North Carolina's Literary Renaissance
State writers and critics discuss North Carolina's abundant literary output and its growing recognition.
(Our State, Down Home Living In North Carolina, to be published April 1998)

At Chapel Hill's Louis Round Wilson Library, North Carolina Collection Curator Bob Anthony leads us inside "the vault." Here, the state's literary past is being preserved. To prove it, Anthony shows me a first printing of Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World. It is huge, unwieldy and peeling leather, a collector's item, without question.

A few rows over, he bends down to pick up a rectangular box. Opening it, he carefully brings out the Durant family Bible, printed in London in 1599 and brought by George Durant to Albemarle Sound more than 300 years ago. It has been in North Carolina longer than any other book. On its well-preserved pages are not only the translation "according to the Ebrew and Greeke" of the "Holy Scriptures" but also penned inscriptions like these: "George Durant came from England . . . He was a man of great note . . . . "

Several rows of shelves hold Thomas Wolfe's works, both English and international printings. There are also boxes of letters and memorabilia. We open a box and find the Asheville writer's composition books. In one, dated 1912, Wolfe, then 12, begins a story called "Swimming" with these words:

Three boys and myself started for the swimming pool. There we met about a dozen more boys who were just "going in." After an hour or so we prepared to go but a well directed volley of rocks aroused our attention. A man, two dogs and a boy were trailing us down. "You boys know its [sic] agin' the law to swim in this pool," he shouted.

A few pages later, the teacher, Mrs. Roberts, who Wolfe portrayed as Margaret Leonard in Look Homeward, Angel, responded in red ink, "Tom, you are capable of doing excellent work, so I can have no patience with such scrawling."

The North Carolina Collection's role is to acquire published materials by North Carolinians or about North Carolina and North Carolinians. In doing so, the collection not only provides resources for the writers who often visit here--Doris Betts, Clyde Edgerton, John Ehle, Charles Frazier, Lee Smith, among them--but also makes available a measure of the state's literary output.

In a bibliography to be included in the April issue of The North Carolina Historical Review, the collection counts 187 creative writing works, published between July 1, 1996 through June 30, 1997, that deal with a North Carolina subject. The same period a year before listed 187. Twenty-five years ago, a similar compilation would have listed only 50 creative writing titles.

NC vs. NY
Along with the numbers that suggest a statewide literary renaissance is a surge in national recognition. In December, Raleigh's Kaye Gibbons made an appearance on "The Oprah Winfrey Show." Her books, A Virtuous Woman and Ellen Foster, muscled their way onto Oprah's Book Club list. The story about an 11-year-old orphan, Ellen Foster begins: "When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy."

The month before Gibbons' TV appearance, North Carolina took New York by storm, contributing three of the 20 nominees for the coveted National Book Award. Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain claimed the prize for fiction. Greensboro poet Sarah Lindsay was nominated for her first book, Primate Behavior, and Front Street Books, an Asheville publishing firm, presented Brock Cole's The Facts Speak For Themselves, a contender in the young reader's category.

State Poet Laureate Fred Chappell attended those ceremonies as a judge in the poetry category. He relished the state's presence in three of four categories. "There were lots of folks from North Carolina at the award's ceremony," he says, "and there was a whole lot of resentment on the part of the New Yorkers that we got so much attention. That made me real happy."

Chappell's delight seems to drive home the notion that despite the fine literature coming from North Carolina, the state still struggles to overcome old stereotypes. North Carolina book reviewers charge that New York critics and publishers harbor outdated ideas about the state. "New York sort of looked at Cold Mountain and asked how did a book that good come from North Carolina," says Dale Neal, book reviewer for Asheville's Citizen-Times. Neal says there's an element of condescension on the part of New York publishers and reviewers when it comes to North Carolina and Southern literature.

Durham poet Michael McFee says that sometimes it's worse than that, that sometimes New York reviewers just don't seem to get it at all. "If you read, for example, a review of a Lee Smith book in The New York Times Book Review, the reviewers will indulge in all the Southern stereotypes," McFee says. "They miss out on the subtleties of the voices. It's irritating. There are nuances to the voices that people who live here appreciate."

Kaye Gibbons says she's often called upon to elaborate on racial inequality in the South, particularly when she's on book tours abroad. "I explain that you can go to Queens or Watts and find much bigger problems," she says. "Sometimes I get sick of those types of questions. It's as if all they have learned about the South is what they have in their textbooks, and those textbooks stopped in 1964."

But with three of 20 books nominated for the National Book Award and rumor at press time that Frazier's book would be nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, there's no denying North Carolina's place at the literary podium. "New York may be the epicenter of publishing," says Front Street Books' Stephen Roxburgh, who moved to Asheville after spending 17 years at prestigious Manhattan publishing firm Farrar, Straus & Giroux. "But the literary output from North Carolina just goes to show that there's life outside Manhattan."

State of the Arts
People who live here appreciate those subtle nuances of voice that McFee says is presented in North Carolina literature. Try finding a North Carolina home without at least one copy of Cold Mountain. Literary interest in the state has never been greater. That may explain the force behind the rapid expansion of the huge bookstore chains in the state.

Wallace Kuralt, owner of Chapel Hill's Intimate Book Shop, says that 22 superstores, with names like Barnes & Noble, Borders and Books-A-Million, came into his market in the last two and a half years. "That was a lot more than we could stand," Kuralt says, noting that the foray of the huge chains is putting the squeeze on independent booksellers.

North Carolinians appear to be not only interested in buying books but also eager to learn more about the state's writers. Last year, McFee taught a new N.C. Lit course at UNC Chapel Hill. He will offer it again next year. "It was so obvious to me that something was going on [with regard to the state's literary output]," McFee says. "It wasn't just that there were all these writers from North Carolina who were writing. It was that their writing was really good. We've got world-class authors here who are producing first-rate stuff, and I see no sign of it abating."

This month, the Chapel Hill campus takes literary learning a step further with the North Carolina Literary Festival (see box). The first of its kind in the state, it will become a biennial affair, according to program development officer Rachel Davies, with the next event celebrating the centenary of Thomas Wolfe's birth in the year 2000.

The hugely anticipated festival underscores the notion that those who want to write will find plenty of company in North Carolina. They needn't come to Chapel Hill, though. There are aspiring writers all throughout the state.

The largest of its kind in the country, Carrboro-based North Carolina Writer's Network counts 1,800 writers among its membership. "People are starting to want to collect their memoirs, express themselves, to see what they know and who they are," says the network's executive director, Linda Hobson. "There's a great act of self-discovery in writing, and people are finding that they get a great deal of joy out of it."

Writing, whether for self-discovery or other reasons, has deep roots in the state, and there are those who would argue that what North Carolina is experiencing is not a renaissance at all but a continuation of a long, unbroken line of literary output. After all, this is the state that raised Thomas Wolfe and O. Henry.

"It's sort of hard to see a renaissance when you're sitting right in the middle of daily dealings with literary works," says Shannon Ravenel, editorial director at Chapel Hill's Algonquin Books. Algonquin has been publishing first-rate North Carolina literature, and plenty of it, for more than a decade and a half now.

But while it's true that North Carolina writers enjoy a long tradition of producing good writing, Chapel Hill's Doris Betts says what's different about this particular period is that it's more inclusive. "The South used to have its white male writers with forefathers in the Civil War and all that guilt/honor stuff," Betts says. "Now there are many Souths, many parts of North Carolina."

Among those many parts of North Carolina are Appalachian writers like poet Kay Stripling Byer, African-American writers like Randall Kenan, women writers like Betts herself and Lee Smith and Kaye Gibbons, gay writers like Hillsborough's Allan Gurganus.

In the old days, there were, of course, exceptions to the white male writers. George Moses Horton, a 1996 inductee to the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in Southern Pines, taught himself to read using an old speller and a copy of the Methodist hymnal. Born into slavery in 1797, Horton produced three books of poetry, including the first Southern book published by a black man.

Then there was Harriet Ann Jacobs. Born a slave in Edenton in 1813, she wrote a story of her life, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent. The book highlights how Jacobs found herself the object of unwanted sexual advances and eventually ran away to her emancipated grandmother's house, where she hid for nearly seven years in the attic.

But by and large the photos and names that line the walls of North Carolina's Literary Hall of Fame are those of white men. "They weren't always wealthy," says NC Writer's Network's Hobson. "But they had good connections."

Birth Of A Renaissance
So how did contemporary writers overcome the notion that they had to be a Harvard graduate or of the Planter class to be published? Betts and others credit writing classes, for one.

It is true that today's best-known state writers--Clyde Edgerton, Kaye Gibbons, Fred Chappell, Lee Smith, Reynolds Price--studied under great teachers like Chapel Hill's Louis Rubin Jr., Duke's William Blackburn, Randall Jarrell of UNC-Greensboro (then Woman's College) and Jessie Rehder at Chapel Hill. And what they were teaching wasn't necessarily good writing skills. Perhaps more than anything else, they were dispensing the courage to write. "We encouraged our students," Rubin says. "We made them think that writing was worthwhile and that it was a very dignified and powerful thing to do."

Clyde Edgerton says he always had a secret dream of becoming a writer but that he didn't know what to write about or how to begin. Writing seemed inaccessible to him. He had been reading Emerson, Thoreau, Hemingway and Twain. "I wanted to write like Hemingway, and I knew that would be impossible," he says. "It seemed like a far-fetched idea to be a writer."

But in the mid-70s, Edgerton's wife encouraged him to begin reading Southern writers. That's when he "got inspired." His reading list included Doris Betts, Lee Smith, Reynolds Price, Max Steele and others. "They were making fiction out of their lives, which, in some cases, weren't all that different from mine," he says. Over a Christmas break, Edgerton sat down to write his first short story. That was 20 years ago.

Independent booksellers also play a role in encouraging budding writers. Asheville's Malaprops hosts a monthly poetry forum for women whose works "wouldn't ordinarily have the opportunity to recognized," says owner Emoke B'Racz. Some of those poems were recently anthologized in a book called Raising Voices. The book may not be lucrative, but it reaffirms the independent bookseller's role as a steward of literature. B'Racz calls her vocation a labor of love anyway, perhaps driven by the need to communicate stories.

There's no denying that the desire to tell stories is inherent in the African and Anglo-Celtic cultures that the people of the state spring from. Listen closely, and you can hear the voices of story-tellers across the state, some sitting in rocking chairs on broad front porches. A lot of state literature had its beginnings on the front porch. Kaye Gibbons, for example, says she establishes language first, "then I create a character who would use that language."

Some writers say that North Carolina's agrarian past has provided the state with a rich harvest of stories, and, likewise but in a different way, so has the move toward urbanization. How so? Rubin argues that if there is a commonality among the state's contemporary works of literature, it is that many of the state's writers grew up in small towns, moved away, and are now assessing that small town from their enlightened points of view.

"In each case, a look backward is involved," he says. "But it's not a nostalgic look backward, nor is it sentimental. They're looking at the kind of experience that they knew when they were growing up and writing about that from the perspective of everything they've seen since, through the spectrum of time and so forth."

Perhaps that explains why Charles Frazier traveled abroad, tried his hand at Paul Bowles type stories, and then came home to write about what he knew best, the region where he grew up, in the language he knew best, that of a Southern story-teller.

Go Ahead, Write
The writers interviewed for this story say their peers may be the best source of encouragement. "There are lots of writers who teach writing and foster the interest and talent in students they encounter and serve as role models," says Hillsborough writer Lee Smith. "Many of our best writers have been, and are, teachers."

Moreover, among NC writers there are few, if any, bitter rivalries. Each seems to delight in seeing the other succeed. "I came here from Maryland 12 years ago," says Ellyn Bache, whose book, Safe Passage, was made into a film. "It is a very warm, nurturing place for a writer to be. There's a sense of the state as a unit." Bache founded Wilmington's Banks Channel Books, which recently published Greensboro writer Susan Kelly's first book, How Close We Come.

"I feel very lucky to be here," adds Jan Harrow, a professor at UNC-Asheville who moved here six years ago from New England. "I was surprised by how much literary activity there was here. There are two published writers in my writing group. I'm lucky to even rub elbows with people who are so prolific."

And it may be that the next generation of writers benefit most from the current literary renaissance. They're already rubbing elbows with the writers who visit schools or speak at libraries and book clubs. "The young can see what I rarely saw," Betts says, "that real live writers can live down the street or across the county line."

"You see these writers at the grocery store or at Hardees," adds Michael McFee, "and this is just what they do for a living. They write, and they do a good job at it. Suddenly, it doesn't seem like such a strange idea to want to be a writer."

Not a strange idea at all, if you the state from which you hail is North Carolina.