At first listen to his new album , it would be easy to cast Marley Carroll as a musician whose instruments are a computer and software. “Once I started really getting into computer-based production, that was the thing that showed me it was possible to produce full records on my own,” he said. “Basically opening up this program and hooking up a MIDI keyboard and hearing a Rhodes sound or a Strat or drum set, it just seemed like the whole universe of musical possibilities was suddenly available to

Aaron Snook has devoted his professional life to creating theater off the beaten path. “I started envisioning a theater that was different, that was more inclusive, and more community building,” he said. “The mission itself is to create new American myths.”

Monica McDaniel didn’t grow up with theater and hasn’t seen much theater as an adult. So even she can’t quite answer why she thought about writing her first play. “I was sitting at a family member’s house, watching TV and I was like “What would you think if I did a play?’ And she was like ‘OK?” And I just went home and wrote a play,” McDaniel recalled. “I feel like God gives me something and I go with it.”

Listen to the Asheville band Town Mountain , and you hear mandolin, banjo, the twang in the harmonies—all the markers of bluegrass. But listen a little more closely. There are socially conscious lyrics and, on the new album—gasp—a drummer. From early on, band members say Town Mountain never quite fit within the bounds of traditional bluegrass.

Susan Patrice can trace generations of violence and trauma against the women in her family. So in photographing people of the South, Patrice had to scale her own hurdles stemming from trauma. “Documentary photography is a deep relationship, and part of what makes my work so successful was the quality of connection with the place and the people,” Patrice said. “One of the outcomes of trauma is it isolates you, it separates you.”

Matt Wilson remembers tagging along with his older brother, Brian, to comic book shops near his family home of Shelby, N.C. Brian was interested in the investment potential of comic books. The younger Wilson had a different motive. “I didn’t know about the collectibility aspect of it,” he said. “More than anything, I just liked reading them. I’d find some books to buy and I would just read them over and over again, cover to cover.

Tina Barr earned a PhD in poetry and a tenured professorship at a small college, and then she met a jazz pianist. “My husband was willing to do his work or die, so he spent years living in Brooklyn, sleeping on a futon rolled up under his piano,” Barr said. “He really was an example to me of how to be an artist, and so I feel like now I can call myself a writer.”

Scott Gorski and Lindsey Miller are lucky they found each other, because it’s hard to imagine them making music with anyone else. “You learn what you like by identifying what it is you don’t identify with,” Gorski said. “That’s an easier way of exploring and identifying what it is that resonates with you.”

Only those involved with local theater might be surprised Steven Samuels is back in action. In September of last year, Samuels was fired from Asheville’s Magnetic Theatre , which Samuels co-founded and ran for eight seasons. He was still smarting, still angry, when he decided, in some respects, to pick up right where he left off, but with a fresh company. “My concern and caring for other artists is so strong that, even though I knew the best thing I could do was focus on myself and my family, I

Jamieson Ridenhour remembers himself as a 10-year-old, reading the original “Dracula” novel and staying awake with his mother well past midnight to watch classic horror movies. Nearly four decades later, Ridenhour has built a career from his early obsession. “Good horror writing works when it’s more than just the horror, when it has some kind of psychological depth to it,” he said. “There’s a metaphor for something else going on.”