by James Shea and Jess McCuan . photos by Matt Rose

Suzy Salwa Phillips and fellow food truck owners just got a big green light. After a year of lobbying the city to allow food trucks like Gypsy Queen Cuisine to operate in Asheville’s core, the truck owners got their way: An initial Asheville City Council vote on the matter in August didn’t pass by a large enough margin to change city ordinance. But on September 13, the council voted 5-2 to allow trucks to operate in the middle of downtown, provided they follow a few specific rules.

Now, the devil is in the details of those rules. And Phillips will be under pressure to plow through them in coming weeks as prime food-selling season comes to a close and winter approaches.

by Ursula Gullow . portrait by Naomi Johnson

Her paintings—unlike much of the rest of her life—are a total mess. In one of them, Swing, currently on display in the Asheville Art Museum show Color Study, tangles of grey interact with strokes of pink and blue, all bursting onto a field of white. “I find mess really interesting,” says Humphries, 45. “Whether it’s in nature, or whether it’s crowds, or in the thrift store where everything is just in piles. I’m simultaneously interested and really freaked out by disorganization.”

To make her gestural paintings, Humphries, an Asheville native, begins by creating an “under-painting” using relatively random marks and colors. Then, she paints the dominating marks, which takes hours. “I have to do it slowly and carefully or else I’ll create mud,” she says.

It’s a combination of the right brain and left, control and chaos, that seems to run through her entire life. After getting a degree in art from UNC-Asheville, Humphries lived in Chapel Hill and got a master’s degree in information science. Then she moved to New York City for several years, working in digital media and web design for MTV and Nickelodeon’s parent company, Viacom. When she moved back to Asheville in 2000, she signed up to teach digital media classes at A-B Tech.

by H. Byron Ballard . photos by Brent Fleury

In 1991, Corinne Gerwe and her late husband David purchased an intriguing old house in Saluda, North Carolina. The former church has a rich and eccentric history, and now it’s the setting for a new book, The Strange Case of the Doyle Diary Murders.

Construction began in 1888 on the Saluda First Baptist Church, and it was dedicated, appropriately enough, on Halloween in 1894. The congregation eventually outgrew its home, and it was bought by Mrs. J. D. Hunt, who converted it into a private residence. Mrs. Hunt was a spiritualist whose decorating taste ran to the dramatic, including flamingo-pink interior and outside trim.

When Corinne and David bought the house from Mrs. Hunt’s heirs, it was a dusty time capsule with most of the furniture and effects as Mrs. Hunt had left them—“down to the hairpins,” Gerwe chuckles. The couple did extensive renovations, including removing the garish trim and returning the house to a sedate grey. They found all sorts of interesting artifacts from the Hunt days, including a Ouija board and a book by Sherlock Holmes’ creator, Arthur Conan Doyle. Gerwe, who has a Ph.D. in biological psychology and has taught at Clemson University, is a fan of Doyle’s work but didn’t know this particular book—one of his later works on spiritualism.

by Jess McCuan . photos by Matt Rose

In mid-May, Tommi Crow knew it was some sort of victory when a Hillman Group executive called from Ohio. He said, as she recalls: “There seems to be some sort of confusion here. Our inboxes are filling up so fast we can’t work.”

Crow, 52, lives in South Asheville and is the inventor of the InfoTube. It’s the plastic tube you sometimes see in the yard of a for-sale home, and InfoTubes (along with another of her inventions, the InfoBox), have been used by real estate agents around the country for two decades now, after Crow partnered up with Home Depot and started selling them through the chain in 1991.

After college, Crow, a Missouri native, moved to Dallas and sold real estate. Tinkering in her garage one day, she assembled a crude tube—one she could leave her sales literature in. After a while, people started calling and saying, “Hey, where’d you get that tube?” she remembers. Brokers and customers were often more interested in her tube than the homes she was trying to sell.

by Olivia Springer . photos by Matt Rose

Playing a standup bass isn’t quite the same as playing in the dirt, but Sara Nichols feels lucky that she gets to do both. As a soil conservationist, the 28-year-old works by day with Madison County landowners and farmers. By night, she plays in several area orchestras, and she was one of the Asheville Symphony’s youngest members when she joined it in 2005 at age 25.

On a typical work day, Nichols drives around Madison County talking farming practices and watersheds. A bit of a tomboy, she was raised in Bradenton, Florida, and knew early on that she wanted to work in science. She moved to WNC and majored in biology at Mars Hill College. Now, she’s thrilled to put her skills to use drawing maps and testing air and water quality. She has even come to appreciate the looks she gets as a young woman (occasionally carrying an auger or a shovel) ambling onto a field to talk engineering.

by Mick Kelly . photo by Matt Rose

It was clear Martha Huggins had some serious inner cool. When we started talking with the 54-year-old assistant librarian, a few twists and turns in her personal life were quite intriguing. Huggins spends her days at the Edneyville branch of the Henderson County Public Library tending to the stacks and telling people to shush. (Actually, she and her fellow librarians are chatty, and sometimes a crew of elderly library volunteers tells them to shush.) She lives just two miles from the library, where she and her husband Fred raise two goats and ten chickens.

But Huggins also has a bit of a rebellious streak, which started young. The New Jersey native skipped college—too “establishment” for her taste at the time—and moved to northern California at 19 to live on a commune. She never went to college, something her librarian colleagues sometimes hassle her about. In fact, she always wanted to sing on stage like Bonnie Raitt.

by Beth Ellen . photo by Roy Cox

The strangest things can inspire people to be stand-up comics. Thirty-three-year-old comedian Erin Jackson has always loved Bill Cosby and Ellen DeGeneres. But what really convinces her that she can tell jokes for a living are odd little moments in everyday life. Like standing in line at CVS waiting for the cashier to figure out how to give her 15 cents change. (The woman ran out of dimes.) Or that time when she was on a flight to Los Angeles and her plane caught on fire. (No joke.)

by Susan Reinhardt . photo by Rimas Zailskas

Let’s face it, ladies: passion wanes. Over time, keeping the romance in a relationship scorching hot is just about the toughest job of all. No time for sex or intimacy? Too much work, not enough play? Too many soccer practices and social events? It’s an old familiar rut.

If all else is going well, though, it’s time to take matters into your own hands (so to speak). At this juncture, says clinical psychologist Kelley Wolfe, a relationship can either fizzle or fire up. You don’t have to settle for humdrum, she says, when a few tweaks can keep your sex life soaring.

Wolfe, 44, is a mother of two and has been happily married for 15 years. She specializes in sex education and finds that relationships lacking hanky panky and intimacy are much more likely to succumb to doom.