Back in the 1940s, while World War II was still raging in Europe and the Philippines,  Charlie Kilpatrick and I used to entertain ourselves by prowling through the kudzu thickets near his house. 

Gary Carden has accomplished a great deal in his life. But by his own estimation, none of it compares to his most recent endeavor — donating a treasure trove of books to the Jackson County Public Library that took him a lifetime to collect. 

Several weeks ago, I published an article that dealt with a trip to Tellico Plains with the Principal Chief of the Cherokees, John Crowe. This was back in 1976 and the Tennessee Valley Authority had announced their plans to flood the Tellico Plains.

This one is for my old friends, living and dead, in Cherokee. Here’s to you, Trigger Young, Woody Sneed, Bill Young, Darlene Whitetree, Homer Burgess, Wanda Lee Burgess, Darlene Bradley, Ralph Henry, Jean Holt, Ethelene Conseen, Johnson Catoaster, Johnson Lee Owle, Eddie Swimmer Wilber Paul and a hundred others. 

Back in the 1980s, when I was telling stories in the Cope Crest Conference Center in Tiger, Georgia, I heard about Eliott Wigginton, who was teaching English in the Rayburn County school system.

I remember a day in March when I was in the seventh grade. We were on the second floor of the old Sylva Elementary building, and we had a kind of ritual that involved the pencil sharpener. 

In “Stories I Lived to Tell: An Appalachian Memoir” (The University of North Carolina Press, 2024, 152 pages), 89-year-old storyteller and writer Gary Carden spends much of his time revisiting his youth and childhood.

So I walk into Gary Carden’s room in the ICU and the first thing he says to me in his sonorous growl is, “OK newspaperman, take this down. I want you to turn this into a story.” 

Legendary Western North Carolina storyteller Gary Carden is at it again, this time, with a new memoir due out from UNC press later this year. 

This little award may not mean all that much to him — after all, he’s one of Southern Appalachia’s most revered literary figures and has won a number of far more significant awards for his books and plays, including the Book of the Year Award from the Appalachian Writers Association in 2001, the Brown Hudson Award for Folklore in 2006 and the North Carolina Arts Council Award for Literature in 2012 — but we’re going to give it to him anyway because we’ve all been big fans of his work for a long time.