Friday from the Archives: “The “Inimitable Music” of Eastern North Carolina” an essay by Michael Parker with photography by Joshua Tyler Rivenbark in NCLR 2008
“Writers are eavesdroppers, and we train ourselves to be particularly avid listeners and pretty good thieves. Steal from the rich; give to the poor,” Michael Parker started his keynote remarks for the 3rd Annual Eastern North Carolina Writers’ Homecoming, excerpted in our 2008 issue. “I will never forget the time I was working on a loading dock in Clinton with a wonderful woman from Stedman, who described her husband to me in a two-word phrase that needed no elaboration and rang with such poetry that I longed to have written it rather than have overheard it. “He’s a good man,” she said. “But he’s accidentally prone.”
“Stories are made of sentences, and each sentence in its pitch and timbre, its indelible syntax and rhythm, says something unique about the speaker. Place in fiction, to my mind, is found not in documentary realism, not in authentic detail–though that is hugely crucial, of course–but in backbeat, syncopation: “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.”
“The thing that Eastern North Carolina has given me–the most important thing, the most priceless and problematic thing–is a prose so meaningful and varied that it damn near runs me ragged trying to get it onto the page.” Parker’s done a pretty good job so far and we look forward to reading how he gets that “inimitable music” on the page in the future.
Read the rest on Gale Literature. Add the 2008 issue to your collection today!
