Living in neighboring towns in North Carolina’s Piedmont, writers Elizabeth Spencer and Allan Gurganus were close friends for decades. A few months before she died in 2019, he visited her one afternoon to talk to her about her story, “Rising Tide” (featured in Eno Publishers’s 27 Views of Chapel Hill: A Southern University Town in Prose and Poetry). They discussed writing, and how leaving her native Mississippi sharpened her focus on racism.

Elizabeth Spencer was the author of nine novels, including The Voice at the Back Door, The Salt Line, and The Night Travellers, as well as short fiction collections, such as The Southern Woman and Starting Over. Her novella, The Light in the Piazza, was adapted to stage and screen. She also published a memoir, Landscapes of the Heart. She won many awards, and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2021, two years after her death at age 98, Library of America issued a forever-in-print edition of Elizabeth Spencer: Novels and Stories.

Allan Gurganus is an award-winning author whose books includes The Practical Heart, Plays Well With Others, Local Souls, White People, and Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. His short stories have been published regularly in The New Yorker, and were recently collected in The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus. He is also the subject of a previous episode of the 27 Views podcast, entitled “At Home With Allan Gurganus.”