A selection of some the author’s favorite longform essays and magazine-length pieces from across his decades of writing.
Pawpaws have been rediscovered and celebrated in a host of products from pawpaw beer to pawpaw popsicles. But how did the custardy fruit get forgotten since a pawpaw patch today might have been one cultivated ages ago by American Indians?
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Getting close-up and personal in Belfast, Ireland, with the Dalai Lama and Christian monk Father Lawrence Freeman as they talk peace after the bombs between Catholics and Protestants fall silent.
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A portrait of the artist as a skinny kid attempting the impossible task of fixing the most important relationship in his life up to that point. While standing there in his pajama bottoms and t-shirt as the house began to shake.
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Fathers can be mysterious guys, especially if they were members of the Greatest Generation who didn't talk about things like their ships being torpedoed in the Atlantic and whose go-to form of anger was volcanic utterance. But in the bits and pieces of a father's life, I find the man he was.
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The black kids went to one school in tiny Mount Hope. The white kids went to another. But when the court order came to desegregate, a funny thing happened in the hills of West Virginia. The white kids were sent to the black school instead of the other way around. Historic things ended up happening.
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The life of a journalist is filled with mundane daily tasks. Get the calendar edited. Rewrite a press release. Track down a source who isn’t returning e-mails. Then, you get to talk to Gary Mays. The West Virginia native, had his left arm shot off at age 5. What happened next was the stuff of legend and lore, complicated by…
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There is this old farmhouse in the heart of West Virginia. No one lives there anymore, but why is the door locked? That's because there is an artistic and mysterious surprise upstairs on the second floor. And, wait... what's that you say about a Dalton Gang connection to the work inside?
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