Category: August 2024

Wandering Billy

WANDERING BILLY

Down to a Fine Art

For 125 years, The Art Shop has decorated Gate City walls – and beyond

By Billy Ingram

“If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.”
— Edward Hopper

Residents in “The City of Flowers” (as Greensboro was known at the time) must have thought the big city had come to town when, in 1899, Andy Andrews opened Andrews Art Store on the 100 block of West Market, an emporium stocked with custom-made framing materials to accommodate the aesthetic needs of our more refined citizens.

Just up the block was the borough’s newly implemented, earliest attempt at a public transit system, consisting of a horse-drawn streetcar traveling north up Elm Street all the way to Judge Dick’s Dunleath house. With its limited horsepower, an old mule, passengers were required to disembark and push from behind at any incline that was encountered.

Rechristened The Art Shop, ready-made frames, prints and etchings were added to the store’s inventory before famed local commercial photographer Charles Farrell purchased the whole kit-and-caboodle in 1923. Farrell expanded the business to include the latest Kodak folding cameras and a state-of-the-art developing plant for photo finishing and enlarging. As this area’s first photographic center, the shop began hosting a camera club in 1933, attracting enthusiastic practitioners all across North Carolina.

“With increased interest in architecture, interior decoration, and amateur photography, The Art Shop has shared widely in those cultural developments in Greensboro and the state,” wrote Ethel Stephens Arnett in her exhaustive historical tome, Greensboro, North Carolina (University of North Carolina Press, 1955).

Farrell focused his lens on this corner of the world for The Greensboro Daily News, snapping pics depicting everything from the mundane to the extraordinary, like his exclusive aerial image of the crime scene on the day R. J. Reynolds’ scion was murdered.

Farrell, as a young man in 1913, assisted his father in creating one of the most iconic images in modern commerce, the original image of a circus camel named “Old Joe” that became the trademarked mascot seen on every pack of Camel cigarettes. In 1939, Farrell staged photographs illustrating everyday Black life in the South for Tobe, the very first children’s book produced for an African American audience.

At that time, The Art Shop’s familiar green canopied entrance was on West Market, right where the front steps to Lincoln Financial Group are today. In 1964, after Farrell fell ill, the family sold The Art Shop to Stanley Dolin, who, a decade later moved the shop to a nondescript, stand-alone storefront at 3912 West Market — where I purchased art supplies as a teenager in the 1970s.

Art supplies had long ago been swept aside when current co-owner Andy McAfee began collaborating with proprietor Stanley Dolin in 1997. “My degree was in art marketing and I had worked for five years with Bill Mangum,” McAfee recalls. “Stanley was more into framing so he brought me on to get more involved in the fine art market.” Launching a website soon after, The Art Shop began selling paintings and sculptures internationally. “That really opened a lot of doors. My first big sale was three Oleg [Zhivetin] originals to [a buyer in] Japan.” Dolin constructed a sprawling, cathedral-like gallery on the site in 2000. Then, in 2015, Andy and April McAfee bought the business.

“My number one selling artist is Nano Lopez,” says Andy McAfee says, standing next to one of the sculptor’s larger works, a 400-pound, distinctly abstract bronze interpretation of a goat. “Lopez is from Columbia, South America. He currently resides in Walla Walla, Washington. That’s like a $68,000 goat.” Known for his almost mythological approach to his subjects and a singularly vibrant color palette, Lopez created a smaller but equally kaleidoscopic bronze of a parrot, being crated and shipped out as we spoke. “[Nano Lopez] was one of the first artists I picked up. He’s just turned 70.”

The showroom is brimming with original oils and sketches by Rod Chase, Pino, Hessam and Roberto Salas, mixed media originals by Bisaillon Brothers, as well as limited edition giclée and serigraph reproductions on canvas from Iranian artist Sabzi and artist Thomas Arvid, known for his portrayals of wine. McAfee also offers a collection of fanciful drawings from the fertile mind of Dr. Seuss.

“I’ve been here long enough that now I work with mostly the family of the artists,” McAfee says. “Like with Hessam, I work with his son. Pino, who made Fabio famous, passed away about 14 years ago, but his artwork still sells well.” McAfee notes that the shop has an email list of 5,000 who are interested in Pino alone.

Dealing in original art is not without its pitfalls. “I’ve had to learn the hard way,” McAfee says. “An artist can be famous for figurative, but his landscapes could be worthless.” Oftentimes it comes down to subject matter: “Like with Pino, everybody wants the female or the mother-daughter. If I had a mother-and-daughter Pino original, it would sell pretty quickly.”

Each year Leland Little, the illustrious auction company in Hillsborough, ends up with a significant number of acquired pieces. “They sold a couple of original Peanuts comic strips by Charles Schultz for me,” McAfee says. It so happens that Charles Schultz sketches in particular are some of the most common forgeries out there. “Schultz mailed all of his strips in, so there should be folds in [an original], which it had,” McAfee says of the research involved in authentication. “I found the year and the date of the actual strip and it was identical.” The strip with Snoopy in it went for around $14,000, and the one without Snoopy sold for a little more than half that. “So there’s a huge difference.”

Shortly after purchasing The Art Shop, the McAfees opened a North Carolina Gallery inside the store dedicated to artists from around the state, such as painter Phillip Philbeck from Casar, a small town near Hickory. “He came down and did some original paintings of Greensboro for me, which I love.” Stunning is the only way to describe his meticulous, photo-realistic depictions of our downtown skyline and shops along Elm Street.

McAfee is happy to do walk-in appraisals for those curious about a cherished treasure. “I just enjoy doing them, really. If you brought something in and wanted me to look at it, there wouldn’t be any charge for that.” If travel is required in order to assess a collection spread out across an entire house, there’s an hourly rate. “A lot of art is inherited,” he says, adding that some people have no idea the item that’s been hanging on their wall for 50 years is something special. But it’s also not uncommon to come across artwork an owner believes is worth tens of thousands of dollars when, in fact, it’s a print ordered from a catalog. “And people are like, ‘No, it has to be an original — my grandmother said it was.’ There are a lot more reproductions out there than originals.”

For 125 years, award-winning custom framing has remained at the core of The Art Shop’s mission. “We do a lot of corporate work. We’re getting ready to do the Truist Leadership Institute campus out by the airport,” McAfee says of what the organization dubs “the perfect getaway for self discovery and personal growth.” He continues, “We hang a lot of hospitals; we did High Point University; and recently hung art throughout an entire home on Figure Eight Island.”

As Greensboro’s second-oldest locally owned business (Binswanger Glass beat it by a quarter-century), The Art Shop has developed and changed its focus over time, selling it’s last photographic accessories, paint and brushes many decades ago. Still, it’s name may suggest something else to some people. McAfee, chuckling, says, “For the 27 years I’ve been here, people are still calling asking for art supplies.” OH

Billy Ingram is the author of EYE on GSO, a compendium of stories (mostly) about the Gate City’s rich history. For instance: How Greensboro, Charlton Heston with a cast of thousands, and a camp filled with Nazis won World War II. Oh yeah!

Birdwatch

BIRDWATCH

The Stately Little Blue

A summer visitor dressed in white

By Susan Campbell

Late summer can be an especially exciting time for birders. We need not travel far to find unexpected visitors. Weather events may cause individuals to be blown off track and show up in the neighborhood. These lost birds may stick around for mere hours. However, in other instances, it may be a more deliberate response to environmental conditions that brings them our way.

One bird that frequently appears in wet areas later in the summer is the little blue heron. And it may not be just one, but several of them, that show up. Furthermore, they are not usually blue. This is because young of the year (which these inland wanderers almost always are) are actually white. Except for the very tips of the wing feathers — usually a challenge to make out — these birds are covered with white feathers. Unlike the great or snowy egret, which also may turn up in the Piedmont or Sandhills at this time of year, the bill of these small herons is pinkish gray, and the legs are greenish.

All of these white waders may be spotted in shallow wet habitats — streams, small ponds, water hazards, retention areas, etc. Little blue herons may be by themselves, mixed with other white, long-legged waders, or even with the much larger great blue heron. Little blues can be identified by their more upright foraging posture, their slow, deliberate movements and a downward angled bill as they stalk prey. Unlike other smaller waders, they will hunt in deeper water, often all the way up to their bellies.

Little blues watch for not only small fish but frogs and crayfish, as well as large aquatic insects. It is thought that their coloration allows them to blend in inconspicuously with similar white species. The association then provides protection from predators. Also, it has been found that little blues are significantly more successful predators when foraging alongside great egrets. These larger birds are likely to stir up the water as they move after underwater prey, which can then flush a meal in the direction of nearby little blues.

It takes these herons at least a year to develop adult plumage, not unlike white ibis — who sport dark plumage their first summer and fall — which also breed along our coast. They may have a pied appearance for a time in late winter or early spring. By April they will be a slatey blue-gray all over with a handsome bluish bill. Unlike our other wading birds, they lack showy head or neck plumes. They are also unique in having projections on their middle toes that form a comb, which is used as an aid when grooming.

Unfortunately this species has experienced an alarming drop in population numbers across North America over the past half-century. Loss of coastal wetland habitat, continued declines in water quality and elimination as a nuisance in fish hatcheries all are thought to be contributing to the decline. So be sure to stop and appreciate these stately birds should you come across one — regardless of when or where you happen to be. OH

Susan Campbell would love to receive your wildlife sightings and photos. She can be contacted by email at susan@ncaves.com, or by calling (910) 585-0574.

2024 Birdwatch Department

Home Grown

HOME GROWN

By Cynthia Adams

There were warning signs before Dad finished packing Mama’s pea-green-colored Samsonite luggage set into the new-to-us station wagon. In the days before soft-sided luggage, such cases were hardshell, hideous and unyielding. Her clothing and makeup cases alone claimed most of the cargo space.

Our Great Canadian Trek was so auspicious Dad had passed over the usual Yank tanks — huge Caddies and stinkin’ Lincolns — for a second-hand forest-green station wagon with faux-wood accents. My brothers were excited. My sister and I less so.

And then I saw my father surreptitiously stuffing in wholesale-sized boxes of Almond Joys, Baby Ruths, Tootsie Rolls, Fireballs and Butterfingers. It dawned on me: He planned to fill us up on sweets so he wouldn’t have to spend money eating out on the road.

Arguing commenced about who would sit where. My youngest brother wanted to wedge himself in the rear beside the candy boxes.

Before we’d left the driveway, our wheel man was fuming. “Shut the ‘H’ up!” he commanded, soon adding the puzzling: “Don’t make me stop this car!” He hadn’t actually even started it.

My thoughts turned to the Donner party and other god-awful, doomed expeditions. There were 1,500 miles yawning ahead between Hell’s Half Acre and Nova Scotia. Ironically, Dad promised Prince Edward Island, the inspiration for my beloved Anne of Green Gables, would make it all worthwhile.

The AC spluttered then died as we rolled through northern Virginia on new Michelins Dad couldn’t stop bragging about. He was not much on getting repairs even as he mumbled about having the Freon checked. Fanning herself, my mother muttered, “So much for driving in comfort.”

Dad, gray eyes narrowing, accelerated onto the interstate and shouted to the hesitating driver in front of us, “The sign says ‘YIELD,’ for God sakes, not ‘give up’!”

I sulked, too, wondering if my new crush would even remember me weeks later.

Dad barked at me to toss some candy to the youngest ones as soon as they began hinting about hamburgers. They devoured sweets, grew antic, then complained about the heat, which increased as we approached the Chesapeake area.

Mom suddenly shrieked. “The sign says there’s a tunnel ahead!”

She was completely petrified of tunnels and long bridges.

Dad commenced reassuring her that she would be OK. I looked forward to the tunnel, assuming it was cool inside. I hissed, “If we drown, we drown.” Dad looked back and shot me a murderous look. Mom paled.

Things did not improve as we skirted New York. In fact, the northward journey became a blur of heat/exhaustion/sugar comas and quibbling. The days (and chocolate candies) melted as everyone’s tempers shortened.

Memorably, we found cooler temps as we hit New England, stopping off in Lincoln, Maine, to visit Dad’s friends, the Lloyds. We learned they were putting us up, but in separate houses. My younger sister and I stayed with Miss Lillian in a Victorian greatly resembling the Addams Family home.

That night, my sister pressed a button near the antique headboard. The kindly widow knocked gently at the door. “Yes, dears?” she asked.

The button had once been used to summon servants.

“My sweet Herman used that to call me when he was ill,” she explained sweetly. As soon as the door closed, I said Herman likely died in our bed. My youngest sister, age 11, was terrified but tried to hide it. Instead, she refused to share the same bed, taking her pillow and our blanket to lay on the rug, where she remained until morning.

At breakfast, I insisted the pot of full cream on Miss Lillian’s table was “northern milk” and watched as my gullible sister poured a glass and took a huge swig. Meantime, our mother discovered bears feasting on wild blueberries in the Lloyd’s backyard, terrifying her.

By the time we lumbered into Canada, we were thoroughly sick of each other. By the first Canadian sunrise, Dad — ever eager to buy property — met with a Realtor. The innkeeper knocked at my door, saying Dad had arranged for me and my sister to help out with housekeeping in exchange for lower room rates.

We grudgingly complied because, well, we’re Southerners. Dad also rejected driving to the Green Gables heritage site. Instead, we returned via Moncton, experiencing the much-ballyhooed Magnetic Hill. As Dad and my brothers exclaimed, I sighed dramatically.

As we continued homeward, nerves shot, Mom overruled Dad and chose a white-tablecloth restaurant, where we (inscrutably) ordered six tomato juice cocktails while he was in the bathroom. Seeing the waiter place juices on a little saucer before all of us, he exploded, “Do you think I’m made of money?” All eyes followed as we noisily scraped our chairs away from the table and departed.

There were more proverbial straws soon to break the camel’s fractured back. Naturally, the car threw a fan belt before we made it to the Mason Dixon Line. The radiator blew, too, prompting me to dub the wagon “Moby Dick.”

We dressed in shorts and T-shirts, seeking relief from the heat, but my sweat-damp thighs stuck to the brown Naugahyde seats. Each shift of my posture produced embarrassing fart-like noises, delighting my siblings. My youngest brother imitated this, producing a gross symphony of sounds to accompany the miles southward — an obscene vacation soundtrack.

Despite Moby Dick’s many ills, and our laments and complaints, Dad finally docked him in our driveway.

I leaped out, pirouetted in the gravel, and raced inside to claim the aqua-colored Princess phone by my parents’ bed.

Later, my father and brothers remembered the trip positively. They would extol New England’s abundant beauty, plus lack of litter, billboards and heat, seemingly forgetting all else. Dad would tell all listeners about the mystery of Magnetic Hill.

But my mother’s brow would raise, her eyes round before exploding. “Tunnels and bridges! Bears in Maine! Overtaxed hairspray costs in Canada! Miles of nothing! That hideous, hot station wagon! Never. Again.”

“Say what you want,” Dad would muse affably, a changed man once home in his easy chair. “That’s some bee-yoo-tee-ful country up there. Can’t wait to get back.” OH

Cynthia Adam is a contributing editor to O.Henry magazine.

2024 Department Home Grown

In Good Taste

IN GOOD TASTE

Meltdown Turned Masterpiece

A brown-butter sugar cookie and raspberry ice cream sammie

Story and photography by Jasmine Comer

My sister’s devotion to ice cream is legendary. Once, years ago at a family gathering when she was 5, she dropped her ice cream cone on the ground and immediately had a, whoops, meltdown. You would’ve thought her cone had been the very last frozen treat in the world. Even today, her passion for ice cream still goes unrivaled in our family. She’s the inspiration behind this recipe.

There’s truly something about homemade ice cream. Unlike store-bought varieties, it is made with love — often with someone special in mind. You get to customize everything from flavors and textures to mix-ins. Watching the churner work its magic, transforming ingredients into a cool, creamy confection is pure summertime satisfaction. And that first bite of ice cream you made with your own hands? Sweetness that goes beyond flavor.

Go ahead and pull out all the stops by sandwiching raspberry ice cream between brown-butter sugar cookies. The crisp, buttery cookies cradle the velvety, tart-and-sweet raspberry ice cream for a symphony of balanced flavors and textures. To achieve a perfectly creamy texture, I use equal parts milk and cream in the ice cream base. The beauty of this recipe lies in its endless possibilities. You can replace the raspberries with any soft seasonal fruit. Just make sure to puree before stirring it into the base. And there’s nothing wrong with vanilla or chocolate ice cream. This recipe might be a labor of love, but it’s totally worth it. I can’t promise you won’t have a meltdown after the last of your ice cream sandwiches are gone, though.

Raspberry Ice Cream

(Recipe adapted from Buttermilk By Sam)

Ingredients

4 large egg yolks
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 cup whole milk
1 cup heavy cream

12 ounces fresh raspberries
Pinch of salt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions

In a pot over medium-low heat, add and mix the egg yolks, sugar, whole milk and heavy cream. Simmer until the mixture thickens and reaches a temperature of 165 degrees Fahrenheit.
Transfer the mixture to a bowl.
Meanwhile, puree the raspberries in a food processor.
Stir the raspberries into the cream mixture. Place the mixture in the fridge overnight.
Follow the instructions on your ice cream machine. Then transfer to a freezer safe container.

Brown-Butter Sugar Cookies

Ingredients

1/2 cup butter, cubed
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup cane sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 cup flour
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cornstarch
Pinch of salt

Directions

Place the butter in small pot over medium heat. Stir continuously. The butter will start to crackle and then it will stop. It will then become foamy. Keep stirring until you see brown bits in the bottom of the pot. Pour the butter into a glass bowl to cool.
Once the butter is cooled, add it to a large bowl with the sugars. Whisk until combined. Then whisk in the egg and vanilla extract.
Fold in the flour, baking soda, baking powder and cornstarch. Divide into eight balls.
Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes, preferably overnight.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit and place the chilled dough balls on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.
Bake for 8–10 minutes or until the edges are golden brown and the tops of the cookies are slightly puffy.
Cool on the baking sheet for 5–7 minutes. Then transfer to a rack until completely cooled.
Before assembling the ice cream sandwiches, it may be necessary to let the ice cream soften a bit. Let it sit out at room temperature until it is soft enough to scoop. Place a generous scoop of ice cream on one cookie. Then place another cookie on top and smash the ice cream until it spreads to the edges of the cookie sandwich.
Enjoy! OH

Jasmine Comer is the creator of Lively Meals, a food blog where she shares delicious, everyday recipes. You can find her on Instagram
@livelymeals.

2024 Department In Good Taste

Art of the State

ART OF THE STATE

Dichotomies & Gaps

Frank Campion’s examinations in paint

By Liza Roberts

Clemmons-based artist Frank Campion brings a cerebral tenacity to his explorations of color and geometry. A series of paintings examining vertical slices of abstracted landscape evolves into another, which juxtaposes rational and random compositional styles, which then gives way to pieces addressing the spaces between those dichotomies. Gap, a recent painting, explores all of that, with the added dimension of a snippet of a view, a depiction of the ways our eyes take in the world before us.

Lately, it’s been hard work. “Sometimes artists have this conceit that everything they touch is going to turn to gold,” he says. “The truth is that it rarely does. So you have to make a lot of messes.” Gap, for instance, is “coming out of the midst of exploring where things might go.”

Campion says 2024 has been a year of just that, of “mucking about, cutting stuff up and putting it back together again. It’s a fun way to work because you can move stuff around without committing to it. It ends up looking like it’s fall in the studio: There’s leaves everywhere, and I’m just sort of blowing them around.”

He made his Dichotomies series by taping off one side of the canvas and painting the other “until it looked interesting.” Then he’d cover that painted side with newspaper and go to work on the blank one. When it was complete, he’d unveil the full canvas to himself. “There are moments when it’s really kind of interesting,” he says. “I have a vague memory of what the other side was like when I peel the tape and the newspaper off, and sometimes it’s good, and sometimes it’s not.”

Gap represents his current interest in “playing around with the idea of gaps and alleys and fissures, looking for a looser way of working. Instead of having two fields to work with, I’m seeing what happens in between them.”

To watch Campion paint is to witness intuitive creativity at work. Once, on a studio visit, he pulled a canvas to the floor and stared at it for a moment before tipping a bucket of paint onto its blank expanse. The paint was gray and viscous. It splashed indiscriminately, like muddy water. He studied it for a moment, then tipped the bucket again and again and again, finally picking up a broom-scaled squeegee to push and pull it back and forth. As starry splotches became ghostly shapes beneath a paler scrim, this respected painter looked for all the world like a pensive janitor, mopping the floor.

The result, weeks later, belied those humble beginnings. Sharp geometry, deep blue, soft orange and acid yellow layered the gray-splashed canvas with subtlety and contrast, dimension and structure. Pieces of gray remained, muddying some of the bright shades, swirling in tendrils on the margins.

“I like color. I like emotion,” Campion says. “I like the collision of chaos and order.” What viewers see in his work includes all of that, but most of all, he says, it’s what they bring to it themselves. “One of the things I like about abstraction is that it’s a kind of mirror. It’s a challenge.”

Campion works in a modernist showpiece of a studio he designed and attached to his house in a residential neighborhood (a contractor likened the space to the spot where Ferris Bueller’s friend Cameron’s father parked his ill-fated Ferrari). It’s a space that challenges him, delightedly so. Miles Davis plays on a continuous loop, art books fill side tables, sunlight pours through a ceiling of skylights; there’s room for giant canvases and places to sit and talk. The floor is a mosaic of speckled paint, and so is he. “He” being “Frank 2.0,” a “re-emerging artist,” as he calls himself (in writing, anyway), the present-day iteration of a Harvard-educated man who came to prominence as a young artist in Boston in the 1980s. Campion had collectors, critically successful solo shows, and was in group shows at the Institute of Contemporary Art and Boston Museum of Fine Arts (where one of his paintings is in the permanent collection). Then he became disillusioned with all of it, walked away from art completely, and immersed himself for more than 30 years in a successful advertising career.

That’s what brought him to Winston-Salem, a top job at ad firm Long, Haymes & Carr, where accounts like IBM, Hanes Hosiery and Wachovia Bank and Trust Co. kept things interesting. “It was a great ride,” he says, “very creative.” After that, painting called him back.

From the beginning, color has been a main attraction. So has tension. Campion says he’s constantly intrigued by “the imposition of geometry, with its logical and rational right angles and parallel lines, pitted against a painterly catastrophe.”

His description of such a catastrophe sounds like the musings of a man in love with his work: “It’s random spills and splats, and drippy, sloppy paint. Thick paint, thin paint, rational form against random painterly incident. When I look at all the things I’ve worked on, that’s a consistent theme.” OH

This is an excerpt from Art of the State: Celebrating the Art of North Carolina, published by UNC Press.

2024 Art of the State Department

Omnivorous Reader

OMNIVOROUS READER

More Than a Mystery

Murder haunts a college town.

By Anne Blythe

The makings for an ordinary crime thriller are present in Joanna Pearson’s first novel, but Bright and Tender Dark is anything but ordinary.

In the first few pages, Karlie, an alluring and enigmatic college student, is found dead in an off-campus apartment, brutally murdered, with no clear trail to the suspect. A former busboy with an eighth-grade education is in prison, conveniently convicted of her murder and serving time for a crime that shattered the tranquility of a college town.

The whodunnit aspect is there.

Joy, Karlie’s freshman year roommate and Pearson’s complicated protagonist, thinks the justice system got the wrong man. It is through Joy’s hunt for the real killer that we quickly realize Pearson’s book is a bit different from the traditional murder mystery. Layered on top is a retrospective investigation into the psychological ripple effects that Karlie’s dark death has had on the whole community, connecting seemingly unconnected people even two decades after it happened.

Pearson, a psychiatrist who lives in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro area, is also a poet and short story writer who now can add literary crime fiction to her compilation of writing genres. Just as her short story collections show that her poetic style spans literary genres, Bright and Tender Dark shows that her storytelling skills extend beyond short stories to novels. Many of the chapters could stand alone as stories within the larger story.

Pearson is masterful at character building. We meet Joy in the throes of middle age. She’s a mother of two finding a new footing after a painful divorce, assessing and reassessing her life. That evaluation creates the springboard for bouncing between two critical times in her life: the present, in which her ex is about to become a father again with his new wife; and the past, for which she has a new obsession, a decades-old murder.

Part of her compulsion comes from an unopened letter that Joy’s teenage son, Sean, finds in a book of John Donne poetry he has borrowed for English class.

It’s from Karlie.

“The letter has made a long and improbable voyage through time after being tucked away and forgotten, never even opened,” Pearson writes. “A miracle. An artifact of an old-fashioned epistolary era. Sean hands the letter to Joy with the solemnity of someone who has grown up on Snapchat. Joy’s hands tremble at the sight of the familiar handwriting. She dare not open it.”

Joy had been taking long walks alone at night, unable to sleep. Words and phrases reverberated through her mind as it raced. “Constitutionally unhappy.” That’s how her husband had described her as their marriage was blowing up. It had been “oppressive” for him, he said.

“He made the unhappiness sound like the core feature of her personality,” Pearson writes. “A suffocating force. The way that Joy looked at the world, pinched and vigilant, bracing for fire ants, falling branches, and tax deadlines, rather than celebrations. But her unhappiness allowed her to get things done!”

Joy eventually musters the courage to open that letter from Karlie. It was written in December 1999, shortly before her death, and is filled with exclamation points and underlined words — Karlie’s “characteristic arbitrary overuse of emphasis” on full display. But the letter holds a clue, one that Joy has not seen in any of the coverage of Karlie’s death, a mention of a BMW that had been pulling up outside her apartment. In the letter Karlie wonders whether it was Joy, but Joy didn’t have a BMW, nor had she been following Karlie to her apartment. Now, nearly two decades later, Joy is determined to find out who it was.

The search takes her back to old haunts in Chapel Hill, where Joy and Karlie went to college and where Joy still lives. She spirals into the depths of internet conspiracy theorists and true-crime Reddit platforms.

Pearson introduces an intriguing cast of characters: the predatory professor who woos his female students; the mother of the man doing time for the crime; the transgender night manager of the apartment building where Karlie was killed; the teenage son of a police chief on the high school soccer team with Joy’s son; people in cult-like religious groups; and more.

She takes her readers on a journey of discovery, giving them a glimpse of each character’s flaws and leaving open the possibility that they might be the killer, while also revealing clues that raise doubts about their potential guilt.

For anyone aware of high profile murders in Chapel Hill over the past couple of decades, there might seem to be some similarities with the 2012 killing of UNC sophomore Faith Hedgepeth and the 2008 death of UNC student body president Eve Carson. But at readings and in published interviews, Pearson has said the book is not based on a true crime. It’s fiction, although as a writer and engaged resident in the area, Pearson acknowledges that she cannot escape true events that continue to haunt the community. Writers write what they know.

Readers will appreciate Pearson’s adroit descriptions of Chapel Hill, places both real and imagined. She takes you onto campus, inside its buildings, and across its many grassy quads and wooded edges. Spots on Franklin Street and in downtown Carrboro are recognizable, as are near-campus neighborhoods.

As Pearson explores the mystery of an inexplicable crime in her novel, she also delves into the many mysteries of the mind. Her novel is a dark, yet tender and bright study of the void a death creates in a community, and the way people use that memory to make sense of themselves. OH

Anne Blythe has been a reporter in North Carolina for more than three decades covering city halls, higher education, the courts, crime, hurricanes, ice storms, droughts, floods, college sports, health care and many wonderful characters who make this state such an interesting place.

2024 Department Omnivorous Reader

Tea Leaf Astrologer

TEA LEAF ASTROLOGER

Leo

(July 23 – August 22)

Impossible as it seems, someone dear forgets your birthday this month. Do you: a) attack them; b) discard them; or c) both? The new moon in Leo on August 4 spells reinvention and radical honesty. If there’s something — or someone — you’ve outgrown, there’s no need to make a production of it. That said, when Mercury enters your sign mid-month, your life becomes a bit of a Broadway musical. Take the stage and own it.

Tea leaf “fortunes” for the rest of you:

Virgo (August 23 – September 22)

Try a fresh coat of paint.

Libra (September 23 – October 22)

Trust your bones.

Scorpio (October 23 – November 21)

Dot your i’s and cross your fingers.

Sagittarius (November 22 – December 21)

The world will keep spinning.

Capricorn (December 22 – January 19)

Dream a little bigger.

Aquarius (January 20 – February 18)

Don’t skip the cooldown.

Pisces (February 19 – March 20)

Check the tread.

Aries (March 21 – April 19)

Pack your toothbrush.

Taurus (April 20 – May 20)

It’s time to go off-script.

Gemini (May 21 – June 20)

Breathe between reps.

Cancer (June 21 – July 22)

Leave some space for the miracle. OH

Zora Stellanova has been divining with tea leaves since Game of Thrones’ Starbucks cup mishap of 2019. While she’s not exactly a medium, she’s far from average. She lives in the N.C. foothills with her Sphynx cat, Lyla.

2024 Department Tea Leaf Astrologer

Simple Life

SIMPLE LIFE

The Quiet of Nature

In an increasingly loud world, maybe we should be still and listen to nature

By Jim Dodson

It’s two hours before sunrise and, per my daily morning ritual, I’m sitting with my old cat, Boo Radley, in a wooden chair beneath the stars and a shining quarter-moon.

Today’s forecast calls for another summer scorcher.

For the moment, however, the world around me is cool and amazingly quiet.

It’s the perfect moment to think, pray or simply listen to nature waking up.

In an hour or so, the world will begin to stir as folks rise and go about their daily lives. Nature will be drowned out by the white noise of commuter traffic, tooting horns and sirens.

But, for now, all I hear is the peaceful hoot of an owl somewhere off in the neighborhood trees, the fading chirr of crickets and the lonely bark of a dog a mile or two away. Amazing how sound carries in such a peaceful, quiet world.

Ah, there it is, right on cue! The first birdsong of the new day. I recognize the tune from a certain gray catbird that seems to enjoy starting the morning chorus. Soon, the trees around us will be alive with the morning melodies of Carolina warblers, eastern bluebirds and the northern cardinals. What a perfect way to lift a summer night’s curtain and herald the dawn!

Unfortunately, it’s a sound that Earth scientists fear may be vanishing before our very ears.

On a planet where many are concerned about the impacts of global warming, declining natural resources and vanishing species, it seems to me that noise pollution and the disappearing sounds of the natural world might be among the most worrying impacts of all.

A recent article in The Guardian alarmingly warns of a “deathly silence” they claim results from the accelerating loss of natural habitats around the globe.

The authors note that sound has become an important measurement in understanding the health and biodiversity of our planet’s ecosystems. “Our forests, soils and oceans all produce their own acoustic signatures,” they write, noting that the quiet falling across thousands of habitats can be measured using ecoacoustics. They cite “extraordinary losses in the density and variety of species. Disappearing or losing volume along with them are many familiar sounds: the morning calls of birds, rustle of mammals through undergrowth and summer hum of insects.”

A veteran soundscape recordist named Bernie Krause, who has devoted more than 5,000 hours to recording nature from seven continents over the past 55 years, estimates that “70 percent of his archive is from habitats that no longer exist.”

As quiet natural places are drowned out by the sounds of freeways, cellphones and the daily grind of modern life, fortunately, a nonprofit group called Quiet Parks International is working to identify and preserve sacred quiet places in cities, wilderness areas and national parks, where all one hears — for the moment at least — is the beat of nature, the pulse of life in the wild.

“Quiet, I think, holds space for things we can’t verbalize as humans,” the group’s executive director, Matthew Mikkelsen, recently told CBS News. “We use silence as a way to honor things.” Quiet, he notes, is becoming harder and harder to find these days, even in the most remote wilderness or within the depths of the national parks. “Every year we see more and more data to reaffirm what we’ve known for a long time — that quiet is becoming extinct.”

Perhaps because I grew up in a series of sleepy small towns across the lower South, places where I spent most of my days wandering at will in nature, I’ve been groomed to be a seeker of natural silence and quiet places in my life.

The first decade of my journalism career was spent in major cities, embedded in the cacophony of busy streets, which explains why I bolted for the forests and rivers of northern New England the moment I had the chance to escape honking horns, blasting radios, screaming sirens and even background music in restaurants, a personal annoyance I’ve never quite fathomed.

Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by traveling in France and Italy and other ancient places. There, cafes and bistros are generally meant to foster a relaxed, slower pace of life through the auspices of good food, lingering conversations and woolgathering as one watches the harried world pass by.

It is no accident that I built my first house on a hilltop near the coast of Maine, surrounded by 200 pristine wooded acres of beech and hemlock trees. On summer evenings, my young children and I could hear the forest coming alive with sounds and often saw and heard wildlife — whitetail deer, pheasants and hawks, a large lady porcupine and even (once) a young male moose — gathering at the edges of our vast lawn where I created feeding areas of edible native plants for our wild neighbors. On frigid winter nights, I put on my Elmer Fudd jacket and toted 50-pound bags of sorghum out to that feeding spot by the edge of the woods, where deer and other critters could be seen dining in a moonlit night. The eerie late-night sound of coyotes calling deep in the forest reminded us that we were the newcomers to their quiet keep.

One reason I love the game of golf is because golf is a two- or three-hour adventure in nature where the simple elements of wind, rain, sand and water provide an existential challenge to mind and body. As a kid, I learned to play golf alone, walking my father’s golf course in the late afternoon, when most of the older golfers had gone home. I came to love “solo golf” at a time of day when the shadows lengthened and the sounds of nature began to reawaken creatures great and small.

Golf courses, like libraries, are meant to be quiet places — which makes the recent trend of golf carts equipped with digital music systems particularly bothersome to a lover of nature’s quiet sounds.

Pause for a moment and just think what one can do in the quiet:

Read a good book.

Admire a sunset.

Rest and recover.

Take an afternoon nap.

Watch birds feed.

Write a letter.

Talk to the universe.

Say a prayer.

Grieve — or feel gratitude.

Think through a problem.

“In quietness,” says the book A Course in Miracles, “are all things answered.”

My heart aches when I hear that the world’s natural places may be going silent.

A world without nature’s quiet sounds would be a very lonely place.

Hopefully, we’ll learn to listen before it’s too late.

Jim Dodson is the founding editor of O.Henry.

2024 Department Simple Life

Chaos Theory

CHAOS THEORY

By Cassie Bustamante

When I imagine heaven — or whatever awaits me on the other side — I envision a cozy room with a roaring fire, a lush, rose-colored velvet chair to sink into, next to which sits a side table holding a steaming cuppa. And surrounding me? Warm-toned wooden walls lined with shelves upon shelves of all the books I didn’t have time to read in my time on Earth. Currently, my TBR — “to be read” — list most definitely exceeds the amount of minutes I have left in this lifetime, and quite possibly the next, too.

And that pile of books grows larger by the minute. Every week brings exciting releases, offering new opportunities to escape into fictional worlds, delve into the minds of intriguing people or learn about places and times past. How on earth am I supposed to keep up with that while also working, running a household and keeping my kids alive at the same time? Therein lies the dilemma.

When overwhelm strikes, I have to step not back, but closer. Don’t look at the big picture, because it’s scary as hell. Instead, focus on one small part. After all, how do you eat an elephant? Well, frankly, I am a pescatarian, so I wouldn’t know. But I’ve heard it’s one bite at a time.

To celebrate our reading issue, here are a few of the nibbles I’ve taken over the last year that have stood out.

A few years back, I read Daisy Jones & the Six and loved it so much that I was ready to consume everything by Taylor Jenkins Reid. And yet, I didn’t. But if you want to know the trick to starting a book faster, it’s borrowing — versus buying — because you’re obligated to return it. Thankfully, a friend loaned me her copy of
Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. When I finished it, I didn’t want to return it. While the title may leave you doubtful, it’s a beautiful love story with so many facets of human emotion. Did I cry? Yes. But do I weep at the end of most books that enrapture me? Also yes. After every great book comes a period of mourning.

Colleen Hoover is some sort of magical unicorn who writes more books in a year than I get haircuts! Granted, I only go to the salon two to three times annually. Just like my stylist — hi, Caitlin! — she hasn’t yet let me down. (Even when I got bangs.) With so much hype around Verity, I had to read it and, boy, was it a gripping page-turner! While many of Hoover’s books are considered romantic, this thrilling tale was dark and unputdownable. By the last page, I had to pick my jaw up off the floor. For fans of Verity, or books that, if made into movies, would be in the film noir genre, also check out Push by Ashley Audrain.

When it comes to nonfiction, especially memoirs, I prefer the audio versions. Why? Nothing beats hearing the tone and emotion delivered directly by the author. Plus, I can multitask, strolling my neighborhood with my dogs at the same time. (Note: If you see a woman power-walking through Starmount, earbuds in, laughing hysterically or with tears streaming down her face, stop and introduce yourself to me!)

Two memoirs that had me walking more miles than I needed are Harrison Scott Key’s How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told and Jeanette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died. Key’s book shares a comedic and intimate look at his wife’s infidelity and the marital journey that followed. I found myself in hysterics and relaying quotes to my husband, Chris, who looked at me quizzically. A story of cheating that’s hilarious? But yes.

By opening a window into her vulnerability and letting out the innermost secrets of her heart, McCurdy shares the darkest corners of her life, the areas most prefer to keep locked behind a closed door. And I will always appreciate a memoir that’s written with honesty, no matter how hard or heartbreaking.

What’s next on my TBR? I’m not totally sure. But I think I’ll snag a novel from my living room bookshelves, sink into our worn brown leather sofa and read by the soft glow of a sconce, my dogs comfortably nestled by my feet. Maybe, just maybe, heaven is a place on Earth after all.

2024 Chaos Theory Department

Life’s Funny

LIFE'S FUNNY

Shhh!

Learning to read (in) a room full of people

By Maria Johnson

A few years ago, an editor pitched me a column idea.

“You know what would be fun?” he said.

“What would be fun?” I asked, taking the bait.

“For you to go someplace where you couldn’t talk and write about it later,” he teased.

“Fun for you,” I shot back.

But I remembered that challenge when I saw a local calendar listing called “Greensboro Silent Book Club.” Here was my chance to be still and know . . . something.

I rang up the group’s founder, 32-year-old Maria Perdomo, who explained that she started the local SBC chapter in the fall of 2019 after hearing an NPR story about the first club in San Francisco.

Members brought their own books and read quietly in a shared space for an hour. Conversation before and after was optional. The practice spread and gelled into a national organization.

The concept made sense to Perdomo, who grew up in Colombia, in a culture that exalted storytelling. Her father, a writer, and her brother devoured books. By comparison, Perdomo was a literary slow-poke.

“It kinda kept me from wanting to engage with books in my own way,” she says.

Eventually, she found her way back to words. She started blogging while she was an international studies student at UNCG, and she yearned for a community of like-minded readers.

Cue the NPR story. Perdomo checked the SBC website — “Welcome to introvert happy hour,” it trumpets quietly — and saw a chapter in the Triangle, but nothing in the Triad. So she and a friend started a monthly meet-up in Greensboro’s independent book store, Scuppernong.

The group met a handful of times before COVID and resumed their regular hushed assemblies in 2023.

Every second Sunday of the month, they draw a core of 10 to 20 people, just enough to fill every seat in the comfortable space at the back of the store.

“My goal is to make it a space that’s not stressful,” says Perdomo, who now writes a Substack newsletter. “We hear all the time, ‘I’m a slow reader,’ but here no one is going to look down on you because you haven’t finished that massive book you started.”

I’m intrigued. I’m not an introvert, but I am a rather slow reader.

Also, my husband has just given me The Backyard Bird Chronicles, a nonfiction handbook by celebrated novelist Amy Tan. I tote the book to the next SBC meeting and take a short-term vow of silence.

Beforehand, Rachel Wasden, who leads the gathering in Perdomo’s absence, explains that people will show up with stories in a variety of platforms — traditional books, tablets, e-readers and audiobooks.

Once, a guy worked on writing his own book.

The point is, everyone will do their own thing, quietly, together.

“Every time I tell someone about it, they say, ‘That’s so weird. Why wouldn’t you read at home, in silence?’” Wasden says.

Her answer: It’s about choice. And energy, a precious commodity for introverts.

“You get to participate, or not participate, as much as you want,” she says.

The funny thing is, by the time I make it to the back of the store, these introverts — average age mid-30s — are chatting up a storm. Rachel asks folks to introduce themselves with names, pronouns and a short description of what they’re reading.

Jeff is working his way though The Greatest Beer Run Ever, the true account of a Vietnam vet who returns to the war as a sort of civilian beer fairy to U.S. troops.

Priya is reading Fairy Tales of Ireland.

Enid has brought the same book she brought last time, Notes on an Execution, the story of a serial killer’s life as seen through the eyes of women in his life. But she might crochet instead.

Kelli, a first-timer, is well into The Yellow Wallpaper.

Heaven, another first-timer, is nibbling away at Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.

The reading list goes on. Rachel, who is plowing through She Who Became the Sun, a re-telling of the Chinese myth of Mulan, calls the meeting to order.

It’s 12:25 p.m., not that anyone is counting the minutes she’ll have to remain quiet.

Ready. Set. Silence.

Whoa. They weren’t kidding. Everyone is reading.

My attention snags on the store’s creaking wooden floorboards.

On the violin music that wafts through speakers at the front of the shop.

On the crispy whiff of pages turning.

I look up and scan the group. Does anyone want to . . . ?

Nope. All heads are down.

Surrounded by stories that I’m forbidden to tap via conversation, I wade into the book in my lap. It’s good stuff.

Tan, who, as a child, liked to draw and play in creeks, outgrew those joys as an adult. Only at age 64 did she sign up for a birding group that sketched their subjects in the field.

It makes me wonder: What could a “new thing” be for me? How long would it take to learn? And . . . what time is it now?

I check my phone. 12:49. Hmm.

Quite the variety of footwear we have in this circle. I need a pedicure. And who is that crooning on the speakers now? Andrea Bocelli?

I rub my eyebrows to reset. It occurs to me how much reading is like meditating, bringing focus to the moment, noticing how the mind wanders and reeling it in again. It also dawns on me why I’m a relatively slow reader.

Finally, Rachel speaks: “If you want to finish the page you’re on, we’ll come together in another minute or so.”

It’s 1:24 p.m.

I pretend to read for the last minute.

Rachel welcomes us back into communion with a prompt for discussion.

“Where does your mind go when you read?” she asks.

I can’t help but laugh. Silently, of course. OH

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry magazine. Email her at ohenrymaria@gmail.com. Find an SBC chapter near you at silentbook.club. Maria Perdomo’s newsletter, “here I am,” can be found at mariamillefois.substack.com.

2024 Department Life's Funny