True Stories

A Deeper South: The Beauty, Mystery, and Sorrow of the Southern Road
by Pete Candler

You know this pervasive story of the American South: it’s a place where old times are not forgotten, where sultry and polite climes smooth over life’s rough edges. That’s not the story Pete Candler, an Asheville writer, photographer, and filmmaker, tells in A Deeper South. Instead, he offers a deeply personal, searching road trip into the harder truths that underlie the region’s (and his own family’s) racial history, unearthing marginalized people and voices along the way. Candler concludes that it is “better to tell a story in many true fragments than to tell an all-encompassing one that is false.”

Stories I Lived to Tell: An Appalachian Memoir
by Gary Carden

In a land of towering storytellers, Jackson County native Gary Carden ranks among the most venerable. He’s a repository of mountain culture, wit, and wisdom, all of which pour forth from his memoir in stories. Sharing more than 40 yarns, Carden recounts a life beset by personal tragedies but lifted by community, traditions, art, and expression. Neal Hutcheson, a filmmaker who produced a recent documentary on Carden, edited the collection and aptly notes in an introduction, “This storytelling business is not an exercise in nostalgia, it is essential.”

The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South
By Leon Fink

While debates about immigration are marked by rancorous politics and sweeping stereotypes, Leon Fink’s multi-decade study reminds us of the real people, the lived dreams and struggles, of some of Western North Carolina’s more recent arrivals to our nation of immigrants. This revision and expansion of his important 2002 book, which surveyed Guatemalan migrants in Burke County (who we meet again in this volume, 20 years later), could not be timelier. It shows the evolution of a vibrant WNC subculture whose multinational roots are helping the region cultivate new growth.

Buncombe Origins: The Making of Asheville and Buncombe County 
Edited by Emily Cadmus and Katherine Calhoun Cutshall

What makes a place what it is? To really find out, you’d have to tap a wide range of sources, seek out perspectives both expert and lesser-known, and ask all the right questions. And that’s exactly what the editors of this welcome volume of local history have done for Buncombe and its county seat of Asheville. This multifaceted book mines area archives to offer new understandings of everything from the county’s native inhabitants to its colonization and urban development to its complicated passage through the civil rights era. 

Night Magic: Adventures Among Glowworms, Moon Gardens, and Other Marvels of the Dark
By Leigh Ann Henion

Boone-based nature writer Leigh Ann Henion is not afraid of the dark. To the contrary: she wants us to see what wonders it hides, and she’s here to guide us through the murk, even as light pollution renders darkness a rarer commodity. “As you travel with me through the fern-sprouting valleys and cloud-cresting peaks of Appalachia, encountering creatures both familiar and strange,” she beckons, “I hope you will join me in recognizing darkness as a restorative balm for this burning world.