HILLSBOROUGH -- One day not long ago Thomas J. Campanella dropped into one of his favorite spots, Cup A Joe on West King Street in downtown Hillsborough.
Cup A Joe is a little coffee shop popular among a lot of relative newcomers to the historic town, many of them the sort whose influx prompted the crunchy Weaver Street Market to open a store in Hillsborough a few years back.
Campanella, a professor of urban planning at UNC-Chapel Hill, paid for his order and walked out onto the sidewalk - where several hunters were carrying the wild turkeys they had just shot into the Carolina Game & Fish shop next door to be weighed.
"I thought: This is what I like so much about Hillsborough," Campanella said. "It's a remarkably diverse little place, with a wonderful balance between being a small Southern town with a unique cultural and historic tradition, and also being a very progressive place that is home to folks from all over the world.
"It's a really remarkable juxtaposition of worlds - and they all get along."
That diversity is reflected in "27 Views of Hillsborough: A Southern Town in Prose & Poetry," the third book from Hillsborough-based Eno Publishers.
The book is a collection of essays, excerpts, short stories and poems by 26 local authors (poet Elon G. Eidenier has two entries).
Some of the writers are well-known - Lee Smith is in the book, and so are Allan Gurganus, Michael Malone, Jill McCorkle and more - and others somewhat less so, such as Aaron Vandemark, the owner and chef at Panciuto restaurant, and musician Katharine Whalen, a former member of Squirrel Nut Zippers.
"It was not a great leap of imagination to think of doing a book like this in this town," said Elizabeth Woodman of Eno Publishers, who conceived of and edited the book. "When you look around Hillsborough you see a wellspring of creativity. We have so many writers here, I was pretty sure we could come up with 27 on a pretty short deadline."
The pieces cover a range of topics, styles and voices but they all touch on the facets of a small town that has managed to preserve its history and evolve.
"I think it's a wonderful collection, one that captures the spirit of the town's amply diverse character and at the same time its shared sense of community," said Malone, who wrote the book's introduction and contributed a short story.
By another name
The book includes historical perspectives such as a tracing of the evolution of the town's name (it has been called, among other things, "Corbinton" and "Childesburg"); fiction and poetry including a new short story by Randall Kenan and a verse by Eidenier on the view from the Saratoga Grill on Churton Street; personal reflections on subjects from deer hunting to historic renovation to the Occoneechee Speedway; essays including one by Campanella comparing Hillsborough to, of all places, Nanjing, China; and works that are difficult to classify, like Vandemark's piece about the bounty of foods he's found strolling around town, such as a fully laden plum tree that grows temptingly close to the sidewalk.
"Elizabeth has made some really audacious choices with this book," said Smith, who contributed an excerpt from her novel "On Agate Hill," which is set in Hillsborough. "This is not one of those fluffy little touristy books where everybody's sitting on the front porch sipping tea. It's a serious look at a town, at the idea of a town, from many very different perspectives.
"It's like a kaleidoscope. It showcases each writer in a different way, and it's wonderful. I'm just knocked out by it."
Woodman said she is delighted with the way the book has turned out, with its lineup of writers and range of pieces. Asked to come up with a favorite or two, though, she recoiled.
"Oh, no, that's impossible!" she said. "That's like being asked to name your favorite child. I love them all."
