HALL OF FAME INDUCTEES

In the pages that follow, read excerpts from the remarks of the various presenters. Consider also reading the work of these and the other writers in the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. And then, go out and find a writer from your part of North Carolina to read. (We have no doubt you can). Find out why 2004 Hall of Fame inductee Doris Betts described North Carolina as “the writingest state” and why NCLR proudly preserves in our pages the rich literary culture of this state.

writers I would come to know and love across the state – not only modeled what that looked like, but took me, a perfect stranger, under his wing. My initial impressions of Tony continue to characterize him, lo, these forty-six-plus years later: loving, indefatigable, inexplicably in several places at once, privileging everyone ahead of himself, consummate family man, supremely gifted writer and teacher, powerfully committed to social and restorative justice.

It’s obvious from his work, especially the novels, that he lived his boyhood so intensely that he remains, for those of us blessed to have known him, forever young. He had the guts, stamina, and talent to reinvent himself on a whim; and, in perhaps his most dazzling sleight of hand, shape-shifted from a distinguished, very fine poet into a distinguished, very fine novelist. Tony’s linked bildungsromans, Leaving Maggie Hope and The Three Great Secret Things, have the compression and lyric grace, and narrative mastery of the four volumes of poems that preceded them: The Girl in the Yellow Raincoat, A Small Thing Like a Breath, The Search for Wonder in the Cradle of the World, and The Man Who. The novels, like the poems, hint at the life lived behind the work, arresting images of a boy trudging along with nothing but his passion, intellect and abiding faith. They also retain the beautiful language of Tony’s poetry. And therein resides the trick to metamorphosing from poet to novelist: the ability to keep the language precariously jacked up at fever pitch over the course of fifty thousand words rather than two hundred. That deft hand is evident, sentence after sentence, in Tony’s novels that remind us of Dickens, Salinger, even Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye – and the parabolic arc of Flannery O’Connor.

Residential College in Boone, NC. The author of nineteen books of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, his newest book, Light at the Seam (Louisiana State University Press, 2022), received the Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Prize from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association.

Tony also published award-winning poetry volumes, If Words Could Save Us and New & Selected Poems 1989–2009. Of all the things I admire about Tony’s work, his refusal to shy from his spiritual preoccupations intrigues me most. His volume The Angel Dialogues mines with even more profundity and lyric intensity that sacred vein – an imaginative finesse and sense of humor that is at once mystical and accessible – a book-length suite of poems about a played-out, cynical poet. Spiritually fatigued, des- which the poet has wrought a personal mythology. Unmistakably autobiographical, deeply contemplative, Dark Side of North excludes nothing, its doors flung wide and beckoning to the least of these. To declare a poet’s new volume his best – especially a poet of Tony’s stature, who year upon year consistently dished up his best – risks hyperbole. Nevertheless, Dark Side of North strikes me as that volume, a brimming opus of heart and soul, a primer on the sacramental moments of life, the Muse having toiled overtime to commend to this poet luminous language that issues from another realm.

This glad day, we enshrine Tony Abbott with heraldry and pomp, yes – but more than anything, abundant love – by inducting him into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame, a distinction he’s exponentially earned and exemplified with great honor, courage, and supreme generosity since arriving in North Carolina fifty-eight years ago.

Max Steele, “one of the most profound and influential forces in literature in our state” induction remarks by Ross White perate for that next great poem, he is visited by an iconoclastic woman angel, the angel of our dreams – who becomes his muse. Tony miters each poem into the next with the precision of a master carpenter, language that moves seamlessly, often floating, from impressionism into quirky vernacular that sounds, in its prayerful simplicity, like ceremony.

Doris Betts called Max Steele “the best teacher of fiction writing, anywhere.” Sam Hodges of the Orlando Sentinel, said, “he was more than a promising writer, he was a delivering writer.” Marianne Gingher called him “elegant, aloof, funny . . . mercurial, mysterious, maxim-delivering Max.” Henry Maxwell Steele, known to just about everyone as “Max” was born in Greenville, SC, in 1922, but once he settled in North Carolina, he established a legacy as one of the most profound and influential forces in literature in our state.

Over the years, I’ve read each of Tony’s books, marveled at his trajectory, astonished that he grew wiser, more candid, cannier, more nakedly vulnerable –better and better. Dark Side of North, his last book, published posthumously by Press 53, is of such valence and heft, bravado and elegiac glory, that “saints” “spin their webs around us and wait / to catch us unawares,” and even “the crosses on the dogwood blossoms tremble in terror.” Each poem acknowledges the shimmering, often blinding, world, out of

From the outset of his career, Max recognized the power of literary communities and literary mentorships. His family traded correspondence in packets, bundling together the letters they had received from distant family and friends with letters of their own, and he himself became a prolific correspondent, eventually writing to a wide swath of the most important writers of his day, including many members of the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame.

Max’s first published work, entitled “Grandfather and Chow Dog: A Story,” appeared in Harper’s in 1944, while he was still an undergraduate. Almost immediately, his work drew major attention, garnering him an agent who would encourage his first novel, Debby, which was later reprinted as The Goblins Must Go Barefoot Debby won the Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Award and the Mayflower Cup for best book by a North Carolinian in 1950. He returned to North Carolina in 1956 to begin teaching at UNC Chapel Hill, where he had earned his BA in 1946.

He followed Debby with two collections of stories in the next few decades: Where She Brushed Her Hair and Other Short Stories and The Hat of My Mother: Stories , as well as the illustrated story The Cat and the Coffee Drinkers . Max’s peers have theorized that he published only a handful of books because he was relentless in the pursuit of perfection with those stories, editing them for years on end – but when they appeared, they garnered no end of praise. The New York Times lauded the marvelous juxtapositions and sudden turns that made his stories so distinctive; Kirkus called him “extraordinary” and said his stories know “just where to tread between humor and despair.”

As an editor, Max reveled in the ability of cleanedged prose to reveal the jagged edges of the human heart. He delighted in working with stories by Phillip Roth and Peter Matthiesen in the early days of Paris Review, whose founding Max was present for; he also later edited fiction for the renowned journal Story, where he fondly recalled his “last major line-editing coup” on a story by Joyce Carol Oates.

Without Max, the careers of a host of North Carolina writers – Laurence Naumoff, Randall Kenan, Jill McCorkle, and Melanie Sumner, to name a few – would have looked dramatically different, and might never have happened at all. In 1967, he became the director of the Creative Writing Program at UNC, and under his leadership, he built it into one of the most prestigious undergraduate writing programs in the country. His students lived in a state of both adoration and fear, as Max’s criticisms could be withering. He joked that he had an antique guillotine in his office with a rusty blade, in case he needed to lop off the ambitions of a student whose sentences were already lifeless. But the fact was that he could hardly bear the wait for his talented students to become seasoned and mature writers, and when they did, he reveled in their successes. To this day, his influence over creative writing instruction in this state remains sweeping.

Max once said, “Art is the ability to suggest without underlining.” He retired in 1988 and passed away on August 1, 2005, but his work and the work of the myriad writers he influenced goes on suggesting the broad range of human potentiality.

Carole Boston Weatherford Shines Her Light induction remarks by Judy Allen Dodson

I’m very proud and honored that Carole Boston Weatherford asked me to say a few words about her at this ceremony. I have admired Ms. Weatherford for a long time. She has inspired me to become a children’s book writer and I thank her for that. I admire her not just as a writer but for her character. I place Ms. Weatherford with the likes of other famous North Carolina writers such as George Moses Horton, John Hope Franklin, and Harriet Jacobs.

Carole Boston Weatherford was born and raised in Baltimore, MD, and began writing in first grade by dictating poems to her mother. Her father taught printing at a local high school and published his daughter’s early works. Ms. Weatherford had a career in marketing and public relations before earning a master’s degree in creative writing. She initially wanted to write poetry for adults, but by the time she graduated decided to write historical fiction and poetry for children. Her first children’s book, Juneteenth Jamboree, was published in 1995, and to date, Weatherford has authored over sixty children’s books (with no plans on stopping any time soon) and has found her niche, as she says, “min[ing] the past for family stories, fading traditions, and forgotten struggles.”

Weatherford’s books have received, among many other honors, three Caldecott Honors, two NAACP Image Awards, a Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators Golden Kite Award, and the coveted 2022 Coretta Scott King Author Award for her most recent book, Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre, illustrated by the late Floyd Cooper, who also won for best illustrator. A teacher at Fayetteville State University for more than thirty years, Weatherford has also received the Ragan-Rubin Award from the North Carolina English Teachers Association. And in 2010, she received the North Carolina Award for Literature.

This is an open letter to Ms. Weatherford to say thank you for her contributions to the literary field, nationally, regionally, locally, but more specifically from our hearts. Thank you for sharing your gift with the youngest readers and using your family – your daughter, son, and your granddaughter – as your muse to create your well-crafted, creative, colorful, and historical books. Society thanks you, Ms. Weatherford, for shining a light on the “forgotten struggles and the fading traditions of the Black community by telling these stories about historical figures: Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom; Be a King: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Dream and You, Schomburg: The Man Who Built a Library, and The Faith of Elijah Cummings: The North Star of Equal Justice.

North Carolina thanks you for your love of our history and enlightening us with stories like Freedom on the Menu: The Greensboro Sit-ins, Racing Against the Odds: The Story of Wendell Scott, Stock Car

“WEATHERFORD HAS AUTHORED OVER SIXTY CHILDREN’S BOOKS (WITH NO PLANS ON STOPPING ANY TIME SOON) AND HAS FOUND HER NICHE, AS SHE SAYS, ‘MIN[ING] THE PAST FOR FAMILY STORIES, FADING TRADITIONS, AND FORGOTTEN STRUGGLES.’”

Racing’s African American Champion , and Sink or Swim: African-American Lifesavers of the Outer Banks. A lover of music, too, more specifically jazz, her favorite singer is Billy Holiday – hence the Becoming Billie Holiday, The Sound that Jazz Makes, Before John Was a Jazz Giant , about John Coltraine, and Respect: Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul.

Not that Ms. Weatherford is done writing – when I say she’s passing the torch, I mean that she has planted the writing seed in many new and up and coming writers in North Carolina, like myself, but also very close to home: she has worked with her son, illustrator Jeffery Weatherford, on books like Call Me Miss Hamilton: One Woman’s Case for Equality and Respect, You Can Fly: The Tuskegee Airmen, and Princeville: The 500 Year Flood.

It is certainly fitting that we induct her into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame, after a writing career of nearly thirty years. Again, we say thank you, Ms. Weatherford, for your continued excellence.

The Charles Frazier Most Folks Don’t Know induction remarks by Annie Frazier Crandell

You only need to pick up a book or two of my dad’s to see how deeply connected he is to his home state. Aside from a few brief stints elsewhere, he’s lived right here in North Carolina the overwhelming majority of his life – born in Asheville, raised in Andrews and Franklin, studied in Chapel Hill and later at Appalachian State. Right now, he and my mom live just a stone’s throw from where he was born in Biltmore Village, in a tiny hospital that’s now a boutique hotel.

Today, I’d like to share a little about the Charles Frazier most folks don’t know as well as I do. When I was little, my dad worked hard to foster in me a connection to this place, whether we were at home in Raleigh, visiting family out in Franklin, or camping up at Cataloochee.

When I was first learning to write, around first grade, my dad encouraged me to keep a journal of daily nature observations – weather descriptions, sketches of bugs and leaves. I had a little Hello Kitty notebook for that purpose. Soon, he taught me about haiku, and I began to scrawl fervent little poems about trees and flowers in my notebook. One summer, our big project was to trace the tiny trickle of a stream behind our house as it connected with larger creeks and rivers and finally emptied right into Pamlico Sound. In teaching me to observe the nuances of North Carolina landscape, weather, and seasons, he was sharing with me the kind of reverence for the place that so many writers around here possess.

He taught me too about our family’s roots, especially out in Haywood and Macon and Cherokee counties. The school in Andrews where he grew up and where my grandfather served as superintendent. The paper mill in Canton. The old family farmhouse at the base of Cold Mountain, its grey-boarded springhouse a marvel to me. And Inman’s Chapel, where you can still see portraits of our ancestors with their long beards and piercing blue eyes.

My dad’s deep connection to both the landscape and the history of North Carolina, which he has poured into his work, is an inspiration to so many, and I’m deeply moved to see him honored for his literary contributions to the state today.

This past June marked twenty-five years since Cold Mountain was first published. A whirlwind time, those first few years. A deeply literary book, Cold Mountain did seemingly impossible things. It won the National Book Award, the ABBY Award, the Heartland Award, the Sir Walter Raleigh Award, and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, among others. It also held the top spot on the New York Times Bestseller List for sixty-one weeks.

In 2003, Anthony Minghella’s film adaptation of Cold Mountain received seven Academy Award nominations and one win – for Renee Zellweger’s incredible portrayal of Ruby Thewes. In 2015, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Jennifer Higdon tried her hand at opera for the first time with a stunning adaptation of Cold Mountain, which debuted at Santa Fe Opera.

His next three books – Thirteen Moons, Nightwoods , and Varina – were all New York Times Bestsellers. Thirteen Moons won the SIBA Book Award and the Pat Conroy Southern Book Prize, and Varina won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award. In 2008, he received the North Carolina Award for Literature – an incredible honor.

But before all that, Charles Frazier was a guy who taught English classes at NC State and waited in the carpool line and then came home to sit in a little onewindow room for a few hours a day in front of a DOS computer, writing a novel based on a sliver of a family story, always working in service of language and history and the narrative of an arduous journey home to the North Carolina mountains. For nearly a decade, hardly anyone knew he was writing a book, but he pressed on, writing when he could.

None of that has changed. From those early days all the way up to this past week, which he spent combing meticulously through page proofs of his fifth novel, he has remained dedicated to the craft. It’s one of the things I admire most about Charles Frazier the Author: every time he sits down to work on something new, his focus is on the language, the history, and the sweep of story. The art of it all.

Bland Simpson’s Lifetime Pursuit Induction remarks by Ann Cary

Simpson

Bland Simpson was raised in a small Elizabeth City neighborhood edging the dark waters of Gaithers Lagoon. And it was here that Bland had his first boating adventure. As a precocious eight-year-old, he and a pal happened upon an old washtub near the edge of a shallow ditch draining into the lagoon. To paraphrase one of my favorite shows, King Mackerel and the Blues are Running, they were pretty sure they could make a boat out of this piece of trash. So, they set about hauling and pushing the tub into the water of the ditch. Then, to the best of their ability, they clambered down the ditch bank and jumped into their new boat –which of course promptly capsized, throwing both of them into the muddy water of the fortunately narrow ditch. And so ended Bland Simpson’s first boating adventure. Even so, two sloshed and soaked boys were having the time of their lives. I don’t know about the other boy, but this is still Bland’s M.O. Happily for all of us, there was much more coastal boating to come.

This early adventure also foreshadowed another defining trait, one that our friend Jim Clark, in introducing us recently at a speaking engagement, pointed out and that stuck with me. Bland Simpson, from day one, has been an enthusiastic and talented collaborator – in writing; . . . in music, theater, film, television; in his teaching; and in our family life. On one of the very early days of our courtship, we were strolling along the Pea Island beach in Dare County, when he suddenly asked, “What are you looking for in a partner.” My answer: “a collaborator.” Why that, I don’t know, but there it was. In front of the perfect person at the perfect time.

ANN CARY SIMPSON is an associate with moss+ross, a Durham firm providing development consulting services. She has previously worked with several nonprofits including Compass Center for Women and Families, the Conservation Trust for NC, the NC Museum of Art, and the UNC Institute for the Enviroment. She is a graduate of the UNC Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication. She has contributed original photography to four UNC Press books by her husband, Bland Simpson, including Into the Sound Country (1997) and The Inner Islands (2006), Little Rivers and Waterway Tales (2015), and North Carolina: Land of Water, Land and Sky (2021).

It was in college that he found his musical niche among like-minded friends and later to forming the popular bands Gravyboat and Southern States Fidelity Choir. He went to New York City to seek his fortune as an independent songwriter, but actually found his calling onstage, collaborating again with longtime friends to create the highly successful production Diamond Studs, which launched a new and still thriving genre called musician’s theater. He went on to collaborate on seven more musical plays, exploring pirate life, the Mississippi River, the birth of UNC, coming of age in the South, and the sweet, durable friendship of climate-aware fishing buddies. Out of musician’s theater also came a lifelong association with the Red Clay Ramblers, the acclaimed Tony Award-winning North Carolina string band that’s now celebrating its fiftieth year. With the Ramblers, Bland also added international travel and movie and Broadway credits to his resume. His literary and academic pursuits are equally collaborative. Bland has absorbed the history and landscape of his beloved North Carolina like a sponge. Whether his writing covers history, the environment, memoir, fiction, nonfiction, or some combination, his prose, like his brain, is wide-ranging, fascinating and always offers a thoughtful new take on our Old North State.

“ WHETHER HIS WRITING COVERS HISTORY, THE ENVIRONMENT, MEMOIR, FICTION, NONFICTION, OR SOME COMBINATION, HIS PROSE, LIKE HIS BRAIN, IS WIDERANGING, FASCINATING AND ALWAYS OFFERS A THOUGHTFUL NEW TAKE ON OUR OLD NORTH STATE.”

Land of Water, Land of Sky is the fourth book he and I have done together with UNC Press since 1997, and it is his tenth volume since his first novel, Heart of the Country, was published in 1983. Other book collaborators have included our talented photographer friends Scott Taylor and Tom Earnhardt and our children. Our youngest daughter, who was born during the creation of Into the Sound Country, frequently awoke from naps to find herself tucked in the bottom of a jonboat looking up at cypress, tupelo, and big blue sky.

In the early 1980s, Bland augmented his music and literary pursuits with a career as a teacher of creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill – thanks to the foresight of fellow inductee Max Steele, who provided that teaching opportunity. Bland is now Kenan Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing. During this teaching tenure he has created new courses – lyric writing, songwriting, playwriting, musical theater – in addition to fiction and nonfiction, while developing a reputation as a patient, respectful, and attentive mentor. His newest collaboration with Professor Brent McKee, “The Changing Coasts of Carolina,” is a STEAM course that combines coastal environmental science with handson observation through field trips, and personal essays. An evaluation from a recent student began, “I loved this course!”

Bland’s awards are many, and he is highly honored to be included now in the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. I think he would also feel that among his highest honors are the fact that he is loved by his friends and family, appreciated by his readers, and that all of his works, taken together, constitute a deep, strong and resilient current of love for his home state, North Carolina.

As the NCLR editor pulls all these remarks together for this story just a couple of months after the 2020 induction ceremony, Moore County, where the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame is located, is particularly cold and dark. Someone shot out two power substations, apparently to stop a drag show. So no one is reading by lamplight in Southern Pines this evening, and some people might be having trouble breathing, if they’re on a ventilator, or staying warm this cold December week. Such a violent reaction to fear of something the shooter simply doesn’t understand increases the poignancy of recalling the induction ceremony’s celebration of writers whose art opens the mind and heart.

Ed Southern, Director of the North Carolina Writers’ Network, closed the belated induction ceremony with a somber but perceptive reminder of the audience’s shared enjoyment of and belief in the value of reading to undermine the kind of ignorant animosity that left Moore County in the dark and cold this week:

As divided as we are now, you’d think we all, at least, could agree that everyone ought to read more books, more and deeper stories, whether on the page, the screen, the audio, or whatever other form they’re available in. But we can’t. We’re too fractured even for that.

Some lack the patience for it, some the empathy. Some hate and fear what they find there: hearing someone else’s voice inside your own head, someone with a voice and body, life and faith and desire, much different than your own; someone who, despite their differences, is still just as fully, as recognizably, as worthily human as you are. For those of us who love to read, it’s easy and comforting to say they don’t know what they’re missing. The truth is, though, some of them do.

Southern concluded by reminding the audience of the day’s uplifting festivities:

We should take none of this for granted, nothing about this day, this place, or these people. We should keep reading, and we should keep writing, and we should keep doing them loudly, and proudly, and with as much mind and heart and guts as we can muster. And while we do it, we should – must – keep celebrating. n

“WE SHOULD KEEP READING, AND WE SHOULD KEEP WRITING, AND WE SHOULD KEEP DOING THEM LOUDLY, AND PROUDLY, AND WITH AS MUCH MIND AND HEART AND GUTS AS WE CAN MUSTER.”