December 19, 2019

Sold two copies of NSDL from the back of my car after choir last night. They are still apparently unavailable in any normal marketplace. I repeat the old cry to heaven, why can’t anything go right? 

Slowly breaking down my school office is tedious, but bringing the unexpected joy of having some beloved objects around me again. My mother’s ceramic jack o’lantern beams quietly at my back, as it has not done in the thirty years I’ve had it. The book of poems I had when I was a child lies on a shelf in plain sight.  Today, I think, I redeem and repot my Christmas cacti.

The Akron Beacon Journal has this to say about The Falls of the Wyona:

The coming-of-age story of four boys in the High Country of western North Carolina after World War II, “The Falls of the Wyona” is a poignant, lyrical novella by Akron native David Brendan Hopes.

Arden Summers is the narrator but not the main character. In the beginning there are three boys. Arden, his best friend Vince Silvano and new kid Tilden: “We were one person, sometimes.” But then there were four, as another newcomer, Glen, arrived. Instead of the usual mild hazing that new boys had to endure, Glen was immediately accepted when Vince drew him into the group.

Their sacrament was a pilgrimage to the Falls of the Wyona River, a mystical and dangerous place that only a few had seen. Arden says that the “Falls claims one every generation,” so the adults keep its whereabouts a secret. The boys are horsing around at the Falls when Glen does a showy, reckless handstand at the very edge. Afterward, Vince confides to Arden that he “feels funny.”

The boys camp in the winter, sleeping close together for warmth. One night Arden awakens to see Glen and Vince kissing passionately. Tilden, too, is awake. They quietly agree to say nothing. Vince’s father, the football coach, fosters a pervasive attitude of homophobia among his athletes, and decks his son for performing in the school talent show.

Vince becomes the star quarterback recruited by major colleges, and has a glamorous blond girlfriend, but his spirit isn’t the same. In this remote town, which has had electricity only a few years and is just learning about television, it would be easy to say that people hate what they don’t understand. But while Arden and Tilden don’t understand the current that runs between Glen and Vince, their acceptance and loyalty show they don’t need to understand to love.

“The Falls of the Wyona” (203 pages, softcover) costs $15.95 from Red Hen Press. David Brendan Hopes is an alumnus of Ellet High School and Hiram College, and is a professor of English at the University of North Carolina in Asheville.

Steve Williams has died of colon cancer.