Friday from the Archives: “Interviews in Cold Springs, North Carolina” a story by Warren Rochelle illustrated by Lali in NCLR 2001
“Everything is a story. When Cold Springs folks answer my questions, they answer, more often than
not, by telling me a story, a narrative that explains as it interprets what happened or the point they are
trying to make.”
If you’re enjoying The Last of Us, or any other of the dystopian fiction stories set after a plague descends, then this short science fiction story is for you. Warren Rochelle, now retired from teaching, penned this and more for our 2001 “Science Fiction and Fantasy in North Carolina” feature. Reminder: interviews and scholarly pieces on any of the incredible newer science fiction and fantasy authors across the state would be welcome additions to our pages!
Set in 2163, Elena, a newly graduated ethnographer from Colombia, is visiting Cold Springs, North Carolina, to interview those who remained after the Death and Killings, some two hundred years earlier. There, she finds members of the remaining clans, the “Killoughs, Mcllvaines, Ezzells, Loves, Houghtons, Tolers, Gurganuses, Jessups, Proctors, Calvanders, McDouglases…” She wants to know “Who these Cold Springs men and women are today is a result of the choices their ancestors made eight generations ago. How this blood-permeated past has shaped them is what I want to begin to find out during the five weeks of this preliminary survey.”
Of course, as every ethnographer–as every writer–knows, there is a hard yet fragile line between observing and changing the story…
Read the entire story online at Gale Cengage. Add the NCLR 2001 issue to your collection.
