North Carolina Literary Review Online Spring 2025

NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE VI E W ONLINE

SPRING 2025

NORTH CAROLINA LGBTQ+ LITERATURE

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F E AT U R I N G n

fiction by Jim Grimsley n poetry by Amber Flora Thomas n reviews of books by Jeffery Beam, Jessica Jacobs, Stephanie Clare Smith, and Eric Tran

COVER ART FRONT COVER

Rusty Fog (oxidation paint and wax, 48x36) by Willie Little BACK COVER

Teal Canyon Diptych (oxidation paint and wax on wood panel, 48x20) by Willie Little Born in Washington, NC, WILLIE LITTLE received his BA from UNC Chapel Hill.

His visual narratives document a fading part of rural Southern life while tackling topics of racism and Black Lives Matter, Social Justice, and childhood memories of growing up on a tobacco farm in Eastern NC. His memoir, In the Sticks (Lulu Press, 2019), documents his years growing up as a poor, Black, gay/queer child in the rural South. His solo exhibits include the Smithsonian Institution, the Noel Gallery in Charlotte, and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Notable group exhibitions include the Corcoran and three International Assemblage exhibitions in Berlin. His work has toured venues throughout South Africa, Belgium, and Mozambique. He currently resides in the Palm Springs area and Portland, OR.

Produced annually by East Carolina University and by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association © COPYRIGHT 2025 NCLR

COVER DESIGNER NCLR Art Director DANA EZZELL designed the cover. She earned an MFA in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence and is a Professor at Meredith College in Raleigh. Her design work has been recognized by the CASE Awards and in such publications as Print Magazine’s Regional Design Annual, the Applied Arts Awards Annual, American Corporate Identity, and the Big Book of Logos 4. She has been designing for NCLR since the fifth issue, and in 2009 created the current style and design. In 2010, the “new look” earned NCLR a second award for Best Journal Design from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.

Tahoe So Blue (oxidation paint and wax, 60x48) by Willie Little

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SPRING 2025

NORTH CAROLINA LGBTQ+ LITERATURE IN THIS ISSUE 6

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North Carolina LGBTQ+ Literature includes poetry, fiction, and book reviews Jeffery Beam Onyx Bradley Catherine Carter Jim Grimsley Jessica Jacobs

Jennifer McGaha Stephanie Clare Smith Amber Flora Thomas Eric Tran Robert West

37 n Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues includes poetry and book reviews

Joanne Durham John Amen Georgann Eubanks Micki Bare Matthew Fiander Michael Beadle Paul Green Michele Tracy Berger Sally Greene Richard Betz Jo Ann S. Hoffman Emily Carter Catherine Pritchard Childress T. Kingfisher Amber Knox Jessica Cory Jennifer McGaha Kenly Corya Hunter Mendenhall Paul Crenshaw

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Cody Messer Dale Neal David E. Poston Jane Shlensky Elaine Thomas Melinda Thomsen Abby Trzepacz Patricia R. Webb Gideon Young

North Carolina Miscellany includes an essay and book reviews Sayantani Dasgupta Becca Hannigan Shelby Hans Marjorie Hudson Ryan McGee

n North Carolina Artists

Kyle Highsmith Carmen Grier Willie Little Tim Lytvinenko

Kevin McIlvoy Megan Miranda Wendy Tilley Thomas Wolf

in this issue n Roger Manley Elizabeth Palmisano Pamela Pecchio Richard Sassoon

Pete Stack Henry Ossawa Tanner Ursula Vernon

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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W

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 252.328.1537 Telephone 252.328.4889 Fax BauerM@ecu.edu Email NCLRstaff@ecu.edu https://NCLR.ecu.edu Website NCLR has received 2024–2025 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.

Spring 2025

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 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.

ISSN: 2165-1809

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Editor Margaret D. Bauer Art Director Dana Ezzell Guest Feature Editor Dwight Tanner Digital Editor Devra Thomas

Graphic Designers Karen Baltimore Sarah Elks Senior Associate Editor Christy Alexander Hallberg

Art Editor Diane A. Rodman

Assistant Editors Desiree Dighton Anne Mallory Randall Martoccia

Poetry Editor Jeffrey Franklin

Book Review Editor Kristi Southern

Founding Editor Alex Albright Original Art Director Eva Roberts

Managing Editor Lyra Thomas Senior Editorial Assistants Kenly Corya Amber Knox Editorial Assistant Brandon Sneed Graduate Interns Alyssa Froemel Chelsey Parsons Senior Intern Abby Trzepacz Undergraduate Interns Thomas Adcock Elizabeth Cook Abby Fletcher Anna Hancock Josefine Klaker Robert Miranda Jamilah Thomas

EDITORIAL BOARD Michael Bibler English, Louisiana State University

Gabrielle Brant Freeman English, East Carolina University

Angela Raper English, East Carolina University

Christina Bucher English, Rhetoric, and Writing, Berry College

Rebecca Godwin Emeritus, Barton College

Kirstin L. Squint English, East Carolina University

Rebecca Hardin-Thrift English, Wayne Community College

Amber Flora Thomas English, East Carolina University

George Hovis English, SUNY-Oneonto

Dean Tuck English, Wayne Community College

Jessica Jacobs Executive Director, Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry

Robert M. West English, Mississippi State University

Jim Clark Emeritus, Barton College Kevin Dublin Elder Writing Project, Litquake Foundation William Eddins English, East Carolina University

Rebecca McClanahan MFA Creative Writing Program, Queens University

De’Shawn Charles Winslow Writer, Newark, NJ

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Spring 2025

Beauty and Precarity: More LGBTQ+ Voices from North Carolina

by Dwight Tanner, Guest Feature Editor One of the many pleasures of serving as the guest feature editor for NCLR’s 2025 issues on North Carolina LGBTQ+ writers has been the opportunity to reacquaint myself with the many established authors in this category while also coming to discover and appreciate countless more. The collection of creative writing, art, and book reviews in this, the Spring 2025 digital issue, provides a great opportunity to do just that.

The special feature begins with “There’s Another Moment After This One,” the first of two new short stories by Jim Grimsley, with the second story to appear in the upcoming Summer 2025 print issue.

This enigmatic story unfolds from the first-person perspective of an unnamed narrator standing on an oceanside sandbar. Grimsley’s masterful use of language vividly depicts the beauty of the scene alongside a mounting sense of the precariousness of our times. The story is accompanied by a similarly evocative painting by the issue’s cover artist, Willie Little, who uses oil, rust, and oxidation to capture both beauty and decay.

Next, Amber Flora Thomas’s poem “Figure in a Landscape” comparably renders the beauty in disquiet and the disquiet in beauty. The poem repeatedly highlights what we can and can’t see.

It is complemented by a mixed media collage by multidisciplinary artist Karena “Kidd” Graves.

Read several book reviews in this section. First, Catherine Carter’s in-depth review of Jessica Jacobs’s latest collection, unalone: Poems in Conversation with the Book of Genesis, analyzes how Jacobs’s poems explore and reconsider themes

from Genesis using the Hebrew tradition of midrash, effectively creating a conversation through myriad voices and ideas. Looking forward, the special feature in the upcoming print edition will include a conversation between Carter, who is also a poet, and Jacobs, which further examines what is said, what is left unsaid, and the host of biblical exegesis and commentary that affect how we might understand the poems in unalone.

Onyx Bradley, another poet, begins their review of Eric Tran’s poetry collection Mouth, Sugar, and Smoke by pointing out the unique ways that death and specific types of grief “hang over LGBTQ+ individuals’ lives.” Bradley argues that Tran provides unique insight into these otherwise common tropes of loss not only as a queer Vietnamese American poet, but also through his unique life experiences studying at the UNC School of Medicine and working as a psychiatrist, all of which mediate the poems and themes in this collection.

Next, Robert M. West begins his review of Jeffery Beam’s Verdant by positioning Beam as a unique poet-singer, which he clarifies as meaning the poet “as ecstatic.” In that tradition, Verdant, at its core, presents twenty-six untitled poems written over thirteen years as part of Beam’s process to help “him think and feel his way through” the end of a romantic relationship. West notes that the poems are surrounded by different types of paratext – such as literary epigraphs and essays and notes by Beam – that directly affect the reader’s experience and responses to the poems

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LGBTQ+ Literature while also foregrounding “the achievement of deep anguish’s transformation into art.”

This idea of telling one’s story as a means of releasing emotions and trauma also ripples throughout Stephanie Clare Smith’s gripping memoir, Everywhere the Undrowned: A Memoir of Survival and Imagination, reviewed here by Jennifer McGaha. The story of Smith’s abandonment and abuse as a teenager (by many of the adults who should have been protecting her) is largely told in vignettes and snippets. Despite the challenges of the traumatic events the book depicts, McGaha’s review highlights both the beauty of Smith’s lyricism and the powerful – and hopeful– reclamation of her own story and healing process.

As the editorial staff at NCLR work toward finalizing the upcoming 2025 print issue, due out this summer, don’t forget to subscribe to receive it.

The print issue promises to both introduce us to and reacquaint us with a wide range of incredible LGBTQ+ voices in North Carolina. In addition to exciting content already mentioned, the print issue will include interviews with poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi, and novelist De’Shawn Charles Winslow.

Featured scholarly and creative essays will explore writers such as Randall Kenan and Carter Sickels.

And there’s more.

Looking further to the future, I’d also like to remind everyone of next year’s upcoming NCLR special feature on North Carolina Veteran and Active Military Authors, which will be guest edited

by Anna Froula, with submissions due by August 31, 2025. n

8 There’s Another Moment After This One

a short story by Jim Grimsley art by Willie Little 11 Figure in a Landscape

a poem by Amber Flora Thomas art by Karena “Kidd” Graves 12 “so many there with me”

a review by Catherine Carter

n Jessica Jacobs, unalone 16 The Kindness in Anger

a review by Onyx Bradley

n Eric Tran, Mouth, Sugar, and Smoke 18 Scripture of Exile and Return

a review by Robert M. West Jeffery Beam, Verdant

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21 A Stunning, Haunting Survival Story

a review by Jennifer McGaha

n Stephanie Clare Smith, Everywhere the Undrowned

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE 24

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Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues poetry and book reviews

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North Carolina Miscellany an essay and book reviews

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Spring 2025

There’s Another Moment After This One

BY JIM GRIMSLEY with art by Willie Little

When the tide goes out we are stranded on a sandbar with waves undulating toward the horizon and still water between us and the shore. This is a typical proposition. The lyrical quality of the waves and wind make a vibration like a far-away drum, a heartbeat of a quality lean and supple, as if we, like the waves, will go on and on, advancing and retreating, what appears at first to be a tedious repetition, the only extraordinary quality of which is endlessness. Filling all the distance

to the horizon forever. You and I again. Too tedious to provide the context. I would never have chosen to stand here with a poet, on the strand, but here you are. It is simply that we breathe so

well together, as if we are a sonnet. I am mended by the wind especially, just so. How it scours and streaks through the spray, the salt, whips up the sand, makes the air a kind of broth. You are bending to the layer of foam over the sand, watching out there, the streaks of violet in the clouds, not just ebb tide but near sunset, the lowering sky all hung with banners of pink and lavender, the gray underside of the clouds flushed bright with reflected light.

We might be at the end of the world, or the border of one kind of world and another; it is easy to imagine possibilities of an apocalypse, a catastrophe, a design. I am trying to decide whether there are enough birds on the bar and on the beach where the light is now purpling, where the colors of the dunes have changed to pink and indigo and streaks of ghostly green. Gulls suspended in the air, sandpipers along the bar, running and pecking and running again, a row of frigate birds along the tops of the distant waves, another farther along the strand.

It really might be the end of the world, if you only knew what world it was. You are dressed in ragged clothes, old clothes, barefoot, sandals hung around your neck on a cord, the drawing of a head on your tee shirt, some new music star I don’t know anything about. Or maybe it’s not a head, it’s just an image that’s been washed so

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. 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 and forthcoming in the 2025 print issue, an interview with him in NCLR 2009, and an essay in NCLR 2012.

Born in Washington, NC, WILLIE LITTLE received his BA from UNC Chapel Hill. His visual narratives document a fading part of rural Southern life while tackling topics of racism and Black Lives Matter, Social Justice, and childhood memories of growing up on a tobacco farm in Eastern NC. His memoir, In the Sticks (Lulu Press, 2019), documents his years growing up as a poor, Black, gay/queer child in the rural South. His solo exhibits include the Smithsonian Institution, the Noel Gallery in Charlotte, and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Notable group exhibitions include the Corcoran and three International Assemblage exhibitions in Berlin. His work has toured venues throughout South Africa, Belgium, and Mozambique. He currently resides in the Palm Springs area and Portland, OR.

I would never have chosen to stand here with a poet, on the strand, but here you are. It is simply that we breathe so well together, as if we are a sonnet.

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of it, but I can’t tell what it is. Perhaps I actually do see it, but the moment has stopped at a point at which I am not thinking about that idea – of what the stone looks like – and so its purpose is a blank to me. But it is there. I do have pants, I do have pockets, but I am barefoot, too, and the highest of the waves breaks foam over my ankles.

I take the stone out of my pocket and fling it far over the waves. Are you Din Wufon, did you write “how the shapes are shaping themselves”?

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

many times it’s unrecognizable. Wet, plastered to your body, the tee shirt. My own shirt is the same, heavy with moisture, too loose to cling to my skin.

We waded out to the bar just as the tide was withdrawing, and here we are.

But something has happened, thrumming through this moment. I have forgotten everything and here I sit, frozen, and the present – stops? – no, floats, wavers, and I sit here, or stand here, my feet in the wet sand and a whole ocean counting time on every side. The moment frozen, the waves yet beating; but that is the eternal state of waves.

Down along the strand, beyond the still stretch of salt water on the shore side, I expect to see houses and people but there is nothing of the kind, only a field of dunes, topped with sea grasses and oats and intricately coiled shrubs that cling to the dune face and quiver in the wind. I think I see a pier a long way south of where we stand.

The book you are holding is the Complete, Selected, and New Poems of Din Wufon Horowitz, battered and worn, self-published, with the swirling of sunflowers on the cover, poorly drawn, I tell you, as though it were the product of a child, but I am being a barbarian, you say, turning up my nose at a book because of its cover. No, I answer, I am turning up my nose at a book because it came from a vanity press. The subtitle of the book – really, there are so many large-type words on the cover, it’s like an eye-test chart – is Blooms from the End of the Day. You have tried to read me one of the poems, about a seagull and its hop-hop-hopping on the sand, but I can be grateful that the hammering of the surf has submerged it all. Somehow this is reduced to a moment. You have either just stopped reading the poem or else you are taking a dramatic breath. You are elated by the words: “Waves pour out petals of lily or rose.” Or something like that, and I look behind us, at the western sky, all florid orange and red clouds, topped with golds and grays, hanging under a dark streak of violet, the coming night. All that violent color drains over the horizon.

In my pocket I am holding a small, smooth stone, and I rub it slowly between thumb and forefinger; there is a design carved into one side

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Teal Rust Red Sunset on a Slab (oil, wax medium, rust medium patina, pigments, on floating birch panel, 48x60) by Willie Little

There is a sense of connection from me to you, a pull of force, and I know I must stand just this close to you, neither farther nor nearer, and I must keep quiet while you wait just ahead of me, the back of your head, the wind, the ceaseless water sound, splash, spray, retreat, a gull hanging over your hair, wings curving over the wind to keep itself still. The moment hangs there, too, steady as the bird, but with the fact of motion running all through it. Even if I am caught here, I am still feeling all the sensations of motion, air, and water; they

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permeate all of space and time. I have been moving, I have been standing in the wind, I have been a living creature. I have been here before. This moment is always. But there will come a passing.

It is a poem you are writing now, lines of it on the wind, the slope of your shoulders, your earnest expression, I can see it even though I am behind you: you are writing one of those weak stanzas of yours, “the sea that bides and borrows, tides and grains of sand, all this,” each word like a pebble in your mouth, caressing your tongue around it, and that is all you can do. We are both waiting. It is my fate that time has left me here in this moment stranded with a lousy poet and a seagull, in a place where inspiration is inevitable but its outcome uncertain, waiting for the next –

This could be the end of the world, with a sky like that. Or this could be Monday, with air pollution and a vivid sunset.

What?

That sky on fire has a look of portent, a whole conflagration. I have never seen colors so vivid, a pulsation tinging the clouds. It is a seeing that is perpetual as we hang here together, it and I, and

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yet behind it all the ring of silence, this notion that it will break apart before it will move forward, this idea that it is simply a matter of ebbing at the right instant. This could be the end of the world, with a sky like that. Or this could be Monday, with air pollution and a vivid sunset.

Who would have believed this would be the moment in which I would pause, hang still, or rather hang in the thousand vibrations of the day, who would have believed I would be trapped here, come to the sea to find all the elements gathered for our sensitivity? I who have pictured so many things, imagined whole worlds, multiverses like coquettish fans, I who can see that orange sky and for whom the impending disaster – nuclear fire, superstorm, riot over food, pandemic, yes, that – is threaded through every interstitial space. “That smear of brown so like a smear of brown.” You are moved by yourself, you are aloof, for you this moment is nothing, you have already hurtled yourself into the next, I suppose, and this echo of you is merely a shell, a bit of purpose, a fleck of regret.

It must be some horror portending toward me that makes me float. The waves’ rolling shimmers onward, the waves breaking each moment, still breaking in essence, the whole vibration of it, in this present containment. I have come unstuck.

I will be this instant and never anything else. It is like a choice.

Calm wash. Easy blow. Sharp call, piercing.

The gull speaks, flaps its wings, furls upward; you turn, your poem is done, and I like a fool am part of it, the next thing. “Spacious the petals, bright the rose.” And then the next, and then. That bright blossoming behind us beyond the dunes, a fire rising to eat the whole of everything. n

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BY AMBER FLORA THOMAS

Figure in a Landscape Thank you for the story, though our view of her disintegrates in the light, as clouds calibrate sun at the horizon. The train trestle locked open for boats. White crests nick the gray river all the way across. She walks away from us, her back to our attention. Fattened by a winter coat and stepping into the light, she shrinks in how the glare cuts around her. It’s a story of her disappearance. She is impossible, breaking apart in the light, no matter how we look. She becomes immaterial

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

as a whirling ember takes over the horizon. Sun scores the railroad tracks.

Dark branches crucify the shore. This becomes a story about February on Tar River.

Downstream pigs are being slaughtered.

Upstream chickens are losing their heads.

Algae will have to be dredged and hauled out by the boat load. We’re past the threshold on carbon omissions. But it feels like solace to see her walking on the railroad tracks, while the light gets all pink and red.

Forever Moment (Collage; mixed media, 36x15)

by Karena “Kidd” Graves

AMBER FLORA THOMAS is the winner of the 2004 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize, and the Rella Lossy Poetry Award. She has an MFA in poetry writing from Washington University in St. Louis and is an Associate Professor at East Carolina University. She has published three collections of poetry: Eye of Water (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), The Rabbits Could Sing (University of Alaska Press, 2012), and Red Channel in the Rupture (Red Hen Press, 2018; reviewed in NCLR Online 2019). Read more of her poetry in NCLR 2019 and NCLR Online Winter 2025.

A native of Greensboro, NC, KARENA “KIDD” GRAVES formed an early interest in art as a student at Durham School of the Arts. They graduated from UNC Greensboro with a BFA in Sculpture and Ceramics and earned an MFA in Sculpture from ECU. Their multidisciplinary art has been exhibited at the Raleigh Fine Arts Showcase and at the Center for Visual Arts at the Greensboro Cultural Center, among others. Graves was an Artist-in-Residence at Greensboro Cultural Center and at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, TN. As a Queer Black artist, Graves often explores topics of race, sexual orientation, and gender, as well as dreams, memories, and African American folklore and storytelling.

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“SO MANY THERE WITH ME” a review by Catherine Carter Jessica Jacobs. unalone: Poems in Conversation with the Book of Genesis.

Four Way Books, 2024.

C AT H E R I N E C A R T E R ’ s p o e t r y collections with LSU Press include Larvae of the Nearest Stars (2019), The Swamp Monster at Home (2012), and The Memory of Gills (2006), with a fourth, By Stone and Needle, forthcoming in fall 2025. She is co-translator and co-editor, with Brian Gastle, of the first complete modern English verse translation of John Gower’s long medieval poem, Confessio Amantis (Medieval Institute Publications, 2024). Her work has also appeared in Best American Poetry, Orion, Poetry, Ploughshares, RHINO, Ecotone, and NCLR, and she has been the winner of NCLR’s James Applewhite Poetry Prize and of the RoanokeChowan Poetry Award. She lives with her spouse in Cullowhee, NC, where she is a Professor of English Education at Western Carolina University.

Jessica Jacobs’s third full-length collection of poems, unalone, is subtitled Poems in Conversation with the Book of Genesis, a declaration preparing the reader – insofar as that is possible – for what is to come. This collection grows from everything Jacobs learned about self-examination from her award-winning Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going, and everything she learned about research and persona poetry in her first fulllength collection, Pelvis with Distance. The poems of this substantial collection are indeed conversations, in a sense drawn from the rich Hebrew tradition of midrash, an ancient and multivalent collection of later commentaries on the stories of the Torah. In this tradition, readers and scholars consider not only the Hebrew words of the original sacred texts, but what the lines seem to leave unsaid – as well as what has already been said by prior commentators on the same text. Some of the commentaries are taught as part of the text itself, rather than as separate works of exegesis, along with the commentaries on those commentaries.

Midrash, then, is perhaps a bit like dinner at a large family reunion, where that family’s accumulated histories and stories are retold and re-remembered, argued over, interpreted and counterinterpreted, mined for their meanings to those alive in the

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present moment – meanings which, in the next generation, may well be revisited from still newer perspectives. The family members’ voices interlace, contradict, talk over and under one another, so that what we call meaning may better be rendered as meanings. And the midrash tradition is alive to this plurality. As Jacobs’s first section, Bereshit, and second poem reveal, the first three words of the Torah are not “In the beginning,” but “In the beginnings.” As the divergent creation narratives of the first two chapters of Genesis suggest (did God make male and female in its own image, or did God make Eve from Adam’s rib? and just when were the animals created and named?), in this tradition sacred text is constantly being made and remade, begun and re-begun, in a universe rife with beginnings.

This is the context in which unalone can enter into bilingual conversation (Jacobs studies Hebrew) with the stories of the Torah. Creation, Eve, Methuselah, Noah and his nameless wife, Lot and his nameless wife, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob and Rebecca, Rachel and Leah, Zilpah and Bilhah, and Serah are all invoked, along with other characters of those traditions.

Jacobs’s new collection encompasses both careful scholarship and ultimate surrender to mystery, receiving both approaches as equally relevant and holy.

JESSICA JACOBS is the author of Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books, 2019), one of Library Journal’s Best Poetry Books of the Year, winner of the Devil’s Kitchen and Goldie Awards, and a finalist for the Brockman-Campbell, American Fiction, and Julie Suk Book Awards, and Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press, 2015), a biography-in-poems of Georgia O’Keeffe, which received the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. She also co-authored Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire (Spruce Books, 2020) and is the founder and executive director of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry.

North Carolina LGBTQ+ Literature

The book is divided into twelve sections, based on the first few words, or parashot, of each of the first stories of the Book of Genesis, like “Go forth” or “And he appeared.” Some of the poems are persona poems, written in the voices of Torah figures like Sarah or the undying Serah. But the sections also illuminate the tendrils and roots which connect all these stories and voices to the poet’s own family and experiences, and to the world we all inhabit together.

That world is far from the “simpler” world mourned by those who imagine that change, complication, moral ambiguity, and identity politics are somehow modern inventions. It’s a world of loss and divorce and agonizing early dementia, of global pandemics, species loss, and climate refugees, of violence and rage, of choices between accepting guilt and accepting our own powerlessness and of finding more company than we might expect, as we climb the many branches of the sacred. It’s a world, and a book, rich in puns and rich in mouths, all of which have words to give.

So much goes on in this broad, deep collection that it is difficult to select representative poems or even themes. The book is a kind of Torah ecosystem, with each story and theme braiding or unspooling into, and echoing off of, all the others. In some ways, the most meaningful response I can muster would be to hand you the book and advise you to read it. Like the tradition it plumbs, it is nearly bottomless and will sustain and reward nearly infinite re-readings.

“Read the book,” however, doesn’t help those for whom the book’s not at hand, or who need details before deciding whether to read it. Begin, then, with two of the collection’s central concerns.

One is the excavation of the silenced voices of women, in pursuit of a truer, deeper vision of the world as it is. The other is the effort to come to terms with what “God” can possibly mean in that complicated, agonizing world which, if not fallen, is at least always falling, in context of family, injustice, and loss. The book does this by drawing on the deep wells of holy text, midrash, imagination, unexpected correspondences between seemingly disparate experiences, and, as Jacobs writes in “Ars Poetica,” “the right words ready as pail, cord, and winch / to draw out even the deepest waters.”

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As one example of how this works, “How Many More” addresses a fascinating variant story of the founding of the twelve tribes of Israel. Jacobs’s note quotes the medieval French rabbi and Torah commentator Rashi’s own note on a still earlier source. This story suggests that for each of Jacob’s twelve sons, founders of the twelve tribes of Israel, a twin sister was also born, and that each son then married one of those half- or stepsisters by a different mother. In this tradition, then, these invisible, silent twin daughters would be the unnamed mothers of those twelve tribes, which are generally identified only by the names of their fathers. These are some of the “so many women / left uncounted, unnamed. And how many more // made extinct by men’s hungers.”

Whether or not such female twins ever existed at the literal level, literal women certainly did. As the poet remarked in a recent interview, someone had to feed the patriarchs and bear their children and do their laundry, which the poem envisions as snapping “like flags / in the breeze, bearing the standard // of their whispered nation.” However, the poem does not merely lament the silenced voices of the tradition (“mystical creatures or just bad // translations”). It also compares them to aurochs, an extinct precursor to modern cattle: “real / animals now mythic, hunted into extinction.” This metaphor links the stifled voices of these women with our own Anthropocene extinction crisis, in which real species are “disappeared” daily, even hourly. This single couplet brings a contemporary ecofeminist slant to the story.

The poem goes on to fuse the twin sisters with the far-from-mythical uncredited female scientists, inventors, and authors who haunt human history. It wishes, on behalf of all these women, that the unnamed twins had taken their father’s story of wrestling the angel until dawn as their own, had taken their men in a grappler’s embrace steady as a winepress, extracting the names not given, the birthrights denied.

They were the leaders of the true lost tribes.

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Here, scholarship and imagination transmute the patriarch Jacob’s violent encounter with the divine into new registers.

The sons of Jacob who founded the twelve tribes become the angels with whom Jacob wrestled, angels who can be themselves forced, perhaps through the midrash tradition, into providing a justice which the story otherwise refuses. The invisible female twins, the grapplers, squeeze their due from these men “steady as a winepress” crushes grapes. And the result is that those names and birthrights become metaphorical wine.

This figurative use of wine sets up associative resonances across the rest of the Torah. It invokes (to name only a few of the Torah’s literal and symbolic mentions of wine) Noah’s role as the first vintner, Melchizedek’s offering of bread and wine to Abraham as emblems of his priesthood, Lot’s daughters’ very problematic use of wine to conceive by their father, Isaac’s blessing of Jacob with plenty by explicitly hoping that God may give him ample grain and wine, and, later, the founding patriarch Jacob’s blessing of his own son, Judah, which describes him as having washed his garments in wine. In Exodus, wine is listed among appropriate offerings to God, a visible sign of joy and celebration. And all these associations are what the poet claims for these other, forgotten names, the lost stories, pressed from the patriarchs by those they have silenced: holiness and taboo, joy and betrayal, sacrilege and sacrament.

These invisible, perhaps mythic women are re-envisioned as the “true lost tribes”: exiled, deported, forgotten, and yet still fermenting in the stories we tell, like yeast in wine.

Not only does the poet know her Torah, but the collection offers an overall vision of the divine as profoundly immanent in every experience, be it love, rage, ecstasy, mourning, fear.

God, whatever we may mean by the word, is not off in the sky, but ambient in the here and now, the vine and the wine, the story and the commentary, the quotidian connections between one human and another, and between each human and the nonhuman world. And that vision of connection, of unalone-ness, is thoughtful, compassionate, and beautiful.

The introduction of the G-word may be the time to note that there are eight short poems in the collection, spread across the parashot, titled “And God speaks.” These identically titled poems don’t presume to put words into God’s mouth, a wise craft choice, but offer different perspectives on possible connections to the divine.

I’ll quote the final “And God speaks” in its entirety: And God speaks in a sound beyond sounding: A ready well in the driest desert.

Your mother’s palm, just before sleep, cupping your small cheek. The still

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small voice you’ve known all your life. You’d always assumed it was yours alone, just like you’d always assumed you were alone.

Here, too, connection and allusion are immanent and everywhere. The “ready well” invokes not only the well of water which God reveals to Hagar, dying of thirst in the desert, but also the well of family feeling and of tears that Judah calls forth from Joseph’s heart back in “Ars Poetica” and the deepest well from which “the right words” can draw at the end of that poem. In the next line, that well, and God’s voice, become the well of memory of the mother whom the poet is losing to dementia. That memory fuses into “the . . . voice you’ve known / all your life,” a reference to the story of Elijah, who after the fire and the earthquake hears the voice of God as “the still small voice.” The memory of the mother is also “the still small voice” of God which the speaker had believed was hers “alone.”

This voice allows the speaker to feel that she is not in fact alone, or not only alone.

This brings us to the book’s final poem, “Aliyah,” a word that means variously “ascent”; the ingathering of exiles to the land of Israel; and, in mitzvah ceremony, the calling up of readers to the pulpit to give blessing on excerpts read from the Torah.

This final use is indicated by the poem’s epigraph from the prayer recited in this context:

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PHOTOGRAPH BY CORY WELLER; COURTESY OF JESSICA JACOBS

“Blessed are you, God our God, Sovereign of the World, who has given us the Torah of truth, planting within us life everlasting.” However, other meanings are implicit in the poem as well as the speaker envisions the divine as a tree of heaven: Let me speak to you as the tree I climbed as a child, the one in the far corner of my grandmother’s yard, whose bark was a tapestry of rough diamonds.

Your first branch was low enough to leap to, textured enough to hold me. And each branch after placed as though to keep me climbing.

I paused only to press my ear to your trunk and hear it: the heartbeat of water moving toward the leaves, the conversation between roots and sky. Climbing until my hair twined your needles’ spines; until, anointed by your green, you took root within me; so I speak from the part of me who grows you, grows with you, who will always live in your branches.

And in the boughs, so many there with me.

A vantage we could not have reached on our own, a vision otherwise beyond us.

All of us, in that overstory, unalone.

This vision of God as a tree to be climbed pulls together many of the book’s themes. The tree

ABOVE Jessica Jacobs reading during the Yetzirah Jewish Poetry

Conference, Asheville, NC, 30 June 2024

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of heaven, literally the tree in the grandmother’s yard, draws in family, female lineage, and memory, and connects the past to the future. The rough diamonds are patterns of bark, felt in the feet, which also carry connotations of diamonds in the rough – priceless worth hidden in misleading exteriors, inner meanings which are yet to be explicated, old stories which hold the search for truth. The tree’s “heartbeat of water” connects speaker and reader to the tree as a living, very possibly sentient, being, echoing the inclusive and perhaps animist commentary on animal sacrifices and species loss in earlier poems like “Covenant between the pieces” and “And the ground opens its mouth to speak.” That heartbeat also foretells the “conversation between roots and sky” in the next line: its hinge word conversation calls back the book’s subtitle and reminds readers of the midrash tradition, gives that tree agency and voice, and sets the nonhuman into right relation as a branch of the divine. The tree’s sap provides an “anointing” with the literal and also holy material of this world: sap become chrism. And the final lines, hearkening back to the ending of “In the Shadow of Babel,” set speaker and reader into right relation with all the others, the “so many there with me” entering upon “a vantage we could not have reached / on our own, a vision otherwise beyond us” in the “overstory,” which is both literally the tree’s canopy and figuratively the larger story in which we all participate.

From “Aliyah,” readers may see that where we find the divine is in the quest for it: to seek, as in the midrash tradition, really is to find. But the poem can best show us this in context of the full volume. From all of unalone, all its voices and explications, its crossing, branching intersections, we see that it can only be done together. There is never just one tree, or just one ultimately authoritative voice or perspective drowning out all the rest. As Jacobs notes in “Why There Is No Hebrew Word for Obey,” the central word of the tradition is shema: listen.

Which brings me back to “read the book.” It is dazzling, gorgeous, thoughtful, spiritual, relevant, and even fun. But an even better idea might be to read it with a friend, or a few friends, and as you read, to talk about what you find there. Together. n

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THE KINDNESS IN ANGER a review by Onyx Bradley Eric Tran. Mouth, Sugar, and Smoke. Diode Editions, 2022.

ONYX BRADLEY was born in Charlotte, NC, and grew up in Pikeville, NC. They were awarded honorable mention in the inaugural Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Prize contest in 2023, then joined the NCLR staff as an Editorial Assistant after enrolling in the ECU MA program in English.

ERIC TRAN is the author of The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer (Autumn House Press, 2020; reviewed in NCLR Online 2021), as well as the chapbooks Revisions (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018) and Affairs with Men in Suits (Backbone Press, 2014). He completed his residency at the Mountain Area Health Education Center in Asheville, NC, graduated from the UNC School of Medicine, and holds an MFA from UNC Wilmington. He is an Associate Editor for Orison Books and a psychiatrist in Portland, OR.

OPPOSITE Eric Tran reading at UNC Asheville in Asheville, NC, 2 Nov. 2023

Whether it be in ancient Greece or modern-day life, the queer experience is often intimately linked with death and mourning. Eric Tran often writes about grief, and much of his poetry is about the specific type of grief that hangs over LGBTQ+ individuals’ lives, so many of which end far too early. In his collection Mouth, Sugar, and Smoke, Tran handles these topics masterfully, without letting the poems get too dark. It’s no wonder that this collection won the Diode Editions 2021 Full-Length Book Prize. It is a riveting collection that centers on the poet’s experiences as a queer Vietnamese American poet while also focusing on his career as a psychiatrist and the deaths he’s experienced both on the job and during his studies at the UNC School of Medicine.

The book is broken into four sections, and while the entire collection focuses on the underlying topic of death, each section features a smaller “story” within it related to drugs and drug use.

The first is about witnessing drug use, seeing how it affects those that one cares about. The second explores living with addiction and learning to deal with the habits that are a byproduct of dependency. The third and fourth sections deal with recovery and healing, even as the temptations are still present.

In the opening poem, “Aubade with Withdrawal,” the speaker wakes up in a detox center’s lobby after releasing a partner into their custody, immediately setting the stage for the collection. The attendants are polite, and while not angry, the speaker answers their ambivalence with a question: how could they

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possibly understand the loss he is experiencing?

The attendants see me startle awake and play polite, like they’re too familiar with this loss. What do you know about me, I want to ask. Not from anger, truly, but because time is always a question.

The next few poems focus on the speaker’s time in medical school and residency. They grapple with the fact that one can never really be just an observer. After all, to witness an event is to interact with it, however insignificant that interaction may seem at the time. In the case of “Poem Starting with Underwear and Ending with Ghost,” the speaker uses his personal time to buy underwear for one of his patients, a deed he knows will ultimately go unappreciated: “my dead don’t remember me, I know. This near dead man won’t / either. No one knows what ghost they leave behind.” Even so, the speaker leaves the gifted clothing with the patient’s nurse.

One of my favorite poems of the collection is in this first section, the first of two titled “My Father Worries War is Coming.” It’s a poem many queer people can relate to. It speaks of the divided self, the gap between a person’s childhood self and the person they become when allowed to be open about their identity. The speaker mentions photos of his family, his father in his younger years, and how “the men I’ve loved / have never seen those pictures” despite wanting to get to know him better. Similarly,

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PHOTOGRAPH BY KENT THOMPSON

“Besides himself, my father / has never seen a photo of me / with a man I love.” Both parts of his life – the boy his father holds on to and the man he’s grown into – want to merge, but the speaker is scared of what could happen, so he keeps them separated, an unfortunately common experience for members of the LGBTQ+ community.

The second section (perhaps the most interesting) tells a story on two different levels, through the poems and through the titles. Most of the poems are named after drugs, and while knowledge of each drug’s purpose isn’t required, it makes the overall story clearer. The section starts off quietly, almost relaxed, with the first four poems named after sedatives and muscle relaxers. Then it becomes a bit frantic by moving onto “Naloxone,” which is used to reverse opioid overdoses, followed by opium itself, “Papaver Somniferum,” which is grittier than its predecessors. “Suboxone,” a medication used to treat narcotic dependence, continues the story; the narcotic pain reliever “Tramadol” suggests a relapse.

After a small interlude, the medications switch to slightly tamer ones that speak of recovery, like the SSRI “Lexapro” and the

anti-nausea medication “Zofran.”

The sequence ends with another antidepressant, “Trazodone.”

Those who have dealt with their own or a loved one’s addiction will find this story familiar.

The third section of the collection is slightly lighter, concerned less with the speaker’s experiences with addiction and death than with how to simply exist in the world. It opens with another one of my favorites, “Commuting by the Confederate Flag on I-40.” Based on the title, many would expect the poem to be angry, perhaps even accusatory. But instead the speaker strives to understand: I want to play the angry faggot but in truth I burn to know what grief demotes your pride, neighbor. Did you lose your son, a lover, a dog?

Anger is easy; it’s so common for people to let differing beliefs make them forget that we are all human. Yet this speaker is compassionate. He hopes that even if the person who hung that flag opposes his existence, they will never feel similarly trapped: “I’m scared / for any of us / to run out of gas / in an unfamiliar place.” The speaker doesn’t let his anger make him cruel and instead chooses to be kind when the same consideration would likely not be given in return.

The fourth and final group of poems is less about experiencing and living with all the terrible matters mentioned before, and more about living in their

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aftermath and dealing with the results. Poems like “On the Psychotic Unit,” which is about the speaker’s sympathy for his patients and the small things that make their days brighter, show the happier moments of life found in the mundane: “After the fire, my patient is visited by her estranged son, who brings / flowers he must take home with him.

They matched the pink lipstick she / hasn’t mustered the energy to wear. It’s crazy, she says after.

This whole / thing made my day.”

Conversely, pieces like “How My Mother Named Me” discuss the bitter realities of life, namely how the speaker’s mother “wishes she had named me better / in a language we no longer share.”

She settled on Eric because it was “fast and easy to write / on form after form after form / you don’t understand.” A more complicated name or even a simpler, more traditional Vietnamese name would bring questions and comments from Americans. As a poor immigrant, the speaker’s mother couldn’t afford the time a different name would require to write or explain to others.

Death, addiction, and queerness are at the forefront of Tran’s collection and are matters most people have dealt with, or at least know someone who has.

Given the injustices and disappointments the speaker has suffered, one might expect the final poems in this collection to lash out angrily at the perpetrators.

Instead, Tran ends the book with “Angier, NC,” in which he wishes others better luck than he had: I wish you the bounty of double coupon day, of dented cans sold for cheap. A slab of bloody roast with the most perfect marble.

A flat of strawberries near spoil, right when they’re sweetest. n

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SCRIPTURE OF EXILE AND RETURN a review by Robert M. West Jeffery Beam. Verdant.

Kin Press, 2022.

ROBERT M. WEST is the editor of both volumes of The Complete Poems of A.R. Ammons (W.W. Norton, 2017; reviewed in NCLR Online 2019) and co-editor of Robert Morgan: Essays on the Life and Work (McFarland & Company, 2022; reviewed in NCLR Online Spring 2024).

He serves as the head of the Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures at Mississippi State University where he is also Associate Editor of Mississippi Quarterly.

JEFFERY BEAM is the author of numerous poetry collections, including The Broken Flower (Skysill Press, 2012; reviewed in NCLR Online 2014). He is a retired UNC Chapel Hill botanical librarian. A native of Kannapolis, NC, he currently lives in Hillsborough, NC. Read his poetry in NCLR 1995, 1996, and 1997.

In a review of Jeffery Beam’s 1995 book Visions of Dame Kind, future state poet laureate Shelby Stephenson declared that Beam was “North Carolina’s lead singer.”* More than one reader surely took this as a pronouncement that Beam was the state’s best poet. Given the strength of the field, that would be a remarkable ranking: even without several fine poets who’d grown up in the state but moved away, North Carolina was still home (by birth or adoption) to many gifted and distinguished voices. As editor of the invaluable Pembroke Magazine, Stephenson knew the state poetry scene well; his judgment mattered, as it still does. Yet anyone who saw that remark as an unnuanced coronation may well have raised an eyebrow.

Such a reader, though, wouldn’t have registered the specific terms of Stephenson’s praise. The fact is that by that point, most of the best-known poets in the state had made their reputations as storytellers, portraitists, and ruminative thinkers. In general, the verse of Fred Chappell, James Applewhite, Betty Adcock, Gerald Barrax, James Seay, and other prominent voices recalled the longstanding concepts of the poet as a maker or as a sayer.

But you were unlikely to hear them pouring out their “full heart / In profuse strains of unpremeditated art,” filling the world with “harmonious madness,” as Shelley described his aspiration in “To a Skylark”; they were unlikely to seem all “flashing eyes” and “floating hair,” * Shelby Stephenson, “Poet’s Vision is Lyrical ‘Yet Exacting’ and Spare,” rev. of Visions of Dame Kind,” The Pilot 15 Apr. 1996: 3B.

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fueled by “honey-dew” and “the milk of Paradise,” as Coleridge evoked his own ideal in “Kubla Khan.” If you were looking for that kind of poet – the poet as inspired singer, as ecstatic – you needed to look elsewhere. And if you did, there was Beam.

Thirty years later, Beam is happily still that kind of poet, and Verdant finds him singing in top form. At the heart of the book is a sequence of twenty-six untitled poems based on the poet’s struggle with the end of an affair.

The affair and the agony that followed took place in the mid-’90s (around the same time that Stephenson made his declaration).

In the substantial essay with which he ends the book, Beam explains how that experience led to these poems. His reading was a major catalyst: he tells us that Akhmatova, Millay, Lessing (Doris), Whitman, Rilke, Rumi, Gibran and others – the list is long – helped him think and feel his way through that difficult time. All that input led to output: I began to burn to make a scripture of my exile and return, and thus to evoke personal healing through a sequence of poems rich with the knit of all these poetic expressions and traditions, with all their bitternesses and sweetnesses . . .

As I regained my sanity, as I “came through” as Lawrence would say, I surrendered peaceably to my preoccupation with longing and grief as perennial themes. Verdant is one semi-fictionalized result.

As often turns out to be the case with poetry that suggests great spontaneity, this sequence didn’t come into being quickly

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PHOTOGRAPH BY PAUL JONES

manipulative, while the speaker nevertheless persisted in his adoration till reaching the current nadir: You told me your heart was a sieve as if to force me into condemnations Instead I praised your wisdom – your brown eyes dancing – your blue-black hair smoking up our nights Summer welcomes me again I walk out Skin crying Neighbors watching my restless solitude You thought you owned me but I know now suffering alone possesses me

at all. Beam tells us he composed it over the span of thirteen years. It’s not only a testament to a great deal of inner work: it’s also the product of much writerly care and craft.

The speaker’s lover is the one who ended the affair, as the sequence’s first line makes clear: “He leaves in a whirlwind.” A few lines later, abandoned, the speaker tells us he’s left with “[e]nduring burning: a kind / of perplexing bleak ecstasy”; the second poem describes him experiencing “silence sweet and deafening” that’s “[p]erfect for remembering . . . and forgetting” (ellipsis in the poem). Both passages capture an emotional paradox that’s central to the book: the loss brings pain, but he learns to savor the accompanying feeling of longing, which he eventually recognizes as a fundamental aspect of his soul, one that transcends this particular relationship. (I’m referring to “the speaker” not to be overly academic, but in recognition of the poet’s description of his “scripture” as “semi-fictionalized.”)

Let me quote three of these poems, to give a better sense of the artfulness here and to suggest more concretely the sequence’s direction. Here is the fourth, which suggests the emotional complexity of the affair’s conclusion. The former lover seems to have been both possessive and ABOVE Jeffery Beam reading from Verdant at the

Thomas Stevens Gallery, Hillsborough, NC, 19 Mar. 2022

All is grief: even his summer sweating feels like “[s]kin crying.”

By the eleventh poem, the pain of “suffering” has become an awakening into “longing.” And longing, the speaker tells us he’s learned, is the secret teaching at love’s heart: Longing: Love’s treasured Kabbalah Every day I learn something new Remembered kisses scripting my skin Letters unsent I’ve written your name backwards to un-spell it A kind of witchcraft A kind of kindness: The least the most you deserve

Kabbalah is a mystical tradition of interpretation, Jewish in origin, and the speaker’s memories compose a text he is learning to interpret. At the same time he says he’s learning from his longing, he tells us he’s pulling free of the bond itself – not only restraining himself from sending letters (written presumably to the lover), but also reversing the lover’s name as a form of defensive magic. The last two lines offer a delicious pivot from a hint of residual affection into a surprising and marvelous snarl.

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The twenty-fourth poem conveys the peace finally attained. The trauma of loss has evolved into self-affirmation and a spiritually restorative bond with nonhuman nature: I have a great secret Living close to the storm the forest the drought and the hail I am a beauty The grasses kneel with me And with my kin the moss and willow my kin the beasts and birds

He’s grown through this painful experience and is now flourishing, become newly (if you like) verdant.

That declaration “I am a beauty” is one of several announcements of self-admiration in the sequence’s second half, announcements that clarify his emergence from suffering. This isn’t some insidious narcissism: it’s acceptance of the self as holy and worthy of respect. Jesus’s command to “love your neighbor as yourself” only functions as a moral imperative if one does love oneself, and “I celebrate myself and sing myself” is the first line of what turns out to be Whitman’s most inclusive poem. Beam’s “secret” holder isn’t hypnotized by his own reflection and so cut off from the world: rather, he feels an

Click right to f ind our Bookshop aff iliate listing of books reviewed in this issue.

exultant new sense of belonging to the family of all living beings.

I said above that the sequence of twenty-six poems is “at the heart of the book” because there’s considerably more to the book than that sequence. Each poem occupies one page, and yet the book is about sixty pages long. That’s because there’s a large amount of what scholars call paratext: additional material included to shape a reader’s response to the main text. The sequence itself follows three sets of dedications and three epigraphs, the third of which is the complete thirteenth poem from Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali (Song Offerings), and then the concluding explanatory essay (which itself begins with four epigraphs), titled “Don’t Forget Love: Sacred Longing’s Dark Project,” adds nine pages. Following that comes the complete ninety-sixth poem from Gitanjali, and then there are three pages of notes on the essay. Some readers may find this wealth of extra material a bit much; one may or may not end up feeling that knowing traditions about Khidr or the Green Man or John the Baptist is as important for understanding the sequence as the essay and notes would suggest. (Though Verdant is hardly the same kind of puzzle-poem, in some ways it resembles The Waste Land; for example, Eliot too appends notes explaining his poem in terms of

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ancient myth and folklore. Both works also associate verdancy with psychological and sexual health.) My own view is that all the paratext gives Beam’s book a fascinating kaleidoscopic quality, and the details of the sequence’s origin both illuminate its literary genealogy and underscore the achievement of deep anguish’s transformation into art.

Today Beam’s reputation is well established indeed among those familiar with North Carolina’s rich community of poets.

Stephenson’s early admiration has been validated by later books like Gospel Earth, The New Beautiful Tendons: Collected Queer Poems 1969–2012, The Broken Flower, and Spectral Pegasus: Dark Movements, and Verdant further strengthens the case. It’s worth noting that not only does Beam exemplify the idea of the poet as a singer, but also that a variety of composers (among them Lee Hoiby, Steven Sérpa, and Tony Solitro) have set his poems to music – a fact recently highlighted by a handsome collection titled Troubadour: Collaborations and Inventions in Music, 1971–2023, published by Beam’s own Green Finch Press in collaboration with Horse & Buggy Press. Beam may be in his seventies now, but he’s clearly still young at heart and (to quote Shelley again) “singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.” n

North Carolina LGBTQ+ Literature

A STUNNING, HAUNTING SURVIVAL STORY a review by Jennifer McGaha Stephanie Clare Smith. Everywhere the Undrowned: A Memoir of Survival and Imagination.

University of North Carolina Press, 2024.

JENNIFER MCGAHA is the author of The Joy Document: Creating a Midlife of Surprise and Joy (Broadleaf Books, 2024), Flat Broke with Two Goats (Sourcebooks, 2018), and Bushwacking: How to Get Lost in the Woods and Write Your Way Out (Trinity University Press, 2023), which was a Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award finalist. Her writing has been featured in The Huffington Post, Lumina Journal, PANK Magazine, The New Pioneer Magazine, Brevity, The Bitter Southerner, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Crab Creek Review, and others.

Among other places, she has taught at UNC Asheville, and she has served as coordinator of the Great Smokies Writing Program.

STEPHANIE CLARE SMITH is the winner of the Poetry of Courage Award and received Honorable Mention for Bellevue Literary Review’s Creative Nonfiction Prize. Her work can be found in Bellevue Literary Review, The Guardian, and Xavier Review. She currently lives in Raleigh, NC, and is a social worker and mediator who works with at-risk families in the judicial system. Everywhere the Undrowned is her first book.

Lyrical, haunting, and deeply moving, Everywhere the Undrowned: A Memoir of Survival and Imagination by Stephanie Clare Smith is a fearless and unforgettable account of the horrific events of one summer that changed Smith’s life forever. As the book opens, fourteen-year-old Smith is taking algebra during the heat of a New Orleans summer. “[I]f all else fails, you can always count on zero,” Smith says (4), but this child cannot count on anything or anyone, especially not her mother, who soon abandons her while she and her boyfriend embark on an extended camping trip out west.

“Teenagers love being on their own,” Smith’s mother tells her, but the following pages are filled with Smith’s yearning for her absent mother. Take, for example, Smith’s description of the moment her mother drives away: “The silver flash of car, her hand leaning out of the driver’s window, her moonstone ring catching the light as she waved goodbye” (17). The concise prose and vivid images – including details the adult narrator recalls so clearly all these years later – convey well this girl’s utter devastation, and emotionally gripping moments like these occur throughout the narrative.

Left to fend for herself, teenage Stephanie attends class, babysits, reads books, does her math homework, rearranges her mother’s plants, and even pretends she is a student at Tulane so she doesn’t feel so alone.

When she can’t sleep, she rides streetcars up and down Saint Charles Avenue where she finds companionship in a much older driver named Gifford. “It didn’t

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seem strange to me that I was so young and he was all grown,” Smith says. “Just like it didn’t seem strange that I was so young and left on my own” (30).

Smith powerfully embodies the mind and spirit of her teenage self, and even as we come to realize that something horrific is going to happen to this child, she remains unaware of her fate.

Her innocence is particularly devastating as we know how soon and how completely it will be lost.

The later passages describing Smith’s kidnapping and sexual assault are, for obvious reasons, difficult to read. They are also stunning in their lyricism: “He took over my body while I waited on the moon,” Smith writes of her attacker. “The way I floated for hours on the dark side of pain. You sink or swim in this world. The way I sank.

The way I swam” (39). After the brutal assault, Smith is betrayed again by the adults in her life – first the algebra teacher who brushes her aside when she tries to tell him what has happened to her, and then Gifford, who takes advantage of her vulnerability even as he, in some ways, is her protector. “[H]ow do you describe what you cannot yet really see? The love and abuse all mixed together like water and milk. Which one is which?

The I don’t want to do this with I don’t want to lose this” (71).

Much like Maggie Nelson’s Bluets (2009), an exploration of the color blue and the nature of grief, Everywhere the Undrowned is told in vignettes that circle through time. Also, like Maggie Nelson, Smith is a poet, a fact evident in the vivid and lyrical prose of both writers.

“Some stories follow us forward”

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COURTESY OF QUAIL RIDGE BOOKS

Smith says (121), and though this movement through time and back to the trauma is a powerful reminder of the reverberations of the attack, the narrative never feels stagnant. Instead, each moment feels pressing and pivotal. As the narrator gains new insights, each scene propels the narrative forward. We are told early on what trauma the narrator experiences. What we don’t know – what we keep reading to discover – is how she will survive it. The memoir-invignette form also allows Smith to pull various threads throughout the work. These threads – algebra, astronomy, the first moon landing – become touchstones, different lenses through which to view this riveting survival story. “Algebra comes from the Arabic word al-jabr and means ‘the reunion of broken parts,’” Smith writes (24).

In other words, this is the story of how the narrator has pieced back together the life that was so nearly taken from her.

ABOVE Stephanie Claire Smith at Quail

Ridge Books, 13 Feb. 2024

Throughout the book, Smith recounts what her mother does without exploring possible motives for her actions or expressing anger or resentment.

“It never occurred to me that it should have occurred to my mother to do more to protect me,” she says. “What you get is what you get” (53). The pain her mother has caused her is real and lasting, but this is not a story of blame. It is a story of survival. Smith reminds readers of this when she says, “I tried to love the whole world and its magnificent desolation, even if it killed me. See how much like a love story this is” (60). Another of these reminders comes when, as an adult, Smith is working as a social worker and advocate for at-risk youth in North Carolina.

There, she encounters fourteen-year-old Tiffany, whose mother will soon have her paternal rights revoked if she doesn’t relinquish them, and the comparison between Tiffany’s mother and Smith’s are evident.

As Tiffany struggles with her feelings of love and loyalty to her mother, Smith overhears someone saying that abused and neglected kids protect their moms to the same degree they weren’t protected. In that moment, Smith returns to the image of the moon, which in turn, takes readers back to the night of her assault. “I’d like to know what you would do floating around on the dark side of the moon all by yourself,” Smith says (80). She then goes on to say, “I wanted to tell Tiffany that she’d already survived all the definitions of neglect. . . . We are both part of that tribe” (84).

Throughout the book, Smith repeats this question: “Is it my story that marks me or the telling that does it?” (68). The telling, she comes to see (and we come to see), frees her in a sense and connects her with other survivors: “For every living thing there is a different solution. A different way of staying alive,” she says (69). Readers begin to see this story, then, as a way of releasing her trauma but also a way of releasing herself from the narratives she has told herself about that night: “What almost takes you out can become your companion – if you carry it out of the war zone and tend to it better” (114). Part of Smith’s survival journey is realizing that she did what she had to do that night to survive, and the passages where she wrestles with the shame she feels surrounding the attack are among the most moving of the book and, indeed, of any

North Carolina LGBTQ+ Literature

memoir I have read: “When I tell the part of my story where I stayed alive, where I lived through my nightmare, what I’m also telling is that I went to hell first. . . . And everywhere I go – rent or buy, stay or move, fly away or be seen – I’ve been to hell first. . . . It’s a dirty shame” (118).

The word undrowned in the book title refers to the women who survived drowning during the Salem witch trials only to be burned at the stake: “Everywhere the undrowned learn to live small. Even then, the odds are against us” (117). In telling

her story, however, Smith is able to live large once again, and her mesmerizing prose and potent images carry us through the darkest moments of this story.

Take for example, this captivating passage at the end of the book: My aura holds a strong scent of soap with hints of sandalwood and mint.

I sit on the front steps and watch as the spent sun lowers into the gray haze of treetops. The houses relax their hot clapboard glare. The headache of parked cars cools down like pools of water. A neighbor walks by and nods. I nod back at her and for a moment we look lucky slanted in old

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Because we have so viscerally experienced the narrator’s pain, we are able to appreciate this simple, peaceful moment for the tremendous achievement it is – a survival story of the highest order. Everywhere the Undrowned is as gut wrenching as it is enchanting, as stunning as it is deeply imaginative.

Smith’s story is an interrogation, a reclamation, a love story to the self, and a testament to the hard work of healing, and it will break you and enchant you and astonish you in all the most beautiful ways. n

sunlight. (119).

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS The 2026 issues will feature

NOR T H CAROLINA LITERARY REVIEW

Writing by and about North Carolina Veteran and Active Military Authors SUBMISSION DEADLINE August 31, 2025 for Interviews with and Critical Analyses of North Carolina veteran/military writers Submit creative writing via our annual contests: n poetry: deadline April 30 and November 15 n fiction: deadline October 31 n creative nonfiction: deadline March 1 Our definition of a North Carolina writer is anyone who currently lives in North Carolina, has lived in North Carolina, or uses North Carolina as subject matter.

For more information, writers’ guidelines, and submission instructions, go to: nclr.ecu.edu/submissions

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Spring 2025

Somewhat Awkward, But . . .

by Margaret D. Bauer, Editor I’m just going to start with it: my own co-edited collection on Paul Green is the subject of an essay in this issue. When Sally Greene sent me her review essay of the Paul Green book Georgann Eubanks and I co-edited, I could not turn it away.

I didn’t think that would be fair to Georgann, the twelve authors writing about Green, or Paul Green himself, who gave so much of himself to North Carolina’s literary heritage. All of the book’s writers have. And as the state’s literary journal of record, NCLR would be remiss in ignoring this book’s publication, which certainly reflects our mission to preserve and promote the state’s rich literary history. I’ll take this opportunity to thank Georgann for allowing me into this project after she did the heavy lifting of soliciting the content and Sally for writing such a substantive review of the book. And thank you to the Paul Green Foundation for once again supporting NCLR with the Paul Green Prize, which encourages submissions related to Green with funding that allows us to provide honoraria for authors like Sally Greene and to pay the talented graphic designer (in this case, Karen Baltimore) for her design of the essay.

When (not if) Sally’s essay inspires you to want to read more about Paul Green, click here to find our package deal on all back issues featuring Green.

Next up in and later in this section, read seven more poems from the 2024 James Applewhite Prize contest, finalists and semifinalsts who have been published in NCLR before (welcome back!).

Subscribe so you don’t miss final judge Jessica Jacobs’s selections for first, second, and third place, which are coming out in the print issue. (Read the honorable mentions and a few more of the finalists and semifinalists in the Winter 2025 issue.)

The Flashbacks section of our online issues tends to include numerous reviews. Read here reviews of books by writers who have previously published their creative writing in NCLR, including Paul Crenshaw, Jennifer McGaha, Dale Neal, and Allan Wolf, or have been a featured writer, like Michele Tracy Berger, who was interviewed in Fall 2022 and now has a new short story collection reviewed. Other reviews hearken back to the special feature topics of previous issues: fantasy literature (2001); the Outer Banks (2005) and Appalachia (2010); children’s literature (2006); and “North Carolina Literature and the Other Arts” (2017), music and visual arts playing key roles in poetry and fiction reviewed in these pages; and African American literature (2019). All of these back issues (indeed, all of our back issues) are available for purchase, though some back issues are in short supply (1998, 1999, 2007). I invite you to check out our back issues page, which includes a listing of all issues’ special feature topic and links to each issue’s table of contents. Don’t miss the opportunity to have a complete set of North Carolina’s literary journal of record on your shelves. Your purchase supports future issues.

Thank you for that support. n

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FLASHBACKS:

Echoes of Past Issues

26 The Generative Legacy of Paul Green a review essay by Sally Greene 39 Ghost Apples a poem by Jane Shlensky art by Roger Manley 40 The Estate Sale a poem by Richard Betz

art by Pamela Pecchio 41 Impermanent Tableau

56 Creating a Midlife of Surprise and Delight a review by Patricia R. Webb

n Jennifer McGaha, The Joy Document 58 A Mix of Grief and Mystory a review by Cody Messer

n Matthew Fiander, Ringing in Your Ears 60 Nadiya Becomes a Sonnet a poem by Melinda Thomsen art by Tim Lytvinenko

a review by David E. Poston

n John Amen, Dark Souvenirs art by Richard Sassoon

61 Solutions a poem by Joanne Durham

44 The Lines We Cross a poem by Jo Ann S. Hoffman

62 A Journey Through Unseen Worlds a review by Amber Knox

n Michele Tracy Berger, Doll Seed

art by Carmen Grier 46 Quick Guide for Lunch with My Brothers a poem by Emily Carter art by Kyle Highsmith 48 Challenging Perspective with Persona Poetry a review by Michael Beadle

n Catherine Pritchard Childress, Outside the Frame 50 Writing Women of Western North Carolina a review by Jessica Cory

n Dale Neal, Kings of Coweetsee and The Woman with the Stone Knife 53 within a poem by Gideon Young art by Henry Ossawa Tanner

art by Elizabeth Palmisano

64 Feminism in Dark Fairy Tales a review by Kenly Corya

n T. Kingfisher, Nettle & Bone and A Sorceress Comes to Call illustration by Ursula Vernon 68 Hope, Heart, and Heroism a review by Abby Trzepacz

n Micki Bare, Omega Crag 70 Introducing Children to the Wonders of the Universe a review by Mark I. West

n Allan Wolf, The Blanket Where Violet Sits illustrations] by Lauren Tobia

54 Fear and Hope in the 1980s a review by Elaine Thomas

n Paul Crenshaw, Melt with Me

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE 6 n

North Carolina LGBTQ+ Literature

73 n

North Carolina Miscellany

poetry and book reviews

an essay and book reviews

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Spring 2025

2025 PAUL GREEN PRIZE WINNER

The Generative Legacy of Paul Green a review essay by Sally Greene

COURTESY OF BLAIR

A story survives from a performance, some time in the 1940s or ’50s, of The Lost Colony, Paul Green’s wildly popular symphonic drama commissioned for an outdoor stage on Roanoke Island, the very site where English settlers first staked their claim upon North America.

The organizers had known that its author would be present. Having agreed to say a few words before the performance began, Green walked to center stage. The rustling of programs quieted as attention focused on him. He surveyed the audience for a beat longer than he might have. Was he gathering his thoughts? A longer silence. The director and actors in the wings became concerned. Finally, he spoke.

“I hope I live to see the day when this rope dividing the audience will no longer be there.” Then he walked off the stage.1 There it literally was, the color line, extending indefinitely, as Du Bois had predicted, into the twentieth century. How Green had spoiled the moment! We know you, Paul; couldn’t you leave it alone? Why trouble this evening, your own gift from our mystical past, with another tiresome complaint about the present? But in Green’s mind, past and present occupied a continuum. He saw threads of the same old story winding tautly down through the centuries. The fictional John Borden in the drama that was about to unfold, a poor landless farmer taking a chance on the new world rather than resign himself to his place in the English hierarchy, was not so different from Alvin Barnes, the recklessly ambitious white sharecropper at the center of Green’s novel This Body the Earth. Nor did their struggles differ categorically from those of the Black sharecroppers, living in the shadow of slavery, who worked at the sufferance of Green’s father. In the words of early biographer Agatha Boyd Adams, “Passion for justice for the Negro and the sharecropper led in [Paul Green’s] thinking to a passion for justice for all humanity, a belief in democracy as a way of human righteousness.”2 In Paul Green: North Carolina Writers on the Legacy of the State’s Most Celebrated Playwright, thirteen distinguished writers and performers – many of whom have maintained an artistic dialogue with Green for years – reflect thoughtfully, critically, and creatively on the legacy of a man who ventured far ahead of his time in advocating for civil rights, prison reform, death penalty abolition, and human rights in the broadest sense.3 Remarkably for such a slim volume,

SALLY GREENE has a JD from George Washington University and a PhD from UNC Chapel Hill. She is an independent scholar in Chapel Hill, NC. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The American Scholar, Southern Cultures, Mississippi Quarterly, Southern Quarterly, and elsewhere. She compiled and wrote the critical introduction of The Edward Tales

by Elizabeth Spencer (University Press of Mississippi, 2022; reviewed in NCLR Online Fall 2023).

1

This story was told in 1988 to Laurence Avery, President of the Paul Green Foundation, by Green’s longtime friend Marion Fitz-Simmons.

2

Agatha Boyd Adams, Paul Green of Chapel Hill (U of North Carolina Library, 1951) 113; subsequently cited parenthetically.

3

Georgann Eubanks and Margaret Bauer, editors, Paul Green: North Carolina Writers on the Legacy of the State’s Most Celebrated Playwright (Blair, 2024); quotations from this collection will be cited parenthetically.

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PHOTOGRAPH BY DONNA CAMPBELL

COURTESY OF THE PAUL GREEN FOUNDATION

the collection offers a solid introduction to the whole of Green’s body of work. And it suggests the joy he took in supporting and encouraging other writers, from the mainstream (Robert Frost) to the marginalized (Zora Neale Hurston), as well as the joy that the lucky recipients of his hospitality would have felt. His home in Chapel Hill served, for a time, as the center of North Carolina’s literary community.

Green was and remains one of the state’s most beloved writers, as these essays attest. Indeed, the essay by filmmaker and writer Ray Owen offers an insightful understanding of Green’s influential friendship with novelist James Boyd. But the narrative thread that runs throughout the collection is a candid acknowledgment of his blind spots. As “a white man of privilege, steeped in the Jim Crow South,”writes Georgann Eubanks in her introduction, “From childhood, Green had Green “could not fully understand the inherited trauma, disenfranseen the injustice inflicted on chisement, and brutality directed toward persons of color in his era.” those less fortunate than he was. Without disparaging the work or dishonoring his intentions, these essays “ask hard questions in a present-day context about Green’s This sparked in him an abiding interest in using his craft to affect relevance” (ix). The answers offered illustrate the generative qualities of his art. Rather than foreclose alternative readings, his works open social change.”—Ray Owen passageways into more expansive, inclusive, and nuanced responses, whether reinterpretations or entirely new work.

The essays limn the evolution of a poor Harnett County farm boy – bright dreams anchored by unusual powers of empathy – into a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who used his voice to amplify morally grounded, if unpopular, social causes. Arriving as a student at the University of North Carolina in 1916, as Eubanks notes, Green brought “dark memories of the abuse and violence of his kinsmen toward their African American neighbors” (xi). Later he would channel these memories into his writing for Frederick H. Koch, the drama professor who would soon be recruited to Carolina.

Before his freshman year had ended, though, events on the world stage compelled him to suspend his studies. Answering the call in the spring of 1917 to fight the “war to end all wars,” he enlisted in the Army, and a year later he was deployed as a mining engineer on the Western Front, working in the trenches at Ypres and the Hindenburg Line.

Though he would not write for public consumption about his traumatic war experience until 1936 (the play Johnny Johnson), Green emerged from the war a changed man, his youthful idealism chastened by the disillusionment of a whole generation. Reacting to the raw physicality of boot camp, he wrote in his diary, “What would I give for a friend whose hand I could grasp as we repeated in unison pages of Omar [Khayyam] or verses and verses from Tennyson and Poe!”4 ABOVE TOP Left to right, Green book co-editor

Georgann Eubanks, Blair publisher Lynn York, and Marjorie Hudson, McIntyre’s Books, Fearrington Village, NC, 27 July 2024 ABOVE BOTTOM Paul Green (right) and his

brother, Hugh, in Europe during World War I

4

Green, quoted in John Herbert Roper, “Notes on the Poet Soldier: An Interpretive Essay,” in Paul Green’s War Songs: A Southern Poet’s History of the Great War, 1917–1920, ed. John Herbert Roper (North Carolina Wesleyan Press, 1993) 99; subsequently cited parenthetically.

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But the world of those writers was disappearing even then. As Paul Fussell writes in The Great War and Modern Memory, “the Great War took place in what was, compared with ours, a static world, where the values appeared stable and where the meanings of abstractions seemed permanent and reliable.” With few Europeans able to remember a major war, this one promised, storybook style, to be “an affair of great marches and great battles, quickly decided.”5 But radically new technologies of death hastened the infliction of human carnage on a scale never imagined.

The dominant mode of thought to emerge from the war that had begun in such innocence was irony.

In poetry committed largely to the private pages of his diary, Green recorded the war’s ironies in ways that resonated with the poetry of Wilfred Owen, Edward Blunden, and the other British war poets (all of them influenced by master ironist Thomas Hardy).6 One moment of wrenching irony came when Green was ordered to destroy a Belgian farmer’s ripening crops. Seeing himself, the Carolina farm boy, in the mournful eyes of the peasants standing witness, he began to view the war through the lens of class: the enemy was not the German commoner but the Prussian aristocracy, and the English leaders were no better. His loyalty to the common folk was sealed (Roper 135–36).

While the war had formed the crucible for Green’s maturing, he returned to the Carolina campus in the fall of 1919 determined to put the experience behind him. He intended to study literature.

But here was “Proff Koch,” who had “rid[den] in from the Dakota prairies, his arms full of plays and his head full of dreams,” he recalled; and quickly he capitulated to the call of writing for the stage.

Koch’s emphasis on interpreting local folkways meshed perfectly with Green’s interest in writing the lives that he knew: “For there is something in the life of ‘the people’ which seems of deeper significance so far as the nature of the universe goes than the characters who might be termed sophisticated.”7 His work would remain true to this grounded vision.

“Green puts his readers in the position of witness. We are left to our own realizations and conclusions. We have seen and heard what so many have chosen not to see or acknowledge in those times and our own.”

—Jill McCorkle

PHOTOGRAPH BY DONNA CAMPBELL

ABOVE Jill McCorkle talking about Green

Spring 2025

The collection begins with a meditation by novelist Jill McCorkle, whose grandparents were Green’s contemporaries, growing up, like him, on farms in the Cape Fear River valley. Reading one of Green’s memoir essays, McCorkle warms to his memory of the child’s play of building “frog houses” (2) – burying bare feet in sandy soil, withdrawing to leave an inviting little cave – a

5

Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford UP, 1975) 21–22, quoting British historian A.J.P. Taylor.

6

To understand the context of irony and disillusionment that Green’s poetry shared with that of the English war poets, it is helpful to read Fussell and Roper’s “Notes on the Poet Soldier” (cited previously).

at the North Carolina Botanical Garden, Chapel Hill, 15 Aug. 2024

7

Green, “Drama and the Weather” (1934), in A Paul Green Reader, ed. Laurence G. Avery (U of North Carolina P, 1998), 253–54.

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

COURTESY OF THE PAUL GREEN FOUNDATION

Paul Green Foundation (originally published

by Harper & Brothers in 1935)

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cherished Sandhills memory of her own. Green had built them with Rassie McLeod, his best friend from earliest childhood days, a Black child of tenant farmers working his father’s land. Rassie died at age ten of typhoid fever, a death the local doctor blamed on the miasmic living conditions tolerated by his father, “the same man who had laughed and thought it was fine for young Paul to spend the night at his friend’s sharecropper shack” (3). What interests McCorkle goes beyond the substance of the story to the way in which it is told, without judgment: “The juxtaposition of these observations – what was right and what was wrong, what his father does and does not do – is clear,” the impact the more powerful for what goes unsaid.

Green “puts his readers in the position of witness” (4).

Green retold the story of Rassie’s death a number of times. The version McCorkle invokes was published late in his career, in 1970.

Thirty-five years earlier, he had given the story to Alvin Barnes, the protagonist in This Body the Earth, a man who bears witness to racial injustice as he struggles alongside Black sharecroppers to get ahead. In a 1974 interview with Rhoda Wynn, his secretary and the first executive director of the Paul Green Foundation, Green credits his love for Rassie with instilling in him “this feeling about people, whether black, white, yellow or not.”8 And yet in a diary entry from his voyage home from the war, in a passage sympathetic with his Black comrades in their social isolation, he describes them in achingly othering language: “Of course the negroes were enjoying every minute of [the music] as rows of white teeth against a dark background testified but few of them sang” (qtd. in Roper 159).

Just such exoticism is what troubles seasoned actor-director Kathryn Hunter-Williams as she weighs the value of Green’s plays for contemporary theater. The stage directions for two Black female characters in The House of Connelly, for example, call for “creatures, sexual and fertile, with round moist roving eyes and jowled faces smooth and hairless as a baby’s,”9 This image “makes my skin crawl,” says Hunter-Williams (31). Acknowledging Green’s abiding commitment to civil rights, she chooses to look past these painful stereotypes. She is willing to forgive his use of dialect, noting that most playwrights of the period did the same. But in White Dresses she confronts a more serious limitation, one she cannot ignore.

Written in 1921 for Professor Koch’s class, White Dresses involves a mixed-race couple, and for that reason was deemed too political to be performed on campus. Hunter-Williams’s objection comes from a different angle: the play “upholds the racist trope of the tragic mulatto, doomed to death and destruction, the result of the ‘mixing of racial bloodlines’” (36). Green’s primary interest in writing Black characters lay, as he put it, in portraying “the

“I talk about Paul Green’s work in my African American theater class and compare it with the works of playwrights Mary P. Burrill, Eulalie Spence, and Angelina Weld Grimké.”

—Kathryn Hunter-Williams

ABOVE 2003 reprint edition published by the

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8

Interview with Paul Green by Rhoda Wynn, 8 Feb. 1974, B-0005-4, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, UNC Chapel Hill, III-11.

9

Quoted from Margaret D. Bauer, ed., Paul Green’s The House of Connelly: A Critical Edition (McFarland, 2014) 31.

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Spring 2025

COURTESY OF EBZB PRODUCITONS

more tragic and uneasy side of Negro life,” with the aim of winning his white audiences’ sympathies.10 But for all his good intentions, Hunter-Williams writes, he falls short of an “understanding of how African Americans pursued tactics to fight back against the overwhelming white oppression” (37). He is unable to fully inhabit the minds of the characters he has placed on the stage.

Novelist and playwright Jim Grimsley turns to Green’s two best-known plays concerning Black life, with generally the same mixture of appreciation and criticism. In Abraham’s Bosom (1926) tells the story of Abe McCranie, an ambitious biracial man whose determination to rise above the turpentine fields where he works to follow his dream of educating Black children ends in tragedy. This play, performed on Broadway, earned a Pulitzer for introducing to white audiences a sympathetic portrayal of the psychological pain and routine violence to which Black Southerners were subjected. The House of Connelly (1931), which also debuted on Broadway, takes as its dark theme the plantation and “big house” gone to ruin, complicating it with elements of class (the arrival of white tenant farmers) and race. Black characters “Current ideas about who Big Sis and Big Sue are the menacing, one-dimensional figshould tell which story – and ures whose primitive characterization in the stage directions who should not – are more makes Hunter-Williams’s skin crawl.11 stringent than they were in Like Hunter-Williams, Grimsley admires the plays for their political daring but finds them problematic for today’s Green’s time, a shift brought theater. Green’s determination to raise awareness of the harsh about precisely by the comfort circumstances of Black life in the South means that he affords with which white male writers them little joy and little agency, Grimsley observes. Even his reliance on dialect reinforces for white audiences, and suggests have told stories about whatever within Green himself, a troubling emotional distance from his and whoever they wish, within Black characters. Further, Grimsley, who is white, argues that a publishing and producing contemporary debates about representation – specifically, the system that limited access question of whether white writers should feel permitted to tell Black stories – may help to explain the plays’ lack of popularity. of other voices to any kind This question does not occur to Hunter-Williams, who of representation.” is Black. She simply refuses to perform them: “Green’s plays —Jim Grimsley do not invite difficult conversation. They instead dramatize the powerlessness of the African American characters in

ABOVE Green Fest panelists following the double feature of

the new Green documentary, The Playmaker, and movie, The Problem of the Hero at ECU; left to right, David zum Brunnen, who plays Green in the film; Serena Ebhardt, who directed the play Native, from which the film was adapted; Green book contributor Jim Grimsley and co-editor Georgann Eubanks; J. Mardrice Henderson, who plays Richard Wright in the film; NCLR DIgital Editor Devra Thomas, who led the post viewing panel discussion; and Green book co-editor Margaret Bauer, Greenville, NC, 19 Oct. 2024

10

Hunter-Williams quotes Green, “Author’s Note,” in Paul Green, Lonesome Road: Six Plays for the Negro Theatre (McBride, 1926) xx.

11

The play marked the first production of the Group Theatre. Its members could not accept Green’s tragic ending: their leftist politics demanded a glimmer of hope, which in turn demanded a new ending. See Bauer’s introduction to The House of Connelly in her edition, cited previously.

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COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

the face of white oppression,” she writes.

“That is not a message I am interested in dramatizing as a theater artist. That is not a character I am willing to embody as a Black theater artist” (37).

By the mid-1930s, as he had gained increased visibility as a Hollywood screenwriter, Green had become well known for his social activism, and no cause moved him more deeply than the fight against the state’s callous and racist administration of criminal justice. Mike Wiley, an actor distinguished for his one-man documentary dramas on civil rights themes, and Lynden Harris, founding director of the arts-activism collective Hidden Voices, offer reflections on Hymn to the Rising Sun (1936), Green’s one-act play exposing the cruelties of the chain gang, as well as his work as a death penalty abolitionist.

A horrific abuse of North Carolina’s chain gang system – two Black convicts suffered such brutality that their gangrene-infected feet required amputation – came to Green’s attention in 1935, and the play he wrote in response was “starkly different from – and harsher than – any other he’d written” (59), writes Wiley. Set in a convict labor camp over the span of an “Green began immersing himself hour, the hour before sunrise, the drama focuses our attenin understanding what life as tion on the camp’s “hot box,” a space of special torture for disobedient convicts. While a prisoner in North Carolina the others quail before Captain Huff, the white foreman was like. And that research who rules like a plantation overseer, life slowly expires from prompted him to write a play Runt, the Black man in the hot box. The dawning day is starkly different from – and Independence Day. The full name of the play is Hymn to the Rising Sun: A Drama of Man’s Waste. harsher than – any other he’d Wiley applauds Green’s daring use of realism. The aswritten His one-act play Hymn pects of the play that trouble him are familiar by now: first, to the Rising Sun challenged the the alienating language of the stage directions, and second, more serious issues with the plot. “Green makes Captain sadistic treatment of prisoners, Huff ’s cruelty the central voice and character,” Wiley points in particular African Americans, out. And yet it is possible, he suggests, to “contemplat[e] in the North Carolina penal the play from the perspective of a Black American; doing system.”—Mike Wiley so, one might find that Runt’s unanswered cries are the

ABOVE A scene from Green’s Hymn

to the Rising Sun, Federal Theatre Project, 1936

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true central voice of the play. But because Runt is never able to make the case for himself, the audience is left with another dehumanized Black body” (62). In a moving postscript, we learn that Wiley’s own brother, while in prison for marijuana possession, developed type 2 diabetes that was allowed to fester until almost all of his toes required amputation. Thrown back into the world with no support, he died. Were Green with us now, “it would be his highest priority to see that Hymn to the Rising Sun is produced in and outside prisons around the country” (62).

Harris reads Hymn to the Rising Sun in the context of Green’s fervent opposition to the death penalty, gratefully acknowledging his influence on the anti-death penalty work of Hidden Voices.

What drove Green’s advocacy (as it does Hidden Voices’ compelling performances) was one human story after another: “Paul Green was confronted with the actual face of what is for most people only a conceptual abstraction” (69). In turn, he rigorously challenged a criminal justice system whose cruelties fell disproportionately upon Black people caught in its machinery. In an era before Innocence Projects, he wrote to newspapers, met with governors. He visited prisoners.

He hired lawyers for the condemned, and when their execution dates came, he stood lonely vigil. Ninety years on, Harris observes, Green’s tenacious moral witness calls us forward still. Invoking his own words, she implores us to “lean toward the light and trust that the light within each of us will lead finally toward the good” (74).

But these images of goodness and light come from other sources, not the play. How are we to read the play’s title? As the sun rises upon Runt’s death, does it cast a ray of hope? Or, given the play’s suffocating atmosphere, its action condensed like a hot box in space and time, should we read the opposite? Green is playing with irony here, and irony is “risky business,” as Linda Hutcheon argues in her study of the literary and political uses of irony. Ironic meaning arises in the tension between the said and unsaid, both meanings conveyed at once. This arresting doubleness gives irony its edge; what remains unsaid works to challenge what is said.12 Richard Wright so admired Hymn to the Rising Sun that he chose Green as his collaborator in translating Native Son, his 1940 blockbuster social protest novel, for the Broadway stage. In Bigger Thomas, Wright depicts a character so morally

“Green left us this legacy, and so we lean toward the light and trust that the light within each of us will lead finally toward the good.”

—Lynden Harris

PHOTOGRAPH BY DONNA CAMPBELL

ABOVE Left to right, Green book

contributors Mike Wiley, Phillip Shabazz, Lynn Harris, Marjorie Hudson, and Ian Finley, with co-editor Georgann Eubanks, McIntyre’s Books, Fearrington Village, NC, 27 July 2024

Spring 2025

12

Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (Routledge, 1994).

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

COURTESY OF EBZB PRODUCTIONS

Henderson as Paul Green and Richard Wright, respectively, in Ian Finley’s play Native (Find information about this play, including booking information, on EbzB Productions’ website.)

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stunted by white oppression that he compounds the inadvertent murder of a white woman (and brutal desecration of her body) with the deliberate murder of a Black woman (his girlfriend), uttering no word of repentance even as he prepares to be executed. As Louis Menand observes, “[A]fter Native Son it was no longer possible to pretend . . . that the history of racial oppression was a legacy from which Americans could emerge without suffering an enduring penalty”13 Wright may have read the title Hymn to the Rising Sun to be as darkly ironic as his own title, the play’s message – and its writer’s world view – just as uncompromising.

The men began with mutual admiration and high hopes,14 yet it became clear over time that they were bringing to the project different, ultimately irreconcilable philosophical perspectives. In the most deeply nuanced essay of the collection, playwright Ian Finley takes us through their fraught process of collaboration while recounting his own journey in writing Native, a brilliant distillation of the conflict as it came to a head in a New York hotel room, where the two tangled over the play’s final scene. A problem concerning “less than a page of dialogue,” Finley writes, “represented a rift between two views of man and our place in society” (75).

Green felt that Bigger should not go to his death without expressing a measure of self-knowledge; the capacity to reflect upon his deeds “would raise Bigger to the stature of a tragic figure, not just a pathetic one,” writes Finley. But for Wright, Bigger could not legitimately claim even such limited agency in a society that so thoroughly denied him the power to act. Working in the tradition of literary naturalism, Wright conceived of Bigger’s violent impulses as “the inevitable products of [his] upbringing and place in society” (78), nothing more.

A redemptive ending would have frustrated his purpose.

The hotel room meeting concluded with apparent agreement on a new version, and Green returned home. But two days later, he telegrammed to say that Wright should take responsibility for the final scene as performed, while he would be responsible for the scene’s published script; he would write it his way.

After seeing an early performance, Green changed his mind again; the published version would closely track the staged version.

And yet he rewrote the ending twice more. Finley believes that his inability to lay it to rest stemmed from his decision to send that imperious telegram, a decision that “haunted” him. Something else weighed on his mind as well, Finley notes, relying on Margaret D. Bauer’s scholarship for this insight: “Green returned again and again in his interviews to the fact that Wright always called him ‘Mr.

“Approached by EbzB Productions to write a play about Green and his place in the American canon, I realized that what happened in the New York hotel room where Wright and Green struggled to make that ending work was the stuff of great theater itself: two brilliant men, wrestling over their deepest beliefs. A great reckoning in a little room indeed.”—Ian Finley

ABOVE David zum Brunnen and J. Mardrice

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Louis Menand, American Studies (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002) 77.

14

Green wrote in his diary that Native Son was “the most vivid writing I’ve seen by any Negro author in America,” calling it “a bit [like] Crime and Punishment.” Wright wrote to Green, “Because of the many threads of Negro and white life you caught in your one-act play, and because of the kind of insight you displayed for the Negro character in that play, I think you can handle a boy like Bigger.” A Southern Life: Letters of Paul Green, 1916–1981, ed.

Laurence G. Avery (U of North Carolina P, 1994), 311; subsequently cited parenthetically.

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“A diverse cast can remind us that the issues of authoritarianism, divisiveness, and the trauma of war reach beyond the scope of World War I and, indeed, are with us today.”

—Debra Kaufman

ABOVE The award-winning film adaptation

of Finley’s play (Find information about this film, now available for streaming, on EbzB Productions’ website.)

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Green,’ and he never thought to break that hierarchy and ask him to ‘Call me Paul.’”15 What saddened him, Finley concludes, was not just “a failure of ideas, but the failure of a friendship” (84).

Green never knew how Wright felt about their collaboration.

But Wright did make his feelings known. In a brief script he wrote about it for intended publication in the New York Times – ironically, he may have been talked out of publishing it by Green himself – he lays out their differences yet concludes with their shaking hands.

Having discovered the manuscript in the Wright archives, Finley resisted the temptation to include it in his own play. “It would have been wrong to grant them a ‘happy ending’ so outside the facts we know” (87). Native (natives of the same land, natives of separate cultures) hews closely to the scene in the hotel room.

Finley concludes that “the privilege and authority he had in the development process was something he didn’t seem to fully realize until years later. And when he did, he seems to have regretted his actions, and what he felt was lost.” And here is the most telling irony: “A lifelong champion of Black rights and communities, he was still a product of the South in the mid-twentieth century” (87).

After writing Hymn to the Rising Sun, Green at last decided to make dramatic use of his wartime experiences. It was spring 1936: Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia, Franco was plotting a coup in Spain, and Hitler wielded unchecked power over Germany. With the winds of war troubling Europe again, Green imagined “a sort of comic anti-war play” (Avery 258) for the Group Theatre, the left-leaning theater collective whose first production had been The House of Connelly. At the same time, composer Kurt Weill, a refugee from Nazi Germany, approached the Group, wishing to collaborate with an American playwright. Group member Cheryl Crawford brought Weill to Chapel Hill, and the musical drama Johnny Johnson was born.

Johnny Johnson is an anti-war response to the Great War, a send-up of war’s follies that asks serious questions about war’s necessity. On the hundredth anniversary of World War I, the Paul Green Foundation was approached by a new generation of producers interested in staging the play – but in a tighter, more practical version than Green’s sprawling script. In response, the Foundation commissioned a modern adaptation by poet and playwright Debra Kaufman, who discusses in her essay the difficult choices she confronted as she met the challenge.

Young Johnny Johnson enlists in the “war to end all wars,” but his heart isn’t in the fight. An Everyman in a morality play, as Green conceived of it (Avery 684), he makes a series of naive attempts to end the war single-handedly. His inevitable arrest leads to confinement See Margaret D. Bauer, “‘Call Me Paul’: The Long, Hot Summer of Paul Green and Richard Wright.”

Mississippi Quarterly 61.4 (2008): 517–38.

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COURTESY OF UNC CHAPEL HILL DEPARTMENT OF DRAMATIC ART

in a mental institution. The play concludes with Johnny back home years later, in the present day. For the play’s first audiences, that meant November 1936, when, against a Depression-scarred cityscape, crowds gather for an “America First” parade and rally. “We are witnessing the rise of fascism and another war in the making” (97), Kaufman observes. Johnny, lonely and dejected, unrecognized by faces he knows, raises his voice to a different tune, still hopeful of a decent world, a “better way to find” (99).

Kaufman immersed herself in Green’s war diaries, literature of the period, background on productions of the play, and recordings of Weill’s score before setting to work on a script with a run time of three hours and a cast of forty. She eliminated scenes and characters that deflected attention from Johnny. She rewrote dialogue that portrayed him as simpleminded. She added a touch to the final scene that humanizes Johnny in a way Green would applaud. For future directors, she recommends nontraditional casting. And though Kaufman chose to set the closing scenes in 1936, future productions could radically honor Green’s intention by closing the play in contemporary time. Either way, casting that, for example, places women in such roles as soldiers and doctors “can remind us that the issues of authoritarianism, divisiveness, and the trauma of war reach beyond the scope of World War I and, indeed, are with us today” (97).

The enduring, though shifting, resonance of Green’s most famous work, The Lost Colony (1937), frames fiction and nonfiction writer Marjorie Hudson’s contribution, a reflection on the imagined relationship she forged with Green through their common bond with Virginia Dare. Long before Green produced his drama about the Roanoke Island colony, the mystery of it had captivated him; he had wanted to write about “those tragic first settlers” since he first visited the island as a young man (Avery 302). The chance came in 1936 when leaders of the Roanoke Island Historical Association approached him about writing a pageant to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the colony’s settlement and Dare’s birth.16 Hudson’s entrée to Dare’s story came with an opportunity to write a book about her. Already having been inspired by Green to follow her own calling as a writer, she saw this project as drawing him even closer.

“If Paul Green were alive today, I think he would be delighted that his play has been transformed in a way that celebrates a broader, more inclusive view of history.”—Marjorie Hudson

ABOVE A scene from the 2014 production

of Johnny Johnson, directed by Serena Ebhardt, Kenan Theatre, UNC Chapel Hill

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16

Green had to be persuaded to take the project on. For a fascinating history of The Lost Colony as part of a grand program of economic development on the Outer Banks, see Brian Edwards, “Selling Sand: W.O. Saunders and the Development of North Carolina’s Outer Banks,” North Carolina Historical Review 100.1 (2023): 29-64. See also Adams (75–77).

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“The dead young Black man in your story was my son in a previous life.”—Phillip Shabazz

PHOTOGRAPH BY CINDY MCENERY PHOTOGRAPHY; COURTESY OF THE LOST COLONY

Searching for Virginia Dare, published in 2002, put Hudson in front of historical societies statewide, including chapters of the Daughters of the Confederacy and the Daughters of the American Revolution.17 Gradually she realized that she and her audiences saw two different Virginia Dares. For them, Dare was not “the first English child born on American soil” but rather “the first white child born in America” (128) – a phrase uttered politely, no doubt, but with disturbing undertones. It didn’t take Hudson long to find V-DARE, a website “advocating virulent anti-immigrant-of-color policies, insisting that the United States was born in purity and whiteness, and claiming Virginia Dare as its icon of white supremacy.” This discovery left her “appalled” (129), wondering what unintended message her book was sending.

Hudson invites us along to a recent performance of The Lost Colony. Thanks to the advocacy of Native Americans who felt excluded and misrepresented, the production now places Native stories and actors at the center – or rather, places the story of the English colonists “within a broader frame – the Outer Banks, the wild things, and Native people.” A touch of impressionism figures in with the addition of crude puppetry – people carrying sticks in “animal shapes” with “eyes that glow. They come alive. The world is made of animals, fish, and Native people” (136).

The puppets would have charmed Green, who had appreciated such fanciful staging in Berlin at a performance of the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre, in 1928.

It was “the most astonishing folk theatre I’ve ever met,” he wrote to Proff Koch.

“Grotesque and human, puppet-like, musicalized, stylized, unreal and other-worldly. . . . all submerged in and generating a strange dream-likeness” (Adams 44–45).This performance rekindled thoughts about writing “that Virginia Dare sort of lyrical song-drama”; and it reaffirmed his interest “in the relation of music and drama,” a relation he steadily worked out in Johnny Johnson and other plays, bringing it to maturity in the “symphonic drama” of The Lost Colony (Adams 45).

ABOVE A scene from the 2023 season of

The Lost Colony

17

Hudson’s Searching for Virginia Dare: A Fool’s Errand was first published in 2002 by Coastal Carolina Press (see review by E. Thomson Sheilds, Jr., in NCLR 2003: 141–51). A new edition was released by Press 53 in 2013.

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And so this twenty-first century Lost Colony comes around full circle, in a sense, and yet in another it enlarges the circle beyond Green’s imagining: for the production invokes a new understanding of the fate of those first colonists, resolving the gauzy mystery of their disappearance into the likely facts of their next steps. Archaeologists are finding evidence that “after John White left his colonists behind, Native people and English of the Roanoke colony era lived in settlements side by side on Hatteras Island, then eventually together, making a brave new tribe of mixed-race people” (130). The production reflects this new ending, or new beginning, by depicting native chief Manteo leading them all to Croatan, his home on Hatteras, where we might assume, with Hudson, that Virginia Dare “grew up to marry a man of Manteo’s tribe, affirming the surprising promise of a new world founded in love as well as violence” (137).

A brief essay by Lumbee Indian Synora Hunt Cummings forms a coda to Hudson’s.18 The Lumbees claim the Croatan people as among their ancestors, and in this latest version of The Lost Colony, Cummings marvels, “my people live to tell the story of how we came to thrive along the present-day Lumber River” (139).The new production “is not about a colony lost in history, but rather one that was birthed beneath this sky and of these estuaries, inscribing a heritage of its own” (141).

Drama thrives on revision; and Green would surely have “delighted,” as Hudson suggests, in seeing his play “transformed in a way that celebrates a broader, more inclusive view of history” (137).

A creative response to a work of fiction, on the other hand, must stand on its own merits. Phillip Shabazz’s answer to the short story “Education South” (1949), also included in this volume,19 is a poem he styles as a letter to Green that manages with uncompromising brilliance to “leap word after black word / into the white space” of the page (28).

A masterwork of irony, “Education South” follows mournful voices rising from a young Black man’s burial service as their song weaves in and out of nearby buildings on a thinly disguised Chapel Hill campus. One by one, professors close the windows of their white-only classrooms, shielding against distraction as they press their students on such heady questions as “what is versus what ought to be” (17).The story’s simple atmospheric conceit poses “what ought to be” against the reality of “what is”; even at the sentence level, Green’s reliance on the conjunctive “and” – parataxis, a strategy perfected by Hemingway

“My people are part of the history put into motion long before ‘CRO’ was carved into a tree. And on this night, my people live to tell the story of how we came to thrive along the present-day Lumber River.”

—Synora Hunt Cummings

PHOTOGRAPH BY DONNA CAMPBELL

ABOVE Left to right, Green book contributors Rod Brower and Ray Owen with co-editor Georgann Eubanks at the Weymouth Center, Southern Pines, NC, 14 September 2024

18

Synora Hunt Cummings’s essay, “Living My Native Past in the Present,” appeared first in NCLR Online Fall 2023: 26–27.

19

Paul Green’s “Education South” has also been reprinted in NCLR 11 (2002): 113120, introduced by Laurence G. Avery.

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COURTESY OF HANNAH BOWMAN

– places one observation after another, steering away from judgment.

Green puts his reader, as McCorkle would say, in the position of witness.

But, once again, it’s his white readers who are placed in the position of witness – witness to the mere existence of a Black reality largely opaque to them. “The dead young Black man in your story was my son in a previous life,” writes Shabazz. He is also countless others. The funeral song, “pushing through the dead air of human indifference,” becomes “another song, then another, in which its blues handles / each personal tragedy, each slammed door, and faces it with grace, / lifting grief out of the gut” (26). More intimate than a third-person narrative of witness, the form of the epistolary poem puts the reader in a position of overhearing a confidence intended for another: “Why do I tell you all this? It is because our paths crossed, / and I would not have trusted the funeral song, except, / I sing all the time. I bury sons all the time” (28).

Paul Green wanted to be remembered as an observer. In speaking with Wynn in 1974, he recalled lines from Hardy:

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay, And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings, Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say, “He was a man who used to notice such things”?20

In this engaging collection, a new generation of writers notices farther, notices deeper, than Green’s own lights could carry him. And yet the inspiration they draw from his example is palpable. At the core of Green’s work lies an enduring humanism, a structure as sturdy as theater scaffolding, waiting for the next production. n

“This book offers a contemporary reckoning with Green’s portrayal of taboo topics that were meant primarily to challenge white theatregoers of his time.

These essays ask hard questions in a present-day context about Green’s relevance.”—Georgann Eubanks

ABOVE Another piece of the recent Paul Green renaissance, the documentary The Playmaker, created by Hannah Bowman, which premiered on PBS North Carolina, 11 July 2024 (Watch here.)

20

Interview with Paul Green by Rhoda Wynn, 8 March 1974, B-0005-4, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, UNC Chapel Hill, IX-15.

KAREN BALTIMORE has been designing for NCLR since 2012. In addition to this layout, for this issue she designed the opening essay of the North Carolina Miscellany section, the Grimsley short story in the Feature section, and all of the poetry in this issue. She is the co-author, illustrator and designer of the From Farm to School – Crops of North Carolina book series for children.

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2024 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE SEMIFINALIST

BY JANE SHLENSKY

Ghost Apples An early ice storm glazes house and orchard, grass spears, icicle roof fangs, tree limbs gleaming in muted light, the sun behind a curtain of haze.

Remaining fruit softens under ice and drops, leaving empty shells like blown glass – ghost apples, they’re called – hanging on their stems. And under heavy trees, twig casings fall and break, melting crystal scree shattering at their roots, beautiful, dangerous, and brief.

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In the frozen orchard, I stand and witness until I lose feeling in my toes, considering if my apple life, too heavy for grace that surrounds me, will drop away, leaving the shape of all I’ve been – for a day, an hour, the length of memory, a life transient as ice. Watching my step, I head for the house feeling brittle, waiting for a thaw.

Chesapeake Ice, 1971 (scanned Kodak Tri-X Panchromatic sheet film, 4x5) by Roger Manley

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 North Carolina Poet Laureate Emeritus Joseph Bathanti, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart four times. Her recent poetry and fiction have appeared in several magazines and anthologies, including Pinesong, Kakalak, moonShine review Journal, and Nostos. She also has a chapbook, Barefoot on Gravel (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Previously, she appeared in NCLR Online 2015 with a travel essay.

ROGER MANLEY was born in San Antonio, TX. He graduated from Davidson College, NC, and spent two years living with an Aboriginal tribe in Australia. He completed graduate work in Folklore at UNC Chapel Hill and in Education at the University of Denver. His artistic career includes awarding-winning work as a photographer, writer, folklorist, filmmaker, and curator. He has received many international grants and fellowships, including the NEA Artist Fellowship and the NEH Humanities Scholars Fellowship. He was a visiting artist with the NC Arts Council’s community college programs and recipient of several awards at international film festivals for his documentary work.

He served as the director of North Carolina State University’s Gregg Museum of Art & Design from 2010 to 2023.

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2024 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE SEMIFINALIST

BY RICHARD BETZ

The Estate Sale

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

I wish I had known this woman, whose home we were rifling through this Saturday morning.

Her estate had settled around her like a blanket lofted into the air, gently falling into place, warmth against the winter wind rattling the loose window panes. The paintings that remained on the wall were lovely flamboyant abstract oils bursting with color, and the emptying bookshelves still held treasures: Nabokov and Georgia O’Keeffe, butterflies and flowers, an artist’s books. I could tell that she had loved deeply, and I hoped that those who loved her had retrieved the things that mattered before we curious weekend yard sale browsers had been admitted to her privacy to thumb through the keepsakes that she had loved, the Asian vases and statues tucked away between the books, the cookbooks under the butcher-block table.

There was a separate studio, a little place nestled in the rhododendron behind the house, to which a crooked path led, cold from an extinguished woodstove, where oversized blind canvases were propped against walls, hungry for life, waiting for the vital brush, its sharp point and its soft belly, the hard outlines and the infilling swirls of color, waiting for the touch of this woman I never knew.

Paintings, 2007 (archival pigment print, 20x24)

by Pamela Pecchio

PAMELA PECCHIO earned a BFA in Photographic Design at the University of Georgia and an MFA in Photography at Yale University.

She is a Professor of the Practice at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor of Art at UNC Asheville, and she has taught at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, Elon University, and UNC Chapel Hill. Her art has been exhibited widely in North Carolina and across the nation and can be found in many permanent collections, including the NC Museum of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and the Sloane Art Library at UNC Chapel Hill.

RICHARD BETZ grew up in New England but has lived in North Carolina for fifty years, first in Asheville, then in Highlands. An outdoorsman and an avid runner, he has run twenty marathons including the Boston Marathon. He is married and has one daughter. He is an eight-time finalist in the James Applewhite Poetry Prize contest between 2013 and 2023. He has collected his poems in two books, Bells in the Night (Outskirts Press, 2021) and a second one forthcoming.

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IMPERMANENT TABLEAU a review by David E. Poston John Amen. Dark Souvenirs.

New York Quarterly Books, 2024.

DAVID E. POSTON is the author of two poetry chapbooks and the full-length collection Slow of Study (Main Street Rag, 2015). His poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in Atlanta Review, Broad River Review, English Journal, Ibbetson Street, Pedestal, Pembroke Magazine, and others, including a poem in NCLR 2021 that received second place in NCLR’s 2020 James Applewhite Poetry Prize contest. He has taught at UNC Charlotte, at Charlotte’s Young Writers’ Workshop, and for thirty years in North Carolina public schools. He has led or facilitated writing workshops for Novant Health Hospice, the North Carolina Writers’ Network, and the North Carolina Poetry Society, among others. A past editor of Kakalak, he currently serves on the board of directors of the North Carolina Poetry Society. A new poetry collection, Letting Go, is forthcoming from Fernwood Press in fall 2025. He lives in Gastonia, NC.

Dark Souvenirs by John Amen is dedicated to the poet’s uncle, Richard Sassoon, by all accounts an extraordinary teacher, painter, theater director and manager, writer, and world traveler.

But the central thread of this book, Amen’s sixth collection, is Amen’s reaction to Sassoon’s suicide at age eighty-three. In the conclusion of “First Date,” Amen writes, “don’t misunderstand me, I’m not / giving you a story, I’m trying to work / my way out of one.” Do not assume, however, that the chief aim or accomplishment of these poems is to poetically work through the stages of grief or to express cathartic anger. For all he works through or out of in these poems, Amen accomplishes much more.

In a 2015 interview with Kris Sweeting for West Trade Review, Amen notes the influences of Kafka, Anne Sexton, and Confessional Poets such as Sylvia Plath (with whom Richard Sassoon shared what has been described as an intimate friendship) early in his career. Amen describes that earlier poetry as darker, but also cathartic, addressing “a need to process inner conflicts, family problems and just that general sense of being somewhat out of sync with life around me or even within me.”* As Amen’s reaction to the trauma of suicide returns him to past conflicts, his maturity – poetic and personal – enables him to explore them more fully and fruitfully. This collection has three major threads: emotiondriven poems reacting directly

* Kris Sweeting, “Interview with John Amen,” West Trade Review 6 (2015): web.

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to the suicide, narrative-driven poems casting a wider net over past experiences and relationships, and philosophical/spiritual poems, each thread energized by transcendent, vivid surrealistic imagery. Throughout, Amen keeps a delicate balance between nostalgia and regret, between anger and acceptance, between recrimination and celebration. Buddhist concepts of impermanence and the fluidity of consciousness inform these poems both thematically and technically, with constantly shifting personae and speakers, both external and diegetic voices. These threads blur as well, moving readers through the pound locks of consciousness from one poem to the next. In these poems, as “Waiting for the Sibyl” puts it, “Visions flood my / limbs before sleep churns like a pound lock.”

The opening poem, “Family Systems,” plunges immediately into the ripple effects of the inciting incident: Three weeks after his bullseye shot, his cellphone kept dialing – long, blank messages, I could almost hear the engine of his breath. He should’ve been the world’s youngest maestro but spent his years hiding in the valves of a westside trumpet, blowing sparks but no music, a part he couldn’t conjure once he inhaled. Finally I answered, waited for the caller to begin his confession.

Hope can nail your feet to a burning floor, grief can smoke the dirt under your shoes.

The conclusion shifts to pathological family images and memories: I could hear my father grinding his teeth from across the room. My mother stared out a window, whispering to herself, deciphering omens in the birdsong.

I told you a thousand times, she blurted, crazy dervish spinning in my direction, never hang a hat on a black doorknob.

Now look, just look what you’ve done.

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Our uncertain perspective on events, chronology, the identity of characters and especially of speakers in this and subsequent poems underscores Amen’s thematic emphasis on the shifting impermanency of perception and consciousness.

“Regrets” directly addresses repercussions: He left me his demos, wine-stained tablature, family bible, chocolate streaked across its cover.

As the trigger finger follows the loud voice’s lead, so grief’s a flood, your fists hold back water for only so long.

Recovery from shock and grief over suicide blurs into recovery from addiction in “Recovery” and “Addict,” then blurs back into grief recovery in “Where the Work Is.” Along with the surrealistic imagery describing the mortician in “Funeral Dream,” for example – “wrapped in seaweed . . . credit cards nailed to his feet” – is the wryly apt comment that he has spent “years of betting on bad limbs, bad science” to enable him to earn his living. There is warmth and humor as well, in the tall-tale exuberance that concludes “Ode to Country Music 2” and in the account of Suzanne the beekeeper and her tattoos in “Roman à Clef.”

JOHN AMEN is the author of five previous poetry collections, including Illusion of an Overwhelm (New York Quarterly Books, 2017), which was a finalist for the 2018 Brockman-Campbell Award and included work chosen as a finalist for the Dana Award. He is founder and editor-in-chief of Pedestal Magazine and the recipient of the 2021 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize. His poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared nationally and

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Poem titles do yeoman work – individually to maintain thematic focus and collectively to echo and speak to each other – to great cumulative effect. There is an easy fluidity to the language that supports equally well the narrative, lyrical, or more emotionally charged passages and is consistently enhanced by unobtrusive mastery of line breaks. Poems that differ formally, such as “The 49 Days” and the series of eleven brief prose poems beginning with “Apprenticeship,” stand out more distinctively because of that formal difference.

Motifs include a mother haunted by visions and superstitions, an absent father, childhood and youth in Tryon, addiction and recovery, stories – joyful and sad – of friends, memories of a tent revival and Nina Simone and a grandfather’s preoccupation with Elvis. The recurring images range from the negative – bloodstains, a bubbling spoon, floodwaters, a Holocaust ghost at the dinner table – to more ambivalent images: angels and cherubs, trumpets and drums, and the playlist of memory. Comforting, albeit escapist, images are found as well: a beloved Morgan horse, cars blitzing down various highways.

The collection’s best features appear in “Poem for Bill B.” It begins with a narrative whirlwind: Bill B & I met & got sober in May ’89, hours spent in musty church basements, smoke-filled VFW halls, discussions, confessions over pots of black coffee.

I pounded for UPS, carting boxes from ten to six, slept in a Days Inn by the airport. Someone dropped a cigarette on a mattress, flames erupted at one AM on a Monday. By dawn, the street was littered with charred furniture, damp ash strewn for miles. Mike M died that year in a car wreck, LJ guzzled a pint after four months clean, cannon-balled off a rooftop dock.

The surrealistic and the spiritual emerge in lines such as: . . . I felt that alien ship hovering above the powerlines, the same way I did when my younger sister died. Buddhists talk of impermanence, how all content dissolves, what you’ve acquired, people you love, consciousness itself.

internationally, and his poetry has been translated into Spanish, French, Hungarian, Korean, and Hebrew. He conducts writing workshops and performs widely, both poetry and music, and is a certified teacher in the Narrative Enneagram professional training program. Born in New York and raised in Tryon, NC, he lives with his wife in Charlotte, NC.

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The ending lines shift to deep longing over a song the speaker has “wanted to write since I was a kid, I can’t nail / the chords.” After describing ways both Bill and the speaker sought consolation in faith, the poem ends with: “Though perhaps we / ignored the angels during our terrestrial stay, we might / in that balmy glow, free of craving, heed their patient call.”

In “The 49 Days,” Richard is the speaker, and that poem – along with the group of prose poems – contains some of the strongest, most lyrically powerful imagery in the collection, peaking in this stanza:

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I want to run for the bluffs, steal another day, another shimmering chorus, but my feet are frozen, & night crashes on the shore.

That sounds like despair, and it echoes the stark beginning of the collection’s title poem: “I studied your craft, / how you drove the demon of gluttonous age / from its hiding place.” From that detached, almost ironic opening, the title poem broadens to a conclusion that seems to characterize all our existence: No way to preserve your opus, air that still trembles, trying to catch its breath.

What foul galleon flew the dock, I perched

Memory does its best

a mad gull the razored balustrade.

to salvage a keepsake

Then on infinite gangway, then

– pulp, bullet, bone,

stretched arms wide to the bow,

a new constellation in the night sky –

I called in spindrift, wait! wait!

What dying desire insane to stoke I tore & stabbed with invisible hands. & the restless ship, plodding mammoth,

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but symbols are lost, art fails, except as it screams at the dead.

I hope what remains of you can recognize my voice.

bawled like a dire Sphinx, lunged from the light, melting as I quivered on the chain. & the stranger for whom I felt such rended lust had vanished, I was sun-wiped, a million stars beyond.

The collection’s final poem, aptly titled “Impermanence,” begins: Richie finally gets his ’69 Corvette,

Perhaps one could begrudge Richard for driving off into that balmy glow, free from suffering and pain, joining all the other departed characters in these poems, leaving only dark souvenirs. Or one could choose, as this reader does, to find consolation in that prospect. Whatever darkness and light Amen explores here, his art does much more than scream at the dead. And it does not fail. n

cruises uptown Bardo with big cash, COURTESY OF JOHN AMEN

shredding solos for his mentor, treating the cheerleaders to hotdogs & beer.

I text the ferryman & convince him to skip our port, lassoing the goodbye sun.

Richie idles on a boomerang curve, honking for me to join him.

The poem shifts from whichever Richie or Richard this is to the troubled speaker: You lean over the balcony, tangled in rainbow vines, waving to me.

A terrible wind blows, & I page back to the rough water. When the anchor drops,

ABOVE AND OPPOSITE Art by John Amen’s uncle, Richard

Sassoon, to whom the collection of poetry is dedicated

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Spring 2025

2024 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE FINALIST

BY JO ANN S. HOFFMAN

The Lines We Cross My mother told me years and years ago that when she and my dad were honeymooning (mostly mooning I suspect), they would kiss at every state line they crossed. My dad crossed the final line when I was a ten-year-old, mom, when I was twenty, and I assure you I did not feel like kissing anyone.

But I’ve crossed some lines, too. In college, Michigan, we hugged the Canadian border, and the Friday night crossings at Windsor were a piece of cake for kids with a stash of beer beneath the seat. Customs guards were lenient with innocents, and each illegal crossing, fraught with tension and romance (I was aware only of the romance), became a badge of honor.

JO ANN S. HOFFMAN’s publications include fiction and poetry in literary journals, including The Merton Seasonal, Persimmon Tree, Pinesong, Broad River Review, Red Clay Review, Kakalak, Flying South, and NCLR Online Winter 2023.

She is a Pushcart nominee and has received awards from The Palm Beach Poetry Festival.

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

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COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

Through Lines (oil on panel, 24x24) by Carmen Grier

Once, in my career, I was assigned to cover a medical conference in Rio. I flew directly into the sunrise from Miami, and my heart lifted as the plane descended through the rise of day.

Nascer do sol said the beautiful brown people at the airport. Bem Vindo! We welcome you at sunrise!

Keep your arms inside the windows, said my cabbie.

Those little boys will grab your watch!

I learned the lines: In Rio, little boys are often crossed with little thieves. At the Canadian border, college kids are more nuisance than villain. Inside a marriage boundaries are negotiable, drawn and redrawn with days and years. Some days we fly across our borders, blow the horn and kiss at every whistle stop, some days it’s strictly standoff: don’t dare cross my line! but mostly it’s a patient peace, sovereign allies living side by side in a pact of promise, partners who often do not feel like kissing at all

CARMEN GRIER’s studio and home are located in rural Mitchell County.

She earned a BA in Music and an MA in Textile Design from the University of Iowa, followed by an MFA in Fiber from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI. She has been creating functional and art textiles for forty years, has added painting to her current practice, and has taught and exhibited nationally. She has been awarded national and international residencies, including the prestigious three-year Artist Residency at Penland School of Craft, where she met her husband, the artist Terry Gess. Her award-winning work has been featured in Fiberarts Magazine and Surface Design Journal. NCLR published another of her paintings in Winter 2022.

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Spring 2025

2024 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE SEMIFINALIST

BY EMILY CARTER

Quick Guide for Lunch with My Brothers Go to our hometown Pik n Pig is a solid choice Run by what remains of a family divided Rising from burnt-down-to-the-ground The fire set by their own It’ll be the right venue Order the BBQ sundae Served in a Mason jar – an extra plate is helpful in navigating Decadent layering of Q, beans, and slaw Eat the piping hot hushpuppy topping while it’s still crunchy Nod with reverent appreciation when the oldest brother Or maybe the middle one Whispers the over sincere prayer Of a makeshift evangelist Probe into their children, their marriages Ask about drinking And what that habit cost in dollars and people Ask about their jeweled crowns of sobriety No wait, no need to ask, they will tell you

EMILY CARTER is a lifelong North Carolinian. She grew up in the Sandhills, went to Appalachian State University, and currently lives in Beaufort with her husband, John. She is a board member of the Writers’ Exchange and a contributor to Haunted Waters Press. Her essay, “Sandspurs and Briars” placed second in NCLR’s 2021 Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize; parts I and II appear in the in the journal’s Winter and Fall 2022 issues. She has also placed second in the 2021 Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Contest, first runner-up in the Creative Nonfiction Category in NYU’s Bellevue Literary Review, and fourth in the American Songwriter Magazine‘s lyrics competition. She was a finalist in the 2023 Randall Jarrell Poetry Contest, and she placed first in the 2024 Arts Council of Carteret County “Rescue Me” Show.” Other writing by Carter has appeared in Haunted Waters Press, Lexington Life Magazine, and Tin Can Review.

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

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COURTESY OF CITY ART GALLERY

B’s Barbeque (oil on canvas, 30x36) by Kyle Highsmith

Solicit thoughts on anger – fists, body slams, permanent scarring Inquire about their tag teaming personalities Bully then victim, victim then bully Show empathy, as if you’re aligning with them They’ll dig that Ask about their estranged sisters and daughters Watch their nervousness as they vet out what you already know Make your face neutral and blank as you let silence do the heavy lifting Don’t offer to pick up the pieces as their weak stories splinter Underpinned by pine, the tree of our homeland, ancestral softwood Explore health, hobbies, careers, criminal charges Have them describe visiting the graves of our parents Listen and nod, nod and listen Insist on picking up the tab Fiscal liberation will lure them toward dessert Order the banana pudding no, wait, get the Coca-Cola cake Eat half, saving the rest for a bedtime snack Chase it with cold milk and then – tell me everything

Kyle Highsmith was born in Greenville, NC, and earned a BS from NC State University’s College of Design. He left his architectural practice and began painting full time in the 1980s. He travels widely to paint en plein air throughout Europe, the US, and the Caribbean. His work is in the permanent collections of the North Carolina Museum of Art and the Greenville Museum of Art, in private collections, as well as in many corporate collections, including GlaxoSmithKline, Duke Hospital, and Northwestern Mutual. See more of his art at City Art Gallery in Greenville and in NCLR Online Winter 2023.

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CHALLENGING PERSPECTIVE WITH PERSONA POETRY a review by Michael Beadle Catherine Pritchard Childress.

Outside the Frame. Eastover Press, 2023.

MICHAEL BEADLE is a poet, author, and teaching artist in Raleigh, NC. His poetry has appeared in Kakalak, Broad River Review, River Heron Review, assorted anthologies, and NCLR Online Winter 2025. His fiction has appeared in Apple Valley Review, moonShine review, and BOMBFIRE. A former journalist and magazine editor, he has written local history books on Haywood County and served as poetin-residence at the North Carolina Zoo, student poetry contest manager for the North Carolina Poetry Society, and emcee for the state North Carolina Poetry Out Loud Finals.

CATHERINE PRITCHARD CHILDRESS teaches writing and literature at Lees-McRae College in Banner Elk, NC. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as North American Review and Still; has been anthologized in Southern Poetry Anthology Volume VI: Tennessee and Volume VII: North Carolina, and Women Speak, Volumes VII and VIII; and has been collected in a chapbook, Other (Finishing Line Press, 2015).

“We wear the mask that grins and lies,” Paul Laurence Dunbar famously wrote in his oftanthologized poem.* Its words resonate with anyone who has ever been told to tone down their voice, subdue their emotions, or silence their opinions so that someone else (family, bosses, society, or cultural institutions) won’t have to confront painful realities like systemic racism or misogyny. But what if a mask didn’t hide the truth but transformed it, reimagined it, magnified it so that voices once silenced and sidelined could acquire new power, agency, nuance, and complexity?

Poet and Appalachian scholar Catherine Pritchard Childress uses her latest collection, Outside the Frame, to don the mask and challenge readers with a series of persona poems that reimagine women and girls from across time telling their own stories with poignant, provocative voices. Each poem carries its own weight while evoking emotions from regret and shame to unabashed sexual desire and tender love. In both free verse and rhymed lines, Childress creates authentic, contemporary women (rebellious teen, irreverent preacher’s daughter, dreamy sister, unfulfilled housewife, among others), and spotlights women from the Bible. From the Old Testament, we meet Rachel, Sarah, and Bathsheba, characters scarcely mentioned and vaguely described when compared to their male counterparts.

We meet a defiant housewife who rejects the trappings of

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June Cleaver (of 1950s Leave It to Beaver television fame), a mournful Mary Magdalene after the crucifixion of Christ, and various stages of girls and women in modern life navigating strict parental expectations, rites of passage, and awkward sexual encounters.

With direct, accessible language, Childress bears witness to girls and women controlled by the passions and demands of older men. In “Blossoming Indigo,” a young woman covets a pair of Wrangler jeans, only to have her Deuteronomy-quoting father declare, “jeans are for boys.” In “Solo,” a barmaid meets a confident man who teaches her to dance the twostep. But their roles get reversed in a seedy motel when his “quick quick, slow, / slow” turns into a “misstep in bed” – an uncoupling set in tidy couplet stanzas.

In “Oeuvre,” a girl regrets losing her virginity in the backseat of a car: “A real boyfriend would’ve cared / I was only twelve, still jailbait / never had a slow, wet kiss.” The rhythm of these words in punch-to-thegut syllables startles the reader with staccato emphasis. When the episode ends with “his chest heaving against me / again and again / pounding out his body of work,” we get the allusion to the French title (resonating with French kisses, cheap French fries, and the idealism of French romance). In this manner, Childress allows phrases and words to reverberate, ricochet, and reflect off one another.

Having studied with some of the leading Appalachian poets

* Quoted from “We Wear the Mask,” first published in 1895 in Dunbar’s second poetry collection, Majors and Minors; rpt. in The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar (U of Virginia P, 1993).

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

I watched the strongest woman I’d known crumbled by convention. Exhausted cotton shift dragged down narrow, hardwood stairs at rooster crow to satisfy a hungry family.

Coal-eyed babies drained her clean as the patterned linoleum she mopped in moonlight

In these opening lines, the reader encounters a daughter watching her mother slog through backaching chores from “rooster crow” to “moonlight.”

Childress repeats the hard “c” sounds in alliterative succession with words like “crumbled,” “cotton,” and “coal-eyed” that do double duty – vividly describing the scene while wielding the language of hard-working families. “Coal-eyed” references the coal extraction industry that has devastated Appalachians with mountaintop removal and black lung disease for miners while traditionally providing much-needed jobs for the region. In “Housewife’s Howl,” a “city-coddled” woman quite literally falls for a “long-haul trucker,” who becomes a preacher. The eloping bride then becomes a pastor’s wife, who dutifully “prayed for the lost, witnessed to backsliders, comforted the sick, / spent her life washing clothes and smart mouths out with soap.” This litany of selfless acts, which pours out like Ginsberg’s original poem in its streamof-consciousness vernacular, ends with a stinging realization that the narrator/daughter both empathizes with and spurns “this woman she never hoped to become.”

Childress takes writing advice from former North Carolina Poet Laureate Cathy Smith Bowers to “shine a light on a moment of intensity” with the poem, “Bathsheba’s Bath,” which creates a sensual scene of a beautiful woman bathing. In the Biblical story, Bathsheba is the wife of Uriah, an elite soldier in King David’s army. King David watches Bathsheba bathing and eventually has sex with her – some Bib-

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lical scholars argue the encounter was nonconsensual, but Childress reimagines the voyeuristic scene with succinct and sultry language that crystalizes the moment in which Bathsheba knowingly seduces the king, anticipating the male gaze from a palace roof: I dropped my robe, dipped one foot into the tub, eased my calf inch by blistering inch testing the waters to see if my friends were right about the way you look at me when I walk into the room with the man who defends your crown

The poem is delivered in two stanzas, which feels right, as the subject engages so many dualities: man and woman, king and subordinate, commitment and infidelity, public knowledge and hidden deception, rooftop view and ground-level bath.

Outside the Frame pairs well with Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife (1999), a cleverly assembled collection by Great Britain’s former Poet Laureate that gives voice to famous women from history, the Bible, mythology, and other timeless stories – Circe, Medusa, and Delilah, for example – whose reputations have been maligned and disparaged for centuries. Duffy also creates female characters from famous male stories – Mrs. Faust, Mrs. Darwin, Queen Kong, Elvis’s Twin Sister, and so on. While it’s refreshing to read about strong, vulnerable, flawed and fascinating women in poetry collections, it’s also disheartening to know how little has changed from the desert tent-cities of Biblical Israel to the back seats and board rooms of modern life. In patriarchal societies throughout the world, women and girls continue to strive and fight for basic respect and dignity when it comes to reproductive rights, equal pay for equal work, and a world free from sexual violence. n

ABOVE Catherine Childress reading at City Lights Bookstore, Siler City, NC, Sept. 2023

PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID UNDERWOOD

of the region, Childress draws poetic prowess from her mountain upbringing, steeped in rich traditions of family, food, music, and religion. Outside the Frame, her second full-length collection, includes forms such as the aubade and the ghazal as well as verses inspired by poems from Claudia Emerson, Jane Kenyon, and Allen Ginsberg. In “Housewife’s Howl,” Childress turns Ginsberg’s iconic Beat poem “Howl” into a tribute to motherhood and all its staggering work:

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WRITING WOMEN OF WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA a review by Jessica Cory Dale Neal. Kings of Coweetsee.

Regal House Publishing, 2024.

—. The Woman with the Stone Knife. Histria Books, 2024.

JESSICA CORY is a settler scholar and the editor of Appalachian Journal: A Regional Studies Review. She is also editor of Mountains Piled upon Mountains: Appalachian Nature Writing in the Anthropocene (West Virginia University Press, 2019) and co-editor (with Laura Wright) of Appalachian Ecocriticism and the Paradox of Place (University of Georgia Press, 2023). She has a PhD from UNC Greensboro, where she specialized in Native American, African American, and environmental literatures. Her creative and scholarly writings have been published in NCLR, North Dakota Quarterly, and Northern Appalachia Review, among other publications.

OPPOSITE The 1762 Cherokee and British

Delegations, the Emissaries of Peace

After decades as an award-winning journalist, Asheville-based writer Dale Neal has turned his pen toward fiction, captivating readers with his wellresearched, place-based novels.

Both released this year with different presses, Kings of Coweetsee and The Woman with the Stone Knife highlight how Neal’s curiosity and investigative spirit move beyond his journalism.

Kings of Coweetsee is somewhat of a murder mystery that dredges up the many conflicting narratives quietly populating the small town of Coweetsee, which seems modeled on many of the rural communities located deep in western North Carolina where politics and familial silences can have serious implications.

Neal returns, to some degree, to this same landscape in The Woman with the Stone Knife, though this time in a much earlier timeframe, the eighteenth century. Transporting the reader between The Overhills in Cherokee territory and England in the late 1700s, Neal imagines (or perhaps, reimagines) the life of Cherokee protagonist Skitty, later known as Helena Ostenaco Timberlake, who finds herself exiled in England for twenty years through a series of unfortunate personal and procedural circumstances, including the death of her British husband, Lieutenant Henry Timberlake.

While these novels certainly differ in timescape and context, they share a few aspects in

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common, including pacing. The Kings of Coweetsee weaves a suspenseful tale involving political misdeeds, complicated relationships, and the notion that secrets never stay secret in a small town. The novel primarily follows Birdie Price, the ex-wife of sheriff-hopeful Roy Barker as she begins to uncover decadeslong political misdeeds that have present-day consequences for many of her friends and neighbors. The Woman with the Stone Knife presents the reader with shocking yet believable scenarios that Helena Ostenaco Timberlake experiences as she attempts to find a way back to her homeland and son from England’s unwelcome shores.

Together, these books showcase Neal’s ability to keep the reader engaged through suspense and impeccable timing. At no point do either of these novels feel predictable.

Turning first to Kings of Coweetsee, Neal’s protagonist, Birdie Price, does not seem to be the type to stir the neighborhood rumor mill. Birdie is a pot-smoking, middle-aged widow who has recently lost her second husband, an “outsider” hippie named Talmadge who had a hobby of documenting aging barns. Birdie wants to work through her grief and loss and be left alone, which her job as the sole employee of the county’s historical museum seems to allow her. However,

DALE NEAL, a lifelong native of North Carolina, was a prize-winning writer for the Asheville Citizen-Times. His short fiction and essays have appeared in various literary journals, including NCLR. His previous novels include Appalachian Book of the Dead (Sfk Press, 2019; reviewed in NCLR Online 2021), The Half-Life of Home (Casperian Books, 2013; reviewed in NCLR Online 2014), and Cow Across America (Novello Festival Press, 2009). A graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, he has been awarded fellowships to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hambidge Center, and the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism at the University of Maryland.

He currently teaches fiction at the Lenoir-Rhyne University Graduate Center.

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

They laughed at hillbillies on the TV they watched in their ’60s brick rancher. Birdie was mortified at how Andy Griffith wore the cuffs of his khaki pants half tucked into his black boots, so sloppy and uncool, or how Jed Clampett struck oil and moved as a millionaire to California, all the silly hillbillies that Americans thought safe to laugh at, the rubes and rustics. Birdie swore she would not be the dimwitted girl with a country accent and wide hips in cutoff blue jeans, though that’s exactly how she grew up. (116)

Birdie goes on to explain how her father’s work “as the county extension agent” adds to her family’s, particularly her mother’s, embarrassment at their “homespun cloth” roots (117), highlighting the nuances and judgements that can pervade a rural upbringing in the Mountain South.

Later, in discussing the antique ballot box and decadesearlier election with her African American friend Shawanda (who also sells her marijuana and whose daughter cares for Aunt Zip in the nursing home), Birdie

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laments a local white politician’s choice to engage in election fraud. Shawanda, however, stops her: “Everybody thinks he stole the election. Nobody remembers he got Black folk to vote for him” (181). While having the Black woman as Birdie’s dealer does lean into potentially problematic stereotypes, in this scene and others, Neal works hard to highlight the presence and reality of Affrilachia and how often stories like Shawanda’s get lost in the whitewashing of history.

Neal continues to highlight nonwhite history in The Woman with the Stone Knife, taking inspiration from a footnote in the exhibit “Emissaries of Peace” curated by the Museum of the Cherokee [now the Museum of the Cherokee People] and based on the Memoirs of Lt. Henry Timberlake.

A young Virginian soldier, Timberlake led a remarkable life, visiting the Cherokee people in 1762 and escorting the tribe’s chiefs on two voyages to the court of King George III. In 1786, years after Timberlake’s COURTESY OF WIKIMEDIA COMMONS; PUBLIC DOMAIN

after an antique voting box with old ballots shows up at her doorstep around the same time convicted felon Charlie Clyde Harmon returns to town, Birdie is thrust into investigative mode.

Birdie’s only family is her aunt Zip, who serves as a dear confidante and fellow ballad singer as Birdie navigates the challenges of her new super-sleuth identity.

Amid this chaos, her first husband, Roy, is running for sheriff and what she finds, some worry, can either cost him the election or force him to uphold Coweetsee’s legacy of secrets.

Despite the many twists and turns of the plot, I was pleasantly surprised that Neal, perhaps due to his background in journalism, didn’t shy away from tough discussions on Appalachian stereotypes and the legacy of Southern racism.

I was even more impressed that engaging with these topics did not take me out of the story; rather, they were gentle yet noticeable nudges. It can be easy for writers to be heavyhanded when discussing these issues, yet Neal’s introduction of them put me in mind of how other talented North Carolina writers like Randall Kenan, David Joy, and Charles Frazier approach such delicate subjects. For example, in a flashback, Birdie recalls her mother observing the neighbor’s property and wondering aloud, “Why those people can’t pick up after themselves, I’ll never know. . . . They act like a bunch of hillbillies,” in response to which young Birdie asks, “Aren’t we hillbillies?” Her mother replies, “No, that’s a trashy word. You need to have standards” (116).

Her mother’s response leaves Birdie reeling:

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death in debtor’s prison, a woman who called herself Helena Ostenaco Timberlake came forward, claiming both the names of the white soldier and the Cherokee chief. Who was this mystery woman? I had to write a novel to imagine her life in the cracks of history. (212)

Excerpts from Timberlake’s Memoirs appear throughout the novel, most notably in the first half of the book before Timberlake’s death. At times, these excerpts come at the beginning of a chapter and read a bit like a lengthy epigraph. However, at other points, these excerpts appear amid the narrative appealing to those readers who enjoy additional historical information within a narrative.

The details Neal includes about Cherokee life clearly demonstrate the amount of research he’s done for the book.

This dedication is echoed in the acknowledgements, in which he lists his sources, including the people who helped him along the novel’s journey, such as several EBCI citizens with whom he worked closely. The texts he cites, however, are works exclusively by white anthropologists, and it should be noted that several collections of stories

by Cherokee storytellers have been published, such as work by Christopher Teuton and Hasting Shade, as well as Cherokee scholarship.

Likely due to his research and relationships within the EBCI community, Neal avoids falling into easy stereotypes when crafting a female Cherokee protagonist and additional Cherokee supporting characters. He also acknowledges the many tensions between European colonizers, the Cherokee,

and other Peoples in this timeframe. For example, as Helena, then known as Skitty, traverses the lands with Timberlake and another settler named M’Comack as an interpreter, she observes, “no interpretation was needed to follow the shift in a man’s eyes or his hand itching on the trigger of the lowered gun to know we were not welcome on this stolen land” (53).

This acknowledgement that the whites have “stolen” the land works to create an accurate historical timeline and, more broadly, novel. This perspective is amplified elsewhere in the novel, such as when Skitty, referring to her father, notes, “He had seen a people who could call themselves the Nation killers” (46). This emphasis does not try to sweep the colonizing act of genocide under the rug, which might be more comfortable for contemporary white writers.

Neal’s use of Tsalagi terms throughout the novel, like yoneg for the settlers and agitsihi for mother, helps to both craft an authentic narrator and create a strong sense of place. Additional references to Cherokee beings and stories, such as when Skitty recounts her grandmother, Cat Walker, standing on the shoreline holding “U’lunsuti, the crystal diadem pried from the severed head of an Uk’tena” (42), contribute to this verisimilitude as well. Further, Neal’s use of the Cherokee language helps remind readers that entire societies with languages, governance forms, family systems, trade relationships, and shared customs were present in the lands many of us call Appalachia and, perhaps more

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importantly, continue to thrive here. Similar to his discussions of Appalachian stereotypes and race in Kings of Coweetsee, this is Neal’s semi-subtle way of reminding readers that they are on stolen Native land.

Like Kings of Coweestee, The Woman with the Stone Knife, nudges readers rather than preaches at them, and the storyline is suspenseful and captivating. However, Neal also manages through ample research to make The Woman with the Stone Knife historically accurate, from the languages and dialogues used to descriptions of travels to details of clothing and hairstyles. While the reality of Skitty/Helena’s stone knife, an object given to her by Cat Walker that is of great importance throughout the novel, is not mentioned in Timberlake’s Memoirs or the influential footnote Neal mentions, the knife and other particulars seem real, which is always a mark of excellent craftmanship of a novel.

Throughout both stories, Neal’s character development, especially his finesse in creating complicated characters, leave the door open for readers to imagine a plethora of endings.

Readers will find themselves wondering if the neighbor recently sprung from prison is at fault for older misdeeds, and if Helena will find a way to free herself from the grips of those who wish to exploit her.

While I don’t want to spoil their endings, Neal’s novels, while often dark, provide readers with satisfying endings, even if the conclusions are not what we anticipate. n

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

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2024 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE FINALIST

BY GIDEON YOUNG

within my body is not filled with iron, water, and bone. i contain neither fat nor lean. beneath my skin i am cavernous, full only of my consciousness. i am not the size we see. in the shape of my body, contained by my body, is a vastness that mirrors blackness between stars; it holds all my universe.

SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM, GIFT OF MR. AND MRS. NORMAN ROBBINS, 1983.95.26.

my toe cradles muggy brasilian jungles, the translucent backs of granny’s hands sluiced with blue mountain-range veins, tchaikovsky’s nutcracker suite, the ever-presence of beloved dead. behind the hollow at the base of my throat: an icy trowel below heavy snow, the wetness of mouths, crucifixion, a salty flourish of waves, the constellation of fatherhood.

Highlands, N.C., 1989 (watercolor and pencil on paper, 10.875x15)

by Henry Ossawa Tanner

GIDEON YOUNG was born in Connecticut and received his BA in Literature from the University of Connecticut and MA in Elementary Education from NC State University.

He is a member of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective, the Carrboro Poets Council, and the Orange County Arts Commission advisory board. A former Title One Elementary School Teacher, Gideon was awarded a 2023 Arts in Education Artist Residency Grant from the North Carolina Arts Council and has recently been named the North Carolina Poetry Society’s 2025–2026 Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for the Eastern North Carolina Region. In 2020, he received second place in the James Applewhite Poetry Prize competition for his poem “kwansaba crown,” which was published in NCLR 2021. Also in 2021, Backbone Press published his haiku collection my hands full of light (reviewed in NCLR Online Winter 2022).

HENRY OSSAWA TANNER (1859-1937) was born in Pittsburgh to an escaped slave mother and an African Methodist Episcopal (AME) bishop father, who was also a political activist and abolitionist. In 1889, Tanner enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and later studied at the Académie Julian in Paris. Partly due to racial barriers Tanner faced in the US, he moved to Paris, where his career flourished. He continued to support those who fought racial discrimination in the US. In 1891, due to ill health, he spent a summer in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Highlands, NC, which inspired the artist’s landscape.

Tanner achieved international acclaim and honors, largely for his religious paintings, and is considered an influential figure in African American art.

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FEAR AND HOPE IN THE 1980S a review by Elaine Thomas Paul Crenshaw. Melt with Me: Coming of Age and Other ‘80s Perils. The Ohio State University Press / Mad Creek Books, 2023.

ELAINE THOMAS has been a college communications director, a journalist, and a hospital chaplain. She holds a BA from St. Andrews Presbyterian College and an MDiv from Duke University. She is retired and lives in Wilmington, NC. PAUL CRENSHAW is the author of previous essay collections This One Will Hurt You (Mad Creek Books, 2019) and This We’ll Defend: A Noncombat Veteran on War and Its Aftermath (University of North Carolina Press, 2019). His essays and short fiction have appeared in numerous venues, including The Pushcart Prize, Best American Essays, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Glimmer Train, The Rumpus, Oxford American, and NCLR (an essay in the 2012 issue). He earned his MFA from UNC Greensboro.

Melt with Me: Coming of Age and Other ‘80s Perils, an essay collection by Paul Crenshaw, examines a seeming multitude of fears faced, or at least felt, by child-ren and adolescents during the 1980s. They lived in the shadow of international, national, and localized threats that ranged from nuclear missile proliferation amid geopolitical tensions to stranger danger, razor blades in candy apples, and exaggerated claims of Satanism with accompanying ritual sacrifice. Popular culture of the time gave voice to and reinforced those anxieties. As surely as Crenshaw’s book is a memoir-in-essays, it also provides thoughtful cultural critique.

Crenshaw looks back at the experiences he and his friends shared – and endured. He brings to the task the mature analytical and descriptive skills of an essayist recognized for his craft. The copious perils of the 1980s, real and imagined, are evoked in a manner which also contains flashes of humor. Dark humor, to be sure, but conveyed in such a way that the reader understands and feels the drive toward connection and love that underlies the fear and, at times, anger. It is this desire to balance fear with hope that clearly hung over the author’s childhood and adolescence – and which packs an emotional wallop. Crenshaw’s writing is clean and clear, devoid of showy gimmicks or pyrotechnics. His precise images put the reader right inside the scene and deep inside the boy’s head and heart and make you think and feel along with him.

Courage is required for an introspective boy to excavate his own thoughts and feelings as he tries to understand a peril-

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ous world, learning what part of its perceived dangers ring true and what under careful scrutiny emerge as mythical constructs.

If memories or mentions of the 1980s evoke in you a personal “greed is good” ethos, something in the manner of the movie Wall Street or of any other decade-of-decadence tropes based in urban affluence, such as Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, you almost certainly did not grow up in a small, gritty Southern town. In contrast, Crenshaw’s childhood and adolescence included all the requisite images from that environment – revivals, church camps, football games, riding around town with friends – ordinary small-town events that are recognized and understood immediately by those from similar backgrounds. In Melt with Me, however, Crenshaw does far more than tell another story of one boy coming of age in a specific time and place. He possesses a sensitive awareness of the wider cultural influences that created anxiety for him and his peers, the omnipresent fear they felt threatening not only their day-to-day lives but their very existence.

The book’s title, and the cover image, call out the fear of thermonuclear war and its threat of annihilation. Crenshaw states, “I knew, even before Billy Joel began to write about fires and who started them, that the United States and Soviet Union were fanning fires that might burn us all” (176). The title also references the 1982 song by the band Modern English, “I Melt with You.” Its lyrics suggest we will melt together when the end comes. Love and war were easy to confuse and conflate in a

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COURTESY OF PAUL CRENSHAW

world on fire, and bring to mind another ’80s song mentioned, “Love Is a Battlefield.”

One of Crenshaw’s essays is titled “Candy Cigarettes.”

Almost everyone seemed to smoke in the 1980s. Cigarette smoke, like the fear of nuclear war, hung over everything. Even children participated, through candy cigarettes. In a sense, the world was literally on fire. Other essay titles (and topics) include “Morgue,” an exploration with his friends of the morgue of an old, abandoned tuberculosis sanatorium; “Dead Baby,” which jarringly intersperses dead-baby jokes with the true story of a toddler who died after suffering physical abuse at the hands of a stepfather; and “Professional Wrestling Is Real,” a look at good and evil playing out right before one’s eyes, along with implicit cultural stereotypes and “other” hatred. As Crenshaw says about that good/evil battle, “It’s a simple solution, to love symbols. Much easier than looking inside at what causes such enmity in the first place . . . why we accept so easily that anyone outside our own small spheres is worthy of our suspicion” (76).

Some of the material is difficult, but this reviewer read and learned from all but two of the book’s twenty-two essays. “Arc” involved a mouse shocked to death during a high school science experiment. “Cold” told about a feral cat encountered during rabbit hunting. Failure to finish these two short pieces is in no way a criticism of Crenshaw’s writing; conversely, it had to do with his descriptive

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power. The reviewer holds a particular sensitivity toward animal suffering. The failure to finish reading them is noted as a warning that every essay may not be for every reader.

Some of the material contains humorous moments, one example being the description of riding on a church bus as a young adolescent. At random intervals the minister’s wife stood up at the front of the bus and instructed everyone to raise their hands. The goal, to ensure that no inappropriate touching was going on, taught “a lesson [he] learned early – that if they don’t want you to do it, it’s probably awesome” (22).

Melt with Me should appeal to anyone (1980s or not) who has ever been a young adolescent male or who has ever wanted to look inside the mind of one.

Crenshaw found longed-for hope in cartoons, in the way Bugs Bunny overcame adversity: “Where I failed, Bugs triumphed” (42). Immersion in video games

offered the same sense of escape and the desire for a better world. Later, popular music met those same needs, even as the author confesses that he frequently failed to fully grasp the meaning of many of the lyrics.

The book suggests connection, the basis for love, is where hope lies. In an essay titled “The Sadness Scale, As Measured by Stars and Whales,” Crenshaw writes, “There’s a whale in the Pacific Ocean that sings at such a high frequency no other whales can hear it. Scientists have been monitoring it for twenty years, and for all that time, it’s been alone, still hoping someone is listening” (197).

Melt with Me engages the thoughtful reader. Even when it hurts. Maybe especially when it hurts. Crenshaw’s is not an easy outlook. The universal, existential struggle for meaning and hope is always there, yet he makes it clear that in the end readers must make their own choices on hope. n

ABOVE Paul Crenshaw (right) with writer/musician Tom Maxwell, “Mixtape Musings:

How the Pop Culture of the 80s and Music Scene of the 90s Shaped Our Lives” panelists at the Greensboro Bound Literary Festival, Greensboro, NC, 18 May 2024

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a review by Patricia R. Webb Jennifer McGaha. The Joy Document: Creating a Midlife of Surprise and Delight. Broadleaf

Books, 2024.

PATRICIA R. WEBB is an Associate Professor of Writing Studies at Arizona State University. She teaches undergraduate courses in writing, as well as the graduate seminars Composition Theory and Composition and Feminism.

Her work has appeared in national and international journals, including Computers and Composition, College English, Composition Forum, Peer Review, Works and Days, JELLiC, and O1E3Media.

JENNIFER MCGAHA is the author of three works of creative nonfiction including Flat Broke with Two Goats (Sourcebooks, 2018) and Bushwhacking: How to Get Lost in the Woods and Write Your Way Out (Trinity University Press, 2023). Her writing has also appeared in many magazines and literary journals, including Image, The Huffington Post, The New Pioneer, Lumina, and NCLR.

COURTESY OF ELLIE NAVARRO

CREATING A MIDLIFE OF SURPRISE AND DELIGHT

As I began writing this review, I paused for a moment to look out my office window at the woodpecker who was working diligently at the bark of the tree in my yard. His bright red crown stood out against the brown of the bark. He probably didn’t know that one of the neighborhood’s stray cats frequently hangs out in that same tree. But for that afternoon, he was safe, pecking away at the bark.

This kind of pause – taking a moment to notice what lies in front of me and appreciating it for what it is – is the kind of action that Jennifer McGaha’s writing has inspired me to do.

After reading The Joy Document: Creating a Midlife of Surprise and Delight, I have found myself embracing McGaha’s assertion that “it is possible to intentionally cultivate a life full of gratitude for the here and now, a life awash with joy and optimism and even humor” (14).

Through her creative essays, she explores both the light and dark of life, showing how to create joy out of both of them.

McGaha’s writing invites readers to look at oneself and the world around in different ways, showing us how “one thing becomes another when examined in a slightly different light, the way the many layers of being unfold right in front of you” (27). Through powerful storytelling, McGaha captures her process of looking for joy throughout one year of her life.

Re-examinations of herself and the world around her populate these pages and invite readers like me to mindfully pay atten-

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tion to the world around them.

At the heart of her insightful reflections is an assertion that adopting an attitude of gratitude toward the big and small wonders we encounter every day can create joy in our lives.

“What is the essence of you?” asks McGaha (89). Although she concedes that this is an impossible question to answer with any certainty, she carefully explores it throughout her essays. What becomes evident in reading her work is that McGaha is, at heart, a storyteller. Stories matter to her, they do important work for her. She used to think that writing was “frivolous” but she now believes that writing – and the wondering it leads us through – is a sacred act of “searching for the whispers between the words – the holy parts” (18). Refusing to label herself or her work, she joyfully explores her reactions to the world and others as a way of understanding herself.

In one thread that runs throughout her work, McGaha

ABOVE AND OPPOSITE Jennifer McGaha

finding joy in her everyday life

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re-see her generation and her own life choices in a different light. And in another essay, Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’” adds the soundtrack to her reconsideration of what it means to let go.

She reflects on the risks that she asks her writing students to take on a regular basis and amazes at the students who are willing to free-fall into the writing.

She tells them that “that’s the way you do it. . . . Even when you can’t see the ground, you just do it. You jump. That’s how you sing. That’s how you write.

That’s how you live. That’s how you learn to fly” (101).

Food and the relationships she develops through it are another lens that McGaha uses throughout her work to re-see life in order to find the joy in the things that surround her. From making a trifle for her brother’s retirement party to the conversation she has with a stranger about how to cook a poblano pepper to the unexpected gift of a “backpack burrito” on a hiking trail, she shows how our engagements around food mirror the relationship within our

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lives. McGaha illustrates that if you look at it right – if you look for the joy in it – food can be magical and having pie for breakfast can be a radical act.

As I read her book, I was drawn to the “happy” moments of joy she shared. Yet even in an explicit search for joy, McGaha does not deny the hard stuff that life presents us. Instead, she shows that seeking joy is an important response to the hard stuff – like living with the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, like living through the investigation of the attack on the US Capitol, and like living with the divisiveness in the country. As with many things that happen in her life, she turns to language and poetry to help her through her feelings of hopelessness. Poets, she insists, ask better questions than medical professionals: “Instead of asking people whether they feel depressed, the poets would ask them: How often do you see glimmers of hope in this otherwise hopeless world? What color are they?” (94). She insists that we need joy precisely because of COURTESY OF JENNIFER MCGAHA

shows the joy that can be found in re-seeing the relationship we have with ourselves and our bodies. She particularly focuses on exploring her attitude toward her aging body and self. McGaha reflects on the way her aging body “requires more attention” as each morning “I wake stiff and sore, aware of every one of my fifty-five years.”

She acknowledges that no matter what we do, our bodies will age. But as she works her way more slowly through her morning, she writes, “I would hands down choose now, these quiet moments in the kitchen with the morning light seeping in” because she values “all the ways I discover the world anew each morning. I am here. I am here.

I am still here” (134). She takes us on a journey of the “slippery slope of reseeing” that allows us to find joy in all parts of us – even in the challenges of our aging bodies.

In another thread is the use of music as a lens to re-see the world around her. From simple things like realizing that her goats are more Led Zeppelin fans than Bob Dylan fans to more complex questioning of her teenage life choices through the lens of ‘80s music, McGaha uses music to help her re-think the world around her. In one essay, she describes an exchange she had with two employees at Trader Joe’s as they asked her about her thoughts on the mus-ak soundtrack of “Love Shack” by the B-52s. Thinking through this discussion leads McGaha to wonder about her own generation and what it held – in some cases, still holds – sacred. This cross-generational conversation about music helps her

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the hard moments, and through her writing, she illustrates how to find those moments of meaning, those times of joy even within the challenges we all face.

McGaha ends her book with “Guiding Questions: Creating Your Own Joy Document,” in which she provides us with thoughtful questions that help readers think more deeply about their own relationship to joy.

For instance, she asks, “What are some stories you have told yourself about your life that might not be fully true? How might revising those stories change you?” and “If you considered your body a sacred space, how might that change how you move in the world?” (196). These questions return us to a central theme of her essays – how our own vision of ourselves and the world and the stories we tell about them need to be revisioned regularly, if we are to create more joy in our lives.

After spending a year examining joy in its myriad forms, McGaha realizes that there are really two kinds of joy – the joy that sometimes finds us and the joy we ourselves create out of ordinary and/or thorny moments. In The Joy Document, she invites us to pause and reflect – to notice the woodpecker in the tree outside our window and to see the joy in everyday moments in ways that help us “to live in greater harmony with the land and with one another” (15). n

A MIX OF GRIEF AND MYSTERY a review by Cody Messer Matthew Fiander. Ringing in Your Ears. Mint Hill Books, 2023.

CODY MESSER graduated from East Carolina University with a major in English and a minor in creative writing. During his program, he interned with NCLR. MATTHEW FIANDER received his BA in English from Elon University and his MFA in creative writing, specifically fiction, from UNC Greensboro. He was an English instructor at High Point University and is currently working as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Wake Forest University. His fiction has been published in journals such as the South Carolina Review, South Dakota Review, and Reckon Review.

OPPOSITE Matthew Fiander

participating in the “M Is for Murder” panel at Bookmarks, Winston-Salem, NC, 21 Feb. 2024

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Matthew Fiander’s debut novel, Ringing in Your Ears, is a slow, gut-wrenching tale of attempting to overcome grief and judgment, with a flair of melancholic ’90s alternative rock thrown in for good measure. The book gets its name from that very music genre, coming from the lyrics of Buffalo Tom’s “Taillights Fade.” The book is filled with references to classic rock in this same vein, bands like Pearl Jam and Nirvana coming up often, for example. In some ways, the book provides its own soundtrack. At many points I found myself putting a song on as it played within the story, letting it run on repeat as I read. Music is integral to the feel of this work.

Fiander’s tale begins with Blue, the main character, writing a letter to her deceased sister, Christine, thirty years after the events surrounding Christine’s death. The narrative then transitions back to 1992, the year of her sister’s untimely passing, as Blue struggles through the immediate despair that comes from losing a loved one, while also dealing with family and friends coping in their own ways. In that aftermath and informed that her sister’s death was not an accident, Blue determines to find out who killed her.

Alongside Blue’s investigation into the foul play surrounding her sister’s demise, she has to deal with the struggles and drama that come with being an umpire for extremely competitive Little League baseball, where every parent seems to be inter-

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scendo of intrigue interrupts and intensifies their introspection.

The most powerful moments in the novel involve choice: characters constantly reference choice. This theme – what choices can be made, who can make them, and how choice can be taken away – crops up within every plotline of the novel; for example, in Kathleen’s constant struggle between meeting or escaping her father’s immense expectations, choosing whether or not she should break away from his theatrical pursuits in order to become her own person, and in the relationship between Blue’s parents’ troubles brought on by the father’s wealth and influence, which put him in situations where his ability to choose is uncomfortably stunted. The tension between Blue’s parents, includes an argument later in the story after Blue’s father has had a very public outburst concerning the death of Christine.

Heated words are exchanged, eventually leading Blue’s mother to give him a poignant wakeup call: “It’s not your choice, even if you think it is” (139). Someone has the choice, and it is not Blue’s father. The most standout example of this discussion of choice comes just after Christine’s funeral as Blue skulks along the outside of her home to find space, alone: a businessman named Mark Hanlon shows up to talk with Blue. Though Hanlon is likely only there to foster a good connection with Blue’s father, in going outside to smoke weed, away from the dreary crowds of the day, he takes the chance to impart what he feels are some brutal facts of life. Blue asks, “[W]hat happens

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mingled with the political and business woes of Blue’s wealthy father. With help from friends, like her sister’s ex-boyfriend Jacob, or her sister’s best friend, Kathleen, she is determined to uncover the mysteries behind Christine’s death.

The grander beats of the tale flow seamlessly one after the other, a cathartic payoff coming from each of the book’s branching narratives by its conclusion, all of which revolve around Blue and her interactions with the rest of the story’s complex and deeply flawed characters. We follow along as Blue’s mind is constantly wracked by thoughts of her sister, rationalizations of why her parents act in the manner they do, and angst for those in the town who she feels are less than upstanding. Her thoughts make this attitude and uncertainty clear: “Maybe it was just my world, this space in limbo, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever find my way out” (53).

Blue is almost always accompanied by one of the impressive supporting cast, be it her sister’s broody ex-boyfriend whose own struggles evolve alongside Blue’s, her sister’s best friend, or one of her father’s slimy business associates. Even Blue’s deceased sister, who only briefly appears alive in the novel, remains central as more is revealed about the choices that led her to that terrible fate. The story revels in the emotions of these characters, deconstructing their complex feelings as they attend sleazy parties and uncover messy secrets. The book wastes no time in establishing the town’s loud personas, diving deep into the low, sad tones of their lives, before a slowly building cre-

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when your sister dies? What happens then? I couldn’t control that, so what now?” Mark gives his answer nonchalantly: “Someone did control that” (69).

His succinct reply encapsulates much of what Ringing in Your Ears is about: everything involves choices; sometimes these choices are just not yours.

Matthew Fiander’s cast of grieving characters dealing with the aftermath of an unforeseen death offers plenty of sadness and tragedy along the way but lands on a brilliant, soft, hopeful vision of the future. Back in the present, back in the beginning of the novel as Blue reminisces about the good times she had with her sister, she asks Christine why she does not look at the lyrics of the song she is listening to, Buffalo Tom’s “That Weathered Man in the Sunken Chair.” In her answer, Christine reveals the crux of her character, and the novel: “[E]very time I hear it, I think something different. I see a different face, hear a different name. For that guy, for Jesus, for the voice singing.

I wait for the song to tell me something new” (viii–ix). n

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2024 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE SEMIFINALIST

BY MELINDA THOMSEN

Nadiya Becomes a Sonnet after Alla Horska’s The Bride, 1960

In her black and white form, Nadiya appears as a mosaic bride, her veil hanging askew by storms which swept her eyes and chiffon aside placing them across two planes. Her eyes gaze straight ahead. Although framed by shards, she stares and almost pries open those bars that cage and claim her soul within these fourteen lines.

Nadiya is desperate for ammo to protect and make something fine

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out of her blown up town and mesh hope from her floral shawls into the marrow of broken bones, grief, and torn flesh.

Fire, 2015, from the Shadow of Russia series (transfer mono prints on archival photo paper, 22x17) by Tim Lytvinenko

Raleigh, NC artist TIM LYTVINENKO is a photographer and printmaker.

He earned a BS in Computer Science from NCSU and has fifteen years of experience in fine art and documentary photography. His work has been shown at Cameron Art Museum, Anchorlight Gallery, and 21c Museum Hotel in Durham, among others. In 2017, he was commissioned to create a work of public art that covers seven floors on the Dillon in the downtown warehouse district in Raleigh, NC. He has accepted a 2025 residency in Wisconsin at the Peninsula School of Art. For generations, his family lived in a small village in Ukraine before relocating to the US. In 2005, he visited the Kalinova community to meet extended members of his father’s family.

MELINDA THOMSEN’s four poetry collections include her recent chapbook, Dropping Sunrises in a Jar (Finishing Line Press, 2024), and Armature (Hermit Feathers Press, 2021; reviewed in NCLR Online Winter 2024), a finalist for the 2022 Eric Hoffer da Vinci Eye award. Her poems have been in Salamander Magazine, THEMA, Big City Lit, and NCLR, among others. A 2019 Pushcart nominee from The Comstock Review, Thomsen is an advisory editor for Tar River Poetry.

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2024 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE FINALIST

BY JOANNE DURHAM

Solutions What we need is an alchemist, a woman schooled to stir a beaker of woundworts and calomel, steady it to steam, scatter light off glass. She doesn’t need to turn lead to gold, just melt stone hearts down to something malleable, clay or mud would do, pour some potion in our ears to let us hear the hollow breath of children who are eating dust, yes, turn gold to bread, and guide our eyes to see their eyes in our own stained mirrors.

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

Incantations (multi-layered upcycled fiber mural, 8x12)

by Elizabeth Palmisano

JOANNE DURHAM is the author of To Drink from a Wider Bowl (Evening Street Press, 2022), which received the Sinclair Poetry Prize, and the chapbook, On Shifting Shoals (Kelsay, 2023). She has received three Pushcart nominations, the 2023 Third Wednesday Magazine’s Poetry Prize, and the Mary Ruffin Poole American Heritage Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society.

Her poems appear in Poetry South, NCLR Online Winter 2023, CALYX, Vox Populi and many other journals and anthologies. She lives on the North Carolina coast.

ELIZABETH PALMISANO lives and works in Charlotte, NC. Her award-winning work has been exhibited in galleries and museums such as the Mint Museum, McColl Center for Art & Innovation, and Bliss Gallery. She was voted “Best Visual Artist” in the QC Nerve Best in the Nest Awards in 2020 and 2022. Her community work and voluntary service with youth, trauma survivors, and the under-served taps into the power of art, mindfulness, and experiential learning. Currently, she is leading an historic major public art project in Charlotte: a twenty-three thousand square-foot multidimensional sculptural mural, #NoDaCloudWall. In the fall of 2019, she created a fiber mural, Incantation, for the Mint Museum Uptown. The art shown here is one of the original works from which the mural was created.

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A JOURNEY THROUGH UNSEEN WORLDS a review by Amber Knox Michele Tracy Berger. Doll Seed and Other Stories. Aunt Lute Books, 2024.

AMBER KNOX received her bachelor’s and master’s 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. She also has an Associate in Arts degree from Pitt Community College.

MICHELE TRACY BERGER is the Eric and Jane Nord Family Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and director of the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University. Her work has been published in numerous periodicals and anthologies, including Ms. The title story of this collection received the 2019 Carl Brandon Kindred Award. She is the author of Workable Sisterhood: The Political Journey of Stigmatized Women with HIV/ AIDS (Princeton University Press, 2004), Black Women’s Health: Paths to Wellness for Mothers and Daughters (New York University Press, 2022), and the novella Reenu-you (2017, Flagstaff Books, 2020; reviewed in NCLR Online 2019). During her time as a professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at UNC Chapel Hill, she received a 2016–2017 Faculty Mentoring Award. Read an essay about her work in NCLR Online Fall 2022.

Michele Tracy Berger’s new book, Doll Seed and Other Stories, is a captivating mix of tales that explore the trauma and strength of the human psyche.

This collection covers a wide range of speculative genres, from science fiction to fantasy to ghost stories to satirical fairy tales. Through the fantastical settings and characters, the author addresses relatable issues as she brings her characters to life and immerses her audience in worlds both uncannily familiar and terrifyingly alien.

Within the pages of Berger’s collection readers encounter worlds that serve as strange reflections of our own. In the title story, the protagonist is a doll named Chevella, who “didn’t remember much of her life before; all she had now was the rubbery plastic odor of her, the mahogany sheen of her doll skin, and the intense yearning for love that yokes all doll forms to the human world” (113). Indeed, Chevella’s personal experiences and the difficulties she faces along the way are easily relatable to humans, particularly her struggle to find her own path despite the ridicule and oppression of her fellow dolls.

Chevella’s strength as she deals with these common obstacles is empowering to the reader.

Berger’s choice to tell this story through the eyes of a doll also creates a unique perspective on racial issues. The majority of Chevella’s struggles stem from being a black doll in a segregated society, in which many people see her as “not a doll you need, or one you should

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have” (141). Not only is Chevella different from the white and much more popular (and white) Missy Ann dolls, she is the only black doll in the toy store. She is treated very differently from the other dolls by both the Missy Anns and the customers.

The Missy Anns even imply that Chevella is missing her “most important thing” (116), her doll seed, a doll’s “essence” or “the extra ether, or star space” in them that lets them connect to and choose a human (119). This prejudice has a major impact on Chevella’s sense of self and her personal choices, and she spends a large part of the story trying to overcome self-doubt.

The personal conflict Chevella has to deal with because of this prejudice also serves as a provocative parallel to the doll test, a real-life study of the effects of segregation on children in which Chevella finds herself playing a significant role.

Personal strength and oppression are both recurring themes in this collection. In “Etta, Zora, and the First Serpent” the main character, Etta, faces both racial and gender inequality during the Harlem Renaissance. As a dancer at the Cotton Club she is degraded by both her boss and her co-worker Laney, whose lighter skin earns her more social acceptance and prestige than the other dancers despite her comparatively meager talent. Etta and her fellow dancers also have to contend with the unwanted attention of the Cotton Club’s owner, an injustice that neither their boss nor society in general can be bothered

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COURTESY OF MARJORIE HUDSON

to protect them from. Etta is not only oppressed by her own unfair treatment, but also by her inability to protect others and the knowledge that “No one was looking out for them” (91). Her sense of powerlessness and the desire for justice in an unjust world drives her to become involved in a fictionalized Zora Neale Hurston’s plans to summon a powerful spirit in an effort to “do something bold. Something that will speed things up” (89). Etta’s job at the Cotton Club gives readers insight into yet another important part of Black history as does the inclusion of writer Zora Neale Hurston as a character and a catalyst for Etta’s spiritual adventure. “Etta, Zora, and the First Serpent” is both a poignant look into the history of racial and gender relationships in America and a truly haunting and atmospheric fantastical story that displays a Lovecraftian level of horror and suspense.

The other stories in this collection address similar issues. In “Nussia,” the characters come face to face not with the supernatural but the extraterrestrial.

When Lindsay “wins” an alien, it is life-changing for her and her family. In the 1970s, the idea that an average Black family from the Bronx will be the first to host a visitor from another world seems groundbreaking.

However, the reality is not what they expect. The media attention on the family brings not only fame but also racial prejudice and harassment. Nussia’s

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arrival in an already contentious family situation also causes tension, as does Lindsay’s own personal difficulties as she grows up and struggles to be seen for who she is. Lindsay’s difficulties are mirrored by Nussia herself, who is also growing up but is now forced to do so in a world and culture that are not her own. In a heartbreaking scene Nussia herself states, “I’m not one of you. I’m on my own here.

Do you understand?” (57). What these two girls need to be happy differs from what is expected of them by both their worlds, leaving Lindsay and Nussia fighting to overcome the pressures of their societies and to be seen.

Over the course of the story, Lindsay embarks on a journey to better understand not only herself, but also the people and aliens around her, and in doing so encourages readers to do the same. As Lindsay states, “When

we can see that what is human is also sometimes what is alien, then we can begin to understand ourselves and them. All the good and the bad” (73).

The stories Berger collects in Doll Seed and Other Stories explore a wide range of experiences, but at their core they all present their readers with the same fundamental themes of the degrading effects of inequality and prejudice as well as the strength of human endurance. Berger’s characters face monumental and sometimes otherworldly obstacles with a determination and personal strength that is inspiring.

Between their powerful characters and atmospheric settings these tales are each stunning in their own right. Like any powerful spirit these stories refuse to be left behind. They continue to haunt the reader long after the book is finished. n

ABOVE Michele Tracy Berger with fellow

NC fiction writer Marjorie Hudson after a reading at Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill, NC, 11 Feb. 2025

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FEMINISM IN DARK FAIRY TALES a review by Kenly Corya T. Kingfisher. Nettle & Bone.

Tor Publishing Group, 2022.

—. A Sorceress Comes to Call.

Tor Publishing Group, 2024.

KENLY CORYA is an English Studies graduate student at East Carolina University, and she works as an editorial assistant with NCLR. After earning a BA in English and Comparative Literature at UNC Chapel Hill, she taught middle school ELA and Social Studies in Tarboro, NC. She has worked as a freelance ghostwriter and editor, and her poetry can be found in The Lookout.

T. KINGFISHER is a the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of over twenty books. She has received numerous awards for her work including a Hugo Award for Thornhedge (Tor Publishing Group, 2023) in 2024, Nettle & Bone in 2023, and “Metal Like Blood in the Dark” (Uncanny Magazine 36) in 2021.

Under the pen name Ursula Vernon, she also writes comics and children’s books.

Originally from the western United States, Kingfisher works as a writer and illustrator in Pittsboro, NC.

T. Kingfisher crafts curious and clever fantasy and horror novels that are rich with comedic acuity and lush prose. Kingfisher creates dark and fantastical worlds that manage to reflect real elements of our own society. As readers experience the unreconciled systemic injustices in her fantasy novels, they might find themselves recognizing injustices in our own world.

While Kingfisher has mastered the art of retellings as is evident in her reimagining of “Sleeping Beauty” in Thornhedge (2023) and “The Fall of the House of Usher” in What Moves the Dead (2022), she also manages to bring us an entirely new fairy tale in Nettle & Bone.

Many readers are familiar with the archetype, the damsel in distress. We’ve all heard stories about a princess locked in a tower who must wait for a prince to rescue her. In Nettle & Bone, Kingfisher returns the autonomy and authority to the princess. The princess is the hero in this story, and she must learn to subvert her society’s gender roles if she is to save herself and her loved ones.

Likewise, A Sorceress Comes to Call is a story of women’s power in a patriarchal society.

While the concept of an evil sorceress is likely familiar to readers, the greater evil, arguably, is the society in which the sorceress lives. The sorceress is unquestionably evil, but she feels a woman must act as she does to prosper in society. It’s up to the non-magical women in the book to work together to defeat the sorceress and redefine the concept of a successful woman in their world.

Kingfisher’s captivating and heartwarming books cleave the

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fantasy genre to create space for women’s often underrepresented voices. With authentic heroines and compelling villains, Kingfisher writes harrowing and hopeful stories of women’s power and rage that keep readers engaged until the end.

T. Kingfisher brings us a wholly original feminist retelling of the Brothers Grimm’s story “The Goose Girl” in A Sorceress Comes to Call, which follows the story of Cordelia, a fourteen-year-old daughter of a sorceress. In a land where sorcerers have been mostly eradicated, her mother, Evangeline, possesses rare powers. Evangeline works to keep her magic a secret and forces her daughter to do the same. While Evangeline is capable of many terrifying abilities, worst of all is her ability to make someone “obedient.”

The first chapter begins in a church wherein Cordelia has become her mother’s puppet.

There was a fly walking on Cordelia’s hand and she was not allowed to flick it away. She had grown used to the ache of sitting on a hard wooden pew and being unable to shift her weight. It still hurt, but eventually her legs went to sleep and the ache became a dull, all-over redness that was easier to ignore. Though her senses were dulled in obedience, her sense of touch stayed the strongest. Even when she was so far under that the world had a gray film around the edges, she could still feel her clothing and the touch of her mother’s hand. And now the fly’s feet itched, which was bad, then tickled, which was worse. (1)

Evangeline routinely takes over Cordelia’s body with her magic, doesn’t allow her to shut or lock any doors, and doesn’t allow her to tell anyone about her mother’s secrets. Evange-

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

line’s moods are volatile, and her reactions are unpredictable. The sorceress frequently reminds her daughter, “I made you, and you belong to me. Don’t forget it” (19). Cordelia never quite knows how to meet her mother’s expectations and is subjected to this magical obedience when she fails. These instances of obedience are irrefutably abusive, and Cordelia recalls that as a young girl she “would wet herself frequently when she was obedient.” Now that she’s older, “[h]er mother mostly remembered to have Cordelia relieve herself at regular intervals . . . but Cordelia had never forgotten the sensation” (3).

Cordelia is a lonely child with few friends. Riding her horse, Falada, is her only reprieve from Evangeline’s control. At home, Cordelia is primarily responsible for household tasks such as cooking and cleaning. In the rare instance she finds herself alone at home, Cordelia relishes in the privacy of a closed door and the freedom to think and move of her own volition, to escape her mother’s abuse.

Whether sorceress or peasant, unmarried women are at a distinct disadvantage in this patriarchal society. Evangeline relies on financial funding from the men she charms and seduces.

When one of her “benefactors,” as she calls these men, cuts off Evangeline, she sets her sights on a role above mistress. Evangeline cannot use her powers to find a husband since the sanctity of marriage vows and wedding rituals unravel magical spells.

But when Evangeline cannot resort to sorcery, she relies upon a power almost as effective: her beauty “was a weapon . . . and it was not an insignificant one in the arsenal.” Evangeline is described as “tall and slender, with the sort of figure that poets described as willowy.

She had shining dark, chestnut hair and large blue eyes in a fragile, heart-shaped face” (24). Evangeline finds a wealthy, unmarried man called Squire, and she orchestrates a mission to become his wife without bewitching him. As a part of her plan, Evangeline and Cordelia are to live in the Squire’s house

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with his sister, Hester, who takes an immediate and concerned interest in the young girl.

Hester, an unmarried middleaged woman with bad knees and keen wit immediately recognizes Evangeline’s sinister nature. Cordelia, who Evangeline claims is seventeen so that she, too, may find a rich husband, gravitates to Hester and her kindness. Hester, sensing “Doom . . . on [her] doorstep, in the shape of a woman” (24), calls upon her dear friends to visit her home to save Cordelia and keep Evangeline from marrying her brother. Once Evangeline begins her plan to seduce the Squire into marriage, Cordelia finds privacy from her mother for the first time in her life. In these moments away from her mother, she interacts with Hester and her two friends, Penelope and Imogene. Cordelia witnesses the power of women’s friendships and schemes with Hester, Penelope, and Imogene to thwart Evangeline’s plans.

As Cordelia works to subvert her mother’s influence, she finds courage in the darkest times and learns what it means to be loved and cared for. Kingfisher reminds us that we may not always be able to pick the family we’re born into, but we can find and choose our own family. A Sorceress Comes to Call is a novel rich with murder, magic, tender romance, mystery, and friendship. Reminiscent of regency culture, Kingfisher explores gender roles and women’s autonomy (and lack thereof) in a rigidly patriarchal society.

LEFT Reviewer (and NCLR Editorial

Assistant) Kenly Corya meeting T. Kingfisher at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, NC, 10 Sept. 2024

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Using the core of Brothers Grimm’s fairy tales, Kingfisher presents a story of redemption, healing, and imagination.

Kingfisher illuminates the dangers in ignoring the injustices around us and encourages us to take action. The other adults in Cordelia’s life witness the abuse, and together they concoct a plan to rescue her. These characters face impossible odds and supernatural adversity, but they persist because they cannot justify idly watching Evangeline’s wrongdoings when they have the chance to defeat her.

Kingfisher reinforces that we always have a choice, and thus we always have the opportunity to do the right thing, even in the direst situations.

“The trees were full of crows and the woods were full of madmen. The pit was full of bones and her hands were full of wires” (1). So begins T. Kingfisher’s dark and delightful bestselling fantasy novel Nettle & Bone. The first chapter opens with a princess in a charnel pit, and as with many classic fairy tales, she must complete a series of impossible tasks to save someone she loves. The princess, Marra, is the youngest of three sisters. She grew up like most fantasy princesses, prized and pampered. When her older sister, Damia, marries Prince Vorling from the fearsome northern kingdom, the two kingdoms forge an essential alliance. Damia should be living happily ever after with her prince, but soon after the wedding, she is returned home,

dead. To appease the northern kingdom’s prince, Marra’s parents offer him the next eldest daughter, Kania. After her other sister is married, Marra, the princess on reserve, is bustled away to grow up in a convent where she spends her days embroidering, shoveling barns, and delivering babies. Marra discovers that Kania is repeatedly pregnant and, having learned about contraceptives at the convent, determines to share this information with her sister.

When a sickness claims one of Kania’s children, Marra travels to the north, where she uncovers something insidious about the prince, which puts her sister in imminent danger.

Aptly described as a “rollicking feminist fairy tale,”* Nettle & Bone challenges common issues pertaining to gender roles, family dynamics, and sisterhood within the context of a fantasy world. Themes pertaining to oppression and gender equality persist throughout the novel. Although Kingfisher’s depiction of gender inequality exists within a fairy tale land, the gender biases bear a striking resemblance to real world scenarios. Marra reflects upon the mistreatment of women in her world and the systems of power that prevent women from establishing autonomy. Marra wonders, “If we were men,” but then realizes, “It did not matter. They were not and the history of the world was written in women’s wombs and women’s blood and she would never be allowed to change it” (58–59). Marra notes the irony in her society wherein

* From blogger Jaclyn Fulwood’s

description of the novel on Shelf Awareness 24 Mar. 2023: web.

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women birth those who grow up and become the oppressors.

As reproductive rights are being threatened in the United States, Kingfisher exemplifies the harm in forced reproduction, and she reminds us why a right to choose will always be important.

In a world where “Nothing is fair. Nothing is right” (181), Marra must seek justice herself.

Although she is a princess, she is powerless to save her sister because she is a woman. Marra may be “kicking against the world” (57), but she is determined to kick until the patriarchal system breaks. In order to rescue her sister, she decides she must first dismantle this system by killing the prince. Marra sets out on a quest to find a powerful dustwife, a witch who communes with the dead. The dust-wife agrees to help Marra take down Prince Vorling, but she must first accomplish a series of impossible tasks: spin stinging nettle into thread to sew a cloak, give life to a dog made from bones, and catch moonlight in a jar. Marra approaches her tasks relentlessly.

Even when the nettle “burned and stung and blazed against her flesh” (69), she persists for her sister. After accomplishing the impossible, she assembles an eclectic crew to join her in yet another impossible quest: regicide. She’s accompanied by the dust-wife, a dog made of bones, a former captive named Fenris, and her very own magical godmother, Agnes. Although Marra is often considered little more than a spare princess for Prince Vorling, she builds a family of her own throughout her quest.

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COPYRIGHT (C) 2022 BY URSULA VERNON; PUBLISHED BY TOR PUBLISHING GROUP. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

With distinctive wit and sincere characters, Kingfisher creates a uniquely cozy atmosphere despite the characters’ perilous adventures. Kingfisher makes fantasy tangible, and while immersed in her pages, the prospect of a surreal world existing next to our own no longer seems so strange: “You heard stories, of course. Stories of the Fair Folk, of little people that lived behind the world. Stories of old gods that had never learned how to die.

But Marra had never imagined that there might be so many or that they might be right here, on the other side of a tree root, not far under the hills” (83). Kingfisher’s heartfelt and imaginative novel will certainly appeal to fantasy lovers.

Kingfisher appeals to our darker fascinations by conjuring a strange world where people eat human flesh and princesses can build a dog out of bones;

ABOVE Endpaper art by Ursula Vernon

from Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher

where a demon hen rides atop a witch’s staff and fireflies are the size of cats; where you could sacrifice two weeks of your life for an enchanted moth, or a creature could play a tune that makes your teeth dance out of your mouth; where you might meet a saint in a market or in “a palace of the dead” (192). Nettle & Bone is a spellbinding fairy tale steeped in magic and illusions. Her fantasy world is “so strange and . . . so flawed that you soon realized that anything and everything could be a trick of the light” (3), and readers and characters alike find themselves questioning their ability to trust their own senses.

While Marra spins nettle thread, Kingfisher weaves feminist theory into her fairy tale tapestry. On the surface, Nettle & Bone is a charming fantasy about loyalty and family, but within this heartwarming story,

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Kingfisher explores fundamental flaws within society. In doing so, she also reminds readers that individuals have the power to change our world: “Nothing is fair, except that we try to make it so. That’s the point of humans, maybe, to fix things the gods haven’t managed” (181).

Kingfisher makes the impossible feel possible, and the sense of possibility transcends the pages of Nettle & Bone. There may be those who try to dictate our stories or determine our fate, but Kingfisher’s fairy tale reminds us that we have the authority and autonomy to challenge systems of power. In a world full of the impossible, we must ask ourselves how far we are willing to go to protect the people we love. How far are we willing to go to right the wrongs in our world?

T. Kingfisher’s fantasy novels are full of heart and hope and contain unforgettable characters, lush settings, and suspenseful plots. With distinctly clever prose, Kingfisher’s characters channel her wit and humor despite the dark settings. Kingfisher crafts compelling antagonists whose villainous actions motivate her characters to make remarkable choices. Aside from her ability to captivate and entertain, Kingfisher thoughtfully explores injustices in her fantasy worlds while illuminating issues pertaining to gender inequality in our own world. T. Kingfisher is an unquestionable force within the fantasy genre, and A Sorceress Comes to Call and Nettle & Bone are not to be missed. n

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HOPE, HEART AND HEROISM a review by Abby Trzepacz Micki Bare. Omega Crag.

Level Elevate, 2024.

ABBY TRZEPACZ is an English major at East Carolina University with a double minor in Professional Writing and Information Design and Communications. She is a Senior Intern on the NCLR staff. She reviewed the second book in this series in NCLR Online Spring 2024.

MICKI BARE is a graduate of NC State University. Her career in education spans three decades, with service as a teacher, administrator, and marketing director. She is the author of three early reader children’s books. She has also published in regional and state magazines and anthologies and has written a human-interest column for almost twenty years. Her first two middle-grade novels, Society of the Sentinelia (Best Level Books, 2022) and Blind Fairy (Level Elevate, 2023), received the North Carolina AAUW Young People’s Literature Award.

Omega Crag is the 2024 recipient of The Golden Wizard Book Prize.

Micki Bare’s book Omega Crag is the third installment of Micki Bare’s Zahra of the Uwharries series. It is set in the Birkhead Mountains Wilderness in central North Carolina, where readers get to see the magical elements of Bare’s story within the natural environs of her home state.

Omega Crag is a story of Zahra, a scraebin, who is tasked with saving all scraebin with the help of her mentors and friends. Zahra was named “The Convener” in the last book, Blind Fairy, which means she has to unite the three special Trilaterian fairies and help save her kind. And she’s the only one who can do it.

Zahra’s journey picks up right where the previous book left her, saving the scraebin from extinction. She is with her friend Aiofe searching for the remaining two fairies in the Trilaterian, a group of three special fairies, who will help her. Right from the start, the mission is clear: unite the Trilaterian, get to the Omega Crag, read the tomes, and save the scraebins and her family.

Zahra knows that there are seven signs that portend the extinction of scraebins. The first sign was “[t]he rising of cicadas in the fall season during an early snow” (4). Reading the Omega Crag will allow Zahra to learn of the remaining signs and hopefully save her kind. That may seem easy, but Zahra must first face physical and emotional obstacles before she can complete her mission.

The Omega Crag rock, located on Purgatory Mountain (an actual trailhead in Randolph County, NC) can only be read when the sun is coming up and going down and under clear skies; oth-

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erwise the etchings won’t show up on the rock. When Zahra finally gets to read the Omega Crag, she learns many things that will aid her on her journey, including that “Hope exists, even nearest the end. Strength grows, despite the cold. Wisdom convenes, only with many. Love shelters, undeterred by distance” (78). At first, Zahra isn’t sure what to make of this message, but as she gets farther along on her journey, it will become clear to her. Zahra also learns what each of the seven signs are and what to expect from them. The seventh sign “shall descend and squelch the flames to save The Convener, The Great Tree, and the forest” (97). So far, only three of the seven signs have presented themselves, leaving Zahra waiting for the last four.

Right from the start the Rain Flowers, the second sign, are a problem for Zahra. They can communicate with her, sometimes giving her helpful advice, but other times they create obstacles for her. When Zahra finds the Rain Flowers growing from a rock, the ground slips from underneath her and she falls down a hidden hole with her heart animals (special animals with amethyst eyes that are meant to help her). However, with the help of her heart animals, she can journey to the Rain Flowers safely. Zahra doesn’t find the flower “scary. But it smells like the rot of a dead fish. The sound it makes – if the shrill voice came from it – is worse than the clanging of human machines used to tear down trees and build houses. But it’s just a flower. A beautiful, colorful flower” (62). The flowers may

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have the potential to be harmful, but Zahra must stop doubting herself and overcome them.

During the journey of reading the Omega Crag rock and the Rain Flowers, Zahra finally gets to unite the three fairies in the Trilaterian. The second fairy she encounters (after Aoife in the earlier book) is Hensley.

Hensley comes from a scraebin colony close by, and with Aoife’s direction, Zahra can find him, and when she does, he says, “Yes, my nail is blue. And I have a red wart” (21), traits found in the special fairies who are in the Trilaterian. When she meets the third fairy, the the last one of the Trilaterian, she is shocked: “He turns his head and looks at me. Both of his eyes shine deep, amethyst purple. Like Aoife and Hensley. Like me. Like our heart animals” (195). The third and final fairy Zahra meets is someone she would never expect.

Bare skillfully incorporates magical elements and typical “‘tween” traits into Zahra’s personality. In Omega Crag, Zahra is just twelve years old, an age kids are seeking more independence and are more willing to take risks, but they often still lack strong communication skills.

When Zahra is practicing her fairy skills, trying to be her best self, she tends to roll her eyes quite a bit at her mentors and peers. When she is hungry, she responds with, “Everyone is so serious. I’m just hungry. If she isn’t going to bring food out, I’ll get it myself” (105). When she is forced to be polite with adults, she thinks, “My best friend is in

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some kind of scary danger, and I have to do pleasantries” (117). In this book, we watch Zahra’s personality emerge and witness her passionate nature.

Much like the last book, a prevalent theme of this one is following your heart and maintaining hope. Throughout the book, Zahra is faced with challenge after challenge. While, in the moment, these challenges are overwhelming and scary, she remembers that she has a strong support system. We see her lean on the people around her and upon herself. Zahra’s confidence falters in this book, and she tends to doubt whether she’s making the right choices.

With this decline in her selfconfidence, we note how those around her – Danni, Aoife, Hensley, her family, her heart animals, and the Sentinelia (a group of humans and scraebins who work together to support the scraebin) – support her

physically and emotionally. With their support, Zahra gains confidence and stops doubting her choices. During a moment of doubt, Zahra’s mentor fairy, Miss Jellisia Levion, shares with her, “Find the good. Sometimes it is difficult, but there is good in all” (150). This message resonates with Zahra, and readers will see her think back to this message when she is feeling doubtful.

In a low moment, for example, she “decide[s] not to be afraid.

I’m awake. My heart animals are here. We have everything we need no matter where we end up. I’m not afraid” (63).

Omega Crag is a captivating continuation of Zahra’s journey, offering readers a mix of magic, adventure, emotional growth, and important life lessons. Bare continues to develop this character who is both relatable and extraordinary, leaving her young readers waiting eagerly for the next installment of this series. n

ABOVE Micki Bare at the Meet the

Authors event at Uwharrie Mercantile, 3 Aug. 2024

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COURTESY OF CANDLEWICK PRESS

INTRODUCING CHILDREN TO THE WONDERS OF THE UNIVERSE a review by Mark I. West Allan Wolf. The Blanket Where Violet Sits. Candlewick Press, 2022.

MARK I. WEST is a Professor of English at UNC Charlotte, where he teaches courses on children’s and young adult literature.

He has written or edited twenty-five books, including Liminal Spaces in Children’s and Young Adult Literature: Stories from the In Between (Lexington Books, 2024). His articles have appeared in various national publications, such as the New York Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly, Americana, and British Heritage, as well as many academic journals. Before entering academia, he worked as an early childhood educator and professional puppeteer.

ALLAN WOLF currently lives in Asheville, NC. He earned an MA in English from Virginia Tech, where he taught for several years before moving to North Carolina.

He has written many books for children and young adults, including The Snow Fell Three Graves Deep (Candlewick Press, 2020) and The Day the Universe Exploded My Head (Candlewick Press, 2019). He is the premiere winner of Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Prize, funded by the North Carolina Poetry Society.

Watch his performance.

When my now grown-up son was four, he attended a preschool located about five blocks from our home. Weather permitting, I often walked to the preschool to pick him up at the end of the school day, and then we would take a leisurely stroll home. On one of these strolls, he suddenly asked me if the sun was going to expand and swallow up our planet. His question came out of the blue, and it took me by surprise. I had no idea where he heard this information, but I thought it best to answer his question truthfully.

“Yes,” I said, “but that won’t happen for millions of years, so we don’t need to worry about it.” He pondered my answer for a few moments, and then he asked, “Will that be the end of everything?” I said that it would be the end of everything on our planet. At this point during our stroll we were walking by Thai Taste, his favorite restaurant. He then asked, “Will it even be the end of restaurants?”

I flashed back on this memorable conversation with my son when I read The Blanket Where Violet Sits by Allan Wolf, a children’s author from Asheville,

NC. Like my son, Violet, the young girl who stars in this picture book, takes an interest in the workings of our vast universe. Wolf taps into children’s natural curiosity about the cosmos, but he also keeps his story grounded in the dayto-day life of children. Just as my son related the fate of our planet to his favorite restaurant, Violet combines stargazing with eating a night-time picnic in a park.

The Blanket Where Violet Sits begins with Violet and her parents going to a city park at twilight. They bring with them a blanket, a full picnic basket, a telescope, a book about space travel, and a toy rocket ship.

Most everything is packed in a large wagon pulled by one of the parents, but Violet clutches the toy rocket ship in her hands as children often do with their favorite toys. They settle in for an evening of stargazing. As the story progresses, it gets darker and darker until the sun goes down and the stars fill the night sky.

Like the nursery rhyme “The House That Jack Built,” The Blanket Where Violet Sits is

ABOVE An illustration from the book

by Lauren Tobia

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told in the form of a cumulative rhyme. The opening line reads, “This is the blanket where Violet sits, eating a sandwich, an apple, and chips.”

From this beginning, the story expands outward to the “bustling city” where Violet lives, to the planet “with a moon so pretty,” to the sun, to the solar system, to the galaxy, and finally to “the known universe.” Following each outward step, the story circles back to Violet sitting on the blanket. The book ends with Violet sleeping in the wagon with the blanket tucked up around her and her beloved rocket ship in her arms.

Lauren Tobia’s lush illustrations perfectly capture the sense of wonder that Wolf evokes with his poetic descriptions of our universe. In some cases, Tobia’s illustrations transcend Wolf’s text. Several of the illustrations,

for example, depict Violet flying through the universe in her rocket ship even though Wolf

does not even mention the rocket ship in the text. Tobia’s illustrations show the universe as Violet imagines it while looking through the telescope.

The Blanket Where Violet Sits provides a reassuring depiction

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of the universe. While Wolf and Tobia present the cosmos as being vast and wondrous, it still seems like a stable and safe place. In this book, there are no ominous blackholes or dying stars consuming planets and restaurants.

The scary universe that my son worried about on our stroll home some twentyfive years ago is not the universe Violet ponders during her stargazing picnic. I think that at some point during their schooling, children should learn about the less-reassuring aspects of the universe. However, The Blanket Where Violet Sits is intended for young children, and for this audience Wolf’s cozy exploration of the universe makes for a perfect bedtime story. n

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS Pedagogical Essays for K-12 and post-secondary classes on TEACHING NORTH CAROLINA LITERATURE Help us to “preserve and promote the state’s rich literary history” Submission guidelines and details here

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NORTH CAROLINA Mission Accomplished, Yet Again

by Margaret D. Bauer, Editor North Carolina is so rich in literary talent that even after almost thirty years I am still discovering not only new (and newish) writers – like those reviewed in this section – but also writers with both long lists of published books and strong reputations as professors and/or mentors. Yet somehow I never encountered someone like Kevin McIlvoy in my literary travels. Read about McIlvoy in Marjorie Hudson’s retrospective on his work and his life. I am sorry not to have known “Mc,” as he was called by his friends. I appreciate Marjorie for bringing his work to our readers’ attention in an essay that began as a review of his latest book, then became a kind of overview of his oeuvre and a eulogy.

Mc clearly manifested the communal spirit I’ve long noted among North Carolina writers who are much more supportive of than competitive with each other.

The NCLR editors welcome such essays. If we’ve not published the writer before, use the North Carolina Miscellany portal on our Submittable page to submit an essay on or interview with such writers. If the writer has previously appeared in our pages or the writer’s work fits into one of our back issues’ themes, use the Flashbacks portal. Such essays (and interviews) are key to our mission (which bears repeating) to preserve and promote the state’s rich literary history.

Speaking of writers we’ve not previously published, read in these last pages of the issue reviews of a few more books by authors new to NCLR. Also here is a review of two-time Betts Fiction Prize winner Thomas Wolf, his book paired with a writer we have not previously published. Both books are sportsbased, which got me to thinking that sports in literature might be an interesting feature topic some time.

If that (or some other feature topic) is of interest to someone with editorial curating experience, please reach out to me with your feature section ideas.

And if you wish to volunteer to write a review for us, find information to do so here. n

Miscellany

74 A Writer’s Life – What Is It? The Life and Work of Kevin “Mc” McIlvoy a remembrance by Marjorie Hudson 84 Her Side of the Story a review by Becca Hannigan

n Sayantani Dasgupta, Brown Women Have Everything and Women Who Misbehave 89 Wolf and McGee in the Outfield a review by Shelby Hans

n Ryan McGee, Welcome to the Circus of Baseball n Thomas Wolf, The Called Shot 92 The Things We Feared a review by Wendy Tilley

n Megan Miranda, Such a Quiet Place

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE 6 n

North Carolina LGBTQ+ Literature

24 n

Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues

poetry, fiction, and book reviews

poetry and book reviews

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A Writer’s Life – What Is It? The Life and Work of Kevin “Mc” McIlvoy

BY MARJORIE HUDSON COURTESY OF PRESS 53

MARJORIE HUDSON writes, teaches, leads arts and community engagement projects, and works the earth in Chatham County, NC. She holds a BA in interdisciplinary studies from American University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College. She founded the George Moses Horton Project to honor the first African American man to publish a book in the South. Her first book, Searching for Virginia Dare (Coastal Carolina Press, 2002; reviewed in NCLR 2003), was republished by Press 53.

Her short story collection, Accidental Birds of the Carolinas (Press 53, 2011; reviewed in NCLR Online 2012), received an honorable mention by PEN/Hemingway, and her novel Indigo Field (Regal House Publishing, 2023; reviewed in NCLR Online Winter 2024) received the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction. Her Kitchen Table Writers workshop has placed numerous area writers on the path to publication. Read an interview with her in NCLR 2016.

ABOVE Kevin McIlvoy

1

I have come to Christine Hale’s home in the woods outside Asheville, North Carolina, to find guidance about how to write about writer, teacher, Buddhist, musician Kevin McIlvoy’s life and work, and his exasperating, fascinating, wise, comic-tragic posthumous story collection Is It So? Glimpses, Glyphs, & Found Novels. Author of a memoir, A Piece of Sky, A Grain of Rice, and a novel, Basil’s Dream, Hale is Mc’s widow and may know more about his new book, written in his last years, than most anyone.1 It’s a beautiful early November day, unseasonably hot, with the kind of shifting, forceful breeze that lifts small tree limbs into whirling dance and signals a change in the weather. Inside, it’s cool and comfortable, earth tones and low light bringing an immediate sense of calm.

As Hale supplies a pottery mug and tea, I explain that I want to capture Mc’s eclectic new book in my essay but I’m not sure of how to do that. I also want to give readers a sense of the intense effect my few encounters with Mc and his work have had on me as well as so many other writers. “Let your essay be an outgrowth of personal feelings,” she says, giving a kind of welcome permission. Then she says, “Is It So is a Buddhist book,” and something chimes inside me, though I don’t exactly know what she means.

McIlvoy – known as “Mc” (pronounced “Mac”) to his many creative writing students, friends, and colleagues – came at life, teaching, and writing in his later years with a spiritual energy honed

by Buddhist practice. “As he became a Buddhist,” Hale says, “one of his practices was to do an ‘aspiration’ – a meditation on bringing loving kindness – before each class. Perhaps that’s why,” she adds, “his students say he was more a spiritual teacher than an academic.”

Raised Catholic in the Midwest, Mc was an altar boy in a local parish populated by Polish immigrants struggling to learn English, while reciting their mass in Latin. He listened as they perfectly mouthed, in a Polish accent, Latin words whose meaning was a mystery to them. In an interview in Willow Springs Magazine, Mc posited that his awareness from this time of language as mystical, unknowable, and related to communication from God underpinned his own obsession with language sounds, meanings, and mystery in his writing. Mc explained that the first oral stories he heard around

Kevin McIlvoy, Is It So? Glimpses, Glyphs, & Found Novels (WTAW, 2023); quotations from this book will be cited parenthetically.

North Carolina Miscellany

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the family table were gin-fueled: “They had a lot to do with getting a rise out of the audience. They had certain patterns to them, but they went off the rails very fast.” They were spellbinding, he said, but “at the end of them, you would say to yourself, ‘What was that?’”.

From the beginning, Mc’s work was not so easily analyzed. He often expressed, with students and interviewers, his trust of “incoherence over coherence,” his focus on the sentence and its sonic values, its silences, its possibilities of bringing surprise or “destabilization” rather than the profluence of “push and glide” story logic.2 I first became acquainted with the work of Kevin McIlvoy in the late 1980s while proofing The Fifth Station, his second novel, for Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, then a distinctively Southern press, though I noticed that the author of this book I was working on was a Midwesterner. A Midwesterner myself, I felt a bond with Mc’s story, his bio, without ever having met him. Fifth Station was a story of brothers, of the world of hard-drinking Catholics and hard labor in factories, and it starts with a tragic confession: “I am the reason my younger brother Matthew died.” 3 There was a great sad heart in the middle of this family story, and I felt immediately at home in it.

Fully churched myself (my father was a Methodist minister), but never Catholic, I did not know then what the phrase “the fifth station” meant, focusing on commas and spelling and the tiny empty spaces after periods. I had skipped over the clue in the epigraph: “The Cyrenian Helps Jesus Carry His Cross.” The fifth station in church lore is the moment when a man is forced by Romans to carry the cross for Jesus on the way to Golgotha, and in the carrying, the man begins to feel for the condemned stranger. Compassion, of course, is Jesus’s main teaching: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” It is also central to Buddhism. And it is compassion’s sister, empathy, that allows writers access to the deep inner lives of characters. If you read Kevin McIlvoy’s books closely, you can see his work in conversation with Catholicism, then later with Buddhist beliefs. His work has never been that easy to characterize, however. In his talks with Willow Springs Magazine, Mc discussed his belief in “incoherence over coherence.” His focus was on the sonic values of the sentence and the powers of silence and indirection in story revision over fiction’s urge to flow forward in a kind of “push and glide” of story logic.

2

“A Conversation with Kevin McIlvoy,” Willow Springs 88 (2021): web.

3

Kevin McIlvoy, The Fifth Station (Algonquin, 1988) 1.

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I didn’t actually meet Mc until I joined the class of 2000 at the Warren Wilson MFA program where he taught. Other student writers already knew what a great teacher he was. Upperclassmen and women whispered about him, vied to be selected for mentoring. Later, I noticed that writers who worked with him went on to publish novels. After graduation, some Warren Wilson alumni kept in touch with Mc and used his manuscript review services. One of those, Kathryn Schwille, whose 2018 novel What Luck, This Life is a many-voiced story of the crash of the space shuttle Columbia, has this to say:

When Mc engaged with your work, he brought his striking vision and imagination to your own humble efforts, even the awkward first drafts. He always encouraged risk, and with his encouragement your work could go places you never expected. If you had a tree in your book that played an important role in the story, why not consider a moment from the tree’s point of view?4 COURTESY OF CHRISTINE HALE

Schwille used Mc’s suggestion to make an extraordinary scene in her novel – yes, from the point of view of a tree.

Warren Wilson MFA graduate Dale Neal, author of four novels, including two in 2024, Kings of Coweetsee and The Woman with the Stone Knife, also worked with Mc after graduation. He says Mc “seemed to have a hundred hands, patting writers on the back, looking at their own words, awakening to the possibilities on every page. Mc read and offered tough suggestions on three of my novels, but only later would I realize he did the same for countless other writers.”5 Poet and memoirist Sebastian Matthews, who taught creative writing in the undergraduate program at Warren Wilson while Mc was MFA faculty, found an able coach and editor for his work through the writer/professor’s “Mc the Book Mechanic” consultations. “Over time, though,” he says, “I started reading and responding to his work, and he read my work outside the biz. [It was] a barter relationship at the end.” Mc became “a dear friend, a mentor, and, yes, a champion of my work (something I needed desperately at the time).” 6 For all these writers and many more, Mc seems to have had the gift Dale Neal recognized – the ability to have many hands – hands of friendship as well as manuscript analysis.

When, as a student in the program, Christine Hale met Mc, she says, “I never felt so heard and seen as a person and a writer.”

His students have told her, she says, that Mc was a Bodhisattva – a ABOVE TOP Kevin McIlvoy and

Kathryn Schwille ABOVE BOTTOM Kevin McIlvoy

and Christine Hale

4

Kathryn Schwille, email to Hudson, 23 May 2024.

5

Dale Neal, email to Hudson, 17 May 2024.

6

Sebastian Matthews, email to Hudson, 18 May 2024.

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realized Buddha who came back to bring others to the teachings. At the time, Hale herself was a longtime follower of Tibetan Buddhism.

Mc became a follower of Zen Buddhism, known for its koans, questions that cannot be easily answered. Another Zen practice is silent meditation. I imagine that such a practice could only have sharpened the attentiveness to sound and silence I find in his work. For Mc, Hale tells me, Zen Buddhism became both a branch of metaphysics and a way of being. As she speaks, I spy through the sliding glass doors the source of a persistent sound: an enormous windchime, tall as a man, tolling long deep notes, followed by resonant silences.

Mc wrote and published six novels and three collections of short fictions over the years (as well as one volume of poetry, published posthumously by Press 53 in 2024). By the time his third book, Little Peg, came out, the geographical compass of his work had shifted to the Southwest, where he had been teaching in the Creative Writing Department at New Mexico State University since 1981. The opening line of the novel signals the existential question that haunts the story’s main character, a young woman teacher of “Nontraditional English One” who lives in a residential treatment center after a breakdown: “I quietly ask myself ‘Who is it?’ before entering even my own home.”7 Unable to face the central suffering in her own life, the loss of a beloved brother to the Vietnam War, the teacher assigns her students to write fiction stories about her, hoping to find the answer to that existential question. The stories deflect and circle, leading back to memory, but finding no pat answers. Here Mc veers away from Catholic themes; rather, he seems to be exploring a belief in the healing power of stories. Can stories heal? Maybe.

Mc’s next novel, Hyssop (Northwestern University Press, 1998) opens with a psalm for cleansing. In a border town that seems timeless, steeped in Catholic rituals and old saints, an old man named Red confesses his life of compulsive infidelity and thievery to his Catholic bishop friend, who laughs, forgives, and feeds him dinner.

This tale seems Mc’s love letter to the kind of Catholicism that is centered in compassion, a promise that a man’s conversation with his own guilt is also a conversation with an attentive friend. In his last hours, Red wonders if confessions of sin be the kind of stories that delight God. Hyssop is a beautiful book, its tendrils of yearning like a flowering vine reaching upward, its confessional storytelling funny and profane.

In Mc’s first story collection, The Complete History of New Mexico (Graywolf, 2005), the title story follows the struggles of a fifth-grade boy as he attempts to follow the outline required by his English teacher’s dull essay assignment. Using the outline topics as section headlines, the boy writes and turns in the moving, fragmented, magical, illogical and powerful story of his young life and losses.

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7

Kevin McIlvoy, Little Peg (Perennial, 1990) 1.

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A series of increasingly frustrated critiques by the teacher punishes the boy’s creativity and humanity. Mc has returned to the question, what is a story for? This is the second of his books that questions how writing may be taught.

After Complete History came out, I had just published my own first story collection. Mc was kind enough to join me for a reading at Malaprop’s Bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina. Mc would be the draw, I knew, though I still had some friends in the area from grad school whom I hoped would come.

The crowd was small, sales were modest. I was a little disappointed for the both of us. Mc and I were standing at the counter afterward, signing stock, when I noticed that, as I had often done with my own books, Mc was now taking returns of some of his books that had not sold, including Hyssop. I admit it shocked me a bit. I did not know that such a venerable writer, beloved teacher, powerful person faced that humbling sort of transaction as part of his writing life. Mc must have seen the stricken look on my face. He paused to tell me a story. He had been told early on that his books would take the literary world by storm, he said. Unexpected things happened, as they do in publishing. Editors move on, publishers run out of money, agents die, publicists change their plans, books get remaindered and sold back to the author – it happens to just about every serious prose writer who keeps at it for a while. Mc, being kind, showed me that day that I was not alone, and that maybe – maybe – the thrill of publishing and awards, crowds and bookstore sales were beside the point. Rather, the writer’s job is to connect – with each other as well as with our readers.

By 2017, when McIlvoy’s next book, 57 Octaves Below Middle C, came out from Four Way Books, his work was teetering on the fulcrum of a major shift in consciousness. Filled with “completely original forms” (Laura Kasischke) and singing “strange songs of belonging” (Matthea Harvey),8 the first of the forty-three mostly very short stories opens with a man who answers an ad for a lawn mower and finds a cult of chanting Buddhist lawn-mower fanatics.

The haiku-spouting Japanese poet leads the chanting group, who cut Buddhist symbols in the lawn, a part theater of the absurd, part critique of American lawn culture.

“Veterans Day” tells of plodding men who celebrate their veteran fathers by playing hopeless games of golf in the snow. Funny, angry, insightful, raging, each story, Mc told one interviewer, was aimed at “one reader,” the imagined person he was writing for, in some cases a “resistant reader,” a person “who has a seriously disturbed mind . . . who readily welcomes not only estrangement but repugnance” (“Conversation”). In one of several stories starring the

8

Blurbs from the book page of the author’s website.

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terrifying/repugnant “Teacher Reptile,” a series of rants covers such seemingly random subjects as prison, violent suffering, writing, teaching, and skateboarding. One of those three Teacher/Reptile stories employs language rhythms akin to those of the Bible’s apocalyptic Book of Revelation. (Later, in a glossary, the reader discovers that some of the language is also insider skateboarding lexicon.) In his dedication page for 57 Octaves, Mc writes, “Mom, you would not have liked this one at all. Still, you would have listened in loving puzzlement to every note of the music. . . .”

The stories in 57 Octaves bracket several jagged work/life transitions for Mc. He had suffered through a difficult divorce and life-threatening illness. He’d moved to North Carolina.

He’d found new love with Hale. Some of the pieces are set in New Mexico, some are set in North Carolina. Some of the pieces reference Buddhism, some sound like Biblical rants. Some are the stories of heartbroken men.

One or two shorts rivet us with surprising talk of love. This book’s chaotic language play, repeated words like chants or curses, absurdities, and fractured narration prefigure the language play in his posthumous book of prose, Is It So?.

Speaking of this transition time in Mc’s life and her own, Hale tells me they both had been destroyed by painful divorces. “When it seems like everybody in your world says you’re horrible, there has to be a change in your outlook.”9 Hale says that the only thing that helped still her panic was to sit and chant sadhana. Mc loved how her ritual chanting, the incense and bells, resonated with the familiar rituals of Catholicism. Seeking his own calm place was the deepening of his exploration of Buddhism. He began to sign his correspondence, “In joy.”

Now Mc’s fiction fully enters North Carolina: His novel At the Gate of All Wonder (Tupelo Press, 2018) celebrates the lush soundscape of the Pisgah Forest as well as the understory of divorce. A student of music, a lover of the blues, a blues harmonica player, a student of breath, Mc creates in this novel a new metaphor for his lifelong love of sound and ritual: his lead character Samantha Peabody runs a “Sonic Adventure Program” for two children, a kind of nature camp of silence and sound.

9

Abby Frucht, “Beyond Judges, Judgements, Limits: Abby Frucht Interview With Christine Hale On Kevin “Mc” McIlvoy’s Is It So? Glimpses, Glyphs, & Found Novels,” JMWW 22 Jan. 2024: web; subsequently cited parenthetically.

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I got to hear Mc read aloud from the book at Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities in Southern Pines, North Carolina.

Mc talked at the reading about how he researched the sounds of the mountains by driving, day after day, to a remote place in the wilderness, hiking in, sitting down, and listening. The result is what reviewer Kathryn Schwille called “a bread-crumb trail to the heart’s strange workings, cast against Pisgah’s sounds and the limits of ear and soul.”10 The prose does hum and sing; it evokes sound, taste, skin sensations. It reminds me, a little, of the gift North Carolina has given me, a place to live on a Piedmont farm where the dominant sounds are birdsong, wind in the trees, and trickling streams after rain. The sounds of civilization – trucks gearing up as they cross the river bridge across the valley – are secondary. There is room for the soundscape of the inner life.

I was in residence at the Weymouth Center the same week Mc was also there, and he proposed that we writers in residence gather in the writers’ lounge one evening to read a few pages aloud from works in progress. Sitting across from me in the drafty room, bundled in his hoodie and woolen hat, Mc explained that he had Raynaud’s syndrome, a circulation disorder that made him always cold. Then he told me he was writing a novel based on a true story, a recent lynching, one that happened in 2014. I was shocked. A lynching and other racial violence was at the center of my work in progress (my novel Indigo Field), but my fictional lynching was based on a rumor whispered in my ear, one I’d been unable to document. I knew North Carolina was no stranger to lynching, but in my community, it was not then spoken of.11 My impulse was to speak of it anyway, in fiction. But Mc had documentation. He told us that a Black teenage boy in Bladenboro had been found hanged from a swing set. And that, without any proper investigation, it had been ruled a suicide.

Mc was digging into North Carolina – all of it, including the terror.

By the time, a few years later, Mc’s One Kind Favor was published, the COVID epidemic had shut down work, the Internet was aflame with videos of Black men being killed by police, and I was starting each winter day by going to an upstairs room before dawn, flinging the window open to the cold, and huddling in my reading chair with a good book to keep from doom-scrolling. I opened One Kind Favor with fear and trepidation. I was immediately lost in it.

The novel stirs a witch’s cauldron of living characters, spirits of the dead, swamp creatures, and racist Trumpers in evangelical clothing into a hellish zombie stew of judgment and apocalypse. The language

10

Kathryn Schwille, Rev. of At the Gate of All Wonder by Kevin McIlvoy, Charlotte Lit 22 Oct. 2018: web.

11

Since that time my local NAACP chapter and the Equal Justice Initiative have documented and honored six lynching victims in Chatham County.

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seethes with rage and rant. The world flames with vengeance and sin as if the very air is on fire. In Mc’s fictional town of Cord, North Carolina, Black and white “Presences,” restless spirits of the murdered and murdering dead, all gather with the living at a combination bar and consignment store. A young Black man with “everything to live for” is about to be lynched, hung from a playground swing set, and no one will be surprised that the crime is never solved.

I read nonstop for days, reveling in Mc’s cleansing rant; everything I wanted to rage-tweet was here. Mc’s voice had become fully that of an Old Testament prophet, invoking the destruction of a sinful people: “The Jim Crow Democrat dead are here, and the living Jim Crow and Jesus Crow jackboot white supremacists are here.

The dead election-riggers, so quiet but so brazen, are here; [as are] the living election riggers.” Art Pope and the Koch brothers (major donors to GOP in North Carolina) are “Kocksuckers” and “SuckPopes.” This is a place where religious cults “grow from the evangelical spore” and “redhats rule us, blood and soil.”12 I realize now that I was Mc’s ideal reader for this book so wrapped in the loose realities of speculative fiction and the ragged profligacy of rant: someone who feels so outside the norm and so full of horror that she craves disruption and chaos on the page. The only ingredient needed for understanding is having lived the chaos of the American moment when it was published. This is a brilliant book, both in its rhetoric and its moral clarity. It is a vindication of Mc’s choice long ago to write for the “one reader” (Mc’s term) suited to receive his work, increasingly the resistant reader, someone who craves work outside the norm because she lives there.

A ballroom dancer, tennis player, writer, and teacher, Buddhist, North Carolinian, and blues-harmonica player, Kevin McIlvoy was writing short-form fiction in his last years and signing correspondence “In joy.” In the summer 2022, Mc handed his wife Christine a manuscript for comment. After reading it, she said to him, “Mc, you’ve written a marvelous last book.” His response, she says, was a “warm silence.”

Neither was expecting his death, which came just months later, suddenly.

Hale calls it “Mc’s Buddhist book.” She also calls it “an old man’s book.” Using all his dedication to indirection in storytelling, the sounds of human speech and inner monologue, Is It So? is also a series

ABOVE Kevin McIlvoy and Christine Hale

12

Kevin McIlvoy, One Kind Favor (WTAW, 2021) 4. Read a review of this novel in NCLR Online Winter 2022.

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of probing questions that can’t be answered, questions about art and failure, teaching, love, and letting go.

In the first five shorts, a man holds a series of conversations about his attempts to draw a goldfish, a face, a wine glass. What he sees is so much more beautiful than he can achieve on the page.

“There should be a ‘Drawing Viagra,’” the man muses (4).

Two of the following shorts contain meditations on Van Gogh and Chaim Soutine, “failed” artists in their lifetimes who erased themselves because of fear and pride. “In the Garden” brings us a panhandler named Jesus who asks a series of questions of a homeowner who will not help him, and tucked in the questions are challenges: “So – you ever see your future self, eye to eye, in this garden?”

(14). “Passerby” is based on a minor player in Singing in the Rain who recounts every detail of the central scene being filmed – Gene Kelly dancing circles around random pedestrians, rain made partly of milk in order to make it luminescent – then asks the reader to “Watch my nine seconds again, would you?” (23).13 “In the Gila” features a hiker revisiting a New Mexico wilderness trail over the years, asking the ranger to explain changes in the map. The hiker finally realizes that he was “an ignorant young and lost wanderer who had become an ignorant lost and old wanderer.”

But the hiker knows even less than he thinks. The helpful ranger finally informs the hiker that he remembers him – as the teacher who “gave me a ‘D’ in Freshman Composition.” After some back and forth that approximates forgiveness, they both contemplate the map before them: “‘Same route?’” the ranger says (30).

In “Blue Squill,” a writer narrates the story of his neighbor, the retired dance instructor/gardener Mr. Jabbock, as he watches the man get into a hopeless pissing contest with crafty crows who are eating his carefully planted bulbs. Then the narrator/writer considers his own life: “more or less writing piss before quitting late and leaving my pages every night with no sense of their use” (114). The narrator knows how stories should end – with honest fullness or honest emptiness, but he’s “lost the gist” of how stories should begin” (116).

Mc’s questions about the value of teaching, of writing, of his own work recur here as in a final accounting and come up short. Here is the intersection between Mc’s ideas about fiction and spirituality and the writing life: that fiction does not answer questions or settle things, rather, it asks unanswerable questions that make for human connection.

“It wasn’t that he couldn’t write a straight story,” Hale tells me.

“He didn’t want to. He was interested in what was behind the story, and the speech and silences were suggesting a story that could never be told. Some of us,” she continues, “are more willing to take our work in the direction the biz wants of us. But he was going to make 13

This story is fun to read after watching the scene on YouTube. I really believe Mc must have watched the YouTube video of this scene over and over, perhaps during Covid isolation, and as a dancer and isolate, he may have been contemplating his own role as a minor literary player, as opposed to the Gene Kelly figure starring role.

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the art he was driven to make, and he wanted to be recognized for it.

As he got older, he was seeing that it wasn’t going to happen.”

Having just published my first novel at age sixty-nine, I’ve noticed the crushing weight of expectations and hopes – attachments to certain results – that my writing colleagues and I carry with us on our book tours. A lapsed Episcopalian, I don’t know a lot about Buddhism. But not too long ago I went looking for some wisdom and came across this: In Buddhist belief, you are the student. Every person, everything that happens to you is a teacher. That is what we are here on earth to do. Learn. I can see how it would be easier, simpler, to be a writer if I could live inside that teaching.

In Is It So? there are stories that seem to be personal essays, so closely do they track Mc’s way of reaching for reflection and meaning but rejecting easy conclusions. Perhaps they are more like riddles, even koans, questions the writer lives in, lived in, in his later years.

They ask such questions as What is the writer’s life, after all? What is left when it has come to fullness? What do we have when it comes to emptiness? What rituals do we need to understand a Latin mass, a neighbor’s pain? How shall we pay attention, how shall we let go?

Hale opens the sliding glass door, leads me past a clothesline of prayer flags down the path to Mc’s writing shed. To one side of the path is a small fire pit surrounded by stones, perhaps a place to meet, a place to think, a place to play the blues. It’s just over a year since Mc died, leaving behind his “glimpses, glyphs, & found novels” and an army of adoring friends and students. I’m expecting answers in the book titles lining his shelves. Will there be a Buddha’s head, art on the walls, a comfortable chair? Hale opens the door. We step inside. I find only a warm silence. n

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HER SIDE OF THE STORY a review by Becca Hannigan Sayantani Dasgupta. Brown Women Have Everything: Essays on (Dis)comfort and Delight.

University of North Carolina Press, 2024.

—. Women Who Misbehave.

Penguin Random House India, 2021.

BECCA HANNIGAN is a writer who earned an MFA from UNC Wilmington, where they worked as fiction editor for Ecotone and taught creative writing.

SAYANTANI DASGUPTA is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at UNC Wilmington. Her earlier books are Fire Girl: Essays on India, America, & the In-Between (Two Sylvias Press, 2016) and the chapbook The House of Nails: Memories of a New Delhi Childhood (Red Bird Press, 2016). Her research spans South Asian history and literature, Indian cinema, world religions, fairy tales, folklore, and mythology. With advanced degrees in both history and creative writing, she has taught in India, Italy, Colombia, and Mexico.

Here’s a thought experiment – what if Siddhartha Gautama had been a woman? What if it hadn’t been him, the prince, but his wife who left all responsibilities behind to search for Enlightenment? This question comes not from me, but Sayantani Dasgupta, a Calcutta-born, New Delhi– raised, North Carolina writer whose newest essay collection is called Brown Women Have Everything: Essays on (Dis)comfort & Delight. This book comes after a previous collection – a work of fiction, short stories – called Women Who Misbehave.

The two make a great pairing; there’s much to be gained by reading them in tandem. Each showcases Dasgupta’s power of imagination and deft ability to tell a story, whether it’s set in India or America, in the nineteenth or the twenty-first century. One gets the sense that Dasgupta has lived many lives – as a comedian, art historian, journalist, and ethicist, you might say – given the array of individuals and characters whose experiences she imagines and describes. And she asks many, wonderful questions.

“A major world religion founded by a woman? What would that even look like?” she wonders in Brown Women Have Everything. Her mother is the one who poses the question, and Dasgupta tells the reader, “I remember being struck by the question, by the possibilities it opened up, and how it wobbled whatever illusion of fairness and equality I had.” Then comes another question, which gives a sense for her incredulousness – but one that is productive, driv-

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ing the book – “Why had I never been taught to even consider her side of the story?” (122).

This specific line of thought comes later in Brown Women Have Everything, in “The Church of Santa Maria Nuova,” which opens with a present-tense scene, as Dasgupta walks into the church for a drawing class she attended while teaching in Italy in 2017. The reader is happy to see her situated in that moment, as earlier essays show obstacles she overcame on the way. That being said, the essays – and their sequence in the collection – are far from strictly linear. They make leaps across time and space, but it’s never confusing; Dasgupta makes clear where and when we are.

“It’s the summer of 1976” (1), the first essay opens. Then Dasgupta gives broader context, warming us up to what proves to be her impressive, panoramic vision: Indira Gandhi is the prime minister of India, Apple Computer is founded in California, and, what’s most relevant, her maternal grandfather posts an ad in a Calcutta newspaper to find a suitable husband for his daughter. Just a few paragraphs later, “It’s the winter of 2021, and I am in Delhi,” Dasgupta writes, “visiting my parents, when my mother pulls out these letters,” the correspondence between her two grandfathersto-be (2). One grandfather’s response to another (via newspaper ad) is one of “three glorious accidents,” per the essay’s title. And this title is worth noting. The word “accident” is often used pejoratively, but Dasgupta pairs it with “glorious,” recognizing and emphasizing how

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purportedly negative events often can, in fact, have positive effects. Situations and individuals cannot adequately be seen as flat, but prismatic.

“I weigh my options through every lens I own – the good, the bad, the absolutely nonsensical” (27), she writes in “Rinse, Repeat” when trying to decide if she should evacuate North Carolina, with Hurricane Florence on its way, one that devastates Wilmington. At this point, Dasgupta has only lived there for about a month. She is homesick for Idaho, where she was homesick for Chandigarh, where she was homesick for New Delhi.

She is alone with the problem.

After helping with the move, her husband had to return to Idaho to finish work until he could settle in North Carolina too.

Feeling at home in new places builds on layers of homesickness, as well as languages, as Dasgupta first learned Bengali, then Hindi and English, which continue to complicate her way of being in the world.

The collection is mixed with present-tense accounts of past events, flashbacks, and present-tense reflections on past events. We get to see Dasgupta as a teenager, daughter, granddaughter, sister, friend, girlfriend, wife, graduate student, teacher, writer, and even a “casual taphophile” (34). But there are some constants: Dasgupta’s commitment to empathy and discernment; humility and self-assurance; vulnerability and sense of humor; and ineluctable descriptions of meals, scenes, and settings.

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There’s another commendable quality: Dasgupta looks major things straight in the eye, with clear, unflinching vision.

She looks right into and at the New Delhi boys who insulted her, American customs officers, contemptuous peers in grad school, her parents and ancestors, students and colleagues, to name a few. And she discusses serious subjects with humor, looking and laughing at her younger self, her mishaps. In “A Tale of Two Chutneys,” we see her first independent cooking attempt as a young adult in Chandigarh. Imagining that cooking will be easy – since it’s effortless for her mother, whom she’s seen preparing meals – she decides to put together a dish of “fresh lettuce and fish,” which turns out as disastrously as you’d expect. “Even now, nearly twenty years later,” she writes, “I feel bad for that fish.

And for that lettuce. Those two poor creatures died twice:

once when they were taken out of their respective natural habitats, the second time when they entered my kitchen” (66).

Later in the essay, we see how Dasgupta has changed – when, during the pandemic, she slows down and learns to cook with her husband, thanks to the international grocery stores in Wilmington, NC, where she can buy mustard oil and panch phoron.

Dasgupta also looks directly at Americans, especially in her early days in the US, giving the reader hilariously scathing observations. In “Killer Dinner,” she befriends two professors who teach in her graduate program (a married couple) and who invite her over to cook Indian food – because it’s “easy,” the woman says (83).

When Dasgupta sees how serious the couple is about following the sequence of events that the woman has deemed necessary for the evening to be a success, she tells us,

ABOVE Sayantani Dasgupta with her colleague, the poet Mark Cox,

at the UNC Wilmington celebration of the launch of Women Who Misbehave, Wilmington, NC, Nov. 2023

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Already, in this one month in the US, I had been both amused and horrified by some of the food habits I had witnessed, such as adults drinking milk at mealtimes, or ice cream portions the size of basketballs. But the hardest one for my urban Indian soul, used to eating dinner late, was this American business of eating dinner at five. Especially on Fridays. I mean, even nine-year-old me was cooler than this. (85)

Coolness is a chosen quality, something Dasgupta displays and has delighted in, in response to less-than-cool moments in which she has been unjustly criticized – in typical teenage ways while living in India (we see in “The Boys of New Delhi”), but in uncalled-for ways in the US. Let’s return, for a moment, to the book’s title: Brown Women Have Everything. It is bold, and sounds a bit snarky, which is relevant, and excellent, in my opinion. As you read the essays, you come to see this assertion as Dasgupta’s sort-of dig at the many Americans who are condescending and/or express befuddlement upon meeting her.

The line can be traced back to an interaction Dasgupta had during a faculty-staff event, which she attended soon after being hired as an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She found herself chatting with two women, who were white, and after introducing themselves, one looked her up and down and said, “Of course you got the job. Brown women have everything these days. They get all the jobs” (7).

That statement, of course, needed to be fact-checked. In response, Dasgupta “looked

around the room, at the 300 or so people in attendance, of whom only a handful were Black or brown, and told them that they were wrong” (7–8).

This book might be an extended version of that correction.

The title is important, and the book is important, because prejudice has yet to be extinguished, given the erroneous claims and “jaw-droppingly ignorant questions” Dasgupta has been asked on many occasions, such as “Is India a country or a continent? Have you ever had ice cream? Does your family own an elephant?” (82).

We also see Americans’ inanity in “A City in Seven Metaphors,” when Dasgupta and her husband meet with a financial advisor in Wilmington, NC. Turning to her “brown and bearded husband,” the man asks, “And what is it that one calls people like you these days?” (162). Her husband’s answer is diplomatic, but while watching the interaction, Dasgupta can “sense the tug of war between three different forces

inside him: one that wants to forgive; a second that wants to educate; and a third that wants to punch” (162). Scenes such as these are written so evocatively that the reader might be more likely to feel the third.

And Dasgupta? What does she feel, and do? In her life, evidenced by her biography and essays, she writes, travels, teaches, reads, turns to art and history – including her family’s – in order to share stories, to more thoroughly answer that man’s question. Or, perhaps, not doing the work of answering for him, but allowing that experience to be a catalyst for her own exploration, moving on and hoping that the man will learn over time.

We see Dasgupta turning to art and history throughout the entire collection, but there’s a moment that stands out, an encounter with art that Dasgupta has during her summer teaching in Viterbo, Italy (in “The Church of Santa Maria Nuova”).

Becoming a student herself, Dasgupta takes drawing classes,

ABOVE Sayantani Dasgupta at WILMA Magazine’s Women to Watch

ceremony, Wilmington, NC, Oct. 2022; also pictured, her UNC Wilmington colleague Nina de Gramont

North Carolina Miscellany

which brings her to the church and the task of drawing a fresco.

Unlike the depiction of the Virgin Mary, whose “eyes are only for her son,” there’s another woman who’s painted on the wall – a saint named Santa Barbara, whose “eyes are squarely on us” (119).

Drawn to the saint’s “unflinching gaze,” Dasgupta returns to the church several times just to stare back, and at some point, addresses the woman’s image, asking, “Why are you staring at us? Was this the artist’s way of granting you agency? Are you holding us all accountable?”

The woman needs agency, and someone must be held accountable because Santa Barbara’s father had her imprisoned, tortured, and beheaded, just because she converted to Christianity. There’s something brilliant about Dasgupta’s angle on the story: according to the legend, Santa Barbara performed miracles after she was killed, but, ironically, Dasgupta notes, “she could neither devise an escape nor design a contraption that would protect her from her father, from his love and, ultimately, his sense of right and wrong” (123). This is fascinating – the thought that love and moral convictions are what cause tremendous harm. At least, in the hands of men, whose convictions and strong reactions – historically, at least – are unyielding and unchallenged.

What if Santa Barbara was the one to express anger rather than her father? What if her father had paused to consider her perspective? Dasgupta wonders about an alternative history in which Santa Barbara wasn’t asked to perform miracles – to serve others – but

rather had been asked to speak.

Since others didn’t, Dasgupta poses the questions for the saint herself: “Who are you? No, not what can you do for us. Tell us who you are. Who do you want to be?” (123).

We see Dasgupta grapple with her own identity throughout the collection, as she flits between nations and states and languages. There are moments when Dasgupta second-guesses herself, understandably, as she moves from home to home.

Even in India, she feels the curse-more-than-blessing of being trilingual when she must translate for her husband, who speaks Punjabi, and parents, who revert to Hindi. “The switch is not just between words, syntax, and grammar,” Dasgupta writes in “Nicer in Hindi.” “It’s of something fundamental and rooted in my core. It’s as if I inhabit a different mind and body when I speak Bengali or Hindi than when I speak English. Who is the real me, then? What is her preferred language?” (146).

To figure this out, Dasgupta turns, again and again, to her ancestors. They come to mind when she’s surrounded by Italian, which she can’t speak, while in Viterbo. On two separate occasions, when Dasgupta goes to eat lunch, she is shooed away by a restaurant manager who, upon seeing her brown skin, mistakes her for a refugee who is begging for food. She quickly corrects the manager, then thinks, “it stings . . . to remove from myself so quickly the tag ‘refugee,’ knowing that my grandparents on both sides had been refugees once, in India in 1947 soon after Independence and the resulting

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Partition” (112). She remembers being told stories “of their hunger and rootlessness,” and how “that devastation continued to manifest itself,” even when they settled into new homes, with children (112).

Dasgupta considers her family in another notable moment, when Hurricane Florence approaches Wilmington: “As nervous as I am, the uniqueness of the situation isn’t lost on me. I, the granddaughter of refugees, am keenly aware that evacuation is its own privilege” (27). The uniqueness of this line should not be lost on us readers.

When dealing with storm experiences, how often do we feel anything other than extremely negative about getting up and relocating? She remembers her grandparents’ “stories of surviving on rice water, of standing in unending lines in hopes of food and shelter, of days spent simply waiting,” and recognizes that these stories are “as much my inheritance as my language or surname” (27).

Questions around inheritance and concordant obligations are also present in Dasgupta’s short story collection, Women Who Misbehave. While the majority of Dasgupta’s essays are set in the US, with some passages set in India, the inverse is true of the stories in this collection. Like Dasgupta’s essays, her fiction moves between centuries. One story is set in Calcutta in 1899, in the early days of a ten-yearold girl’s arranged marriage, and another shows an ill-fated marriage-for-love in Bengal in 1948. Other stories are set in Kolkata in 2010, Texas in 2018, New Delhi in present day.

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Dasgupta’s ability to get inside so many minds is impressive, to say the least. Each story in the collection contains evocative imagery and characters who act in all sorts of unsavory ways, with reasons that we may or may not call “good.” The title establishes this – Women Who Misbehave, behave as in, to be, to have, just as “brown women have everything.” The women in these stories are appealing because they’re courageous. We see their desires drive them to go after what they need – mostly basic, rather than extravagant, things – despite patriarchal barriers. In her Author’s Note, Dasgupta explains: When I was growing up, I needed more women to do the things the men were doing . . . wanted women to give in to anger, ambition, wanderlust, desire, insecurity, greed, sloth and even perversity. . . . I hope the misbehaving women in this book do that for you. I hope they serve neither as heroes nor as villains, but look you straight in the eye from somewhere in the middle. (xiii)

It’s true – the characters in this collection are neither pure victims nor pure villains. Through effective world-building, Dasgupta shows how unpleasantries are derived from systemic issues, inequality, and innate human tendencies – not just individuals’ choices.

That being said, the book’s characters are individuals who feel fully formed, and we get to know them through a variety of perspectives. The first story, “The Party,” is written in second person, set in a “two-storied bungalow-style home” that’s “conveniently located a hop, skip and a jump from the bustling Hauz Khas market” in New

Delhi (3). The details in the story gradually reveal how out of place the main character feels – a smart, thorny young woman who works hard, not born with money, unlike, it seems, the couple who lives in the twostory bungalow-style home, the ones hosting the dinner party. With three other guests, they are celebrating their threemonth wedding anniversary, and though “you care neither for the occasion nor the husband,” you attend because “you are a good person” (3). Here we have the book’s first mention (a snarky one, at that) of the fraught ethical realm in which women live.

Sure, men (and those who exist between binaries) must also subscribe to normative social forms of politeness, but, as we see in these stories, choosing to be “good” can make the difference between a woman perishing or surviving. Other stories give more brutal examples, but this dinner party offers a safe, comical example of a young woman pushing aside her physical needs: as the night progresses, and as the man responsible for cooking the meal hasn’t started, “you” grow hungrier and hungrier. The story is wonderfully, uncomfortably embodied, with apt imagery: the husband’s shaved head is “hovering like an egg” over his wife’s shoulder (5), hinting at his intense commitment to her, so sweet it’s almost suffocating.

Though “you” manage to follow the social script for the majority of the dinner party, something cracks at the end – or perhaps gives rather than cracks. Other stories, like “Shaaji and Satnam,” begin with a woman who has had enough.

And in this one, there’s violence.

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Dasgupta also gives us a satisfying sequel to this couple’s story in the one that follows (“If Only Somewhere”), in which we see their relationship ten years later, by which time the husband’s love has hardened into dangerous jealousy. It’s frightening to see how people change, and the ways in which they don’t, as Satnam has maintained his habit of biting the inside of his lower lip, “a sure sign of anger or nervousness, or both” (114).

Dasgupta’s books are full of both/ands. Taken together, the titles of her essay and story collection arrive at something bigger. Contrary to the beliefs of the white women at the faculty meeting, brown women do not “have everything” – but they do have drives and desires, intuition and intelligence, which is far more than what many people grant them. They also have moments of discomfort as well as delight, homesickness and belonging, irritation and wonder, unfairness and gratitude, and much more. Dasgupta’s stories and essays show what women have and haven’t had, in India and the US, in reality and representation, in present and past generations. And Dasgupta has the ability to hold all of these in her arms at once – many dialectics – and make them clear to us, lining them up in tidy rows of words on pages in a book of essays for others to hold as well. At least, if we can put down some of the things we’ve been holding, because there is – or should be – plenty of room for stories, for answers from women who have yet to be asked, in all their misbehaving glory. n

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WOLF AND MCGEE IN THE OUTFIELD a review by Shelby Hans Ryan McGee. Welcome to the Circus of Baseball: A Story of the Perfect Summer, at the Perfect Ballpark, at the Perfect Time. Doubleday, 2023.

Thomas Wolf. The Called Shot: Babe Ruth, the Chicago Cubs, and the Unforgettable Major League Baseball Season of 1932. University of Nebraska Press, 2023.

SHELBY HANS, a native of Rocky Mount, NC, is completing her master’s degree in English Studies at East Carolina University where she also received her BA in 2021. During her tenure at ECU, she served as an editorial assistant for NCLR. North Carolina native RYAN MCGEE serves as a senior writer for ESPN and cohosts Marty and McGee on ESPN Radio. He has been featured on College Gameday, for which he has won two of his five Sport Emmys. He is the co-author (with Dale Earnhart, Jr. ) of Racing to the Finish (Thomas Nelson, 2018).

Despite never having a Major League Baseball team, North Carolina has been home to numerous minor league teams, collegiate summer leagues, and college teams for years. The love for baseball here is strong, as demonstrated by authors Thomas Wolf and Ryan McGee. Wolf, an expert on baseball history, gives readers an introduction to the world of baseball in The Called Shot: Babe Ruth, the Chicago Cubs, and the Unforgettable Major League Baseball Season of 1932. Ryan McGee dives deep into what it takes to work for one of our many minor league teams in his memoir Welcome to the Circus of Baseball: A Story of the Perfect Summer, at the Perfect Ballpark, at the Perfect Time.

The thing about baseball is that its history and culture are so furiously intertwined with that of the United States that it is difficult to study one without the other – a daunting task and North Carolina writer Thomas Wolf gives baseball fans an overview of both with his book The Called Shot: Babe Ruth, the Chicago Cubs, and the Unforgettable Major League Baseball Season of 1932. In spite of the specificity of the title, Wolf’s book is about more than baseball, it’s a book about America and its people during one of the country’s greatest challenges, the Great Depression, and the lives of those who lived and breathed baseball.

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The Called Shot provides historical context, from politics to culture, to set the stage for the full story of the 1932 season. Thomas Wolf begins with a recounting of the 1918 Major League Baseball season, which was greatly affected by World War I, and on through the seasons of the 1920s. Babe Ruth and Rogers Hornsby, as well as a few other key players in the future of baseball are introduced early in their careers. Among these background chapters, Wolf also talks of the bombing of Chicago’s Federal Building, providing a tidbit that would catch just about anyone’s attention: “A sixteen-year-old postal worker, Walt Disney, was in the lobby of the building when the blast occurred and barely escaped serious injury” (6).

Of course, a history of the 1932 season must include William Wrigley, owner of a chewing gum production company that eventually financed his majority ownership stake in the Chicago Cubs. Wolf builds the businessman up as being heavily involved with the team before the emotional blow of his death in January 1932. As the team arrives in California for Spring Training, Wolf writes, “It was the first time in eleven years that it rained on the day the Cubs arrived. It was also the first year that William Wrigley had not accompanied the team to Catalina” (49). Here, Wolf highlights just one devastating twist of the season. Later on, the

THOMAS WOLF is the author of numerous articles on baseball and a frequent attendee of The Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He resides in Chapel Hill with his wife, Patricia Bryan, with whom he co-authored Midnight Assassin: A Murder in America’s Heartland (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2005) and The Plea: The True Story of Young Wesley Elkins and His Struggle for Redemption (University of Iowa Press, 2022). Wolf is a twotime winner of the 2007 and 2011 Doris Betts Fiction Prize and his winning stories “Distance” and “Boundaries” were published in NCLR in 2008 and 2012, respectively.

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COURTESY OF THOMAS WOLF

Violet Popovich.

Malamud’s first novel, The Natural (1952), is said to be inspired by this event. In addition, Wolf draws the reader into the world of America’s prison reform movement and baseball’s unconventional fans with his stories of prison baseball leagues. The most notable of these being Anamosa Men’s Reformatory team the Snappers and Harry “Snap” Hortman, a long-time inmate on the team. Hortman would eventually be allowed to attend Games 3 and 4 of the 1932 World Series with warden Charlie Ireland. Following the never-ending dramatics of the season, Wolf’s book culminates with Game 3 between the Chicago Cubs and the New York Yankees. Coming full circle, Wolf once again describes Babe Ruth on a train to Chicago to play a World Series game against the Cubs, just as he had in 1918 as a member of the Boston Red Sox – this time as one of the most notable hitters in baseball, rather than as a pitcher. Wolf sets up the day with the arrival of many significant attendees: Charlie Ireland and Harry Hortman from Anamosa Men’s Reformatory; Lincoln and Charlie Landis, sons of Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis; Lowell Blaisdell and Irving Boim, young Chicago natives who would later give retellings of the day;

Cubs would release their playermanager Robert Hornsby from his contract and lose their star shortstop, Billy Jurges, for much of their Pennant run. Despite their challenges, the Cubs make it to the 1932 World Series, but previous events did not bode well for the outcome of that final series.

In addition to those involved directly in the 1932 season, Wolf writes of those indirectly involved – the fans. Wolf calls them the Boys of Summer, most likely a reference to Roger Kahn’s nonfiction baseball book The Boys of Summer (1974).

Wolf also gives a shout out to fellow writer, Bernard Malamud, who was, at the time of the 1932 season, a young boy and Brooklyn Dodger fan. One of the most notable occurrences off the diamond in 1932 was the shooting of Cubs shortstop Billy Jurges by then ex-girlfriend

ABOVE Thomas Wolf at home in

Chapel Hill, June 2024

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and even presidential candidate and New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

By the top of the fifth inning, the game was tied 4–4. Wolf gives the reader two things to consider: “Ruth was in the batter’s box with fifty thousand people watching him and fixated on what was going to happen next” (255) and “the Cubs in their dugout were doing everything possible to disturb Ruth’s frame of mind” (256).

With two strikes, Babe Ruth pointed toward the deepest section of the ballpark, and what happened next elicited one of the longest debates in sports: Did Babe Ruth really call his final World Series home run? An admirable distinction of Wolf’s The Called Shot is that, in spite of his book’s title, he doesn’t offer an opinion on the debate, leaving it up to his readers to form their own. Rather, Wolf has given the reader the detailed history they need to truly understand the events and culture of the season, culminating in this legendary incident.

But so much more than a history book, The Called Shot is a captivating story of the 1932 Major League Baseball season and American culture, which Thomas Wolf delivers with astounding detail and obvious passion for the sport. A 2021 Seymour Medal Finalist – an award presented to the best book of baseball history published in the preceding year – The Called Shot is a must read for devoted baseball fans and an entertaining read for others.

North Carolina Miscellany

ship, at the 1993 Baseball Winter Meetings. A recent college graduate, McGee is headed to Atlanta for a job fair in hopes of securing a job in radio broadcasting. Having overslept and then wrecking his car that morning, his day is not off to a good start. He makes it to Atlanta and spends several days waiting and hoping for any of the hundreds of teams present to read his resume and schedule him for an interview. Ultimately, he ends up with two interviews: one with the New Britain Red Sox working with an iconic broadcasting duo but without a guaranteed salary, the other with his childhood favorites, the Asheville Tourists as an intern with a guaranteed one hundred dollars a week. McGee, being a fresh college graduate with no other income source, obviously goes for the guaranteed income.

What follows is a story of what might be called a found family, brought together by their love of baseball. There’s McGee and his college friend Carlton, who share an apartment in a senior community; Jane Lentz, concession manager and office receptionist; R. J. Martino, account representative; Gary Saunders, assistant general manager and his wife, Eileen, director of merchandising; Carolyn McKee, business manager; and finally,

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Ron McKee, one of the most influential general managers in minor league history. McKee turned the Tourists around when he took over in 1980 and changed the fan experience at McCormick Field. As McGee writes, “No matter who they were, how long they stayed, or what planet they came from, they were all part of the family.

Guests in Ron McKee’s fourthousand-seat living room, just as he’d promised” (103).

McGee’s memoir relies on an easy conversational tone, as he speaks directly to his readers on multiple occasions, cracking jokes and anticipating questions. It makes the stories of McGee’s experiences even funnier, including those of a Dairy Queen ice cream machine mishap, suiting up as Ted. E. Tourist on picture day when their usual mascot overslept, and even auditioning for Richie Rich, starring Macauly Culkin, which was filming at Biltmore that summer.

Woven in with these hilarious stories, McGee explains how the minor league farm systems

ABOVE Ryan McGee during North Carolina Humanities’

North Carolina Reads program, “Welcome to the Discussion of Baseball,” 26 June 2024: web.

COURTESY OF NORTH CAROLINA HUMANITIES

Much like Wolf, Ryan McGee is no stranger to the sports world.

He currently serves as a senior writer for ESPN, has won five Sports Emmys, and has authored several books, including Racing to the Finish (2018) with Dale Earnhardt Jr. However, before he could garner such writing credits, he had to get his foot in the door. Welcome to the Circus of Baseball details McGee’s first summer in the professional sports world, working as an intern for a minor league baseball team, the Asheville Tourists, in 1994. McGee’s memoir digs deep behind the scenes to show what it takes to run a minor league team and showcases a community of baseball-minded people like those Wolf praises in his book.

For the most part, Welcome to the Circus of Baseball follows the chronological timeline of McGee’s summer; however, he starts with a short prologue about gameday entertainer Captain Dynamite. The hilarity of the memoir is cemented from the very beginning as the chaotic act of Captain Dynamite and his Exploding Coffin of Death is used as an introduction to McGee’s beloved Asheville Tourists and McCormick Field.

Intermingled with a story of wild explosions, McGee provides the hallowed history of McCormick Field, with visitors like Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, the iconic broadcasting voice of Sam Zurich, and a quick cameo of future Major League pitcher John Thompson.

McGee’s story actually starts the December before his intern-

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work, making his memoir more accessible for those who might not have a lot of baseball knowledge. McGee also includes some history from both the years before and from 1994, including Michael Jordan’s brief foray into baseball. What truly sticks out in McGee’s brief history lessons, as a fan of North Carolina writers, is the story of Thomas Wolfe’s childhood in Asheville, where Wolfe (the Thomas Wolfe with an e) was a Tourists fan, even serving as a batboy for the team, just like general manager McKee. When Wolfe returned home twenty years after leaving for college at sixteen-years-old, he found solace from prying eyes at McCormick Field. Similarly, his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald found a similar calming presence at McCormick when his wife Zelda was admitted to a hospital just outside of Asheville.

All in all, McGee’s Welcome to the Circus of Baseball is a charming story of exactly what Wolf demonstrated in The Called Shot: the people who love baseball are the ones who truly make the game. Ryan McGee took a chance on a small internship job with a team he grew up loving, despite having another offer in broadcasting, and in doing so, built himself a family and memories that would last him through his entire career. Anyone, minor league baseball fan or not, will find this memoir to be heartwarming, nostalgic, and most of all, just plain funny. n

THE THINGS WE FEARED a review by Wendy Tilley Megan Miranda. Such a Quiet Place. Simon and Schuster, 2021.

WENDY TILLEY earned her master’s degree in English, with a concentration in creative writing, at ECU, where she worked as an editorial assistant for NCLR. MEGAN MIRANDA is the author of six Young Adult novels and seven psychological thrillers, including The Last to Vanish (Simon and Schuster, 2022; reviewed in NCLR Online Winter 2023) and the New York Times bestsellers The Last House Guest (Simon and Schuster, 2019) and The Perfect Stranger (Simon and Schuster 2017). She grew up in New Jersey, attended MIT, and pursued a career in the biotech industry in Boston before moving to North Carolina, where she now lives and writes.

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In the small college town of Lake Hollow, VA, fourteen months before Megan Miranda’s Such a Quiet Place begins, a double murder occurred. Brandon and Fiona Truett, residents of the Hollow’s Edge neighborhood (a couple that none of the other neighbors particularly liked) were found dead in their home. From the police investigation that followed, it became apparent that someone entered their home in the middle of the night, started their car in the garage, opened the door leading into their house, and left the exhaust to slowly strangle them. In a surprising turn of events, their twenty-four-yearold next-door neighbor, Ruby Fletcher, who cared for the Truetts’ dog whenever they were gone, was arrested for the crime, tried, and convicted.

These events had shocked the town, become a lurid sensation at the College of Lake Hollow (where Brandon Truett was the head of admissions and from which Ruby Fletcher had graduated), and changed the Hollow’s Edge community from a place where neighbors could “name every family on the street” (21) to a place where people “slowly disappeared” (11). Once open and gregarious neighbors “hardened” and became “skeptical, wary, impenetrable” (18). In short, this was the kind of event that the whole town sought to get past, and they thought the twenty-year sentence Ruby Fletcher received would give them time to do just that. But then the police investigation is found to be corrupt – evidence had been suppressed – and Ruby Fletcher’s conviction is overturned after only fourteen months of confinement.

North Carolina Miscellany

COURTESY OF MEGAN MIRANDA

sentences are always in service of the mystery, with a simple style light on metaphors, dependent clauses, or rhetorical flourishes. Such would distract from what matters: the novel is a compelling page turner that meets the expectations of the mystery genre head on, while maybe subverting an expectation or two. There is a large but manageable cast of characters (think And Then There Were None), well-earned red herrings, and enough genuine clues for the savvy reader to figure stuff out on her own. The setting is appealing (especially for academics): summer in a small college town, in a neighborhood full of college staff and faculty. And the satire of HOAs, property values, and cookiecutter townhomes is subtle but enjoyable: Harper, even as she is trying to figure out Ruby’s intentions, can’t help but notice the renovations and decorations of all the other houses (which are subtle variations on her own home’s floorplan). For instance, Harper lets us know early on that “the renters had all gotten out when they could, but the rest of us couldn’t sell without taking a major loss right now” (11), and that the neighbors had joined together to care for the Truetts’ vacant house not so much out of respect for the

And that is when the novel begins – with Harper Nash, the novel’s first-person narrator, processing the news that Ruby, her once best friend and housemate, turned convicted murderer has been freed. Understandably, Harper’s a little on edge, and when she hears a noise in her house and “spins from the kitchen counter, knife still in [her] hand, blade haphazardly pointed outward” (5) to find Ruby standing in her door, that edge becomes even sharper.

With a book focused on solving the little and big mysteries of Ruby and Harper, to go any farther with this plot summary would be to rob the reader of what is most compelling about this mystery: the plot. To be sure, there are themes wrestled with in the book – the amorality of “being polite,” the compromises we make to fit in and what they cost us, the personal animus that can take root in small communities – but for the most part this is an entertaining murder mystery, a “beach read,” and a good one.

And Miranda’s prose style fits the beach read genre. Her

ABOVE Megan Miranda at Barnes & Noble

in Huntersville, NC, 15 Apr. 2024

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dead, but for their own return on investment.

The contemporary setting is also something at which Miranda excels. Doorbell cameras, online message boards (okay, maybe that’s not so contemporary anymore), and cell phones figure heavily; screenshots condemn or exonerate, cast doubt or remove suspicion. Theories are spun from blog posts, grainy images, and digital surmise. Miranda is a veteran writer of the mystery genre, and to see her tackle these contemporary forms of evidence, and life, in the plot (and the trial that takes place before the action begins) is refreshing.

In demonstrating the corrupting nature of all the little compromises the people in this community made to get along – to be polite, friendly even, but fundamentally dishonest and unkind – Miranda succeeds in painting every character as inherently flawed, though not without humanity. But even without a true hero to root for, the plot keeps us going to see how their story ended.

As Freeman Dyson said, “It is better to be wrong than to be vague.”* And while I think many of these characters make wrong decisions and are unlikeable, they are fully realized, and that makes them, and Miranda’s story, compelling, and so I recommend this book to all mystery fans. You may leave conflicted about the characters, you may question some of their actions near the end, but you will have a hard time putting this book down. n

* Freeman Dyson,“The World on a String,” New York Review of Books 13 May 2004: web.

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