BEYOND LOCAL: Gwenyfar Rohler returns to encore with new pitches in 2026

There are questions in life that surprise you—the stock answer on the tip of your tongue no longer applies—and you have to formulate a new answer. 

Recently, for me, that happened over a game of chess when my opponent asked me about that last November 2025 election in Wilmington. I found myself getting ready to say, "Business as usual, what did you expect?" But instead I realized the answer was more surprising: 

It’s the first time we are going to have a female majority on the City Council, everyone elected isn't a real estate developer, and the expected candidates didn't win. "Maybe the demographics really are shifting," I commented, "instead of everybody just saying they are and business as usual continuing. It really was a surprising election for here." 

(By the way the gambit worked—I was very distracted by the question and lost the chess game very quickly thereafter.)

But it got me thinking... in so many ways I had given up hope in the last few years, I had succumbed to a “Business as usual, what can we really do about it anyway?" mindset. I think, like many people, I had grown up with the idea that the world was slowly changing for the better. It came slowly, but it did come. In the last six years that feeling had eroded like sand dunes in a hurricane. Events, specifically since the first iteration of encore shuttered in 2020, have been disappointing and dispiriting. I think about what we were trying to talk about in encore then: 

Covid, George Floyd, the protests on the steps of City Hall, the removal of the Confederate statues, the impact of all these things on the local economy, and the shifting ground that we were all trying to tread. For a small independent weekly—dependent upon advertising revenue from bars, restaurants and event venues—the pandemic was the death knell. There was no money to print it and no place to distribute it. Encore was founded in 1984, and only missed one week of printed issues (due to a hurricane) until Covid hit in 2020. 

A year ago Shannon Gentry, our former Assistant Editor, had announced her intention to resurrect encore. Certainly there was a void to fill. I wasn't the only one to see it. In a town with such a thriving arts and culture scene, to not have a periodical dedicated to arts and culture coverage seemed short-sighted at best. But periodicals are expensive to start and hard to maintain. Like any small business, a periodical requires a tremendous amount of elbow grease, leg work and what my mother called "stick-to-it-ive-ness”—and all of that in an age of media shifting daily. Shannon seemed like the logical person, it felt like it slotted back into place. If anyone had the experience, the drive and the vision to make it happen, it was her. 

 "I kept looking through the back issues of encore and in the front was Live Local," Shannon Gentry noted. We were on the phone.  Here we were a year later and she wanted to do a print issue of encore to go hand-in-hand with the online content, which sounded great. In an incredibly flattering moment, she asked me to reprise Live Local. I have to admit that that coveted front spot in the magazine had meant so much to me. To have occupied it for so many years was something I had taken tremendous (and guilty) pride in every week. 

When Live Local first debuted in encore’s pages it was one of the most important days of my life. I had no idea that for over a decade I would sweat a deadline for that column, and for book reviews, theatre reviews and serialized fiction. I had no idea that encore (along with our family's bookstore) would come to define almost every waking moment of my life and certainly shape every week. 

Shannon's offer was tempting, flattering, but I hemmed. I hawed. The world has changed so very, very much since I wrote the first installment of the Live Local column. It began with a question: Could I, a small business owner, spend money only at other locally owned small businesses for a year and not shop online, in a chain store or eat at a chain restaurant? Along the way we explored the unfolding financial crisis around us: the bail out of the banks, the furloughs of jobs, and the impact that incentives (or lack thereof ) could have on our small town. 

Live Local grew into the classic editorial column using my life with Jock Brandis and the small independent bookstore that our family owns, as a lens to explore life in our area: Hurricane Florence, the poisoning of our water with PFAs, election coverage, economics, and the occasional history lesson through the hauntings by NC historic figures. It was a lot of fun to write it over the years. However, when Shannon started talking about resurrecting encore and her vision for it, I didn't really see a place for Live Local. 

To begin with, my life has changed so drastically since 2020. I don't think I can meet a weekly deadline right now. I heard a lot of people talking in 2020 and 2021 about their priorities shifting as far as focusing on career and work over family time and quality of life. For 11 years I did not get a paycheck from the bookstore. I worked to support the staff at the bookstore. When you own a small business everyone else gets paid before you do and all the bills get paid before you do. At the time of the shut down I was writing for 36-38 deadlines a month (encore, Salt, WHQR, and additional freelance gigs); managing the bookstore and our literary themed Bed & Breakfast and Nightly Rental Loft; and our Literary History Walking Tour. I was far from a pleasant person to be around. There was simply no bandwidth to have a polite conversation with people, and no time to have dinner (or coffee or drinks) with friends. I think several of our mutual friends thought I had left Jock eight or nine years ago and everyone was just too embarrassed to ask. It had been so long since he had been accompanied by me at a social function. Clearly, this couldn't continue. After a decade it is incredible that my body was still keeping up with this, if only out of a galvanizing combination of habit and terror.

Then I hit a wall. Literally.

I drove a beautiful 1963 Honda Dream Motorcycle head first into a brick wall.

The metaphor was not lost on me. It doesn't get much clearer than that. 

As the world crawled back toward normalcy in the wake of the pandemic I realized that I didn't have the hustle to go pitch stories to the publications that had survived Covid. I didn't have the money to hire staff at the bookstore so that I could have the time to pitch, conduct interviews and write (which is extraordinarily time consuming). Just as the Covid restrictions were lifted, the bookstore got a second condemnation threat from the City of Wilmington and began what became an almost two-year legal battle (which, thankfully, has ended). Now Jock, at nearly 80, is four years into a cancer diagnosis.

Shannon has assembled an incredible group of writers around her to help relaunch encore. Throughout this coming year the online content is going to explore in both short form and long form journalism what this community is growing into in 2026 and beyond. She couldn't have chosen a more prescient time to do this, as I type this, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has just announced that their Board of Directors has voted to shut down the organization founded in 1968 that has funded PBS and NPR stations and programing. Clearly, the media landscape is shifting sand. If ever community grown and focused journalism is needed, it is now. 

Shannon keeps talking about the importance of asking questions. I am reminded that Live Local began with a question. At the root of all good writing is an attempt to ask questions and seek answers. Right now our community is still looking at a lot of the same questions that were in 2020. But also, after six years, some of those questions have shifted, deepened, and become more nuanced. 

The encroachment of AI into the media world is frightening, and it is real, and it is here. I was shocked after writing a brief book recommendation list for a magazine to receive a response from the editor commenting on how refreshing it was to receive something that was clearly NOT AI generated. Your freelancers are sending you AI writing? I thought. This is insane to me. Why bother reading that? Why bother printing that? And perhaps most perplexing of all, why bother turning that in as your own work? But it is here, and it is happening. My friends still in the media talk about it and the impact it has on their daily working lives. This reality is something that encore is going to have to reckon with; hopefully, we will do it with transparency and integrity. Knowing Shannon, she will invite you into that conversation. 

— What’s to Come in 2026 —

The issue of housing—both affordable housing and the struggles of people who are unhomed—continues to be very real and very present in our community. To be blunt, there is no way I could afford rent in this town, let alone scrape together the money to try to buy a house. I am not alone in this. As the year unfolds, the issues around housing are one of several that encore is going to shine a light upon. There are historic factors in play, but also it is time to talk about what long-term strategies and changes we can enact now, standing on this precipice to try to have a livable community in 10 years, 20 years. 

Related to this is the redevelopment of the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge, the impact that is going to have on historic neighborhoods, housing where the bridge lands, and the environmental impacts. Next door to that is the discussion currently going on about Eagles Island and the proposed riverside development. (Seriously people, you want to build there? We know it floods, we don't need to wait for a hurricane—just look at it after a normal spring rain on a Tuesday afternoon.) Oh... but the view will be so nice and people from out of town who don't know better will love to spend money on it. Does that sound immoral to you?     

It certainly is related to gentrification, which is related to our escalated housing costs. How many people have moved here because it looks so quaint and cute, but have no idea that our water is poisoned? How many trees have we lost to the development to accommodate the mushrooming population? Trees that absorb water during rainstorms, provide oxygen and shade to cool our ever-warming, ever-hotter summers.  

I don't think my life is at a point that Live Local is the contribution I can make to the next phase of encore. When I think about the history of this city—the burial place of the first American playwright, birthplace of the first African American playwright to have a hit show on Broadway, home of the the first North Carolina painter to be included in the Metropolitan Museum's collection, and of course, home of Thalian Hall, one of the jewels of historic American theatres—I want to bury myself in the history and the culture of our area. 

The public art discussion has always been fraught. In 2020 it reached a fever pitch nationwide. Here the Confederate statues on Third Street came down. This happened at a time when so much of the art we took for granted (live music, live theatre, libraries, art museums, and galleries) were shuttered due to the pandemic. Across North Carolina (found in post offices, libraries, and auditoriums), murals and sculptures depicting the essence of the communities they inhabit are about to turn 100 years old. They were created with funding from the Federal Arts Administration (part of the Works Progress Administration) during the 1930s.  

Readers have probably encountered our mural in the downtown post office showcasing the port. Again, thinking about the loss of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and what the impact of public money can have on arts, culture and a thriving world, I am drawn to spending some time with these nearly century old federally funded pieces of public art. Perhaps later in the year or next year we can do that together. 

So we are here again. Everything old is new. Bridges are built and that is the beginning of a beautiful new world. Or so we hope. Welcome back to encore, we have missed you. We have missed being part of the cultural conversation, and we are very excited to explore the future of this community.