About the Book
Degrees of Elevation: Short Stories of Contemporary Appalachia
About the Author :
Charles Dodd White is the author of Lambs of Men: A Novel. Page Seay is from Nashville, Tennessee. Silas House is the Author of Crazy Quilt and other novels set in Appalachia. Chair of Appalachian Studies at Berea College and on the fiction faculty at Spalding University�s MFA in Creative Writing Chris Holbrook is the author of Hell and Ohio, and Upheaval, short stories set in Appalachia. A graduate of the Iowa Writer�s Workshop, Holbrook is associate professor of English at Morehead State University Valerie Nieman has received an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship in poetry, two Elizabeth Simpson Smith prizes in fiction, and the Greg Grummer Prize in poetry. A graduate of West Virginia University and the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte, she teaches writing at N.C. A&T State University and is a regular workshop leader at the John C. Campbell Folk School and the North Carolina Writers Network. She is poetry editor for the online/print literary journal, Prime Number. Chris Offut's work has beenrecognized by fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation. His works has also received a Whiting Writer award, and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for �fiction that takes risks.� He�s also written comic books, essays, stage plays, and screenplays. His work appears in many anthologies, is widely translated, and taught in high schools and college. Richard Hague's books include 11 volumes of poetry, a multigenre poetry collection/teaching memoir called Lives of the Poem, and Milltown Natural: Essays and Stories from a Life in Ohio ( nominated for a National Book Award). His Alive in Hard Country (Bottom Dog Press, 2003) was named Poetry Book of the Year in 2004 by the Appalachian Writers Association Crystal Wilkinson is winner of the 2002 Chaffin Award for Appalachian Literature, and Water Street, a finalist for both the UK�s Orange Prize for Fiction and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. She teaches at Moorehead University in Kentucky. RON RASH is the author of four novels, four books of short stories, and three books of poems. He has been awarded NEA fellowships in fiction and poetry. His short story collection, Chemistry, and the novel, Serena, were both Pen/Faulkner Award Finalists. His most recent book, Burning Bright, won the 2010 Frank O�Connor Short Fiction Award. He teaches at Western Carolina University. ALEX TAYLOR lives in Rosine, Kentucky. He has worked as a day laborer on tobacco farms, as a car detailer at a used automotive lot, as a sorghum peddler, at various fast food chains, as a tender of suburban lawns, and at a cigarette lighter factory. He holds an MFA from The University of Mississippi and now teaches at Western Kentucky University. His work has appeared in Carolina Quarterly, American Short Fiction, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. His story collection, The Name of the Nearest River, was published by Sarabande Books in 2010. MARK POWELL is the author of the novels Prodigals and Blood Kin. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Breadloaf Writers� Conference. Born and raised in the mountains of South Carolina, he now teaches at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida.
Review :
From New York Journal of Book Review
Degrees of Elevation provides a variety of characters portrayed in their deepest and most exposed moments. You aren't likely to forget their stories. White and Seay have done us all a favor by gathering these remarkable stories together. White writes, "We do not believe any one view of Appalachia is a Truth entire. But somewhere in the patchwork, we have tried to present the hard beauty of the land and the history of a unique country and its people." They have succeeded. Degrees of Elevation is a wonderful collection that deserves to be read, savored, and remembered.
From New York Journal Book Review
Degrees of Elevation: Short Stories of Contemporary Appalachia brings together 17 gifted writers whose voices are as unique and striking as the region about which they write.
Editors Charles Dodd White and Page Seay have gathered some of the finest storytellers of this region, some writers, in White's words, "not yet established" and others whose names will be recognized. Ron Rash, for instance, was recently awarded the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award for his own collection of short stories. But whether these writers are still emerging, or whether they have managed to move beyond regional recognition, each casts an unflinching eye toward a region of America that exists in the mists for most of us, offering us glimpses of its raw reality. The lives and choices written about in this collection are hard-edged; there is no romanticizing.
In "Horseweed," Chris Offutt introduces us to William, a construction day worker struggling to make ends meet, hoping to one day have enough money to put an indoor bathroom in his home. Growing hemp on mining company land, he tends his crop in the late hours of the night. Confronted by the possibility of arrest in the person of a mining company guard, William realizes that the man has been bitten by a snake and will die without his help. He must choose whether to let this dangerous stranger die--thereby avoiding problems with the law--or to save the man's life and risk his own ruin.
"Magic," by Jim Nichols, brings in Joe, a man who does magic tricks. He lives in a trailer park and drives an airport taxi to earn some money. Being arrested after a typical night of bar-fighting has never phased him before; but he's brought to a kind of paralyzing depression when he is made the show-and-tell prisoner for a group of school children visiting the jail.
Hunter Tillman is a gay meth-head journalist who falls in with a group of meth-head castrators. Walt Thomas returns home from the war with a self-inflicted blindness that helps him, somehow, to finally see. Ligon Fields, a self-appointed, unordained minister, somehow manages to cast out devils--or at the very least, drive back home missing cats. LaWanda Heever, a big-haired woman with big dreams, realizes she's wasting her days selling fishing bait to the walking dead, and so heads her truck out of town in search of a real life. What all these stories share is that the life they portray is hard. In "The Coal Thief," Alex Taylor writes, "Coal buckets went empty and houses turned cold for boys just as they did for men and old women. There weren't any favors."
Degrees of Elevation provides a variety of characters portrayed in their deepest and most exposed moments. You aren't likely to forget their stories. White and Seay have done us all a favor by gathering these remarkable stories together. White writes, "We do not believe any one view of Appalachia is a Truth entire. But somewhere in the patchwork, we have tried to present the hard beauty of the land and the history of a unique country and its people."
They have succeeded. Degrees of Elevation is a wonderful collection that deserves to be read, savored, and remembered.
Reviewer Debra Leigh Scott is Founding Director of Hidden River Arts, and Editor-in-Chief of Hidden River Publishing.
From New York Journal of Book Review Degrees of Elevation provides a variety of characters portrayed in their deepest and most exposed moments. You aren�t likely to forget their stories.
White and Seay have done us all a favor by gathering these remarkable stories together. White writes, �We do not believe any one view of Appalachia is a Truth entire. But somewhere in the patchwork, we have tried to present the hard beauty of the land and the history of a unique country and its people.�
They have succeeded. Degrees of Elevation is a wonderful collection that deserves to be read, savored, and remembered.
Hard, brilliant, and dark as coal, this brand new and necessary volume captures Appalachia today, a place where the old bedrock verities of family, community, belief, work, and the earth itself are all in painful �Upheaval�--to use the title of Chris Holbrook�s story herein. From manic to elegiac to rough, raw, beautiful, and heartbreaking, these stories will strike the reader as both absolutely true and as unforgettable, like the high pure ring of an ax on a cold winter morning, vibrating across distance, hanging in the air long afterward. -Lee Smith, author of Saving Grace and Mrs. Darcy Meets the Blue-Eyed Stranger
Nominated for The Pushcart Prize Award 2010
