"Literary Trails of the North Carolina Mountains" arrives at the right moment for me. I had been talking to incoming freshmen at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa about the importance of place in a writer's life, how the ground itself seems to speak to you in ways that often we are too busy or distracted to notice. Thanks to Georgann Eubanks’ own literary hikes, mingled with some diligent sleuthing, we have a book and a web site that take us through the main streets and the back roads of our North Carolina literary heritage.

This first installment, exploring our state’s mountain region, aspires to be definitive. In such a project one can always point to writers over- or under-represented, or left out entirely. Nevertheless, rife with photographs, poems, and excerpts from novels and memoirs, the guide captures the intoxicating richness of our state’s western literary voices, from Sequoyah to Charles Frazier to Wilma Dykeman.   

For the literary hiker, one who wants to know the places our writers called home, this is the travel guide we have needed for a long time. I wish more folks would devote time to literary hikes, climbing Cold Mountain, say, or sitting on the banks of the Tuckasegee River that flows just a few yards down the hill from where I live.

As Ms. Eubanks urges in her preface to this Web site’s companion book: “Let North Carolina literature be your starting place. Carry a journal. Write your own poem.  Invite the stories of those you meet along the way. We can’t begin to tell it all here.”

— Kathryn Stripling Byer