Weldon Payne's (as yet incomplete) Bibliography:

Books:

Through the Pane (1969) This is the first collection of his newspaper columns, Through the Pane. It was published in 1969, and is not available at this time.
A Taste of Time (1974; second printing in 1997) The second collection of newspaper columns.
Child of Cotton (1996) The third collection of  stories, true and otherwise, from the newspaper column Through the Pane.
Lonesome Time (2007) A love story viewed through Past, Present and Future windows of  poetic narrative.
Little Boys Bad (2008) A gritty story about loss of innocence, and redemptive love.
Beyond the Rain (2009) The plight of two women: a daughter whose personal hopes and desires have been put on hold; the other her mother, wholly dependent on her.
To Taste the Wild (2010) A  tale of eight males hunting wild boars in the Nantahala National Forrest of North Carolina in the shadow of a crumbling dream of George Gordon Moore, who once established a wild game preserve in those mountains. When a deaf teen gets lost in the wilderness, the others enter a world as weird and unyielding as John Keats described in his Ode on a Grecian Urn. Each hunter confronts his own challenges in the wild while facing phantoms from his past. And back at home, Nora, the boy’s mother, confronts phantoms of her own.

Stage Plays:

SWEET SONG OF NIGHT, Weldon’s two-act play, was presented three weekends in May 1996 at the Parnassus Theater in his hometown of Manchester.  Roy Henderson, a former British actor, and Charlie Winton, a school teacher and versatile actor, had the lead roles in the Southern drama.  The story revolved around three main characters who had grown up together years before:  Attorney Clay Anthony, Elizabeth Turner, and Tooter Hogan.  On the surface, it is a murder mystery opening with the murder of Miss Turner, but its roots are deeper as all three lives are wounded by the kind of tragedy that can result when good people see evil and do nothing about it.



ANGEL'S BAND, Weldon's two-act comedy, was performed in April 1999 at the Manchester Arts Center with Director Warren Gore also playing the lead as Angel Norris, a loveable Appalachian thief. Upon being released from prison for various indiscretions, Angel sets out to regroup his old gang only to discover that in his absence, several federal programs have spoiled all of his former partners as well as his younger siblings. " Nobody wants to steal any more," Angel wails. Only Mama Norris tries to encourage her distraught son, who feels that he is betraying the memory of  his late father, who died at the hands of prejudiced lawmen. Despite her support, Angel – who boasts that he "never dodged my duty on account of getting shot" – caves in to the persuasive Mr. Nichols, a lawyer with the Poor People's Program (P.P.P.), and accepts legitimate employment.  Angel apologizes to Mama, but she – like  her oldest son, a malapropism master – understands that Angel was "a victim of circumcision." Despite his five-year absence in Atlanta, Angel agrees to marry his very pregnant long-time girl friend Annie Sue – who had succumbed to the charms of Mr. Nichols. After all, as Angel tells Mama, "Somebody has to do it."

“You take all the crime out of a country, and it ain’t going to last. It would take away people’s incenatives. Like Papa used to say: ‘Idle hands don’t pick no pockets.’”


BEYOND THE RAIN, Weldon's  latest two-act drama depicts Edna King, a lonely spinster nearing forty,  striving to care for her mother who is fast falling prey to what we now know as Alzheimer's. Earlier, Edna had given up her job – and abandoned plans to become a school teacher – in order to care for her father after he was injured in a mining accident. Her two siblings are married and living in other states while Edna and Mama survive on the old home place near Birmingham in the 1970's. Johnny Scoggins, a kindly but false-hearted Vietnam veteran, during one of several midnight visits, seduces Edna. The romance ends abruptly when Edna learns Johnny is getting married.  As Mama's deterioration worsens, Edna faces the truth that her real love for Mama requires making difficult decisions and admitting that she needs the help of others. She accepts that she is no longer an innocent little girl. As she says, "We are innocent when we are very young and very old. In between, we make mistakes."