When you walk into the gallery, you’re surrounded by paintings of dogs and the sounds of acoustic guitar. One dog, a white pit-bull in a bed of teal, will draw your eye as the biggest painting in the room. The next things you might notice are the nine rows of wine-red chairs on a real hardwood floor, worn and faded. As Meg Reid, the assistant editor of Ecotone Magazine, comes to give you your ticket, you will hear the heavy, solid sound of that floor as she walks across it in her brown leather pumps. And next, you might visit the back wall where fruit, vegetable and cheese trays have been set out. The newest issue of Ecotone Magazine is the “Happiness issue,” and they held their release party Thursday, Nov. 3, in the WHQR gallery.

The night started at 7:30 p.m. as the guests arrived, but the readings did not begin until 8:05 p.m. when Ben George, editor of Ecotone, spoke about the magazine and the newest issue. “It’s never a profitable venture though. We love angels,” he said.

Reid said the event was put together to introduce the magazine to the community. The editors each chose one piece and a speaker. Ecotone contains both fiction and non-fiction. According to George, Ecotone magazine is supposed to bridge science and culture. They don’t have to be enemies of each other.

Regardless of what happiness might mean, the release party was a fun, community event for the guests. “Happiness: it’s right here, now, or it’s nowhere,” George Scheibner, WHQR operations manager read in his deep voice with the cadences of the narrator in the cartoon movie, “How the Grinch Stole Christmas!” He read an essay, “Are You Happy?” by Sven Birkerts, from the new issue of the magazine.

Scheibner was one of the readers that guest Peggy Rusoff came to the release party to hear. “I like the name of the book, the issue, and I like the people who are going to read from it,” she said, and she was specifically interested George Scheibner and Clyde Edgerton. She’d heard Edgerton before and she knew Scheibner from her work as a volunteer at WHQR.

After Scheibner finished, Karen Bender and Robert Siegel, husband and wife faculty in UNCW’s Creative Writing department, read a piece, “At the Cultural Ephemera Association National Conference,” by Robert Olen Butler. The crowd laughed as the inner lives of Bill (“May I call you William?”) and Cleo (“why didn’t you name me Cleopatra?”) were played out by Bender and Siegel. And they ended with a kiss.

Then Edgerton and Reid did a few duets on guitars. The first song, sung in Edgerton’s twang, was an offbeat song with a chorus involving bologna, bacon and beer. Their next duet was a rendition of “Jackson,” where Edgerton switched out his acoustic for an electric and Reid took the lead in the vocals. After that quick break, the readings resumed, and by then the air was strong with the scent of wine.

Edgerton read from Ron Rash’s fiction piece, “A Sort of Miracle” from the Sex and Death issue. His story was a very entertaining, somewhat outlandish piece with a hunt for a bear’s gall bladder, two dimwit in-laws, sex and death. David Gessner, a professor of creative writing, shouted from his chair, “Is this really in Ron’s story?” Edgerton simply replied, “No comment.” The crowd laughed.

The last speaker was Gessner, who read excerpts from several books. He said, “I read to my class earlier, and I did a really bad job.” Gessner is the one who threw the word Ecotone out in a faculty retreat, and some people there said it would be a good name for a literary journal. Ecotone is a region of transition according to Merriam-Webster. As a nature writer, Gessner is familiar with the concept.

The idea seems perfectly suited to Wilmington, a place of transition for students, like those at UNCW. “(Wilmington) like sucks creative energy out of everything,” Rosoff said. Maybe happiness, at least here, is experiencing all the cultures one town can offer – listening to rich voices reading local writers’ work at a release party one night and visiting the club scene downtown the next.