Crone Letter for Jim Grimsley

Dear Selection Committee:

I am writing to nominate Jim Grimsley for the North Carolina Award in Literature. Grimsley's remarkable career spans many genres—plays, realistic and speculative novels, as well as non-fiction and short stories. Others will write about his contributions to the theater. His narratives are my subject.

Born in Grifton, North Carolina, in 1955, Grimsley's hemophilia meant he couldn't join the rough and tumble life of other country boys. This did not affect his spirit, though: it intensified it. His gift for observation of the meaning in gesture, tone, and mood, and in the struggles of intimate relationships, flowered. His family's poverty and his being a young gay man in the South did not stop him either: both of these circumstances gave him yet another lens for viewing the world.

His first novel, Winter Birds, renders an Eastern North Carolina family's descent from vulnerability and misfortune into horror over one Thanksgiving weekend. Published first in Europe, it eventually appeared in the US, winning the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the Academy of Arts and Letters. Remarkable for its unstinting gaze, the novel's central voice is of a young participant/observer uncannily able to render his flawed parents in the round--- their cruelty, love, victimization, and desire--- even as they cause him great suffering. This amazing book has a place with the best Southern Gothics, by O'Connor, Capote, and Dorothy Allison. Tense, tragic, beautifully paced and observed, it is a masterpiece.

My Drowning is another of his great gothic works that, like Winter Birds, is told in an extraordinary, virtuoso voice. A woman in mid-life recalls a vision from childhood, of seeing her mother wading into water. The true nature of this scene eventually illuminates the narrator's whole history. It is told in the round, as if from a great distance, but also with gritty detail. The book displays Grimsley's deep understanding of how trauma and denial shape personality. The story's dreamy point of view, the fact that the main voice spends time with the ghost of a sibling who died, the rendering of religion, of deprivation and hunger, all add to its depth and beauty. It also faithfully describes the route from poverty into the middle class, a path many poor Eastern North Carolinians took between the thirties and the sixties. He shows the lingering shame as well as the rewards, of this transition. The novel gained for Grimsley the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writer's Award, and also, the Georgia Author of the Year Award.

There is a feature both these gothic tales, and the book Dream Boy have in common: along side the realistic story, there is another-- archetypal and akin to folk tale. In Winter Birds, the central character's fantasy life includes great benevolent creatures living in caves underwater. In My Drowning, the uneducated community believe supernatural monsters threaten them. This layer of magic we find in Grimsley's intense realism leads us to a new development: his speculative science ficition.

In these works, another level of Grimsley's talent is display: his societal critique, his ability to move to a larger canvas. The Ordinary renders a universe where a magical world collides with a technological one through the marvelous device of a mysterious massive gate that opens between the two. The traveler between the worlds is a linguist and scientist who later changes her views about the certainties of her high tech world. A fantasia of invention, the manner of magic in the superstitious world is finally fully explained as a form of singing that creates and changes matter itself.

Beyond the closely observed love and power relationships, there is another similarity between The Ordinary and My Drowning. Fine storyteller that he is, deft in every sinuous and experimental point of view, Grimsley poses a thrilling question, and takes a long, marvelous, and scary road toward the answer, with many beautiful features along the way.

In the Last Green Tree, set in the same universe as The Ordinary and Kirith Kirin, Grimsley's world-building embraces economic, ecological, and theological themes. The gods of the world themselves are characters. Like Ursula LeGuin, and Marge Piercy, and Neal Stephenson, he has a philosopher's and an anthropologist's imagination and acuity. At the same time he displays his gift for depicting intimacy and human frailties. Two of his novels in this genre won prizes from the Lambda Literary Award for gay-themed science fiction or fantasy.

At another level of societal critique, Grimsley's memoir How I Shed My Skin: Unlearning the Racist Lessons of a Southern Childhood, renders a first hand account of the social experiment of mass desegregation of schools that took place in Eastern North Carolina in the late sixties. I went through this same social upheaval and find he rendered perfectly the feeling of that new opening between two societies separated for hundreds of years while living side by side. His tale of being a poor white child taught to dislike and disdain the African Americans in his midst, is another example of his truth-telling, and readiness to examine his own past without a shred of sentimentality. Always ready to show us another side, his heart-breaking recent short story “What Happens to People Like Us” reflects upon the impact of mass shootings on the family of the perpetrator.

I first met Grimsley as a fellow teacher in a summer writing program in Mexico. Students flocked to him. He was willing to give every person a voice, beginners and near-professionals alike. He was ready to embrace the magic that narratives can work in young people's lives. As director of the writing program at Emory for many years, he led a diverse and celebrated faculty onto great things. Now he has retired back to Eastern North Carolina, to Goldsboro. A true man of letters, his works are a gift that journey to worlds known and unknown, and render beauty and truth in the hardest as well as the most fantastical places. An unstinting, but completely compassionate observer in all his narratives, Jim Grimsley embodies the North Carolina motto, “To Be Rather than to Seem.” He richly deserves the North Carolina Award in Literature.

Moira Crone
Novelist, Professor Emerita
Former Director, Creative Writing Program, LSU English Department