Each Friday, NCLR will post content from past issues. All past issues are currently available for purchase. Or check your library’s digital collections to read the full piece.
Friday from the Archives: “The Things They Have To Endure To Stay Together”: A Conversation with Matthew Griffin by Jim Coby from NCLR 26 (2017).
It’s always exciting to read stories about older queers, especially since we have lost so many of them (people and their stories). Matthew Griffin’s first novel, Hide, explored the quiet relationship between two North Carolina men for their entire lives.
Friday from the Archives: “The Poet and The Sea”: an Interview with Peter Makuck by Gary Ettari from NCLR 16 (2007).
We remember and give thanks for our dear friend Peter Makuck, who passed away this week after a long illness. He was a champion for our work and for poetry in North Carolina and beyond.
Friday from the Archives: “Muscle Men, Tennessee Williams, and the State of Southern Drama: An Interview with Jim Grimsley” by Gary Richards from NCLR 18 (2009).
Friday from the Archives: “A Wanderer of the Earth and a Son of the Community: Place and the Question of Queers in the Rural Souths of Lee Smith and Randall Kenan” by Harry Thomas from NCLR 17 (2008).
“In an endnote contained within his The Queer Renaissance (1997), critic Robert McRuer says that “migration-to-the-big-city novels could compete against coming-out stories for the title of ‘Most Common Lesbian/Gay Genre.”
Friday from the Archives: “into the vast unknown”? The Changing Ending of Paul Green’s The Lost Colony By E. Thomson Shields, Jr. from NCLR Issue 27 (2018)
It’s the unofficial start of summer, which means one of North Carolina’s most well-known stories and summer adventures is getting started for the season. The outdoor symphonic drama The Lost Colony has been important to several North Carolina industries over the years.
Friday from the Archives: “Wedding Belles” fiction by Melissa Hardy from NCLR Issue 12 (2003)
Clad in a flame azalea organdy leftover bridesmaid dress from her older sister’s wedding, Julia Snow (of the Chapel Hill Snows) is attending her college roommate Muffin’s wedding in Charlotte. Julia thought she, like Muffin, like her sisters, like many other women of her time, would have gotten an MRS degree along with her Music BA. As it turns out, she didn’t and is now pondering what, and who, her future holds.
Friday from the Archives: “Make Believe with Utter Conviction: An Interview With Garth Risk Hallberg” by Brian Glover from NCLR Issue 24 (2017) “Brian Glover interviewed Hallberg during his novel book tour in 2015. Glover wrote, “By any measure, Garth Risk Hallberg’s novel City on Fire was one of the major literary events of 2015…”
Friday from the Archives: “Omar ibn Sayid: An Arabic Scholar/Slave in Nineteenth-Century Carolina” by Patricia Gantt from NCLR 1993
Friday from the Archives: “There’s Always A Story To Tell: Creating Tradition on the Qualla Boundary” by Karen McKinney from NCLR Issue 13 (2004) “What emerges is an example of Cherokee literature that is as traditional as the story of Selu’s gift of corn but unashamedly a product of the late twentieth century.”
Friday From The Archives: “Big Fish: The Myth and the Man” by Barbara Bennett from NCLR 2019 Online
Authors glean inspiration for their stories from all kinds of places. In Daniel Wallace’s latest, the memoir This Isn’t Going To End Well, his inspiration is his late brother-in-law. In this piece from 2019, Barbara Bennett takes us down a different road, seeing where mythology and storytelling served as inspiration for Wallace’s first novel, Big Fish.