More than 150 leaders from Cherokee, Clay, Graham, Haywood, Jackson, Macon and Swain counties in North Carolina gathered Aug. 16 in Bryson CIty for the 7 County Western North Carolina Community Summit to discuss strategies about how to collectively create better cooperation in their efforts to encourage lifelong recovery for those suffering from substance use abuse and dependence.

For many people the county fair conjures up images of Ferris wheels, carnival games and cotton candy, but here in Western North Carolina the annual events represent a time of year when the region’s agricultural roots get to take center stage. 

Of course there will be the beloved fair foods, carnival rides and children giggling on the Ferris wheel, but there will also be hundreds of gardeners, farmers, agricultural students and others signing up to show off their prized plants, produce and cattle.

A new state park has been created in Buncombe and Haywood counties following Gov. Roy Cooper’s signature on a state Senate bill July 19, but it will be years before Pisgah View State Park will bridge the gap from concept to reality. 

It was finally moving day, and that empty little Greensboro apartment must have seemed like a mansion to 29-year-old Clayton Suggs. 

Fitting, the lack of furnishings; the whole thing was a blank slate, a new start.

Dr. Stephen Wall couldn’t have come to Waynesville at a better time. 

“There were four pediatricians in Haywood County, and three of them retired all at the same time,” said Wall. “So Dr. Bob Earnest recruited me and another guy, Dr. Garnet Maharajh, to join Haywood Pediatrics, which he started two years prior, in 1987.”

It’s fascinating to watch a cultural arts organization grow up, mature, get a little long-in-the-tooth, and then re-define itself to adjust to a changing world. That’s exactly what is happening with Folkmoot, which is now in its 36th year in Western North Carolina.

And what about that mission statement above. In these times when politicized culture wars and presidential twitter tantrums divide us, here is an arts organization whose very existence is based on trying to build bridges and foster international understanding. Folkmoot avoids politics, but now more than ever its mission is relevant and necessary.

In its 36th year of cultural exchange through song and dance, Folkmoot remains a moving target, one that constantly evolves in its programming, but never once forgetting its core values.

Bordering the bustling Patton Avenue in downtown Asheville, you wouldn’t know where Echo Mountain Recording is unless you were told. 

An old church turned into a state-of-the-art production studio, the property is purposely minimal, this sort of physical doorway into a melodic universe of potential and possibility. 

Only $80 stands between Sylva resident Carrie McBane and affordable health care coverage. If she made $80 less she would qualify for Medicaid in North Carolina, and if she made $80 more she would qualify for subsidies through the Affordable Care Act. 

There’s a good reason President Lyndon B. Johnson traveled to Independence, Missouri on July 30, 1965, to sign the legislation that created Medicaid — he wanted to present the first membership card to former President Harry S. Truman. 

Truman had long been a backer of socialized medicine, inheriting the position from his Oval Office predecessor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who established a number of social safety net programs during his 12 years as chief executive.