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.

We like to categorize things—put them in neat little boxes with defined walls, with simple labels, and expect that nothing will ever challenge or break free of those molds. We do this with people, with media, and clothing, we even do it with tools. We assign something, anything, a function, and we rarely think about the ways in which it might work outside of those parameters.

Take the computer for example. We have expectations for our computers. We want them to be good at math and processing data. We want them to assist us in our daily tasks, to look things up when we don’t know the answer. To store our documents and photos.

What we don’t expect our computers to do, is help us understand what it might feel like to die, or assist us in evoking an emotional response through heart-wrenching musicality. These, in our categorized belief system, are human endeavors—distinctly separate from science and innovation.

Yet, computers can do these things, and they are, all of the time.

Dr. Nicholas Laudadio has been examining this relationship between technology, music, humanity, and art for the better part of the last twenty years. His research has looked at the many ways in which electronic music, especially analog synthesizers, have been infused into the genre of Science Fiction media. In studying this blurring of lines between man and machine, between musical performance and technology, a paradigm shifts in our own understanding of what it really means to be human.

Alice Corbin Henderson did not want to leave Chicago. The mid-west born and raised poet and editor had everything that she needed right there in the city. She was in with the hot and happening poets of the day, she was the co-editor of the most popular and influential of the city’s poetry magazines, and she was receiving considerable acclaim as a rising poet herself. When her husband told her that he was moving the family to Sante Fe, she felt that her world was ending.

Yet, it didn’t end, even if it did almost kill her. She moved to New Mexico in 1916, and found something there she never could have imagined, a muse. Her entire worldview shifted, gazing upon the vistas of pueblos and cacti, and she quickly became one of the most prominent advocates for Midwest poetry and indigenous midwestern culture. The move proved not to be a career ender, but a catalyst for her most prolific and meaningful era as an artist.

Henderson kept editing her Chicago based periodical remotely, and her newfound midwestern influence would come to heavily shape national poetry taste. This change made her grapple with her own relationship with place, with the notion that real art only happened in cities, and that real poets were an urban commodity. Living out in New Mexico, she found a true appreciation for the rural, for the small-town, for the outskirts of American civilization. She realized that her move had forever changed not only her poetic sensibilities, but her outlook on life.

Rachel Williamson is a graduate student here at UNCW, and her thesis is dedicated to Alice Corbin Henderson’s career and poetry. In her own writing, she analyzes the changes that Henderson underwent, and considers the widespread effects that her writing had on American poetry. In doing so, she asks us all to consider the effect that place has on our day to day lives. She encourages us to wonder, is true art only made in the cities? What is the value of a life on the outskirts? For a small coastal town with its own vibrant community of poets, songwriters, and artists, I feel that Wilmington is exactly the kind of city that needs to hear a message like Henderson’s. A message of hope, of creation, of finding peace and community right there, right where you already are.

In the 2014 film, “Gone Girl”, which was adapted from the novel of the same name by Gillian Flynn, scorned wife Amy Dunne delivers a legendary monologue. If you haven’t seen the movie, or read the book; It’s a thriller about a couple who seem perfectly happy on the outside, but are rotten to the core within. When Amy fakes her own murder—fed up with her miserable marriage to a man she despises—she leaves a trial of incriminating breadcrumbs right to her semi-innocent husband.

For Nick, the world turns upside down, and the perfect picture of their marriage begins crumbling down around him, and all of his darkest secrets start to float up to the surface.

In both the book and the film, Amy delivers this monologue, ripping apart the falsehood of the “Cool Girl.” The Cool Girl, which she admits to having been, is a lie, a broad lie told by all sorts of women. She lambastes the men who succumb to this ruse, and is no less kind to the women.

Recently, this monologue resurfaced, blowing up on TikTok and other social media. The women of the internet have rekindled their love of this scene, and their mutual fascination with Amy Dunne. Gone Girl is experiencing a moment of relevation, it’s been brought back into the discourse, which is exactly what this podcast is about.

Meg Giuliano is a Junior here at UNCW, and she has been examining this scene. She’s been thinking about its place in the cultural moment, and looking deeper into what Flynn is doing within the language of Dunne’s legendary monologue. By analyzing these linguistic structures, a new narrative is exposed between the lines, a narrative of disempowerment and illigetimization.

Gone Girl movie audio courtesy of 20th Century FOX. All rights reserved.

Food-hacks. Supplements. Fad diets. Nootropics. In the expansive landscape of online marketing campaigns, social media, and algorithms, it feels like half of all that you read or hear online boasts some form of posthuman biological optimization. These products promise a gambit of health benefits and biological improvements to the human body. Some claim to help your brain function at a faster speed or capacity. Some claim to regulate your gut—to make your input and output as efficient as a hybrid automobile.

In all of this, there is a common appeal to self-betterment—a tug at the universal belief that we could be smarter, stronger, less anxious, with just a little help from technological innovation.

But, these products, and their claims, have dipped into the realm of the uncanny. In the promises they offer, there is a darkness lying below the surface—a sense of existential dread and mortal panic.

Dr. Jeremy Tirrel has been examining this phenomenon. In his upcoming book, which is tentatively titled: Strange Consumptions: the Gothic Rhetorics of Nutrition, he and Dr. Kate Maddalena look at the relationship between humanity’s nutritional discourse and the weird, eerie rhetoric that surrounds it.

By utilizing a Gothic lens, they hope to illustrate how these adverts prey on our discomforts and anxieties, working to make us desperate for scientific intervention.