In the world of literary scholarship, we’re always focused on the other guy. We place our opinions, our thoughts, our most cutting critiques onto the works of other writers, and work under an established discourse of criticism and praise. But, we very seldom dare to dabble in creation. Many of us feel that it isn’t our job, that creation is for the artists, the poets, the writers, and we exist only to analyze. There is a notion that to attempt to become the artist is blasphemous, or somehow debasing of one’s intellectualism. Many scholars that do create keep their academic and creative careers separate, or downplay their whimsical pursuits amongst colleagues. 

I think this is misguided. 

In engaging in the creative, we awaken an empathetic part of our minds, a part more attune to wonder and originality. As literary critics—as cultural caretakers—it is an incredibly helpful exercise to engage in creation. It illuminates a part of our field that we aren’t always in sync with: its origin. It’s easy to criticize something from fifty feet away. It remains opaque, foreign. It’s much harder to dismiss something when you know how much effort went into it, to have attempted the same forms or methods yourself. Working creatively is not just an exercise in becoming a better scholar, it’s an exercise in being a better human. 

Today we are mixing things up on the Relevate podcast, and instead of focusing on a scholar’s attempt to analyze another person’s work, we are going right to the source. 

Autumn Kepley and Brooke Burris are alumni of UNCW, Autumn graduated last Spring with her MA in English, and Brooke finished the year before with a BA in Business. Together, they have co-authored a collection of poetry titled In a Field of Flowers, which came out earlier this year. Their journey through creation, collaboration, and publication is one that I think we all could learn something from, and their ability to transcend the hierarchy of artist, scholar, and student is nothing short of courageous. 

Today we’re going to dive into the creative process, the tumultuous world of traditional publishing, the benefits of self publishing, and where on earth these two found the time to write a book while in college.

In the mid nineteenth century, Louisa May Alcott was a struggling, aspiring writer. She had written a great deal for periodicals, published a few books, and dabbled in sensationalism. Most of these she wrote under her own name, but some she penned under pseudonyms. Nevertheless, despite her attempts on all of these fronts, nothing ever really caught—nothing worked to bring her star fully into the realm of mass popularity. 

This frustrated everyone involved. Alcott often complained of her tensions with the publishing industry—that they didn’t appreciate the kind of work she was penning; and in return the industry urged her to write things she didn’t want to write, things they thought were more likely to sell, and so this combative relationship wore on. 

But then, in 1868, Alcott gave in. She wrote a story that she thought her publishers would finally be pleased with, with the intention of proving to them that what they wanted was boring, unlikely to succeed, and embarrassingly sentimental. She wrote this story, sent it in, and by year’s end, it was the most popular book in America. That book, was Little Women. 

Little Women would continue to live in the zeitgeist uninterrupted for the next 156 years, spawning countless adaptations, reprints, spin-offs, and a fandom that would transcend both era and generation. As Little Women got older, and entered public domain, any limitation to the places and forms that Little Women could  go completely dissolved. So, for the last century, Little Women has been anyone’s property—free to reprint, adapt, and engage with however you might see fit. And that has certainly happened, a lot.

Anlie Williams is a graduate student here at UNCW, and she has been examining these varied and disparate versions of Alcott’s most famous novel. She has been looking at how different elements of these renditions affect the original work, and how these versions alter the experience of the reader. She has dedicated her thesis to this project, and her findings speak to both the fine line between ownership and property, and the publishing marketplace, culture, and art. 

The world of print media has been ever evolving since its inception in the fifteenth century. Woodblock printing gave way to the Gutenberg press, which gave way to the Rotary press, which gave way to the internet. In just the last few decades, online media has catalyzed the largest change in the discourse of public literacy since the very invention of mass printing. Globalization has given us the ability to share ideas with one another at lightspeed; do art or literature or business in seamless collaboration; and to form meaningful relationships with people we’ve never even met face-to-face. 

In all of these interactions, there is language—there is writing. How we communicate with each other is fundamentally altered by the technology available to us at a certain time in history. Our relationship to language, is in part, our relationship to our devices. But, as the tech industry rolls out each yearly update, and each new generation of mechanisms, it becomes harder to keep up with the constant onslaught of technological evolution. 

That is precisely why we need people like Dr. Colleen Reilly. Since the beginning of her academic career, she has been examining this strange relationship between man, machine, and language. She has been thinking about how we can best utilize these writing tools that are available to us, and how to better implement them into our classrooms, routines, and lives. She has wondered, how are these tools that we’re utilizing shaping us, and how are we shaping them?

When a book comes out—if it’s successful—a couple of things can happen. That book can make it on lists, like the New York Times Best-Sellers, or Goodreads Listopia. It can win awards like the Booker, the Hugo, or the Pulitzer. Or it can be translated into other languages—reprinted for audiences all over the world. There are some famous examples of this. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, was originally published in Portuguese. Tolstoy’s Anna Kerinina, was of course, authored in Russian. 

But this opens up a whole new room for debate, and not just in regard to authorship. This act of translation—it's never perfect. It can’t be. That’s just not how language works. Sometimes, aspects of the original text don't work in a new language, sometimes things just fall flat. Other times, a translator might take creative liberties, embellish things or make minor changes out of preference. In all of this, there is change. There is a disconnect between pieces. A translation is never a true, meticulous, word by word reprint of the original. 

Jessica Shafer is a Junior here at the UNCW, and she has been ruminating on this quandary. Her paper, “The Languages of Caramelo and Puro Cuento,” examines Sandra Cisneros' bilingual epic and its Spanish-language translation. In it, she ponders: What is lost when a novel is translated? What is potentially gained? How is a text even further complicated by the inclusion of multilingual hybrids, like Spanglish or Ingspañol? And, what effect does this code-switching have in Cisnero’s writing?

Food. Food is so many things. It is nourishment, sustenance, it fuels our bodies as we work, live, and play. It’s something that motivates us, a symbol of survival. But it is also so much more. Food is capable of satisfying not just our biological needs, but our spiritual ones too. Food brings people together, through both process and product. It’s the thing that gathers families around the table in celebration, and in memorial. It’s the centerpiece of romance, the fertilizer for budding relationships. And it’s what you bring to a friend, when they have experienced a tragedy. Food is the glue of society. 

But it’s also a weapon. 

The denial of food is an unmistakable act of aggression, and it is the base structure for societal inequity. Starvation is a completely preventable disease in America, but yet it persists as a threat to more than 44 million people. To face hunger isn’t merely a product of circumstance. To go hungry is to be abandoned by your community. 

In the South, food has an especially complicated relationship to politics. In the land of plantations, Jim Crow, and indigenous removal, the American South has seen more than its fair share of foodway disruption. The massive influx of African influence brought in through the transatlantic slave trade, the tactless appropriation of indigenous crops and traditions, bound beneath the overeaching umbrella of European methods and mentalities, has made the history of Southern food a richly seasoned gumbo of unexpected flavors and ingredients. It makes for a heavy dish, served on a platter forged from racism, and with a side salad of civil disobedience. 

Rachel Merritt Jones has made a picnic of her scholarly endeavors this semester, diving headfirst—or rather mouth-first—into the rich history of African Diasporic foodways and traditions in the American South. She is a graduate student here at UNCW, and has dedicated much of her research to studying the relationship between food and African American history. Recently, she embarked on an academic survey of Natchez Mississippi, to explore the oral and culinary traditions of her home-town community there. Today, Rachel is here to talk about that experience, and to share what she learned—and tasted—while immersed in her delicious pursuits. 

We live in a content saturated media landscape. Since the birth of Netflix's streaming service in 2007, there has been a steady exponential explosion of online media and media platforms. It seems that every month we have a new streaming app, and every app offers dozens to hundreds of brand new original series and movies. Society has gone from being at the receiving end of a monocultural conveyor belt, to scavengers in a wasteland of varied and disparate small scale and blockbuster offerings. Media companies have had to change their entire approach to the way they create content for audiences, because they have to fight tooth and nail for just a second of attention. 

The things that do float to the surface these days are assigned unusual adjectives. They’re called ‘“binge-worthy,” “addictive” — they’re characterized more akin to the way we talk about narcotics, than traditional pieces of art. Streamers aren’t in the business of making movies or television, they’re in the business of stealing your attention. 

In the wake of this media overhaul, there is one genre that has come out on top, one genre that has captured the attention of millions, and consistently sits at the top of the charts. That genre is True Crime. 

Aidan Healey is a Senior here at UNCW, and he has been examining the murky depths of this cultural phenomenon. Sifting through dead bodies and murder weapons, his senior thesis is dedicated to the analysis and unearthing of the origins of the True Crime genre. He has traced a line all the way back through the decades, to the mid-century novelist Truman Capote, and his infamous “non-fiction novel.” Capote’s In Cold Blood, he believes, is the catalyst for all of our bloodlust and intrigue for scandal; it is the beginning of popularized crime dramas and macabre documentaries. Today, he is here to discuss all things Capote, True Crime, streaming and the intriguing liberties taken in nonfiction storytelling.

In 1925, right here in Wilmington North Carolina, Gertrude Perry West founded her little magazine, Poetic Thrills. It was the first of its kind in the state, and West had big plans. The magazine prided itself in its “national scope and international hope.” There were hundreds of poetry periodicals popping up around the country at this time, but Poetic Thrills was different. Commonly, little magazines like this would relish in the rebellious — they would push back against the popular movements of the time: engage with controversial methods and topics, and serve as testing grounds for new concepts, forms, and ideas. These magazines typically served urban audiences, as that’s where the art communities flourished, and so they catered to a highly urban flavor of discourse and ideals. 

Poetic Thrills, however, was its own breed of little magazine. West didn’t just aim to criticize discourse at large, but the very little magazines she would consider her peers. In doing so, she provided a new avenue for writers and poets, creating a space for those on the fringes of the fringes. She created something entirely unique, and artistically anomalous. 

Dr. Alessandro Porco has been exploring this curious little entity, and his paper “Southern Tradition and the Eccentric Editorial Talent: Gertrude Perry West and the Little Magazine in Southeastern North Carolina” is set to come out later this year. Today I invite you to dive into Poetic Thrills with us, as we attempt to get to the heart of why little magazines like this were essential to the arts, to small country life, and why they still matter today.

In the Fall of 1933, John Andrew Rice and and a half dozen ex-Rollins professors set out into the unknown. Spurned by their previous employers, sick and tired of the American higher education system, they took to the wilderness—setting up camp in the North Carolina Blue Ridge Mountains. There, they did what any rag-tag ensemble of renegade college professors would do: they built a school. They attempted to build a new kind of educational facility: one that cared not about classicism, canonized texts, and memorization, but about the well-rounded formation of the student. They called the place: Black Mountain College. 

Black Mountain would go on to change not only the way liberal arts education was approached in academia, but the very way art and music were thought about and created. It would come to produce some of the greatest poets, artists, writers, and composers of the mid 20th century. It would become the global center for the Avant Garde. And then, it would disappear. Like a candle in the wind it would sparkle, shine brightly, and extinguish. 

Black Mountain shut its doors in 1957, only twenty four years after its creation. It’s a blip on the timeline of progress, and yet, we still feel its echoes today. The legacy of the college lives on, remaining a persistent presence in art, culture, and academia. In July of 2022, the New York Times published an article about this enigma, titled: “Why Are We Still Talking about Black Mountain College?” Today, we might get an answer. 

Dr. Alessandro Porco has been fascinated by the phenomenon of Black Mountain college for a long time. He has hunted down troves of untouched information, traversed heaps of unseen poems and pieces, and has discovered a side of the school that very few have ever come in close contact with before. His book, The Anthology of Black Mountain College Poetry which he co-authored with Blake Hobby and Joseph Bathanti is set to come out next year, and today he was gracious enough to give us a sneak peek. 

Acclaimed American novelist Kurt Vonnegut once said, that “The most daring thing (a person can do,) is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.” 

I started going to college in the heart of the COVID pandemic. It wasn’t until my third semester that I actually started going to classes in person; and, those classrooms were not at all what I expected. They were awkward, silent, uncomfortable. Nobody looked at each other, nobody spoke, and nobody was there to make friends or meet people. I was struck by the realization that despite being finally let out of the confines of our homes, we were each still firmly living within our bubbles. 

It took a few years to come out of it. And that’s understandable. Society itself had to recover from a tremendous international trauma. Becoming ourselves again was going to be uncomfortable, it was going to be weird, and difficult. But, we did it. Now, after a couple semesters back, classrooms are filled with buzzing conversation before lectures, people are getting to know each other with ease, and almost nobody is staring at their phone in absolute silence anymore. 

Right behind the millions of human lives lost during the Covid pandemic, one of the greatest losses we all experienced was the death of community. Being shut inside for so long, we forgot how to live and interact every day with each other. This was especially apparent on college campuses. But, not everybody stood by and waited for things to get incrementally better. A bold few took the courageous steps forward: to build a better future, and to get people interacting and simply having fun with each other again. 

Autumn Kepley and Rachel Hendrix are two of those delightful, courageous human beings, and I am exceedingly thrilled to have them both on the podcast today. Both are graduate students here at UNCW, and are both people I have had the pleasure of knowing and working alongside for a number of years now. Together, they have been making significant strides to bring the UNCW English department back into a meaningful sense of community. Their endeavors have been fun, creative, unexpected, and utterly necessary in this time of societal reconstruction. Their work has created an exciting and tangible sense of camaraderie and family, in a place and time where those two things felt distant and almost entirely forgotten. 

Circa 1867, Louisa May Alcott was yearning for success. Despite being featured in a number of periodicals, writing consistently for serials, and even putting out a few books, she hadn’t yet broken through to the realm of real popularity. She tried seemingly everything, even writing salacious tales of seduction and murder — under pseudonyms, of course, but nothing ever really stuck. She just couldn’t break through to the masses. 

Discouraged and indignant, Alcott frequently did verbal battle with her publishers. She insisted that the stories she wrote would catch on, and they told her to instead try writing things that would appeal more to traditional American young ladies. So, in an act of sneaky rebellion, she decided to give in to her publishers—those dim-witted literary patriarchs, and prove to them that the moralistic tales they wanted were boring, overly sentimental, and would never sell like they predicted. In 1868 she turned in the manuscript for her first sentimental novel, a book she coyly entitled, Little Women. By the following year, it would be one of the most highly sold books in the entire Western World. 

        Savannah Jones is a graduate student here at UNCW, and she has spent a lot of time looking into Alcott, her literary tastes, and the effect that Little Women had on the now iconic author’s developing career. She has dedicated her honors thesis to the study of Alcott’s resistance, dabbling, and eventual dedication to Sentimentalism. She grapples with the disconnect between Alcott’s disdain for sensationalism, and her full-fledged commitment to the genre in her professional offerings.