|
Showing 1 - 3 of
3 matches in All Departments
A thinly veiled autobiographical account of one woman's austere
life in the north Georgia mountains, A Circuit Rider's Wife draws
on the years Corra Harris accompanied her husband in his work as a
Methodist missionary. Set mostly in the fictional Redwine circuit,
the novel tells of the challenges, hardships, and--aside from the
occasional homemade or homegrown donations--mostly intangible
rewards of itinerant country preaching. Through the eyes of
Elizabeth Thompson, the circuit rider's wife and narrator, Harris
offers a witty but caring assessment of the sometimes fine
differences between spiritual and merely religious folks, town and
country society, backsliders and straight-and-narrow plodders,
Methodists and Baptists, and heaven and hell.
The seventeen narratives of The Common Lot and Other Stories,
published in popular magazines across the United States between
1908 and 1921 and collected here for the first time, are driven by
Emma Bell Miles’s singular vision of the mountain people of her
home in southeastern Tennessee. That vision is shaped by her strong
sense of social justice, her naturalist’s sensibility, and her
insider’s perspective. Women are at the center of these stories,
and Miles deftly works a feminist sensibility beneath the plot of
the title tale about a girl caught between present drudgery in her
father’s house and prospective drudgery as a young wife in her
own. Wry, fiery, and suffused with details of both natural and
social worlds, the pieces collected here provide a particularly
acute portrayal of Appalachia in the early twentieth century.
Miles’s fiction brings us a world a century in the past, but one
that will easily engage twenty-first-century readers. The
introduction by editor and noted Miles expert Grace Toney Edwards
places Miles in the literary context of her time. Edwards
highlights Miles’s quest for women’s liberation from
patriarchal domination and oppressive poverty, forces against which
Miles herself struggled in making a name for herself as a writer
and artist. Illustrations by the author and Miles family
photographs complement the stories.
The Highland Summer Writing Conference (HSC), held each summer
along the banks of the ancient New River at Radford University's
Selu Conservancy, brings together and inspires writers as they
participate in the communal art of creating and sharing. Over the
years, many prestigious Appalachian authors have taught workshops
to like-minded students, many of whom became published authors in
their own right. This book, a celebration of the HSC, is a
collection of reflective essays, poetry, fiction, and non-fiction
contributed by 41 authors and student-authors who have taken part
in the conference over a span of 43 years.
|
|