Tag: Appalachian poetry

Mountain Memories: Poems from Southeastern Tennessee

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.

Discover Art and Poetry in Cades Cove

A Return to the Cove (and a Table Full of Paper Dreams)

There are places that live in your bones whether you intend them to or not.

For me, it’s the stretch of road that bends toward Cades Cove—that quiet, almost reverent unfolding of field and mountain that never quite looks the same twice, and yet somehow never changes at all.

On Friday, April 24, from 10 AM to 3 PM, I’ll be there—well, just outside it—on the grounds of the Cades Cove Museum for a craft fair, book signing, and sale.

And if you’re wondering why a museum hosts a craft fair in the first place: it’s both practical and a little poetic. Events like these bring people in, keep the lights on, and quietly ensure that the stories held in those buildings—stories of families, land, and long memory—don’t slip through the cracks. Publicity helps. Funding helps more. Showing up helps most of all.

The Long Way Back

I grew up passing through Maryville on the way to the mountains, though “passing through” isn’t quite right.

It’s where my parents were married. It’s where my husband proposed—at the same church, because apparently we are nothing if not consistent in our sentimentality.

And beyond it, always, the pull of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Summers meant camping with the Pathfinders at Lazy Daze in Townsend—a place that felt, even then, like a threshold between the everyday and something older. We’d bike through the Cove until our legs gave out, or until someone spotted a deer and the entire group decided that was reason enough to stop and stare like we’d never seen one before.

Even now, years later, something shifts the moment I turn onto those roads. It’s not nostalgia, exactly. It’s sharper than that. A kind of recognition.

Like the mountains remember me back.

Paper, Thread, and a Little Stubbornness

I’ve had a series of children’s stories—Appalachian “princess” tales—rattling around in my head for a while now. They’re stubborn things. They refuse to be rushed, which is inconvenient but probably correct.

One day, they’ll make their way into the world. For now, though, I’m starting somewhere quieter.

At the craft fair, I’ll be releasing my first poetry chapbook—a small, handmade collection rooted in this region and the way it has shaped me. First editions of chapbooks tend to be a little different from the books you order online without thinking. They’re often limited, assembled by hand, imperfect in the best possible way.

This one is no exception.

It’s been a labor of love—mine in the words, my husband’s in the artwork. Between us, we’ve managed to produce something that feels less like a product and more like an object you happened to come across and decided to keep.

Eventually, I’ll make it available more broadly. But not yet.

The Analog Gamble

For now, I’m doing this the old way.

No preorders. No “link in bio.” No quiet warehouse waiting to ship copies across the country.

If you’re at the craft fair, you’ll find it. If you’re not, you’ll miss this particular version of it—the handmade, first-run edition that smells faintly of ink and effort.

There’s something honest about that. A little inconvenient, maybe. But honest.

If You’re Passing Through

If you’re already planning a trip to the mountains, or if you need an excuse to take the long way somewhere, come by.

Walk the grounds. Support the museum. Pick up something made by hand. Stay longer than you meant to.

I’ll be there with a small stack of chapbooks, probably rearranging them more often than necessary, trying to look like I expected any of this.

And if nothing else, you’ll get to stand at the edge of the Cove for a moment—and remember, or discover, what it feels like when a place refuses to let you go.