Going Plaid in a Solid Gray World: Collected Columns

Tamra Wilson's prose is all about the extraordinary in everyday life: smelling "ghosts," discovering a family diary from the Gold Rush, spotting real pennies from heaven.

These short essays are drawn from her newspaper column "A Fork in the Road" that readers in her corner of North Carolina look for every other Tuesday. Like friendly chats over coffee, they offer insights about room mothers, greeting card glitter and wearing seersucker and white shoes after Labor Day. There are weightier subjects, too, such as leaving home and coping with COVID.

Peppered with humor, Tamra's writing captures the essence of what it means to be fully human in our time and place. Her thoughtful work has appeared in the North Carolina Literary Review, storySouth, Evening Street Press, The New Guard and elsewhere.


From the Foreword

Since 2015, Tamra Wilson has offered readers a unique perspective of life in Catawba County through her column "A Fork in the Road." Through her writing, Tammy captures the essence of what it means to be fully human in our time and place.

These 130+ essays offer commentary on such topics as greeting-card glitter, going plaid in a solid gray world and wearing white shoes after Labor Day. But there are weightier subjects too: storms, COVID, slave narratives and war casualties. Interspersed throughout are slices of humor that feel as if you're chatting over the backyard fence.

About the Author

Tamra Wilson is an essayist and fiction writer whose work has appeared in North Carolina Literary Review, Our State, storySouth, and dozens of other journals and anthologies across the United States. She is the author of Dining with Robert Redford & Other Stories and co-editor of Idol Talk: Women Writers on the Teenage Infatuations that Changed Their Lives, which was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. She has received two North Carolina Regional Artist Project Grants and has traveled the state as a Road Scholar for the North Carolina Humanities Council.

Tamra is a 2021 honoree of the Baker's Dozen Women's Society affiliated with The Corner Table, a nonprofit focused on providing meals to those affected by hunger in Catawba County. A portion of proceeds from this book will benefit that organization.


From Going Plaid in a Solid Gray World

The recent cold snap reminds me of why we live in North Carolina. Six degrees Fahrenheit sounds extreme, but it could be worse.



The other day a Facebook friend posted a photograph from Central Illinois in 1979. It showed a winter scape of a rural highway buried in twelve-foot drifts. A string of stranded semitrailers looks ridiculously small and powerless.

I replied, "Thanks for reminding me what prompted Tym and me to move to North Carolina."

This same topic came up a few weeks earlier when I noticed that Catawba County Museum of History was seeking artifacts for a display about "local immigrants."

I asked museum director Amber Clawson Albert if people from other parts of the United States would qualify as "immigrants."

She had never thought of that. Turns out she had never heard of the three horrific winters that sent us South.