According to novelist and Wilmington resident Wiley Cash, North Carolina’s port city has a vibrant community of readers and writers. What’s missing is an option for bringing that community together at scale.
“Wilmington is an incredibly literary city, and we’re home to a number of really successful, well-known writers,” Cash said. “But there’s not a bookstore space that can accommodate a large crowd when you're having significant literary events.”
To address this issue, the writer of books will soon become a seller of them as well. Cash, along with his wife Mallory, is overseeing renovations to a building on North Front Street that will house the Cashes’ new independent bookstore, Floodplain Books. The store, which is anticipated to open by fall 2026, will be able to host up to 100 people for events such as author readings, writing workshops, and children’s story hours. It will also have access to a larger event space on the building’s third floor that can accommodate 300 people.
Cash’s debut novel, A Land More Kind Than Home, made the New York Times bestseller list in 2012, and his later novels have won notable literary prizes like the Gold Dagger Award and the Southern Book Prize. So, it is safe to say that he counts among the well-known Wilmington writers he mentioned. But according to Cash, even he has struggled to find an appropriate place for readings in his hometown, and he knows that other nationally renowned authors have typically skipped Wilmington on book tours entirely.
“When John Grisham has a book come out, he’ll come to Wilmington now,” Cash said, by way of example. “He normally doesn’t. All my friends are writers, and I want to give them an awesome place to come showcase their books.”
In order to raise capital for the store’s opening and to preview its eventual role as an event space, Floodplain Books is hosting a series of online literary seminars with published authors, centered on the craft and business of writing. Cash said these discussions often focus on excerpts from the authors’ works, which are sent in advance to seminar attendees. Attendees can then pose questions, which Cash relays to the authors in a moderated back-and-forth.
“They get to ask about how to get an agent, how did you get your start, where did you first publish, how do you not give up,” he said. “The conversations so far have been generous and fun.”
Floodplain Books kicked off the series on January 25 with the aforementioned John Grisham, one of the most widely read fiction authors of all time. In a seminar titled “Getting Started,” Grisham and Cash discussed how to get the ball rolling on new literary projects. Other seminars have included National Book Award winner Jason Mott and bestselling poet Maggie Smith.
According to Cash, he chose the slate of seminar participants by asking himself a simple question. “Who are some of my writer friends who are super famous that would get people’s butts in chairs to watch them talk about writing,” he said.
Heavy subject matter
One of the answers Cash found to that question was Randy Blythe, who will be participating in the final Floodplain Books seminar on April 19, titled “Writing the Truth.” Like Cash’s other friends who have agreed to donate their time to the seminar series, Blythe’s books have landed on bestseller lists.
The thing that sets Blythe apart, however, is his day job. While the other participants are known primarily as writers in a traditional sense, Blythe is best known as the vocalist and lyricist of Lamb of God, one of the most popular heavy metal bands in the world.
Based out of Richmond, Virginia, Lamb of God has sold millions of records and been nominated for dozens of music awards, including five Grammys. But Blythe has also ventured into the literary world in recent years. In 2015, the publishing imprint Da Capo released his memoir Dark Days, which chronicles Blythe’s 2013 trial and acquittal for manslaughter in the Czech Republic, where he was charged in the death of a concertgoer attending a Lamb of God show. And in 2025, Blythe published an essay collection titled Just Beyond the Light: Making Peace With the Wars Inside Our Head.
Both books tackle challenging and deeply personal subject matter, and are written largely in Blythe’s accessible, often conversational style. In the spirit of the alternative music communities that Blythe came of age in—first punk rock, then metal—they are attempts to look honestly and critically at himself and the world around him. For instance, subjects that feature in his 2025 essay collection include Blythe’s past alcoholism, school shootings in the United States, the social value of the arts, and the death of his grandmother.
“He’s a writer and musician who’s not afraid of telling the truth, whether he’s telling it on the page or screaming it out to 40,000 people at Madison Square Garden,” Cash said of Blythe. “That kind of boldness felt like an honest way to close out our series.”
Blythe’s writing is well-known to metalheads around the globe, whether in the form of his books or his song lyrics, but it may be less familiar to Wilmington’s local literary community. Blythe, however, is a local product himself in many ways.
Though his band is based out of Virginia, Blythe spent much of his childhood in Columbus and New Hanover counties, and he still visits the Wilmington area often, where he occasionally jumps on stage to perform with local or touring bands. Last November, for instance, he sang alongside the veteran Cape Fear metal trio Weedeater during the Port City Blitz music festival. He can even be found surfing on Oak Island or at Wrightsville Beach—both places he mentions repeatedly in his most recent book.
As for Blythe’s literary chops, Cash was happy to vouch for him. “Randy is as well-read and well-versed in literature as any of the writers that I know,” he said. “And he’s a beautiful writer.”
‘Write what you’re scared to write.’
In a recent phone interview about his upcoming seminar for Floodplain Books, Blythe mentioned the impact that his 2013 trial for manslaughter — and his detention in an infamous Czech prison — had on his writing. Though he was ultimately declared not criminally liable for the 2010 death of a fan at a concert in Prague that had led to his imprisonment, the incident affected him deeply.
“The process, as I went through it, required me to look for the truth,” Blythe said. “I didn't want to glamorize anything or make it worse than it was, or avoid any sort of responsibility. It’s just important to tell the truth, and in writing, that can be very uncomfortable at times. But I have often heard a writing maxim, ‘write what you’re scared to write.’”
Blythe’s most recent book, the essay collection Just Beyond the Light, deals extensively with the mental and emotional tensions he experiences on a daily basis. These are the “wars inside our head” mentioned in the book’s subtitle. By drawing from his own unique color palette of uncommon experiences and sometimes strongly polarized emotions, Blythe is able to paint vivid pictures of his personal conflicts.
A notable example can be found in the essay “My War,” which Blythe uses to present two contrasting parts of his personality—one of which is optimistic and oblivious to the world’s problems, the other of which is so deeply pessimistic that it drives away friends and loved ones.
“These two drastically different characters, whipping the ship of my emotional state back and forth through the stormy seas of existence, resemble very closely the highs and lows of my active alcoholism,” he writes. “While drinking and drugging, at times I reveled in states of ecstatic bliss, […] and I felt on top of the world. Matching that grand and delusional mountain peak were rapid descents into a foul-smelling valley of self-pity and sadness, a wretched place where all I saw was darkness.”
Blythe is sober these days, and he credits his sobriety for not only saving his life outright, but also helping him tune down the emotional extremes that drove his behavior for years (including his drinking). With those extremes tempered and his thoughts increasingly clear, Blythe has been able to embrace an old bit of paradoxical wisdom articulated most famously by Socrates: all we know is that we don’t know anything.
“I think one great truth that people have become increasingly uncomfortable with is that life is uncertainty,” he said. “Not everything is yes and no, not everything is binary, not everything can be quantified. That’s the truth. Sometimes, you just don’t know.”
D.I.Y.
Another piece of ancient Greek philosophy that Blythe repeatedly returns to in Just Beyond the Light is the Stoic ideal of not concerning himself with problems that are entirely out of his control. But, as he notes, the flip side of that ideal is the need to take responsibility for those things that he does have some influence over.
Blythe invokes this concept often when discussing his mental and physical health, such as his reminders to himself to treat others with patience and kindness, or his resolution to avoid alcohol. But he also refers to it when examining social ills.
In one essay, he recounts an episode from his early childhood when he tried donating his family’s entire savings to a charity fundraiser. His mother intervened before he could drain their bank account, but the episode still stood out in his mind as an example of an important principle. “I had seen a problem and I simply took action,” he writes.
This story reflects the do-it-yourself mindset that is so prevalent in the alternative music communities that Blythe came of age in. In the worlds of punk and metal, it is not unusual for bands to release records or organize music festivals without backing from major record labels; it is, in fact, sometimes a badge of honor.
Floodplain Books co-owner Wiley Cash—while not generally associated with the punk rock or metal underground scenes—can likely relate to this sentiment. He said that he and his wife Mallory have long wanted to start their own independent bookstore, in part because of the creative freedom it allows, and in part because of the role such stores play in promoting literature in a community.
“That’s who gave me my start in the publishing industry when my first novel came out in 2012,” Cash said. “It was really embraced by independent stores.”
Cash noted that when local booksellers get to know their customers’ reading habits, they can help those customers find more of what they’re looking for while also helping them discover new authors and subjects to explore.
“Going to an independent bookstore is like going to a doctor’s office if they could diagnose you and prescribe you medicine in one place,” he said.
