We beg to disagree, Thomas Wolfe: You can go home again. Returning to our old home town or walking in the door after a hard day at work, we all experience Coming Home. It may be family, friends, a tail-wagging dog, or a familiar landscape. Most of us enjoy the comfort of the familiar to balance the adventure of the new and unknown. Coming Home is the theme for the Carolina Mountains Literary Festival’s 2010 celebration of reading, readers, books, and writers. This year’s featured Saturday night banquet speaker and inspiration for our theme is Tony Early, author of Jim the Boy and the sequel Blue Star. Jim grows up in a rural North Carolina town, experiences the depression, falls in love, goes off to WWII, and then comes home,albeit a changed man. Friday’s keynote speaker is Paul Cuadros whose book, A Home on the Field, tells the story of a community brought together by a North Carolina championship high school soccer team. Home-grown and immigrant families find that Coming Home sometimes means looking around and appreciating people often taken for granted in their home town. Coming Home includes learning more about our local history and recognizing local writers too. So we invite you come to our home town--to a festival that includes novelists, poets, historians, journalists, and everyday people who enjoy stories, conversation, and a real good time.
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