Lucinda Mae lives with her family and their homestead animals in Painter Creek Hollow, a secluded nook of the Blue Ridge Escarpment in upstate South Carolina that people call the Gorges. The story explores the lifeways of rural mountain families who remain tied to traditional ways of living, such as raising hogs, poultry, hunting squirrels, and using local plants for medicine, among others. The winter holiday season, the warming earth, and the ways misunderstanding and prejudice can harm relationships between friends and between generations are also themes in the novel.

In Making a Map of the River, award-winning poet Thorpe Moeckel focuses his rueful, tender attention on the spectrum of being-family, work, play, nature, home--sometimes all at once. The river in question is not just the Chattooga or its colorful, conflicted, rain chasing paddlers and guides. The river is consciousness itself, and Moeckel navigates the rapids and pools of memory and presence and language, layering moments of recognition and realization with painterly details and silty tonalities that embody the paradoxes of living in and representing the natural world. Lavish and austere, this is a book that lingers long on the tongue and eye and ear. It will fascinate readers who know the Chattooga and readers who don't--and will delight anyone who wishes to get closer to life's complexity, beauty, folly, and joy.

On foot and in a leaky canoe, award-winning poet and naturalist Thorpe Moeckel meanders for a year through the fragmented forests of the Eno and Haw watersheds. He seeks the alive interiors of a world covered over in asphalt, seeks to shed its hard exterior and ""wonder the woods."" In doing so he makes a record both physical and numinous. His writing-lyrical and leapy with cellular, porous perceptiveness-invites readers to journey with him around every surprising bend and twisting turn of phrase. Reading this book is like trying to grasp a live fish or to study the seeds of a jewelweed pod the moment they unfurl: joyful, exhilarating, wakeful, wise, and riddled with each moment's loss. It orients by disorienting, because how else, Moeckel asks, can being in such an altered, changing, resilient place feel. Here are upwellings from the interior Piedmont. Here is an eco-psychological lingua terra, an Anthropocene pilgrimage, a chronicle of presence, and presence's peregrinations. Here, most of all, is an experience in attention to place, the events of the seasonal, day-to-day flora and fauna of the Carolina Piedmont. Here we reside in the space where one thought has ended and another has not yet begun, where one way of life has ended and another is still being dreamed. Those who love good writing and/or nature will love Thorpe Moeckel's exploration in this Wonder Almanac.

While ranging from creekbanks to hummocks, from barrier islands to ridges and hollers (from the Kansas River to West Penobscot Bay, to the Edisto, to various tributaries of the New and the James, the Neuse and the Savannah), the poems in According to Sand exhume often lost and surprising senses of the world and of words. They track, these creaturely poems, the abundant and the minimal, singing (in praise and loss) the uncanniness of existence. Into the waters and the lives there, this collection goes: the ghost crabs, fungi, heron crap, shifts of light, of history, family, time, a doll's head on a riverbank, deadfall, leaves, weeds; yes, lots of plants, some in blossom, many edible. There are lyric sequences. There are the strange ekphrastics of ""Thaw"" and ""Figure Drawn on the Ground as the Bull Moose Urinates Upon Waking."" There are riddles (can you hear, maybe even name, what from the other-than-human-world is speaking?). Also historical and botanical persona narratives, rimas dissolutas, and other echoes among them. ACCORDING TO SAND is an aching, wryly joyous collection that embodies the erosive and porous qualities of sand and invites us to recognize how we might remain among the remains, settling, shifting, filtering, and surviving.

Best Creative Nonfiction of the South, of which this Virginia collection is the first volume, serves as a valuable resource for scholars, students, writers, and general readers interested in creative nonfiction both from specific areas of the South and across the region as a whole. The writers included in each volume come from diverse backgrounds, generations, and artistic traditions. Most, if not all, volumes in the series indirectly reflect literary changes over time and/or how literary variations have manifested themselves in a given state. In some cases, publisher permissions and other factors have foiled the editors from including the work of deserving writers. Nevertheless, the abundant literary talent across the South has lessened the impact of the occasional unfortunate omission. "TRP has for years now published an annual collection of poetryfrom each of our Southern states, and these anthologies have donevery well for us, both inside and outside university classrooms. Wewelcome this new series on Southern nonfiction and look forwardto visiting these fine essayists, state by state."-Paul Ruffin,Director, Texas Review Press

In Watershed Days, the reader embarks on a wide array of adventures shared in seasonal order over a period of two years, 2005-2007, yet spanning in memory back to the author's youth. Infused with a blend of ruggedness and sensitivity, the writing is ripe, wry, and roving, ever attuned to the natural world. When the focus is not on the immediate homestead activities of making apple butter, telling stories to his child at bedtime, coming to terms with an aging dog, planting fruit trees, building garden beds, stacking firewood, butchering hogs, keeping chickens, hunting deer behind the barn, Moeckel zooms in on his escapes to the near woods and rivers, creeks and coasts-surfing, canoeing, fishing, even skateboarding on the Blue Ridge Parkway. The twenty-four adventures are woven into a subtle, cohesive whole, providing a textured portrait of a young man, his family, and their evolving intimacy and distance with each other and the natural world, the 18-acre homestead to which they have just moved and started working, as well as the woods and rivers of Virginia's Jefferson National Forest just down Arcadia Road.