My first memory of being alive in the South was the sound of stories. As I grew older, I learned to negotiate and survive by telling stories.

Still, she remembered lessons he had taught her: To cast towards shadows, where the sunlight fails And fishes shelter in the undergrowth.

Reluctance wasn’t the right word—wasn’t a strong enough word—to describe what I felt the afternoon my wife told me that she’d signed me and Margaret, our daughter, up for the...

She liked this story, and she liked that there was someone who believed it was true. She wanted the world to be like this, just for a little while longer. “Don’t tell anybody,” Rachel...

When Germans and their hog-droving Scotch-Irish contemporaries arrived in the 1700s, they fit right in to porcivorous North Carolina. To this day, German cookery has a particular fondness...

In Southern literature, if nowhere else, we can, perhaps, still find the wastrel as hero, the drunkard who goes outside of polite society and brings back the truths the rest of us hide...

There was excitement in these first hours home. I had to be patient, wait for them to settle down and get to the real storytelling. It was always, every time, worth the wait.

Water is everywhere in New Orleans—above us, below us, in the very air we breathe. We look up at passing ships, imagining the unthinkable, and then sometimes it happens. Mother Nature is...

Once a year, during the week of the July 4th holiday, more than forty thousand Lumbee Indians gather in Pembroke, North Carolina, to enjoy a little fellowship. We have beauty pageants, a...