Book Reviews+Storytelling
Featured
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Holly Kays photo
The Founding of Fluffy Butt Hut
My big chicken-keeping adventure started out as a throwaway conversation over beer. Between rounds at trivia night, a friend was talking about how she and her husband had accidentally hatched out too many chicks for their backyard flock that spring. Read more
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Courtesy of the National Park Service Collections Preservation Center
A Conversation With the Smokies’ Recordkeeper
Mike Aday has been the librarian-archivist for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park since 2013, when he left his post at Yosemite National Park to travel east and manage the Smokies’ impressive archival collection. Read more
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Who We Are
On a windy, frigid evening in late November 2016, not long after Donald Trump’s election, Jennifer McGaha and her three adult children ignored signs warning visitors not to enter a park after hours and scaled the gate. Read more
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Oh Those Gregarious Goats!
The sign read, “Baby Goats 4 Sale.” I had traveled the always-busy, Hardscrabble Road, in Roswell, Georgia, several times a day and never noticed the farm located behind the small brick home. But my daughter didn’t miss the sign. Read more
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David Cohen illustration
Skeleton Key
I found the skeleton key in a cabinet on my mother’s back porch, stored there alongside discarded tools, nails and screws, and spools of twine my father had brought home from the hosiery mill where he worked. Read more
David Cohen illustration
Skeleton Key
I found the skeleton key in a cabinet on my mother’s back porch, stored there alongside discarded tools, nails and screws, and spools of twine my father had brought home from the hosiery mill where he worked. Read more
May 29, 2023
Watching Thunderstorms
Springtime drew my family outdoors after a cold winter. March brought winds and, for me, kite flying—oftentimes with a homemade kite my father constructed out of twigs, newspaper, a strip of rag, and twine. Read more
Apr 1, 2023
Our Best and Then Some
A week earlier, I had returned from the Appalachian Community of Whitesburg, Kentucky. I still couldn’t talk about what I’d seen there, what Mother Nature had washed away from people who were already struggling to make ends meet. Read more
Apr 1, 2023
An Earth-friendly Waste Disposal Model
Imagine inviting a friend to visit for the weekend: you go out for a meal or two, buy extra groceries and do some cooking, go out sightseeing and shopping. Read more
Apr 1, 2023
Merry Mushroom Memories
The search began with me in the dining room on hands and knees. I had forgotten how tightly mother packed the china cabinet. Read more
Feb 1, 2023
Love Deeply and Never Grow Old
Aunt Gracie, in her late 90s, with her hair coiled high, away from her face all around, in the style of the ‘40s, died as quietly and as naturally as she had lived, as she stooped to pluck a tomato in her garden. Read more
Feb 1, 2023
The Ghosts That Never Leave Us
Though Loving the Dead and Gone time-travels back and forth over the twentieth century, the novel begins with the accidental death of Donald Ray Spencer in 1963, killed instantly when his car is rear-ended by another driver. Read more
Feb 1, 2023
