These five will be the new members of the NC Literary Hall of Fame
At a time when our public debates about the meaning of history, heroism and humanity itself have descended into shouting matches lacking even a hint of complexity, nuance and empathy, we need the N.C. Literary Hall of Fame more than ever.
Nestled in a stately home in Southern Pines, the Hall is North Carolina’s version of Brigadoon — a magical, restorative place that springs to life for a single day every two years to remind us of our better angels in all their raging glory.
On Oct. 7, the Hall will induct five new members — James W. Clark Jr., Randall Kenan, Jill McCorkle, Penelope Niven and Marsha White Warren — in a ceremony that begins at 2 p.m. at the Weymouth Center and which is free and open to the public.
Those inductees will join 60 other Tar Heel greats, including Maya Angelou, Fred Chappell, Paul Green, John Hope Franklin, Lee Smith and Thomas Wolfe.
None has led an unblemished life – who has? – but all are heroes in the deepest sense of the word. Heroism is an act of service and heroes are those rare individuals graced with talent and drive whose efforts have given the rest of us an opportunity to become better.
For authors, this means addressing what Faulkner called “the only thing worth writing about [which] is the human heart in conflict with itself.”
That seems like a straightforward task but it requires writers to master the nearly impossible task of putting themselves aside in order to enter the minds of others. Then they must come back out on the other side to create characters with individual integrity who pulse with the forces that define us all — hope and dread, love and anger, damnation and salvation.
This can only be achieved through a devotion to radical empathy. Writers may be imaginative artists, but they do not create their characters from whole cloth; all are composites of people they have seen and heard and watched — people they’ve read — including themselves.
One of the great gifts these talented writers offer is the message that the rest are worthy of their attention. They show us the depths in ourselves we never suspected, that we are all, as Whitman suggested, “large” and “contain multitudes.”
Another great gift the best writers bestow — which may be the hardest part of their calling — is that they render us without judgment. They trust us enough to hold up their mirror and give us the room to decide what we see. Their humility is breathtaking.
Great art endures because it raises questions instead of insisting on answers. Shakespeare’s plays are timeless because they address everything while settling nothing. The Sweet Swan of Avon has both the insight to see the inexorable struggles which forever defines the human condition and the wisdom to understand they admit no final resolution.
Randall Kenan captures this tension in one of the magnificent passages from his debut novel, “A Visitation of Sprits,” which portrays a 16-year-old child of a religious family wrestling with his desires:
“[Horace] had been created by this society. He was a son of the community, more than most. His reason for existing, it would seem, was for the salvation of his people. But he was flawed as far as the community was concerned. First, he loved men; a simple, normal deviation, but a deviation this community would never accept. And second, he didn’t quite know who he was.”
Like Horace, each of us must try to find a way to resolve the tensions life throws at us. We cannot live in a literary state of limbo.
But at a time when so many people seem intent on running everybody else’s life, literature reminds us how hard it is just to run our own.
This story was originally published September 28, 2018 at 8:55 AM.