Join Brent Martin, director of the Blue Ridge Bartram Trail Conservancy, as he discusses the guidebook he wrote for William Bartram’s trail through North Georgia and Western North Carolina. 

In a November 2022 interview with The Smoky Mountain News, storied writer Fred Chappell, a Haywood County native who was 86 at the time, was asked what the culmination of his life meant to him looking back. 

Macon County residents will not have to travel far to attend Pisgah Legal Services’ 13th Annual Justice Forum. A special Watch Party for the Oct. 17 event will be held at Macon County Public Library.

International hiker and writer Jen Seymour will speak at 6 p.m. Thursday, June 8, at the Macon County Public Library in Franklin.

Maggie Wallem Rowe will be reading from her newest book, "Life is Sweet, Y'all: Wit and Wisdom with a Side of Sass," from 2 to 3 p.m. Saturday, May 28. The book is a humorous collection of inspirational life lessons with tips, quips and vintage recipes representing the best in Southern cooking. Drop by to meet Maggie, enjoy the discussion and have some homemade treats. 

Horace Kephart has been dead for 88 years, but his name and his story still pull an undercurrent through Western North Carolina. 

Kephart is acclaimed as the father of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, an outdoorsman gifted with an adventurous soul, and the author of such staples of regional literature as Our Southern Highlanders and Camping and Woodcraft. He’s derided, too, as a man with a severe drinking problem, a shirker of family responsibility and an outsider who profited off of sometimes less-than-flattering depictions of the locals. 

Born of the same generation but in different parts of the country, Jane Sherron De Hart and Ruth Bader Ginsburg traveled on oddly similar parallel paths. Those paths would eventually cross as De Hart’s 15 years worth of research on the Supreme Court Justice recently became the most comprehensive biography of Ginsburg’s life and law career.

In the six or so years I’ve lived and worked in Western North Carolina, the amount of craft breweries in our region has literally quadrupled. And as someone who has written extensively about craft beer, industry trends and so forth, it’s pretty impossible to keep up with it all. 

Ronnie Evans tries to remember his cousin as the beautiful and spunky woman pictured on the cover of his new book — the sparkle emanating from her party dress and her eyes — but the image he can’t get out of his head is the one of her lying on a cold slab following her autopsy in 1963. 

“I see these beautiful photos of her and realize she’d be 95 today if she lived, but I also saw her on a slab after the autopsy was done,” he said. “That and knowing how it happened to her — to know what she was subjected to — that’s why I’ve kept searching for answers.”

If you didn’t know him, you wouldn’t even notice him.

Sitting by himself at the counter of the Innovation Station in Dillsboro one recent sunny afternoon, David Joy sips on a heady craft brew, the blonde ale to be specific (his favorite). The sparkling new second location for Innovation Brewing (based out of nearby Sylva), Joy is fiercely loyal to the indepently-owned/operated company, a loyalty akin to the hardscrabble characters of his wildy fascinating and acclaimed novels.