Bookworks in Staunton is hosting an event for poet / novelist Laura Long this Saturday afternoon.
Moving through time and space, Out of Peel Tree unfolds the patterns of an Appalachian sensibility that reverberate everywhere: a fatalism balanced by humor and flinty, hard-won hope, an appreciation for the surprises of the everyday, and a search for love and home amid strange and familiar places and people.
This innovative debut novel reveals the lives of a far-flung contemporary Appalachian family through a web of delicate turning points. A child discovers a grandmother she never knew has died … a runaway teen schemes to start a new life in Texas … a man on parole falls hopelessly in love with a shoplifter … a woman receives a letter about her husband’s other wife … an old woman confronts a burglar with the help of her ghost-husband.
United by a connection to their matriarch, these characters search at home and beyond to make a fresh sense of their changing lives. As a novel in stories, Out of Peel Tree brings a new lyricism to the page and a new voice to American and Appalachian literature — a voice deeply inflected by the beauty of the natural world and by working-class grit.
About the Author: Laura Long has received a James Michener Fellowship, James River Writers Award, Donald Barthelme Fellowship, PEN-Texas Award, Virginia Center for Creative Arts fellowships, and has published in magazines including “The Southern Review” and “Shenandoah.” She is the author of two books of poems, Imagine a Doorand The Eye of Caroline Herschel: A Life in Poems. She teaches at Lynchburg College in Virginia and has taught in numerous community and university settings in Austin, Houston, and far west Texas.
Call Bookworks at (540) 887-0007, or visit the shop at 101 W. Beverley Street in historic downtown Staunton, with any questions.
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