Anyone brave enough to travel home and spend this Thanksgiving locked down with their family will no doubt find themselves in desperate need of entertainment. So, as movie awards season shifts conveniently from theater seats to our comfortable couches, we might be tempted to indulge in some post-feast Oscar bait. […]
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When Chue Lee first started selling Laotian sticky rice at the East Asheville farmers market, she didn’t have much luck. The rice was unfamiliar to customers and cost quite a bit more than what you could get at the supermarket. People just didn’t know what to make of it. “Well, […]
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Alison Stine, a freelance journalist and fiction writer, started her career as a poet, but knew she always wanted to be a novelist. Those aspirations came true earlier this year with the release of her first novel “Road Out of Winter.” Inspired by what seemed to be a never-ending winter […]
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COVID-19 closures and supply chain failures have sharpened concerns about food security and more. Rural areas were not spared from the worries. For those of us who grew up in rural families where gardening, canning and a freezer full of meat are just normal preparations for winter, 2020 has been […]
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American ginseng is imperiled by overharvesting. Locals are racing to preserve the plant — and its economic potential. Iris Gao keeps a ginseng root in her office. It’s fixed on black velvet with three other bleached-brown specimens, all of them twisty and otherworldly and protected by glass in a shadowbox frame. […]
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“There’s a lot that makes West Virginia and the surrounding areas mysterious,” Sean McCracken tells me in between puffs on his pipe. “The mountains themselves are mysterious, because, half the time, you never know what’s around the next corner.” McCracken, a West Virginia native, knows the region’s mysteries better than […]
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