by Devra Thomas, Digital Editor
Apparently, it’s a bit of tradition now for me to write the December Editors’ Blog about my “wouldn’t it be cool if?” ideas that celebrate North Carolina’s rich literary history, culture, and community. I was all set for this year’s excitement.
But before I could write it, we found out D.G. Martin had died.
I was gutted. Not that I’d ever gotten the pleasure of sitting across from him on his television set, as so many of our authors (and editor) have done. But as a native North Carolinian, particularly one who grew up in the Triangle watching UNC-TV (Channel 4, always and forever), he was one of those ever-present people in my local cultural world. I thought he’d always be there.
I’d been quietly bugging Margaret for over a year now that I thought it would nice to have an interview with D.G. in NCLR. And, as sometimes happens with our long list of ideas, it languished there, waiting for time or resources.
And now we can’t. Thankfully, we do have access to years of North Carolina Bookwatch episodes we can rewatch. But that’s not quite the same.
So, part of this post is me imploring you, dear reader, to write your story. Write YOUR story, your history, what has made you YOU, so that future readers may know you. And also, write your STORY, that one in you that the Universe has placed into your creative consciousness, the one you know you were meant to write. Get it on paper. Get it out now. It’s not perfect, it’s a draft, it’s there and not lost. Fiction, poetry, nonfiction, history: you know what your story is.
The other part of this post is related, albeit in a gentler mode. As we’ve written about on numerous occasions, NCLR is looking to the future and new staff and the (dreaded but eventually necessary) changing of the guard in our editorship. It’s why we’ve restarted the Friends of NCLR contributors’ group, so we have more sustained funding to continue our work. Because there’s still so much work to do. Our mission is not over! We, ok, I am constantly coming up with ideas for special features, authors and books to revisit, new authors we need to interview, and connections between works. We’ve already announced our 2027 feature theme, “Longleaf Spirits: Southern Gothic in NC Literature.” But here are a few more literary areas I think we could examine:
- A feature on sports in NC literature: basketball, natch, baseball, of course, maybe even football or hockey?
- A feature dedicated to food writing: how important this is to our cultural idea of self
- A feature dedicated to our NC Literary Hall of Famers, particularly those we’ve not covered in the past
And then there’s revisiting old features:
- 2001’s Science Fiction & Fantasy and the explosion of texts now available;
- 2006’s Children’s and Young People’s literature and the way those genres now include such diverse voices across the state;
- 2012’s NC Literature Into Film: particularly with the announcement of the new George Moses Horton film, consulted one by one of our earliest and longest contributors, Marjorie Hudson; can we expand to television series?
- 2017’s NC Literature and Other Arts: the rise of work by and about musicians, the influence of jazz or bluegrass on our literature (just ask me about the use of music in both Annette Clapsaddle’s and Terry Roberts’s work)
We never know when the end is coming, either philosophically or actually. Writing our stories is an attempt to make sure the end never comes. NCLR is helping preserve and promote our rich literary culture: we’re publishing work about writers long gone, writers who only a relative handful of people now have ever heard of, writers whose work formed a bedrock for North Carolina literature but now no one reads.
I could write about how NCLR is already well positioned to help those readers find new-to-them work to read, how the books and writers we cover contribute to a greater understanding of North Carolina. I could write about how the story of the 1898 Wilmington coup would be lost to the mists of time if not for North Carolina writers like Philip Gerard, editors David Cecelski and Tim Tyson, and our own Alex Albright featuring the story in our 1994 issue, before the centennial. I could write about why it’s important we teach with North Carolina literature in our classrooms, from kindergarten on up through graduate school, in English, Language Arts, History, and Civics classes alike. There’s so much more I could write about why we need literature, in any format, now more than ever.
What I will write, to close this post, is this: don’t let the story end with you. We are working very hard every day at NCLR to ensure our literary heritage is preserved and our literary future is promoted. Your contribution—literary, financial, effort, and otherwise—is critical to the cultural landscape of North Carolina. Randall Kenan once wrote, “We are made by the things we regret.” Don’t regret your untold stories.