Writer of Creative Nonfiction, Fiction, Poetry and Master Photographer
A few years ago, my family and I visited an exhibit of Blackbeard’s ship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, in Greenville. East Carolina University had the display at the Voice of America site just outside town. I was almost as fascinated about the VOA as the pirate stuff, as it seems like something from a black…
In August of 1880, former Confederate General Bryan Grimes was returning from a political convention in Washington County when he was killed by a hitman. The murder occurred in Bear Creek, just five miles from Grimes’ home, known as Grimesland. Grimes was a signer of North Carolina’s secession ordinance and joined the Confederate army shortly…
School teacher Peter Stuart Ney died on November 15, 1846 in Rowan County. He was part of a great legend that ended with a deathbed confession that he was Napoleon’s right-hand man. It was said that Marshal Michel Ney escaped a firing squad in 1815 and managed to make his way to America. It is…
We had caught the drop on them . . . [but then] . . . the earth just seemed to open up and take that line Captain John H. Thorp (sometimes spelled Thorpe) of Rocky Mount wrote a summary of the actions of the 47th North Carolina Regiment. At one point, the outfit was running…
With MLB announcing baseball is coming back next week, I dug out an old story about a Rocky Mount baseball team. All I can say is thank goodness we now have the Carolina Mudcats (and several other minor league teams within a short drive). I remember wanting to go see a minor league baseball game…
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…