Amazing place : what North Carolina means to writers

170 Pages·2015·0.85 MB·English

by  Gingher

Amazing Place
Amazing Place
What North Carolina Means to Writers
Edited by
Marianne Gingher
The University of North Carolina Press
Chapel Hill
This book was published with the assistance of the Blythe Family Fund of the University of North Carolina
Press.
© 2015 The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
Designed by Kimberly Bryant and set in Miller by Rebecca Evans
Manufactured in the United States of America
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production
Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina
Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.
Cover and interior illustrations by Alyssa D’Avanzo Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Amazing place: what North Carolina means to writers / edited by Marianne Gingher.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-4696-2239-2 (pbk: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4696-2240-8 (ebook)
1. Authors, American—Homes and haunts—North Carolina. 2. Place (Philosophy) in literature. 3. North
Carolina—In literature. I. Gingher, Marianne, editor.
PS266.N8A43 2015 810.9′9756—dc23
2014026607
For my sons,
RODERICK AND SAM,
and for my brothers,
MARK, DAVID, AND JOHN,
mostly North Carolinians by birth, and all, by heart
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The Mountains
ROBERT MORGAN / Fertile North Carolina
MONIQUE TRUONG / Our First Steps
FRED CHAPPELL / 100
PAMELA DUNCAN / The Stories That Lead Me Home
MICHAEL MCFEE / Relief
The Piedmont
LEE SMITH / Salad Days
CLYDE EDGERTON / My Mind Grinds the Graveyard
LYDIA MILLET AND JENNY OFFILL / The School of Generosity
JUDY GOLDMAN / 26 Miles
WELLS TOWER / Seven Postcards from an Orange County Childhood
BELLE BOGGS / Belonging
STEPHANIE ELIZONDO GRIEST / No Man Nomad No More
WILL BLYTHE / Five Encounters with Vegetation
MARIANNE GINGHER / The Capital of Normal
ROSECRANS BALDWIN / Diary, 2008–2013
Down East and the Coast
RANDALL KENAN / Chinquapin: Elementary Particles
BEN FOUNTAIN / Cutting Down Trees
JAN DEBLIEU / Writing from the Rim
MICHAEL PARKER / A Man Came Up from Wilmington, Carrying a Bag of
Snakes
JILL MCCORKLE / Writing by Ear
BLAND SIMPSON / Water Everywhere
Contributors
Acknowledgments
This book was actually the brainchild of Zach Read, a former editor at UNC
Press, and I am grateful to him for his early enthusiasm and persistence in seeing
the project launched. I hope he’ll be pleased with the end result. A plenitude of
gratitude goes to my editor, Mark Simpson-Vos, whose patient steerage, sharp
insights, and suggestions improved the manuscript in every way; to Lucas
Church, Mark’s assistant, for keeping me on task with the nit-picky stuff; and to
Jay Mazzocchi for meticulous, eagle-eyed copyediting. Thanks to everyone at
the press for making my job easier and for supporting the publication of this
wonderful and unique little book. And now … a drumroll, if you please, because
Amazing Place is a “first” for UNC Press: an anthology of never-before-
published personal narratives by contemporary fiction and imaginative
nonfiction writers. It will assume its proper niche on the shelf beside anthologies
of contemporary poetry and fiction that the press has published in the past.
Kudos to UNC Press for its vision.
Thanks to all the great people I work with at UNC–Chapel Hill, most
importantly to my colleagues in the Department of English and Comparative
Literature and in the Creative Writing Program. Special thanks to Anita Braxton,
Susan Irons, Bland Simpson, Beverly Taylor, and Daniel Wallace for always
having my back, and to my new colleague, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, who so
gamely undertook the assignment to write a piece for this book even though
she’d only been a North Carolinian for about five minutes. Gratitude to Lee
Smith, too, for going the extra mile—always.
I am indebted to the Bowman and Gordon Gray Professorship Program for the
grant I received that enabled me to spend time collecting and assembling the
contents of this book.
Last, but by no means least, mighty thanks and thunderous cheers to the
writers who signed on and delivered such, well … amazing narratives. Their
generosity of time and spirit, their enthusiasm, and their writing means the world
to me.
Introduction
“Place” is where “we put our roots, wherever birth, chance, fate, or our traveling
shoes set us down,” Eudora Welty wrote.
I’ve lived in North Carolina since I was three years old. My father was born
and raised here, as were his Scottish forebears. I was educated here, and I
continue to work here. My writing life began here, and I am fairly certain it will
end here. I would be hard-pressed to deny that living in North Carolina has
shaped me as a writer. The essence of “place” is family, friends, community,
heritage, culture, weather, and landscape in all its sensory glory (or squalor),
steeping in a particular containment of time. Any writer you ask will tell you that
place insists upon particulars: politics, religion, race, economy, manners, jokes,
fashion, music, recipes, wood smoke, the taste of sea salt, an unpaved road, a
wrecking ball, a church, a swamp, an alleyway, a tobacco field, the syrupy
warble of a wren, the sound of somebody humming while washing dishes at the
kitchen sink, the stink of a paper mill, the chill of a waiting room where anything
might happen and usually does, the cadences of language and variances of
human attitude, glimpsed up-close or slant. All the things around us, physical
and atmospheric, obvious or implied, combine to center, guide, and sharpen a
writer’s sensibilities, leaving impressions that endure.
Which is probably why, when I take myself to the most generic and mundane
of places—a car dealership in Greensboro—I find an inkling of story. I am not
even looking for a story, but closely observed, any place can become a particular
place and will attract stories.
Stories begin in a “where.” There’s got to be a where before somebody shows
up and things begin to happen. Once a character arrives on the scene, she’s
bound by the laws of human nature to have some kind of reaction to her
surroundings. Place is a medium, after all, a kind of situational petri dish that
cultures behavior, good, bad, or indifferent. The nature of place is that it insists
upon being reckoned with by everyone, not just writers.
At the car dealership, it’s 7:30 A.M.; there’s a complimentary pot of
superheated coffee-turned-to-sludge, the sort of beverage that threatens to melt
any cup you pour it into. Florescent lighting bleaches the air. I can’t tolerate the
inane blather of TV ads in the lounge area. The mechanic has told me the
inspection might take an hour and a half. I’ve brought some reading, and so I
amble around the glacial showrooms stocked with cars so pristine, so quietly
muscular, they look embalmed, mosey past a warren of mostly empty offices,
until I locate a dark and distant room where I trespass. There’s a white board
scribbled with statistics. “One out of four demos will buy,” reads one note. Ah!
Secret information! This is a room where car salesmen are trained. I sit down at
the seminar table, settle in, flip open my book. Then, a woman pokes her head
into the room. She, too, is seeking asylum from the infernal TV. “Mind if I join
you?” she asks in a honey-baked down-home accent. “I need some place I can
read my Bible in peace.”
She lugs in a Bible as big as a cinderblock and sits across from me. Her lips
move silently as her fingers glide down a page. The incongruity of a woman
devotedly reading her Bible in proximity to the sleek, glossy, secular showroom
of a car dealership resonates. I’m suddenly wide awake and loving that I’m in
this place, where sharky commerce and somebody’s faith so blithely coexist.
Would I be so attuned to the dynamics of incongruity if I lived elsewhere? If
many of my elders had not been drawling North Carolina porch-sitters who
made mountains out of molehills and thrived on the odd detail? Maybe. What I
do know is that my upbringing in such a story-centric milieu accelerates my
delight in such gleanings, has honed my appetite for, my appreciation and
expectation of them. I have learned to keep vigil for stories. A place might seem
as ordinary as a still pond waiting for ripples, but if you keep watching and
listening like a patient fisherman, the ripples will come. A fish is going to leap
out of the water—or something even more extraordinary. Even the hucksterish,
generic chic of a car dealership can glitter with more than chrome.
How important is place in a writer’s life? Very. But a writer can write anywhere,
right? Writing’s the portable art—all one needs is a pencil and paper, or an
electronic tablet. While it’s true that the act of writing can happen anywhere,
without the writer imagining a place in which a work is grounded, the story
drifts, unmoored. Place, both on the page and in life, is about location, a solid
sensory somewhere, belonging to it or not belonging, feeling niched or agitating
to be elsewhere. What do all writers who have lived in North Carolina have in
common? Time spent soaking up the sensations of this place and possibly
feeling inspired. Is there evidence that affiliation with North Carolina
contributed in some way to each writer’s development or vision or craft or
sensibilities? Absolutely.
When I wrote to potential contributors about the Amazing Place project, my
hunch was that every writer would have something to say about the role North
Carolina has played in his or her writing life. Some would tell their stories more