Feature | O.Henry Magazine

Poem September 2026

Proto-Indo-European Speakers

Ross White

Those steppe-dwellers had words for apple

and bee, so we can guess at where they were

and weren’t, can guess at the wheeled wagons

and lactose-tolerant mutations and skills

on horseback that helped them spread the tongue.

I love learning how thick forests kept languages

isolated, how textiles weren’t possible until sheep

ascended mountainous terrain in western Asia

and evolved longer wool, and all these factors

led to a family of shared sounds reaching

across continents, across time. Our words

for mouse and mead and star and new

aren’t so different from theirs, and I can’t help

thinking that they looked drunkenly

at the night sky and felt the same wonder

and renewal that I do when I stumble

into the darkness and am swallowed by a night

whose constellations form the same shapes

those nomadic herders would have seen —

bear, serpent, warring god — each a light

from someone else’s sun, so distant

it might as well be eternity. And someday,

my human descendant may reach

one of those planets and may have on the journey

a record of the words I spoke during this time

of ignorance, and he may see in his own words

some parallel to mine: remember or solace or joy.

Ross White is the director of Bull City Press, an independent publisher of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. He is the author of Charm Offensive, winner of the Sexton Prize for Poetry. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-hosts The Chapbook, a podcast devoted to tiny, delightful collections.

A Golden Opportunity

A once-vacant Fisher Park home overflows with life and color

By Cassie Bustamante

Photographs by Betsy Blake

“I’d always wanted to live in an old house,” says Catherine Birch. Even as a child she knew she wanted to fix up old homes. Four years ago, an outdated, water-damaged abode with peeling paint provided her and her husband, Jed, a golden opportunity. “This grand Fisher Park home needs a new owner who will repair and restore her to her former glory,” the listing read.

Today, the Dutch Colonial’s rich, olive-green door and porch — Farrow & Ball’s Bancha — invite guests inside, where textiles, painted ceilings, wallpaper and artwork convey a joyful life. Several rooms are saturated in color with splashes of whimsy. Jed and Catherine, who serves on the Greensboro Historic Building Trust board, have during their renovation uncovered clues to the house’s former inhabitants while making it into a home of their own.

While Catherine’s childhood home in nearby Randleman wasn’t historic, she knows exactly where that seed of desire was planted: in her grandmother’s over-century-old house. Out of that sprang a path forward. After attending UNCG for a couple of years, she transferred to Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), where she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in historic preservation. Today, she works as lead designer at Greensboro Kitchen and Bath, a family business her father and brother launched in 2007 when she was in college.

In 2009, while enrolled at SCAD, Catherine met Jed on a blind date — at Bass Pro Shops, of all places. Who knew romance could blossom between racks of fishing poles and rugged apparel? Jed, a golf irrigation specialist, was working on a course in Bluffton, S.C., 40 minutes from Savannah, with a fellow Catherine’s roommate was dating. (As it turns out, they would also go on to marry). Fall breezes had just begun to cool Southern temperatures, so Jed’s coworker lured him there under the pretense of gearing up for cold weather. Jed took the bait — after all, their work had them outside most days. “And by the way, my girlfriend wants to go and she’s gonna bring a friend,” Jed recalls his pal saying.

“It was a set up,” he adds.

“We were kind of never apart after that,” says Catherine, her dark-brown eyes glimmering. “It was just a natural fit.”

After Catherine’s 2011 graduation, the young couple remained in Savannah for another eight months or so until Jed, who earned his bachelor’s degree in turf science from The Ohio State University, was tapped for a new opportunity. A friend of his had taken a superintendent’s job at a Lexington, Kentucky, country club. “He called me and was like, if you ever want something different, give me a call,” says Jed.

Jed, who hails from Virginia, was burnt out on South Carolina. Soon enough, the moving truck wheels were in motion, and Catherine found herself working at the country club, too. “My job morphed several times,” she recalls. Eventually, she ended up doing event planning at the club, which led to a role doing the same at Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, the largest National Historic Landmark in Kentucky. Focused on historic preservation, Shaker Village felt more in line with her career goals.

In Lexington, the couple first dipped their toes — or perhaps dove headfirst — into old-home ownership and all that comes with it. They purchased a 1924 fixer-upper that “needed a lot of work.” On top of that, they got married and adopted Eddie, a gentle, old hound dog who turns 14 this month.

Sights set on starting their own family and first renovation behind them, Catherine and Jed decided to relocate to Greensboro in 2018. Catherine joined the family business and Jed found a position with a local distributor in commercial and sports turf irrigation services. His role has him often traveling to Southern university campuses and professional stadiums. “I was at Wake Forest [University] today,” he says.

With two new jobs and Catherine’s desire to revamp Greensboro Kitchen and Bath a bit, they decided to purchase a home that, while still old, didn’t need work. Their plates were full enough as it was. They zeroed in on Lindley Park and Fisher Park, seeking “an older, historic neighborhood that’s walkable with sidewalks.” On New Year’s Eve that year, the couple closed on a 1935 Lindley Park charmer that had already been renovated by Frye Build + Design.

“It was a good house,” says Catherine. But, she adds, “We just never felt fully comfortable because there was nothing for us to do.” That itch to “put our stamp on it” crept back in and, after a few years, they began looking for something that needed the love they had to give.

Their realtors, Maggie Marston and Joanna Harris, showed them a few contenders before they stepped foot inside what is now their Florence Street home (@florencestreetrevival on Instagram). Jed wandered upstairs with Joanna.

“I remember being in what is now our primary bedroom,” he says. “It was late afternoon.”

“Oh, it was when that light’s perfect,” says Catherine, a dreamy look in her eyes. “That room just glows.”

That golden-hour moment sealed the deal. Jed recalls knowing right then, “Yeah, this is it.”

The glass-cased sunporch, where gutters had backed up above, was in a state of rot and ruin. No one had lived in the house for over a decade. In the kitchen, the ceiling had collapsed due to an upstairs bathroom leak. Far from perfect, the 1915 house was ideal for them: It was structurally sound, they liked the layout and it was in a location they loved.

Built originally as a spec house for the Brooks Lumber Company — “I never thought I would buy a spec house,” jokes Catherine — the plans were designed by architect Raleigh James Hughes. But when Brooks Lumber completed construction, they veered from the blueprints’ square columns, opting for classic instead, leaving Hughes fuming. The home’s very first owner is listed as B.B. Tatum, who, with C.L. Stafford, and Ruth and W. C. Boren Jr., founded Tatum’s Inc., the entity that constructed Fisher Park’s pre-war apartments known as Cannon Court.

Listed in August 2022, the house became officially theirs two-and-a-half weeks later, though it wouldn’t be until March 2025 that they moved in. But before it was theirs, it had been owned by generations of the same family for over 70 years. Although Cora Sawyer Scott, who purchased the house with her husband in 1951, renovated in the early 1950s. It was largely untouched after that.

They got to work right away, first addressing the layout by opening one wall to add a doorway between the kitchen and the central room. What they found behind that wall surprised them. “We discovered that it had always been open,” says Catherine. Turns out, they had restored the original flow. Opening the wall allowed them to turn a former pantry into a powder room, accessible through an old, paneled door found at Preservation Greensboro’s Architectural Salvage. A black-and-gold, oval sign that hangs on it reads “WC” for wash closet.

Most of the original pine flooring throughout was in good shape — yet hidden underneath thin oak planks. Today, nail holes are visible, but, as Catherine says in an Instagram post from early 2025, “I just love how the lines tell the story of the oak floor that had been placed on top.” The kitchen and the library needed entirely new flooring, but the couple knew the kitchen would be one of the biggest undertakings.

A letter the seller presented to the Birches reads, “The mystery of the third chimney!” Standing on the street, three chimneys are visible on the roofline, one seemingly leading into the kitchen. The letter went on to say that she’d heard her grandparents possibly plastered over it.

With that in mind, the couple removed plaster, exposing brick and revealing — drumroll, please — “holes for a stove, like a stove pipe hole,” says Catherine. “Yep.”

The exposed brick meant their renovation no longer met the Standards for Rehabilitation and, thus, the Birches could no longer apply for historic tax credits. Exposing the brick, it turned out, was “not in keeping with the historic character of the kitchen.”

“One wall,” Jed says with a sigh. “One wall.”

“I really like it,” says Catherine, ever the aesthete, who pushed for keeping the brick.

“You know what I’d rather have?” quips Jed. In the end, Catherine won and continued leaning into utilitarian touches “because in a 1915 and 16 house, the kitchen would have been a very industrial space.”

A freestanding island anchors the space, surrounded by custom oak cabinetry from the family business — where all new cabinetry in the home came from — topped with black soapstone. Upper cabinets with ribbed-glass doors and interior lighting keep the space bright and functional. “My design sense,” says Catherine, “is [using] things that would have been here, but in a more modern way.”

A glass-doored, stainless-steel refrigerator sits on another exposed-brick wall. Catherine spied the Wolf subzero beauty at a trade-show — “one other problem with the job,” she quips. She showed Jed, thinking he’d talk her out of it, but he was all in.

“We are a food-centered family,” he says, noting that they both like to cook.

The walls are Catherine’s go-to white — White Flour by Sherwin-Williams, the same paint used in the central room and on the exterior — while the ceiling is coated in Farrow & Ball’s Dix Blue, “a relaxed green blue,” according to the brand’s website.

On a small, wall-mounted shelf, an original piece by Winston-Salem artist Anna Jarrell adds a rainbow of color, though it’s been covered in glass to protect it from kitchen grease. Catherine purchased the painting off of Instagram during COVID. When everyone else was backyard farming and sourdough baking, Catherine says, “I bought more art than I’ve ever bought before.”

Just off the kitchen is the once-formal dining room, though the space has morphed more into a casual hangout area. When the Birches purchased the home, its walls were covered in a red tonal-stripe, velvet-flocked wallpaper from the 1800s. In the 1940s, Cora scored rolls upon unused rolls, already nearly a century old, from a Hudson River mansion’s estate sale in Upstate New York. When she purchased the Florence Street home, up it went. Today, Catherine has the remaining unused rolls.

Red paper came down, and a handprinted, saturated-pink paper from Zeuxis & Parrhasius called Liebesflügel — aka Wings of Love — went up. The paper’s design was originally created in the early 1900s, notes Catherine.

Catherine had originally intended to use it in her primary closet, but Jed, also a big fan of color, asked, “Why are you going to put it in your closet?’” It was too magnificent to be hidden. The ceiling, painted in Farrow & Ball Rangwali, echoes the paper’s dusty rose.

Corner cabinets Catherine believes were not original to the home were removed and donated to Architectural Salvage. In their place, Catherine and Jed built a banquette flanked by floor-to-ceiling walnut cabinets.

Under a window that they restored, a built-in buffet cabinet was added. The window had been previously covered up by plaster. Why would one cover a perfectly good source of natural light? According to a family member of the previous owner, Catherine says it was because “next door was a frat house and they started peeing off the porch.” She takes that tale with a grain of salt.

The fireplace wall remains the same as it was in the 1950s. The mantel, not original to the house, was added by Cora. In fact, according to Cora’s descendants, none of the home’s four mantels are original and supposedly came from the circa 1870 Tyrell County home of her grandfather — Captain Richard Sawyer of the schooner Santa Maria — when it was torn down in the 1950s. “We tried to keep little parts of that history,” says Catherine.

The grandest of the mantels, along with dentil molding, was added to the central room at that time, too. While this long space is intended as a living room, its seven doorways plus fireplace make layout a challenge. The Birches shifted their dining table into here to give them room for entertaining. The Midcentury-style table sits atop a rug featuring a kaleidoscope of color that mimics the palette of the artwork hanging over the mantel, a painting by Jerry Allen Brem that features pink shelves stuffed to the brim with books. Catherine found it at the Woodland Art Fair, just a few blocks from their Lexington home.

Next to it sits a vintage, black-and-white train photograph. Others are scattered throughout the house. “I guess little boys growing up in Virginia are big on trains,” muses Catherine about Jed’s collection. Most are by famed train photographer O. Winston Link, whose railway work was shot primarily in Virginia.

Flanking the fireplace, French double doors open to the now functional sunporch. Neighbors report that the room was once stacked with stuff, visible through its glass encasement. Once the guttering was revamped to provide proper drainage, they color-soaked it in Dix Blue. The previously-rotted wooden flooring was replaced with terracotta tiles, popular in the 1910s, though Catherine opted for a modern twist on the classic.

Against the one wall that is without windows, an antique mantel with built-in mirror has been mounted. It’s a family heirloom that originated in Catherine’s grandmother’s house, a little memento of her own journey toward historic preservation.

In the back of the house sits a cozy library, bathed in Bancha. A small room that featured just two tall, narrow bookcases, it’s now surrounded in built-in shelving plus a window seat and bench. Above a striped trundle sofa hangs a landscape painting the Birches found on a visit back to Bluffton. “I wanted a piece of art that just reminds us of being there,” says Catherine.

Custom pillows and a matching window shade were crafted by Asheboro design studio Cotton & Wood by Sherry, who made the drapes and cushions throughout the home. Catherine selected the fabric from textile designer Kristy Stafford: Marigold in gold, featuring splashes of chartreuse and pine plus touches of pink and lavender.

Upstairs, the spacious primary bedroom allowed the couple to fit a king-sized bed for the first time. “I’m a very large person,” says Jed. “I like to spread out, then you throw [Eddie] in there and he takes up more of the bed than either her or I.” The Birches added arched detailing surrounding their botanical upholstered headboard — building “nightstands” into the wall to save space — to mimic the room’s arched closet and seating nook. In the nook, new cabinetry replaced the tired, dingy closet, providing Jed with the drawer space he craved. But none of that is what makes it Catherine’s favorite room. It’s the afternoon light that originally sold them. “It just gets this goldeny glow.”

In a corner where a pitiful closet not even deep enough for a coat hanger sat, they created a walk-in closet that houses clothing as well as the washer and dryer. A dusty rose-glass fixture Catherine chose when she was just 4 years old lights it. When her parents were moving out of her childhood home, she grabbed it and it’s moved from house to house ever since. On the wall just outside the closet door hangs a collection of celestial faces formed in clay. Most were made by her artist cousin, Keri, of Earthstar Studio.

What began life as a sleeping porch is now their en suite bathroom. While they had to replace the beadboard walls to make it work, they were able to preserve the beadboard ceiling, painted Dix Blue, of course. Under the corner windows, a soaking tub invites them to bask in the warm glow, while lush houseplants bring nature inside. On the vanity wall and inside the double-headed shower stall, Catherine chose Fireclay brick tile in a mossy green, so you’d feel “like you were showering outside.”

Of all the rooms, she says, this small space took the most time. That’s because Catherine designed the vanity and marble countertop, backsplash and ledge. “As small as it is,” she says, “I probably drew it 50 times.” A prized possession sits atop the countertop, an antique mirror she scored in Kentucky.

Down the hall, the original, smaller bathroom was begging for a makeover. Terracotta Fireclay tiles in a geometric pattern were laid on the floor, while the new shower stall walls are lined in vertical white Fireclay tiles on the bottom, a soft blue similar in tone to Dix Blue above. Wallpaper samples adorn the wall. And the winner?

“I think I’m gonna go with the horses,” Catherine says. The print, a collaboration between Backdrop and Schumacher, features sketches of jockeys atop horses in action, originally printed in 1957 by Schumacher. Of course, it pays homage to the couple’s Lexington days.

One motivating factor in the Birches’ move to Greensboro was starting a family of their own, knowing they’d have the support of Catherine’s parents and brother. As their house neared the finish line, they put in their foster license application and prepared a bedroom, painting it two-thirds of the way up in a muted salmon (Pink Ground by Farrow & Ball), thinking it ideal for a children’s space. Shortly after acquiring their foster license in spring 2025, Catherine got a call about 3-week-old twins while Jed was traveling for work. “We didn’t have cribs, we didn’t have carseats,” she recalls. “We went to the Family Room and that helped a lot.” Now with identical light-wooden cribs, their room is a soft place to land for two tiny toddlers.

From top to bottom, the Birches’ have put their own flourishes on their Fisher Park home, taking it well beyond its former glory. Of course, Catherine wonders — when the time comes — what future owners will think of what they’ve done. But, she says, “The story of the house, how a house has evolved, is what has always attracted me to preservation, how a building lives and how it continues keeping little parts of all that history.” And their chapter is just beginning. OH

2026 Feature

A Portrait of O. Henry

The mysterious master of short stories and tall tales

By Cynthia Adams

By the time he arrived in New York City in 1902, writer William Sydney Porter was in his 40s and had effectively disappeared into his identity as O. Henry. Living in a Gramercy Park apartment, he was grinding pieces as fast as he could produce them, committed to writing a short story weekly from 1903 to 1906.

One biographer, David Stuart, said he wrote his opus, “The Gift of the Magi,” in a few feverish hours as The New York Sunday World’s Christmas edition waited on press. (To further burnish the legend, he was said to have written “Magi” at Pete’s Tavern near his apartment.) Porter produced nearly 400 short stories by 1910.

He sought anonymity, refusing to allow publications to print his photo. He haunted the city by night, including the Bowery and Hell’s Kitchen. And he drank.

During a rare 1909 New York Times interview at home before his death, he suggested the writer describe him as a “healthy butcher.” The writer duly noted his full head of hair. But Porter, in the last stages of cirrhosis, was a dying man.

He reported earning $750 for a short story in the same interview. However, he also shaved five years off his age, saying he was born “in Greensborough” in 1867.

It was a common pattern for the chameleon-like author, having successfully hidden his three years in an Ohio Penitentiary for embezzlement by changing his name. Incarceration, The New Yorker once observed in a piece about Porter, “is the secret he spent the rest of his life trying to hide — even from his daughter.”

By the early 1900s, Marquis Who’s Who in America described him as “a cowboy, sheep herder, merchant, miner, druggist, and extensive traveler.” (He denied being a miner.)

The truth was remarkable enough: Porter was, in fact, a trained pharmacist, sketch artist, ranch hand, editor, bank teller, short-story writer — and, definitively, inmate.

In the fall of 1916, a full six years after his death, The New York Times outed the secret of his incarceration.

Undeterred, in 1918, the Twilight Club, later known as the Society of Arts and Letters, in New York established a national writing prize in his honor. It continues today.

One of Porter’s closest friends from Greensboro, Professor C. Alphonso Smith (buried in Green Hill Cemetery), soon published his biography.

By 1923, a group of well-heeled women met in the home of Mrs. W. Justice to organize the O. Henry Study Club. Initially limited to 24 members, it was later expanded to 35, given its popularity.

In 1925, the club awarded its first O. Henry Short Story Prize, according to a club history by Mary L. Herbert archived at the Greensboro History Museum. A collection of club minutes and programs resides at the Greensboro History Museum.

“When Greensboro had only one senior high school, we established an award for the best short story written by a member of the senior class,” the historian noted. The first-place winner received cash or a government bond and a leather-bound set of O. Henry’s books.

Our magazine’s founding editor, Jim Dodson, won the O. Henry prize in 1970 as a Grimsley High School student. “It was a set of O. Henry books — still have them — and a sweet little certificate,” he recalls. A high school athlete at the time, he adds, “Very embarrassing, instant loss of cred with my buddies.”

According to archives at UNCG, the O. Henry Study Club continued into the 1990s, surviving longer than Porter’s 48 years. Recently, Greensboro resident Teresa Moore discovered a tranche of programs from the 1930s–50s belonging to her great-aunt, founding member Mrs. W. E. (Mary) Blair, depicting member names and duties.

By 1948, the O. Henry Study Club paid an $18.75 government bond to the first-place winner, and $10 to the second-place winner. Payouts were recorded from 1948–1965, when first place had risen to $25. (The writing contest was later overseen by UNCG’s literary magazine.)

Approaching the O. Henry Study Club’s 25th anniversary in 1939, Nellie Rowe, head of the Greensboro Public Library and an O. Henry Study Club member, proposed something ambitious. An original portrait of Greensboro’s native son O. Henry should be presented to the library.

The club raised $500 from its members, equivalent to nearly $12,000 today, commissioning artist Henry Rood Jr.

The club planned the unveiling for September 27, 1939. Mrs. Henry P. (Ada) Foust, invited The Saturday Review from New York, using her finest monogrammed stationery. The Review sent regrets but requested a print of the portrait for publication.

O. Henry’s oil portrait was hung in the library, which occupied the first floor of what is now the Greensboro History Museum. Today it hangs in the Greensboro Public Library downtown.

Surprisingly, the pen name on this magazine’s masthead, created in 2011, was not the only pen name Porter adopted.

Former O.Henry contributing editor Jim Schlosser, who has researched Porter extensively, mentions his use of S. H. Peters and Sydney Porter.

The writer says Porter also considered James L. Bliss, T. B. Down, Howard Clark and Olivier Henry.

While on the lam in New Orleans, he had also flirted with the name Shirley Worth, his older brother’s first and middle names, filing newspaper assignments as Worth.

“A newspaper once wrote and asked me what the ‘O’ stands for,” Porter once said. “I replied, ‘O’ stands for Olivier, the French for Oliver. And several of my stories accordingly appeared in that paper under the name Olivier Henry.”

Only as inmate #30664 at the Ohio State Penitentiary did Porter settle on O. Henry.

The year before his death, Porter told The New York Times reporter, “It was during these New Orleans days that I adopted my pen name of O. Henry. I said to a friend: ‘I’m going to send out some stuff. I don’t know if it amounts to much, so I want to get a literary alias. Help me pick out a good one.’ He suggested that we get a newspaper and pick a name from the first list of notables that we found in it. In the society columns we found the account of a fashionable ball. ‘Here we have our notables,’ said he. We looked down the list and my eye lighted on the name Henry. ‘That’ll do for a last name,’ said I. ‘Now for a first name. I want something short. None of your three-syllable names for me.’ ‘Why don’t you use a plain initial letter, then?’ asked my friend. ‘Good,’ said I, “O” is about the easiest letter written, and “O” it is.’”

Austin, Texas, where he had worked, married and became a father, went unmentioned. It was the place where he had faced the death of a son and wife, plus ruin and conviction for embezzlement. It is also the home of the O. Henry Museum, housed in Porter’s former residence.

He produced as many as 14 short stories in 39 months of imprisonment. Some characters were modeled after friends and inmates. Jimmy Valentine in “A Retrieved Reformation” was based on another drug clerk in the prison hospital who was a “notorious safe blower,” according to a 1916 news story.

Twelve of his “best known stories belong to that period,” noted a posthumous article. The New Yorker piece noted that “bankers, millionaires and politicians . . . are the true grifters” and that Porter sided with “the marginalized and the downtrodden.”

To his close friend Smith, “O. Henry was the composite smile of Greensboro.”

Yet “The Gift of the Magi” differed: “Life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.” Porter wrote those words at 43.

After his death, the writer’s popularity was undiminished, even as his secret was exposed.

Porter’s childhood friend wished to set the record straight. “Professor C. Alphonso Smith of the University of Virginia has decided to publish the complete story of O. Henry’s trial and imprisonment,” The New York Times reported in 1916.

The Times said listening to convicts “from Arizona, Texas, and the Indian Territory” informed his popular works, “turning a stumbling block into a stepping stone . . .”

In an improbable twist to his personal story, prison was where “he passed from journalism to literature.”

Smith’s biography devotedly compared Porter to Rudyard Kipling, Bret Harte and Guy de Maupassant, saying he had been hailed as “the Homer of the Tenderloin” in New York. He corresponded lifelong with Porter.

Smith had previously declared, “Unarguably, the greatest living master of the short story” was none other than Will Porter of Greensboro.

“Even in 1953, the final year of Stalin’s dictatorship, the Soviets printed almost a quarter of a million O. Henry books.” A century later, O. Henry’s popularity in Russia endures.

Porter’s last two stories were for Cosmopolitan magazine. The first, “Let Me Feel Your Pulse,” is eerily sentient and published on June 5, 1910 — the day he died. The final one, “The Dream,” was found on his desk, incomplete but with an outline. (It was published posthumously in September that year.)

He told the publisher he wanted to write something straightforward, completely different. A condemned man approaching death imagines a different life.

“Murray had dreamed the wrong dream,” he wrote.

With the story stopped mid-sentence, he was taken to the Polyclinic Hospital, where he checked in under a false name. Perhaps America’s greatest short story writer, O. Henry died alone two days later.

“About the only chance for the truth to be told,” he wrote another publisher that same year, “is in fiction.” OH

2026 Feature

Storytellers

For decades, ArtStock Studio Tour has connected artists with the greater Greensboro community

By Ross Howell Jr.

Photographs by Bert VanderVeen

“W

hat sells a painting is its story,” says Natalie Eversole, the new director of ArtStock Studio Tour, a program now celebrating 30 years of providing essential services for artists’ careers in Greensboro and Guilford County.

Nodding in agreement, Terry Wessling, who served as ArtStock’s director the past three years, has stayed on as assistant director so he can mentor Eversole.

“Yep,” Wessling says. “The story behind the piece. Or the story behind the artist.”

So how do those stories get shared? Well, the concept is simple.

Back in 1996, when the program was established in Greensboro by a husband-and-wife artist team, Keith and Betsy Rose, the concept of open studio tours was just being introduced across the U.S. — from Portland, Ore., to Philadelphia. If people could meet artists in their studios and homes, and see close up the artwork they produce and how they produce it, those people would be more likely to become active consumers of art.

While we may entertain romantic visions of solitary artists laboring over their passion, the simple fact is that artists can’t sustain their careers without people buying their work. Professional artists themselves, Eversole and Wessling are keenly aware of that reality.

So, on their own time and with no compensation, they’re working hard to sustain the ArtStock tradition.

They’re perfect for the job.

With her bright artist’s eyes, Eversole — the mother of a toddler — looks even younger than her years and her voice brims with the energy of youth, while Wessling — retired from a successful graphic design and marketing business — sports the grizzled hair and beard of a seasoned veteran.

Eversole was born in Raleigh and later moved to Wilmington with her parents, who own a fine art gallery.

“I grew up around artists,” she says. She never set out to be an artist, but did feel a pull to work behind the scenes.

“So I took to the science of art,” Eversole explains. “I wanted to be a painting restorer.”

Her academic choices in the U.S. were limited. Art restoration is a subset of art conservation, and the only undergraduate academic program in conservation was at the University of Delaware. And the major required a healthy dose of chemistry.

Eversole opted to begin her chemistry studies closer to home at East Carolina University. While still a freshman, she was invited to attend the Moscow Surikov State Academic Institute of Fine Arts in Russia.

“I was there about two years and finished the program in conservation,” Eversole continues. “From there, I went directly to New York, where I got a job banging on people’s doors!” She laughs at the thought.

The purpose of the knocking was to solicit business for her employer, Simon Parkes Art Conservation, a highly regarded painting restoration studio that was based near the offices of Sotheby’s. (It closed in August 2025 following Parkes’ death.)

“Simon Parkes was Sotheby’s go-to art restorer,” Eversole explains. “So I’ve worked on Picassos, Sargents, Monets, you name it. That was a special experience.”

In 2017, she returned south to Greensboro, discovering that sometime during the years of study and work, the artist bug had bit.

Here, Wessling takes up the narrative.

At the time Eversole moved to Greensboro in 2017, Wessling was sharing space with his daughter at Studio 503, where he offered graphic design while his daughter was concentrating on photography. But he also had a side quest.

“I got hooked on old, manually-operated printing equipment,” Wessling acknowledges. He has five letterpresses that are more than 100 years old. They’re enormous, cast-iron machines that were used to print newspapers and books back in the day.

“I use them to print artwork,” Wessling says with a grin. (In 2018, he started marketing his prints through ArtStock.)

Eversole also had a space at Studio 503 that she shared with a friend. Her work caught Wessling’s eye.

“As I recall, she was doing some art conservation and some painting,” Wessling says. “I think she had a couple commissions from people to paint portraits.”

At any rate, the two got to know each other.

When Wessling agreed to take over the ArtStock directorship in 2023, he hired Eversole to curate that year’s gallery show.

“I needed somebody who had gallery experience,” he explains. “She was a natural fit.”

“And the rest is history!” Eversole quips.

You’ll discover a broad range of mediums and styles in the artworks displayed throughout the ArtStock Studio Tour, which begins on Thursday evening, October 1, with a plenary gallery show at the Center for Visual Artists, found inside the Cultural Arts Center downtown. The show presents three new works of art from each of the 50 or so artists participating.

No judges decide what works will hang in the show. As long as the works the artists submit are recent, they will be displayed.

Side by side, you’ll see the artworks of amateurs, skilled newcomers and talented, experienced artists who’ve been part of ArtStock for years.

That’s by design — for the two distinct audiences the event draws together.

First is the audience of collectors or potential collectors of art.

“Education is so important in what we do,” Eversole says. “I like talking to people about the value of bringing beauty into your home, a one-of-a-kind piece that a human being created, the joy you feel when you see it.”

“Whether you’re just starting out as a collector or your family’s collected for generations, you learn to hone your eye,” she continues. “You’ll come to recognize composition, color, design and technique, regardless of where you are in your art journey.”

The second audience is the artists themselves.

“As an artist, you can find yourself doing the same thing over and over again, whether it’s good, bad or indifferent,” Wessling says. But he believes that if local artists study the work of other artists, it can help them see how to do things better or at least differently, and how to expand as an artist.

“We’re not here to teach you that,” he adds. “That’s something that you need to do as an artist on your own.”

And finally, the special sauce of the Thursday night gallery social event is served — the maps guests take with them to navigate weekend visits to artists’ open studios and homes on October 3 and 4. For many, the weekend’s studio tour is the highlight of ArtStock.

Why?

It all comes down to stories.

“People get to hang out with the artists whose paintings they saw at the gallery,” says Eversole. “They want to know more. So they can sit down out in the back yard, have a glass of wine and just chat.”

Some of the artists are real masters as hosts, offering French desserts, rosé and champagne. A few homes will feature multiple artists, making it convenient for tour hoppers — less driving, more admiring.

For local artists, however, perhaps the critical component of the ArtStock Studio Tour is the placement they receive on the service’s website, www.artstocktour.com. (You can also follow ArtStock Studio Tour on Facebook.)

For a year’s time — and for a very modest fee — artists have their own individual webpages on the ArtStock site, featuring the artist’s profile and the works displayed at the gallery show. The website is e-commerce friendly, so the artists can sell their work directly to buyers.

“We’ve developed ArtStock Studio Tour to provide a marketing and promotion component for local artists who don’t have the knowledge, skills, time or money to do their own promotion,” Wessling says.

But a broad, art-savvy community committed to its artists is essential to success.

“I think that Greensboro loves its art,” Eversole says. “But if you want to keep art in your community, you have to provide for it. You have to buy the work.”

Ever the marketing guy, Wessling chimes in.

“We’ve got a lot of great artists who are going to make a name for themselves. Get in early, before their artwork’s priced by a large gallery!”

Eversole reflects for a moment.

“My earliest patrons were people who saw my work in my backyard gallery,” she says.

Be sure to attend ArtStock Studio Tour this October. Look at the art. Visit with the artists. Listen to their personal stories. Hear why they created that piece you especially like.

You might just find yourself face to face with the artist you didn’t even realize you’d been searching for. OH

Ross Howell Jr. is a contributing writer.

ArtStock Studio Tour 2026 Artists

Jessamyn Bailey collage, etching, fiber-and-fabric, mixed-media, oil, printmaking, photography, watercolor

Susanne Baker paper-making, collage, fiber-and-fabric, mixed-media

Jennifer Ballard acrylic, collage

Franchone Bass fiber-and-fabric, acrylic, mixed-media, jewelry, wood

Janet Berry oil

Sidney Branch acrylic, collage, mixed-media, jewelry

Laura Bricker oil

Brownlee Bryant oil

Celia Bucek acrylic, fiber-and-fabric

Amy Buchanan acrylic, collage, mixed-media, oil, watercolor

Jerry Carpenter mixed-media, papier mache

Joie Lola Chapman acrylic, collage, mixed-media, oil, paper, watercolor, pastel

Terry Chavis ceramics-pottery

Laura Cooke ceramics-pottery

Maddie Cratch collage, mixed-media, papercutting, sculpture

Sally Donnell Rilee oil

John Easton collage, ceramics-pottery, mixed-media, glass sculpture, jewelry

Natalie Eversole oil

Stacy Fogleman acrylic, collage, mixed-media, paper, ink, watercolor

Janet Gaddy ceramics-pottery

Page Gleeson charcoal

Veronica Grossi oil, pastel, watercolor

Ash Hein acrylic, ceramics-pottery, digital, oil, ink

Martha Hicks acrylic, ink, mixed-media, oil, watercolor, sculpture

Christina Hill acrylic, mixed-media

Jenny Jones B. acrylic, collage, watercolor

Gail Kelly ceramics-pottery, glass sculpture

Christopher Koenig acrylic, collage

Alexis Lavine watercolor

Elizabeth Lemon fiber-and-fabric

Andrea Lewis photography

Judy Lomax glass, ink, jewelry, oil, watercolor

Jane McAuliffe pastel

Judy Meyler oil

Terri Millard collage

Crystal Miller acrylic, mixed-media, watercolor

Carol Moates acrylic, calligraphy, oil, watercolor

Timothy Moran ceramics-pottery

Paul Nixon acrylic, mixed-media, wood, sculpture, photography

Brenda Olds Carter acrylic, collage, mixed-media, glass, watercolor

Nirmal Panchal digital, acrylic, collage, mixed-media, glass, sculpture, wood

Kathryn Patterson oil, watercolor

Katie Podracky painting

Joanne Rich collage, acrylic, mixed-media, papercutting, watercolor, photography

Craig Richards acrylic, oil

Susan Ridenour ceramics-pottery

Natalie Schorr collage, mixed-media

Dorothy Sellers acrylic, oil

Bruce Shores sculpture, watercolor, printmaking

Chana Smith acrylic, fiber-and-fabric, glass, mixed-media, sculpture

Elizabeth Stafford watercolor

Renee Swink acrylic, oil

Ronda Szymanski mixed-media

Kathryn Beam Troxler oil, pastel, watercolor

Bethany Vigilante acrylic, collage, digital, mixed-media, pastel, photography, printmaking, watercolor

Terry Wessling printmaking

Fay Wood collage, fiber-and-fabric, ink, mixed-media, oil, paper sculpture, watercolor, wood

2026 Feature

The Five Faces of O. Henry

Local artists turn paint, sequins and ephemera into portraits of William Sydney Porter

By Joi Floyd

In honor of O.Henry magazine’s 15th anniversary this month, there’s no better time to celebrate the many faces of our namesake, Greensboro-born William Sydney Porter — more commonly known by one of his pen names, O. Henry. In just a few decades, he went from a prison inmate in Texas to one of America’s most popular writers, selling nearly 5 million copies of his books in the U.S. We asked five local artists to take a crack at portraying the elusive storyteller through their own creative lens. Maybe their interpretations will reveal something new or maybe they’ll only deepen the mystery. Either way, we’re happy to keep the legend alive — and we’re raising our Sazerac to another 15 years of carrying on his literary legacy. (See page 60 to learn more about O. Henry.)

Artist: James Celano

“It’s a visual art. Just look at it,”

Some people can’t resist looking for the hidden meaning in a work of art. Others are happy to let it have the last word. William Sydney Porter trusted his stories to speak for themselves, and Greensboro artist James Celano, a graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, takes the same approach. The best way to experience art, he says, is simply to look at it.

Much like our esteemed O. Henry, Celano chose to focus solely on the image, allowing viewers to create their own interpretations. “The trickiest part was working from a black-and-white photograph,” he says. Still, where there’s a will, there’s a way. Using oil paint on a birchwood panel, Celano transformed the reference image into a striking portrait.

When asked about his process, Celano prefers to keep the mystery intact. Referencing a quote from renowned Frenchman Paul Valéry, he says, “I think a French poet once said, ‘One must apologize for talking about painting.’”

Artist: Sky Bradshaw

“Stitch by stitch, sequin by sequin.”

In Porter’s prime years he was a short-story star. His writing is where he shone most, whether fiction or poetry. And what better way to commemorate a life that sparkled than with sequins?

Sky Bradshaw, a sequin and textile artist, says her creative process brought her a deeper understanding of Porter as well as the city she calls home. “I felt like it rooted me in a lot of ways with history in Greensboro that I never touched on,” says Bradshaw.

With needle, thread and thousands of glimmering sequins, Bradshaw stitched a scintillating adaptation of O. Henry’s face, drawing on the myriad of stories that were told about him. Beginning with a simple white cloth, she sat quietly with her sketch, letting it unfold through meditation before weaving embroidery and shimmering embellishments into a portrait worth a thousand stories.

“Connecting with his energy, history and story allowed me to tune into the underdog aspects of myself,” says Bradshaw. One O. Henry quote specifically spoke to her: “There are stories in everything.” And in this piece, Bradshaw has connected an invisible string from herself to Porter, artist to artist.

Artist: Christina Hill

“It just goes to show that your life doesn’t have to

be perfectly lived in order to be something amazing.”

William Sydney Porter’s talent carried him to remarkable heights. From founding The Rolling Stone — no, not that Rolling Stone — magazine to writing for The New York Sunday World magazine, he painted the picture of a successful writer. But, behind every carefully crafted portrait lies a different story.

Greensboro artist Christina Hill, known for her bold color palettes and blushing portraits, chose to focus on the more flawed side of Porter’s life rather than presenting an idealized image. “There’s so much more to him that you can’t speak through him, so I felt like it needed to be behind him to show who he was,” Hill says.

Through her research, Hill found beauty in Porter’s imperfections. His life was marked by setbacks, including an embezzlement conviction and time in federal prison. Yet under the pseudonym O. Henry, he transformed hardship into enduring short stories. To reflect the complexity of his life, Hill incorporated layers of vintage materials, such as old newspaper articles, into the work. “The paper is from the 1950s. I found it years ago at the Salvation Army,” she explains.

Hill’s portrait invites viewers to see more than just face value. Embedded within the painting are traces of his past and the experiences that shaped him as a writer.

Artist: Leti Reis

“It was kind of like a lost story.”

“For me, what I was trying to give with the painting was that he was [immersing] himself in the story,” says Leti Reis, a Greensboro-based artist. Rather than focusing solely on technique, Reis painted from feeling, creating a portrait that she can only describe as “emotional.”

“I like to have this watercolor background and just let the paint flow,” Reis says. Because Porter was a writer, she wanted his words to become part of the piece itself. Layering blooming watercolor with passages from O. Henry’s writing in ink, she created a portrait that blends the author’s words with his image, inviting viewers into both his world and his work.

For Reis, the tie between an artist and their art begins with the eyes. “I couldn’t find any pictures with him looking at the camera, so I changed it. I wanted that connection in the painting,” she says. By meeting the viewer’s gaze, her portrait creates an intimate encounter with Porter, much like his short stories.

Artist: Rukiya Williams

“I wanted to know what’s in between.”

There are many ways to describe William Sydney Porter; clever, witty, a genius storyteller. But, for Rukiya Williams, local artist and filmmaker, “layered” suits her fancy best.

Working with recycled cardboard and acrylic paint, Williams built O. Henry’s portrait one layer at a time, creating a face that reflects the many stories he told — and the many lives he lived — while suiting her creative mission. “The repurposed supplies and layer concept speaks to me more as an artist, so I incorporated that into the painting,” she says. For her, one facial feature mattered most: “The main thing I wanted to showcase was his eyes.” Piercing blue and hard to overlook, Porter’s eyes steal the show, rivaled only by his signature ’stache.

“Art is about trying to find another angle and perspective,” notes Williams. It’s a sentiment our beloved Porter himself might have appreciated. No stranger to seeing the world from a different point of view, in his 1904 novel Cabbages and Kings, O. Henry writes, “I wanted to paint a picture some day that people would stand before and forget that it was made of paint. I wanted it to creep into them like a bar of music and mushroom there like a soft bullet.” OH

2026 Feature

Playing to Their Strengths

A home-run reno for two former athletic stars

By Cynthia Adams

Photographs by Amy Freeman

Houston and Emily Summers share a formidable drive. After playing pro baseball with the Arizona Diamondbacks, he started his own business. She earned All-ACC honors 12 times and is about to complete medical school.

They’re only in their 30s. And they’re new parents.

Whether coping with the pressures of athletics or professional competition, they both excel, also proving a sunny-natured resilience.

There is also mutual modesty.

Inside Emily’s study in the couple’s restored vintage North Elm Street bungalow are trophies — numerous ones — clues to the remarkable lives the young couple have already led. Houston proudly points to some she won back in high school in West Virginia, where she was a record-smashing track-and-field athlete of the year in Buckhannon.

He is no less remarkable.

As a track star who also played on the baseball field as pitcher and catcher at Northeast Guilford High School, recruiters noted Houston’s athleticism.

After graduation, he became the youngest American-born baseball player drafted by the Arizona Diamondbacks, signing three months shy of his 18th birthday. Too young to rent an apartment, he initially lived with a host family.

Houston’s contract stipulated that the Diamondbacks pay for his undergraduate education. Carolina, he says, was always in mind.

Eight years later, Houston left professional baseball after seven seasons to attend UNC-Chapel Hill, long determined to get into “the best school in North Carolina I could.”

From being a notably young ball player, Houston had become a 25-year-old college freshman eager to pursue a medical degree, a goal since weathering his own medical trauma. At age 11, he developed a non-malignant tumor in his right brain diagnosed as a juvenile nasopharyngeal angiofibroma.

“It’s a pretty rare tumor,” he explains, and a highly vascular one causing headaches and blurred vision.

“I couldn’t smell, couldn’t taste, couldn’t really hear out of my right ear.” Ironically, the benign tumor had grown swiftly to the size of a baseball. He minimizes this, saying, “It wasn’t horrible, horrible.”

At age 13, Houston underwent an 18-hour-long surgery. Today, a long scar on the right side of his skull is well concealed by clipped hair. Even up close, it is nearly invisible.

He determinedly mounted a full recovery, ignoring doctors’ orders to rest. In fact, because he didn’t listen, he suffered an accident that Houston says left him with a slight indentation in his skull. He laughs it off. Yet the harrowing experience had an impact.

“That sparked my interest in medicine.”

At Carolina, Houston tried out for the track-and-field team, but a coach redirected him. Former ball players, the coach reasoned, had an easier time becoming proficient in javelin throwing.

The sports-minded new college student “still wanted to compete.”

In his sophomore year, Emily caught Houston’s eye when attending a track-and-field picnic for the team and its incoming members. She was an 18-year-old athletic star focused on the heptathlon and high jump. “She is just very modest, but multiple-time West Virginia Gatorade Player of the Year. Junior Olympic champion.” He calls her “the real athlete.”

He recalls chatting with Emily, who asked him, “Well, how old are you?” Avoiding giving her a number, he coyly replied, “I’m a sophomore.” He laughs at the memory. “Like that was it, period.”

Meanwhile, Houston doggedly worked to prove himself in javelin. He became an honor student and earned All-Atlantic Coast Conference honors in the javelin.

Emily demurs, stressing that javelin was not her best sport, as she scoops up their smiling and gurgling baby, Julia, just waking from a nap.

A Tar Heel student-athlete, Emily earned All-ACC honors 12 times. In 2016, Emily and Houston were both named to the Capital One Academic All-District 3 teams. She was a junior (named for the second year). Houston, who served as a student body president, finished a degree in psychology.

In 2018, Emily was selected as a Chancellor’s Fellow, the first student-athlete to do so, after earning a degree in business. The University quipped in a media release that she jumped at the opportunity.

While a fellow, Emily applied to medical school. “It was interesting because I thought I was going to do consulting, then I wanted healthcare,” says Emily. Her mother, she points out, was a nurse. So was Houston’s.

Funnily enough, Houston was the one to wind up in consulting, working with Deloitte for a couple of years. Then, on July 7, 2018, the couple wed.

He and a partner acquired Sasser Restoration in nearby Whitsett. Houston says they work “in the eye of the storm,” mitigating fire, flood and mold damage for commercial businesses.

In 2023, he found a promising listing on Zillow within blocks of Cone Health System, where Emily, now a fourth-year UNC medical student, was doing a specialized rotation. The Summerses purchased that listing in April that year.

Houston’s family was conveniently nearby in Summerfield. Emily had a sister living in Burlington.

The house offered ample square footage at 2,550 square feet, even before Julia was born. Baby’s arrival made four; the Summerses owned a sweetly natured brown-and-white Newfoundland-poodle mix named Oliver.

While the bungalow looked great, their “new” one-story home was 90 years old. As their first home, they were keen to know its back story.

Neighbors believed the house was built for one of two sisters who lived side-by-side and shared a driveway. They didn’t have particulars, nor names, but dated the house to 1935–1939.

No records could be found to support the winsome story about the sisters. The address first appeared in Hill’s Greensboro City Directory by 1936, with Henry Wiseman Kendall listed as owner. (He is likely the same distinguished journalist and newspaper editor who later won multiple honors for journalism.)

A previous renovation had gutted and replaced the kitchen, giving it handsome maple cupboards, double ovens, and a large center island. The original red-oak flooring was restored to a gleaming finish.

They thoughtfully began to make it their own.

Just one look at the home’s curb appeal suggests they intuitively understood exactly how to play to its strengths. With white clapboard replacing aluminum siding, shaker shingles and copper gutters, it has all the elements of a historic bungalow’s best.

Since the Summerses took ownership, the home’s stylish evolution on one of Greensboro’s oldest streets has become obvious.

“It’s eye-catching,” says a business owner who passes by daily and enjoys watching each tweak and improvement.

“But, you know, it’s a 1930s home,” says Houston, who points out that as great as the house looks now, there were also drawbacks. “There’s no insulation in the exterior walls. There are original windows.”

And that fed other concerns.

In the summertime, their air conditioning is constantly running; in the winter, it’s the heat. Apart from the kitchen, the Summerses have scrutinized almost every other square inch. “We’ve done everything else, like [refining] built-ins and changes to the fireplace.”

Houston points out style details that elevated the front room. He changed the red brick fireplace, creating a neutral, soft-white, plaster-like finish of his own design for the mantle, overmantel and surround. He installed neutral tile to define the hearth.

Original features were kept but enhanced by modifications Houston designed himself. The built-in bookcases in the living room were extended to the ceiling to surround the windows, with added doors below.

Houston does a walk-through from the living room towards the back of the house. He mentions swinging doors that once closed the living room off from the connecting dining room. At some point, those were removed.

“But everything else [remaining] is original to the home . . . We took the mentality of, ‘I don’t know what it looked like in 1935 when it was built, but let’s imagine what it would look like if we were in 1935 and building.’ What might it have been?”

As with any older home, mysteries presented themselves.

“There used to be a walkway to the front door,” he says. “We believe the front door of the house used to be where the master bathroom is now.” During the main bathroom remodel this year, Houston unearthed signs of a second front doorway, long boarded over. Was it for a separate business entrance for a home office, as was a common practice at that time? Both doctors and lawyers often separated public and private entrances.

He is puzzled, but shrugs.

“So, there’s definitely been some changes to this home over the last almost 100 years.”

Houston and Emily wanted to incorporate the aesthetics of California designer Rose Tarlow and Steve and Brooke Giannetti, an architect/designer couple now based in Tennessee.

“I really feel like our style — we really don’t talk about it — it’s just kind of we have a natural alignment with what we like or what we think,” says Houston. “It can be a little different, a little quirky, but it’s really this clean, more neutral tone, maybe a little bit of modern, but also of a tie to some classical stuff. It’s just this organic blend.”

Houston took the lead in planning refurbishments as Emily focused upon medical studies and her pregnancy last summer. “But,” she confirms his thoughts, “we complemented each other. We have similar tastes.”

Houston volunteers that beyond style, durability and comfort mattered to both. Especially in home furnishings. And he didn’t mind imperfections. He brakes for antique and consignment stores, scoring a distressed-leather Ralph Lauren Chesterfield-style sofa — that would retail for thousands — for the sunporch for $220.

“Oliver loves sleeping on it every night,” Emily says.

Just off the sunporch, there’s a favorite sunny spot for early mornings with a hot cuppa or cold drink. A built-in niche was designed with space for a comfy chair, coffee maker and an ice machine.

And there were additional built-ins in the office/study, which Houston spiffed up with lower doors and contrasting paint.

The bungalow’s corner lot received upgrades, too, with landscaping reworked to boost its considerable cottage appeal. Hydrangeas and boxwoods, plus a new brick walkway leading to a covered porch with seating and wooden planters, upped the Southern charm factor. A white picket fence, soon to be replaced with a more period-appropriate style, cements the storybook cottage impression.

Meanwhile, as he feathered their nest, Julia was set to make her debut early this year. Houston sped to complete the bathroom redo after a plumbing snag caused flooding. He describes racing barefoot down Elm Street in the dead of winter trying to isolate the main water cutoff, finding a City water and sewer crew working nearby, a story that is only funny in hindsight.

Emily, former athletic star, laughingly recalls how she no longer raced anywhere — having regressed from running to walking with Oliver as the pregnancy advanced and her center of gravity shifted dramatically.

She approached the pregnancy experience with complete calm, says Houston.

In fact, she is steadfast in the face of new motherhood, too. Emily bounces Julia, whose eyes widen into circles as Oliver sits patiently at Mom’s feet. In March 2027, Emily learns where she will be matched for the next step, her medical residency, on what is called the “match date.”

The unknowable future — either the stuff of concern or celebration — always depends upon perspective.

The Summerses gamely anticipate what comes next. Their penchant for clearing hurdles is simply part of the fun. OH

2026 Feature

Class Act Cadets

Southeast Guilford High School’s NJROTC trains to the top

By Billy Ingram Photographs

By Bert VanderVeen

This past May, I attended one of the most impressive ceremonies it has been my privilege to witness, the graduating and upcoming senior class honors assembly for Southeast Guilford High School’s Naval Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (NJROTC). Snapped-to-attention teens resplendent in military dress blues and crisp khakis were on deck to accept dozens of awards for distinguished service to their community, academic excellence and individual achievement earned over the school year.

A highlight that evening was the women’s drill team executing the precision routine that solidified their standing in 2026 as one of the finest in the nation. Weaving rhythmically through a cascading series of formations with intense precision reminded me (archaic pop-culture references incoming) of a 1930s Busby Berkeley musical or the June Taylor Dancers from a mid-century episode of The Jackie Gleason Show. In other words, top-tier showmanship.

As the ceremony culminated with the coronation of the unit’s new Commanding Officer, a nattily-attired lady behind me politely — but firmly — nudged me out of the way. “That’s my son,” she exclaimed with pride, moving in closer to get a better photo.

That son being junior Jonathan Vanhook. I couldn’t help noticing that he and his twin brother, Joshua, were frequently called forward that night to receive recognition, advanced rankings and commendations. They, along with Torrie Shaw and Genevieve Canupp, were canonized as 2025–26 Color Guard champions, best in the nation at the ritualistic presentation of flags, accompanied by firearm acrobatics, often reverentially performed at military funerals and formal public gatherings.

When asked about his reason for joining NJROTC, Jonathan recalls gazing behind the middle school cafeteria window. “I would see the male drill team out there spinning their rifles, doing drills, and how structured it was, how disciplined it was. Everything they did was with structure, with intensity and effort.” What he saw was individuals moving together as one. “I wanted to be a part of it simply because I see that everyone here gives everything.”

Brother Joshua insists, “I would have definitely done this even if [Jonathan] didn’t.” He too was magnetically drawn to the curriculum’s exacting standards. “This is going to set me up for a career in general. We have fun and that’s really what I like about NJROTC.” Jonathan agrees: “You put in work and you get a lot out of it. This is a very give-and-take organization.”

Southeast Guilford engaged in competitive skirmishes all around the country, including North Augusta, Georgia, Washington, D.C., and Sacramento, California. Cadets are expected to arrange financing for these excursions. “I wouldn’t call it a problem, it’s just something we have to do,” says Jonathan. “The communities around us help fund things we do, [GCS] has also helped us out.”

While school days commence at 9:30 a.m., JROTC cadets are expected to arrive for practice at 8. But, Joshua attests, “They really mean 7:45.” Weeks leading up to drill league competitions, squads might assemble as early as 2 a.m.

Fortitude and fastidiousness rarely go unnoticed beyond school grounds as Jonathan notes. “I was at my job and they were looking at me funny.” Mannered and exceptionally well-spoken, JROTC students naturally attract attention, desired or not. “So I had to explain to them what ROTC was, where I was in it, how good our school is. They call me ‘Commander’ at work now. It’s just a little awkward but really, it just tells people that they can depend on you.”

Both brothers credit an uncompromising upbringing for their dedication to service, an environment that was, “structured, a very organized household. Our mother brought us up in a way that says, ‘You can do anything you want to do if you put yourself up to it.’”

I later caught up with that proud (if a bit nudge-y) mother, Queen E. Sweeper, who told me about finding herself 41 and pregnant with twins 18 years ago, gripped with the realization that “as an African American mom, I’ll be raising them by myself.” She had her hands full. “I had to keep these young boys under control. I couldn’t take them a lot of places because they were off the chain.” A veteran herself, she issued a royal decree before her hellcats entered elementary school: “You’ll go into the military when you graduate high school, not college.” What if they didn’t wish to enlist? “My answer was, ‘You don’t have a choice!’” This Queen rules.

The Vanhooks could have easily been redirected into athletics. “They played football, baseball, they’ve wrestled, they’ve done it,” Sweeper says. But she had mentally mapped for uneven terrain ahead, swept for cultural minefields torpedoing Black youth, determined to avoid a rudderless voyage for her offspring “because we can still raise excellent young men. And mine have followed that path and look at where we are.”

The National Defense Act of 1916 established JROTC in our nation’s high schools. These days it boasts a curriculum tailored to every branch of the military.

Southeast Guilford’s program is administered by Capt. Frank Shearin (who retired in June of 2026) but most especially under the commanding presence of 1st Sgt. Thomas Hilliard, entering his 20th year teaching NJROTC at Southeast after two decades of service in the United States Marine Corps. The mission? Excavating authentic selves from cadets before life’s gale force winds trim their sails, unlocking unrecognized potential and releasing powerful capabilities and outstanding aptitudes that otherwise might become submerged under superficial peer pressure and society’s suffocating hum of low expectations.

When it comes to JROTC, Southeast Guilford is far and away Guilford County School System’s winningest organization: Distinguished Unit for 17 consecutive years, NJROTC Academic, Athletic and Drill champs for the last three years and, for 2025–26, overall champions in Area 6, which encompasses 30 schools in North and South Carolina and a portion of Georgia. They were last year’s Area 6 winning academic team, securing 13th in the nation in a competition similar to Jeopardy!

“Under 1st Sgt. Thomas Hilliard’s leadership, we were fifth in the nation for our drill team,” Shearin points out. Plus, third place overall best NJROTC team in the nation for 2019–20, placing top five for 2025–26, beating out over 630 competing units. That’s just skimming the surface of the numerous accolades Southeast Guilford earned during just this most recent academic term.

“The Department of Defense has sanctioned Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps for high schoolers and Reserve Officers’ Training Corps in college,” Capt. Shearin explains. “ROTC obligates you to go into the military — Junior does not.” Courses for eighth graders through 12th graders emphasize character development and citizenship. While most units around the nation concentrate on one or two skill sets, “We have full curriculum: a drill team, academic team, orienteering, marksmanship, physical training, cyber patriot information technology and an aviation drone team. There are a number of different teams that kids can be a part of, actually more than anyone could ever take advantage of.”

During the 2025–26 academic year, Southeast’s 133 NJROTC cadets performed 6,875 community service hours. “About 51 community service hours for each student,” Shearin emphasizes. These hours encompass everything from picking up highway litter, doling out meals at churches, stocking food pantries, placing Memorial Day flags and marching in Veteran’s Day parades. Seniors mentor elementary school kids and visit local nursing homes. “We are trying to train young people to care about others, to be good citizens.”

Uniforms provided provisionally are worn at least once a week on campus. You might imagine such sharp-edge students marching through their lives with sticks inserted you-know-where. Not at all. When time comes to rise to the occasion, they’re fully committed but, “out of character,” so to speak, laughing and sly-aside roasting.

That juxtaposition of duty and revelry was exhibited by one of those individuals posing for our spring photo shoot. Lieutenant Commander Barker, class of ’27, is an incoming XO (Executive Officer), meaning, “I am over all of the officers in the unit. I just make sure they’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing. If they’re not, then it’s on me. If they are, it’s on me.” Thriving on that sense of dead certainty “gives me a chance to lead people and it’ll help me for what I want to do, which is enlist in the Marine Corps.”

Following graduation in 2027, both Vanhook brothers anticipate entering the Army, Jonathan aspiring to “aircraft or diesel and gas mechanic,” while Joshua sets his sights on becoming a, “heavy equipment operator, which will be like 12 November” — confusing to me but military speak for horizontal construction engineer. Cadets are required to memorize catalogs of these terms.

NJROTC training doesn’t cease with summer — it’s a year-long stint. While you’ve been sunning and funning, cadets attended a leadership academy and commanding officer courses followed by a four-day-long drill camp, while those rising into uppermost positions recently completed the Capstone Leadership Course. The women’s Drill Team is well under way developing fresh choreography, perfected over months of rigorous rehearsal. Orientation for rising freshmen got underway in July. Given last year’s triumphs, they’ll have big boots to fill.

Principal Christopher Scott, career educator and administrator, is prepping for his fifth scholastic session at Southeast. NJROTC is just one example of the exemplary extracurricular activities this academy offers, but one that carries with it tremendous pride. “It definitely brings out leadership skills that kids didn’t know they had to have or that they even possessed — also the idea that not every leader is the person standing in front of the room.” Scott exudes a genuine enthusiasm for what is undoubtedly a daunting task, “I love our kids. I love our families, our staff, we kind of have a perfect socioeconomic and racial diversity. I think when you believe in students, good things will happen.”

You’ve heard the scuttlebutt: “Today’s young people are our future leaders? This country is so screwed!” Clichéd shade I’ve shamelessly thrown about, but that was before being introduced to this commanding clique of sentient pupils whose eyes are wide open to the challenges and possibilities associated with entering adulthood under choppy waters, yet emerging with leadership authority, armored with discipline, decisiveness, perseverance and accomplishment, all characteristics embedded in the cadets enrolled in Guilford County’s high school JROTC program. Bravo Zulu! OH

2026 Feature

Poem August 2026

Terri Kirby Erickson

Day at the Beach

I’d like to feel again, my six-year-old self

skimming a long, sea oat-surrounded trail

to the ocean like a skipping stone, the wind

in my dark hair, legs pumping like pistons.

And oh, that first plunge into the water, the

squealing — how it felt to be hit by a wave

and tumble to the shore, as light as a shell.

Now, it’s hard to walk the trails to the beach.

Each step works my calf muscles, my bare

feet sinking deep into hot sand. And the sun

is like a blowtorch, not the gentle source of

warmth that I remember, the ocean rife with

dangers I knew nothing about as a child. So

I settle into a folding chair with a book, my

aging body slathered with the highest SPF,

and watch a couple of kids scoop wet sand

into bright plastic buckets while others splash

in shallow pools, their faces the definition of

delight. If only I could snap my fingers, step

out of a body that has become too weary and

cumbersome, and run to the water like I used

to — limbs weightless as a plover, my thoughts

no heavier than a beach ball, a paper kite rising.

— Terri Kirby Erickson

Terri Kirby Erickson is the award-winning author of eight collections of poetry.

2026 Feature Poem

Dear . . .

Illustrations by Campbell Pringle

The 2026 induction ceremony for the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame takes place in October at the Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities. Could there be a better time to devote our Summer Reading issue to the current and soon-to-be members of that exclusive club than now? We’ve asked three members of the class of 2026 to write a letter to one of their favorite fictional characters and, to round out the field, we’ve surrounded them with four current enshrinees. The rules were simple: Pick a character you love, or hate, or even love to hate, and go from there. And we think you’ll agree, the places they went are extraordinary.

From: Clyde Edgerton

To: Manley Pointer, the Bible salesman in
“Good Country People,” by Flannery O’Connor

Dear Manley (if I may),

I got your penitentiary address from Henry Dampier, a character of mine who also sells Bibles. He knows you and I assume you know him.

A few days ago, Henry told me about your recent criminal activities, including getting caught again — stealing boxes of Gideon Bibles and then razoring out the title page (referencing “Gideon”).

I’ve not read the story “Good Country People” in a good while but I remember being drawn to your cleverness in that story, and also, aspects of your appearance — especially your yellow socks rolled down “to your ankles” or something like that. Images get stuck in your head, you know?

I am sending you this letter to let you know that you have been an inspiration to me in at least a couple of ways:

1. I sometimes go to bed at night happily anticipating the next morning’s completion of a scene I’m writing. On the second or third reading of “Good Country People,” when I was still a young writer, I came to realize that heaven for me would be the opportunity to write the last half or so of “Good Country People” — the part that would include your second visit to Hulga’s mother’s house. I realized that to know you were going back to visit again, and that I could write out what then happened, would be a kind of delightful heaven on earth for me. All this (including reading about your relationship to Hulga) fell onto me as I was learning to write fiction.

2. A couple of writers got in touch with me early in this century, saying they were hoping to publish a book-length tribute to Flannery O’Connor, written by different writers — would I contribute?

Of course.

I decided to contribute a short story that included my character, a Bible salesman who was not you (but who knew you). I also wanted to include a “misfit” in my story — one who knew Miss O’Connor’s famous character, The Misfit. I wondered if the writers hoping to publish the O’Connor tribute book would accept a story rather than an essay. I was afraid they’d say no, so I didn’t ask, I just wrote the story, and I liked it so much I eventually made it into a novel: The Bible Salesman. I never heard from the writer/editors again, but was very happy, of course, that they — and you — helped me write a novel.

Thank you for your inspirations and best of luck in your post-prison endeavours. I wish for you the very best in all things. I read that you recently said that you were “going straight” now.

Have you ever thought about entering politics?

Please write back.

Sincerely,

Clyde

From: Daniel Wallace

To: Neddy Merrill in “The Swimmer,”
by John Cheever

Dear Ned Merrill,

This is the last time I’ll write to you. All the other letters have been returned to me, the sole response stamped on the unopened envelope by some heartless machine: OCCUPANT UNKNOWN. MOVED. VACANT. NO FORWARDING ADDRESS. Why do I keep hoping that somehow you will have returned to the house in Bullet Park, and that you will get my letter (the 5th? 6th?) and write back with an upbeat apology, explaining where you’ve been and what happened to you? I wonder if you even know.

I’m a fan, Ned. Maybe not a fan of yours but a fan of your incredible plan — to swim that Sunday morning the eight miles from the Westerhazy’s pool to your own home, realizing you could make it almost the entire way pool to backyard pool. You were not a young man, either, when the idea came to you, and perhaps that’s why you did it: a younger man would not have felt the need to prove to himself (and to all the lesser mortals) that something so incidental could be done, and certainly not with the same heedless and drunken joie de vivre. Only a man who had nothing to lose would do it, precisely because (whether he knew it or not) he had lost everything already. The old man’s still got it I can hear you telling yourself, over and over again, in those pools before the rains came.

You remind me of my father. You were more his generation than mine. I think you would have liked him. So many of the poolside scenes you swim through remind me of those “midsummer Sundays” at our own home, the kind when everyone sits around saying, “I drank too much last night.” I didn’t drink — I was just a kid — but my parents did. This is after we moved from Homewood to Mountain Brook, when my father started making real money and we had the pool in our backyard; in Homewood, we just had grass.

Those were the Sunday mornings the Hurleys would come over. Jack and Mary. They brought the V8 juice and the celery; my parents supplied the vodka, Worcestershire sauce, and Tabasco. By the pool they would shine themselves up with Baby Oil and sip on their Bloody Marys well into the afternoon, as the Alabama sun beat down on them. The Wallaces and the Hurleys drank, laughed, smoked, swam, all at the same time, too, sometimes, ashtrays and glasses balanced on a long yellow float.

As it was with you (there’s a bar beside almost every pool you swim through on your journey home) those Sunday mornings were just as much about drinking as the party the night before may have been. Drinking was assumed. An expectation. No matter how many Sunday morning Bloody Marys they had though (and it was impossible to say how many, because they came to the poolside in a gigantic pitcher) they were never drunken, or even tipsy. They were relaxed. “This is so relaxing,” they said, eyes closed behind their porthole-sized sunglasses. And the sun baked them lobster red.

They all seemed so old to me then, years beyond counting. But no: in 1970 I was 11 and my father was a mere 40 years old. The hair on his arms was going gray though and he wasn’t in the best of shape. Still, he would race me in the pool and win going away. And, like you, Neddy, he had a “simple contempt” for people who did not hurl themselves into pools, and pull themselves out of them by the curb — no ladder for him. He still had it! At 40 he was at the top of his game. That’s what it looked like anyway.

I imagine you were about 40, too, when your story takes place, when you almost seem to figure out how lost you were, and how much you’d lost.

Which brings me to why I’ve been writing to you.

My father died in 1997. He was 67, same age as I am now. And I can’t ask him, obviously, so I’m writing you to ask: When you swam back home, through almost a dozen pools, having a drink at as many of them as you possibly could, and when you made it back home and found that everything you had taken for granted wasn’t there anymore, when you caught up with yourself and the reality of your world — what did you do next? I can ask you that, right? Just because one story ends doesn’t mean they all do. When you finally don’t have it anymore, what do you have? How long can you keep on swimming? That’s what I want to know. That’s what I need to know. Sooner the better too, because summer is almost over. That’s how it feels, anyway.

Thanks, and I hope all is well,

Daniel

From: Joseph Bathanti

To: Colin Smith, the main character and narrator in
“The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner,” by Alan Sillitoe

Dear Smith (Colin, if I may):

I recently reread Alan Sillitoe’s brilliant novella, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, in which you, the inimitable first-person narrator, claim to have authored the tale. Thus, the novella becomes a pedigree of metafiction. Most interesting — and I wish I had Sillitoe to consult on the matter. Is it he who brings you to life? Or are you the agent of that feat? And please stop me, if this gets to sounding like some puffed-up, egghead scholarly treatise.

Your voice is unforgettable. I’ve always had a soft spot for the cheeky and you have a gift for smartassery that would have been cherished in the working-class Little Italy of Pittsburgh in which I grew up, where the art of biting off your nose to spite your face has been empirically perfected. Tough kids with El Dorado-sized, Marxist chips on their shoulders and a viral antipathy for authority to match yours — and not a scrap of remorse among them. In truth, Colin, you’re a revolutionary; the authorities like to keep your sort in stir. You scare the bloody hell out of them. You even allude to Hungary and what I presume is the Hungarian Revolution of 1956; and there’s also the mention of “a big boot . . . likely to smash any nice picnic [you] might . . . make for [yourself].” It seems you’ve studied your fellow Englishman, Orwell: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” You are a prole, one of the fellaheen, among those the “whip-hand” aims to force to their knees.

But you can take a punch as well as deal one. You throw the big race — the Blue-Ribbon Prize Cup for Long Distance Cross Country Running — so coveted by the “governor,” the borstal warden, a “pot-bellied pop-eyed, bastard” as you dub him — even though you’re meters and meters ahead of your closest competitor and the finish line’s in sight. Like a convict, mere hours from parole, who jumps the fence. Rather than curry favor, you symbolically spit in the governor’s eye, which fetches you his outrage and a goodly dollop of additional hardship in borstal. More than anything, you exemplify so gloriously Albert Camus’ famous injunction from “The Myth of Sisyphus”: “There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn.” It’s the gesture, the gorgeous immemorable flourish, that seems precious, near sacramental, to you — that piss-on-everything mentality. It recalls Marlon Brando as he dies in Last Tango in Paris: removing the chewing gum from his mouth and fixing it to the underside of the balcony railing before collapsing. How I admire your flare for self-immolation — Bravo! — though I don’t possess your threshold nor stamina for Purgatory.

But, of course, there’s more to it than that. Isn’t there always? You hail from a withered home where the only things in abundance are neglect, ennui and not enough dollars — and let’s not even broach the subject of love, though it’s there, but in the guise of yearning and desperation; nor should we mention your philandering mam; and your dad, whom you find dead, “ . . . like a skinned rabbit . . . lino and carpet” soaked in his blood. A tram-load of dysfunction. Trauma. Post traumatic stress.

You’ve a heart, Colin Smith, and a capacious one, though you purposefully secrete it beneath the bilious Eiderdown of regret and cynicism. After all, you’ve been — what we call here in North Carolina — state-raised, first in Remand Homes, now in borstal — one joint after another — plotting your next lame caper and committed to the life of a lammist. You’re only seventeen, already “institutionalized.” Your name, Colin, means “whelp” or “young hound.” There it is: the childhood state in which you’re forever immured. Of course, all that’s left to you is scorn. Blessed searing scorn.

I actually have run from the “coppers” a few times and have found myself, along with a gaggle of my mates, in the backseat of a police car — but, just to be clear, for the most innocuous empty-headed schoolboy pranks, and we were released with barked threats of juvie and the legendary rubber hose designed to put would-be juvenile delinquents on the straight. Nothing even close to robbing a bakery and stashing the lolly in a drainpipe where it flows from the spout in a downpour and damningly presents itself at the feet of the suspicious copper at your door. I’ve not the sand for a life of crime and I had the tireless love and guidance of hard-working parents. They dreamt a better life for me long before I figured out how to dream that dream myself — and I continually remind myself of the advice dispended to Nick Carraway from his father in the second sentence of The Great Gatsby: “Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone . . . just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages you’ve had.” Again, there it is. More to the point, I’ve never been incarcerated — Grace of God, and all that — though, over the years, I’ve spent considerable time in prisons as a writing teacher. I’ve also been a long-distance runner, though with nary a jot of your virtuoso clout.

Thus, I’ve now twigged you coming and going; and, make no mistake, I strangely love you and your ilk, taking my place in the cellblock, shackled to a prison cot. And I know enough to declare you a poet and contemplative. You offer not only a lyric tutorial on running — I’ve never read a more convincing account of the fabled “runner’s high” — but your metaphysical riff on being the first and last man on earth simultaneously, as you run the dawn “frozen fields,” is the stuff of magic, clearly rooted in holy writ.

So, my iconoclastic falling-down funny brother-comrade, I look forward to your next book, and I pray you’re on the free side of concertina when you pen it. Please: never stop running; that’s how I imagine you — and weeping, perhaps as Jesus wept at the death of Lazarus.

Fingers crossed this missive makes it to you. Penitentiary mail is notoriously unreliable, and I hope this passes the grubby-handed censors.

In peace and solidarity,

Joseph

From: Jill McCorkle

To: Charlotte, the barn spider in Charlotte’s Web, by E.B. White

Dear Charlotte,

Salutations! I have loved and admired you for 60 years and never glimpse the shining threads of a web that I don’t think of you. For almost 75 years, you have taught children — young and old — about friendship and the seasons and cycle of life. You have shown us the best and the worst of humanity, from fat greedy rats to innocent humble souls like Wilbur, forever loyal in his love and devotion. Your voice is one of reality and acceptance of life’s journey — a wise observation of grief — and what an individual leaves behind for future generations.

Here in the state of North Carolina, there are 8.2 million of Wilbur’s kind, not counting the additional wild ones roaming and rooting. Imagine the many webs it would take to save them! And especially at a time when there is so much talk about bacon products — soda, toothpaste, lollipops and cologne! — to name a few. I suspect the desire some have for bacon is not unlike what you felt about the many flies you devoured. But still, it is always hard not to think of Wilbur when pork products are discussed. And he was Some Pig; he was Terrific, in fact! And what a lucky guy he was to have you and Fern and your many descendants in his life.

We could use your wisdom these days, Charlotte. You said: People are very gullible. They’ll believe anything they see in print. And oh, what an understatement that is. You would not even believe what people are believing! And it goes beyond print — made-up photos and videos, manufactured voices. There is a widespread struggle for truth. And there are those who make Templeton the fat rat look like Gandhi. Some even tried to use your name as code for a cruel, coldblooded operation designed to harm innocent people. You will be pleased to know that there was great public outrage over the use of your good name. After all, you taught the opposite. When Wilbur asked why you had been so kind to him, you said: By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.

Are there enough webs? Enough words? I like to believe that wisdom such as yours will always be repeated and if said and seen enough, will continue to hatch and grow. Your words to Wilbur are always worth repeating and you, dear Charlotte, are my reason for allowing discrete cobwebs in corners and the eaves of the porch (thank you), and you remain a reminder to stop and admire the intricate and beautiful artwork of nature and declare it a miracle and rightly so.

Sometimes your voice comes to me in the cadence of an elementary school teacher’s voice, reminiscent of all those times after lunch we were told we could rest our heads on our desks and just close our eyes and listen while chapter by chapter, the teacher’s voice would lull us into your world and your final day with Wilbur: These autumn days will shorten and grow cold . . . Winter will pass, the days will lengthen, the ice will melt in the pasture pond. The song sparrow will return and sing, the frogs will awake, the warm wind will blow again. All these sights and sounds and smells will be yours to enjoy, Wilbur — this lovely world, these precious days . . .

Your story left me crying and grieving too many times to count, Charlotte. I didn’t want Fern to grow up and choose time with a boy over time with Wilbur. And I didn’t want you to die. How could you die?! But then I learned something incredibly valuable. I could read your book all over again, and suddenly there you were — salutations! — and even knowing what was coming, I could once again get lost as I feared for Wilbur’s safety, marveled at your messages and hoped that Templeton — fat rat that he is — might have a change of heart. In addition to all else, you taught me the power of words on the page.

Thank you for all you have given to millions of readers (no exaggeration), and may your book always grace the shelves of schools and libraries as it finds its way into young hands and changes their lives in wonderful ways.

With sincere love and appreciation,

Jill

From: Jaki Shelton Green

To: Celie, the protagonist and narrator in The Color Purple, by Alice Walker

Dear Celie,

My mother taught me that the color purple was associated with royalty, luxury, power, spirituality, mystery and creativity, but your story taught me that purple was often a bruise, a dictionary version of a common contusion that happens when blood vessels under the skin break from an impact, leaking blood into the surrounding tissue. I became obsessed with the color purple in the 1970s and curated my second wedding in 1979 around shades of lavender, violet, grape, lilac, wisteria, magenta, fuchsia, mauve and plum . . . all juicy luxurious colors not knowing that within a year those lush sensual shades would be prickly stains on my broken heart.

When I met you in 1982 after my “royal purple marriage” withered away, your definition of purple seemed to make so much more sense to me. Thank you for daring me to turn all the wounded flower petals upside down and crawl inside them to explore the other side of breaking skin and ruptured voice.

Thank you for your lessons about reclamation, fulfillment and independence. In the 1980s your presence in the world became a map for many women who were struggling with granting themselves the urgent and necessary permissions they needed in order to begin unraveling the expectations enforced and placed upon us by society, whether it originates from our gender or race.

Our Southern lives are not too far apart. We both grew up in a time period with gender inequality and racial division. We both grappled with expectations placed upon us by male authority figures in our lives, taking on the responsibilities which come with expectations, while our own dreams and desires are muted, invisible, and erased.

Like you, Celie, I broke the bonds of betrayal, emotional impoverishment, self-hate, and began carving a pathway for the self that remembered to remember who she is and who she truly belongs to while re-embracing the color purple inside my gardens. Tiny purple blooms run rampant as groundcover almost choking out the other plants and my thoughts return to your words, “I don’t know how to fight. All I know how to do is stay alive.” So I allow them to make their own choices about survival and the other plants manage to keep on living.

And like the purple groundcover, you reminded us that we were never the bruises or the myths that someone tried to convince us that we were. Thank you, Celie, for demonstrating how you transformed from a silenced, abused victim to an independent, self-actualized woman. Thank you for demonstrating that female solidarity and “womanist” love are essential for overcoming both racial and patriarchal oppression.

Dearest Celie, you taught so many of us to sing out loud in fields of lavender declaring that we are a full embodiment of spiritual wholeness . . . celebrating how our relationships with other women can heal us and help us embrace the power to reject male supremacy, find our voices, reclaim our bodies, sexuality and cultural identity.

Celie, you may not remember, but my mother and my teenage daughter met you at the same time I met you. One paperback copy of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple was passed back and forth between the three of us. We were three generations in a matriarchal household daily discussing your identity search, racism, sexism and sensitive, often contrasting, generational perceptions about self-worth and double consciousness.

Thank you for being the character that my mother cheered on knowing you would not perish. Thank you for all the questions your character served nightly at our dinner table.

Thank you, Celie, for the uplifting lessons that my daughter and I taught each other about the power of intuitiveness, the power of utterance, the power of silence and witness, and all the grace that we granted each other in order to agree to disagree about your journey to liberation.

I am truly grateful for you allowing the ink’s breath to dream you awake.

With deep respect and admiration,

Jaki

From: Michael Parker

To: Darl Bundren, a character in As I Lay Dying,
by William Faulkner

Darl Bundren

Mississippi State Asylum

Jackson, Mississippi

Alright now, Darl,

I thought of you the other day. I went for a long drive, trying to find some open country. I had to pass by all sorts of places you never, thank God, got to see: storage units, used car dealers, Korean barbecue, nails, nails, nails. I was in search of a landscape you would have encountered on the way to Jefferson with your family. On a backroad that dipped through a stand of pine down to a sudsy river I pulled over and felt, suddenly, your presence. I remembered how, when I first met you many years ago, in college, I didn’t understand you because the professor said I had to. He wanted me to understand his version of you. He wrote on the board some of the things you said: “The hallway looks like a searchlight turned into rain.” He said what the hallway represented and the searchlight and the rain. All of a sudden it was Psych 101.

He barely mentioned the passage that spoke to me the most, the one that, if I had to sum you up (and why should I, how could I, though that’s the sort of thing we did in classes back then, pick a line and slim you down to fit it): “In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don’t know what I am. I don’t know if I am or not.”

It wasn’t just because I had a hard time sleeping, then and now, or because, around the time when everyone else’s mind shuts down, mine ramps up. The way that second sentence ended in a period instead of a question mark opened something up for me: how a little squiggle of punctuation makes a question more desperate than the way you wrote it, which is just as much statement. But not. That’s what I liked. It is, but not. I didn’t know what I was, I didn’t even know if I was or not. Most days that is still the half-statement, half-question, Darl. See, you stuck with me, even though it’s been forty years now.

This kid who sat beside me in class said, “This mess is harder to understand than calculus if you ask me.” I had not asked him and had no idea how to even spell calculus, but I wanted to say, it’s not that bad if you listen hard and also maybe it’s just hard in a different way.

I do get that some of the things you said took a while to hear, though. You said you heard teeth in your brother Jewel’s breath. And, “In sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gesture of dolls.” That one went right over my head. But in that same chapter you said, “If we could just ravel out into time. That would be nice. It would be nice if you could just ravel out in time.” I never heard anyone say “ravel,” always “unravel,” and I too wanted to untwist into time. If I could just. Instead, I got more twisted up. I never forgot to wonder how nice it would be to ravel out. You taught me that also, Darl.

I wrote a term paper on you. I compared you to Hamlet, because, see, I don’t think you were as crazy as everyone claimed. I believe you were faking it sometimes, because faking crazy is a way out of just going along. You never did just go along. The people in Jefferson called you “queer.” They meant odd. I read up on you recently and found a few professors saying you liked men. They said you were queer, as in “a queer,” like people used to say back in high school. Queer was a slur, but over time it has become an umbrella term classifying all kinds of sexual configurations. I like how that word has changed meaning, how it went from the worst thing you might get called in high school to a word people nowadays use with pride. I get a kick out of the professors who don’t understand the original meaning of the word. He’s a queer one, I heard people say about some fellow when I was growing up, but the next time they would say he was peculiar. The professors seemed to believe you were confused about everything; therefore, you must be confused about what you like and who you like to do it with. “I don’t know if I am or not” does not mean you are confused. It means you know way more than the rest of us and are too smart to claim that such things can be figured out one way or another.

A hillbilly Hamlet! Wrote the professor at the end of my term paper. He gave me a B minus. To get an A on any term paper about you (as if our connection had any kind of term limit; as if I didn’t believe you when you said, “it is as though time, running straight before us in a diminutive line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread and not the interval between”) would have bummed me out big time. I’d as soon my GPA suffer than agree with the professor and confine you to what struck me as another life sentence in the state asylum up in Jackson, where they shamefully sent you.

I ran into the kid who said he preferred calculus on the quad one day. Fuck a bunch of Faulkner, he said. I’m going to see if I can’t take that class pass/fail. I was reminded of what you said about your brother: “Jewel knows who he is because he does not know that he does not know whether he is or not.” Though I liked that kid. I like people like him, for they make me question how they know what I don’t know and whether I even know it.

You don’t have to write back. I like writing to you, Darl. I feel myself raveling right out.

Signed,

Michael

From: Shannon Ravenel

To: Johnny, a character in “Boy and Dog,”
from Facing the Music, Stories, by Larry Brown

Dear Johnny —

There are many reasons to ponder this story about the death of your beloved dog, Bozo. You loved him so much. He was eleven and you are only eight. He must have seemed almost like your big brother. It is very, very sad to think of you finding his dead body run over by a 1965 Mustang driven by a guy who returned to the place where he’d hit Bozo, not to see if Bozo was OK, but to find his car’s hubcap. He didn’t care about having killed your dog. And so you killed him, with a yellow brick. And all hell broke loose after that, which you describe in your unusual literary format (293 one-sentence paragraphs, each sentence in five words), obviously a story emerging from the terrible grief of losing a beloved pet dog.

The double viewpoint — the boy’s and the author’s — captures my attention and makes me wonder. Could an eight-year-old really throw a brick hard enough to kill a grown man in his car? Could a boy that age really cause the hugely explosive scene, observe it, and outwait its end in order to retrieve his beloved dog’s body?

Or could that boy have had an extraordinary imagination? Could he have grown up to be an author? I think I know the answers.

Love,

Shannon

Clyde Edgerton was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2016. He is the author of 10 novels, a book of advice, a memoir, short stories and essays. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and, most recently, a 2025 O. Henry short story award. He lives in Wilmington, N.C.

Joseph Bathanti was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2024. Among his many awards are the Sam Ragan Fine Arts Award, the Sherwood Anderson Award and the North Carolina Award for Literature. He is the author of over 20 books, including poetry, novels, short stories and nonfiction. He was North Carolina’s poet laureate from 2012-14 and joined the faculty of Appalachian State University in 2001.

Jill McCorkle was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2018. Her first two novels were published simultaneously in 1984 by the newly launched Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. The author of seven novels and five short-story collections, her many accolades include the John Dos Passos Prize for Excellence in Literature and the North Carolina Award for Literature.

Jaki Shelton Green was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2014 and is the ninth and current poet laureate of North Carolina. Her honors include receiving the North Carolina Award for Literature in 2003 and the North Carolina State University 2026 Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters. Author of 10 books of poetry, an LP and two audio collections, she serves as poetry editor for Walter magazine and is a professor of Documentary Poetry at Duke University.

Daniel Wallace will be inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2026. He is the author of six novels, a memoir, a short story collection and a children’s book. Wallace is the J. Ross MacDonald Distinguished Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, his alma mater.

Shannon Ravenel will be inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2026. Born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina, she was editor of the Best American Short Stories series for 13 years and one of the founders of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. In 1986 she introduced the annual anthology New Stories from the South. During her time at Algonquin, Ravenel nurtured and advanced the work of numerous writers from the American South, including Clyde Edgerton and Jill McCorkle. OH

Michael Parker will be inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2026. He is the author of eight novels and three collections of short stories. He has received fellowships in fiction from the North Carolina Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Hobson Award for Arts and Letters, the North Carolina Award for Literature, and the 2020 Thomas Wolfe Prize.

2026 Feature

Poem July 2026

Fourth of July Night

The little boat at anchor in black water sat murmuring to the tall black sky.

A white sky bomb fizzed on a black line.

A rocket hissed it’s red signature into the west.

Now a shower of Chinese fire alphabets,

A cry of flower pots broken in flames,

A long curve to a purple spray, three violet balloons —

Drips of seaweed tangled in gold, shimmering symbols of mixed numbers,

Tremulous arrangements of cream gold folds of a bride’s wedding gown —

A few sky bombs spoke their pieces, then velvet dark.

The little boat at anchor in black water sat murmuring to the tall black sky.

— Carl Sandburg

Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) was a poet, biographer, journalist and editor. He was awarded three Pulitzer Prizes, two for poetry and one for a biography of Abraham Lincoln.

2026 Feature Poem

Tag: Feature

Poem September 2026

Proto-Indo-European Speakers

A Golden Opportunity

A Golden Opportunity

A once-vacant Fisher Park home overflows with life and color

A Portrait of O. Henry

A Portrait of O. Henry

The mysterious master of short stories and tall tales

Storytellers

Storytellers

For decades, ArtStock Studio Tour has connected artists with the greater Greensboro community

ArtStock Studio Tour 2026 Artists​

The Five Faces of O. Henry

The Five Faces of O. Henry

Local artists turn paint, sequins and ephemera into portraits of William Sydney Porter

Playing to Their Strengths

Playing to Their Strengths

A home-run reno for two former athletic stars

Class Act Cadets

Class Act Cadets

Southeast Guilford High School’s NJROTC trains to the top

Poem August 2026

Poem August 2026​

Dear . . .

Dear . . .

Fourth of July Night

Fourth of July Night

ArtStock Studio Tour 2026 Artists

Poem August 2026