Citizen's Journal

A Creative Place To Call Home

by Gordon Jameson | May 13 2008

My wife and I first visited North Carolina in 1991 while on vacation. There was something special in the air that made us decide if we ever left California, North Carolina felt like a good destination.

Two- years later we sold our house in Los Angeles, put everything in storage and headed east. We stayed in a friend’s house in Winston-Salem and one day someone told us to check out Chapel Hill. I remember driving down Franklin Street in the historic part of town on a fine day and thinking, “I’m home.”

A Great Place to Start Your Second Life

by Daniel Wallace | April 03 2008

I have lived two lives. In the first life, I was a boy in Alabama, and in the second I was a man in Chapel Hill. This is where I was when my father died, and when my son was born. In the basement of a house a half-a-mile from Franklin Street is where I wrote my first published novel, and one night—let’s say it was a Wednesday—I met the love of my life at the last place I ever expected to… a bar.

Great Music and Local Flavors

by Bill Smith | March 04 2008

I came to Chapel Hill as a student in 1967, and have pretty much always had an address here ever since. I loved the fact that the town was full of people who felt no need to conform to ordinary rules of behavior. You couldn’t do that in New Bern in 1967. I’ve worked in restaurants pretty much the whole time I’ve lived here. I began cooking seriously in the mid seventies and the next thing I knew I was a chef.