North Carolina Miscellany
N C L R ONLINE
173
BY J OE L T HOM AS
W H I M S Y TO N, NC 2 018
AlexAlbright
Creative Nonfiction Prize HONORABLE MENTION
. . . authenticity has become a growing market . . . Whether this arises from a desire to find getaways on the cheap or a desire to experience the “real ” local culture, nearby small towns are prime destinations.
A
uthenticity is in high demand in the modern South. With the rise of city centers dominated by chain stores and impersonal architecture, and surrounded by suburban sprawl, especially in areas like Charlotte and Atlanta, authenticity has become a growing market for the urban middle class. This has manifested itself in a number of ways: adventure races where you pay people exorbitant amounts of money to run through an artificial swamp, week-long “mission” trips to exotic locales, but especially in the search for authentic getaways close to home. Whether this arises from a desire to find getaways on the cheap or a desire to experience the “real” local culture, nearby small towns are prime destinations. For example, I recently saw an article from a Charlotte lifestyle website
titled “11 Reasons to Embrace Whimsy and Drive 45 Minutes to the Totally Adorable Town of Lincolnton, NC.” This sort of article isn’t atypical, there are a million of them, essentially identical, about a million different small towns floating around the internet, but this one caught my eye because Lincolnton, a rural North Carolina town on the edge of the Appalachian foothills, is where I spent my later childhood and teenage years, and which I still, in some sense, call home. The eleven whimsical reasons were familiar – the coffee shop, the bookstore run by my friend Richard, even the huge pottery jugs with faces on them, a local tradition, lining Main Street – but, at the same time, the descriptions seemed completely alien to me. They all had a sense of
Having grown up in Cambridge, England, Memphis, TN, and Lincolnton, NC, JOEL THOMAS currently lives, writes, and studies at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, VA. Selecting this essay for honorable mention in the Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize competition, final judge Randall Kenan called it “distinguished” and remarked upon it “having something refreshing to say and a refreshing way of telling it.”
Contemporary photographs featured within this layout were taken by Sally Thomas, the author’s mother and, coincidentally, second-place recipent in the 2018 James Applewhite Poetry Prize competition. Read her other finalist poem in this issue and her second place poem in the 2019 print issue. The postcards featured here are from the North Carolina Postcards collection at UNC Chapel Hill.