The literary success for which North Carolina has become recognized continues to flourish as this century comes to a close. Indeed, it could be forcefully argued that this is an irational place for young writers to grow their talents.
Thomas Wolfe remains the giant towering over that landscape—a hulking figure, both physically and metaphorically, with his weighty tomes and themes. The Asheville native’s novels—Look Homeward, Angel (1929), Of Time and the River (1935), The Web and The Rock (1939) and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940)—continue to be both influential and popular, exerting a strong influence over our state’s writers and others across America.
And there on the far horizon of the century now closing stands another literary pioneer. Playwright Paul Green, a Lillington native, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1927 for In Abraham’s Bosom and established a lasting legacy with The Lost Colony, a “symphonic drama.” The Lost Colony premiered in 1937 and continues to be successfully produced today on the Manteo waterfront along the Outer Banks.
The panoply of writers who chose to do some of their most distinguished work in North Carolina—Carl Sandburg notable among them—are as numerous as those who left the state to find success, such as Rocky Mount’s Jack Kerouac.
Still, more than 60 years after Wolfe’s premature death at age 38 and more than 60 years after the premiere of The Lost Colony, it could easily be argued that North Carolina’s strongest literary legacy will, in future years, rest not so much on figures like Wolfe and Green as on the writers enjoying success here at the turn of the century.
To a great degree, Reynolds Price is the state’s leading literary citizen, with an impressive oeuvre stretching over four decades. It’s important to recognize, though, that Price’s fiction and poetry compose only a fraction of the tremendous body of work produced by all the writers working in North Carolina today. Fred Chappell, North Carolina’s poet laureate, has published more than two dozen books spanning fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Lee Smith’s Oral History (1985) and Fair and Tender Ladies (1988) are landmarks both of her career and of American literature in general. Jill McCorkle’s July 7th and The Cheer Leader—published on the same day in 1984 by Algonquin Books—mark a one-two punch that most writers would envy and few could match. Allan Gurganus rose to super stardom with the publication of his first novel, 1989’s The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. When Oprah Winfrey chose Kaye Gibbons’ first two novels, Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman, for her influential book club in 1998, the books rocketed to the bestseller lists—a decade after their critically heralded publications. And need we say anything further about Charles Frazier and the success of Cold Mountain?
Yet there’s still more. Even mentioning established fiction writers such as Doris Betts, Clyde Edgerton, Tim McLaurin and Robert Morgan, and poets including James Applewhite, Gerald Barrax, Kathryn Stripling Byer and James Seay only scratches the surface. And any attempt at naming up-and-coming writers such as first-time novelist Daniel Wallace, two-time novelist Nancy Peacock, award-winning novelist Susan S. Kelly and poet Sarah Lindsay, who was a finalist for the 1997 National Book Award, only makes it clear that a brief listing can cover only a corner of a field of writers that stretches from here to … well, as far as the eye can see and further than most of us could conceivably find the time to read.
And the proof of that statement continues to proliferate.
Sally Buckner, who edited Our Words, Our Ways, a 1991 anthology of North Carolina literature for middle school students, recently completed another anthology, Word and Witness: 100 Years of North Carolina Poetry, published by Carolina Academic Press. In that volume, she writes: “Of the 138 writers included in this collection, 122 are still alive and actively writing and/or serving the literary community.”
UNC Press also has recently produced anthologies underscoring the vitality of the contemporary scene. The Rough Road Home in 1992 collected the short stories of 22 writers; 1994’s companion volume, The Language They Speak Is Things to Eat, gathered the works of 15 poets. Fall 2000 brings another fiction anthology, This Is Where We Live. Michael McFee, a successful poet and the editor of two of these collections, says, “I can’t think of another state, especially of this size, that could sustain three major anthologies in 10 years and still not have covered everything.”
Further proof from UNC-Chapel Hill of the state’s vibrant literary community? In the fall, McFee will teach the undergraduate course “Contemporary North Carolina Literature”—the first time the class has been offered at the university. Today’s writers, it seems, are suddenly not just contemporary but becoming part of the canon.
Clearly, the state’s literary reputation is solid here at the turn of the century—past authors having cemented their place in history, present authors continuing to build new masterpieces upon the successes of their earlier works, and anthologies commemorating and celebrating the best that North Carolina has to offer.
But is there a risk that the fertile ground from which these authors grew could go fallow? Can the next generation of North Carolina writers, inspired and influenced by today’s successes, continue to produce according to such high standards? Good news abounds in an encouraging climate fostered by several factors: strong creative writing programs at area colleges; writing grants from the North Carolina Arts Council and other organizations; respected literary magazines including Crucible, Mount Olive Review, North Carolina Literary Review, Pembroke Magazine, Sandhills Review, Tar River Poetry and Wellspring; and the support of both the North Carolina Poetry Society and the nation’s largest and arguably most successful writer’s organization, the North Carolina Writers’ Network.
Several university programs in Eastern North Carolina—notably the undergraduate creative writing minor at UNC-Chapel Hill and the MFA program in creative writing at UNC-Wilmington—have established reputations for producing successful fiction writers and poets. Those reputations can be partially credited to established, often great writers passing their experience directly to the next generation: Daphne Athas, Doris Betts, James Seay and Alan Shapiro teach today in Chapel Hill; Clyde Edgerton and Philip Gerard teach in Wilmington; Gerald Barrax, Tim McLaurin and Lee Smith have been associated with N.C. State University; Reynolds Price holds court at Duke.
Sarah Dessen, who followed the fiction track at UNC-CH, has published three novels since her graduation in the mid-1990s and has since returned to teach at her alma mater. “And I was definitely not the strongest writer in my class,” she protests, crediting the program with helping her to improve her fiction.
Michael McFee, who graduated from the poetry track of UNC-CH’s program nearly 20 years before Dessen and is now her colleague in the department, concurs in assessing the impact of these classes in shaping his career. “There’s something very encouraging about being in a community of like-minded people, who share their writing with each other, and to get the guidance and advice of teachers who have been through all this before.”
McFee sees the seeds of North Carolina’s continued literary excellence in his classrooms, and the themes of that tradition persisting in the work of his students. Speaking specifically of his ’93–’94 senior honors class, he says, “They shared the interests that Southern writers of whatever genre share, which is an interest in family stories, religion or the loss of religion, [the] question of race certainly, the changing nature of the South.” And these thematic similarities are matched by these students’ level of talent. “Every semester I probably see half a dozen students who … could certainly be part of the North Carolina poetry scene,” says McFee, stressing that “talent is a big part of it, but an equally big part is persistence, refusal to quit, determination to succeed.”
Poet Mark Cox, who has recently come to North Carolina to head up the creative writing program at UNC-Wilmington, admires the state’s literary reputation and sees it as a boon to young writers native to the region. “You’ve got an embarrassment of riches,” he said. “And that, in and of itself, creates a community where there’s some excitement about writing, where people grow up wanting to do it, where the written word is a large part of the social fabric and regional identity. When you’ve got that going, naturally the students who come in are going to be touched by that.”
Students from North Carolina will benefit particularly from the fact that UNC-W recently has developed an undergraduate program in creative writing separate from the English Department—another step in helping even younger writers develop their craft.
But Cox stresses that the MFA program at UNC-W has achieved not only a regional reputation but also a national and even international status; one current student hails from Cyprus. And he points out that not all developing writers are necessarily young in the traditional sense. “Those people who are flooding into the MFA program are, often enough, older students—mature, very experienced people who have given their lives over to careers already or to family or children and are coming back and saying, ‘It’s my turn. This is something I’ve always wanted to do.’ The study of writing has something to do with one’s evolution as a person.”
Joe Newberry, program and services director for the North Carolina Writers’ Network, agrees—and he points to a specific and dramatic example: “At the recent Writers’ Network fall conference, I gave a ride from the airport to Ms. Christine Whaley Williams, who was the register of deeds in Duplin County and wrote her first book at the age of 83.” The novel, Chrysthine: Portrait of a Unique North Carolina Girl UP from the Sharecrop Fields, is in Newberry’s words, “a very personal work. I think Ms. Williams just wanted to tell her story—which is a wonderful thing and very human.”
Established in 1985, the North Carolina Writers’ Network develops workshops, conferences and contests designed to provide writers an environment for exploring their craft and a forum for having their work read.
Frances Dowell, the NCWN’s program coordinator and a published poet, sees the network’s competitions as training ground for young writers and potentially a springboard to even greater success. “Competition forces you to do some hard work, to present your best work,” she said, and she’s proud of the projects, specifically the Blumenthal Writers and Readers series, which provides exposure to young writers through publicized readings, and the Harperprints Poetry Chapbook Competition. “A number of poets who have won that have gone on to publish full-length books with high-quality publishers,” she said, citing previous winners Debra Kang Dean and Kathleen Halme and the most recent Harperprints poet, Maria Hummel, a Durham resident and a graduate of the MFA program at UNC-Greensboro.
Does winning such a competition guarantee success? Does membership in the network automatically trans-late into a place in the pantheon of North Carolina’s next generation of great writers?
“You can’t say to everyone coming down the pike, ‘Hey, you’re going to be the next Lee Smith,’ because it’s not going to happen in each case,” said Dowell. But, as with the university programs, the network provides further nourishment for the next crop of North Carolina’s great writers.
Whether one can predict which young writer will be the next Lee Smith—or the next Clyde Edgerton, Tim McLaurin or Michael McFee—it seems clear that the growing season is far from over. While the following profiles are not meant to suggest that these people will prove the best of the new Millennium—or to pressure them to aim for such a goal—they are representative of a much larger group of young writers who are working to bring their talents to full bloom in the next century.
Nina Riggs
Nina Riggs is not a native of North Carolina, and at 22, she’s already spent as much time in New England and New York as in her adopted hometown of Beaufort. But a sense of place permeates her poetry, and that place is Coastal North Carolina.
“I can’t think of a more inspirational place than Beaufort,” said Riggs. “I love Beaufort because of the hurricanes, and its precariousness, the hardness of life. I love the fishing culture and the way it transforms this gorgeous place. I think that the beauty is heightened by the sense of possibility of loss. Some-thing about the tides and the idea of the whole landscape changing, shoals shifting around, shipwrecks—there’s something really energized about it.”
Riggs’ family moved to Beaufort from Boston when she was in the seventh grade. She spent only one year at Beaufort Middle School and one year at East Carteret High School before finishing her secondary education at Milton Academy in Massachusetts. But it was during her college years at UNC-Chapel Hill that Riggs made her greatest strides as a writer, studying fiction with Bland Simpson in her freshman year and then pursuing the poetry track under the tutelage of Michael McFee, whom she claims as a mentor. “He opened my mind to so many things and introduced me to so many poets,” she said. “I loved the atmosphere of being in a poetry workshop. Suddenly, everything was coming together and I was able to write.”
And write she did, in an atmosphere that provided her influences—readings by Allan Gurganus, Michael Chitwood and Fred Chappell—and outlets, specifically The Cellar Door, an undergraduate publication that printed much of her work.
True to place, Riggs wrote her senior poetry manuscript about the coastal town of Sealevel. “I remember going there in high school and it was sort of the last place in the entire world, the end of the Earth,” she said. “The idea of a starting place and the built-in poetry of a place called Sealevel has always interested me: ground zero, a home, a beginning.”
Since graduation, Riggs once more has left her adopted state, this time to pursue an MFA at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. But even there, ties to North Carolina emerge: She went to Cornell to study with poet Robert Morgan, who grew up in Hendersonville and was schooled at N.C. State, UNC-Chapel Hill and UNC-Greensboro.
“There are those whom you can tell from the beginning have ‘it’—however hard ‘it’ is to define,” said McFee of Riggs. “I do not doubt that Nina will go on to publish a book some day.”
Riggs herself expresses more reluctance. “Success in the poetry world? I don’t even know what that means. But if you have an audience, even if it’s just a few people, that seems like success to me, and I’d be really happy about that.”
As for the original question, Riggs admits not knowing if she qualifies as a North Carolina writer but she identifies with the label and with the support that it offers her. “Some people might say that identifying yourself with a region is a crutch, but I don’t think so in the case of North Carolina writers,” she said. “It’s feeding a tradition and creating a tradition. I hope that keeps expanding and hope that I’m a part of it.”
Tony Peacock
Thirty-eight-year-old Tony Elton Peacock—novelist, short story writer, essayist, WUNC radio commentator, teacher and national hollerin’ contest champion—is from the North Carolina farming community of Clement. And that’s an important thing to know.
“Just to give you an idea of how small Clement is, the larger community next to it is Spivey’s Corner, and they estimated their population at 40,” said Peacock. And Clement is not a community that raises writers as easily as farm crops. “Michael Parker has a wonderful essay in one of the back issues of the North Carolina Literary Review about there being no writers from Sampson County on the literary map of North Carolina.”
Peacock plans to change that.
He knew that he had a passion for using words as early as elementary school, but it wasn’t until years later—after graduating from Mount Olive College and UNC-Chapel Hill, after teaching English for two-and-a-half years on the Outer Banks—that Peacock moved to Asheville with the express goal of writing the “Great American Novel” in the venue where Thomas Wolfe once worked.
There, he discovered the work of Clyde Edgerton, whom he claims as a “huge” influence. “He was the first person I ever read that made me feel like I was listening to people talk in my backyard,” said Peacock. “His characters were so real to me.” And Peacock finds echoes of this in his own work: “I’m fascinated by voice. I love listening to the way people talk and my fiction is very voice-driven.”
And autobiographical as well. Peacock’s novel Sidney Langston: Giblets of Memory, scheduled to be published in the fall by Mount Olive Press, covers one year in the life of the 10-year-old title character, growing up on a farm in rural North Carolina. And Peacock’s radio commentaries for WUNC have covered both the writing life and his year as the national hollerin’ champ, which he emphasizes is not “hog calling” but “a traditional form of communication between farmers.”
Peacock’s work has been published in a variety of other venues including The Thomas Wolfe Review, the short story magazine Cities and Roads and the Durham magazine Southern Exposure, which featured an issue on working-class writers.
That, too, is a distinction that Peacock takes seriously. He once was advised to ask for the financial support of his parents while he pursued his craft—advice he dismissed. “As the first person in my family to go to college, I wasn’t going home to tell my father that I needed him to support me for a couple of years while I played around with my writing,” said Peacock. “I think a part of what’s frightening to young writers is that growing up in rural North Carolina, you weren’t supposed to be a failure if you went to college. You were supposed to be a success and find a career that would provide you a better life than if you hadn’t gone to college.”
While pursuing his writing, Peacock has worked a variety of jobs: dry-cleaning, preparing tax returns, toiling in a turbocharger factory, serving vegetables in the cafeteria of The Carolina Inn in Chapel Hill, where he now lives. He barned tobacco from the time he was in the fourth grade until college and he now teaches fourth graders “how to put touch and smell in their writing, how to shape a story from beginning to end” during week-long residencies in various elementary schools.
Such determination to make his own way is surely as much a part of Peacock’s success as the writing itself.
Being a writer might not traditionally be a career goal for a young man from Clement, and Peacock admits suspicions that his father, Burlington, who worked as a rest station attendant for 26 years and who recently died of cancer, might have been pleased to see Tony go back to teaching, which he called “an honorable profession.” But Peacock also recognizes that the inspiration for his own writing came from his father, who was “a great storyteller around the kitchen table or when we were out fishing.” In fact, Peacock found more proof of this familial connection after his father’s death. “When I was going through his things, his personal cedar chest, I found that he had done some writing of his own—keeping a journal, recording some things he believed. He actually wrote a song and sent it off, had it put to music.
“Discovering that was moving,” he said, and his description suddenly hangs in the air like a tangible revelation, an epiphany worthy of the writer he wants to become.
Lavonne Adams
Wilmington’s Lavonne Adams received one of her first grants—an “emerging artist” grant—from the Cape Fear Arts Council in 1993. She was in her early 40s.
“I came to writing very late in life,” Adams said, “but in a way I think I might appreciate it more for that—having stumbled across it. Maybe I had a more mature love of writing at that point, and of course, everything I had been through in my earlier years began showing up in my work in a way that I hope makes it richer for people to relate to—that sense of a life having been lived.”
A native of Virginia, Adams dropped out of Old Dominion University during her final semester to get married and have children. In the 1970s, she and her husband lived in the mountains near Asheville, had two of their three children and, in her words, did “the hippie thing: all-natural foods, the wood-burning stove, my own garden.”
After the job market brought them to Holly Ridge in the 1980s, Adams decided to finish her degree and enrolled at UNC-Wilmington, where she was first introduced to the idea of creative writing.
“We were reading Dante’s Inferno and our instructor said that instead of writing a traditional paper, we could just create our own version of hell,” she remembers. “I was obsessed with writing that paper. And after I turned it in, he asked, ‘Have you ever thought of doing creative work?’ That planted the seed.”
She was 32 at the time.
Adams admits to being intimidated by talk about writers who claim to have found their calling as children. “You get the impression that if the muse wasn’t whispering in your ear at a very early age, you didn’t stand a chance. But I just kind of fell into it.”
Adams’ first published poem, “Returning to Asheville, 1977,” was written not so much out of love for the form (she originally aspired to write fiction) as from a lack of funds. “I wanted to go to the North Carolina Writers’ Network Conference in Asheville,” she said. “But money was tight. There was an announcement that if you wrote a poem about Asheville which they could use at the conference, the network would pay your fees. I thought, ‘What do I have to lose?’”
Adams’ poem didn’t get her to the conference, but she did submit it to a dozen places over a couple of years and it was ultimately published by The New Delta Review in 1995. “That reaffirmed in me not to give up on my work,” she said. “And I’m pretty persistent about working toward publication. Every Friday afternoon is devoted to sending out my work. If something comes back [rejected], it goes out again that same week.”
In June 1999, Adams completed the MFA program at UNC-Wilmington, where she also has served as an undergraduate lecturer and as the coordinator of undergraduate advising. In that same summer, she saw the publication of her book Everyday Still Life, which had won the North Carolina Writers’ Network’s Persephone Prize the previous fall. And she is now in the process of shopping a full-length manuscript to eleven publishing houses. Persistence, it seems, can pay off.
Though perhaps beginning her career later in years than many young writers, Adams sees that her experiences have enriched her work. “A lot of the poetry I write deals with things I did: raising my children, coaching baseball, dealing with the fire and rescue squad—all the things you do when you’re in Onslow County. Submerging myself in that culture really helped my work—though that wasn’t why I was doing it, of course; I was just living my life.”
Adams currently has a new book in the works, one that marks a departure for her. “Instead of just a variety of pieces, it would have a central idea which would run through the poems,” she says. “It will be a real challenge for me.”
And that sense of challenge brings Adams back to the idea of being not a young writer or even an up-and-comer but an “emerging” artist. “That term gives you a sense that you’re always going to be opening and growing,” she said. “I think it’s a wonderful label.”