“ If you’re tired of narratives that paint Appalachians as helpless, backward caricatures. . . “, This phrase, from an anonymous Amazon review of bell hooks’ poetry collection, Appalachian Elegy , captures part of the reason I write about Appalachia. Thank you for reading The Foark River Salon and Bait Shop . It may not strike you as an Appalachian novel because it does not come anywhere near some of the standard themes and tropes that Appalachian novels are traditionally expected to use. That is exactly why I want it to be considered Appalachian; not only is it set smack dab, as we say, in the middle of Southern Appalachia (south of the Smoky Mountains in East Tennessee) but it purposefully does avoid stereotypical themes. Or does it? One standard trope is the outsider coming in to “save” the benighted mountain people. Another is that the characters are benighted: poor, ignorant, uneducated, barefoot, addicted, outlaw, religiously fanatically, sexually or morally devian...
“Barbara, I found it!” My brother Donald called out to me from across the lush, overgrown grass and mostly obscured grave markers of Fort Lincoln Cemetery. For the past twenty minutes he and I had been on a hunt in this long-established resting place in Colmar Manor, Maryland, right outside the District of Columbia. Rush hour traffic sped by on the other side of the iron fence, mostly moving east into Maryland’s Prince George’s County suburbs or on to Anne Arundel or Calvert Counties. I looked up from the marker where I stood, about 100 feet from my brother. I had been scraping cuttings of dried grass from its face, mostly with the tip of my New Balance shoe, trying to decipher the name. So far I had cleaned off dozens of markers, all of which were level with the ground. I had used my foot and sometimes by hands, quietly disappointed by each. A few swipes across each marker showed either letters that did not fit the name of my query or dates of birth and death that did...