Greg Jones: The rockin rev
by Dean King Put an ear to a window of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church a little shy of midnight on a random Wednesday or Thursday night, and you might just hear music. Not sacred music, but roof-raising rock ’n’ roll….
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A persistent pastime: Pete Sack paints baseball players and much more
by Liza Roberts photographs by Nick Pironio Artist Pete Sack, 37, has always been drawn to photographs of the human face. Strangers in yearbooks speak to him; archival snapshots of orphans, schoolchildren, and athletes hold unusual sway. One particular brunette…
Eureka! A glimpse of blue Tricyrtis lasiocarpa
by Tony Avent illustration by Ippy Patterson It was early in the morning, a sunny Monday morning, when Mark Weathington of Raleigh’s J.C. Raulston Arboretum and I sped down the winding roads of Alishan mountain on the island of Taiwan,…
Play on
by Jesma Reynolds photograph by Lissa Gotwals “If music be the food of love, play on.” So wrote William Shakespeare to open Twelfth Night, and so says Robert McMillan about living life to the fullest. The Raleigh trial lawyer turns…
Kari Howe Stoltz: Banking on community
by Todd Cohen When she was a first-grader at Mary P. Douglas Elementary School in Raleigh, Kari Howe Stoltz volunteered to help raise money for a bike-a-thon to support a girl in her neighborhood who had cystic fibrosis. She’s been…
The Walter cocktail contest
by Wilton Barnhardt, author of the new novel Lookaway, Lookaway I suspect Sir Walter Raleigh, back in 1618, went to the executioner convinced of the utter failure of his ventures, having fallen out of favor with Queen Elizabeth as well…
Essential ingredient: Eggplant
by Kaitlyn Goalen photographs by Juli Leonard It may not have the juiciness of a tomato or the intoxicating perfume of a ripe peach, but the eggplant is among my favorite late summer ingredients. It wasn’t always so. Until fairly…
Varmint bites back: It’s so good at Soo
by Dean McCord The place is in a run-down mini strip mall scheduled for demolition in the not-too-distant future. It’s between a head shop and an old-school record store. It has the tiniest, most cramped parking lot, perfectly ripe…
Gigs: The pork enforcer
by Allie Higgins A Piggly Wiggly parking lot in Warsaw, N.C., might not be the most obvious place to spend a sweltering summer afternoon, but it’s a great spot to meet Raleigh’s own Ann Edmondson. As coordinator of the North…
The laser’s edge: where art and science meet
by Ann Brooke Raynal photographs by Lissa Gotwals As with most stories about art, this one begins with the human eye. In this case, the eye belongs not to an artist but to a leading laser pioneer, whose vision is…
Swamp Mallows
text and photograph by John Rosenthal In 1996, Gibbons Ruark, Raleigh native and well respected poet, wrote a splendid poem called Swamp Mallows. It was inspired by the remarkably beautiful Ben Berns painting of the same name in the North…
This is your life
by Maureen Sherbondy Place your hand in the fire imagine it is a river that can only burn the skin of one who fears and sees flame. Jump out of the plane. No parachute. Fall and grab what you need…
Hope and a ’68 Impala
by Settle Monroe The radio never worked and the air conditioning was shot in the 1968 Chevrolet Impala my father inherited from his grandmother. But when I was a 5-year-old girl riding to kindergarten with my dad, its run-down condition…
Patterns
by Tracie Fellers “Why?” That’s what my mother says when I tell her, while we finish our Sunday dinner – post-Thanksgiving plates of turkey, oyster dressing, collard greens, and sweet potatoes. Mom and I had joked that my maternal grandmother and…