Steve Cushman
Heart With Joy

In Heart with Joy, award-winning North Carolina author Steve Cushman (he received the Novello Festival Press Literary Award for his first novel, Portisville) offers the story about the importance of following one’s heart. It centers about 15-year-old Julian Hale. His mother suddenly decides she wants to move from North Carolina to Florida, saying she wants to run her parents’ motel and finish the novel she’s been writing for years.

Young Julian is torn, as he wants to go with her. Instead, she tells him he has to go live with his father until the end of the school year. Although he’s always been closer to his mother, the experience of staying with his father creates for them the intimate relationship they’ve never before enjoyed.

As the story progress, an elderly neighbor, who spends nearly every day bird-watching, helps Julian understand that the most important thing in life is to follow your heart. Julian’s passion, it turns out, is cooking—and also the young cashier at the grocery store. As his parents begin to drift inevitably apart, he must decide whether to stay with his father or move back with his mother.

Heart with Joy is an uplifting tale about coming of age and trusting your heart.

Heart with Joy, fiction, softcover, $14.95, by Steve Cushman, is published by John F. Blair Publishers.

Larry Thacker
Mountain Mysteries: The Mystic Traditions of Appalachia

Unraveling the mysteries of the mountains in what author Larry Thacker calls his own particular brand of “cultural therapy,” Mountain Mysteries explores the supernatural, seeking to dispel urban myths and the attitudes that create them. The book delves into the folklore of the people who live here, who produce “stale lists” of herbal remedies, conjure up ghost stories, and keep alive generations-old legends.

The author also examines more modern phenomena as well, such as incidents involving encounters with UFOs, along with paranormal activity and widespread belief in the supernatural. “It is no accident,” says Larry, “that newly flourishing paranormal research societies thrive in Appalachia today alongside established communities of Wiccans, psychics, and tarot card readers.” It’s only natural, he says, that people having grown up in the old traditions would naturally want to pass along Old Word beliefs to future generations. “Always there is some souvenir of the spirit world in a nook in the mountaineer’s brain,” he adds.

Mountain Mysteries is attempts to answer the ultimate question: What does the existence of our stories (on everything from folk cures to our unique view on death and dying) tell us about ourselves? The book is a “well-researched and very entertaining look at Appalachian life,” says Silas House, author of Eli the Good.

Mountain Mysteries: The Mystic Traditions of Appalachia, nonfiction, softcover, $14.95, by Larry Thacker, is published by The Overmountain Press.

Michael Oppenheim & Laura Hope-Gill
Look Up Asheville

“Ashevillians have favorite buildings, buildings that greet them as they make their way through the city,” says local author/poet Laura Hope-Gill. “Perhaps it is the Jackson Building, the golden brick-and-terra- cotta-gargoyle-adorned first skyscraper in Western North Carolina. Or maybe it is the Beaux Arts-style Masonic Temple, just recently opened to the public for such events as poetry slams and dances.”

It is no accident, she says, that our city’s unofficial motto is “Keep Asheville Weird.” Weirdness suggests eclecticism, and that very word is the official name of the architectural style in which Asheville was built.

For five years, Michael Oppenheim photographed Asheville’s buildings, capturing them in different hours, different seasons. He says he has reached a point where he can’t walk through the city without seeing it in a new way every time. The city is a source of revelation for him as he makes his way from one building to the next. His attention is drawn to the way rainwater has worn away a limestone cartouche on the Flat Iron building, and to the growth of grass from appearing in an eaves trough on the S&W.

“We see things,” says Laura, “but don’t always notice them. This is why we need photographers and artists—to show us the very things we see every day.” Look Up Asheville, a most aptly named book, is an invitation to go for a walk and simply look at the fascinating architecture that is all around us.

Readers will quickly discover, through Michael’s photographs and Laura’s stories, about the people and circumstances of the times, and that there are as many ways to look at buildings in Asheville as there are architectural styles. “There’s the way that involves just looking while thinking about something else,” explains Laura. “There’s the way that involves remembering a conversation you had inside it. There’s the way that involves knowing something about the building’s history and how its uses have changed over the years ...”

Look Up Asheville will engage readers in the story of Asheville architecture. The only danger in learning the stories of so many local treasures is that it might make it more difficult to say which one is your favorite.

Look Up Asheville, nonfiction, hardcover, $50.00, is available exclusively through Grateful Steps Publishing. For more information, call 828.277.0998 or visit gratefulsteps.com.

J. Scott Graham & Elizabeth C. Hunter
Blue Ridge Parkway: Road to Discovery

To help commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Blue Ridge Parkway, renowned photographer J. Scott Graham and award-winning columnist Elizabeth C. Hunter have produced the recently released Blue Ridge Parkway: Road to Discovery. This elegant, 144-page book is the pair’s third collaborative venture.

Elizabeth’s essays bring alive the stories behind the stunning photographs. Of the Biltmore Estate, for example, she writes about George Vanderbilt: “On a long ramble, he came upon a prospect he thought finer than any other. A good place to build a country estate, he decided, and, through an agent—to keep the price down—set about acquiring the property.”

Scott’s photographs are, quite simply, breathtaking. The book contains his photographic record of sweeping vistas down to the smallest of details, finding beauty wherever he goes.

While he’s perhaps best known up to now for his photographs of the Great Smoky Mountains and the Caribbean national parks sites, he has been focusing— figuratively and literally—on the Blue Ridge Parkway for the better part of the last two decades.

“While we’ve each visited the Parkway for decades,” says Elizabeth, “our attraction to it still feels new. We’ve driven its 469 miles so many times that, in one sense, we know what’s around every bend. In another, we don’t know at all.”

Scott agrees. “Visual phenomena arise at the most unusual times and in the most unexpected places,” he says. “The parkway is a never-ending avenue of surprises, and has become a road to discovery—the greatest of all human adventures.”

With elevations ranging from 649 to 6,047 feet above sea level, the Blue Ridge Parkway connects Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains national parks on a 469-mile ride through some of the most beautiful scenery in America. With an excess of 20 million annual visitors, the parkway entertains more travelers than any other unit in the U.S. national park system.

Blue Ridge Parkway: Road to Discovery, nonfiction, hardcover, $39.95, is available anywhere fine books are sold or by calling 888.301.9248 or by visiting jscottgraham.com.