When I read the news of the day, it feels as though I’m rereading the biggest political stories of my youth. Closer to home, when I started writing about the North Carolina legislature in the late 1980s, one hot-button issue was pork-barrel spending. But the solution wasn’t to run the pork barrel more judiciously, we argued. Under the North Carolina constitution, the General Assembly isn’t a co-equal branch alongside the executive and judicial. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk and Water Folk combine epic fantasy with American history (FolkloreCycle.com).