by Christy Alexander Hallberg, Senior Associate Editor
I hate jigsaw puzzles. Always have.
My mother loved them. She could spend days, sometimes weeks, bent over the dining room table studying a jumble of tiny shapes and colors as if she were solving some cosmic mystery. Even as a child, I found the whole scene stressful. To me, jigsaw puzzles are chaos in a cardboard box—hundreds of pieces dumped out at once, no obvious path forward, no promise that anything will ever make sense.
And yet, in a moment of metaphorical self-flagellation, I recently pulled the puzzle I’d ordered during the Covid lockdown out of my closet and started it. I’m convinced that from the Great Beyond, my mother is in a state of shock.
This particular puzzle is a thousand-piece classic rock montage: Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and tiny bits of guitars, psychedelic lettering, concert tickets, and a bootless Nancy Sinatra staring up at me in scattered fragments from my dining room table—the sort of puzzle that was probably destined to find its way to the house of a lifelong classic rock fan who ended up publishing a music-centric novel a few years ago.
At first the whole endeavor felt hopeless. The picture on the box showed me what the final image was supposed to be, but in front of me was complete disorder. Nothing connected. I was tempted to sweep the mess back into the box and declare the experiment a failure.
Then I had what is probably a rather obvious revelation: writing fiction is not so different from putting a puzzle together.
I’m currently working my way through the first full draft of a new novel centered on the late musician Gram Parsons. Like most early drafts, it’s a messy one. Characters shift, scenes feel forced, narrative threads refuse to line up neatly. For someone who prefers order, this stage of writing can feel less like art than like trying to assemble a thousand tiny pieces without knowing whether the finished image will even be worth the trouble.
But that, of course, is the work: not controlling the outcome, but trusting the process.
One of the things North Carolina Literary Review has given me over the years is a deeper appreciation for the way literature helps us recognize patterns we might otherwise miss. My relationship with the journal stretches back to graduate school in the early 1990s and has continued through the many roles I’ve held since—reader, reviewer, interviewer, and now Senior Associate Editor. Across all those years, NCLR has been a place of discovery.
One such moment came in 2019, when I interviewed novelist Jeff Jackson for the journal. During our conversation, Jeff casually tossed off the term “rock novel,” as though it were a subgenre that deserved its own section in every bookstore. I remember thinking, Rock novel—is that a thing?
The funny part is that by then I had already written one. My novel Searching for Jimmy Page, with its obsession with Led Zeppelin and rock mythology, fit squarely within that tradition. I just hadn’t recognized the pattern yet. Jeff’s work—and my work with NCLR more broadly—helped me see that what had seemed like scattered interests were actually part of a larger literary conversation.
For me, North Carolina Literary Review has often been one of the places where those connections come into focus. Over the years I’ve had the privilege of watching writers bring together stories, essays, and poems that illuminate the richness of North Carolina’s literary life. Each issue gathers voices that might otherwise seem separate, revealing unexpected relationships among them.
That is one of the great gifts of literary work: helping us see shape, resonance, and meaning where we might once have seen only fragments. For more than three decades now, North Carolina Literary Review has been one of the places where I’ve found that kind of discovery—as a reader, interviewer, editor, and writer. It is a journal devoted not just to individual works, but to the larger conversation they create together. And that conversation, issue by issue, continues to reveal an ever more vivid picture of North Carolina’s literary life.