Overview

Across the Blue Ridge Mountains stretches a world both charming and complicated. Jeremy Jones and his wife move into a small house above the creek where his family had settled 200 years prior. He takes a job alongside his former teachers in the local elementary school and sets out on a search to understand how this ancient land has shaped its people-how it shaped him. His search sends him burrowing in the past-hunting buried treasure and POW camps, unearthing Civil War graves and family feuds, exploring gated communities and tourist traps, encountering changed accents and immigrant populations, tracing both Walmart sidewalks and carved-out mountains-and pondering the future. He meshes narrative and myth, geology and genealogy, fiddle tunes and local color in his exploration of the briskly changing and oft-stigmatized world of his native southern Appalachians and particularly the mystical Bearwallow Mountain, a peak suddenly in flux.

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9781949467543

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Reviews

His narrative is haunting and evocative, full of rich details and natural scenery. -Shelf Awareness 'Me in place and the place in me,' Seamus Heaney declares in his poem 'A Herbal.' That idea is at the core of this deeply satisfying memoir of one man's exile from and return to his Appalachian homeland. Jeremy Jones shows the complexity of a region and a people too often reduced to the crudest of stereotypes, and by doing so gains even greater self-awareness. Bearwallow is a book to be savored. -Ron Rash, author of Serena and The Risen Bearwallow is a marvel of a book-intricate and wise. Jones folds the past in with the present-his ancestors' stories in with his own and those of the new generations of immigrants-tales told in beautiful, meditative prose that stack up like the mountain ridges, one on top of another in a seamless continuum. -Mesha Maren, Sugar Run In prose vivid and fresh, Jeremy Jones gives us an intimate and in-depth study of contrasting worlds-Latin America, the Blue Ridge Mountains, old families, new Hispanic arrivals, the pull of home, and the need to escape. . . . It is a story of both teaching and learning, of roots, and of unexpected discovery. Bearwallow is a delight to read. -Robert Morgan, author of The Road from Gap Creek Jones changes the way we talk about Appalachians . . . an artful exploration of voice, place, and belonging. -The Iowa Review The remarkable thing about Bearwallow is its seamless weaving of time, place, and blood. Jeremy Jones's craftsmanship in telling this story of generations and geography and his reverence for both are a beauty to behold. A fine debut of a fine writer-this is a wonderful book. -Bret Lott, author of Dead Low Tide

Author Information

Jeremy B. Jones is the author of the memoir Bearwallow, which was named the 2014 Appalachian Book of the Year in nonfiction and awarded gold in memoir in the 2015 Independent Publisher Book Awards. His essays appear in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Oxford American, Appalachian Reckoning, and The Iowa Review. Born and raised in the mountains of North Carolina, Jeremy earned his MFA from the University of Iowa and now serves as an associate professor of English at Western Carolina University, where he teaches creative writing and directs the Spring Literary Festival. Alongside Elena Passarello, Jeremy is the series co-editor of In Place, a nonfiction book series from West Virginia University Press.

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