Since 2005, the Asheville Habitat ReStore has
hosted a bi-monthly Silent Auction featuring a vast array of items including turn-of-the-
century furniture, antique toys, vintage bicycles and sports memorabilia, all sort of
collectibles, locally made art, and occasionally items so rare and unique that no one
even knows what they are.
The auction running November 1 st through the 15 th will be particularly special. The
curated items are all locally handmade and contributed by Asheville Habitat staff
and core volunteers! Nearly 30 staffers and volunteers donated their art, and there will
be over 90 items to bid on including stained glass, wood-turned pieces, pottery, oil
paintings, and much more.

Buncombe County Special Collections is excited to announce a call for proposals for the third year of its creative residency program.

This is an annual opportunity for artists in Buncombe County to create new, research-driven creative work using BCSC’s historic resources as source material and/or inspiration, and to present their work in the Carolina Record Shop, a dedicated exhibition space in the BCSC reading room. Artists age 18 and up, based in Buncombe County, working in any creative discipline are invited to apply.

Buncombe County Special Collections is looking for projects that will:

• Offer new, diverse perspectives on our shared history
• Identify and address gaps and/or amplify narratives that are historically underrepresented in the collection
• Educate and inspire non-traditional users of archives and special collections to engage with the collection in new ways.

More information (including the PDF of the call for proposals) is available at here. The 2024 Creative Residency is made possible in part by the Trust Fund for Buncombe County Public Libraries.

You can also visit Buncombe County Special Collections in the lower level of Pack Memorial to view the current exhibition in the Carolina Record Shop, “Belonging & Non-Belonging: The History and Future of Zines in Western North Carolina,” curated by 2023 resident Miles Lamberson.

Food Scraps Drop Off

The City of Asheville, in partnership with Buncombe County and the Natural Resources Defense Council, is offering a FREE Food Scrap Drop-Off program in two locations for all Buncombe County residents.  This organic matter will be collected and turned into good clean compost, keeping it OUT of our landfill and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Register for Food Scraps Drop Off

Need a handy kitchen countertop food scrap bin?  Let us know on the registration form! We’ll be having bin giveaways at city and county facilities and would love to give you one.

Locations

Murphy Oakley Community Center and Library – “Food Scrap Bin Shelters” on the east side of the parking lot

749 Fairview Road, Asheville

• • Dawn – Dusk

Stephens-Lee Recreation Center “Food Scrap Shed” next to the Community Garden on the North side of the parking lot

30 Washington Carver Avenue, Asheville

• • Monday – Friday, 7 a.m. – 6 p.m.
  • Saturday, 8 a.m. – 2 p.m.
  • Sunday, 12 – 4 p.m.

West Asheville Library – “Food Scrap Bin Shelters” on the south side of the building

942 Haywood Road, Asheville

• • Library open hours
  • Buncombe County Landfill – Convenience Center

    85 Panther Branch Road, Alexander

    • • Monday-Friday, 8 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.
      • Saturday, 8 a.m. – 12:30 pm

The London Raffle is limited to just 250 tickets, giving you great odds to win a travel package value up to $9,000, including flights, hotel stays, and $500 to experience the sights and sounds of London. This raffle ends December 31, 2023 or when tickets sell out.

The London Raffle prize includes:

• Two (2) round-trip from Charlotte – Non-stop on British Airways Economy Plus
•  Transfers to and from the airport to your hotel
• Accommodations for Five (5) nights at the Park Plaza Westminster Bridge, in a Superior
  Double with Breakfast daily
• Up to $500 to spend on guided tours or additional theatre tickets
• Personal consultation with Foothills Travel to customize your trip
• On-site concierge provided through MyBucketListEvents

The winner of the Asheville Community Theatre London Raffle will work with David Lloyd of Foothills Travel to customize their London adventure.

It’s November again and that can only mean one thing: National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)!

NaNoWriMo began in 1999 as a daunting but straightforward challenge: to write 50,000 words of a novel during the thirty days of November.  Now, each year on November 1, hundreds of thousands of people around the world begin to write, determined to end the month with 50,000 words of a brand-new novel.

If you are doing NaNoWriMo this year, the Buncombe County Public Libraries are here to help! Several branches will be hosting “Write-ins” throughout the month of November, offering quiet spaces for writers to come chip away at their word count. Each Write-in will have its own unique spin (snacks, ambient music, writing prompts, local author hosts, etc.), so please check the library event calendar for specific details.

In addition to the Write-Ins, a NaNoWriMo Wrap Party will be held at rEvolve Mercantile on Wednesday, December 6th from 6pm – 8pm. All NaNoWriMo participants are invited to join us for food, activities, prize raffles , and “micro mic” readings that will give each writer a chance to share a paragraph or two from their novel.

Any questions? Let us know.

North Carolina Farm Bureau is happy to provide agricultural outreach grants to NC teachers through their Ag in the Classroom Going Local program. These grants value up to $500. Going Local Grants help educators provide pre-K through collegiate-level students with valuable, real-world education and experiences directly related to the agricultural industry and the NC Standard Course of Study. Teachers practicing in private and public North Carolina schools, colleges, and universities are encouraged to apply. Learn more here.

More than half a million low-income, uninsured North Carolinians will gain access to comprehensive health coverage when Medicaid expansion launches on December 1, 2023.

Pisgah Legal is here to help people in Western North Carolina enroll in Medicaid and understand their options for coverage. Pisgah Legal has spent a decade advocating for this change and is proud to help make it a reality for people in this region.

“Medicaid expansion is going to save lives,” said Chief Operations Officer Jaclyn Kiger. “This is a momentous occasion and Pisgah Legal is thrilled to be in a position to help guide people through this process.”

Kiger continued: “Each and every person has a right to health care. Pisgah Legal Services will continue to advocate and strive for a future where everyone can access the care they deserve.”

Pisgah Legal is poised to help people start the Medicaid enrollment process as soon as expansion launches. Pisgah Legal’s certified Navigators help local people find quality, affordable health insurance plans.

Pisgah Legal also helps people who have had their Medicaid terminated during the unwinding period that began in April 2023. If you or someone you know has lost coverage, Pisgah Legal can help you determine if you’re eligible for a plan on the Healthcare.gov Marketplace and can help you access legal resources. Pisgah Legal’s NC Medicaid Ombudsman Program can help current Medicaid beneficiaries who are experiencing problems with their plans.

To make an appointment for free help enrolling in Medicaid or exploring your options, visit http://www.pisgahlegal.org/health or call 828-210-3404.

The trees that directly protect our homes and neighborhoods from flooding, extreme heat, pollution, and soil erosion are the most vulnerable to development and the pressures of a changing climate. They also have an immense impact on how vulnerable we are to those same conditions.   Asheville GreenWorks is leading local efforts to protect our urban trees and restore our tree canopy, but it takes ALL of us. You can help create a better future by donating today — no contribution is too small to make an impact.

RUNNNER

For the last five years, Los Angeles-based musician Noah Weinman has been Runnner, and for much of those five years, Runnner has been working. Working on his 2021 collection album, Always Repeating; working as a producer on the Skullcrusher records; and, of course, working towards his debut full-length, Like Dying Stars, We’re Reaching Out. From LA to Ohio and the Northeast and back, he’s been deep in the craft of sound. This is music made at home, using anything and everything: cell phones and handheld tape recorders, the hum of an a/c unit, voicemails from friends. Rubbing cardboard together, stretching acoustic sounds out to near liquid, or stacking delay pedals at random to scramble the smoothness of a song can make something known into something unknown — something ordinary into something cosmic. These are songs where the edges have been left deliberately rough because perfection invites predictability, and imperfection imbalances, and those imbalances ask the listener to listen again, and again. And in that listening, the sound can become earnest, can ask a question, can hold a conversation.

“I was sifting through my demos trying to decide what songs would go on the album, and I sort of started to notice this theme about the limits of language,” explains Weinman. “You’re trying to articulate something to someone, and it either doesn’t come out right or you end up not saying anything at all. It’s a pattern I see in my life, just having a hard time expressing myself to the people I’m close with.” So it’s no surprise that from a young age, Noah was drawn to other modes of expression: first studying trumpet and jazz, then falling into guitars, banjo, pianos and synths, and along with them discovering a love for stitching together songs and recordings. “It wasn’t until I got out of the studio environment and started recording at home that it became something I really love doing,” he says.

Like Dying Stars, We’re Reaching Out is the result of years of writing, recording, and tinkering in Weinman’s home, a lovingly crafted patchwork of organic instrumentation and otherworldly digital manipulation. The unexpected sounds and lush production elevate Weinman’s already impressive skill for melody and warm vocals, always pivoting between sparse intimacy and sweeping grandeur at the right moments. “I think I just want to try to make sounds that are a little original, that you couldn’t easily identify,” he explains. “But I get there by keeping my options pretty limited. I only have one input, so I don’t record things in stereo; I only have about three microphones and a few instruments, and I try not to use MIDI. I keep the ingredient list short, but that pushes me to be more creative in the genesis of certain sounds.”

This musical approach is reflected in Runnner’s lyrics as well, where the familiar is made unfamiliar, and then familiar again. With humor and heart, Weinman sifts through isolation and anxiety in the everyday: ruining the rice, buying shampoo, the way boredom and loneliness are tangled up together. And from these fragments, he makes something new, but also something already known and felt at once. “A lot of the songs have this narrative arc of rising tension that just leads to me not saying or doing anything,” he says. “It’s like there’s a signal loss between thought and speech.” Tracks like “I Only Sing About Food,” “Raincoat,” or “Chess With Friends” explore these different mental and sometimes even physical barriers to communication, while skittering drum beats and scrappy acoustics guide the listener through Weinman’s crowded thoughts. On mid-album standout “Running In Place At The Edge of The Map,” Weinman likens his catatonic self on the couch to a video game avatar stuck at the end of its digital space with nowhere left to go — tying the image to our desperate attempts to be who we want to be, despite knowing that our attempts will fall short.

Often Like Dying Stars, We’re Reaching Out sounds like life caught inside a moment, unsure of what comes next, but there is hope and lightness here too. The album’s final track “A Map For Your Birthday” closes with the lines “like dying stars, we’re reaching out / so much i can’t say / but you nodded anyway.” Despite our inability to be what we want to be, to know where we are going, feel we belong, to be present, and to present ourselves fully and completely to the world, Runnner offers that perhaps it’s this longing to know one another, to understand each other when we’re incoherent or when the words just don’t come, that just might connect us.

SUN JUNE

The five members of Sun June spent their early years spread out across the United States, from the boonies of the Hudson Valley to the sprawling outskirts of LA. Having spent their college years within the gloomy, cold winters of the North East, Laura Colwell and Stephen Salisbury found themselves in the vibrant melting-pot of inspiration that is Austin, Texas. Meeting each other while working on Terrence Malick’s ‘Song to Song’, the pair were immediately taken by the city’s bustling small clubs and honky-tonk scene, and the fact that there was always an instrument within reach, always someone to play alongside.

Coming alive in this newly discovered landscape, Colwell and Salisbury formed Sun June alongside Michael Bain on lead guitar, Sarah Schultz on drums, and Justin Harris on bass and recorded their debut album live to tape, releasing it via the city’s esteemed Keeled Scales label in 2018. The band coined the term ‘regret pop’ to describe the music they made on the ‘Years’ LP. Though somewhat tongue in cheek, it made perfect sense ~ the gentle sway of their country leaning pop songs seeped in melancholy, as if each subtle turn of phrase was always grasping for something just out of reach.

Sun June returns with ‘Somewhere’, a brand new album, out February 2021. It’s a record that feels distinctly more present than its predecessor. In the time since, Colwell and Salisbury have become a couple, and it’s had a profound effect on their work; if Years was about how loss evolves, Somewhere is about how love evolves. “We explore a lot of the same themes across it,” Colwell says, “but I think there’s a lot more love here.”

Somewhere is Sun June at their most decadent, a richly diverse album which sees them exploring bright new corners with full hearts and wide eyes. Embracing a more pop-oriented sound the album consists of eleven beautiful new songs and is deliberately more collaborative and fully arranged: Laura played guitar for the first time; band members swapped instruments, and producer Danny Reisch helped flesh out layers of synth and percussion that provides a sweeping undercurrent to the whole thing.

Throughout Somewhere you can hear Sun June blossom into a living-and-breathing five-piece, the album formed from an exploratory track building process which results in a more formidable version of the band we once knew. ’Real Thing’ is most indicative of this, a fully collaborative effort which encompasses all of the nuances that come to define the album. “Are you the real thing?” Laura Colwell questions in the song’s repeated refrain. “Honey I’m the real thing,” she answers back.

They’ve called this one their ‘prom’ record; a sincere, alive-in-the-moment snapshot of the heady rush of love. “The prom idea started as a mood for us to arrange and shape the music to, which we hadn’t done before,” the band explains. “ Prom isn’t all rosy and perfect. The songs show you the crying in the bathroom,, the fear of dancing, the joy of a kiss – all the highs and all the lows.”

It’s in both those highs and lows where Somewhere comes alive. Laura Colwell’s voice is mesmerising throughout, and while the record is a document of falling in love, there’s still room for her to wilt and linger, the vibrancy of the production creating beautiful contrasts for her voice to pull us through. Opening track ‘Bad With Time’ sets this tone from the outset, both dark and mysterious, sad and sultry as it fascinatingly unrolls. “I didn’t mean what I said,” Colwell sings. “But I wanted you to think I did.”

Somewhere showcases a gentle but eminently pronounced maturation of Sun June’s sound, a second record full of quiet revelation, eleven songs that bristle with love and longing. It finds a band at the height of their collective potency, a marked stride forward from the band that created that debut record, but also one that once again is able to transport the listener into a fascinating new landscape, one that lies somewhere between the town and the city, between the head and the heart; neither here nor there, but certainly somewhere.

Greg Freeman

Greg Freeman deals in biblical deluges, apocalyptic fever dreams, Floridian miscreants, and green mountain malaise. On his excellent debut LP “I Looked Out,” Gregs’s voice takes center stage, creaking, crooning, and cutting through clouds of static. The songs are linked together by a palpable urgency, whether it is the punch-in-the-face, careening momentum of “Tower,” the country-gazing guitar squall of “Souvenir Heart,” or the singalong finale of “Palms.” Careful arrangements and production choices bring out the best of the 7-piece band that ornament the album with pedal steel, horns, eerie strings, and tape warbles. Greg’s strong narrative songwriting is equally effective chronicling the demise of a 1920s ocean liner as it is documenting his own interpersonal uncertainties. The sounds on the record conjure up the feeling of driving around Chittenden County in the middle of winter, high beams on, slush on the floor mats. It’s hard for me to imagine a more promising debut record, and I can’t wait to see where this band goes next.

SURPRISE – we’re also having a tree sale to clear out inventory that has gotten too large to be stored in the hoop houses over winter. These are species not typically given away at our adoption events, so here is your chance to add something unique to your home or business.

We need your help and the help of your network to make this holiday drive as successful as possible in putting new books into the hands of Buncombe County elementary and middle school students during the holiday break.

What better way to spread holiday cheer than by donating books? Imagine the joy on a child’s face when they receive a brand-new book. It’s like sprinkling a little bit of magic into their lives!

We’ve partnered with over a dozen local organizations serving K-12 students throughout the county. They’re eagerly waiting for book drop-offs like kids waiting for the first snowfall! 

You can make a positive impact right now by donating directly using the button below, or why not turn giving back into an outing?

Holiday Book Drive 2023 (givebutter.com)

Visit the Barnes & Noble on Tunnel Road at the Asheville Mall to shop in-store and donate them on the spot.

In early 2024, 50 organizations will be awarded $500 in funding and a collection of gardening supplies for their youth garden program.