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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
BLESSED MEMORY a review by Jim Clark
Lee Zacharias. Remember Me. Unicorn Press, 2024.
JIM CLARK is Professor Emeritus of English at Barton College in Wilson, NC, where he was the Elizabeth H. Jordan Professor of Southern Literature from 2007 to 2019 and served as Dean of the School of Humanities. Some of his honors include the Randall Jarrell Scholarship, the Harriette Simpson Arnow Short Story Award, and the Merrill Moore Writing Award. He served as the President of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association in 2015 and the Chair of the North Carolina Writers Conference in 2017. LEE ZACHARIAS is Professor Emerita of English at UNC Greensboro. She served as editor for the Greensboro Review for ten years. She is the author of several books, including fiction and nonfiction. Two of her novels received the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction: Lessons (Houghton Mifflin, 1981) and Across the Great Lake (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018; reviewed in NCLR Online 2020). Her numerous other publications include essays in NCLR 2004 and 2008.
Perhaps I shouldn’t begin this review by admitting that the first thing that popped into my head when I looked at the cover of Lee Zacharias’s lovely little collection of essays Remember Me is the early 1960s doo wop song by The Earls “Remember Then,” with its unforgettable earworm bass vocal intro “Re-Mem-MemRe-Mem-Remember,” etc., etc. But then, that’s why we retain memories, right? Because they are unforgettable. And I could well imagine Zacharias’s largerthan-life, ebullient father-in-law, (“Koke”? or is it “Pap”?) vividly rendered for us in the book’s second essay, “Across the River,” liking that song. I thought of other things, too – the old spiritual “Do Lord Remember Me,” for instance. But since I am now in my seventies and memento mori are everywhere, I thought of the sweetly touching Jewish condolence now appropriated by just about everyone, “May his (or her) memory be a blessing,” because that’s what this little book offers the reader, blessings of various kinds. The book itself is unique due to its brevity – just seventy pages long. Too long, perhaps, to qualify as a chapbook, and one generally thinks of those as short collections of poetry, rather than prose. A gift book, then, or a keepsake. Or, given the reputation of the book’s publisher, Unicorn Press, an example of the art of the book. I belabor its taxonomy only so as to suggest that Remember Me is a special little book. One final thing to note about the book is that, appropriately, it is prefaced by a dedication – “In memory of James Lester Clark 1945–2017.” Many North Carolina readers will recognize him as the Jim Clark who was the
Winter 2026
long-time director of the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. The first essay, “The Village Idiot,” is a fondly indelible portrait of Wayne, the neighbors’ developmentally disabled son who spends most of his days playing with the neighborhood children, even though he is on the cusp of adulthood. More than that, though, the essay is a tour de force of regional writing, recreating for the reader a gray, gritty midwestern community just as it is teetering on the edge of becoming a part of “the rust belt.” “Our fathers worked in the steel mills and oil refineries; our mothers stayed home,” Zacharias writes. “We were Leave It to Beaver without Ward’s whitecollar wisdom or June’s pearls . . . children born since the war” (5). Because of his unique position within the neighborhood – omnipresent and generally tolerated, despite Zacharias’s mother’s fear that he might be the rumored neighborhood Peeping Tom – Wayne wanders from house to house picking up and distributing bits of news the neighbors might otherwise never know about each other. Zacharias relates Wayne’s role in her community to the figure of “the village idiot” in European folklore with the eloquent realization that “We were mistaken to think of Wayne stalled in time, as if he would not travel with us. All these years he has been by our sides, though we were so blinded by our futures, so arrogant with health and certain of our luck, we did not know it was the idiot who made us a village” (14). If a community can be said to offer one sort of blessing, family can offer another, and as previ-