By Kristi Southern
I think Emily Carter and I should be best friends. It’s a no brainer, really. We have all-the-things in common, which I quickly learned from reading her 2025 refreshingly honest, adorably humble and relatably humorous collection of essays, A Spork in the Road. She is a goal tracker and list maker, a grudge holder who values forgiveness, a constant mover and morning person, a lover of animals, a devoted cousin, daughter and wife, a traveler, a wordsmith, a proud eastern North Carolinian, and a possessor of other positive attributes I can only hope we have in common.
Reading her essays feels like sitting on the porch in her company sipping something slightly bubbly and slowly intoxicating — just the right mix of celebratory and comforting familiarity. What is she celebrating? Life. Sometimes it’s the bigger things, like inclusion and justice and birth and death. But, just as importantly, she celebrates the small gifts we often miss: the delicate blanket of fog, the feel of certain words in our mouths and minds, simple acts of kindness, the sweet seat on the airplane, or cool and carefully tucked sheets.
Emily — I feel that she would prefer this familiarity — shares 81 short essays, each lasting only a few pages. They are brief enough to read “just one more” and entertaining enough to read just one more again, followed by . . . OK, maybe five more minutes. You get the idea. She is magically able to remain lighthearted and casual even when she explores significant ideas and the graver parts of her life. These reflections are introduced with time frame subheadings, in no particular order, of Way Back, Back, Not Long Ago, and Now.
Way Backs may include episodes from her parents’ childhoods, such as “Red Reappraised,” when her father, as a boy, went postal on his brother’s red wool hat, but many of the Way Backs are reflections on her own childhood connected to who she has become today. One such narrative is “Mop Day,” which begins with her mother’s secret Wednesday ritual of shooing the kids outdoors while the floor takes all day to dry. “I was resting,” her mother says when asked what she could possibly be doing in the house all day alone.
She reminisces about childhood Halloweens, including a $3.99 Bozo costume and her unprepared, candy-less mother in “Zesta.” And in “School Bus #5” she provides us with a list of “everything (she) ever needed to know,” all learned on the ride to Carthage Elementary: avoid bullies, be on time, “save a seat for your friends,” know the difference between good and bad power, and hang on because there’s no seatbelt for life’s bumpy ride.
Essays from Back might tell of her daughters’ childhoods, both when they found her cool and when they thought the opposite. In “Jets, Castles, and Monsters,” we are graced with snippets from daughter Ryann’s 8-year-old autobiography, dedicated to her mother. Authentically written, we learn about Ryann’s likes (golf), dislikes (homework), fears (monsters and being alone), and aspirations (becoming a waitress or a doctor), reminiscent of some of her mother’s own essays and unjustly earning a B grade. We also catch a glimpse of young Riley in “Knock on Woody,” when T-shirt innuendo involving familiar old-school “woody” station wagons is awkwardly navigated with an admittedly candid mother. “Please, Mom, do not write about this,” Riley pleads.
Also under the heading of Back is “Carpe Alaska,” when Emily makes a spontaneous trip with her mother to Alaska to attend her niece’s wedding. Her mother is failing, although I am hesitant to use that word about the “force of (their) family,” and is clearly where the daughter gets her energy, compassion and her own love of adventure. We can all benefit from what Emily takes from this excursion: “Stop fretting the how and focus on the what and the why.”
Those selections under the Not Long Ago time frame may be some of my favorites. In “String of Pearls” Emily finds joy in the checkout line at Walmart, which most of us can agree is not a place often associated with this emotion. She observes and then engages with Pearl, the elderly cashier, whose old-fashioned customer service proves to be nonverbal kindness that “eclipses the need for translation.”
Just as relatable is one of Emily’s COVID Chronicles that we encounter several times in the Not Long Agos. “Pura Vida (COVID Chronicles)” situates us on a drive with her, listening to an interview with a scientist on NPR. “What if COVID was meant to be our teacher?” she posits. An insightful thought soon followed by a list of COVID inconveniences, small things taken for granted.
Emily’s wordplay is evident in “By the Seat of My Skirt” as she contemplates her first first-class seat on an airplane in relation to the many seats she has occupied throughout her life. They range from the hand-me-down highchair to multiple waiting room seats to the seats by her parents’ sides as they passed to rocking chairs with babies to seats “asking for mercy” and “demanding justice” to seats in cars, on porches, by fires, and on balconies.
Included in the Now selections, Emily contemplates the scars she has collected throughout her life in “Living While Impaired,” the work put into befriending an elderly neighbor in “Connect For,” and an encounter she witnesses between a teenage store clerk and a questionable patron in “Season & Purpose.” This particular section is decorated with an unfair nut allergy, the offensive sound of someone eating, simultaneously running the car AC and the seat warmer (don’t we all?), the sound of her husband’s voice, her love of cousins and a number of other notions that are, yet again, both ordinary and relatable.
As I read over my Spork notes, I see all the juicy parts I left out — but I’ll let you find those diamonds yourself. Meanwhile, I will keep my eyes open as I stroll the Beaufort farmers market or the Fort Macon trails of Atlantic Beach as Emily and I currently share the same stomping ground in Eastern North Carolina. “Be someone others want to know” was a lesson she learned on Bus #5. I think she aced that one and has reminded me to try to do the same. EB
Kristi Southern has a master’s degree in multicultural literature and an MBA from East Carolina University. She currently serves as book review editor for the North Carolina Literary Review. An eastern Carolinian for the past 30 years, she lives in Atlantic Beach.