It’s been two years since Hurricane Helene left its trail of destruction across North Carolina. More than 100 people in western North Carolina lost their lives in the aftermath. Record-breaking rainfall, high winds, and flash floods caused downed trees, widespread power outages, and nearly 2,000 landslides.
This weekend in Boone, a program featuring local poets, writers, and performers will recognize and pay tribute to the resilience of High Country residents.
The event will feature dramatic readings from Surge, an original play by students and staff at Watauga High School. Leading that collaboration was recently retired theater arts teacher Sarah Miller. She says just weeks before a statewide competition, her students, many of whom were impacted by the storm, shifted gears and developed an entirely different play centered on their own experiences.
"That idea fell out of them," she says. "It was so fast. I’ve never experienced anything like it. It just was so organic. The riffing that happened, their need to process what was happening, was driving that. They had to get it out of their little systems and try and figure out, like, dang, what is going on up here? What is happening to all of us? And this was their way to do it."
The play has reporters time-stamping the events of Helene and traces three families who experience the storm to different degrees. The students performed Surge at last year’s Southeastern Theatre Conference in Baltimore, where it won the award for Best Ensemble.
And there will also be poetry at this weekend's event.
High Country Poet Laureate Hilda Downer worked for decades as a psychiatric nurse helping traumatized adults and children. After Helene, she created a poetry workshop on writing about trauma. That led to the compilation Had I a Dove: Appalachian Poets on the Helene Flood. The anthology of nearly 100 poets was originally intended to help people process the pain they’d experienced. Downer says throughout the editing process the healing went both ways.
"I cried a lot," says Downer. "But I didn’t even realize at the time that I was gaining strength just from reading these poems and finding hope."
The anthology won the 2025 Weatherford Award for Poetry.
"Remembering Helene Through Plays & Poetry" takes place Saturday at the Watauga County Public Library in Boone.