In Print

Two essays by Bryan Oesterreich have been published in the current March issue of Our State.  According to Oesterreich, "'Rigs to Rhetoric' chronicles my mid-life career change from driving tractor-trailers to teaching English, and 'Port of Call' is an essay on Sailor's Snug Harbor retirement community in Sea Level, NC."  From his essay "Rigs to Rhetoric:" "Over the course of the next three years, I wrote and studied. A lot. I was challenged to find my 'voice.'  I was asked to develop characters.  And then I met Clyde Edgerton.  Edgerton had signed up to teach a one-year, two-semester novel writing course. Seats in that class were harder to come by than front row seats at a Pavarotti performance. Somehow, I made it in.  For two semesters, Edgerton inspired me.  He emailed editorial comments on my novel manuscript while in flight on a book-signing tour.  He talked about point of view over salmon at the Bridge Tender in Wrightsville Beach.  He spent hours annotating my chapters.  I completed a 300 page rough draft in four months.  He exhausted me, and it was wonderful."

Rick Taylor's review essay of Big Chief Elizabeth by Giles Milton, "A Swashbuckling History," was published in Roanoke Colonies Research Newsletter 8 (2002/2003). Taylor writes: "Just as Powhatan's men lifted their clubs to separate John Smith's brains from his skull, the chief's beloved daughter Pocahontas threw herself between the clubs and their intended victim and so saved Smith's life.  Only in a 'popular history,' where the rules of evidence and history writing are relaxed, can this legend be repeated uncritically.  And so Giles Milton in this adventure story aims rather for the legendary yarn, the spell-binding epic, than the precision of academic history.  It begins, aptly enough, with a map: a 'circular sheet of parchment,' once belonging to the explorer Sir Humfrey Gilbert, that represents a mid-sixteenth-century conception of what would later be understood as North America.  It is this America of the imagination and the dreamers and scoundrels who pursued this treasure that the author himself pursues in this narrative.  The narrative takes its readers through the myriad of misadventures and false steps that followed in the wake of John Cabot's voyage to North America in 1497 -- Cabot's "discovery of the continent," as Milton puts it.  The author is silent on evidence of earlier exploration, and the objection that the 'savages' who lived there -- yes, he actually uses that term unitalicized throughout Chapter One -- might also have a claim to 'discovering' the place is unaddressed.  The unfortunate Gilbert is the first real protagonist, or anti-hero perhaps, of the story.  From the explorer's  vantage point, Milton initiates one of the central motifs in the narrative: a kind of adolescent fascination with prurient matters.  There is rapturous description of the garments covering the 'private parts' of the 'comely wives' of the 'cannibalistic savages' that Gilbert encountered.   The reader is treated to a visual representation and vivid description of the native people 'hacking corpses into juicy gobbets and munch [ing] ravenously on arms and legs.'   In the explorer's (and author's?) imagination, the reward for surviving the 'monstrous beasts that stalked America's forest' was the nearly inexpressible pleasure of half-naked indigenous women.  Of course, the book does develop an 'appearances versus reality' theme, of which the aforementioned Gilbert became a victim -- lost at sea rather than, as poetic justice might warrant, his becoming one of the juicy gobbets."

Maya Socolovsky's essay "Narrative and Traumatic Memory in Denise Chavez's Face of an Angel" appears in Melus 28.4 (Winter 2003).  The article is one of the first to analyze Chavez's first novel.  According to Socolovsky, "In it, I read the main character's traumatic memories of sexual abuse during childhood through Cathy Caruth's understanding of trauma as a 'missed experience' which cannot be precisely remembered or narrated.  The article draws parallels between aspects of personal traumatic history and more public moments of historical trauma, locating and situating the narrator's story against her family's Mexican-American ancestry.  Ultimately, her narrative writes back to the patriarchal family history which has silenced generations of abused women, and opens up a dialogue within Chicana feminist circles that enables new voices to be heard."

A second edition of Regular Life: Monastic, Canonical, and Mendicant Rules by Doug McMillan with Daniel Marcel La Corte has been published by Medieval Institute Publications (2004).  Published for TEAMS (The Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages) Documents of Practice Series edited by Joel T. Rosenthal, this is a revised and expanded version of the first edition of 1997 by Doug McMillan (with Katie Fladenmuller).  According to Rosenthal: "The booklet has proved to be a best seller, and after two reprintings of the original version we decided that a second edition -- revised and considerably expanded -- would give our audience more information, more for their money."  From the Preface:  "The purpose of this book is to introduce the reader to the Rules of life of the major religious orders within the monastic, canonical, and mendicant traditions.  We present the most important Rules of religious life, mainly as developed in western Europe, and we offer selections from these Rules and other documents to illustrate the ideals established for the members of the various orders through the fourteenth century."

Gay Wilentz's study, "Civilization Underneath: African Heritage as Cultural Discourse in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon," is included in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon: a Casebook, edited by Jan Furman and published by Oxford U P (2003).  Wilentz writes: "Morrison's use of African modes of storytelling and orature is a way of bridging gaps between the Black community's folk roots and the Black American literary tradition.  Furthermore, through this dilemma tale, Morrison compels us to question Western concepts of reality and uncover perceptions of reality and ways of interpretation other than those imposed by the dominant culture. ...  From the double entendre of the title to the mythical, contradictory ending, Morrison bears witness to 'that civilization that existed underneath the white civilization' (Le Clair interview 26), a society in which the fathers soared and the mothers told stories so that the children would know their names."

Tom Douglass reviewed Anthony Minghella's Cold Mountain for Appalachian Heritage (Winter 2004).  Douglass writes: "Anthony Minghella's Cold Mountain is not Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, but then Frazier's Cold Mountain is not Cold Mountain either.  Some 26 miles southwest of Asheville at the highway turnout there on the Blue Ridge Parkway, you can get a good 14-miles-away peek at the real thing, some 6,030 feet above sea level.  There's no town there, just a good chunk of Pisgah National Forest, and one trail leading up to the top. Cold Mountain sits north of the parkway, near Waynesville.  Highway 276 runs roughly along the path of Wagon Road Gap and winds down from the north off the parkway and along the mountain's east side.  Since Frazier's book (1997) and now Minghella's film (2003), the local real estate offices and the Forest Service have been flooded with calls for directions and a place to stay.  One may ask: How deep is our yearning for the mythic return?"