Writer of Creative Nonfiction, Fiction, Poetry and Master Photographer
Confederate statues are coming down all over the country, and the one near me — in Rocky Mount, NC — starts getting moved today. The local newspaper said it will take five days and cost over $280,000. Ironically, the original cost to install the statue, in today’s dollars, was about $275,000. In my book Galvanized:…
It seems like we could all use a laugh during these stressful times. I ran across this local story when I was doing some research. It was something I had to share — the story of a problem patient in Spring Hope. Note: I don’t know how long Dr. Lewis practiced, but he definitely worked…
North Carolina has a history of colorful, sometimes “mutinous people,” and no doubt the story of Bute County from the area around Warrenton adds to it. Be sure to read to the end to find out how “shotgun influence” helped determine borders. Bute County was established in the North Carolina Piedmont area in 1764. Like…
I was fortunate enough to appear on Rocky Mount’s WHIG-TV recently to talk about Galvanized. Here’s the link:
“Michael Brantley’s Galvanized is a conscientious and sweeping hybrid narrative gathering together fragments of the author’s personal history—that of his great-great-grandfather’s life in nineteenth-century North Carolina—alongside elaborately researched accounts of the Civil War. When Brantley offers, ‘These were the stories that had become interesting to me, the stories about real people, regular people,’ he focuses our attention…
While “Lincoln’s pockets” sounds like an interesting name for a band, it’s actually the result of a couple of articles I recently read about what the 16th president had on him the night he was assassinated. On that fateful night, April 14, 1865, when Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth in Ford’s Theatre, he…