Carolina Alumni Review - March/April 2008

WRITING
Finding Her Voices

Darnell Arnoult ’ 90 grew up in Martinsville,Va., got married right out of high school and had kids while her husband did a tour in the Marines. She didn’t have any particular ideas about where to go to college, but the family moved to Chapel Hill chasing the chance to see more Tar Heel games, and Arnoult started classes at UNC.

“My first UNC assignment, the writing professor suggested that I withdraw from the course,” Arnoult says. “A friend asked me, ‘Well, how do you want to write?’ So I showed her a book by Lee Smith, Black Mountain Breakdown.”

The friend told Arnoult that Smith was teaching a night course at UNC. Arnoult signed up and began a mentorship and friendship that continue to this day. The marriage fell apart and Arnoult had to drop out of school, but she kept in touch, and she kept writing. To pay the bills, she started a cleaning service. “With kids and work, I couldn’t keep

my mind around stories, so I characters who inhabit Arnoult’s would keep characters in poetry collection, What Travels narrative poems to hold With Us, but Arnoult, who has onto them,” Arnoult recalls. since remarried and lives in

“I would write in my car in Tennessee, said she “had one
10 or 15 minutes before I short story about a woman leav-
cleaned a house.” ing her husband that wouldn’t
When the kids got older, stay short. I started with the idea
Arnoult returned to UNC that the wife leaves because he is
for a degree in American having an affair with his secre-
studies. She connected with tary, but that wasn’t what was
writer Virginia Boyd, and happening. She was hearing
“she and I started meeting voices, like my mother, but it
once a week. We had to have wasn’t my mother’s story.”
at least one page — bad or _Darnell _Arnoult _{’ 90} _used _poetry _toArnoult’s mother was schizo-
good, written the second keep track of characters before phrenic, and she did once draw a
before or whatever — but ^publishing ^her ^first ^novel ^last ^year.big Jesus on the wall of the bed-
something to show each other.” room. The novel is partly an effort to help
The commitment to writing grew. Arnoult people understand that illness, but, as Arnoult
recruited Lynn York, and they met Pamela admits, each piece of fact has a way of under-
Duncan ’ 83 in Smith’s classes at N.C. State going a metamorphosis until the little pieces
University. In 2007, each of the four members of life take on their own fictional dimensions.
of the group published a novel, including Sufficient Grace has even been placed in the
Duncan’s The Big Beautiful and Arnoult’s category of Christian fiction, a surprise to
Sufficient Grace. Arnoult, who admits she often cusses as much
Sufficient Grace is rooted in the kind of as her characters.

HOBBIES
On the Fast Track

The Targa Newfoundland road race drew some 250 competitors who spent a week last September driving at top speeds on a 1,364- mile ( 2,200 km) course around the rugged coast and across the hilly terrain of the Canadian island. While the course is blocked off for the race, the roads receive no special preparation. Drivers, touching speeds up to 130 mph, face the same hazards as everyone else: blind curves, slippery surfaces in rain and uneven pavement.

“It’s like a mechanical ballet,” Harold Seagle ’ 73 raves, recalling the excitement of Targa, which he started racing in 2006. Last year, driving a Porsche 911, he finished first in his class. He won the Targa Plate for finishing all competition stages under trophy time, and he shared the Kenzie Cup with some other Porsche teams. “It’s kind of like music,” Seagle continues. “There’s something beautiful about racing. There’s a balance and symmetry to it.”

Seagle, 60, who also received his law degree from UNC in 1977, has been riding motorcycles since he was in school at Carolina. He moved from licensed open-road racing to tracks when he was in his 40s and began collecting trophies from the beginning. “A track gives you control,” Seagle says. “It’s

Harold Seagle ’ 73 and navigator Stan Pendergraft take a break with their Porsche during the Targa Newfoundland.

safer than riding on the road, where there are a lot of unknowns: dogs, litter, pot holes, other vehicles. At the track, you go around the same curves and you can anticipate, so your lap times go down as you learn each turn.”

COURTESY TARGA NEWFOUNDLAND

language that we use: ‘right one’ or ‘right two.’ I don’t have to slow down if Stan tells me there is a straight line over the hill.”

Seagle knows about teamwork from his day job. He spent most of his career with the law firm Rountree & Seagle in Wilmington. In the 1990s, he took on a case representing a community in its fight to hold a petroleum company responsible for a gasoline spill. Collecting evidence for the case, Seagle found a doctor in California who had treated toxic injuries and a firm in Texas that had expertise he needed. Seagle won the case and found himself called in on a Santa Monica, Calif., case involving the same toxins, including MTBE, a substance oil companies had added to boost octane when leaded gas was outlawed. He worked with Erin Brockovich — made famous in the movie of the same name and portrayed by Julia Roberts — and her California firm.

At a race such as the Targa, Seagle says, there is no track. There are 150 turns, and each one is different. That’s why drivers have a navigator; Seagle’s is Stan Pendergraft. “My life is in his hands,” Seagle says, “and his life is in my hands. He has a set of directions that tell him about things I can’t see. If we are going over a rise, I have some sensitivity to the shape of the tree line or the path of power lines, but there could be a ‘T’ or a hard right 300 meters after the crest. We have a private