Friday from the Archives: “Knowing Your Place: Tony Earley’s Human Geography”
by Jimmy Dean Smith in NCLR 2020
Much like a nesting doll, current NC writers learn from established writers, who learned from writers perhaps now gone, ad infinitum, backwards. This is why we have our critical mission to “preserve and promote North Carolina’s rich literary culture.” It is important for new writers, students of the craft, to understand where they come from, in both time and space.
Regular reviewer and Appalachian scholar, Smith wrote, “In the nearly thirty years he has been publishing fiction and essays, Tony Earley has repeatedly turned to this theme: place is not just a physical location with human inhabitants but also a cognitive space that is essential to the corporate identity of those inhabitants. Although Earley has not physically remained a resident of North Carolina, his “little patch” and the importance of that place in people’s lives has been on his mind ever since he published “Charlotte” to great acclaim in 1992.”
Smith uses characters and excerpts from Here We Are in Paradise and Mr. Tall, the essay collection Somehow Form a Family: Stories That Are Mostly True, and novels Jim the Boy and The Blue Star, in order to show how “place recurs as a theme and a complication.” He wrote, “Tony Earley’s first success was as the author of “Charlotte,” a story about poetry and wrestling and, in the end, mobility. “New people come to Charlotte from the small towns every day,” says its narrator, “searching for lives that are bigger than the one they have known” (Here 41). And what small towns do those glamor-seeking people come from? McAdenville, Cherryville, Lawndale, King’s Mountain, Chester, Gaffney, Polkville, Aliceville, Cliffside, one of which is not even a real town.”
We are using new texts and authors to help teachers discuss these very same questions in Carolina K-12 upcoming Teachers’ Retreat in Asheville, NC. The novels Even As We Breathe, The American Queen, and The Sky Club all have central questions that are similar to Earley’s above: Where do I come from and Where am I going? While all these novels are set in Appalachia, the question is core to the human spirit.
Read the entire story online at ProQuest. Add the NCLR 2020 issue to your collection.
