
{"id":11225,"date":"2010-06-30T13:00:48","date_gmt":"2010-06-30T21:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/?p=11225"},"modified":"2010-06-30T13:13:54","modified_gmt":"2010-06-30T21:13:54","slug":"just-up-the-road","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/2010\/06\/30\/just-up-the-road\/","title":{"rendered":"Just Up the Road"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By Vicky Dickson<br \/>\n<\/strong><br \/>\nWhen I was growing up in Chapel Hill, Hillsborough was the place we drove to on Sundays to eat fried chicken and biscuits at the Colonial Inn. Those were delicious meals \u00e2\u20ac\u201c particularly to a kid brought up on TV dinners and fish sticks \u00e2\u20ac\u201c but I never paused to consider what other wonderful things the town might have to offer.<\/p>\n<p>Nor, in later years, did my consideration of Hillsborough extend beyond a vague awareness that the town seemed to have turned into something of a mecca for nationally known writers. So I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m very glad to have come upon a new book that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s helped fill in some blanks.<\/p>\n<p><em>27 Views of Hillsborough: A Southern Town in Prose and Poetry<\/em> is a collection of poems, stories and essays by some of the town\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s most illustrious citizens. All the pieces are inspired, in some fashion, by the town of Hillsborough \u00e2\u20ac\u201c though as Lee Smith pointed out at a reading at The Regulator, the collection is far from a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153sweetie, sweetie\u00e2\u20ac\u009d sort of travelogue meant to attract tourists from New Jersey.<\/p>\n<p>The perspectives are fresh, and often unexpected. In \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Views of the Eno,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Beverly Scarlett writes of her shock, after multicultural summer camp at Carolina Friends School, at entering first grade and finding that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153everyone at school looked like me.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d The happiness she felt when integration provided a best friend who didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t look anything like her was eventually replaced by the misery of being the harassed, only black on the school bus. But the solace she found in an old Churton Street house along the bus route led in turn to some fascinating discoveries about Scarlett\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s family history. <\/p>\n<p>The solace to be found in houses also figures prominently in Allen Gurganus\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Old Houses and Young Men: Notes on Renovation and Survival,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d which tells how the restoration of his Hillsborough home brought Gurganus back to life after New York City had become a graveyard for far too many of his friends. <\/p>\n<p>Randall Kenan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Where the Wild Things Are\u00e2\u20ac\u009d depicts a fictional retreat from the big city into small-town gardening, while real-life gardening at Montrose, the complex of historic gardens where Nancy Goodwin lives and works, forms the focus of her story \u00e2\u20ac\u0153A Gardener\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Journal. \u00e2\u20ac\u009d <\/p>\n<p>Much of 27 Views deals with history, from Michael Malone\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s story inspired by the Regulator uprising to Barry Jacobs\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 account of one of the town\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s (and the state\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s) most prominent early families. There are excerpts from Lee Smith\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s novel <em>On Agate Hill<\/em>, for which she found inspiration in Hillsborough\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Burwell School. And there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Katharine Whalen\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Stop Your Engines,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d about the Occoneechee Speedway, which closed in 1968.<\/p>\n<p>The wilder surroundings of Hillsborough aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t left out. Hal Crowther describes his love of trees, and his distress at the loss of so many to hurricane Fran. Jill McCorkle admires the cocky independence of a hunting beagle named Dottie. And Chef Aaron Vandemark describes the edibles to be found growing wild (or in a neighbor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s garden) in a walk around Hillsborough. <\/p>\n<p>The book includes poems by Piedmont poet laureate Jaki Shelton Green and others, cautionary essays about the precarious nature of Hillsborough\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s unique community and much more. So, to get a real sense of the wealth of history and literary talent that is Hillsborough, check it out for yourself. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When I was growing up in Chapel Hill, Hillsborough was the place we drove to on Sundays to eat fried chicken and biscuits at the Colonial Inn. Those were delicious meals \u00e2\u20ac\u201c particularly to a kid brought up on TV dinners and fish sticks \u00e2\u20ac\u201c but I never paused to consider what other wonderful things the town might have to offer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-features"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11225"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11225\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11249,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11225\/revisions\/11249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}