CHRIS ARVIDSON

Mountain Memoirs is an Anthology that I edited with my Word Keepers colleagues Julie E. Townsend and Scot Pope. We're so excited -- it's turned out wonderfully. We've got 20 pieces related to Ashe County somehow, by people who have some kind of relationship with Ashe County. Here's the synopsis that will soon appear on the publisher's website:

You can still get lost in Ashe County, North Carolina, and GPS won’t help. Once called The Lost Province, it’s a place of gravel roads, gorgeous mountains, and the first tricklings of the New River. And, here there are writers. In Mountain Memoirs: An Ashe County Anthology, twenty of them craft works about their relationships with this frequently beautiful and sometimes mysterious corner of the North Carolina high country. They write about its mysteries, its beauty, and the people who are sometimes lost and sometimes found in the landscapes.

Something about this particular little place -- amongst the peaks and on the riverbanks – inspires writers. They live here and visit and hideout and work. Some are well known, like Lee Smith, Clyde Edgerton and D.G. Martin. Some are known only locally. Like the very small towns that sparsely dot the area, the writers in this anthology are sprinkled in the hollows and along the river, writing stories, poems and essays about how this very specific place has shaped, changed and informed their lives and the lives of those around them.

Lee Smith invents a young academic from another century who is studying the flora; Clyde Edgerton crafts poetry evocative of the sense of his corner of the county. From editor Scot Pope, a concentration of the “Essence” of the place is offered; others like D.G. Martin and Editor Julie Townsend, profile people whose characters shape their attachments to this place. Each of the twenty writers brings their words to evoke the sense, and sometimes nonsense, of this small corner of big mountains and the old New River.

GO TO: www.mountain-memoirs.com and you can order "Mountain Memoirs: An Ashe County Anthology" and do it right away! The advance order discount will likely be discontinued by the end of August.