The Grip of the Past

I’ve just received word that my new short story, “What I Learned From Fat Annie” has won the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize for 2023, a great honor and a reminder to all us writers to continue to submit to literary organizations, even if it takes years or a lifetime to win an award. There are several less than obvious reasons to submit to these competitions, listed month by month in the esteemed Poets and Writers. Our submission fees, which run from $5-$25 keep the literary quarterlies alive; and having our work read by editors is always worthwhile even when we don’t know what seed our work may have planted.

The Wolfe Prize also connects me to the past. Wolfe was born in Asheville, North Carolina at a time when the Bingham School was still an ongoing proposition on Bingham Heights, across the French Broad River (many jokes about that name) in Asheville. The headmaster, William James Bingham, was a familiar sight, and Wolfe described him in a paragraph in Look Homeward, Angel, his most well-known novel, driving his buggy down from the Heights on Saturday nights to round up the cadets who had escaped the school to go to the Asheville bars. Discipline was rigorous at the school and when I was doing research for Passion and Prejudice, I found many details, including a letter written by the headmaster to explain to a woman the suicide of her son.

Wolfe went even further in “The Battle of Hogwart Heights,” a chapter in his posthumously published collection, The Hills Beyond; it was not published during Wolfe’s lifetime for fear of libel.

In this chapter, Wolfe describes “old Bear Joyner” who bears some resemblance to William Bingham. An acquaintance said of this progenitor, “Well, he KNOWED he was good… He was remarkable but he KNOWED that he was good,” although described elsewhere in Wolfe’s novel as a desiccated former Confederate general, a “mummy” like the supporters of the Lost Cause whom Walter Hines Page felt impeded progress in the South with their sentimental reverence for the past.

“Old Kentucky Home” was the boarding house Wolfe’s mother ran in Asheville. The house was restored after a fire in 1998, and it is still named as a National Landmark. Years ago when I visited Asheville, it was still standing, furnished as it had been when Wolfe’s mother ran it as a boarding house, grim bedrooms with the shared bathroom at the end of the hall…

What does all this have to do with my story, “What I Learned From Fat Annie”? Well, nothing, and yet in this Western setting, weird family antics bear some resemblance to the carryings on in Wolfe’s fiction, and he and I both benefitted from getting out.

In My Family, Writing The Lost Cause Asheville Passion and Prejudice Favorites of 2023