Overview

In 1910 rural Virginia, guns and homemade liquor were readily available. Good citizens turned a blind eye and a sheriff rarely interfered. Married women were at the mercy of a husband and his family. Ella, a young woman with two small children, is trapped in an abusive marriage to Red Hutchinson, with no way out. At the time, no woman had a way out under those circumstances, but she didn't know that. When calamity befalls her daughter, Ella makes the most heart wrenching decision a woman can face. Sommers McCloud, an unsophisticated nineteen-year-old believes he can produce a new fabric of beauty and artistry vastly different from the endless white cotton woven in his father's textile mill. He needs help and secretly hires Ella, a decision that tears apart a family and complicates both their lives. A first love is an intense emotion and hardest to relinquish. Rural Appalachia has intrigued authors and readers with romanticized versions of the region and its people for more than 100 years, often ignoring the reality of men and women struggling to make a living and a life in a hard land of steep mountains, dense forests, and great beauty.

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Kathleen Curtis Wilson is the author of five books: Textile Art from Southern Appalachia: The Quiet Work of Women; Uplifting the South-Mary Mildred Sullivan's Legacy for Appalachia; Irish People, Irish Linen; Dancing at the Warm Springs Hotel; and Adventurous Max Flax, an educational children's book. She compiled a history of The Southern Industrial Educational Association, 1905-1926, a digital resource at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia.Wilson established and operated Old Abingdon Weavers from 1983-1993. She served as Craft Section editor of the Encyclopedia of Appalachia and curated a multi-venue international textile exhibition. She was an honorary fellow at University of Ulster, Northern Ireland and Virginia Humanities, Charlottesville, Virginia. Wilson has given scores of public speeches and lectures at professional conferences in the United States and abroad on Appalachian craft history.Born in Michigan, Wilson studied weaving at Cranbrook Schools. She lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.

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