"This work is unlike any other, in its range of rich, conjuring imagery and its dexterity, its smart voice. Carroll-Hackett doesn’t spare us—but doesn’t save us—she draws a blueprint of power and class with her unflinching pivot: matter-of-fact and tender." —Jan Beatty

Posts tagged ‘Appalachian Writers’

Quarantine Prompt a Day <3 Elders

26 March 2020 

My grandmothers. Two women from completely different worlds, cultures, backgrounds, across a vast socioeconomic divide, brought together at the end of their lives, because my parents loved each other, and loved them.

From Miz Pearl I learned about survival, food preservation, foraging, mending, how to find and create beauty even on the darkest days, and the power of prayer, especially when it’s sung. From Miz Ann I learned about the joy to be found in making things with your hands, the value of being a smartass, the pervasive connection of laughter, which fork to use 🙂 and how even the brashest and most self-regarding among us can learn the power of gratitude and humility. 

Fierce women, strong women, wise women, loving women, despite the brokenness life dealt both of them. When they lived together, sharing the same room in my parents’ house, in the twilight of their lives, they became unlikely friends and sisters. ‘Cause that’s what Love does.

Make art about what you’ve learned from elders, about the gifts they bring to our lives. 

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2020 Prompts, Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, Family, fiction, Food, freedom, Gratitude, healing, Love, Nature, nonfiction, One Love, peace, poetry, prompts, self care, Writing, Writing Prompts

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Daily Prompt Love <3 So Much Power

23 August 2019 

Make art about the power of story, of how story can change lives. 

story

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2019 Prompts, activism, Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, Dreams, Family, fiction, freedom, Gratitude, healing, Love, nonfiction, One Love, peace, poetry, prompts, resistance, Writing, Writing Prompts

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Monday Must Read! States of Mercy, A Novel by Ace Boggess

Ace Boggess is author of the novel A Song Without a Melody and four books of poetry: I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So, Ultra Deep Field, The Prisoners, and The Beautiful Girl Whose Wish Was Not Fulfilled. He earned degrees from Marshall University and the West Virginia University College of Law. His fiction appears in Notre Dame Review, Lumina, Belmont Story Review, Superstition Review, and other journals. He received a fellowship for fiction from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts and spent five years in a West Virginia prison. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.

Buy States of Mercy Here! 

States of Mercy Boggess

Mercy Adams, the young existential heroine, follows a path of self-discovery through chaos at the turn of the millennium and beyond. Her friend Lucian Lang narrates the story of her struggle to overcome hurt in a world in transition. Violence, drug abuse, and a growing diversity of approaches to spirituality are the norm, setting up barriers to understanding and, ultimately, transformation. States of Mercy explores questions of identity and belief, but also friendship. How far can friends travel this road together before one goes where the other cannot follow? Mercy and Lucian intend to find out together, unless the mad world destroys them first.

 

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Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, fiction, Gratitude, healing, Love, Must Read Monday, Must Read Writers, One Love, publishing, Writing

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K’in Spotlight! Jonathan Corcoran, Author of The Rope Swing

K’in Spotlight! Choosing To Love or Run ❤
Check out Dave Magill’s excellent interview with Jon Corcoran. 
Jonathan Corcoran is the author of the story collection, The Rope Swing, which was named a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards and long-listed for The Story Prize. His stories have been anthologized in Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Fiction and Poetry from West Virginia and Best Gay Stories 2017. He received a BA in Literary Arts from Brown University and an MFA in Fiction Writing from Rutgers University-Newark. Jonathan teaches writing at Rutgers and serves as a Visiting Writer in the low-residency MFA program at West Virginia Wesleyan College. He was born and raised in a small town in West Virginia and currently resides in Brooklyn, NY.
 
Corcoran_Jonathan_Photo

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Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, fiction, K'in, literary journals, litmags, Must Read Writers, One Love, Writing

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Monday Must Read! The Rope Swing by Jonathan Corcoran

Jonathan Corcoran is the author of the story collection, The Rope Swing, published in 2016 by West Virginia University Press. The Rope Swing was a finalist for the 2017 Lambda Literary Awards and long-listed for The Story Prize. His stories have been anthologized in Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Fiction and Poetry from West Virginia and Best Gay Stories 2017. He received a BA in Literary Arts from Brown University and an MFA in Fiction Writing from Rutgers University-Newark. Jonathan is currently Visiting Assistant Professor at Wesleyan University and serves as a Visiting Writer in the low-residency MFA program at West Virginia Wesleyan College. He was born and raised in a small town in West Virginia and currently resides in Brooklyn, NY.

Check out Jonathan’s website here! 

Corcoran Must Read

Buy this beautiful book here!

Praise for The Rope Swing

“Jonathan Corcoran’s Appalachian voice, so fierce, so tender,portrays tradition as both weapon and soothing balm. The Rope Swingtakes us inside quiet revolutions of the soul in mountain towns far from Stonewall: we can never go home again, but we recognize ourselves in these linked stories of love, loss, the economic tyranny of neglect and exploitation, and the lifelong alliance between those who stay and those who leave. The Rope Swing establishes a new American writer whose unerring instincts are cause for celebration.”

—Jayne Anne Phillips, author of Quiet Dell, Lark and Termite, and Black Tickets

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Art, Artists, Books, Creativity, fiction, Must Read Monday, Must Read Writers, One Love, Uncategorized, Writing

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Monday Must Read! Drifting in Awe by Larry Thacker

Larry D. Thacker is a Kentuckian poet, writer, and artist now hailing from Johnson City, Tennessee with his wife, Karin, and their cat, Abraham Lincoln. A five year veteran of the US army and having served fifteen years in the realm of student services in higher education, he finally paid heed to the voices of adventurous reason and will soon complete his poetry and fiction MFA at West Virginia Wesleyan College. He earned his bachelor of history, master of education in counseling, and education specialist degree from Lincoln Memorial University, home of the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival. Besides Drifting in Awe, he is the author of Mountain Mysteries: The Mystic Traditions of Appalachia (2007), and the chapbooks Voice Hunting (2011) and Memory Train (2015). His poems have appeared in over a hundred journals and magazines.

Keep up with what’s happening at http://www.larrydthacker.com

and on Instagram at: thackalachia

Buy this beautiful book here!   

Also, keep an eye out for Larry’s forthcoming collection, Grave Robber Confessional, later this year, from one of my favorites, FutureCycle Press. 

Thacker

Praise for Drifting in Awe

The poems in this resonant book offer a strong, hands-on encounter with the world as it is, with the weather, geography, the trees, our fellow creatures. Attending to the muscular and physical realities of the local world, however, rightly leads these poems to the lesser-known and less-certain wonders of the metaphysical, to the apprehension, as far as the mind can reach, of a meaning beyond the limits of physical knowledge. What’s out there beyond the fog rising in a cove? What questions should we ask, only to voice them, knowing they have no ready answer? That strange little paradox is why we have poetry at all, and here is a fine book to prove that point, with elegance, and with elegant reserve.

—Maurice Manning

Larry Thacker writes of the natural world and what hovers on the edge of consciousness. Entities “seen in the corner of the eye” or “the sound of the sun” might manifest if one becomes still enough to see and hear. Drifting in Awe, gives us a manual for doing just that. In his first full length collection, Thacker invites us to be still and let that world come to us if we are brave enough. 

—Jane Hicks

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Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Books, Creativity, Must Read Monday, Must Read Writers, poetry, Writing

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Monday Must Read! Cat Pleska: Riding On Comets

cat pleskaCat Pleska is a seventh generation West Virginian, and an amazingly loving and generous person. She is the author of Riding on Comets, and most recently, she published a cookbook with a sense of humor, One Foot in the Gravy–Hooked on the Sauce. Cat is a writer, editor, educator, publisher, and storyteller. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Goucher College. She is an essayist for West Virginia Public Radio and a book reviewer for the Charleston Gazette. She coedited the anthology Fed from the Blade: Tales and Poems from the Mountains. Pleska has been published in literary magazines and newspapers throughout the Appalachian region. She lives in Scott Depot, West Virginia, with her husband, Dan, one dog, four cats, and with a daughter, Katie, in nearby St. Albans.

Cat’s Website

Buy Cat’s Books!

Riding on Comets

Praise for Riding on Comets

“The gifts of Cat Pleska’s Riding on Comets are many: it is fresh, candid, gently humorous, tautly lyrical, and deeply moving.”-Lisa Knopp, What the River Carries: Encounters with the Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte

This is a storyteller who knows how to piece together shards of story into a brilliant mosaic of a life. A joy to read.”–Janice Gary is the author of Short Leash: A Memoir of Dog Walking and Deliverance, winner of two Silver 2014 Nautilus Awards and a 2014 Eric Hoffer Prize for Memoir.

Cat Pleska’s restrained but graceful prose allows us to witness four generations through the eyes of the author, first as a child and then through the years that followed as her people live, age, and die. The details Pleska offers have the immediacy of truths well told, with a resolute eye and spacious heart, neither shying away from family and personal dysfunction, nor sentimentalizing the bonds of fear and love that held her family together.”–Geoffrey Cameron Fuller is an author of the true crime Pretty Little Killers and the crime thriller Full Bone Moon

One Foot in the Gravy–Hooked on the Sauce

Fed from the Blade

More from Cat Online

http://www.friedchickenandcoffee.com/2016/04/27/reckoning-fiction-by-cat-pleska/

https://www.catpleska.com/interviews-reviews-blogs/

http://www.rednecromancer.typepad.com/mouth_of_the_holler/

https://pocahontastimes.com/memories-to-memoirs/

http://www.lauratreacybentley.com/apps/blog/entries/show/41683985-spotlight-cat-pleska

 

Happy Reading!

xo

Mary

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Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, fiction, Gratitude, Love, Must Read Monday, Must Read Writers, nonfiction, One Love, Writing

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Monday Must Read! Katie Fallon: Vulture: The Private Life of an Unloved Bird

Angels walk among us, and Katie Fallon is one of them. Her talent, compassion, humor, and committed love for this sweet planet are all breath-taking. You just gotta read Vulture.

katieKatie Fallon is the author of the nonfiction books Vulture: The Private Life of an Unloved Bird (University Press of New England, 2017) and Cerulean Blues: A Personal Search for a Vanishing Songbird (Ruka Press, 2011). 

Katie is also the author of a beautiful book for children, Look, See the Bird!, written with Bill Wilson of Birds & Beans Coffee Company and illustrated by Leigh Anne Carter, from Hatherleigh Press.

A finalist for the Reed Award for Outstanding Writing on the Southern Environment, Cerulean Blues is “part journey, part documentary, and wholly engaging; a tribute to a bird that bridges continents with its wings and to a rising star among contemporary nature writers,” according to Pete Dunne, former Director of the Cape May Bird Observatoryand author of Hawks In Flight and other books.

Katie’s essays have appeared in a variety of literary journals and magazines, including Fourth Genre, River Teeth, Ecotone, Bark Magazine, Appalachian Heritage, Now & Then, Isotope, Fourth River, the minnesota review, The Tusculum Review, and elsewhere. Her essay “Rebirth” (published in River Teeth, Fall 2013) was listed as a “Notable” in Best American Science & Nature Writing 2014, and her essay “Hill of the Sacred Eagles” was a finalist in Terrain‘s 2011 essay contest. She has been nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize. Katie has taught creative writing at Virginia Tech and West Virginia University. Her first word was “bird.”

Katie is also one of the founders of the Avian Conservation Center of Appalachia, Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to conserving wild birds through scientific research; outreach and public education; and rescue and rehabilitation. The ACCA is based near Morgantown, WV, and each year treats more than 200 injured wild birds, conducts dozens of environmental education programs, and sponsors citizen-science research projects.

Katie’s website:

Visit Avian Conservation Center of Appalachia

Buy Vulture: The Private Life of an Unloved Bird

Buy Look, See the Bird!

About VULTURE: The Private Life of an Unloved Bird

VULTURE chronicles the life and times of one the world’s most under-appreciated and overlooked birds: the turkey vulture. Part ecological memoir, part travel narrative, part scientific exploration, and part love story, this book examines the roles turkey vultures–and all vultures–play in healthy ecosystems. Fallon travels to India, Arizona, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and her own backyard in her quest to study, care for, and observe this often unloved though vitally important (and uniquely beautiful!) bird.

Praise & Reviews

“When you read this book you will know why I consider it to be the most eloquent and beautiful depiction of a vulture ever… A heartfelt and authoritative account of the world’s most numerous and misunderstood avian scavenger. Written in a style reminiscent of Edward Abbey and John McPhee, Fallon successfully captures the natural history of the species and its ability to succeed in both natural and man-made landscapes. Destined to change the mind of anyone who reads it.” — Keith L. Bildstein, PhD, Sarkis Acopian Director of Conservation Science at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary

“Naturalist and bird rehabilitator Fallon (Cerulean Blues: A Personal Search for a Vanishing Songbird) presents an entertaining, well-researched title that nominally concerns the familiar turkey vulture but ranges widely, incorporating up-to-date information on condors and vultures worldwide… She displays great passion and enthusiasm yet writes knowingly and dispassionately on the science of her subject in an engaging, literary style.” — Library Journal, starred review

“This book is about vultures in the human world, but nowhere in the story does the human aspect overly intrude. The great birds are front-and-center, consistently painted in a positive and empathetic light. It is to Fallon’s credit that she is able to coax the reader into the same love affair with vultures that she herself enjoys, without romanticizing her subject to the point of putting off her audience.” — Sense of the Misplaced

“Who would have suspected the astonishments of vultures? Katie Fallon has given us an ingenious, funny, delightful book.”—Janisse Ray, author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

More from Katie Online

Listen to an interview with Katie on BirdCallsRadio, September 2016.

Essay “Hill of the Sacred Eagles” published in Terrain and named a Finalist for its 2011 Creative Nonfiction Contest. This piece appears in a different form as a chapter in Vulture.

Essay “Dogs Bring Comfort in Wake of Virginia Tech Tragedy” in Bark Magazine, 2011.

An excerpt from Chapter Two of Cerulean Blues in The Tusculum Review, 2011.

Happy Reading!

xo

Mary

Category:

animals, Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, freedom, Gratitude, Love, Must Read Monday, Must Read Writers, Nature, nonfiction, One Love, Writing

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Monday Must Read! Pamela Duncan: Moon Women

 

Pam_Duncan_MHLF_2011This week meet Pamela Duncan! Novelist Pamela Duncan was born in Asheville and grew up in Black Mountain, Swannanoa, and Shelby, North Carolina. She holds a B.A. in journalism from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and an M.A. in English/Creative Writing from North Carolina State University in Raleigh. She lives in Cullowhee, North Carolina and teaches creative writing atWestern Carolina University.

Her first novel, Moon Women, was a Southeastern Booksellers Association (now Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance) Award Finalist, and her second novel, Plant Life, won the 2003 Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction. She is the recipient of the 2007 James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South, awarded by the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Her third novel, The Big Beautiful, was published in March 2007. An excerpt from Pam’s current novel-in-progress, The Wilder Place, can be heard here: http://www.pameladuncan.com/the_wilder_place__a_novel_in_progress__80970.htm

Visit Pam’s Website

http://www.pameladuncan.com/

Buy Pam’s Beautiful Books

Moon Women

https://www.amazon.com/Moon-Women-Pamela-Duncan/dp/0440236487

Plant Life

https://www.amazon.com/Plant-Life-Pamela-Duncan/dp/0385335261/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

The Big Beautiful

http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/43755/the-big-beautiful-by-pamela-duncan/9780385338387/

Excerpts, Interviews, & Reviews

Moon Women

http://www.pameladuncan.com/moon_women_15139.htm

Plant Life

http://www.pameladuncan.com/plant_life_15138.htm

The Big Beautiful

http://www.pameladuncan.com/the_big_beautiful_52887.htm

More About Pam Online

Publishers Weekly

http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-385-33518-8

Fantastic Fiction

https://www.fantasticfiction.com/d/pamela-duncan/plant-life.htm

BookPage

https://bookpage.com/reviews/2902-pamela-duncan-plant-life#.V7GuHfkrLDc

IndyWeek

http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/pamela-duncan/Content?oid=1181965

Hear Pam Read

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrkiaeMdTEg

Happy Reading!

xo

Mary

Category:

Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Books, Creativity, Family, fiction, freedom, Gratitude, Love, Must Read Monday, Must Read Writers, One Love, Writing

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