Writer of Creative Nonfiction, Fiction, Poetry and Master Photographer
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…
I’ve really enjoyed the emails, texts, posts on social media and responses from readers about Galvanized: The Odyssey of a Reluctant Carolina Confederate. People have sent me copies of documents and photographs, and in some instances, ideas for future blog posts. I love it, and that’s what I started this blog for — to interact…
In my first book, Memory Cards: Portraits from a Rural Journey, I wrote about the three girls who are buried on my parents’ farm, in a small plot near my house. The Winstead sisters, Mamie Harriet, 21; Mary Frances, 18; and Eula Pearl, 9 went swimming in the Tar River during a blistering July heat…
There were a lot of interesting things I ran across while researching Galvanized that either didn’t get much coverage in the book, had to be cut or edited, or just simply weren’t relevant. The story of the Immortal 600 got brief mention in Chapter 13 “Statues of Limitation” because there is a statue in Washington,…
(Feedback used in this post was not solicited. —MKB) Let’s face it, writers have egos. Those egos are fragile and no matter how large, they need feeding. I tell my creative writing students that a writer has to have an ego. If you’re going to put words out in the world for people to read…
One thing about writing a book is that you learn so much. Galvanized was a fun education for me, mostly North Carolina history from the early 1800s through the late 1880s. One of the characters I’d always been fascinated about is Zebulon Vance. Vance was a legislator, governor, senator, and mostly loved by the people…