Appalachia And Beyond

In Appalachia and Beyond:Yarns and Yearnings in Prose and Poetry, Stanley Barlow entertains us with some stories and sketches--many of them from Appalachia as he experienced it growing up. He engages us in some thinking about education, religion, and personal identity. Here too are some poems--new and selected. The yarns and sketches are for the most part true. Some come from my humorist years, writes the author. The play, Mostly Anecdotal, I hope reads like a short story: it centers on a colorful professor in Oregon, and at the same time, it argues the importance of career counseling in our schools and colleges. Much of the narrative in the book reflects my years as an educator in Tennessee, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, and New York. This book also includes some deep thoughts lets say, jottings that are pensivehence I call them Pensees--that are like Wagnerian chords seeking resolution. They are for conversation. So also, are some of the eighty-one poems. In Appalachia and Beyond, you will find the following:-- In Part One: Twelve humorous stories and collectionsthe author calls them: Yarns--- that will tickle your funny bone, and Fourteen sketches/groups of sketches that highlight unique personalities. In Part Two: An original play: Mostly Anecdotal, features a certain colorful teacher named Jewell, and focuses on career counseling. In Part Three: Twelve Pensees: Thoughts for conversationfrom the authors essays, notes and journalsdiscuss religious beliefs, personal identity questions, and the joys of poetic reverie. In Part Four: Forty-three new poems, under headings: 9/11, Devotions, Looking Back, Love Notes, and Questions In Part Five: Thirty-eight poems selected from Swimming Laps in August . . . (2001) --with some revisions and notes.

Beyond the Mountains explores the ways in which Appalachia often served as a laboratory for the exploration and practice of American conceptions of nature. The region operated alternately as frontier, wilderness, rural hinterland, region of subsistence agriculture, bastion of yeoman farmers, and place to experiment with modernization. In these various takes on the southern mountains, scattered across time and space, both mountain residents and outsiders consistently believed that the region's environment made Appalachia distinctive, for better or worse. With chapters dedicated to microhistories focused on particular commodities, Drew A. Swanson builds upon recent Appalachian studies scholarship, emphasizing the diversity of a region so long considered a homogenous backwater. While Appalachia has a recognizable and real coherence rooted in folkways, agriculture, and politics (among other things), it is also a region of varied environments, people, and histories. These discrete stories are, however, linked through the power of conceptualizing nature and work together to reveal the ways in which ideas and uses of nature often created a sense of identity in Appalachia. Delving into the environmental history of the region reveals that Appalachian environments, rather than separating the mountains from the broader world, often served to connect the region to outside places.

After rising from poverty to earn two Ivy League degrees, an Appalachian lawyer pays tribute to the strong “hill women” who raised and inspired her, and whose values have the potential to rejuvenate a struggling region. “Destined to be compared to Hillbilly Elegy and Educated.”—BookPage (starred review) “Poverty is enmeshed with pride in these stories of survival.”—Associated Press Nestled in the Appalachian mountains, Owsley County is one of the poorest counties in both Kentucky and the country. Buildings are crumbling and fields sit vacant, as tobacco farming and coal mining decline. But strong women are finding creative ways to subsist in their hollers in the hills. Cassie Chambers grew up in these hollers and, through the women who raised her, she traces her own path out of and back into the Kentucky mountains. Chambers’s Granny was a child bride who rose before dawn every morning to raise seven children. Despite her poverty, she wouldn’t hesitate to give the last bite of pie or vegetables from her garden to a struggling neighbor. Her two daughters took very different paths: strong-willed Ruth—the hardest-working tobacco farmer in the county—stayed on the family farm, while spirited Wilma—the sixth child—became the first in the family to graduate from high school, then moved an hour away for college. Married at nineteen and pregnant with Cassie a few months later, Wilma beat the odds to finish school. She raised her daughter to think she could move mountains, like the ones that kept her safe but also isolated her from the larger world. Cassie would spend much of her childhood with Granny and Ruth in the hills of Owsley County, both while Wilma was in college and after. With her “hill women” values guiding her, Cassie went on to graduate from Harvard Law. But while the Ivy League gave her knowledge and opportunities, its privileged world felt far from her reality, and she moved back home to help her fellow rural Kentucky women by providing free legal services. Appalachian women face issues that are all too common: domestic violence, the opioid crisis, a world that seems more divided by the day. But they are also community leaders, keeping their towns together in the face of a system that continually fails them. With nuance and heart, Chambers uses these women’s stories paired with her own journey to break down the myth of the hillbilly and illuminate a region whose poor communities, especially women, can lead it into the future.

Annotation "The first book to focus exclusively on studies of Appalachia's women, Beyond Hill and Hollow: Original Readings in Appalachian Women's Studies is a pathbreaking collection that firmly establishes the field of Appalachian women's studies. Bringing together the work of historians, linguists, sociologists, social workers, performance artists, literary critics, theater scholars, and others, the collection portrays the diverse cultures of Appalachian women." "Appropriate both as a reference and as a classroom text, Beyond Hill and Hollow expands our understanding of Appalachian women's lives."--BOOK JACKET. Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The last quarter-century has seen a remarkable outpouring of fiction and poetry from southern Appalachia-a surge of creativity that has formed an integral part of a larger, and still growing, regional self-consciousness. This book charts the course of this literary renaissance through twenty-one interviews with contemporary Appalachian writers, conversations conducted between 1983 and 2003 at Emory & Henry College's annual literary festival and originally printed in the Iron Mountain Review. The authors interviewed range from nationally known figures such as Fred Chappell, Robert Morgan, Lee Smith, Mary Lee Settle, and Charles Wright to less prominent, though no less gifted, writers like George Ella Lyon, Jo Carson, and George Scarborough. Many of the interviewers are themselves creative writers or Appalachian studies scholars, as well as longtime friends of the interviewees. For example, Jim Wayne Miller interviews James Still; Loyal Jones interviews Jim Wayne Miller; Richard Marius interviews Wilma Dykeman; George Garrett interviews David Huddle; and Michael Chitwood interviews Michael McFee. These wide-ranging conversations address such topics as formative experiences in the author's childhood, major literary influences, the author's educational background and mentors, the writing process, the limitations imposed by such labels as “Appalachian writer,” and the broadening scope of literature originating in the Appalachian region. Collectively, these interviews confirm the judgment of some observers that writers from the mountain South are now playing a much larger role in southern letters than in previous periods, thus constituting a “renaissance within a renaissance.”

A celebratory collection of essays and photographs, originally published as part of an effort to preserve Red River Gorge from plans to build a dam and a man-made lake, shares the T. S. Eliot Award-winning writer's perspectives on the gorge's wild beauty and the nature of rivers. Reprint.

Beyond Appalachia is a collection of short stories, some written several decades ago and some written recently specifically for this collection. There are travel stories, romances (sort of), museum stories, and ironic stories. The most poignant story is titled "Dirty OB," a description of unsafe abortion practices prior to Roe v. Wade. 1

Since the 2016 presidential election, Americans have witnessed countless stories about Appalachia: its changing political leanings, its opioid crisis, its increasing joblessness, and its declining population. These stories, however, largely ignore black Appalachian lives. Karida L. Brown's Gone Home offers a much-needed corrective to the current whitewashing of Appalachia. In telling the stories of African Americans living and working in Appalachian coal towns, Brown offers a sweeping look at race, identity, changes in politics and policy, and black migration in the region and beyond. Drawn from over 150 original oral history interviews with former and current residents of Harlan County, Kentucky, Brown shows that as the nation experienced enormous transformation from the pre- to the post-civil rights era, so too did black Americans. In reconstructing the life histories of black coal miners, Brown shows the mutable and shifting nature of collective identity, the struggles of labor and representation, and that Appalachia is far more diverse than you think.