"Our 'Wild'-life Sanctuary" by Charles Davenport, Jr.

A North Carolina writer remembers vividly his boyhood tromping around in the now-disappeared forbidden woods adjacent to his neighborhood.

Charles Davenport Jr. has been an op-ed columnist at the News & Record (Greensboro, North Carolina) for 15 years. His debut novel, The Closure Committee, was published in 2018, and he is working on a sequel. His favorite scribbler is George Gissing, an English novelist of the Victorian era. Charles and his wife live in Kernersville, N.C. with their three spoiled “kids”: a giddy Golden Retriever and two haughty felines.