Arts + Entertainment
Keep your fancy free — reading at whim
Fifty years ago this year, I dropped out of graduate school and my studies in medieval history, and set off in a different direction. I’ve never forgotten the thought that came rolling along right behind my escape from academia: “Now I can finally read whatever I want.”
A Baby Beat poet finds his voice
“Power Spots” (Edgework Press, 2025) by Ron Myers is a first press-published book of his poetry by someone who is of the “boomer” generation. In that sense, as now a book-published poet, you could say that he’s a “late bloomer,” or a “late boomer.”
Roving jewel: Angela Autumn comes to Franklin
Raised in the small town of Zelienople, Pennsylvania (pop: 3,769), singer-songwriter Angela Autumn recalled having an isolated childhood, one that was “very intermingled with nature.” By the early 2000s, as an elementary school kid first hopping onto the internet, Autumn was able to access world culture and trends — more specifically, music and its endless rabbit hole.
Poe biography prompts a newfound respect
“In my younger and more vulnerable years” are the words with which narrator Nick Carraway kicks off “The Great Gatsby.” Those seven words entranced me when I first read “Gatsby,” living then in my own younger and vulnerable days as a 20-something whose heroes were writers, most of them American, most of them male. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe: that was my triumvirate, with dozens of other novelists and poets sitting just below the salt at the same table.
The living word: John C. Campbell Folk School at 100
Celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2025, the storied John C. Campbell Folk School — located in Brasstown amid the rural landscape of Clay County — remains a cultural bastion for the arts, music and dance in Western North Carolina.
“[The school] had an effect of kind of changing what traditional music and dance was in the region,” said T-Claw Crawford, music and dance coordinator for JCCFS.
Wisdom from an Appalachian Renaissance man
Whether you are an expert in folk music or if you can’t tell a banjo from a mandolin, a new biography, “Doc Watson: A Life in Music,” by Eddie Huffman, will draw you in. Along the way you’ll discover not just Doc’s story, but the rich history of our state and the impact of its traditional music.
No one said it would be easy: Patrick Sweany to headline Rock for Relief festival
At age 51, acclaimed blues rocker Patrick Sweany has performed over the decades at seemingly at every venue from coast-to-coast and beyond. Through it all, one sentiment still rings true in his heart — “The whole thing is luck and trying to show up as much as possible.”
A different kind of power in New Zealand
When you think “politician,” what picture pops into your mind? In today’s world, regardless of party, it is likely a bald or gray-haired old man, fixated on power and money, loyal only to his corporate sponsors.
Enter Jacinda Ardern. Prime Minister of New Zealand. Elected at age 37 to lead her country. What kind of young woman could handle such a task, survive the opposition and pull her country together?
Solitude is gratitude: Happily disappearing to Snowbird Mountain Lodge
There’s a certain feeling you get when you cross over the Graham County line. For most “outsiders,” whether it be nearby East Tennessee or origin points from any incoming direction, it’s a sense of genuine curiosity and wonder, where you don’t know what to expect around the next curve. And that’s half the fun, you dig?
