Novelist Amy Greene and her husband, Trent Thomson, have done a lot of wonderful things in the relatively short “Step into the Circle.” They’ve given readers profiles of nine contemporary Appalachian writers—essays written by other Appalachian writers. So in a little over 100 pages, you get to hear Wiley Cash consider Ron Rash, Silas House listen to Wendell Berry, Jason Kyle Howard receive longstanding wisdom from Lee Smith.
It’s also a beautiful collection of portraits: writers at their desks, skipping rocks, at bookstores and on stages, considering the next word with pen in hand. And of the place that grounds all of the writers involved in the project—mountains and valleys, rivers and fields and phlox, Main Streets and murals and sky and light.
There’s a wide range of writers profiled in “Step into the Circle”—novelists and short story writers, essayists and poets. What lies at the root of all of their work is place. Wiley Cash puts it especially well when he writes about novelist Ron Rash:
“His literary mining of Appalachia is regenerative and restorative; it holds the mirror of the past up to the present moment and shows us what the region was, what it is, and what it could be.”
As does this book.
Amy Greene and Trent Thomson, eds. Step into the Circle: Writers in Modern Appalachia. (Blair/Carolina Wren Press, 2019). 111 pp.
The story above first appeared in our September / October 2021 issue.
