award for Literature.
of words “ripping up” moments indicates, it’s equally possible, equally supportable, to read the whole book as a long ars poetica: over and over Pratt ponders words’ power, or lack of power, to “save” anything, or to help us survive it.
The poems that directly address the questions of what writing and words can do are too numerous to list, but a few may convey some sense of their ubiquity. Broken twigs “scribble” on the snow, writing “nothing beautiful” (“Sip”). The feet of passersby on snow clear a blackboard for a parsed sentence (“Parsing”). The poet scavenges gutters for “something to hold onto, put inside this poem” (“Waste”). “Thaw” shows us words as “the water-
drops, frozen crystals / on the cedar fingertips waiting for thaw. // And you, reading this, you are the thaw.” The second person “you” incorporates both Feinberg, during her life, reading the words then, and also, perhaps, the reader, reading them in the “now” of the book, a now which may be many years after the words were written; words, like saved voicemails, can exist simultaneously at multiple points in time. In “Listening at a Closed Door,” “Now if I can make another like, / another as, you will still have a breath. One more.” “Do Not Seek to Remain” asks, “How do I go on?” Its somewhat oblique answer is, “The way yesterday // a tree shook its small crescents of seed? Angled / for planting, sickled for reaping, red in the blue sky. / The answer in things, not words.” And this difficultto-articulate realization in no way abates the speaker’s longing to talk about this with her absent beloved; the two are (here we are again) separated and yet inseparable.
And so, throughout the book, up to the fourth poem from the
end, “The Ledge,” in which the speaker asks bluntly, “What’s the use of poetry? / Not one word comes back to talk me out of pain.” It’s a fair critique. Whatever gifts words may offer to their speakers and their hearers, sparing pain is almost never one of them. And yet the book comes back to those gifts, and those concerns, obsessively, over and over.
But because that doesn’t entirely capture the breadth or depth of the collection either, we could observe just as truly that this is a book built around the figure of water – that which flows, which constantly changes and yet never entirely dies. Again and again the reader encounters ice, thaw, mist, dew, snow, rain, current, torrent, carwash, and, yes, Niagara Falls. Broadly speaking, freeze seems to align with grief, thaw with love and connection, but the poet’s uses go far beyond those easy correspondences.
In “Niagara Falls,” as a central example, rain makes its appearance as a figurative mother or housewife, folding up snow like linen. Next, it is associated with love offerings as it makes the crinkling sound of “someone / wrapping flowers in cellophane,” then with sex and simultaneously with cleansing as the speaker speculates that the imaginary flowers in the imaginary cellophane might be “pussy / willows, the blurred fur blooms like the slush, / blush of soap on the car windows, the carwash / I drove through, dead of winter, to hear water rush.” (Pratt is a master of the pun.)
ABOVE Minnie Bruce Pratt (right) and Leslie Feinberg, 1993; photograph by Robert Giard; courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
In the next stanza, though, the metaphor shifts again. The rain first softens the “cracked, parched lips of frozen ground,” which part to receive the rain, an image again invoking tenderness, sexuality, and fertility. Not content with that, though, the “long fingers of rain / write in the dirt, silver lines in the furrowed fields”; water now shifts or morphs into an authorial hand. Finally, the rain embodies striking transfiguration. Water “leaps” over the falls, “trying to come / again, to be a different element.” “Trying to come/ again” suggests that that element is, or has been, passionate love. However, it is also the telling of that love, the work of the book itself: “What-was is gone. // It [the water of the Niagara river, but also, perhaps, the what-was of the past] can rise into clouds on fire. It can turn to lightning / and make the sky write. What-will-be is still our story.” The lovers’ choices, and voices, make and claim the story. The water becomes fire that can make the very sky write.
Inseparability, time, words, water are all integral aspects and organizing principles (elements, if you will) of the book; however, a longer review (or a master’s thesis), with room to expand, could unpack others as well. Future scholarship might profitably explore the poems’ subtle but steady music of rhyme and half-rhyme; the rich ambiguity of its line breaks (as in “The Gulls’ Cry”: “Even as I stand and look down / at the muddy ground, unable to imagine how / I will go on without you”); or
the implications of the book’s seven sections, each organized around a phrase from a central poem (with the table of contents including only those key phrases; individual poem titles instead appear as an index).
Such scholarship might also explore the individual poems’ ordering and their constant play between thematic unity and chronological ordering, given that only two of these poems seem to have been written after Feinberg’s death. “In the End,” which is in fact the third poem from the end, begins, “What is left to say? In the end, you died.”
This poem, stretched taut at eight lines, grieves not only for Feinberg, but for “the person I was with you.” It concludes, “But someone / unknown to me was the one who survived, / saying, If only, if only we were still alive.” What died was not a single person, but the fused identity of the we.
“In the End” would have been deeply effective as a final poem, but it is followed by two
more: “The Forward” and “In the Beginning.” The book ends by gyring back to the beginning of the long relationship, remembering the lovers looking together off an escarpment into a literal and figurative unknown, confronting snow, granite, and clouds of ice “slipping / through our fingers, melting from present into past” – the water turned back to ice, the love to loss. Its final couplet is “And yet. The hope we took in that cold view cast / far beyond us.”
Above all, what the book does is cast insight, meticulous observation, grief and, yes, hope, beyond its own boundaries, so that they come to stand in for all grief, and all hope. It’s a magnificent book, one in which destroying grief and bare survival of that grief, conjoined identity and maimed survivor, long love and the severing of long love, remain a constant both-and, neither offering any conclusion which excludes the other. And I think I’ll be giving it to my widowed friend. n
ABOVE Minnie Bruce Pratt (right) and Leslie Feinberg, 2003; photograph by Marilyn Humphries
FRAGILE BEAUTY
a review by Dwight Tanner
Jim Grimsley. Dream Boy. 1995. Levin Querido, 2025.
DWIGHT TANNER has served as the Guest Feature Editor of the 2025 issues of NCLR He earned his PhD from the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the UNC Chapel Hill, during which time he received a Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship and the James R. Gaskin Award for teaching. He then taught at Winston-Salem State University and at Appalachian State University. His research areas are twentieth and twentyfirst century American literature and film with a focus on ecocriticism, comparative ethnic literature, and LGBTQ literature and culture. His work has been published in South Atlantic Review, the Journal of Asian American Studies, and Post-45
JIM GRIMSLEY is a native of Eastern North Carolina, a graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, and Professor Emeritus of Emory University. He has won the Sue Kaufman Prize for best first novel from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/ Hemingway Award, also for his first novel, Winter Birds (Algonquin Books, 1994). The author of several novels, both literary fiction and science fiction, plays, and a memoir, he received the 2018 Mary Francis Hobson Prize for Distinguished Achievement in Arts and Letters. Read his most recent short stories in NCLR Online Spring 2025 and NCLR 2025. His most recent novel is The Dove in the Belly (Levine Querido, 2022; reviewed in NCLR Online Winter 2023 ). Read more fiction by him in NCLR 2016, an interview with him in NCLR 2009, and an essay he wrote about observing Dream Boy adapted into film in NCLR 2012.
The recent reprinting of Jim Grimsley’s astounding and beautiful novel Dream Boy (1995) is a cause for much celebration, even as the renewed relevancy and even urgency of the novel’s themes about queer adolescent bullying, violence, and trauma is decidedly not. Yet this applicability does render a fresh immediacy and poignancy to the story of Nathan, a teenager in rural North Carolina who, after moving to a new town with his parents, develops a relationship with Roy, a slightly older schoolmate who lives on the farm next door. Often referred to as Southern gothic, Dream Boy can be difficult to categorize along genre lines: at times reading like a coming-of-age story that nevertheless subverts many of the conventions of the bildungsroman, it’s also a decidedly adolescent gay love story, a familial Southern drama of secrets and abuse, a mediation on deep historical trauma, and, perhaps at the end, even a ghost story. Certainly, it is a tale that centers all kinds of hauntings.
Written in the 1990s, Dream Boy preceded the more visible wave of young adult LGBTQ+ fiction that emerged in the 2000s and 2010s. Whereas much queer fiction, particularly in the 1990s, focused on adult gay life in cities, Grimsley turns to rural adolescence, while also refusing the sanitation of many popular queer youth narratives, emphasizing, instead, the potential precarity of queer experiences.
Juxtaposing the central story of surreptitious adolescent queer love, readers intuit early on that Nathan has suffered years of sexual abuse at the hands of his father, which appears to be the reason the family has regularly moved
from place to place. When he begins a secret relationship with Roy, Nathan experiences –perhaps for the first time – the tenderness of mutual affection. Their relationship unfolds tentatively, with moments of sweetness countering Nathan’s ongoing trauma. While slim in length, Dream Boy is a novel dense with exquisite writing, symbolic resonance, and striking narrative experimentations.
Nathan’s abuse at home forms the violent underside of the novel’s exploration of queer longing, suggesting that desire is always shadowed by danger in cultures of silence. At the same time, Grimsley invests the love between Nathan and Roy with lyricism and grace. Their intimacy is portrayed as a fragile site of possibility, even in a hostile environment as “each [boy] reaches for ways to manage nearness to the other without seeming responsible for it” (41). The novel thus oscillates between affirmation and negation, joy and fear, possibility and foreclosure, and Grimsley expertly holds readers in the uneasy tension.
Despite its grim subject matter, Dream Boy is written in a prose style of startling beauty. His sentences are spare, rhythmic, and lyrical, producing a style that veers into poetry. His use of repetition – particularly in rendering Nathan’s inner thoughts – creates a hypnotic effect, as though the novel itself were caught in a dreamlike loop. It’s a tightrope of simplicity, evocative symbolism, and beauty. Consider, for example, the way Grimsley describes how “the grass, heavy with morning dew, whispers to his feet as he crosses the yard” (17). This stylistic economy also reflects Nathan’s
consciousness: fragmented, reticent, shaped by secrecy.
Such stylistic choices align the novel with minimalism, yet Grimsley resists the cool detachment of many minimalist writers. Instead, his minimalism is charged with affect, carrying immense emotional weight precisely through its restraint. The spareness of the language amplifies the intensity of the story, forcing readers to inhabit silences, omissions, and gaps, while at moments of intimacy between Nathan and Roy, the prose swells with sensuous description. The writing’s stylistic minimalism underscores the psychological atmosphere of repression and silence, while the lyrical inflections suggest the possibility of transcendence even amid horror.
Grimsley’s settings – the isolated rural homesteads, the high school, the ominous abandoned plantation house – bear the hallmarks of a Southern Gothic sensibility: decaying structures, suffocating family secrets, and the persistent presence of violence in many forms. Perhaps even more striking are the ways that literary beauty is to be found even in the more sinister aspects of the storytelling. Nathan’s family home is, for example, described as a site of dread, especially the downstairs, where his father inhabits, drinking and quoting the bible. In this way, Grimsley aligns queer experience with the Gothic’s preoccupation with secrecy, repression, and the uncanny, where the downstairs, a decidedly unsafe place for Nathan,
is described ethereally as dark and hazy, with Nathan stepping downstairs compared to slowly stepping underwater.
Nathan’s father looms within this grotto-like space as one of the novel’s most terrifying figures, a representation of patriarchal violence taken to its extreme. His abuse of Nathan is central, but equally important is the climate of fear he generates, rendered most obvious by the mother’s almost literal disengagement –“She is away. She is wherever she goes”– in the face of her son’s abuse (56).
Critically, Grimsley indicts not only the father, but the social structure that enables him: the patriarchal family, the authority of male dominance, and the religious cultural ethos that valorizes obedience while shrouding violations in secrecy.
While the book does not engage much with the surrounding community at large, the implied presence of the church (both Nathan’s and Roy’s parents rarely miss a church service) and other adults who do not act looms large. (Remember, the family has been forced to leave past towns before.) The silence surrounding Nathan thereby reflects even broader cultural silences and failings, including the repression of sexuality in reli-
gious communities, the denial of domestic violence, and the stigmatization of queer desire. The counter intimacy between Nathan and Roy emerges, not in open spaces but in stolen, similarly silent (or at least overlooked) moments: bus rides, an abandoned graveyard, bedrooms with doors closed. The novel’s language, often elliptical and understated, captures both the hesitancy of first desire and the overwhelming force of forbidden love. But while Nathan’s emotional and sexual relationship with Roy is often tender and exploratory, it pointedly unfolds under the shadow of his father’s ongoing abuse. The contrast between the violence of the father and the mutual desire
between Nathan and Roy is one of the novel’s most important thematic juxtapositions. Yet these moments painfully remind us that Nathan struggles to disentangle his sexuality from his trauma, suggesting that queer self-realization in such a repressive context is always precarious. This perhaps becomes most evident in the ways that the trauma of what his father does seems to affect Nathan even in his friendship and romance with Roy. While the gut-wrenching descriptions of violence and assault are harrowing, Grimsley’s writing in these passages becomes particularly sparse and compact, capturing the necessary horror while also representing the tragic ways Nathan has mastered his own distancing mechanisms in the face of repeated traumas. This writing style effectively avoids a voyeuristic or exploitative sensationalism while repeatedly showing the tragic effects of these coping mechanisms – which also lead to self-blame for the ways he is abused – in Nathan’s life: “Roy will treat Nathan as he pleases, and Nathan expects the coldness. In the daylight Nathan will be invisible” (31). Indeed, this may be one of the more powerful but painful interventions of the novel, which could feel personal to many queer readers, even as their experiences may differ greatly, as Nathan tragically comes to misguidedly understand – and maybe even on some level accept – the abuse and trauma he suffers as indicative of something intrinsically wrong in himself.
In the book’s final chapters, Nathan and Roy escape the oppressiveness of Nathan’s home to camp in the woods
with two other friends of Roy’s, where they ultimately come across an abandoned plantation house, perhaps the novel’s most symbolically charged setting. As yet another site of secrecy, violence, and transgression, the plantation in ruins is layered with historical and spectral resonance, suggesting the legacies of slavery, the collapse of Southern aristocracy, and the persistence of buried trauma.
Nathan’s intimacy with Roy intensifies in this liminal space, away from the surveillance of adults. Yet it is also here that Nathan faces brutal violence at the hands of others, culminating in the novel’s devastating climax. The plantation house thus functions as a palimpsest: a site where histories of racial and sexual violence intersect, where past and present collapse, and where personal trauma is inseparable from collective haunting.
You’ll want to read the final, unexpected (but not unearned)
pages slowly – both for the beauty of the writing and for the almost imperceptibly brilliant ways that Grimsley opens up the narrative to a whole host of possibilities, understandings, and interpretations. It is, indeed, striking how the story and writing come to mirror how queer experience can create varied, even contradictory, possibilities at once: tragic and wonderful, beautiful and violent, hopeless and hopeful, constricting and liberating, complete and ongoing.
The novel’s ending further underscores Grimsley’s commitment to indeterminacy and ambiguity. It is unclear what exactly has happened, whether the ending is literal or metaphorical, or whether the final pages represent a dream, a hallucination, or something else. This refusal of closure is not a flaw but a deliberate aesthetic strategy true to the novel’s style and queer themes of possibility, even amidst contradictions.
In rendering Nathan’s experience with both tenderness and unflinching honesty, Grimsley compels us to confront the costs of silence, the persistence of violence, and the fragile beauty of queer desire in hostile spaces. Dream Boy is not only an important contribution to Southern and queer literature but also a profound exploration of what it means to dream, to love, and to live in the aftermath of unspeakable harm. n
THE BEGINNING IN THE END
a review by Onyx Bradley
Gregory Ariail. The Gospel of Rot. Mercer University Press, 2022.
When our first introduction to a protagonist involves a graveyard meeting with an orchardist turned telepathic apple tree, we know we’re in for a fantastic read. The North Carolina mountains are truly peculiar in Gregory Ariail’s novel The Gospel of Rot. The main character is a seventy-year-old woman, Amelia, who lives with her dying father, Emil. After her father’s death, Amelia’s quest to explore her homeland leads her on a surreal journey, and she discovers that things and people are rarely what they seem. Complement all of that with the author’s beautiful, if bizarre, prose.
Amelia and her father are hermits living on a plot of land they’ve nicknamed “Amelia’s World,” which is “a hundred and twenty acres of oak, creek, and granite dome” (5). Ariail’s descriptions of the landscape throughout the book are all detailed, and the opening section about Amelia’s World is a particularly strong reflection of the author’s talent:
The author brings the landscape and characters to life with picturesque descriptions of the mountains and forests in the Appalachian countryside he says inspired the novel.*
ONYX BRADLEY was born in Charlotte and grew up in Pikeville, NC. They received honorable mention in the inaugural Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Prize contest in 2023. Onyx earned a BA in English at East Carolina University and is now completing their MA in English with a Creative Writing concentration. During their graduate program, they served as an NCLR Editorial Assistant and taught composition.
GREGORY ARIAIL grew up in Buford, GA, and is an instructor at the University of Alabama where he earned his MFA. He has also earned English degrees from the University of Georgia (a BA), Oxford University (a MSt), and the University of Michigan (a PhD). He has published short fiction, nonfiction, book reviews, and literary essays in a varity of periodicals.
We’d search for lonely, abandoned chimneys from the nineteenth century, the relics of the cabins of Cherokee and frontiersmen, which often tilted dramatically on uneven ground. One can find these all over western North Carolina, hidden in rhododendron coves: creek rocks rising twelve feet high layered with clay chinking and reinforced with rope, hair, and hog’s blood. Over time, bees bored into the chinking’s hard pottery. Sometimes we’d light a fire in one of these crumbling hearths and smoke would pour out of the holes. (5)
The book itself is formatted as Amelia’s journal, which begins with her recording her father’s final words but evolves into something more akin to a scrapbook. There are also a few chapters that feel like loose paper stuck between the pages. For example, one chapter is comprised of letters between Emil and one of his photographer friends and another is a list of names labeled “The List in the Folder Labeled ‘Cold Weather Scenes.’” These inclusions give the reader an idea about what Amelia is doing beyond what she’s writing down, namely searching her father’s belongings to get an understanding of who he was outside of being her father. Each postcard and crumpled piece of paper Amelia sticks in the “journal” she’s writing helps build the reader’s understanding of her relationship with her father and how different the new world Amelia finds herself in is from the one she’s used to.
After Emil’s death, Amelia decides she no longer wants to be a hermit. She begins her explorations outside of Amelia’s World using her father’s photographs to guide her choice of destination:
Each day, I’ll choose a photograph from the folders of his landscapes and visit whatever location speaks to
me. . . . Each evening, I’ll come home and write down my adventures. I haven’t kept a journal in years and it’ll be refreshing to do so again, however loosely. Somehow Dad’s death, now that the period of paralysis is over, has released me from my selfimposed isolation. (12)
Her first adventure is to a nearby orchard owned by a man named Endicott. Not only is the orchard a fascinating place, it’s also where Amelia begins to realize the world she inhabits is not quite what it appears.
October is the time of the year when one would expect an orchard to be bustling, but it’s not. The grove is abandoned, littered with piles of “apples” Amelia finds fallen around the trees, which are not actually apples but rather millions of miniature human bodies, each no bigger than a fingernail. Shortly after her discovery, Amelia notices that one of the trees has a face, “old Endicott Hoyt’s face, outlined in the leaves and apples; curves in the leaves formed the orchardist’s head and a clump of lichen a minty green mustache. Two chips of blue sky between the leaves created the impression of eyes” (16). Beyond the obvious weirdness Amelia encounters here, Endicott is the first “person” she talks to after her father’s death, and one of only four speaking characters who isn’t a part of a flashback. Endicott commiserates with her grief, having lost his wife some years before. He also mentions the apple piles, giving Amelia and the reader the first real clue to what’s going on:
You’ve noticed the bodies in the apple piles; that’s keen of you. What are they, you say? Why have many years’ worth of apples gathered beneath the trees to rot? On the one hand – now bear with me, because I only half understand this myself –well, they seem to be first folk, the Mississippians, the Cherokee, ten thousand years of the dead, and only recently the Spanish, English, ScotsIrish, Germans, the frontiersmen and mountaineers: the whites dribbles of snow on a foundation nearly as deep as the mountains themselves. From a distance the mounds just look like small models of mountains made of apples. But up close, you see that the apples are, in fact, legions of the dead. Nowadays things can be two things at once; formerly, if I remember rightly, that wasn’t the case. (20)
Although rooted in the fantastical, the novel also brings in aspects of local history, and characters from history, like the Scottish author Sir Walter Scott. Sir Walter, as Amelia refers to him, is Amelia’s father’s favorite writer. Aside from his writing being an interest Emil and Amelia shared, the writer also becomes her guide to the land outside of Amelia’s World.
This rambling old gentleman could well be a figment of her imagination, but he claims that he “must’ve wandered beneath [the] ocean for more than a century” (63) and somehow ended up near Amelia’s home nearly 150 years after his death to prod her into questioning things she always knew, such as her father’s affinity for dolls and local legends:
“They remind me of a figure I once saw at a quaint thatched cottage at Gallow Hill, between Leith and Edinburgh. It was made of clay mixed with paste. Brass pins had been thrust into the figure’s bosom to accomplish a deed of black magic. A peasant’s wife, Bessie Gowdie by name, attempted to murder her stepsister through such vicarious means . . . though I assume such petty deceptions no longer dupe the scientific mind, in your country as well as my own.”
“The dolls aren’t for witchcraft,” I said, a little amused and offended. “They gave a sense of community to the household and made things less lonely. These are called cornhusk dolls.” (73)
Though he is confused by and wary of Amelia’s “witchcraft,”
Sir Walter pushes her into facing her fears and confronting things she has spent most of her life trying to bury, namely her romantic attraction to women and the secrets she and her father kept from one another.
Dispersed through the book are mentions of Elodie McWaters, a married woman Amelia met and fell in love with as a young woman. Amelia’s World is four miles away from the town of Attic’s Window, where Elodie lived with her husband, Silas Fenton. Aside from explaining why Amelia hasn’t left Amelia’s World in fifty years, the chapters about Elodie also bring in most of the folklore of the novel, explaining certain Cherokee myths that help the reader to understand some of Amelia’s experiences when she is following her father’s photographs to new locations, like the medicine bear she encounters towards the end of the book.
As she learns her father’s secrets, Amelia learns about herself, too, and decides she’s so much more than Emil’s daughter. Becoming her own person allows her to live her life how she wants, even if the reader isn’t able to witness this new life, since she finishes writing in her notebook and leaves it in the orchard in which she started her adventure. The Amelia who began the journal and the one who finishes writing it are two very different women, and yet they are the same, because with the world changing as it is, “things can be two things at once” (20). Ultimately, The Gospel of Rot is a late in life coming-of-age story that shows it’s never too late to confront ourselves and discover our truths. n
THE COURAGE TO CONFRONT WHAT HURTS US
a review by Bridget Bell
Jayme Ringleb. So Tall It Ends in Heaven. Tin House, 2022.
Han Vanderhart. What Pecan Light. Bull City Press, 2022.
It is easy to despise that which we know is contemptible, to condemn that which we know is wrong, but what happens when the reprehensible is also what we are supposed to love?
BRIDGET BELL is the author of the poetry collection All That We Ask of You Is to Always Be Happy (CavanKerry Press, 2025; reviewed later in this issue). She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and teaches composition and literature at Durham Technical Community College and proofreads manuscripts for Four Way Books.
JAYME RINGLEB is a queer writer raised in the southern US and northern Italy. They are the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and fellowships to the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices. They live in Raleigh, NC, where they are an Assistant Professor of English at Meredith College.
HAN VANDERHART is a queer writer living in Durham, NC. They are the author of Larks (Ohio University Press, 2025) and the chapbook Hawk & Moon (Bottlecap Press, 2025) and the winner of the 2024 Hollis Summers Prize. Their essays and poetry have appeared in Poetry Daily, The Boston Globe, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, Poet Lore, AGNI, and elsewhere.
In their first full-length collection, What Pecan Light, Han Vanderhart traverses the emotionally complex landscape of a Southern familial history marred by legacies of racism. “No one chooses their family,” Vanderhart writes in “Song of the South,” and this statement is the crux of their collection. Questions of family, too, are at the heart of Jayme Ringleb’s So Tall It Ends in Heaven. In these poems, Ringleb dissects the pain that arises when our true selves contradict the version of ourselves the people we love want us to be and how, sometimes, we change ourselves to gain that love. As they write in “I Was, Of Course,” “whatever He wanted, / that’s what I was.” In Ringleb’s “Love Poem to the Son My Father Wished For,” we encounter tender, intimate lines in which the speaker addresses an imagined, alternate rendering of himself, a man who stands in the drive “some nights, having / bedded a wife and left a robe she loves / folded over the wardrobe door.” This imagined son contradicts the true speaker – the son rejected by the father – a son who does not know “what there is between a woman and a man.” Both Vanderhart’s and Ringleb’s collections navigate the seemingly unnavigable terrain of how to offer grace and forgiveness in situations that feel unforgivable and how to move forward from a haunted past.
If we cannot choose our family, as Vanderhart notes, we must figure out how to live with a family – both biological and geographical – even if it carries the dark history of the South. In the aforementioned “Song of the South,” Vanderhart writes, “Most of / all, the song is black and white. Most of all / we don’t talk about it,” but this speaker is talking about it, and not as a means to talk around it, but through it. To admit, “as a child I ran with the rebel flag / and we did not question / our play,” as the speaker does in the poem “Post-Antebellum in the States,” takes courage, and this is a courageous collection. It is not looking to exonerate current generations from our ancestors’ actions, but rather to hold space in the present for the past’s moral wrongs.
Courage, too, is front and center in Ringleb’s poems, though often quiet and intimate, as in “Parable,” in which a boy bestows love and kindness on a newborn pig that is destined to be drowned because it “could not unfold its legs / and from its
palate a cleft / ending between the eyes blinded it.” Despite these deformities, despite “the boys with / coat pockets fattened with stones” who come to harm the pig, the older boy “lay there with the pig on his chest,” and he “rubbed the hooves / as if the hooves were cold.” To love the rejected and to honor the courage it takes to do so is the message of the “Parable,” a message that’s woven throughout Ringleb’s collection.
Both Vanderhart’s and Ringleb’s books are often blunt and unflinching, as if each poet has taken a magnifying glass and held it up to a multitude of traumas in order to better process and understand their impact. In Vanderhart’s “Remembering That My Grandfather Hunted Men with Dogs in the Alabama Woods,” the speaker refuses to turn away from a grandfather who “could hunt men, calling them deserters of the Confederacy,” ultimately wondering what words the grandfather used “to justify what came next.” The poem continues, “what came next,” are “Some acts a
person should not imagine.” Within the space of those two words, “should not,” the reader understands the speaker is, indeed, imagining these horrendous acts as a means of fighting against erasure. If some people try to sweep the South’s past under the rug, Vanderhart’s collection picks up the rug in “History As a Bottle Tree” and says, come look at “our evil spirits.”
Similarly, Ringleb’s “A Wedding of Jackals,” a long prose poem that makes up the entire third section of the book, refuses to ignore the deep cuts of past hurts, speaking of abandonment in a matter-of-fact tone: “I called the inn the next day and was told he’d gone,” Ringleb writes of a father’s reaction after the mother shows him “at last, the porn” the son “had printed out to keep.” The same speaker who watched his father “sit alone in the rented car he’d parked on the road” before driving off, creates stories to tell men “in gay bars the size of double-wides” of a father who “dragged me by the
ABOVE BOTTOM Han Vanderhart reading from Larks at Letters Bookshop in Durham, NC, 13 Mar. 2024
ABOVE TOP Jayme Ringleb talking about their book with former NCLR inern, fellow poet Ina Cariño at Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh, NC, 20 Sept. 2022 (See a close-up of Ringleb at this reading on page 6.)
legs through the parking lot” when in reality, “nothing happened, really.” Here, the reader understands the deep ache of a speaker who is left so easily by the father, who imagines that a reaction – any reaction, even if violent – would be better than quiet abandonment.
Amidst the darkness of these poems are also tender moments providing poignant reminders about the complexity of the human experience. In Vanderhart’s “The Supper Book,” we tentatively greet the healing potential of a family sharing a meal together, where a mother who “could not say I love you for many years,” offers love through “a pecan sweet roll with pink icing.” With its wistful, evocative imagery, this poem reads like an elegy for the word supper, a “meal had as the sun slips down.” Food, too, offers an avenue toward healing – or at least something like it – in Ringleb’s “Peacock at a Garden Party,” where we encounter the line “I am in my father’s garden” again and again, as if the speaker himself is in disbelief. After tracking down his father in Italy, the speaker finds himself among “potato dumplings” and “clean-
cut pigeon breasts” when the estranged father reaches out and “tries to ruffle” the speaker’s “clippered hair.” This warm gesture is brilliantly complicated by the following lines: “Here we are: love, it seems, / is a lack of alternatives.”
Readers, too, will revel in the rich imagery – pleasant and offensive – offered by the backdrop of the American South. In Vanderhart’s poems we can taste (in “Song of the South” and “Post-Katrina,” for example) “sweet potato pie,” “Always gravy,” “The biscuits, steaming, the apple butter / brown and velvet” and smell “the magnolias blooming, flowers large as dinner plates” and the “putrefying” odor of “a load of chicken / manure” after rain. Ringleb carries the reader to Florida, that distinctive part of the South where an “orange / tree in particular suffers” from downpours that “keep thieving / its fruit” and “fat-trunked / bald cypresses daintily / submerged at the roots” appear both “lonely and content.” No matter what part of the South we find ourselves in, both poets note the sticky dampness so indicative of this region, that “we are mostly
the humidity” (in Vanderhart’s “A Visitor Says Things Are Rotting in Durham, North Carolina”), that when “It’s the rainy season / . . . we’re aggressively / relieved of our misery, / then returned to it” (in Ringleb’s “North Florida”). In both collections, this suffocating humidity, so typical of the South, becomes a perfect metaphor for trying to escape that which we cannot escape.
In their collection’s final poem, “Self-Portrait as Medusa in Shock,” Ringleb writes, “It seems a father can work to keep his children from the world’s injuries, / but rarely his own,” and this line so concisely sums up one major take away from both lovely collections. Whether children are injured by Vanderhart’s family’s “history / with its long oppressive arm / its roll calls / and musters” (“Poem Ending in a Line by C.D Wright”), or by Ringleb’s father “who wanted / to gather you, to remake you / into what may have been worth a man” (“Colloquy with Creeper and Beer”), we are reminded that what we love is also what renders us most vulnerable to heartbreak, because, after all, as Vanderhart writes, “the heart is muscle and sore.” n
RESTLESS SPIRITS
a review by Amber
Knox
Zelda Lockhart. Trinity: A Novel Amistad/Harper-Collins, 2023.
AMBER KNOX received her BA and MA degrees in English at East Carolina University. During her programs, she served as an NCLR intern and then editorial assistant, and was promoted to senior editorial assistant in her last year, and she wrote book reviews. She also has an Associate in Arts degree from Pitt Community College.
ZELDA LOCKHART‘s three earlier novels are Fifth Born (Atria Books, 2003), a Barnes & Noble Discovery selection and a Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award finalist; Cold Running Creek (LaVenson Press, 2006), a Black Caucus of the American Library Association Honor Fiction award winner; and Fifth Born II: The Hundredth Turtle (LaVenson Press, 2010), a Lambda Literary Award finalist. Trinity received the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-career Novel Prize. Lockhart is Director at Her Story Garden Studios: Inspiring Black Women & Girls to SelfDefine, Heal, and Liberate Through Our Stories & Nature in Durham, NC, and a current Fulbright Specialist. Read an interview with her in NCLR 2012.
Southern literature often addresses difficult topics, from personal and multi-generational trauma, racial violence, and gender roles to societal issues and world conflicts. In her novel Trinity, author Zelda Lockhart continues this tradition, weaving a tale that follows the Lee family through three generations as they deal with racial violence and the post-traumatic stress left behind by two wars. The family members must contend both with the trauma of their own personal experiences and losses and with restless spirits that refuse to let themselves and the atrocities they suffered be forgotten. The novel immerses readers in a deeply emotional and spiritual world as they follow the Lee family’s journey of rediscovery, redemption, and recovery. Lockhart invites her readers to participate in that journey, exploring the struggles of a Black American family and the unacknowledged personal and cultural violence that helped cause these struggles, and to join them as they begin the long and difficult work of healing.
Trinity begins with the story of Bennie Lee and his younger brother Lenard growing up in Mississippi during the Great Depression. Despite their mother’s love for them, the boys’ childhood is far from happy. Their father is a harsh man who frequently beats his wife and sons. Their mother, Lottie, on the other hand, is “the mulatto child born of the landlord’s rape” (10); then, at the age of twelve, she was given by that same landlord to her new husband “like she was some prized pig washed down in buttermilk to look white and clean before being parceled off for somebody else to feed, fatten up, and breed” (11). Having been formed in these circumstances, the Lee family’s relationships with each other are dysfunctional and fraught with the echoes of traumas that are rarely spoken of but always present. The family’s oldest child has already fled by the time the story begins, and Lottie herself makes a shocking exit from her children’s lives when they are still young, leaving Bennie to essentially raise himself
ABOVE AND OPPOSITE Zelda Lockhart in Lusaka, Zambia, summer 2025
and Lenard with no source of guidance other than an abusive father and the haunting memory of his family’s trauma.
Eventually his fractured and dysfunctional family life leads Bennie, and years later his son BJ, to join the Marines where they both imagine they can “shed the overalls of who they were” and don the “light brown uniforms that gave them a new start” (33). Unfortunately, as Lockhart points out by having BJ run away to “the same place his father sought false escape” (117), Bennie’s trauma and his family’s painful history is not so easy to leave behind. Instead of a new start, both men find only the addition of battlefield trauma and mental scars along with a new awareness of the societal inequality that comes from returning as a Black soldier to a country where their skin color matters more than their military service. Such scars are passed down to their children along with the familial trauma the two men were originally trying to escape.
Alongside their own issues and the trauma they inherit from their ancestors, Bennie and BJ also have to contend with the spirits that follow the family from Bennie’s Mississippi home and possibly even from “the sun-hardened earth of the Congo,” where their ancestor was “chased out of her village by the white men” generations before (1). Bennie plans to run “away from whatever womanish child-as-God intended to snuff his soul out on the southern nighttime road” (33), but throughout the novel these spirits remain with the Lee family as silent witnesses and occasional participants in their lives.
Indeed, “a deeper, familiar voice with an elusive smell of gin on her breath” (39) pulls Bennie out of danger at one point. There are also “unexplained whispers” that “seep through a seam that appeared at the top of a doorframe or mysteriously in the middle of a wall” (150) as BJ works to repair his house and build a safe space for his family. Though these spirits are a constant presence in the family’s lives, the Lees try to drown out the voices rather than acknowledge them and the generations of pain they represent. Just as the PTSD these men suffer from continues to impact their lives, ignoring the spirits does not make them go away. Lockhart’s use of these spirits keeps the family’s past in the foreground and highlights how, despite the characters’ attempts to bury their trauma, its impact remains with them and with their family even generations later.
The Lees’ repressed trauma has a large impact in the life of BJ’s daughter, Lottie Rebecca, named “to honor the memories of women whose names were honored only in their son’s nightmares” (161). Bearing the names of her grandmother and great-grandmother, who both led traumatic and largely forgotten lives, Lottie Rebecca pulls their memories forward into the present, unearthing secrets and forcing her family to face long avoided truths. Lottie Rebecca’s life is one of self-discovery and revelation. With the help of her family and ancestors, she gives voice to “the Word that has for so long been dormant in the dungeon of our throats” (262). In doing so, she succeeds where her family had previously failed. By acknowledging and giving
voice to her family’s trauma, she brings peace to the restless spirits that have followed them for generations and to the restless spirits that reside within their own souls.
The narrative that Zelda Lockhart unravels in Trinity is too complex to be told within the confines of one generation. Lottie Rebecca’s story begins long before her birth, in the experiences and choices of her father and grandfather. Even Bennie and BJ’s stories are much older than they are, beginning on the sun-drenched ground of a country neither man had ever seen. Trinity encompasses not only the lives of its individual characters but also the complex and entwined existence of their entire family, and, in doing so, gives its readers insight into the characters’ personal traumas and the far-reaching consequences those traumas have on their descendants. Lockhart explores the actions necessary to heal from trauma and invites her readers to join the Lee family as they move forward into a better future, finally able to acknowledge their past rather than bury it. n
THE BEAUTY OF NOTICING
a review by Evan
Peter Smith
Georgann Eubanks. The Fabulous Ordinary: Discovering the Natural Wonders of the Wild South University of North Carolina Press, 2025.
—. Rural Astronomy: Poems. Eastover Press, 2025.
EVAN PETER SMITH is a reporter and writer from Ohio specializing in longform narrative nonfiction. He is the author of the nonfiction book Here by the Owl (Claude Perry Press, 2021). He is the former managing editor of the Greenville Journal and Upstate Business Journal. His writing has appeared in Forbes, the Claremont Review of Books, USA Today, and Town Magazine
GEORGANN EUBANKS is a writer, teacher, and consultant to nonprofit groups across the country. She is director of the Table Rock Writers Workshop and the Paul Green Foundation. She was a founder of the North Carolina Writers’ Network and a past chair of North Carolina Humanities. She is the author of the Literary Trails of North Carolina series, published by the University of North Carolina Press for the North Carolina Arts Council (reviewed in NCLR 2008 and 2011, and NCLR Online 2014). She is also the author of The Month of their Ripening: North Carolina Heritage Foods Through the Year (University of North Carolina Press, 2021; reviewed in NCLR Online Winter 2020). Read her feature essay on Paul Green in NCLR 2022.
Some years ago, during a darkening twilight, the writer and documentarian Georgann Eubanks was walking down the beach on Bald Head, a small island off the North Carolina coast, when she noticed the ocean water begin to glow. As a careful observer of nature over the decades, Eubanks had cultivated a deep scientific understanding of the biomes and ecosystems of the South. But this – the radiant ocean – was something new. “The waves, which were gentle that evening, seemed to be sparkling as they flattened into surf” (104), she writes in her excellent new book The Fabulous Ordinary: Discovering the Natural Wonders of the Wild South
Eubanks did not believe she was hallucinating or experiencing a miracle; she was aware that bioluminescent phytoplankton can occur on the Atlantic shoreline. These single-celled organisms produce light through a chemical reaction involving an enzyme called luciferase and a light-emitting molecule called luciferin, and when startled, the phytoplankton will glow blue, green, red, or orange, depending on the species. Still, she had never seen this with her own eyes, and the beauty of it lured her into the waves. “As I waded into the shallows,” she writes, “my feet and legs stirred up a colorful glitter in the water” (104).
If Eubanks were a different kind of writer, this anecdote about the glowing ocean would perhaps transition into a meditative paragraph or two
about the beauty of nature, the miraculous and enchanting qualities of the world around us, and how one need only step outside of the cement and steel confines of society to gaze upon it. Indeed, Eubanks could have used her experience of wading into the glowing water as a nice baptism metaphor, and she could have easily spent a whole chapter explaining how she found herself reborn from this spiritual cleansing. Readers could then sigh and smile, feeling hopeful and restored. “Ah, yes!” they might think. “There is so much beauty in the world!”
But Eubanks is allergic to this kind of comforting simplicity, and in her telling, she immediately makes it clear that “all that sparkles in not good.” This glowing water, she explains, is created when the phytoplankton are exposed to too much nutrients from fertilizer, wastewater, and stormwater runoff. Like a beautiful sunset in a smoggy skyline, the sea sparkle can develop into an algae bloom that can kill off fish and be dangerous for humans. Of course, most people are not aware of this, and Eubanks offers a bleak example of this ignorance: vendors on the Florida coast now promote guided kayak tours at night so that tourists can see the beautiful glowing water for themselves. (I actually looked up such tours, and on one website, they start at $89 per person for approximately ninety minutes; and because I am writing this review in October, they also offer a “Halloween Haunted Bioluminescence Tour,” in which your guide will
tell you ghost stories along the way. “Safe for families, thrilling for adults, and unforgettable for everyone,” the tour’s write-up boasts, with no mention of red tide or sea pollutants).
I mention this story about the glowing ocean because it seems to be a perfect encapsulation of what readers can expect from Eubanks’s The Fabulous Ordinary – that is to say, a catalogue of nature’s beauty that is also devoid of naive sentimentality. Please do not be confused and assume that for every beautiful description there is a counterpart of despair; Eubanks is not out to pour cold water on wonderment for the sake of being gloomy alone. But she won’t shy away from being realistic when she needs to be, won’t shield her eyes to the realities of climate destruction and manmade pollutants. Readers should take comfort from this tact, because you know that when she tells you something, you can believe she’s shooting straight.
The book, which also includes gorgeous full-color images from
Eubanks’s longtime collaborator Donna Campbell (photographs which Eubanks endearingly calls “enticements”), can be seen as a counterpart to Eubanks’s previous book, Saving the Wild South, which chronicled the unique stories of individual plants in the American South that are now threatened by habitat loss and climate change. When reading that prior book,* I often got the feeling that I was reading about plants that were in the witness protection program; Eubanks was often cagey or deliberately withholding about their locations and how one could reach them (understandably so, given how fragile their continuing existence is). With this new book, she seems to want to offer a more overtly “useful” book by writing about natural wonders that any reader can go out and experience for themselves.
Which begs the question: Is this an eco-tourism field guide? The answer is both yes and no. On one hand, readers who want to take their kids or grandkids out to experience the most
magnificent natural events the American South has to offer would do well to pick up a copy of The Fabulous Ordinary, for they will find ample examples of places to check out for themselves. To name just a handful, this book offers accounts of bald eagles in Alabama, firefly displays in the Smoky Mountains, alligators in Georgia, tundra swans and snow geese in North Carolina, river otters in Florida, and screech-owls in Virginia. While some of these events only occur at certain times of the year, they are all easily accessible to the average person looking to hop in the car and take a road trip.
The book is full of fascinating nature facts. Did you know that male and female bald eagles flirt with one another by flying high up in the sky and then falling together at rapid speeds? Or that butterflies only evolved because a few brave moths decided to stay up during the day to sip from some of the nectar rich flowers that coevolved with bees? Or that there
ABOVE TOP AND RIGHT Examples of the photography by Donna Campbell found throughout The Fabulous Ordinary
really is no difference between frogs and toads?
Eubanks also writes with a poet’s eye for the arresting visual (something I will touch on in greater detail later, when I discuss her equally impressive debut poetry collection). She describes cranes honking as “hand puppets – beaks opening and closing in heated conversation” (2). Eagles make nests within a “vintage TVA” landscape that is “both shabby and charming” (18). River otters nudge their noses upward, dripping wet, amidst “a cathedral of cypress” (52). Blooming lily flowers in a nature preserve are “spread out in every direction, well beyond our human capacity to see them all at once” (33). Eubanks continues, “I’d swear the lilies were yawning and stretching open as we turned in circles, taking in a view that was like watching a time-lapse film in 3D. The mottled tree trunks –large and small – were the only interruptions in this glorious ground cover: a carpet of bright green, dotted with emerging strokes of yellow. It was like nothing I’d ever seen” (34).
But to call this book a simple field guide would be to overlook the questioning nature and
admirable self-doubt that are hallmarks of Eubanks’s writing. What are the ethics of ecotourism? Which is to say: what are the ethics of this very book? On one hand, Eubanks believes it is necessary to spur passion within the next generation, and ecotourism is one such way to do so, just as she herself loved to go out and interact with nature as a child: “I took for granted that picking up shards of mica or smooth river stone for my rock collection was every kid’s birthright.” But she is also aware that “ecotourism, a growing enterprise in the South, does not always improve the environment for plants and animals. Nor can it instantly transform visitors into better stewards of the natural world” (xiv).
Perhaps the answer, then, is exactly what Eubanks herself exemplifies: an unbridled promotion of nature’s beauty with a constant vigilance toward how quickly it can be snuffed out.
As Dr. Kimberly Andrews, a coastal ecology specialist, told Eubanks, “Even when you have a success, it’s not permanent right? You have to keep fighting for it, because something new will happen.” No matter how many nature preserves
are established, according to Andrews, the pressure from human development is neverending. “That’s why conservation is a career and not an initiative,” she said. “We don’t get to stop.” Or as Eubanks herself says, “We can’t possibly run it all, but we can ruin it all” (75).
Set against this landscape of beauty impeded by despair, might I suggest another book that offers exactly the inverse: despair constantly overwhelmed by beauty. Georgann Eubanks’s debut poetry collection, Rural Astronomy, is a collection of deceptively simple, easy-reading, enjoyable poems that provide snapshots of normal lives and events, of grace discovered in unexpected places.
Like a peach from a roadside fruit stand or a homecooked meal from a Southern grandmother, these poems are nourishing, unfussy, deceptively complex, and a joy to taste. The poems are so carefully crafted, it’s reasonable to assume Eubanks labored over every word, comma, and hyphen, but the effect of taking the poems in as a reader is that each one emerged fully formed, just right.
SUBMISSIONS ACCEPTED JANUARY 15–MARCH 1
In the poem “Terminal Birds,” Eubanks tracks the migratory patterns of birds within the O’Hare Airport, over debris from McDonald’s and moving walkways and the familiar airport carpet, before landing us at these final lines:
The birds seem unaware of the world outside. They have no desire to take off toward that ridge of runway oaks.
The scraps here are plentiful, the lights bright, so much color to navigate, so many possible destinations.
Notice the subtle way she merges the visuals of airplanes and birds, the molding of the natural with the artificial, so that we see the birds’ discovery of McDonald’s wrappers and
glowing departure signs as a miraculous achievement in avian curiosity.
In the poem “My Brother’s Snake,” Eubanks compares the molting skin of a snake to her grandmother “peeling a stocking and leaving it behind – the wrinkled accordion of a long day.” Immediately we see not only the snake but the old woman, a family’s lore present in that simple image.
In “Motel Soaps,” she uses small hotel soap bars as an entry point into a father’s infidelity and the impact it has on his wife and children; and the soap’s eventual dissolving in a bath holds hope for a better future.
In “Pouring the Slab,” she reveals the difficulty of a father-daughter relationship by recounting the common moment when a girl presses her handprint into wet cement, “her small fingers under his, the wet foundation cool, already hardening.” Eubanks never once explains the emotional crux of their relationship, and yet with those last two words – “already hardening” – we can see all the unspoken trials that lie ahead with a stubborn, unwavering father, and a girl looking to go her own way.
In “Women’s Work,”one of my favorite poems in the collection, Eubanks takes a simple image
of men posing with fish and, in just two short stanzas, extrapolates the plight of generations of women:
Women’s Work
In the photo,
The bass are fat as loaves.
Dad has one end of the stringer, Bomer holds the other, His mouth partway open. Straw hats shade their blissful eyes.
What we don’t see
Are Ruby, Stella, Doris, and Kate
Chopping the cabbage,
Setting out plates.
Stirring meal, buttermilk, and eggs –While feeding the misery of a woodstove in August, the deep grease only beginning to smoke.
Notice the use of the word “feeding” when describing the work at a woodstove, how even then the work the women do requires them to nourish another being. And notice, too, how the poem ends: with the smoke just beginning to rise, the implication of so much work ahead, unseen even by the readers of the poem.
Eubanks also scatters wonderful “found poems” throughout the book, which serve as even more overt examples of beauty in the ordinary. Some are heartfelt, some intense, and some are simply comical:
At the Inn: found poem
Previous guests please note We now have air conditioning, Wi-Fi, And the rooster has moved.
If the job of the poet is to notice what we all miss, then Eubanks is a maestro. n
Networks of North Carolina Writers
by Margaret D. Bauer, Editor
We were so proud to be the lunchtime honoree at this year’s North Carolina Writers Conference. How appropriate, I remarked, that we were in Greensboro, home of Founding Editor Alex Albright’s MFA program and the place I attended my first North Carolina Writers Conference, after being nominated for membership by Alex. And fitting, too, that the other Conference honoree was Clyde Edgerton, who has been featured in NCLR several times, including an interview with him in our 2003 issue celebrating 100 years of flight, which Clyde later noted prompted his memoir Solo: My Adventures in the Air. Read more about the summer event here, including the banquet remarks about Clyde by John Rosenthal, whose photography has appeared in NCLR
If NCLR is unique for its focused mission (and gorgeous designs – which I can say because I have nothing to do with those), so too can North Carolina boast about the one-of-a-kind North Carolina Writers’ Network. Back in our 2016, twenty-fifth issue, Network Director Ed Southern explored what makes North Carolina so special that it inspires so many writers; read in this issue his homage to forty years of the Network, in which he notes that it is the networking that distinguishes this particular writers’ support organization from others.
The James Applewhite Poetry Prize 2025 contest finalist poems published in this section are by writers we’ve published before, like Michael Beadle (and the artist featured with his poem, Stephen L. Hayes, Jr., has also appeared in our pages before). The poems by the other returning poets also flash back to past issue themes: Jane Shlensky’s poem about a mother with dementia relates to the 2021 Writing
to Heal theme, and to complement the poem, Art Editor Diane Rodman selected a painting from ECU Emeritus Professor Michael Dorsey from his series inspired by his own wife’s experience with Alzheimer’s. The imagery from nature in Sylvia Freeman’s poem reminds me of the poetry we published in the 2011 issue’s special feature section on environmental writing. Sylvia has so generously shared her photography with NCLR over the years, this time to complement her own poem.
That 2011 issue opened with an interview with David Gessner, and here we have a review of one of his newest books. Also reviewed, a novel set in part on the Outer Banks (see our 2005 issue theme), also the setting of the children’s book reviewed, which suits too the environmental writing theme of 2011 and the 2006 feature on children’s literature. Also reviewed: new poetry collections by Carole Boston Weatherford (whom we published in the 2006 issue) and Glenis Redmond, interviewed in our 2019 issue. And finally, a novel with a playlist of a sort is reminiscent of the North Carolina literature and the other arts theme of 2017, and as the author, Michael Amos Cody, has moved to Tennessee, also our 2020 theme: North Carolina expatriate writers.
This is a good time, I think, to remind you all that all of our back issues are still available for purchase. Place an order for any one of the issues mentioned here, and we’ll send you another one of them free. Just email NCLRStaff@ecu.edu after your order is placed, mention this offer, and let us know which free issue you’d like (from those mentioned here), and we’ll add it to the package. n
Echoes of Past Issues
42 NCLR and Clyde Edgerton Honored at the North Carolina Writers Conference remarks by Christy Alexander Hallberg and John Rosenthal
46 North Carolina Writers’ Network at Forty by Ed Southern
50 Freeing the Past, Lifting Up Voices a review by Michael Beadle art by Jeffery Boston Weatherford n Glenis Redmond, The Three Harriets and Others n Carole Boston Weatherford, Kin
54 Vanitas a poem by Michael Beadle art by Stephen L. Hayes, Jr.
56 Unexpected Places: Wildness Within and Without a review by Barbara Bennett n David Gessner, The Book of Flaco
59 The Arborist a poem and photography by Sylvia Freeman
60 The Thrill of Southern Noir a review by Andrew K. Clark n Michael Amos Cody, Streets of Nashville
62 Be Still and Know a poem by Jane Shlensky art by Michael Dorsey
64 Just One More Thing You Don’t Know a review by Rebecca Duncan n Angel Khoury, Between Tides
66 Sand and Spirit a review by Chelsey Parsons art by Larry McCarter and Anne Marshall Runyon n Hannah Bunn West with Ann-Cabell Baum, Save Our Sand Dunes poetry and book reviews an essay and book reviews
NCLR AND CLYDE EDGERTON HONORED AT THE 2025 NORTH CAROLINA WRITERS CONFERENCE
During the annual gathering of the North Carolina Writers Conference the weekend of July 18–19, the North Carolina Literary Review was honored “in recognition and appreciation [for] supporting North Carolina literature since 1992.” Longtime editor Margaret Bauer and founding editor Alex Albright accepted a plaque on behalf of the literary magazine. With her on a panel to talk about NCLR’s thirty-four-year history were Founding Editor Alex Albright, Senior Associate Editor Christy Alexander Hallberg (who
served as a student editor for Albright back in the ’90s), and North Carolina Writers’ Network Director Ed Southern. Former NCLR Editorial Assistant Michael Brantley, in his capacity as 2025 Conference Chair, presented the award.
The panel discussion covered the magazine’s origin as a single annual print issue and expansion into a quarterly, along with the collaborative nature of the “enterprise,” from Albright’s work with the NCLR ’s first award-winning Art Director Eva Roberts to the numerous arts and humanities organizations NCLR works with. Bauer explained,
The workaround to a static state budget is collaboration, and in this state, where there is such a strong writing community, it has been a pleasure working with the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association, our other founding organization; with the North Carolina Writers’ Network and the North Carolina Poetry Society on contests; with Press 53, UNC Chapel Hill Creative Writing, and Paul Green Foundation, for our John Ehle, Randall Kenan, and Paul Green Prizes, respectively; and with the North Carolina Arts Council, North Carolina Humanities, and North Caroliniana Society, who have provided grant support. Y’all should see my budget spreadsheet. Pretty different from the old-fashioned, leather-bound, green-paged ledger Alex passed down to me.
Bauer gave a (partial) list of current activities beyond producing four issues a year: “We’re running four contests, managing the North Carolina Book Awards, releasing a new book review every week, producing blogs and newsletters, and writing up to four grant proposals a year. A regular enterprise,” she concluded. n n n
“ I’ll know it when I see it”
panel
remarks from Christy Alexander Hallberg
I’m so happy to be here today to celebrate the North Carolina Literary Review—a journal that has not only preserved our state’s literary voice but has played a major role in shaping mine.
I first joined NCLR in 1993 or ‘94 as a graduate student at East Carolina University. I really wanted the assistantship with the journal. And more than that, I really wanted to work with Alex Albright. He had been my Freshman Comp and African American Lit professor, and I admired him deeply. I know I must have driven him crazy pestering him about that internship, but when I landed it, I felt like I’d gotten into the coolest club in the department.
The issue I worked on was 1994, focused on Black Mountain College, a school I had never heard of. Suddenly, I was learning about avant-garde artists like John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Anni and Josef Albers, and Buckminster Fuller. The college was wild
ABOVE NCLR founding editor Alex Albright, North Carolina Writers Conference Chair Michael Brantley, and Editor Margaret Bauer, Greensboro, NC, 19 July 2025; photograph by Amber Flora Thomas
and radical and collaborative, and I was immediately enthralled with these new models of creativity and education. In fact, I never would’ve chosen Goddard College for my MFA if NCLR hadn’t introduced me to Black Mountain College.
My internship with the journal changed the course of my creative life in more ways than one. Alex asked me to write an introduction to a piece by Paul Metcalf, Herman Melville’s great-grandson. This would be my first professional publication.
I was thrilled – and absolutely petrified.
I wanted so badly to get it right. I respected Alex tremendously, and I had no idea what I was doing. I remember walking into his office tentatively one day and asking him, in my most professional, faux-confident voice, “What exactly are you looking for in this piece?” And he gave the most Alex Albright answer imaginable: “I’ll know it when I see it.”
Gulp!
I smiled and nodded like I understood, then shuffled out of his office and knocked back a glass or three of wine. When the buzz wore off and I stopped hyperventilating, I got to work, sweating through the drafting wilderness until I got the piece done. Somehow, Alex saw enough in what I wrote to publish it. When I held that issue in my hands, with my name in it, it meant the world. It still does.
That experience taught me a lot: Sometimes the only way to grow as a writer is to leap before you’re ready, to write your way into clarity, to trust yourself. It also taught me how to write professionally, how to work with editors during the revision process, and how to hold my own, even when I was full of doubt.
Flash forward to 2000, when I returned to ECU as a full-time faculty member. In 2005, I rejoined NCLR, this time as a staff member. I became Assistant Editor in 2015 and Senior Associate Editor in 2019. And after all these years, I’m still learning with every issue.
None of this would be possible without Margaret Bauer. When she took over the journal in 1997, she honored what Alex had built and transformed NCLR into the literary powerhouse it is today. Margaret expanded the journal’s reach, added digital issues, and made it a place where emerging voices and literary legends sit side by side. She’s a phenomenal editor and one of the most committed literary citizens I know. Her leadership has helped NCLR not just survive but thrive. Working with both Margaret and Alex has been an honor and a joy.
NCLR taught me more than how to edit or write or revise. It taught me how to be part of something meaningful. It gave me my first byline and a frontrow seat to North Carolina’s rich literary culture. So thank you to NCLR, to Alex and Margaret, and to all the writers and editors who make this work matter. And thank you to the North Carolina Writers Conference for honoring a journal that has taught me – and so many others – how to find our voices. n n n
The North Carolina Writers Conference (not to be confused with the North Carolina Writers’ Network, which is celebrating its fortieth anniversary this year) dates back to 1950. Since 1977, the annual end-ofJuly gathering has culminated in a banquet honoring one of North Carolina’s literary stars. The Friday and Saturday programs leading up to the banquet typically focus on the honoree’s work or interests. This year’s honoree was Clyde Edgerton, author of ten novels and two nonfiction books, as well as a musician and painter. Edgerton has a doctorate in Education and just recently retired from his faculty position at UNC Wilmington: he was the Thomas S. Kenan III Professor of Creative Writing. Saturday’s panels focused on teaching and writing, writing in multiple genres, literature and music, and writing humor. The traditional broadside given to all conference attendees featured not only a passage from one of Edgerton’s books, but also one of his paintings. n n n
ABOVE NCLR panel left to right, Ed Southern, Alex Albright, Margaret Bauer, and Christy Hallberg, Greensboro, NC, 19 July 2025; photograph by Amber Flora Thomas
Read an interview with CHRISTY ALEXANDER HALLBERG about her novel Searching For Jimmy Page (Livingston, 2021) in NCLR Online Winter 2022
A Writer with a Banjo
banquet remarks by John Rosenthal
I met Clyde a day or two before Raney was published. This would have been in late winter of 1985. At the time I hosted a local access TV talk show in Chapel Hill called Portfolio. Mainly I interviewed people I knew, artists and writers. But one day Lee Smith, who I’d interviewed a couple of times, told me about a guy who was teaching at Campbell University and was about to publish his first novel, Raney, which
she said was a great book. I don’t know what I was expecting; certainly not a writer who came to the studio carrying a banjo. Of course Clyde didn’t tell me that he’d written a funny book; he wouldn’t do that. But a few days later, I was to meet Raney with her inimitable smalltown North Carolina voice. She is observing her Aunt Naomi blowing her nose at the K&W Cafeteria:
Aunt Naomi blew her nose on this Kleenex she had been fumbling with. She had a cold. She can get more nose blows on one Kleenex than anybody I ever saw. She always ends up with this tiny corner which she slowly spreads out, then blows her nose into.
We’d finished eating so I said, “Aunt Naomi, you get more nose blows out of one Kleenex than anybody I’ve ever seen in my life.”
“I probably won’t be able to sing Sunday,” she said. She sings in the church choir. “This cold just drags on and on and on.”
I love that phrase “we’d finished eating, so I said . . .”; it so perfectly carries the unspoken rule that you don’t comment on someone blowing their nose while people are still eating. Pure Raney. Pure Clyde. Clyde and I have been friends for decades now. I know that besides being a fighter pilot during the Vietnam War, he was, years earlier, the only child in a family that included twenty-three aunts and uncles, half of whom – the women half – did all the talking while the men generally knew better than to interrupt. Imagine being an only child in such a world of family stories and remembrances. The very young child listens raptly. Call it active apprehension. His world is made up of women talking and serving food. There are allusions to events that are never talked about because they are better off being forgotten, though of course they never are. Mysterious things are occasionally said. What the women say, what they pass on, remember, shake their heads over, is the boundary of the child’s known world. I see the boy, now older, listening considerately, respectfully, for this is a strict Christian family and children breathe respect. Then, at the age of manhood, I see the boy listening responsibly, without the slightest cynicism, but still full of questions. He’s figuring out what things mean, who among his aunts was and
ABOVE Clyde Edgerton performing for the Friday evening program, Greensboro, NC, 18 July 2025; photograph by Michael Brantley
PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL BRANTLEY
wasn’t a reliable narrator. He realizes that the world isn’t as straightforward, as rule-bound, as Baptist, as it was supposed to be. There are always and inescapably different points of view, and he’ll try to capture that complexity in prose. He’ll also find the voice of all those uncles who rarely said a word.
Clyde’s written ten novels. He’s created a universe of characters. To talk about his actual achievement would take hours, so I’m just going to remember a few moments out loud, moments that capture the humor and pathos of Clyde’s novels. I’m thinking of June Odum in Where Trouble Sleeps. June works part time at the Dairy DeeLight. She has a big, sad face, as round as the moon, and she’s the sort of person who often feels the need to say something even though she might have nothing to say. For instance, she’ll look at a vase of daisies, take a draw off her Pall Mall, and say, “You just can’t beat yellow for a color, can you?” Later in the book she watches as Alease Toomey beheads a cat that had just been hit by a car and was flopping around in pain. June takes the cigarette out of her mouth, looks closely at the cat, and says, “You just can’t beat a cat for a pet, can you?” Then there’s a character named Mrs. House who shows up in only one scene in The Bible Salesman It’s a funeral service for a boy who lies in a casket at the front of the church. Mrs. House approaches and looks at him. She says to his grieving mother, “I like that red tie. It gives him a little color in his complexion.” She looks at the boy again. “They do get pale at a time like this.”
I’m not going to forget Gloria, the older black woman who cares for dying white people in Clyde’s In Memory of Junior. Gloria reminds me of Dilsey, who keeps things together in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. One day Gloria ruminates. She’s thinking of her dead husband, Lorenzo. She’s thinking about something that her son, Lorenzo, Jr., just told her – that the four-way highway going into Wilmington has been named after Michael Jordan. Gloria thinks,
What about my little hallway with the cracks in the floor I travel back and forth on to the bathroom with my Lorenzo. Why don’t the government pave that, and name that after Michael Jordan? Sha. I just don’t get it. A man make his living jumping up and down with people screaming all over the place and him making enough money to pave Hansen County three times over in gold-plated concrete getting a big four-lane highway named after him while at the same time hundreds of little women in North Carolina breaking
She walked into the kitchen, turned on the light, and saw through the window that the eastern sky was dark red. It was her favorite time of the day. She stepped out onto the back step. It was cool. She also liked it when it was cold and she could stand there taking in the cold morning while the sky was red, and time stopped, stood still, and rested for a minute. People thought that time never stood still, except in Joshua when the sun stood still; but she knew that for a minute before sunrise when the sky began to lighten, showing dark early clouds, there was often a pause when nothing moved, not even time, and she was always happy to be up and in that moment; sometimes she tried to stand perfectly still, to not move with time not moving, and it seemed that if she were not careful she might slip out of this world and into another. That made the moment risky, bright shining, and very still at the same time. She hoped that when her time came, it would be close to morning, and she could wait for the still moment
their own backs scrubbing up after a sick, broke-down husband who done worried hisself down to a nub after sixty-five years of toting shingles and nailing roofs and these little women can’t buy a pair of bedsheets because they cost so much – you looked at the price of bedsheets lately? –and they don’t have time to powder their nose much less wipe their own ass and they don’t even get their names wrote down in a . . . two-bit beggarman’s matchbook.
The world is a funny place.
Problem is that people don’t have the eyes and hearts to judge up on somebody like me, but they sure judge up Mr. Basketball. n
Clyde’s written ten novels. He’s created a universe of characters.
ABOVE Broadside designed by Michael Brantley
Find examples of JOHN ROSENTHAL ’s
Clyde Edgerton From Walking Across Egypt
THE NETWORK AT FORTY
by Ed Southern
Yes, I do realize how pat, how ham-handed, how on-the-nose it is to call a word choice the most significant decision in the founding of the North Carolina Writers’ Network.
But there it is: not the center or an association or just North Carolina Writers but the Network, an active word with connotations of energy and connection, an old portmanteau of one ancient word that denotes tying together threads in order to gather, and another even more ancient word meaning creation and labor.
A network may have a hub, but it is by definition dispersed, broadcasting from place to place to place, reaching people where they are rather than demanding they come to it.
“It became clear . . . that we wanted to serve a whole state not a major metro area, so we needed to see ourselves differently as an organization that connects the dots through conferences, workshops, newsletters, contests, and membership drives,” said North Carolina Writers’ Network co-founder Georgann Eubanks. “We would not be a Place but a Network.”
You see now, I hope, why I couldn’t avoid what might seem cliché, why I nominate the choice of a single word as the most important factor in the North Carolina Writers’ Network’s history as we celebrate our fortieth year. Words carry meanings, not rigid or absolute but – pardon the pun – definite, and of consequence. By all means, play with them, experiment and expand what words can do, but no one can up and decide that “wet” now means “dry.” No one’s a “partner” unless they share profit and liability. No one’s a “writer” unless they write, but anyone who writes is indeed a writer.
All writers, whatever their level of skill and experience, have three needs: excellence, opportunity, and community.
They need exposure to excellent work as a model and a measure, so that they know what good writing looks and sounds like, so that they know what good writing can do . More to the point, if they’re paying for classes and conferences and critiques, they need to be getting them from writers who know what they’re doing.
They need the opportunity to write, the time and the mental energy, both of which can be hard to find. They need the opportunity to share their work with
. . . the Network , an active word with connotations of energy and connection, an old portmanteau of one ancient word that denotes tying together threads in order to gather, and another even more ancient word meaning creation and labor.
others, if they so desire, whether that opportunity comes in a critique group or a blog, a literary journal or a Substack, a podcast or a published book.
If they do not want to share their work with others, that makes their writing no less valid, makes them no less a writer.
They need a community of people who care that they’re writing, who encourage them to write through their praise – or, sometimes, their criticism – or their curiosity, their subscriptions or shares or purchases. At some point they will need – or, at the very least, find useful – a community of fellow writers who have been through what they’re going through, who can warn them or nudge them or even inspire them.
Excellence, opportunity, and community: that’s what I told the Network’s board in my job interview, when they asked me what my “vision” for the Network was. They had told me already that my first task, if they hired me, would be to move the Network out of its longtime offices in the White Cross School outside Carrboro, and into “virtual” home offices.
The White Cross School was beloved but it had become a boondoggle, draining the Network’s budget and, in the twenty-first century, of no real use to its members. Ten years before, its library of literary journals, trade magazines like Poets & Writers, and annuals like the Writers’ Market had been a valuable resource to Network members – if they were close enough to Carrboro to make use of them.
I am a tech skeptic, especially when that tech is online, but I have to admit that broadband internet access has let the Network live up to its name and
ED SOUTHERN, Wake Forest University graduate and WinstonSalem, NC, resident, is the Executive Director of the North Carolina Writers’ Network. He has authored or edited The Jamestown Adventure: Accounts of the Virginia Colony 1605–1614 (John F. Blair, 2004), Voices of the American Revolution in the Carolinas (John F. Blair, 2004), Parlous Angels: Stories (Press 53, 2009), Fight Songs:A Story of Love and Sports in a Complicated South (Blair, 2021; reviewed in NCLR Online Winter 2022), and The Devil’s Done Come Back: New Ghost Tales from North Carolina (Blair, 2025). Read his essay on “The Writingest State” in NCLR 2016.
mission more truly and fully. Right now we have staff members in Wilmington, Winston-Salem, and Asheville. We have one trustee who lives in Cherokee in the heart of the Smokies and one who lives on the banks of the Neuse in New Bern, both of whom can participate fully in board meetings, held since the pandemic on Zoom. For the first time in a long time, if not ever, Triangle residents are not a majority on our board. We have volunteer Regional Reps holding monthly events for writers in communities all across the state, and volunteers in our Prison Writers Outreach corresponding with writers incarcerated in state facilities. More than in any other stretch of the last forty years, we can connect and serve – we can network – all of North Carolina as “the Writingest State,” as one big literary community.
“But to what end?”
That question stopped me short, when our consultant David Scruggs asked it of me in 2019. The Network board and I were working with David on what he called “strategic discernment,” seeking to clarify our mission, how we pursued it, and how it might need to evolve.
He was asking about our mission statement, which described well what the Network does but didn’t address its why. Since 1985 we had more or less taken that for granted, taken for granted that creative writing was and is a worthy pursuit, taken for granted that the vast majority of North Carolinians – including those who didn’t write or even read much – accepted it as a good thing, as well.
David was the first to point out to us that we couldn’t take that for granted anymore.
Working with David, and then in 2024 with nonprofit consultant Lilly Skok Bunch, we examined our why and incorporated it not only into our mission statement, but our mission itself: “The North Carolina Writers’ Network creates and nurtures community for those who care about writing, because good writing is vital to our wider community.”
Our mission statement goes on to say, “We believe that writing can connect people across time, distance, and difference; that writing with integrity is necessary for civic discourse and a healthy society; and that the deeply satisfying experiences of writing and reading should be available to everyone,” all of which is true, but it’s not nearly all.
“We believe that writing can connect people across time, distance, and difference; that writing with integrity is necessary for civic discourse and a healthy society; and that the deeply satisfying experiences of writing and reading should be available to everyone.”
ABOVE LEFT Keynote speaker Randall Kenan at the 2018 Fall conference, Wrightsville Beach, NC
ABOVE CENTER Keynote speaker Charles Frazier talking about writing at the 2019 Fall conference, Asheville, NC
ABOVE RIGHT Keynote speaker Jason Mott talking about the experience of receiving the National Book Award at the Fall conference, Wrightsville Beach, NC, Nov. 2022
OPPOSITE Network Director Ed Southern at the 2025 Spring conference, Greensboro, NC
We had to stand sentinel for the value and virtues of curiosity; of honest human expression; of deep human connection; of true and lasting communication; of excellence, opportunity, and community.
In 2008, I would have told you that the Network’s job – that my job – was to keep North Carolina “the Writingest State,” to see off any challenges from Mississippi or Minnesota or that other Carolina to our south. Before long, though, I realized that my job –that the Network’s job – was to defend the whole idea of creative writing from a host of challenges: dwindling attention spans, shallow distractions, isolation and despair, algorithms and glop. We had to stand sentinel for the value and virtues of curiosity; of honest human expression; of deep human connection; of true and lasting communication; of excellence, opportunity, and community. We had to stand up for words and their meanings.
We still do. I expect that we will for some time. This is a fight, and it won’t be quick or easy or painless.
On the one hand, I see the powers-that-be dismantling a robust and thriving and long-cherished support system, one that helped North Carolina become the “Writingest State,” and I wonder how much art we will lose. How many people will write masterpieces that never find an audience? How many will stop or never start writing because the economy never spares them the time or mental energy? Real average wages have not kept up with inflation over the last forty years. How many would-be writers would like to join the Writers’ Network, would like to come to our conferences, but can’t afford to? Combine that with the topdown, indiscriminate slashing of arts funding across the country, and it’s neither hypothetical nor alarmist to ask if the Network can survive another forty years.
On the other hand, I’m old enough to remember when hair metal seemed unstoppable and unavoidable, on MTV and at the Record Bar at the mall. That was fine by me, since I was a thirteen-year-old boy and theirs was music made for thirteen-year-old boys: loud and fast and simple, and raunchy in the way that most appeals to virgins. How could I, in my Sun Belt suburb, have known that all the while much smarter and more interesting musicians were making and releasing much smarter and more interesting music to smaller but more devoted (and discerning) audiences? How could I, without my driver’s license or a cool older sibling, have known then that many of those musicians were right here in the Writingest State? How could I, without a crystal ball, have known that some of them – Peter Holsapple of the dBs, Tom Maxwell of the Squirrel Nut Zippers – would become Network members? How could I have known, and who on earth could have guessed, that the witless swagger of Jon Bon Jovi and Nikki Sixx would be dethroned by the scrawny, artsy angst of Michael Stipe and Kurt Cobain? The opening snare-drum salvo of R.E.M.’s “The One I Love” and the riff of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” are reminders that tides turn. No matter how much fast food they’ve been force-fed, sooner or later people will find and demand the good stuff. People, being people, will keep telling stories and creating art with their own minds and eyes, hearts and hands, tastes and perspectives – no matter how small an audience it’s for, no matter how little support they get.
The Network will keep giving writers – giving ourselves – as much support as we can, for as long as we can. In many ways it will be harder than it was in our first forty years, even with broadband. We know now we can take none of it for granted: not our work, not our purpose, not our community, not a single word. n
LEFT Founding members meeting at Marsha Warren’s home
FREEING THE PAST, LIFTING UP VOICES
a review by Michael Beadle
Glenis Redmond. The Three Harriets and Others. Finishing Line Press, 2022.
Carole Boston Weatherford. Kin: Rooted in Hope. Illustrated by Jeffery Boston Weatherford. Simon & Schuster, 2023.
MICHAEL BEADLE is a poet, author, and teaching artist living in Raleigh, NC. Since 1999, he’s taught thousands of students in poetry and creative writing workshops across the state and performed poetry at schools, libraries, churches, and festivals. His poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including Broad River Review, Kakalak, and NCLR (including this issue). In addition to a fifteen-year career as a journalist, he’s worked as a high school English teacher, magazine editor, and freelance writer. Beadle has served as an A+ Schools Fellow, poet-in-residence at the North Carolina Zoo, emcee for North Carolina Poetry Out Loud, student poetry contest coordinator for the North Carolina Poetry Society, and visiting instructor at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, NC.
Tracing ancestry has become one of America’s favorite pastimes. The popular PBS TV show Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., offers riveting results for famous Americans that can be at times exhilarating and, for some, downright shocking. However, for millions of African Americans, putting together an accurate genealogy is complicated by slavery. So many roots of family trees were ripped apart when African men, women, and children were captured, bound, and shipped in cramped cargo holds, enslaved to work in the Caribbean islands or American colonies. Whole family lineages were lost. Names, histories, and stories were erased by slaveowners who regularly separated families as part of the slave economy.
For award-winning author and former Fayetteville State University professor Carole Boston Weatherford, family genealogy had been a mystery. For most of her childhood, she knew of only one formerly enslaved ancestor. Later in adulthood, she discovered a second ancestor, her great-great-grandfather Isaac Copper. He’d fought with the Union Army’s US Colored Troops during the Civil War and went on to help found an all-Black village in Unionville, MD. After years of research and
writing about African American history in more than fifty books, Weatherford published a powerful speculative story about her family’s struggle from slavery to freedom in a compelling novel-in-verse with captivating, black-and-white illustrations by her son, Jeffery Boston Weatherford, a stellar artist and rapper who has collaborated with his mother on various projects. This mother-and-son enterprise is nothing less than a triumphant work of young adult literature. Kin: Rooted in Hope has already earned critical praise and several awards, including the Coretta Scott King Honor Book Award and North Carolina’s Roanoke Chowan Book Award for Poetry.
“I did not know what I might never know,” Weatherford writes in her opening poem, “Of Roots and Glory,” “But I knew that truth would be hard to come by.” Taking the plunge into her family’s roots, she discovered that her ancestors crossed paths with the legendary Frederick Douglass (who was enslaved at Wye House along with Copper) and Francis Scott Key, author of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and a slaveholder who had a mixed record of defending slavery while also arguing against the transatlantic slave trade.
Weatherford’s poems include a wide range of styles from
CAROLE BOSTON WEATHERFORD is a poet, author, and retired English professor. She holds an MA in publications design from the University of Baltimore and an MFA in creative writing from UNC Greensboro. As a professor at Fayetteville State University, she earned the Ragan-Rubin Award from the North Carolina English Teachers Association. Weatherford has published eighty books. Her writing has garnered two NAACP Image Awards and eighteen American Library Association Youth Media Awards, which include a Newbery Honor, a Coretta Scott King Award, and four Caldecott Honors. Kin received the 2024 Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry. She has also received the North Carolina Award for Literature and the Nonfiction Award from the Children’s Book Guild. In 2020, she was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. Read more about her induction in NCLR Online Winter 2023
OPPOSITE Illustration of Isaac Copper, US Confederate Troops by Jeffery Boston Weatherford for Kin: Rooted in Hope
catalogue poems and lyrical rhymes to narrative and persona poems. She not only enters the minds of her ancestors but slaveholders as well – even taking on the persona of a 205-year-old clock, a hunting dog, and a slave ship named Rachel. “What the Lloyds’ Ledger Reveals,” for example, imagines an exhaustive list of slave names arranged alphabetically: “Every last one, with a mind of their own / and a story that ain’t been told yet.”
Weatherford speaks to yearning hopes and haunting horrors of men, women, and children trapped in slavery. “The only thing greater than this house, / is my hope to someday leave it,” she writes in “Nan” from the perspective of a sevenyear-old enslaved at the Lloyd house.
“I work harder than these beasts,” one house servant attests in “Barnett.” “If the horses give Master any problem . . . Young Barney and I get blamed. / Master whips us before he will a horse.”
The (il)logic of slavery is so simply laid out with words that might normally carry the connotation of ease, comfort, and care but are reserved for horses while the agony, uncertainty and anxiety are the burdens slaves carry with each waking hour. Yet even in this trauma-inducing world, Weatherford includes lyrical lines to show how enslaved people found inspiring moments, little glimpses of joy:
I exercise the horses, rushing like wind until trees blur and heartbeat and hoofbeat become one pounding, resounding rhythm. If not for family, I would gallop, gallop far away.
With rhyme, repetition, and alliteration, Weatherford distills a drop of serenity from an ocean of adversity. Note how human and beast fuse into one as similar-sounding words – “heartbeat” and “hoofbeat” / “pounding” and “resounding” – connect rider and horse, freedom and fantasy, the galloping speed of a horse and the racing mind of the rider.
As brilliantly as this collection imagines the “what ifs” of Weatherford’s family heritage, the tragic truth is that there are still so many unanswered questions. In “Questions for Doctor and Minister Isaac Copper,” Weatherford fires off a litany of questions for her ancestor, each more elusive than the next. But there is courage in the question, dignity in the mystery, hope in the unknowable. In “Between Rivers,” Weatherford finds a physical and emotional link between her African ancestors, relatives once enslaved, and her own childhood. The rhythm, once again, leaps with anaphoric phrasing that echoes across the centuries:
We were swimmers: enslaved fishermen, pearl divers, and deep-sea treasure hunters. . .
We were swimmers, baptized in creeks: the currents, a barrier and a blessing. If blood is thicker than water, then our faith is deeper than fear.
With the wonder of a poet and the tenacity of a researcher, Weatherford takes it upon herself to be the griot of her family’s history. When she speaks in the voice of her ancestor Issac Copper, she could also be calling any writer or storyteller to take on the responsibility of carrying the family’s legacy into the future: “When you are the keeper of stories, cures, and rituals, / you must tell your children about their heritage. / You must summon the power of shamans / and healers and the ancient wisdom of the elders.” In these quatrains that each begin with the anaphoric phrase, “When you . . .”, Weatherford’s words are a commitment to remember, to resurrect, and honor the past, to act against cultural erasure.
Weatherford has made a career of celebrating Black excellence with books about the lives of such greats as Aretha Franklin, Fannie Lou Hamer, John Coltrane, Gordon Parks, Billie Holiday, and Harriet Tubman, while also recognizing dark chapters of America’s past. Unspeakable (2021) documents the Tulsa Race Massacre and won the prestigious Coretta Scott King Award and Caldecott Honor Award. Inducted into the North Carolina Writers Hall of Fame in 2020, Weatherford recently won the American Library Association’s 2025 Children’s Literature Legacy Award, which honors an author or illustrator whose books have made a significant and lasting contribution to children’s literature. As the 2025–2026 Young People’s Poet Laureate, she declares, “My mission is to mine the past for family stories, fading traditions, and forgotten struggles that center on African American resistance, resilience, remarkability, rejoicing and remembrance.”1
Poets allow us to time travel and speculate about what it might be like to live in a particular historical era, to enter the mind of a supernatural being, or to walk with the people who change the course of history. In Glenis Redmond’s powerfully wrought chapbook, The Three Harriots and Others, we meet three famous Harriets who endured the horrors and humiliations of slavery and oppression but survived and thrived as champions of freedom and fortitude. These three Harriets include Harriet Jacobs (1813–1897), the first woman to author a fugitive slave narrative in the United States; Harriet Wilson (1825–1900), who grew up as an indentured servant and published the first African American novel in the United States; and Harriet Tubman (1820–1913), who escaped slavery, liberated dozens of other slaves as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, and then worked tirelessly as an abolitionist and social activist. Though these women most likely never met each other,
they lived through common decades of social and cultural upheaval. Redmond’s collection of poems weaves their stories together, braiding their timelines into a unique narrative.
As a self-proclaimed Road Warrior Poet touring throughout the US, Redmond has built an impressive career empowering voices young and old and earning a slew of honors and titles – most recently as Poet Laureate of Greenville, SC. These Harriets share Redmond’s relentless spirit and show her range as a poet as she channels voices from a century ago. In Harriet Jacobs, we meet a desperate young woman born into slavery in Edenton, NC. In “House: Another Kind of Field” she struggles daily against the sexual exploitation with which white masters threatened house slaves:
He makes me feel like the dirt he walks on. Upturned and plowed. His teeth metal rakes across my skin. His mouth and his hands don’t do nothing, but take: rip, tear and thrust. I bleed and breed. Chains seen or unseen, my feet, still shackled. This is not the life the Almighty meant for me, but no choice is what I got. The only place I run far is my mind. I keep my lips shut, but every scream I don’t shout is loud within me. . . . 2
RIGHT Illustration of Harriet Tubman by Jeffery Boston Weatherford, which faces the poem “Harriet Tubman Moses” in Weatherford’s Kin: Rooted in Hope
The power of these words is a gut-punch to the stomach. Redmond uses assonance to echo vowel sounds – “bleed” / “breed” / “seen” / “feet” – and to accentuate a kind of anxious exhale, while the quick, staccato-like rhythm of short, one-syllable sentences creates a sense of trapped breath – accurate for Jacobs, who was forced to hide in a cramped attic for seven years to evade her cruel slaveowner’s sexual advances. Jacobs eventually escaped North, reunited with her two children, and went on to document her struggles in an expose that has become one of the most famous slave narratives: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861).
The most famous of these Harriets – Harriet Tubman – has lately enjoyed a revival with a 2019 biopic film starring Cynthia Erivo that earned an Oscar nomination and a plan (albeit agonizingly slow) to place Tubman’s image on the United States twenty-dollar bill. Redmond conjures “Freedom Spells” for this Harriet, who in prophetic visions, aspired to be an instrument of God. In separate prose poems, Tubman conveys bold convictions, sharp wit, and her most intimate thoughts. In “Freedom Spells 2,” Redmond uses Tubman’s dialect in simple, direct language to draw upon the hopeless condition of slavery with its incessant demands:
. . . . We bound by dey law. Though it crooked as a creek. We’s worth more dan de money we put in his pocket, but greed speak louder dan truth to him. Greed be winter. Be cold wrong. Holding us against our time. We done wet dese field wid both sweat and tears. Skutch flax. Toted de lumber. Our feet done walk every step of dis ground. . . .
Redmond conjures the voices of these Harriets –as well as the African water spirit Simbi, folk artist Harriet Powers, and Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer (the first Black woman photographed with a typewriter) – to portray the indomitable feminine spirit that challenges the status quo, faces down powerful men, and calls upon the next generation of Harriets to pick up the torch for truth, dignity, and self-determination.
The poem “Sketch,” though not directly addressed to a particular Harriet, captures the essence of this collection with an instructional voice that might apply to Harriet Wilson or current social activists, artists, or poets as an ars poetica Redmond arranges the couplets like rows in a classroom or pews in a church to offer wisdom in terse, yet expansive pieces of advice: “Draw the face so we may stare / at the rotten teeth truth” and “Spill ink like night clouds / that clot what your soul cannot hold” and “Press down. The paper can bear your weight. / Make the page speak of backbreak.” Here, Redmond is at her lyrical best mixing rhythmic sounds with keen truths that inspire us all to be Harriets.
Both Weatherford and Redmond bring their full poetic selves to these works, emboldening readers to seek the lost and whitewashed chapters of American history. While nonfiction prose writers continue to explore eras and episodes of America’s painful past, poets also play a pivotal role as historians, using graceful lyricism, rich imagery, and bold perspectives as they sift through the past and inspire the next generation of storytellers. n
JEFFERY BOSTON WEATHERFORD is an award-winning children’s book illustrator and a performance poet. He has lectured, performed, and led art and writing workshops in the US, the Middle East, and West Africa. He was a Romare Bearden Scholar at Howard University, where he earned an MFA in painting and studied under members of the Black Arts Movement collective AfriCobra. A North Carolina native and resident, Jeffery has exhibited his art in North Carolina, Georgia, Maryland, and Washington, DC.
2 This poem first appeared in
GLENIS REDMOND, a resident of Greenville, SC, is a performance poet, a Kennedy Center Teaching Artist, a Cave Canem alumnus, and Poet Laureate of South Carolina. Since 2014, she has served as the mentor poet for the National Student Poets Program through Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. In this capacity, in 2014–16 she prepared youth poets to read at the Library of Congress, the Department of Education, and for First Lady Michelle Obama at The White House. She is the author of several poetry collections, and her poetry has been showcased on NPR and PBS and published in Orion Magazine, storySouth, and The New York Times. In 2020, she received the highest arts award in her home state of South Carolina, the Governor’s Award, and in 2022 was inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors. Her poetry has appeared numerous times in NCLR . Read an interview with her in NCLR 2019.
2025 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE FINALIST
BY MICHAEL BEADLE
Vanitas
from Still Life with Fruits, Pie, and Silver and Silver-gilt Tazze (oil on canvas, 1653) by Jan Davidsz. de Heem
Tell me again how the Dutch masters leisured luxury to look so haphazardly elegant in their still lifes, how the half-peeled orange seems to roll across the table, how a cluster of plump grapes might at any moment burst into goblet wine, how the toppled chalice stretches light across its gilded concavities, how the porcelain cup appears like a throne set on its shimmery tray, the ruffled green velvet complements jeweled cherries, and oh, how the cavernous mouth of that pie teases the serving spoon to swoon.
MICHAEL BEADLE is the author of several poetry books, including, for children, Foodtopia! (2025) and What Makes a Giraffe Laugh? (2022), both published by BookBaby Bookshop, and Beasts of Eden (Press 53, 2018) and Primer (Main Street Rag, 2017). His poems have appeared in journals such as NCLR, Kakalak, Broad River Review, Pinesong, and in the Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol. VII: North Carolina. He has also published short fiction and history books. In addition to a fifteen-year career as a journalist, he’s worked as a high school English teacher, magazine editor, and freelance writer. He’s also served as a poet-in-residence at the North Carolina Zoo in Asheboro, a Fellow for the NC A+ Schools program, instructor at Duke Young Writers’ Camp (Duke University), emcee for NC Poetry Out Loud, board member for various arts organizations, judge for various student poetry contests, book reviewer for NCLR, guest editor for Prime Number Magazine, and student contest manager for the North Carolina Poetry Society, and book reviewer for NCLR. This is his second time as an Applewhite Prize finalist.
Tell me how paint strokes captured the convoys of cargo ships delivering swollen holds of tea and tobacco, coffee and cotton, silk and sugar from the far islands of the empire, how those billowing sails brim with amber light as they enter the harbor of Amsterdam, how towering clouds triumphantly welcome the God-blessed fleet returning home without any notion of the chained wrists, blistered feet and blood-whipped backs, generations who mined and plowed, chopped and slogged, heaved and hauled the bounteous fruits and treasure that made these lords of portrait prosperity so damned rich.
STEPHEN L. HAYES, JR. was born in Durham and is an Assistant Professor at Duke University. He earned a BA at NC Central in 2006 and an MFA at Savannah College of Art and Design in 2010. He was the 2020 winner of the prestigious 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art. The artist’s work has been featured at the National Cathedral, Rosa Parks Museum, and Harvey B. Gantt Center for African American Art + Culture, among others. His art explores the African American experience, often incorporating historical context, as in his thesis exhibition, Cash Crop, which has been traveling and exhibiting for nearly a decade. See another of his sculptures in NCLR Online Winter 2022
Cash Crop, 2011 (sculpture) by Stephen L. Hayes, Jr.; photographs courtesy of the Cameron Art Museum, Wilmington, NC
UNEXPECTED PLACES: WILDNESS WITHIN AND WITHOUT
a review by Barbara Bennett
David Gessner. The Book of Flaco: The World’s Most Famous Bird. Blair, 2025.
I must have been about four or five when I first discovered a fascination with birds. I was watching Captain Kangaroo (look it up!) in my living room, and there was a segment about birds –mostly just pictures of them flying accompanied by music. I was enthralled. Of course I’d seen birds before, but it was the first time I felt the elation of flight, the beauty of a flock of birds all flying in sync, the freedom of the wild. I still feel that way when I look up and see birds flying in unison or a single hawk circling in a wind current.
BARBARA BENNETT is a Professor of English at NC State University. Her books include Comic Vision, Female Voices (Louisiana State University Press, 1998), Understanding Jill McCorkle (University of South Carolina Press, 2000), Soul of a Lion (National Geographic Books, 2010), and Smoke Signals from Samarcand: The 1931 Reform School Fire and its Aftermath (University of South Carolina Press, 2018). Read her interview with Jill McCorkle and Lee Smith in NCLR 2016, her essay on Jill McCorkle’s Ferris Beach in NCLR 2006, her essay on Daniel Wallace’s Big Fish in NCLR Online 2019, and her creative nonfiction essay in NCLR 2022. She also reviews regularly for NCLR
Most of the time we don’t pay attention to these things, though. It isn’t until it hits us in the face in this fast-paced world that most of us take a second and consider the wildness around us – the omnipresent coyotes, the armies of squirrels, the gecko on the window. Living in New York City must be even harder for people to pay attention. But on February 2, 2023, vandals, ecoterrorists, freedom fighters – you choose your description – cut through the mesh in a small enclosure in Central Park Zoo and released Flaco, a Eurasian eagle-owl into the night.
Never having been free before, Flaco couldn’t fly very far or very well, but he flew toward the city and landed roughly (he had never had to
land before) on the sidewalk around 5th Avenue and 60th. He was discovered and surrounded by people. Animal control came and put out a too-small cat carrier next to him, hoping he would just hop into it. He did not. He flew away, and his year-long adventure in New York City began, as did the year-long fascination with this bird by city dwellers as well as on social media all over the world. Even Saturday Night Live included comic updates on Flaco’s progression in their Weekend Update. As his wings got stronger and his stamina increased, he flew longer and farther. He learned to hunt, catching rats and pigeons. He became a celebrity bird. Sadly but not unexpectedly, his journey ended a year later when he was found dead, the victim of pigeon herpes and rodenticide. Thousands mourned.
But his story is about more than a wild bird who lived in Central Park and sometimes the surrounding city for a while. It is a tale of the Wild and our fascination with it. In The Book of Flaco: The World’s Most Famous Bird, David Gessner chronicles the adventures of Flaco certainly, but this book is more a treatise on our relationship with the Wilderness and our loss of connection to it. It is only this that explains
DAVID GESSNER is the author of thirteen books, including Leave It As It Is: A Journey Through Theodore Roosevelt’s American Wilderness (Simon & Schuster, 2020) and the New York Times bestselling All the Wild that Remains (W. W. Norton & Company, 2016). Gessner is a Professor in the Creative Writing Department at UNC Wilmington, where he is also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Ecotone. His own magazine publications include pieces in the New York Times Magazine, Outside, Sierra, Audubon, Orion, among others. He is the winner of a Pushcart Prize, the John Burroughs Award for Best Nature Essay, the Association for Study of Literature and the Environment Award for best book of creative writing, and the Reed Award for Best Book on the Southern Environment. In 2017, he hosted the National Geographic Explorer show, Call of the Wild. Read an interview with him in NCLR 2011.
OPPOSITE Flaco; photograph by Anke Frohlich
why millions of people became obsessed with this bird, watching his movements day to day, and reveling in his adventures.
Of course, differing views of Flaco’s “escape” emerged. Some saw Flaco as the immigrant coming to New York and learning to survive the rough streets. Some saw him as a victim of zoos in general and rejoiced in his freedom. Some wanted him caught and returned either to a zoo or to a sanctuary, worried about his safety as well as about other creatures in New York who had never encountered this invasive species. And some, because we were just emerging from our COVID lockdown, saw themselves in Flaco, finally emerging and living again. In fact, writes Gessner, “The poor owl carried so much symbolic weight that it was a miracle he could fly” (9). Even after death, Flaco stood for so many things: was he “Flaco-asRachel-Carson” illuminating the toxins we were putting into the world? Perhaps the zoo was at fault. They certainly didn’t do anything after the first month, only monitoring the owl from a distance. People felt that “someone had to be blamed” for his death (191). His life and death had become too important.
Gessner interviews many Flaco followers for his book, including the playwright Nan Knighton. Flaco showed up outside her 13th floor Fifth Avenue kitchen window and stayed for three hours. Knighton told her children that other than their birthdays, the day she encountered Flaco was “one of the most exciting in her life” (5). How could this be? How could a three-hour encounter with an
owl outside your window have such “transcendence” and be “a quotidian epiphany” (72)? What was his existence giving people that they had lacked before? What need was he fulfilling simply by his presence?
Gessner wisely says, “A bird encounter is one thing. An owl encounter is another” (68). To further explain this truism, let me digress for a bit. Since 2007 I have spent many months at an animal sanctuary in Namibia, Africa. I even wrote a book about Marieta Van der Merwe, the woman who started this amazing place simply by rescuing one vervet monkey from a boy selling it on the side of the road. I worked hands-on with all kinds of injured, orphaned, or abandoned wild animals:
cheetahs, lions, leopards, baboons – the list goes on. One of the animals Marieta rescued was a baby white-faced scopsowl – only about five inches tall fully grown – that some San people (commonly called Bushmen) found lying on the ground, injured. They brought him to Marieta.
Marieta nursed him back to health and released him, but he kept coming back and perching in her courtyard, begging for food. He had never learned to hunt. So Marieta named him DooDoo and he came to live in her kitchen, perched on cupboard doors, curtain rods, and ceiling fans, safe from marauding cats. She fed him a little bowl of raw meat every day and he would entertain us by growl-
ing. (White-faced owls don’t hoot; they growl. Don’t believe me? Check out this video.)
One night I was sleeping in my room across the courtyard, sharing my bed with three dogs and two baby baboons who clung to me the way they would have to their mothers. They were in diapers to protect me and the bed. In the middle of the night, it became obvious that one of the baboons, Jessie, needed a new diaper. So I took my flashlight and walked across the courtyard to Marieta’s kitchen where they were stored. Halfway across the room I got hit from above and behind, little thorns going into my scalp. I shouted (what I shouted doesn’t matter, but be assured it was colorful), and ducked my head down. I saw a flash of gray swoosh by. I reached up – no blood, just my dignity in tatters. DooDoo was making it clear that the kitchen belonged to him at night. It was very Hitchcock-esque and I have to admit, any encounter with an owl, no matter how small, is thrilling. Gessner notes that “One part of wildness is surprise, the unexpected. But it is something else, too. Something ineffable. Something we crave but have forgotten we crave. Something we have pushed aside, decided not to take seriously, dismissed to our own detriment” (67). I feel that every time I’m in Africa. And New Yorkers felt it just seeing Flaco.
Gessner observes that “The history of the last three centuries can be described in many ways, but one way is the age of separation of Homo sapi-
ens from the rest of the animal world” (142). Even the encounters with Flaco generally took place with a lens between bird and human, an iPhone, camera, or computer. Gessner questions: “Why is that? Why are we all so often a tourist to our own experiences? Why can’t we get back to raw experience?” (150). Believing that our lives are only valid if the rest of the world witnesses them is a disease of our time. And yet we still crave the real. We want “To be lifted out of the ordinary.” We “hunger for encounters beyond ourselves” and “We all want to touch a world beyond our own. . . . To reach out of our caged world and touch a wilder one”(82). Flaco gave many people this experience, and although he died – perhaps from our own careless use of toxins – it was better, Gessner concludes, that he lived free for that year. He served as an ambassador for his species – and therefore all wild animals. David Barrett, one of those who followed and chronicled Flaco’s sojourn in the city, said that celebrity animals like Flaco cause people to “become nature aficionados, appreciators of nature, and are more likely to think favorably of conservation of nature” (199). According to Gessner, Flaco’s story “showed us that human beings can care about something other than human beings” (200).
Since Flaco’s death, we have experienced another encounter with the Wild in our country. In November of 2024, fortythree rhesus monkeys escaped from Alpha Genesis Research
Center in Yemassee, SC. The country was hooked on the story and followed it, including monkey updates on late night television with Stephen Colbert. One by one the monkeys were re-captured until all were caught. People were torn: should we root for the monkeys to stay free in an environment where they didn’t belong?
Or should we hope that the research center got them back, where they would be used for breeding lab monkeys and going through the terrible things that monkeys experience in labs?
Gessner describes so many of our relationships with animals as about “control.” We have tried and tried to control nature, and it has continued to defy us. Just look at a hurricane. As humans, we “can’t plan the wild. You can’t organize it and check it off a list” (147).
The Book of Flaco will give readers a lot to think about. The story of Flaco is fascinating and the photographs in the center of the book are stunning. The real story here, though, is deeper –which is why, I think, Gessner quotes so many naturalists. Gessner questions his own examination of the Flaco story, wondering about “the deeper meaning of encounters like these” (235). My own answer to that question sides closely with the John Muir quotation Gessner alludes to: “Find something. Pick it up. Follow it. Care about it; maybe even obsess over it. If you do, you might find that your life widens and maybe even deepens. And you might find that it leads you to unexpected places” (220). n
2025 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE SEMIFINALIST
BY SYLVIA FREEMAN
The Arborist
lean and lithe, a scarf of leaves around his shoulders, the arborist moves branch to branch, a dancer in dappled light scaling the old oak some call the tree of life he seems weightless, even though he wears full body harness, hard hat, boots a chain saw glinting in his hands
a yellow helmeted ground crew holds tether lines, adjusting to his movement as he wraps branches in two places, saws they drop, not with a thud, but hang swinging in air, eased down by ropes
he moves upward, examines brittleness of wood, texture of bark, width of branches decides where to cut and then climbs higher and higher to crown of oak leaves until there’s nothing left to trim
he lingers midair, a boy again scanning the view he begins to move down, cutting into trunk section by section, logs crash to the ground the forest echoes with sound his boots touch earth, aerial dance ends
the dark trunk, stripped of life, stands stark in morning mist, his chain saw buzzes final cut graceless now, the arborist clumps around edge of woods, inspects the work stumbles, nearly falls, squirrels scamper birds and tree spirits take flight half rotted branches that once held seasons on their arms are fed to a chipper
the arborist turns away, moves his hand slowly over the ground-level stump follows the life rings until he touches center he sighs, stands, pockets a check, gets in his truck drives away leaving scattered acorns and silence
SYLVIA FREEMAN ’s poems have appeared in NCLR and storySouth, among other venues. She received the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize in 2018 from the North Carolina Writers’ Network. NCLR has often featured her photography in our issues. She lives in Durham, NC.
Remnant of Autumn (photography) by Sylvia Freeman
THE THRILL OF SOUTHERN NOIR
a review by Andrew K. Clark
Michael Amos Cody. Streets of Nashville. Madville Publishing, 2025.
They say the music never stops in Nashville, TN, and if you’ve ever spent time there you know it’s true. Once, many years ago, I was on a trip to the city when my friends and I retired to our hotel rooms on what I believe locals would call Lower Broadway at about midnight. In my room, I heard the thump of the bass and pluck of guitars in the bars outside my window. I wasn’t mad at it, but I couldn’t sleep, so after a few hours I found myself getting up and dressed to head back out: if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. It’s true the music never stopped, but I think the volume on Lower Broadway was lowered a bit at about five or six in the morning when I finally made it back to my room.
its own, propelling Ezra and the other characters along, giving them the language and means to understand the world around them, to try to make sense of it all. As a poet, I loved interludes in the novel when Ezra’s song lyrics are shared, often at the end of a chapter. These sections allow us to see the progression of Ezra’s song ideas, which he jots down in a notebook and which are influenced by the events in his life, as they morph into fully realized lyrics:
jesus came to me my lonely and me just before he made it rain I asked him for a cigarette and he give me one I offered him my beer and he said keep it son. (31)
ANDREW K. CLARK is from Western North Carolina where his people settled before the Revolutionary War. His poetry collection, Jesus in the Trailer (Main Street Rag Press, 2019), was shortlisted for the Able Muse Book Award. His debut novel, Where Dark Things Grow (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2024) was shortlisted for the Manly Wade Wellman Award and won an IPPY from the Independent Book Publishers Awardswas followed by a sequel, Where Dark Things Rise (Quill and Crow Publishing House, 2025). His work has appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Appalachian Review, Rappahannock Review , and many other journals. He received his MFA from Converse College.
MICHAEL AMOS CODY grew up in the community of Walnut, within Madison County, NC. He has a PhD in English from USC and is a Professor in the Department of Literature and Language at East Tennessee State University. His works have been finalists for the 2025 American Fiction Awards and the Killer Nashville Claymore Award and first place finalist in the Short Story for the 2022 Feathered Quill Book Awards.
Michael Amos Cody’s Streets of Nashville captures the soul of Music City, the notion that the music never stops, that it is everywhere, as much a part of the city as the streets and buildings. Like the music sounding in my hotel room, music rings through the pages of this novel. Country music, of course, but also, because the book is set primarily in 1989, we hear ‘80s music in bars, restaurants, and echoing from the open windows of the cars in the streets. The main character, Ezra MacRae, hears the music with us, but as a songwriter and student of music he has an academic interest in each lyric and how it fits into the world. Each time a song is introduced into the narrative, MacRae recounts the songwriter’s name, as in “‘Naughty Naughty’ – John Parr, Songwriter” (252).
Beyond this professional interest in the business of music, we feel the weight of music in the novel as a spiritual entity of
Ezra, like many artists, has a day gig to pay the bills: he cleans swimming pools, often for famous Country music stars around Nashville in areas like Brentwood. As he tries to realize his dream of becoming a songwriter, he feels the pull of his hometown, Runion, NC, where his best friend and his parents live and where he knows he will wind up if the songwriting gig doesn’t work out.
In the midst of this struggle, Ezra witnesses a shooting. The killer sees him but doesn’t kill him, setting up the thriller bones of this story, in which our concerns shift from hoping Ezra finds success as a songwriter to hoping he will somehow survive. There are more murders, and soon authorities realize they have a serial killer on their hands – a serial killer who knows who Ezra is and where he lives and who stalks him as the novel progresses, both in reality, and in the fears that blossom in Ezra’s mind.
At its core, Streets of Nashville is a crime thriller in the vein of the best noir literature. But it struck me, reading the novel, that, while much has been written about both rural and urban noir, the focus of urban noir tends to be centered on the largest US cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. What we don’t see as often is Southern city noir, the assumption being that Southern noir must always be rural, must always be banjos on the front porch and swamp witches. In Streets of Nashville, the city takes center stage, the characters navigating its twists and turns as Ezra’s terror deepens: “Beneath a vivid blue sky, he moved along with the growing sense that these beloved streets of Nashville –
streets that had always seemed a kind of wonderland to his creative mind – had become bloodhaunted and threatening” (209). As much as Cody captures place in his novel he also captures the sense of what it was like to live in the late 1980s. Cody’s Southerners explain the mysteries of the world in the context of their Southern religious tradition that feels like a mix of superstition and Biblical rigidity. Ezra’s dad is a preacher, and while we don’t get the sense he judges Ezra harshly for wanting to write secular music in Nashville, I couldn’t help but feel a comparison to the character Preacher Boy in the movie Sinners, whose pastor father warns him not to pursue blues
music, as it is a path to wickedness. Ezra seems to internalize a sense of guilt and conflict. Cody also explores what it was like to be gay during the 1980s, with fears of religious judgment, persecution, all under the dark shadow of the AIDS epidemic.
An important part of any good thriller is the unveiling of the killer at the center of the story. Here, Cody doesn’t disappoint. We learn early on that we are dealing with a true psychopath in the story, with the killer’s motivations masterfully revealed slowly over the course of the novel, keeping us engaged with the mystery. Clues are left along the way, and as we’re strung along with Ezra, we collect them and try to figure out where the pieces might fit, why he’s doing what he’s doing, and why he’s so damned creepy.
If I have one criticism of the novel it would be that an important character when the novel opens doesn’t figure into the closure the novel offers for other characters, after playing a pivotal role in a particularly traumatic scene. I wanted to know how she dealt with the trauma and her resolution alongside the other characters.
This novel will please readers of Southern literature, fans of rural and urban noir, and those who love true crime documentaries and podcasts. One more thing: before you sit down to read this book, pick yourself up a large chocolate milk and a Moon Pie (IYKYK) and put on the song “More Than This” by Roxy Music (songwriter Bryan Ferry). Trust me. n
ABOVE Michael Amos Cody (left) with Peter McDade and NCLR Senior Associate Editor Christy Hallberg on her podcast, Rock Is Lit, 15 Apr. 2025 (Listen here.)
2025 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE FINALIST
BY JANE SHLENSKY
Be Still and Know
Each weekend, I go home to care for Mama, listen to her disease repeat itself, and I am Zen in those moments, for her sake.
On Sundays, we sing hymns or listen to Wake Forest University choir on radio. We talk of birds and flowering plants, and Mama asks my name.
I’m Jane, I say, and her eyes light up.
“I have a daughter named Jane!”
I know. I’m her. Her face clouds.
“No, Jane’s young with long dark hair!” That was thirty years ago
Now I’m white-haired, like you. She takes my hand.
“My own girl,” she marvels.
JANE SHLENSKY, a veteran teacher and musician, holds an MFA from UNC Greensboro. She was selected as winner of the North Carolina Poetry Society’s 2023 Poet Laureate Award by Laureate Emeritus Joseph Bathanti, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart four times. Her recent poetry and fiction have appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies, including Pinesong, Kakalak, moonShine review, Nostos, and her chapbook Barefoot on Gravel (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Previously, she appeared in NCLR Online 2015 and NCLR Online Spring 2025
“All this time, you were my own girl.” Later I read aloud her favorite poems from her first book, Edgewood Poems, lines she once recited to me as we worked the fields. She has forgotten who she once was, but she smiles as I read.
When I ask if she can name the poet, herself, she hesitates. She hates forgetting. Mary Craver, I tell her, but she shakes her head. “Seems like I remember the name,” she says, “but I don’t believe I ever met the lady.”
Sundowner’s Syndrome (digital print on canvas, from original watercolor, 36x48) by Michael Dorsey; in the collection of J.Y. Joyner Library, East Carolina Univeristy
MICHAEL DORSEY received his MA and MFA in Painting from Bowling Green State University. Before retiring from East Carolina University, he served as Dean of the School of Art and Design and then Interim Dean of the College of Fine Arts and Communication. He is a Signature Member of the Watercolor Society of North Carolina, and he has served as an exhibition juror for professional competitions in North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Illinois. His work is shown nationally and is included in permanent collections at the Muscarelle Museum of Art, the College of New Jersey, the Library Collection of the School of Art Institute of Chicago, and the University of Perugia in Italy. One of his paintings inspired by James Applewhite’s poetry is published in NCLR Online 2013, and NCLR has featured his art in the 2016 and 2019 print issues.
JUST ONE MORE THING YOU DON’T KNOW
a review by Rebecca Duncan
Angel Khoury. Between Tides. Dzanc Books, 2021.
REBECCA DUNCAN is Professor of English and Director of General Education at Meredith College in Raleigh, NC. She teaches and writes on British and postcolonial literature. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Genre, Mosaic, Southeast Review , Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and Pisgah Review. Read her essay on Zoe Kincaid Brockman in NCLR 2019.
ANGEL KHOURY has worked as an associate editor of Coastland Times and publisher of Outer Banks Magazine . She has served on the board of Outer Banks Conservationists, owners of the Currituck Beach Lighthouse and Island Farm. Between Tides was chosen as a Publishers Weekly Big Indie Book. Khoury is a Virginia native and graduate of the University of Virginia. She is working on a second novel.
Jacket copy that puts a novelist in the company of Virginia Woolf is at once high praise and a bit risky, as not all readers appreciate a modernist sensibility and might prefer narration anchored firmly in time and place. Angel Khoury’s debut novel, Between Tides, rewards readers of both persuasions with an intimate, lyrically rendered story of two women’s unique attachments to an elusive and eccentric man. The trick is to conquer one’s impatience and settle in and read the novel slowly – line by line, page by page. Only then will an abundance of anchoring cues and clues shine brightly through the luminous halo of the exquisite prose.
An early clue to the novel’s structure and themes is its title. The notion of “between” reverberates in the setting, the storyline, and the characters’ relationships. Events and actions take place between two wars: the Civil War and World War II. Characters inhabit two coastal regions, Cape Cod and North Carolina’s Outer Banks, and there is a good amount of movement between the two.
Gilead “Gil” Lodge, the absent focus of everyone’s attention, slides up and down the coast between two not-necessarilysequential marriages. Land literally appears and disappears between high and low tides along the coast, affecting life on a personal and historical scale. When Lodge’s late-life daughter Gilly appears at the Cape Cod home of the first wife, Blythe, the two explore and begin to repair the empty, often painful
“between” spaces the man’s dual life imposed upon them.
As the story begins, Gilly, born in North Carolina to Lodge and his second wife, is a Red Cross nurse awaiting deployment to Europe or North Africa. She approaches Blythe for information about her father, who died in his seventies when she was a child. She is shocked to learn that Blythe is more than a distant acquaintance. Their interaction serves as a structural device that launches multiple layers of recollection and revelation. Each character has something valuable to contribute to the other’s quest to comprehend Lodge and his effect on her life. Delays in Gilly’s deployment extend and deepen the women’s bond. The capricious Gilly makes herself at home with Blythe, who lets down her cantankerous, sardonic guard and weaves a series of stories about the version of Gil she knew. One filter remains, though. Blythe’s love for Gil seems never to have lessened, even though he maintained his emotional distance and ultimately abandoned her to build a duplicate life in North Carolina, augmented by four daughters and two hotels. On the eve of one departure, for instance, he turns to Blythe as they lie entwined in the sand and says, “We are not spinning smoothly, the earth is off balance. I feel an irresistible urge to leave” (138). He promises to return, and Blythe muses, “And I did believe him, against the evidence of my own heart. For the heart, like the sun, cannot alter its orbit, even when covered by cloud,
even when masked by pleasure, or pain” (139). Readers may find Blythe’s fixation endearing or exasperating. Or they may shift their attention from this somewhat confining context and follow Khoury’s turn toward the factual and the historical.
In an afterword, Khoury shares the encounters, memories, and research that inspired the story. Gilly Lodge arises from a woman Khoury met on Roanoke Island. That woman’s father led a life that aligns with Gil’s: keeper of a lifesaving station, ornithologist, owner of hotels. Vague newspaper accounts, amplified by rumors, opened the way for the fictional Gil to emerge as a larger-than-life, imaginative charmer who could embrace intimacy at one moment and retreat into solitude the next.
On Cape Cod, Gil works at the Chatham Beach lifesaving service, the forerunner of the US Coast Guard. The maritime rescues described there and later in North Carolina are factual for the most part. The novel offers a compelling glimpse of the lifesaving service that the fictional Gil enlivens with a few astonishing feats and a few catastrophic missteps. Simply put, he does not follow rules or respect authority, unless doing so serves his personal values and agenda. He especially dislikes the mandated telegraph system. It’s amusing to see his men surreptitiously learning Morse code and not so disappointing to see what the coastal winds do to the poles and wires.
In a previous (nonfiction) book, Manteo: A Roanoke Island
Town (1999), Khoury offers a more comprehensive history of the lifesaving service. A chapter on “Medal Men: Lifesavers and Lightkeepers” draws on personal and official accounts of those who have protected the coastline and rescued distressed ships since the 1800s. Hurricanes, along with the diurnal shifting of sands and winds, have for centuries put maritime endeavors at risk. The men on the shore, often admired by crowds of female observers, saved lives and cargo using the best innovations and resources they could muster. For instance, Khoury’s novel refers often to the “breeches buoy,” and an illustration in her history shows this flotation device, with its pants-like lower hammock, ready to carry a rescued crew member or passenger to shore. Gil’s real-life counterpart may or may not have left Cape Cod in 1866 for news of his brother Ben’s death in the Civil War battle known as the Chicamacomico Races. (Chicamacomico is now Rodanthe.) Khoury absorbs
this rumor into Gil’s character and thus enables a retelling of this crucial fight for control of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse and two forts. Gil’s encounter with a group of locals makes history personal, as Gil reads aloud his late brother’s letters and takes in first-hand accounts of the battle. At one point he observes one of these new acquaintances and imagines that Ben “could have been this man’s brother” (80).
This is a novel of discovery of self and others, a novel of revelation that filters through the hearts and minds of each fascinating yet humanly flawed character. The language is stunning, yet its unique lyricism lies in the pace of the narrative unfolding: at times hesitant, coy, contemplative, at times sudden, abrupt, intense. Together, the language, historical anecdotes, and the present action put readers in touch with a life governed by tides, weather, marshes, ever-shifting sands, and all of the natural and invasive forms of life that thrive there. n
ABOVE Cape Hatteras Lighthouse and keepers quarters, circa 1908; from the Durwood Barbour Collection of North Carolina Postcards; North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, Wilson Library, UNC Chapel Hill
SAND AND SPIRIT
a review by Chelsey Parsons
Hannah Bunn West with Ann-Cabell Baum. Save Our Sand Dunes. Illustrated by Larry McCarter and Anne Marshall Runyon. North Carolina Office of Archives and History, 2024.
CHELSEY PARSONS is a tutor, freelance writer, and aspiring author in Wilkesboro, NC. She received a BA in English literature from Western Carolina University and an MA in professional and technical communication from East Carolina University. During her master’s program, she served as an NCLR intern. She is working on her first book, a creative nonfiction memoir recounting her family’s adventures in North Carolina’s state parks.
HANNAH BUNN WEST, a native of the Outer Banks of North Carolina, is an author, freelance writer, and community advocate. West is a UNC Wilmington graduate who studied creative writing and elementary education. Her articles have been featured in Our State Magazine , and she regularly writes for Milepost Magazine . West also serves as the Layout & Design Editor for The Doctor’s Creek Journal, the publication of The Friends of Portsmouth Island.
ANN-CABELL BAUM grew up in Nags Head and now resides in Raleigh, NC. She earned a bachelor’s degree in business management and marketing from NC State University. Baum is a businesswoman, broker, and realtor. Additionally, she serves as vice chairwoman of Friends of Jockey’s Ridge State Park and as a Roanoke Island Historical Association board member.
As a mother of four and a long-time admirer of Jockey’s Ridge State Park, I was deeply moved by Save Our Sand Dunes by Hannah Bunn West with Ann-Cabell Baum. This beautifully illustrated children’s book describes the inspirational story of how one family, a determined mother and her three children, spearheaded the effort to preserve this natural wonder. Jockey’s Ridge has always been a favorite destination for my family. When visiting the state park my children delight in sliding and jumping down the dunes, flying kites high above the sandy peaks, and embarking on endless adventures. It’s no surprise that this park, drawing over a million visitors annually, holds a special place in North Carolina’s heart. Reading this story together added a profound layer of appreciation for the park’s history and the activism that ensured its preservation.
Hannah Bunn West and AnnCabell Baum capture the inspiring tale of Jockey’s Ridge, the tallest living sand dune system on the east coast, and the determined people who fought to protect it. The book opens with a vivid description of this unique landscape: “They are barrier islands, which can be found all along North Carolina. But one of them has something special – a sand dune that is taller, wider, and bigger than all the rest” (1). The narrative provides fascinating details about the dune’s history and ecology, noting that Jockey’s Ridge is estimated to be “3,000 to 4,000 years old”
(3) and introduces readers to its rare ecosystem, where “three sandy peaks, with no vegetation atop them” (4) contrast with the grasses and trees at the base that is home to foxes, raccoons, and deer. The book continues by asking readers to engage with the story by noting the park is home to “400 different bird species” and asking, “have you seen any of these birds at Jockey’s Ridge or in other areas of the Outer Banks?” (7).
The pivotal moment in the early 1970s came when the Baum children, discovered that their beloved Jockey’s Ridge was in danger:
Jockey’s Ridge was a personal playground for Ann-Cabell, her sister Inglis, and their brother Gibbs. It was a magical place where they could hear squawking gulls, the whistling winds, and the gentle lapping of waves. But on this day, they heard something odd and out of place. They followed the low, rumbling sound across the sands until they found a bulldozer, ready to dig into the base of the dune. (8)
The children ran to tell their mother, Carolista Baum, who quickly became the heart of the movement to save Jockey’s Ridge. She is “known for making beautiful jewelry,” the authors tell us. “[b]ut she was also known for getting things done” (10) When faced with the sight of bulldozers, she took action: “She marched over to Jockey’s Ridge with her three children trailing behind. . . . Carolista walked right up to the bulldozer. She stood in front of it and
RIGHT Illustrations from the book by Anne Marshall Runyon; see the book’s cover on page 41 for an example of a painting by the book’s other artist, Larry McCarter
motioned for it to stop (11). She rooted her feet determined to stop them and to save Jockey’s Ridge: “[S]he stood for the land, for the animals, for her children, and for all the people” (12). Her defiance, standing in front of the machine, became the catalyst for a community effort to protect the dune.
Save Our Sand Dunes not only provides heartfelt moments but also significant details and dates. It is touching to learn that thanks to Carolista and her children, “in 1974 Jockey’s Ridge was declared a Natural National Landmark” (17). The following year, North Carolina purchased “152 acres of land to create Jockey’s Ridge State Park” (17), showcasing the profound impact community action can have in preserving natural treasures.
For families, Save Our Sand Dunes offers a compelling narrative of environmental advocacy and community action. It’s a story of empowerment and a reminder that even small actions can lead to monumental change. Furthermore, the book emphasizes the power of collective action: “[K]ids all over the Outer
Banks collected spare change in cardboard canisters that said ‘SOS! Save Our Sand Dunes.’ The people to Preserve Jockey’s Ridge sold bumper stickers, T-shirts, notepads, kits, and more all printed with the same message” (14). My children, who are three, four, ten, and twelve, were captivated by the idea that kids their age played such a pivotal role in preserving something so significant.
West and Baum seamlessly transition from discussing the park’s history to the present, telling how “[v]isitors enjoy ranger programs, activities for kids, nature hikes, hang gliding, kite flying, and breathtaking sunsets. And, of course, racing each other down the dune” (19). They recount how, in 2024, a group that included Carolista’s three children “gathered to remember and celebrate Carolista by dedicating a highway historical marker in honor of her hard work” (20).
Illustrations by Larry McCarter and Anne Marshall Runyon bring the story and its setting to life, capturing the natural splendor of the sand dunes and the spirit of the movement.
The mix of visuals, watercolors, photographs, graphics, and even newspaper clippings add an engaging and dynamic layer to the narrative. A particularly special touch is the scrapbook page at the end, inviting children to add their own Jockey’s Ridge memories, making the experience interactive and personal. This creative blend of illustrations helps bring history to life in a way that captivates young readers and invites them to become a part of the story. Hannah Bunn West and AnnCabell Baum have created a touching tribute to Jockey’s Ridge and Carolista Baum and shown the enduring spirit of community advocacy. The book’s vibrant illustrations and engaging narrative make it perfect for reading aloud to younger children. For older elementary-aged kids, the blend of historical facts and real-life activism offers an inspiring and educational reading experience. Whether you’re a longtime visitor or new to the story, Save Our Sand Dunes is a remarkably crafted reminder of what we can achieve when we stand together for what matters. n
More, More, More
by Margaret D. Bauer, Editor
Welcome to more writers new to our pages, beginning with the 2025 Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Prize winner Asma Abike, who was also a finalist in the 2025 James Applewhite Poetry Prize contest. Her Applewhite poem will be in a 2026 online issue. Here you will find links to enjoy Asma’s winning performance, as well as the performances of the other Green Prize honorees in the story on the 2025 contest results. And stay tuned for an update about this contest, which will evolve in 2026.
Another winner: Hunter Mendenhall received the premiere Barrax/Bayes award for military poets. This is the newest contest sponsored by the North Carolina Writers’ Network. It is named for two of North Carolina's beloved poetry professors who also served in the military: Gerald Barrax and Ronald Bayes. The UNC Chapel Hill Creative Writing program manages the contest for the Network, and NCLR will continue to consider the winner and other honorees for publication. For the 2025 contest, since our 2026 theme is military-focused, we are considering all of the finalists for publication.
The other poems in this section are by first-time finalists in the 2025 James Applewhite Poetry Prize contest, with several more poems from that contest forthcoming in 2026 issues (and a couple more in this issue’s Flashbacks section). We send thanks to our Poetry Editor Jeffrey Franklin for selecting these finalists for publication, and for all the years he commented on just about every poem that reached him. Jeff retired from the University of Colorado in Denver a few years ago, and after his 2025 Applewhite contest reading last summer, he extended that retirement to include his service to NCLR and to all the North Carolina poets he touched during his quarter century on staff.
NCLR manages the Doris Betts Fiction Prize for the North Carolina Writers’ Network, and in this section you will find one of the 2024 contest finalists, by SD Williams. Read the winning story and another of the finalists in the 2025 print issue, which finally came out late summer (we apologize for the delay). Also in this issue, read Elisa Troncoso-Cabello’s essay, a finalist from the 2025 Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize contest. More of this contest’s submissions are forthcoming in 2026 issues. Finally, more book reviews. With thanks to Book Review Editor Kristi Southern, with this issue, NCLR can boast reviewing 69 books in our three 2025 online issues. I call that fulfilling our mission to promote North Carolina writers. The response from North Carolina writers to our weekly book review initiative has been so enthusiastic that I want to give special credit to Kristi, who keeps the process running smoothly – from review assignments going out to completed reviews coming in. And thanks to the editors who read reviews ahead of me – Anne Mallory and Ken Parille for the poetry reviews – and behind me – Christy Alexander Hallberg, Rebecca Bernard, and, new to the team, incoming Poetry Editor Amber Flora Thomas. Book reviews also provide our student staff with the valuable experience of seeing a review through production from initial formatting through layout and including quote- and fact-checking. In this era of providing practical work-related experience within university curricula, NCLR prepares ECU students for careers in publishing. We invite all of our readers to consider sending your future writer or editor (your student, your child, yourself, a friend or relative) to ECU. And you can tell them to look me up to hear about opportunities to join the NCLR staff in the work that fulfills our mission “to preserve and promote the state’s rich literary history.” n
70 The Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Prize Contest Brings New and Returning Voices to NCLR by Devra Thomas Facts
Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Prize poem by Asma Abike
Our History Revealed Performance poem by Dionne Hunter
Dirty Performance poem by JeanMarie Olivieri
Shadow Work Performance poem by Marcial (CL Tha Artist) Harper
72 The Stained Ouroboros a review by Dustin Pickering
n Kashiana Singh, Witching Hour
74 Dance for the Little Angel creative nonfiction by Elisa Troncoso-Cabello art by Doris Barahona
78 The Dangerous Myths of Motherhood a review by Janis Harrington n Bridget Bell, All that We Ask of You Is to Always Be Happy
80 Playing with Postmodern Pastiche a review by Sharon E. Colley
n Alan Michael Parker, Bingo Bango Boingo
Miscellany NORTH CAROLINA
82 Alex Sees Him on the Water a short story by SD Williams art by Nat Dickinson
86 The I and the Eye: Poetic Ways of Seeing and Showing a review by David E. Poston
n Terri Kirby Erickson, Night Talks
n Irene Blair Honeycutt, Mountains of the Moon
91 Salty Son Barrax/Bayes Prize poem by Hunter Mendenhall art by Ed Macomber
92 A Journey of Identity, Magic, and Power a review by Abby Trzepacz
n Tracy Deonn, Bloodmarked photography by James O. Reynolds
95 The Art of War a poem by Terry Cawley art by JJ Jiang
98 A Collection of Characters Gathering Outside the Margins a review by Kristi Southern n Joanna Pearson, Bright and Tender Dark and Now You Know It All
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE
6 n North Carolina LGBTQ+ Literature fiction and book reviews
40 n Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues poetry, book reviews, and literary news
2025 JAKI SHELTON GREEN PERFORMANCE POETRY PRIZE BRINGS NEW AND RETURNING VOICES TO NCLR
by Devra Thomas, Digital Editor
The performance poetry scene continues to expand, welcoming anyone who wishes to stand behind a microphone and share their verses. Memorization isn’t required: many poets read from quickly thumbed notes on a phone or shuffle pieces of paper. Performers are diverse in all ways, and this reflects in the multitude of topics and memories conveyed in their spoken words. Slams, Open mics, and poetry readings continue to grow throughout communities, at libraries, bookstores, and coffeeshops. Local poets laureate are expected to be as accomplished performing poems as they are writing them.
Our 2025 Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Prize, sponsored by the North Carolina Poetry Society, continues to receive video submissions from a diverse group of performers from across the state, highlighting how the scene continues to grow. Named after the incredible artist and state poet laureate, the contest invites performers to draw creative inspiration from Green’s renowned expressive work.
This year’s guest judge was acclaimed writer, performer, and teacher El’Ja Bowens, of Fayetteville, NC. Bowens, an Army veteran, founded Southeast Regional North Carolina poetry competition and leads a slam poetry team to compete in Southern Fried, the country’s current largest performance poetry competition. He is a Kennedy Center Teaching Artist, leading poetry workshops for schools throughout the state. He was appointed to the North Carolina Writers’ Network Board of Trustees this year and serves many literacy nonprofits in Fayetteville.
“Facts,” written and performed by Asma Abike won the 2025 Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Prize Contest. Bowens praised Abike’s poem: “the tone, the delivery, the presentation all wrapped up into an awesome poem dealing with a lot of current events not just happening here in America, but in the world as a whole.”
Abike is a poet and painter from Houston, TX, now based in Charlotte, NC. A first-generation
Nigerian-American Muslim, her work explores the rich intersections and dualities of her identity, weaving together themes of heritage, faith, and belonging. Through both visual and literary art, she creates spaces for complex stories to breathe and be heard. Her dedication to her craft has earned her numerous accolades, including being named the inaugural Blackberry Peach National Poetry Champion and a Watering Hole Fellow.
The North Carolina Poetry Society sponsors the Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Prize contest
ABOVE Asma Abike performing “Facts” for submission to the Jaki Shelton Green Performance Prize contest, Apr. 2025
to highlight the talent and culture of spoken word across the state. They provide honoraria for the winners and the judge, and, as part of the recognition, awardees are invited to present their winning poems before the North Carolina Poetry Society at their fall conference, along with other award-winning poets. Our second- and third-place and honorable mention honorees all presented at the Cary Arts Center on September 13.
Dionne D. Hunter received second place. Also from Charlotte, Hunter is a talented author, poet, and spoken word artist, and a veteran of the US Navy. Her military service, experiences as a mother and grandmother, and journey as a Black woman in America deeply enrich her artistic voice. Her poetry has been featured in several anthologies, while her spoken word performances and film series have been screened domestically and internationally. She was named the 2024 AMG Heritage Awards Spoken Word Artist of the Year.
Hunter’s performance, entitled “History Lessons Revealed,” moved Bowens, who remarked, “I am impressed by the culmination of Black history and using art and storytelling to connect to why these things need to stay relevant and revealed in a world trying to not acknowledge its contribution.” Her poem
was inspired by paintings by Aisha Thomas, reflecting how one art form can inspire works in another.
The third-place honoree, JeanMarie Olivieri from Mebane, NC, is a retired business writer now mostly writing poetry. Her poem “Dirty” is lighthearted in tone and Olivieri delivered it with aplomb, calling attention to her muse, her artificial leg and braces. Bowens praised, “how the poem seems to be comedic, but . . . addresses a lot of issues dealing with financial stability, disability, and just trying to make it.”
In our first repeat, last year’s thirdplace winner, Marcial “CL Tha Artist” Harper, was given honorable mention for his performance of “Shadow Work.” The poem is quiet and powerful at the same time. Bowens calls it “a poem of a man and his vulnerability” and says he “loved the passion and the wordplay.” Harper is a multifaceted poet, rapper, health coach, and business consultant. He regularly performs in Durham and throughout the Triangle.
In its third year, the Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Prize contest has brought several new voices , if not to our pages, to our readers’ ears. We invite you to click on the YouTube graphics to watch each performance. n
ABOVE Honorees performaning at the North Carolina Poetry Society’s Fall Meeting, held at the Cary Arts Center in Cary, NC, 13 Sep. 2025; LEFT Dionne Hunter performing “History Lessons Revealed,” CENTER JeanMarie Olivieri performing “Dirty,”
RIGHT Marcial Harper performing “Shadow Work”; photographs by Bill Griffin
Kashiana Singh’s latest poetry collection, Witching Hour, offers language from science and medicine as well as Eastern spiritual traditions. The central metaphor is the making of the whole woman through rebirth. This poetic subject includes but is not limited to the thought of creation as a returning to oneself, and Singh explores birth and death as part of a universal creative process. The dividing lines between selfhood, nature, and the universe give the book thematic structure and shape its philosophy. Woman heals her psychological and physical wounds as she experiences cycles of birth and death, coming closer to divine happiness. In “Ouroboros,” she introduces the collection with scattered senses that need gathering together:
While there is ample time let me collect, a parceled bewilderment, gather the fraying collage, this earth
the ananda and Anantha of roshini in liquid wombs
DUSTIN PICKERING is the author of multiple books including Salt and Sorrow (Chitrangi, 2016) and A Matter of Degrees (Hawakal, 2017). He founded Transcendent Zero Press and is the publisher of Harbinger Asylum, a literary and arts journal. He is a former contributor to Huffington Post. He lives in Houston, TX.
KASHIANA SINGH serves as the Managing Editor for Poets Reading the News and is the president of the North Carolina Poetry Society. She is the author of Crushed Anthills (Yavanika Press, 2020) and Woman by the Door (Apprentice House, 2022). Her work has been featured in several publications, including Poets Reading the News, Rattle Poetry, Visual Verse, Oddball Magazine, Turnpike Magazine, Inverse Journal, Counter-Currents , and others. She was recently appointed as a council member for the Literary Arts Society for the Women’s Indian Chamber of Commerce and industry.
Singh’s poems in previous collections explored place (Crushed Anthills) and womanhood (Woman by the Door). Witching Hour enlarges the scope by focusing on one’s cosmic place. Comparing Witching Hour to Singh’s previous collections allows readers to scrutinize her development from particulars to broader themes of universalism and humanism. The poems maintain a concern with the female form and body but invite metaphysical interpretations.
In “All is Ouroboros,” Singh conceptualizes galaxy formation as part of the birthing process
and compares the universe to a woman’s body, inscrutable and suffering through travails:
let one thing stay clear as the world catalogues amnesia, and names, always names – earth itself is named . . . galaxies are all undercurrents of leeched blood . . .
Like language directing and delineating form and sign, life returns to the moment of creation. This is the metaphor of the witching hour.
Creating poetry is an act of joy and rebellion, protesting the human condition at its sorrowful root. However, Witching Hour seems more inclined to describe what life is rather than petition against its struggles. The book contains three sections: “Earth: Prithvi” (of beginnings and endings), “Water: Apas” (on resilience and renewal), and “Aether: Akash” (the essence of emptiness).
The poem titles reflect joy and work in light of creation as in the first poem of the “Earth: Prithvi” section, “How to Love Blueberries like a 7-Month-Old.” After describing the infant eating blueberries in her arms, the baby is “indigo / a blue god / in my arms.” Singh writes in the same poem, “he traces hieroglyphs across my arms,” suggesting the infant’s imagination. While a seven-month-old is not able to form coherent sentences, their gestures may still have some meaning. Singh captures a child’s imagination within the moment, making the act of eating transformative work.
In “How to Destroy a Sunny Side Up like an 8-Month-Old,” the poet highlights the same childlike imagination as applied to the common world:
witch story drunk on liquefied wells of ovum bitter sweet yarrow an unwavering resolve of incubation.
This ending suggests that the poem is about more than an infant playing with his morning eggs. The eggs and their intimate devouring parallel creation and destruction within our universe (“puddle lake full of sunshine,” to name one metaphor), as well as the female persona – hence “witch story.” Singh artfully blends a childlike imagination with the act of creating, particularly through the body.
In “How to Collect Blessings like a Newborn,” Singh suggests babies “bury poems inside bodies /. . . / follow chants, own a tingsha bell,” lines that follow the logic of the previous poem. The poet doesn’t shy away from celebrating the woe of the body in “Menopausal Orcas”: “earth’s womb holds / rivers folding into
creases / mother’s marionette lines / now mine,” suggesting the heaviness and frailty of a body simultaneously. These lines also parallel our relationship with Nature by metaphorically linking earth’s womb with the mother’s.
Witching Hour is full of poems of joy and celebration. Lines such as “her heart / is an orchard / of being. / it chuckles sometimes” in “We Swallow 8 Spiders in a Lifetime” engage a reader’s sense of humor. A common image is the forest, which provides a metaphorical space for healing, leading to joyful community. “Instructing a Yoga Class” offers these lines: “Find afterlife in craters touch their hollow / make space for the woman adjacent too / browse barefoot into the frangipani forest / follow in footprints of a mycorrhizal web.” The space after “craters” exemplifies a hollow crater, offering concrete symbolism for the poem’s image.
Singh’s advice also reminds readers of community and what can be learned from imitating our natural habitations.
In “Grandmother Wonders if She Was a C Minus Mother,” Singh reflects on a woman’s concerns following the birth of a grandchild. Although the narrative seems personal, much of the imagery and scope move beyond it. She asks in the poem’s 1998 section, “how much craving can a mother take, how much of mother can a daughter be, / how a fledgling swells inside adjusted body.” In the 2024 section she embraces uncertainty again: “had she been a C minus mother, made poor / parenting choices, did she care enough, sacrifice enough poetry for ancestors, / stay curious.”
The poems develop a mythological purpose – a sacrifice to ancestors. Why should poetry be a medium for survival? Singh suggests the answer in “How to Be Boundaryless like a Newborn”: “original words of mercy, acceptance / a bowing inward and into this hatchling god who / stays wrapped in my cradled orison.” Poetry helps her accept life, both distant and present.
Witching Hour reminds us of the human urge to create while allowing the freedom to decide to create, and even how to judge oneself in the act of creating. The title may suggest some innate mischief or secrecy to the act of creating, but the pains and trials of giving birth and seeing life develop over time are deeper themes. Witching Hour balances the contradictions of life with artistic grace. n
FINALIST, 2025 ALEX ALBRIGHT CREATIVE NONFICTION PRIZE
L ittle Angel for the Dance
BY ELISA TRONCOSO-CABELLO
with art by Doris Barahona
We ride the bikes as far as we can, which isn’t very far, because soon the path is overrun with rocks and the wind is so strong it hurts our legs to pedal. The closer we get to the cliffs the more the seagulls swarm, blocking out the gray of the sky with white and their cries like children. Anna calls out to us from the head of the group and tells us we should leave our bikes here by the wall and walk the rest of the way to the Black Fort. The islands are cold and dark and my body feels like it’s thrumming on the edge of something terrible. There’s a cool fear. The bulk of it sits in my chest and is pointed like a star, digging into my lungs.
“It’s up that road,” says Yasmine as we set our bikes against the stone wall. I take my camera from my bag, look around. Suddenly gray sky poured open with rain, the moors extending into the fog, sheep bleating anxiously through the hail. It’s a couple of months past lambing season, and the little ones are still stumbly and helpless,
It’s funny – to fear someone that’s now a shadow, even at the end of the world.
Hill where she writes for The Daily Tar Heel. She was the 2023 Thomas Wolfe Scholar for creative writing and is the recipient of the Bland Simpson Prize in Creative Non-Fiction.
sheltering in the hollows of their mothers. At the sight of them my eyes fill with tears.
As we clamber over the locked gate I am shaking. I saw him on the ferry over here, briefly: a flash of a beard, green eyes. While we were docking I looked over the people waiting to get off and there he was. The ship was rocking gently in the bay and the cries of the gulls were pouring into my ears and I felt like I was about to shatter and I just kept staring until the crowd swallowed him. It’s funny – to fear someone that’s now a shadow, even at the end of the world. At least this is a place well-suited for terror – an ancient field of stones, older than living memory, thousands of hands stacking up great dark walls for miles and miles.
Grant shows me a pink bunch of flowers cradled amongst the rocks and a knot catches in my throat. Something so fragile in the middle of a storm. I think they like their life here, cleansed by the rain, sheltered by the stone, balancing over a violent sea. I know he would have hated this.
The boy who raped me liked the ocean calm. We would go through all of that long May down to the beach, a short walk in the exuberant Spanish sun. It was always bright and always warm, and the water was still and cool and aquamarine. He liked to force me underwater and kiss me, which
DORIS BARAHONA was born in Santiago, Chile, and has lived in Charlotte, NC, since 1997. She studied Psychology at UMass Amherst, earned her PhD in Education from UCLA, and has spent the last twenty-eight years in education. She completed a residency with artist Andy Braitman and has participated in workshops around the US. As a 2023 ArtPop artist, her work appeared on a Times Square billboard, as well as on local billboards around the US. In 2023, her work won second place in the Mooresville (NC) Arts Springfest. Her piece Purple Rain was selected for inclusion in Charlotte’s Novant Health Agnes Binder Weisiger Breast Health Center. She is a member of StudioWorks Gallery & Artist Collective and Nine Eighteen Nine Studio Gallery, both in Charlotte.
ELISA TRONCOSO-CABELLO is a writer and visual artist from Greensboro, NC. She currently attends UNC Chapel
The water let him hold me; the water kept still.
terrified me, even back when I loved him. He’d hold me down for a little too long until I started punching at his arm to let me up. The water let him hold me; the water kept still.
The first few times I screamed at him after, but I learned quickly this would make the rest of my day unlivable. I told myself I didn’t really like to be underwater anyways, which put me in his line of sight for that terrifying game, and started instead to float on top of the waves stretched out like a sea star. I always had my eyes on him. Sometimes I thought too hard about how it felt to be surrounded by a vast sea contaminated with his cruelty, and I would have to swim over to the rocks to throw up. I told him the sun made me nauseous.
In the island of Chiloé, off the Southern coast of Chile, where there is very little sun, the rin is danced by two couples forming a square. Chiloé is cut off from the mainland by a violently cold ocean, sparsely populated only by communities of fishermen and their families. The culture of the island is rich and insular and ancient. The mythology is fervently believed and carefully guarded in the indigenous enclaves that have attempted to preserve their memory in the face of encroaching cultural extinction. Most of the music and dance of the rin has died out, but I was raised listening to the remaining compositions, many written by the mid-century folk singer Violeta Parra.
Rin del Angelito was one of the last she ever wrote. It was released in 1966, one year before she ended her own life. It was written to be played at the funerals of babies and toddlers, who died so young and so pure, it was believed, that they became angels upon the moment of their deaths. Parra sings that the soul of the baby, restless with youth, seeks life in all its places – it becomes a fish, a bird on the heights, a rose blooming in the spring. My parents played it for me in the car when I was young and told me gravely there was nothing worse than losing a child. The butterflies will flutter quietly around his crib, Parra sang. The rain will wash his face in the morning.
There’s a moment where my arms are interlocked with Yasmine’s and Grant and Anna are beside us and we’re walking up to the edge of the cliff and suddenly everyone cries out. Below us is a cove deep in cliffs hundreds of feet high and rushing with fields of blue-green foam. We collapse. It feels like maybe there’s never been anything more beautiful, more dangerous, more visceral than this. And maybe it’s the exhaustion and maybe it’s the pouring rain, but I know now that I’m somewhere on the edge, some kind of gateway. Yasmine and I clutch each other on the ground, crying out loud, laughing hard. Mud on my jeans, mud on my face. I think if I just threw a stone fast enough I could hit the next world. I don’t know how to hold it all in my body, the enormity of this moment and my terror and my overwhelming love. Fear so great it becomes joy.
In the Distance (oil on canvas, 40x30) by Doris Barahona
When you have been raped the whole world treats you like a fool. Pity – so much of it – tears shining on people’s faces, that voice people use when they’re talking to a child, or someone they know to be unstable. Nothing you say matters, as far as I can tell, and everyone – regardless of their intentions – will find a way to make the hurt worse. Nobody knows how to act around you. Strangers regard you with a sort of quiet and tugging sadness. Boys become overprotective and girls overconcerned. When I first started telling people, I was utterly embarrassed by the emotion of their reactions. Jesus, I thought. They care a lot more than I do
In the immediate aftermath when fractures of memories were still coming back to me – the patterns of bruises on my legs, the blood I wiped up in the bathroom, scrambling for purchase while he held me against the edge of his balcony – I started submerging myself in freezing water. I ran the bathtub as cold as it could go and poured measuring cups full of ice until I got sick of carrying them from the kitchen. It hurt. It hurt so bad I had to teach myself how to breathe again, every time. It hurt like daggers. At night after my parents had gone to sleep I would listen to Sufjan Stevens and painfully dip my body in, limb by limb, convinced that I was utterly unaffected by what had happened that previous summer. Hours at a time. Sometimes I fell asleep in there, freezing cold, my hair stuck to my face, dreaming intently about a baby nestled in blankets, crying no matter what I did to comfort it.
When I jumped off the diving board in Galway I thought first, I’m going to die. And then, there has never been anything as good as this. All of the air left my body in a great rush. I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach, the kind of blow that wakes you up, makes you breathe bigger, makes the sky clearer. I couldn’t stop gasping but through the gasps I called out to Grant. “Come down,” I said, “it’s so good. God, it’s so good.”
“Is it cold?”
I laughed. “Oh my god,” I said. “Oh my god.”
We shook off our hair like dogs after and laughed and laughed. I knew this was the kind of ocean I loved, the ocean from home, the ocean that was frigid and all alive and all explosive with feeling. All that walk back to the hotel in our towels, dripping on the grass, immune suddenly to the wind and the cold and everything we’d complained about, I felt an intense relief. Thank
Coming Together (oil on canvas, 40x30) by Doris Barahona
god, my body had said, thank god for the shock. In the mirror at dinner, there was salt crusting on my eyebrows. I washed it off and faintly regretted it. I felt like a piece of the euphoria had gone with it, this tangible proof of what I had just done, what had been done to me.
For some reason in Ireland, I keep thinking about the boy I haven’t thought about in years. Rape is a life sentence, but we’re all fooled into thinking we’re free. And it is true that there was a long time where I hardly ever saw him in flashes moving through crowds, or heard his footsteps in my hallway during half-sleep at night, or broke into tears when I saw an ultrasound. Years and years.
The last time I lived by the ocean for longer than a week I was miscarrying. I was fourteen and angry and my body was happy to take care of what my mind couldn’t. I didn’t tell anyone. That night in Spain I walked fifty feet from our friend’s home down to meet the calm water and was filled with rage at the sight of it. A weak ocean, a fragile one. I didn’t want to drift atop the water like a starfish. I wanted to walk into it and flinch with cold, to be knocked over and dragged out and have to fight against a sea that didn’t care if it killed me. Much better, I thought, to be beaten by the water than by a man. When I got in the water I prayed that my baby had not simply disappeared but had been sent out to sea somewhere, its spirit part of this vast and living creature, reborn to live alongside tearing waves.
I was grateful for what my body had done for me but in the way that the boy lives in my periphery forever so too does the child. Still sometimes I wake up from dreams where a squishy baby fat with newness blinks wide brown eyes at me, and her hair is just a little bit red. Looking at her makes me feel a little sick. I don’t know how much of it is fear and how much is love.
I’m not supposed to miss
the baby.
I’m not supposed to miss the baby. People seem to think that because it was a rape the baby is more him than it is me. They say things like this is why we need abortion. They say things like at that point it was only cells. I guess so. Is that what she was? Is that all she ever gets to be? When they say this I feel like I’m dying. I don’t know how to explain it. The truth is that I’m sure I would have gotten an abortion if my body hadn’t done it for me. But I don’t know how to explain to them that the only reason I could have ever gone through with it is because I had no choice. I don’t think you get to say what you want when you’re talking about someone else’s baby. Who says you get to call her a clump of cells? Who says you get to call her anything other than what she was, something that wanted and hungered for life, proof that I survived him and came away with love?
Don’t they know it was my body that formed her?
People say it’s better that you don’t have a reminder of him. Don’t they know it was my body that formed her? When people find out how I got pregnant, at what age, they call the miscarriage a blessing. Sometimes they say I’m lucky. I don’t think it’s luck, to feel what it is to hold something tiny and infinite inside your body, a life that could go on and on, and to watch it all spill out of you.
Anna takes a picture of me drenched and crying. I feel like I’ve been baptized, like I’ve been hit so hard in the head I’ve been made completely new. The fear has been transformed. I’m not sure I can name the feeling in its place.
As we walk back towards our bikes, shellshocked, we spot the nests of the seagulls. They’re on the inside of the walls of the coves and we don’t understand how we didn’t see them before, because there’s hundreds of them, shocks of white against stark black stone. Everyone smiles. “All the little babies,” Anna says. n
THE DANGEROUS MYTHS OF MOTHERHOOD
a review by Janis Harrington
Bridget Bell. All that We Ask of You Is to Always Be Happy. CavanKerry Press, 2025.
JANIS HARRINGTON is the author of How to Cut a Woman in Half (Able Muse Press, 2022; reviewed in NCLR Online Winter 2024), a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award. Her first collection, Waiting for the Hurricane (St. Andrews University Press, 2017), was awarded the North Carolina Poetry Society’s Lena Shull Book Award. She is a multi-year finalist and honoree of NCLR’s James Applewhite Poetry Prize contest, including winning the contest in 2023. Read her winning poem in NCLR 2024, and find several of her other poems in other issues. Her work also appears in Tar River Poetry, Journal of the American Medical Association, and Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease (Kent State University Press, 2009).
BRIDGET BELL is originally from Toledo, OH. She is a graduate of the MFA program in creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and now lives in Durham, NC, where she teaches composition and literature at Durham Technical Community College. She also proofreads manuscripts for Four Way Books and has recently joined NCLR’s team of book reviewers. Read one of her reviews in the feature section of this issue.
Bridget Bell wanted to become a mother and began her journey with a planned, healthy pregnancy. Once home with her newborn daughter, she experienced dread, a desire to flee, and a profound sadness she couldn’t shake. The poem “Dangerous for Mothers” recounts:
I watched greeting cards pile up, pale pink and sparkly: blessing, little angel, princess, precious And then the crumbling would appear again, like a mudslide caving in a village, and I’d drop my head on the kitchen table and cry next to a plate of Chinese takeout.
The mudslide is eventually identified as postpartum depression (PPD), an illness affecting one mother in seven. These fearless, wrenching poems chronicle Bell’s illness and recovery, and advocate for other women affected by maternal mental illness.
Bell’s debut poetry collection, All That We Ask of You Is to Always Be Happy, spans her first pregnancy and early months with her daughter, her choice to have another child, a miscarriage, and the birth of her son. With unflinching honesty, she relates her experience of pregnancy and motherhood. The poems express anger and disillusionment with our culture’s insistence, as the book’s title infers, that mothers should feel only happiness and fulfillment. Bell’s unquestioned belief in this myth – and her doctors’ collusion – led her to blame herself: “Some nights I bow over the crib. Almost prostrate, // I whisper, You have changed everything, // and I hate you for it. Then shame // and its thorny arms. (“Origin Stories”).
A new mother’s distress is often dismissed as temporary “baby blues.” A doctor in Bell’s obstetric practice told her not to worry, crying is normal. Later, her daughter’s pediatrician asked how Mom was doing, giving Bell permission to admit she was not doing well and empowering her to seek treatment.
To stress that PPD is an illness, Bell weaves personal experience with her research into perinatal mood and anxiety disorders (PMAD). Each of the book’s four sections begins with one or more quotations from scientific literature, many of the poems have an epilogue from a clinician or expert, and notes provide references.
In the book’s introduction, Riah Patterson, MD, Director, Perinatal Psychiatry at UNC Chapel Hill, explains the urgent need for attention to perinatal mental health. PPD is childbirth’s most frequent complication. Yet, in the US, the illness most often goes undiagnosed and untreated. The most common cause of death for mothers in the first year postpartum is suicide. In the poem “I Worry About
Women,” Bell conjures Sylvia Plath making cookies and taking “the time to measure the intricacies // of a recipe, and then stick her head in that same hot space // where the dough baked.”
Bell helps readers grasp the severity of maternal mental illness through imagery and metaphor. The disturbing images in “This Is for the Mother (intrusive thoughts)” communicates PPD’s hellish reality:
for the mother who sees the baby slip from her loose grip, trip down the basement stairs, concrete flip, this is for the mother who fabricates the blue fat face under the bathwater’s skim, . . . for the mother who washes the knives quickly to get them out of her hands.
The poem’s repetition of the phrase “this is for the mother” creates momentum and urgency.
“Postpartum Depression” portrays PPD as “a window painted shut // a cornered mouse frantic along the floorboards // wheels on black ice – // spinning, spinning, spinning – .” The poem titled “On Not Waiting It Out to See If I Feel Better” employs the extended metaphor of a black widow spider and its “sticky weave through // my brain’s gray matter.”
The book’s thirty-four poems vary in style and length. They include a nine-page poem, a poem made up of twelve quatrains, as well as a list poem, a sestina, sonnets, anaphora, and an elegy. Bell skillfully chooses an effective form and lineation for each poem’s content.
“Sleep Deprivation” has inconsistent stanza lengths and lines scattered across the page. The poem’s fractured appearance mimics a sleepdeprived mother’s reality. In “Don’t Tell Her Congratulations,” Bell uses a seemingly random pattern for a different purpose. The lines stop and start as the speaker parses the word congratulations, and what it might mean to a new mother:
Because in con there is with, as in con leche, with milk and she might be sunbaked, so un-con leche that her breasts feel brittle feel failure feel conned as in the woman is deceived is duped is hoodwinked as in she’s suspect she suspects
the whole world has lied to her . . . ABOVE Bridget
In “Sestina in which the World Fails to Tell You about the Tedium,” the form’s looping stanzas and repeated end words convey how days run into nights for new parents, trapping them in a maze of monotony.
Bell creates tension between form and subject matter. As an example, she selects the discipline of a Shakespearean sonnet, with its orderly rhyme scheme and uniform line lengths, to express her fear that she is losing her mind:
The Peas
Pole after pole of pea plants, thick with their distended pods and the fear that I’m going crazy again – or rather the fear that if I stop talking, I will be suspended in my bonfire brain, and so as not to think, I blather
to the peas. Up the poles they twist and climb, their little, green hands clinging to anything they can touch, through thyme, through basil and mint. To the peas, I am singing
an off-key rendition from Jesus Christ Superstar, asinine, my insistence of Mary Magdalene’s promise –everything’s alright, yes, everything’s fine –the peas are incredulous like Doubting Thomas:
We’ll believe it when we see it, they demur. I shut up and concur.
Sound and image increase this poem’s intensity. The repeated “p” and long “e” sounds are playful and energetic. The “distended pods” evoke a pregnant woman’s belly. The “little, green hands clinging to anything they can touch” imply an infant’s insistent demands. The image of a bonfire captures the danger that her flammable thoughts might consume her.
Finding other women’s stories helped Bell recognize her illness and recover, as in “Dangerous for Mothers”: “I searched for other mothers’ stories and folded up / in relief when I read about a
woman who pictured her baby / floating dead in a swimming pool.” Some poems address other mothers in an attempt to make them visible and to offer solidarity. In “Collective,” Bell promises: “Everywhere, there is a woman awake with you.”
This collection is especially relevant today when there are calls for government policies to encourage a higher birth rate. The US has the highest maternal mortality rate of any developed nation and no guaranteed parental leave. Many parents can’t afford quality daycare. Few workplaces offer a private space for pumping breastmilk. Bell observes in “Raising Mothers”: “A bad way to raise mothers is to deify / Everything Baby, to say what a blessing, / then hand over the flailing fists[.]”
Our culture’s expectation that women will become mothers is the subject of another debut collection by a poet living in North Carolina. In no swaddle,* Mackenzie Kozak reflects on the complicated question of whether to bear children. She acknowledges the shame that can accompany a woman’s decision not to become a mother. We need more voices examining the assumption that women should have babies and be happy. We need poets like Bridget Bell who courageously tell their own stories and demand help for all women experiencing maternal mental illness. n
PLAYING WITH POSTMODERN PASTICHE
a review by Sharon E. Colley
Alan Michael Parker. Bingo Bango Boingo: Stories. Dzanc Books, 2025.
SHARON E. COLLEY is a professor of English at Middle Georgia State University. She researches and teaches courses in Southern, Appalachian, and American literature, as well as the short story. Her essay on Lee Smith is featured in NCLR 2021, and she is a regular book reviewer for NCLR as well.
ALAN MICHAEL PARKER is Department Chair and Douglas C. Houchens Professor of English at Davidson College in North Carolina. A poet, cartoonist, novelist, and professor, Parker has published four novels and nine volumes of poetry, including The Ladder (Tupelo Press, 2016; reviewed in NCLR Online 2019).
So far, Alan Michael Parker’s publications have included numerous poetry collections, including the winner of the 2017 Brockman-Campbell Award for the best poetry book published in North Carolina. Also a 2012 recipient of the Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Award from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association, he has earned the right to experiment with the juxtaposition of images and words found in his new volume, Bingo Bango Boingo Parker’s playful new book combines flash fiction interspersed with themed whimsical bingo cards to create a postmodern pastiche. Each bingo card features a theme: “Change Your Life Bingo,” “Yard Sale Bingo,” or “Long Marriage Bingo.” Each box on the bingo card has a word or phrase that relates to the theme; some are general phrases while others relate to specific narrative situations. The reader is invited to find connections between the squares on the bingo cards. For example, the bingo card titled “First Day Bingo” (30) features a free center square that says, “Lunch.” The other spaces on the five-by-fivesquare card name potential moments on a first day at work. In the top row, for example, “The blue pen, the Post-Its, the paper clips, the other Post-Its,” “Dream in which you can only meow,” “Your boss, not your dad,” “One POC,” and “College
* Mackenzie Kojak, no swaddle (U of Iowa P, 2025).
hookup is a coworker.” The squares are not meant to be read linearly; instead, the phrases in the squares bounce off each other. While some squares are clearly connected to the theme, others need elaboration by the reader. In “First Day Bingo,” squares in columns one, two, and four include the word “dream”: “Dream in which your arm and hand are goo,” “Dream in which you can only meow,” “Dream in which your new boss melts,” and “Bits of dreams.” The reader must decide whether these dreams are alternatives or all part of first-day anxiety. The bottom square in the middle column says, “Shouldn’t have slept with the window open.” Again, the reader must decide if this item is significant and how it relates to the other spaces. The non-linear connections between the squares, provided by the reader, create narrative potential to unravel.
The flash fiction in the volume follows a similar pattern as the squares on the bingo cards. Flash fiction, as editor Tara L. Masih notes in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction (2009), had a resurgence in the 1980s that continues today: a length of one to three pages and 250–1000 words is a general guideline for the form.* In Bingo Bango Boingo, the flash fiction stories are scattered throughout the book; themes such as isolation, connection, and the meaning of life recur, but the juxtapositions must be found by the reader. These connections make the book read somewhat
like a short story sequence. As critics like Susan Garland Mann, J. Gerald Kennedy, and James Nagel observe, the short story sequence combines independent short texts into a larger volume that takes on more thematic depth with the juxtaposition of the stories. Arguably, both the bingo cards and the flash fiction pieces follow this pattern.
A number of the flash pieces have an absurdist aspect to them, such as “Dreaming, The Pregnant Women,” in which pregnant women dream about giving birth to anything but human babies. (This piece is reminiscent of Donald Barthelme’s “The Balloon.”) Similarly, “The Miniatures” features a young boy who finds and then searches (in that order) for the title scenes. The texts utilize the brevity of the form to highlight moments of insight, the epiphanies of good short stories.
Bingo Bango Boingo is a fun book to read. The bingo
cards provide a novel way to participate in creating narrative by pulling together fragments in good postmodernist style. I found myself reading the squares out of order, starting with the bottom row or the right column and then working across. The device still works pleasantly that way. Parker even includes a “Your Turn” section with bingo cards that have titles, a few filled-in squares, but also blank squares for the reader to complete. The invitation to participate creatively is offered in a fresh and non-threatening way. The book could sink into the novelty of its method, but it pulls out of that danger. Several of the flash pieces, notably “In Defense of Solitude,” “Trees,” and especially the final “The Bridge,” take on deeper themes about identity and death. The stories have the focus of a lyrical poem without the limitations of self-conscious poetic form. While the method is part of the message, the message exists.
Bingo Bango Boingo is an entertaining collection of flash fiction that is not limited by its somewhat novel form. For readers who like to be engaged in the creation of their literary texts, it is a worthy addition to a library. n
* Tara L. Masih, The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field (Rose Metal Press, 2009).
ABOVE “First Day Bingo” card, designed by Matthew Revert
FINALIST, 2024 DORIS BETTS FICTION PRIZE
Alex Sees Him on the Water
BY SD WILLIAMS
Henry stood one foot on the float and the other in the Whaler. He stepped down and sat on the bench before the steering console. He held still and watched the salt river. The sun had not risen, and mist was on the water. Alex watched from the lane and saw a canvas of a seaman contemplating his world or an old friend huddled in a boat. She breathed in the twilight. She stayed watching until the sun appeared and unmade the grays.
Henry looked up when he heard Alex step on the float, his face wearing a week of beard and his jacket years of work. They each said “morning.” Henry stood and pivoted to the console, and Alex stepped to the bow. Henry started the motor, Alex pushed off, and they turned toward the harbor, where they moved slowly among the moored boats.
They passed two college girls already scraping paint from a private float. They were young and sleek, Alex thought, like otters. One turned and kissed the other, who looked not fully awake and smiled in surprise. When the boat passed, they looked up and waved to Alex. She lifted her chin. She checked Henry. He minded his business.
Henry had trouble when he came to the small float by the passage beneath the bridge. A skiff, tied loosely, had drifted into the opening. It should have been easy to avoid, but Henry had trouble, turning too wide and then too sharp. Alex could feel his displeasure.
Her father used to help Henry bring the floats from winter storage at the back of the cove. He drove from Boston on the last weekend each April,
SD WILLIAMS is a newspaper and magazine editor and consults on communications with organizations such as the World Bank. He lives in Durham, NC, but was raised in part on Lobster Cove in Annisquam, MA. He has taught writing in prisons, hospitals, and universities. Much of his published work consists of journalistic pieces on economic development, but he also writes literary essays and fiction.
with art by Nat Dickinson
and by the time she was ten, Alex accompanied him. Now she was Henry’s sole helper. She was forty now.
When Henry bumped the Whaler against the skiff, Alex said, “Let me tie her.” She grabbed the skiff by the gunwale, pulled it close, and stepped across with the ease of someone raised among boats. She pulled the skiff to the float and lashed the trailing stern line single-handed in a figure eight around a cleat. When she returned, Henry steered them through the passage and to their work.
Henry had already pulled the floats from the shore and gathered them into a herd of islands on the shallow cove water. He and Alex began. They cut away and replaced old rope. They pried up rotted decking. They repaired the rings and clamps for the chains. They kept a companionable silence. In late morning the sun breeched the treetops on the eastern hill and poured light on the floats. The cool air dissipated. Alex set her hammer and cat’s claw on the deck and shed her windbreaker. Henry kept his old jacket on.
They stopped for lunch when the siren at the fire station sounded at noon. Henry said, “You drive,” when they stepped into the Whaler. She looked at him. He untied them from the archipelago of floats, and she steered past the wayward skiff and to the marina, where they tied up. The owner tended to his own floats there. As they crossed, Henry pointed to a chain plate whose rusted bolts protruded half an inch and shook his head.
Asheville resident NAT DICKINSON is a native of Washington, DC. He received his undergraduate studio arts degree from Kenyon College and his MFA from Indiana University. His love of painting landscapes was instilled by his grandfather. As a child, Nat would paint with him on the back porch of their cottage in Maine overlooking the Penobscot Bay. Landscape painting is a family tradition he is proud to carry on. He continues to be inspired by coastal Maine and by his home city of Asheville. He usually works from studios currently closed by the destruction of Hurricane Helene in Asheville, NC, as well as in Deer Isle, ME. His art may be found at Swallowfield on Northeast Harbor, ME and at Mountain Nest Gallery in Black Mountain, NC.
Petey Peterson and Frank Brockelmeyer were at the lunch counter. It seemed to Alex that once spring came and the marina opened, they lived there.
Petey said, “Look what the tide brought in.”
Petey had started to shrink and curl in recent years but still kept a few lobster pots near shore.
Frank cocked his head. His eyes were slits among lines.
Alex’s father had called them “the old guys.” They had outlived him, but she could feel them drifting away, and she was onshore holding the rope to them, but she shouldn’t try to pull them in, because the rope would go slack and come back empty.
The four of them had lunch here every year during what Frank called “the great float event.” Five years ago, after eating, they’d stood at the cash register near the front, each paying separately, and Frank, uncharacteristically, fumbled putting his change in his pocket, so that the others were outside by the time he and Alex finished paying. On the way out, in the doorway, he had turned and said, “You’re too good for him.”
She’d never satisfied Michael. In the end, she didn’t know why he’d chosen her. He was a painter, somebody to watch for a while, and he liked his
late nights drinking and talking about art in bars. He wanted to pry something loose from beneath Alex’s cool surface, but he failed. She wondered what it was he wanted. She thought had she not been vaguely pretty, the straight blond hair tucked behind ears and the boyish body, he would not have bothered. That stayed with her. When Frank spoke, she was grateful. Alex took her seat and listened.
Petey asked Henry, “How many fingers you smashed this morning?”
Henry said, “A dozen. Lend me yours for the afternoon?”
“Arithmetic was always your strong point, wasn’t it?”
Frank grinned at Alex as if to say, “Listen to these old guys.”
Two years before, as they’d stood at the register, Frank again had managed to build space between him and Alex and the others. On the way out he patted her on the shoulder. Clara had left her, Clara who had rescued her after Michael. In the end, Clara had left her for the same reason Michael had.
When it was time to leave this day, Petey said, “Alex, you gonna make sure this old guy doesn’t fall in the cove and drown himself in two feet of water?”
Alex realized she’d been daydreaming. That was all right. They expected it.
“I’ve got my eye on him,” she said. She ate her last fry and swiveled on her stool.
She drove the Whaler again, and Henry sat at the bow. When they tied to the floats, he walked to a far corner and kneeled over a loose chain brace with a ratchet. Alex built a sawhorse from the decking they’d torn up. She measured and cut the new wood, laying the pieces near their destinations, ready for priming. The power convertor was solar and quiet, but the saw wailed and drowned out all other sound. The goggles made the world opaque. She enjoyed the world’s shrinking; it was part of the work. When she’d finished cutting enough wood for repairs on two floats she set the saw down, careful so that the guard closed, pulled the goggles down so they hung around her neck, and brushed sawdust from her shirt and hair.
Dawn Shine, 2021 (acrylic in panel, 18x18) by Nat Dickinson
“The power convertor was solar and quiet, but the saw wailed and drowned out all other sound. The goggles made the world opaque. She enjoyed the world’s shrinking; it was part of the work.”
She saw that Henry had sat back, his arms extended behind him, still near the brace where he’d started. Alex felt the heat from the work and the sun, but Henry still wore his jacket. She stepped easily over the gaps between floats and went to him.
He didn’t look up when she approached.
“You okay?” she asked.
He turned then, squinted against the sun, and nodded, but she saw that his face was gray.
“I’ll get you a drink,” she said. He nodded again and looked away. Alex fetched a bottle of water, but when she took it to him he would only hold it, not drink.
“Henry?”
“Yeah,” he said, and then, “it’s damn cold. And I know it’s not.”
She heard what he was saying.
“Stay there,” she told him.
She ran across the floats to the sawhorse and the pile of her things and fetched her phone from the water-tight bag in the pocket of her windbreaker. She dialed the emergency number, then slid the phone into her pant packet, untied the Whaler, and pulled it by its painter around the border of the herded floats until she reached Henry. She tied it, front and stern, to cleats Henry had repaired that morning.
“Come on,” she said. She knew he understood.
She guided him to the boat and set him on the bench before the console, cast off, and drove to the small float by the passage beneath the bridge. All access to the float was now taken by skiffs and dinghies. Alex turned off the engine, walked to the bow, took the painter, and stepped across a pram to the float, where she untied the pram’s rear line and the painter of the adjacent boat so she could pull the Whaler in and tie it. Then she helped Henry onto the decking and sat him leaning against the ramp from the bridge.
The ambulance came down the hill from the cape road. The technicians trotted down the ramp
with a chest of medical tools. They huddled around Henry. Alex stepped back. It did not take long for one of the technicians to run up the ramp, fetch the carry stretcher because the wheeled one would not navigate the ramp, and run down. They strapped Henry in and carried him up to the ambulance. Alex followed. When they had him inside, they took his jacket off.
“I’ll take it,” Alex said.
One of the technicians tossed it to her. He looked familiar, but she couldn’t place him. Somebody she’d seen around the cape in stores maybe. Someone she’d seen at summer dances when they were young. He closed the back doors, and the ambulance went back across the bridge and then disappeared behind trees along the cape road. Alex stood on the bridge wondering what had just happened.
People had started to gather, but they kept their distance. No one approached to lay a claim on Henry. Petey and Frank weren’t there. Henry lived by himself. He was a widower, with a daughter on the other side of the country. There would be people who wanted to know, but there was no one that must be called in the moment.
But she thought someone should know, so she called her aunt Elizabeth, who knew everyone.
When she picked up, her aunt said, “Hi sweetheart. What’s up? I heard a siren.”
Alex described what had taken place. She sounded detached to herself. She looked at Henry’s jacket in her hand.
“And you?” her aunt asked. “You okay?”
“I’m,” she started, then wondered what she was, and let out her breath.
“Come on home.” The family house was up the hill in the opposite direction from the ambulance’s route.
“I’ve got to clean things up.” She paused. “I’m all right.” Then, “I didn’t know who to call, but I guessed you would.”
Her aunt said she did and then told Alex to come home when she was ready.
Alex walked to the railing on the shallow side of the bridge and looked at the floats. They still needed work. She decided she would go to them and see what she was supposed to do.
When she turned, three people from the village, a middle-aged man and an older couple she
knew, approached and asked what had happened. She told them. They offered worried looks and concern. The woman asked if there was anything they could do. Alex shook her head and told her she’d already made calls. They left, and Alex crossed the bridge and descended to the float, where the Whaler waited.
She let out line so the boat would drift into the passageway, then re-tied the boats she’d moved. She stepped across them and into the Whaler. She set Henry’s jacket on the seat before the console. She started the motor, and when she was about the pull away the two young women who had waved in the early morning trotted down the ramp and waved to her again. She turned off the motor.
“We just heard,” one of them called, as if they had a claim on the day.
Alex looked at them. Their faces wore an offer. But she could think of nothing to say.
“Can we help?” asked the other. She waited a moment and added, “With the floats.”
Alex considered. She would need help. But Henry was bonded by the town, and by extension, as his employee, even though she was paid nothing, she was too. Technically they could not be on the floats with her. But she imagined working
with them. She had no doubt they could do the work. But it would be different. She could not find a better word. She didn’t want it to be different.
“I have to call the harbormaster,” she said. “He’ll probably want to send somebody.” She waited then, after disappointing them. She wondered what they could read in her. She smiled in what she hoped was an apologetic manner. “I’ll call if we need you. Okay?”
They nodded. Alex wondered if she should have done something different. She started the boat, waved, and drove to the islands Henry had gathered.
Alex called the harbormaster and left a message, then secured the phone in its bag in the pocket of her windbreaker. She gathered the tools that Henry had left where he’d last been working, and she lingered and remembered him bent over his task. She covered the power generator with its tarp. Then she considered the boards she’d cut after lunch and left for priming. It was only mid-afternoon. The sky was clear, and the sun would warm this part of the cove for hours. There was no better time.
She primed one side of the sixteen boards she’d cut, and by the time she was finished, the first had grown tacky enough to flip, and she primed them on the other side. When she’d finished, the first was ready to be fastened, and so she screwed the decking pieces into their places, sometimes stopping to extract an old screw she’d overlooked or chisel away residue of old wood. When she’d finished, she sat back on her calves.
Her body felt good for the work. She surveyed the archipelago and saw boards on other floats that should be pried up and replaced. The afternoon still had light in it. She looked at the Whaler and Henry’s jacket.
She worked until second twilight. When she’d finished, she sat on the bench before the Whaler’s console with her hands folded between her legs and looked down at the length of the gray cove. She thought Henry hadn’t been thinking much of anything when she saw him that morning. You watched. You felt the beginning or the end of the day and the work ahead or behind. And sometimes someone on shore sees you. n
Loring’s Dinghy (acrylic in panel, 12x12) by Nat Dickinson
THE I AND THE EYE: POETIC WAYS OF SEEING AND SHOWING
a review by David E. Poston
Terri Kirby Erickson. Night Talks: New & Selected Poems. Press 53, 2023.
Irene Blair Honeycutt. Mountains of the Moon. Charlotte Lit Press, 2024.
Two new collections from significant North Carolina poets invite us to take a long view of their poetic careers. A volume of new and selected poems such as Terri Kirby Erickson’s Night Talks invites reflection on her entire body of poetry, and Erickson’s decision to scatter new poems among older ones facilitates reflection on how she has evolved poetically. When Irene Blair Honeycutt – recognized for leadership, service, and vision in the Charlotte literary community and far beyond – releases a new collection with herself as commanding presence, it is both impossible and unnecessary to separate speaker from poet from teacher and guide.
DAVID E. POSTON lives in Gastonia, NC. He has taught at UNC Charlotte, Charlotte’s Young Writers’ Workshop, and for thirty years in North Carolina public schools. He is the author of two award-winning poetry chapbooks and the full-length collections Slow of Study (Main Street Rag, 2015; reviewed in NCLR Online 2017) and Letting Go (Fernwood Press, 2025). He is a regular NCLR reviewer, and he won third place in the 2020 James Applewhite Poetry Prize (his poem then published in the 2021 print issue). His poetry, fiction, and reviews have also appeared in Broad River Review, Cider Press Review, Ibbetson Street, The MacGuffin, Pembroke Magazine , and others. A past editor of Kakalak , he currently serves on the North Carolina Poetry Society’s Board of Directors.
Throughout Irene Blair Honeycutt’s Mountains of the Moon, readers will feel her authorial presence – her selfconscious. These poems have deep connections to literary tradition and the literary community, current and past, near and far, poets and writers whom she brought to Central Piedmont Community College or with whom she studied at Breadloaf or abroad. She mentions, speaks to, or draws from poets ranging from Basho and Wang Wei to poets of the English tradition to contemporary American and international poets such as Pastan, Glück, Hass, Holub, and Miłosz, as well as nature writers, playwrights, and composers.
In the first poem of Section One, “During the Time of No Moon,” she calls us to “follow the dog outside,” to “listen to the birds practicing / melodies for the day.” She speaks to herself: “Remember the time of kite-building / on the living room floor, // times you ran to
the vacant lot next door / and sent messages up kite strings to the moon.” Memory is central, as is Honeycutt’s eye for nature. In “It Can Happen Anywhere,” she employs a line from Edward O. Wilson to identify her focus on “Little things that run the world.” For Honeycutt, the ant, the shelf mushroom, and the mantis teach us volumes; Honeycutt teaches us to consider our kinship with cicadas or the heron with his nose to earth and “a dark half-moon / waxing on his shoulder.” Whomever she addresses, whatever she observes, she establishes intimacy with subject and reader, whether over tea with a friend or wine with Wang Wei. Her matriarchal nature, informed by her vivid recollection of childhood experiences, forms the emotional underpinning of these poems. She explores the world with various children, talking with two boys who have seen an albino skunk, offering “what might be a prayer” with her twelve-year-old niece at the end of “Song for the Sea Lion, Steep Ravine CA.” Her “Song for the Hours” begins: “O railroad spike – rusting in the field next to the splintered / tracks I walked one summer alone into my father’s past – I / held you hot from the sun, heavy in my hand.”
A succession of remarkable images follows: a “train whistle of woe,” possum babies tugged loose from their dead mother and wrapped in an officer’s handkerchief, invocations of John Donne, Abraham, and Typhoid Mary, prisoners on an exercise yard, a bumble bee suckling a blossom. Then she returns to childhood and to the holiness of the present moment:
I was once a child sitting on the city bus next to my mother, holding a windmill out the window. Joy coursed through my being, mingled with fumes from the streets.
Sweetness of bird song returns.
O wind chimes of my hours.
I am here.
These powerful images are conveyed through varied forms: a haibun, the non-linear grid of “Footsteps,” the intricate pattern of repeated lines that lead into and out of “I Felt a Forest Growing in My Skin,” prose poems, and concrete poetry such as the whimsical ending to “A Way into the Trees,” where the letters of the poem’s last two words swirl down the page. In her formal play and her more conventionally arranged poems, Honeycutt shows her versatility with craft, both when the form is on display and when it unobtrusively supports content.
Near the end of Section Five, two childhood confessional poems illustrate the empathetic tenor of this collection. In “One Peppermint Ball,” a daughter describes an unforgettable encounter. “This is the first time Mama has trusted me / to walk alone to the grocery . . . . The old woman knitting in the rocker / in the dark store hunches toward the window / to catch the sunlight. Her hair is knotted / into a tight wad that looks like a grenade.” She provides a background of menacing sounds – rocking chair, clicking knitting needles – as the speaker eyes the bounty of the candy counter. When the child cannot resist the temptation to swipe a candy and then is called out by the woman’s spine-chilling voice, her cheeks burn in a way most of us have felt.
“When the Challenge Came in Fifth Grade” describes another moment of spine-chilling fear and vulnerability, as the girl waits for a bully to appear for an after-school showdown, feeling “like
IRENE BLAIR HONEYCUTT has published four previous poetry collections, including It Comes as a Dark Surprise (Sandstone, 1992), winner of the New South Poetry Book Series; Before the Light Changes (Main Street Rag, 2008), finalist for the BrockmanCampbell Book Award; and Beneath the Bamboo Sky (Main Street Rag, 2017; reviewed in NCLR Online 2018). At Central Piedmont Community College, she founded the Spring Literary Festival, later known as Sensoria, which brought a number of acclaimed poets and writers to Charlotte. Upon her retirement, she was recognized by the establishment of the Irene Blair Honeycutt Distinguished Lectureship. She continues to be a vital leader of the Charlotte literary community, teaching at Charlotte Lit and other venues, and mentoring individual writers.
a piñata hit so hard by a peppermint / candy cane that all the confetti laughed its way down the / sidewalk, exposing every secret I’d carried my entire life.” The girl waits with her friend, “stirring the gravel / with the toes of our black & white Oxfords,” but the bully never shows. Though relieved, the speaker will not fully understand the experience until much later. The poem concludes, “the myth of the piñata filled with hosts / of fears remained with me well into adulthood. / Decades would pass before I’d learn: / There is no illusion greater than fear.”
The sixth section dives deeper into nostalgia and processing grief. At its center is a series of poems about her late brothers, to whom she dedicated her 2017 collection Beneath the Bamboo Sky. Memories of her brothers and parents are interwoven with present imaginings, dreams, and snatches of conversation. Her prose poem “The House within a Mansion” recounts a dream in which a disembodied Voice guides her family through their childhood home, here strangely grafted into a much grander structure. Although the entire family is present, the mother plays no role, the father merely smiles, and it is the brothers who converse with the speaker.
When the brothers appear in other dreams, they are often busy performing routine chores, and when they appear in the speaker’s memory, it is often when she is performing some household task. In “The Dead Don’t Miss Us,” a poem which
ABOVE Irene Blair Honeycutt’s mother, Laura Pierce Blair, circa 1947
argues powerfully against that title statement, the speaker glimpses her brother walking behind her as she pours detergent into her washer. That sighting prompts her to recall how they scrubbed their dirty socks as children and spread them to dry on an oil heater. The poem’s poignant ending: “Maybe it’s times like that – the mundane – / you miss most.”
Most of Honeycutt’s last section is taken up by a dramatic poem introduced as “structurally inspired by ancient Greek techniques” and by the choruses in T.S. Eliot’s pageant play The Rock. Titled “We came to a Place that was Grieving and Gathered to Listen,” its central character is a mother haunted by loneliness, desire, and the sins, real and falsely attributed, which sprang from them. She describes herself variously as Lady Arsonist, Madame Fury, Lady Wino, and “the ghost who never died.” The story she tells in the chorus names various characters who are complicit in her fate, but the dramatic crux of the poem involves a daughter and mother seeking understanding. The daughter’s final words recall images found throughout the collection: wind chimes, frog choruses, lilies, spoonbills, whispering trees. Here, those images are used to describe the daughter’s attempt to grasp and define her mother’s nature.
The mother’s final words employ the image of the moon, a central image throughout the collection, to provide consolation. She begins, “When you thought you were lost/ I guided you. / When you thought you were alone / I brought you home.” She concludes, “Wherever you go I am there. / You carry me – a waxing moon / at your back.”
Honeycutt dedicates this collection to her teachers, specifically to “the best of them.” It is clear that Honeycutt is one of our best teachers. Her epigraph from C.D. Wright, about the indissoluble connection between “[t]he once the now the then and again,” aptly describes how these poems interweave memory, dream, and allusion. And these words from “During the Time of No Moon” might best describe the spirit of the poet herself:
Lean into the wind, nimble as bamboo. Hope has not abandoned you.
It nests among notes you have written all your life.
Tucked in crevices, ancient and gentle.
In Night Talks: New & Selected Poems
, Terri Kirby Erickson is a different sort of poetic presence, a keen and always empathetic observer, but unobtrusive, more often eye than I. Poems from six previous books are mixed here with fifty-four new poems in sections named for various stars of different brightness, distance, and mythological significance. Throughout, the poems display a novel-like detail in setting and characterization and an easy, nostalgic warmth that is ubiquitous enough to make the occasional darker poems all the more striking. Erickson’s command of poetic craft, especially her choices of stanza forms and her line breaks, is well-considered, subtle, and skillful. Throughout this collection Erickson uses a variety of stanza lengths, with enjambed lines that move swiftly through even the denser, singlestanza poems.
A trademark of these poems is how they are energized by similes that almost take on a life of their own, adding textures that sometimes distract but ultimately enhance the cumulative effect of the poem. In “Empathy,” two women stand in a grocery parking lot: “sharing sadness like a loaf of warm bread – / eyes luminous as pearls formed by her friends’ // suffering. Perhaps the stars will wish on them / tonight.” In “Betty’s Roadside Diner,” the diner’s rusty sign beckons “[l]ike a blazing // campfire to a cluster of tired cowpokes.” Inside, the fluorescent lighting of the diner is “so bright, you can see your own / soul through the back of your hands,” yet the “babies, // curled in corner booths like cocktail shrimps” dream peacefully. The poem’s ending illustrates the warmth that pervades Erickson’s work:
. . . There’s a sense of isolation surrounding everyone,
as if they’re actors in separate plays –yet it comforts you to see them. In fact,
it seems like all that’s warm and safe in the whole world lies amid the fake-leather seats and unfamiliar faces of folks who wound up here tonight, in the same place as you.
A similar setting is described in a new poem, “Stan’s Place,” though the place is sketchier, the diction grittier, and the tone starker. Stan and Irma have forged a trust based on unspoken understandings of each other’s past troubles: “What some people carry, Stan often thought, / shaking his head as Irma keyed in another / six-
pack, a lit cigarette dangling from her lips / like a marker buoy bobbing above a wreck.” Erickson invites us to see what they carry emotionally before we dismiss or disregard them. We sense what Erickson herself carries in poems such as “To My Brother Who Died a Virgin” and “Stairway to Heaven.” The latter poem begins by describing siblings riding a sofa down a flight of stairs but ends on this somber note:
We might have broken our necks, of course, but never did. You waited a few years to die, not many – while I live on and on, breaking in ways we never imagined.
Erickson’s gentle empathy fills poems such as “The Ophthalmology Specialists’ Secondary Waiting Room,” with its vivid description of whispered conversations among patients who “share stories like cowboys / gathered around a circle of slowly dying / embers” while others dab their eyes with tissues or sit stoically. Yet when they observe a daughter patiently shushing her restless, elderly mother, “most can’t help but smile, / faces illuminated like priceless paintings by / the faintest, yet unbearably beautiful, light.”
In poem after poem, Erickson gives us similarly compassionate portraits of people she has
encountered. When she does turn her attention to herself, she is never solipsistic. “Poem by a Woman with Glaucoma” has a coyly self-announcing title, but the poem is infused with a joyful appreciation of light everywhere reflecting from dewdrops and car grilles and lawn rakes. When Erickson proclaims that “Loving You Burns Like Shingles,” the wry description of passion is focused on the you being addressed. These poems come largely from a familiar North Carolina milieu, one of tomato sandwiches and Granny’s biscuits, lightning bugs, prize-winning poultry, orange juice and Lorna Doone cookies at Sunday school. They present a varied cast of characters – greengrocers and mailmen, sawmillers and sunbathers – always with that same eidetic vividness of detail. But the most engaging poems are about her par-
ents, her deceased brother, her daughter, and other family members. In “The Sam White Special,” her great-grandfather is portrayed as not just a barber, but a confessor, whose customers realize “how telling Papa their sins and / secrets felt like being baptized in a river – / where every dusty soul is washed clean.” What elevates these poems beyond the stereotypical or nostalgic is not just Erickson’s keen eye for detail, but her way of seeing into the emotional core of characters and situations.
From the title poem, which opens the collection, to the final one – a new poem titled “Geminids” – Erickson shares her deepest and most intimate perceptions of her parents, their relationship, and their abiding influence. “Night Talks” begins with a childhood recollection of overhearing her parents talking
is
author of seven previous collections
Atlanta
has appeared in American Life in Poetry, Asheville Poetry
Latin American Literary Review, Poet’s Market, The Christian Century, The Sun, The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, and numerous other publications. Her honors include the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, Atlanta Review International Publication Prize, the International Book Award for Poetry, the Board of Regents Annals of Internal Medicine Poetry Prize, and the Key West Art and Historical Society’s Tennessee Williams Poetry Prize.
Winston-Salem native TERRI KIRBY ERICKSON
the
of poetry. Her work
Review,
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ABOVE Terry Kirby (Erickson) with her brother, Tommy, circa 1964
in their beds. “Washing Dishes” describes her parents side by side at their kitchen sink, inviting the reader to see them through the open window and to hear “their sweet dishwashing song,” what Erickson calls “the music of my childhood.” It is the song described in “Night Talks” as “their beloved / familiar voices echoing among the stars.” And in “Geminids,” the concluding poem, seeing meteors and wild geese streaking across the sky provokes this closing prayer: “May departing souls, traveling through // space like comets, remember how it felt to be alive – / how even birds, flying in the dark, cry out with joy.”
The nuanced details of these poems often provide trenchant commentary. In “Slave Cemetery,” the speaker is accustomed to white graveyards, where gravestones are decorated with “jaunty bouquets dyed to match the season,” looking “like place cards on a fancy / dinner table.” Instead, what children find in the slave cemetery are “thorns and trees with roots / so fat and twisted, they looked like anacondas / sleeping in the underbrush.” A similarly telling contrast appears in “County Fair,” where a Ferris wheel rises “jaunty / as an Easter bonnet” in stark contrast with the West Vir-
ginia coal country below, where “[r]ows of ramshackle / houses kneel by the river like washer women / with their knees in river muck.”
When one encounters a poem from 2006’s Thread Count beside a new poem, “Sabine LeBlanc,” one can see how the generic imagery of “Autumnal Equinox” contrasts with the vivid characterization of the later poem. The former presents images of flowers drooping, of nights turning chill, of memories of sundresses and home runs and mosquitoes falling like leaves from the mind. All beautifully and skillfully rendered, yes; but in “Sabine LeBlanc” one encounters “a hard rain let loose from the sky / like fenced in bulls.”
The neighbors smoke their King Edwards and holler “Bonjou,” and a lover plays smooth saxophone jazz on a Monday morning while Sabine makes herself up for work, “her lips, still swollen / from kisses, as red as a cayenne pepper.” This is poetic craft of a higher order, worth noting not as a criticism of earlier poems, but as a benchmark of how Erickson’s vision has sharpened over her career.
Though Erickson is largely unobtrusive throughout this collection, she is never unengaged
or unengaging. While her observations may be more trenchant in her newer poems, her tone is not jaded. Most significant, for this reader, is that these poems provide the familiar warmth one associates with Erickson and yet bring fresh insights and images that continue to be pleasing, evocative, and surprising.
The final poems in both these collections illustrate their respective ways of seeing and showing. Honeycutt watches a solar eclipse and, upon removing her protective glasses, marvels at a bumblebee hovering before her face. She cannot say
How long she had been there beside me silent as the birds
during the eclipse, but she guides us to ponder with her the contrast of heavenly and earthly images. And before that concluding prayer in Erickson’s “Geminids,” she gives us images of meteors appearing and vanishing silently, contrasting their silence with the sound of a cello playing in an empty room. Honeycutt is our teacher and guide. Erickson shows us what moves her heart. Reading either is richly rewarding. n
WINNER, BARRAX/BAYES POETRY CONTEST
BY HUNTER MENDENHALL
The Salty Son
I am the son of a sailor
Salt courses through my veins
Stick-and-Poke stories cover my leathered skin
My mouth speaks a wretched tongue
I am the son of a sailor
Driftwood is my only companion
Barnacles trace a bourbon trail
Women whisper how the depths prevail
I am the son of a sailor
Bow to stern my abyss awaits
Torn black sails cover a northern gust
My father speaks how anchors rust
Season’s Approaching (watercolor, 27x21) by Ed Macomber
HUNTER MENDENHALL , a native of Virginia Beach, VA, graduated from Florida State University in 2020 with a degree in Law Enforcement Intelligence. He joined the Marine Corps and attended Officer Candidate School in 2022. Upon graduating, he was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant and after more training rceived orders to Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, NC. He and his wife now reside in Surf City, NC.
Final judge A.E. Stallings said of of the winner of the premiere Barrax/Bayes Poetry Contest, “I admire this short, balladlike poem for its clarity and deceptive simplicity, while it also displays sophisticated sound effects and charged sea-changed language. The opening assertion suggests a song, but we quickly find ourselves in ‘uncharted waters’ of images – Stick-and-poke stories for tattoos, for instance, and the wretched tongue that might be the literal tongue in the mouth, a failure of language, or poetry itself. There is a whole odyssey in this little poem.”
Long Island, NY, native ED MACOMBER earned a BA in Art from Wagner College, NY. He interned with MOMA in the discipline of fine art conservation and restoration and pursued further studies at Parsons School of Design. Service in the US Marine Corps led him to Cherry Point, NC. The owner of Art and Materials in New Bern, NC, for many years, he subsequently opened Macomber Art Restoration Services, and he has maintained a successful art career, with works in private collections throughout the US and Canada. Commissions include the Carolina Panthers and Bank of America. Among his many honors is the William James Memorial Award. He is a member of the Southern Watercolor Society, Watercolor Society of North Carolina, and American Watercolor Society.
A JOURNEY OF IDENTITY, MAGIC, AND POWER
by Abby Trzepacz
Tracy Deonn. Bloodmarked. Simon & Schuster, 2022.
ABBY TRZEPACZ is an English major at East Carolina University with a double minor in Professional Writing and Information Design and Communication Studies. She is a Senior Intern on the NCLR staff. In 2025, she was inducted into the ECU Servire Society.
TRACY DEONN is the #1 New York Times bestselling and Coretta Scott King-John Steptoe award-winning author of Legendborn (Margaret K. McElderry Books/ Simon & Schuster, 2020; reviewed in NCLR Fall 2022 ). Her writing has appeared in several anthologies, on Tor.com, and in the 40th Anniversary The Empire Strikes Back collection, From a Certain Point of View (Penguin Random House, 2022). She grew up in central North Carolina and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Communication and Performance Studies from UNC Chapel Hill. She has worked in theater and video game production, as well as teaching at both K-12 and university levels.
Tracy Deonn’s Bloodmarked is a magical continuation of the author’s Legendborn Cycle. The novel is a blend of Arthurian legend with contemporary fantasy that weaves in themes of grief, power, and identity. Bloodmarked follows Briana “Bree” Matthews as she navigates her identity as a Black Scion of Arthur. Deonn masterfully intertwines an action-packed narrative with deep emotional resonance, crafting a story that is thrilling and introspective. Bloodmarked picks up right where Legendborn left off. Bree is the prophesied Scion of Arthur, which means she is connected to the magical lineage that historically excludes people like her. The secret society of the Legendborn is a modern-day order of knights descended from King Arthur and his Round Table. The society is bound by rigid traditions and deeply ingrained biases, which challenge Bree’s place as a young Black woman. With her new title as the Scion of Arthur, she also faces the threat of Camlann, a signal that a battle with the Shadowborn (demons who come from a dimension of hell) is on the horizon.
Deonn skillfully incorporates elements of her home state, North Carolina, into the novel. Much of the story unfolds on UNC Chapel Hill’s campus, but Deonn also includes locations like Fountain, NC, adding depth and authenticity to Bree’s story. Readers get to see Bree’s fond memories of growing up in North Carolina, especially the ones she shares of her family.
Bree tells her mentor, “‘Dad always knows the best places to stay in the mountains.’ It’s true. He grew up in rural western North Carolina and my mom used to take me out there every year to see the fall leaves. Bright reds, vibrant golds, splotches of pink, peach, and grapefruit orange” (62). By grounding Bree’s story in a recognizable North Carolina, Deonn creates a powerful blend of fantasy and realism. This blending makes the magical elements feel more believable, while also highlighting the symbolic weight of setting a story about exclusion and legacy within real institutions historically tied to white power. When Bree battles for recognition within the Legendborn society, readers are reminded of the parallel struggles faced by Black communities in spaces like North Carolina, where histories of racial exclusion remain present. These elements enrich the novel, making North Carolina an essential and living part of Bree’s story rather than just a setting. Deonn does not shy away from the reality of exclusionary spaces and systemic barriers that Bree faces, further adding to the authenticity of the novel. Indeed, readers will find a reflection of real-world problems in this novel, especially regarding racism and injustice.
Bree’s battle is more than just physical; it is a struggle for recognition and autonomy. Her journey becomes as much about carving space for herself and redefining legacy as it is about defeating monsters. New challenges arise, ones
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that threaten not only her own life but also the lives of those around her. On top of the looming war, there is the ominous presence of the Hunter, who has been haunting her family for centuries. Even with the threats that face her, Bree remains a strong protagonist who fights for what she believes in.
Bree’s identity plays a fundamental role in Bloodmarked, just as it did in Legendborn. Bree is the first Black Scion of Arthur, which seems to be a problem for some people in
the historically white Order of the Round Table. The novel powerfully critiques how institutions uphold privilege and resist change. She is constantly facing microaggressions and sometimes outright hostility from people who refuse to accept her for who she is. This forces her to fight for her survival, but also for respect from her peers. When faced with discrimination, Bree does not hesitate to stand up for herself. When Theresa, an emissary for the Regents, remarks upon her
looks, Bree quickly responds, “Just because my hair takes up space doesn’t mean it’s dirty” (68). Deonn also explores how Bree’s dual heritage – Arthurian lineage and ancestral Root magic – shapes her identity. The Order, which represents authority and privilege, is contrasted with the spiritual and community-driven Root magic, which is tied to her mother and the legacy of enslaved African Americans. Bree struggles with what it means to be a Black girl in spaces not built for her and is constantly reminded of the sacrifices her ancestors made before her. Bree knows that the fight ahead of her is not going to be easy, but she is “not scared of the risks, or of hard work. I’ll fight what my ancestors wanted to fight but couldn’t. I will make the power worth the cost by how I use it” (355). Bree’s battles are not only against the threat of the Shadowborn but also against the ingrained structures that seek to limit her.
Bree’s grief over the loss of her mother and friends remains a crucial element of Bloodmarked, as it was in Legendborn. She continues to process her loss while also stepping into the role of Scion of Arthur as well as Rootcrafter. Deonn does not shy away from expressing her feelings about loss. She shows that healing is not a linear process and often takes time. Bree’s pain is palpable: “The grief slips between my ribs like a scalpel. A thing I gasp against but can’t prevent” (15). This exploration of grief adds
ABOVE Sunset at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina; photography by James O. Reynolds (See more of his photography on his website.)
depth to Bree’s character: her journey is not just one of magic and destiny, but also one of healing and self-discovery. Her trauma impacts the decisions she makes, specifically in relation to her support system. With the pressure Bree is under with The Order and the Root community, she also feels the need to protect the ones surrounding her. In a moment of self-doubt, Bree reflects on her commitment to those she loves and her role in protecting them: “I take a deep breath and recite my way through the panic. Keep my friends safe, keep them from harm. No more deaths, no more damage” (122). This mantra proves to be more than just a coping mechanism; it speaks to the impact of her mother’s death. Bree is haunted by the loss, but it also drives her to take on the responsibility of ensuring the people around her are safe. The trauma of her mother’s death not only shapes Bree’s character but also influences her actions, which deepens the emotional stakes of her journey. One of Deonn’s greatest strengths is her ability to craft deeply nuanced characters. In Bloodmarked, readers get to see serious character growth and self-discovery. Bree remains a powerful and relatable protagonist, but her struggles in this novel feel even more pronounced. As she navigates the increasingly difficult landscape of power and magic, her internal conflict becomes more apparent. The push and pull between her connections with the Legendborn and her desire to
create a path independent from their expectations reflect her internal struggles. Throughout the novel, Bree seeks to better understand the unique magic that sets her apart from the Legendborn. The journey of truly understanding the powers she possesses is a tricky one, to say the least. In a powerful outburst, while channeling her ancestors, she says,“You say I am the spear, the pain-wielded blade. . . . You say I am the wound turned weapon, but you won’t help me become that weapon! Either no one knows how or they do and they refuse to tell me. I’ve been running for my life, nearly killed because I have to almost die before I can defend myself!” (450). In this raw outburst, Bree’s frustration with her situation is clear. To face these struggles, Bree has her fiercely loyal support system to help her.
Bree’s relationships with her friends are integral to her growth as a character and essential to her journey; they push her, help her, and sometimes, even hurt her. Through her friendships, Bree learns how important trust and loyalty are. One of Bree’s longest friendships is with Alice, who provides guidance and support for her when she needs it. Alice is wellversed in the Legendborn and understands the pressure Bree is under. Another important relationship is the one between Bree, Nick, and Selwyn. Nick represents Bree’s past and the life she is trying to protect. Their bond is built on shared experiences, and Nick’s love for Bree is a grounding force for her.
However, in Nick’s absence, Bree builds her bond with Selwyn, the Oathed Kingsmage to Nick. Their relationship is one of tension, attraction, and respect, but it’s also muddied with his role in The Order and the secrets he keeps. As the love triangle unfolds, it becomes clear that Bree’s romantic relationships are not just about attraction or choosing between two people; they serve as a mirror to her internal struggles. Both relationships require her to ask herself difficult questions about loyalty, trust, and the person she is becoming. With these relationships, Deonn does an exceptional job of representing the complexities that come along with them. By creating complex relationships that mirror Bree’s internal struggles, Deonn not only enriches the emotional landscape of the story but also provides a thoughtful exploration of how love, trust, and loyalty shape these characters.
Bloodmarked is a stunning sequel that deepens the Legendborn Cycle’s exploration of power, identity, and legacy. Tracy Deonn has crafted a novel that is both a fascinating fantasy adventure and a powerful reflection on contemporary issues. Her ability to blend Arthurian legend with contemporary issues makes this series stand out in the Young Adult fantasy genre. Bree’s journey is one of self-discovery, resistance, and resilience, and readers will find themselves rooting for her at every turn. n
2025 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE FINALIST
BY TERRY CAWLEY
The Art of War by Sun Tzu
My boss is bullying me.
Read Sun Tzu, The Art of War.
My next-door neighbor Chris wants to blow up my shit.
Read Sun Tzu, The Art of War.
My co-worker Bill Rockne won’t play nice.
Read Sun Tzu, The Art of War.
My partner is giving me the stink eye. In ten days or less I will be dead. My partner gave up on me. My partner punted.
Read Sun Tzu, The Art of War.
Sun Tzu writes in The Art of War, if a thousand cicadas come to visit you, let there be a million instead. Sun Tzu also writes, the above does not apply to the instance of a thousand locusts, or a thousand termites.
It is written by Sun Tzu in The Art of War, if you wait long enough by the river, eventually the bodies of your enemies will float by.
TERRY CAWLEY has written several stage plays that have received full productions and staged readings, including at professional theatres in Atlanta, Chapel Hill, and Cleveland. These plays include “Playing Office,” a two-act play selected for staged readings by The Cleveland Public Theatre in January 1995; “Grease Paper,” a two-act play produced by The Academy Theatre in Atlanta in 1987, also received a staged reading at Playmakers Repertory Company at UNC Chapel Hill and was the competition winner of the Playwrights Fund of North Carolina Annual Playwriting Fellowship. A member of the Dramatists Guild, Cawley has received numerous writing honors including an Artist’s Fellowship from the North Carolina Arts Council for his playwriting. He is also an award-winning poet, twice receiving the annual Academy of American Poets Prize at Kenyon College, an honorable mention in the 2025 Charlotte Writers Club poetry competition, and second prize in 2025 in the annual literary competition of the Arts Council of York County, SC. In 2024, a chapter of his novel in progress also received honorable mention in prose in the same competition. This multi-genre writer received a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Kenyon College and graduated from the UNC Chapel Hill School of Law in 1990, where he served on the board of editors of the UNC Law Review. Cawley is an attorney in private practice.
Sun Tzu writes in The Art of War that Duncan Hines Cakes are “Perfectly Moist.” Sun Tzu writes in The Art of War that the normal stakes for a single game of backgammon are one point or unit, but if a player concludes that she has gained an advantage, she may try to double the stakes by invoking the doubling cube. Sun Tzu writes in The Art of War that the Warriors blew a 3-1 lead in the 2016 NBA Finals.
It is written by Sun Tzu in the Art of War that everything is more than it seems, but everything is also only what it seems, and everything is also, no surprise, somehow less than it seems, too. These three contradictory ideas are in an entire and absolute harmony, so that the revolving door in the hotel lobby is much more than a mere revolving door in a hotel, and much less than one, too, but if you need to pass from the sidewalk into the lobby, because it is raining, or even if it is not, you can use the revolving door, it is the way through, and in that moment, the revolving door is the revolving door, and most days that will need to be enough, and most days that is enough.
Sun Tzu writes in The Art of War that Sun Tzu does not write anything in the Art of War. Sun Tzu writes that Sun Tzu did not write The Art of War. Sun Tzu writes in the Art of War that there is no Sun Tzu and there is no work The Art of War. There is no writing it and there is no reading it. There is no owning it and there is no recommending it to others. Sun Tzu writes in The Art of War that Sun Tzu is done with the whole “Sun Tzu The Art of War” business. It’s over. It’s finished. It’s exhausted. It’s done.
But wait. Hold on. I’m still here. I might need some help. Life seems a battle to me. At any rate, it’s a God damn struggle. I’ve not been well. My desk is a complete mess. I’m not remembered. I lost. I lose. I’m a loser.
Read Sun Tzu, The Art of War.
Sun Tzu writes in The Art of War that love is not a single puzzle piece in a detailed jigsaw, but the entire puzzle, including the box and all of the pieces, and it is the image on the cover that you are to look at while working, it is the dumping of the pieces, then the sorting, love is the putting together, the enjoyment of the finished work, it is also the taking apart, and love is also the putting away, too.
This broadcast is a copyrighted production of the National Basketball Association, and all rights are expressly reserved and none, however, are waived.
It is written by Sun Tzu in The Art of War that you, too, can be a God in America.
, 1984
JJ JIANG, a Cary, NC resident, grew up in China during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. He was trained as an architect and received his professional degrees in architectural history from both the US and China. As an artist, his paintings have been juried into the Oil Painters of America and the National Watercolor Society; he is a Signature Member of both. He has also achieved Master Status in the Watercolor Society of North Carolina. He has numerous awards for his widely collected artwork. In 2013, he opened Village Art Circle in Cary, which has exhibited over forty member artists, and serves as his working studio, where he teaches numerous workshops on site as well as at a variety of venues.
Chinese Warriors
(pen and ink, 6x10) by JJ Jiang
A COLLECTION OF CHARACTERS GATHERING OUTSIDE THE MARGINS
a review by Kristi Southern
Joanna Pearson. Bright and Tender Dark. Bloomsbury USA, 2024.
—. Now You Know It All. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021.
Joanna Pearson’s collection of short stories, Now You Know It All, provides a rich variety of entertaining characters in borderline creepy atmospheres and situations. There is a hint of unease – perhaps more than a hint in some selections – that makes the reader wary but wanting to read on. I was reminded of Daphne Du Maurier’s “Don’t Look Now,” the 2008 film The Strangers, Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (obviously), and several fairy tales. One does not have to be a horror fan to enjoy Pearson’s stories, though; Pearson’s rhetoric, imagery, and string of outsider characters are enough to inspire the reader to devour all eleven in her lineup.
KRISTI SOUTHERN holds an MA in English from East Carolina University where she also taught English from 2003 to 2009. She earned her MBA from ECU in 2025, while serving as a graduate intern for NCLR. She is now the NCLR Book Review Editor.
JOANNA PEARSON , originally from western North Carolina, lives with her husband and two daughters near Chapel Hill, where she works as a psychiatrist. She is the author of a novel and two books of short stories, including Shirley Jackson Awards finalist Every Human Love (Acre Books, 2019). Her stories have been anthologized in several publications, including The Best American Mystery and Suspense and The Best American Short Stories. She has received multiple fellowships supporting her writing, including the North Carolina Arts Council/ Durham Arts Council.
From the first page of the first story, Pearson’s language has readers hooked with, “Naked putti lounging fatly in marble,” and “Old men in storefronts arranged cheeses and sausages tenderly, as if tucking in sleeping infants” (3). This reader, who appreciates fun imagery and simply how certain words feel in her mouth, knew she had found a North Carolina writer she was to enjoy. The first story, “Rome,” finds Lindsay on a day trip without her travel companion, Paul, on a tour to Tivoli, as an outsider to the strange family of seven joining her. The narration switches back and forth between this day trip and the larger trip as a whole. Readers are put into Lindsay’s awkward interactions with both Paul and the Gooley family, feeling alone along with her as the story juxtaposes life with death and the idea of both wanted and unwanted everyday miracles.
“The Whaler’s Wife,” Pearson’s third story in the collection,
also follows a solo collegeaged character, Gracie, as she spends the summer serving as a volunteer in a youth education program, living in the basement of the affluent Whitworth family. Here, ideas of wealth and sophistication are intimidating to Gracie, who “recognized them as a different species from [her]self” (47). Another character situated as an outsider to her environment – and another environment that is somewhat awkward, even perhaps haunted. Gracie’s fellow student volunteers all know about the Whitworth home and its ghost of a teenage girl who disappeared never to be found. As the summer progresses, Gracie tends to change in unexpected ways and realizes that “this world of reserve and taste” may not be exactly what it appears to those looking in (46).
A story titled “The Films of Roman Polanski,” which references Rosemary’s Baby, centers around Beth Ann, the relationship with her prankster boyfriend, and her job at a clinic that helps troubled youth and their families. Beth Ann appears to be another outsider: a childless woman, dating at a bit later age, after being “left lonely to rot” (105) and “already tossed into the markdown bin” by her previous boyfriend (107). A new client at the clinic, James Hadley, thirteen years old, piques her interest, not only due to his reputation as “the Devil Boy” (also his nickname), but also because he seems to manipulate Beth Ann into wanting to care for him and believing that she can save him. As their time together progresses, readers may be reminded of vampires and the concern of inviting one
in. Maybe Beth Ann’s childless life, albeit not what she pictured, is the safer route for her after all.
The story “The Field Glasses” includes twin sisters Eleanor and Clara, “Two nice, oldfashioned storybook spinsters who just happened to live in this wooded neighborhood filled now with young families” (139). The wooded neighborhood, however, isn’t as safe as it seems due to “something in the woods that wanted to eat the children” (137). Eleanor and Clara, “integral to the workings” of their community, are still quite the outsiders – especially Clara, who has always been delicate and fearful, and who cancels their annual summer visit from nephew Peter due to her concerns with the recent child bitings (141), much to Eleanor’s dismay, as the visit is one of the few things she seems to look forward to. Eleanor’s description of Peter with his “little body like warm bread” and “his face glowing at [her] like a small sun” (144) suggests she regrets not being a mother, making these somewhat odd sisters another instance of childless female characters whom society tends to marginalize. As the tale progresses, readers are given a glimpse of Eleanor and Clara’s
past, which hints at their current relationship not being as tight and secure as we often associate with twins, and we question whether the danger is lurking in the woods or a bit closer to home.
“Riding” situates readers in the passenger seat of the car with Janet, who is driving to her grandmother’s house during a time of quarantine and masking – calling to mind Little Red Riding Hood and urban legends of hitchhiking, and serving as an early addition of what is likely to be a growing body of literature in response to the Covid pandemic. Janet is rear-ended by a nondescript, tailgating sedan populated by three shady-feeling characters. “The pandemic had brought out an extra skittishness around strangers,” and tension mounts as we learn neither driver nor her passengers are wearing masks (155), a strange detail that inspires wariness in the post-Covid era. What follows is a short and uncomfortable ride for Janet in the car of Crow, Rogue, and Longshot, who does wear a mask, though a “horrifyingly convincing wolf mask” (162). Janet exchanges small talk with her new companions as readers simultaneously learn of Dan, her ex, and their introduction to the commune he left her for, a similar past experience of being picked up by drivers due to car issues. Janet is faced with a decision whether to ride with these strange companions to tonight’s full moon party or to continue on to her grandmother’s, and readers are not sure which the safest trip really is.
The remaining selections in Pearson’s collection all carry a similar feel of something being off, evoking wariness from the reader but enticing us to continue. She somehow manages to present both her protagonist narrators and the strange situations or characters they encounter with a touch of otherness or outsider tendencies, whether due to their own choices and characteristics or due to those that society expects of them. Altogether, though, they make for a cohesive and certainly entertaining group of personalities and anecdotes.
Bright and Tender Dark, Pearson’s first novel, centers around the twenty-year-old murder of a female college student in Chapel Hill. The first half of the book predominately takes place in 2019, two decades after the murder of young Karlie Richards. Joy, Karlie’s former college roommate, is struggling with the aftermath associated with a recent divorce; KC navigates college life and an overnight job; and other players are introduced, including a suspicious college professor, the man behind bars for the murder, and The Weeper (a local urban legend). The narrative then switches to the events of 1999, and readers meet Karlie herself and her acquaintances during the last fateful weeks of her life and glimpse into a western North Carolina cult-like religious group.
Pearson’s characters are diverse and somewhat damaged, and all seem to be on the margins of the Chapel Hill community of both 1999 and 2019.
LEFT Joanna Pearson (left) discussing Bright and Tender Dark with poet/ psychiatrist Celeste Lipkes (right) at Malaprop’s in Asheville, NC, 21 Aug. 2024
While a fairly close-knit community where everyone seems to have some sort of connection to or familiarity with the life and death of young Karlie Richards, the majority of the characters once again fit the description of hovering outside the norm or what the typical Chapel Hill resident “should be.” Perhaps it is the otherness or outsider aspect of most of the novel’s characters that serves as a barrier to discovering what happened to poor Karlie on her final night in early January 2000.
The novel concentrates on Karlie’s murder, but the main character and protagonist is arguably present-day Joy. Joy
is a sympathetic and relatable character; she feels like an outsider as a college student to those in her dorm and Karlie’s following of friends, and she also feels like an outsider in 2019, to her ex-husband, her two sons, and the Chapel Hill community. We see this through her older son Sean’s opinions of her, her interactions with Professor Jacob Hendrix in 1999 and 2019, her awkward night visit to the home of her ex-husband and his new pregnant wife, and via multiple descriptions of Joy in college as lonely, keeping to herself in corners, “stuck outside . . . no space for her” (10). A visit to the local Chapel Hill co-op by present-day Joy is almost painful to read as she anxiously and self-consciously makes her way through the store with her incomplete shopping list, seemingly afraid of other patrons and the checkout clerk.
As a college student, Joy stands apart as a preacher’s daughter, with parents unlike the others, and as a recently divorced adult who suffered a difficult miscarriage, she doesn’t feel like she
stacks up to the fertile new wife and society’s expectations of her. Her interest in Karlie’s life and murder is reignited by a found letter that Karlie sent her shortly before her death, which somehow Joy never received. This sends her to the internet – an environment where she can be seen, get involved, and elevate herself based on her roommate status with Karlie in the realm of current online amateur sleuths and real crime enthusiasts. She soon decides she should do what she can to prove the man currently in prison for Karlie’s murder is, in fact, innocent, and simultaneously find the real culprit.
In the novel’s present, we also meet KC, a Chapel Hill scholarship student who is living and working as the night manager at the apartment complex where Karlie lived and died. KC is a self-proclaimed outsider to his peers, those whom he considers “a different species entirely” (29). Readers feel empathetic toward KC as they do with Joy – at least this reader did – as we learn that he has had a falling out with his previous suitemates, feels taken advantage of by late-night drunken apartment residents, and shares an uncomfortable encounter with a group of true crime docuseries film-makers, one of which finds his license that reads, “Kristina Claire Anderson” (43). KC’s introductory chapter is riddled with references to his outsider status, both to his college peers and his own parents: “Unlike these lords and ladies of the manor in their pastel collared
LEFT Joanna Pearson at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, NC, 4 June 2024
shirts,” “an interloper here,” “like a ghost” (30–31). KC serves as a 2019 connection to the 1999 murder of Karlie even as he is not connected to anything or anyone around him.
A third character who is quite an outsider to the community but an inside player to Karlie’s murder is Toby, the man in prison for the events of 1999. Toby is 43 but childlike due to an “Anoxic brain injury . . . [m] arking him with a kind of specialness” at birth (101–102). There is a sense from the beginning that he is the wrong man being punished, and presentday Joy decides to pursue this avenue, as she uses her past connection with Karlie to connect her to the online community today. We learn more about Toby as his mother visits him in prison in 2019 and as we see what appears to be his harmless fixation on Karlie back in 1999. In the sophisticated, affluent Chapel Hill community, Toby does not belong with his “otherworldly[ness],” an unknown father, and a mother who has worked at the university behind the scenes in housekeeping since she was sixteen (102). Perhaps these characteristics are what make him an easy target for blame and an easy solution for the community to wrap up the events of 1999. Technically, the murder has been “solved,” but readers see it differently from the start. It is necessary to explore Karlie’s character as an outsider as well, even as she is literally the focal point of the novel. She is an outsider to the events of
2019; she is an urban legend herself as sorts, a ghost, perhaps a warning. During her time as a student at Chapel Hill, though, even as she touches many (both in life and in death), she seems to not really know herself nor feel that she fits in anywhere. We get this personal introduction to Karlie in her own words, almost exactly halfway into the book, via an essay she writes for one of her literature professors. Here, Karlie shares with us a bit about her upbringing in western North Carolina and her involvement in “the trappings of Christian youth worship-culture” (148). She ends her essay noting the “particular role [she’s] been playing so well” and wondering if it is time to reinvent herself (152). Perhaps the confident, popular college student we assume her to be in the first half of the novel is not exactly who the real Karlie is, making her more of an outsider than initially observed.
The Chapel Hill setting of Pearson’s novel serves, to some extent, to establish characters as marginalized or outsiders. Through characters like Joy, KC, Toby, and Karlie, we see a Chapel Hill made up of those of higher economic standing and higher education levels. Joy’s sons attend “a Quaker school, with excellent academics . . . a quidditch team,” very different from their cousins’ “ruggedly American” public school in western North Carolina (77). This comparison of Chapel Hill to western North Carolina is included throughout the text, working to establish several of our western North Carolina
characters as outsiders who have come to the Triangle community. Through KC, we see a separation between his status as a scholarship and work-study student and those “traditional” Tarheels who “do not notice him anymore” (31). We also see parents and alumni who are different from our main characters, in their Ann Taylor capris, polos and khakis – “a parade of sturdy middle-class Americana” (153). These opposing images of North Carolina schools, students, and residents only emphasize the otherness of the characters “inside” the events of the novel.
Pearson’s descriptions do not necessarily bathe Chapel Hill in a negative light, but they do act as a means of separating characters from their environment, likely in order to establish why Karlie’s murder has gone so long truly unsolved. All those who were “close” with Karlie in life, whether knowing her or simply in close proximity to her, as well as those in 2019 who are familiar with her story or somehow close to those who knew her, are outside the margins of their own community – as a number of Pearson’s short story characters also found themselves. In the case of Bright and Tender Dark, readers must finish Pearson’s story to determine whether these marginalized characters will help solve the 1999 murder and acquire justice for Karlie. While doing so, readers will enjoy Pearson’s clever rhetoric and imagery that we came to appreciate in Now You Know It All. n
