Posts Tagged ‘Appalachian literature’
Two New Children’s Books Share Tales of the Outdoors and Activism
Two new children’s books are set in Appalachia. “Saving Annie’s Mountain” is a picture book about mountaintop coal removal, and “The Adventures of Bubba Jones” is a chapter book about kids exploring nature in the Great Smoky Mountains.
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The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature By David George Haskell In a circle of Cumberland Plateau old-growth forest roughly the size of a hula hoop, Haskell finds reasons for awe and wonder in the anatomy of a flower or the heartbeat of a chickadee. Inspired by both the place-based writings of Thoreau and…
Read MoreThe Evening Hour: Painting a Gripping Picture of a Gritty Place
Review by Paige Campbell Carter Sickels’ debut novel “The Evening Hour” is a study in contradictions, many rooted deeply in its Appalachian setting. The town of Dove Creek is a remote southern West Virginia community cloaked in the same desperate, static smallness that often characterizes the Appalachia of literature. At the same time, the setting…
Read MoreWriting the Ballad Novels: Sharyn McCrumb In Her Own Words
My father’s family settled the North Carolina mountains in the 1790s, and I grew up in a swirl of tales: mountain legends, ballads and scraps of Appalachian history. My first ancestor to settle in these mountains was Malcolm McCourry, chronicled in my novel The Songcatcher. As a child in 1751 he was kidnapped from a…
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