D.G. Martin

If you really want to get in the mood for Halloween, in a local kind of way, pick up “The Devil’s Done Come Back: New Ghost Tales from North Carolina,” a collection of stories and poems edited by Winston-Salem’s Ed Southern and published by Blair, a small press based in Durham.   

The house is empty and cold and dead. Next week it will be full again with other lives. But we can never go black inside again to wander in the bookshelves, closets, and attic.

As long as we have needed to get from point A to point B, by trading routes or trails or paved...

In some North Carolina houses, this is a time of empty rooms and empty spaces. Children, so long...

Where does our garbage go?  After you take it out of your house into your bin and roll it to the curb, the garbage truck comes to get it and rolls on out of your neighborhood. But then where does it go? 

Here’s a trivia question: Name a novel by a North Carolina writer about a fictional author who traveled abroad and struggled with returning to the complexities of American culture?

This week marks the 80th anniversary of our country dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and...

Nobody’s going to argue when I say that our country is in a complicated place these days. You can feel it in the news, around the dinner table, even in the grocery store line.

Mildred Council was tall as a child and she had the job of using her long arms to dip into the rain barrel for water, earning her nickname, “Dip.” She started cooking when she was ten, “cooking the corn when the corn came in” and frying chicken “as a form of love.”