Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean

“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.”