Going Plaid in a Solid Gray World
Tamra Wilson ‘s prose is all about the extraordinary in everyday life: smelling “ghosts,” unearthing an ancestor’s diary from the Gold Rush, spotting real pennies from heaven.
These collected 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 prose 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 Nassau Review and elsewhere.
About Tamra Wilson
Tamra Wilson’s first book, Dining with Robert Redford & Other Stories, was published in 2011 upon graduation from the Stonecoast Creative Writing Program at the University of Southern Maine. Later, with novelist/playwright Elizabeth Searle, she co-edited Idol Talk: Women Writers on the Teenage Infatuations that Changed Their Life, the first-ever anthology by women on their teen idols. It was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award for anthologies in 2019.
Tamra’s short stories and essays have appeared in a variety of literary journals including storySouth, North Carolina Literary Review and elsewhere. She has contributed to WFAEats, a food blog affiliated with NPR in Charlotte, and her fiction has been anthologized in Chicken Soup for the Soul, Chocolate for Women and the New American Press. She is a two-time recipient of Regional Artist Project grants from the N.C. Arts Council and local affiliates.
Tamra won the Jesse Stuart Prize for Young Adult Fiction, and is a three-time winner of the Children’s Story Contest sponsored by Charlotte Writers Club and two-time finalist for Press 53 Open Award for the Novella. Her slice-of-life newspapers column is the inspiration for Going Plaid in a Solid Gray World. She lives near Newton, North Carolina.
