Historical Newspapers of South Carolina

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§::i N.C. literary community shares spirit of generousity by Martha Waggoner Associated Press Raleigh, N.C. — Novelist Kaye Gib bons doesn’t recall the exact date, but she does remember the precise feeling she got when she read the first 100 or so pages of a book by a new novelist. “I can still see myself sitting on the couch in the li orary, siuwieu in a sort of an artistic shock. It vibrated my system,” Gib bons says of the pages that were to become the bestseller “Cold Moun tain” by Charles Frazier. Gibbons, who had dropped work on her own novel to read Frazier’s work, called her agent. “I’ll be FedExing this to you,” she said. Then she called every editor she knew, hoping tor a bidding war. “Cold Mountain” was published in August 1997 by Atlantic Monthly Press and has sold more than 1.7 million hard back and 1 million paperback copies. Frazier, overwhelmed by the response, now spends much of his time in anoth er state. The encouragement and interces sion Gibbons provided isn’t unusual in North Carolina and is one reasons the state has become a literary hotbed, be ginning with 0. Henry, Thomas Wolfe and Paul Green at the turn of the cen tury and stretching to Frazier at the end. “One thing that North Carolina has that lifts us above the rest of the South and explains why Georgia, Virginia and Tennessee can’t begin to compare to the flood of good writing that’s going on here: It’s the community of writers here,” says Sally Buckner, who wrote “Our Words, Our Ways,” a textbook about North Carolina writers for eighth graders. Literature, she says, “is rife with jealous writers. Ana it s just the opposite here. And the neat thing about it is in supporting each other, it’s also spread to the reading community, so it’s sort of a writing and reading net work.” This gen erous spirit is “why we see now at the end of the century so many good, young writers coming along,” says Geoigann Eu banks, assistant director of Duke University’s office of continuing education and summer ses sion. “I think people understand that there’s room for all kinds of writing, and we’ve certainly witnessed a huge, huge range,” she says. Writers’ altruistic nature extends from the writing community to the state at large, Eubanks says. “There have been many writers in this century who have not just been scribes, but they have been activists for the state, for certain political issues, public policy, government and the phil anthropic community,” she says. For example, poet and journalist Sam Ragan was the first secretary of the state Department of Art, Culture and Histo ry, now the Department of Cultural Re sources. John Ehle helped establish the N.C. School of the Arts while working with Gov. Terry Sanford and also was involved with the Ford Foundation and the National Council for Humanities. And Wilma Dykeman was a pioneer en vironmentalist, feminist and civil rights activist. For those writers, the North Car olina Writers Network, with its 1,800 members, offers conferences, seminars and one-to-one critiques. It also spon sors the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame, begun in 19% at Weymouth Cen ter in Southern Pines. Writers teach at universities and com munity colleges, encouraging a new gen eration of writers, and writers help writ __— a'.a it_ Cl J, (U VIUA1U1IO U1U X UU.1V1. Gibbons also was the beneficiary of someone else’s interest when Louis Ru bin Jr., then a teacher at UNC-Chapel Hill, encouraged her. “He helped teach me to read from a writer’s point of view and ask ques tions," she says. “Why does this metaphor work? Why did the writer choose this narrator? So when I read, I tear things apart. It takes me forever to read a book.” Writers who teach have helped schools with one kind of reputation — as a teachers school or agricultural university — develop another kind. Peter Taylor and Randall Jarrell in the 1930s and 1940s, and now poet lau reate Fred Chappell, did that with UNC Greensboro; Lee Smith, Tmi McLaurin and John Kessel did the same at N.C. State University. “Hie great thing about Fred’s promi nence is he’s on a campus that got there fust in North Carolina in a real effort to remake itself from a normal school, to stop being a teachers college and be come a comprehensive college,” says Jim Uark, director ot humanities ex tension/publications at N.C. State Uni versity. Other schools already had their lib eral aits heritage; the writers helped seal it. William Blackburn taught Reynolds Price and Jim Applewhite at Duke Uni versity; at UNC-Chapel Hill, Rubin taught Gibbons and others, while Doris Betts led McLaurin and Randall Ke nan by her example. Betts is so beloved that a $ 1 million creative writing professorship has been established in her name, the first in the state. Some writers teach for the money, but Chappell says he thinks most teach because they love it. “In my particular case, for the past five years, I would have made more mon ey if I had quit teaching and just writ ten,” he says. “But in order to do that, I would have to quit teaching, and 1 would ' have to give up poetry, and I refuse to do either one, no matter how many re quests I get.” Linda Hobson, president of the N.C. Waiters Network, credits the explosion of writing in the state in the last 30 years to a strong university system that sup ports writing. Being a writing teacher who is pub lished “gives authority to what they say,” she says. “The confidence that comes from publication also works down in the person’s teaching. And that filters down to the student — here’s a guy who knows what he’s doing.” In McLaurin’s case, Betts gave him the confidence that if he wanted to write about people who live in east Fayet teville and drink hard and cut each uuici, men uc miuuiu. “As long as you write about it with as much truth and integrity as you could muster, that’s what you should write about it,” he says. “So I took that to heart, and I try to do the same thing as a teacher.” And now, Southern writing is taught all over the world, Betts says. “People assume regional writing means down home writing,” she says. “It’s not true. I think Southern writing does touch something universal.” Another reason for the spurt of cre ative writing in North Carolina is the state’s changing sense of self. “We’re changing so much, and whenever you change, you stop and look around, ” Buckner says. “I also think you explain the Southern renaissance by say ing we lost the war. Whenever you lose anything, you tend to examine yourself So I think that has made us more intro spective.” Conflict, not tranquility, begets cre ativity, and North Carolinat has seen its share of that, McLaurin says. “North Carolina has always been on the cutting edge of what’sgoing on,” he says. “Some of the earliest civil rights stuff happened here in North Carolina. We’re pulled between the Deep South and the New South, as you see with all the immigration of people.” Annthpr reason* North Carolina ic recently literate by many standards, and books are exciting to new readers, Chap pell says. “We’re reaping the harvest of the ’40s and ’50s now.” So what’s ahead for the next centu ry? Thanks to Buckner’s book, the state will be blessed with students who have studied homegrown writers. “This means we will have, for the first time, a generation of students who have studied the literary culture of the state,” Clark says. “As those stu dents grow into adulthood, they wirr bring with them a more systematic con nection with North Carolina writers than any earlier generations brought.” m_■ N.C. author, Kaye Gibbons.