I was engaged by each of the readers who shared their contributions to the “27 Views of Durham” anthology at the Carolina Theatre a few weeks back.

From my seat in Cinema One, I chuckled at Ceil Cleveland’s terrific rendering of a conversation she had at a party in Chapel Hill, soon after she’d moved to the area, with a man who wondered why on earth she and her husband would choose to live in Durham.

As I listened to historian Jean Bradley Anderson’s richly woven account of the life of D.C. Parrish, one of the fathers of this town first known as Durham Station, I wondered why I’d never heard that a pioneering newspaper here was called the Tobacco Plant – one of the most ingenious names ever to grace a masthead (or one of the most inane, depending on your taste in publication titles and your knowledge of Durham’s history).

I caught glimpses of myself in both Adam Sobsey’s making his escape from Durham at 18 and never intending to come back, and Pierce Freelon’s love letter to Durham that celebrates his birthright and the charms of our hometown.

Still, what has stayed with me most is a comment Steve Schewel made as he kicked off the reading. The way he defined Durham grit was new food for thought: a combination of Durham grace and Durham wit.

I can’t remember if he attributed that definition to someone else or offered it as his own. Either way, though, that notion of equal parts grace and wit adding up to grit really spoke to me.

On that day, I hadn’t shown up at the reading with only a column idea in mind. I was also making a conscious effort to shake off the psychic residue of a tough couple of weeks.

In this sometimes bewildering new world I find myself in, space can be tight. Too often, money is even tighter. And I’m definitely in what one of my friends aptly called as a “professional hiccup.” (Translation: doing work I’ve never done before that is pretty far afield from the writing/editing/teaching path I’ve been on for more than a decade.)

Of course, that’s life for a lot of people in 2012 – a less-than-we’re-accustomed-to place many of us have been in for a year or two, or three. Hoping and praying that as the country’s fortunes turn around, our worlds will right themselves too.

With those thoughts not far from top of mind that Sunday afternoon, I saw a direct correlation between my hometown’s character and my own. Durham’s grit – equal parts grace and wit – was, is, at my center too.

I know those qualities, which I can only credit to a higher power, are at least part of why I’m still standing – reminding myself of what I’m blessed to have, and working on letting go of what I’ve lost. That was the light-bulb moment, aka revelation number one, of the day.

An excerpt Schewel read from his “27 Views” introduction was light-bulb moment number two. In it, he references Pauli Murray, another daughter of Durham, and her need to leave this town behind back in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s “to find her voice and her future.”

Schewel draws on Murray’s memoir “Proud Shoes” to shed light on the significance of her annual tributes to her grandfather after his death in 1919. Murray, born in 1910, was young but already familiar with the slights and stings of segregation and bigotry.

Given the racism she and her family experienced, Schewel writes, Murray’s bold placement of an American flag on her grandfather’s grave each year, in plain sight of a white cemetery’s field full of Confederate flags, is a reminder “of the ever-present hard truths beneath our city’s prosperous new cool – and a reminder, too, that in Durham people have always fought back.”

It’s that last phrase, about fighting back, that provided another flash of insight and moment of newfound kinship with my birthplace that I needed.

My mother has reminded me more than a couple of times over the years that I was born a fighter, delivered two months early in Duke Hospital and weighing in at a mere 3 pounds and an ounce.

So, as sure as Durham flows through me, lives within me, continues to shape me, I’m destined to stay in the ring.