6-minute Stories

A Kentucky writer recalls a gift of faith in her abilities at a challenging time in her life, a gift which set her on her career path, a gift she has given to others in turn.

A North Carolina writer reflects with all her senses attuned on her four-year experience of hiking over 100 trails along the Blue Ridge Parkway stretching through North Carolina and Virginia during every season of the year.

A North Carolina writer remembers a time of peril when her fear of strangers almost thwarted her guardian angels.

A toxic culture and work environment of objectifying women for their looks deeply affected how this writer sees herself years later.

Kentucky writer Deboroh Rankin encounters a memory of a beloved grandmother in a place re-purposed from what her Memie would have known. With the recollections of a powerful woman comes a transforming acceptance of change and the blessing of knowing gratitude.

The day after Thanksgiving 1864 was a truly "black Friday" for the Union prisoners who attempted to escape from the Confederate prison camp in Salisbury, North Carolina. (This bonus episode is a story appearing in "From Time to Time in North Carolina" by Randell Jones.)

Grateful to be alive

Surprised and trapped in their North Carolina mountain home by a harsh and threatening late-winter blizzard, a couple struggles to survive and to care for their horses, thankful for any good turn of fate to befall them throughout their ordeal.

Putting your heart and soul into the soil

A love of tilling the earth may not always be enough for making a living, but this writer believes at least for her Greatest-Generation father, it just might be what the doctor ordered for making a life.

Talent. Self-confidence. Perseverance. Patience.

An artist explores and discovers. Damaged, an artist believes and persists. This artist recreates herself—bearing the weight of “born talent,” refusing, rebuffing, rebuilding, rebounding, reborn.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and the belly of the cultivator

This Blue Ridge Mountains-loving North Carolina writer peels away the folklore and gets to the core of the story, grafting another legend onto the family tree, the apple of her family’s eye.