What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
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6 WHAT'S UP! SEPTEMBER 13-19, 2020 A Gift From Beyond BECCA MARTIN-BROWN NWA Democrat-Gazette I f there's anybody who knows — and loves — the Ozark village of Stay More as much as Donald Harington did, it's arguably Brian Walter. Walter has been researching and writing and making films about the beloved Northwest Arkansas novelist and his fictional world for more than two decades and was even inducted into the Stay More "hall of fame" by being added as a character. But with Harington's voice stilled by death in 2009, Stay More was frozen in time and memory. Until Walter, whose day job is professor of English and director of convocations at St. Louis College of Pharmacy, uncovered a new manuscript just waiting for the light of day. "In the summer of 2015, I was working in the Harington Archive maintained by the University of Arkansas' Special Collections looking for supplemental visuals to use as I finished editing the second documentary about his life and work," Walter begins the story. "I was also keeping my eyes open for items that might fit well into a follow-up book idea that I had discussed with the University Press. "That's when I stumbled on this complete typescript of a novel that had to have been written in the 1970s but which neither I nor Don's widow and literary executor, Kim Harington, had ever heard of," he marvels. "I was not surprised to stumble across the original issues of Esquire in which some of his early stories had been published in the late '60s, nor was I surprised to find the stories from the mid-'90s, because Don had referred to all of those — along with some of his other unpublished novels — both in our conversations and in the interviews we'd done together. But 'Double Toil and Trouble' was a totally unexpected discovery, a long lost treasure buried in the files of his life. "The novel 'Double Toil and Trouble' — or 'DUB,' as I usually shorthand it, following Don's habit of giving his books three-letter nicknames — adds a whole new chapter to the Stay More saga," Walter says. "Set in about 1920, it builds on the complicated view that all of the Stay More novels take on the Ingledew family — the 'royal family' of Stay More as Dawny (a fictional version of the author as a child) refers to them. On the one hand, the Ingledews of 'DUB' are delightful in their authentic, deeply rooted rural customs and sensibilities. But on the other, they are keenly, fallibly human in their distrustfulness, their anger and their willingness to threaten or resort to violence to protect what they see as their own. "When Don wrote 'DUB' in early 1973," Walter goes on to explain, "he was already working on the history of the Ingledew family in what would become the 'Bible of Stay More,' his 1975 novel, 'The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks,' so this portrait of the third generation of Ingledews in Stay More both springs from and adds considerable detail to the history that 'Architecture' covers." UA Press releases new Donald Harington novel "From his second, unpublished novel, 'Work of Fiction,' which he mentions in his correspondence with his publisher as a book that he dearly hoped would be published someday, to his book on Arkansas artist Carroll Cloar, to his mountains of correspondence, and to who knows what else, the Harington vault is far from empty," editor Brian Walter says of author Donald Harington, pictured here in 2005. "I sometimes imagine him off in Stay More somewhere, humming and grinning a bit to himself as he anticipates scholars and readers stumbling across still more of the voluminous writings that he poured his heart and imagination into." (Arkansas Democrat- Gazette File Photo) FAYETTEVILLE