Of all the chapters that I read and reviewed in my most recent review of the book “Letters From the Smokies” in Smoky Mountain Living (June-July 2025), the story of the Walker Sisters was the one story that got my attention probably more than any of the others.

To the Editor:

In the 2024 Presidential race, 49.8% of the votes went to Donald J. Trump, who promised to reduce the costs of consumer goods, end the wars in Gaza and Ukraine and fix our immigration crisis.

Benjamin Merkle’s “The White Horse King: The Life of Alfred the Great” (Thomas Nelson, 2009, 272 pages) tells the story of the Wessex monarch who resisted the Vikings and after decades of fighting and prayer drove them out of his kingdom. He also began unifying Anglo-Saxon England into one realm, a merger only completed during the reign of Athelstan, Alfred’s grandson. 

Earlier this summer, two Western North Carolina artists completed and installed a new public sculpture at a park in Virginia.  

Metalsmith William Rogers designed the work and created steel elements that support hammered copper panels made by Nathan Bush.

For all of you ’70s and ’80s hipsters, I’ve got one for you. In his new book, acclaimed author Paul Elie (“The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex and Controversy in the 1980s,” Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025, 464 pages) takes a deep dive into the music and arts scene of the 1970s and 80s.

County governments and conservation nonprofit groups may apply for grant funding from the N.C. Agricultural Development and Farmland Preservation Trust Fund for farmland preservation projects. 

When Claire Stovall applied to the Artist-in-Residence program at Great Smoky Mountains National Park, she hoped to use the time to work on the wildlife textile collages she had highlighted in her application. Then she told her family she’d been selected for the program — and that plan spun on a swivel.  

 Watching Cal Raleigh win the final round of the T-Mobile Home Run Derby on TV last week was a special kind of thrill for Steve Wilson, who works in Purchasing, Shipping and Receiving for Southwestern Community College. 

If you’re like me, you avoid driving I-40 through the Pigeon River Gorge like warm beer on a hot summer day. 

Hey, if I have to circle through Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas to enter Tennessee from the west and then drive east back to Knoxville, I’ll do it. Perhaps I exaggerate, but that drive through the gorge to Knoxville has always been one of white knuckles, clinched orifices and prayers that speeding semis don’t topple over on you in a curve. 

On Monday, July 21, the series “Where We Live: History, Nature and Culture,” will present a program on the history of Cowee School, now the Cowee School Arts and Heritage Center. Speakers will be Bill Dyar, long-time principal of the school; Stacy Guffey, founding director of the Arts and Heritage Center; and Laura Brooks, current director.