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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Port City prose and poetry

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Twenty-seven Wilmington novelists, essayists and poets joined forces to create an anthology of fiction and nonfiction literature that depicts the Port City’s vibrant past and present.

Emily Louise Smith, who oversees the publishing laboratory at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, contributed an essay about running on Wrightsville Beach titled “Winter Beach Run.”

Smith describes the sense of peace and inner stillness she feels as she runs past the sailboats moored in Banks Channel, the sand paths that cut through oleander and fig trees and the nesting grounds for loggerhead turtles, least terns, black skimmers, American oystercatchers and piping plovers.

“I’ve written a lot of poetry about places and where I grew up, but I hadn’t written an essay about this area,” Smith said. “It’s about making my home on the coast versus where I grew up. I think that’s how you learn about a place: being a keen observer of it,” she said.

While Smith misses the colorful fall leaves of her hometown in western South Carolina, she has grown to appreciate the wax myrtles and dwarf palmettos that grow on Wrightsville Beach.

Smith moved to Wilmington in 2003 to pursue a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing with a concentration in poetry at UNCW. After graduation, Smith took a job in South Carolina, but returned to the UNCW to teach publishing classes and direct the publishing lab.

In 2011, Smith started Lookout Books, UNCW’s publishing company.

“We have our own in-house publishing imprint. Our first book, ‘Binocular Vision’ by Edith Pearlman, was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prizes. Students cannot get an experience like that outside of New York,” she said.

Smith said running on the John Nesbitt Loop, Summer Rest Road and other parts of the island has helped her feel at home. The routes of Smith’s 6-mile runs vary depending on the direction of the wind, she said.

Although Wrightsville Beach is one of Smith’s favorite parts of the greater Wilmington region, she said she is excited to read about other districts and eras of town captured in “27 Views of Wilmington.”

“It’s nice to see how we all overlap each other in what makes this community so vibrant,” she said.

Michael White selected a darker theme for his poem, “Coup.” White’s piece ties to Wilmington’s 1898 coup d’etat, a race riot that resulted in white Democrats overthrowing elected government officials and an attack on the staff of the only black newspaper in the state, along with people and property in black neighborhoods, that killed more than 15 men.

White’s inspiration for the poem stemmed from President Obama’s election in 2008.

“I was distressed by the racial tension in America at the time,” he said.

The three-page poem includes regional details, such as the Cape Fear’s “roiled and dented current” and “little rivulets of melting praline ice cream,” as well as grim depictions of the riots, including imagery of houses burning and women and children forced from their homes.

“I wanted to write about the history of race here in Wilmington,” White said. “It served as a piece in the structure of the book.”

“Coup” is also published in White’s award-winning poetry collection, “Vermeer in Hell.”

Unlike White, Virginia Holman included peaceful images of the Cape Fear River in her essay, “The Face of the River.”

“I went out with Kemp Burdette, the Cape Fear River keeper, looking at what they call camera traps that document wildlife movement through the region,” she said. “They’re these tiny hidden cameras. They have an infrared sensor, so they can take pictures of nocturnal animals. It’s fascinating to see what’s there that you don’t normally see.”

Holman was partial to two of the animals the cameras’ lenses captured.

“There were a fascinating amount of birds that check out the camera. There was a heron that somehow seemed aware that the camera was there. He had his face up to it, checking it out. I especially liked the bobcat because I’ve never encountered one,” she said.

Holman also discussed watching bear cubs climb up trees, and looking at pictures of an osprey carrying a red shiner fish to its chicks.

Holman’s tour was enabled by a connection between the Cape Fear River Watch and the Wildlands Network.

Other works in the anthology include Nan Graham’s tale of the 1958 Azalea Festival, Wendy Brenner’s venture through the Cape Fear Serpentarium and Rhonda Bellamy’s recount of the greens on Queen Street.

Eno Publishers, a company based out of Hillsborough, North Carolina, published the book.

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