I was born just shy of a Civil War battlefield in Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia. I grew up barefoot on a small farm in southeastern Tennessee, where the roads curve without apology and the names on mailboxes belong to families who have been there long enough to forget why they stayed.
That is the credential that matters for this book. Not the degrees, not the countries visited, not the years spent elsewhere. The red clay. The ridge lines. The people who shaped me before I was old enough to know I was being shaped.
In 2018, during the Hawaiian missile scare, I had what I believed were minutes left. I did not think about my list of things not yet done. I thought about faces — the ones who had loved me, the ones I had loved, and the one I knew I would see next. That reckoning is what became this book.
Appalachian Roots: Poems of Mountain, Memory, and Home is my first poetry chapbook, and it is the most honest thing I have written. It moves through four sections:
- The Land Speaks
- What Is Inherited
- Becoming
- Returning Home
William Wordsworth said poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, emotion recollected in tranquility. That is close. I would add that it is the heart bled out onto the page — a space of vulnerability, the inner thoughts of the poet held open for the reader to find a bit of themselves in.
Some of these poems are serious. Some are not. Some are angsty, others are quieter than I expected them to be when I sat down to write them. That is the nature of the form, and it is the nature of memory — it does not always arrive in the order or register you anticipated.
· · ·
Each of us is unrepeatable, all the way down to our gut flora — which is, I’ll admit, a less romantic way of saying what I mean. What I mean is that there has never been and will never be another you, in all your specific and irreducible aspects. The world is in want of good stories, and in want of people willing to tell them honestly.
I hope that somewhere in this journey through the hills of southeastern Tennessee, you find a corner of your own story looking back at you. And I hope, whatever form it takes, you find the courage to put it on the page.
Appalachian Roots: Poems of Mountain, Memory, and Home is available now on Amazon, IngramSpark, and all other Digital sellers.
