Friday from the Archives: “The North Carolina that Made Me” the Thomas Wolfe Lecture by Ben Fountain in NCLR 2025
Welcome students! Classes begin in earnest next week: young adults are arriving or returning to Eastern North Carolina (and colleges across the state) to continue their education.
Hopefully, like author Ben Fountain, they have fond memories of their time in K-12 institutions, making friends, being encouraged by teachers, and finding books they love. No matter what they field they are studying in college, reading across a broad array of subjects will be beneficial to their personal growth. In his 2024 Thomas Wolfe Lecture, Fountain talked about how an early librarian in ENC helped cultivate his own reading practice:
“Going to the public library in town was as regular a thing for our family as church and school, and among the wonderful librarians I encountered growing up was a great lady named Polly Oettinger, the librarian at Northwest Elementary School in Kinston. Mrs. Oettinger read to us, and her reading wasn’t accompanied by the drag of quizzes or drills or comprehension tests. No, she read to us for the pure pleasure of reading and being read to. During the summers, she would open up the school library several mornings a week, and you could ride your bike up to the school and hang around the library and check out books. Those relaxed, leisurely, bookish summer mornings are very dear memories to me now.”
Students coming into college now might not realize what a difference the public education was thirty or more years ago, but Fountain does. He said,
“…Governor Terry Sanford, was a singularly powerful force for education in the first half of the 1960s, and he set the template for a series of governors, Democratic and Republican, who would follow his example for the next thirty years. What resulted over time was a reasonably good public school system, a fine and well funded – publicly funded – state university system, and an extensive community college system that gave access to higher education to a lot of people who wouldn’t have had the opportunity otherwise. … If you didn’t even know how to read or write, you could still come in and they would teach you, and you could continue your education from there.
Open doors.
This, my fellow North Carolinians, is how you lift people up.
This is how you build a citizenry, a democracy, a great society.”
This, of course, is also why NCLR exists, to preserve and promote North Carolina’s rich literary history and culture, to show new readers and writers how our literature can “build a great society.” We are thrilled to have Fountain back in North Carolina! Read another of his exhortations, “Can Literary Language Save Us?” essay in this year’s flagship print issue!
Read the entire essay on ProQuest and pick up a 2025 issue today!
