A Year-Round Guide to Franklin and Nantahala

Join The New York Times best-selling author and North Carolina native Wiley Cash as he highlights great writers across the state and their work each month. Listen in on conversations

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Join The New York Times best-selling author and North Carolina native Wiley Cash as he highlights great writers across the state and their work each month. Listen in on conversations

Our State Book Club With Wiley CashJoin The New York Times best-selling author and North Carolina native Wiley Cash as he highlights great writers across the state and their work each month. Listen in on conversations between Cash and his author friends as they discuss how North Carolina inspires them on the Our State Book Club podcast. 


Early on in Night Magic: Adventures Among Glowworms, Moon Gardens, and Other Marvels of the Dark, author Leigh Ann Henion expresses a sense of shock that it took her nearly half a lifetime to recognize the importance of darkness. She shouldn’t be surprised. Most of us have been raised to fear the dark rather than to find its value.

“I’m just a really curious layperson, and I want people to understand that everyone’s night ecology is unique and local to where they are,” she says.

Henion’s “unique and local” night unfolds in her native Appalachia, where she now lives just outside of Boone, the same landscape where she can recall some of her earliest experiences with darkness.

“I went to summer camp in Watauga County,” she says, “and as part of camp, they would take us down into these caves, where the darkness was really powerful. But can you believe they sent children with flames on their helmets into caves? That’s how old I am.” She laughs, remembering the carbide lanterns they used.



After her summer camp days, Henion attended UNC Asheville, where she developed her storytelling and photography skills while beginning her world travels. After graduation, her photographs, essays, and reporting started appearing in outlets like Our State, The Oxford American, Smithsonian, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.

In 2015, Henion published her book Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer’s Search for Wonder in the Natural World, which became a New York Times bestseller. The book follows Henion as she embarks on awe-inspiring adventures: chasing migratory monarch butterflies, floating in the ocean with glowing plankton, and marveling at the Northern Lights in Sweden. No matter where she went or what she wrote about, Henion’s work was always marked by ebullient and intelligent observations.

These astute observations fill her latest work, Night Magic, a book that brings the intrepid explorer home to backyards and common spaces across southern Appalachia, including the areas around Boone where she grew up. She’d spent years chasing wonder and awe around the globe, but the pandemic encouraged Henion to consider the wonder she could find at home, sometimes with her son in tow. It’s their relationship that made clear to her how fleeting darkness is in the contemporary world, and Henion laments that the sense of night her son experiences is different from the night she experienced at his age. “The darkness that I knew no longer exists,” she says.



As Henion makes clear in her book, these wonders of darkness and our relationship to it are under threat due to everything from development in rural areas, where streetlights and parking lots eliminate darkness, to orbiting satellites that make it more and more difficult for astronomers to see the stars. We’re all — humans and animals alike — losing our ability to find darkness.

“There are not many storylines that tell us that darkness has any value,” Henion says, cataloging the stories — from Disney movies to Grimm’s fairy tales — that warn children about the terrors of the dark, about what is waiting for them if they step off the lighted path and into the shadowy woods. “We don’t understand what darkness stands to give,” she says, adding that it supports and sustains life.

What Night Magic gives Henion — and the reader — is a deeper appreciation of the wonders we can only find at night.


Lights Out

the book Night Magic by Leigh Ann Henion

Photography courtesy of Algonquin Books

Leigh Ann Henion’s Night Magic: Adventures Among Glowworms, Moon Gardens, and Other Marvels of the Dark is a brilliantly accessible piece of nighttime exploration combined with scientific reporting, personal narrative, and an impassioned call to turn off the lights so we can all experience the world of night. Readers follow Henion through southern Appalachia as she encounters bats, glowworms, moths, and salamanders — creatures that have been hiding in the dark, right outside her door.

The book also chronicles how we are losing darkness and how light pollution affects us. Artificial light is disrupting our circadian rhythms, our mental health, our digestion, and many other bodily systems. In short, all this light is overstimulating and exhausting us.

If rest is resistance in our current moment of technological overreach, then darkness might just be the balm we need to heal, to rest emotionally and physically. Henion’s book is a bright light in all that dark talk, proving that there is more to see with the lights off than we could ever imagine.


More to Explore: Catch Wiley Cash in conversation with Leigh Ann Henion. New podcast episodes air November 5 and 19. Find out where to listen at ourstate.com/podcasts.

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This story was published on Oct 15, 2024

Wiley Cash

Wiley Cash is an award-winning and New York Times best-selling author of four novels and the founder of This Is Working. He has published widely on issues ranging from the environment to history to foodways to music and is also the host of the Our State Book Club podcast. He serves as the executive director of Literary Arts at UNC Asheville and lives in North Carolina with his wife, photographer Mallory Cash, and their daughters, Early and Juniper.