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In essays that take wide-ranging forms—ideal for creative nonfiction classes—established and emerging writers with roots in Appalachia take on the theme of silencing in Appalachian culture. They write about families left behind, hard-earned educations, selves transformed, identities chosen, and risks taken.
Adrian Blevins was born in Abingdon, Virginia. She is the author of Live from the Homesick Jamboree, The Brass Girl Brouhaha, and two chapbooks. She has received a Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and a Pushcart Prize, among others. She teaches at Colby College. Karen Salyer McElmurray’s Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother’s Journey was a National Book Critics Circle Notable Book. Her novels are The Motel of the Stars and Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven. The recipient of a National Endowment from the Arts Fellowship, McElmurray teaches at West Virginia Wesleyan College.
“Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean offers lively discussion of the role
of silence and silencing in Appalachian culture. Blevins and
McElmurray have assembled an impressive array of established and
new voices. The essays are provocative, electric, occasionally
heart-rending, occasionally hilarious, but always thoughtful and
essential.”
“The essays of Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean create a cumulative
effect of startling honesty. Like any worthwhile act of reckoning,
this anthology is not particularly concerned with providing answers
to the tough personal or cultural dilemmas posed in the essays.
Instead it focuses on the writers’ willingness to engage
permanently open questions. In fact, the sheer variety of style and
form collected in this book offers its own powerful testament to
the evolving legacy of literary Appalachia.”
*Chapter16.org/Knoxville Sentinel*
“The book’s diverse reflections… offer a fascinating cross-section
of contemporary Appalachian authors’ experiences in regard to their
unorthodoxy of gender, religion, race, or class in the region.”
*Now and Then*
“There’s galvanizing power in the pages of Walk Till the Dogs Get
Mean. The voices collected here, crying out of an Appalachia too
often defined by outsiders, ask us to raise our own voices against
those who would speak for us, against our whispered inner fears
that our stories aren’t worth telling. This is a book for our sons
and daughters. I know I’ll be handing it down to mine.”
“The times they are a-changin’, even in one of the most traditional
of places, Appalachia. Shuck off your biases and read this book—a
lot of suffering here but also persistence, triumph, achievement,
fulfillment, and joy.”
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