“Beautifully written, nostalgic, and indeed unique, this work will be welcomed by those who enjoy memoir or American regional history and by anyone interested in Appalachian culture.”
Library Journal
“A clear hallmark of memoir is allowing the reader to experience the author's moments of realization with her as it happens, but it requires a brave writer to share something so raw and unfiltered, and Childers does so without pause.”
Appalachian Heritage
“[Childers] weaves together complex characters, a culture shaped by faith and music, and vibrantly imagined settings to both capture and complicate an often misunderstood facet of Appalachian culture—fundamental Christianity.”
West Virginia Living
“Childers’s collection of carefully arranged family vignettes reveals a master storyteller sharing the tales of her yarn-spinning clan over the generations.”
“Around Cincinnati,” WVXU-NPR
Sarah Beth Childers grew up listening to stories. She heard them riding to school with her mother, playing Yahtzee in her Granny’s nicotine cloud, walking to the bowling alley with her grandfather, and eating casseroles at the family reunions she attended every year.
In a thoughtful, humorous voice born of Appalachian storytelling, Childers brings to life in these essays events that affected the entire region: large families that squeezed into tiny apartments during the Great Depression, a girl who stepped into a rowboat from a second-story window during Huntington’s 1937 flood, brothers who were whisked away to World War II and Vietnam, and a young man who returned home from the South Pacific and worked his life away as a railroad engineer.
Childers uses these family tales to make sense of her personal journey and find the joy and clarity that often emerge after the earth shakes terribly beneath us.
Sarah Beth Childers is from Huntington, West Virginia, and she lives and writes in Richmond, Indiana, where she is a writer in residence at Earlham College. Previously, she served as a lecturer at West Virginia University and as a visiting professor of creative nonfiction in the low-residency MFA program at West Virginia Wesleyan College. More info →
Table of Contents and Excerpts: “O Glorious Love” and “Shorn”
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“Nearly all of us have our own full share of childhood memories. But few of us are willing—or able—to dig as deep into our store of memories as does Sarah Beth Childers in her impressive new memoir, Shake Terribly the Earth.”
Charleston Gazette
“A tightly connected collection of essays….”
ForeWord Reviews
“Shake Terribly the Earth announces a new, clear voice in Appalachian nonfiction, free of cant, free of even the rumor of a stereotype. Sarah Beth Childers’s family saga engages the griefs of the region in many ways—times have been difficult in her native West Virginia—but a thread of joyfulness, like light, winds through these essays, as stories accumulated by generations at last find voice in Childers’s telling. It is a pleasure, rare and true, to sit with this book and listen.”
Kevin Oderman, author of White Vespa and How Things Fit Together
“The West Virginia childhood that Sarah Beth Childers gives us in Shake Terribly the Earth is hardscrabble, pietistic, and loving. Disability checks, pizza, and Mountain Dew along with the Holy Spirit inflect this clear-eyed and moving portrait of a young woman’s coming of age in one deep corner of the American Landscape.”
Peter Balakian, author of Black Dog of Fate
“This is a book to rattle us awake and stir in our blood forgotten memories of family and faith, of fire and flood. Shake Terribly the Earth introduces us to a young writer mightily engaged with the world before her. There is wisdom in these pages. Music bellows from the words.”
Glenn Taylor, author of The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart and The Marrowbone Marble Company
“Wonderfully rich and beautifully written … the collection is also self-aware and articulate about storytelling as an art and as a profoundly human means of creating meaning. Storytelling is furthermore a powerful folkway in Appalachian life, and one of the main themes of the book.… It is a deeply worthwhile and fascinating collection.“
Meredith Sue Willis, author of Out of the Mountains
Out of the Mountains
Appalachian Stories
By Meredith Sue Willis
Meredith Sue Willis’s Out of the Mountains is a collection of thirteen short stories set in contemporary Appalachia. Firmly grounded in place, the stories voyage out into the conflicting cultural identities that native Appalachians experience as they balance mainstream and mountain identities.Willis’s
Short Stories (single author) · American Literature · Appalachia · Ohio and Regional · Women Authors
Power in the Blood
A Family Narrative
By Linda Tate
Power in the Blood: A Family Narrative traces Linda Tate’s journey to rediscover the Cherokee-Appalachian branch of her family and provides an unflinching examination of the poverty, discrimination, and family violence that marked their lives.
Memoir · Women Authors · Appalachia · Creative Nonfiction · Ohio and Regional
Dragging Wyatt Earp
A Personal History of Dodge City
By Robert Rebein
In Dragging Wyatt Earp essayist Robert Rebein explores what it means to grow up in, leave, and ultimately return to the iconic Western town of Dodge City, Kansas. In chapters ranging from memoir to reportage to revisionist history, Rebein contrasts his hometown’s Old West heritage with a New West reality that includes salvage yards, beefpacking plants, and bored teenagers cruising up and down Wyatt Earp Boulevard.Along
Memoir · American Literature · Americas · North America · United States · Creative Nonfiction · Literature
Loving Mountains, Loving Men
By Jeff Mann
Loving Mountains, Loving Men is the first book-length treatment of a topic rarely discussed or examined: gay life in Appalachia. Appalachians are known for their love of place, yet many gays and lesbians from the mountains flee to urban areas. Jeff Mann tells the story of one who left and then returned, who insists on claiming and celebrating both regional and erotic identities.
Memoir, LGBT · Social Science | Regional Studies · Appalachia · Ohio and Regional · Literature
